Free Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick Page B

hung directly in front of her eyes. Her six’s eyes.
    Once more he dropped in a coin, dialed.
    “Hi again,” he said, when Heather at last picked up the phone in her car. “I know that about you, too,” he said. “You can’t let a phone ring; that’s why you have ten private numbers, each for a different purpose of your very special own.”
    “I have three,” Heather said. “So you don’t know everything.”
    Jason said, “I merely meant—”
    “How much?”
    “I’ve had enough of that today,” he said sincerely. “You can’t buy me off because that’s not what I want. I want—listen to me, Heather—I want to find out why nobody knows me. You most of all. And since you’re a six I thought you might be able to explain it. Do you have
any
memory of me? Look at me on the picture screen. Look!”
    She peered, one eyebrow cocked. “You’re young but not too young. You’re good-looking. Your voice is commanding and you have no reluctance about brigging me like this. You’re exactly what a twerp fan would look like, sound like, act like. Okay; are you satisfied?”
    “I’m in trouble,” he said. It was blatantly irrational for him to tell her this, since she had no recollection of any sort of him. But over the years he had become accustomed to laying his troubles before her—and listening to hers—and the habit had not died. The habit ignored what he saw the reality situation to be: it cruised on under its own power.
    “That’s a shame,” Heather said.
    Jason said, “Nobody remembers me. And I have no birth certificate; I was never born, never even born! So naturally I have no ID cards except a forged set I bought from a pol fink for two thousand dollars plus one thousand for my contact. I’m carrying them around, but, God: they may have microtransmitters built into them. Even knowing that I have to keep them on me; you know why—even you up at the top, even you know how this society works. Yesterday I had thirty million viewers who would have shrieked their aggrieved heads off if a pol or a nat so much as touched me. Now I’m looking into the eyes of an FLC.”
    “What’s an FLC?”
    “Forced-labor camp.” He snarled the words at her, trying to pin her down and finally nail her. “The vicious little bitch who forged my papers made me take her out to some Godforsaken broken-down wop restaurant, and while we were there, just talking, she threw herself down on the floor screaming. Psychotic screaming; she’s an escapee from Morningside, by her own admission. That cost me another three hundred dollars and by now who knows? She’s probably sicced the pols and nats
both
on me.” Pushing his self-pity gingerly a little further, he said, “They’re probably monitoring this phone line right now.”
    “Oh, Christ, no!” Heather shrieked and again hung up.
    He had no more gold quinques. So, at this point, he gave up. That was a stupid thing to say, he realized, that about the phone lines. That would make anybody hang up. I strangled myself in my own word web, right down the old freeber. Straight down the middle. Beautifully flat at both ends, too. Like a great artificial anus.
    He shoved the door of the phone booth aside and stepped out onto the busy nocturnal sidewalk…down here, he thought acidly, in Slumsville. Down where the pol finks hang out. Jolly good show, as that classic TV muffin ad went that we studied in school, he said to himself.
    It would be funny, he thought, if it were happening to someone else. But it’s happening to me. No, it’s not funny either way. Because there is real suffering and real death passing the time of day in the wings. Ready to come on any minute.
    I wish I could have taped the phone call, plus everything Kathy said to me and me to her. In 3-D color, on videotape it would be a nice bit on my show, somewhere near the end where we run out of material occasionally. Occasionally, hell: generally. Always. For the rest of my life.
    He could hear his intro now.