On February 20, 1974, Phil moaned in pain as he paced around the small apartment that he shared with Tessa and baby Christopher in Fullerton. He had just had a wisdom tooth pulled, and, the effects of the sodium pentathol having worn off during the night, his world had become a bottomless chasm of unspeakable pain. He knew, rationally, that the throbbing in his jaw would soon subside, but that thought didn’t help; all he wanted was to not be there, to not exist until the pain had stopped, assuming it ever would.
Tessa called the dentist, who prescribed painkillers. Since Tessa’s leaving the patient’s side for a single minute was out of the question, the dentist phoned the prescription into the pharmacy, asking them to deliver the medication as quickly as possible.
Half an hour later, the doorbell rang. Phil, a damp tea bag clenched in his teeth, opened the door and found a young woman with thick black hair, dressed in a white uniform. From a delicate gold chain around her neck hung a gold pendant in the shape of a fish. Mesmerized by the ornament, Phil simply stood there, unable to speak.
“Eight dollars and forty-two cents,” the young woman said, probably for the second time, as she continued to hold out the bag with the medication.
Phil pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet.
“What—is that necklace?”
“An ancient sign,” the girl said, raising her hand to the golden fish. “Used by the early Christians.”
Holding the bag of medication, Phil stood frozen on the doorstep, studying the fish that gleamed softly in the shadows of the entryway. He had forgotten the throbbing in his jaw, forgotten what this young woman was doing there and what he was doing there himself. Tessa came out of the bedroom, where she had been drying her hair, and took in the scene; following the path of her husband’s gaze, she assumed it was the young woman’s breasts that had inspired the ecstasy she read on his face. At this point, the girl finally gave Phil his change and left. Tessa closed the door, making some kind of crack that later she couldn’t remember and that Phil himself never heard, so no one has any way of knowing what line of dialogue should go at this particular place in this biography.
* * *
In The Man in the High Castle, when the Japanese businessman contemplates a piece of jewelry in harmony with the Tao, the veil of appearances lifts from before his eyes and for the first time he sees the world as it really is. It was only sometime later that Phil drew the parallels between his experience that day and what had happened to Mr. Tagomi, a character in a novel he had written twelve years earlier. But he knew that what had just happened on his doorstep was something he had been waiting for his whole life.
The moment of truth. Debriefing. Anamnesis.
It had finally come.
He knew who he was, where he was, and where he had always been.
The golden fish hanging around the neck of a delivery girl from a pharmacy was the code that had been there forever, waiting to deactivate the amnesia module that had been implanted in his brain and launch the program that would lead him back to reality.
He was ready.
THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED.
When this phrase, strange yet also familiar, sprang into his mind, he understood its truth. The young woman was a secret Christian, and so was he. She had come to let him know this, bringing with her a sign to unlock his memories.
But why all the secrecy, the equivocal announcement, the tentative approach?
To foil the surveillance of the Romans.
But what Romans? This was Orange County, California, and the year was 1974.
No.
No, we only believe—or, to be exact, most of us only believe—that we are living in 1974 in the democratic United States of America, just as Ragle Gumm believed that he was living in 1950, just as Mr. Tagomi believed he was living in a world in which Japan had won the war, just as Joe Chip and his companions believed they were alive and Glen Runciter wasn’t. They are waging the battle for truth, and you, Philip K. Dick, have just joined their ranks.
You have become part of the invisible troops of the Awakened, those who can see beyond the hologram foisted on the unsuspecting masses for whom the highways, the electric sockets, and the Howard Johnson restaurants have the compact, placid density of reality; now you, too, can make out the iron bars of the enormous prison in which the Empire holds its slaves. You may not have known it, but you have always been one of them, and today you have joined up with the secret resistance, the bearers of light who walk among the shadows.
Do you feel it? Something has been set into motion deep within you, at the core of your being. Your internal clock has been reset with the correct time and date.
We are in the year AD 70.
But that you now know this, that you now know the truth shouldn’t surprise you. Deep down you have always known it.
The Savior came and then He left. But soon He will return. He promised to do so—and before this generation was finished. You’ll see. Do you doubt the words of the Savior? No, you are like us and with us. You are awaiting His return. Despite the persecutions, you are preparing for it with gladness and joy.
He who has been graced with this knowledge must not run from his responsibilities. He must not shield himself from the truth with rationalizations—telling himself that what he has seen is a hallucination, an allegory, a past-life experience. No, he has seen the truth, literal and unmediated, the only truth. Rome is here, now. The average American sees nothing, but Rome is the underlying reality of the world in which he lives. The Empire never ended. It has merely hidden itself from the eyes of its subjects. It has spun a fantasy universe, like a film projected onto a prison wall, a shameless fiction that the inmates take for a factual documentary depicting nineteen centuries of history and the world in which those years have culminated. But while the movie plays, the war goes on. Those who refuse to watch the film and to believe that it is real are hounded mercilessly. They aren’t permitted to leave the room, they are massacred in the restrooms. Some, out of caution, play along with the charade; they sit facing the movie screen, their eyes closed and their minds alert. They follow their own path; they serve a different king. They bear neither shields nor weapons; their only possessions are their robes, their sandals, and sometimes around their necks or on their wrists the golden fish by which they recognize one another. They form a secret society bound together by hope and by danger, a society that communicates in code, through cryptic signs scratched in the dust.
Praise the Lord, we have found you. You are back among us.
* * *
During the nights that followed, Phil dreamed a great deal and understood that his dreams were intended to complete his initiation. In most of them, opened books appeared before him. Had he been able to read these books and remember what he read, he would have found the answer to all the questions he was now asking. Unfortunately, however, the pages flipped by too quickly, as though before the moving lens of a photocopier. And they seemed to have been written in a foreign alphabet. He woke from these dreams frustrated yet convinced that the information he was supposed to glean had nonetheless been imprinted on his brain, without his knowledge. Perhaps it was supposed to be hidden from his consciousness as a safety measure.
* * *
How to put it? An aura drifted down and hummed around him, like a living, intelligent form of life, surrounding familiar objects and energizing them. His mind, the apartment he shared with Tessa and Christopher, their entire little world seemed like a nearly dead battery that someone had suddenly charged up.
He looked at Tessa, curled up into a ball on the couch like a tiny animal, sipping her coffee from a Snoopy mug. He looked at Chris, crawling along the carpet in his pajamas. He looked at the cats. Apparently, no one suspected anything.
He would have to teach his wife certain codes, the basic precautions, without revealing the whole truth to her. Luckily, he was a pro at that. What most people considered his paranoia was a blessing in disguise, the very condition on which his initiation depended. For so long he had been afraid of everything—the IRS, narcs, the police, the FBI—and all that time he had been right, and wrong only these last few months when he had tried to let go of his fears. They had sharpened his senses, had given him the reflexes of someone gone underground.
He was also known for saying strange things. People sometimes couldn’t tell whether he was joking or being serious, whether he believed what he was saying or was trying out on his listener some new crackpot theory that had just occurred to him and would soon be replaced by some other crackpot theory. It was widely understood that a conversation with Philip K. Dick did not follow the normal rules and that nothing he said should come as a surprise. This tacit protocol gave him substantial maneuvering room in which he could do and say what he wanted without being taken for a complete lunatic. Still, the risk was there, and he would have to proceed with extreme caution.
* * *
He sent Tessa to buy some votive candles for a little altar he was setting up on a shelf in their bedroom, complete with a primitive painting of the Virgin appearing before Saint Philip, in front of which the candles would burn continuously.
While Tessa was off at the supermarket, Christopher, who had awoken from his nap, started to cry. Phil went into the kitchen to make some cocoa for him, and when he returned to the bedroom the baby reached for the bottle. Phil gave it to him. Without knowing why, he had also picked up a piece of bread that had been lying on the kitchen table. Suddenly he understood why. He started to go back to get some water, then changed his mind. If the Romans were somehow watching all this, the connection between the bread and the water would surely alert them. Everything would have to look as if it were happening naturally, so that anyone who didn’t actually know what was happening would see nothing other than a father playing with his son. He gave a tiny piece of bread to Christopher, using the opportunity to take back the bottle, whose nippled top he gently unscrewed, just enough so that a little bit of the chocolate milk spilled on the child’s head. Quickly Phil traced the sign of the cross with the milk on Christopher’s forehead, whispering, in Greek, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Then he gave the bottle back to the child, and, while Christopher drank from it, he hugged him and said in his ear his secret Christian name: Paul. The whole ceremony had not taken more than a few moments, and an unapprised observer would have had no idea what he had just witnessed. Phil had carried out all the gestures from instinct, with authority and precision, impelled by a force that was infinitely greater than him yet concerned with the well-being of both father and son.
* * *
The hostilities began the night of Christopher’s baptism, on the easy-listening station to which, for several days now, Phil had gotten into the habit of leaving his radio tuned all night long. He kept it on at a low volume, and the sound reassured him, allowed him to remember where he was when he woke with a start and couldn’t get his bearings. Thus they slept, Phil, Tessa, and Christopher, protected by the Virgin of Saint Philip, surrounded by scented candles and by the smooth sounds of Carly Simon, Olivia Newton-John, and—Phil’s favorite singer—Linda Ronstadt.
Sometime around three in the morning, Tessa was woken from sleep by a sudden commotion. Phil was sitting bolt upright in the bed, rocking back and forth, his hands over his ears. In a quavering voice, he kept repeating, “Libera me Domine!” Tessa, scared out of her wits, didn’t dare move, but he suddenly became aware of her presence and yelled at her to turn it off. She didn’t have time to figure out that “it” referred to the radio. Phil had already scrambled to the foot of the bed and pulled the plug, then run with the radio into the kitchen. When he came back, he was trembling.
He explained that he had been woken by Linda Ronstadt singing “You’re No Good,” a song off her latest album, one that normally Phil was very fond of. But this time his name had somehow become part of the lyrics, like a kind of interference. It was to him, Phil, that Ronstadt was viciously repeating, “You’re no good, you’re no good, you’re no good, baby, you’re no good,” finishing the refrain with the words “Die, die, die.” Ronstadt, or the anti-Christian terrorists who were using Ronstadt, wanted him dead.
Tessa calmed him as best she could. They went back to sleep. A little later the unplugged radio switched back on. This time, instead of Ronstadt, there came a slow, deep, echoing voice—doubtless synthesized—that, playing on his name, kept repeating childish and menacing obscenities against a background of bubble-gum rock. These were interspersed with death threats, or rather veiled incitements to suicide that terrified him with their persuasive power.
He finally mustered the courage to go into the kitchen, but the voice stopped, only to pick up again the moment he returned to the bedroom. Awoken again, not knowing what else to do, Tessa listened in vain for the voice. In the end Phil threw the radio into the sink, filled the sink with water, and put wax in his ears.
The next morning it occurred to him that he was not supposed to have consciously heard what he heard. His enemies had broadcast the program to condition his mind while he slept. He had once received an advertisement in the mail for foreign language instructional cassette tapes that you listened to on a speaker placed under your pillow while you slept. By waking up while they were trying to imprint their incitements to suicide on his cerebral circuits, he had fouled up their plans. But for how long? And how many times, without being aware of it, had he been exposed to these lethal sound waves?
* * *
It was as though his brain, having been reactivated by the appearance of the golden fish, had become a radio receiver, picking up several frequencies simultaneously that bombarded him with contradictory information. The trick now was to separate the channels, determine the source of the broadcasts and the intentions behind them.
It was not going to be a pretty fight.
If his brain was going to have to be a radio receiver, he might as well try to control it as best he could. In a popular science magazine to which he and Tessa subscribed he had read that a person could improve the communication between the two hemispheres of the brain by taking massive doses of vitamins. Phil decided to overlook the fact that the treatment had been tested only on young schizophrenics. Three times a day he ingested several handfuls of pills, which kept him from sleeping and set off dazzling displays of phoshenes beneath his closed eyelids. His thoughts raced through his brain, like reptiles darting through a dark corridor. Spots of color floated in the shadows of the bedroom. When he managed to fall asleep, toward daybreak or in the afternoon, he was visited with strange dreams, most of them seeming to have something to do with the Greco-Roman world. He was locked in a cage in the middle of the Coliseum and giant lizards were tearing at the door. He saw a black and gold vase sitting on a three-legged table, and a voice told him the year was 842 BC. The voice spoke Greek but he understood it. When he woke up he wondered what had happened in the year 842 before Jesus Christ. According to his Encyclopedia Britannica, that was the Mycenaean era. He scoured his brain for some explanation as to why everything was pointing to this date, eight centuries before the apostolic era toward which all the other signs were pointing.
One night when he was moping about in the kitchen, casting sidelong glances at the radio that Tessa had rescued from the sink, he realized that he’d made a mistake in his vitamin dosages. The vitamin C pills he had been taking contained five hundred milligrams, five times more than he had thought. This meant that for the past eight days he had been taking seven more grams a day than he should have been taking—not even counting the other vitamins. He went back to bed feeling a bit worried. The votive candles flickered on the shelf before the painting of the Virgin and Saint Philip. Everyone else—Tessa, Christopher, Pinky the cat—was asleep. The only sounds were their breathing, the hum of the refrigerator, and the distant but constant rumbling of cars hurtling down the freeway.
* * *
Suddenly floating patches of color started to climb up the wall. Quickly, and then quicker still, as if propelled by centrifugal force toward some enormous, consuming beyond. They were moving toward the edge of the universe, Phil thought, and that idea terrified him. Lying perfectly still on his bed, he was entering a corridor of light that extended endlessly before him. He was in it now, falling, plunging at the speed of light. It was like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the astronaut leaves the solar system.
Then the colors produced forms with defined contours that linked together, permutating and transforming at dazzling speed. They seemed like abstract paintings. It was if he had looked at a hundred works by Paul Klee in a matter of seconds. Then came the Kandinskys and the Picassos, of various periods. This went on for hours. Thousands upon thousands of paintings by these artists—many more than they could ever have painted during their lifetimes, even had they lived several centuries. Each one passed by in a flash, one following another in rapid succession but lingering long enough to leave an impression of its sovereign perfection on his mind. Phil was no aesthete and always maintained that he had no visual sense. For the first time, the violent and ineffable beauty of forms was revealed to him. He would have loved to have been able to enjoy the spectacle unreservedly, without thinking about what he was seeing, but that was precisely what he had never been able to permit himself to do: there was no room in him for pure enjoyment, only for meaning, and already he was trying to figure out what these visions meant. He would have liked to have had a camera attached to his retina so that he could preserve a trace of this marvelous art collection and have it authenticated. Seeing wasn’t enough; he needed to know where this visual feast came from and what it meant. It had to mean something; it couldn’t simply be gratuitous, a random event. Someone was sending him telepathic messages, messages that had been transformed into brilliant colors and displayed like abstract paintings, messages whose nature he couldn’t grasp.
Later, Christopher cried out, and Tessa shuffled grumpily into the kitchen to prepare his bottle. Phil remained in bed, bathed in the last remnants of the nocturnal orgy; the patches of color were slowing down and fading in intensity, then, gradually, they disappeared. He arose, certain that he had been transformed.
* * *
The transformation did not have much effect on his taste for conjecture, which had free rein in the days that followed.
It kept coming down to the same question: had these messages that he had been receiving originated within himself or had they come from some outside agency?
From a materialist perspective that saw the mind and body as inextricably linked, the answer was readily at hand. Nonetheless, he reread carefully the article about the vitamin regimen he had been following, studied the labels on the bottles, and leafed through the medical dictionary that, as a lifelong hypochondriac, he always had at his side. From this research emerged a theory brilliant in its scientific verisimilitude: the acidity of the vitamins had dramatically lowered the level of gamma-aminobutyric acid in his brain. At adequate levels, this substance, also known as GABA fluid, inhibits the firing of certain neural circuits, the very ones that make people see parades of pink elephants or wondrous displays of Klee or Kandinsky paintings hurling past their retinas. GABA fluid is the opposite of LSD; when there is not enough of it, the phantasmagoria begins. He found this hypothesis satisfying enough, much like a motorist who, when his car begins to make strange noises, tells himself reassuringly that “it must be the spark plugs.”
At the same time, however, he kept up a parallel line of inquiry, sending Tessa to the library to check out books on Klee and Kandinsky for him. He discovered that the Hermitage in Leningrad had a large number of their canvasses in its collections. This information brought back a memory. Years before, someone had told him about experiments the Soviets were doing on telepathic communication. Could it be that he was the object of such an experiment—in which the Soviets had decided to film the abstract works in the museum and transmit the montage at enormous velocity halfway around the world to bombard the neural circuits of a resident of Fullerton, California?
Perhaps they had, but then the question was why. Why choose Phil Dick rather than some other Southern Californian? And why choose abstract paintings—was the choice random, because they had to test the transmission with some message or other and these paintings happened to be at hand, or was there some significance to the paintings?
As for the first question, he asked it only as a matter of form, for he had no doubt that he had indeed been targeted specifically. He was certainly aware of his tendency to find it suspicious, or at any rate meaningful, that a vacuum cleaner salesman would ring his doorbell on the same day as a Jehovah’s Witness; he would have very much liked to doubt his own logic, but facts were facts, and the principle of parsimony that underlies all scientific explanation precluded his imagining that there was no relationship between his being contacted by secret Christians fighting against the Empire, then by Soviet telepaths, all within a matter of three weeks. He just had to figure out the connection.
Did the Russian scientists working on this program belong to the confederacy of the golden fish? It seemed more logical to imagine them working for the Empire, of which the Soviet Union was the most obvious, though not the most sophisticated, avatar. But what about the dissidents? Maybe dissident scientists were risking their lives trying to contact him. Maybe, but maybe not. Perhaps the real truth was that Soviet scientists—not dissidents but, on the contrary, loyal servants of the Empire—had somehow happened upon the message the fish worshipers were trying to send him and now they were doing what they could to disrupt it. When he lived on Hacienda Way, one of the freaks—a kid who had since died—used to call out random numbers in a loud voice whenever someone started to make a telephone call, so that it was impossible for the person to remember the number he was trying to dial. If that was what the Russians were up to, then the whole point of the message was to overload the frequency and therefore the message had to be completely random. But he didn’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly. The fact that the message confused him didn’t prove it was not the real one that his invisible friends wanted to reach him. For there was a strong possibility that this message wasn’t intended for his conscious mind but was aimed directly at some deeper and safer subcortical region of his brain. And, despite this reasoning, nothing could shake his certainty of having begun to amass a data bank that, unbeknownst to his conscious mind, was starting to affect his nervous system and cause it to change profoundly. To his benefit, perhaps, or at any rate to hasten the triumph of the light.
* * *
In the days that followed, Phil’s dreams became even more intense. He felt as if he were in an accelerated learning program, though without knowing what the crash course was trying to teach him. Yet now and again, and to his great displeasure, he found he could identify the language—Russian. Page after page, hundreds at a time, technical manuals printed in Cyrillic letters filed past his eyes.
That was when he remembered Lem’s article.
Several months earlier, someone had sent him the German translation of an article that had first appeared in a Polish magazine under the name of Stanislas Lem, reputed to be the greatest science fiction writer of the socialist bloc: his work had been translated into dozens of languages; and the great Tarkovski had based his film Solaris—the Soviet answer to Kubrick’s 2001—on Lem’s novel of that title. And now, this important writer had apparently gone to the trouble to write a long analysis of American science fiction, the gist of which was this: it was one vast wasteland, with the exception of Philip K. Dick.
Inasmuch as Lem’s indictment of American science fiction was based on high cultural arguments, his estimation of Dick was surprising since only with great difficulty could one cast him in the role of belletrist among the philistines. And, indeed, Lem didn’t try to do so; on the contrary, he underscored Dick’s bad taste, his pedestrian style, his limping plots. Yet in spite of all this, Lem believed, the gulf between Dick and his contemporaries was no less great than the one separating the Dostoevsky of Crime and Punishment from the writers of pulp crime fiction. For all his naïveté, Dick managed to express a truly visionary perspective on the modern world, and nowhere was this more apparent than in Ubik.
Phil had been flattered by Lem’s praise, but it troubled him as well. He himself had never thought of Ubik as one of his better works. He remembered the novel far less vividly than he did that terrible period of his life when he was working on it, when his home and brain were falling apart. And here, within the space of several months, a number of Europeans were discovering in this thrown-together novel profoundly mysterious dimensions. One of his French editors, Patrice Duvic, had come to visit him that fall and announced with solemnity that he considered Ubik one of the five most important books ever written.
Phil assumed Duvic meant one of the five best science fiction novels ever written. But Duvic said no, he meant one of the five most important books in human history. Phil never asked why, or what the other four books were. Duvic had spoken with such conviction that Phil didn’t know what to think.
He had started to correspond with Lem, who was planning to publish Ubik in Poland. These plans went awry when it emerged that under Polish law, authors could only collect royalties in Poland, not abroad. Lem had suggested that this restriction offered an incentive for Phil to do a little traveling. Perhaps he might like to attend an upcoming literary conference in Warsaw, where a pile of zlotys awaited him. Unpredictable as ever, Phil dug in his heels. He wrote furious letters to his agent, his publisher, and particularly Lem, whom he at first accused of wanting to make off with the royalties by counting on his never showing up to claim them and then of trying to use the money as bait to lure him to Poland, which he would never be allowed to leave. This latter hypothesis offered richer possibilities than ordinary embezzlement, and Phil spent the winter exploring its tortuous implications—on his own, since Lem had stopped answering his letters.
To all appearances, the Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies were trying to determine how subversive his work was. They had started to decode it—witness the article by Lem, who probably wasn’t even an individual but most likely a collective writing under that name. They saw Dick as a potential Solzhenitsyn, perhaps even more dangerous because he threatened to expose the secret Sovietization of America—to say nothing of the secret of life after death—to what remained of the free world. Weren’t people beginning to speak of him as a writer of Nobel Prize caliber? Duvic had passed on a comment to that effect that had been made on a late-night cultural program on French television, and from it Phil had surmised that a group of French intellectuals was lobbying the Swedish jury on his behalf; he was already wondering what he would do when Nixon’s apparatchiks refused to allow his now illustrious adversary to go to Stockholm to pick up his prize.
Before it could come to that, his enemies in the East were looking for a way to disarm the ticking time bomb. They were making overtures to him; they were floating trial balloons his way. And who knew? Perhaps Duvic was involved as well, though maybe unwittingly. Clearly these French intellectuals—who were all Marxists anyway and read Phil’s work as a critique of capitalism—were being used by the KGB to influence public opinion in the West in furtherance of their aims. Duvic was a pawn they had put into play so as to draw Phil out into the open. That’s where Lem came in; the groundwork had been laid, and his job was to soften Phil up and get him to Poland. Phil wondered what would have happened to him in Warsaw had he taken the bait. He could just imagine it: the lecture, the banquet that night, the toasts to his success, and then the next morning, when he would wake up with a hangover in a room with stark white walls, surrounded by guys in white coats holding syringes. “This won’t take long, Gospodin Dick, and you won’t feel a thing. You’ll even be able to give your lecture this evening.” And that evening he would find himself before an even larger crowd than before, because the foreign press corps would have been invited, and he would hear himself tell them that he had decided to stay in Poland, land of freedom.
Luckily he had thwarted their designs and, at least for now, managed to escape their brainwashing. He had a good laugh thinking of all the heads that were probably rolling within the ranks of the Lem collective, but then it occurred to him that perhaps his enemies had failed on purpose and weren’t trying to get him after all, at least not yet.
He felt the uneasiness of the chess player who realizes his opponent is about to mount a devastating assault but who can’t tell where it will come from. Lem’s efforts to get him out of the country, the pages of Cyrillic characters, the dream visions of paintings from the Hermitage—it all heralded the return of the diabolical Russian theme in the symphony of his life. He waited.
* * *
The shot was fired on March 20, though it was on March 18 that he first had an inkling of the impending disaster, when Tessa signed for a registered letter. In labored English, the author of the letter proclaimed himself an admirer of Dick’s work and wanted an autograph or, if possible, a signed photograph. It was a classic fan letter of the sort he felt he never received enough of, particularly from women, but this one came from Tallinn, Estonia.
In all his life no one had ever written him from Estonia. He opened his atlas and was not surprised to find that Tallinn was located near Leningrad and not far from Warsaw. The net was beginning to close around him.
Suddenly words came out of his mouth, as if on their own and without premeditation: “Today is Monday,” he told Tessa. “On Wednesday, another letter will come. It is highly dangerous.”
He refused to provide further explanation and didn’t get out of bed for two days.
On the morning of the twentieth, he sent Tessa out to get the mail. She returned looking anxious and solemn and handed him the seven letters that had arrived that day. Phil glanced at the envelopes without opening them. Six were easily recognizable: ads and bills for the most part, letters whose senders he recognized by their return address or the familiar handwriting. The seventh had no return address. The postmark indicated it had been mailed from New York.
“That’s the one,” he told her, his voice constricted in fear.
He asked Tessa to open the envelope and to describe the contents without showing it to him. It was a single sheet of paper on which two book reviews had been photocopied, both from the Daily World, a left-leaning New York newspaper. The articles praised a certain Soviet writer living in the United States for her lucid depiction of capitalist decadence. The words decline and death had been underlined in red pen on the photocopy. Tessa said that the name and address of the novelist were on the back of the page. Everything seemed to indicate that the photocopy had been sent by the novelist herself.
Phil kept his eyes shut as he listened to Tessa. If he chose to, he could explain away the situation. It was thoroughly banal: a Soviet writer, aware of his reputation among leftist intellectuals, had sent him a photocopy of a couple of articles praising her talents because she admired his novels and wanted to bring her own work to his attention. But he knew better. Ever since the registered letter from Estonia had arrived, a voice inside him had been telling him that a supreme test—an ordeal in the literal sense—awaited him. How he handled it would determine his entire destiny.
“‘See,’ said the Eternal, ‘I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. Choose.’”
* * *
Now it was his turn. He considered every move he might make and calculated every possible consequence, all the way to checkmate. If only he knew who his enemy was. Obviously it was the Russians, but that was precisely the problem: it was too obvious. Did they really think that, having turned down the enticing offers from Lem and his clique, he would fall for such a clumsy ploy? Then maybe the letter had come from the secret Christians, who, in the purest spiritual tradition, had strewn his initiatory path with temptations to see whether he would resist them. Same problem. He wasn’t tempted in the slightest to get in touch with the Soviet novelist. In fact, everything having to do with the Soviet Union terrified him, and those who were subjecting him to this test would have known that about him. The test must therefore have some other meaning. It was not simply a matter of replying to the letter and thereby failing the test or of not replying and thereby passing it. Suddenly he understood: the way he would fail the test was not by replying to the letter but by not replying. That was the trap. Whoever had sent him the letter had expected him to burn it, bury his head under his pillow, try to put it out of his mind. So that’s just what he wouldn’t do. Did that mean he would reply? No, he wouldn’t do that either.
Two hours after the letter arrived he phoned the FBI.