Philip Dick - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

"Tim has Christ on his side; he's immortal. Didn't you know that? Bishops live forever. The first bishop-'Peter, I imagine-is still alive somewhere, drawing a salary. Bishops live eternally and they get paid a lot. I die and I get paid almost nothing."

"It beats working in a record store," I said.

"Not really. Everything about your life is out in the open, at least; you don't have to skulk around like a second-story-man. This book of Tim's-it's going to be clear as day to everyone who reads it that Tim and I are sleeping together. We were in England together; we witnessed the phenomena together. Perhaps this is God's revenge against us for our sins, this prophecy by that old lady. Sleep with a bishop and die; it's like 'See Rome and die.' Well, I can't say it's been worth it, I really can't. I'd rather be a record clerk in Berkeley like you ... but then I'd have to be young like you, to get the full benefits."

I said, "My husband is dead. I don't have all the breaks."

"And you don't have the guilt."

"Balls," I said. "I have plenty of guilt."

"Why? Jeff-well, anyhow, it wasn't your fault."

"We share the guilt," I said. "All of us."

"For the death of someone who was programmed to die? You only kill yourself if the DNA death-strip tells you to; it's in the DNA ... didn't you know that? Or it's what they call a 'script,' which is what Eric Berne taught. He's dead, you know; his death-script or-strip or whatever caught up with him, proving him right. His father died and he died, the exact same age. It's like Chardin, who desired to die on Good Friday and got his wish."

"This is morbid," I said.

"Right." Kirsten nodded. "I just heard a while ago that I'm doomed to die; I feel very morbid, and so would you, except that you're exempt, for some reason. Maybe because you don't have a spot on your lung and you never had cancer. Why doesn't that old lady die? Why is it me and Tim? I think Jeff's malicious, saying that; it's one of those self-fulfilling prophecies you hear about. He tells Dr. Spooky I'm going to die and as a result I die, and Jeff enjoys it because he hated me for sleeping with his father. The hell with both of them. It goes along with the pins stuck under my fingernails; its hate, hate toward me. I can tell hate when I see it. I hope Tim points that out in his book-well, he will because I'm writing most of it; he doesn't have the time, and, if you want to know the truth, the talent either. All his sentences run together. He has logorrhea, if you want to know the blunt truth-from the speed he takes."

I said, "I don't want to know."

"Have you and Tim slept together?"

"No!" I said, amazed.

"Bull."

"Christ," I said, "you're crazy."

"Tell me it's due to the reds I take."

I stared at her; she stared back. Unwinkingly, her face taut.

"You're crazy," I said.

Kirsten said, "You have turned Tim against me."

"I what?"

"He thinks that Jeff would be alive if it hadn't been for me, but it was his idea for us to get sexually involved."

"You-" I could not think what to say. "Your mood-swings are getting greater," I said finally.

Kirsten said in a fierce, grating voice, "I see more and more clearly. Come on." She finished her drink and slid from her stool, tottered, grinned at me. "Let's go shop. Let's buy a whole lot of Indian silver jewelry imported from Mexico; they sell it here. You regard me as old and sick and a red freak, don't you? Tim and I have discussed it, your view of me. He considers it damaging to me and defamatory. He's going to talk to you about it sometime. Get prepared; he's going to quote canon law. It's against canon law to bear false witness. He doesn't consider you a very good Christian; in fact, not a Christian at all. He doesn't really like you. Did you know that?"

I said nothing.

"Christians are judgmental," Kirsten said, "and bishops even more so. I have to live with the fact that Tim confesses every week to the sin of sleeping with me; do you know how that feels? It is quite painful. And now he has me going; I take Communion and I confess. It's sick. Christianity is sick. I want him to step down as bishop; I want him to go into the private sector."

"Oh," I said. I understood, then. Tim could then come out in the open and proclaim her, his relationship with her. Strange, I thought, that it never entered my mind.

"When he is working for that think tank," Kirsten said, "the stigma and the hiding will be gone because they don't care. They're just secular people; they're not Christians-they don't condemn others. They're not saved. I'll tell you something, Angel. Because of me, Tim is cut off from God. This is terrible, for him and for me; he has to get up every Sunday and preach knowing that because of me he and God are severed, as in the original Fall. Because of me, Bishop Timothy Archer is recapitulating the primordial Fall in himself, and he fell voluntarily; he chose it. No one made him fall or told him to do it. It's my fault. I should have said 'no' to him when he first asked me to sleep with him. It would have been a lot better, but I didn't know a rat's ass about Christianity; I didn't comprehend what it signified for him and what, eventually, it would signify for me as the damn stuff oozed out all over me, that Pauline doctrine of sin, Original Sin. What a demented doctrine, that man is born evil; how cruel it is. It's not found in Judaism; Paul made it up to explain the Crucifixion. To make sense out of Christ's death, which in fact makes no sense. Death for nothing, unless you believe in Original Sin."

"Do you believe in it now?" I asked.

"I believe I've sinned; I don't know if I was born that way. But it's true now."

"You need therapy."

"The whole church needs therapy. Old Dr. Batshit could take one look at me and Tim and know we're sleeping together; the whole media-news network knows it, and when Tim's book comes out-he has to step down-it has nothing to do with his faith or lack of faith in Christ: it has to do with me. I'm forcing him out of his career, not his lack of faith; I'm doing it. That cracked old lady only read back to me what I already knew, that you can't do what we're doing; you can do it but you have to pay for it. I'd just as soon be dead, I really would. This is no life. Every time we go somewhere, fly somewhere, we have to get two hotel rooms, one for each of us, and then I slip up the hall into his room. .. Dr. Batshit didn't have to be a psychic to ferret it all out; it was written on our faces. Come on; let's shop."

I said, "You're going to have to lend me some money. I didn't bring enough along to shop."

"It's the Episcopal Church's money." She opened her purse. "Be my guest."

"You hate yourself," I said; I intended to add the word unfairly, but Kirsten interrupted me.

"I hate the position I'm in. I hate what Tim has done to me, made me ashamed of myself and my body and being a woman. Is this why we founded FEM? I never dreamed I'd ever be in this situation, like a forty-dollar whore. Sometime you and I should talk, the way we used to talk before I was busy all the time writing his speeches and making his appointments-the bishop's secretary who makes sure he doesn't reveal in public the fool that he is, the child that he is; I'm the one who has all the responsibility, and I'm treated like garbage."

She handed me some money from her purse, grabbed out at random; I accepted it, and felt vast guilt; but I took the money anyhow. As Kirsten said, it belonged to the Episcopal Church.

"One thing I have learned," she said as we left the bar and emerged into the daylight, "is to read the fine print."

"I'll say one thing for that old lady," I said. "She certainly loosened up your tongue."

"No-it's being out of San Francisco. You haven't seen me out of the Bay Area and Grace Cathedral before. I don't like you and I don't like being a cheap whore and I don't particularly like my life in general. I'm not sure I even like Tim. I'm not sure I want to continue with this, any of this. That apartment-I had a much better apartment before I met Tim, although I suppose that doesn't count; it's not supposed to, anyhow. But I had a very rewarding life. But I was programmed by my DNA to get mixed up with Tim and now some old skuzz-bag rails at me that I'm going to die. You know what my feeling is about that, my real feeling? It no longer matters to me. I knew it anyway. She just read my own thoughts back to me and you know it. That is the one thing that sticks in my mind from this seance or whatever we're supposed to call it: I heard someone express my realizations about myself and my life and what's become of me. It gives me courage to face what I have to face and do what I have to do."