theme "pressure" title "things to do in denver when you're dead" in misc. flash fiction

Philip K Dick wrote the works upon which “Blade Runner” “Total Recall” and “Minority Report” were all based, not to mention half the dystopian science-fiction cinema of the last forty years stolen from him with limited accreditation. He was also an intermittently drug-addled schizophrenic who heard God speak through satellites, believed himself the reincarnation of John the Baptist and occasionally ransacked his own offices in paranoid fits then woke the next day, last evening a blur, believing he’d been raided by the CIA. Needless to say, Phil was my kind of guy.

When my ex and I fled California because everything collapsed, we stayed a few days in Denver with my cousin and, knowing Phil was buried in Fort Morgan, a small hamlet two hours northeast of there, I had to go and pay respects. There were arts-and-crafts stores for my ex in Fort Morgan to stroll through as well so win-win.

Fort Morgan’s a farm town of ten thousand that only exists because it was a whistle-stop for the trains from Chicago on west, with still an Amtrak station open eight hours a day. Driving in, there are ten-thousand signs proclaiming Ft Morgan “The Boyhood Home of Glenn Miller” a middling Big Band leader nearly no one under eighty-five can recall. There are none commemorating one of the most influential English-language writers of the Twentieth Century, probably as a squeaky clean tromboner better fits their self-image than a tortured speed-freak genius but that’s neither on Phil nor on Glenn, who seemed nice enough. It’s all on them. Needless to say, Fort Morgan was not my kind of town.

The only evidence at all outside the cemetery was that the sci-fi section of the local library, in the same building as the Glenn Miller museum, had more of Phil’s work than an average small-town library. At the local bookstore I wanted to buy one of his novels in his burial town, only for the owner to sniff that they don’t carry him, then she tried to pressure me into buying “Left Behind” or some other religious propaganda.

But in the cemetery whose name only MapQuest would speak, when we got to the plot he shares with his twin sister who died in infancy, there were dozens on dozens of remembrances left by people like myself. Notes, tattered copies of his books, carvings of the cats he loved so well. The local chamber of commerce may be in denial, polite company may avoid his bizarre majesty, but Philip K Dick indeed rests in Fort Morgan and is, by pilgrimaging weirdos, well-memorialized.

No other offering at hand, we left our Burbank library cards there, in his obscured monumental memory, and then continued east. Our paths are not straight train-tracks, those of us searching for truth as we stumble through this life but Phil, shine on you crazy goddamned diamond, you are the secret treasure of a tiny place where people only go on the way to somewhere else.

Last updated February 26, 2021