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

up. “Proves they’re not faked, though, because who would fake a felony onto an ID card? They’d have to be out of their minds.”
    “Yes,” Jason said.
    “Well, it’s not part of our area,” the senior pol said. He handed Jason’s ID cards back to him. “He’ll have to take it up with his drug inspector. Move on.” With his nightstick the pol shoved Jason out of the way, reaching meanwhile for the ID cards of the man behind him.
    “That’s it?” Jason said to the thungly pols. He could not believe it. Don’t let it show, he said to himself. Just
move on
!
    He did so.
    From the shadows beneath a broken streetlight, Kathy reached out, touched him; he froze at the touch, feeling himself turn to ice, starting with his heart. “What do you think of me now?” Kathy said. “My work, what I did for you.”
    “They did it,” he said shortly.
    “I’m not going to turn you in,” Kathy said, “even though you insulted and abandoned me. But you have to stay with me tonight like you promised. You understand?”
    He had to admire her. By lurking around the random checkpoint she had obtained firsthand proof that her forged documents had been well enough done to get him past the pols. So all at once the situation between them had altered: he was now in her debt. He no longer held the status of aggrieved victim.
    Now she owned a moral share of him. First the stick: the threat of turning him in to the pols. Then the carrot: the adequately forged ID cards. The girl had him, really. He had to admit it, to her and to himself.
    “I could have gotten you through anyhow,” Kathy said. She held up her right arm, pointing to a section of her sleeve. “I’ve got a gray pol-ident tab, there; it shows up under their macrolens. So I don’t get picked up by mistake. I would have said—”
    “Let it lie there,” he broke in harshly. “I don’t want to hear about it.” He walked away from her; the girl skimmed after him, like a skillful bird.
    “Want to go back to my Minor Apartment?” Kathy asked.
    “That goddamn shabby room.” I have a floating house in Malibu, he thought, with eight bedrooms, six rotating baths and a four-dimensional living room with an infinity ceiling. And, because of something I don’t understand and can’t control, I have to spend my time like this. Visiting run-down marginal places. Crappy eateries, crappier workshops, crappiest one-room lodgings. Am I being paid back for something I did? he asked himself. Something I don’t know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you’re not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven at the end. Haven’t I learned that by now, if I’ve learned anything?
    “Guess what’s at the top of my shopping list for tomorrow,” Kathy was saying. “Dead flies. Do you know why?”
    “They’re high in protein.”
    “Yes, but that’s not why; I’m not getting them for myself. I buy a bag of them every week for Bill, my turtle.”
    “I didn’t see any turtle.”
    “At my Major Apartment. You didn’t really think I’d buy dead flies for myself, did you?”
    “
De gustibus non disputandum est
,” he quoted.
    “Let’s see. In matters of taste there’s no dispute. Right?”
    “Right,” he said. “Meaning that if you want to eat dead flies go ahead and eat them.”
    “Bill does; he likes them. He’s just one of those little green turtles…not a land tortoise or anything. Have you ever watched the way they snap at food, at a fly floating on their water? It’s very small but it’s awful. One second the fly’s there and then the next, glunk. It’s inside the turtle.” She laughed. “Being digested. There’s a lesson to be learned there.”
    “What lesson?” He anticipated it then. “That when you bite,” he said, “you either get all of it or none of it, but never part.”
    “That’s how I feel.”
    “Which do you have?” he asked her. “All or