Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (21 page)

“Come and visit me,” Buckman said.

“Call me,” the black man said. Slowly and firmly, but also a little loudly, he said. “These places, these coin-operated robot gas stations, are downers late at night. Sometime later on we can talk more. Where it’s friendly. I can sympathize and understand how you’re feeling, when it happens that places like this get you on a bummer. A lot of times I get gas on my way home from the factory so I won’t have to stop late. I go out on a lot of night calls for several reasons. Yes, I can tell you’re feeling down at the mouth—you know, depressed. That’s why you handed me that note which I’m afraid I didn’t flash on at the time but do now, and then you wanted to put your arms around me, you know, like you did, like a child would, for a second. I’ve had that sort of inspiration, or rather call it impulse, from time to time during my life. I’m forty-seven now. I understand. You want to not be by yourself late at night, especially when it’s unseasonably chilly like it is right now. Yes, I agree completely, and now you don’t exactly know what to say because you did something suddenly out of irrational impulse without thinking through to the final consequences. But it’s okay; I can dig it. Don’t worry about it one damn bit. You must drop over. You’ll like my house. It’s very mellow. You can meet my wife and our kids. Three in all.”

“I will,” Buckman said. “I’ll keep your card.” He got out his wallet, pushed the card into it. “Thank you.”

“I see that my quibble’s ready,” the black man said. “I was low on oil, too.” He hesitated, started to move away, then returned and held out his hand. Buckman shook it briefly. “Goodbye,” the black man said.

Buckman watched him go; the black man paid the gas station, got into his slightly battered quibble, started it up, and lifted off into the darkness. As he passed above Buckman the black man raised his right hand from the steering wheel and waved in salutation.

Good night, Buckman thought as he silently waved back with cold-bitten fingers. Then he reentered his own quibble, hesitated, feeling numb, waited, then, seeing nothing, slammed his door abruptly and started up his engine. A moment later he had reached the sky.

Flow, my tears, he thought. The first piece of abstract music ever written. John Dowland in his Second Lute Book in 1600. I’ll play it on that big new quad phonograph of mine when I get home. Where it can remind me of Alys and all the rest of them. Where there will be a symphony and a fire and it will all be warm.

I will go get my little boy. Early tomorrow I’ll fly down to Florida and pick up Barney. Have him with me from now on. The two of us together. No matter what the consequences. But now there won’t be any consequences; it’s all over. It’s safe. Forever.

His quibble crept across the night sky. Like some wounded, half-dissolved insect. Carrying him home.

PART FOUR

Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,

Learn to condemn light.

Happy, happy they that in hell

Feel not the world’s despite.

EPILOGUE

The trial of Jason Taverner for the first-degree murder of Alys Buckman mysteriously backfired, ending with a verdict of not guilty, due in part to the excellent legal help NBC and Bill Wolfer provided, but due also to the fact that Taverner had committed no crime. There had in fact been no crime, and the original coroner’s finding was reversed—accompanied by the retirement of the coroner and his replacement by a younger man. Jason Taverner’s TV ratings, which had dropped to a low point during the trial, rose with the verdict, and Taverner found himself with an audience of thirty-five million, rather than thirty.

The house which Felix Buckman and his sister Alys had owned and occupied drifted along in a nebulous legal status for several years; Alys had willed her part of the equity to a lesbian organization called the Sons of Caribron with headquarters in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and the society wished to make the house into a retreat for their several saints. In March of 2003 Buckman sold his share of the equity to the Sons of Caribron, and, with the money derived, moved himself and all the items of his many collections to Borneo, where living was cheap and the police amiable.

Experiments with the multiple-space-inclusion drug KR-3 were abandoned late in 1992, due to its toxic qualities. However, for several years the police covertly experimented with it on inmates in forced-labor camps. But ultimately, due to the general widespread hazards involved, the Director ordered the project abandoned.

Kathy Nelson learned—and accepted—a year later that her husband Jack had been long dead, as McNulty had told her. The recognition of this precipitated a blatant psychotic break in her, and she again was hospitalized, this time for good at a far less stylish psychiatric hospital than Morning-side.

For the fifty-first and final time in her life Ruth Rae married, in this terminal instance, to an elderly, wealthy, potbellied importer of firearms located in lower New Jersey, barely operating within the limit of the law. In the spring of 1994 she died of an overdose of alcohol taken with a new tranquilizer, Phrenozine, which acts as a central nervous system depressant, as well as suppressing the vagus nerve. At the time of her death she weighed ninety-two pounds, the result of difficult—and chronic—psychological problems. It never became possible to certify with any clarity the death as either an accident or a deliberate suicide; after all, the medication was relatively new. Her husband, Jake Mongo, at the time of her death had become heavily in debt and outlasted her barely a year. Jason Taverner attended her funeral and, at the later graveside ceremony, met a girl friend of Ruth’s named Fay Krankheit, with whom he presently formed a working relationship that lasted two years. From her Jason learned that Ruth Rae had periodically attached herself to the phone-grid sex network; learning this, he understood better why she had become as she had when he met her in Vegas.

Cynical and aging, Heather Hart gradually abandoned her singing career and dropped out of sight. After a few tries to locate her, Jason Taverner gave up and wrote it off as one of the better successes of his life, despite its dreary ending.

He heard, too, that Mary Anne Dominic had won a major international prize for her ceramic kitchenware, but he never bothered to trace her down. Monica Buff, however, showed up in his life toward the end of 1998, as unkempt as ever but still attractive in her grubby way. Jason dated her a few times and then dumped her. For months she wrote him odd, long letters with cryptic signs drawn over the words, but that, too, stopped at last, and for this he was glad.

In the warrens under the ruins of the great universities the student populations gradually gave up their futile attempts to maintain life as they understood it, and voluntarily—for the most part—entered forced-labor camps. So the dregs of the Second Civil War gradually ebbed away, and in 2004, as a pilot model, Columbia University was rebuilt and a safe, sane student body allowed to attend its police-sanctioned courses.

Toward the end of his life retired Police General Felix Buckman, living in Borneo on his pension, wrote an autobiographical exposé of the planetwide police apparatus, the book soon being circulated illegally throughout the major cities of earth. For this, in the summer of 2017, General Buckman was shot by an assassin, never identified, and no arrests were ever made. His book,
The Law-and-order Mentality
, continued to clandestinely circulate for a number of years after his death, but even that, too, eventually became forgotten. The forced-labor camps dwindled away and at last ceased to exist. The police apparatus became by degrees, over the decades, too cumbersome to threaten anyone, and in 2136 the rank of police marshal was abandoned.

Some of the bondage cartoons that Alys Buckman had collected during her aborted life found their way into museums displaying artifacts of faded-out popular cultures, and ultimately she became officially identified by the
Librarian’s Journal Quarterly
as the foremost authority of the late twentieth century in the matter of S-M art. The one-dollar black Trans-Mississippi postage stamp which Felix Buckman had laid on her was bought at auction in 1999 by a dealer from Warsaw, Poland. It disappeared thereupon into the hazy world of philately, never to surface again.

Barney Buckman, the son of Felix and Alys Buckman, grew eventually into difficult manhood, joined the New York police, and during his second year as a beat cop fell from a substandard fire escape while responding to a report of burglary in a tenement where wealthy blacks had once lived. Paralyzed from the waist down at twenty-three, he began to interest himself in old television commercials, and, before long, owned an impressive library of the most ancient and sought-after items of this sort, which he bought and sold and traded shrewdly. He lived a long life, with only a feeble memory of his father and no memory at all of Alys. By and large Barney Buckman complained little, and continued in particular to absorb himself in old-time Alka-Seltzer plugs, his specialty out of all the rest of such golden trivia.

Someone at the Los Angeles Police Academy stole the twenty-two Derringer pistol which Felix Buckman had kept in his desk, and with this the gun vanished forever. Lead slug weapons had by that time become generally extinct except as collector’s pieces, and the inventory clerk at the academy whose job it was to keep track of the Derringer assumed wisely that it had become a prop in the bachelors’ quarters of some minor police official, and let the investigation drop there.

In 2047 Jason Taverner, long since retired from the entertainment field, died in an exclusive nursing home of acolic fibrosis, an ailment acquired by Terrans at various Martian colonies privately maintained for dubious enthrallment of the weary rich. His estate consisted of a five-bedroom house in Des Moines, filled mostly with memorabilia, and many shares of stock in a corporation which had tried—and failed—to finance a commercial shuttle service to Proxima Centaurus. His passing was not generally noticed, although small obit squibs appeared in most metropolitan newspapers, ignored by the TV news people but not by Mary Anne Dominic, who, even in her eighties, still considered Jason Taverner a celebrity, and her meeting him an important milestone in her long and successful life.

The blue vase made by Mary Anne Dominic and purchased by Jason Taverner as a gift for Heather Hart wound up in a private collection of modern pottery. It remains there to this day, and is much treasured. And, in fact, by a number of people who know ceramics, openly and genuinely cherished. And loved.

PHILIP K. DICK
FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write thirty-six novels and five short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1962 for
The Man in the High Castle
and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

Novels by Philip K. Dick

Clans of the Alphane Moon

Confessions of a Crap Artist

The Cosmic Puppets

Counter-Clock World

The Crack in Space

Deus Irae
(with Roger Zelazny)

The Divine Invasion

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
?

Dr. Bloodmoney

Dr. Futurity

Eye in the Sky

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Galactic Pot-Healer

The Game-Players of Titan

The Man in the High Castle

The Man Who Japed

Martian Time-Slip

A Maze of Death

Now Wait for Last Year

Our Friends From Frolix 8

The Penultimate Truth

Radio Free Albemuth

A Scanner Darkly

The Simulacra

Solar Lottery

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Time Out of Joint

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Ubik

The Unteleported Man

VALIS

Vulcan’s Hammer

We Can Build You

The World Jones Made

The Zap Gun

First Vintage Books Edition, July 1993

Copyright © 1974 by Philip K. Dick

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York, in 1974.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dick, Philip K.
Flow my tears, the policeman said / Philip K. Dick.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3554.I3F56 1993
813´.54—dc20 92-50649
CIP

www.vintagebooks.com

eISBN: 978-1-4000-9575-9

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