The first warning signs came one evening after Phil and Kleo had eaten some lasagna she had made. She and Phil were talking and listening to music when Phil suddenly developed a stomachache. He got up and said he was going to find something to take for it, then walked down the long, dark corridor to the bathroom.
He reached the door and started fumbling for the light cord. Kleo called to him from the dining room, asking if he was all right. He replied that he was fine. But he still couldn’t seem to find the light cord, even though he knew perfectly well that it hung inside the door on the left. It was getting ridiculous. His fingers spread wide, he made wide circles in the air with his arms, trying to snag the end of the cord. A wave of panic descended on him—it was as if everything had fallen away around him. In his flailing about, he banged his head against the corner of the medicine cabinet. The glasses on the shelf rattled. He swore.
Kleo’s voice came again, as though from far away. “Are you all right?” Then, “What’s wrong?” He groaned, though not loud enough for her to hear, and mumbled that he couldn’t find the goddamn light cord.
And then it hit him. There wasn’t any cord to pull. The switch was on the wall—it had always been there—just to the right of the door. He found it easily and flicked it up. The bulb hanging from the ceiling went on. He looked around the bathroom, expecting it would somehow look different, but it didn’t. Undergarments were still hanging from the shower curtain rod, a cockroach was scuttling across the tiles. Phil lifted his foot to squash it, then stopped himself.
He opened the medicine cabinet, trying not to look at his face in the mirror, picked up a bottle that had fallen over, found the one containing his stomach pills, and swallowed one of the pills with a glass of water. Then, having gently turned off the light switch so that it would make no noise, he went back into the dining room. Kleo had cleared the table and was in the kitchen doing the dishes. He thought again about the light cord, wondered where the memory of it had come from—it was a specific light cord, of a specific length and in a specific location. He knew he hadn’t been fumbling around for it randomly, as he might have done had he been in someone else’s bathroom. He had been looking for a cord that he had used before, on any number of occasions—often enough, he thought, to create a reflex in his nervous system.
“Has that ever happened to you?” he asked Kleo. “Have you ever felt around for a light cord that wasn’t there? Instead of the wall switch?”
“Oh, so that’s what took you so long,” she replied, looking up at him from the dishes in the sink.
“Where would I have gotten into the habit of pulling on a light cord?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to find them anymore. Most lights work with wall switches these days. Maybe it’s a childhood memory coming back to you.”
Then Kleo went off to bed, leaving Phil with Magnificat, the cat, in the dining room, which in the evenings became his study. He put on Schumann’s Liederkreis, opus 39, a new recording by Fischer-Dieskau, and sat down at the table. Kleo had already put his typewriter back in the usual place, in front of his chair. A car drove by, but after the noise had receded there was absolute silence. This was his favorite time of day. The first lied on the record, the most beautiful one, was about a man who has taken a trip and is now trudging through the snow, thinking nostalgically about his homeland. Actually the poem that Schumann had set to music said nothing about snow, but the lied was part of a collection that also contained a recording of Schubert’s Winterreise, and the album cover showed a frosty winter landscape, putting the listener in the mood for snow. Phil laughed to himself. He wondered whether it would be possible to write a poem, and then a song, based on what had just happened to him: a guy goes into the bathroom, and instead of flipping a light switch he gropes for a pull cord that isn’t there. Phil improvised some lyrics. He was almost tempted to wake Kleo up and sing them for her, to the melody of the lied that had just finished and in his best imitation of Fischer-Dieskau. “Es gab keine Lampenschnur”… “There was no light cord.”
* * *
He considered writing a story about the incident. He had already written several stories in which someone is struck by some small, utterly insignificant detail, perhaps some little thing out of place, and realizes that something is not right. In one of these stories, a man goes to his office and notices that everything has been altered ever so subtly. He finds it hard to say what, exactly, is different—whether it’s the furniture, or the arrangement of the furniture, or something about his secretary’s face. But the more he thinks about it, the more positive he is that everything has changed. And in fact, he’s right: a secret organization has been routinely recomposing his reality—in something of the same way one might renovate a building—all for vague reasons of national security that Phil doesn’t take the trouble to develop in any detail. In another story, a man, his family, his friends, and everyone around them think they are residing in a small American town circa the 1950s; in reality they are living in an immense stage set, part of a historical exhibit in a museum in the twenty-third century. The townspeople are fenced in like Indians on a reservation, except in their case they have no idea where they really are. A sophisticated system of optics prevents them from realizing that they are being observed by the people of the future, who come to the museum in droves to get a glimpse of what life used to be like. At a certain point, the hero of the story suddenly understands what’s going on and tries to convince the others. They think he’s crazy, of course.
Phil adored writing this kind of scene, spelling out the arguments of the hero who speaks the truth and is believed by no one and who knows that if he were one of his listeners, he wouldn’t believe himself either. One might expect these scenes to be tedious, given their obligatory nature and the formulaic character of the stories themselves, but they are extremely successful. In the story about the 1950s historical reconstruction, for example, Dick does a nice job presenting the encounter between the hero and his psychiatrist, who by definition is the worst possible interlocutor, since he is interested not in the truth or falsehood of what his patient is telling him, only in determining the mental state that the man’s “symptoms” indicate. Phil hated psychiatrists’ smug certainty. He joked that had Galileo gone to his psychiatrist and informed him that the earth moved around the sun, or had Moses repeated to his what Yahweh had told him, the doctors would have smiled benevolently and started asking them about their childhoods. At bottom what pleased Phil most about these stories, and about such scenes in particular, was that he got to have the last word. He could show that the psychiatrists were wrong, that the patients they dismissed as delusional were actually right. He delighted in being able to make the psychiatrist in the story an unwitting part of the historical reconstruction. The museum visitors double over in laughter when they hear the good doctor explain to his hapless patient—the only one to have figured out what is really going on—that he’s avoiding reality by retreating into his imagination. An escape mechanism, the psychiatrist intones sagely, which is precisely how Phil’s friends might have accounted for his writing stories about little green men instead of holding down a real job with adult responsibilities: obviously he felt guilty or feared authority or simply refused to grow up. Science fiction was an escape mechanism. Maybe they were onto something.
Several months earlier, reading Freud’s Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Dick had learned about the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, the judge whom Freud uses as the model of the paranoiac. Dick decided that, retold slightly differently, the case would make great science fiction. The Man Whom God Wanted to Change into a Woman and Penetrate with Larvae in Order to Save the World—sure, it was a little long as titles go, but if science fiction, as Anthony Boucher argued, consisted of asking the question “What if?,” then clearly this was something he could have some fun with. What if Schreber was right? What if his supposed delusions were in fact an accurate description of reality? What if Freud was just another self-righteous know-it-all, pathologizing a man who understood better what was really going on? The whole idea that the only man who knew was locked away in an insane asylum wasn’t all that crazy, but unfortunately it probably wasn’t all that marketable either. No science fiction editor would be interested in a novel featuring Freud or Schreber. On the other hand, nothing prevented the writer of the light-cord lied from styling the protagonist after himself. After all, the light-cord incident was real and had actually happened to him.
So that’s what he decided to do—he would tell the story of a science fiction writer who tries to turn on a bathroom light that is not there and realizes that something is not right. And if the publishers wanted mainstream, he would pile it on: a small town, little white houses, pretty little gardens, the neighbors’ dog, a fat garage mechanic with a corncob pipe, the smell of a homemade apple pie baked by that nice lady next door. Except that it would be science fiction, meaning, first and foremost, that Phil would get it published and, second, that the main character would be right: something really is amiss; the world is not what it seems to be. It’s a stage set, nothing but props and backdrops and special effects, all cleverly designed to fool the inhabitants and keep them from finding out the truth. But what is this truth that someone is concealing from them?
* * *
When he sat down to write the novel, Time Out of Joint, Dick gave the hero a different name and a different profession. The main character, Ragle Gumm, has been earning a living for the past several years by participating in a daily mail-in contest organized by the local newspaper called “Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?”
The entry forms are always the same—a blank grid on which the little green man appears in one of the hundreds of empty squares. From one day to the next, the little green man changes squares, and each and every day the newspaper publishes a series of apparently meaningless phrases, something along the lines of “A swallow is as great as a mile”—which supposedly offers a hint to where the little green man will next turn up. Operating under the assumption that these apparently meaningless phrases contain hidden messages, Ragle begins by free-associating, though he also uses his previous results, which he has carefully recorded since he started playing the game. Ragle’s method, a combination of deduction and sheer inspiration, turned out to be oddly effective: he wins each and every time and manages to live off the modest prize money. What begins as a whim, a way of bringing in a few extra bucks playing little guessing games, soon becomes a chore. The game is his ball and chain. People don’t understand this; they imagine that all he does is sit at his kitchen table, pick a square by intuition or at random, mail in the reply, and deposit his checks. They think he is a lazy bum leading the good life, thanks to a talent he doesn’t deserve, while honest folk go out and work for a living. No one appreciates how stressful his life is—the toll taken on him by this occupation fit for no one but an arrested adolescent, and, even as he congratulates himself on the autonomy it affords him, he is plagued by the envy and suspicion that he arouses in those around him. He sometimes dreams of changing his life, of giving up the contest and doing something else—sweating under a hard hat in the shadow of oil derricks, perhaps, or raking leaves, or pushing a pen behind some desk. Any occupation has to be more rewarding, more grown-up, more real than this stupid game he can’t seem to let go of. But then the next morning the newspaper arrives, and after eating breakfast, without even clearing the table, he opens to the page where the contest appears and gives the wheel of his life another spin. It must be his karma—at least that is what he has read in the Vedas.
Ragle Gumm has one consolation: he knows he is needed. The contest organizers have built their advertising campaign around his long tenure as undefeated champion. In fact, they want him to win. By secret agreement, they allow him to send in several entries a day to increase his chances of winning.
* * *
One day, Ragle works up the courage to ask Lowery, the man in charge of the contest, whether the puzzles actually mean anything.
“Not literally.”
“I know that. I mean, do they mean anything at all, in any way, shape or form? Or is it just to convince us that somebody up at the top knows the answer?”
“What does that mean?” Lowery said, with a shade of annoyance.
“I have a theory,” Ragle said. “Not a very serious theory, but it’s fun to toy with. Maybe there’s no correct answer.”
Lowery raised an eyebrow. “Then on what basis do we declare one answer a winner and all others incorrect?”
“Maybe you read over the entries and decide on the strength of them which appeals to you the most. Esthetically.”
Lowery said, “You’re projecting your technique on us.”
Then comes the business with the lamp cord, reinforcing Ragle’s vague impression that something is wrong. He comes across some kids playing in an empty lot who have found an old telephone directory in which the prefixes correspond to no exchanges he has ever heard of, and when he tries dialing some of the numbers, no one answers. He is beset by strange impressions of disconnectedness, by feelings of déjà vu. He notices that everyone recognizes him on the street, even total strangers. They’ve probably seen his picture in the local paper, he tells himself; he is, after all, the perennial champion of the little-green-man contest, but still … Later, fiddling with an old radio set, he picks up messages that seem to come from planes circling constantly overhead. No one in town seems to know anything about these planes, or at any rate nobody mentions them. Maybe I’m the only one, he thinks, who’s not in on this. Maybe I’m the center of something without even realizing it. No, no. Got to keep calm. I already suspect I’m the focus of some conspiracy, that the universe spins around me, without any other purpose than to torture me. I’m becoming paranoid. But no sooner do these thoughts cross his mind than the radio starts picking up messages again. They’re about him:
“It’s fine. You’re passing over him now.”
Him, Ragle thought.
“… down there,” the voice said. “Yes, you’re looking down at Ragle Gumm himself.”
In Dick’s earlier stories of this sort, the hero typically uncovers a secret that involves nothing less than the fate of the world and vainly attempts to tell those around him what he knows. In Time Out of Joint Dick turns this plot on its head, creating something even creepier. The story line is no longer about the hero’s being the only one to know the great secret; now it’s about everyone except him knowing, about everyone conspiring to prevent him from finding out what’s really going on. Ragle struggles no less mightily than Dick’s earlier protagonists to convince others of his dawning revelation and receives the same incredulous response from those around him. The difference is that this time his “incredulous” fellow citizens are in on the secret and are waiting to see where his suspicions will lead him.
Pursuing his investigations—as surveillance teams look on—Ragle tries to leave town, but escape proves impossible. It is as though the world stops just beyond the outskirts of town and everything must be done to keep him in ignorance of this. If he is driving a car, the engine dies. When he tries to catch a bus out of town, the bus depot disappears in the middle of the night. He panics. If I turn on the radio, he thinks, I’ll hear them talking about me. Because I am the center of this universe. They’re working like crazy to construct a fake world all around me, to keep me quiet and happy. Buildings, cars—an entire city. It all looks real, but it’s not. What I don’t get is, why me? And what is this contest really about? Obviously it’s very important to them, because this whole illusion has been built around it. When I figure out where the little green man is going to appear next, I must be doing something else. They know what it is. I don’t.
* * *
I’m not going tell the story to the very end, but I will give away the secret on which the novel turns. Ragle eventually cuts through appearances and gets to the truth. One of his first discoveries is an issue of Time magazine dating from 1997—some forty years in the future—with a picture of him on the cover, under a banner reading, “Ragle Gumm: Man of the Year.” And here is what he learns: at the close of the twentieth century, war broke out between the earth and its rebellious lunar colony, whose forces relentlessly bombarded the mother planet. Happily, the earth’s defenses were led by a strategic genius—none other than Ragle Gumm, who, thanks to his superior intelligence, his experience, and, most of all, his almost infallible intuition, was able to predict where the next missiles were going to hit, so that people could be evacuated from the targeted towns before catastrophe. But one day, overcome by the weight of this crushing responsibility, he retreated into an imaginary world of peace and tranquillity—to the 1950s, the carefree years of his youth. An escape mechanism, the agonized psychiatrists declared; there was no way to draw him out of this mental universe he created for himself. The authorities came up with the idea of adapting his environment to his psychosis, and they built a world in which Ragle could feel safe and secure. In a top-secret military zone they constructed an entire little town, like those that existed on earth before the war, and peopled it with actors. Then they gave Ragle a hobby that allowed them to continue to exploit his talent. Believing that he has been solving a kid’s puzzle in the daily newspaper—picking the square in which the little green man will appear again—he has in fact been telling the authorities exactly where the next missile will hit and thus continuing to defend the earth’s population against the lunar rebels. Up until the day, that is, when a number of little incidents make him suspect that something is not right and he begins to recover his memory. The lamp cord triggered everything.
* * *
With this chapter, the apprenticeship years of Philip K. Dick come to a close, and I propose we now take a little break and play a game. Here are three exercises to help the reader guess where, in the pages that follow, the little green man will pop up next:
1) At thirty, when he had written the novel I have just summarized, Philip K. Dick thought he was a poor, struggling working-class writer, condemned to earn a meager living banging out stories for pimply teenagers, stories that kept him from writing the more serious works that he believed would make his mark. Yet at the same time, he sensed that this estimation of his activities was not the whole truth—and that he was actually, without knowing it, doing something else. The question is, what did he think he was really doing?
2) You are holding in your hands an issue of Time magazine from the year 2007, with a picture on the cover of Philip K. Dick, “Man of the Year.” Describe what the article says.
3) Variation: the issue is dated 2004, which means that it comes not from the universe in which you are reading this book but from a parallel universe. Redo exercise number two with this in mind.