Philip Dick - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

I suppose we all do it, and do it often; but this was too glaring, too basic, to ignore. Kirsten's lunatic son, palpably schizophrenic, could show why asking a computer for the largest number short of two is an unintelligible request, but Bishop Timothy Archer, a lawyer, a scholar, a sane adult, could see a pin on the bedsheet beside his mistress and leap to the conclusion that his dead son was communicating with him from another world; moreover, Tim was writing it all up in a book, a book that would first be published and then read; he not only believed nonsense, he believed it in a public way.

"Wait'll the world hears about this," Bishop Archer and his mistress declared. Winning the heresy confrontation perhaps had convinced the bishop that he could not err; or, if he erred, no one could pull him down. He was wrong in both respects: he could err and there were people who could pull him down. He could pull himself down, for that matter.

I saw all this clearly as I sat with Kirsten at one of the bars in the St. Francis Hotel that day. And there was nothing I could do. Their fixed idea, being not a problem but a solution, could not be reasoned away, even though, finally, it amounted to a further problem on its own. They had tried to solve one problem with yet another. That is not how you do it; you do not solve one problem with another, greater problem. This is how Hitler, who uncannily resembled Wallenstein, had tried to win World War Two. Tim could admonish me about hysteron proteron reasoning to his heart's content-and then fall victim to the merely occult nonsense-stuff of popular paperback books. He might as well have believed that Jeff had been brought back by ancient astronauts from another star system.

I hurt, thinking about this. I hurt in my legs; I hurt throughout. Bishop Archer, who hysteron-proteroned me up and down the street, he being a bishop, I being a young woman with a B.A. from Cal in liberal arts-I had one night heard Edgar Barefoot talk about this anumana Hindu thing and I knew more or could do more than the Bishop of California; and it didn't matter because the Bishop of California was not going to listen to me any more than he was going to listen to anybody else, over and beyond his mistress, who, like himself, was so steeped in guilt and so messed up by intrigue and deceit-emanating from their invisible relationship-that they had long since ceased to be able to reason properly. Bill Lundborg, shut up in jail now, could have set them straight. A taxi driver picked at random could have told them they were calculatedly destroying their lives-not just by believing this, although that alone was sufficiently destructive, but by deciding to publish it. Fine. Do it. Wreck your goddamn life. Cast charts of the stars, cast horoscopes while the most destructive war in modern times is raging. It will earn you a place in the history books-as a dunce. You get to sit on the tall stool in the corner; you get to wear the conical cap; you get to undo all the social activist shit you ever engineered in concert with some of the finest minds of the century. For this, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., died. For this you marched at Selma: to believe-and to say publicly that you believe-that the ghost of your dead son is pushing pins under the fingernails of your mistress while she is asleep. By all means publish it. Be my guest.

The logical error, of course, is that Kirsten and Tim reasoned backward from effect to cause; they did not see the cause-they saw only what they called "phenomena"-and from these phenomena they inferred Jeff as the secret cause operating in or from "the other world." The anumana structure shows that this inductive reasoning is not reasoning at all; with the anumana you begin with a premise and work through the five steps to your conclusion, and each step is airtight in relation to the step before it and the step after it, but there is no airtight logic involved in inferring that broken mirrors and singed hair and stopped clocks and all that other crap reveals and, in fact, proves another reality in which the dead are not dead; what it proves is that you are credulous and you are operating at a six-year-old level mentally: you are not reality-testing, you are lost in wish fulfillment, in autism. But it is an eerie kind of autism because it revolves around a single idea; it does not invade your general field, your total attention. Outside of this one spurious premise, this one faulty induction, you are clear- headed and sane. It is a localized madness, allowing you to speak and act normally the rest of the time. Therefore no one locks you up because you can still earn a living, take baths, drive a car, take out the trash. You are not crazy in the manner that Bill Lundborg is crazy, and in a certain sense (depending on how you define "crazy") you are not crazy at all.

Bishop Archer could still perform his pastoral chores. Kirsten could still buy clothes at the best stores in San Francisco. Neither of them would smash the windows of a U.S. Postal Service substation with their bare fists. You cannot arrest someone for believing that his son is communicating to this world from the next, or believing, for that matter, that there is a next world. Here the fixed idea shades off into religion generally; it becomes part of the other- worldly orientation of the revealed religions of the world. What is the difference between believing in a God you can't see and your dead son whom you can't see? What distinguishes one invisibility from another invisibility? Nonetheless, there is a difference, but it is tricky. It has to do with the general opinion, a slippery area; many people believe in God but few people believe that Jeff Archer sticks pins under Kirsten Lundborg's fingernails while she is asleep-that is the difference, and when put that way the subjectivity of it is plain. After all,

Kirsten and Tim have the goddamn pins, and the burned hair, and the broken mirrors, not to mention the stopped clocks. But the two of them are making a logical error, for all that. Whether the people who believe in God are making an error I don't know, since their belief- system cannot be tested one way or another. It simply is faith.

Now I had been formally asked to sit in as a hopeful spectator to further "phenomena," and were they to occur I could, along with Tim and Kirsten, vouch for what I witnessed and add my name to Tim's forthcoming book-a book that, his editor had said, would undoubtedly outsell all his previous books based on less sensational material. But I could not be disinterested. Jeff had been my husband. I loved him. I wanted to believe. Worse, I sensed the psychological motor driving Kirsten and Tim to believe; I did not want to shoot their faith-or credulity-down because I could see what cynicism would do to them: it would leave them with nothing-leave them, once more, with staggering guilt, a guilt neither could cope with. I found myself, then, in a position where I had to comply, at least pro forma. I had to allege belief, allege interest, allege excitement. Neutrality would not be enough: enthusiasm was required. The damage had been done in England, before I was brought in on this. The decision was already made. If I said, "It's bullshit," they would continue on anyhow, but bitterly. Fuck the cynicism, I thought to myself as I sat with Kirsten that day at the St. Francis bar. There is nothing to be gained and a lot to lose, and anyhow it doesn't matter; Tim's book is going to get written and published-with or without me.

That is bad reasoning. Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it. But that was my reasoning. I saw this: if I told Kirsten and Tim how I felt, I could look forward never to seeing either of them again; they would cut me off, lop me away and discard me, and I would have my job at the record shop- my friendship with Bishop Archer would be a thing of the past. It meant too much to me; I could not let it go.