I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Go with the Flow

348 Go with the Flow Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is the scattershot estimation of the prospects for mourning when every interpersonal connection has been lost and your social context no longer recognizes you back. The protagonist Jason Taverner endures a loss of reciprocity that would resemble the psychotic break or the half-life of a ghost if reality did not continue to compute but only one way. It turns out that social reality was displaced by a relationship that crossed fantasy with realization of the wish through alterations in time and space. Alys Buckman, it turns out, reduced the world she swallowed whole with her drugs to her relationship to Taverner , famous TV personality and singer, otherwise unknown to her but the object of her fantasy communion. “It was Alys. Taverner, like the rest of us, became a datum in your sister’s percept system and got dragged across when she passed into an alternate construct of coordinates . She was very involved with Taverner as a wish-fulfillment performer. . . But although she did manage to accomplish this . . . , he and we at the same time remained in our own universe. We occupied two space corridors at the same time, one real, one irreal.” (211–12) Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said picks up Ubik’s society-wide coordinates of relations with the after- or higher life, but displaced to the periphery of Alys’s boundary-blending wish fulfillment. The empathy boxes of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are again pressed into service, but this time to raise consumerism to the power of the “phone grid” of Passion , with sadomasochism legibly inscribing the legend to this remapping of Christianity onto exhaustible surfaces of embodied life. Go with the Flow 349 “Your—everybody’s—sexual aspects are linked electronically, and amplified, to as much as you can endure. It’s addictive, because it’s electronically enhanced. People, some of them, get so deep into it they can’t pull out; their whole lives revolve around the weekly—or, hell, even daily!—setting up of the network of phone lines. . . . Most of them have been doing it two, three years. And they’ve deteriorated physically— and mentally—from it. . . . But don’t put down the people. . . . For them it’s a sacred, holy communion.” (153) The new medium spans the recent past of two, maybe three, years (during which time teenagers at heart are sentenced to midlife). Taverner’s spell of nonexistence in the Is of his beholders in an environment he alone recognizes as his own lasts two days. The countdown of mourning is orthogonally twisted around and away from the duo dynamic of one twin’s wish fulfillment . Alys, the acting-out, world-warping twin sister of Felix Buckman, one of the generals of this police state, can be seen as Jane Dick’s representative in her own brother’s work. What if Jane’s world doesn’t admit mourning, identification, or recognition but entertains only fantasies by association with the mediatic environment? What if she is the author with the Dick surname? Jane, see Dick run. Her portrait, however, is highly ambivalent not because Alys herself or the incestuous relationship to her brother is so illicit, but because she dies within the vehicle of her comeback. What Alys and Jason Taverner do have in common however is, if only by dint of what the industry calls continuity error, they could both be already dead. That Alys dies an instant ancient skeleton suggests, not only in the lexicon of Dick’s collected work, that she may already have been dead. And then Jason wakes up in the two-day world to which he does and doesn’t belong from what was going to be emergency surgery for removal of an extraterrestrial parasite’s tentacles. Never again is the operation, the emergency, the near-death mentioned, let alone accounted for. Alys’s consumerism turns identification as recognition value into identi fication with that which she recognizes as other. The object is creaturely or thingly in the range of selection. Alys craves contact with celebrities. Plus Jason Taverner is, as a so-called six, genetically enhanced stock, which means, however, since the plan of experimentation to which he owes his status was long ago abandoned, that he is collectible. At the hub of twinship we find a collection unconscious that sifts through and preserves that which is functionally or futurally extinguished. The novel ends with...