Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (45 page)

Now and then Phil and Tessa went out into the world. Together they attended the Los Angeles Worldcon in September 1972; Phil took part in panel discussions on the state of SF. In October, a former girlfriend brought her new boyfriend by-an honest-to-God narc! Phil, already conceiving the plot of Scanner, was both thrilled and terrified by the meeting. The narc, camouflaged by long hair and a flowered shirt, took the four of them for a wild drive and warned that he could bust any of them anytime he wanted. At evening's end he gave Phil his card.

That same October, Phil and Tessa flew to San Francisco for four days to finalize his divorce from Nancy. Custody of Isa was awarded to Nancy, and, given the geographical distance, Isa's young age, and recurrent tensions between the former spouses, Phil saw little of Isa until the late seventies, a situation that anguished him. Unlike in his dealings with Anne, Phil did make regular child-support payments to Nancy, at the $100-per-month rate specified by the court.

Despite two years of writing inactivity, Phil's career wasn't doing badly. Good news came in the form of a visit from his Paris-based editor, Patrice Duvic, whose Editions Opta had published most of Phil's work. (Steady foreign sales, particularly in France, England, and Germany, had supported Phil despite his failure to sell a new novel since 1970.) Duvic spoke of the possibility of a screenplay based on Ubik, which several French critics saw as a masterwork of pataphysique. Soon after, Phil was interviewed (along with Spinrad) on Los Angeles's KPFK FM. And there would be glowing mention of his work in Thomas Disch's anthology The Ruins of Earth and in Brian Aldiss's study of the SF genre, Billion Year Spree-both published in 1973.

Tessa and Phil discussed moving to Vancouver or to the Bay Area, but Fullerton continued its hold on them. As Phil deadpanned in a December letter to Roger Zelazny: "There is nothing more reassuring to someone who's gone through an acute identity crisis than clean plastic apartments, streets, restaurants and furniture. Nothing gets old or worn or dirty here because if it does the police come in and kill it. I'm not sure if I have an identity again, or if I do if it's the same one (I suppose not to both questions). "

Then, in November, Phil learned that Stanislaw Lem had succeeded, after much struggle, in arranging for the publication in Poland of a translation of Ubik. The news thrilled Phil, who speculated that he might travel to Warsaw to make use of any captive royalties. The trip never materialized, but there was a brief correspondence between Phil and Lem. One topic was Lem's 1972 essay "Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case-With Exceptions," the exceptions being solely the works of Philip K. Dick. Phil explained the "trash" elements Lem had noted in his work:

But you see, Mr. Lem, there is no culture here in California, only trash. And we who grew up here and live here and write here have nothing else to include as elements in our work; you can see this in ON THE ROAD [Phil had, earlier in the letter, stressed his literary affinity to the Beats]. I mean it. The West Coast has no tradition, no dignity, no ethics-this is where that monster Richard Nixon grew up. How can one create novels based on this reality which do not contain trash, because the alternative is to go into dreadful fantasies of what it ought to be like; one must work with the trash, pit it against itself, as you so aptly put it in your article. [...] Hence the elements in such books of mine as UBIK. If God manifested Himself to us here He would do so in the form of a spraycan advertised on TV.

(When Ubik was published in Poland in 1975, Phil was angered at what he saw as broken promises concerning royalties, and (unjustly) blamed Lem. Tit for tat, Phil lobbied for Lem's expulsion from the Americanbased Science Fiction Writers Association, on the grounds that Lem's honorary, nonpaying membership violated SFWA rules prohibiting honorary membership when a writer was eligible for a regular paying membership. Lem, by virtue of having published in the U.S., was so eligible. Phil was not alone in raising this objection-Lem had raised the ire of several SFWA members by his critical comments on American SF writers-and Lem's honorary membership was ultimately revoked.)

Now that he was settled in with Tessa, Phil's writing energies had returned, in late 1972, in full force for the first time in over two years. In November 1972, he wrote to Disch: "If [Tessa] didn't exist I would have had eventually to invent her, in order to survive; [... ] My motive for once more writing is so that I can have something to dedicate to her."

His first project was the completion of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which had lain unfinished since August 1970. After Flow, Phil wrote his first short story since 1969, "A Little Something for Us Tempunanuts." Then it was on to Scanner-with just a brief time out for a brush with extinction. In late 1972 Phil contracted double pneumonia. Things looked so bad that "Death" thought to pay Phil a bedside visit:

He wore a single-breasted plastic suit, a tie, and carried a sort of samplecase, which he opened to show me. In it he had several psychological tests, and he indicated to me that these tests showed that I was completely nuts and therefore ought to give up and go with him. I felt relief that he would take me somewhere else, because if I was completely nuts there was no point in my trying any more and wearing myself out, and I was really so damn tired. Death pointed to a rising road, up a long twisting hillside, and indicated to me that there was a mental hospital at the top of the hill there where I could go and be and take it easy and not have to try any more. He led me up the winding road toward it, higher and higher. And then all at once Tessa came back into the bedroom to see how I was, and instantly I was back in bed sitting up against my pillow, same as always. But I had really gone a long way before she came in and it ended. Later I realized that Death had lied to me. He told me what would cause me to go voluntarily with him. Another person, he would tell something else, whatever would do it. I didn't see him again, but now I know that Death lies to make his job easier. It's a lot easier for him if you go of your own free will. I still remember, though, what relief I felt to know I could give up. Nothing but relief. How willing I was. But, then, I believed him.

Death did indeed lie. Phil proceeded to write A Scanner Darkly, the definitive portrait of the sixties drug endgame. The addictive, brain-toxic drug Phil invented for Scanner is called "Substance D" or "Death." The overcoming of Death, the triumph of the spirit over lies that drain life of meaning, is the tale told.

In music, you can form a perfect sixties syzygy with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Beatles embodying the joyous dream that seemed not only possible but more real than reality, the Rolling Stones flashing the edge that the dream risk entailed.

in literature, you can fashion an equally telling sixties syzygy with Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America and A Scanner Darkly. Trout Fishing catches the feel of the magic that people could pull, for a time, from the hat of daily life. The sixties provided the wildly colored backdrop, the spacy patter, and the spiritual suspense to make the magic work.

And Scanner lets you see and hear how cravings for drug-based special effects maimed and killed many who, as Phil wrote in his "Author's Note," were "like children playing in the street." He added: "I myself, I am not a character in the novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time." Included in Phil's "Note" is a list of friends who died or suffered permanent injury through drug abuse; included is Phil himself, with "permanent pancreatic damage." Not all of his diagnoses of "permanent psychosis" are accurate, but there is death enough to make the point that "We were forced to stop by things dreadful."

Phil produced a first draft of Scanner from February to April of 1973, then revised intensively (with the valued assistance of editor Judy-Lynn Rey) in summer 1975. Phil then wrote to editor Lawrence Ashmead (whom he naively addressed as "Editor-in-Chief" when Ashmead worked only on Doubleday SF) pleading for the house to treat Scanner as mainstream. Indeed, Scanner has few SF trappings, and its 1994 Los Angeles is recognizably our own, down to 7-11s and freeway hassles. Not since High Castle had Phil's mainstream ambitions shown so fiercely. Ashmead recalls:

Science fiction is very gutterized as pulp. I can remember trying to get people at Doubleday to read Philip K. Dick, and they'd say, "I don't read science fiction."

I have always thought Phil's books will still be selling in forty years, which is probably not true for most of his contemporaries. I tried to get him out of science fiction, but there was just no way. They just didn't take the genre seriously, and they thought of it strictly as a library sale. It just wasn't a commercial reality.

The basic plot of Scanner is the decline into something near total brain death of Fred, an undercover narc who poses as Bob Arctor, a small-time dealer, to track down the ultimate suppliers of Death. There is one standout bit of SF tech: the "scramble suit" Fred wears for anonymity when reporting on Arctor and friends. As the dealers have their own antinarc undercover operatives in the police department, Fred must keep both his real Fred and alias Bob identities secret from both sides. The "scramble suit" (inspired by Phil's phosphene vision experiences of 2-374-see Chapter 10) is "a multifaceted quartz lens hooked to a miniaturized computer whose memory banks held up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people"; these rapid-fire images are projected onto a "shroudlike membrane" in human form, in which Fred is enclosed.

What drives a man to go into a line of work in which identity splitting is inevitable? In Fred's case, disgust with suburban life. Fred, a loyal cop, prefers the company of Death addicts to that of the Orange County Lions Club members whom he addresses on the evils of drugs. In this, Phil and Fred are one. Phil wrote in a September 1973 letter:

During each marriage I was the bourgeois wage-earner, and when the marriage failed I dropped (gratefully) into the gutter of near-illegal life: narcotics and guns and knives and oh so many crimes ... not so much that I did them but that I surrounded myself with those who did; I embrace truly vicious people, I suppose as an antidote to the middle class safe rational spineless world my wives had forced on me. Cut loose from my children and wives I had no responsibilities to anyone but myself, and I wallowed in the gutter; and yet, to be fair to me, drew from that very gutter, lives of young people that might otherwise have been lost. [... ] I am only out of there because once again I am married and must lock my door each night, lest some one rip off my valuables. I was happier living with those who ripped off (i.e. stole) valuables.

Phil exaggerates for effect here; he was never a "bourgois wageearner," and he had no real desire to abandon the safe harbor of Tessa and their Fullerton home. But he had felt Fred/Bob's craving, and this spurred him to finish what he had begun with Felix Buckman in Flow: the creation of a fully sympathetic policeman protagonist. Fred's drive to escape the suburban void leads him to Death. He loves his fellow addicts even as they betray him by slipping him ever more Death. The result is toxic brain psychosis that severs the right and left hemispheres of the brain, terminating gestalt functions in the percept and cognitive systems.

It all adds up to this: Fred stops knowing who Bob is.

He narcs on himself. Listens disdainfully to the Holo-Scanner surveillance tapes of Bob and his friends babbling aimlessly. As the toxicity advances, the world grows ever more murky. His police superiors notice that all is not well and bring in Fred, clad in scramble suit, for testingjust a little too late. The brain hemispheres have begun to compete. And then all but the dimmest awareness fades away. Just before that final stage, Fred/Bob lives out the truth of Paul's words in 1 Corinthians by way of his Scanner self-surveillance:

It is [the police psychologist explains] as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. [...]

"Through a mirror," Fred said. A darkened mirror, he thought; a darkened scanner.

Scanner was wrung from late-sixties darkness, from Phil's times of hellish despair. Donna Hawthorne, an undercover cop who loves and betrays Fred/Bob, is based on the dark-haired Donna who saw Phil through hard times and let him go to Vancouver alone. Death addict Jerry Fabin, who cannot fight off the aphids, is drawn from Phil's Santa Venetia housemate Daniel. The maniacal Jim Barris, who may have slipped Fred/Bob the final Death overdose, is based on Peter, the ominous hanger-on whom Phil suspected of burglarizing his house. NewPath, the drug treatment center to which the husk of Fred/Bob is consigned, owes much to X-Kalay. In Scanner, New-Path is the clandestine supplier of Death.