Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  Surprisingly, the woman was smiling. “That’s pretty witty for a pet-store flunky, Mr. Pickford.”

  “I’m sorry. Really. I shouldn’t’ve said it.”

  “Why not? It’s a free country.”

  Gal’s mind gave him a troubling flash of the big guy who had preceded this woman into the shop. “If you’re rich, white, and Republican, maybe. Otherwise you’d better hope whoever you’re talking to isn’t wired.” Cal couldn’t believe he’d said that. Out of the frying pan. Into the inferno. Lia would have to buy him an asbestos mitten for his tongue, his most inflammatory appendage.

  A wry smile replaced the woman’s warm one. “No, it’s free even for people like you, Mr. Pickford. In these United States, one out of three’s a passing grade. You can flag ‘em all and still prosper if you’re not an avowed antipatriot.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’d like it better if you said, ‘Yes, miss.’ ”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “I’m assuming you’re saying that freely—with no sense of being yanked about.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, Yes, miss.”

  “I came in here to buy a pet, a friend to keep me company when there’s no one else who’ll do.”

  How often can that happen? Cal thought, for this woman, whether pushing forty or glancing back over her shoulder at it, had a nice figure and a well-proportioned face. Her sunglasses couldn’t hide the pleasing symmetry of her features.

  Aloud he said, “Are you a dog person or a cat person? Maybe that would help me get a fix on you.”

  “I hope I’m not either, Mr. Pickford. You make both sobriquets sound like titles.”

  “Titles?”

  “His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, Dog Person. All-Star Center Fielder Murph Dailey, Cat Person. Can you imagine those words engraved on dinner invitations?”

  Suddenly, Cal was frightened. Who was he talking to? Was this person maybe—in actual fact—wired? What about the guy who’d come in ahead of her? Most of Mr. K’s customers had an easy-going, unpretentious, down-home manner about them. You didn’t see that many upper-crusters bopping around West Georgia Commons. Even if they had money, or breeding, or both, they also had enough of one or both to act like everyday Americans instead of the highfalutin characters in a play by Oscar Wilde. Cal was now certain that his “rich, white, and Republican” remark had been a big mistake. This woman was letting him know. She wanted him to sweat. And that was the only “fix” on her that she intended him to arrive at.

  Maybe she’d like to buy a snake, Cal thought. A rattler. Or possibly our boa constrictor.

  “I’ve heard a good deal about Brezhnev bears,” she said. “You have some, don’t you? I believe I’d like to see them.”

  “Take her back there,” Mr. Kemmings encouraged Cal. The boss had lost the battle with his own customer, but apparently didn’t want to steal Cal’s potential sale. “We’ve got a good stock of ‘em right now, miss, but they’re going like hot cakes. Pick one or two out before the weekend crowd gets in here.”

  Hot cakes. Cal imagined drenching the naked backs of Brezhnev bears with Log Cabin syrup.

  Shaking this image from his head, he led his customer to the benches at the shop’s rear. Here were six aquariums, each housing—on cedar chips, not in water—two or more of the popular pets. One of the aquariums still needed its chips dumped and replaced, but Cal squared his back to it, shielding it from the woman’s view, and she began scrutinizing the “bears” in the other cages.

  “My, they’re odd little animals, aren’t they?”

  Cal said nothing.

  “How long have you been selling them?”

  “Me personally or Mr. Kemmings’s shop? I’ve only been here since the middle of January. About eight weeks.”

  “I meant the shop, of course.”

  “Well, the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium’s had them ever since the first shipments arrived from the Soviet Union. Maybe six months. That’s because Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, Hiram Berthelot, hails from Woodbury, not that far from here, and I guess he wanted local pet stores to be among the first in the country to offer the critters for sale.”

  “The efficacy of friends in high places.”

  “I guess so. Anyway, New Yorkers had to wait a month or two longer than Allan tans to buy theirs.”

  Gracefully lifting the wings of her cape, the woman squatted before an aquarium. She put the tip of one finger to the glass, an inch away from the tawny-maned head of one of the animals. “They’re not really bears, I know that. So what are they?”

  “They’re cavies, ma’am.” Cal swallowed. “I mean, miss.” He felt again that this woman was toying with him. A person totally ignorant of Brezhnev bears was a person who had been marooned on an uncharted island for the past half year.

  “Cavies?”

  “Guinea pigs. Most scientists don’t like to call them that anymore, though. ‘Guinea pig’ has some bad connotations.”

  “But they’re naked. Except for their bushy little manes, that is. Guinea pigs have hair. Some of them have quite a lot of hair. When I was a girl, a friend of mine owned two Peruvian guinea pigs, and they looked like tangled balls of chocolate- or soot-colored yarn. She had to clip them every month or so just to be able to tell their heads from their heinies.”

  “These guinea pigs—cavies—were bred especially for laboratory research by Soviet scientists, miss. That’s why they’re nicknamed Brezhnev bears. Sort of a tip of the hat to détente and President Nixon’s foreign-policy successes.”

  Cal hated himself for choosing his words with such craven care, but this lady—and the strange guy who’d come in ahead of her—had him spooked. If he blew his job at the mall, Lia might finally stop trying to rescue him from his suicidal impulses. She wanted their move to Georgia to be a fresh start, not a rehash of past problems.

  The woman stood up, simultaneously releasing her cape. “But why are they hairless?”

  “To reduce the need for hands-on care. That’s what makes them such good pets for busy young people with jobs. Also, it pretty much cuts out the gamy odor that you get with regular guinea pigs, and that’s another plus. With all the cultural and technological exchanges we’ve got going with the Soviets nowadays, it was almost inevitable that Secretary Berthelot would arrange to import some of these bald commie cavies for American laboratories.”

  “And the manes?”

  “I think they’re just for cuteness. The Kremlin has a strain that’s completely naked. Unfortunately, they give most people the willies. But Brezhnev bears, well, their looks mostly make you giggle and feel protective and want to take a couple home for pets or conversation pieces.”

  “Or status symbols?”

  “That, too.”

  “Do you think, Mr. Pickford, I’m the sort of woman who requires status symbols to bolster her ego?”

  “No, miss. You asked to see them.”

  “I know I did. And I’m going to buy a pair. Not for status, though. For their cuteness. For their company.”

  She selected two cavies, and Cal showed her some unoccupied aquariums so that she could buy one of those, too—along with a bag of guinea-pig pellets, a water bottle, and a large sack of cedar chips. Her total bill came to $122.00, plus tax, and Mr. Kemmings, beaming, let Cal ring it all up himself.

  Maybe now I’ll learn your name, Cal thought. He was ready to receive from their customer a check or credit card. He wanted to know her name partly because he felt that knowing it would make her less intimidating and partly because he had the odd suspicion that he ought to know it already.

  But rather than a check or a credit card, the woman handed over cash. A one-hundred-dollar bill, a twenty, and a ten.

  Feeling stymied, or possibly even subtly mocked, Cal gave her three dollars and twelve cents in change. The two pennies (he noted, as he always did) bore in profile the graven likeness of Richard Nixon, the only living president ever to secure this honor. Moreover, King Richard’s me
n had achieved this coup not after his retirement but during the first year of his third term. Both pennies, in fact, were from that year, 1977, with the word Liberty to the left of RN’s visage and a D (for the Denver mint) stamped a quarter inch beneath his ski-slope nose.

  “Is there anything else I should know about their care?” the woman asked, pocketing her change.

  “Keep them warm. Sixty-five degrees, or about that, or they’ll catch cold and cash in their chips.” (Pun half-assedly intended.)

  “Can do. However, it’s only about fifty outside today. How do I get them to my car?”

  Cal remembered that a nippy March headwind had fought his Dart all the way to the mall this morning. The “bears” could stand a few minutes in such conditions, of course, but if one of them were a trifle puny when it left the shop, even brief exposure to the cold could be life-threatening. And because Mr. K. guaranteed the health of his animals for a week after purchase, any Brezhnev bear that died during that time meant lost profits.

  But the boss had overheard. “Pickford’ll help you, miss,” he said, walking toward them from the hamsters and gerbils. “Drive your car around back. Park it where you see our name on one of the service doors. We’ll load your purchases for you.”

  We’ll? What’s this “we’ll” business? Mr. K. was fifty-eight, going on eighty-five, with a damaged ticker and chronic shortness of breath. Cal didn’t expect him to tote heavy pet supplies to customers’ automobiles, but he resented his use of the royal “we” almost as much as he resented having a living man’s kisser on legal coins of the realm.

  Outside, after squeezing through the door with an aquarium in which two scared Brezhnev bears were running amok, Cal encountered a big, cordovan-colored Cadillac. He tried to hold a nonchalant look on his face as he eased the cage onto the leather-upholstered seat and put everything else in the Fleetwood’s trunk.

  “You like my car?”

  “I couldn’t afford gas for it, much less the insurance.”

  “Why hasn’t a smart fellow your age—over thirty?—found more challenging, and better-paying work?” A significant gesture at the pet store. “Were you ever in trouble with the authorities?”

  Wind whipping past Cal’s sweated work shirt chilled him. “No, ma’am—miss, I mean. It’s just that I love animals.”

  “Oh.”

  “But my wife’s a psychotherapist,” he blurted.

  “That must be handy for you. Where does she practice?”

  “Warm Springs. Her brother owns the office, thank God, so we don’t have to pay rent. Her name’s Lia. Dr. Lia Bonner.”

  “That’s good to know.” Smiling, the woman took off her silver shades. Bright blue eyes whose irises had a cool lack of depth. Tinted contacts? “That’s really good to know.”

  She replaced her sunglasses, gave Cal a five-dollar tip, slid into her Cadillac, and drove off around the back of the mall into an encroaching twilight zone of mist or fog. Only a moment later, another car—a late-model Plymouth—followed the Cadillac into this same spooky murk.

  At least she has her Brezhnev bears, Cal thought. Because all I’ve got is my unfocused terror …

  2

  DR. LIA BONNER sat in her Warm Springs office, waiting for clients to walk in. She had ten or twelve already, including a few referrals from doctors at the county hospital and the Roosevelt/Warm Springs rehab center, but unless she got some consulting work from area industries—Millikin, Goody, Georgia-Pacific—she might not be able to keep her shingle out.

  After all, you met with your clients only once a week, if that often, for only an hour or so a session. With only twelve clients, you could hardly expect to stay busy shrinking heads every hour of every day, and for the past three weeks Lia had spent most of her time making telephone calls, paying visits to the merchants and manufacturers who might one day let her session with their troubled employees, and shooing away the salespeople who wanted her to buy couches, filing cabinets, or computer systems.

  I can hardly afford dog food for Viking, she wanted to shout. How could I justify seventy-five dollars for a plastic floor protector?

  Cal had insisted that it was a mistake to leave Colorado. He’d had steady, if not spectacularly lucrative, work with Arvill Rudd, on his ranch near Gardner, above Walsenburg, and Lia had been doing okay sessioning with clients in a rented house near Walsenburg’s hospital. But when her father died in a collision with a logging truck on the West Point Highway in Harris County, Georgia, a wreck that had also severely crippled her mother, Lia—more homesick than she had ever been—had told Cal that it was time to move south.

  “What the hell’re we gonna do in Georgia, Lia?”

  “I’ll set up a new practice, and you’ll find a job. There’s really nothing but legal technicalities to keep us here now.”

  “This is where I was born, gal. It’s the country I was meant for. I have a job.”

  “Right. But I was born in Georgia, and that’s the place I was meant for. We’ve lived out here in Marlboro Country ever since we got married. Given the Travel Restrictions Act, it would’ve been stupid to object, but now it’s your turn to go where I go.”

  “But you came out here of your own free will, and I’ve never so much as set foot in Dixie.”

  “Cal, my daddy’s dead, and my mama’s going to be a cripple from now on. I want to be down there for her. You ought to understand my feelings. You know what it’s like to lose your folks.”

  Wearily, Cal had said, “You get over it, Lia.”

  “Ha! That’s really ironic. That’s one of the things you most emphatically haven’t gotten over.”

  “Lia…” (Warning her.)

  “Cal, you should take advantage of my expertise. You should sit down and talk to me about that. I could help you.”

  But he had deflected her argument. “I’ll never make a Georgia Boy. I’m a cowboy, not a cracker.”

  Cowboy or no, he was a cracker today, and Lia felt a twinge of guilt every time she drove to West Georgia Commons to meet him and saw him puttering around inside the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium with a sack of cedar chips or a blow dryer for his poofy Brezhnev bears. It was a far cry from bucking hay for Arvill Rudd or delivering calves on cold February nights with his arms halfway up the birth canal of an exhausted heifer.

  The dust of forage; the steaming slime of new life.

  Cal had loved those things, and seeing her husband kowtowing to customers and feeding parakeets sometimes made her wonder if she were being selfish. Then she remembered that she had lived in Gardner for five years and that her mother was in the Warm Springs nursing home, confined either to bed or a wheelchair, and she knew that she’d done only what simple decency required.

  Exactly, Lia thought. And Cal’s getting acclimatized.

  What had finally enabled her to convince Cal, though, was the fact that the Internal Travel Restrictions Act—passed in 1971 mostly as a means of controlling antiwar protesters, but still in effect eight years after victory in Vietnam—allowed residents of one state to travel to another, or to make a permanent change of state residency, only under strictly policed conditions.

  Those freest to move about were politicians with national reputations; well-connected business types (especially if they kept Republican campaign coffers brimming); professional athletes on major-league franchises; registered truckers; federal employees in the military, the postal service, or domestic intelligence; and Congressionally certified entertainers. Rock musicians and folk singers often had trouble getting certified; and when Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, along with several other big-name figures in the folk-rock counterculture, dropped permanently from sight during a single eight-month period in 1973, only complete airheads and paid administration flunkies tried to attribute their separate disappearances to “coincidence”.

  In any case, you had to have an “in” with the Powers That Be to travel freely in King Richard’s United States, and most “little people”—ordinary folks with civilian employme
nt—could go from one state to another only if they met the criteria qualifying them for an exemption from the Internal Travel Restrictions Act.

  These criteria were mercantile, educational, or “humanitarian” in character, and Lia, on scholarship in Colorado Springs at a school recommended by a paternal uncle, knew all the categories by heart. After all, by wedding Cal and settling with him in Gardner, Colorado, she had cut herself off from Georgia forever—unless, of course, a humanitarian exemption presented itself.

  Well, the death of someone in your immediate family was grounds for exemption, but it was good for only two weeks after that death, and you had to act quickly to get it. If, by chance, you wanted to file for residence in the state where the funeral was being held, you had to show the authorities cause. Inheriting a farm or a business was almost always sufficient, but you could also prevail if you proved to them that a spouse or child of the decedent now required your care. Lia thanked God that she met this criterion even as she rebuked Him for taking her father and incapacitating her mother.

  So here she was in Georgia, with Cal dutifully in tow. It had meant a jumble of red tape getting here and then a puppet theater full of pulled strings establishing her practice. That was why Cal had been able to go to work before she did. Having earned all her professional credentials out of state, she’d had to buttonhole her state representative in LaGrange, write letters to the governor, and impose on her brother Jeff’s acquaintance with a federal judge to get set up. Had it all been worth it? A shingle was only a shingle, and the act of hanging it out by no means guaranteed you either a clientele or a livelihood.

  I can’t believe this, Lia thought. I scratched and clawed to get back home, and now—irony of ironies—I’m homesick for Huerfano County and my tumbledown office in Walsenburg.

  Don’t tell Cal, she advised herself. He’ll say, “My lord, Lia, you wouldn’t be happy in heaven,” as if any place in this country even remotely approximated that metaphysical Happy Hunting Ground.