A Scanner Darkly

“Nice guys,” Fred said.
“I’ll tell you one that’ll get you for sure. You’re aware of the three babies over at Fairfield Hospital that they have to give hits of smack to every day, that are too young to withdraw yet? A nurse tried to—”
“It gets me,” Fred said in his mechanical monotone. “I heard enough, thanks.”
Hank continued, “When you think of newborn babies being heroin addicts because—”
“Thanks,” the nebulous blur called Fred repeated.
“What do you figure the bust should be for a mother that gives a newborn baby a joypop of heroin to pacify it, to keep it from crying? Overnight in the county farm?”
“Something like that,” Fred said tonelessly. “Maybe a weekend, like they do the drunks. Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.”
“It’s a lost art,” Hank said. “Maybe there’s an instruction manual on it.”
“There was this flick back around 1970,” Fred said, “called The French Connection, about a two-man team of heroin narks, and when they made their hit one of them went totally bananas and started shooting everyone in sight, including his superiors. It made no difference.”
“It’s maybe better you don’t know who I am, then,” Hank said. “You could only get me by accident.”
“Somebody,” Fred said, “will get us all anyhow eventually.”
“It’ll be a relief. A distinct relief.” Going farther into his pile of notes, Hank said, “Jerry Fabin. Well, we’ll write him off. N.A.C. The boys down the hail say Fabin told the responding officers on the way to the clinic that a little contract man three feet high, legless, on a cart, had been rolling after him day and night. But he never told anybody because if he did they’d freak and get the hell out and then he’d have no friends, nobody to talk to.”
“Yeah,” Fred said stoically. “Fabin has had it. I read the EEG analysis from the clinic. We can forget about him.”
Whenever he sat facing Hank and did his reporting thing, he experienced a certain deep change in himself. Afterward was when he usually noticed it, although at the time he sensed that for a reason he assumed a measured and uninvolved attitude. Whatever came up and whoever it was about possessed no emotional significance to him during these sessions.
At first he had believed it to be the scramble suits that both of them wore; they could not physically sense each other. Later on he conjectured that the suits made no actual difference; it was the situation itself. Hank, for professional reasons, purposefully played down the usual warmth, the usual arousal in all directions; no anger, no love, no strong emotions of any sort would help either of them. How could intense natural involvement be of use when they were discussing crimes, serious crimes, committed by persons close to Fred and even, as in the case of Luckman and Donna, dear to him? He had to neutralize himself; they both did, him more so than Hank. They became neutral; they spoke in a neutral fashion; they looked neutral. Gradually it became easy to do so, without prearrangement.
And then afterward all his feelings seeped back.
Indignation at many of the events he had seen, even horror, in retrospect: shock. Great overpowering runs for which there had been no previews. With the audio always up too loud inside his head.
But while he sat across the table from Hank he felt none of these. Theoretically, he could describe anything he had witnessed in an impassive way. Or hear anything from Hank.
For example, he could offhandedly say “Donna is dying of hep and using her needle to wipe out as many of her friends as she can. Best thing here would be to pistol-whip her until she knocks it off.” His own chick … if he had observed that or knew it for a fact. Or “Donna suffered a massive vasoconstriction from a mickey-mouse LSD analogue the other day and half the blood vessels in her brain shut down.” Or “Donna is dead.” And Hank would note that down and maybe say “Who sold her the stuff and where’s it made?” or “Where’s the funeral, and we should get license numbers and names,” and he’d discuss that without feeling.
This was Fred. But then later on Fred evolved into Bob Arctor, somewhere along the sidewalk between the Pizza Hut and the Arco gas station (regular now a dollar two cents a gallon), and the terrible colors seeped back into him whether he liked it or not.
This change in him as Fred was an economy of the passions. Firemen and doctors and morticians did the same trip in their work. None of them could leap up and exclaim each few moments; they would first wear themselves out and be worthless and then wear out everyone else, both as technicians on the job and as humans off. An individual had just so much energy.
Hank did not force this dispassion on him; he allowed him to be like this. For his own sake. Fred appreciated it.
“What about Arctor?” Hank asked.
In addition to everyone else, Fred in his scramble suit naturally reported on himself. If he did not, his superior—and through him the whole law-enforcement apparatus—would become aware of who Fred was, suit or not. The agency plants would report back, and very soon he as Bob Arctor, sitting in his living room smoking dope and dropping dope with the other dopers, would find he had a little threefoot-high contract man on a cart coasting after him, too. And he would not be hallucinating, as had been Jerry Fabin.
“Arctor’s not doing anything much,” Fred said, as he always did. “Works at his nowhere Blue Chip Stamp job, drops a few tabs of death cut with meth during the day—”
“I’m not sure.” Hank fiddled with one particular sheet of paper. “We have a tip here from an informant whose tips generally pan out that Arctor has funds above and beyond what the Blue Chip Redemption Center pays him. We called them and asked what his take-home pay is. It’s not much. And then we inquired into that, why that is, and we found he isn’t employed there full time throughout the week.”
“No shit,” Fred said dismally, realizing that the “aboveand-beyond” funds were of course those provided him for his narking. Every week small-denomination bills were dispensed to him by a machine masquerading as a Dr. Pepper source at a Mexican bar and restaurant in Placentia. This was in essence payoffs on information he gave that resulted in convictions. Sometimes this sum became exceptionally great, as when a major heroin seizure occurred.
Hank read on reflectively, “And according to this informant, Arctor comes and goes mysteriously, especially around sunset. After he arrives home he eats, then on what may be pretexts takes off again. Sometimes very fast. But he’s never gone for long.” He glanced up—the scramble suit glanced up—at Fred. “Have you observed any of this? Can you verify? Does it amount to anything?”
“Most likely his chick, Donna,” Fred said.
“Well, ‘most likely.’ You’re supposed to know.”
“It’s Donna. He’s over there banging her night and day.” He felt acutely uncomfortable. “But I’ll check into it and let you know. Who’s this informant? Might be a burn toward Arctor.”
“Hell, we don’t know. On the phone. No print—he used some sort of rinky-dink electronic grid.” Hank chuckled; it sounded odd, coming out metallically as it did. “But it worked. Enough.”
“Christ,” Fred protested, “it’s that burned-out acid head Jim Barris doing a schizy grudge number on Arctor’s head! Barris took endless electronic-repair courses in the Service, plus heavy-machinery maintenance. I wouldn’t give him the time of day as an informant.”
Hank said, “We don’t know it’s Barris, and anyhow there may be more to Barris than ‘burned-out acid head.’ We’ve got several people looking into it. Nothing I feel would be of use to you, at least so far.”
“Anyhow, it’s one of Arctor’s friends,” Fred said.
“Yes, it’s undoubtedly a vengeance burn trip. These dopers—phoning in on each other every time they get sore. As a matter of fact, he did seem to know Arctor from a close standpoint.”