Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  And Cal was trying to shush her!

  “If you loved me,” she said, “you wouldn’t rush off in pursuit of this megalomaniac dream.”

  “If you loved me, you’d know there’s nothing megalomaniac about it. I’m scared shitless, Lia. But what do you want me to do? Go out there and tell Colonel Hudner, ‘Hey, man, gotta get on home and fix our sump pump. Catch you next trip’? ”

  “What’s going to happen, Cal? When will we next see each other? And where? Or will we at all?”

  “God knows, Lia. God or the demiurge.”

  Okay, she reflected. It’s inevitable. He’s trained for this trip, and he’s going, and I’d be the worst sort of obstructionist female if I derailed the whole thing by making him stay. A bitch of a wife. A monkeywench in the reality-reshaping conspiracy of Kai, Cal, and their presumptuous lowercase demiurge. Which is why another bishop’s going instead, and why I’ve got to stop badgering Cal and give him my own feeble blessing…

  Lia stepped back and, with trembling fingers, undid the pin on her blouse. Then she dropped the tiny intaglio fish into a pocket on Cal’s NASA jumpsuit.

  “Keep this with you,” she said. “Always.”

  They kissed, a kiss longer and deeper than any she could recall since their courtship. After which he strode away from her like a hero in a western movie. Only a fleeting glance over his shoulder cracked the veneer of his stoicism, redeeming him as the flesh-and-blood creature she had married.

  As she climbs the steps of the Chattahoochee Valley Art, Film, and Photography Salon, Grace Rinehart imagines that the cameras are rolling. A night scene. A mystery woman going to an assignation with a mystery man.

  In the absence of her work-absorbed husband, what other option does she have? She could stay in the Berthelot mansion awaiting Hiram’s next visit, but the intervals between these visits seem to grow longer, and with only filmed images of herself for company (her own face and figure endlessly multiplied on the screens around her), the nights protract and demoralize.

  So I’m going to meet my lover, she tells herself an hour after midnight, unlocking the iron-barred door and stepping inside.

  The reflection of the red traffic light at Hines and Railroad Streets glares in the foyer window; it spills its winking stain on the white stone floor. Grace stands in the dark, imagining that the director has cut to an interior shot taken from great altitude; her foreshortened body gives the scene an impressionistic air of claustrophobic menace. Anyone viewing the scene in a theater would intuit, entirely from the camera angle, that a probing pair of eyes has sighted Grace and from henceforth will track her remorselessly through the salon.

  Turn on the lights! every anonymous viewer wants to cry. Don’t be an idiot! Turn on the lights!

  But she is thinking. My lover’s already here, and he’s kept the galleries dark to heighten the glamor of our tryst. Our director concurs. The darkness will incite his two principals to a storm of photogenic passion that light would render… well, commonplace, if not downright tawdry and repellent. So let me go to my lover in the dark, and let our high-speed color cameras follow me to him as if I were in danger instead of heat…

  Whom has she enticed here from among her sexiest former leading men? James Garner? Cliff Judson? William Shatner? Or maybe it’s one of the younger bloods. Keith Carradine? Fordham Hayes? Geoff Bridges? She can’t remember whom she telephoned long-distance, or whether that person was serious about accepting her invitation or only facetiously flirty, but as she strolls from the foyer into the gallery of Popular Americana, she senses that her lover awaits her aloft. If he refuses to disclose his presence, he does so not only to sharpen their appetites for each other but also to increase the dramatic tension of this footage. Like her, the man is a pro, and a pro is ever ready to sacrifice even immediate carnal fulfillment for a stunning cinematic coup. So she grins as she strolls, but, each time the camera intercepts her face-on, hides her grin behind a pout of bemused expectancy.

  The signature Grace Rinehart pout.

  “Luciano!” she calls (Luciano seems a good fictional name for whoever awaits her.) “Luciano, are you here?”

  The question echoes up and down among the galleries.

  Continuing to stroll, she circles the pedestal on which sits a bronze icon of Checkers—the Nixons’ dog during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the namesake of the t-ship taking Dick, Cal, and Bishop Marlin to the Moon. Grace lets her fingers caress the bronze furrows on Checkers’s muzzle (no wonder the Nixons loved this dog) and then wanders on to the next statue, a sensuous marble effigy of MariLou Monroe, that bastard JFK’s secret playmate. The camera cuts from this moon-white Monroe to shadowy living woman and back again. A slow-motion do-si-do of cinema goddesses.

  “Luciano!”

  The name reverberates, its ultimate O spiraling up the helical stairway to the photography gallery, the screening room, and the concealed bedroom to which Grace often retires when Hiram is away. That must be where her mysterious paramour has concealed himself, too. With a crane-mounted camera dollying back to accommodate her advance, she mounts the stairs.

  Nobody in the photography gallery. Nobody in the upholstered seats of the screening room. Nobody in her hidden bedroom.

  Luciano, it seems, wants to make her search. Filmically, this strategy has a certain Hitchcockian charm, but Grace has begun to resent the stuck-up sonuvabitch’s dedication to elusiveness. She marches from one end of the second floor to the other with a clumsy swagger betraying her mood.

  “Damn it, Luciano! Get your butt out here!”

  No answer. Did he miss his flight? Did he lose the key that she sent him? Has he been detained by a death in the family, a movie shooting, a personal-appearance commitment? Well, he should have called to tell her. But of course nearly every actor in Hollywood, whether sixteen or sixty, is a self-absorbed adolescent. Their dismaying similarity to her first two conniving husbands is clear. Shouldn’t she know better by now? Yes, sir. She definitely ought to know better.

  “Keep shooting,” Grace commands. “I know I lost it there for a minute, but I’m getting it back. Really, I am.”

  She goes to the screening room’s projection booth, rummages in its film library, and finds an unmarked canister that she stuck behind the others two or three years ago. Luciano hasn’t shown, but at least she can show herself. And show herself to fresh, if not brilliant, advantage by sprocketing into the projector a film made while she was still a mere girl. Filming an actress in the process of showing one of her own films is too self-referential an approach to be very entertaining, but let the director in her head keep ‘em rolling, anyway. She’s always been her own best audience, and The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt is probably worth at least one more viewing before she dies. She was horrendous in it—it was a truly bad film—but she probably never looked better in any of her starring or co-starring roles. Which is the reason she has saved this solitary print of the film after buying up and cold-bloodedly destroying nearly every other copy.

  Soon, she sits slumped in a center-aisle seat in the screening room while the second movie she ever made burns silently—she has turned down its soundtrack—on the high white rectangle opposite. Two-dimensional images prance and preen on this surface. Today’s face is lit by the tattered radiance pouring down from the wistful visage of her nineteen-year-old self. And Grace is certain that yet another camera is filming the interaction between her and the immature goddess glowing in celluloid apotheosis.

  This certainty persuades her that a climax of some sort must be nearing, that she cannot be sprawled here eyeing her daughter—no, not her daughter: a younger clone of her continuous self—solely to gratify a craven desire to sidestep the aging process. Something is about to happen… not up on the screen but in the theater of the absurd of her very life.

  “Luciano!” she calls again. “Luciano, I’m giving you one more goddamn chance!”

  “Here, I am,” Luciano declares, and in the phallic guise of an eight-foot-
long boa constrictor he rises from the floor between her stretched-out legs and holds his blunt reptilian head only inches from her own. Luciano’s tongue flicks out, a split filament full of annihilating electricity, and the brushing touch of its two cold prongs deadens Grace’s lips and stops her heart.

  “My God!” she reflexively exclaims.

  Goggle-eyed, she recoils from Luciano’s kiss, grimly clutching the arms of her seat. She fails in mid-recoil, consciousness going out of her with her last line of dialogue. Luciano balances on his nether body, staring sidelong into her eyes like a rapist robbed of some ambiguous satisfaction.

  Meanwhile, this creature sees in the glassed-over hemispheres of Grace Rinehart’s eyes the twinned image of an immortal goddess, all of whose childish laughter erupts from her like gunfire in a perfect vacuum.

  Two days out from the modularized space station Kennedy Port, the transfer ship Checkers was dog-paddling—coasting—away from Earth toward the Moon. To Cal’s eye, the t-ship resembled a huge dunce cap sitting atop two immense fuel tanks, the smaller tank containing O2 (oxygen) and the larger H2 (hydrogen). In fact, the hydrogen-holding bottom tank was as large as the entire upper portion of the Checkers, and Cal had the chagrined sense that even Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers would have considered their vehicle a technological albatross.

  The President was actually aboard. However, he spent most of his time in a passenger area just above the crew deck in which Cal floated with Bishop Marlin and the two NASA crew members, the pilot Colonel Hudner and copilot Major Levack. Nixon had for company the whip-thin Secret Service man, Griegs, who had trained off and on with Cal and the bishop in Houston, and another Secret Service agent, Robinson, who played cameraman whenever the President wished to make a TV broadcast to his expectant Earthbound audience. Each broadcast was “historic”, and during each one Nixon repeated that he had chosen to visit the base at Censorinus for three very good and sufficient reasons:

  “First off, my fellow Americans—indeed, my fellow Earthlings—I go to Von Braunville to lift the hearts of the brave men and women who have sacrificed so much to serve us on our barren lunar outpost. Like Dear Abby, I care.

  “Second, I go to Von Braunville to leave my mark on history. What other leader has dared so much in the face of such odds?

  “And, third, I go to Von Braunville to speak to its forty-plus pioneers—and, incidentally in that regard, to all of you sitting by your TV sets—a message that will expand the dimensions of the American space program and eventually bring home to you even richer blessings than it has to date. God bless you, every one.”

  In one telecast from the Checkers, the President brought Joshua Marlin on camera, introducing him as the “distinguished spiritual leader of Georgia’s God-fearing Episcopalians.” He announced that taking the bishop to the Moon—an idea first suggested by Secretary Berthelot—was another new strategy to bolster the morale of Von Braunvillians. And the selfless Bishop Marlin—bless his heart—had agreed to serve as their chaplain for three months.

  Watching this broadcast with Colonel Hudner and Major Levack, Cal saw the bishop smile myopically, clasp his hands, and make a crowd-acknowledging gesture more typical of a prizefighter than a clergyman. But Nixon did not permit him to speak, and a moment later Marlin came swimming back down to the crew deck to tell Cal that the President wanted him to get his fanny up to the passenger deck now doubling as a broadcast booth. He also wanted Cal to bring with him one or two of the Brezhnev bears.

  “You’re kidding,” Cal said.

  “No, Calvin, I’m not. The President sees this as a fine ‘video opportunity’. A chance to show off his personal warmth. To score a few points with tottery Leonid Ilyich in Moscow. And against him in the Vigorous Leader Sweepstakes.”

  Bishop Marlin explained that Brezhnev was reputedly miffed that his American counterpart had opted to one-up him like this. So the President hoped to cool him down by showing the Soviet cavies in a broadcast. At the same time, he was not unaware that magnanimously spotlighting the pigs would underscore the fact that he was taking them to the Moon and Leonid wasn’t. From these facts, the world could draw its own conclusions about the health of the American and Soviet space programs and the countries’ two leaders.

  Cal pushed off to get the Brezhnev bears. Jesus, he thought, what an idea. The cavies had been a nuisance from the beginning; the possibility that they would tremendously cheer the selenonauts struck him as remote. Housed in two plastic boxes on the crew deck—so that Cal could tend to them—the pigs squeaked continually, noises so similar to computer beeps that Hudner often thought that either Houston or Kennedy Port was trying to signal him.

  Worse, the “bears” had little understanding of zero-g hygiene, and Cal spent a lot to time vacuuming drifting pellets out of their boxes and trying to repair the improvised filter that was supposed to keep their pee from separating out into free-floating droplets that jaundiced the crew deck’s atmosphere. Because of the guinea pigs, things were always about to go blooey—equipment failing, tempers pulled thin—and Cal was more than ready for the Checkers to rendezvous with the ferry shuttle that would set them all down on the Moon. A surface where “up” and “down” were not arbitrary terms and you could exercise your God-given right to take a piss without a lot of clunky zero-g paraphernalia.

  “Come on,” Cal coaxed, reaching into one of the double-walled plastic boxes. “You guys’ve got a presidential summons.”

  The cavies, who had learned to hang themselves by their manes on the strips of Velcro lining the rear walls of their boxes, were not impressed. Cal had to grip their naked bellies and pull; the result was a ripping sound like that obtained yanking a Band-Aid off an unhealed wound. Fortunately, having chosen two plump males to meet the President, he had to do this only twice, but these two squealed histrionically, thrashed their little legs, and tried to bite him. The overlooked male and the three females, hanging like Lilliputian sides of pork on their own Velcro strips, squealed and kicked in sympathy.

  And it doesn’t help much, thought Cal bitterly, knowing that everyone else sees this as the Calvin Pickford Comedy Minute. For the colonel, the major, and the bishop were amusedly following his efforts and trying hard not to snigger.

  At last, he had the cavies free. He let them go, and in the open space of the cabin they struggled, treading air for purchase and finding none. God, they were ugly, obscene in their nudity and in their futile wriggling. Cal’s first inclination was to cram them into socks to restore a degree of decorum to the cabin.

  But that, Cal knew, was a prudish urge. He spurned it, opting to shepherd the cavies toward the ladder by shooting jets of air at them from a squeeze bottle. And so they rose, a binary of helpless rodents, pig-paddling about each other, energetically squeaking.

  Cal hand-over-handed his own way to the upper deck, emerging into this jungle of ferns, caladiums, hydrangeas, and miniature evergreens to find himself facing Robinson’s camera and Griegs’s perpetual scowl. Nixon, too, was eyeing the helical waltz of the guinea pigs and the jack-in-the-box arrival of their keeper.

  Boosted by the squeeze bottle, the “bears” kept going; Cal had to grab each of them by a foot to prevent them from colliding with the floor of the cargo bay capping the passenger decks. He also feared the possibility of their getting lost in the foliage of the various plants bracketed to the pegboard walls.

  “All right,” said the President. “Let’s shoot, boys. Billions of people are waiting to see this.”

  Whereupon Griegs towed one of the guineas to the President by a hind leg and Robinson began televising its summit with the Leader of the Free World. Soon, the other pig joined their deliberations, and finally even Cal got to enter the picture. The two men and the two bare cavies circled one another in a parody of friendliness, the nauseous implications of which put Cal in danger of barfing in front of half the world’s population, not excluding his wife.

  But, by dint of will, he kept his gorge down, and the President told the mu
ltitudes that Cal Pickford, the first working cowhand in space, had foregone the pleasures of post-hole digging and bovine midwifery to escort Brezhnev’s babies to the Moon and that for this sacrifice he deserved three cheers from every English- (and maybe Spanish-) speaking person watching this broadcast.

  And, to his chagrin, Cal smiled to consider that millions of Americans were even now rising before their TV sets to bellow, in unison, “Hip hip hooray for Cal Pickford!”

  A biological accident interrupted this reverie. The plumper of the two cavies discharged a swarm of pellets, which floated around the two men like wayward planetoids. Cal had to take the nozzle off his squeeze bottle and chase them down. Nixon stayed calmly affable through this impromptu business—human, almost—as if tickled by the spectacle of an erstwhile cowhand collecting BBs of cavy dung in a container meant for Co’ Cola.

  But after the broadcast, the President—it was hard to deride him as “King Richard” when you were floating alongside him in a fragile tin can one hundred thousand miles from Earth—rebuked Cal for wearing an Indian braid.

  “That goddamn hippie hair string,” he said, “has no place on a mission like ours. The Checkers was built for tradition-respecting souls, and if you don’t cut that doo-whanger off before we go into lunar orbit, pigs or no pigs, I’m going to send your calloused butt back to Kennedy Port with Hudner and Levack.”

  “None of our NASA colleagues objected, sir.”

  “Then they’re not the sticklers for clean-cutness they should be, and I’m ashamed of the sorry peckers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After which the President withdrew into himself, veiling his worry-cratered eyes behind a look of such aloof malignity that Cal was frightened. What had happened to the semi-human Richard Nixon of five minutes ago? It seemed that he had metamorphosed into a real-world hypostasis of Philip K. Dick’s fictional Harper Mocton. Even Robinson and Griegs, former Green Berets and veterans of the Indochina triumph, wanted nothing to do with him now. Although both men remained on the upper deck, they strove to get as far from their employer as possible. Meanwhile, the President swam to his passenger chair, strapped himself in, and sat there like an effigy in a department-store window.