A Scanner Darkly

They didn’t notice any difference, he noticed, even though he had dropped the prepared speech and was wandering on, by himself, without help from the PR boys back at the Orange County Civic Center. 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 pillow-case 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 flatout 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?

“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?”

Silence.

In the headphone of his scramble suit a tinny voice said, “I think you’d better go back to the prepared text, Fred. I really do advise it.”

Into his throat mike, Fred, Robert Arctor, whatever, said, “I forget it.” Only his superior at Orange County GHQ, which was not Mr. F., that is to say, Hank, could hear this. This was an anonymous superior, assigned to him only for this occasion.

“Riiiight,” the official tinny prompter said in his earphone. “I’ll read it to you. Repeat it after me, but try to get it to sound casual.” Slight hesitation, riffling of pages. “Let’s see … ‘Each day the profits flow—where they go we—’ That’s about where you stopped.”

“I’ve got a block against this stuff,” Arctor said.

“ ‘—will soon determine,’ ” his official prompter said, unheeding, “ ‘and then retribution will swiftly follow. And at that moment I would not for the life of me be in their shoes.’ ”

“Do you know why I’ve got a block against this stuff?” Arctor said. “Because this is what gets people on dope.” He thought, This is why you lurch off and become a doper, this sort of stuff. This is why you give up and leave. In disgust.

But then he looked once more out at his audience and realized that for them this was not so. This was the only way they could be reached. He was talking to nitwits. Mental simps. It had to be put in the same way it had been put in first grade: A is for Apple and the Apple is Round.

“D,” he said aloud to his audience, “is for Substance D. Which is for Dumbness and Despair and Desertion, the desertion of your friends from you, you from them, everyone from everyone, isolation and loneliness and hating and suspecting each other. D,” he said then, “is finally Death. Slow Death, we—” He halted. “We, the dopers,” he said, “call it.” His voice rasped and faltered. “As you probably know. Slow Death. From the head on down. Well, that’s it.” He walked back to his chair and reseated himself. In silence.

“You blew it,” his superior the prompter said. “See me in my office when you get back. Room 430.”

“Yes,” Arctor said. “I blew it.”

They were looking at him as if he had pissed on the stage before their eyes. Although he was not sure just why.

Striding to the mike, the Lions Club host said, “Fred asked me in advance of this lecture to make it primarily a question-and-answer forum, with only a short introductory statement by him. I forgot to mention that. All right”—he raised his right hand—“who first, people?”

Arctor suddenly got to his feet again, clumsily.

“It would appear that Fred has something more to add,” the host said, beckoning to him.

Going slowly back over to the microphone, Arctor said, his head down, speaking with precision, “Just this. Don’t kick their asses after they’re on it. The users, the addicts. Half of them, most of them, especially the girls, didn’t know what they were getting on or even that they were getting on anything at all. Just try to keep them, the people, any of us, from getting on it.” He looked up briefly. “See, they dissolve some reds in a glass of wine, the pushers, I mean—they give the booze to a chick, an underage little chick, with eight to ten reds in it, and she passes out, and then they inject her with a mex hit, which is half heroin and half Substance D—” He broke off. “Thank you,” he said.

A man called up, “How do we stop them, sir?”

“Kill the pushers,” Arctor said, and walked back to his chair.

He did not feel like returning right away to the Orange County Civic Center and Room 430, so he wandered down one of the commercial streets of Anaheim, inspecting the McDonaldburger stands and car washes and gas stations and Pizza Huts and other marvels.