A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly. Under very specialized conditions, such as today.

How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just—change. With nothing causing it.

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.

I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. 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.

“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.”

Stooping down, Bruce picked one of the stubbled blue plants, then placed it in his right shoe, slipping it down out of sight. A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving.