I’m coming to the end of this story—unless, of course, it already ended, somewhere in the last hundred pages. What else happened to Dick? His mother died and he called Kleo, whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years, and cried as he told her the news. Movie rights to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? brought him lots of money. He gave a large part of it to charitable organizations, bought a house for Tessa and Christopher, and offered the apartment next to his—the one Doris had lived in for a time—as a wedding present to Tim Powers, who wouldn’t accept it. He continued to go to Powers’s house every Thursday, and every Friday he went to his therapist. He made an effort to lose weight, and he dressed better. A photo taken in the offices of Warner Bros. shows him standing next to the director Ridley Scott, looking rather convincingly like a successful writer—heftily built but not overweight, sporting a neatly trimmed beard and an elegant suede jacket. Joan Simpson may have been his last love but he still had a few friendships with women and perhaps a sexual tryst or two. A young actress for whom he tried in vain to open the doors of the studios remembers five qualities in Dick: his kindness, his warmth, his loyalty, his devotion to his art, and his melancholy. With the blinds drawn in his darkened apartment, he listened to Dowland’s lute songs, bearing such titles as “Sorrow, Stay” and “Weep You No More, Sad Fountains,” but his favorite of all remained “Flow, My Tears.” From afar he watched his son grow up and for a while even considered getting remarried to Tessa. On bad days, he called her and asked her to come over and hold him.
God spoke to him no more. He had almost no more visions, and he dreamed less, too. Depending on how he felt, he saw this abandonment either as a new test of faith on the road to his salvation, as a sign of the Adversary’s final victory, or as a return to lucidity after a long bout of delirium. One night, however, he smoked a roach that he found in his ashtray after a guest had left, and God broke His silence. To make sure he was dealing with the Almighty Himself, not some imposter, Phil tried to put Him to a test. The one he came up with on the spur of the moment seemed perfect: at long last he had found the question that would force Him—or whoever was passing himself off as Him—to show His cards and come clean. But alas, the next day he could remember neither this ultimate question nor the answer he received.
With nothing else to cling to, he continued to work on the Exegesis. He wrote two more books—or, to be exact, Horselover Fat wrote one book and Phil Dick another.
* * *
Fat’s book, The Divine Invasion, treats that most intractable of subjects: the Incarnation. Everyone who has written a life of Jesus has racked his brains over this problem. What exactly did the carpenter’s apprentice from Nazareth know about his divine nature? Did he become aware of it gradually, in a long, slow awakening? As he hung from the cross, could he possibly have thought that, by taking himself to be the Son of God, he had fallen prey to an illusion? And if not, and he knew all along that he would be resurrected, then how can one take the Passion seriously?
The Divine Invasion has as its protagonist a little boy named Emmanuel. Smuggled to Earth as an unborn child inside the womb of an ailing colonist who dies before giving birth to him, Emmanuel brings unhappy tidings to our planet. The universe, he announces, is both a prison and a simulacrum; the Creator has lost control of His Creation; and all of us are asleep, dreaming the dreams that the all-powerful Empire puts into our brains. The least deeply asleep among us, alerted by vague doubts and intuitions, by little glitches and inconsistencies in their daily lives, can sense the truth that the Empire tries to suppress. They dare not believe it, yet somehow they must—they must wake up. Whoever hears the words of Emmanuel and believes in him shall enter the Garden and make the world real again.
Various tutelary figures appear on the scene to help the child discover his origin and his mission: the prophet Elijah, in the guise of an old beggar, John the Baptist, Zoroaster, Athena, Yahweh Himself, and a sententious little girl whose name is the one used by Cabalists to refer to the spirit of God, His feminine element—Shekkinah.
This gathering of cosmic luminaries is reminiscent of those big-budget “prestige” films in which Hollywood studios used to give “guest appearances” to every last star they had under contract. Bedecked in an array of Essenian, Gnostic, and Hebraic references, the upper crust of the Exegesis mingle around an ample buffet of traditional Dickian specialties, like implanted memories and cryonic suspension, while a medley of John Dowland airs, as sung by Linda Ronstadt to the accompaniment of her vibrolute orchestra, plays in the background.
The usual, in other words.
* * *
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is the exact opposite. Vicious and unpredictable, it is the work of the Rat at his confounding best.
In 1979, Joan Didion’s White Album, a collection of essays on the 1960s, was published and instantly hailed as a classic of literary journalism. One of the essays, “James Pike, American,” offered a devastating portrait of Phil’s old friend, painting him as a religious opportunist, a philistine, an unintelligent intellectual, and a narcissist. Phil read the essay and found it very painful; given his tendency to adopt the point of view of anyone who attacked him, he probably saw that Didion was right about Pike in many ways, and that what she said about Pike applied to him as well.
Dick had subtitled his Exegesis “Apologia Pro Mia Vita.” Now he thought he might write an apologia for Pike, who had been both a role model for him and the embodiment of what he feared becoming—in other words, a perfect alter ego.
The question was, who should tell the story? He briefly considered narrating it in his own voice, but he realized that he would soon find himself at the same impasse where he had left Phil and Fat caught up in their interminable duel. Every novelist has dreamed of escaping himself, of writing the thoughts of someone else, of telling a story in someone else’s words. Dick, quite improbably, realized this dream, just as the end was drawing near. For the first time in his life he chose a woman as his protagonist—and not the dark-haired, empathetic woman of his dreams or the castrating bitch of his nightmares but a complex and believable character who bears no resemblance to the author who created her.
Angel, the narrator of this very mainstream novel, had been married to Jeff, the son of Timothy Archer, the celebrated Episcopal bishop of the diocese of California. Jeff Archer committed suicide in 1971, and the bishop and his mistress, Kirsten, claimed to be in contact with him, from the Other Side. Then Kirsten committed suicide, and shortly afterward the bishop himself died a strange death in the Judean desert. The book opens on December 8, 1980, the day John Lennon is shot. Three weeks before, Ronald Reagan had been elected president. It is a time, the I Ching indicates, “when inferior people are pushing forward and are about to crowd out the few remaining strong and superior men” (Po, “Splitting apart”).
Angel manages a record store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and like so many others in the Bay Area, she dates the events of her life by the release of Beatles albums. Her marriage was falling apart around the time Rubber Soul came out. When Jeff moved into the hotel room where his body was later found, he brought Paul McCartney’s first solo album with him; the room did not have a record player. Nine years later, Angel still wants to weep whenever she hears “Teddy Boy.” Despite the fact that her Sufi instructor—an Alan Watts clone who gives seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito—has been teaching the exact opposite lesson, she thinks that the only reason we’re on earth is to make the discovery that what we most love will be taken from us. The day Lennon dies, she happens upon an article by the essayist Jane Marion, the darling of the New York literary establishment; it’s about Angel’s former father-in-law. Reading the essay, Angel bursts into tears and then decides to write her own version of events as she witnessed them.
Angel Archer loved and admired the bishop, whom she calls Tim, but she was not blind to his faults. Nor was Dick to his own; by taking the viewpoint of this grieving young woman who is trying to understand what went wrong, he lets the apologetic aspects of his project fall by the wayside. He had intended to eulogize his old friend Jim and, in doing so, to justify himself, but his portrait of Tim Archer, even less flattering than Didion’s of Pike, presents a dry pedant of a man, someone who, deaf to his interlocutors, overwhelms them with learned quotations and lards his monologues with terms like kerygma, parousia, and hypostasis. Tim Archer had a moral lesson for everyone and spoke grandly of charity and love, but he elbowed his way through life without a thought to the consequences of his actions. No mundane concerns would ever stand between him and his zeal for truth. When he took the wrapping off a new shirt, he let the cellophane and pins and cardboard stays fall to the floor and then, since he was always in a rush, would stroll out of the room without picking them up. When he no longer got along with his wife, he declared their marriage annulled. When a commitment no longer served his interests, he ceased to honor it. After all, rather than persevering in an error, wasn’t it better to simply turn the page? This rule of conduct, which Didion perceptively identified as a signal trait of the 1960s, guided his entire life—a succession of hastily turned pages, a book he skimmed. Christ Himself was but one of those pages, one experience among others. To remain loyal to Him in the face of doubt and temptation would have been unworthy of this spiritual Don Juan. And like certain Don Juans for whom each successive love affair is the one great and true love, the bishop believed that in his latest vision of the world he had found the final answer. But all it took was a new book or a seductive new theory and all his former certainties were called into question. As a five-year-old child, he had read the dictionary and telephone directory cover to cover—a feat his admirers held up as a sign of his zeal for knowledge; now, as an adult, he continued to seek objective answers to his every question in one book or another. He knew that somewhere there had to be an impartial, documented, dependable account of the Real Truth, just as there is one, for example, of agricultural policy in the Low Countries. Surely he had discovered that books contradict one another in the answers they offer to this type of question—and necessarily so, given that they reflect human opinions—but that discovery led him neither to relativism nor to throw in his lot with one camp; all it did was cause him to continually change his mind.
Characteristically, Dick’s case study of intellectual and emotional faithlessness—a self-portrait in fact—was the occasion for yet another of his famous about-faces. In depicting the erring ways of Pike and those around him, he sided with Angel Archer. At least she had her feet on the ground and, without blaming the sinner, spoke out against his sin—an absurd quest for meaning that ultimatley had lured him into the Judean desert behind the the wheel of a Ford Cortina and left him stranded there with a gas station road map and those two bottles of Coke. There’s nothing more pathetic than the mistrust of immediate reality by people who never stop splitting hairs over Ultimate Reality. They always think they’re getting to the bottom of things, whose surfaces they turn away from as unworthy of their attention; they end up never knowing the flesh of the world, the softness and resistance it offers to the touch. They manage to bypass their own lives.
Yes, Phil thought with a sigh, I have bypassed my life.
* * *
Unsurprisingly, Dick went too far in his championship of reality. Not satisfied with giving his woeful-countenanced Knight of Meaning a worthy opponent in the figure of a lucidly unhappy yet loving young woman, he had to throw in a schizophrenic as well, whose inability to engage in abstract thinking makes him Dick’s new model for humanity. As a teenager, Phil had been given the “proverb test” by a psychiatrist, the one that asks the subject to explain what sayings like “When the cat’s away, the mice will play” mean. A person of reasonable mental capacities might talk about employees taking advantage of their boss’s absence; someone less equipped to translate the proverb into more general, abstract terms will merely paraphrase it, never getting beyond its surface meaning. He or she will say something like, “If you have mice in your house, your cat will hunt them. And if your cat takes off, the mice will be happy because they’ll be left alone, and that’s why they’ll play.” In his newfound enthusiasm for the concrete, Dick came to vaunt this incapacity for abstract thinking as a welcome antidote to the excesses of which he knew he himself was guilty.
Hence the following conversation, as reported by Angel, between Bishop Archer and Bill, his mistress’s schizophrenic son, who cannot make the abstract leap that would allow him to understand the analogical argument by which the bishop seeks to demonstrate that vague psychic phenomena can prove that his son has returned from among the dead:
“You look under your parked car and you find a pool of water. Now, you don’t know that—the water—came from your motor; that is something you have to assume. You have evidence. As an attorney, I understand what constitutes evidence.” …
“Is the car parked in your own parking slot?” Bill said. “Or is it in a public parking lot, like at the supermarket?”
Slightly taken aback, Tim paused. “I don’t follow you.”
“If it’s your own garage or parking slot,” Bill said, “where only you park, then it’s probably from your car. Anyhow, it wouldn’t be the motor; it’d be from the radiator or the water pump or one of the hoses.… Also, your transmission, if you have an automatic transmission, uses the same kind of fluid. Do you have power steering?”
“On what?” Tim said.
“On your car.”
“I don’t know. I’m speaking about a hypothetical car.”…
“Okay.… The first thing to figure out is what kind of fluid it is. So you reach under the car—you may have to back it out first—and dip your finger in the fluid. Now, is it pink? Or brown? Is it oil? Is it water? Let’s say it’s water. Well, it could be normal; it could be overflow from the relief system of your radiator; after you turn off an engine, the water gets hotter sometimes and blows out through the relief pipe.… What kind of car are you driving?”
“I think it’s a Buick,” Tim said.
“It’s a Chrysler,” I said quietly.
“Oh,” Tim said.
In life, what you need to know, Dick now insisted, is how to repair your car. Not some hypothetical car, not cars in general—because nothing exists in general; only particular things exist, and those that we happen to encounter along our path should suffice us. Those who want something else, something more, are looking for trouble: they start off noticing impossible repetitions and making ludicrous connections between unrelated events, and before they know it they’re believing that everything that happens is the result of a secret master plan that it is their job to get to the bottom of; in short, they become paranoid. Be careful, kids, Dick seems to be saying in this novel, it’s all too easy to get caught up in this sort of thing. And I should know.
And so, in this snakes-and-ladders game of a book we find ourselves back at space 16—irony and withdrawal, The Soul’s Winter. Don Quixote has settled down, and before he dies, he undergoes one last conversion—to Sancho’s vision of the world. And Cervantes, it seems, embraces Sancho’s vision as well, for he ends his novel with Quixote’s conversion, fully aware that the last chapter of a story traditionally carries its moral and meaning.
Timothy Archer being Dick’s last novel, one might think that Phil—not Fat—came away with the final word. People who see the world in the same way as Jeter, Dick’s apostle of bullshit, tend to read it as a final “testament,” evidence of Dick’s “return to reality,” a disenchanted yet calm acceptance of the world in all its absurd, complex, and marvelous idiocy. There is no meaning, there is no Other Side, and maybe it’s better that way. In any case, that’s simply the way it is.
Or maybe not. Dick may have decided it was okay for him to live among windmills, but he would go on being a Rat. He just couldn’t conquer the temptation to end his last book with the transmigration of the dead bishop’s soul into the mind of Bill, his schizophrenic contradictor, as Bill and the narrator look on, stoned on some really good weed. Tired, Dick saw his death approaching and dreaded the moment when the roulette wheel would stop spinning and the little ball would land on a number—even or odd, it had to be one or the other. He knew that this moment would come, but he also knew that, for as long as he could, he would resist coming to a final conclusion and would go on contradicting himself to the bitter end, offering only penultimate truths.
In September 1981, he had one last vision. The new Savior had been born and was living in Sri Lanka among the poor; he went by the name of Tagore. Believing he had been chosen to prepare the world for this second incarnation of Christ, Dick summarized Tagore’s teachings in a letter that he photocopied and sent to all his friends and acquaintances, as well as to the editor of an obscure fanzine. It was a clumsy interweaving of his usual religious obsessions with the philosophy of a fringe environmentalist movement—Deep Ecology—that was making its presence known on college campuses throughout California. The ecosphere is sacred, Tagore taught, and when the ecosphere is harmed, God is harmed. Tagore, the new Christ, had taken mankind’s sins against the ecosphere upon himself.
The tone of this letter and others that Dick sent around this time shows how deadly serious he was about his new vision. That didn’t prevent him, however, from attributing it to Horselover Fat or from writing a parodic article for another fanzine in which he expresses the following convictions—as firmly held, no doubt, as those he evinced in the Tagore letter—in regard to his recent output: “It is glib enough,” he wrote,
but apparently Dick is trying to work off the bad karma he allegedly acquired during his year or years with street-people, criminals, violent agitators and just by and large the scum of Northern California (this all took place, apparently, after the collapse of one of his many marriages). This reviewer suggests that a better way to make amends would be to take some much-deserved R&R: stop writing, Phil, watch TV, maybe smoke a joint—one more bite of the dog won’t kill you—and generally take it easy until both the Bad Old Days and the reaction to the Bad Old Days subside in your fevered mind.
Having written this, he gave a contented sigh and went back to his Exegesis.