Philip Dick - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Tim told him, I said to myself. Reflexively, I down-shifted, into low; I started the car up again.

"Tim had a crush on you," Bill said.

"So?" I said.

"That was one reason he wanted to take you to Israel with him."

I said, "You speak of Tim in the third person. So, in point of fact, you do not identify yourself with Tim or as Tim; you are Bill Lundborg talking about Tim."

"I am Bill Lundborg," he agreed. "But also I am Tim Archer."

"Tim wouldn't tell me that," I said, "about being sexually interested in me."

"I know," Bill said, "but I am telling you."

"What did we have for dinner that night at the Chinese restaurant?"

"I have no idea."

"Where was the restaurant?"

"In Berkeley."

"Where in Berkeley?"

"I don't remember."

I said, "Tell me what hysteron proteron means."

"How would I know that? That's Latin. Tim knows Latin; I don't."

"It's Greek."

"I don't know any Greek. I pick up Tim's thoughts and now and then he's thinking in Greek but I don't know what the Greek means."

"What if I believe you?" I said. "What then?"

"Then," Bill said, "you are happy because your old friend is not dead."

"And that's the point of this."

He nodded. "Yes."

"It would seem to me," I said carefully, "there there would be a larger point involved. This would be a miracle of staggering importance, to the entire world. It is something that scientists should investigate. It proves there is eternal life, that a next world does exist- everything that Tim and Kirsten believed is, in fact, true. Here, Tyrant Death is true. Don't you agree?"

"Yes. I suppose so. That's what Tim is thinking; he thinks that a lot. He wants me to write a book, but I can't write a book; I don't have any writing talent."

"You can act as Tim's secretary. The way your mother did. Tim can dictate and you can write it all down."

"He rattles on and on a mile a minute. I've tried to write it down but-his thinking is fucked. If you'll pardon the expression. It's all disorganized; it goes everywhere and nowhere. And I don't know half the words. In fact, a lot of it isn't words at all, just impressions."

"Can you hear him now?"

"No. Not right now. It's usually when I'm alone and no one else is talking. Then I can sort of tune in on it."

" 'Hysteron proteron,' " I murmured. "When the thing to be demonstrated is included in the premise. So it's all in vain, the reasoning. Bill," I said, "I've got to hand it to you; you have me tied up in a knot, you really have. Does Tim remember backing over the gas pump? Never mind; fuck the gas pump."

Bill said. "It's a presence of mind. See, Tim was in that area-the word 'presence' reminded me; he uses that word a lot. The Presence, as he calls it, was there in the desert."

"The Parousia," I said.

"Right." Bill emphatically nodded.

"That would be anokhi, " I said.

"Would it? What he was looking for?"

"Apparently he found it," I said. "What did Barefoot say to all this?"

"That's when he told me-when he realized-I was a bodhisattva. I came back. Tim came back, I mean, out of compassion for others. For those he loves. Such as you."

"What is Barefoot going to do with this news?"

"Nothing."

"'Nothing,'" I echoed, nodding.

"There's no way I can prove it," Bill said. "To skeptical minds. Edgar pointed that out."

"Why can't you prove it? It should be easy to prove it. You have access to everything Tim knew; like you said-all the theology, details of his personal life. Facts. It should be the most simple matter on Earth to prove."

"Can I prove it to you?" Bill said. "I can't even prove it to you. It's like belief in God; you can know God, know he exists; you can experience him, and yet you can never prove to anyone else that you've experienced him."

"Do you believe in God now?" I said.

"Sure." He nodded.

"I guess you believe in a lot of things now," I said.

"Because of Tim in me, I know a lot of things; it isn't just belief. It's like-" He gestured earnestly. "Having swallowed a computer or the whole Britannica, a whole library. The facts, the ideas, come and go and just whizz around in my head; they go too fast-that's the problem. I don't understand them; I can't remember them; I can't write them down or explain them to other people. It's like having KPFA turned on inside your head twenty-four hours a day, without cease. In many respects, it's an affliction. But it's interesting."

Have fun with your thoughts, I said to myself. That is what Harry Stack Sullivan said schizophrenics do: they have endless fun with their thoughts, and forget the world.

There is not much you can say when someone unveils an account such as Bill Lundborg's- assuming that anyone ever unveiled such a narration before. It did, of course, resemble what Tim and Kirsten had revealed to me (that is the wrong word) when they returned from England, after Jeff's death.

But that had been minor compared with this. This, I thought, consists of the ultimate escalation, the monument itself. The other narration was only the marker pointing to the monument.

Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances. It is not solitary. Madness does not remain content; it fans out across the landscape, or seascape, whichever.

Yes, I thought; it is like we are under water: not in a dream-as Barefoot says-but in a tank, and being observed, for our bizarre behavior and our more bizarre beliefs. I am a metaphor junkie; Bill Lundborg is a madness junkie, unable to get enough of it: he possesses a boundless appetite for it and will obtain it by whatever means possible. Just when it seemed, too, as if madness had passed out of the world. First John Lennon's death and now this; and, for me, on the same day.

I could not say, and yet he is so plausible. Because Bill was not plausible; it is not a plausible matter. Probably, even Edgar Barefoot recognized that-well, however a Sufi phrases such moksa to himself, that someone is sick and needs help, but is touchingly appealing, is guileless and not going to do any harm. This madness arose from pain, from the loss of a mother and what almost certainly amounted to a father in the true sense of the word. I felt it; I feel it; I always will feel it, as long as I live. But Bill's solution could not be mine.

Any more than mine-managing the record store-could be his. We each must find our own solution, and, in particular, we each must solve the sort of problem that death creates-creates for others; but not death only: madness also, madness leading to final death as its end-state, its logical goal.

When my original anger at Bill Lundborg's psychosis had subsided-it did subside-I began to view it as funny. The utility of Bill Lundborg, not just for himself but, as I viewed it, to all of us, consisted in his grounding in the concrete. This, precisely, he had lost. His showing up at Edgar Barefoot's seminar disclosed the change in Bill; the kid I had known, formerly known, would never have set foot in such surroundings. Bill had gone the way of the rest of us, not the way of all flesh but the way of our intellects: into nonsense and the foolish, there to languish without a trace of anything redemptive.

Except, of course, Bill could now emotionally deal with the assortment of deaths that had plagued us. Was my solution any better? I worked; I read; I listened to music-I bought music in the form of records; I lived a professional life and yearned to move into the A & R Division of Capitol Records down in Southern California. There my future lay, there were the tangible things that records had become for me, not something to enjoy but something to first buy and then sell.

That the bishop had returned from the next world and now inhabited Bill Lundborg's mind or brain-that couldn't be, for obvious reasons. One knows this instinctively; one does not debate this; one perceives this as absolute fact: it cannot happen. I could quiz Bill forever, trying to establish the presence in him of facts known only to me and to Tim, but this would lead nowhere. Like the dinner Tim and I had eaten at the Chinese restaurant on University Avenue in Berkeley, all data became suspect because there are multiple ways that data can arise within the human mind, ways more readily acceptable and explained than to assume that one man died in Israel and his psyche floated halfway across the world until it discriminated Bill Lundborg from all the other people in the United States and then dove into that person, into that waiting brain, and took up residence there, to sputter with ideas, thoughts and memories, half-baked notions; in other words, the bishop as we had known him, the bishop himself, like a sort of plasma. This does not lie within the domain of the real. It lies elsewhere; it is the invention of derangement, of a young man who grieved over the suicide of his mother and the sudden death of a father-figure, grieved and tried to understand, and one day into Bill's mind came-not Bishop Timothy Archer-but the concept of Timothy Archer, the notion that Timothy Archer was there, in him, spiritually, a ghost. There is a difference between the notion of something and that something itself.