I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

A Couple of Years

292 A Couple of Years At one time—during the first year of his life in particular—Horace had asked a Question. It had been his custom to place himself in front of a person and to gaze up. . . . Staring up, his forehead wrinkled with care, the cat had uttered a single baritone miaow, and then had waited for an answer, an answer to a Question which no one could fathom. . . . Horace now eyed the newspaperman with this traditional concern. It was not a simple confusion; Horace was not asking, Who are you? Or Why are you here? He seemed to want to know something deeper, perhaps something philosophical. But, alas, no one would ever know. Certainly not the newspaperman; Mr. Deverest returned the cat’s intent stare with uneasiness—a reaction which most people had to Horace’s scrutiny. “What’s he want?” Mr. Deverest asked, as if alarmed. Nick said, “No one to this day knows.” —philip k. dick, Nick and the Glimmung Mrs. Pilsen, tears appearing in her eyes, said, “There is only one cat like Horace. He used to—when he was just a kitten—stand and stare up at us as if asking a question. We never understood what the question was. Maybe now he knows the answer.” Fresh tears appeared. “I guess we all will eventually.” —philip k. dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Nick and the Glimmung takes off into the outer-space setting for its fantasy to get around a future law prohibiting pets on earth. Nick’s father has in fact been considering leaving Earth again and again “during the last two years” (9). The cause of their cat, Horace, puts a period to that two-year span or sentence. The newspaperman tries to draw a distinction between A Couple of Years 293 wildlife and pets. The latter “‘love us and we love them, even though there is a law against them. What we love, I suppose, is their memory.’ ‘You mean our memory,’ Nick’s mother said. ‘Our memory of animals as they lived in the past. Or, as in the case of Horace, their real but illegal presence ’” (22). The epigraph to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? tells a tall totemic tale of a prized animal’s life and death. But it also marks the kind of exception that turns up the volume on what rules. A life span of two hundred years places the tortoise outside the economy of mourning, which totemic animals or pets otherwise inhabit fully, but in miniature or capsule form. When the tortoise goes it’s news, it’s history, and in place of burial its remains are placed on museum display. What is so easily misunderstood in Freud’s Totem and Taboo is the measure of mourning that the identifiedwith animal provides and models. The primal father story leads us to see through the totemic animal to the close encounter with the mortality of the human other. It would be equally tendentious—yet readily possible—simply to reverse the hierarchy. In some nonlinear sense one can say that civilization or humanity begins and ends with the relationship to animals. In Martian Time-Slip the schizo inside view of entropy or death drive as the purpose and momentum of life is punctuated, granted an intermission , or is in fact initiated over the first see-through view of the human across from you, taking it interpersonally but as skeletally robotic Gestell. For the time being, then, the prosthetic frame of techno relations survives the decay that uncovers it. What can reverse the collapse into the so-called tomb world is the reanimation of extinguished animals leading the falling world to rescue. The title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? doubles as a question. The answer, for the most part, is “no.” Empathy tests are used to identify androids. But even after the test results are in and the tester has terminated the identified android, the final and conclusive test is the examination of the test subject’s spinal column. In the 1982 film adaptation, Blade Runner , no conclusive test is ever given. Though Deckard admits toward the end of the novel that even electric animals have a kind or degree of life, this realization does not automatically extend to include androids, which are precisely not electric or machinic but humanoid.1 When hunter-tester Deckard, rattled in the cage of his belief in a clear distinction between humans and androids, proposes...