Philip Dick: Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

“Yes,” Al said. “I worked with her husband a number of years.”

“You really must have been nursing a long-term grudge,” Tsarnas said, “to become active so soon after his death. That man was just cremated.”

“How was the service?” Al said.

“I didn’t have the opportunity to be present.”

Suddenly Al realized that he still had the five dollars that Lydia had given him to buy flowers. It was still in his shirt pocket; he got it out and held it between his hands. He had bilked her out of this, too. So he handed it over to the lawyer. “This belongs to Lydia,” he said.

The lawyer put it in his briefcase, in an envelope.

“How did you know which way I went?” Al said. “How did you know I headed for Utah?”

“You were cashing those traveler’s checks all along the route. Every time you stopped to eat. And you paid for your ticket at the Sparks Greyhound ticket-office with a traveler’s check. There was a bulletin out just after that, and they got in touch with the police.”

Al said, “What about my wife?”

“She got in touch with us,” Tsarnas said. “From Reno. She had noticed that you were acting erratically, and she feared to travel any farther with you. So under a pretext she disembussed at some small town along the way. Wendover.”

“Of course I was acting erratically,” Al said. “Everyone was against me. Plotting to kill me.”

“So she probably is back here by now,” Tsarnas said, half to himself as he rose to his feet. “She felt you needed psychiatric aid. Possibly you do. If I were your attorney, I’d advise you to place yourself under county or state medical care. You certainly could obtain it, and private care is frightfully expensive.”

“Harman’s after me,” Al said. “He’s brought everyone else into it on his side. I’m surrounded. That’s why I had to leave the state.”

Eyeing him, Tsarnas said, “You might consider this. Mr. Harman has an airtight case he could bring into court against you, if he really wanted to hound you—as you seem to believe. Defamation of character, in as much as you accused him before witnesses of being a criminal, a swindler. And it can be shown that it damaged him in a financial way; it affected his business interests, did it not?”

“Who’d I say that in front of?” At the Harman house he had said nothing against Harman; he was sure of it. “Who’s the witness?” The old man, who had heard him say that, was dead.

Tsarnas said, “Mrs. Fergesson.”

It was true. He nodded.

“I have no reason to believe he contemplates any civil action against you,” Tsarnas said. “I’m only pointing it out in order to bring you to your senses, so perhaps you can be made to listen to reason.”

“I’m listening to reason,” Al said. “All the time.”

“Did the grief and shock of Fergesson’s death temporarily drive you to derangement?” Tsarnas said. “Under the emotional pressure did you lose the ability to distinguish what you were doing, from a moral standpoint? Well, it doesn’t matter; if you behave yourself, and keep your head, you won’t be coming up before the judge anyhow.” He nodded goodbye to Al and left the room. The door shut after him.

An hour later Al was told that he could go.

He left the Hall of Justice and stood outside on the sidewalk, his hands in the pockets of his cloth jacket.

They really gave me a demonstration, he said to himself as he watched the people and traffic going by, the heavy downtown Oakland traffic with its buses and taxis. They showed me they could whip me back here any time they wanted. And they could tell it their way, make their account of it work and demolish mine. The same way they demolished my Marmon. And, he realized, they got everyone in it, even my wife. Although, he realized, she doesn’t know and never will know.

Who does know? he asked himself. Lydia Fergesson? Probably not. That lawyer? Too shrewd; I’ll never be able to tell about him, one way or another, if he believes it, or if he knows it’s nothing but a mass of interlocking and carefully polished shit. The police? They don’t care. They’re just a machine that does what the wires make it do, like a vacuum cleaner that sweeps up whatever’s in front of it, and whatever’s small enough.

Harman knows, he said to himself. That, perhaps, is the only one I can be certain of. Not Bob Ross for sure, not Knight, not Gam, or any of them working for Harman; not even Mrs. Harman. But Chris Harman himself; that’s the difference between him and the rest of us. He knows what’s going on; he knows what makes the thing run. And, Al thought, I know.

Hands in his pockets, he walked over to the bus stop to wait for a bus that would take him uptown to his apartment.

They prey on the weak, he said to himself. That is, the sick, such as the old man. The helpless, such as me. The widows, such as Lydia Fergesson. And they have us. There’s no way we can fight back, because the language itself works against us. The very words were manufactured to explain their situation so it looks good, and ours so it looks bad. Looks so bad, in fact, that we’re relieved to be let out of jail; we’re relieved to be allowed to walk the street.

He thought, I guess they’ll let me go back into the used-car business. Where I was. I wasn’t offending anyone, there. I was in my place, the way Tootie Dolittle is in his place.

But the difference between me and Tootie, he realized, is that Tootie knew the boundary; he knew how far he could go before he was stepped on. And I didn’t. I thought if I used all the words, the same type of talk as Harman and Ross and Knight and Gam and the rest of them, I could make it, too. As if the only thing that separated me from them was the talk.

The yellow Key System bus came. Along with the other people at the stop he pushed onto it; the doors wheezed shut, and the bus started up. He was on his way back to his apartment in the three-story building where the McKeckneys and the young Mexican couple lived. Where he had begun his effort, his life of lies and crimes.

I wonder if Julie is home, he asked himself. He did not feel like coming home to an empty apartment.

The door of his apartment was unlocked, and, as he opened it, he could hear voices from inside. So she was home, he thought. He pushed the door so hard that it banged. But it was not Julie. In the living room of the apartment stood Bob Ross, smoking his pipe and looking at a motor magazine that he had picked up from the table. And, in the other room, was Chris Harman. He was using the phone.

Seeing Al, Harman finished his phone call and hung up. He came into the living room and said, “We were just checking now, trying to locate your wife.”

“I see,” Al said. “Did you find her?”

Ross said, “Apparently she’s somewhere in Nevada, or possibly on the California side of Lake Tahoe. She may be at one of those Lake resorts, such as Harrah’s Club.”

“She’ll turn up,” Harman said, in his easy, friendly voice; he smiled at Al, the smile that Al was familiar with. “But probably broke. But glad to be home again.”

“What do you care?” Al said.

Harman said, “You’ve suffered a lot of unnecessary loss in this, Al. I personally am very concerned that it be made up to you.”

Beside him, Ross nodded in agreement as he put down the motor magazine.

Al said, “What loss?”

“The humiliation,” Harman said. “For one thing.” His hand moved. Ross, seeing the motion, ducked his head and started from the apartment, out into the hall. “I’ll be along in about fifteen minutes,” Harman said after him.

“I’ll be in the car,” Ross said, and shut the door after him.

“I haven’t suffered any humiliation,” Al said. “Show me where I have.”