A Scanner Darkly

“Do you know, Mr. Arctor, that more deaths from that happen than people realize? I read that when you are dining with a friend, and he or she does not speak for a period of time but just sits there, you should lean forward and ask him if he can talk? Because he may not be able to; he may be strangling and can’t tell you.”

“Yes,” Arctor said. “Thanks. That’s true. And thanks about the check.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” the lady said.

“Yes,” he said. “He was about the best friend I had.”

“That is so dreadful,” the lady said. “How old was he, Mr. Arctor?”

“In his early thirties,” Arctor said, which was true: Luckman was thirty-two.

“Oh, how terrible. I’ll tell Carl. And thank you for coming all the way down here.”

“Thank you,” Arctor said. “And thank Mr. Englesohn too, for me. Thank you both so much.” He departed, finding himself back out on the warm morning sidewalk, blinking in the bright light and foul air.

He phoned for a cab, and on the journey back to his house sat advising himself as to how well he had gotten out of this net of Barris’s with no real overly bad scene. Could have been a lot worse, he pointed out to himself. The check was still there. And I didn’t have to confront the dude himself.

He got out the check to see how closely Barris had been able to approximate his handwriting. Yes, it was a dead account; he recognized the color of the check right away, an entirely closed one, and the bank had stamped it ACCOUNT CLOSED. No wonder the locksmith had gone bananas. And then, studying the check as he rode along, Arctor saw that the handwriting was his.

Not anything like Barris’s. A perfect forgery. He would never have known it wasn’t his, except that he remembered not having written it.

My God, he thought, how many of these has Barris done by now? Maybe he’s embezzled me out of half I’ve got.

Barris, he thought, is a genius. On the other hand, it’s probably a tracing reproduction or anyhow mechanically done. But I never made a check out to Englesohn Locksmith, so how could it be a transfer forgery? This is a unique check. I’ll turn it over to the department graphologists, he decided, and let them figure out how it was done. Maybe just practice, practice, practice.

As to the mushroom jazz—He thought, I’ll just walk up to him and say people told me he’s been trying to sell them mushroom hits. And to knock it off. I got feedback from somebody worried, as they should be.

But, he thought, these items are only random indications of what he’s up to, discovered on the first replay. They only represent samples of what I’m up against. Christ knows what else he’s done: he’s got all the time in the world to loaf around and read reference books and dream up plots and intrigues and conspiracies and so forth. … Maybe, he thought abruptly, I better have a trace run on my phone right away to see if it’s tapped. Barris has a box of electronic hardware, and even Sony, for example, makes and sells an induction coil that can be used as a phone-tapping device. The phone probably is. It probably has been for quite a while.

I mean, he thought, in addition to my own recent—necessary—phone tap.

Again he studied the check as the cab jiggled along, and all at once he thought, What if I made it out myself? What if Arctor wrote this? I think I did, he thought; I think the motherfucking dingey Arctor himself wrote this check, very fast—the letters slanted—because for some reason he was in a hurry; he dashed it off, got the wrong blank check, and afterward forgot all about it, forgot the incident entirely.

Forget, he thought, the time Arctor …

Was grinsest du mir, hohier Schädel, her?
Als dass dein Him, wie meines, einst verwirret
Den leichten Tag gesucht und in der Dämmrung schwer,
Mit Lust nach Wahrheit, jämmerlich geirret.

… oozed out of that huge dope happening in Santa Ana, where he met that little blond chick with odd teeth, long blond hair, and a big ass, but so energetic and friendly … he couldn’t get his car started; he was wired up to his nose. He kept having trouble—there was so much dope dropped and shot and snorted that night, it went on almost until dawn. So much Substance D, and very Primo. Very very Primo. His stuff.

Leaning forward, he said, “Pull over at that Shell station. I’ll get out there.”

He got out, paid the cab driver, then entered the pay phone, looked up the locksmith’s number, phoned him.

The old lady answered. “Englesohn Locksmith, good—”

“This is Mr. Arctor again, I’m sorry to bother you. What address do you have for the call, the service call for which my check was made out?”

“Well, let me see. Just a moment, Mr. Arctor.” Bumping of the phone as she set it down.

Distant muffled man’s voice: “Who is it? That Arctor?”

“Yes, Carl, but don’t say anything, please. He came in just now—”