A Scanner Darkly

  “I’m going to hell,” Donna said. She smiled suddenly, a broad, boyish grin. “My Catholic upbringing.”

  “In hell they sell you nickel bags and when you get home there’s M-and-M’s in them.”

  “M-and-M’s made out of turkey turds,” Donna said, and then all at once she was gone. Vanished away into the hither-and-thither-going people; he blinked. Is this how Bob Arctor felt? he asked himself. Must have. There she was, stable and as if forever; then—nothing. Vanished like fire or air, an element of the earth back into the earth. To mix with the everyone-else people that never ceased to be. Poured out among them. The evaporated girl, he thought. Of transformation. That comes and goes as she will. And no one, nothing, can hold on to her.

  I seek to net the wind, he thought. And so had Arctor. Vain, he thought, to try to place your hands firmly on one of the federal drug-abuse agents. They are furtive. Shadows which melt away when their job dictates. As if they were never really there in the first place. Arctor, he thought, was in love with a phantom of authority, a kind of hologram, through which a normal man could walk, and emerge on the far side, alone. Without ever having gotten a good grip on it—on the girl itself.

  God’s M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can’t perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will not know the dreadful war we’ve gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen.

  There should be a monument somewhere, he thought, listing those who died in this. And, worse, those who didn’t die. Who have to live on, past death. Like Bob Arctor. The saddest of all.

  I get the idea Donna is a mercenary, he thought. Not on salary. And they are the most wraithlike. They disappear forever. New names, new locations. You ask yourself, where is she now? And the answer is—

  Nowhere. Because she was not there in the first place.

  Reseating himself at the wooden table, Mike Westaway finished eating his burger and drinking his Coke. Since it was better than what they were served at New-Path. Even if the burger had been made from groundup cows’ anuses.

  To call Donna back, to seek to find her or possess her … I seek what Bob Arctor sought, so maybe he is better off now, this way. The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love the most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.

  So maybe we saved him from something worse, Westaway concluded. And, while accomplishing that, put what remained of him to use. To good and valuable use.

  If we turn out lucky.

  “Do you know any stories?” Thelma asked one day.

  “I know the story about the wolf,” Bruce said.

  “The wolf and the grandmother?”

  “No,” he said. “The black-and-white wolf. It was up in a tree, and again and again it dropped down on the farmer’s animals. Finally one time the farmer got all his sons and all his sons’ friends and they stood around waiting for the black-and-white wolf in the tree to drop down. At last the wolf dropped down on a mangy-looking brown animal, and there in his black-and-white coat he was shot by all of them.”

  “Oh,” Thelma said. “That’s too bad.”

  “But they saved the hide,” he continued. “They skinned the great black-and-white wolf that dropped from the tree and preserved his beautiful hide, so that those to follow, those who came later on, could see what he had been like and could marvel at him, at his strength and size. And future generations talked about him and related many stories of his prowess and majesty, and wept for his passing.”

  “Why did they shoot him?”

  “They had to,” he said. “You must do that with wolves like that.”

  “Do you know any other stories? Better ones?”

  “No,” he said, “that’s the only story I know.” He sat remembering how the wolf had enjoyed his great springing ability, his leaping down again and again in his fine body, but now that body was gone, shot down. And for meager animals to be slaughtered and eaten anyhow. Animals with no strength that never sprang, that took no pride in their bodies. But anyhow, on the good side, those animals trudged on. And the black-and-white wolf had never complained; he had said nothing even when they shot him. His claws had still been deep in his prey. For nothing. Except that that was his fashion and he liked to do it. It was his only way. His only style by which to live. All he knew. And they got him.

  “Here’s the wolf!” Thelma exclaimed, leaping about clumsily. “Voob, voob!” She grabbed at things and missed, and he saw with dismay that something was wrong with her. He saw for the first time, distressed and wondering how it could happen, that she was impaired.

  He said, “You are not the wolf.”

  But even so, as she groped and hobbled, she stumbled; even so, he realized, the impairment continued. He wondered how it could be that …

  Ich unglücksel’ get Atlas! Eine Welt,

  Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen muss ich tragen,

  Ich trage Unerträgliches, und brechen

  Will mir das Herz im Leibe.

  … such sadness could exist. He walked away.

  Behind him she still played. She tripped and fell. How must that feel? he wondered.

  He roamed along the corridor, searching for the vacuum cleaner. They had informed him that he must carefully vacuum the big playroom where the children spent most of the day.

  “Down the hall to the right.” A person pointed. Earl.

  “Thanks, Earl,” he said.

  When he arrived at a closed door he started to knock, and then instead he opened it.

  Inside the room an old woman stood holding three rubber balls, which she juggled. She turned toward him, her gray stringy hair falling on her shoulders, grinning at him with virtually no teeth. She wore white bobby socks and tennis shoes. Sunken eyes, he saw; sunken eyes, grinning, empty mouth.

  “Can you do this?” she wheezed, and threw all three balls up into the air. They fell back, hitting her, bouncing down to the floor. She stooped over, spitting and laughing.

  “I can’t do that,” he said, standing there dismayed.

  “I can.” The thin old creature, her arms cracking as she moved, raised the balls, squinted, tried to get it right.

  Another person appeared at the door beside Bruce and stood with him, also watching.

  “How long has she been practicing?” Bruce said.

  “Quite a while.” The person called, “Try again. You’re getting close!”

  The old woman cackled as she bent to fumble to pick the balls up once again.

  “One’s over there,” the person beside Bruce said. “Under your night table.”

  “Ohhhh!” she wheezed.

  They watched the old woman try again and again, dropping the balls, picking them back up, aiming carefully, balancing herself, throwing them high into the air, and then hunching as they rained down on her, sometimes hitting her head.

  The person beside Bruce sniffed and said, “Donna, you better go clean yourself. You’re not clean.”

  Bruce, stricken, said, “That isn’t Donna. Is that Donna?” He raised his head to peer at the old woman and he felt great terror; tears of a sort stood in the old woman’s eyes as she gazed back at him, but she was laughing, laughing as she threw the three balls at him, hoping to hit him. He ducked.

  “No, Donna, don’t do that,” the person beside Bruce said to her. “Don’t hit people. Just keep trying to do what you saw on TV, you know, catch them again yourself and throw them right back up. But go clean yourself now; you stink.”

  “Okay,” the old woman agreed,
and hurried off, hunched and little. She left the three rubber balls still rolling on the floor.

  The person beside Bruce shut the door, and they walked along the hall. “How long has Donna been here?” Bruce said.

  “A long time. Since before I came, which was six months ago. She started trying to juggle about a week ago.”

  “Then it isn’t Donna,” he said. “If she’s been here that long. Because I just got here a week ago.” And, he thought, Donna drove me here in her MG. I remember that, because we had to stop while she got the radiator filled back up. And she looked fine then. Sad-eyed, dark, quiet and composed in her little leather jacket, her boots, with her purse that has the rabbit’s foot dangling. Like she always is.

  He continued on then, searching for the vacuum cleaner. He felt a great deal better. But he didn’t understand why.

  15

  Bruce said, “Could I work with animals?”

  “No,” Mike said, “I think I’m going to put you on one of our farms. I want to try you with plants for a while, a few months. Out in the open, where you can touch the ground. With all these rocket-ship space probes there’s been too much trying to reach the sky. I want you to make the attempt to reach—”

  “I want to be with something living.”

  Mike explained, “The ground is living. The Earth is still alive. You can get the most help there. Do you have any agricultural background? Seeds and cultivation and harvesting?”_____________

  “I worked in an office.”

  “You’ll be outside from now on. If your mind comes back it’ll have to come back naturally. You can’t make yourself think again. You can only keep working, such as sowing crops or tilling on our vegetable plantations—as we call them—or killing insects. We do a lot of that, driving insects out of existence with the right kind of sprays. We’re very careful, though, with sprays. They can do more harm than good. They can poison not only the crops and the ground but the person using them. Eat his head.” He added, “Like yours has been eaten.”

  “Okay,” Bruce said.

  You have been sprayed, Mike thought as he glanced at the man, so that now you’ve become a bug. Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction.

  Nothing new will ever enter his brain, Mike thought, because that brain is gone.

  And with it, that person who once gazed out. That I never knew.

  But maybe, if he is placed in the right spot, in the right stance, he can still see down, and see the ground. And recognize that it is there. And place something which is alive, something different from himself, in it. To grow.

  Since that is what he or it can’t do any longer: this creature beside me has died, and so can never again grow. It can only decay gradually until what remains, too, is dead. And then we cart that off.

  There is little future, Mike thought, for someone who is dead. There is, usually, only the past. And for Arctor-Fred-Bruce there is not even the past; there is only this.

  Beside him, as he drove the staff car, the slumped figure jiggled. Animated by the car.

  I wonder, he thought, if it was New-Path that did this to him. Sent a substance out to get him like this, to make him this way so they would ultimately receive him back?

  To build, he thought, their civilization within the chaos. If “civilization” it really is.

  He did not know. He had not been at New-Path long enough; their goals, the Executive Director had informed him once, would be revealed to him only after he had been a staff member another two years.

  Those goals, the Executive Director had said, had nothing to do with drug rehabilitation.

  No one but Donald, the Executive Director, knew where the funding for New-Path originated. Money was always there. Well, Mike thought, there is a lot of money in manufacturing Substance D. Out in various remote rural farms, in small shops, in several facilities labeled “schools.” Money in manufacturing it, distributing it, and finally selling it. At least enough to keep New-Path solvent and growing—and more. Sufficient for a variety of ultimate goals.

  Depending on what New-Path intended to do.

  He knew something—U.S. Drug Restriction knew something—that most of the public, even the police, did not know.

  Substance D, like heroin, was organic. Not the product of a lab.

  So he meant quite a bit when he thought, as he frequently did, that all those profits could well keep New-Path solvent— and growing.

  The living, he thought, should never be used to serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead—he glanced at Bruce, the empty shape beside him—should, if possible, serve the purposes of the living.

  That, he reasoned, is the law of life.

  And the dead, if they could feel, might feel better doing so.

  The dead, Mike thought, who can still see, even if they can’t understand: they are our camera.

  16

  Under the sink in the kitchen he found a small bone fragment, down with the boxes of soap and brushes and buckets. It looked human, and he wondered if it was Jerry Fabin.

  This made him remember an event from a long way back in his life. Once he had lived with two other guys and sometimes they had kidded about owning a rat named Fred that lived under their sink. And when they got really broke one time, they told people, they had to eat poor old Fred.

  Maybe this was one of his bone fragments, the rat who had lived under their sink, who they had made up to keep them company.

  Hearing them talking in the lounge.

  “This guy was more burned out than he showed. I felt so. He drove up to Ventura one day, cruising all over to find an old friend back inland toward Ojai. Recognized the house on sight without the number, stopped, and asked the people if he could see Leo. ‘Leo died. Sorry you didn’t know.’ So this guy said then, ‘Okay, I’ll come back again on Thursday.’ And he drove off, he drove back down the coast, and I guess he went back up on Thursday again looking for Leo. How about that?”

  He listened to their talk, drinking his coffee.

  “—works out, the phone book has only one number in it; you call that number for whoever you want. Listed on page after page … I’m talking about a totally burned-out society. And in your wallet you have that number, the number, scribbled down on different slips and cards, for different people. And if you forget the number, you couldn’t call anybody.”

  “You could dial Information.”

  “It’s the same number.”

  He still listened; it was interesting, this place they were describing. When you called it, the phone number was out of order, or if it wasn’t they said, “Sorry, you have the wrong number.” So you called it again, the same number, and got the person you wanted.

  When a person went to the doctor—there was only one, and he specialized in everything—there was only one medicine. After he had diagnosed you he prescribed the medicine. You took the slip to the pharmacy to have it filled, but the pharmacist never could read what the doctor had written, so he gave you the only pill he had, which was aspirin. And it cured whatever you had.

  If you broke the law, there was only the one law, which everybody broke again and again. The cop laboriously wrote it all up, which law, which infraction each time, the same one. And there was always the same penalty for any breaking of the law, from jaywalking to treason: the penalty was the death penalty, and there was agitation to have the death penalty removed, but it could not be because then, for like jaywalking, there would be no penalty at all. So it stayed on the books and finally the community burned out entirely and died. No, not burned out—they had been that already. They faded out, one by one, as they broke the law, and sort of died.

  He thought, I guess when people heard that the last one of them had died they said, I wonder what those people were like. Let’s see—well, we’ll come back on Thursday. Although he was not sure, he laughed, and when he said
that aloud, so did everyone else in the lounge.

  “Very good, Bruce,” they said.

  That got to be a sort of tag line then; when somebody there at Samarkand House didn’t understand anything or couldn’t find what he was sent to get, like a roll of toilet paper, they said, “Well, I guess I’ll come back on Thursday.” Generally, it was credited to him. His saying. Like with comics on TV who said the same tag-line thing again and again each week. It caught on at Samarkand House and meant something to them all.

  Later, at the Game one night, when they gave credit in turn to each person for what he had brought to New-Path, such as Concepts, they credited him with bringing humor there. He had brought with him an ability to see things as funny no matter how bad he felt. Everybody in the circle clapped, and, glancing up, startled, he saw the ring of smiles, everybody’s eyes warm with approval, and the noise of their applause remained with him for quite a period, inside his heart.

  17

  In late August of that year, two months after he entered New-Path, he was transferred to a farm facility in the Napa Valley, which is located inland in Northern California. It is the wine country, where many fine California vineyards exist.

  Donald Abrahams, the Executive Director of New-Path Foundation, signed the transfer order. On the suggestion of Michael Westaway, a member of the staff who had become especially interested in seeing what could be done with Bruce. Particularly since the Game had failed to help him. It had, in fact, made him more deteriorated.

  “Your name is Bruce,” the manager of the farm said, as Bruce stepped clumsily from the car, lugging his suitcase.

  “My name is Bruce,” he said.

  “We’re going to try you on farming for a period, Bruce.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think you’ll like it better here, Bruce.”