Philip Dick - Deus Irae

Her fingers passed through his arm. And it came to her, then, in an instant, in a twinkling of an eye, a flash of insight, that this was only his spirit, that as the lizzy had said, her daddy was dead. His spirit had stopped on its way back to be with her, to spend a final moment resting by the side of the road with her. This was why he did not speak. Spirits could not be heard.

“Can you hear me?” she asked.

Smiling, her daddy nodded.

An unusual sense of understanding things began to course through her, a kind of alertness which she could not recall from any time ever. It was as if a… she struggled for the word. A membrane of some nature had been removed from her mind; she could see in the sense that she could comprehend now what she had never comprehended. Gazing around her, she saw in truth, in very truth, a different world, a world comprehensible at last, even if only for an interval.

“I love you,” she said.

Again he smiled.

“Will I see you again?” she asked him.

He nodded.

“But I have to—” She hesitated, because these were difficult thoughts. “Pass across first, before that time.”

Smiling, he nodded.

“You feel better, don’t you,” she said. It was evident beyond any doubt, from every aspect of him. “What is gone from you is something terrible,” she said. Until now, now that it had gone, she had never understood how dreadful it was. “It was an evil about you. Is that why you feel better? Because now the evil about you—”

Rising silently to his feet, her daddy began to move away, along the dim marks of the road.

“Wait,” she said.

But he could not or would not wait. He continued on away, now, his back to her, growing smaller, smaller, and then at last he disappeared; she watched him go and then she saw what remained of him travel through a clump of tangled rubbish and debris— through, not around, ghostly and pale as he had become; he did not step aside to avoid it. And he had become very small, now, only three or so feet high, fading and sinking, dwindling into bits of mere light which drifted suddenly away in swirls which the wind carried off, and were absorbed by the day.

Two lizzys came toiling along toward her, both of them looking perplexed and somewhat angry.

“It’s gone,” the first lizzy said to her. “Your corpse is gone—your father’s, I mean.”

“Yes,” Alice said. “I know.”

“It was stolen, I guess,” the other lizzy said. Half to itself it added, “Something dragged it off… maybe ate it.”

Alice said, “It rose.”

“It what?” Both lizzys stared at her, and then simultaneously they broke into laughter. “Rose from the dead? How do you know? Did it come floating by here?”

“Yes,” she said. “And stayed a moment to sit with me.

Cautiously, one lizzy said to its companion, in a totally changed tone of voice, “A miracle.”

“Just a retard,” the other said. “Prattling nonsense, like they do. Burned-out brain muttering. It was just a dead human, nothing more.”

With genuine curiosity, the other lizzy asked the girl, “Where’d it go from here? Maybe we can catch up with it. Maybe it can tell the future and heal!”

“It dissipated,” Alice said.

The lizzys blinked, and then one of them rustled its scales uneasily and muttered, “This is no retard; did you hear that word she used? Retards don’t use words like that, not words like ‘dissipated.’ Are you sure this is the right girl?”

Alice, with her doll held tight, turned to go. A few of the particles of light which had comprised her daddy’s transformed being brushed about her, like moonbeams visible in the day, like a magic, living dust spreading out across the landscape of the world, to become progressively finer and finer, always more rare, but never completely to disappear. At least not for her. She could still sense the bits, the traces, of him around her, in the air itself, hovering and lingering, and in a certain real sense, speaking a message.

And the membrane which had, all her life, occluded her mind—it remained gone. Her thoughts continued clear and distinct, and so they were to remain, for the rest of her life.

We have advanced up the manifold one move, she thought. My father and I… he beyond visible sight, and I into visible sight at last.

Around her the world sparkled in the warmth of day, and it seemed to her that it had permanently changed as well. What are these transformations? she asked herself. Certainly they will last; certainly they will endure. But she could not really be positive, because she had never witnessed anything like it before. In any case, what she perceived on all sides of her as she walked away from the puzzled lizards was good. Perhaps, she thought, it is springtime. The first spring since the war. She thought, The contamination is lifting from us all, finally, as well as from the place we live. And she knew why.

Dr. Abernathy felt the world’s oppression lift but he did not have any insight as to why it had lifted. At the moment it began he had taken a walk to market for the purchase of vegetables. On the way back he smiled to himself, enjoying the air because it had—what was it once called?—he could not remember. Oh yes: ozone. Negative ions, he thought. The smell of new life. Associated with the vernal equinox; that which charged the Earth from solar flares, perhaps, from the great source.

Somewhere, he thought, a good event has happened, and it spreads out. He saw to his amazement palm trees. All at once he stopped, stood clasping his basket of string beans and beets. The warm air, the palm trees… funny, he thought, I never noticed any palm trees growing around here. And dry dusty land, as if I’m in the Middle East. Another world; touches of another continuum. I don’t understand, he thought. What is breaking through? As if my eyes are now opened, in a special way.

To his right, a few people who had been shopping had seated themselves along the way, for rest. He saw young people, dusty from the walk, sweating, but full of a purity new to him. A pretty girl with dark hair, somewhat chubby, she had unfastened her shirt; it did not bother him; he was not offended by her naked breasts. The film is scrubbed away, he thought, and again he wondered why. A good deed done? Hardly. There was no such deed. He paused, standing there, admiring the young people, the bareness of the girl who did not seem self-conscious at all although she saw him, a Christian, gazing.

Somehow goodness has Arrived, he decided. As Milton wrote once, “Out of evil comes good.” Notice, he said to himself, the relative disparity of the two terms; evil is the most powerful term for what is bad, and good—it barely surpasses its opposite. The Fall of Satan, the Fall of Man, the crucifixion of Christ… out of those dreadful, evil acts came good; out of the Fall of Man and the expulsion from the Garden, man learned love. From a Trinity of Evil emerged at last a Trinity of Good! It is a balanced thing.

Then, he thought, possibly the world has been cleared of its oppressive film by an evil act… or am I getting into subtleties? In any case, he sensed the difference; it was real.

I swear to god I’m somewhere in Syria, he thought. In the Levant. Back in time, too, perhaps… thousands of years, possibly. He stood gazing around him, inhaling and excited, amazed.

To his right, the ruins of a prewar U. S. Post Office substation.

Old ruins, he thought. The antique world. Reborn, somehow, in this our present. Or have I been carried back? Not me back, he decided, but it transported in time, as through a weak spot, to enter here and suffuse us. Or me. Probably no one else sees it. My god, he thought, this is like Pete Sands and his drugs, except that I haven’t taken anything. This is the sundering of the normal and the entry into or else the invasion by the paranormal which he experiences; this, he realized, is a vision, and I must try to fathom it.