A Scanner Darkly

What you get instead is wipeout. I mean, what I get. Not the people behind the scanners but me.

What I ought to do, he thought, to get out of this, is sell the house; it’s run down anyway. But … I love this house. No way!

It’s my house.

Nobody can drive me out.

For whatever reasons they would or do want to.

Assuming there’s a “they” at all.

Which may just be my imagination, the “they” watching me. Paranoia. Or rather the “it.” The depersonalized it.

Whatever it is that’s watching, it is not a human.

Not by my standards, anyhow. Not what I’d recognize.

As silly as this is, he thought, it’s frightening. Something is being done to me and by a mere thing, here in my own house. Before my very eyes.

Within something’s very eyes; within the sight of some thing. Which, unlike little dark-eyed Donna, does not ever blink. What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? 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.

From the living-room bookcase he took down a volume at random; it turned out to be, he discovered, The Picture Book of Sexual Love. Opening at random, he perceived a page—which showed a man nibbling happily at a chick’s right tit, and the chick sighing—and said aloud, as if reading to himself from the book, as if quoting from some famous old-time double-dome philosopher, which he was not:

“Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost …

Weh! steck’ ich in dem Kerker noch?
Verfluchtes dumpfes Mauerloch,
Wo selbst das liebe Himmelslicht
Trüb durch gemalte Scheiben bricht!
Beschränkt mit diesem Bücherhauf,
Den Würme nagen, Staub bedeckt,
Den bis ans hohe.

… perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.”

Nodding, as if moved by the wisdom of the nonexisting written words on that page, he closed the large redbound, gold-stamped Picture Book of Sexual Love and restored it to the shelf. I hope the scanners don’t zoom in on the cover of this book, he thought, and blow my shuck.

***

Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more depressed by what was happening to everybody he knew, decided finally to off himself. There was no problem, in the circles where he hung out, in putting an end to yourself; you just bought into a large quantity of reds and took them with some cheap wine, late at night, with the phone off the hook so no one would interrupt you.

The planning part had to do with the artifacts you wanted found on you by later archeologists. So they’d know from which stratum you came. And also could piece together where your head had been at the time you did it.

He spent several days deciding on the artifacts. Much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself, and approximately the same time required to get that many reds. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way he would indict the system and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved.

Actually, he was not as sure in his mind what the death achieved as what the two artifacts achieved; but anyhow it all added up, and he began to make ready, like an animal sensing its time has come and acting out its instinctive programming, laid down by nature, when its inevitable end was near.

***

At the last moment (as end-time closed in on him) he changed his mind on a decisive issue and decided to drink the reds down with a connoisseur wine instead of Ripple or Thunderbird, so he set off on one last drive, over to Trader Joe’s, which specialized in fine wines, and bought a bottle of 1971 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon, which set him back almost thirty dollars—all he had.