“Lone Boy,” Cal declared even before crossing the store’s open threshold, “Lone Boy, Philip K. Dick is dead.”
“Lots of people’re dead,” Lone Boy replied, turning to face him inside the waist-high minifort of the sales counter.
“I just found out about Dick, though. I want to know if you’ve got any of his books.”
“If you want it, we probably don’t have it. What you want is almost always weird, and Gangway’s big boss has a policy against stocking weird.”
Cal liked Le Boi Loan, whom everyone naturally called The Lone Boy, or simply Lone Boy, although Cal had still not figured out why the young Asian—he was a year or two younger than Cal—had chosen to work in a bookstore. Lone Boy was a video game and VCR addict, with a pathological mistrust of the written word unless it reposed in the dialogue balloons of the comic book Daredevil, starring his favorite Marvel superhero. He also apparently worked night shifts at a convenience store on the southern outskirts of LaGrange, and money was of course the reason for his employment there, just as it must be at Gangway Books. He had a wife and kids to support, and if he talked like a teenage rebel from a cheapjack Hollywood film, well, that was the sort of celluloid primer from which Le Boi Loan had partly learned his English.
“What’s weirder than Dungeons and Dragons or calendars of guys in Day-Glo jockstraps? You’ve got tons of that stuff, Lone Boy.”
“That’s movable weird. But you want weird that only a place with you for a customer could ever get rid of.”
“Philip K. Dick was an important American writer.”
“I’ll make a note.”
“Now he’s dead, and I’d just like to know if any of his work’s still in print.”
“Ain’t that the way? A guy has to die, or win a Nobel Prize, before anybody’ll crack a knuckle to read him.”
“I read him before he died, Lone Boy. I’ve been reading him for fifteen years. I’ve got copies of Dickian opuses that big-time editors and critics would kill to lay their hands on.”
“Oh, yeah. Dickian opuses.”
Cal stopped jabbering. Hey-diddle-diddle, he was letting his mouth run away with his brain. He had to calm down before someone overheard and started badgering him for incriminating details. As, for instance, the dude who’d cased out the pet shop that morning?
“Lone Boy,” Cal said more deliberately, “do you happen to know if you’ve got any of Dick’s books on the premises?”
“He’s a fiction writer?”
“Sure. Of course. What’d you think he’d be?”
“Not much of anything. Me, I try not to think. But if he’s a fiction writer, go look through the D’s over there where all the paperback novels hang out.”
“It hasn’t been there before.”
“Then it’s possible we ain’t got it now, either.” Cal walked to the fiction section, row upon row of paperbacks emblazoned with Nazi swastikas, ghoulishly complexioned children, embracing lovers, and the cannon-barreled bores of .38-caliber pistols. He could find not a single title by Dick. He returned to the skeptically squinting Le Boi Loan.
“Nothing.”
Lone Boy shrugged and spread his hands.
“Look him up in Books in Print for me.”
“Not that thing. You want me to break my arms trying to lift it up here? Have a heart, Cal.”
“I’ll do it. Let me do it.” Overcome with both impatience and irritation, Cal started to yank up the countertop giving access to the sales area, but now Lone Boy was waving his hands energetically at shoulder height, urging him to halt.
“Wait,” the naturalized Vietnamese said. “I’ve just remembered something.” He bent down by the garish nudie publications that store policy did not permit him to shelve with the other magazines and rummaged through a box of slick-papered posters and advertising flyers from various New York publishing houses. He pulled one of these impossibly creased posters free, stood up, and shook it out so that Cal could see it.
“Look here, my bookwormish buddy, Pouch House is going to be reprinting Dick’s stuff in paperback as part of a ‘Contemporary Rediscovery Series’. All with color-coordinated, hi-tech covers, matching typography, fancy-talkin’ lit-crit material, and so on. You’ll be able to buy lots of best-forgotten, minor Amerikanski writers in these packages—P. K. Dick, A. Nin, and J. Kerouac, as off-the-top-of-my-head for instances.”
Cal examined the poster. The Dick titles that Pouch House was going to be releasing in uniform paperback editions included Mary and the Giant, The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, Puttering About in a Small Land, In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, and The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike. Pouch had set the price of these volumes at $3.95 a copy.
“I thought you said you’d never heard of Dick.”
“You said he was an important American writer. I said I’d make a note.”
“You asked if he was a fiction writer.”
“Am I supposed to know this kind of trivial Americana from the git-go? You can’t even name the great Vietnamese emperor that I’m descended from.”
“Le Thanh Tong, the founder of the Le dynasty.”
“I told you that before,” Lone Boy accused.
“Yes, you did. And I remembered.” Cal felt that Lone Boy was jerking him around. “So why’d you play ignorant of Dick? And just where the hell do you get off calling him—how did you put it?—a ‘minor Amerikanski writer’?”
“When your government brought me over here from Hanoi, not long after the Christmas bombardment of the irrigation dikes that made Le Duc Tho sign the 1974 surrender agreement at Gif-sur-Yvette in Paris, I went into the Grace Rinehart school at Fort Benning to be Americulturated. A two-year program. I read until I was sick. We got force-fed everybody from Louisa May Apricot to James Ghoul Cozzens. Puttering About in a Small Land was the Dick title I had to choke down. Flat as day-old beer left uncorked in the fridge, buddy mine. Very deadly boring social criticism. The dude should’ve grown up in a totalitarian state like the so-called Democratic Republic of North Vietnam.”
“Boring?” Cal was flabbergasted.
“He picked a good title, though. Little people doing little stuff. One guy in it is a squirty nerd bigoted against blacks. If this is a ‘Classic of American Lit’, give me Daredevil any day. I OD’d on reading, and your P. K. Dick fella is one supergood reason I still ain’t gone back to it.”
“One book isn’t a fair test. Besides, the world hasn’t had a chance to read the real masterpieces Dick wrote.”
“Lucky world.” Lone Boy had grown weary of the conversation. Two customers holding books stood behind Cal waiting for Lone Boy to take their money, and Cal could tell that the Vietnamese wanted him to step aside. Loan refolded the Pouch House poster—not all that neatly—and crammed it emphatically back into the pasteboard carton next to the skin slicks. “These ‘Contemporary Rediscovery’ titles will get here around the first of April. No PKD available until then, Cal.”
“I want you to reserve me a set.”
“Reserve you a set? Hey, buddy mine, you might as well reserve you some sand grains at a beach. Nobody’s gonna walk off with this stuff before you get a shot at it. Just bring your money in, plunk it down, and go home with your, uh, goodies. April first.”
(April first. Right. April Fool’s Day.)
Cal took his checkbook from the back pocket of his jeans and wrote a check to Gangway Books for $12.50. Why? he wondered, even as he watched his ballpoint glide. Except for The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, he already owned this set in other paperback editions, some dating back to the mid 1960s, and Lia and he really couldn’t afford to spend their money on inessentials. Books, given their present financial situation, were inessentials, and Lia would tell him so when she found out what he’d done.
But, damn it, Phil Dick had died, and he had to do something to commemorate the man’s achievement. The Atlanta paper, after all, had buried his obituary—as lengthy and complete as it had been—in the last pag
es of the business section when news of his death had deserved a banner headline on page one. That canny snub was owing, of course, to King Richard’s ill opinion of the writer, a wound reopened and then exacerbated by the publication of Valis in 1981. Actually, it was a small miracle that the newspaper had run Dick’s obituary at all, and Cal understood that the Constitution had dared to do so only because Nixon—in his sixty-ninth year, one year into his fourth term—had mellowed. During his fourth inaugural, the President had smugly declared an amnesty for any draft dodger who would publicly recant his opposition to the war.
Cal ripped the draft for $12.50 out of his checkbook and slid it onto the register. “There. My reservation. Half what I’ll owe this place when the books come in.”
“Sleeping pills’re cheaper, Cal, but it’s your moolah. Use it for toilet paper if you like.”
That was a knee-jerk anticommunist for you; they revered King Richard and despised any literary or political figure who expressed even the mildest doubts about the superiority of capitalism to all other economic systems. Cal’s resentment of Le Boi Loan, however, was mitigated by the knowledge that the Vietnamese had spent his whole childhood and youth resisting the relentless state propaganda apotheosizing Ho Chi Minh, “He Who Enlightens”, as the conqueror of the French colonialists and the ultimate Indochinese patriot. That behavior had made Le Boi Loan the oddest of anomalies in the North, a youth who cheered every bomb released on Hanoi and Haiphong by the unseen B-52s overhead, but who prudently took shelter to ride out the earthshaking blasts of those same bombs. Let him dislike Phil Dick. He had earned the right to prize Daredevil over Ho and the video game Phun Ky Cong over the Vietcong. Arguing about books with Loan was a fool’s game, for he was too idiosyncratically “Americulturated”—in all the worst as well as best connotations of that frightful neologism—to give a damn about literature. He had life to amuse him and his memories of the Bad Old Days to sabotage the artsy-fartsy bitchings of American novelists and playwrights. In Lone Boy’s eyes, they were all spoiled leftists anyway, with no hard-knock understanding of tyranny, only beaucoups of highfalutin theory and a shared distaste for Richard Nixon—the Great Man who had saved the South and then reunited the entire country under the truly democratic government of President Tran Van Don.
But I’ve had some hard-knock training of my own, Cal thought, leaving the bookstore, and I damn well know that tyranny comes in at least two flavors…
He was out in the main walkway of West Georgia Commons again when he saw Mr. Kemmings coming toward him from the Pet Emporium, cupping something to his chest as he approached.
“I thought maybe you’d detoured over this way,” his boss said. “How’re you feeling, Pickford?”
“Okay.” You’re not going to ask me to come back to work, are you? Cal worried. I know I should’ve gone straight home from the shop, but I had to make a side trip to Gangway Books. I just had to. Nevertheless, if Mr. Kemmings insisted, Cal was prepared to surrender to guilt and return to the pet store.
“I wanted to give you this as a consolation for the loss you’ve sustained,” Mr. Kemmings said. He pushed the thing in his hands at Cal, who instinctively retreated from the gesture.
A Brezhnev bear nestled in the old guy’s hands—a trembling, tawny-maned, pink-gray creature whose naked skin made Cal think of newborn mice or ratlings. The varmint was making noises remarkably similar to those that some computer toys made.
“That’s a fifty-dollar animal, Mr. Kemmings. I can’t accept that.” He didn’t want to accept it. Just about the last thing he and Lia needed—they already had a pet—was a Soviet-bred guinea pig symbolizing the long rapprochement between the Nixon Gang and Leonid Brezhnev & His Kremlin Kronies.
“Fifty’s what we’re charging now,” Mr. Kemmings replied, “but the cost is coming down all the time. It’s no longer necessary to import them from the Soviet Union. So don’t let the cost keep you from accepting the animal, Pickford.”
“What about the upkeep cost? That worries me, too.”
“It shouldn’t. You can take a bag of pellets home with you any time you need it. I can’t give you an aquarium, but these critters do just as well in a cardboard box. They’re good company, and you don’t want to sit around all alone when you get home today.”
“I’ve got a dog to keep me company, Mr. Kemmings.”
“Take it, anyway.” (The squealing cavy had suddenly stopped squealing, and Cal realized that that was because it had begun to chew on his windbreaker’s zipper.) “Your wife will love it. Women always love ‘em. They remind the ladies of babies.”
“Sir—”
“I insist. Make me happy. Make you and your wife happy.”
Cal thought, I can’t handle this. I can’t stand being leaned on this way. Aloud he said, “I don’t want it, Mr. Kemmings. I just don’t want the damn thing. You’re very kind to offer, but you can’t always make the other guy feel better by making yourself feel better, and that’s really what you’re trying to do.”
Mr. Kemmings’s face betrayed stunned confusion.
“Sorry, sir.” Cal pushed the cavy back into the boss’s hands. “Bright and early tomorrow. To make up for today.”
That said, he brushed past the old man and headed for the rear exit—a row of glass doors disclosing the misty March afternoon—giving on the parking lot and his ‘68 Dart. He tried not to think about what he had just done to his sweet old boss. An impossible assignment. He felt angry and sad. He felt that he was as out of place in this mall—in this state—as a deballed jackrabbit leaping across the Sea of Fertility on the Moon.
In short, he felt lousy.
An overbearing tough guy had given him several bad moments just by making a distinction between “looking” and “browsing”.
A mystery woman had scared the bejesus out of him, hinting that she knew more about him than he wanted her to. And he had docilely given that woman the location of Lia’s office in Warm Springs.
Philip K. Dick had died of a stroke in California, three weeks ago, and he had found out only by reading the death notice through the newsprint-graying stain of stale rodent piss.
Le Boi Loan had told him that Dick’s work was both “minor” and “boring”, and yet he had committed himself to a needless purchase of six Pouch House reissues by Dick as a means of dealing with his pathetic grief.
And he had hurt Mr. Kemmings’s feelings by rejecting the man’s well-intentioned would-be gift of a Brezhnev bear.
But maybe worst of all was the fact that he had bad-mouthed King Richard to that intimidating woman in the pet shop and then made a stupidly self-incriminating remark about his collection of “Dickian opuses” to Lone Boy, a true Nixonian. Had he forgotten that Fourth of July Parade down Denver’s Colfax Avenue in 1971?
Of course he had. He had worked to forget it.
Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day.
5
THE MAN had called her decaffeinated coffee an ersatz drink, but he was already on his second cup. Sipping it, he reminded Lia of a defrocked priest.
Seedily distinguished.
Miss Bledsoe entered Lia’s office with the forms that he had refused to sign in the waiting room. Lia told her new patient that she wanted him to fill them out to the best of his ability, even if that meant leaving three quarters of the questions blank. If he really wanted to session with her, he also had to sign her standard agreement form to legalize their counselor-client relationship.
“You’re not afraid I’ll sue your ass for malpractice, are you, Dr. Bonner?”
Lia glanced up at him. He was wearing a poker face, but his eyes were grinning. Mocking her. Not maliciously but lightly, as if she were an upstart daughter presuming to lesson her old man on the ways of the world. Yeah, the guy’s got a saturnine charm, Lia thought. A funny-prickly sense of humor.
“You wouldn’t get much if you did,” she said. “It’s simply a professional formality.”
The man lowered the footrest of
his lounger and leaned forward so that he could read Lia’s forms. After looking for a moment or two at the first page, however, he shook his head and glanced up at her in unabashed bewilderment. “It’s like a foreign language to me,” he said. “The letters are recognizable letters, but the words they’ve fallen into and the paragraphs they make, well, hell, it might as well be Greek. You know, koine Greek from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. In fact, that’s exactly what it is to me: koine Greek.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Never more serious. Unfortunately.” He chuckled glumly. “I can’t even read the money in my billfold—except, somehow, for the denominations of the bills.”
“Then it wouldn’t help you much even if you had identification in there, would it?” Lia nodded at his billfold. “Social Security card, driver’s license—they’d be useless to you.”
“Unless someone read them to me, I guess they would.”
“Shawanda, read the signature agreement to him, and I’ll ask him everything else aloud.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Shawanda said. She picked up the specified form and read the pertinent paragraphs. He listened to her attentively, reminding Lia of Viking when Vike sat near the dinner table, hoping for scraps and trying to get a fix on how generous they were likely to be. Yeah, that was it. Her new patient had the sad eyes and the guileless intelligence of her Siberian husky, Viking.
“Is that okay with you?” Lia asked when Shawanda had finished reading. “Do you think you can sign that?”
“I don’t object to the terms, if that’s what you mean.”
“Good. Just put your name there.” Lia reached across her desk to tap the appropriate spot with one shiny red fingernail.
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 5