The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

Paul McAuley The Two Dicks

Phil is flying. He is in the air, and he is flying. His head full of paranoia blues, the Fear beating around him like black wings as he is borne above America.

The revelation came to him that morning. He can time it exactly: 0948, March 20, 1974. He was doing his programme of exercises as recommended by his personal trainer, Mahler blasting out of the top-of-the-line stereo in the little gym he’d had made from the fifth bedroom. And in the middle of his second set of sit-ups something goes off in his head. A terrifically bright soundless explosion of clear white light.

He’s been having flashes — phosphene after-images, blank moments of calm in his day — for about a month now, but this is the spiritual equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. His first thought is that it is a stroke. That his high blood pressure has finally killed him. But apart from a mild headache he feels perfectly fine. More than fine, in fact. Alert and fully awake and filled with a great calm.

It’s as if something took control of me a long time ago,he thinks. As if something put the real me to sleep and allowed a constructed personality to carry on my life, and now, suddenly, I’m fully awake again. The orthomolecular vitamin diet, perhaps that did it, perhaps it really did heighten synchronous firing of the two hemispheres of my brain. I’m awake, and I’m ready to put everything in order. And without any help, he thinks.Without Emmet or Mike. That’s important.

By this time he is standing at the tall window, looking down at the manicured lawn that runs out from the terrace to the shaggy hedge of flowering bougainvillea, the twisty shapes of the cypresses. The Los Angeles sky pure and blue, washed clean by that night’s rain, slashed by three white contrails to make a leaning A.

A for affirmation, perhaps. Or A for act.

The first thing, he thinks, because he thinks about it every two or three hours, because it has enraged him ever since Emmet told him about it, the very first thing I have to do is deal with the people who stole my book.

A week ago, perhaps inspired by a precursor of the clear white flash, Phil tried to get hold of a narcotics-agent badge, and after a long chain of phone calls managed to get through to John Finlator, the deputy narcotics director, who advised Phil to go straight to the top. And he’d been right, Phil thinks now. If I want a Fed badge, I have to get it from the Man. Get sworn in or whatever. Initiated. Then deal with the book pirates and those thought criminals in the SFWA, show them what happens when you steal a real writer’s book.

It all seemed so simple in the afterglow of revelation, but Phil begins to have his first misgivings less than an hour later, in the taxi to LAX. Not about the feeling of clarity and the sudden energy it has given him, but about whether he is making the best use of it. There are things he’s forgotten, like unformed words on the tip of his tongue. Things he needs to deal with, but he can’t remember what they are.

He is still worrying at this, waiting in line at the check-in desk, when this bum appears right in front of him, and thrusts what seems like an unravelling baseball under Phil’s nose.

It is a copy of the pirated novel: Phil’s simmering anger reignites, and burns away every doubt.

It is a cheap paperback printed by some backstreet outfit in South Korea, the thin absorbent paper grainy with wood specks, a smudged picture of a castle silhouetted against the Japanese flag on the cover, his name far bigger than the title. Someone stole a copy of Phil’s manuscript, the one he agreed to shelve, the one his publishers paid handsomely not to publish in one of those tricky deals Emmet is so good at. And some crook, it still isn’t completely clear who, published this cheap completely illegal edition. Emmet told Phil about it a month ago, and Phil’s publishers moved swiftly to get an injunction against its sale anywhere in the USA. But thousands of copies are in circulation anyway, smuggled into the country and sold clandestinely.

And the SFWA, Phil thinks, the Science Fiction Writers of America, Emmet is so right about them, the Swine Fucking Whores of Amerika, they may deny that they have anything to do with the pirate edition, but their bleatings about censorship and their insidious promotion of this blatant violation of my copyright proves they want to drag me down to their level.

Me: the greatest living American novelist. Erich Segal called me that only last month in a piece in The New York Review of Books; Updike joshed me about it during the round of golf we played the day after I gave that speech at Harvard. The greatest living American novelist: of course the SFWA want to claim me for their own propaganda purposes, to pump my life’s blood into their dying little genre.

And now this creature has materialized in front of Phil, like some early version or failed species of human being, with blond hair tangled over his shoulders, a handlebar moustache, dressed in a buckskin jacket and faded blue jeans like Hollywood’s idea of an Indian scout, a guitar slung over his shoulder, fraying black sneakers, or no, those were his feet, bare feet so filthy they looked like busted shoes. And smelling of pot smoke and powerful sweat. This aborigine, this indigent, his hand thrust towards Phil, and a copy of the stolen novel in that hand, as he says, ‘I love this book, man. It tells it like it is. The little men, man, that’s who count, right? Little men, man, like you and me. So could you likesign this for me if it’s no hassle. ’

And Phil is seized by righteous anger and great wrath, and he smites his enemy right there, by the American Airlines First Class check-in desk. Or at least he grabs the book and tears it in half — the broken spine yielding easily, almost gratefully — and tells the bum to fuck off. Oh, just imagine the scene, the bum whining about his book, his property, and Phil telling the creature he doesn’t deserve to read any of his books, he is banned for life from reading his books, and two security guards coming and hustling the bum away amid apologies to the Great American Novelist. The bum doesn’t go quietly. He screams and struggles, yells that he, Phil, is a fake, a sell-out, man, the guitar clanging and chirping like a mocking grasshopper as he is wrestled away between the two burly, beetling guards.

Phil has to take a couple of Ritalin pills to calm down. To calm his blood down. Then a couple of uppers so he can face the journey.

He still has the book. Torn in half, pages frazzled by reading and rereading slipping out of it every time he opens it, so that he has to spend some considerable time sorting them into some kind of order, like a conjuror gripped by stage-flop sweat in the middle of a card trick, before he can even contemplate looking at it.

Emmet said it all. What kind of commie fag organization would try to blast Phil’s reputation with this cheap shot fired under radar? Circulating it on the campuses of America, poisoning the young minds who should be drinking deep clear draughts of his prose. Not this. this piece of dreck.

The Man in the High Castle. A story about an author locked in the castle of his reputation, a thinly disguised parable about his own situation, set in a parallel or alternate history where the USA lost the war and was split into two, the East governed by the Nazis, the West by the Japanese. A trifle, a silly fantasy. What had he been thinking when he wrote it? Emmet was furious when Phil sent him the manuscript. He wasted no words in telling Phil how badly he had fucked up, asking him bluntly, what the hell did he think he was doing, wasting his time with this lame sci-fi crap?

Phil had been stuck, that was what. And he’s still stuck. Ten, fifteen years of writing and rewriting, two marriages made and broken while Phil works on and on at the same book, moving farther and farther away from his original idea, so far out now that he thinks he might never get back. The monster doesn’t even have a title. The Long-Awaited. The Brilliant New. The Great Unfinished. Whatever. And in the midst of this mire, Phil set aside the Next Great Novel and pulled a dusty idea from his files — dating back to 1961, for Chrissake — and something clicked. He wrote it straight out, a return to the old days of churning out sci-fi stories for tiny amounts of money while righteously high on speed: cranked up, cranking out the pages. For a little while he was so happy: just the idea of finishing something made him happy. But Emmet made him see the error of his ways. Made him see that you can’t go back and start over. Made him see the depth of his error, the terrible waste of his energy and his talent.

That was when Phil, prompted by a research paper he discovered, started on a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, started dosing himself with high levels of water-soluble vitamins.

And then the pirated edition ofThe Man in the High Castle appeared, and Emmet started over with his needling recriminations and insinuations, whipping up in Phil a fine hot sweat of shame and fury.

Phil puts the thing back in his coat pocket. Leans back in his leather-upholstered First Class seat. Sips his silvery martini. The anger is still burning inside him. For the moment he has forgotten his doubts. Straight to the top, that’s the only answer. Straight to the President.

After a while, he buzzes the stewardess and gets some writing paper. Takes out his gold-nibbed, platinum-cased Cross fountain pen, the pen his publishers gave him to mark the publication of the ten millionth copy of the ground-breaking, genre-bustingThe Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Starts to write:

Dear Mr President: I would like to introduce myself. I am Philip K. Dick and admire and have great respect for your office. I talked to Deputy Narcotics Director Finlator last week and expressed my concern for our country.

Things go smoothly, as if the light has opened some kind of path, as if it has tuned Phil’s brain, eliminated all the dross and kipple clagging it. Phil flies to Washington, D.C. and immediately hires a car, a clean light-blue Chrysler with less than a thousand miles on the clock, and drives straight to the White House.

Because there is no point in posting the letter. That would take days, and it might never reach the President. All Phil would get back would be a photograph signed by one of the autograph machines that whir ceaselessly in some White House basement.

No, the thing to do is subvert the chain of command, the established order. So Phil drives to the White House: to the White House gate. Where he gives the letter to one of the immaculately turned out Marine guards.

Because of an act of wanton piracy, Sir, the young people, the Black Panthers etc etc do not consider me their enemy or as they call it The Establishment. Which I call America. Which I love. Sir, I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out. I have done an in-depth study of Drug Abuse and Communist Brainwashing Techniques.

Phil walking up to the White House gates in the damp March chill, handing the letter, written on American Airlines notepaper and sealed in an American Airlines envelope, to the Marine. While still buzzing from the uppers he dropped in the LAX washroom.

And driving away to find the hotel he’s booked himself into. Everything going down smoothly. Checking in. Washing up in his room. Wondering if he should use the room menu or find a restaurant, when the phone rings. It’s his agent. Emmet is downstairs in the lobby. Emmet wants to know what the hell he’s up to.

And suddenly Phil is struck by another flash of light, igniting at the centre of his panic, and by the terrible thought that he is on the wrong path.

Phil’s agent, Anthony Emmet, is smart and ferocious and tremendously ambitious. A plausible and worldly guy who, as he likes to put it, found Phil under a stone one day in the early 1950s, when Phil was banging out little sci-fi stories for a living and trying to write straight novels no one wanted to publish. Emmet befriended Phil, guided him, mentored him, argued with him endlessly. Because (he said) he knew Phil had it in him to be huge if he would only quit puttering around with the sci-fi shit. He persuaded Phil to terminate his relationship with the Scott Meredith Agency, immediately sold Phil’s long mainstream novel Voices from the Street to a new publishing outfit, Dynmart, guided Phil through endless rewrites. And Voices, the odyssey of a young man who tries to escape an unfulfilling job and a failing marriage, who is seduced by socialists, fascists and hucksters, but at last finds redemption by returning to the life he once scorned, made it big: it sold over two hundred thousand copies in hardback, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was made into a movie starring Leslie Caron and George Peppard.

But the long struggle withVoices blocked or jammed something in Phil. After the deluge, a trickle: a novel about interned Japanese in the Second World War, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which received respectful but baffled reviews; a slim novella,Earthshaker, cannibalized from an old unpublished novel. And then stalled silence, Phil paralysed by the weight of his reputation while his slim oeuvre continued to multiply out there in the world, yielding unexpected translations in Basque and Turkish, the proceedings of a symposium on the work of Philip K. Dick and Upton Sinclair, an Australian miniseries that blithely transposed the interned Japanese of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy into plucky colonial prisoners of war.

Phil hasn’t seen his agent for ten years. It seems to him that Emmet still looks as implausibly young as he did the day they first met, his skin smooth and taut and flawless, as if made of some material superior to ordinary human skin, his keen black eyes glittering with intelligence, his black hair swept back, his black silk suit and white silk shirt sharp, immaculate, his skinny black silk tie knotted just so. He looks like a 1950s crooner, a Mob hit man; he looks right at home in the plush, candlelit red-leather booth of the hotel bar, nursing a tall glass of seltzer and trying to understand why Phil wants to see the President.

‘I’m on the case about the piracy,’ Emmet tells Phil. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I’m going to make this — ’ he touches the frazzled book on the table with a minatory forefinger ‘- go away. Just like I made that short-story collection Berkley wanted to put out go away. I have people on this day and night,’ Emmet says, with a glint of dark menace. ‘The morons responsible for this outrage are going to be very sorry. Believe me.’

‘I thought it was about the book,’ Phil says. He’s sweating heavily; the red-leather booth is as snug and hot as a glove, or a cocoon. ‘But now I’m not sure—’

‘You’re agitated, and I completely understand. A horrible act of theft like this would unbalance anyone. And you’ve been self-medicating again. Ritalin, those huge doses of vitamins. ’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the vitamins,’ Phil says. ‘I got the dosages from Psychology Today.’

‘In a paper about treating a kid with schizophrenic visions,’ Emmet says. ‘I know all about it. No wonder you’re agitated. Last week, I understand, you called the police and asked to be arrested because you were — what was it? — a machine with bad thoughts.’

Phil is dismayed about the completeness of Emmet’s information. He says, ‘I suppose Mike told you about that.’

Mike is Phil’s driver and handyman, installed in a spartan little apartment over Phil’s three-door garage.

Emmet says, ‘Of course Mike told me that. He and I, we have your interests at heart. You have to trust us, Phil. You left without even telling Mike where you were going. It would have taken a lot of work to find you, except I just happen to be in Washington on business.’

‘I don’t need any help,’ Phil tells Emmet. ‘I know exactly what I’m doing.’

But he’s not so sure now that he does. When the light hit him he knew with absolute certainty that something was wrong with his life. That he had to do something about it. He fixed on the first thing that had come into his head, but now he wonders again if it is the right thing. Maybe, he thinks unhappily, I’m going deeper into what’s wrong. Maybe I’m moving in the wrong direction, chasing the wrong enemy.

Emmet, his psychic antennae uncannily sensitive, picks up on this. He says, ‘You know exactly what to do? My God, I’m glad one of us does, because we need every bit of help to get you out of this mess. Now what’s this about a letter?’

Phil explains with great reluctance. Emmet listens gravely and says, ‘Well, I think it’s containable.’

‘I thought that if I got a badge, I could get things done,’ Phil says. The martini he’s drinking now is mixing strangely with the martinis he drank in the air, with the speed and Ritalin he took in LAX, the speed he took just now in his hotel bedroom. He feels a reckless momentum, feels as if he’s flying right there in the snug, hot booth.

‘You’ve got to calm down, Phil,’ Emmet says. Candlelight glitters in his dark eyes as he leans forward. They look like exquisite gems, Phil thinks, cut with a million microscopic facets. Emmet says, ‘You’re coming up to fifty, and you aren’t out of your mid-life crisis yet. You’re thrashing around, trying this, trying that, when you just have to put your trust in me. And you really shouldn’t be mixing Ritalin and Methedrin, you know that’s contraindicated.’

Phil doesn’t try and deny it; Emmet always knows the truth. He says, ‘It’s as if I’ve woken up. As if I’ve been dreaming my life, and now I’ve woken up and discovered that none of it was real. As if a veil, what the Greeks call dokos, the veil between me and reality has been swept away. Everything connects, Emmet,’ Phil says, picking up the book and waving it in his agent’s face. Loose pages slip out, flutter to the table or to the floor. ‘You know why I have this book? I took it from some bum who came up to me in the airport. Call that coincidence?’

‘I’d say it was odd that he gave you the copy I gave you,’ Emmet says. ‘The agency stamp is right there on the inside of the cover.’ As Phil stares at the purple mark, he adds, ‘You’re stressed out, Phil, and that weird diet of yours has made things worse, not better. The truth is, you don’t need to do anything except leave it all to me. If you’re honest, isn’t this all a complicated ploy to distract yourself from your real work? You should go back to LA tonight, there’s a Red Eye that leaves in two and a half hours. Go back to LA and go back to work. Leave everything else to me.’

While he talks, Emmet’s darkly glittering gaze transfixes Phil like an entomologist’s pin, and Phil feels that he is shrivelling in the warm darkness, while around him the noise of conversation and the chink of glasses and the tinkle of the piano increases, merging into a horrid chittering buzz.

‘I hate this kind of jazz,’ Phil says feebly. ‘It’s so goddam fake, all those ornate trills and runs that don’t actually add up to anything. It’s like, at LAX, the soupy strings they play there.’

‘It’s just background music, Phil. It calms people.’ Emmet fishes the slice of lemon from his mineral water and pops it in his mouth and chews, his jaw moving from side to side.

‘Calms people. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It deadens them, Emmet. Turns them into fakes, into unauthentic people. It’s all over the airwaves now, there’s nothing left but elevator music. And as for TV. It’s the corporations, Emmet, they have it down to a science. See, if you pacify people, take away all the jagged edges, all the individualism, the stuff that makes us human — what have you got? You have androids, docile machines. All the kids want to do now is get a good college degree, get a good job, earn money. There’s no spark in them, no adventure, no curiosity, no rebellion, and that’s just how the corporations like it. Everything predictable because it’s good for business, everyone hypnotized. A nation of perfect, passive consumers.’

Emmet says, ‘Is that part of your dream? Christ, Phil. We really do need to get you on that Red Eye. Away from this nonsense, before any real damage is done. Back to your routine. Back to your work.’

‘This is more important, Emmet. I really do feel as if I’m awake for the first time in years.’

A man approaches their booth, a tall overweight man in a shiny grey suit and cowboy boots, black hair swept back and huge sideburns framing his jowly face. He looks oddly bashful for a big man and he’s clutching something — the paperback of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. He says to Phil, ‘I hope you don’t mind, sir, but I would be honoured if you would sign this for me.’

‘We’re busy,’ Emmet says, barely glancing at the man, but the man persists.

‘I realize that, sir, so I only ask for a moment of your time.’

‘We’re having a business meeting,’ Emmet says, with such concentrated vehemence that the man actually takes a step backward.

‘Hey, it’s okay,’ Phil says, and reaches out for the book — the man must have bought it in the hotel shop, the price sticker is still on the cover — uncaps his pen, asks the man’s name.

The man blinks slowly. ‘Just your signature, sir, would be fine.’

He has a husky baritone voice, a deep-grained Southern accent.

Phil signs, hands back the book, a transaction so familiar he hardly has to think about it.

The man is looking at Emmet, not the signed book. He says, ‘Do I know you, sir?’

‘Not at all,’ Emmet says sharply.

‘I think it’s just that you look like my old probation officer,’ the man says. ‘I was in trouble as a kid, hanging about downtown with the wrong crowd. I had it in my head to be a musician, and well, I got into a little trouble. I was no more than sixteen, and my probation officer, Mr McFly, he straightened me right out. I own a creme doughnut business now, that’s why I’m here in Washington. We’re opening up a dozen new franchises. People surely do love our deep-fried creme doughnuts. Well, good day to you, sir,’ he tells Phil, ‘I’m glad to have met you. If you’ll forgive the presumption, I always thought you and me had something in common. We both of us have a dead twin, you see.’

‘Jesus,’ Phil says, when the man has gone. The last remark has shaken him.

‘You’re famous,’ Emmet tells him. ‘People know stuff about you, you shouldn’t be surprised by now. He knows about your dead sister, so what? He read it in a magazine somewhere, that’s all.’

‘He thought he knew you, too.’

‘Everyone looks like someone else,’ Emmet says, ‘especially to dumb-ass shit-kickers. Christ, now what?’

Because a waiter is standing there, holding a white telephone on a tray. He says, ‘There’s a phone call for Mr Dick,’ and plugs the phone in and holds the receiver out to Phil.

Even before Emmet peremptorily takes the phone, smoothly slipping the waiter a buck, Phil knows that it’s the White House.

Emmet listens, says, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ listens some more, says, ‘He’s not calm at all. Who is this Chapin? Not one of — no, I didn’t think he was. Haldeman says that, huh? It went all the way up? Okay. Yes, if Haldeman says so, but you better be sure of it,’ he says, and sets down the receiver with an angry click and tells Phil, ‘That was Egil Krogh, at the White House. It seems you have a meeting with the President, at 12.30 tomorrow afternoon. I’ll only ask you this once, Phil. Don’t mess this up.’

So now Phil is in the White House — in the ante-room to the Oval Office, a presentation copy of Voices from the Street under his arm, heavy as a brick. He’s speeding, too, and knows Emmet knows it, and doesn’t care.

He didn’t sleep well last night. Frankly, he didn’t sleep at all. Taking a couple more tabs of speed didn’t help. His mind racing. Full of weird thoughts, connections. Thinking especially about androids and people. The androids are taking over, he thinks,no doubt about it. The suits, the haircuts, the four permitted topics of conversation: sports, weather, TV, work. Christ, how could I not have seen it before?

He scribbles notes to himself, uses up the folder of complementary hotel stationery. Trying to get it down. To get it straight. Waves of anger and regret and anxiety surge through him.

Maybe, he thinks in dismay, I myself have become an android, dreaming for a few days that I’m really human, seeing things that aren’t there, like the bum at the airport. Until they come for me, and take me to the repair shop. Or junk me, the way you’d junk a broken toaster.

Except the bum seemed so real, even if he was a dream, like a vision from a reality more vibrant than this. Suppose there is another reality: another history, the real history. And suppose that history has been erased by the government or the corporations or whatever, by entities that can reach back and smooth out the actions of individuals that might reveal or upset their plan to transform everyone and everything into bland androids in a dull grey completely controlled world.

It’s like one of the weird ideas he used to write up when he was churning out sci-fi stories, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Maybe back then he was unconsciously tapping into some flow of greater truth: the truth that he should deliver to the President. Maybe this is his mission. Phil suddenly has a great desire to read in his pirated novel, but it isn’t in his jacket pocket, and it isn’t in his room.

‘I got rid of it,’ Emmet tells him over breakfast.

‘You got rid of it?’

‘Of course I did. Should you be eating that, Phil?’

‘I like Canadian bacon. I like maple syrup. I like pancakes.’

‘I’m only thinking of your blood pressure,’ Emmet says. He is calmly and methodically demolishing a grapefruit.

‘What about all the citrus fruit you eat? All that acid can’t be good for you.’

‘It’s cleansing,’ Emmet says calmly. ‘You should at least drink the orange juice I ordered for you, Phil. It has vitamins.’

‘Coffee is all I need,’ Phil says. The tumbler of juice, which was sitting at the table when he arrived, seems to give off a poisonous glow, as of radioactivity.

Emmet shrugs. ‘Then I think we’re finished with breakfast aren’t we? Let’s get you straightened out. You can hardly meet the President dressed like that.’

But for once Phil stands his ground. He picked out these clothes because they felt right, and that’s what he’s going to wear. They argue for ten minutes, compromise by adding a tie Emmet buys in the hotel shop.

They are outside, waiting for the car to be brought around, when Phil hears the music. He starts walking, prompted by some unconscious impulse he doesn’t want to analyse. Go with the flow, he thinks. Don’t impose anything on top of it just because you’re afraid. Because you’ve been made afraid. Trust in the moment.

Emmet follows angrily, asking Phil what the hell he thinks he’s doing all the way to the corner, where a bum is standing with a broken old guitar, singing one of that folk singer’s songs, the guy who died of an overdose on the same night Lenny Bruce died, the song about changing times.

There’s a paper cup at the bum’s feet, and Phil impulsively stuffs half a dozen bills into it, bills that Emmet snatches up angrily.

‘Get lost,’ he tells the bum, and starts pulling at Phil, dragging him away as if Phil is a kid entranced beyond patience at the window of a candy store. Saying, ‘What are you thinking?’

‘That it’s cold,’ Phil says, ‘and someone like that — a street person — could use some hot food.’

‘He isn’t a person,’ Emmet says. ‘He’s a bum — a piece of trash. And of course it’s cold. It’s March. Look at you, dressed like that. You’re shivering.’

He is. But it isn’t because of the cold.

March, Phil thinks now, in the antechamber to the Oval Office. The Vernal Equinox. When the world awakes. Shivering all over again even though the brightly lit ante-room, with its two desks covered, it seems, in telephones, is stiflingly hot. Emmet is schmoozing with two suits — H. R. Haldeman and Egil Krogh. Emmet is holding Haldeman’s arm as he talks, speaking into the man’s ear, something or other about management. They all know each other well, Phil thinks, and wonders what kind of business Emmet has, here in Washington, DC.

At last a phone rings, a secretary nods, and they go into the Oval Office, which really is oval. The President, smaller and more compact than he seems on TV, strides out from behind his desk and cracks a jowly smile, but his pouchy eyes slither sideways when he limply shakes hands with Phil.

‘That’s quite a letter you sent us,’ the President says.

‘I’m not sure,’ Phil starts to say, but the President doesn’t seem to hear him.

‘Quite a letter, yes. And of course we need people like you, Mr Dick. We’re proud to have people like you, in fact. Someone who can speak to young people — well, that’s important isn’t it?’ Smiling at the other men in the room as if seeking affirmation. ‘It’s quite a talent. You have one of your books there, I think?’

Phil holds out the copy ofVoices from the Street. It’s the Franklin Library edition, bound in green leather, his signature reproduced in gold on the cover, under the title. An aide gave it to him when he arrived, and now he hands it to the President, who takes it in a study of reverence.

‘You must sign it,’ the President says, and lays it open like a sacrificial victim on the gleaming desk, by the red and white phones. ‘I mean, that’s the thing isn’t it? The thing that you do?’

Phil says, ‘What I came to do—’

And Emmet steps forward and says, ‘Of course he’ll sign, sir. It’s an honour.’

Emmet gives Phil a pen, and Phil signs, his hand sweating on the page. He says, ‘I came here, sir, to say that I want to do what I can for America. I was given an experience a day ago, and I’m beginning to understand what it meant.’

But the President doesn’t seem to have heard him. He’s staring at Phil as if seeing him for the first time. At last, he blinks and says, ‘Boy, you do dress kind of wild.’

Phil is wearing his lucky Nehru jacket over a gold shirt, purple velvet pants with flares that mostly hide his sand-coloured suede desert boots. And the tie that Emmet bought him in the hotel shop, a paisley affair like the President’s, tight as a noose around his neck.

He starts to say, ‘I came here, sir,’ but the President says again, ‘You do dress kind of wild. But that I guess is the style of all writers, isn’t it? I mean, an individual style.’

For a moment, the President’s eyes, pinched between fleshy pouches, start to search Phil’s face anxiously. It seems that there’s something trapped far down at the bottom of his mild gaze, like a prisoner looking up through the grille of an oubliette at the sky.

‘Individual style, that’s exactly it,’ Phil says, seeing an opening, a way into his theme. The thing he knows now he needs to say, distilled from the scattered notes and thoughts last night. ‘Individualism, sir, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Even men in suits wear ties to signify that they still have this one little outlet for their individuality.’ It occurs to him that his tie is exactly like the President’s, but he plunges on. ‘I’m beginning to understand that things are changing in America, and that’s what I want to talk about—’

‘You wanted a badge,’ Haldeman says brusquely. ‘A federal agent’s badge, isn’t that right? A badge to help your moral crusade?’

Emmet and Haldeman and Krogh are grinning as if sharing a private joke.

‘The badge isn’t important,’ Phil says. ‘In fact, as I see it now, it’s just what’s wrong.’

Haldeman says, ‘I certainly think we can oblige, can’t we, Mr President? We can get him his badge. You know, as a gift.’

The President blinks. ‘A badge? I don’t know if I have one, but I can look, certainly—’

‘You don’t have one,’ Haldeman says firmly.

‘I don’t?’ The President has bent to pull open a drawer in the desk, and now he looks up, still blinking.

‘But we’ll order one up,’ Haldeman says, and tells Emmet, ‘Yes, a special order.’

Something passes between them. Phil is sure of it. The air is so hot and heavy that he feels he’s wrapped in mattress stuffing, and there’s a sharp taste to it that stings the back of his throat.

Haldeman tells the President, ‘You remember the idea? The idea about the book.’

‘Yes,’ the President says, ‘the idea about the book.’

His eyes seem to be blinking independently, like a mechanism that’s slightly out of adjustment.

‘The neat idea,’ Haldeman prompts, as if to a recalcitrant or shy child, and Phil knows then, knows with utter deep black conviction, that the President is not the President. Or he is, but he’s long ago been turned into a fake of himself, a shell thing, a mechanical puppet. That was what I was becoming, Phil thinks, until the clear white light. And it might still happen to me, unless I make things change.

‘The neat idea,’ the President says, and his mouth twitches. It’s meant to be a smile, but looks like a spasm. ‘Yes, here’s the thing, that you could write a book for the kids, for the, you know, for the young people. On the theme of, of—’

‘ “Get High on Life”,’ Haldeman says.

‘ “Get High on Life”,’ the President says. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ and begins a spiel about affirming the conviction that true and lasting talent is the result of self-motivation and discipline; he might be one of those mechanical puppets in Disneyland, running through its patter regardless of whether or not it has an audience.

‘Well,’ Haldeman says, when the President finishes or perhaps runs down, ‘I think we’re done here.’

‘The gifts,’ the President says, and bends down and pulls open a drawer and starts rummaging in it. ‘No one can accuse Dick Nixon of not treating his guests well,’ he says, and lays on the desk, one after the other, a glossy pre-signed photograph, cuff links, an ashtray, highball glasses etched with a picture of the White House.

Emmet steps forward and says, ‘Thank you, Mr President. Mr Dick and I are truly honoured to have met you.’

But the President doesn’t seem to hear. He’s still rummaging in his desk drawer, muttering, ‘There are some neat pins in here. Lapel pins, very smart.’

Haldeman and Emmet exchange glances, and Haldeman says, ‘We’re about out of time here, Mr President.’

‘Pins, that’s the thing. Like this one,’ the President says, touching the lapel of his suit, ‘with the American flag. I did have some. ’

‘We’ll find them,’ Haldeman says, that sharpness back in his voice, and he steers the President away from the desk, towards Phil.

There’s an awkward minute while Egil Krogh takes photographs of the President and Phil shaking hands there on the blue carpet bordered with white stars, in front of furled flags on poles. Flashes of light that are only light from the camera flash. Phil blinks them away as Emmet leads him out, through ordinary offices and blank corridors to chill air under a grey sky where their car is waiting.

‘It went well,’ Emmet says, after a while. He’s driving the car — the car Phil hired — back to the hotel.

Phil says, ‘Who are you, exactly? What do you want?’

‘I’m your agent, Phil. I take care of you. That’s my job.’

‘And that other creature, your friend Haldeman, he takes care of the President.’

‘The President — he’s a work of art, isn’t he? He’ll win his third term, and the next one too. A man like that, he’s too useful to let go. Unlike you, Phil, he can still help us.’

‘He was beaten,’ Phil says, ‘in 1960. By Kennedy. And in 1962 he lost the election for governor of California. Right after the results were announced, he said he would give up politics. And then something happened. He came back. Or was he brought back, is that what it was? A wooden horse,’ Phil says, feeling hollow himself, as empty as a husk. ‘Brought by the Greeks as a gift.’

‘He won’t get beaten again,’ Emmet says, ‘you can count on that. Not in 1976, not in 1980, not in 1984. It worked out, didn’t it — you and him?’ He smiles, baring his perfect white teeth. ‘We should get you invited to one of the parties there. Maybe when you finish your book — it’ll be great publicity.’

‘You don’t want me to finish the book,’ Phil says. He feels as if he’s choking, and wrenches at the knot of his tie. ‘That’s the point. Whatever I was supposed to do — you made sure I didn’t do it.’

‘Phil, Phil, Phil,’ Emmet says. ‘Is this another of your wild conspiracy theories? What is it this time, a conspiracy of boring, staid suits, acting in concert to stifle creative guys like you? Well, listen up, buddy. There is no conspiracy. There’s nothing but a bunch of ordinary guys doing an honest day’s work, making the world a better place, the best way they know how. You think we’re dangerous? Well, take a look at yourself, Phil. You’ve got everything you ever dreamed about, and you got it all thanks to me. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be no better than a bum on the street. You’d be living in a cold-water walk-up, banging out porno novels or sci-fi trash as fast as you could, just to keep the power company from switching off your lights. And moaning all the while that you could have been a contender. Get real, Phil. I gave you a good deal. The best.’

‘Like the deal that guy, the guy at the hotel, the doughnut guy, got? He was supposed to be a singer, and someone just like you did something to him.’

‘He could have changed popular music,’ Emmet says. ‘Even as a doughnut shop operator he still has something. But would he have been any happier? I don’t think so. And that’s all I’m going to say, Phil. Don’t ever ask again. Go back to your nice house, work on your book, and don’t make trouble. Or, if you’re not careful, you might be found dead one day from vitamin poisoning, or maybe a drug overdose.’

‘Yeah, like the folk singer,’ Phil says.

‘Or a car crash,’ Emmet says, ‘like the one that killed Kerouac and Burroughs and Ginsberg in Mexico. It’s a cruel world out there, Phil, and even though you’re washed-up as a writer, be thankful that you have me to look after your interests.’

‘Because you want to make sure I don’t count for anything,’ Phil says, and finally opens the loop of the tie wide enough to be able to drag it over his head. He winds down the window and drops the tie into the cold gritty wind.

‘You stupid bastard,’ Emmet says, quite without anger. ‘That cost six bucks fifty. Pure silk, a work of art.’

‘I feel sick,’ Phil says, and he does feel sick, but that’s not why he says it.

‘Not in the car,’ Emmet says sharply, and pulls over to the kerb. Phil opens the door, and then he’s running and Emmet is shouting after him. But Phil runs on, head down in the cold wind, and doesn’t once look back.

He has to slow to a walk after a couple of blocks, out of breath, his heart pounding, his legs aching. The cold, steely air scrapes the bottoms of his lungs. But he’s given Emmet the slip. Or perhaps Emmet doesn’t really care. After all, Phil’s been ruined as a writer, his gift dribbled away on dead books until nothing is left.

Phil thinks, Except for that one book, The Man in the High Castle. The book Emmet conspired to suppress, the book he made me hate so much because it was the kind of thing I was meant to write all along. Because I would have counted for something, in the end. I would have made a difference.

He walks on, with no clear plan except to keep moving. It’s a poor neighbourhood, even though it’s only a few blocks from the White House. Despite the cold, people are sitting on the steps of the shabby apartment houses, talking to each other, sharing bottles in brown paper bags. An old man with a terrific head of white hair and a tremendously bushy white moustache sits straight-backed on a kitchen chair, smoking a cheap cigar with all the relish of the king of the world. Kids in knitted caps and plaid jackets bounce a basketball against a wall, calling to each other in clear, high voices. There are Christmas decorations at most windows, and the odours of cooking in the air. A good odour, Phil thinks, a homely, human odour. A radio tuned to a country station is playing one of the old-time ballads, a slow, achingly sad song about a rose and a brier twining together above a grave.

It’s getting dark, and flakes of snow begin to flutter down, seeming to condense out of the darkening air, falling in a slanting rush. Phil feels the pinpoint kiss of every flake that touches his face.

I’m still a writer, he thinks, as he walks through the falling snow. I still have a name. I still have a voice. I can still tell the truth. Maybe that journalist who interviewed me last month, the one who works for the Washington Post, maybe he’ll listen to me if I tell him about the conspiracy in the White House.

A bum is standing on the corner outside the steamed up window of a diner. An old, fat woman with a mottled, flushed face, grey hair cut as short as a soldier’s. Wearing a stained and torn man’s raincoat that’s too small for her, so that the newspapers she’s wrapped around her body to keep out the cold peep from between the straining buttons. Her blue eyes are bright, watching each passer-by with undiminished hope as she rattles a few pennies in a paper cup.

Phil pushes into the diner’s steamy warmth and uses the payphone, and then orders coffee to go. And returns to the street, and presses the warm container into his sister’s hand.