Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

[The following letter, to the editor of the fanzine Scintillation , in which this essay was first published, was attached as an epilogue.]

Just within the last two days I've read two separate articles, one in Rolling Stone , the other the editorial in the May 17, 1976, New Yorker , which so horribly bear out my fears expressed in the last three pages I sent you that I want to call them to your attention. Hopefully, you can call them to your readers' attention. The RS piece is titled: "The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection: The Secret Alliances of the CIA from WWII to Watergate," by Howard Kohn. Look for it. Anyhow, the article suggests, incredibly, that Nixon may have been set up by the CIA, since "Deep Throat," who provided all the leaked secrets to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post , turns out to be Robert Bennett, a CIA front man... which Woodward and Bernstein never realized. There seem to have been crucial segments of the puzzle that Woodward and Bernstein never got on to.

Carl, I think we were sold another crock; the exposure of the cover-up was itself a cover-up! What the RS piece points to is truly dreadful, far beyond what Woodward and Bernstein found. Would you believe that "Watergate," as they found it, was a CIA red herring? Incredible.

I woke up this morning and felt the chill of October [1979] in the apartment, as if the seasons understood the calendar. What had I dreamed? Vain thoughts of a woman I had loved. Something depressed me. I took a mental audit. Everything was in fact fine; this would be a good month. But I felt the chill.

Oh, Christ, I thought. Today is the day they evict the Lysol Lady.

Nobody likes the Lysol lady. She is insane. No one has ever heard her say a word and she won't look at you. Sometimes when you are descending the stairs she is coming up and she turns wordlessly around and retreats and uses the elevator instead. Everybody can smell the Lysol she uses. Magical horrors contaminate her apartment, apparently, so she uses Lysol. God damn! As I fix coffee I think, maybe the owners have already evicted her, at dawn, while I still slept. While I was having vain dreams about a woman I loved who dumped me. Of course, I was dreaming about the hateful Lysol Lady and the authorities coming to her door at 5:00 A.M. The new owners are a huge firm of real estate developers. They'd do it at dawn.

The Lysol Lady hides in her apartment and knows that October is here, October first is here, and they are going to bust in and throw her and her stuff out in the street. Now is she going to speak? I imagine her pressed against the wall in silence. However, it is not as simple as that. Al Newcum, the sales representative of South Orange Investments, has told me that the Lysol Lady wants Legal Aid. This is bad news because it screws up our doing anything for her. She is crazy but not crazy enough. If it could be proved that she did not understand the situation a team from Orange County Mental Health could come in as her advocates and explain to South Orange Investments that you cannot legally evict a person with diminished capacity. Why the hell did she get it together to go to Legal Aid?

The time is 9:00 A.M. I can go downstairs to the sales office and ask Al Newcum if they've evicted the Lysol Lady yet, or if she is in her apartment, hiding in silence, waiting. They are evicting her because the building, made up of fifty-six units, has been converted to condominiums. Virtually everyone has moved, since we were all legally notified four months ago. You have one hundred and twenty days to leave or buy your apartment and South Orange Investments will pay $200 of your moving costs. This is the law. You also have first refusal on your rental unit. I am buying mine. I am staying. For $52,000 I get to be around when they evict the Lysol Lady who is crazy and doesn't have $52,000. Now I wish I had moved.

Going downstairs to the newspaper vending machine I buy today's Los Angeles Times . A girl who shot up a schoolyard of children "because she didn't like Mondays" is pleading guilty. She will soon get probation. She took a gun and shot schoolchildren because, in effect, she had nothing else to do. Well, today is Monday; she is in court on a Monday, the day she hates. Is there no limit to madness? I wonder about myself. First of all, I doubt if my apartment is worth $52,000. I am staying because I am both afraid to move -- afraid of something new, of change -- and because I am lazy. No, that isn't it. I like this building and I live near friends and near stores that mean something to me. I've been here three and a half years. It is a good, solid building with security gates and deadbolt locks. I have two cats and they like the closed patio; they can go outside and be safe from dogs. Probably I am thought of as the Cat Man. So everyone has moved out, but the Lysol Lady and the Cat Man stay on.

What bothers me is that I know that the only thing separating me from the Lysol Lady, who is crazy, is the money in my savings account. Money is the official seal of sanity. The Lysol Lady, perhaps, is afraid to move. She is like me. She just wants to stay where she has stayed for several years, doing what she's been doing. She uses the laundry machines a lot, washing and spin-drying her clothes again and again. This is where I encounter her: I am coming into the laundry room and she is there at the machines to be sure no one steals her laundry. Why won't she look at you? Keeping her face turned away... what purpose is served? I sense hate. She hates every other human being. But now consider her situation: Those she hates are going to close in on her. What fear she must feel! She gazes about in her apartment waiting for the knock on the door; she watches the clock and understands!

To the north of us, in Los Angeles, the conversion of rental units to condominiums has been effectively blocked by the city council. Those who rent won out. This is a great victory but it does not help the Lysol Lady. This is Orange County. Money rules. The very poor live to the east of me: the Mexicans in their barrio. Sometimes when our security gates open to admit cars the Chicano women run in with baskets of dirty laundry; they want to use our machines, having none of their own. The people who lived here in the building resented this. When you have even a little money -- money enough to live in a modern, full-security, all-electric building -- you resent a great deal.

Well, I have to find out if the Lysol Lady has been evicted yet. There is no way to tell by looking at her window; the drapes are always shut. So I go downstairs to the sales office to see Al. However, Al is not there; the office is locked. Then I remember that Al flew to Sacramento on the weekend to get some crucial legal papers that the state lost. He hasn't returned. If the Lysol Lady wasn't crazy I could knock on her door and talk to her; I could find out that way. But this is precisely the focus of the tragedy; any knock will frighten her. This is her condition. This is the illness itself. So I stand by the fountain that the developers have constructed, and I admire the planter boxes of flowers that they have had brought in ... they have really made the building look good. It formerly looked like a prison. Now it has become a garden. The developers put a great deal of money into painting and landscaping and in fact rebuilding the whole entrance. Water and flowers and French doors... and the Lysol Lady silent in her apartment waiting for the knock.

Perhaps I could tape a note to the Lysol Lady's door. It could read:

MADAM, I AM SYMPATHETIC TO YOUR POSITION AND

WOULD LIKE TO ASSIST YOU. IF YOU WISH ME TO

ASSIST YOU, I LIVE UPSTAIRS IN APARTMENT C-1.

How would I sign it? Fellow loony, maybe. Fellow loony with $52,000 who is legally here whereas you are, in the eyes of the law, a squatter. As of midnight last night. Although the day before it was as much your apartment as mine is mine.