A Scanner Darkly

“Your car is at your place. I drove you.” The girl struggled up, tousled and confused and half asleep, wandered toward the closet to get her leather jacket. “I’ll drive you back. But you can see why I have to protect my snatch. Four pounds of coke is worth—”

“No fucking way,” he said. “You’re too stoned to drive ten feet, and you never fucking let anybody else drive that little roller skate of yours.”

Facing him, she yelled wildly, “That’s because nobody else can fucking drive my car! Nobody else even gets it right, no man especially! Driving on anything else! You had your hands down into my—”

And then he was somewhere outside in the darkness, roaming, without his coat, in a strange part of town. Nobody with him. Fucking alone, he thought, and then he heard Donna hurrying along after him, trying to catch up with him, panting for breath, because she did so much pot and hash these days that her lungs were half silted up with resins. He halted, stood without turning, waiting, feeling really down.

Approaching him, Donna slowed, panted, “I am dreadfully sorry I’ve hurt your feelings. By what I said. I was out of it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Too ugly!”

“Sometimes when I’ve worked all day and I’m super super tired, the first hit I take just spaces me. You wanna come back? Or what? You wanta go to the drive-in? What about the Southern Comfort? I can’t buy it … they won’t sell it to me,” she said, and paused. “I’m underage, right?”

“Okay,” he said. Together they walked back.

“That sure is good hash, isn’t it?” Donna said.

Bob Arctor said, “It’s black sticky hash, which means it’s saturated with opium alkaloids. What you’re smoking is opium, not hash—do you know that? That’s why it costs so much—do you know that?” He heard his voice rise; he stopped walking. “You aren’t doing hash, sweetie. You’re doing opium, and that means a lifetime habit at a cost of … what’s ‘hash’ selling for now a pound? And you’ll be smoking and nodding off and nodding off and not being able to get your car in gear and rear-ending trucks and needing it every day before you go to work—”

“I need to now,” Donna said. “Take a hit before I go to work. And at noon and as soon as I get home. That’s why I deal, to buy my hash. Hash is mellow. Hash is where it’s at.”

“Opium,” he repeated. “What’s hash sell for now?”

“About ten thousand dollars a pound,” Donna said. “The good kind.”

“Christ! As much as smack.”

“I would never use a needle. I never have and I never will. You last about six months when you start shooting, whatever you shoot. Even tap water. You get a habit—”

“You have a habit.”

Donna said, “We all do. You take Substance D. So what? What’s the difference now? I’m happy; aren’t you happy? I get to come home and smoke high-grade hash every night … it’s my trip. Don’t try to change me. Don’t ever try to change me. Me or my morals. I am what I am. And I get off on hash. It’s my life.”

“You ever seen pictures of an old opium smoker? Like in China in the old days? Or a hash smoker in India now, what they look like later on in life?”

Donna said, “I don’t expect to live long. So what? I don’t want to be around long. Do you? Why? What’s in this world? And have you even seen—Shit, what about Jerry Fabin; look at someone too far into Substance D. What’s there really in this world, Bob? It’s a stopping place to the next where they punish us here because we were born evil—”

“You are a Catholic.”

“We’re being punished here, so if we can get off on a trip now and then, fuck it, do it. The other day I almost cashed in driving my MG to work. I had the eight-track stereo on and I was smoking my hash pipe and I didn’t see this old dude in an ‘eighty-four Ford Imperator—”

“You are dumb,” he said. “Super dumb.”

“I am, you know, going to die early. Anyhow. Whatever I do. Probably on the freeway. I got hardly any brakes on my MG, you realize that? And I’ve picked up four speeding tickets this year already. Now I got to go to traffic school. It’s a bummer. For six whole months.”

“So someday,” he said, “I will all of a sudden never lay eyes on you again. Right? Never again.”

“Because of traffic school? No, after the six months—”

“In the marble orchard,” he explained. “Wiped out before you’re allowed under California law, fucking goddamn California law, to purchase a can of beer or a bottle of booze.”

“Yeah!” Donna exclaimed, alerted. “The Southern Comfort! Right on! Are we going to do a fifth of Southern Comfort and take in the Ape flicks? Are we? There’s still like eight left, including the one—”

“Listen to me,” Bob Arctor said, taking hold of her by the shoulder; she instinctively pulled away.

“No,” she said.

He said, “You know what they ought to let you do one time? Maybe just one time? Let you go in legally, just once, and buy a can of beer.”

“Why?” she said wonderingly.

“A present to you because you are good,” he said.