Philip Dick: The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

It was interesting to watch Fred Hill, the KGB agent, greeting all his customers the way a good restaurateur does, shaking hands and smiling. Hill had cold eyes. According to the talk on the street he had the authority to murder those under Party discipline who seemed restive. Tim paid hardly any attention to Fred Hill as the son of a bitch led us to a table. I wondered what the Bishop of California would say if he knew that the man handing us our menus was a Russian national here in the U.S. under a fake name, an officer in the Soviet secret police. Or perhaps this was all a Berkeley myth. As in the many preceding years, Berkeley and paranoia were bedfellows. The end of the Vietnam War was a long way off;

Nixon had yet to pull out U.S. forces. Watergate still lay several years ahead. Government agents rooted about the Bay Area. We independent activists suspected everyone of conniving; we trusted neither the right nor the CP-USA. If there was any single hated thing in Berkeley it was the smell of the police.

"Hello, folks," Fred Hill said. "The soup today is minestrone. Would you like a glass of wine while you decide?"

The three of us said we wanted wine-just so long as it wasn't Gallo-and Fred Hill went off to get it.

"He's a colonel in the KGB," Jeff said to the bishop.

"Very interesting," Tim said, scrutinizing the menu.

"They're really underpaid," I said.

"That would be why he has opened up a restaurant," Tim said, looking around him at the other tables and patrons. "I wonder if they have Black Sea caviar, here." Glancing up at me, he said, "Do you like caviar, Angel? The roe of the sturgeon, although they do sometimes pass off the roe of Cyclopterus lumpus as caviar; however, that is generally of a reddish hue and larger. It is much cheaper. I don't care for it-lumpfish caviar, I mean. In a sense, to say 'lumpfish caviar' is an oxymoron." He laughed, mostly to himself.

Shit, I thought.

"What's wrong?" Jeff said.

"I'm just wondering where Kirsten is," I said. I looked at my watch.

The bishop said, "The origins of the feminist movement can be found in Lysistrata. 'We must refrain from all touch of baubled love ...'" Again he laughed. "'With bolts and bars our orders flout and-' " He paused, as if considering whether to go on. " 'And shut us out.' It's a pun. 'Shut us out' refers both to the general situation of noncompliance and a shutting up of the vagina."

"Dad," Jeff said, "we're trying to figure out what to order. Okay?"

The bishop said, "If you mean we're trying to decide what to have to eat, my remark is certainly applicable. Aristophanes would have appreciated that."

"Come on," Jeff said.

Carrying a tray, Fred Hill returned. "Louis Martini burgundy." He set down three glasses. "If you'll excuse my asking-aren't you Bishop Archer?"

The bishop nodded.

"You marched with Dr. King at Selma," Hill said.

"Yes, I was at Selma," the bishop said.

I said, "Tell him your vagina joke." To Fred Hill I said,

"The bishop knows a real old vagina joke."

Chuckling, Bishop Archer said, "The joke is old, she means.

Don't misunderstand syntactically."

"Dr. King was a great man," Fred Hill said.

"He was a very great man," the bishop said. "I'll have the sweetbreads."

"That's a good choice," Fred Hill said, jotting. "Also let me recommend the pheasant."

"I'll have the veal Oscar," I said.

"So will I," Jeff said. He seemed moody. I knew that he objected to my using my friendship with the bishop in order to get a free speech-for FEM or any other group. He knew how easily free speeches got tugged out of his father. Both he and the bishop wore dark-wool business suits, and of course Fred Hill, famous KGB agent and mass killer, wore a suit and tie.

I wondered that day, sitting there with the two of them in their business suits, if Jeff would go into Holy Orders as his father had; both men looked solemn, bringing to the task of ordering dinner the same intensity, the same gravity, that they brought to so much else: the professional stance oddly punctuated on the bishop's part with wit ... although, like today, the wit never struck me as quite right.

As we spooned up our minestrone soup, Bishop Archer talked about his forthcoming heresy trial. It was a subject he found endlessly fascinating. Certain Bible Belt bishops were out to get him because he had said in several published articles and in his sermons preached at Grace Cathedral that no one had seen hide nor hair of the Holy Ghost since apostolic times. This had caused Tim to conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity was incorrect. If the Holy Ghost was, in fact, a form of God equal to Yahweh and Christ, surely he would still be with us. Speaking in tongues did not impress him. He had seen a lot of it in his years in the Episcopal Church and it struck him as autosuggestion and dementia. Further, a scrupulous reading of Acts disclosed that at Pentecost when the Holy Ghost descended on the disciples, giving them "the gift of speech," they had spoken in foreign languages which people nearby had understood. This is not glossolalia as the term is now used; this is xenoglossy. The bishop, as we ate, chortled over Peter's deft response to the charge that the Eleven were drunk; Peter had said in a loud voice to the scoffing crowd that it was not likely that the Eleven were drunk inasmuch as it was only nine A.M. The bishop pondered out loud-between spoonfuls of minestrone soup-that the course of Western history might have been changed if the time had been nine P.M. instead of nine A.M. Jeff looked bored and I kept consulting my watch, wondering what was keeping Kirsten. Probably she had gone in to have her hair done. She fussed forever with her blond hair, especially in anticipation of momentous occasions.

The Episcopal Church is Trinitarian; you cannot be a priest or bishop of that church if you do not absolutely accept and teach that-well, it's called the Nicene Creed:

"... And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified."

So Bishop McClary back in Missouri was correct; Tim had, in fact, committed heresy. However, Tim had been a practicing lawyer before he became a rector of the Episcopal Church. He relished the oncoming heresy trial. Bishop McClary knew his Bible and he knew canon law, but Tim would blow golden smoke-rings around him until McClary would not know up from down. Tim knew this. In facing a heresy trial, he was in his element. Moreover, he was writing a book about it; he would win and, in addition, he would make some money. Every newspaper in America had carried articles and even editorials on the subject. Successfully trying someone for heresy in the 1970s was really difficult.

Listening to Tim dilate endlessly, the thought came to me that he had calculatedly committed heresy in order to bring on the trial. At least, he had done it unconsciously. It was, as the term has it, a good career move.

"The so-called 'gift of speech,' " the bishop said cheerfully, "reverses the unity of language lost when the Tower of Babel was attempted; that is, its construction was attempted. When the day comes that someone in my congregation gets up and talks Walloon, well, that day I will believe that the Holy Ghost exists. I'm not sure he ever existed. The apostolic conception of the Holy Spirit is based on the Hebrew ruah, the spirit of God. For one thing, this spirit is female, not male. She speaks concerning the Messianic expectation. Christianity appropriated the notion from Judaism and when Christianity had converted a sufficient number of pagans- Gentiles, if you will-it abandoned the concept, since it was only meaningful to the Jews anyhow. To the Greek converts it made no sense whatsoever, although Socrates declared that he had an inner voice or daemon that guided him ... a tutelary spirit, not to be confused with the English word 'demon,' which of course refers to an indubitably evil spirit. The two terms are often confused. Do I have time for a cocktail?"