Getting Dick

By Isaac Butler

Ah, Winter Break and the glories of reading for pleasure without apology!  For my three week sojurn to Richmond, VA, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, NY and Smith Mountain Lake, VA, I packed The Collected Nonfiction of Joan Didion, Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, Jonathan Lethem's monograph They Live (about the film of the same name), Charles Baxter's Burning Down The House, Toni Morrison's Beloved and The Library of America's Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s. From this last tome, I just finished Dick's 1966 Now Wait For Last Year, about a surgeon who gets caught up in an unhappy marriage, an intergalactic war, and a drug that causes people to move through time.

Despite having all the regular Dickian elements-- clumsy, 8th grade level prose, hilarious names, crazy hidden conspiracies, brilliant ideas tossed off with abandon, etc.-- the book wasn't really doing it for me like, say, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.  Until, that is, its final, amazing chapter.  This chapter has in it everything I look for in a Philip K. Dick novel and more. 

But discussing it at all involves spoilers, obviously. It's the last chapter. So if you don't want it spoiled, don't keep reading. If you've never read Dick, tho, lemme tell ya, this is not the place to start.  Start with either of the novels mentioned above, and when you're done with those two, read Dr. Bloodmoney and then A Scanner Darkly.  If you're already familiar with Dick, tho, Now Wait For Last Year is a bit of a sleeper gem.

Full spoilage, after the jump:

The final chapter of Now Wait for Last Year takes us into Tijuana, in 2055.  The protagonist, Eric Sweetscent, has not-quite-suceeded (but not-quite failed) in his quest to save Terra from its ongoing embroilment in a war in which it has picked the wrong side.  Not because that side (the 'Starmen) are losing (although they are) but because they are totalitarian bastards with imperial intentions, while their foes (the reegs, lowercase for whatever reason) are peaceful and friendly.  The difference is the 'Starmen look like us-- are, in fact, our ancestors-- while the reegs are giant insects. 

If you can't tell, Dick had a somewhat jaundiced view of humanity, although he was never possessed by the kind of misanthropy that characterizes Harlan Ellison. And this is one of the things that sets Dick apart; he takes humanity as a venal, fundamentally self-interested species that is occasionally capable of moments of extreme compassion and nobility.  These moments, however, are destined to be thwarted.  And we see this in Eric Sweetscent.

Sweetscent here serves as the prototypical Dick protagonist. For one thing, he's a bit of a schlub.  This again is part of why I love Dick's novels. Authors like Frank Herbert or Larry Niven or Isaac Asimov (all writers I have enjoyed) would have centered Now Wait For Last Year around the characters with real power, either wealthy industrialist Virgil Ackerman or de-facto ruler of Earth (and Secretary General of the UN) Gino Mollinari.  Or perhaps one of their children who rises to power, or some unknown boy of poor origins who follows the Joseph Campbell checklist.  

This is so clearly what should be done, that the cover art pictured above promises you this. Only One Man Could Save The World, And He Was Dead-- Again.  This sentence is about Molinari. The novel is about Sweetscent.

And what's Sweetscent about?  Well, like Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream he's trapped in a loveless marriage.   And while the fate of an interstellar war and the future of Terra rests on his shoulders, Sweetscent is at least as interested in finding a way to either save or extricate himself from his relationship with his drug addict wife.  This dilemma propels him through the novel. Each revelation about the war is complimented in some way by a revelation about his wife Karen.

This comes to a head in the final chapter.  Sweetscent, as mentioned above, has failed (At least somewhat). His mission-- to bring a spy from the reegs to meet with Molinari-- has gone south when the spy is located and murdered.  But it's not all a failure, for Molinari has decided to change sides to the reegs anyway, and as the novel comes to a close and as the 'Starmen invade Earth, we know the next phase of the conflict has begun.

Knowing this, Sweetscent wanders Tijuana, and here Dick's prose grows increasingly evocative, almost like Bolano during parts of 2666.  Sweetscent asks a pimp (out of curiosity rather than prurient need, sex is ever present but rarely realized in the Dick novels I've read) how much the going rate for a seven year old girl is, and he responds, "Ten dollars plus the cost of the room; there must be in name of God a room.  The sidewalk makes love into something sordid; you cannot do it here and respect yourself after."

(And here the Dickian non-revising is present as well.  The person speaking this line in eleven years old, and so his vocabulary is absurd.  Also, the sentence is missing the word "the" between "in" and "name.")

Here on the streets of Tijuana, Sweetscent comes to a revelation about permissiveness:

"In a town where everything is legal, he thought, and nothing achieves worth, you are wrenched back into childhood.  Placed among your blocks and toys, with all your universe within grasp.  The price for license is high: it consists of a forfeit of adulthood.  And yet he loved it here. The noise and stirring represented authentic life.  Some people found all this evil; he did not. People who thought that were wrong."

This conflict-- between realizing the damage of a kind of lifestyle and craving its authenticity at the same time-- is pure Philip K. Dick, just as the tension between realizing what low-down no-good assholes we are while simultaneously believing us capable of moments of transcendence is.

As the chapter progresses, Eric decides to take a bit of the time travel drug that propels the action of the novel.  JJ-180, an instantly addictive, intensely toxic drug invented as a weapon of war has the side effect of causing its user to move in time.  Some people move backwards. Some move sideways into other quantum realities and some move forwards.  Of course they move into possible futures and possible pasts, and it is into one of these that Eric travels, ten years thanks to the drug.  

And what does he want to know in this moment, when the world is falling apart around him, when an invasion is about to start?  He wants to know what happens to his wife.  His wife he cannot stop loving and cannot stop hating.  And what he finds out is that he will eventually have her committed and then remain obsessed with her for the rest of his days.

This kind of hopelessness is again pure Dick. And the strange thing about his books is how depressing they often are. This is why a Blade Runner where Rachel can get pregnant is a travesty, while a Blade Runner where the last thing you hear is Edward James Olmos saying Too bad she won't live, but then again, who does? while Harrison Ford's eyes glow, robotlike in an elevator is a triumph. 

So while Eric has succeeded in saving Earth (sort of) he has absolutely failed to resolve his relationship with his wife.  Uncomforted by the first, he decides (and fails to) kill himself with a substance called g-Totex blau.  And this leads to another classic Dick moment, a paragraph both clumsy and beautiful in its construction that reads like a cross between a text message and James Salter:

"Holding the package of g-Totex blau in the palm of his hand, he weighed it, experienced its mass. Felt the Earth's attraction for it.  Yes, he thought, the Earth likes even this.  She accepts everything."

As the drug wares off and Eric returns to his present, what is left to do but to ask for advice from an artificially intelligent taxi-cab?  And that is where we leave him, in the back of a taxi-cab receiving marital counseling.  It's a scene both absurd ("I have no wife sir... Autonomic mechanisms never marry; everyone knows that,") and moving.  

And at the very end, as the cab dispenses computerized wisdom, Dick manages somehow to tie in Eric's job as a surgeon keeping impossibly old people alive to the drug abuse, political machinations and quantum reality manipulation of the last two hundred pages.  "Life is composed of reality configurations," the cab intones, "To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."

It is these "uniquely special easier conditions" that all of the characters in the novel pursue, and in this pursuit, they are truly human.  And this-- more than the hidden conspiracies and whacked-out trips to other dimensions, fucking with reality, and enough tossed off concepts to fuel ten other novels*-- is what makes Dick so special. In the midst of what he's famous for, he finds a space for an ongoing inquiry into the human condition, and roots his stories in these sad sack losers trying to figure out what their purpose is.  

It's this quest for meaning and purpose that his characters are destined to fail.  They might uncover the vast conspiracy (or at least reveal it to the reader, as Bob Arctor does in A Scanner Darkly), but they still don't know their own purpose.  Now Wait For Last Year ends on a twinned note of resignation of hope.  Eric has changed the course of human history, but it was never his mission to do so. Instead, like the sentient shopping carts, Eric "still persists."  

That taxicab, after all, is taking him back to his day job. 

*: Some examples... the company Eric works for manufactures artificially intelligent guidance systems.  The person in charge of quality control is too heartbroken by them to throw them out, so he wires them to little carts and lets them loose where they run around like feral cats.  Early in the novel, Dick introduces a circle of drug addicts friends of Kathy Sweetscent's that are never really mentioned again but have the potential to be like the gang in A Scanner Darkly. And that's not even mentioning the character who is so empathic he gets whatever disease anyone within a one mile radius has, including organ failure. Or the billionaire industrialist who is trying to construct an exact replica of Washington, D.C. circa 1935 on Mars. 

PS: I make a few sweeping statements about Dick above, and while I've read enough of his work to feel like I can do this, I have not read it all, and there are obviously exceptions.  Hell, there are exceptions even within the work I've read.  Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, for example, is not about a schlub, but instead about a beloved talk show host who is changed, Kafka's-Metamorphosis-like into a nobody schlub.  If you want to read something about Dick by someone who has read ALL of Philip K. Dick at least twice, Jonathan Lethem's essay on the subject is your place to go. 

Comments

[RVCBard]

This post needs to be sued for false advertising.

[michael]

You need to read I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère