Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (34 page)

But at least the flow of the writing had returned. And even in the midst of his doubts, Phil could write brilliantly.

During the latter part of 1965, Phil was at work on two novels-The Ganymede Takeover, in collaboration with Nelson, and Counter-Clock World (p. 1967). Through 1966 he completed his work on Canymede and wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (p. 1968) and a children's SF novel, The Glimmung of Plowman's Planet (p. 1988), a pre- liminarv foray into material also utilized in the excellent Galactic PotHealer (p. 1969).

But above and beyond all these soars Ubik (w. 1966, p. 1969). This is the novel that propelled Phil's election, in France, as an honorary member of the College du Pataphysique, a society established in loving memory of Alfred Jarry's predilection for turning solemn ideas on their heads in strange and nasty plays like Ubu Roi.

There's precious little nastiness in Ubik, however. Phil, far more humbly, chips away at tiny chinks in time and space until society-and reality itself-falls apart. Pratfalls, that is (the one spaceship in the book is named Pratfall 11). As with Dr. Bloodmoney and other of his SF novels, Phil set the Ubik future in what should have been his lifetime: 1992. Perhaps it was his way of forcing recalcitrant readers to see that his SF partook as fully of the present as the latest official mainstream "masterpiece. "

The plot set out in the opening chapters is a grand red herring, but we meet a gratifying range of characters. Glen Runciter is the vibrant, heart-of-gold owner of Runciter Associates, which employs "inertials" (gifted psychics who can neutralize the psychic talents of others) to combat the "teeps" (telepathy) and "precogs" (precognitives) employed by scumbag Ray Hollis (named, as a twist, after the Art Music boss Phil adored). For business advice in tough times, Runciter consults with his dead wife, Ella, who is kept in a "cold-pac" casket to sustain a "half-life" existence (patterned on the Bardo Thodol post-death realm described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead) in the Beloved Brethren Moratorium of Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. But Ella is fading. Her cold-pac neighbor, a kid named Jory, is tapping her dwindling life force.

Joe Chip is the little guy, a loyal Runciter employee who tests inertials. The latest applicant is a beautiful dark-haired girl named Pat Conley who has a brand-new talent-she can change the past so that Hollis's precogs will see a different future (or never even get around to looking). Could be a breakthrough for Runciter Associates. But will Joe Chip ever be able to open the door of his conapt to let her in for testing? You see, lie's a little behind on his Magic Credit Keys payments. But Joe dons suitable business attire-a "sporty maroon wrapper, twinkle-toes turned-up shoes and a felt cap with a tassel"-and meets the challenge:

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and closing constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's moneygulping door.

"I'll suc you," the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, "I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."

Plot devices ransacked from Phil's fifties SF set up the real fun and games. Bad guy Hollis lures Runciter, Joe Chip, and the staff of inertials to a death trap on Luna (lifted from Solar Lottery), and the resultant explosion casts them into a radically transformed reality that may or may not be controlled by Pat Conley or Runciter or Hollis or someone or something else (a situation lifted from Eye in the Sky). But in Eye the pseudo-science rational solution allows the straight-arrow characters to get back to liberal action. In Ubik there are no answers. Is Runciter half dead in cold-pac? Or is it Joe Chip and the inertials who lie hallucinating in caskets? Runciter thinks he knows and composes a graffito to let Joe in on it: "Jump In The Urinal And Stand On Your Head. / I'm The One That's Alive. You're All Dead." But how can Runciter be so sure, especially when the face of Joe Chip shows up on a coin in his pocket?

A student once asked William Burroughs if he believed in life after death. Burroughs asked back: How do you know you're not dead already? Ubik offers no solutions to Burroughs's question, because there are none. But there is the mysterious Ubik (Latin ubique: everywhere; ubiquity), which might just be enough for all us half-lifers to get by. But despite its tantalizing name, Ubik isn't easy to come by. It requires hard work (as Eye said it would), and it also takes a kind of religious faith (that Eye mocked). Runciter, the "coming-into-existence" force, is trying to get some to Joe Chip, but "going-out-of-existence" entropy has Joe in its grasp: Milk sours, cigarettes go stale, and death looms.

Runciter resorts to unique stratagems to get his message acrossshowing up on bathroom walls, matchbook covers, and tacky TV commercials:

"Yes," Runcitcr's dark voice resumed, "by making use of the most advanced techniques of present-day science, the reversion of matter to earlier forms can be reversed, and at a price any conapt owner can afford. Ubik is sold by leading home-art stores throughout Earth. Do not take internally. Keep away from open flame. Do not deviate from printed procedural approaches as expressed on label. So look for it, Joe. Don't just sit there; go out and buy a can of Ubik and spray it all around you night and day."

Standing up, Joe said loudly, "You know I'm here. Does that mean you can hear and see me?"

"Of course I can't hear you and see you. This commercial message is on videotape [... ]"

What is Ubik? It declares itself in the final chapter:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

Critic Peter Fitting has noted the resemblance to the opening of the Book of John. But jumping to doctrinal conclusions would be unwise. In a November 1977 Exegesis entry, Phil linked Ubik and Palmer Eldritch: "So Runciter and Ubik equals Palmer Eldritch and Chew-Z. We have a human being transformed into a deity which is ubiquitous (no one seems to have noticed that Palmer Eldritch is ubiquitous as is Ubik, that the same themes dominate both novels)." Phil went on to describe the theme of Ubik: "Salvific information penetrating through the `walls' of our world by an entity with personality representing a life- and reality-supporting quasi-living force."

What remains constant in Phil's novels is a sense of apparent reality as false or untrustworthy. In one 1978 Exegesis entry, Phil stated: "I don't write beautifully-I just write reports about our condition to go to those outside of cold-pak. I am an analyzer." These reports must take trashy SF forms for the same reasons that Runciter found it necessary to employ TV commercials-the delusional world has no use for gnosis (direct experience of divine wisdom), so camouflage is necessary. In another 1978 entry, Phil focused upon this strategy. In its utter candor, it is as revelatory a statement on method as Phil ever made:

[...] I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue-the clue-lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun & religion & psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift-rather than toward the hard sciences. The overall impression is childish but interesting. This is not a sophisticated person writing. Everything is equally real, like junk jewels in the alley. A fertile, creative mind seeing constantly shifting sets, the serious made funny, the funny sad, the horrific exactly that: utterly horrific as it is the touchstone of what is real: horror is real because it can injure. [...] I certainly see the randomness in my work, & I also see how this fast shuffling of possibility after possibility might eventually, given enough time, juxtapose & disclose something important & automatically overlooked in more orderly thinking. [. I Since nothing absolutely nothing is excluded (as not worth being included) I proffer a vast mixed hag-out of it I shake coin-operated doors & God. It's a fucking circus. I'm like a sharp-eyed crow, spying anything that twinkles & grabbing it up to add to my heap.

Anyone with my attitude just might stumble onto, by sheer chance & luck-in his actual life, which is to say, the life of his mind-the authentic camouflaged God, the deus absconditus, by trying odd combinations of things & places, like a high speed (sic) computer processing everything, he might outdazzle even a wary God, might catch him by surprise by poking somewhere unexpectedly. If it is true that the real answers (& authentic absolute vs the merely seeming) are where we would least expect them, this "try it all" technique might-might take at face value as true the most wornout, most worked over & long ago discarded obvious "staring us in the face all the time" as the crux of the mystery. [... ]

This kind of fascinated, credulous, inventive person might be granted the greatest gift of all. To see the toymaker who has generated-& is with or within-all his toys. That the Godhead is a toymaker at all-who could seriously (sic) believe this? 1.]

Too dumb to know you don't look for God in the trash of the gutter instead of Heaven.

Phil longed for a revelation. As the sixties progressed and his novel production stayed steady (prolific for anyone but Phil), he was anguished that the "the greatest gift of all" had been denied him. Not that the novels lacked force and subtlety: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (w. 1966, p. 1968), Galactic Pot-Healer (w. 1968, p. 1969), and A Maze of Death (w. 1968, p. 1970) belie the mask of unsophistication donned above. But in his sixties SF novels that posed the reality theme again and again, Phil came to feel that-at critical junctures-he was outright faking it. From a 1981 Exegesis entry on Galactic Pot-Healer:

. ] thus in writing "Pot" that exactly was where I reached the end-wore out & died as a writer; scraped the bottom of the barrel & died creatively & spiritually. What misery that was!

I. . .] if "Pot" shows signs of psychosis, & it does-it is not because I experienced & knew God but precisely because I did not. [... ] Thus in a very real sense my sanity depended on my experiencing God, because my creative life logically demanded it-& as (name of a therapist] said, my sanity depended on my writing.

And as the writing began to fail him, so, it seemed, did everything else. Gradually at first, then in a rush.

Phil and Nancy got married primarily because Nancy had become pregnant. Their daughter, Isolde Freya, Nancy's first, Phil's second, was born on March 15, 1967, a little over eight months after the ceremony. Nancy recalls: "I didn't really believe in marriage but we decided we wanted a little baby to keep us company-we were like children ourselves. I thought it would be okay to have children and not be married, but Phil thought we should be married. Later I was glad we did."