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CHAPTER 1
BERKELEY
On December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Dorothy Kindred Dick gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The babies were six weeks premature and very underweight. Unaware that she was not producing enough milk for both infants, and because no one — neither a family member nor a doctor — suggested to her that she supplement their diet with formula, Dorothy undernourished the twins during the first weeks of their lives. On January 26, 1929, the baby girl, whom her parents had named Jane, died. She was buried in the cemetery in her father's hometown of Fort Morgan, Colorado. The little boy survived. His parents had his name, Philip, engraved alongside Jane's on the headstone; under his name, next to the dash that followed the date of birth he shared with his sister, a blank space was left. Not long afterward, the Dicks moved to California.
*
A rare family photo shows a hatchet-faced Edgar Dick in a rumpled suit and wearing a fedora, the kind later made famous by Treasury agents in films like The Untouchables. And in fact Edgar was a federal employee, though with the Department of Agriculture rather than the Treasury. His job involved rooting out fraud in a federal price-support program that paid farmers to reduce their herds: he had to verify that farmers had actually slaughtered the numbers of cows they claimed; if not, he had to kill the animals himself. Hunched over the wheel of his Buick, he crisscrossed a California countryside hit hard by the Depression, encountering grim, suspicious locals along the way who might well show their hospitality to a government agent by shoving under his nose the rat they were roasting on a makeshift spit. The one bright spot in these trips was occasionally coming across a fellow World War I veteran with whom he could swap stories. Edgar, who had volunteered for active duty, had come back from Europe with stories of bravery, sergeant's stripes, and a gas mask. Once, he took the mask out of its box and pulled it over his head to amuse his son, who was three at the time. At the sight of the round opaque eyes and the sinister-looking rubber trunk, the boy screamed in terror, convinced that a hideous monster, a giant insect, had eaten his father and taken his place. For weeks afterward Phil kept scanning his father's face for other signs of the substitution. Edgar's attempts to tease his son out of his anxieties only heightened the boy's fears. From then on, Dorothy couldn't bring herself to look at her husband without rolling her eyes and huffing self-righteously. She had her own ideas about how to raise children.
Dorothy had been a beautiful woman when Edgar married her, shortly after the war; people said she looked liked Greta Garbo. Age and illness took their toll, however, and left her looking rather like a scarecrow, bereft of the sex appeal she had once possessed although not without a certain seductive severity. A voracious reader, Dorothy divided humanity into two camps: those who devoted their lives to creative pursuits and those who did not. Unable to conceive of anyone of any worth who did not fall squarely within the first camp, she spent her life in a state of intellectual bovarysme, trying but never managing to break into that elite circle, the ranks of published authors. She despised her husband, who, apart from things military, was interested only in football. He tried to pass on his passion to his son, sneaking him out of the house and taking him to games. Phil, however, was his mother's child, even when he disobeyed her; he couldn't understand how grown-ups could get so worked up about a stupid game.
Phil was one of those pudgy, brooding little boys who grow up to become chess champions or musical prodigies; in fact, his childhood had much in common with that of Nabokov's Luzhin or Glenn Gould (his contemporary and in some respects his spiritual cousin). People praised him for his maturity and his precocious appreciation of music. More than anything else in the world, though, Phil loved spending hours on end hiding in old boxes, silent and safe from the world.
He was five when his parents separated and divorced. Dorothy had taken the initiative, having been assured by a psychiatrist that her child would not suffer from the separation (he complained about it his entire life). Edgar had not wanted to sever all ties to his son and ex-wife, but his first visits following the divorce were so coldly received that he soon gave up and moved to Nevada. Hoping to find work that was both more interesting and better paid than the secretarial position in which she felt she had been stagnating, Dorothy took Phil and moved to Washington, D.C.
The next three years were horrendous. Having left Chicago as a baby, Phil knew only the West Coast and its mild winters; in Washington he discovered the dull misery of rain and cold, poverty and loneliness. Dorothy spent her days working at the Federal Children's Bureau, editing and correcting the proofs of educational pamphlets. Every day Phil would come home from Countryside School in Silver Spring, Maryland, the Quaker academy where the children gathered silently in circles awaiting the direct experience of God, and spend hours alone in the dark, sad apartment waiting for his mother to return. Since she came home late, too tired to tell him stories, he had to tell himself stories he already knew. His favorite was the one about the fairy who grants three wishes to a farmer and his wife. The wife asks for a nice fat sausage, and instantly one appears before her, fat and juicy. Her husband is furious. "Idiot! How can you waste one of your wishes that way?" he asks her. "May this sausage always hang from your nose!" And no sooner does he utter these words than the sausage attaches itself to the woman's nose; to get rid of it, they have to use the third wish. Phil invented endless variations on the theme. When he learned to read, he discovered Winnie-the-Pooh and not long afterward, an abridged version of Quo Vadis. This story, which seemed to bring to life everything he had been hearing at his Quaker school, troubled him deeply. Unbeknownst to his mother, Phil spent his afternoons for an entire winter playing at being one of the first Christians hiding in the catacombs.
*
Phil and Dorothy's lonely exile in Washington ended in 1938, when Dorothy took a job in the U.S. Forestry Department office located on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Mother and son could breathe again. Anyone who lived there for more than a week knew that Berkeley was the center of the world. A feminist and pacifist, a tireless proponent of progressive ideas, Dorothy blossomed in this academic enclave in which one could be both an office worker and a women's rights activist. As for Phil, he loved to watch the water in San Francisco Bay sparkling in the sun; he also loved the green lawns of the Berkeley campus and the small creek running through it in which local children were allowed to play and the bells of Sather Tower, whose joyous, peaceful tones echoed over the rooftops. School was a different matter. Phil had asthma and episodes of tachycardia, and he took full advantage of his conditions to miss school at every opportunity. Even when she could tell he was faking symptoms, Dorothy played along and let him stay home. Deep down, she was delighted that he took so little after his father, that he hated sports, horseplay, and all those other mindless tribal activities that absorbed the interest of the average red-blooded American male. He was more like her — an artistic soul, an albatross whose enormous wingspan prevented him from walking on the earth.
By the age of twelve, Phil was already immersed in the things that would become his lifelong passions: listening to music, reading, and typing. He had his mother buy him classical records, 78s at first, and he soon developed a talent — of which both mother and son were not a little proud — for identifying any symphony, opera, or concerto after hearing only a few measures played or, for that matter, hummed. He collected illustrated magazines with titles like Astounding! and Amazing! and Unknown!, and these periodicals, in the guise of serious scientific discussion, introduced him to lost continents, haunted pyramids, ships that vanished mysteriously in the Sargasso Sea. But he also read stories by Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the recluse from Providence, Rhode Island, whose protagonists face abominations too monstrous for them to name or even describe.
Early on, Phil stopped merely reading these writers and began to imitate them. In Washington he had written a few lugubrious poems — one about a kitty eating a birdie, another about an ant that drags the carcass of a bumblebee into the forest and leaves it there, a third about a tearful family burying its blind dog. Typing freed Phil's creative energies. As soon as he had a typewriter of his own, he became a wizard at the keyboard. No one could type faster than Philip Dick or for as long; it took him only ten days to finish his first novel, a sequel to Gulliver's Travels called Return to Lilliput (the manuscript has been lost). His first published works were macabre tales inspired by Poe; they appeared in the "Young Author's Club" column in the Berkeley Gazette. The magazine's literary editor, who signed her name "Aunt Flo," favored realism of the Chekhov or Nathanael West school. Even as she continued to publish his work, she exhorted him to write about what he knew — everyday life with its actual little details — and to keep his imagination in check. At thirteen, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood, Phil founded a magazine of his own. Foreshadowings of the future Philip K. Dick are everywhere apparent in this endeavor: in its title, The Truth, in the editorial statement that opened the magazine's first and only issue ("This paper is sworn to print only that which is beyond doubt the TRUTH"), and in the fact that this uncompromising truth took the form of intergalactic adventures, the fruit of the feverish daydreams of the prolix adolescent who was the magazine's sole contributor.
*
Around this time Phil began having a recurring dream in which he found himself in a bookstore trying to locate an issue of Astounding! that would complete his collection. The rare, indeed priceless, issue contained a story entitled "The Empire Never Ended" that, if only he could get his hands on it, would reveal the secrets of the universe to him. The first time he had the dream he awoke just as he had worked his way down to the bottom of a pile of old magazines he was sure contained the prized issue. He waited anxiously for the dream to recur, and whenever it did he found the pile of magazines exactly as he had left it. Again he started rummaging through. With each recurrence of the dream, the pile became smaller and smaller, but he always awoke before he could get to the bottom of it. He spent days reciting the story's title to himself, until he could no longer distinguish it from the sound of the blood beating in his ears when he had a fever. He could see the letters that formed the words of the title; he could picture the cover illustration. The illustration worried him, even though — or because — he couldn't quite bring it into focus. Over the course of weeks, Phil's desire to find the magazine turned into anxiety that he actually might do so. He knew that if he read "The Empire Never Ended" the world's secrets would be revealed, but he also understood the danger of such knowledge. He had read it in Lovecraft: if we knew everything, we would go mad with terror. Eventually, Phil began to see his dream as a diabolical trap. The buried issue was lying in wait, ready to devour him whole. Instead of tearing through the pile of magazines as he had at first, Phil tried to slow his fingers as they pulled one magazine after another from the pile, bringing him closer and closer to the final horror. He became afraid to fall asleep.
Then, for no apparent reason, he stopped having the dream. He awaited its return, first nervously, then impatiently; at the end of two weeks, he would have given anything for the dream to come back. He remembered the story of the three wishes, how the last one had to be squandered to remedy the catastrophe of the previous two. He had wished that he could read "The Empire Never Ended"; then, sensing danger, he wished that he wouldn't have to; now, once again, he wished he could. Then again, it was probably better for him not to get his third wish, because he wouldn't get a fourth wish to undo it. Still, he was disappointed that the dream didn't recur. He longed for it. Then he forgot about it.
*
Phil lived alone with his mother. Dorothy and he called each other by their first names, treating each other with a curious combination of formality and intimacy. At night they left their bedroom doors open and held conversations from their beds. Their favorite topics were books, diseases, and medications. A lifelong hypochondriac, Dorothy maintained a supply of pharmaceuticals nearly as extensive as her son's record collection. When tranquilizers started hitting the market, right after the war, she was among the first to set off for the new chemical El Dorado. She tried Thorazine, Valium, Tofranil, and Librium the instant they became available; she ranked them according to the quality of the stupor they induced and enthusiastically recommended her favorite brands to her friends.
From time to time Phil saw his father, who had remarried and settled in Pasadena, where he worked for the Department of Commerce and became a regular on a local radio program called This Is Your Government. His broadcasts impressed the shy teenager, who dreamed of exercising power over others. Like everyone else during the war years, Phil was patriotic but he was also fascinated by Nazi propaganda, priding himself on being able to admire a plan for the way it was being executed even though he found its goals abhorrent. Within him, he felt, there was a leader among men, but, as he had no followers, he stuck close to his own little world.
He contented himself with ruling over that little world, filling it with possessions. His mother constantly begged him to straighten up his room, but he was one of those compulsive personalities who, like Sherlock Holmes, can date a file by the thickness of the dust covering it and relish being the only one who can make sense of the reigning chaos. In Phil's case, the chaos was an imperceptibly organized jumble of model airplanes and army tanks, chess sets, records, science fiction magazines — and, somewhat better hidden than those other things, pictures of naked women.
Of course, Phil was starting to become aware of girls, and even though, thanks to his lack of self-confidence, his interest remained fairly theoretical, it was enough to threaten the osmotic unity of mother and son. This interest, coupled with Phil's bad grades, introversion, and anxiety attacks, persuaded Dorothy that her son should see a psychiatrist. He was fourteen when she took him to his first session, the first in a series that would continue nearly uninterrupted until his death.
*
It took only a few sessions — along with hours in between spent leafing through books that his mother had feverishly annotated — for young Phil to begin speaking knowledgeably about "neuroses," "complexes," and "phobias." He subjected his classmates to various personality tests of his own devising from which, without revealing the sources of his wisdom, he drew conclusions that were to varying degrees flattering and welcome.
Toward the end of the 1930s, psychological tests had begun influencing middle-class Americans' notions of what was going on in their heads — as well as in the heads of their neighbors. Administered to over fourteen million recruits subsequent to America's declaration of war, these tests revealed that more than two million of them had one neuropsychiatric disorder or another that was serious enough to disqualify them from military service. Before the establishment of these new, reputedly scientific parameters of mental illness, no one had suspected the number of misfits would be so astronomically high. The result was panic — as well as a vast infusion of public money into the mental health sector and growing, popular interest in psychoanalysis, which, it was hoped, would turn these problem cases into responsible, mentally balanced citizens.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "I Am Alive and You Are Dead"
by .
Copyright © 1993 Emmanuel Carrère.
Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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