Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

I go back upstairs to my apartment with the idea of writing a letter to the woman I once loved and last night dreamed about. All sorts of phrases pass through my mind. I will re-create the vanished relationship with one letter. Such is the power of my words.

What crap. She is gone forever. I don't even have her current address. Laboriously, I could track her down through mutual friends, and then say what?

MY DARLING, I HAVE FINALLY COME TO MY SENSES.

I REALIZE THE FULL EXTENT OF MY INDEBTEDNESS

TO YOU. CONSIDERING THE SHORT TIME WE WERE

TOGETHER YOU DID MORE FOR ME THAN ANYONE ELSE

IN MY LIFE. IT IS EVIDENT TO ME THAT I HAVE

MADE A DISASTROUS ERROR. COULD WE HAVE DINNER

TOGETHER?

As I repeat this hyperbole in my mind the thought comes to me that it would be horrible but funny if I wrote that letter and then by mistake or design taped it to the Lysol Lady's door. How would she react? Jesus Christ! It would kill her or cure her! Meanwhile I could write my departed loved one, die feme Geliebte , as follows:

MADAM, YOU ARE TOTALLY NUTS. EVERYONE WITHIN

MILES IS AWARE OF IT. YOUR PROBLEM IS OF YOUR

OWN MAKING. SHIP UP, SHAPE UP, GET YOUR ACT

TOGETHER, BORROW SOME MONEY, HIRE A BETTER

LAWYER, BUY A GUN, SHOOT UP A SCHOOLYARD. IF

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

Maybe the plight of the Lysol Lady is funny and I am too depressed by the coming of autumn to realize it. Maybe there will be some good mail today; after all, yesterday was a mail holiday. I will get two days of mail today. That will cheer me up. What in fact is going on is that I am feeling sorry for myself; today is Monday and, like the girl in court pleading guilty, I hate Mondays.

Brenda Spenser pleaded guilty to the charge of shooting eleven people, two of whom died. She is seventeen years old, small and very pretty, like one of those she shot. The thought enters my mind that perhaps the Lysol Lady has a gun in her apartment, a thought that should have come to me a long time ago. Perhaps South Orange Investments thought of it. Perhaps this is why Al Newcum's office is locked up today; he is not in Sacramento but in hiding. Although, of course, he could be hiding in Sacramento, accomplishing two things at once.

An excellent therapist I once knew made the point that in almost all cases of criminal psychotic acting-out there was an easier alternative that the disturbed person overlooked. Brenda Spenser, for instance, could have walked to the local supermarket and bought a carton of chocolate milk instead of shooting eleven people, most of them children. The psychotic person actually chooses the more difficult path; he forces his way uphill. It is not true that he takes the line of least resistance, but he thinks that he does. There, precisely, lies his error. The basis of psychosis, in a nutshell, is the chronic inability to see the easy way out. All the behavior, all that constitutes psychotic activity and the psychotic lifestyle, stems from this perceptual flaw.

Sitting in isolation and silence in her antiseptic apartment, waiting for the inexorable knock on the door, the Lysol Lady had contrived to put herself in the most difficult circumstances possible. What was easy was made hard. What was hard was transmuted, finally, into the impossible, and there the psychotic lifestyle ends, when the impossible closes in and there are no options at all, even difficult ones. That is the rest of the definition of psychosis: At the end there lies a dead end. And, at that point, the psychotic person freezes. If you have ever seen it happen -- well, it is an amazing sight. The person congeals like a motor that has seized. It occurs suddenly. One moment the person is in motion -- the pistons are going up and down frantically -- and then it's an inert block. That is because the path has run out for that person, the path he probably got on to years before. It is kinetic death. "Place there is none," St. Augustine wrote. "We go backward and forward, and there is no place." And then the cessation comes and there is only place.

The spot where the Lysol Lady had trapped herself was her own apartment, but it was no longer her own apartment. She had found a place at which to psychologically die and then South Orange Investments had taken it away from her. They had robbed her of her own grave.

What I can't get out of my mind is the notion that my fate is tied to that of the Lysol Lady. A fiscal entry in the computer at Mutual Savings divides us and it is a mythical division: It is real only so long as people such as South Orange Investments -- specifically South Orange Investments -- are willing to agree that it is real. It seems to me to be nothing more than a social convention, such as wearing matching socks. In another way, it's like the value of gold. The value of gold is what people agree on, which is like a game played by children. "Let's agree that that tree is third base." Suppose my television set worked because my friends and I agreed that it worked. We could sit before a blank screen forever that way. In that case it could be said that the Lysol Lady's failure lay in not having entered into a compact with the rest of us, a consensus. Underlying everything else there is this unwritten contract to which the Lysol Lady is not a party. But I am amazed to think that the failure to enter into an agreement palpably childish and irrational leads inevitably to kinetic death, to total stoppage of the organism.

Argued this way, one could say that the Lysol Lady had failed to be a child. The element that had taken over her life was the element of the grim. She never smiled. No one had ever seen her do anything but glower in a vague, undirected way.

Perhaps, then, she played a grimmer game rather than no game; perhaps her game was one of combat, in which case she now had what she wanted, even though she was losing. It was at least a situation she understood. South Orange Investments had entered the Lysol Lady's world. Perhaps being a squatter rather than a tenant was satisfying to her. Maybe we all secretly will everything that happens to us. In that case does the psychotic person will his own ultimate kinetic death, his own dead-end path? Does he play to lose?

I didn't see Al Newcum that day but I did see him the next day; he had returned from Sacramento and opened up his office.

"Is the woman in B-15 still there?" I asked him. "Or did you evict her?"

"Mrs. Archer?" Newcum said. "Oh, the other morning she moved out; she's gone. The Santa Ana Housing Authority found her a place over on Bristol." He leaned back in his swivel chair and crossed his legs; his slacks, as always, were sharply creased. "She went to them a couple of weeks ago."

"An apartment she can afford?" I asked.

"They picked up the bill. They're paying her rent; she talked them into it. She's a hardship case."

"Christ," I said. "I wish someone would pay my rent."

"You're not paying rent," Newcum said. "You're buying your apartment."

Conducted by Frank C. Bertrand (1980, 1988)

INTRODUCTION [BY BERTRAND]: The following interview was conducted by mail in January 1980. Intended to be but the beginning of a long, in-depth discussion and exploration of P. K. Dick's interest in philosophy and the manifestation of that interest in his stories and novels, it was cut short by a disagreement over how best to continue, by letter or by phone. Nonetheless, what P. K. Dick has to say is a brief but informative overview of his interest in philosophy.

FB: I would like to start by asking a cliche question phrased a bit differently. How do you define science fiction? In asking this, though, I do not seek a "dictionary"-type definition, but rather what is it about a work of fiction that when you read it causes you to say this is science fiction?