A Scanner Darkly (22 page)

In the line of duty.

I’ll say, “Hey, man, I’m hurtin’—can you lay a joint on me? I’ll pay you a buck.” And he will, and then I’ll arrest him, drag him to my car, throw him inside, drive onto the freeway, and then pistol-whip him out of the car in front of a truck. And I can say he fought loose and tried to jump. Happens all the time.

Because if I don’t I can never eat or drink any open food or beverage in the house, and neither can Luckman or Donna or Freck or we’ll all croak from toxic mushroom fragments, after which Barris will explain about how we were all out in the woods picking them at random and eating them and he tried to dissuade us but we wouldn’t listen because we didn’t go to college.

Even if the court psychiatrists find him totally burned out and nuts and toss him in forever, somebody’ll be dead. He thought, Maybe Donna, for instance. Maybe she’ll wander
in, spaced on hash, looking for me and the spring flowers I promised her, and Barris will offer her a bowl of Jell-O he made himself special, and ten days later she’ll be thrashing in agony in an intensive-care ward and it won’t do any good then.

If that happens, he thought, I’ll boil him in Drāno, in the bathtub, in hot Drāno, until only bones remain, and then mail the bones to his mother or kids, whichever he has, and if he hasn’t either then just toss the bones out at passing dogs. But the deed will be done to that little girl anyhow.

Excuse me, he rolled in his head in fantasy to the other two scramble suits. Where can I get a hundred-pound can of Drāno this time of night?

I’ve had it, he thought, and turned on the holos so as not to attract any more static from the other suits in the safe room.

On Monitor Two, Barris was talking to Luckman, who apparently had rolled in the front door dead drunk, no doubt on Ripple. “There are more people addicted to alcohol in the U.S.,” Barris was telling Luckman, who was trying to find the door to his bedroom, to go pass out, and having a terrible time, “than there are addicts of all other forms of drugs. And brain damage and liver damage from the alcohol plus impurities—”

Luckman disappeared without ever having noticed Barris was there. I wish him luck, Fred thought. It’s not a workable policy, though, not for long. Because the fucker is there.

But now Fred is here, too. But all Fred’s got is hindsight. Unless, he thought, unless maybe if I run the holo-tapes backward. Then I’d be there first, before Barris. What I do would precede what Barris does. If with me first he gets to do anything at all.

And then the other side of his head opened up and spoke to him more calmly, like another self with a simpler message flashed to him as to how to handle it.

‘The way to cool the locksmith check,” it told him, “is to
go down there to Harbor tomorrow first thing very early and redeem the check and get it back. Do that first, before you do anything else. Do that right away. Defuse that, at that end. And after that, do the other more serious things, once that’s finished. Right?” Right, he thought. That will remove me from the disadvantage list. That’s where to start.

He put the tape on fast forward, on and on until he figured from the meters that it would show a night scene with everyone asleep. For a pretext to sign off his workday, here.

It now showed lights off, the scanners on infra. Luckman in his bed in his room; Barris in his; and in his room, Arctor beside a chick, both of them asleep.

Let’s see, Fred thought. Something. We have her in the computer files as strung out on hard stuff and also turning tricks and dealing. A true loser.

“At least you didn’t have to watch your subject have sexual intercourse,” one of the other scramble suits said, watching from behind him and then passing on by.

“That’s a relief,” Fred said, stoically viewing the two sleeping figures in the bed; his mind was on the locksmith and what he had to do there. “I always hate to—”

“A nice thing to do,” the scramble suit agreed, “but not too nice to watch.”

Arctor asleep, Fred thought. With his trick. Well, I can wind up soon; they’ll undoubtedly ball on arising but that’s about it for them.

He continued watching, however. The sight of Bob Arctor sleeping … on and on, Fred thought, hour after hour. And then he noticed something he had not noticed.
That doesn’t look like anybody else but Donna Hawthorne!
he thought. There in bed, in the sack with Arctor.

It doesn’t compute, he thought, and reached to snap off the scanners. He ran the tape back, then forward again. Bob Arctor and a chick, but not Donna! It was the junkie chick Connie! He had been right. The two individuals lay there side by side, both asleep.

And then, as Fred watched, Connie’s hard features melted and faded into softness, and into Donna Hawthorne’s face.

He snapped off the tape again. Sat puzzled. I don’t get it, he thought. It’s—what they call that? Like a goddamn dissolve! A film technique. Fuck, what is this? Pre-editing for TV viewing? By a director, using special visual effects?

Again he ran the tape back, then forward; when he first came to the alteration in Connie’s features he then stopped the transport, leaving the hologram filled with one freeze-frame.

He rotated the enlarger: All the other cubes cut out; one huge cube formed from the previous eight. A single nocturnal scene; Bob Arctor, unmoving, in his bed, the girl unmoving, beside him.

Standing, Fred walked into the holo-cube, into the three-dimensional projection, and stood close to the bed to scrutinize the girl’s face.

Halfway between, he decided. Still half Connie; already half Donna. I better run this over to the lab, he thought; it’s been tampered with by an expert. I’ve been fed fake tape.

Who by? he wondered. He emerged from the holo-cube, collapsed it, and restored the small eight ones. Still sat there, pondering.

Somebody faked in Donna. Superimposed over Connie. Forged evidence that Arctor was laying the Hawthorne girl. Why? As a good technician can do with either audio or video tape and now—as witness—with holo-tapes. Hard to do, but …

If this was a click-on, click-off, interval scan, he thought, we’d have a sequence showing Arctor in bed with a girl he probably never did get into bed and never will, but there it is on the tape.

Or maybe it’s a visual interruption or breakdown electronically, he pondered. What they call
printing.
Holo-printing: from one section of the tape storage to another. If the tape sits too long, if the recording gain was too high
initially, it prints across. Jeez, he thought. It printed Donna across from a previous or later scene, maybe from the living room.

I wish I knew more about the technical side of this, he reflected. I’d better acquire more background on this before jumping the gun. Like another AM station filtering in, interfering—

Crosstalk, he decided. Like that: accidental.

Like ghosts on a TV screen. Functional, a malfunction. A transducer opened up briefly.

Again he rolled the tape. Connie again, and Connie it stayed. And then … again Fred saw Donna’s fact melt back in, and this time the sleeping man beside her in the bed, Bob Arctor, woke up after a moment and sat up abruptly, then fumbled for the light beside him; the light fell to the floor and Arctor was staring on and on at the sleeping girl, at sleeping Donna.

When Connie’s face seeped back, Arctor relaxed, and at last he sank back and again slept. But restlessly.

Well, that shoots down the “technical interference” theory, Fred thought. Printing or crosstalk.
Arctor saw it too.
Woke up, saw it, stared, then gave up.

Christ, Fred thought, and shut off the equipment before him entirely. “I guess that’s enough for me for now,” he declared, and rose shakily to his feet. “I’ve had it.”

“Saw some kinky sex, did you?” a scramble suit asked. “You’ll get used to this job.”

“I never will get used to this job,” Fred said. “You can make book on that.”

The next morning, by Yellow Cab, since now not only was his cephscope laid up for repairs but so was his car, he appeared at the door of Englesohn Locksmith with forty bucks in cash and a good deal of worry inside his heart.

The store had an old wooden quality, with a more modern sign but many little brass doodads in the windows of a lock type: funky ornate mailboxes, trippy doorknobs made to resemble human heads, great fake black iron keys. He entered, into semigloom. Like a doper’s place, he thought, appreciating the irony.

At a counter where two huge key-grinding machines loomed up, plus thousands of key blanks dangling from racks, a plump elderly lady greeting him. “Yes, sir? Good morning.”

Arctor said, “I’m here …

… to pay for a check of mine which the bank returned. It’s for twenty dollars, I believe.”

“Oh.” The lady amiably lifted out a locked metal file, searched for the key to it, then discovered the file wasn’t locked. She opened it and found the check right away, with a note attached. “Mr. Arctor?”

“Yes,” he said, his money already out.

“Yes, twenty dollars.” Detaching the note from the check, she began laboriously writing on the note, indicating that he had shown up and purchased the check back.

“I’m sorry about this,” he told her, “but by mistake I wrote the check on a now closed account rather than my active one.”

“Umm,” the lady said, smiling as she wrote.

“Also,” he said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell your husband, who called me the other day—”

“My brother Carl,” the lady said, “actually.” She glanced over her shoulder. “If Carl spoke to you …” She gestured, smiling. “He gets overwrought sometimes about checks … I apologize if he spoke … you know.”

“Tell him,” Arctor said, his speech memorized, “that when he called I was distraught myself, and I apologize for that, too.”

“I believe he did say something about that, yes.” She laid out his check; he gave her twenty dollars.

“Any extra charge?” Arctor said.

“No extra charge.”

“I was distraught,” he said, glancing briefly at the check and then putting it away in his pocket, “because a friend of mine had just passed on unexpectedly.”

“Oh dear,” the lady said.

Arctor, lingering, said, “He choked to death alone, in his room, on a piece of meat. No one heard him.”

“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: Luck-man 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 …