Free The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick

outargued with little effort on his part: little effort and professional skill. It was an easy verbal victory for Tim Archer. So much for that.
    If you intend to kill yourself you don't require a reason, in the usual sense of the term; just as, to the contrary, when you intend to stay alive, no verbal, articulated, formal reason is necessary, one you can seize on if the issue comes up. Jeff had been left out. I could see that his interest in the Thirty Years War really had. to do with Kirsten; his mind, or some portion of it, had noted her Scandinavian origin, and another part of his mind had perceived and recorded the fact that the Swedish army was the victor and heroic power of that war; his emotional pursuits and his intellectual pursuits wove together, which was, for a time, to his advantage, and then when Kirsten flew to England he found himself wrecked by his own cleverness. Now he had to confront the fact that he didn't really give a good goddamn about Tilly and Wallenstein and the Holy Roman Empire; he was in love with a woman his mother's age who was sleeping with his father—and doing that eight thousand miles away, and above and beyond everything else the two of them, to his exclusion, participated in one of the most exhilarating archeological theology discoveries in history, on a day-to-day basis as the translations became available, as the documents got patched and pasted together and the words emerged, one by one, and again and again the Hebrew word
anokhi
manifested itself, in unusual contexts, baffling contexts: new contexts. The documents spoke as if
anokhi
were present at the
wadi.
It or he was referred to as
here,
not there,
now,
not then.
Anokhi
was not something the Zadokites thought about or knew about;
it was something they possessed.
    It is very hard to read your library books and listen to a Donovan record, no matter how good, when a discovery of that magnitude is going on in another part of the world, and if your father and his mistress, both of whom you love and at the same time furiously hate, are involved in that unfolding discovery—what drove me frantic was Jeff playing and replaying Paul McCartney's first solo album; he liked "Teddy Boy" in particular. When he left me to go live alone in the hotel room—the room where he shot himself—he took the album with him, although he had, it turned out, nothing to play it on. He wrote me a number of times, telling me that he was still active in antiwar happenings. Probably he was. I think, though, by and large he just sat alone in the hotel room trying to figure out how he felt about his father and, even more important, how he felt about Kirsten. So that would be 1971, since the McCartney album came out in 1970. But see, that left me alone, too, in our house. I got the house; Jeff died. I told you not to live alone but I am speaking, really, to myself. You can do any goddamn thing you want but I am never going to live alone again. I'll take in street people before I let that happen to me, that isolation.
    Just don't play any Beatles albums around me. That's the main thing I ask. I can take Joplin, because I still think it's funny that Tim thought Joplin was alive and black instead of dead and white, but I do not want to hear the Beatles because they are linked to too much pain in me, inside me, in my life, in what happened.
     
    I am not quite rational myself when it comes down to it, to, specifically, my husband's suicide. I hear in my mind a mélange of John and Paul and George—with Ringo thumping away in the rear somewhere—with fragments of tunes and their words, critical terms pertaining to souls suffering a great deal, although not in a way I can pin down except, of course, for my husband's death and then Kirsten's death, and finally, Tim Archer's death—but I suppose that is enough. Now, with John Lennon shot, everyone is pierced as I have been, so I can fucking well stop feeling sorry for myself and join the rest of the world, no better