A Scanner Darkly (11 page)

“Hey, man,” Luckman said loudly, “did this happen by accident or was this done deliberately? Like the cephscope?”

Barris pondered, still smiling his wily, rueful smile. “I couldn’t say for sure about this. Normally, sabotage on a car, malicious damage to cause an accident …”He glanced at Arctor, his eyes invisible behind his green shades. “We almost piled up. If that ‘Vet had been coming any faster … There was almost no ditch to head for. You should have cut the ignition as soon as you realized what happened.”

“I got it out of gear,” Arctor said. “When I realized. For a second I couldn’t figure it out.” He thought, If it had been the brakes, if the brake pedal had gone to the floor, I’d have flashed on it sooner, known better what to do. This was so— weird.

“Someone deliberately did it,” Luckman said loudly. He spun around in a circle of fury, lashing out with both fists. “MOTHERFUCKER! We almost bought it! They fucking almost got us!”

Barris, standing visible by the side of the freeway with all its heavy traffic whizzing by, got out a little horn snuffbox of death tabs and took several. He passed the snuffbox to Luckman, who took a few, then passed it to Arctor.

“Maybe that’s what’s fucking us up,” Arctor said, declining irritably. “Messing up our brains.”

“Dope can’t screw up an accelerator linkage and carb-idle adjustment,” Barris said, still holding the snuffbox out to Arctor. “You’d better drop at least three of these—they’re Primo, but mild. Cut with a little meth.”

“Put the damn snuffbox away,” Arctor said. He felt, in his head, loud voices singing: terrible music, as if the reality around him had gone sour. Everything now—the fast-moving
cars, the two men, his own car with its hood up, the smell of smog, the bright, hot light of midday—it all had a rancid quality, as if, throughout, his world had putrefied, rather than anything else. Not so much become all at once, because of this, dangerous, not frightening, but more as if rotting away, stinking in sight and sound and odor. It made him sick, and he shut his eyes and shuddered.

“What do you smell?” Luckman asked. “A clue, man? Some engine smell that—”

“Dog shit,” Arctor said. He could smell it, from within the engine area. Bending, he sniffed, smelled it distinctly and more strongly. Weird, he thought. Freaky and fucking weird. “Do you smell dog shit?” he asked Barris and Luckman.

“No,” Luckman said, eyeing him. To Barris he said, “Were there any psychedelics in that dope?”

Barris, smiling, shook his head.

As he bent over the hot engine, smelling dog shit, Arctor knew to himself that it was an illusion; there was no dog-shit smell. But still he smelled it. And now he saw, smeared across the motorblock, especially down low by the plugs, dark-brown stains, an ugly substance. Oil, he thought. Spilled oil, thrown oil: I may have a leaky head gasket. But he needed to reach down and touch to be sure, to fortify his rational conviction. His fingers met the sticky brown smears, and his fingers leaped back. He had run his fingers into dog shit. There was a coating of dog shit all over the block, on the wires. Then he realized it was on the fire wall as well. Looking up, he saw it on the soundproofing underneath the hood. The stink overpowered him, and he shut his eyes, shuddering.

“Hey, man,” Luckman said acutely, taking hold of Arctor by the shoulder. “You’re getting a flashback, aren’t you?”

“Free theater tickets,” Barris agreed, and chuckled.

“You better sit down,” Luckman said; he guided Arctor back to the driver’s seat and got him seated there. “Man, you’re really freaked. Just sit there. Take it easy. Nobody
got killed, and now we’re warned.” He shut the car door beside Arctor. “We’re okay now, dig?”

Barris appeared at the window and said, “Want a lump of dog shit, Bob? To chew on?”

Opening his eyes, chilled, Arctor stared at him. Barris’s green-glass eyes gave nothing back, no clue. Did he really say that? Arctor wondered. Or did my head make that up? “What, Jim?” he said.

Barris began to laugh. And laugh and laugh.

“Leave him alone, man,” Luckman said, punching Barris on the back. “Fuck off, Barris!”

Arctor said to Luckman, “What did he say just now? What the hell exactly did he say to me?”

“I don’t know,” Luckman said. “I can’t figure out half the things Barris lays on people.”

Barris still smiled, but had become silent.

“You goddamn Barris,” Arctor said to him. “I know you did it, screwed over the cephscope and now the car. You fucking did it, you kinky freak mother bastard.” His voice was hardly audible to him, but as he yelled that out at smiling Barris, the dreadful stench of dog shit grew. He gave up trying to speak and sat there at the useless wheel of his car trying not to throw up. Thank God Luckman came along, he thought. Or it’d be all over for me this day. It’d all fucking be over, at the hands of this burned-out fucking creep, this mother living right in the same house with me.

“Take it easy, Bob,” Luckman’s voice filtered to him through the waves of nausea.

“I know it’s him,” Arctor said.

“Hell, why?” Luckman seemed to be saying, or trying to say. “He’d of snuffed himself too this way. Why, man? Why?”

The smell of Barris still smiling overpowered Bob Arctor, and he heaved onto the dashboard of his own car. A thousand little voices tinkled up, shining at him, and the smell receded finally. A thousand little voices crying out their strangeness;
he did not understand them, but at least he could see, and the smell was going away. He trembled, and reached for his handkerchief from his pocket.

“What was in those tabs you gave us?” Luckman demanded at smiling Barris.

“Hell, I dropped some too,” Barris said, “and so did you. And it didn’t give us a bad trip. So it wasn’t the dope. And it was too soon. How could it have been the dope? The stomach can’t absorb—”

“You poisoned me,” Arctor said savagely, his vision almost clear, his mind clearing, except for the fear. Now fear had begun, a rational response instead of insanity. Fear about what had almost happened, what it signified, fear fear terrible fear of smiling Barris and his fucking snuffbox and his explanations and his creepy sayings and ways and habits and customs and comings and goings. And his anonymous phoned-in tip to the police about Robert Arctor, his mickey-mouse grid to conceal his real voice that had pretty well worked. Except that it had to have been Barris.

Bob Arctor thought,
The fucker is on to me.

“I never saw anybody space out as fast,” Barris was saying, “but then—”

“You okay now, Bob?” Luckman said. “We’ll clean up the barf, no trouble. Better get in the back seat.” Both he and Barris opened the car door; Arctor slid dizzily out. To Barris, Luckman said, “You sure you didn’t slip him anything?”

Barris waved his hands up high, protesting.

Item. What an undercover narcotics agent fears most is not that he will be shot or beaten up but that he will be slipped a great hit of some psychedelic that will roll an endless horror feature film in his head for the remainder of his life, or that he will be shot up with a mex hit, half heroin and half Substance D, or both of the above plus a poison such as strychnine, which will nearly kill him but not completely, so that the above can occur: lifelong addiction, lifelong horror film. He will sink into a needle-and-a-spoon existence, or bounce off the walls in a psychiatric hospital or, worst of all, a federal clinic. He will try to shake the aphids off him day and night or puzzle forever over why he cannot any longer wax a floor. And all this will occur deliberately. Someone figured out what he was doing and then got him. And they got him this way. The worst way of all: with the stuff they sell that he was after them for selling.

Which, Bob Arctor considered as he cautiously drove home, meant that both the dealers and the narks knew what the street drugs did to people. On that they agreed.

A Union station mechanic near where they had parked had driven out and gone over the car and finally fixed it up
at a cost of thirty dollars. Nothing else seemed wrong, except that the mechanic had examined the left front suspension for quite a while.

“Anything wrong there?” Arctor had asked.

“Seems like you should be experiencing trouble when you corner sharply,” the mechanic had said. “Does it yaw at all?”

The car didn’t yaw, not that Arctor had noticed. But the mechanic refused to say more; he just kept poking at the coil spring and ball joint and oil-filled shock. Arctor paid him, and the tow truck drove off. He then got back into his own car, along with Luckman and Barris—both of whom now rode in back—and started north toward Orange County.

As he drove, Arctor ruminated about other ironic agreements in the minds of narcotics agents and dealers. Several narcotics agents that he had known had posed as dealers in their undercover work and wound up selling like hash and then, sometimes, even smack. This was a good cover, but it also brought the nark a gradually increasing profit over and above his official salary plus what he made when he helped bust and seize a good-sized shipment. Also, the agents got deeper and deeper into using their own stuff, the whole way of life, as a matter of course; they became rich dealer addicts as well as narks, and after a time some of them began to phase out their law-enforcement activities in favor of full-time dealing. But then, too, certain dealers, to burn their enemies or when expecting imminent busts, began narking and went that route, winding up as sort of unofficial undercover narks. It all got murky. The drug world was a murky world for everyone anyhow. For Bob Arctor, for example, it had become murky now: during this afternoon along the San Diego Freeway, while he and his two buddies had been within foot-seconds of being wiped out, the authorities, on his behalf, had been—he hoped—properly bugging their house, and if this had been done, then possibly he would be safe from now on from the kind of thing that had happened today. It was a piece of luck that ultimately might mean the
difference between him winding up poisoned or shot or addicted or dead compared to nailing his enemy, nailing whoever was after him and who today had in fact almost gotten him. Once the holo-scanners were mounted in place, he ruminated, there would be very little sabotage or attacks against him. Or anyhow successful sabotage or successful attacks.

This was about the only thought that reassured him. The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues—he had heard that, and maybe that was true. What for a certainty was true, however, was that the guilty fled, fled like hell and took plenty of swift precautions, when someone did pursue: someone real and expert and at the same time hidden. And very close by. As close, he thought, as the back seat of this car. Where, if he has his funky .22 single-action German-made nowhere pistol with him and his equally funky rinky-dink laughable alleged silencer on it, and Luckman has gone to sleep as usual, he can put a hollow-nose bullet through the back of my skull and I will be as dead as Bobby Kennedy, who died from gunshot wounds of the same caliber—a bore that small.

And not only today but every day. And every night.

Except that in the house, when I check the storage drums of the holo-scanners, I’ll pretty well know pretty soon what everyone in my house is doing and when they do it and probably even why, myself included. I will watch my own self, he thought, get up in the night to pee. I will watch all the rooms on a twenty-four-hour basis … although there will be a lag. It won’t help me much if the holo-scanners pick up me being given a hotshot of some disorientation drug ripped off by the Hell’s Angels from a military arsenal and dumped in my coffee; someone else from the academy who goes over the storage drums will have to watch my thrashing around, unable to see or know where or what I am any more. It will be a hindsight I won’t even get to have. Somebody else will have to have it for me.

Luckman said, “I wonder what’s been going on back at the house while we’ve been gone all day. You know, this proves you got somebody out to burn you real bad, Bob. I hope when we get back the house is still there.”

“Yeah,” Arctor said. “I didn’t think of that. And we didn’t get a loan cephscope anyhow.” He made his voice sound leaden with resignation.

Barris said, in a surprisingly cheerful voice, “I wouldn’t worry too much.”

With anger, Luckman said, “You wouldn’t? Christ, they may have broken in and ripped off all we got. All Bob’s got, anyhow. And killed or stomped the animals. Or—”

“I left a little surprise,” Barris said, “for anybody entering the house while we’re gone today. I perfected it early this morning … I worked until I got it. An electronic surprise.”

Sharply, concealing his concern, Arctor said, “What kind of electronic surprise? It’s my house, Jim, you can’t start rigging up—”

“Easy, easy,” Barris said. “As our German friends would say,
leise.
Which means be cool.”

“What is it?”

“If the front door is opened,” Barris said, “during our absence, my cassette tape recorder starts recording. It’s under the couch. It has a two-hour tape. I placed three omnidirectional Sony mikes at three different—”

“You should have told me,” Arctor said.

“What if they come in through the windows?” Luckman said. “Or the back door?”

“To increase the chances of their making their entry via the front door,” Barris continued, “rather than in other less usual ways, I providentially left the front door unlocked.”

After a pause, Luckman began to snigger.

“Suppose they don’t know it’s unlocked?” Arctor said.

“I put a note on it,” Barris said.

“You’ve jiving me!”

“Yes,” Barris said, presently.

“Are you fucking jiving us or not?” Luckman said. “I can’t tell with you. Is he jiving, Bob?”

“We’ll see when we get back,” Arctor said. “If there’s a note on the door and it’s unlocked we’ll know he isn’t jiving us.”

“They probably would take the note down,” Luckman said, “after ripping off and vandalizing the house, and then lock the door. So we won’t know. We’ll never know. For sure. It’s that gray area again.”