A Scanner Darkly

“Sure.” The girl waved, and two guys, mediocre in appearance, showed up, looking impassive. “Take him where he can sit down and get him some coffee.”

What a drag, Arctor thought as he let the two guys coerce him to a seedy-looking overstuffed couch. Dismal walls, he noticed. Dismal low-quality donated paint. They subsisted, though, on contributions; difficulty in getting funded. “Thanks,” he grated shakily, as if it was an overwhelming relief to be there and sit. “Wow,” he said, attempting to smooth his hair; he made it seem that he couldn’t and gave up.

The girl, directly before him, said firmly, “You look like hell, mister.”

“Yeah,” both guys agreed, in a surprisingly snappy tone. “Like real shit. What you been doing, lying in your own crap?”

Arctor blinked.

“Who are you?” one guy demanded.

“You can see what he is,” the other said. “Some scum from the fucking garbage pail. Look.” He pointed at Arctor’s hair. “Lice. That’s why you itch, Jack.”

The girl, calm and above it, but not in any way friendly, said, “Why did you come in here, mister?”

To himself Arctor thought, Because you have a bigtime runner in here somewhere. And I’m the Man. And you’re stupid, all of you. But instead he muttered cringingly, which was evidently what was expected, “Did you say—”

“Yes, mister, you can have some coffee.” The girl jerked her head, and one of the guys obediently strode off to the kitchen.

A pause. Then the girl bent down and touched his knee. “You feel pretty bad, don’t you?” she said softly.

He could only nod.

“Shame and a sense of disgust at the thing you are,” she said.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“At the pollution you’ve made of yourself. A cesspool. Sticking that spike up your ass day after day, injecting your body with—”

“I couldn’t go on any more,” Arctor said. “This place is the only hope I could think of. I had a friend come in here, I think, he said he was going to. A black dude, in his thirties, educated, very polite and—”

“You’ll meet the family later,” the girl said. “If you qualify. You have to pass our requirements, you realize. And the first one is sincere need.”

“I have that,” Arctor said. “Sincere need.”

“You’ve got to be bad off to be let in here.”

“I am,” he said.

“How strung out are you? What’s your habit up to?”

“Ounce a day,” Arctor said.

“Pure?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I keep a sugar bowl of it on the table.”

“It’s going to be super rough. You’ll gnaw your pillow into feathers all night; there’ll be feathers everywhere when you wake up. And you’ll have seizures and foam at the mouth. And dirty yourself the way sick animals do. Are you ready for that? You realize we don’t give you anything here.”

“There isn’t anything,” he said. This was a drag, and he felt restless and irritable. “My buddy,” he said, “the black guy. Did he make it here? I sure hope he didn’t get picked up by the pigs on the way—he was so out of it, man, he could hardly navigate. He thought—”

“There are no one-to-one relationships at New-Path,” the girl said. “You’ll learn that.”

“Yeah, but did he make it here?” Arctor said. He could see he was wasting his time. Jesus, he thought: this is worse than we do downtown, this hassling. And she won’t tell me jack shit. Policy, he realized. Like an iron wall. Once you go into one of these places you’re dead to the world. Spade Weeks could be sitting beyond the partition, listening and laughing his ass off, or not be here at all, or anything in between. Even with a warrant—that never worked. The rehab outfits knew how to drag their feet, stall around until anyone living there sought by the police had zipped out a side door or bolted himself inside the furnace. After all, the staff here were all ex-addicts themselves. And no lawenforcement agency liked the idea of rousting a rehab place: the yells from the public never ceased.

Time to give up on Spade Weeks, he decided, and extricate myself. No wonder they never sent me around here before; these guys are not nice. And then he thought, So as far as I’m concerned, I’ve indefinitely lost my main assignment; Spade Weeks no longer exists.

I’ll report back to Mr. F., he said to himself, and await reassignment. The hell with it. He rose to his feet stiffly and said, “I’m splitting.” The two guys had now returned, one of them with a mug of coffee, the other with literature, apparently of an instructional kind.

“You’re chickening out?” the girl said, haughtily, with contempt. “You don’t have it at gut level to stick with a decision? To get off the filth? You’re going to crawl back out of here on your belly?” All three of them glared at him with anger.

“Later,” Arctor said, and moved toward the front door, the way out.

“Fucking doper,” the girl said from behind him. “No guts, brain fried, nothing. Creep out, creep; it’s your decision.”

“I’ll be back,” Arctor said, nettled. The mood here oppressed him, and it had intensified now that he was leaving.

“We may not want you back, gutless,” one of the guys said.