A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills.

“Get the commies!”

Substance D can’t destroy their brains; they have none.

“If you were a diabetic,” he said, “and you didn’t have money for a hit of insulin, would you steal to get the money? Or just die?”

What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

In Southern California it didn’t make any difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere.

Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing.

Every pay phone in the world was tapped. Or if it wasn’t, some crew somewhere just hadn’t gotten around to it. The taps fed electronically onto storage reels at a central point, and about once every second day a printout was obtained by an officer who listened to many phones without having to leave his office. He merely rang up the storage drums and, on signal, they played back, skipping all dead tape. Most calls were harmless. The officer could identify ones that weren’t fairly readily. That was his skill. That was what he got paid for. Some officers were better at it than others.

Probably seemed improbable at the time.

Synanon

Gloomy hall, lounge to his left, with guys reading. A ping-pong table at the far end, then a kitchen. Slogans on the walls, some hand-done and some printed: THE ONLY REAL FAILURE IS TO FAIL OTHERS and so forth. Little noise, little activity. New-Path maintained assorted retail industries; probably most of the residents, guys and chicks alike, were at work, at their hair shops and gas stations and ballpoint-pen works. He stood there, waiting in a weary way.

Not much has changed.

They subsisted, though, on contributions; difficulty in getting funded.

“I’ll tell you one that’ll get you for sure. You’re aware of the three babies over at Fairfield Hospital that they have to give hits of smack to every day, that are too young to withdraw yet?

Moral panics....... Things never change......

“In this day and age, with the kind of degenerate society we live in and the depravity of the individual, every person of worth needs a gun at all times. To protect himself.”

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.

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

At My Lai during the Viet Nam War, four hundred and fifty priceless works of art had been vandalized to death at the orders of the CIA—priceless works of art plus oxen and chickens and other animals not listed.

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

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, Die eine will sich von der andern trennen: Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust, Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen; Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because 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.

“That’s bullshit,” Donna said. “Prayer, I mean. I prayed a long time ago, a lot, but not any more. We wouldn’t have to do this, what we’re doing, if prayer worked. It’s another shuck.”

There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were.

If there was any “sin,” it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great,

In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The “enemy” was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.