Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (50 page)

Phil recovered sufficiently from his hypertension to attend, in early May, the local SF Carsacon for high school students. Tim Finney, who arranged for Phil and other SF luminaries such as Bradbury, Spinrad, and Sturgeon to appear, recalls that Phil went over best of all with the young audience. Despite this public triumph, he canceled out attending the July 1974 SF Westercon, of which he had been named guest of honor. But even in the safety of his own apartment, what with the visions and an infant who often cried through the night, exhaustion was setting in. Tessa recalls:

It [2-3-74] made Phil more fun to be with. Every day brought an adventure. It also wore us out. You can only keep your adrenaline up for so long. [...] Phil had more severe periods of depression, more often than I did. He would lie in bed for a week at a time, needing to have his meals brought to him three times a day, plus snacks. Sometimes his appetite was dull, but most often he ate ravenously. He would get up every few hours and type-letters, notes, his latest novel.

He would doze off, then wake up frantic, run to the bathroom, try to get a drink of water. You see, during his sleep, sometimes the juices from his stomach would come up and he would choke on them. I would have to drop whatever I was doing-or wake up-and get him a drink, hold him and comfort him, talk to him as if he were a very small child, in order to get him through the trauma.

During May 1974, Phil was paid what he regarded as an unwelcome visit by Marxist-oriented French literary critics; he reported the visit to the FBI. These critics found in the Ubik force a metaphor for the decay of capitalism. To Finney Phil complained: "To me it [the novel's setting] is in Cleveland or Des Moines-I don't think of it as a capitalist nation. [...] To them-they are materialists; to me, I am this person. I saw it as a spiritual journey away from this world."

Phil's visionary experiences continued apace. One of the most notable was his repeated sighting of the "Golden Rectangle" (based upon the golden mean ratio of Greek art; numerically expressed in the Fibonacci constant of 1.618). In Radio Free Albemuth, Nicholas Brady describes the vision:

What I was seeing now was a door, proportioned by the measure which the Greeks had called the Golden Rectangle, which they had considered the perfect geometric form. I repeatedly saw this door, marked with letters of the Greek alphabet, projected onto natural formations that resembled it: a dictionary stand, a basalt block, a speaker cabinet. And one time, astonishingly, I had seen Pinky [Phil's cat] pressing outward from beyond the door into our world, only not as he had been: much larger, more fierce, like a tiger, and, most of all, filled to bursting with life and health. [. .. ] [Brady] glimpsed beyond the door: a static landscape, nocturnal, a quiet black sea, sky, the edge of an island, and, surprisingly, the unmoving figure of a nude woman standing on the sand at the edge of the water. I had recognized the woman; it was Aphrodite. I had seen photographs of Greek and Roman statues of her. The proportions, the beauty and sensuality, could not be mistaken.

In a July 1974 Exegesis entry Phil observed, concerning the GrecoRoman content of his dreams and "Golden Rectangle" visions:

If it [his unconscious] shows me the Golden Rectangle it does so in order to calm me with that ultimate esthetically balanced sight; it has a firm therapeutic purpose. There is a utilization of all its abstract material for genuine purposes, for me, by and large. It is a tutor to me as Aristotle was to Alexander [...] I sense Apollo in this, which is consistent, since the Cumaen sibyl was his oracle. Moderation, reasonability and balance are Apollo's virtues, the clear-headed, the rational. Syntosis [self-harmony].

The events surrounding the death of Pinky from cancer in the fall of 1974 were a further visionary confirmation to Phil. Two years earlier, when Phil had contracted pneumonia during the completion of Flow, Pinky had lain across his stomach to care for him as best a cat could. Phil had recovered, but now came Pinky's time to die:

That Sunday night, four days before Pinky died, he and Tessa and I were lying on the bed in the bedroom, and I saw pale white light filling the room, evenly distributed, and I saw Pinky inert and exposed, like a decoy duck, floating forever, and I got incredibly frightened and kept saying, "Death is in the room! I'm going to die!" I began to pray frantically, in Latin, for almost half an hour. I knew Pinky couldn't see it; I alone could. Death was there, but I thought it was for me. I knew Pinky and I would be separated. "Within the next four days," I said to Tessa. "Death will strike." She said, "You're nuts." Later that night I dreamed that a terrific gunshot was fired at me, deafeningly; I was okay but a woman, close by me, lay torn open and dying. I went for help. Three days later Pinky was dead [...] And the evening he died, while I was in the bathroom, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder; I was sure Tessa had come into the room behind me, and I turned to ask her why. No one was there. It was the touch of my friend, on his departure; he paused a moment to say goodbye.

Prior to Pinky's death, Phil had undergone a physical crisis of his own. In early August, during an argument with Tessa, Phil flung a seashell against the wall and painfully separated the shoulder he'd previously injured in 1964 and 1972. Following corrective surgery, Phil was forced to plot his novel in progress-Valisystem A-by dictating into a small tape recorder. (Valisystem A and a second proposed novel, To Scare the Dead, eventually blossomed into Radio Free Albemuth and Valis; this sequence is detailed in Chapter Eleven.)

It was in this weakened condition, in late summer, that Phil was zapped by the "pink light" information that Christopher suffered from a potentially fatal inguinal hernia. This diagnosis was confirmed by their physician and corrective surgery was performed in October. From an Exegesis entry c. 1977:

I am thinking back. Sitting with my eyes shut I am listening [in 1974] to "Strawberry Fields [Beatles song]." I get up. I open my eyes because the lyrics speak of "Going through life with eyes closed." I look toward the window. Light blinds me; my head suddenly aches. My eyes close & I see that strange strawberry ice cream pink. At the same instant knowledge is transferred to me. I go into the bedroom where Tessa is changing Chrissy & I recite what has been conveyed to me: that he has an undetected birth defect & must be taken to the doctor at once & scheduled for surgery. This turns out to be true.

What happened? What communicated with me? I could read & understand the secret messages "embedded within the inferior bulk." [Quotation from Gnostic text. ]

Phil relished the fact that a pop song, of all things, had bestowed the needed wisdom. From a 1980 Exegesis entry: "God talked to me through a Beatles tune ('Strawberry Fields'). [.] A random assortment of trash blown by the wind, & there is God. Bits & pieces swept together to form a unity." But Phil being Phil, he posed contrary views with equal convic tion. From a 1981 entry: "The beam of pink light fired at my head-as discussed in VALIS-is, I have always believed deep down underneath, not God but technology, and technology from the future at that."

In September, fellow SF writer Thomas Disch paid Phil a visit. Each admired the other's work; Disch recalls that Phil looked to him as "the great rationalist who was going to be sympathetically but objectively examining his theory for flaws. These are unusual social circumstances for meeting somebody for the first time." Their talk, fueled by beer, went on for twelve hours. At stake, it seemed, was Phil's probity. Says Disch:

We talked about whether the dreams were of an external source. He wanted to say, how else could I have heard ancient Greek? But I said that the part of the mind used in dreams is unlikely to decide that we're hearing Greek. He didn't fancy my argument.

I was fascinated. He was determined to make me say, yes, this is a religious experience. It was like arm wrestling for hours, and neither one of us got the other's arm down on the table.

I was being lightly skeptical and affirming his imaginative side of it. At the same time I thought: Interesting-a masterful con that works. He's a professional entertainer of beliefs-in other words, a con man. He wants to turn anything he imagines into a system. And there was his delight in making people believe-he LOVED to make you believe. It made for great novelsbut when he overdid it it became delusions of reference. The urge to translate every imagined thing into a belief or suspended belief is a bit of a jump. Yet it was probably his ability to sew these things together that was his strength as a novelist.

For his part, Phil was heartened by their talk; in particular, he valued Disch's suggestion that 2-3-74 resembled the enthusiasmos of prophecy, as when one is filled with the spirit of Elijah. Long passages in the Exegesis explore this theory, which bore fruit in Valis and The Divine Invasion.

But in the final months of 1974, Hollywood and Fame came acalling, and Phil had exciting possibilities other than those posed by 2-3-74 to consider.

In September, French director Jean-Pierre Gorin met with Phil to negotiate a film option on Ubik. Phil had, at this point, three other novels optioned out to various Hollywood-based producers: Time Out of Joint, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But Gorin, who'd previously collaborated with jean-Luc Godard, was an outsider in the Hollywood world. After a day of happy brainstorming, Gorin and Phil struck an agreement by which Gorin paid Phil, out of his own meager pocket, $1,500 down to produce a first-draft screenplay by December 31, 1975, with an additional $2,500 due on delivery. Things were looking bright: Francis Ford Coppola had ex pressed interest in producing the film. But the Coppola deal fell through. And then Phil went and finished the screenplay within a month instead of a year, which Gorin had never expected, producing an instant cash-flow crisis (Phil was eventually paid). In the end, despite great effort, Gorin failed to win financial backing for the project.

To interviewer D. S. Black, Gorin recalled his September 1974 meeting with Phil:

He was a very broadshouldered, enthusiastic guy, who was from first contact very easy and very much fun. Apparently from the dialogue we had he was very much taken with the fact that some French dude talked to him as a writer. He was very fond of spinning out a thousand and one references a minute, ranging from what I learned to be one of his hobbies-Elizabethan poetry-to all sorts of considerations. [...I There was this very strange woman he was living with at the time-had this sort of bizarre look to herself, a Squeaky Fromme quality. Short skirt, long hair; he kept bantering with her. There was talk of women, sex and literature. A big, big guy like a bouncer; a low-culture Hemingway figure in some ways. Very, very warm and genuine in the way he interacted.

Two other visitors with movie-making aspirations paid calls in November. Robert Jaffe, son of producer Herb Jaffe, had written an Androids scrrenplay, which Phil roundly detested, though he enjoyed Jaffe's raffish Tinseltown gossip; Herb Jaffe let the Androids option expire. The second visitor, Hampton Fancher, was also interested in Androids. He paid two visits to Phil's Fullerton apartment, once accompanied by actress Barbara Hershey, who dazzled Phil. Fancher recalls that Phil treated him like a "cigar-chomping Hollywood producer after plunder." Despite this tension, Fancher remained fascinated:

He was baronial, expansive, wall-to-wall effusiveness--come into my home, make dinner, "my dear," and so on. Germanic almost. There was no room for two-way conversations, no room for another ego in the same room. He was a brilliant guy. His eyes twinkled, he was congenial.

I began to think that he was a little ... that he lied. He told me things which I didn't know if he believed or not. Some of these things, if he did believe them, I thought that he might be, not clinically, but a touch paranoid. That the FBI is after him. And he would dramatize with physical, facial characteristics that were a little "over the top," as they say in acting. Telling a story of how the FBI came down on him, he would look around and demonstrate the position he was in, and enjoyed being watched.

Meanwhile, the publicity ground swell that had been building since 1973 was reaching its apex. Paul Williams conducted an interview in November 1974 for Rolling Stone. Shortly afterward, New Yorker staff writer Tony Hiss interviewed Phil for two sequential "Talk of the Town" pieces (January 27 and February 3, 1975), in which Phil was referred to as "our favorite science fiction writer," which was not to be taken to meannor did the Meredith Agency so take it-that the New Yorker would have published a trashy Phil Dick story on a bet.

One of the subjects that Phil discussed with Williams-within days of Fancher's visit-is alluded to by Fancher above. Paranoia. Phil didn't like the term, but conceded that it used to fit: "Okay. I used to believe the universe was basically hostile. [...J Now, I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different 1 was from it." Phil then wove a fascinating premise-that religious belief pulls paranoia "inside out" and spiritually redeems it: