“When?” he broke in. They had reached his car; he halted, opened the door, got in. On the far side Donna got in. They sat side by side.
“Day after tomorrow,” Donna said. “If I can git ahold of this guy. I think I can.”
Shit, he thought. Day after tomorrow. “No sooner? Not like, say, tonight?”
“Tomorrow at the earliest.”
“How much?”
“Sixty dollars a hundred.”
“Oh, Jeez,” he said. “That’s a burn.”
“They’re super good. I’ve got them from him before; they’re really not what you usually buy into. Take my word for it—they’re worth it. Actually, I prefer to get them from him rather than from anybody else—when I can. He doesn’t always have them. See, he just took a trip down south, I guess. He just got back. He picked them up himself, so I know they’re good for sure. And you don’t have to pay me in advance. When I get them. Okay? I trust you.”
“I never front,” he said.
“Sometimes you have to.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then can you get me at least a hundred?” He tried to figure, rapidly, how many he could get; in two days he probably could raise one hundred twenty dollars and get two hundred tabs from her. And if he ran across a better deal in the meantime, from other people who were holding, he could forget her deal and buy from them. That was the advantage of never fronting, that plus never being burned.
“It’s lucky for you that you ran into me,” Donna said as he started up his car and backed out into traffic. “I’m supposed to see this one dude in about an hour, and he’d probably take all I could get . . . you’d have been out of luck. This was your day.” She smiled, and he did too.
“I wish you could get them sooner,” he said.
“If I do . . .” Opening her purse, she got out a little note pad and a pen that had SPARKS BATTERY TUNE-UP stamped on it. “How do I get hold of you, and I forget your name.”
“Charles B. Freck,” he said. He told her his phone number—not his, really, but the one he made use of at a straight friend’s house, for messages like this—and laboriously she wrote it down. What difficulty she had writing, he thought. Peering and slowly scrawling . . . They don’t teach the chicks jack shit in school any more, he thought. Flat-out illiterate. But foxy. So she can’t hardly read or write; so what? What matters with a fox is nice tits.
“I think I remember you,” Donna said. “Sort of. It’s all hazy, that night; I was really out of it. All I definitely remember was getting the powder into those little caps—Librium caps—we dumped the original contents. I must have dropped half. I mean, on the floor.” She gazed at him meditatively as he drove. “You seem like a mellow dude,” she said. “And you’ll be in the market later on? After a while you’ll want more?”
“Sure,” he said, wondering to himself if he could beat her price by the time he saw her again; he felt he could, most likely. Either way he won. That is, either way he scored.
Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills.
The day outside the car, and all the busy people, the sunlight and activity, streamed past unnoticed; he was happy.
Look what he had found by chance—because, in fact, a black-and-white had accidentally paced him. An unexpected new supply of Substance D. What more could he ask out of life? He could probably now count on two weeks lying ahead of him, nearly half a month, before he croaked or nearly croaked—with- drawing from Substance D made the two the same. Two weeks! His heart soared, and he smelled, for a moment, coming in from the open windows of the car, the brief excitement of spring.
“Want to go with me to see Jerry Fabin?” he asked the girl. “I’m taking a load of his things over to him at the Number Three Federal Clinic, where they took him last night. I’m just carting over a little at a time, because there’s a chance he might get back out and I don’t want to have to drag it all back.”
“I’d better not see him,” Donna said.
“You know him? Jerry Fabin?”
“Jerry Fabin thinks I contaminated him originally with those bugs.”
“Aphids.”
“Well, then he didn’t know what they were. I better stay away. Last time I saw him he got really hostile. It’s his receptor sites, in his brain, at least I think so. It seems like it, from what the government pamphlets say now.”
“That can’t be restored, can it?” he said.
“No,” Donna said. “That’s irreversible.”
“The clinic people said they’d let me see him, and they said they believed he could work some, you know—” He gestured. “Not be—” Again he gestured; it was hard to find words for that, what he was trying to say about his friend.
Glancing at him, Donna said, “You don’t have speech-center damage, do you? In your—what is it called?—occipital lobe.”
“No,” he said. Vigorously.
“Do you have any kind of damage?” She tapped her head.
“No, it’s just . . . you know. I have trouble saying it about those fucking clinics; I hate the Neural-Aphasia Clinics. One time I was there visiting a guy, he was trying to wax a floor—they said he couldn’t wax the floor, I mean he couldn’t figure out how to do it . . . What got me was he kept trying. I mean not just for like an hour; he was still trying a month later when I came back. Just like he had been, over and over again, when I first saw him there, when I first went to visit him. He couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get it right. I remember the look on his face. He was sure he’d get it right if he kept trying to flash on what he was doing wrong. ‘What am I doing wrong?’ he kept asking them. There was no way to tell him. I mean, they told him—hell, I told him—but he still couldn’t figure it out.”
“The receptor sites in his brain are what I’ve read usually goes first,” Donna said placidly. “Someone’s brain where he’s gotten a bad hit or like that, like too heavy.” She was watching the cars ahead. “Look, there’s one of those new Porsches with two engines.” She pointed excitedly. “Wow.”
“I knew a guy who hot-wired one of those new Porsches,” he said, “and got it out on the Riverside Freeway and pushed it up to one seventy-five—wipe-out.” He gestured. “Right into the ass of a semi. Never saw it, I guess.” In his head he ran a fantasy number: himself at the wheel of a Porsche, but noticing the semi, all the semis. And everyone on the freeway—the Hollywood Freeway at rush hour—noticing him. Noticing him for sure, the lanky big-shouldered good-looking dude in the new Porsche going two hundred miles an hour, and all the cops’ faces hanging open helplessly.
“You’re shaking,” Donna said. She reached over and put her hand on his arm. A quiet hand that he at once responded to. “Slow down.”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I was up two nights and two days counting bugs. Counting them and putting them in bottles. And finally when we crashed and got up and got ready the next morning to put the bottles in the car, to take to the doctor to show him, there was nothing in the bottles. Empty.” He could feel the shaking now himself, and see it in his hands, on the wheel, the shaking hands on the steering wheel, at twenty miles an hour. “Every fucking one,” he said. “Nothing. No bugs. And then I re alized, I fucking realized. It came to me, about his brain, Jerry’s brain.”
The air no longer smelled of spring and he thought, abruptly, that he urgently needed a hit of Substance D; it was later in the day than he had realized, or else he had taken less than he thought. Fortunately, he had his portable supply with him, in the glove compartment, way back. He began searching for a vacant parking slot, to pull over.
“Your mind plays tricks,” Donna said remotely; she seemed to have withdrawn into herself, gone far away. He wondered if his erratic driving was bumming her. Probably so.
Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent: He saw, first, a big parked Pontiac with a bumper jack on the back of it that was slipping and a kid around thirteen with long thatched hair struggling to hold the car from rolling, meanwhile yelling
for assistance. He saw himself and Jerry Fabin running out of the house together, Jerry’s house, down the beer-can-littered driveway to the car. Himself, he grabbed at the car door on the driver’s side to open it, to stomp the brake pedal. But Jerry Fabin, wearing only his pants, without even shoes, his hair all disarranged and streaming—he had been sleeping—Jerry ran past the car to the back and knocked, with his bare pale shoulder that never saw the light of day, the boy entirely away from the car. The jack bent and fell, the rear of the car crashed down, the tire and wheel rolled away, and the boy was okay.
“Too late for the brake,” Jerry panted, trying to get his ugly greasy hair from his eyes and blinking. “No time.”
“ ’S he okay?” Charles Freck yelled. His heart still pounded.
“Yeah.” Jerry stood by the boy, gasping. “Shit!” he yelled at the boy in fury. “Didn’t I tell you to wait until we were doing it with you? And when a bumper jack slips—shit, man, you can’t hold back five thousand pounds!” His face writhed. The boy, lit tle Ratass, looked miserable and twitched guiltily. “I repeatedly and repeatedly told you!”
“I went for the brake,” Charles Freck explained, knowing his idiocy, his own equal fuckup, great as the boy’s and equally lethal. His failure as a full-grown man to respond right. But he wanted to justify it anyhow, as the boy did, in words. “But now I realize—” he yammered on, and then the fantasy number broke off; it was a documentary rerun, actually, because he remembered the day when this had happened, back when they were all living together. Jerry’s good instinct—otherwise Ratass would have been under the back of the Pontiac, his spine smashed.
The three of them plodded gloomily back toward the house, not even chasing the tire and wheel, which was still rolling off.
“I was asleep,” Jerry muttered as they entered the dark interior of the house. “It’s the first time in a couple weeks the bugs let up enough so I could. I haven’t got any sleep at all for five days—I been runnin’ and runnin’. I thought they were maybe gone; they’ve been gone. I thought they finally gave up and went somewhere else, like next door and out of the house entirely. Now I can feel them again. That tenth No Pest Strip I got, or maybe it’s the eleventh—they cheated me again, like they did with all the others.” But his voice was subdued now, not angry, just low and perplexed. He put his hand on Ratass’s head and gave him a sharp smack. “You dumb kid—when a bumper jack slips get the hell out of there. Forget the car. Don’t ever get behind it and try to push back against all that mass and block it with your body.”
“But, Jerry, I was afraid the axle—”
“Fuck the axle. Fuck the car. It’s your life.” They passed on through the dark living room, the three of them, and the rerun of a now gone moment winked out and died forever.
Visit your favorite store to purchase the book.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
Footnotes
* Logos is an important concept that litters the pages of the Exegesis. An ancient Greek word with a wide variety of meanings, Logos can mean word, speech, reason (in Latin ratio) or giving an account of something. For Heraclitus, to whom Dick frequently refers, Logos is the universal law that governs the cosmos, of which most human beings are somnolently ignorant. Dick certainly has this latter meaning in mind, but most importantly, Logos refers to the opening of the Gospel of John, which invokes the word that becomes flesh in the person of Christ. The human faculty for the intuition of Logos is nous (or noös, as Dick transliterates it) or “intellection,” which also appears all over the Exegesis. But the core of Dick’s vision is gnostic: it suggests a specifically mystical contact with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with Logos and who can communicate in the form of a ray of light, non-objective graphics, or some other visionary transfer. The novelty of Dick’s gnostic vision is that the divine communicates through information that has a kind of electrostatic life of its own.—SC
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† Neoplatonism is crossed with thermodynamics to provide a framework for Dick to think through his experiences here. The entire universe can be comprehended as subject to an imperative: more entropy! While entropy is usually associated with the negativity of disorder, here it functions as something like a revelation: the bare bones, so to speak, of our world are revealed. And while the revelation is a “regression,” it enables an insight into the nature of reality. The divine, “Atman,” is perceived within all things for Dick even as the vehicle of this revelation is entropy—in the guise of noise, he receives a clarifying signal.—RD
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* Until the mid-1960s, Dick’s novels explored isolation, entropy, and psychological withdrawal. But with Ubik (1966), his work becomes progressively more concerned with redemption and rebirth. After a team of anti-telepaths is injured in an explosion, the novel develops a dreamlike quality inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead. As the reality around them devolves, the characters begin to succumb to entropy themselves. A magical cure-all product begins to show up in advertisements: Ubik, which comes in an aerosol spray can and promises to combat the forces of encroaching chaos. Ubik is clearly an allegory for the Christian concept of “grace”; author Michael Bishop has written that Ubik is “whatever gets you through the dark night of the soul.” In the Exegesis, Ubik becomes shorthand for redemption.—DG
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* This word information has become so commonplace that it is important to mark out its history here. Dick is writing a quarter of a century after Claude Shannon published his Mathematical Theory of Communication with Warren Weaver, wherein he defined the quantity of “surprise value” contained in any message as its “entropy.” Shannon named this value entropy because he was using equations drawn from the thermodynamic measure of entropy in a system—Maxwell’s equations. The paradox here—one that Dick grappled with—is presented by the fact that information, whose etymology suggests the existence of a pattern or “form,” is found to be mathematically equivalent to the amount of disorder in a closed system. That is, entropy is both the measure of the content of a message and a measure of its disorder. Maximum entropy is maximum message. The Exegesis is a working-through of this paradox: was Valis signal or noise?—RD
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† The paradox of “entropy” as a measure of disorder and order is, for Dick, temporarily overcome. It is only through the breakdown of his ordinary reality that he can be in-formed by the suprasensual reality of the divine letter: the Logos. Here, as in the famous opening of the Gospel of John—“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”—language becomes an “active agent” that is actually prior to material reality. John 1:1 is additionally instructive because of what information theory would describe as the sentence’s “redundancy.” The semantic content of “In the beginning” reiterates the line’s formal content, since “In the beginning” is indeed in the beginning of the gospel. “In the beginning was the word” is, of course, in words, so here too the signal repeats itself through its own self-reference. In this passage Dick is treating this threefold redundancy as the Logos itself, out of which any message at all might emerge. Thus, when Dick receives this “letter from the future,” it is felt as salvation. The question of whether Valis is signal or noise is abstracted another level, as information “from the future” pours into the present, revealing the unreal nature of linear time.—RD
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* Here Dick acknowledges that, as he comes to terms with 2-3-74, he can choose different maps for his exploration, since “any such terms will do.” He regards the present as a “continual informational print-out” in which he nonetheless and simultaneously has “free will,” a perception that is in accord with the thinking of physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the chief architects of the informatic paradigm Dick is experiencing. Schrödinger, whose idea of the “code-script” in DNA gave birth to the concept of the genetic
code, grapples in What Is Life? with the simultaneously mechanistic and free characteristic of human experience: “(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’—am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.” Notice that to perceive this twofold nature of the human being requires an act of contemplation on Dick’s part: “I am free to consider it, digest and understand it, and, with its assistance, act on it.”—RD
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* When he wrote this sentence, Dick sat less than ten miles away from Disneyland, a geographic synchronicity that reminds us how regional a writer Dick was. Unlike most California writers, however, he bridged the “two hemispheres” of the bipolar Golden State. Before moving to the tacky conservative sprawl of Orange County, Dick lived for decades in the Bay Area, absorbing the lefty bohemia of Berkeley and Marin County. In 1973 he wrote Stanislaw Lem: “There is no culture here in California, only trash.” But as Dick’s own work proves, trash can achieve a visionary intensity, even a kind of escape velocity. After all, California was also the petri dish of our digital age, spawning the Internet, biotechnology, the personal computer, and geosynchronous satellite communication. And California has long encouraged the restless, eclectic, and sometimes wacky search for spiritual authenticity that drives the Exegesis. There is no more Dickian a Mecca than Disneyland. Indeed, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride offers a model for the entangled plots of a Phil Dick novel: a fantastic contraption that careens through a variety of trapdoors and false fronts and deposits you in a kind of surreal hell. But then the doors open once again, and you face the blank blue sky.—ED