A Scanner Darkly

“I’m tired,” he said. “I was up two nights and two days counting bugs. Counting them and putting them in bottles. And finally when we crashed and got up and got ready the next morning to put the bottles in the car, to take to the doctor to show him, there was nothing in the bottles. Empty.” He could feel the shaking now himself, and see it in his hands, on the wheel, the shaking hands on the steering wheel, at twenty miles an hour. “Every fucking one,” he said. “Nothing. No bugs. And then I realized, I fucking realized. It came to me, about his brain, Jerry’s brain.”

The air no longer smelled of spring and he thought, abruptly, that he urgently needed a hit of Substance D; it was later in the day than he had realized, or else he had taken less than he thought. Fortunately, he had his portable supply with him, in the glove compartment, way back. He began searching for a vacant parking slot, to pull over.

“Your mind plays tricks,” Donna said remotely; she seemed to have withdrawn into herself, gone far away. He wondered if his erratic driving was bumming her. Probably so.

Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent: He saw, first, a big parked Pontiac with a bumper jack on the back of it that was slipping and a kid around thirteen with long thatched hair struggling to hold the car from rolling, meanwhile yelling for assistance. He saw himself and Jerry Fabin running out of the house together, Jerry’s house, down the beer-can-littered driveway to the car. Himself, he grabbed at the car door on the driver’s side to open it, to stomp the brake pedal. But Jerry Fabin, wearing only his pants, without even shoes, his hair all disarranged and streaming—he had been sleeping—Jerry ran past the car to the back and knocked, with his bare pale shoulder that never saw the light of day, the boy entirely away from the car. The jack bent and fell, the rear of the car crashed down, the tire and wheel rolled away, and the boy was okay.

“Too late for the brake,” Jerry panted, trying to get his ugly greasy hair from his eyes and blinking. “No time.”

“ ‘S he okay?” Charles Freck yelled. His heart still pounded.

“Yeah.” Jerry stood by the boy, gasping. “Shit!” he yelled at the boy in fury. “Didn’t I tell you to wait until we were doing it with you? And when a bumper jack slips—shit, man, you can’t hold back five thousand pounds!” His face writhed. The boy, little Ratass, looked miserable and twitched guiltily. “I repeatedly and repeatedly told you!”

“I went for the brake,” Charles Freck explained, knowing his idiocy, his own equal fuckup, great as the boy’s and equally lethal. His failure as a full-grown man to respond right. But he wanted to justify it anyhow, as the boy did, in words. “But now I realize—” he yammered on, and then the fantasy number broke off; it was a documentary rerun, actually, because he remembered the day when this had happened, back when they were all living together. Jerry’s good instinct—otherwise Ratass would have been under the back of the Pontiac, his spine smashed.

The three of them plodded gloomily back toward the house, not even chasing the tire and wheel, which was still rolling off.

“I was asleep,” Jerry muttered as they entered the dark interior of the house. “It’s the first time in a couple weeks the bugs let up enough so I could. I haven’t got any sleep at all for five days—I been runnin’ and runnin’. I thought they were maybe gone; they’ve been gone. I thought they finally gave up and went somewhere else, like next door and out of the house entirely. Now I can feel them again. That tenth No Pest Strip I got, or maybe it’s the eleventh—they cheated me again, like they did with all the others.” But his voice was subdued now, not angry, just low and perplexed. He put his hand on Ratass’s head and gave him a sharp smack. “You dumb kid—when a bumper jack slips get the hell out of there. Forget the car. Don’t ever get behind it and try to push back against all that mass and block it with your body.”

“But, Jerry, I was afraid the axle—”

“Fuck the axle. Fuck the car. It’s your life.” They passed on through the dark living room, the three of them, and the rerun of a now gone moment winked out and died forever.

2

“Gentlemen of the Anaheim Lions Club,” the man at the microphone said, “we have a wonderful opportunity this afternoon, for, you see, the County of Orange has provided us with the chance to hear from—and then put questions to and of—an undercover narcotics agent from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.” He beamed, this man wearing his pink waffle-fiber suit and wide plastic yellow tie and blue shirt and fake leather shoes; he was an overweight man, overaged as well, overhappy even when there was little or nothing to be happy about.

Watching him, the undercover narcotics agent felt nausea.