Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “Signing is another matter, Dr. Bonner,” the man said. He took the pen that Shawanda proffered and wrinkled his forehead in concentration. “Whose name would you like me to sign, and in what alphabet would you like me to sign it?”

  Oh, shit, Lia silently exclaimed. The poor guy doesn’t know who he is, he’s forgotten how to read, and so he’s also forgotten how to write. Still, he identified the words on my questionnaire as being—for him—unreadable examples of koine Greek. Well, how can he make so specific an identification of the Roman alphabet if he’s unable to read the koine Greek that he thinks it is? I could mind-wipe myself trying to plumb this guy’s… amnesia.

  “He could put an ex on the forms,” Shawanda suggested. “My gran’mama used to buy her insurance policies jus’ by putting her ex on the policy papers.”

  “Was it legal?” Lia asked.

  “It was legal enough she had to pay her premiums.”

  “I’ll do it,” the man said. “I can make an ex with the best of ‘em. Just you watch.” He put a big capital X at the bottom of the form, studied it as if it might turn into a flaming character with messianic implications, a symbol sacred and daunting. “That’s a chi,” he said. “The first letter of Christ.”

  Lia ignored the messianic implications of his comment. “May I call you Kai, then?” she asked him. “It has a genuine Welsh sound, and it’ll be a lot less shuddersome than calling you Mr. X.”

  “Call me anything you like. Just smile when you do it.”

  “Okay, Kai it is, and we’re ready to get going.” Lia dismissed Shawanda, and Kai—the name somehow fit him—scooted his butt back into the lounger, tipped its footrest up to support his legs, and folded his hands on his midriff. To his right, a cup of ersatz coffee sat on a TV tray, easily within his reach.

  “How did you get here?”

  “Taxi from Atlanta. Said to my driver, ‘Warm Springs,’ and he was happy to bring me, his meter tick-ticking all the way.”

  “You don’t live in Atlanta, do you?” Lia couldn’t credit this idea. Kai had an accent more like Cal’s than her brother Jeff’s. If he did live in Atlanta, he’d come there from another part of the country, either the Rocky Mountains or the Far West.

  “Caught my cab at the airport. I’d just gotten off a plane.”

  “Where from, Kai?”

  “I don’t recall. That’s where my amnesia seems to start. How far back it goes”—he gave a shrug—“well, your guess is as good as mine. Better, probably.”

  “Did you have any luggage?”

  “Don’t remember that, either. If I did, the handlers must be having a damn good time with it right now.”

  “What made you say Warm Springs?” You could’ve saved a tidy sum, thought Lia, if you’d ridden a Greyhound or rented a car.

  “I knew that FDR used to come here. I wanted to see the place where he’d visited the springs. I thought it would be profoundly meaningful—for me, you understand?—to look around here.”

  “You admired Roosevelt?”

  “Sure. Who is it who’s in there now?”

  “The President? Richard Nixon.”

  “That’s right. And it’s no comparison. No comparison between Nixon and FDR. One fought—admittedly, out of ambition—for the little person, and the other fights—also out of ambition—for his own greater glory. Equal in ambition but completely different when you come to their impact on the world.”

  Lia had a small tape recorder going. She had turned it on with her patient’s consent—Kai’s X had been his okay—but this turn in their talk frightened her. The walls had ears. If not ears, then bugs. Too often the walls had bugs, and an enigmatic person like Kai—with the naïve brashness to bad-mouth King Richard—well, Kai was the sort of fellow who could mysteriously go poof!, taking with him anyone unlucky enough to have overheard the slanders provoking his removal. Possibly, in fact, he had already had hostile action taken against him, action resulting in his radical, if incomplete, amnesia. On the other hand, why, given a hostile administration, would he still have a billfold full of money?

  “What brought you to me?”

  “Coming back from the Little White House, my cab driver started reading signs out loud. He read yours. I made him stop.”

  My shingle, Lia thought. I’ve actually corralled a customer by my sign. It pays to advertise.

  “I meant, did your amnesia bring you to me? You seem sort of blasé about your lack of memory. So I’m wondering if something else is wrong—a guilt, a hang-up, a whole complex of problems.”

  “All my problems are complex, Dr. Bonner.” Kai picked up his cup and sipped some coffee. “But, hey, you’re pretty astute, you know that? I didn’t come because of the amnesia. I came because even in this lovely town, I feel awful—just awful—about my place, and everyone else’s, in this ugly, unreal, fuckin’ reality.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “I’m out of place here, doctor. But that’s okay. So are you. Everyone’s out of place here. What isn’t okay is we’re sitting on our asses abiding it, letting it go on.”

  “Abiding what? Letting what go on?”

  “I’ll try to explain. I’m seeing this reality under the aspect of another reality. One’s sitting on top of the other. I call it stereographia, bringing two different pictures together to make a single picture, a new picture. You only see the picture that the second one’s trying to merge with and eventually nudge aside, but I see the one that’s trying to do the nudging. I’m in your picture, in your reality, but I’m seeing—stereographically—the world that wants to displace and redeem it.”

  Well, Lia thought, I’ve had strange ones before, a woman who believed she could deflect evil X-rays from Soviet satellites with a silver-plated soup spoon and a teenager who imagined that he had traveled to Antarctica with Shackleton. Kai’s got them beat. He sounds almost sane, but he’s constructed a fantasy that allows him to operate simultaneously in both dimensions, the mundane and the illusional, as if he had some godlike ability to straddle and even reconcile them. Add to that his amnesia, and you have a case study for the books.

  “Kai, you’re suffering from a kind of estrangement. That may be owing to your amnesia. Don’t assume that everyone else feels as distanced and as alien from this ‘reality’ as you do.”

  “Who says I assume that? I assume the opposite. And I’m angry that everyone over here seems to be asleep to the need to let the better world take over from the bad world—the one that’s squatting on us like a venomous toad.”

  “Others may not even see this so-called better world, Kai.”

  “They won’t see it. Which is exactly what makes me want to hop a barricade and put a grenade in somebody’s bonnet.”

  Anger on top of amnesia; strong violent feelings that accompany and intensify his illusory binocular vision of the world. You’ll have to recommend again that he see a physician, Lia. He may have an elevated blood pressure, he may be courting an epileptic episode or a cerebral stroke. You don’t want him to die on you, do you? You wouldn’t even be able to help the authorities put a name on his corpse. “Kai” probably wouldn’t impress them…

  “What’s better about your better world, Kai?” Accentuate the positive, Lia thought. Maybe that’ll calm him down.

  “For starters, Richard Milrose Nixon has been neutralized. I don’t think he’s died or been exiled or anything, but he’s not out there running amok, either, like a robot that’s got away from its operators and that nobody knows how to deactivate.”

  “And that makes things better?”

  “Yeah. It’s crucial, but it isn’t—how do I say this?—it doesn’t all hinge on Nixon. It’s the elimination of a mindset that won’t grant the legitimacy of other mind-sets.”

  Thank God he didn’t say that he saw the President dead. If he had, anyone listening to this tape later on would assume that he’d threatened to assassinate the President.

  At Lia’s fingertips, a disconcerting coldness. “Kai—”


  “Once upon a time, we had checks and balances. It was written into the Constitution. What happened to those things?”

  “Please tell me something, Kai. Do you want me to help you cope with this stereographic phenomenon you’ve described?”

  “Fuck no,” the man said angrily. “I want you to help me cure my amnesia. Then help me bring the better world into obliterating focus on top of the bad one.”

  “You didn’t come here looking for a psychotherapist,” Lia said accusingly. She could hear a tremor in her voice.

  “I didn’t?” Kai wore a look of intelligent puzzlement.

  “You want a hotshot social reformer or a revolutionary. I’m neither of those things.”

  “Who is?” Kai slid his cup—the coffee had to be cold by now—onto the TV tray and hugged himself as if freezing. “Really, I didn’t come looking for you at all, Dr. Bonner. Or FDR’s Little White House. I came looking for an emanation. A focus. Your sign seemed to resonate with what I was looking for. So I came in. I don’t understand this any better than you do.”

  “An emanation?” Lia was baffled.

  “You’re married, aren’t you?”

  “I am. But I don’t see—”

  “Do you have a snapshot of your husband with you?”

  Humor him, Lia thought. She had a wallet-sized photo of Cal in her purse, which hung from its strap on her hat tree. She went to the hat tree and a moment later handed the snapshot to Kai.

  “This is it,” he told her. “Your husband’s the reason I came. He may even be the lens that’ll focus my stereographia.”

  “Cal?” What did Cal have to do with Kai, or Kai with him? The man’s explanations obscured rather than illuminated. His delusions had taken on the whacky coloring of those plaguing Anita Arrazi, Lia’s spoon-wielding X-ray deflector in Walsenburg. Lia took the snapshot away from Kai and returned to her desk.

  “Tell me about your husband,” Kai suggested.

  “That’s off-limits,” Lia said. “My family life—the members of my family—none of that’s relevant to our consultations.”

  “What if I were in love with you or hated your hubby or thought your brother was trying to kill me? Wouldn’t that be relevant?”

  “Not necessarily. You’re grasping at straws, and if we can’t get back to—”

  “It’d be relevant to my self-concept. To my perception of my own mental health.”

  This is outrageous, Lia thought mildly. I can’t do anything with this person. What made me think that I could? Desperation, I guess. Anyway, he needs to be hospitalized. I may be dealing with somebody dangerous to both himself and others, and, right now, if I had to make a deposition about his state of mind, I’d tilt to such a judgment—a judgment to commit.

  Or would I? she wondered. Even in his rage and irrationality, he somehow projects a disarming, funny-prickly reasonableness.

  Abruptly, Lia changed tacks. “To the best of your knowledge, have you ever tried to kill yourself?”

  “I’m an amnesiac, Doctor. I don’t remember.”

  “You must have some intuition about the matter. I’d like you to try your damnedest to recall if you’ve ever attempted suicide.”

  The coffee maker gave a shuddering, steamy sigh. A noise like a death rattle. Kai jumped, then laughed self-deprecatingly and wiped his mouth and forehead with his handkerchief.

  “Yeah, I probably did,” he said, looking at his hands. “More than once. I think.”

  “Why?”

  “I could tell you lots of things, couldn’t I? I could say it was failure—a perceived failure—in my work. Or disillusionment with the way we’ve conspired to spoil the goddamn American dream. Or health problems owing to my stupid, flipped-out life-style. I could say any or all of that stuff, foxy lady, and you’d have no way of knowing if I was talking straight or jiving you. Problem is, I don’t know myself if any of that shit’s on the up-and-up.”

  “What is on the up-and-up? Why kill yourself?”

  “Because I was bereft. Something had left me. It had left me like steam sighing up and escaping a coffee maker. It was awful, being bereft. Worse than anything else I can think of, and so I made this heavy concerted effort to cease being.”

  “What left you, Kai?”

  “I don’t know. That’s something I wish I knew. I’m wondering, sitting here, if maybe it hasn’t come back. Or started to.”

  “Why didn’t you die?”

  “It must’ve been medical intervention. Yeah. It was medical intervention. I had friends.”

  “Tell me what you think has maybe started coming back to you. What you lost and what you’re finding again.”

  “Power,” Kai said. “Spirit. I’m dead to the person I used to be, but this Power—an efficacious Voice—seems to be trying to use me again. I think that’s one reason I have money in my billfold—it’s sort of an ironic promise of my returning Power. But the real Power comes and goes. Sometimes it fades out—stretches so thin—that I nearly cease being without raising a hand against myself. I drink coffee to stop that from happening.”

  “Coffee?”

  Kai laughed. “The real stuff. Not this emasculated brew. Of course, it’s a delusion—the idea that thick, black, hot coffee can keep me from fading away. But who said delusions were supposed to make sense, anyway?”

  How can a man who admits the nonsensicality of his delusion be dangerous? Lia asked herself. How can you fear a guy who purports to believe that coffee drinking is his salvation, but who in the next breath ridicules that silly idea? Well, you can’t. Kai’s a harmless sweetie. As sweet as Viking—all bluff and bluster and ambiguous growl.

  But there’s the rub. The ambiguity of his personality. Sane or insane? Dangerous or innocuous?

  “Your time is about up,” Lia said, glancing at her watch. It was nearly noon. “Come back next week—at the same time—and we’ll pick up from your coffee fixation.” She laughed to show Kai that this was a joke, but an expression of concern—alarm, in fact—claimed his features, and she feared that she had hurt him, either by breaking off the session or by dubbing a “fixation” his fantasy about the redemptive attributes of coffee and caffeine.

  Hurriedly, she said, “You’ll be staying somewhere in the Warm Springs/Manchester area, I take it.”

  “Staying somewhere,” Kai echoed her vaguely.

  “You will come back, won’t you?” Did she sound panicked by the possibility that he would desert her after only one session?

  “How many rooms are there in this area?” Kai asked. “Who’ll get one ready for me?” He sounded abstracted, distant.

  “Let me buzz Miss Bledsoe,” Lia said. “I’ll have her look into some attractive potential lodgings for you. Would that be okay?” Over the intercom she told Shawanda to do just that.

  “Ma’am,” came Shawanda’s voice, “we’ve got us a small problem.”

  “What sort of problem?”

  Lia glanced at Kai. He seemed to be losing color, as if some unnamed time-lapse ailment were remorselessly leaching the melanin from his flesh. He had heard Shawanda’s intercom announcement, of course, and maybe word of an indeterminate “problem” had made him go pale, but, struggling to encompass the reality of the Wellsian Invisible Man routine that Kai was pulling, Lia understood that her patient was fading, not merely because an external threat to him had arisen but because the existential reality of his identity lay outside the bounds of downtown Warm Springs and the thirteenth year of Richard Milrose Nixon’s presidency.

  There’s a cab driver out here who wants to know how long his fare’s gonna be in there, Dr. Bonner,” Shawanda said. “Seems Mr. Kai told him jus’ to keep his meter runnin’.”

  “Wait!” Lia commanded Kai, without depressing the talk lever on the intercom. You can’t leave like this. It’s not an Emily Post-approved exit. Besides, how have you managed to get your clothes to fade the same way your face and hands are fading? Amazingly, her barked command—“Wait!”—seemed to have halted the otherw
ise steady progress of Kai’s decay. He had stabilized on the interface between mundane corporality and story-book ghostliness.

  Lia spoke into the intercom. “Shawanda, come in here, please.”

  “I was tryin’ not to interrupt, ma’am. Should I tell this Acme cabbie to go back to his cab for a few minutes?”

  “I’d appreciate that, Shawanda. But get in here fast.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When Shawanda came in, Kai was hovering between substance and shadow, the image of a defrocked priest modulating in and out of viewability. Like a TV picture in a bad thunderstorm.

  “Lawdamercy,” Shawanda stage-whispered. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “You see it, too, then? I’m not hallucinating?”

  “No, ma’am. It does appear to be happenin’, whatever it is.”

  I have a witness, Lia told herself. If I’m going crazy, then I’m not going alone. But I’d better talk to Kai. Maybe another command—voiced authoritatively enough—will rescue him from his impossible in-betweenness. Already I’ve kept the poor sucker from disappearing into Cheshire Cat gehenna, haven’t I?

  “Kai, stay! Damn it, stay!” It was like trying to rein in Viking when Viking wanted to run. “What’s happening to you?”

  Dimly flickering, Kai stabilized again. His voice, when he spoke, was tinny and static-riven, like the sound emanating from an old Victrola horn. “God knows,” he said. “You and your damn Brim. Maybe now you’ll buy a coffee with some zing to it.”

  “Like what?” Lia said, desperate to keep him from vanishing.

  “Deedle-deedle-queep,” Kai said. (Or, at least, it sounded like “Deedle-deedle-queep.” If that was the brand name of a coffee, it was a brand name from some other continuum.) And then he said, “I mean, Luzianne, the black kind with chicory.”

  “That’s nasty,” Shawanda said. “Makes your mouth pucker.”

  “It’ll hold you to the planet,” Kai replied. “I don’t like it myself—but it’ll fuckin’ well hold you to the planet.”

  We’re talking about coffee, Lia thought with astonishment. The guy’s flickering between living substance and the intangible gas of nonexistence, and we’re arguing the merits of Brim, Luzianne, and Deedle-deedle-queep. Coffees, for God’s sake.