Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (28 page)

By the end of summer 1963, Phil had decided that things with Anne had gotten totally out of hand. Dr. X helped him realize that his marital problems were due largely to Anne's mental condition; Dr. X's diagnosis, Anne recalls, was "manic-depressive." Sheriff Christensen, who'd witnessed Anne in a fury the one time he had come out in response to her call, was not inclined to disagree. Phil told them both that her spending had gotten out of hand, that she had tried to run him down with the car and had threatened him with a knife.

And so one night, during dinner, Sheriff Christensen came to the door with involuntary commitment papers signed by Dr. X. While the girls watched, Anne was hauled off for seventy-two hours of observation at Ross Psychiatric Hospital.

Phil had made a rather definite decision as to what was real.

Anne explains why she never stopped loving Phil during the ordeal to come: "I was rooted in my marriage. We had four children. I felt that, no matter what, you just had to try to work things out. Loyalty was a very strong value to me."

The shrink at Ross believed Anne when she explained that marital fights were one thing and craziness another. But having come this far, she had only two options: a full-scale legal hearing on her sanity or two weeks of further evaluation at Langley-Porter Clinic. She chose the second, residing in a locked ward. Phil and the kids came to visit every day. Daughter Hatte (then thirteen) recalls that during one such drive Phil said: " 'I'm going to talk to the doctors today. I'm sure they're going to tell me that I'm the one who should be in there, not your mother.' On the way home he said: 'That's what they told me. I already thought that, myself.' Well, maybe it's true and maybe not-that's the kind of thing he'd say."

The clinic records of her stay include (according to Anne's transcription) the following comments: Mr. Dick "was very unhappy-he says that he has never seen his wife looking worse. Mr. Dick feels that he is the mentally ill partner and should be hospitalized. He feels he may be schizophrenic." The recording male physician stated that Mr. Dick's problem was that he was "unable to control his wife."

Anne was released after the two weeks. On the way home, Phil insisted that they pay a visit to Dr. X, who informed Anne that, LangleyPorter notwithstanding, she was manic-depressive. While in the clinic, Anne had spit out the daily Stelazine pill; her first day in, she had swallowed it obediently and been left logy. According to Anne, Dr. X now insisted that she keep taking them at home; Phil threatened to leave her if she refused. Phil's faith in Stelazine (a phenothiazine downer used to manage certain psychotic disorders and high anxiety) was sincere; he took it himself on occasion and found it beneficial. Anne's experience with a regular dosage: "They turned me into a zombie. Once I had taken them I didn't have sense enough not to take any more." Anne stayed on Stelazine for two or three months, suffering some impairment of memory. She and Phil began seeing a female marriage counselor who made little dent in what was happening. Anne, after her Stelazine haze, was furious but still determined to save the marriage. Phil had his doubts.

In later years, Phil never alluded publicly to the commitment, though he continued to maintain that Anne was "schizoid," lacking in human kindness. Surely his lingering anger over the 1960 abortion played a part in these comments. But his reticence on the subject of Anne's commitment (as opposed to frequent and vehement accounts, in interviews, of the jewelry fiasco) does indicate a degree of discomfort. But while Phil kept a public silence on the real-life events, he drew heavily on his memories of the commitment in his SF novels. Phil made no secret of the fact that many of his sixties female protagonists were inspired at least in part by Anne. Three examples that cast some light here are Emily Hnatt in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (w. 1964, p. 1965), Mary Rittersdorf in Clans of the Alphane Moon (w. 1963-64, p. 1964), and Kathy Sweetscent in Now Wait for Last Year (w. 1963, rewritten, p. 1966).

Emily, in Palmer Eldritch, undergoes E (for Evolution) Therapy along with her second husband, Richard (a name likely drawn from Anne's first husband). E Therapy is risky business. Subjects either evolve-with larger brains creating a "bubblehead" look-or regress to become husks of their former selves. As it turns out, Richard evolves and Emily regresses. Anne speculates that this was Phil's way of comparing their differing responses to Stelazine. Richard's higher vision affords a benign, enlightened view of the wife he loves. Emily's decline is an unavoidable sorrow. It should be added that the character of Emily was also likely influenced by second wife, Kleo. In particular, the regret felt by Emily's first husband, Barry Mayerson, over the end of their marriage parallels Phil's own sense that in Kleo he had lost a "perfectly good wife."

But in the latter two examples, the figure of Anne clearly dominates. In Clans, hapless Chuck Rittersdorf and his brilliant psychiatrist wife, Mary, both undergo psychiatric-profile testing. The result: Mary is forced to admit that Chuck is "without a trace of mental disturbance" while she is a depressive type. She admits: "My continual pressing of you regarding your income-that was certainly due to my depression, my delusional sense that everything had gone wrong, that something had to be done or we were doomed."

In Now Wait, love is put to the test. Dr. Eric Sweetscent is a confused but kindly artiforg (artificial organ) surgeon; his wife, Kathy, a consultant, is a brilliant, driven harridan, whose salary exceeds Eric's. Kathy loves Eric and tries to keep him even as he struggles to get out of the marriage. She becomes addicted to JJ-180, a hallucinogen with toxic side effects and looping time-travel properties. Kathy tricks Eric into taking JJ-180 to motivate him to discover an antidote. Despite Eric's loyal efforts, which Kathy hardly deserves, the truth is-as Eric's future self tells him during a JJ-180 trip-that Kathy suffers from Korsakow's syndrome ("pathological destruction of cortical brain tissue due to long periods of intoxication") due to narcotics use prior to JJ-180. The situation is hopeless; but, as the future Eric notes: "Under phenothiazine sedation she's quiet, anyhow."

At the end of Now Wait, Eric has a talk with a flying cab on the meaning of caritas. As is often the case in Phil's SF, the machine speaks with soul:

To the cab he said suddenly, "If your wife were sick-"

"I have no wife, sir," the cab said. "Automatic Mechanisms never marry; everyone knows that."

"All right," Eric agreed. "If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled ten years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty that the damage to her brain could never be reversed? And staying with her would mean-"

"I can see what you mean, sir," the cab broke in. "It would mean no other life for you beyond caring for her."

"That's right," Eric said.

"I'd stay with her," the cab decided.

"Why?"

"Because," the cab said, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."

"I think I agree," Eric said after a time. "I think I will stay with her."

"God bless you, sir," the cab said. "I can see that you're a good man."

"Thank you," Eric said.

The cab soared on toward Tijuana Fur & Dye Corporation.

The worth of these novels does not depend upon the correctness of Phil's evaluation of Anne's mental state. He was a fiction writer, imagining and elaborating even the events of his life. But this cluster of husband-wife sanity bouts fairly indicates that, in committing Anne, Phil took action that he felt was necessary and, ultimately, loving. For the record, Anne does not suffer from insanity or brain damage, and after Phil left the marriage she built up a successful jewelry business while raising and educating four daughters.

After the commitment, even after the Stelazine, the fights continued. In autumn 1963 Phil and Anne attended a party at a house on Mount Vision in Inverness. Anne recalls that, quite atypically, Phil downed several martinis. On the way home he swerved the car off the steep road-the front wheels hanging in air. Anne writes that as they waited for help, "Phil took my arm and tried to forcibly lead me into the driver's seat. He said, 'Get in and I'll push.' If he had pushed the car, it would have gone over the side of the mountain. Of course, there were trees to stop it from going very far."

Late in 1963 tensions came to a head and Phil left, moving in with Dorothy in Berkeley. Before long Anne came to take him back, and Phil returned docilely, seeming flattered by this demonstration of her love. But there was no return to happy times. President Kennedy's assassination in November shocked Phil so severely that he dropped to the floor when he learned of it, then remained depressed for days. When Phil's beloved cat Tumpy disappeared they purchased twin Siamese cats, who died of distemper. Phil, who had lived with cats all his adult life, refused to consider finding replacements just then.

Anne suggested that church attendance might help. They joined St. Columba's, an Episcopal church in Inverness, and attended "religiously" (as Phil liked to say) every Sunday. He would sometimes claim that this was due solely to Anne's social climbing: "She says, If we're going to know judges and district attorneys and important people, we have to be Episcopalian."

But the primary force that led Phil to his brief involvement with the Episcopal Church was not Anne, but a horrific vision in the second half of 1963 that brought him to the point of spiritual crisis. In the late seventies, Phil recalled:

There I went, one day, walking down the country road to my shack, looking forward to eight hours of writing, in total isolation from all other humans, and I looked up in the sky and saw a face. I didn't really see it, but the face was there, and it was not a human face; it was a vast visage of perfect evil. I realize now (and I think I dimly realized at the time) what caused me to see it: the months of isolation, of deprivation of human contact, in fact sensory deprivation as such ... but anyhow the visage could not be denied. It was immense; it filled a quarter of the sky. It had empty slots for eyes-it was metal and cruel and, worst of all, it was God.

I drove over to my church [... I and talked to my priest. He came to the conclusion that I had had a glimpse of Satan and gave me unction-not supreme unction; just healing unction. It didn't do any good; the metal face in the sky remained. I had to walk along every day as it gazed down at me.

The vision-not "really" seen but decisively encountered-endured for several days. Isolation and the anguish of his failing marriage were not the only causal factors. Phil had also been taking what he described alternately as "certain chemicals" and "psychedelic drugs." What drugs these were is unknown; Phil did indicate, in a 1967 letter, that LSD was not among them; amphetamines alone, in sufficiently high doses, could account for such a vision. By the seventies, his accounts of the vision no longer included mention of drugs, likely because his attitude toward drug experimentation had changed.

However, at the heart of the vision lay not drugs, or even isolation, but rather memories of father Edgar putting on a gas mask as he told four-year-old Phil stories of World War I: "[T]he sight of him wearing his gasmask, blending as it did with his accounts of men with their guts hanging from them, men destroyed by shrapnel-decades later, in 1963, as I walked alone day after day along that country road with no one to talk to, no one to be with, that metal, blind, inhuman visage appeared to me again, but now transcendent and vast, and absolutely evil."

The visage-which became Palmer Eldritch-was a psychic implosion on the order of Phil's classroom horrors. The difference was that now, as a writer, Phil possessed a means of response, of integration. Even so, the challenge was severe. Phil later said: "[W]e must have our idios kosmoses to stay sane; reality [the koinos kosmos) has to filter through, carefully controlled by the mechanisms by which our brains operate. We can't handle it directly, and I think that this was what was occurring when I saw Palmer Eldritch lingering, day after day, over the horizon."

Phil did not tell Anne of the experience. She writes, "If he had I might have said to him, `You probably ate something that didn't agree with you.'

For Christmas 1963, Phil and Anne gave their daughters Barbie and Ken dolls. That very month, Phil had published (in Amazing) "The Days of Perky Pat," a strange, hilarious story of life on a bleak, defeated Earth whose survivors are kept alive through the relief efforts of the Martian victors. To keep their sanity, the survivors play with dolls and models in elaborate "Perky Pat layouts" styled after Barbie and Ken wardrobes and accessories. Daughter Hatte recalls that Phil measured the proportions of Barbie dolls to confirm that they could not exist in the real world-their heads were too small for their bodies.