A Scanner Darkly

“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 Do

“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, Do

I can dig it, two voices thought inside his mind in unison as he heard his buddy laying it on Do

“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 sca

“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, Do

“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 pla

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.

Do

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

Do

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.”