By luck or by providence, he was spared the poisoned gift of a deathbed testament. He did not have an opportunity to choose his last words or to let the world know whether he was taking leave of it as Phil Dick or Horselover Fat.
On February 17, 1982, he gave an interview to a journalist who came to see him. He talked at great length about his latest enthusiasm: he had recently seen Benjamin Creme, a New Age guru of sorts, on television, and now considered him one of the great spiritual lights of our troubled time. Intrigued by the similarity between Tagore’s teaching and Creme’s message of hope for humanity in the Age of Aquarius, he had sent Creme a few of his books, along with a user’s guide he extracted from the Exegesis; he expected great things to come of their meeting. All this he explained to the journalist, then, after asking him to turn off the tape recorder, confessed his doubts about the whole thing. That evening, he phoned the journalist to tell him that the off-the-record comments were perhaps a better reflection of his real thoughts than those the journalist had on tape. It was hard to tell whether he was agonized or amused. That was his last conversation.
The next day, worried that they hadn’t seen him, his neighbors knocked on his door, then forced their way into his apartment. They found him lying unconscious on the floor. The doctors diagnosed a stroke and thought at first that he would recover, but he had two more in the days that followed. He could neither speak nor eat; only his eyes revealed that he was conscious. He received the sacraments of the Church, though there was no way of telling whether he wanted them or not. Then he fell into a coma. For three days he lingered, connected to life by a battery of tubes and pumps. The monitor beside his bed indicated an extremely diminished level of electrical activity in his brain, as those in the room with him kept their eyes fixed on the screen, watching the crests on the wavy line grow smaller and smaller. To what sorts of thoughts might these ripples correspond? In what sort of limbo was what remained of Phil now drifting? Did an answer lie somewhere in its deepest depths, and if so, was someone there to hear it?
* * *
I don’t know whether someone reminded him of his third wish. Nor do I know whether, during his last moments or after, he came face-to-face with whatever it was he had once glimpsed in a mirror darkly and had chased after during most of his stay on earth. I don’t know whether God exists, but I do know that the question is not the province of a biographer.
Doris spent three nights at his bedside, praying.
From what he had told her of his spiritual experiences, she had concluded that he had lost his way, that in his searching for the Living God all he had found was himself and the misery of his own flesh. But he had searched for Him, had desired Him with all his heart and soul, and Doris wanted to believe that, with so strong a desire, a person might lose his way but not his soul. If God did not pity Phil, how could we call Him merciful? How could there be a Communion of Saints?
She prayed for his salvation, certain that her prayers would be answered, certain that, indeed, all of us will be saved. That was why Christ had come among us. And precisely because she was certain of this, she vowed that she would offer this prayer every day for the rest of her life. (At the time of writing, she is still alive, still praying for his soul’s salvation.)
* * *
Then the EEG went flat. It remained so for the next five days—a straight line splitting the screen in two. On March 2, the wires and tubes were disconnected and the monitor was turned off.
Edgar Dick, very old now, came to retrieve his son’s body and took it to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where Phil’s gravesite had been waiting for him for fifty-three years. Only the date of his death needed to be engraved on the stone. When Phil was laid next to Jane, the old man, who until then had shown no emotion, saw the tiny coffin again and burst into sobs.