A Scanner Darkly

I could use, he reflected, anything that'd help, anything at all. Any hint, like from that girl, any suggestion. He felt dismal and afraid. Shit, he thought, what am I going to do?

If I'm off everything, he thought, then I'll never see any of them again, any of my friends, the people I watched and knew. I'll be out of it; I'll be maybe retired the rest of my life—anyhow, I've seen the last of Arctor and Luckman and Jerry Fabin and Charles Freck and most of all Donna Hawthorne. I'll never see any of my friends again, for the rest of eternity. It's over.

Donna. He remembered a song his great-uncle used to sing years ago, in German. "Ich seh', wie em Engel im rosigen Duft/Sich tröstend zur Seite mir stellet," which his great-uncle had explained to him meant "I see, dressed like an angel, standing by my side to give me comfort," the woman he loved, the woman who saved him (in the song). In the song, not in real life. His great-uncle was dead, and it was a long time ago he'd heard those words. His great-uncle, Germanborn, singing in the house, or reading aloud.

Gott! Welch Dunkel hier! 0 grauen voile Stille!

Od' ist es um mich her. Nichts lebet auszer mir…

God, how dark it is here, and totally silent.

Nothing but me lives in this vacuum …

Even if his brain's not burned out, he realized, by the time I'm back on duty somebody else will have been assigned to them. Or they'll be dead or in the bucket or in federal clinics or just scattered, scattered, scattered. Burned out and destroyed, like me, unable to figure out what the fuck is happening. It has reached an end in any case, anyhow, for me. I've without knowing it already said good-by.

All I could ever do sometime, he thought, is play the holotapes back, to remember.

"I ought to go to the safe apartment …" He glanced around and became silent. I ought to go to the safe apartment and rip them off now, he thought. While I can. Later they might be erased, and later I would not have access. Fuck the department, he thought; they can bill me against the back salary. By every ethical consideration those tapes of that house and the people in it belong to me.

And now those tapes, they're all I've got left out of all this; that's all I can hope to carry away.

But also, he thought rapidly, to play the tapes back I need the entire holo transport cube-projection resolution system there in the safe apartment. I'll need to dissemble it and cart it out of there piece by piece. The scanners and recording assemblies I won't need; just transport, playback components, and especially all the cube-projection gear. I can do it bit by bit; I have a key to that apartment. They'll require me to turn in the key, but I can get a dupe made right here before I turn it in; it's a conventional Schlage lock key. Then I can do it! He felt better, realizing this; he felt grim and moral and a little angry. At everyone. Pleasure at how he would make matters okay.

On the other hand, he thought, if I ripped off the scanners and recording heads and like that, I could go on monitoring. On my own. Keep surveillance alive, as I've been doing. For a while at least. But I mean, everything in life is just for a while—as witness this.

The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place.

Not for their sake. For mine.

Yeah, he amended, for theirs too. In case something happens, like when Luckman choked. If someone is watching—if I am watching—I can notice and get help. Phone for help. Bring assistance to them right away, the right kind.

Otherwise, he thought, they could die and no one would be the wiser. Know or even fucking care.

In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record, so they'll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.

***

In Hank's office he sat with Hank and a uniformed officer and the sweating, grinning informant Jim Barris, while one of Barris's cassette tapes played on the table in front of them. Beside it, a second cassette recorded what it was playing, for a department duplicate.

"… Oh, hi. Look, I can't talk."

"When, then?"

"Call you back."

"This can't wait."

"Well, what is it?"

"We intend to—"

Hank reached out, signaling to Barris to halt the tape. "Would you identify the voices for us, Mr. Barris?" Hank said.

"Yes," Barris eagerly agreed. "The female's voice is Donna Hawthorne, the male's is Robert Arctor."

"All right," Hank said nodding, then glancing at Fred. He had Fred's medical report before him and was glancing at it. "Go ahead with your tape."

"… half of Southern California tomorrow night," the male's voice, identified by the informant as Bob Arctor's, continued. "The Air Force Arsenal at Vandenberg AFB will be hit for automatic and semiautomatic weapons—"

Hank stopped reading the medical report and listened, cocking his scramble-suit-blurred head.

To himself and now to all in the room, Barris grinned; his fingers fiddled with paper clips taken from the table, fiddled and fiddled, as if knitting with metal webs of wine, knitting and fiddling and sweating and knitting.

The female, identified as Donna Hawthorne, said, "What about that disorientation drug the bikers ripped off for us? When do we carry that crud up to the watershed area to—"

"The organization needs the weapons first," the male's voice explained. "That's step B."

"Okay, but now I gotta go; I got a customer."

Click. Click.

Barris aloud, shifting in his chair, said, "I can identify the biker gang mentioned. It is mentioned on another—"

"You have more material of this sort?" Hank said. "To build up background? Or is this tape substantially it?"

"Much more."

"But it's this same sort of thing."

"It refers, yes, to the same conspiratorial organization and its plans, yes. This particular plot."

"Who are these people?" Hank said. "What organization?"

"They are a world-wide—"

"Their names. You're speculating."

"Robert Arctor, Donna Hawthorne, primarily. I have coded notes here, too …" Barris fumbled with a grubby notebook, half dropping it as he tried to open it.

Hank said, "I'm impounding all this stuff here, Mr. Barris, tapes and what you've got. Temporarily they're our property. We'll go over them ourselves."

"My handwriting, and the enciphered material which I—"

"You'll be on hand to explain it to us when we get to that point or feel we want anything explained." Hank signaled the uniformed cop, not Barris, to shut off the cassette. Barris reached toward it. At once the cop stopped him and pushed him back. Barris, blinking, gazed around, still fixedly smiling. "Mr. Barris," Hank said, "you will not be released, pending our study of this material. You're being charged, as a formality to keep you available, with giving false information to the authorities knowingly. This is, of course, only a pretext for your own safety, and we all realize that, but the formal change will be lodged anyhow. It will be passed on to the D.A. but marked for hold. Is that satisfactory?" He did not wait for an answer; instead, he signaled the uniformed cop to take Barris out, leaving the evidence and shit and whatnot on the table.

The cop led grinning Barris out. Hank and Fred sat facing each other across the littered table. Hank said nothing; he was reading the psychologists' findings.

After an interval he picked up his phone and dialed an inbuilding number. "I've got some unevaluated material here—I want you to go over it and determine how much of it is fake. Let me know about that, and then I'll tell you what to do with it next. It's about twelve pounds; you'll need one cardboard box, size three. Okay, thanks." He hung up. "The electronics and crypto lab," he informed Fred, and resumed reading.

Two heavily armed uniformed lab technicians appeared, bringing with them a lock-type steel container.

"We could only find this," one of them apologized as they carefully filled it with the items on the table.

"Who's down there?"

"Hurley."

"Have Hurley go over this sometime today for sure, and report when he's got a spurious index-factor for me. It must be today; tell him that."

The lab technicians locked the metal box and lugged it out of the office.

Tossing the medical-findings report on the table, Hank leaned back and said, "What do you—Okay, what's your response to Barris's evidence so far?"

Fred said, "That is my medical report you have there, isn't it?" He reached to pick it up, then changed his mind. "I think what he played, the little he played, it sounded genuine to me."

"It's a fake," Hank said. "Worthless."

"You may be right," Fred said, "but I don't agree."

"The arsenal they're talking about at Vandenberg is probably the OSI Arsenal." Hank reached for the phone. To himself, aloud, he said, "Let's see—who's the guy at OSI I talked to that time … he was in on Wednesday with some pictures …" Hank shook his head and turned away from the phone to confront Fred. "I'll wait. It can wait for the prelim spurious report. Fred?"

"What does my medical—"

"They say you're completely cuckoo."

Fred (as best he could) shrugged. "Completely?"

Wie kalt ist es in diesem unterirdischen Gewolbe!

"Possibly two brain cells still light up. But that's about all. Mostly short circuits and sparks."

Das ist natürlich, es ist ja tief.

"Two, you say," Fred said. "Out of how many?"

"I don't know. Brains have a lot of cells, I understand—trillions."

"More possible connections between them," Fred said, "than there are stars in the universe."

"If that's so, then you're not batting too good an average right now. About two cells out of—maybe sixty-five trillion?"

"More like sixty-five trillion trillion," Fred said.

"That's worse than the old Philadelphia Athletics under Connie Mack. They used to end the season with a percentage—"

"What do I get," Fred said, "for saying it happened on duty?"

"You get to sit in a waiting room and read a lot of Saturday Evening Posts and Cosmopolitans free."

"Where's that?"

"Where would you like?"

Fred said, "Let me think it over."

"I'll tell you what I'd do," Hank said. "I wouldn't go into a Federal clinic; I'd get about six bottles of good bourbon, I.W. Harper, and go up into the hills, up into the San Bernardino Mountains near one of the lakes, by myself, and just stay there all alone until it's over. Where no one can find me."

"But it may never be over," Fred said.

"Then never come back. Do you know anyone who has a cabin up there?"

"No," Fred said.

"Can you drive okay?"

"My—" He hesitated, and a dreamlike strength fell over him, relaxing him and mellowing him out. All the spatial relationships in the room shifted; the alteration affected even his awareness of time. "It's in the …" He yawned.

"You don't remember."

"I remember it's not functioning."

"We can have somebody drive you up. That would be safer, anyhow."

Drive me up where? he wondered. Up to what? Up roads, trails, paths, hiking and striding through Jell-O, like a tomcat on a leash who only wants to get back indoors, or get free.

He thought, Em Engel, der Gattin, so gleich, der fuhrt mich zur Freiheit ins himmlische Reich. "Sure," he said, and smiled. Relief. Pulling forward against the leash, trying and striving to get free, and then to lie down. "What do you think about me now," he said, "now that I've proved out like this—burned out, temporarily, anyhow. Maybe permanently."

Hank said, "I think you're a very good person."

"Thank you," Fred said.

"Take your gun with you."

"What?" he said.

"When you go off to the San Bernardino Mountains with the fifths of I.W. Harper. Take your gun."

"You mean for if I don't come out of it?"

Hank said, "Either way. Coming down off the amount they say you're on … Have it there with you."

"Okay."

"When you get back," Hank said, "call me. Let me know."

"Hell, I won't have my suit."

"Call me anyhow. With or without your suit."

Again he said, "Okay." Evidently it didn't matter. Evidently that was over.

"When you go pick up your next payment, there'll be a different amount. A considerable change this one time."

Fred said, "I get some sort of bonus for this, for what happened to me?"

"No. Read your penal code. An officer who willingly becomes an addict and does not promptly report it is subject to a misdemeanor change—a fine of three thousand dollars and/or six months. You'll probably just be fined."

"Willingly?" he said, marveling.

"Nobody held a gun to your head and shot you up. Nobody dropped something in your soup. You knowingly and willingly took an addictive drug, brain-destructive and disorienting."

"I had to!"

Hank said, "You could have pretended to. Most officers manage to cope with it. And from the quantity they say you were dropping, you have to have been—"

"You're treating me like a crook. I am not a crook."

Picking up a clipboard and pen, Hank began to figure. "How much are you at, paywise? I can calculate it now if—"

"Could I pay the fine later on? Maybe in a series of monthly installments over like two years?"

Hank said, "Come on, Fred."

"Okay," he said.

"How much per hour?"

He couldn't remember.

"Well, then, how many logged hours?"

That, neither.

Hank tossed his clipboard back down. "Want a cigarette?" He offered Fred his pack.

"I'm getting off that, too," Fred said. "Everything including peanuts and …" He couldn't think. They both sat there, the two of them, in their scramble suits, both silent.

"Like I tell my kids," Hank began.

"I've got two kids," Fred said. "Two girls."

"I don't believe you do; you're not supposed to."

"Maybe not." He had begun to try to figure out when withdrawal would begin, and then he began to try to figure how many tabs of Substance D he had hidden here and there. And how much money he would have, when he got paid, for scoring.

"Maybe you want me to continue figuring what your payoff amount will consist of," Hank said.

"Okay," he said, and nodded vigorously. "Do that." He sat waiting, tensely, drumming on the table, like Barris.

"How much per hour?" Hank repeated, and then presently reached for his phone. "I'll call payroll."

Fred said nothing. Staring down, he waited. He thought, Maybe Donna can help me. Donna, he thought, please help me now.

"I don't think you're going to make it to the mountains," Hank said. "Even if somebody drives you."

"No."

"Where do you want to go?"

"Let me sit and think."

"Federal clinic?"

"No."

They sat.

He wondered what not supposed to meant.

"What about over to Donna Hawthorne's?" Hank said. "From all the information you've brought in and everyone else has, I know you're close."

"Yes." He nodded. "We are." And then he looked up and said, "How do you know that?"

Hank said, "By a process of elimination. I know who you aren't, and there aren't an infinite number of suspects in this group—in fact, they're a very small group. We thought they'd lead us up higher, and maybe Barris will. You and I have spent a lot of time rapping together. I pieced it together a long time ago. That you're Arctor."

"I'm who?" he said, staring at Hank the scramble suit facing him. "I'm Bob Arctor?" He could not believe it. It made no sense to him. It did not fit anything he had done on thought, it was grotesque.

"Never mind," Hank said. "What's Donna's phone number?"

"She's probably at work." His voice trembled."The perfume stone. The number is—" He couldn't keep his voice steady, and he couldn't remember the number. The hell I am, he said to himself. I'm not Bob Arctor. But who am I? Maybe I'm—

"Get me Donna Hawthorne's number at work," Hank was saying rapidly into the phone. "Here," he said, holding the phone toward Fred. "I'll put you on the line. No, maybe I better not. I'll tell her to pick you up—where? We'll drive you there and drop you off; can't meet her here. What's a good place? Where do you usually meet her?"

"Take me to her place," he said. "I know how to get in."

"I'll tell her you're there and that you're withdrawing. I'll just say I know you and you asked me to call."

"Far out," Fred said, "I can dig it. Thanks, man."

Hank nodded and began to redial, an outside number. It seemed to Fred that he dialed each digit more and more slowly and it went on forever, and he shut his eyes, breathing to himself and thinking, Wow. I'm really out of it.

You really are, he agreed. Spaced, wired, burned out and strung-out and fucked. Completely fucked. He felt like laughing.

"We'll get you over there to her—" Hank began, and then shifted his attention to the phone, saying, "Hey, Donna, this is a buddy of Bob's, you know? Hey, man, he's in a bad way, I'm not jiving you. Hey, he—"

I can dig it, two voices thought inside his mind in unison as he heard his buddy laying it on Donna. And don't forget to tell her to bring me something; I'm really hunting. Can she score for me or something? Maybe supercharge me, like she does? He reached out to touch Hank but could not; his hand fell short.

"I'll do the same for you sometime," he promised Hank as Hank hung up.

"Just sit there until the car's outside. I'll put through the call now." Again Hank phoned, this time saying, "Motor pool? I want an unmarked car and officer out of uniform. What do you have available?"

They, inside the scramble suit, the nebulous blur, shut their eyes to wait.

"It might be I should get you taken to the hospital," Hank said. "You're very bad off; maybe Jim Barris poisoned you. We really are interested in Barris, not you; the scanning of the house was primarily to keep on Barris. We hoped to draw him in here … and we did." Hank was silent. "So that's why I knew pretty well that his tapes and the other items were faked. The lab will confirm. But Barris is into something heavy. Heavy and sick, and it has to do with guns."

"I'm a what, then?" he said suddenly, very loud.

"We had to get to Jim Barris and set him up."

"You fuckers," he said.

"The way we arranged it, Barris—if that's who he is—got progressively more and more suspicious that you were an undercover police agent, about to nail him or use him to get higher. So he—"

The phone rang.

"All right," Hank said later. "Just sit, Bob. Bob, Fred, whatever. Take comfort—we did get the bugger and he's a—well, what you just now called us. You know it's worth it. Isn't it? To entrap him? A thing like that, whatever it is he's doing?"

"Sure, worth it." He could hardly speak; he grated mechanically.

Together they sat.

***

On the drive to New-Path, Donna pulled off the road where they could see the lights below, on all sides. But the pain had started for him now; she could see that, and there wasn't much time left. She had wanted to be with him one more time. Well, she had waited too long. Tears ran down his cheeks, and he had started to heave and vomit.

"We'll sit for a few minutes," she told him, guiding him through the bushes and weeds, across the sandy soil, among the discarded beer cans and debris. "I—"

"Do you have your hash pipe?" he managed to say.

"Yes," she said. They had to be far enough from the road not to be noticed by the police. Or at least far enough so they could ditch the hash pipe if an officer came along. She would see the police car park, its lights off, covertly, a way off, and the officer approach on foot. There would be time.

She thought, Time enough for that. Time enough to be safe from the law. But no time any more for Bob Arctor. His time—at least if measured in human standards—had run out. It was another kind of time which he had entered now. Like, she thought, the time a rat has: to run back and forth, to be futile. To move without planning, back and forth, back and forth. But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.

They found a sheltered place, and she got out the foilwrapped fragment of hash and lit the hash pipe. Bob Arctor, beside her, did not seem to notice. He had dirtied himself but she knew he could not help it. In fact, he probably didn't even know it. They all got this way during withdrawal.

"Here." She bent toward him, to supercharge him. But he did not notice her either. He just sat doubled up, enduring the stomach cramps, vomiting and soiling himself, shivering, and crazily moaning to himself, a kind of song.

She thought then of a guy she had known once, who had seen God. He had acted much like this, moaning and crying, although he had not soiled himself. He had seen God in a flashback after an acid trip; he had been experimenting with water-soluble vitamins, huge doses of them. The orthomoleculan formula that was supposed to improve neural firing in the brain, speed it up and synchronize it. With that guy, though, instead of merely becoming smarten, he had seen God. It had been a complete surprise to him.

"I guess," she said, "we never know what's in stone for us."

Beside her, Bob Arctor moaned and did not answer.

"Did you know a dude named Tony Amsterdam?"

There was no response.

Donna inhaled from the hash pipe and contemplated the lights spread out below them; she smelled the air and listened. "After he saw God he felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn't seen God. He told me one day he got really mad; he just freaked out and started cursing and smashing things in his apartment. He even smashed his stereo. He realized he was going to have to live on and on like he was, seeing nothing. Without any purpose. Just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, crapping."

"Like the rest of us." It was the first thing Bob Arctor had managed to say; each word came with retching difficulty.

Donna said, "That's what I told him. I pointed that out. We were all in the same boat and it didn't freak the rest of us. And he said, ‘You don't know what I saw. You don't know.' "

A spasm passed through Bob Arctor, convulsing him, and then he choked out, "Did … he say what it was like?"

"Sparks. Showers of colored sparks, like when something goes wrong with your TV set. Sparks going up the wall, sparks in the air. And the whole world was a living creature, whenever he looked. And there were no accidents: everything fitted together and happened on purpose, to achieve something—some goal in the future. And then he saw a doorway. For about a week he saw it whenever he looked—inside his apartment, outdoors when he was walking to the store or driving. And it was always the same proportions, very narrow. He said it was very—pleasing. That's the word he used. He never tried to go through it; he just looked at it, because it was so pleasing. Outlined in vivid red and gold light, he said. As if the sparks had collected into lines, like in geometry. And then after that he never saw it again his whole life, and that's what finally made him so fucked up."

After a time Bob Arctor said, "What was on the other side?"

Donna said, "He said there was another world on the other side. He could see it."

"He … never went through it?"

"That's why he kicked the shit out of everything in his apartment; he never thought of going through it, he just admired the doorway and then later he couldn't see it at all and it was too late. It opened for him a few days and then it was closed and gone forever. Again and again he took a whole lot of LSD and those water-soluble vitamins, but he never saw it again; he never found the combination."

Bob Arctor said, "What was on the other side?"

"He said it was always nighttime."

"Nighttime!"

"There was moonlight and water, always the same. Nothing moved or changed. Black water, like ink, and a shordane, a beach of an island. He was sure it was Greece, ancient Greece. He figured out the doorway was a weak place in time, and he was seeing back into the past. And then later on, when he couldn't see it any more, he'd be on the freeway driving along, with all the trucks, and he'd get madder than hell. He said he couldn't stand all the motion and noise, everything going this way and that, all the clanking and banging. Anyhow, he never could figure out why they showed him what they showed him. He really believed it was God, and it was the doorway to the next world, but in the final analysis all it did was mess up his head. He couldn't hold on to it so he couldn't cope with it. Every time he met anybody, after a while he'd tell them he'd lost everything."

Bob Arctor said, "That's how I am."

"There was a woman on the island. Not exactly—more a statue. He said it was of the Cyrenaican Aphrodite. Standing there in moonlight, pale and cold and made out of marble."

"He should have gone through the doorway when he had the chance."

Donna said, "He didn't have the chance. It was a promise. Something to come. Something better a long time in the future. Maybe after he—" She paused. "When he died."

"He missed out," Bob Arctor said. "You get one chance and that's it." He shut his eyes against the pain and the sweat streaking his face. "Anyhow what's a burned-out acid head know? What do any of us know? I can't talk. Forget it." He turned away from her, into the darkness, convulsing and shuddering.

"They show us trailers now," Donna said. She put her arms around him and held on to him as tightly as she could, rocking him back and forth. "So we'll hold out."

"That's what you're trying to do. With me now."

"You're a good man. You've been dealt a bad deal. But life isn't over for you. I care for you a lot. I wish …" She continued to hold him, silently, in the dankness that was swallowing him up from inside. Taking over even as she held on to him. "You are a good and kind person," she said. "And this is unfair but it has to be this way. Try to wait for the end. Sometime, a long time from now, you'll see the way you saw before. It'll come back to you." Restored, she thought. On the day when everything taken away unjustly from people will be restored to them. It may take a thousand years, or longer than that, but that day will come, and all the balances will be set right. Maybe, like Tony Amsterdam, you have seen a vision of God that is gone only temporarily; withdrawn, she thought, rather than ended. Maybe inside the terribly burned and burning circuits of your head that char more and more, even as I hold you, a spark of color and light in some disguised form manifested itself, unrecognized, to lead you, by its memory, through the years to come, the dreadful years ahead. A word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood, some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world, to guide you by reflex until the day … but it was so remote. She could not herself truly imagine it. Mingled with the commonplace, something from another world perhaps had appeared to Bob Arctor before it was over. All she could do now was hold him and hope.

But when he found it once again, if they were lucky, pattern-recognition would take place. Correct comparison in the right hemisphere. Even at the subcortical level available to him. And the journey, so awful for him, so costly, so evidently without point, would be finished.

A light shone in her eyes. Standing in front of her, a cop with nightstick and flashlight. "Would you please stand up?" the officer said. "And show me your identification? You first, miss."

She let go of Bob Arctor, who slid sideways until he lay against the ground; he was unaware of the cop, who had approached them up the hill, stealthily, from a service road below. Getting her wallet out of her purse, Donna motioned the officer away, where Bob Arctor could not hear. For several minutes the officer studied her identification by the muted light of his flashlight, and then said,

"You're undercover for the federal people."

"Keep your voice down," Donna said.

"I'm sorry." The officer handed the wallet back to her.

"Just fucking take off," Donna said.

The officer shone his light in her face briefly, and then turned away; he departed as he had approached, noiselessly.

When she returned to Bob Arctor, it was obvious that he had never been aware of the cop. He was aware of almost nothing, now. Scarcely of her, let alone anyone or anything else.

Far off, echoing, Donna could hear the police can moving down the nutted, invisible service road. A few bugs, perhaps a lizard, made their way through the dry weeds around them. In the distance the 91 Freeway glowed in a pattern of lights, but no sound reached them; it was too remote.