“Listen,” Kai suddenly demanded, gripping the arm rests of the lounger for dear life. “I think I’m damaged. I’m not going to be able to hang on here. Take your fee out of my wallet, Dr. Bonner, and toss it to me. Do it. Do it now.”
Lia obeyed, counting out her usual session fee and tossing the heavy wallet into his lap. He slid it, with considerable trouble, into the pocket of his translucent Members Only jacket. To what Continuum Club does Kai belong? Lia thought. It may be for Members Only, but he seems to be returning to it against his will.
“One final thing,” he managed, his voice tinnier than ever.
Shawanda, apparently on impulse, assumed an easy hunker beside him, cocking her head to watch his ghostly departure and stretching her hand toward his arm.
“Don’t,” he said shortly. Then he added, as if to soften the prohibition, “I’m not totally gone yet, Miss Bledsoe. I’m neither here nor there.”
“What final thing?” Lia asked. “What?”
“That pin you’re wearing—the one your husband gave you—it’s an icon that spiritually disadvantaged persons might risk lynching to get their hands on. Call it a linchpin.” Kai guffawed, the deranged cacophony of a nonswimmer balancing on the deep end of a huge swimming pool. “Jesus. Forgive me. All I meant to say was that I like it. It’s beautiful. Don’t lose it.”
Lia glanced down at her blazer. There, on its lapel, shone a golden pin—very simple—featuring the intaglio figure of a fish in profile. Where had it come from? I don’t have a pin like this, she thought. I certainly don’t remember having a pin like this. It’s not the sort of item that Cal would go out of his way to buy for me. It’s Christian, a Christian symbol antedating even the cross, and Cal’s never gone in for religious iconography. He’d be more likely to buy me a wide-brimmed leather hat or a new pair of all-weather boots…
Kai had faded utterly. The lounger, its footrest still in the up position, held nothing but the warm impress of the being—man, ghost, transdimensional visitor—who, a moment ago, had sat there talking about suicide and coffee. Shawanda looked at Lia, and Lia at Shawanda, and the early-spring chill in the office penetrated their bodies like a rain of tiny iron darts.
“I won’t say nothin’ to anybody about this,” Shawanda said, “if you won’t.”
“Are we hallucinating? We must be hallucinating.”
“Look at that chair. There’s a funny dent in it. And look at that coffee cup on the TV tray. It’s near drunk up.”
“A ghost?”
“Ghosts don’t leave fanny dents and down-gulp coffee. And you got his money, too.” Then Shawanda said, “Oh!” and quickly added, “Even if he did forget to pay his poor cabbie.”
Lia went to the lounger, touched it. She tingled up and down her vertebrae, all along her wrists and forearms. A hair-raising experience, she told herself. I’ve heard about them, but this is the first time I’ve actually had one that wasn’t just a kiddy’s Halloween nape-tickler. And it’s going to change my life.
She turned to Shawanda. “Was I wearing this pin when I came in this morning? Do you remember?”
“I don’t remember,” Shawanda said. “Sure is pretty, though.”
“You don’t remember it, and I don’t recall ever even owning it. Kai and me, we’re both amnesiacs.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do you think happened here this morning, Shawanda?”
“I don’t know. I can tell you what it remind me of, though.”
“What?”
“Jesus goin’ to Emmaus with those two lightweight disciples and them not recognizin’ him till he’d broke bread with ‘em.”
Lia stared abashedly at her secretary. “You think Kai is Jesus Christ?” Mr. X, she thought. X is the Greek letter chi, and chi, as he told us, is the ancient symbol for Christ.
“What? Jesus in a Members Only jacket?” Shawanda walked to the window overlooking the town’s main drag. “What I think is that that man’s got the same kind of body Jesus had when he’d been glorified. A resurrection body. He wouldn’t let me touch him, no more ‘n Jesus would let Mary Magdalene touch him at the tomb.”
“A resurrection body?”
“Seems so, ma’am. Jesus ate him some broiled fish in front of the eleven in Jerusalem—ghosts can’t do that—and Mr. Kai, well, he down-gulped him some automatic coffee. Only a resurrection body could eat and then run off up to heaven that way.”
It almost makes sense, Lia thought, what Shawanda’s saying. As plausible as any other explanation we may be able to mount.
“Kai seemed a pretty shabby messiah stand-in, Shawanda.”
“Things go rubbishly after a coupla thousand years. What can we expec’? Mr. Landis, my science teacher, he called it entropy.”
“ ‘Things fall apart,’ ” Lia quoted. “ ‘The center cannot hold.’ ”
That cabbie’s comin’ back, ma’am,” Shawanda announced from the window. “Lookin’ for his fare.”
Lia went to the window and saw that a bulky black man with a cab driver’s cap perched on his burnt-umber Afro was crossing the street from his hack and entering the downstairs entrance to her office. He looked angry. Well, he had a right to be angry, Lia supposed. They’d chased him off with a spur-of-the-moment dodge, and now Kai had vanished—evaporated like steam—and the cabbie was swaggering back to collect both his passenger and his fare.
“Shawanda, what’ll we do?” Ashamed of herself for desiring her husband’s presence and support, she wished that Cal were here.
The cabbie came stomping up the wooden stairs; twenty seconds later he knocked aside the door to Lia’s office and stood beyond its threshold glaring at the two women.
“Where is he?” the man demanded.
“He jumped up and ran out,” Shawanda said.
“How’d he do that? Y’all got you another door?”
“He jus’ sneaked, that’s all. He jus’ sneaked out of here.”
“I been watchin’ your downstairs door seem like forever and I never seen a goddamn soul scoot out through it.”
“Well, he’s very sneaky,” Shawanda said, hands on hips.
“That cheatin’ honky!” the cabbie exclaimed, throwing his cap to the floor. “That cheatin’ honky bastid!”
What a mess, Lia thought. Kai’s disappeared like Jesus Christ himself, and this poor cabbie’s out a two-hundred-dollar fare. And no fare is unfair. It’s an unjust reality …
6
THE DRIVE from LaGrange to Pine Mountain, south down Highway 27, always semiastonished Cal. He had spent most of his life in or around the Rockies and had seen plenty of breathtaking scenery. Mountains, real mountains: rugged steeps with bright ropes of water cascading down them, braiding and unbraiding. But this stretch of highway wasn’t like that. It didn’t steal your breath; it pulled it from you gently, the way the piano interlude in the Beatles’s “In My Life” from the Revolver album always did.
Here and there, fog still drifted across the highway, but the sun was stabbing through it. The pines standing sentinel along the two-lane road in easy waves made Cal think of Celtic warriors, green in their garb, ever watchful. He was calming down. And it was the drive through this worn Piedmont topography that had him breathing easy. Even if his Dart did spit and chug on the upslopes.
On one such upslope, Cal saw a gnomish black man sitting on an upper branch of a pine tree at roadside, grinning down at him from the wispy fog. My God, thought Cal, it’s Horsy Stout, for that was the name of the stable-hand employed by Lia’s brother, Jeff, at Brown Thrasher Barony. Because Stout, a muscular dwarf in his fifties, could have no rational motive for sitting where he was sitting, Cal squinted incredulously at the apparition.
Pickford, he told himself, you’re seeing things.
Stout’s grin broadened. He lifted his hand and waved. Then, like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, the dwarf vanished, convincing Cal that the March fog and the upsetting events of the morning had prompted him to hallucinate. If he dwelled on what he ha
d just “seen”, he’d go crazy, and because his Dart was now on the slope’s downside, he determined to put the image of the little man altogether out of his mind and to go on breathing easy.
That didn’t really happen, he thought, and you’re never going to mention it to anyone…
Twenty minutes from the mall, Cal sighted Pine Mountain’s water tower. The town’s name strode around its chalk-white tank in neat green letters taller than any human being, and at the first red light (the town had only two), he turned left and drove two blocks down Chipley Street to the duplex apartment that he and Lia were renting from the McVanes. Immediately, he saw the stunning animal chained in its front yard. “Hello, Vike,” he murmured.
Viking was a male Siberian husky—black, silver, and cream—that Lia’s brother, Jeff, had given to them about three days after their arrival in Georgia. At Christmas, the dog had showed up at Brown Thrasher Barony, the horse farm that Jeff managed. Although Jeff’s kids had begged him to let them keep the dog, Jeff hadn’t trusted it enough to let it roam the pastures where his employer’s horses grazed. And so Viking had come into town to live with Lia and Cal. An adult husky in a duplex apartment supposedly occupied by them alone.
This ruse soon fell through. You couldn’t hide a dog Viking’s size for long, and once Cal and Lia began commuting, they couldn’t keep him indoors until they came home from work. He’d chew up Cal’s books and shed on Lia’s furniture. And so they’d had one of their first rip-snorting knock-down-drag-outs in Georgia over a Siberian sled dog that Cal didn’t really want, as much as he loved animals, and that Lia wouldn’t let go.
Fortunately, Mr. McVane saw no reason to evict them for keeping a dog. Fortunately, because Lia’s desire to keep Viking triumphed over Cal’s fear that confining him to town, indoors or out, would be to do him (huskies needed room, and Pine Mountain wasn’t exactly the Yukon) a terrible injustice.
Viking lay on the porch on a thirty-foot chain attached to a spike driven into the ground under a redbud tree. Cal parked his Dart parallel to Chipley Street, on the edge of the yard. The dog lifted his big head and stared at the car from under cream-colored patches of fur that reminded Cal of eerie eyebrows.
Cal rolled his window down and said, “Hey, Vike, how’d you like off that chain?”
The husky stood up and dragged the chain with him to the car. Cal could hear him making strangled-sounding moans, a disconcerting variety of growling—not in anger, but in anticipation—that made the dog very effective as a watchdog. Most passersby, noting how big and fierce Viking looked, assumed that this intimidating noise was meant to warn them off. Actually, it was his peculiar way of informing visitors that he wanted attention. The little black kids who trailed up and down Chipley before and after school were afraid of Viking and made a practice of crossing to the other side of the street and carrying sticks or rocks with them. You couldn’t really blame them, though, Vike looked a lot like a wolf.
Out of the Dart, Cal grabbed the dog’s head and thrust him from side to side. Viking liked this. He reared and shoved his muddy forepaws against Cal’s chest, meanwhile amplifying the Growl that so frightened folks unfamiliar with him. Cal pushed the dog aside, and Viking came rushing back for more, growling the Growl.
“He’s a sweetheart,” Lia always said. “All bluff and bluster.”
Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, Cal had never owned—or partly owned—so fascinating an animal, and at first he hadn’t even wanted him. You could never really be sure, after all, that the Growl was all “bluff and bluster”, but you hoped and trusted that it was.
“Hey, Vike, you hungry? How would you’ve liked a Brezhnev bear for lunch?”
The dog sat back on his haunches, expectantly regarding Cal.
Yeah, I should’ve brought you that Brezhnev bear, Cal thought. You’d’ve taken care of it a lot faster than My Main Squeeze puts away Mr. K.‘s mice, wouldn’t you?
Cal checked the water and food dishes on the porch. The food was gone, of course, but the water bowl still contained water. In February, when he and Lia had first started chaining Viking out in the yard, the temperature had several times fallen below freezing, and the dog’s water had turned to clear stone in the bowl. By the time that he or Lia arrived home from work, Viking was so thirsty that he slurped up three or four cooking pots of water as soon as they brought him inside.
About the only disadvantage to keeping the husky in front of their half of the duplex—once, that is, you got past the boredom it posed for him—was the effect that he had on the yard. He had dug a wallow under the scrawny redbud tree, and he had dragged his chain back and forth through the shrubs next to the duplex so many times that he had uprooted some of them. But the McVanes, their landlords, never complained about Viking’s brutal landscaping techniques. Lia said that Mrs. McVane tolerated the destruction because she felt safer with the dog on guard.
Cal keyed open the front door and went inside, letting Viking slip in beside him. He turned up the heat, washed his hands at the sink in the kitchen, and sat down with a plastic cup of yogurt at the kitchen table. Lunch. A belated lunch. He wasn’t crazy about yogurt, but Lia always had a bunch in the refrigerator, and having no desire to fix anything even mildly elaborate or time-consuming, Cal took the route of least resistance. Blueberry yogurt. It was more palatable than fried mice or raw cavy, and because he’d begun to feel weak—maybe roughhousing with Viking had taken the starch out of him—he felt that he had an obligation to himself to choke down something. Anything.
“Choke down.” That was the phrase Lone Boy had used to describe his only experience of reading Philip K. Dick.
Stupid, Cal thought. Unjust.
He couldn’t handle another bite of the yogurt. It looked to him like Elmer’s Glue with a dollop of ink stirred into it. He stood up, found a cereal bowl in a cabinet, plopped the yogurt into the bowl, and set the bowl on the floor for Viking. Viking downed the stuff in one noisy gulp, then pushed the bowl up against the stove trying to lick it clean.
Cal left him there and walked down the hall to the tiny room that he and Lia had declared the “library”. Lia had a desk, a filing cabinet, and an expensive error-correcting typewriter, as well as a cheap store-bought hutch containing many of her textbooks from Colorado College. Cal had a tower of pine-board shelves on cinder blocks for his paperback westerns, mysteries, and fantasy fiction. Another such tower held “serious” work: Great English and American Fiction, Eloquent Poetry, Learned History, and Profound Philosophy. Cal’s worn copies of P. K. Dick’s contemporary novels occupied a shelf near the top of this second tower.
Also in the room, with a cushion on it so that it could serve as a place to sit, squatted a dilapidated olive-green trunk held shut with a padlock. Cal removed the embroidered cushion from the trunk and flipped it into the hall. Then he knelt in front of the old army locker, sprang the padlock with his key, and raised the battered lid. Amid a scramble of musty letters from his parents (many of them with scissored cutouts or concealing smears of black ink, courtesy of the Board of Citizen Censorship) lay the spiral binders in which Cal kept his illegal copies of Philip K. Dick’s unpublished science-fiction novels.
In the Soviet Union, both before and after détente, dissident writers had circulated their works among friends in self-published manuscripts that were often only carbons or photocopies of the original typescript. The system was known as samizdat, a term meaning “to self-publish” that dated back at least as far as 1970, but that may have had antecedents even in czarist times.
Well (Cal remembered), with the advent of the dreaded No-Knocks soon after Nixon’s defeat of Herbert Humphrey in 1968, and with the crackdowns on free expression during his pursuit of victory in Vietnam, samizdat had come to the United States of Amerika.
As an antiwar student at the University of Colorado in the late 1960s and then as a ranch hand during Nixon’s first two terms, Cal had acquired a small but incriminating library of “self-published” manuscripts. Despite the surrender
of North Vietnam in 1974 and the President’s supposed mellowing since his landslide win over the Democrats’ quadrennial sacrificial lamb in 1980, Cal knew that he could still go to jail for owning the photocopies. Lia and he had often argued about them—much more violently than they had argued about keeping Viking.
Before their move to Georgia, Lia had even suggested that Cal gather up all his illicit Dickiana and burn them on a bonfire on Arvill Rudd’s ranch. She wanted them to make a fresh start, and as attractive as that notion had been to him, he hadn’t been able to destroy Dick’s work. That driven genius had written his novels as an indignant cry against the sleazy bomb-‘em-till-they-holler mind-sets of King Richard and his megalomaniac henchmen. Besides, it would have been a betrayal of the memory of his mom and dad to have torched the books.
Viking, a blueberry-yogurt smear on his nose, came padding into the library. He nuzzled Cal and growled the Growl.
“All right. Don’t be nosy. I’ll show you.”
The husky sat down at Cal’s shoulder.
“This one’s my favorite, The Doctor in High Dudgeon.” Cal set the binder down in front of Viking. “It’s a far-future history in which the Richard Nixon figure—Dick calls him Abendsen Ferris—sends a combat expedition to a distant star system, only to lose every member. Then he takes out his frustrations on the citizens who protested the mission by turning them into cyber-servants for himself and his imperial aides. Sounds sort of silly, summarized that way, I’ll admit. The thing you have to remember is that Dick wrote this right after Nicholas and the Higs— but before the 1968 election. That’s a pretty startling accomplishment, Vike. Not just prescient, more like precognitive. The result was that Dick couldn’t sell the book. Publishers were frightened. They realized that it was satire as well as science fiction, a caustic comment on a complex American personality. They rejected it—not by admitting their fear that the new president would disapprove but by telling the author that a novel in this vein would confuse the readership that knew him as a realist social critic. After the debacle of Nicholas and the Higs (his editors at Hartford, Brice said), they had to be careful to preserve the tattered rags of respectability still clinging to his reputation.”
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 7