A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood.

“Have we really been able to duke him?” Donna asked. “Yes,” Westaway said. But he thought, The guy’s so burned out. I wonder if it matters. I wonder if we accomplished anything. And yet it had to be like this.

He thought, But there is no other way. To get in there. I can’t get in. That’s established by now; think how long I’ve been trying. They’d only let a burned-out husk like Bruce in. Harmless.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Leo died. Sorry you didn’t know.’ So this guy said then, ‘Okay, I’ll come back again on Thursday.’

He bent down and saw growing near the ground a small flower, blue.

“I saw,” Bruce said. He thought, I knew. That was it: I saw Substance D growing. I saw death rising from the earth, from the ground itself, in one blue field, in stubbled color.

The farm-facility manager and Donald Abrahams glanced at each other and then down at the kneeling figure, the kneeling man and the Mors ontologica planted everywhere, within the concealing corn.

Death of the spirit

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.

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow.

I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment.

“Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.