The Search for Philip K. Dick Read Online Free

an old brown leather jacket with knitted cuffs and knitted waist, a cheap plaid flannel shirt, stiff jeans, and clunky, brown Army boots. Nevertheless, he managed to look graceful and attractive—like someone wearing a disguise.
    Kleo introduced him: “Meet Philip K. Dick.” He looked up at me as we came in, and I looked up into his eyes, and, as I was beginning to say, “How nice to meet you,” I had an odd experience unlike anything that had ever happened to me before. A voice from the depths of my mind said, “I already know this person. I’ve known him for eons.” But my practical conscious mind, astonished, answered itself, “Ridiculous, how can that be? You just met him.”
    “What does the ‘K’ stand for?” I asked him.
    “Kindred,” he answered.
    “Aha!” said that voice.
    I considered myself to be a logical person not given to silly mysticism and brushed this whole experience out of my mind. The three of us sat down at the kitchen table and immediately plunged into an animated conversation. Phil had a most pleasant manner and a beautiful voice. He almost fell backward in his tilted chair when he heard that my late husband and I had been connected with the little magazine
Neurotica
, and that we knew William Inge, James Jones, and other poets and writers whose names I dropped with great abandon. I told him that I had edited, published, and distributed four issues of two little poetry magazines,
Inferno
and
Gryphon
, and a small chapbook of Richard’s poems,
Beer and Angels
.
    I told Kleo and Phil about Richard’s sudden death on Yom Kippur three weeks earlier at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. He had dropped dead while getting a drink of water from the water fountain. After a long investigation, it was discovered that he had been fatally allergic to the heavy tranquilizers given to him, drugs that were still so new that their side effects were not yet known. Also, some doctors don’t seem to know this, but many sensitive, creative, high-strung people react differently to pharmaceutical medicines. Maybe we’ve already killed many of them off.
    But I didn’t want to go over that tragedy again. I changed the subject and asked Phil about his writing. He said he was a science fiction writer. Interesting. I had never met this type of writer before. As we talked, I realized that I had actually read one of his stories in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. He was quite pleased, although he seemed more interested in telling me about his literary novels, as yet unpublished. “I am only a minor science fiction writer,” he said.
    Later, I found he had already written and published eighty-five short stories and five science fiction novels—
Solar Lottery, The World Jones Made, The Man Who Japed, Eye in the Sky, The Cosmic Puppets
—and he was finishing
Time Out of Joint
, but in those days science fiction was in a literary ghetto and Phil was embarrassed that he wrote it. He was struggling to be a “mainstream” success by writing literary novels, most of which wouldn’t be published until after his death.
    I told Phil and Kleo that Richard, the girls, and I had moved to Point Reyes Station in 1955 to get away from the city. We wanted to own some land where we could raise plants and animals, and Richard wanted to devote his time to his poetry. He had never had a job; he was too nervous, and luckily his family had the wherewithal to support him.
    Phil and Kleo told me that they had wanted to get back to the land and garden and raise animals too. To supplement their income, Kleo was commuting to Berkeley three days a week to work in the administrative offices of the University of California.
    Phil described their house and the area in a letter to a friend: “… [W]e … bought a house in a small dairy-farming town up in North West Marin County called Point Reyes Station—it’s on State Route One. We have a plot of land 100 × 160, and we’re raising two ducks and one tomcat. The area is