A Scanner Darkly Read online

  Eventually—this was the name of the project—he would meet someone high enough to be worth busting. That meant someone who knew something, which meant someone either in contact with those who manufactured or someone who ran it in from the supplier who himself knew the source.

  Unlike other drugs, Substance D had—apparently—only one source. It was synthetic, not organic; therefore, it came from a lab. It could be synthesized, and already had been in federal experiments. But the constituents were themselves derived from complex substances almost equally difficult to synthesize. Theoretically it could be manufactured by anyone who had, first, the formula and, second, the technological capacity to set up a factory. But in practice the cost was out of reach. Also, those who had invented it and were making it available sold it too cheaply for effective competition. And the wide distribution suggested that even though a sole source existed, it had a diversified layout, probably a series of labs in several key areas, perhaps one near each major urban drug-using spot in North America and Europe. Why none of these had been found was a mystery; but the implication was, both publicly and no doubt under official wraps, that the S. D. Agency—as the authorities arbitrarily termed it— had penetrated so far up into law-enforcement groups, both local and national, that those who found out anything usable about its operations soon either didn’t care or didn’t exist.

  He had, naturally, several other leads at present besides Donna. Other dealers he pressured progressively for larger quantities. But because she was his chick—or anyhow he had hopes in that direction—she was for him the easiest. Visiting her, talking to her on the phone, taking her out or having her over—that was a personal pleasure as well. It was, in a sense, the line of least resistance. If you had to spy on and report about someone, it might as well be people you’d see anyhow; that was less suspicious and less of a drag. And if you did not see them frequently before you began surveillance, you would have to eventually anyhow; it worked out the same in the end.

  Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing.

  Ring-ring-ring.

  “Hello,” Donna said.

  Every pay phone in the world was tapped. Or if it wasn’t, some crew somewhere just hadn’t gotten around to it. The taps fed electronically onto storage reels at a central point, and about once every second day a printout was obtained by an officer who listened to many phones without having to leave his office. He merely rang up the storage drums and, on signal, they played back, skipping all dead tape. Most calls were harmless. The officer could identify ones that weren’t fairly readily. That was his skill. That was what he got paid for. Some officers were better at it than others.

  As he and Donna talked, therefore, no one was listening. The playback would come maybe the next day at the earliest. If they discussed anything strikingly illegal, and the monitoring officer caught it, then voiceprints would be made. But all he and she had to do was keep it mild. The dialogue could still be recognizable as a dope deal. A certain governmental economy came into play here—it wasn’t worth going through the hassle of voiceprints and track-down for routine illegal transactions. There were too many each day of the week, over too many phones. Both Donna and he knew this.

  “How you doin’?” he asked.

  “Okay.” Pause in her warm, husky voice.

  “How’s your head today?”

  “Sort of in a bad space. Sort of down.” Pause. “I was bum-tripped this A.M. by my boss at the shop.” Donna worked behind the counter of a little perfume shop in Gateside Mall in Costa Mesa, to which she drove every morning in her MG. “You know what he said? He said this customer, this old guy, gray hair, who bilked us out of ten bucks—he said it was my fault and I’ve got to make it good. It’s coming out of my paycheck. So I’m out ten bucks through no fucking— excuse me—fault of my own.”

  Arctor said, “Hey, can I get anything from you?”

  She sounded sullen now. As if she didn’t want to. Which was a shuck. “How—much do you want? I don’t know.”

  “Ten of them,” he said. The way they had it set up, one was a hundred; this was a request for a thousand, then.

  Among fronts, if transactions had to take place over public communications, a fairly good try consisted of masking a large one by an apparently small one. They could deal and deal forever, in fact, in these quantities, without the authorities taking any interest; otherwise, the narcotics teams would be raiding apartments and houses up and down each street each hour of the day, and achieving little.

  “ ‘Ten,’ “ Donna muttered, irritably.

  “I’m really hurting,” he said, like a user. Rather than a dealer. “I’ll pay you back later, when I’ve scored.”

  “No,” she said woodenly. “I’ll lay them on you gratis. Ten.” Now, undoubtedly, she was speculating whether he was dealing. Probably he was. “Ten. Why not? Say, three days from now?”

  “No sooner?”

  “These are—”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I’ll drop over.”

  “What time?”

  She calculated. “Say around eight in the P.M. Hey, I want to show you a book I got, somebody left it at the shop. It’s cool. It has to do with wolves. You know what wolves do? The male wolf? When he defeats his foe, he doesn’t snuff him—he pees on him. Really! He stands there and pees on his defeated foe and then he splits. That’s it. Territory is what they mostly fight over. And the right to screw. You know.”

  Arctor said, “I peed on some people a little while ago.”

  “No kidding? How come?”

  “Metaphorically,” he said.

  “Not the usual way?”

  “I mean,” he said, “I told them—” He broke off. Talking too much; a fuckup. Jesus, he thought. “These dudes,” he said, “like biker types, you dig? Around the Foster’s Freeze? I was cruising by and they said something raunchy. So I turned around and said something like—” He couldn’t think of anything for a moment.

  “You can tell me,” Donna said, “even if it’s super gross. You gotta be super gross with biker types or they won’t understand.”

  Arctor said, “I told them I’d rather ride a pig than a hog. Any time.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, a pig is a chick that—”

  “Oh yeah. Okay, well I get it. Barf.”

  “I’ll see you at my place like you said,” he said. “Good-by.” He started to hang up.

  “Can I bring the wolf book and show you? It’s by Konrad Lorenz. The back cover, where they tell, says he was the foremost authority on wolves on earth. Oh yeah, one more thing. Your roommates both came into the shop today, Ernie what’s-his-name and that Barris. Looking for you, if you might have—”

  “What about?” Arctor said.

  “Your cephalochromoscope that cost you nine hundred dollars, that you always turn on and play when you get home—Ernie and Barris were babbling away about it. They tried to use it today and it wouldn’t work. No colors and no ceph patterns, neither one. So they got Barris’s tool kit and unscrewed the bottom plate.”

  “The hell you say!” he said, indignant.

  “And they say it’s been fucked over. Sabotaged. Cut wires, and like sort of weird stuff—you know, freaky things. Shorts and broken parts. Barris said he’d try to—”

  “I’m going right home,” Arctor said, and hung up. My primo possession, he thought bitterly. And that fool Barris tinkering with it. But I can’t go home right now, he realized. I’ve got to go over to New-Path to check on what they’re up to.

  It was his assignment: mandatory.

  3

  Charles Freck, too, had been thinking about visiting New-Path. The freakout of Jerry Fabin had gotten to him that much.

  Seated with Jim Barris in the Fiddler’s Three coffee shop in Santa Ana, he fooled around with his sugar-glazed doughnut morosely. “It’s a heavy decision,” he said. “That’s cold turkey they do. They just keep with you night and day so you don’t snuff yourself or bite off your
arm, but they never give you anything. Like, a doctor will prescribe. Valium, for instance.”

  Chuckling, Barris inspected his patty melt, which was melted imitation cheese and fake ground beef on special organic bread. “What kind of bread is this?” he asked.

  “Look on the menu,” Charles Freck said. “It explains.”

  “If you go in,” Barris said, “you’ll experience symptoms that emanate up from the basic fluids of the body, specifically those located in the brain. By that I refer to the catecholamines, such as noradrenalin and serotonin. You see, it functions this way: Substance D, in fact all addictive dope, but Substance D most of all, interacts with the catecholamines in such a fashion that involvement is locked in place at a subcellular level. Biological counter-adaptation has occurred, and in a sense forever.” He ate a huge bite of the right half of his patty melt. “They used to believe this occurred only with the alkaloid narcotics, such as heroin.”

  “I never shot smack. It’s a downer.”

  The waitress, foxy and nice in her yellow uniform, with pert boobs and blond hair, came over to their table. “Hi,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

  Charles Freck gazed up in fear.

  “Is your name Patty?” Barris asked her, signaling to Charles Freck that it was cool.

  “No.” She pointed to the name badge on her right boob. “It’s Beth.”

  I wonder what the left one’s called, Charles Freck thought.

  “The waitress we had last time was named Patty,” Barris said, eyeing the waitress grossly. “Same as the sandwich.”

  “That must have been a different Patty from the sandwich. I think she spells it with an i.”

  “Everything is super good,” Barris said. Over his head Charles Freck could see a thought balloon in which Beth was stripping off her clothes and moaning to be banged.

  “Not with me,” Charles Freck said. “I got a lot of problems nobody else has.”

  In a somber voice, Barris said, “More people than you’d think. And more each day. This is a world of illness, and getting progressively worse.” Above his head, the thought balloon got worse too.

  “Would you like to order dessert?” Beth asked, smiling down at them.

  “What like?” Charles Freck said with suspicion.

  “We have fresh strawberry pie and fresh peach pie,” Beth said smiling, “that we make here ourselves.”

  “No, we don’t want any dessert,” Charles Freck said. The waitress left. “That’s for old ladies,” he said to Barris, “those fruit pies.”

  “The idea of turning yourself over for rehabilitation,” Barris said, “certainly makes you apprehensive. That’s a manifestation of purposeful negative symptoms, your fear. It’s the drug talking, to keep you out of New-Path and keep you from getting off it. You see, all symptoms are purposeful, whether they are positive or negative.”

  “No shit,” Charles Freck muttered.

  “The negative ones show up as the cravings, which are deliberately generated by the total body to force its owner— which in this case is you—to search frantically—”

  “The first thing they do to you when you go into New-Path,” Charles Freck said, “is they cut off your pecker. As an object lesson. And then they fan out in all directions from there.”

  “Your spleen next,” Barris said.

  “They what, they cut— What does that do, a spleen?”

  “Helps you digest your food.”

  “How?”

  “By removing the cellulose from it.”

  “Then I guess after that—”

  “Just noncellulose foods. No leaves or alfalfa.”

  “How long can you live that way?”

  Barris said, “It depends on your attitude.”

  “How many spleens does the average person have?” He knew there usually were two kidneys.

  “Depends on his weight and age.”

  “Why?” Charles Freck felt keen suspicion.

  “A person grows more spleens over the years. By the time he’s eighty—”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Barris laughed. Always he had been a strange laugher, Charles Freck thought. An unreal laugh, like something breaking. “Why your decision,” Barris said presently, “to turn yourself in for residence therapy at a drug rehab center?”

  “Jerry Fabin,” he said.

  With a gesture of easy dismissal, Barris said, “Jerry was a special case. I once watched Jerry Fabin staggering around and falling down, shitting all over himself, not knowing where he was, trying to get me to look up and research what poison he’d got hold of, thallium sulfate most likely … it’s used in insecticides and to snuff rats. It was a burn, somebody paying him back. I could think of ten different toxins and poisons that might—”

  “There’s another reason,” Charles Freck said. “I’m running low again in my supply, and I can’t stand it, this always running low and not knowing if I’m fucking ever going to see any more.”

  “Well, we can’t even be sure we’ll see another sunrise.”

  “But shit—I’m down so low now that it’s like a matter of days. And also … I think I’m being ripped off. I can’t be taking them that fast; somebody must be pilfering from my fucking stash.”

  “How many tabs do you drop a day?”

  “That’s very difficult to determine. But not that many.”

  “A tolerance builds up, you know.”

  “Sure, right, but not like that. I can’t stand running out and like that. On the other hand …” He reflected. “I think I got a new source. That chick, Donna. Donna something.”

  “Oh, Bob’s girl.”

  “His old lady,” Charles Freck said, nodding.

  “No, he never got into her pants. He tries to.”

  “Is she reliable?”

  “Which way? As a lay or—” Barris gestured: hand to mouth and swallowing.

  “What kind of sex is that?” Then he flashed on it. “Oh, yeah, the latter.”

  “Fairly reliable. Scatterbrained, somewhat. Like you’d expect with a chick, especially the darker ones. Has her brain between her legs, like most of them. Probably keeps her stash there, too.” He chuckled. “Her whole dealer’s stash.”

  Charles Freck leaned toward him. “Arctor never balled Donna? He talks about her like he did.”

  Barris said, “That’s Bob Arctor. Talks like he did many things. Not the same, not at all.”

  “Well, how come he never laid her? Can’t he get it on?”

  Barris reflected wisely, still fiddling with his patty melt; he had now torn it into little bits. “Donna has problems. Possibly she’s on junk. Her aversion to bodily contact in general— junkies lose interest in sex, you realize, due to their organs swelling up from vasoconstriction. And Donna, I’ve observed, shows an inordinate failure of sexual arousal, to an unnatural degree. Not just toward Arctor but toward …” He paused grumpily. “Other males as well.”

  “Shit, you just mean she won’t come across.”

  “She would,” Barris said, “if she were handled right. For instance …” He glanced up in a mysterious fashion. “I can show you how to lay her for ninety-eight cents.”

  “I don’t want to lay her. I just want to buy from her.” He felt uneasy. There was perpetually something about Barris that made his stomach uncomfortable. “Why ninety-eight cents?” he said. “She wouldn’t take money; she’s not turning tricks. Anyhow, she’s Bob’s chick.”

  “The money wouldn’t be paid directly to her,” Barris said in his precise, educated way. He leaned toward Charley Freck, pleasure and guile quivering amid his hairy nostrils. And not only that, the green tint of his shades had steamed up. “Donna does coke. Anybody who would give her a gram of coke she’d undoubtedly spread her legs for, especially if certain rare chemicals were added in strictly scientific fashion that I’ve done painstaking research on.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way,” Charles Freck said. “About her. Anyhow, a gram of coke’s selli
ng now for over a hundred dollars. Who’s got that?”

  Half sneezing, Barris declared, “I can derive a gram of pure cocaine at a total cost to me, for the ingredients from which I get it, not including my labor, of less than a dollar.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’ll give you a demonstration.”

  “Where do these ingredients come from?”

  “The 7-11 store,” Barris said, and stumbled to his feet, discarding bits of patty melt in his excitement. “Get the check,” he said, “and I’ll show you. I’ve got a temporary lab set up at the house, until I can create a better one. You can watch me extract a gram of cocaine from common legal materials purchased openly at the 7-11 food store for under a dollar total cost.” He started down the aisle. “Come on.” His voice was urgent.

  “Sure,” Charles Freck said, picking up the check and following. The mother’s dingey, he thought. Or maybe he isn’t. With all those chemistry experiments he does, and reading and reading at the county library … maybe there’s something to it. Think of the profit, he thought. Think what we could clear!

  He hurried after Barris, who was getting out the keys to his Karmann Ghia as he strode, in his surplus flier’s jump suit, past the cashier.

  They parked in the lot of the 7-11, got out and walked inside. As usual, a huge dumb cop stood pretending to read a stroke-book magazine at the front counter; in actuality, Charles Freck knew, he was checking out everyone who entered, to see if they were intending to hit the place.

  “What do we pick up here?” he asked Barris, who was casually strolling about the aisles of stacks of food.

  “A spray can,” Barris said. “Of Solarcaine.”

  “Sunburn spray?” Charles Freck did not really believe this was happening, but on the other hand, who knew? Who could be sure? He followed Barris to the counter; this time Barris paid.

  They purchased the can of Solarcaine and then made it past the cop and back to their car. Barris drove rapidly from the lot, down the street, on and on at high speed, ignoring posted speed-limit signs, until finally he rolled to a halt before Bob Arctor’s house, with all the old unopened newspapers in the tall grass of the front yard.