Philip Dick - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

For the life of me I could think of nothing to say.

"Paranoids have a fear of being looked at," Bill said. "So invisibility would be important to them. There was this one lady, she couldn't eat in front of anyone. She always took her tray off to her room. I guess she thought eating was dirty." He smiled. I managed to smile back.

How strange this is, I thought. An eerie conversation, as if it is not actually taking place.

"Jeff was real hostile," Bill said. "Toward his father and toward Kirsten both, and maybe toward you, but I don't think as much; toward you, I mean. We talked about you that day I came over. I forget when that was. I had a two-day pass. I hitched down then, too. It's not that hard to hitch. A truck picked me up, even though it had a NO RIDERS sign posted. It was carrying some kind of chemicals, but not the toxic kind. If they're carrying flammable material or toxic material they know not to give you a ride, because if there is an accident and you're killed or poisoned then sometimes it voids their insurance."

Again I could think of nothing to say; I nodded.

"The law," Bill said, "in case of an accident where a hitchhiker is injured or killed, is that it's presumed he rode at his own risk. He took the chance. So because of that when you hitch if something happens you can't sue. That's California law. I don't know how it is in other states."

"Yes," I said. "Jeff felt a lot of anger toward Tim."

"Do you feel animosity toward my mother?"

After a pause, after I had thought it over, I said, "Yes. I really do."

"Why? It wasn't her fault. Any time a person kills himself, he has to take full responsibility. We learned that. You learn a lot in the hospital. You know a whole bunch of things that people on the outside never find out. It's a crash course in reality, which is the ultimate-" He gestured. "Paradox. Because the people there are there because, presumably, they don't face reality, and then they wind up in the hospital, the mental hospital, a state hospital like Napa, and have to face a whole lot more reality all of a sudden than other people ever have to do. And they face it very well. I've seen things I have been very proud of, patients helping other patients. One time this lady-she was like about in her fifties-said to me, 'Can I confide in you?' She swore me to secrecy. I promised not to say anything. She said, 'I'm going to kill myself tonight.' She told me how she was going to do it. This was not a locked ward. She had her car parked out in the lot and she had an ignition key they didn't know she had; they-the staff-thought they had all her keys but she kept this one back. So I thought it over, about what I should do. Should I tell Dr. Gutman? He was in charge of the ward. What I did was, I sneaked outside onto the lot-I knew which car was hers-and I removed the coil wire that runs-well, you wouldn't know. It runs between the coil and the distributor. There's no way you can start an engine with that wire missing. It's easy to do. When you park your car in a really rough neighborhood and you're afraid someone will steal it, you can pull out that wire; it comes out real easy. She cranked it until the battery ran down and then she came back in. She was furious but later on she thanked me." He pondered and then said, half to himself, "She was going to ram an ongoing car on the Bay Bridge. So I saved him, too; the other car. It might have been like a station wagon full of kids."

"My God," I said faintly.

"It was a decision I had to make in a hurry." Bill said. "Once I knew she had that key, I had to do something. It was a big Merc. Silver-colored. Almost new. She had a lot of money. In a situation like that if you don't act, it's the same as helping them."

I said, "It might have been better to tell the doctor."

"No." He shook his head. "Then she would have-well, it's hard to explain. She knew that I did it to save her life, not to get her in trouble. If I had told the staff-especially if I had told Dr. Gutman-she would have interpreted that as me just trying to get her kept there another couple of months. But this way they never knew, so they didn't hold her any longer than they originally intended to. When I got out-she got out before I did-one time she came by my apartment ... I gave her my address; anyhow, she came by-she was driving that same Merc; I recognized it when she pulled up-and she wanted to know how I was getting along."

"How were you getting along?" I said.

"Not good at all. I didn't have money to pay my rent; they were going to evict me. She had a whole lot of money; her husband was rich. They owned a bunch of apartment buildings up and down California, as far down as San Diego. She went back to her car and came back and handed me a roll of what I thought were nickels. You know; a roll of coins. After she left, I opened the roll at one end and they were gold coins. She told me later she kept a lot of her money in the form of gold. It was from some British colony. She told me when I sold them to a coin dealer to specify that they were 'B.U.' That stands for 'bright uncirculated.' It's a dealers' term. A bright uncirculated coin is worth more than whatever the opposite would be. I got about twelve dollars a coin, when I sold them. I kept one, but I lost it. I got something like six hundred dollars for the roll, with that one coin missing." Turning, he scrutinized the stove. "Your water's boiling."

I poured the water into the Silex coffee pot.

"Unboiled coffee," Bill said, "filtered coffee, is a lot better for you than the percolated kind, where it shoots back up to the top and starts all over again."

"That's true," I said.

Bill said, "I've been thinking a lot about your husband's death. He seemed like a really nice person. Sometimes that's a problem."

"Why?" I said.

"Much mental illness stems from people repressing their hostility and trying to be nice, too nice. The hostility can't be repressed forever. Everybody has it; it has to come out."

"Jeff was very calm," I said. "It was hard to get him to fight. Marital quarrels; I was usually the one who got mad."

"Kirsten says he had been dropping acid."

"I don't think that's true," I said. "That he dropped acid."

"A lot of people who get messed up get messed up from drugs. You see a lot of them in the hospital. They don't always stay that way, contrary to what you hear. Most of it is due to malnutrition; people on drugs forget to eat and, when they do eat, they eat junk food. The muscles. Everyone who does drugs gets the munchies, unless, of course, they're taking amphetamines, in which case they don't eat at all. Much of what looks like toxic brain psychosis in speed freaks is in fact a deficiency in their galvanic electrolytes. Which are easily replaced."

"What sort of work do you do?" I said. He seemed less ill at ease, now. More confident in what he was saying. "I'm a painter," Bill said.

"What artist is your work-"

"Car painting." He smiled gently. "Spray painting. At Leo Shine's. In San Mateo. 'I'll spray your car any color you want it for forty-nine-fifty and give you a written six-month guarantee."' He laughed and I laughed, too; I had seen Leo Shine's commercials on TV.

"I loved my husband very much," I said.

"Was he going to be a minister?"

"No. I don't know what he was going to be."

"Maybe he wasn't going to be anything. I'm taking a course in computer programming. Right now I'm studying algorithms. An algorithm is nothing but a recipe, like when you bake a cake. It is a sequence of incremental steps sometimes utilizing built-in repeats; certain steps have to be reiterated.

One primary aspect of an algorithm is that it be meaningful; it's very easy to unintentionally ask a computer a question it can't answer, not because it's dumb but because the question really has no answer."