Philip Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Don’t use that ‘I don’t give a fuck’ tone with me,” he said angrily. “Your false tooth is a molar. You call it Andy. Right?”

“A twerp fan knows all this about me. God. My worst nightmare confirmed. What’s the name of your club and how many fans are there in it and where are you from and how, God damn it, did you get hold of personal details from my private life that you have no right to know in the first place? I mean, what you’re doing is illegal; it’s an invasion of privacy. I’ll have the pols after you if you call me once more.” She reached to hang up the receiver.

“I’m a six,” Jason said.

“A what? A six what? You have six legs; is that it? Or more likely six heads.”

Jason said, “You’re a six, too. That’s what’s kept us together all this time.”

“I’m going to die,” Heather said, ashen, now; even in the dim light of her quibble he could make out the change of color in her features. “What’ll it cost me to have you leave me alone? I always knew that some twerp fan would eventually—”

“Stop calling me a twerp fan,” Jason said bitingly; it infuriated him absolutely. It struck him as the ultimate in something or other; maybe a bird down, as the expression went now.

Heather said, “What do you want?”

“To meet you at Altrocci’s.”

“Yes, you’d know about that, too. The one place I can go without being ejaculated on by nerds who want me to sign menus that don’t even belong to them.” She sighed wretchedly. “Well, now that’s over. I won’t meet you at Altrocci’s or anywhere. Keep out of my life or I’ll have my prive-pols deball you and—”

“You have one private pol,” Jason interrupted. “He’s sixty-two years old and his name is Fred. Originally he was a sharpshooter with the Orange County Minutemen; used to pick off student jeters at Cal State Fullerton. He was good then, but he’s nothing to worry about now.”

“Is that so,” Heather said.

“Okay, let me tell you something else that how do you think I would know. Remember Constance Ellar?”

“Yes,” Heather said. “That nonentity starlet that looked like a Barbie Doll except that her head was too small and her body looked as if someone had inflated her with a CO2 cartridge, overinflated her.” Her lip curled. “She was utterly damn dumb.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Utterly damn dumb. That’s the exact ward. Remember what we did to her on my show? Her first planetwide exposure, because I had to take her in a tie-in deal. Do you remember that, what we did, you and I?”

Silence.

Jason said, “As a sop to us for having her on the show, her agent agreed to let her do a commercial for one of our quarter-time sponsors. We got curious as to what the product was, so before Miss Ellar showed up we opened the paper bag and discovered it was a cream for removing leg hair. God, Heather, you must—”

“I’m listening,” Heather said.

Jason said, “We took the spray can of leg-hair cream out and put a spray can of FDS back in with the same ad copy, which simply read, ‘Demonstrate use of product with expression of contentment and satisfaction,’ and then we got the hell out of there and waited.”

“Did we.”

“Miss Ellar finally showed up, went into her dressing room, opened the paper bag, and then—and this is the part that still makes me break up—she came up to me, perfectly seriously, and said, ‘Mr. Taverner, I’m sorry to bother you about this, but to demonstrate the Feminine Hygiene Deodorant Spray I’ll have to take off my skirt and underpants. Right there before the TV camera.’ ‘So?’ I said. ‘So what’s the problem?’ And Miss Ellar said, ‘I’ll need a little table on which I can put my clothes. I can’t just drop them on the floor; that wouldn’t look right. I mean, I’ll be spraying that stuff into my vagina in front of sixty million people, and when you’re doing that you can’t just leave your clothes lying all around you on the floor; that isn’t elegant.’ She really would have done it, too, right on the air, if Al Bliss hadn’t—”

“It’s a tasteless story.”

“All the same, you thought it was pretty funny. That utterly dumb girl with her first big break ready to do that. ‘Demonstrate use of product with expression of contentment and—’”

Heather hung up.

How do I make her understand? he asked himself savagely, grinding his teeth together, nearly biting off a silver filling. He hated that sensation: grinding off a piece of filling. Destroying his own body, impotently. Can’t she see that my knowledge of everything about her means something important? he asked himself. Who would know these things? Obviously only someone who had been very close physically with her for some time. There could be no other explanation, and yet she had conjured up such an elaborate other reason that he couldn’t penetrate through to her. And it hung directly in front of her eyes. Her six’s eyes.

Once more he dropped in a coin, dialed.

“Hi again,” he said, when Heather at last picked up the phone in her car. “I know that about you, too,” he said. “You can’t let a phone ring; that’s why you have ten private numbers, each for a different purpose of your very special own.”

“I have three,” Heather said. “So you don’t know everything.”

Jason said, “I merely meant—”

“How much?”

“I’ve had enough of that today,” he said sincerely. “You can’t buy me off because that’s not what I want. I want—listen to me, Heather—I want to find out why nobody knows me. You most of all. And since you’re a six I thought you might be able to explain it. Do you have any memory of me? Look at me on the picture screen. Look!”

She peered, one eyebrow cocked. “You’re young but not too young. You’re good-looking. Your voice is commanding and you have no reluctance about brigging me like this. You’re exactly what a twerp fan would look like, sound like, act like. Okay; are you satisfied?”

“I’m in trouble,” he said. It was blatantly irrational for him to tell her this, since she had no recollection of any sort of him. But over the years he had become accustomed to laying his troubles before her—and listening to hers—and the habit had not died. The habit ignored what he saw the reality situation to be: it cruised on under its own power.

“That’s a shame,” Heather said.

Jason said, “Nobody remembers me. And I have no birth certificate; I was never born, never even born! So naturally I have no ID cards except a forged set I bought from a pol fink for two thousand dollars plus one thousand for my contact. I’m carrying them around, but, God: they may have microtransmitters built into them. Even knowing that I have to keep them on me; you know why—even you up at the top, even you know how this society works. Yesterday I had thirty million viewers who would have shrieked their aggrieved heads off if a pol or a nat so much as touched me. Now I’m looking into the eyes of an FLC.”

“What’s an FLC?”

“Forced-labor camp.” He snarled the words at her, trying to pin her down and finally nail her. “The vicious little bitch who forged my papers made me take her out to some Godforsaken broken-down wop restaurant, and while we were there, just talking, she threw herself down on the floor screaming. Psychotic screaming; she’s an escapee from Morningside, by her own admission. That cost me another three hundred dollars and by now who knows? She’s probably sicced the pols and nats both on me.” Pushing his self-pity gingerly a little further, he said, “They’re probably monitoring this phone line right now.”

“Oh, Christ, no!” Heather shrieked and again hung up.