Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “But I’ll be interested in every aspect of your life—personal, financial, political, professional—that may be contributing to the problems tormenting you. Nothing can be out of bounds in our talks if I’m to help you confront and exorcize these torments. Is that agreed, Miss Ri—Grace?”

  “Of course. However, I have some stipulations of my own.”

  Lia halted. She clasped her hands behind her back and stared at the actress with an apprehensiveness bordering on dismay. What stipulations? And would it damage her professional credibility to yield to them? I’ve lost Kai as a client, Lia thought, and though I’m not that crazy about taking on someone as high-strung, spoiled, and unpredictable as Grace Rinehart may prove to be, neither do I want to kick away a chance to treat her. I need this client.

  “All right,” Lia said warily. “What stipulations?”

  Leaning assertively forward, Grace said, “I want to meet with you somewhere other than this office.”

  “Where?” Lia blurted, surprised.

  Grace waved away her question. “Second, I insist that you set aside for me—I’ll pay for the privilege—one whole day out of each week. On that day, you’ll be not only my personal psychotherapist but also my companion. You’ll go where I go, interviewing me as we travel together.”

  Lia could feel her blood rising. “Friends make lousy shrinks, Grace, and trying to conduct an interview while driving around the countryside would be a lot like trying to compose a sonnet while playing roller derby.”

  “I didn’t say ‘friend’, I said ‘companion’, and—”

  “Does the distinction matter?”

  “—and there’s no place as conducive to confession as the front seat of an expensive car cruising along on a lovely spring day.”

  “The front seat of a car?”

  “Or a secluded spot on Berthelot Acres. Or a private room at the Fort Benning LAC. Or maybe even my suite at the Art, Film, and Photography Salon in LaGrange.”

  “But why?” Lia protested. “Psychologists don’t ordinarily make house calls. For the simple reason that—”

  “They want to control the shrink-shrunk relationship.”

  “Not true. We just want our clients to make real progress at as many sessions as possible. That’s why we don’t meet them in casinos full of one-armed bandits.”

  “Baloney, Lia. All you need’s a little privacy and quiet. You don’t need an isolation booth with your nameplate on the door.”

  “Is this an isolation booth?” Lia gestured at her office. “A medieval torture chamber?”

  “Those are my conditions. That we meet in quiet places other than this office. And that you set aside one full day each week for my session. Even if it lasts no longer than an hour.”

  Lia felt hassled and violated. That another woman was mapping out this ego trip, and demanding that she get aboard, bugged her even more than the “conditions”. You just didn’t let a client dictate to you. It was also galling that Grace Rinehart, thinking a woman might empathize more than a “turtleneck”, had no misgivings about pushing a fellow female around to access this empathy. There was something predatory about her mind. A life of celebrity and privilege undoubtedly accounted for it.

  “Well?” the actress said.

  “Let’s make Wednesday your day,” Lia replied, hating herself for surrendering but anticipating not only the money that she would earn but also the insights into the minds of the rich and powerful that she would surely acquire. Besides, ever since her first week in Warm Springs, Wednesday had been her slowest day.

  Shawanda is astonished when Lia dons her coat and goes clumping down the stairs with Grace Rinehart—but scarcely more astonished than Lia herself. An hour before noon and she is leaving on a wild-hair jaunt with the wife of the Secretary of Agriculture, a woman as well known today for turning Ho Chi Minh fans into raving capitalists as for bringing a new image of Southern womanhood—self-reliant, smart, and foxy—to the silver screen.

  Of course, Grace hasn’t made a new film in three years, and the widespread perception of her as an ideologue, a zealous defender of conservative ideals, has begun to dilute her reputation as a film actress. Even during her Hollywood heyday—the decisive years of the Vietnamese conflict—many people in the industry respected her political connections more than her acting ability, and most agree that she ruined Jane Fonda’s career even before the latter’s vocal support of Ho’s gang culminated in her disappearance. Grace also did much to send Paul Newman back to Broadway, where he toiled in relative obscurity until landing the part of the boozy ex-astronaut in Terms of Endearment and finally winning an Academy Award.

  In any case, Grace made her influence felt during the 1970s, as much as a patriot as a thespian, and Lia wonders if she regrets having mixed the two. Her wedding in 1978 to Hiram Berthelot, a Georgian whose grandfather had made a fortune in textiles, has gradually—inevitably—untied her from the film industry, and Lia feels sure that the severing of this identity-giving knot has at last begun to unravel her new client.

  “Where to?” Lia asks. They are seated next to each other in the front of Miss Rinehart’s Cadillac, cruising at Ye Old Double Nickel (Cal’s derisive nicklename for the speed limit) and moving out of town on a narrow two-lane. Woodbury—Berthelot Acres—has to be their destination, Lia decides, but she still finds it easy to get lost amid the pine-fretted hills that rise up and fall away from the tiny communities abutting one another on the southern edge of the Piedmont shield.

  “Relax and enjoy the ride,” the actress says, her eyes hidden by mirror lenses that go jarringly with her outfit.

  The Fleetwood whisks them through the greening countryside—past fields full of clover or rusted autos, railroad embankments thick with new kudzu, and a portable signboard on which someone has spelled out this tripartite message: DEER PROCESSING / FATBACK / JESUS SAVES.

  At last they reach the turnoff—a long gravel drive through upward-sloping meadows of moist spring grass—to the latterday fiefdom called Berthelot Acres. Here, Grace Rinehart lives with her husband (when the secretary can get away from Washington), and here they try to lead normal lives despite their status as Hotshot Politico and Famous Activist Actress. However, two burly Secret Service men guard the entrance to the place. And so large is the estate that if it were set down in Europe, somewhere near Monaco or Luxembourg, it would qualify for UN membership.

  It seems to Lia that they glide forever up the entrance drive, on either side of which graze imposing specimens of reddish cattle. These animals have the elegance and coloring of well-groomed Irish setters. Grace informs Lia that they are Santa Gertrudis cattle, first developed on the King Ranch in Texas by a complicated series of crosses between shorthorn and Brahman stock, and that here on Berthelot Acres Hiram has more than a thousand head. Lia marvels at the clean wooden breeding pens that grid the rolling meadow to her right and also at the number of healthy red beasts nibbling at the stretches of lawn between the rectangular pens.

  “Cal would love this,” she tells Grace.

  “Your husband may be working in a pet store, but he’s still got calluses on his palms and an unmistakable cowboy squint.”

  “You were disguised. You bought a couple of Brezhnev bears.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Why would you do that? You said to keep you company, but you hardly need to buy Brezhnev bears, and—”

  “Hardly.”

  “—and you scared Cal to death. He didn’t know who you were then, but he was afraid you were checking him out, spying.”

  “Does your husband have something to hide?”

  This question chills Lia. What have I got myself into, riding around with this Nixon administration zealot? Am I betraying Cal by being here? No, no. He himself told me that Kai wanted us to take risks, to reach out to opportunities that might at first strike us as, well, repugnant.

  “I’m sure he’s got no more to hide than most of us,” Grace says before Lia can manage a reply. “Those guinea pigs were
gifts for a friend of mine’s children, but I fibbed—told a white lie—to keep from, ah, blowing my cover.” She chuckles at this expression. “I can’t go out as myself without attracting notice, Lia, and I weary of the attention. Sometimes I resort to melodramatic subterfuges. I’m terribly sorry if I gave your husband a bad moment.”

  “Several bad moments.”

  “He’s not secretly pining for Herbert Humphrey or Jimmy Carter, is he? I’ll think less of him if he is.”

  “It’s not illegal to feel a fondness for the loyal opposition.”

  “A fondness is fine. Seditious rancor is something else.”

  That ended the conversation. The Cadillac crested a hillock of grass and day lilies capped by a stand of oaks, and Lia caught her first glimpse of the Berthelot mansion, an antebellum house with a portico, fluted white columns, and at least six towering red-brick chimneys. A gargantuan solarium, all glass and hanging plants and wrought-iron furniture and sculpture-surmounted fountains, grew out of the Berthelot mansion on the north, and a small army of peacocks marched the nearby parade fields like a scattershot drill team with no instructor to coordinate its strutting.

  Grace introduced Lia to the Secret Service men, veterans of the Vietnam War, who had trailed them up to the house in a vehicle like an armored golf cart, and, once inside, to a black housekeeper who set table places for them in the solarium and served them lemonade and deliciously oniony chicken-salad sandwiches with pickle slices and potato chips.

  Over this meal, Grace began to talk. She said that she had come to Lia because she felt that she was beginning to disappear from life, leaving behind maybe fifteen half-decent films and the nationwide chain of Liberty Americulturation Centers that had won her the Freedom Medal. These things were her gifts to posterity, but she herself was going transparent, and this terrified her. It was probably a fear of aging that lay behind her visions of turning into mist or wind, but knowing this did not banish the fear, and she wondered how she could make herself real again.

  Lia realized that they were sessioning, that this was the part of their day for which Grace Rinehart had expressly hired her; she set down her chicken-salad sandwich, took out a notepad, and began to scribble notes. A tape recorder would have been a real help, but Lia wasn’t going to interrupt the flow of her client’s recital to ask for one.

  The business about disappearing—fading out—gave Lia an abrupt shock of recognition. Grace Rinehart was afraid of succumbing to a spiritual state that mirrored—metaphorically—the physical fadeout to which Kai, or Philip K. Dick, had recently succumbed. She was afraid of disappearing. Coincidence? Or synchronicity? Also (and this was almost as disturbing to Lia as the analogy between Grace and Kai), the end of Dick’s novel The Dream Impeachment of Harper Mocton featured the symbolic dematerialization of its title character. What was going on? Could nothing hold these unhappy people to the planet?

  “Coffee?” Grace Rinehart asked.

  “Coffee doesn’t work, either,” Lia said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “No, thank you. That’s all I meant. I can’t drink it unless it’s decaffeinated, anyway.”

  “I’m sure we’ve got some decaffeinated somewhere.”

  “No, it’s all right. I’m fine.” Jeena, the housekeeper-cook, came by to refill her glass of lemonade.

  Even before Jeena had left the solarium, Grace was confessing that Hiram, her third husband, probably had no idea how rootless and uncertain she was feeling these days. Her first two husbands had been actors, callow guys with swashbuckling profiles and raging libidos—damned if she hadn’t made the same mistake twice—both of whom had begun cheating because their own careers had devolved into dramatic donkeywork: a sidekick in a dumb TV cop show, a shill for aspirin. Her career, meanwhile, was rocketing skyward like a Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle. Old Tweedledum and Tweedledee—it was hard to recall which had been the cop and which the pitchman—had been able to handle the bruising of their male egos only by screwing every leggy starlet who came their way. And so these “marriages”—ha!—had fizzled out in divorce.

  Hiram, however, was as dependable/faithful as sunrise/sunset. If he had a failing, it was work. Therefore his ignorance of her—Well, what to call it? Her “midlife crisis”? That was popular terminology nowadays, wasn’t it? Anyway, Hiram stayed busy talking with wheat fanners, dairy ranchers, farm-equipment manufacturers, agribusiness lobbyists, and so on. He was constantly plugging away for grain shipments to Africa and the Soviet Union, lower interest rates on farm loans, and the end of every federal price ceiling on beef, mutton, and pork.

  Lia listened to this synopsis of Hiram Berthelot’s career with real sympathy, in part because even Cal liked him. Indeed, Cal and Arvill Rudd thought Berthelot the gutsiest member of Nixon’s third- and fourth-term cabinets. Who else, they argued, had had the brass to tell King Richard that the price ceiling he’d fixed for beef in 1973 was a monstrous disaster for the cattle industry and only a temporary boon for the American consumer? But that’s exactly what Berthelot had done, and there was some evidence that Nixon had heeded his words.

  Grace was still talking, and Lia’s hand was tiring. Politics, Grace allowed, was an even nastier trade than show business. It bugged her how often some yellow-dog Democrat in the House or the Senate accused Hiram of a conflict of interests. They didn’t like him raising cattle, they disapproved of his owning a large block of prime pasture in Meriwether County, they objected to the fact that he’d arranged the first shipment of Brezhnev bears from the Soviet Union and now raised the critters—along with a thousand head of Santa Gertrudis cattle—on Berthelot Acres. They had no right to object. Hiram had signed all his income from these enterprises over to the Liberty Foundation, a nonprofit patriotic organization, and the Senate had long ago ruled that he was not technically in violation of any of the conflict-of-interest statutes pertaining to cabinet members.

  Why are you telling me all this? Lia wondered. She had stopped taking notes. You’re my client, not your husband, and although I need to have as much background as I can to help you, a lot of this seems overdetailed and extraneous.

  Outside the solarium, the branches of two elm trees had filled with goldfinches. The birds clung precariously to these branches, pecking away at seeds or buds. Lia, sipping her tea, watched them teetering like circus aerialists on the cascading limbs.

  “I think it would help,” Grace said, “if I saw more of Hiram.”

  “Why don’t you go to Washington to live, then?”

  “I hate that city. It’s bitchier than Los Angeles.”

  This remark, insofar as Lia could judge, concluded their first formal session. Grace beckoned to Jeena, who entered the solarium and cleared away their dishes. Then the actress got up and led Lia outdoors, through a gauntlet of potted ferns and down the back side of the hill on which the mansion perched to a long whitewashed barn with three cupolas and three antique weather vanes.

  One of the Secret Service agents, a big guy named Twitchell, joined them about halfway down the hill and accompanied them to the barn. Which, Lia decided, was actually a converted chickenhouse. When they stepped through the west-end door, she could smell—not the sickening odor of barnyard fowls, but a delicate gaminess betraying the presence of… guinea pigs.

  “Three of four of them don’t smell bad at all,” Twitchell said, “but when you get just beaucoup bunches of ‘em in the same joint at one time, well, forget it. Nude or no, their tiny bods can perfume a place as fast as a—” Twitchell blushed, and Lia understood that he had almost framed a scatological figure of speech.

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  As far as the eye could see in the converted chickenhouse—with its green indoor/outdoor carpenting, overhead warm-air blowers and fluorescents, and metal food and water trays—Berthelot’s half-nude cavies cavorted. Amused, Lia looked at all the pink varmints, with only their manes to make them “cuddlesome”, and wondered again why the American people had taken them to their
hearts. These guinea pigs were more popular than war orphans or March of Dime poster kids, and Lia knew that Hiram—good guy or no—was making money hand over fist peddling the little buggers to pet stores and other breeders. Besides, the Liberty Foundation was Grace’s baby, and if it were getting all of Hiram’s profits from beef and cavy raising, well, she and Hubby Dear were probably raking a pretty sum off the top of these contributions.

  “Would you like one?” Grace asked. “If you would, it’s yours. Just pick it out.”

  “I don’t think it would get along too well with our husky. And I really don’t want to take my pay in barter items.”

  The actress stressed that she had not intended barter as her way of paying her bills. Then she jolted Lia by saying, “You’re not doing all that well yet, are you? In your practice?”

  Twitchell was leaning over one of the low wire fences, trying to pet a pale-maned pig that kept scooting to and fro among its chittering buddies to avoid his hand.

  “They don’t like to be touched on their heinies,” Grace shouted at Twitchell. “Rub its nose. That, they like.”

  Lia was thinking, Is she trying to humiliate me? I’ve come out here to session with her. Now she’s insinuating—correctly—that my practice isn’t much of a practice. The unspoken implication is that I’m a charity case. She even wants me to accept a Brezhnev bear. Maybe this is how Cal felt when Mr. Kemmings tried to foist a pair of the little stinkers off on him…

  “You aren’t, are you?” Grace insisted.

  “Things are starting to turn around,” Lia said through clenched teeth. “It just takes awhile.”

  Grace Rinehart studied Lia in a way that made her feel that she had a bra strap showing. Then she said, “Come on, young lady. You and I are going to Columbus.”

  “Columbus?”

  “Well, Fort Benning.”

  “Fort Benning?”

  “Specifically, the Liberty Americulturation Center.”

  “But I need to get back to—”

  “You’ve given me the entire day, remember?”