The literary breakthrough Phil had achieved with The Man in the High Castle brought about no change in his material and social conditions, in spite of the Hugo Award. The publication of Martian Time-Slip, of which he had also expected much, went nearly unnoticed. Despite the income from the wealthy family of Anne’s dead husband and despite the jewelry sales, Phil needed money, lots of money by Berkeley standards, to maintain his family of six in a middle-class lifestyle. He had to work incredibly hard to earn what Anne thought was still only barely sufficient. With the help of amphetamines, he could turn out a novel in a few weeks—in two years he published a dozen—but he paid for the boost they gave him with terrible bouts of depression. He felt incapable of measuring up to his responsibilities. He looked haggard. The face behind the beard was blotchy and puffy. Large black insects buzzed on the periphery of his field of vision. He began to regard Anne as his enemy. He was certain that she considered him a failure and that the advice she gave him—to work less and earn more, the way other men somehow managed to do—was designed merely to rub it in. She despised him for being a loser but it seemed to him she needed a loser to despise, and he, for his part, was happy to oblige her, having discovered a certain dark pleasure in acting according to the role he figured she wanted him to play. He had dedicated The Man in the High Castle to her, just as he had promised, but she had blanched when she read the way he had worded the dedication: “To Anne, my wife, without whose silence this book never would have been written.” A small masterpiece of churlishness, the cheap vengeance of an underling—but after all, he reasoned, she had brought it out in him. She may have looked like the model American wife, but there was something of the Nazi inside her: a cruelty born of the absolute certainty of being right, of believing that the natural order of things, indeed nature itself, was on her side. When he had come up with that caste system for Clans of the Alphane Moon, he’d wondered where exactly he would have fit in and decided he would have been either a Skitz (a flattering idea, since the Skitzes possessed visionary powers) or a depressive Dep (the more likely possibility, he felt, and one that was growing likelier with each passing day). But he had no doubt about Anne: she was pure Mans—overbearing, predatory, and utterly without empathy.
Phil amused himself turning that novel into a psychodrama of Anne and his relationship. Chuck Rittersdorf, the hero, has a job not unlike Phil’s, programming CIA simulacra—humanoid robots that the agency uses for delicate or dangerous missions. The job carries no prestige whatsoever and it doesn’t pay well either, but Chuck takes pleasure in the secret knowledge that, when the simulacra speak, the words coming out of their mouths are his. It gives him a feeling of power and usefulness that his wife, Mary, apparently cannot fathom. She thinks what Chuck does is pathetic hackwork ill-befitting the man to whom she gave the honor of marrying her, and she thinks Chuck is pathetic too. An attractive, ambitious, and utterly uncompassionate woman, she specializes in other people’s problems and is convinced she has none of her own. Phil had a great time developing this character, and was nearly jubilant the day he figured out what he would have her do for a living. It was too delicious—Mary would be a marriage counselor, and of that particularly offensive breed: garrulous and self-assured, continually lacing her pronouncements with liberal doses of Freud and Jung.
Chuck is unhappy with their relationship, and his wife’s being a marriage counselor doesn’t help matters—quite the contrary. He leaves home and holes up in a rundown apartment house in a seedy part of town, hoping to elude Mary for as long as possible. Phil must have derived vicarious pleasure from his protagonist’s flight. How many times had he imagined doing exactly the same thing? But there were the girls to think about, and now his own daughter, and then that devastating paralysis of will that overcame him as soon as he stepped out the door—actual physical shakes. And where could he go? Those times he did make it to the car and managed to drive off—his hastily packed suitcase in the trunk and with no particular destination in mind—he always ended up at his mother’s, where, after a few hours, Anne would come find him and bring him home. He would stand there outside his mother’s door like a man on the lam who knows the jig is up and is waiting for the police to arrive. It was no use trying to look for a better place to hide: Anne would find him anyway, just as, at the beginning of the novel, Mary finds Chuck. Phil didn’t bother explaining how; this kind of woman always finds you, and she doesn’t take her time about it. And now, having found him, Mary lays down the law: Chuck is going to have to earn some real money, she tells him, so that he can pay the colossal alimony the court will award her at the divorce.
“You can have everything,” he told Mary, all at once.
Her look said, But what you can give isn’t enough. “Everything” was merely nothing, as far as his achievements were concerned.
“I can’t give you what I don’t have,” he said quietly.
“Yes you can,” Mary said, without a smile. “Because the judge is going to recognize what I’ve always recognized about you. If you have to, if someone makes you, you can meet the customary standards applied to grown men with the responsibility of a wife and children.”
He said, “But—I have to retain some kind of life of my own.”
“Your first obligation is to us,” Mary said.
For that he had no answer; he could only nod.
Having issued this warning to her husband, Mary takes off for Alpha III M2, the madhouse Alphane moon, as field psychologist on a government mission. This one detail aside, Phil suspected that his life with Anne would play itself out in just this way. She might make him her doormat, but she would never let him go. Like Chuck, he felt starved for sympathy and compassion and had no one to turn to. How alone he was! In drawing him into her web, Anne had created a void around him. Their friends were her friends. Their pets were her pets. Even their psychiatrist was her psychiatrist. If only he had a mistress … He wanted to call Kleo, to hear her voice and that ringing laugh that used to get on his nerves but whose honesty and uncalculating cheerfulness he now missed terribly. But he didn’t dare. She had gotten remarried, to another salesman at University Radio. She probably hated him. Perhaps she had found out that he had sold their house without telling her about it or sending her a penny. Anne, of course, had pushed him to sell it; she told him that they would pay Kleo back when their finances were in better shape, but he knew very well that they never would. He had been a coward to give in, a coward and a fool. As he always did when he felt guilty, Phil felt sorry for himself.
But there wasn’t time for him to feel sorry for himself. He needed to keep typing, one eye on the page and the other riveted to the calendar on the wall that was telling him that this novel which he had barely started was going to be finished in three weeks. He still needed to find a way of connecting the two plots that he had set up: the war between Chuck and Mary and the one on the Alphane moon.
Thank goodness for robots. Chuck’s bosses at the CIA order him to program a simulacrum that will join the mission Mary has signed on with. This robot, whom Mary will no doubt take to be just a handsome travel companion, will actually be operating under her husband’s guidance via remote control. From a marital standpoint, the situation is scandalous, but Chuck immediately sees how to turn it to his advantage. A jealous man might have seized the chance to seduce his own wife in the guise of another. But Chuck isn’t a jealous man; he’s a man oppressed, married to a hateful woman who is bent on his destruction, and now he has been handed the opportunity to kill her. He can say that the robot went berserk, and although he’d certainly be a prime suspect in the murder, no one would have anything on him.
Perhaps it’s not the perfect crime, but the idea is too good to let go, and Chuck is obsessed with it. Phil was, too. For two weeks, everyone at home found him in a far better mood, a remarkable thing since, when he was busy writing, he generally crammed himself with pills and didn’t sleep. Anne accused him of playacting, of pretending to be the model husband. And in fact he was playacting, but at a different role: that of a lookalike robot whose mission was to kill Anne. At the same time, he played a second role, that of the robot’s programmer, who, having launched the “model husband” program, was now waiting for the right moment to strike. The dual roles added spice to the most mundane activities, such as drying the dishes when Anne was washing them. He watched her move, listened to her hold forth about this or that, her speech punctuated by all those “shits” and “fucks,” and took great pleasure in the thought that he knew something that she didn’t, which was that at any second he was going to strangle her.
* * *
Two weeks later Chuck and Phil staggered off the field of battle together, leaning on each other for support. They had managed to transform the planet of the lunatics into a slaughterhouse, but without having accomplished the one thing they had set out to do. Sitting at the bottom of a trench, they went over what had happened, trying to find some meaning in their failure. “Maybe some day when it doesn’t matter,” Chuck thinks to himself, “I can look back and see what I should have done that would have avoided this, Mary and me lying in the dirt shooting back and forth at each other. Across the darkened landscape of an unfamiliar world. Where neither of us is at home, and yet where I—at least—will probably have to live out the remainder of my life. Maybe Mary too.”
In fact, Mary and Chuck both remain on the Alphane moon, and, as they will be living among the mental patients, they must undergo tests to determine which clinical family they should be assigned to. Phil now roused himself from the dazed stupor into which the carnage of the penultimate chapter, his feelings of inadequacy, Anne and his own marital troubles, and the general messiness of the plot had plunged him in. He decided that Mary would run the tests since she is after all a psychologist, but he reserved for himself the right to announce the results. To everyone’s surprise, Mary, who thinks herself the only normal person on the moon and whom her husband thinks is a Mans, turns out to be a Dep, profoundly depressed and destined to wallow in the depths of Cotton Mather Estates. As for Chuck, the Dickian flipped-out hero, whom his wife has pegged as a latent hebephrenic, he suffers from no pathologies whatsoever. He is completely normal. As the only one of his kind on the Alphane moon, he will found the clan of the Norms, with its capital in Thomas Jeffersonburg, and dedicate himself to the task of making others well. His wife looks at him with respectful gratitude. The end.
* * *
It would be hard to imagine a more perfect illustration of wishful thinking than this triumphalist ending. Yet the strangest part of the whole business was that an actual psychiatrist—not just one of Dick’s fictional creations—had come round to his view.
For two years Phil and Anne had been going separately to San Rafael, a suburb just north of San Francisco, to see a doctor whom they had come to consider the arbiter of their differences. By this point, they were no longer hoping to understand each other so much as trying to convince him that the other one was at fault. Anne had been his patient originally and was banking on her seniority, as well as on what she considered the obvious validity of her grievances: her husband was refusing to face up to his responsibilities and had withdrawn into an infantile stubbornness; he had no sense of reality; his Oedipus complex, his inferiority complex, and his guilt complex had made him impossible to live with and quite possibly dangerous. Phil didn’t pull his punches either. He accused Anne not only of harboring deep feelings of aggression behind a facade of friendliness and civility but also of acting on those feelings. In fact, Phil told the doctor, she might already have actually committed a murder. Phil had become persuaded that Anne had managed to kill her first husband, and now Phil lived in fear that his turn was next. If she had managed to have Rubenstein committed to an institution, she could get him committed too. That was actually the best-case scenario. More likely she would simply kill him with her own two hands. She had tried to run him over once while backing the car down the driveway. Another time she had threatened him with a knife. When the doctor broached the possibility that Phil himself might be harboring unacknowledged emotions—feelings of insecurity, perhaps?—he laughed and shook his head ruefully: Wouldn’t you feel insecure, doctor, if your life was in danger? Sure, okay, maybe he was paranoid, but paranoids can get themselves murdered too. One of these days they’d find him on the floor of the garage, asphyxiated by car exhaust, or floating facedown in the bathtub, and the coroner would rule his death an unfortunate accident; and maybe then the doctor would remember what Phil had told him and regret not having acted while there’d still been time.
One evening in the fall of 1963, while Phil and Anne and the girls were having dinner, the sheriff—the man from whom they rented the shack—came to the door. He had with him a court order committing Anne to a psychiatric hospital for three days of observation. When she realized that the order was signed by her psychiatrist, she flew into a rage, convincing the sheriff that the poor guy he had been renting his shack to had been telling him the truth all this time: he really was married to a crazy woman.
It was a painful scene. Anne had to be dragged away by force. The girls were in tears. Philip immediately took charge, ministering to the girls with the sad gravity of the responsible father who continues to keep the family clothed and fed even as their world is crashing down around them.
The three days of psychiatric observation turned into three weeks. Phil and the girls were at the hospital every morning as soon as visiting hours began. Anne’s shock and rage at her forced internment had been deadened by massive doses of tranquilizers, and she received her family calmly, as if they had come to see her after an appendix operation. She wore a pink bathrobe whose buttons she toyed with incessantly. Her movements were slow, her expression vacant.
Phil felt uneasy about what he had done, yet it wasn’t exactly remorse that he felt, for he had truly believed that his life had been in jeopardy. Somehow he couldn’t quite shake the notion, though, that by having Anne committed he had brought about one of those nightmarish reversals in which the lunatics take over the insane asylum and tie the staff up in straitjackets. The classic scene has the “director” of the asylum showing around the policeman who’s heard rumors about strange goings-on there. As they pass in front of one of the padded cells, the policeman is informed that the patient inside is one of their oddest and most interesting cases. He thinks he’s the director, the visitor learns, and that the inmates of whom the “director” is supposedly the ringleader have locked him away.
Now that Anne—zoned out on tranquilizers—couldn’t tell him he was wrong, Phil was less sure he was right. Lacking an enemy against whom to hone his arguments, he began to feel that they were losing their edge. Anne had been in the hospital a few days when Phil went to see the psychiatrists to try to explain that the whole thing had been a terrible misunderstanding, that he was the one who needed to be locked up: he had schizoid tendencies, he told them, because his mother had let his twin sister die from hunger when they were six weeks old; he had the diagnostic tests to prove it. The resident psychiatrists curtly suggested that he take his concerns to his own psychiatrist.
By now, however, Phil had lost confidence in his doctor: he had revealed his weakness by taking Phil’s side. As for the doctor, he was beginning to fear he had made a grave mistake, and when Dick showed up at his door, agitated and suspicious, his fears were only confirmed. Not daring to go back on his diagnosis, he could do nothing but try to shore up his patient’s defenses against the forces of self-doubt. He told Phil it was perfectly natural to have feelings of guilt; in fact, he would have been surprised had Phil not had them. But what Phil needed to do now, the doctor advised, was to face reality and stop trying to run and hide behind fictions.
The doctor must have known his patient well, for Phil never felt more reassured than when someone told him he wasn’t facing reality or that there was something wrong with the way he looked at things. It was easy to get him to admit that his mistake—his unforgivable mistake—had been in not realizing that he was perfectly normal and that his wife was desperately ill. He understood that he had been behaving like someone who tries to start a car that doesn’t have a motor, then gets angry with himself for not being able to.
It wasn’t Phil’s fault that there was no motor, the doctor explained with insinuating persuasiveness. It was his fault, though, that he believed it was his fault. That was a case of refusing to face reality. His wife, not he, was sick, and he would have to deal with that. Not admitting it was crazy.
Phil left the doctor’s office feeling nearly convinced. He may not have completely bought the doctor’s assessment of the situation, but he held out the hope that one day Anne would be well enough to recognize its truth. He imagined her confessing to him with a sad smile—exactly as Mary does in the last scene in Clans of the Alphane Moon:
“I’m not a Mans at all. In fact I’m just the opposite; I reveal a marked agitated depression. I’m a Dep.” She continued to smile; it was a worthy effort on her part and he took note of it, of her courage. “My continual pressing of you regarding your income—that was certainly due to my depression, my delusional sense that everything had gone wrong, that something had to be done or we were doomed.”
Rereading these lines in proof, Phil experienced a powerful surge of tenderness for Anne. Tears rose to his eyes. She had looked so fragile, so helpless in her pink bathrobe. What an idiot he had been: here was this unhappy, frightened little girl who needed his protection, and he had been able to see her only as a shrew intent on crushing him like an insect. All he could think about now was taking her in his arms and telling her that he would never leave her, that he would help lead her through these rough waters and back to the shores of reason. Yes, he would lead her out of the cold, desolate world of madness and back to the soft and welcoming warmth of the real world.
* * *
Anne came home from the hospital a zombie, thanks to the powerful drugs that, according to the doctors, she would probably have to take for the rest of her life. It would be Phil’s responsibility to make sure that she took her pills as prescribed. Because the medicines didn’t so cloud her mind that she ceased to aspire to complete recovery, she would sometimes pretend to swallow them and then spit them out when Phil wasn’t looking. Suspecting this subterfuge, Phil would hover around her while she took the pills and would rifle among the leaves of the houseplants for the ones she had spat out. He felt sorry for himself for being married to someone so seriously ill. One day, while he was on the phone with his mother complaining about Anne, she overheard him making the magnanimous concession that “it must have been hard for her too.” She nearly choked with rage.
Phil wondered what he would do if Anne didn’t get better. Divorce her and marry someone else, or carry this ball and chain for the rest of his life? How long would he have this burden to bear?
While Anne was in the hospital, an attractive if somewhat odd woman came to his aid. Maren Hackett was of Swedish descent, athletic, and hard-drinking. She had been a policewoman and a truck driver, and was a member of Mensa. Although she didn’t fit Phil’s idea of a religious fanatic, she was in fact active in Saint Columba’s Episcopal Church in Inverness, the village not far from Point Reyes where she lived. At her suggestion, Phil began to read the epistles of Saint Paul, and in particular those passages concerning charity. In them Phil recognized what until then he had called empathy and, like Paul, held to be the highest of the virtues. He saw himself as a self-denying caregiver who for his wife’s sake sacrificed the brilliant life and gratifying love affairs that would otherwise have been his due. Eric, the hero of Now Wait for Last Year, the novel that Phil wrote that autumn, faces a similar dilemma and finds the same courage and comfort Phil had found in Maren Hackett in a talking taxicab:
To the cab he said suddenly, “If your wife were sick—”
“I have no wife, sir,” the cab said. “Automated Mechanisms never marry; everyone knows that.”
“All right,” Eric agreed. “If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean—”
“I see what you mean, sir,” the cab broke in. “It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her.”
“That’s right,” Eric said.
“I’d stay with her,” the cab decided.
“Why?”
“Because,” the cab said, “life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can’t endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions.”
“I think I agree,” Eric said after a time. “I think I will stay with her.”
“God bless you sir,” the cab said. “I can see you’re a good man.”