A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

“Sure,” he said, wondering to himself if he could beat her price by the time he saw her again; he felt he could, most likely. Either way he won. That is, either way he scored. Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills.

he was an overweight man, overaged as well, overhappy even when there was little or nothing to be happy about.

Once a month an undercover narcotics agent of the county was assigned at random to speak before bubblehead gatherings such as this. Today was his turn. Looking at his audience, he realized how much he detested straights. They thought this was all great. They were smiling. They were being entertained.

Robert Arctor halted. Stared at them, at the straights in their fat suits, their fat ties, their fat shoes, and he thought, Substance D can’t destroy their brains; they have none.

What difference anyhow? he thought. So what? What, really, do they know or care? The straights, he thought, live in their fortified huge apartment complexes guarded by their guards, ready to open fire on any and every doper who scales the wall with an empty pillowcase to rip off their piano and electric clock and razor and stereo that they haven’t paid for anyhow, so he can get his fix, get the shit that if he doesn’t he maybe dies, outright flat-out dies, of the pain and shock of withdrawal. But, he thought, when you’re living inside looking safely out, and your wall is electrified and your guard is armed, why think about that?

You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you’re a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

“What’s the beef?” he usually said, if he said anything at all. A crowd naturally gathered. Most of them assumed he’d been nailed dealing on the corner. They grinned uneasily and waited to see what happened, although some of them, usually Chicanos or blacks or obvious heads, looked angry. And those that looked angry began after a short interval to be aware that they looked angry, and they changed that swiftly to impassive. Because everybody knew that anyone looking angry or uneasy—it didn’t matter which—around cops must have something to hide. The cops especially knew that, legend had it, and they hassled such persons automatically.

Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.

But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn’t hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon. And entered, by degrees, a new and somber life, lacking all of that.

It isn’t worth it, this work, he thought. There isn’t that much money on the fucking planet. But it wasn’t the money anyhow. “How come you do this stuff?” Hank had asked him. What did any man, doing any kind of work, know about his actual motives? Boredom, maybe; the desire for a little action. Secret hostility toward every person around him, all his friends, even toward chicks. Or a horrible positive reason: to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all admired—to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward.

He touched his gun, felt reassured, then wondered if he should make certain it was still full of shells. But then, he realized, I’ll wonder if the firing pin is gone or if the powder has been removed from the shells and so forth, on and on, obsessively, like a little boy counting cracks in the sidewalk to reduce his fear.

“You poisoned me,” Arctor said savagely, his vision almost clear, his mind clearing, except for the fear. Now fear had begun, a rational response instead of insanity.

What an undercover narcotics agent fears most is not that he will be shot or beaten up but that he will be slipped a great hit of some psychedelic that will roll an endless horror feature film in his head for the remainder of his life, or that he will be shot up with a mex hit, half heroin and half Substance D, or both of the above plus a poison such as strychnine, which will nearly kill him but not completely, so that the above can occur: lifelong addiction, lifelong horror film.

One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven—or even proven at all—to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if a public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings—then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.

At the wheel of his slow car, Bob Arctor forgot theoretical matters and did a rerun of a moment that had impressed them all: the dainty and elegant straight girl in her turtleneck sweater and bell-bottoms and trippy boobs who wanted them to murder a great harmless bug that in fact did good by wiping out mosquitoes—and in a year in which an outbreak of encephalitis had been anticipated in Orange County—and when they saw what it was and explained, she had said words that became for them their parody evil-wall-motto, to be feared and despised: IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.

“Do you think,” he said aloud as he painstakingly drove, “that when we die and appear before God on Judgment Day, that our sins will be listed in chronological order or in order of severity, which could be ascending or descending, or alphabetically? Because I don’t want to have God boom out at me when I die at the age of eighty-six, ‘So you’re the little boy who stole the three Coke bottles off the Coca-Cola truck when it was parked in the 7-11 lot back in 1962, and you’ve got a lot of fast talking to do.’ ”

“Did I hear you say you’re going to sell your house?” Donna asked him. “Or was that—you know, me dreaming? I couldn’t tell; what I heard sounded spaced out and weird.” “We’re all dreaming,” Arctor said. If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.

If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.

“It used to be believed the right hemisphere had no linguistic faculties at all, but that was before so many people had screwed up their left hemispheres with drugs and gave it—the right—a chance to come on. To fill the vacuum.”

Let’s ask the first person we see. Let’s wheel it out the door and when some freak comes along we’ll ask him. That way we’ll get a disheartened viewpoint.

And then a dreadful, ugly thought rose inside him. Suppose when I play the tapes back I see Donna when she’s in here—opening a window with a spoon or knife blade—and slipping in and destroying my possessions and stealing. Another Donna: the chick as she really is, or anyhow as she is when I can’t see her. The philosophical “when a tree falls in the forest” number. What is Donna like when no one is around to watch her? Does, he wondered, the gentle lovely shrewd and very kind, superkind girl transform herself instantly into something sly? Will I see a change which will blow my mind? Donna or Luckman, anyone I care about. Like your pet cat or dog when you’re out of the house … the cat empties a pillowcase and starts stuffing your valuables in it: electric clock and bedside radio, shaver, all it can stuff in before you get back; another cat entirely while you’re gone, ripping you off and pawning it all, or lighting up your joints, or walking on the ceiling, or phoning people long distance … God knows. A nightmare, a weird other world beyond the mirror, a terror city reverse thing, with unrecognizable entities creeping about; Donna crawling on all fours, eating from the animals’ dishes … any kind of psychedelic wild trip, unfathomable and horrid. Hell, he thought; for that matter, maybe Bob Arctor rises up in the night from deep sleep and does trips like that. Has sexual relations with the wall. Or mysterious freaks show up who he’s never seen before, a whole bunch of them, wi...

“It’s amazing,” Barris said, “the limitation of the human anatomy, the fact that food and air must share a common passage. So that the risk of—” Silently, Luckman gave him the finger.

“I need to now,” Donna said. “Take a hit before I go to work. And at noon and as soon as I get home. That’s why I deal, to buy my hash. Hash is mellow. Hash is where it’s at.” “Opium,” he repeated. “What’s hash sell for now?” “About ten thousand dollars a pound,” Donna said. “The good kind.” “Christ! As much as smack.” “I would never use a needle. I never have and I never will. You last about six months when you start shooting, whatever you shoot. Even tap water. You get a habit—” “You have a habit.” Donna said, “We all do. You take Substance D. So what? What’s the difference now? I’m happy; aren’t you happy? I get to come home and smoke high-grade hash every night … it’s my trip. Don’t try to change me. Don’t ever try to change me. Me or my morals. I am what I am. And I get off on hash. It’s my life.” “You ever seen pictures of an old opium smoker? Like in China in the old days? Or a hash smoker in India now, what they look like later on in life?” Donna said, “I don’t expect to live long. So what? I don’t want to be around long. Do you? Why? What’s in this world? And have you ever seen—Shit, what about Jerry Fabin; look at someone too far into Substance D. What’s there really in this world, Bob? It’s a stopping place to the next where they punish us here because we were born evil—”

“Hey, man,” he said, “can I go with you to Oregon? When you do take off finally?” She smiled at him, gently and with acute tenderness, with the answer no. And he understood, from knowing her, that she meant it. And it would not change. He shivered. “Are you cold?” she asked. “Yeah,” he said. “Very cold.” “I got that good MG heater in my car,” she said, “for when we’re at the drive-in … you’ll warm up there.” She took his hand, squeezed it, held it, and then, all at once, she let it drop. But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.

They sleep like Count Dracula, he thought, junkies do. Staring straight up until all of a sudden they sit up, like a machine cranked from position A to position B. “It—must—be—day,” the junkie says, or anyhow the tape in his head says. Plays him his instructions, the mind of a junkie being like the music you hear on a clock radio … it sometimes sounds pretty, but it is only there to make you do something.

Wow, he thought: I still remember—or never will correctly remember—that night.

It’s the slushed leading the slushed. And right into doom.

Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Unless he’s shucking me, Fred thought with uneasiness. In some fashion figured out he’s being monitored and is … covering up what he’s actually doing? Or just playing head games with us? Time, he decided, will tell. I say he’s shucking us, Fred decided. Some people can tell when they’re being watched. A sixth sense. Not paranoia, but a primitive instinct: what a mouse has, any hunted thing. Knows it’s being stalked. Feels it. He’s doing shit for our benefit, stringing us along. But—you can’t be sure. There are shucks on top of shucks. Layers and layers.

“And you won’t really listen at all,” the other scramble suit said, “until you do actually hit something. Like a mother when she’s asleep—nothing wakes her, even a truck going by, until she hears her baby cry. That wakes her—that alerts her. No matter how faint that cry is. The unconscious is selective, when it learns what to listen for.”

“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.

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.

“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 cr...

She gestured. “He doesn’t know; he never did know. He didn’t volunteer—” “Sure he did. It was his job.” “He had no idea, and he hasn’t any idea now, because now he hasn’t any ideas. You know that as well as I do. And he will never again in his life, as long as he lives, have any ideas. Only reflexes. And this didn’t happen accidentally; it was supposed to happen. So we have this … bad karma on us. I feel it on my back. Like a corpse. I’m carrying a corpse—Bob Arctor’s corpse. Even while he’s technically alive.”

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 had to live on, past death. Like Bob Arctor. The saddest of all.

“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 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.