Philip Dick - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Whichever way you want to compute it, the results came out to this: I had lost everyone I knew, so the time had arrived to make new friends. I decided that retail record selling was more than a job; for me it amounted to a vocation. Within a year, I had risen to the post of manager of the Musik Shop. I had unlimited powers to buy; the owners put no ceiling on me, none at all. My judgment alone determined what I ordered or did not order, and all the salesmen-the representatives of the various labels-knew it. That earned me a lot of free lunches and some interesting dates. I started coming out of my shell, seeing people more; I wound up with a boyfriend, if you can abide such an old-fashioned term (it would never be employed in Berkeley). "Lover" I guess is the word I want. I let Hampton move into my house with me, the house Jeff and I had bought, and began what I hoped was a fresh, new life, in terms of my involvements.

Tim's book, Here, Tyrant Death, did not sell as well as had been expected; I saw remaindered copies at the different bookstores near Sather Gate. It had cost too much and rambled on too long; he would have done better to shorten it, insofar as he had written it-most of it, when I finally got around to reading it, struck me as Kirsten's work; at least she had done the final draft, no doubt based on Tim's bang-bang dictation. That was what she had told me and probably it was the case. He never followed it up with an amending sequel, as he had promised me.

One Sunday morning, as I sat with Hampton in our living room, smoking a joint of the new seedless grass and watching the kids' cartoons on TV, I got a phone call-unexpectedlyfrom Tim.

"Hi, Angel," he said, in that hearty, warm voice of his. "I hope this isn't a bad time to call you."

"It's fine," I managed to say, wondering if I really heard Tim's voice or if, due to the grass, I was hallucinating it. "How are you? I've been-"

"The reason I'm calling," Tim interrupted, as if I had not been speaking, as if he did not hear me, "is that I'll be in Berkeley next week-I'm attending a conference at the Claremont Hotel-and I'd like to get together with you."

"Great," I said, immensely pleased.

"Can we get together for dinner? You know the restaurants in Berkeley better than I do; I'll let you pick whichever one you like." He chuckled. "It'll be wonderful to see you again. Like old times."

I asked him, haltingly, how he had been.

"Everything down here is going fine," Tim said. "I'm extremely busy. I'll be flying to Israel next month; I wanted to talk to you about that."

"Oh," I said. "That sounds like a lot of fun."

"I'm going to visit the wadi," Tim said. "Where the Zadokite Documents were found. They've all been translated, now. Some of the final fragments proved extremely interesting. But I'll tell you about that when I see you."

"Yes," I said, warming to the topic; as always Tim's enthusiasm was contagious. "I read a long article in Scientific American; some of the last fragments-"

"I'll pick you up Wednesday night," Tim said. "At your house. Be formally dressed, if you would."

"You remember-"

"Oh, of course; I remember where your house is."

It seemed to me he was speaking ultra-rapidly. Or had the grass affected me? No, the grass would slow things down. I said, in panic, "I'm working at the store on Wednesday night."

As if he hadn't heard me, Tim said, "About eight o'clock; I'll see you then. Good-bye, dear." Click. He had rung off.

Shit, I said to myself. I'm working until nine Wednesday night. Well, I will just have to get one of the clerks to fill in for me. I am not going to miss having dinner with Tim before he leaves for Israel. I wondered, then, how long he would be over there. Probably for some time. He had gone once before, and planted a cedar tree; I remembered that: the news media had made quite a bit of it.

"Who was that?" Hampton said, seated in jeans and a T-shirt before the TV set, my tall, thin, acerbic boyfriend, with his black-wire hair and his glasses.

"My father-in-law," I said. "Former father-in-law."

"Jeff's father," Hampton said, nodding. A crooked grin appeared on his face. "I have an idea as to what to do with people who suicide. I think it should be a law that when they find someone who's suicided, they should dress him up in a clown suit. And photograph him that way. And print his picture in the newspaper like that, in the clown suit. Such as Sylvia Plath. Especially Sylvia Plath." Hampton went on, then, to recount how Plath and her girlfriends- according to Hampton's imagination-used to play games in which they'd see who could stick their head in the oven of the kitchen stove the longest, meanwhile all of them going "tee-hee," giggling and breaking up.

"You're not funny," I said, and walked from the room, into the kitchen.

Hampton called after me, "You're not sticking your head in the oven, are you?"

"Go fuck yourself," I said.

"-with a big red rubber bulb for a nose," Hampton was droning on, mostly to himself; his voice and the racket of the TV set, the kids' cartoons, assailed me; I put my hands over my ears to shut out the noise. "Head out of the oven!" Hampton yelled.

I walked back into the living room and shut off the TV set; turning to face Hampton I said, "Those two people were in a lot of pain. There's nothing funny about someone who's in that much pain."

Grinning, Hampton rocked back and forth, seated curled up on the floor. "And big floppy hands," he said. "Clown hands."

I opened the front door. "I'll see you. I'm going for a walk." I shut the door after me.

The front door swung open. Hampton came out on the porch, cupped his hands to his mouth and called, "Tee-hee; I'm going to stick my head in the oven. Let's see if the baby-sitter gets here in time. Do you think she'll get here in time? Anybody want to make a bet?"

I did not look back; I kept on going.

As I walked along, I thought about Tim and I thought about Israel and what it must be like there, the hot climate, the desert and the rock, the kibbutzim. Tilling the soil, the ancient soil that had been worked for thousands of years, farmed by Jews long before the time of Christ. Maybe they would direct Tim's attention to the ground, I thought. And away from the next world. Back to the real; back to where it belonged.

I doubted it, but perhaps I was wrong. I wished, then, that I could go with Tim-quit my job at the record store, just take off and go. Maybe never return. Stay in Israel forever. Become a citizen. Convert to Judaism. If they'd have me. Tim could probably swing it. Maybe in Israel I'd stop mixing metaphors and remembering poems. Maybe my mind would give up trying to solve problems in terms of recycled words. Used phrases, bits ripped from here and there: fragments from my days at Cal in which I had memorized but not understood, understood but not applied, applied but never successfully. A spectator to the destruction of my friends, I said to myself; one who records on a notepad the names of those who die, and did not manage to save any of them, not even one.

I will ask Tim if I can go with him, I decided. Tim will say no-he has to say no-but nonetheless, I will ask.

To root Tim in reality, I realized, they will first have to get his attention, and if he is still on the Dex it will not be possible for them to do that; his mind will be tripping and freewheeling and spinning forever out into the void, conceiving the great models of the heavens ... they will try and, like me, they will fail. If I go with him, maybe I can help, I thought; the Israelis and I maybe could do what I never could do alone; I will direct their attention to him and they, in turn, will direct his attention to the soil under their feet. Christ, I thought; I have to go with him. It's essential. Because they will not have time to notice the problem. He will skim his way across their country, be first here, then there, never lighting, never coming to rest long enough, never letting them