A Scanner Darkly

“He imagined he served two terms back around 1882. Later on after a lot of therapy he came to imagine he served only one term—”

With great fury Fred slammed the holos ahead two and a half hours. How long does this garbage go on? he asked himself. All day? Forever?

“—so you take your child to the doctor, to the psychologist, and you tell him how your child screams all the time and has tantrums.” Luckman had two lids of grass before him on the coffee table plus a can of beer; he was inspecting the grass. “And lies; the kid lies. Makes up exaggerated stories. And the psychologist examines the kid and his diagnosis is ‘Madam, your child is hysterical. You have a hysterical child. But I don’t know why.’ And then you, the mother, there’s your chance and you lay it on him, ‘I know why, doctor. It’s because I had a hysterical pregnancy.’ ” Both Luckman and Arctor laughed, and so did Jim Barris; he had returned sometime during the two hours and was with them, working on his funky hash pipe, winding white string.

Again Fred spun the tape forward a full hour.

“—this guy,” Luckman was saying, manicuring a box full of grass, hunched over it as Arctor sat across from him, more or less watching, “appeared on TV claiming to be a world-famous impostor. He had posed at one time or another, he told the interviewer, as a great surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical College, a theoretical submolecular high-velocity particle-research physicist on a federal grant at Harvard, as a Finnish novelist who’d won the Nobel Prize in literature, as a deposed president of Argentina married to—”

“And he got away with all that?” Arctor asked. “He never got caught?”

“The guy never posed as any of those. He never posed as anything but a world-famous impostor. That came out later in the L.A. Times—they checked up. The guy pushed a broom at Disneyland, or had until he read this autobiography about this world-famous impostor—there really was one—and he said, ‘Hell, I can pose as all those exotic dudes and get away with it like he did,’ and then he decided, ‘Hell, why do that; I’ll just pose as another impostor.’ He made a lot of bread that way, the Times said. Almost as much as the real world-famous impostor. And he said it was a lot easier.”

Barris, off to himself in a corner winding string, said, “We see impostors now and then. In our lives. But not posing as subatomic physicists.”

“Narks, you mean,” Luckman said. “Yeah, narks. I wonder how many narks we know. What’s a nark look like?”

“It’s like asking, What’s an impostor look like?” Arctor said. “I talked one time to a big hash dealer who’d been busted with ten pounds of hash in his possession. I asked him what the nark who busted him looked like. You know, the—what do they call them?—buying agent that came out and posed as a friend of a friend and got him to sell him some hash.”

“Looked,” Barris said, winding string, “just like us.”

“More so,” Arctor said. “The hash-dealer dude—he’d already been sentenced and was going in the following day—he told me, ‘They have longer hair than we do.’ So I guess the moral of that is, Stay away from guys looking the same as us.”

“There are female narks,” Barris said.

“I’d like to meet a nark,” Arctor said. “I mean knowingly. Where I could be positive.”

“Well,” Barris said, “you could be positive when he claps the cuffs on you, when that day comes.”

Arctor said, “I mean, do narks have friends? What sort of social life do they have? Do their wives know?”

“Narks don’t have wives,” Luckman said. “They live in caves and peep out from under parked cars as you pass. Like trolls.”

“What do they eat?” Arctor said.

“People,” Barris said.

“How could a guy do that?” Arctor said. “Pose as a nark?”

“What?” both Barris and Luckman said together.

“Shit, I’m spaced,” Arctor said, grinning. “ ‘Pose as a nark’—wow.” He shook his head, grimacing now.

Staring at him, Luckman said, “POSE AS A NARK? POSE AS A NARK?”

“My brains are scrambled today,” Arctor said. “I better go crash.”

At the holos, Fred cut the tape’s forward motion; all the cubes froze, and the sound ceased.

“Taking a break, Fred?” one of the other scramble suits called over to him.

“Yeah,” Fred said. “I’m tired. This crap gets to you after a while.” He rose and got out his cigarettes. “I can’t figure out half what they’re saying, I’m so tired. Tired,” he added, “of listening to them.”

“When you’re actually down there with them,” a scramble suit said, “it’s not so bad; you know? Like I guess you were—on the scene itself up until now, with a cover. Right?”

“I would never hang around with creeps like that,” Fred said. “Saying the same things over and over, like old cons. Why do they do what they do, sitting there shooting the bull?”

“Why do we do what we do? This is pretty damn monotonous, when you get down to it.”

“But we have to; this is our job. We have no choice.”

“Like the cons,” a scramble suit pointed out. “We have no choice.”

Posing as a nark, Fred thought. What does that mean? Nobody knows …