Philip K. Dick - Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said

VIP免费
2024-12-15 0 0 304.94KB 89 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
by Philip K. Dick
Copyright 1974 by Philip K. Dick
First Vintage Books Edition, July 1993
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the
United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Doubleday & Co., Inc.,
New York, in 1974.
ISBN 0-679-74066-X
The love in this novel is for Tessa,
and the love in me is for her, too.
She is my little song.
FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
PART ONE
Flow my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled forever let me mourn;
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.
1
On Tuesday, October 11, 1988, the _Jason Taverner Show_ ran thirty seconds short. A
technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the
video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician
tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth.
Into the boom mike Jason said smoothly, "Keep all those cards and V-letters coming in,
folks. And stay tuned now for _The Adventures of Scotty, Dog Extraordinary_."
The technician smiled; Jason smiled back, and then both the audio and the video clicked
off. Their hour-long music and variety program, which held the second highest rating among the
year's best TV shows, had come to an end. And it had all gone well.
"Where'd we lose half a minute?" Jason said to his special guest star of the evening,
Heather Hart. It puzzled him. He liked to time his own shows.
Heather Hart said, "Baby bunting, it's all right." She put her cool hand across his
slightly moist forehead, rubbed the perimeter of his sand-colored hair affectionately.
"Do you realize what power you have?" Al Bliss, their business agent, said to Jason,
coming up close--too close as always--to him. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly
tonight. That's a record of sorts."
"I zip up my fly every week," Jason said. "It's my trademark. Or don't you catch the
show?"
"But thirty million," Bliss said, his round, florid face spotted with drops of
perspiration. "Think of it. And then there's the residuals."
Jason said crisply, "I'll be dead before the residuals on this show pay off. Thank God."
"You'll probably be dead tonight," Heather said, "with all those fans of yours packed in
outside there. Just waiting to rip you into little tiny squares like so many postage stamps."
"Some of them are your fans, Miss Hart," Al Bliss said, in his doglike panting voice.
"God damn them," Heather said harshly. "Why don't they go away? Aren't they breaking some
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (1 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
law, loitering or something?"
Jason took hold of her hand and squeezed it forcefully, attracting her frowning attention.
He had never understood her dislike for fans; to him they were the lifeblood of his public
existence. And to him his public existence, his role as worldwide entertainer, was existence
itself, period. "You shouldn't be an entertainer," he said to Heather, "feeling the way you do.
Get out of the business. Become a social worker in a forced-labor camp."
"There're people there, too," Heather said grimly.
Two special police guards shouldered their way up to Jason Taverner and Heather. "We've
got the corridor as clear as we're going to get it," the fatter of the two cops wheezed. "Let's go
now, Mr. Taverner. Before the studio audience can trickle around to the side exits." He signaled
to three other special police guards, who at once advanced toward the hot, packed passageway that
led, eventually, to the nocturnal street. And out there the parked Rolls flyship in all its costly
splendor, its tail rocket idling throbbingly. Like, Jason thought, a mechanical heart. A heart
that beat for him alone, for him the star. Well, by extension, it throbbed in response to the
needs of Heather, too.
She deserved it: she had sung well, tonight. Almost as well as--Jason grinned inwardly, to
himself. Hell, let's face it, he thought. They don't turn on all those 3-D color TV sets to see
the special guest star. There are a thousand special guest stars scattered over the surface of
earth, and a few in the Martian colonies.
They turn on, he thought, to see me. And I am always there. Jason Taverner has never and
will never disappoint his fans. However Heather may feel about hers.
"You don't like them," Jason said as they squirmed and pushed and ducked their way down
the steaming, sweatsmelling corridor, "because you don't like yourself. You secretly think they
have bad taste."
"They're dumb," Heather grunted, and cursed quietly as her flat, large hat flopped from
her head and disappeared forever within the whale's belly of close-pressing fans.
"They're ordinaries," Jason said, his lips at her ear, partly lost as it was in her great
tangle of shiny red hair. The famous cascade of hair so widely and expertly copied in beauty
salons throughout Terra.
Heather grated, "Don't say that word."
"They're ordinaries," Jason said, "and they're morons. Because"--he nipped the lobe of her
ear--"because that's what it means to be an ordinary. Right?"
She sighed. "Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That's what I long
for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic
chewing gum in nine iridescent colors."
"You really do hate them," he said.
"Yes." She nodded briskly. "And so do you." She halted briefly, turning her head to
confront him. "You know your goddamn voice is gone; you know you're coasting on your glory days,
which you'll never see again." She smiled at him, then. Warmly. "Are we growing old?" she said,
above the mumbles and squeaks of the fans. "Together? Like man and wife?"
Jason said, "Sixes don't grow old."
"Oh yes," Heather said. "Oh yes they do." Reaching upward, she touched his wavy brown
hair. "How long have you 'been tinting it, dearheart? A year? Three?"
"Get in the flyship," he said brusquely, maneuvering her ahead of him, out of the building
and onto the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard.
"I'll get in," Heather said, "if you'll sing me a high B natural. Remember when you--"
He thrust her bodily into the flyship, squeezed in after her, turned to help Al Bliss
close the door, and then they were up and into the rain-clouded nighttime sky. The great gleaming
sky of Los Angeles, as bright as if it were high noon. And that's what it is for you and for me,
he thought. For the two of us, in all times to come. It will always be as it is now, because we
are sixes. Both of us. Whether they know it or not.
And it's not, he thought grimly, enjoying the bleak humor of it. The knowledge which they
together had, the knowledge unshared. Because that was the way it was meant to be. And always had.
. . even now after it had all turned out so badly. Badly, at least, in the designers' eyes. The
great pundits who had guessed and guessed wrong. Forty-five beautiful years ago, when the world
was young and droplets of rain still clung to the now-gone Japanese cherry trees in Washington,
D.C. And the smell of spring that had hovered over the noble experiment. For a short while,
anyhow.
"Let's go to Zurich," he said aloud.
"I'm too tired," Heather said. "Anyhow, that place bores me."
"The house?" He was incredulous. Heather had picked it out for the two of them, and for
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (2 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
years there they had gotten away--away especially from the fans that Heather hated so much.
Heather sighed and said, "The house. The Swiss watches. The bread. The cobblestones. The
snow on the hills."
"Mountains," he said, feeling aggrieved still. "Well, hell," he said. "I'll go without
you."
"And pick up someone else?"
He simply could not understand. "Do you want me to take someone else with me?" he
demanded.
"You and your magnetism. Your charm. You could get any girl in the world into that big
brass bed with you. Not that you're so much once you get there."
"God," he said with disgust. "That again. Always the same old gripes. And the ones that're
fantasy--they're the ones you really hang on to."
Turning to face him, Heather said earnestly, "You know how you look, even now at the age
you are. You're beautiful. Thirty million people ogle you an hour a week. It's not your singing
they're interested in . . . it's your incurable physical beauty."
"The same can be said for you," he said caustically. He felt tired and he yearned for the
privacy and seclusion that lay there on the outskirts of Zurich, silently waiting for the two of
them to come back once more. And it was as if the house wanted them to stay, not for a night or a
week of nights, but forever.
"I don't show my age," Heather said.
He glanced at her, then studied her. Volumes of red hair, pale skin with a few freckles, a
strong roman nose. Deepset huge violet eyes. She was right; she didn't show her age. Of course she
never tapped into the phone-grid transex network, as he did. But in point of fact he did so very
little. So he was not hooked, and there had not been, in his case, brain damage or premature
aging.
"You're a goddamn beautiful-looking person," he said grudgingly.
"And you?" Heather said.
He could not be shaken by this. He knew that he still had his charisma, the force they had
inscribed on the chromosomes forty-two years ago. True, his hair had become mostly gray and he did
tint it. And a few wrinkles had appeared here and there. But--.
"As long as I have my voice," he said, "I'll be okay. I'll have what I want. You're wrong
about me--it's your six aloofness, your cherished so-called individuality. Okay, if you don't want
to fly over to the house in Zurich, where do you want to go? Your place? My place?"
"I want to be married to you," Heather said. "So then it won't be my place versus your
place but it'll be our place. And I'll give up singing and have three children, all of them
looking like you."
"Even the girls?"
Heather said, "They'll all be boys."
Leaning over he kissed her on the nose. She smiled, took his hand, patted it warmly. "We
can go anywhere tonight," he said to her in a low, firm, controlled, and highly projected voice,
almost a father voice; it generally worked well with Heather, whereas nothing else did. Unless, he
thought, I walk off.
She feared that. Sometimes in their quarrels, especially at the house in Zurich, where no
one could hear them or interfere, he had seen the fear on her face. The idea of being alone
appalled her; he knew it; she knew it; the fear was part of the reality of their joint life. Not
their public life; for them, as genuinely professional entertainers, there they had complete,
rational control: however angry and estranged they became they would function together in the big
worshiping world of viewers, letter writers, noisy fans. Even outright hatred could not change
that.
But there could be no hate between them anyhow. They had too much in common. They got so
damn much from each other. Even mere physical contact, such as this, sitting together in the Rolls
skyfly, made them happy. For as long, anyhow, as it lasted.
Reaching into the inner pocket of his custom-tailored genuine silk suit--one of perhaps
ten in the whole world--he brought out a wad of government-certified bills. A great number of
them, compressed into a fat little bundle.
"You shouldn't carry so much cash on you," Heather said naggingly, in the tone he disliked
so much: the opinionatedmother tone.
Jason said, "With this"--he displayed the package of bills--"we can buy our way into any--
"
"If some unregistered student who has sneaked across from a campus burrow just last night
doesn't chop your hand off at the wrist and run away with it, both your hand and your flashy
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (3 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
money. You always have been flashy. Flashy and loud. Look at your tie. Look at it!" She had raised
her voice, now; she seemed genuinely angry.
"Life is short," Jason said. "And prosperity even shorter." But he placed the package of
bills back in his inside coat pocket, smoothed away at the lump it created in his otherwise
perfect suit. "I wanted to buy you something with it," he said. Actually the idea had just come to
him now; what he had planned to do with the money was something a little different: he intended to
take it to Las Vegas, to the blackjack tables. As a six he could--and did--always win at
blackjack; he had the edge over everyone, even the dealer. Even, he thought sleekly, the pit boss.
"You're lying," Heather said. "You didn't intend to get me anything; you never do, you're
so selfish and always thinking about yourself. That's screwing money; you're going to buy some big-
chested blonde and go to bed together with her. Probably at our place in Zurich, which, you
realize, I haven't seen for four months now. I might as well be pregnant."
It struck him as odd that she would say that, out of all the possible retorts that might
flow up into her conscious, talking mind. But there was a good deal about Heather that he did not
understand; with him, as with her fans, she kept many things about her private.
But, over the years, he had learned a lot about her. He knew, for example, that in 1982
she had had an abortion, a well-kept secret, too. He knew that at one time she had been illegally
married to a student commune leader, and that for one year she had lived in the rabbit warrens of
Columbia University, along with all the smelly, bearded students kept subsurface lifelong by the
pols and the nats. The police and the national guard, who ringed every campus, keeping the
students from creeping across to society like so many black rats swarming out of a leaky ship.
And he knew that one year ago she had been busted for possession of drugs. Only her
wealthy and powerful family had been able to buy her out of that one: her money and her charisma
and fame hadn't worked when confrontation time with the police came.
Heather had been scarred a little by all that had overtaken her, but, he knew, she was all
right now. Like all sixes she had enormous recuperative ability. It had been carefully built intci
each of them. Along with much, much else. Even he, at forty-two years, didn't know them all. And a
lot had happened to him, too. Mostly in the form of dead bodies, the remains of other entertainers
he had trampled on his long climb to the top.
"These 'flashy' ties--" he began, but then the skyfly's phone rang. He took it, said
hello. Probably it was Al Bliss with the ratings on tonight's show.
But it was not. A girl's voice came to him, penetrating sharply, stridently into his ear.
"Jason?" the girl said loudly.
"Yeah," he said. Cupping the mouthpiece of the phone he said to Heather, "It's Marilyn
Mason. Why the hell did I give her my skyfly number?"
"Who the hell is Marilyn Mason?" Heather asked.
"I'll tell you later." He uncupped the phone. "Yes, dear; this is Jason for real, in the
true reincarnated flesh. What is it? You sound terrible. Are they evicting you again?" He winked
at Heather and grinned wryly.
"Get rid of her," Heather said.
Again cupping the mouthpiece of the phone he said to her, "I will; I'm trying to; can't
you see?" Into the phone he said, "Okay, Marilyn. Spill your guts out to me; that's what I'm for."
For two years Marilyn Mason had been his protégée, so to speak. Anyhow, she wanted to be a
singer--be famous, rich, loved--like him. One day she had come wandering into the studio, during
rehearsal, and he had taken notice of her. Tight little worried face, short legs, skirt far too
short--he had, as was his practice, taken it all in at first glance. And, a week later, he had
arranged for an audition for her with Columbia Records, their artists and repertoire chief.
A lot had gone on in that week, but it hadn't had anything to do with singing.
Marilyn said shrilly into his ear, "I have to see you. Otherwise I'll kill myself and the
guilt will be on you. For the rest of your life. And I'll tell that Heather Hart woman about us
sleeping together all the time."
Inwardly he sighed. Hell, he was tired already, worn out by his hour-long show during
which it was smile, smile, smile. "I'm on my way to Switzerland for the rest of tonight," he said
firmly, as if speaking to a hysterical child. Usually, when Marilyn was in one of her accusatory,
quasi-paranoid moods it worked. But not this time, naturally.
"It'll take you five minutes to get over here in that milliondollar Rolls skyfly of
yours," Marilyn dinned in his ear. "I just want to talk to you for five seconds. I have something
very important to tell you."
She's probably pregnant, Jason said to himself. Somewhere along the line she intentionally-
-or maybe unintentionally-- forgot to take her pill.
"What can you tell me in five seconds that I don't already know?" he said sharply. "Tell
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (4 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
me now."
"I want you here with me," Marilyn said, with her customary total lack of consideration.
"You must come. I haven't seen you in six months and during that time I've done a lot of thinking
about us. And in particular about that last audition."
"Okay," he said, feeling bitter and resentful. This was what he got for trying to
manufacture for her--a no-talent--a career. He hung up the phone noisily, turned to Heather and
said, "I'm glad you never ran into her; she's really a--"
"Bulishit," Heather said. "I didn't 'run into her' because you made damn sure you saw to
that."
"Anyhow," he said, as he made a right turn for the skyfly, "I got her not one but two
auditions, and she snurfied them both. And to keep her self-respect she's got to blame it on me. I
somehow herded her into failing. You see the picture."
"Does she have nice boobs?" Heather said.
"Actually, yes." He grinned and Heather laughed. "You know my weakness. But I did my part
of the bargain; I got her an audition--two auditions. The last one was six months ago and I know
goddamn well she's still smoldering and brooding over it. I wonder what she wants to tell me."
He punched the control module to set up an automatic course for Marilyn's apartment
building with its small but adequate roof field.
"She's probably in love with you," Heather said, as he parked the skyfly on its tail,
releasing then the descent stairs.
"Like forty million others," Jason said genially.
Heather, making herself comfortable in the bucket seat of the skyfly said, "Don't be gone
very long or so help me I'm taking off without you."
"Leaving me stuck with Marilyn?" he said. They both laughed. "I'll be right back." He
crossed the field to the elevator, pressed the button.
When he entered Marilyn's apartment he saw, at once, that she was out of her mind. Her
entire face had pinched and constricted; her body so retracted that it looked as if she were
trying to ingest herself. And her eyes. Very few things around or about women made him uneasy, but
this did. Her eyes, completely round, with huge pupils, bored at him as she stood silently facing
him, her arms folded, everything about her unyielding and iron rigid.
"Start talking," Jason said, feeling around for the handle of the advantage. Usually--in
fact virtually always--he could control a situation that involved a woman; it was, in point of
fact, his specialty. But this. . . he felt uncomfortable. And still she said nothing. Her face,
under layers of makeup, had become completely bloodless, as if she were an animated corpse. "You
want another audition?" Jason asked. "Is that it?"
Marilyn shook her head no.
"Okay; tell me what it is," he said wearily but uneasily. He kept the unease out of his
voice, however; he was far too shrewd, far too experienced, to let her hear his uncertainty. In a
confrontation with a woman it ran nearly ninety per cent bluff, on both sides. It all lay in _how_
you did it, not what you did.
"I have something for you," Marilyn turned, walked off out of sight into the kitchen. He
strolled after her.
"You still blame me for the lack of success of both--" he began.
"Here you are," Marilyn said. She lifted up a plastic bag from the drainboard, stood
holding it a moment, her face still bloodless and stark, her eyes jutting and unblinking, and then
she yanked the bag open, swung it, moved swiftly up to him.
It happened too fast. He backed away out of instinct, but too slowly and too late. The
gelatinlike Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes clung to him, anchored itself to
his chest. Already he felt the feeding tubes dig into him, into his chest.
He leaped to the overhead kitchen cabinets, grabbed out a half-filled bottle of scotch,
unscrewed the lid with flying fingers, and poured the scotch onto the gelatinlike creature. His
thoughts had become lucid, even brilliant; he did not panic, but stood there pouring the scotch
onto the thing.
For a moment nothing happened. He still managed to hold himself together and not flee into
panic. And then the thing bubbled, shriveled, fell from his chest onto the floor. It had died.
Feeling weak, he seated himself at the kitchen table. Now he found himself fighting off
unconsciousness; some of the feeding tubes remained inside him, and they were still alive. "Not
bad," he managed to say. "You almost got me, you fucking little tramp."
"Not almost," Marilyn Mason said flatly, emotionlessly. "Some of the feeding tubes are
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (5 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
still in you and you know it; I can see it on your face. And a bottle of scotch isn't going to get
them out. _Nothing_ is going to get them out."
At that point he fainted. Dimly, he saw the green-and-gray floor rise to take him and then
there was emptiness. A void without even himself in it.
Pain. He opened his eyes, reflexively touched his chest. His hand-tailored silk suit had
vanished; he wore a cotton hospital robe and he was lying flat on a gurney. "God," he said thickly
as the two staff men wheeled the gurney rapidly up the hospital corridor.
Heather Hart hovered over him, anxious and in shock, but, like him, she retained full
possession of her senses. "I knew something was wrong," she said rapidly as the staff men wheeled
him into a room. "I didn't wait for you in the skyfly; I came down after you."
"You probably thought we were in bed together," he said weakly.
"The doctor said," Heather said, "that in another fifteen seconds you would have succumbed
to the somatic violation, as he calls it. The entrance of that _thing_ into you."
"I got the thing," he said. "But I didn't get all the feeding tubes. It was too late."
"I know," Heather said. "The doctor told me. They're planning surgery for as soon as
possible; they may be able to do something if the tubes haven't penetrated too far."
"I was good in the crisis," Jason grated; he shut his eyes and endured the pain. "But not
quite good enough. Just not quite." Opening his eyes, he saw that Heather was crying. "Is it that
bad?" he asked her; reaching up he took hold of her hand. He felt the pressure of her love as she
squeezed his fingers, and then there was nothing. Except the pain. But nothing else, no Heather,
no hospital, no staff men, no light. And no sound. It was an eternal moment and it absorbed him
completely.
2
Light filtered back, filling his closed eyes with a membrane of illuminated redness. He
opened his eyes, lifted his head to look around him. To search out Heather or the doctor.
He lay alone in the room. No one else. A bureau with a cracked vanity mirror, ugly old
light fixtures jutting from the grease-saturated walls. And from somewhere nearby the blare of a
TV set:
He was not in a hospital.
And Heather was not with him; he experienced her absence, the total emptiness of
everything, because of her.
God, he thought. _What's happened?_
The pain in his chest had vanished, along with so much else. Shakily, he pushed back the
soiled wool blanket, sat up, rubbed his forehead reflexively, gathered together his vitality.
This is a hotel room, he realized. A lousy, bug-infested cheap wino hotel. No curtains, no
bathroom. Like he had lived in years ago, at the start of his career. Back when he had been
unknown and had no money. The dark days he always shut out of his memory as best he could.
Money. He groped at his clothes, discovered that he no longer wore the hospital gown but
had back, in wrinkled condition, his hand-tailored silk suit. And, in the inner coat pocket, the
wad of high-denomination bills, the money he had intended to take to Vegas.
At least he had that.
Swiftly, he looked around for a phone. No, of course not. But there'd be one in the lobby.
But whom to call? Heather? Al Bliss, his agent? Mory Mann, the producer of his TV show? His
attorney, Bill Wolfer? Or all of them, as soon as possible, perhaps.
Unsteadily, he managed to get to his feet; he stood swaying, cursing for reasons he did
not understand. An animal instinct held him; he readied himself, his strong six body, to fight.
But he could not discern the antagonist, and that frightened him. For the first time in as long as
he could remember he felt panic.
Has a lot of time passed? he asked himself. He could not tell; he had no sense of it
either way. Daytime. Quibbles zooming and bleating in the skies outside the dirty glass of his
window. He looked at his watch; it read ten-thirty. So what? It could be a thousand years off, for
all he knew. His watch couldn't help him.
But the phone would. He made his way out into the dustsaturated corridor, found the
stairs, descended step by step, holding on to the rail until at last he stood in the depressing,
empty lobby with its ratty old overstuffed chairs.
Fortunately he had change. He dropped a one-dollar gold piece into the slot, dialed Al
Bliss's number.
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (6 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
"Bliss Talent Agency," Al's voice came presently.
"Listen," Jason said. "I don't know where I am. In the name of Christ come and get me; get
me out of here; get me someplace else. You understand, Al? Do you?"
Silence from the phone. And then in a distant, detached voice Al Bliss said, "Who am I
talking to?"
He snarled his answer.
"I don't know you, Mr. Jason Taverner," Al Bliss said, again in his most neutral,
uninvolved voice. "Are you sure you have the right number? Who did you want to talk to?"
"To you, Al. Al Bliss, my agent. What happened in the hospital? How'd I get out of there
into here? Don't you know?" His panic ebbed as he forced control on himself; he made his words
come out reasonably. "Can you get hold of Heather for me?"
"Miss Hart?" Al said, and chuckled. And did not answer.
"You," Jason said savagely, "are through as my agent. Period. No matter what the situation
is. You are out."
In his ear Al Bliss chuckled again and then, with a click, the line became dead. Al Bliss
had hung up.
I'll kill the son of a bitch, Jason said to himself. I'll tear that fat balding little
bastard into inch-square pieces.
What was he trying to do to me? I don't understand. What all of a sudden does he have
against me? What the hell did I do to him, for chrissakes? He's been my friend and agent nineteen
years. And nothing like this has ever happened before.
I'll try Bill Wolfer, he decided. He's always in his office or on call; I'll be able to
get hold of him and find out what this is all about. He dropped a second gold dollar into the
phone's slot and, from memory, once more dialed.
"Wolfer and Blame, Attorneys-at-law," a female receptionist's voice sounded in his ear.
"Let me talk to Bill," Jason said. "This is Jason Thverner. You know who I am."
The receptionist said, "Mr. Wolfer is in court today. Would you care to speak to Mr. Blame
instead, or shall I have Mr. Wolfer call you back when he returns to the office later on this
afternoon?"
"Do you know who I am?" Jason said. "Do you know who Jason Taverner is? Do you watch TV?"
His voice almost got away from him at that point; he heard it break and rise. With great effort he
regained control over it, but he could not stop his hands from shaking; his whole body, in fact,
shook.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Taverner," the receptionist said. "I really can't talk for Mr. Wolfer or--
"
"Do you watch TV?" he said.
"Yes."
"And you haven't heard of me? The _Jason Taverner Show_, at nine on Tuesday nights?"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Taverner. You really must talk directly to Mr. Wolfer. Give me the number
of the phone you're calling from and I'll see to it that he calls you back sometime today."
He hung up.
I'm insane, he thought. Or she's insane. She and Al Bliss, that son of a bitch. God. He
moved shakily away from the phone, seated himself in one of the faded overstuffed chairs. It felt
good to sit; he shut his eyes and breathed slowly and deeply. And pondered.
I have five thousand dollars in government high-denomination bills, he told himself. So
I'm not completely helpless. And that thing is gone from my chest, including its feeding tubes.
They must have been able to get at them surgically in the hospital. So at least I'm alive; I can
rejoice over that. Has there been a time lapse? he asked himself. Where's a newspaper?
He found an L.A. _Times_ on a nearby couch, read the date. October 12, 1988. No time
lapse. This was the day after his show and the day Marilyn had sent him, dying, to the hospital.
An idea came to him. He searched through the sections of newspaper until he found the
entertainment column. Currently he was appearing nightly at the Persian Room of the Hollywood
Hilton--had been in fact for three weeks, but of course less Tuesdays because of his show.
The ad for him which the hotel people had been running during the past three weeks did not
seem to be on the page anywhere. He thought groggily, maybe it's been moved to another page. He
thereupon combed that section of the paper thoroughly. Ad after ad for entertainers but no mention
of him. And his face had been on the entertainment page of some newspaper or another for ten
years. Without an ellipsis.
I'll make one more try, he decided. I'll try Mory Mann.
Fishing out his wallet, he searched for the slip on which he had written Mory's number.
His wallet was very thin.
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (7 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
All his identification cards were gone. Cards that made it possible for him to stay alive.
Cards that got him through pol and nat barricades without being shot or thrown into a forcedlabor
camp.
I can't live two hours without my ID, he said to himself. I don't even dare walk out of
the lobby of this rundown hotel and onto the public sidewalk. They'll assume I'm a student or
teacher escaped from one of the campuses. I'll spend the rest of my life as a slave doing heavy
manual labor. I am what they call an _unperson_.
So my first job, he thought, is to stay alive. The hell with Jason Taverner as a public
entertainer; I can worry about that later.
He could feel within his brain the powerful six-determined constituents moving already
into focus. I am not like other men, he told himself. I will get out of this, whatever it is.
Somehow.
For example, he realized, with all this money I have on me I can get myself down to Watts
and buy phony ID cards. A whole walletful of them. There must be a hundred little operators
scratching away at that, from what I've heard. But I never thought I'd be using one of them. Not
Jason Taverner.
Not a public entertainer with an audience of thirty million. Among all those thirty
million people, he asked himself, isn't there one who remembers me? If "remember" is the right
word. I'm talking as if a lot of time has passed, that I'm an old man now, a has-been, feeding off
former glories. And that's not what's going on.
Returning to the phone, he looked up the number of the birth-registration control center
in Iowa; with several gold coins he managed to reach them at last, after much delay.
"My name is Jason Taverner," he told the clerk. "I was born in Chicago at Memorial
Hospital on December 16, 1946. Would you please confirm and release a copy of my certificate of
birth? I need it for a job I'm applying for."
"Yes, sir." The clerk put the line on hold; Jason waited.
The clerk clicked back on. "Mr. Jason Taverner, born in Cook County on December 16, 1946."
"Yes," Jason said.
"We have no birth registration form for such a person at that time and place. Are you
absolutely sure of the facts, sir?"
"You mean do I know my name and when and where I was born?" His voice again managed to
escape his control, but this time he let it; panic flooded him. "Thanks," he said and hung up,
shaking violently, now. Shaking in his body and in his mind.
_I don't exist_, he said to himself. There is no Jason Taverner. There never was and there
never will be. The hell with my career; I just want to live. If someone or something wants to
eradicate my career, okay; do it. But aren't I going to be allowed to exist at all? Wasn't I even
born?
Something stirred in his chest. With terror he thought, They didn't get the feed tubes out
entirely; some of them are still growing and feeding inside of me. That goddamn tramp of a no-
talent girl. I hope she winds up walking the streets for two bits a try.
After what I did for her: getting her those two auditions for A and R people. But hell--I
did get to lay her a lot. I suppose it comes out even.
Returning to his hotel room, he took a good long look at himself in the flyspecked vanity
mirror. His appearance hadn't changed, except that he needed a shave. No older. No more lines, no
gray hair visible. The good shoulders and biceps. The fat-free waist that let him wear the current
formfitting men's clothing.
And that's important to your image, he said to himself. What kind of suits you can wear,
especially those tucked-inwaist numbers. I must have fifty of them, he thought. Or did have. Where
are they now? he asked himself. The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing? Or however
that goes. Something from the past, out of his days at school. Forgotten until this moment.
Strange, he thought, what drifts up into your mind when you're in an unfamiliar and ominous
situation. Sometimes the most trivial stuff imaginable.
If wishes were horses then beggars might fly. Stuff like that. It's enough to drive you
crazy.
He wondered how many pol and nat check stations there were between this miserable hotel
and the closest ID forger in Watts? Ten? Thirteen? Two? For me, he thought, all it takes is one.
One random check by a mobile vehicle and crew of three. With their damn radio gear connecting them
to pol-nat data central in Kansas City. Where they keep the dossiers.
He rolled back his sleeve and examined his forearm. Yes, there it was: his tattooed ident
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (8 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
number. His somatic license plate, to be carried by him throughout his life, buried at last with
him in his longed-for grave.
Well, the pols and nats at the mobile check station would read off the ident number to
Kansas City and then--what then? Was his dossier still there or was it gone, too, like his birth
certificate? And if it wasn't there, what would the polnat bureaucrats think it meant?
A clerical error. Somebody misfiled the microfilm packet that made up the dossier. It'll
turn up. Someday, when it doesn't matter, when I've spent ten years of my life in a quarry on Luna
using a manual pickax. If the dossier isn't there, he mused, they'll assume I'm an escaped
student, because it's only students who don't have pol-nat dossiers, and even some of them, the
important ones, the leaders--they're in there, too.
I am at the bottom of life, he realized. And I can't even climb my way up to mere physical
existence. Me, a man who yesterday had an audience of thirty million. Someday, somehow, I will
grope my way back to them. But not now. There are other things that come first. The bare bones of
existence that every man is born with: I don't even have that. But I will get it; a six is not an
ordinary. No ordinary could have physically or psychologically survived what's happened to me--
especially the uncertainty--as I have.
A six, no matter what the external circumstances, will always prevail. Because that's the
way they genetically defined us.
He left his hotel room once more, walked downstairs and up to the desk. A middle-aged man
with a thin mustache was reading a copy of _Box_ magazine; he did not look up but said, "Yes,
sir."
Jason brought out his packet of government bills, laid a five-hundred-dollar note on the
counter before the clerk. The clerk glanced at it, glanced again, this time with wide-opened eyes.
Then he cautiously looked up into Jason's face, questioningly.
"My ident cards were stolen," Jason said. "That fivehundred-dollar bill is yours if you
can get me to someone who can replace them. If you're going to do it, do it right now; I'm not
going to wait." Wait to be picked up by a pol or a nat, he thought. Caught here in this rundown
dingy hotel.
"Or caught on the sidewalk in front of the entrance," the clerk said. "I'm a telepath of
sorts. I know this hotel isn't much, but we have no bugs. Once we had Martian sand fleas, but no
more." He picked up the five-hundred-dollar bill. "I'll get you to someone who can help you," he
said. Studying Jason's face intently, he paused, then said, "You think you're world-famous. Well,
we get all kinds."
"Let's go," Jason said harshly. "Now."
"Right now," the clerk said, and reached for his shiny plastic coat.
3
As the clerk drove his old-time quibble slowly and noisily down the street he said
casually to Jason, seated beside him, "I'm picking up a lot of odd material in your mind."
"Get out of my mind," Jason said brusquely, with aversion. He had always disliked the
prying, curiosity-driven telepaths, and this time was no exception. "Get out of my mind," he said,
"and get me to the person who's going to help me. And don't run into any pol-nat barricades. If
you expect to live through this."
The clerk said mildly, "You don't have to tell me that; I know what would happen to you if
we got stopped. I've done this before, many times. For students. But you're not a student. You're
a famous man and you're rich. But at the same time you aren't. At the same time you're a nobody.
You don't even exist, legally speaking." He laughed a thin, effete laugh, his eyes fixed on the
traffic ahead of him. He drove like an old woman, Jason noted. Both hands fixedly hanging on to
the steering wheel.
Now they had entered the slums of Watts proper. Tiny dark stores on each side of the
cluttered streets, overflowing ashcans, the pavement littered with pieces of broken bottles, drab
painted signs that advertised Coca-Cola in big letters and the name of the store in small. At an
intersection an elderly black man haltingly crossed, feeling his way along as if blind with age.
Seeing him, Jason felt an odd emotion. There were so few blacks alive, now, because of Tidman's
notorious sterilization bill passed by Congress back in the terrible days of the Insurrection. The
clerk carefully slowed his rattly quibble to a stop so as not to harass the elderly black man in
his rumpled, seam-torn brown suit. Obviously he felt it, too.
"Do you realize," the clerk said to Jason, "that if I hit him with my car it would mean
the death penalty for me?"
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (9 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt
"It should," Jason said.
"They're like the last flock of whooping cranes," the clerk said, starting forward now
that the old black had reached the far side. "Protected by a thousand laws. You can't jeer at
them; you can't get into a fistfight with one without risking a felony rap--ten years in prison.
Yet we're making them die out--that's what Tidman wanted and I guess what the majority of
Silencers wanted, but"--he gestured, for the first time taking a hand off the wheel--"I miss the
kids. I remember when I was ten and I had a black boy to play with . . . not far from here as a
matter of fact. He's undoubtedly sterilized by now."
"But then he's had one child," Jason pointed out. "His wife had to surrender their birth
coupon when their first and only child came . . . but they've got that child. The law lets them
have it. And there're a million statutes protecting their safety."
"Two adults, one child," the clerk said. "So the black population is halved every
generation. Ingenious. You have to hand it to Tidman; he solved the race problem, all right."
"Something had to be done," Jason said; he sat rigidly in his seat, studying the street
ahead, searching for a sign of a pol-nat checkpoint or barricade. He saw neither, but how long
were they going to have to continue driving?
"We're almost there," the clerk said calmly. He turned his head momentarily to face Jason.
"I don't like your racist views," he said. "Even if you are paying me five hundred dollars."
"There're enough blacks alive to suit me," Jason said.
"And when the last one dies?"
Jason said, "You can read my mind; I don't have to tell you."
"Christ," the clerk said, and returned his attention to the street traffic ahead.
They made a sharp right turn, down a narrow alley, at both sides of which closed, locked
wooden doors could be seen. No signs here. Just shut-up silence: And piles of ancient debris.
"What's behind the doors?" Jason asked.
"People like you. People who can't come out into the open. But they're different from you
in one way: they don't have five hundred dollars . . . and a lot more besides, if I read you
correctly."
"It's going to cost me plenty," Jason said acidly, "to get my ID cards. Probably all I've
got."
"She won't overcharge you," the clerk said as he brought his quibble to a halt half on the
sidewalk of the alley. Jason peered out, saw an abandoned restaurant, boarded up, with broken
windows. Entirely dark inside. It repelled him, but apparently this was the place. He'd have to go
along with it, his need being what it was: he could not be choosy.
And--they had avoided every checkpoint and barricade along the way; the clerk had picked a
good route. So he had damn little to complain about, all things considered.
Together, he and the clerk approached the open-hanging broken front door of the
restaurant. Neither spoke; they concentrated on avoiding the rusted nails protruding from the
sheets of plywood hammered into place, presumably to protect the windows.
"Hang on to my hand," the clerk said, extending it in the shadowy dimness that surrounded
them. "I know the way and it's dark. The electricity was turned off on this block three years ago.
To try to get the people to vacate the buildings here so that they could be burned down." He
added, "But most of them stayed on."
The moist, cold hand of the hotel clerk led him past what appeared to be chairs and
tables, heaped up into irregular tumbles of legs and surfaces, interwoven with cobwebs and grainy
patterns of dirt. They bumped at last against a black, unmoving wall; there the clerk stopped,
retrieved his hand, fiddled with something in the gloom.
"I can't open it," he said as he fiddled. "It can only be opened from the other side,
_her_ side. What I'm doing is signaling that we're here."
A section of the wall groaningly slid aside. Jason, peering, saw into nothing more than
additional darkness. And abandonment.
"Step on through," the clerk said, and maneuvered him forward. The wall, after a pause,
slid shut again behind them.
Lights winked on. Momentarily blinded, Jason shielded his eyes and then took a good look
at her workshop.
It was small. But he saw a number of what appeared to be complex and highly specialized
machines. On the far side a workbench. Tools by the hundreds, all neatly mounted in place on the
walls of the room. Below the workbench large cartons, probably containing a variety of papers. And
a small generator-driven printing press.
And the girl. She sat on a high stool, hand-arranging a line of type. He made out pale
hair, very long but thin, dribbling down the back of her neck onto her cotton work shirt. She wore
file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policeman%20Said.txt (10 of 89) [1/19/03 7:41:37 PM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Philip%20K.Dick/Dick%20Flow%20My%20Tears%20The%20Policema %20Said.txtFLOWMYTEARS,THEPOLICEMANSAIDbyPhilipK.DickCopyright1974byPhilipK.DickFirstVintageBooksEdition,July1993AllrightsreservedunderInternationalandPan-AmericanCopyrightConve tions.PublishedintheUnitedStatesbyVintageBooks,...

展开>> 收起<<
Philip K. Dick - Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said.pdf

共89页,预览18页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：89 页 大小：304.94KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-15

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 89
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注