The broom-closet chapel has become the grotto of an outdoor sanctuary walled about by sandstone pillars, towering arabesques of ocher and Navajo red.
Lia realizes that the marriage ceremony now going forward—hers—is doing so in the blue-sky splendor of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. Hundreds of people attend, and, giving her away, is her dead father. Not a corpse, thank God, but the man he must have been in the mid-1970s, flushed with pride and vigorous. Miss Emily, her brother, Jeff, and her sister-in-law, and dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins stand behind her and her daddy, looking on.
The presiding cleric has a beard and an ivory collar, but no distinct face, as if the sunlight has blanched it of its features. Already Lia suspects that the hidden visage belongs to the man who visited her office today. Apparently, he is a member of a secret, albeit kindly, priesthood.
“Give her the pin,” this man instructs the groom.
It didn’t happen this way, Lia recalls, turning toward Cal, who materializes at the sandstone altar in a white leather coat fringed like that of a dream-sequence movie cowboy.
She likes the way he looks, but this isn’t how it happened. They were married in the den of Arvill Rudd’s ranch house by a justice of the peace (her parents couldn’t attend), with Rudd’s wife, Bernadine, as her matron of honor and Arvill himself as best man. Their honeymoon was a white-water-rafting trip on a stretch of the Arkansas River in miserable September weather.
“With this pin, I thee wed,” Cal tells her in the shadow of the lofty rocks. And he affixes it to her gown.
“Love, honor, cherish, and connect,” the cleric enjoins them. “You may kiss.” (His voice is the voice is the voice …)
They do kiss, miniature figures in the diorama of the Garden of the Gods. They kiss beneath the profile of Kissing Camels Rock, to the hubba-hubba murmuring of the wedding guests.
“How appropriate,” Jeff says from the crowd, a smirk in his voice. “Now they can go home and hump.”
Letting the kiss go on and on, Lia discovers herself grinning against Cal’s mouth, grinning at Jeff’s remark, at the blessedness of the memory that this ceremony will hardwire into them for all the ever-after days of their lives
Except, of course, that it didn’t happen like that. History and circumstance intervened to evict the gods from the garden and to drown the kissing camels in spotlights. There was no pin. Like everyone else, they used a ring. In their case, a ring that had once belonged to Cal’s mother’s mother.
Lia heard a violent snort. Suddenly, the chapel and all its furnishings reappeared. The snort had come from Phoebe Flack, who, sitting in her wheelchair, praying or pretending to, had fallen asleep. Lia smiled at the woman. Then, looking between her legs, she saw that her fish pin had disappeared.
Where is it? Lia wanted to scream. Instead, she lifted her bottom and felt the warm metal basin into which the pin might have slid. No luck. She eased herself to her knees and began groping for it on the Lysol-scented floor. Still no luck. So she began crawling, palpating the featureless tiles for an excrescence that they did not possess. Then she bumped into a chair.
“What a target,” Phoebe Flack said, snorting herself awake. “A man in boots would have a fine time kicking your fanny.”
When Emily’s documentary ended, she turned to Cal. “Look in my robe,” she said. “The pocket.”
Cal got up from the uncomfortable hospital chair and felt in the pocket of her robe, which was hanging from a hook on the inside of the bathroom door. His fingers closed on something round and squat; his first thought was that they had wandered onto a tin of shoe polish. But that didn’t seem quite right.
The size and weight are wrong, Cal reflected. Plus there’s no lip on the top to get a coin or a wingnut under.
“That’s right,” Miss Emily encouraged him. “Bring it here.”
He brought out the object - a small, yellow tin of Dean Swift’s snuff. Which astonished him. So did the fact that when he turned back around, Miss Emily, sitting up, gave him the weird impression of a person in costume. She looked like Emily Bonner … and she didn’t. Cal, eyeing her, imagined that he must feel, now, somewhat the way Little Red Riding Hood had felt peering at the Big Bad Wolf in its brummagem Grandma getup.
“Calvin, I said, ‘Bring it here.’ ” A peculiar husk to Lia’s mother’s gentlewomanly voice.
Her face seemed to waver—tremble—in the room’s fluorescents. Her scalp hair was retracting, pulling in, like flower stalks in reverse time-lapse photography. Meanwhile, bristles began to sprout on her jawline and chin, stubbling her matronly face. And yet the effect was reminiscent of a double exposure. Cal could still see, behind these changes, the unchanged countenance of the woman whom Lia had come to visit.
Laminations, he thought. It’s more like an identikit rendering than a double exposure. Put one plastic layer down on another, and if you squint, the original layer remains visible.
“I didn’t know you did snuff, Mrs. Bonner.”
“I can’t do it if you stand there gawking, can I? Bring it to me, please.”
Cal obeyed. Miss Emily took the tin and held it over her blanket; she screwed the top off and shook a sprinkle of fine brown powder onto the back of her hand. Then she snorted the grains like a blitzed-out coker doing a crooked line. Cal, cocking his head, felt like a boy standing in queue at a freak show and raptly gazing up—well down— at the Bearded Lady. In a moment, if he didn’t wet his pants or barf from a combination of embarrassment and nausea, she would stand up and show the crowd her virilia.
My God, a hermaphrodite. My mama-in-law’s a hermaphrodite.
But she doesn’t stand up and open her nightgown. She taps out more snuff, noisily snorkles it, blows her nose into a monogrammed handkerchief, taps out more powder, snuffles, and so on. Maybe she isn’t an hermaphrodite, Cal thinks, but she’s certainly an addict. A chain-snuffer. He watches Miss Emily furiously chain-snuffing, breathing tobacco dust faster than any cowhand, and he’s finding it harder and harder not to sneeze. Finally, he does sneeze.
Kuh-CHOOOF!
“Shut the door,” Emily commands him. “If a night nurse catches wind of this, she’ll be in here with a vengeance.”
Cal closes the door, wiping his nose on his sleeve. Lia’s mama sounds like a man. To wit, the man who regaled Lia’s tape recorder with stories of stereographia and the need for anamnesis.
“Damn!” the person in the bed exclaims. “This crap isn’t any goddamn better than coffee!”
“I beg your pardon.”
The veil over Miss Emily’s face replies, “ ‘I beg your pardon.’ Christ, what an expression.” More snuffing. “All I’m saying is that this lousy nozzle dust probably won’t hold me to the planet any better than your wife’s coffee did.”
“It was decaffeinated.”
“Yeah, yeah. But even unadulterated Maxwell House couldn’t do the trick. And this isn’t working, either.”
“Philip K. Dick,” Cal says. “Lia told me that you visited her this morning. You’re actually—I mean, actually— Philip K. Dick.” (Even if you’ve mysteriously usurped the body of Lia’s mother.)
“Means nothing to me,” the blur says. “You could tell me I was someone famous—Einstein, for example—but if I were really someone famous, I’d already know, and since I don’t, I must not be. Philip K. Dick is therefore a nonentity—”
“No!”
“—or a man with so restricted a celebrity that ninety-seven out of a hundred Americans would never have heard of him.” Snort-snuffle-snort. “Damn!” A powerful sneeze. “ ‘Scuse me. Like the umpteen millionth customer at McDonald’s or the first Vietnamese to open an argyle-hosiery mill.”
“But you’re a—”
“Pooh-pah. I’m off. This isn’t working. I aimed at a victim of senectitude for a couple of reasons. One, to ease my takeover attempt. And, two, to zero in on you, Mr. Pickford.”
“But why?”
The Philip K. Dick aura around the body of Lia�
��s mama trembles, brightens, dims. “If I weren’t trying so goddamn hard to talk with you, coming unglued like this might be fun. It’s my secret love of chaos that gets me off on the depredations of entropy. But it’s my love of justice that makes me kick and scream against them.”
Briefly, the walls go clear; Cal can see through them into the chilly March night. The overheads dim as Dick’s aura dims. When his aura pulses back, so do the lights. “I came to you because you’re my beacon. Something to home on, a strobe in the ectoplasm into which I’m continually drifting, then kicking back. Pickford, you know better than I do why I’ve picked you out.”
Like hell, Cal thinks as Miss Emily emerges from the watery lamination. He has no idea what to say, what to ask.
“Watch and wait,” the Dick voice croaks. “I’ll try to help.”
Emily Bonner sat up out of the Phil Dick aura, knocking the tin of Dean Swift’s snuff to the floor. Motes of gauzy dust whirled in amber slow-motion around her. Cal hurried to capture the tin and to brush the telltale paprika specks from her blanket.
“Tobacco,” Miss Emily said. “All over.”
“I’m getting it. Don’t worry.” Cal took her blanket, shook it out over the bathtub, ran water into the tub, returned the blanket to her bed, and scrubbed the floor with a wet towel.
“Funny, that smell. It’s a hayloft smell.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lia returned with Phoebe Flack. Cal and his wife traded looks, each trying to decide what had been going on with the other. They were going to have more—a great deal more—to talk about on their drive home from Warm Springs.
8
BEHIND THE COUNTER of the Save-Our-Way convenience store, Le Boi Loan made change for a night student from the nearby vo-tek school, where the zombied-out gal was probably training to be a cosmetologist. She had a beehive hairdo that Sandra Dee would have swatted killer bees to possess, lips as red as a sucking chest wound, and enough violet goo on her eyes to drive a male mandrill mad. Lone Boy felt sorry for her. Despite her 1950-ish ‘do and garish face paint, she seemed a sweet enough kid. She was buying a carton of milk and some cold cuts, and when he gave her her change, she smiled, said, “Thanks,” and, on her way out the door, reverted to fatigue-ridden zombihood.
Chasing the American dream, Lone Boy decided. Works her ass off all day waiting tables or slinging hash, then goes to school at night to “better” herself. Eventually, she’ll be able to buy good clothes, a neat car, and a single-family dwelling. Eventually, if the restrictions are repealed, she may get to travel … Hell, she’s a lot like me.
Lone Boy, who had been running this place since six, only an hour after going off duty at Gangway Books, checked his watch. He had twenty minutes before his shift ended and Norman Fraley, the midnight-to-morning clerk, arrived to relieve him. He ached in every sinew. An annoying tic rippled his right eyelid. If only I had some of that vo-tek gal’s blue goo, he thought, I could stop the ticking … weight my damn eyelid down.
Now, at least, he had a quiet moment before Tuyet drove up in their secondhand Datsun. Tuyet always brought Triny and Tracy so that they could all go eat at whatever place was still open, Burger King or a pancake house. Sometimes this was the only meal that they got to take together, and when the girls started school, even this “tradition” would end. Tuyet was a lounge hostess, who did not have to report for work until early afternoon. So Triny and Tracy had long mornings in which to sleep. First grade, however, would dictate earlier bedtimes.
Lone Boy sat back on his stool, perusing a copy of Daredevil. Gangway Books didn’t carry comics, but Save-Our-Way had all the major brands—Marvel, DC, Stupendo. You could stay abreast of almost any superhero’s monthly adventures just by whirling the upright comic rack around, thumbing through the flimsy multicolored booklets, and yanking your favorite titles. Frank Miller’s revitalization of Daredevil— a comic devoted to the crime-fighting exploits of the red-suited alter-ego of the blind attorney Matt Murdock—so delighted Loan that he had been buying and collecting it for over a year now.
Tonight, he was eyebrow-deep in the May issue, the poignant tale of Murdock’s obsessive grief for his ex-girlfriend Elektra. In the April issue, Elektra, a with-it antiheroine in a skimpy scarlet costume, took a blade from a bad guy named Bullseye right through the heart, and now Matt, aka Daredevil, is trying to convince himself that—somehow, some way—Elektra has survived this brutal shish-kebabbing and secretly fled to a far corner of the earth, there to hide out until Daredevil can track her down and punish her for plunging him into needless mourning.
Many of the comic’s tall, skinny panels feature characters in mysterious silhouette, and many colorful onomatopoeic expressions—KLUDD, KRESSH, CHOK, CLUGGG, and KRAK—heighten the excitement of the fight scenes between Daredevil and the pathetic stooges of his archenemy, Kingpin.
Lone Boy, turning the pulpy pages of the comic, is sucked into the action. He becomes a participant in Murdock’s painful search, and the whole world encompassing the Save-Our-Way convenience store fades off into utter irreality and complete inconsequence.
“You’re crazy, Matt,” Lone Boy said. “She’s dead, fella. You can’t go digging up her grave …”
But, of course, that is exactly what Matt intends to do and is doing now. KREEE goes Elektra’s coffin lid as the blind man prises it up and leans down into the stench of her icy grave to lay hands on her face. Foggy, Matt’s friend, enters the cemetery to rescue Matt from the horror of what he is about to learn: that Elektra does indeed slumber the forever sleep of death.
“My God!” Lone Boy exclaimed. “What a helluva story!”
He flipped back to the beginning of the comic and started going through it again, just as engrossed as the first time.
A shadow fell across the page. Terror clutched Lone Boy, and he looked up expecting to see a Saturday-night special in his face.
“It’s only me—me and the girls,” Tuyet said.
“You scared me, baby.”
“The bell tingled. You didn’t hear. Another Daredevil?”
Loan looked past his wife at the twins. Four years old and as cute as koalas, bundled as if for a snowstorm. They stood beneath the counter looking up at him expectantly.
Before he could even wink at his daughters, Tuyet handed him a letter, her expression clearly fretful. Something was wrong. Now Lone Boy saw that she had torn one end off the envelope, to get at its contents, and his own lack of ease mounted.
“It’s from the Liberty Americulturation Centers of the Greater Southeast.”
Lone Boy relaxed a bit. “An update on alumni, I bet. Progress reports on the successes of various graduates.”
Tuyet was shaking her head. “They want you to report to the Fort Benning LAC for a refresher course. You’ve been out on your own since ‘76. It’s time for your biennial reindoctrination.”
“I was exempted from that in the spring of ‘78,” protested Lone Boy. “I’ve got a fuckin’ certificate, and I’m—”
“Shhh, Loan. The girls.”
“—an official certificate, and I’m fully Americulturated, from the taps on my shoes to the tip of my ducktail.” Shaking, Lone Boy pulled the LAC/GSE letter from its envelope and studied it. Tuyet had not misrepresented its message.
This is harassment, Lone Boy thought. I’m as American as hot dogs, baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolets. Quickly, he directed a worried glance at the Datsun that Tuyet had parked in front of the Save-Our-Way. But even buying foreign was American. Surely, they couldn’t hold that old clunker against him; he was still struggling to establish himself as an enterprising capitalist. After all, it takes longer for some than others. I’ve voted for Nixon in two presidential biggies, and I’m moonlighting like a sonuva-bitch to prove myself. What more can the lovely people at LAC/GSE expect of gutsy Le Boi Loan?
“I want a Whopper,” Triny piped.
“Not me,” countered Tracy. “I want pancakes.”
Tuyet touched her husband’s wri
st. “But this evening something else happened.”
“Something else?” Lone Boy asked suspiciously.
“Grace Rinehart phoned. You’re to meet her at twelve-fifteen at the Chattahoochee Valley Art, Film, and Photography Salon.”
“She’s here in town? She wants to see me?”
“So it appears.”
Lone Boy slid the May issue of Daredevil— he had already paid for it—into a sack containing a bottle of cranberry juice and a bag of popcorn. Grace Rinehart, Oscar-winning film actress and a Freedom Medal recipient for her work Americulturating political relocatees from Southeast Asia and elsewhere, wanted to meet with him on Hines Street in the Art, Film, and Photography Salon—long after its stated closing time. What a whopping big honor. Maybe she would countermand the LAC order that he show up at Fort Benning every night next week—losing income and maybe even risking his second job—for reindoctrination. Possibly, she hadn’t caught wind of this letter until after one of her workers had typed and mailed it. Although a celebrity nine times over, she took a real interest in Little People. She went out of her way to rectify the mistakes of overzealous Americulturators.
“It’s five-after now!” Lone Boy shouted. “We’ve only got ten minutes to make it! Where’s that drag-butt Fraley?”
“Here I am, chink,” said Norman Fraley, entering. “And here’s a goddamn quarter.” He slapped it on the counter. “Five minutes’ wages, prorated from our hourly pay.”
Lone Boy pocketed the quarter, shed his apron, and got out from behind the counter so that Fraley could take over. “You may be a drag-butt, but you’re a decent drag-butt.”
Tuyet hurriedly told Fraley hello and tried to get the twins to greet him, too—but Lone Boy, pulling on a jacket, herded the three females out the door and into the Datsun, thinking, Two jobs down, an interview with Miss Rinehart ahead of me, and miles to go before I sleep …
Twelve minutes later, Loan’s family’s Datsun pulled up in front of the Chattahoochee Valley Art, Film, and Photography Salon. This odd remodeled building, with tinted windows at various heights and sheets of intricately stamped tin covering its many roofs, sat at the bottom of a hill, with a concrete wall surmounted by flower boxes around its tiny access court.
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 10