A Scanner Darkly

“This crummy significant crud doesn’t go down with me worth shit,” Charles Freck said. “Who damaged this cephscope? When did it happen? You just find out recently? Arctor didn’t say anything the last time I saw him, which was the day before yesterday.”

Barris said, “Perhaps he wasn’t prepared to talk about it yet.”

“Well,” Charles Freck said, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re talking in spaced-out riddles. I think I’ll go over to one of the New-Path residences and turn myself in and go through withdrawal cold turkey and get therapy, the destruct game they play, and be with those guys day and night, and not have to be around mysterious nuts like yourself that don’t make sense and I can’t understand. I can see this cephscope has been fucked over, but you’re not telling me anything. Are you trying to allege that Bob Arctor did it, to his own expensive equipment, or are you not? What are you saying? I wish I was living over at New-Path, where I wouldn’t have to go through this meaningful shit I don’t dig day after day, if not with you then with some burned-out freak like you, equally spaced.” He glared.

“I did not damage this transmitting unit,” Barris said speculatively, his whiskers twitching, “and doubt seriously that Ernie Luckman did.”

“I doubt seriously if Ernie Luckman ever damaged anything in his life, except that time he flipped out on bad acid and threw the livingroom coffee table and everything else besides out through the window of that apartment they had, him and that Joan chick, onto the parking area. That’s different. Normally Ernie’s got it all together more than the rest of us. No, Ernie wouldn’t sabotage somebody else’s cephscope. And Bob Arctor—it’s his, isn’t it? What’d he do, get up secretly in the middle of the night without his knowledge and do this, burn himself like this? This was done by somebody out to burn him. That’s what this was.” You probably did it, you gunjy motherfucker, he thought. You got the technical know-how and your mind’s weird. “The person that did this,” he said, “ought to be either in a federal Neural-Aphasia Clinic or the marble orchard. Preferably, in my opinion, the latter. Bob always really got off on this Altec cephscope; I musta seen him put it on, put it on, every time as soon as he gets home from work at night, soon as he steps in the door. Every guy has one thing he treasures. This was his. So I say, this is shit to do to him, man, shit.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“What’s what you mean?”

“ ‘As soon as he gets home from work at night,’ ” Barris repeated. “I have been for some time conjecturing as to who Bob Arctor is really employed by, what specific actual organization it is that he can’t tell us.”

“It’s the fucking Blue Chip Redemption Stamp Center in Placentia,” Charles Freck said. “He told me once.”

“I wonder what he does there.”

Charles Freck sighed. “Colors the stamps blue.” He did not like Barris, really. Freck wished he were elsewhere, maybe scoring from the first person he ran into or called. Maybe I should split, he said to himself, but then he recalled the jar of oil and cocaine cooling in the freezer, one hundred dollars’ worth for ninety-eight cents. “Listen,” he said, “when will that stuff be ready? I think you’re shucking me. How could the Solarcaine people sell it for that little if it has a gram of pure coke in it? How could they make a profit?”

“They buy,” Barris declared, “in large quantities.”

In his head, Charles Freck rolled an instant fantasy: dump trucks full of cocaine backing up to the Solarcaine factory, wherever it was, Cleveland maybe, dumping tons and tons of pure, unstepped-on, uncut, high-grade cocaine into one end of the factory, where it was mixed with oil and inert gas and other garbage and then stuck in little bright-colored spray cans to be stacked up by the thousands in 7-11 stores and drugstores and supermarkets. What we ought to do, he ruminated, is knock over one of those dump trucks; take the whole load, maybe seven or eight hundred pounds—hell, lots more. What does a dump truck hold?

Barris brought him the now empty Solarcaine spray can for his inspection; he showed him the label, on which were listed all the contents. “See? Benzocaine. Which only certain gifted people know is a trade name for cocaine. If they said cocaine on the label people would flash on it and they’d eventually do what I do. People just don’t have the education to realize. The scientific training, such as I went through.”

“What are you going to do with this knowledge?” Charles Freck asked. “Besides making Donna Hawthorne horny?”

“I plan to write a best-seller eventually,” Barris said. “A text for the average person about how to manufacture safe dope in his kitchen without breaking the law. You see, this does not break the law. Benzocaine is legal. I phoned a pharmacy and asked them. It’s in a lot of things.”

“Gee,” Charles Freck said, impressed. He examined his wristwatch, to see how much longer they had to wait.

***