The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Memories Found in a Bill from a Small Animal Vet" (1976)

Hark! Each tree its silence breaks.

-- NICHOLAS BRADY (1692)

When I first met Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote More Than Human, this good man said to me right off, "What sort of universe is it that causes a man like Tony Boucher to die of cancer?" I had been wondering the same thing ever since Tony Boucher died [in 1968]. So had Ted Sturgeon, although he didn't expect me to give an answer. He just wanted to show me what he -- Ted Sturgeon -- was like. I've found I can do that, too: let people know about me by asking that. It shows that I cared a lot about one of the warmest men who ever lived. Tony was warm and at the same time when he stood in the midst of a group of people, sweat came out on his forehead from fear. Nobody ever wrote that about him but it's true. He was terrified all the time. He told me so once, in so many words. He loved people, but one time I encountered him on the electric train going to the opera and he was scared. He was a music critic and he did reviewing for The New York Times and edited a magazine and wrote novels and stories. But he was scared to take a drive across town.

Tony loved the universe and the universe frightened him, and I think I know where his head was at. A lot of people who are timid are that way because they love too much. They're afraid it'll all fall through. Naturally, it did with Tony. He died in middle age. Now, I ask you, what good did it do him to be scared? He used to carry his rare old 78 records to radio station KPFA every week for his program "Golden Voices," wrapping them in a towel so they wouldn't get broken. One time I decided to give Tony all my rare opera and vocal records, just plain give them to him as a gift of my loving him. I phoned him up. "I got Tiana Lemnitz and Gerhard Husch," I told him. Tony replied shyly, "They are my idols." He was a Roman Catholic, the only one we knew, so that was a strong statement. Before I could get the records to him he was dead. "I feel tired half the day," he had said. "I can't work as much as I used to. I think I'm ill." I explained I had the same thing. That was eight or so years ago. The doctor told him he had a bruised rib and taped it up. Someday I will meet that doctor on the street. Tony got bad advice from everyone who could talk.

We used to play poker. Tony loved opera and poker and science fiction and mystery stories. He had a little writing class. This was after he was famous and edited Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine and he charged one dollar a night when you showed up. He read your whole manuscript. He told you how rotten it was, and you went away and wrote something good. I never figured out how he accomplished that. Criticism like that is supposed to crush you. "Maybe it's because when Tony reads your story it's like he's reading it in Latin," Ron Goulart, a fellow student, said. Tony taught me to write, and my first sale was to him. I still can remember that nobody understood the story but he, even after it was printed. It's still in print, twenty-two years later, in a college-level sf course manual put out by Ginn and Company. There're only about fifteen hundred words to the story, about as short as this. After the printing of the story, Ginn and Company prints an impromptu discussion I had with a high school class about the story. All the kids understand the story. It's about a dog and how he sees garbagemen coming to steal the precious food that the family stores up every day until the heavily constructed metal urn is full and then these Roogs come and steal the harvest just when it's ripe and perfect. The dog tries to warn the family, but it's always early in the morning and his barking just annoys them. The story ends when the family decides they have to get rid of the dog, due to his barking, at which point one of the Roogs or garbagemen says to the dog, "We'll be back to get the people pretty soon." I never could understand why no one but Tony Boucher could understand the story (I sent it to him in 1951). I guess in those days my view of garbagemen was not shared universally, and now by 1971 when the high school class discussed it with me, I guess it is. "But garbagemen don't eat people," a lady anthologizer [SF editor Judith Merril] pointed out to me in 1952. I had trouble answering that. Something comes and carries off and devours people who are sleeping in tranquillity. Like Tony... something got to him. I think the dog who cried "ROOG! ROOG!" was trying to warn me and Tony. I got the warning and escaped -- well, we'll see about that; time will tell -- but Tony stayed at his post. You see, when you're so scared of the universe (or Roogs, if you will), to stay at your post takes courage of the kind they can't write about, because (1) they don't know how and (2) they don't notice in the first place, except maybe Ted Sturgeon, with all his own love, and his total lack of fear. He must have known how scared Tony was, and to be that scared and for the Roogs to get you... it's so goddam symmetrical, isn't it?

However, Tony is still alive, I discovered last year [1974]. My cat had begun to behave in an odd way, keeping watch over me in a quiet fashion, and I saw that he had changed. This was after he ran away and returned, wild and dirty, crapping on the rug in fear; we took him to the vet and the vet calmed him down and healed him. After that, Pinky had what I call a spiritual quality, except that he wouldn't eat meat. He would tremble whenever we tried to feed it to him. For five months he'd been lost, living in the gutter, seeing God knows what; I wish I knew. Anyhow, after he was changed -- in the twinkling of an eye; that is, while at the vet's -- he wouldn't ever do anything cruel. Yet I knew Pinky was afraid, because once I almost shut the refrigerator door on him and he did a three-cushion bank shot of himself off the walls to escape, and clocked a velocity unique for a pink sheeplike thing that usually just sat and gazed ahead. Pinky had trouble breathing because of his heavy fur and what they call hairballs. Tony had asthma terribly and needed it cold. Pinky would sit by the door to get the cold air from under the crack, and struggle to breathe. I will not write a teaser article here; Pinky died of cancer suddenly; he was three years old, very young for a cat. It was totally unexpected. The vet diagnosed it as something else, which could be cured.

I hadn't realized Pinky was Tony Boucher, out of love served up by the universe again, until I had this dream about Tony the Tiger, the cereal box character who offers you Sugar Frosted Flakes. In my dream I stood at one end of a light-struck glade, and at the other a great tiger came out slowly, with delight, and I knew we were together again. Tony the Tiger and me. My joy was unbounded. When I woke up I tried to think who I knew named Tony. I had other strange experiences after Pinky died. I dreamed about a "Mrs. Donlevy," who was incredibly tall -- I could see only her feet and ankles -- and she was serving me a plate of milk on the back porch and there was a vacant lot where I could roam at will, forever. It was the Elysian Vacant Lot, which the Greeks believed in, just my size. Also, the day Pinky died, at the vet's, that evening as I stood in the bathroom I felt my wife put her hand on my shoulder, firmly, to console me. Turning, I saw no one. I also dreamed this dream: I had the album notes for Don Pasquale and at the end the conductor had added a note: five strings of catgut like a cat's cradle, like a musical stave. It was a final hello from Pinky, who was Tony Boucher; in the dream the album was an old 78 one, a rare classic, a favorite of Tony's.

Tony or Pinky, I guess names don't count, was a lousy hunter all his life. One time he caught a gopher and ran up our apartment stairs with it. He placed it in his dish, where he was fed, because that was orderly, and of course the gopher got up at once and ran off. Tony felt that things belonged in their places, being an obsessively tidy person, his enormous collection of books and records was arranged the same way -- each object in its proper place, and a proper place for each object. He should have tolerated more chaos in the universe. However, he recaught the gopher and ate it, all except the teeth.

Tony, or Pinky, was my guide; he taught me to write, and he stayed with me when I was sick back in 1972 and 1973, lying beside me day after day. That's why my wife, Tessa, brought him over, because I had pneumonia and needed help and we had no money for a doctor. (I think now in that regard I lucked out; he would have told me I had a bruised rib.) When the pain was really bad, Pinky used to lie on my body until I realized that he was trying to figure out which part of me was sick. He knew it was just one part, around the middle of my body. He did his best and I recovered but he did not. That was my friend.

Most cats fear the clattering arrival of the garbagemen each week, but Pinky detested them. Under our bed fixed, set eyes, but no Pinky was visible. Just the eyes, waiting for the bastards to go.

Four nights before Pinky unexpectedly died, before we knew he had cancer -- I started to say, before he had been diagnosed as having a bruised rib -- he and Tessa and I, as was our custom, were lying on the big bed, and I saw a uniform pale white light slowly fill the room. I thought the angel of death had come for me and I began praying in Latin: "Tremens factus sum ego, et timeo," and so forth. Tessa gritted her teeth, but Pinky sat there, front feet tucked under him, impassive. I knew there was no place to hide, like under the bed. Every child knows that. And it looks bad.

It never occurred to me that death was arriving for anyone but me, which shows my attitude. I saw us all as painted ducks, on a painted sea, and thought of the thirteenth-century Arabic poem about "Once he will miss, twice he will miss. All the world's one level plain for him on which he hunts for flowers." We were as conspicuous as -- well, anyhow, finally I gave up praying, but I remember in particular I kept crying out, "Mors stupebit et natura," which I thought meant that death stood stupefied, as if in surprise (as in, "I was stupefied to learn that my car had been towed away." It means just standing there impotently. That maybe is not what Merriam-Webster 3 says, but it is what I say).

Pinky never noticed the pale white light; as was his custom he seemed awake, but dozing. I think he was humming to himself. Later when I slept, toward morning, I dreamed a disturbing dream: The report of a gun fired close to my ear: a dreadful shotgun blast, and when I looked I saw a woman lying dying. I went for aid, but got on to one of those electric trolley buses by mistake, along with three Gestapo agents (I dream that a lot). We rode around forever while I tried vainly to short-circuit the power cables of the bus or trolley car, whatever it was -- no luck. The Gestapo agents remained confident in that smug way they have and read newspapers and smoked. They knew they had me.