A Scanner Darkly

“Yes, but partial noncompeting function is better than no function, since twin competing cross-cuing amounts to zero recept form.”

“You see, Fred,” the other man said, “you no longer have—”

“I will never drop any Substance D again,” Fred said. “For the rest of my life.”

“How much are you dropping now?”

“Not much.” After an interval he said, “More, recently. Because of job stress.”

“They undoubtedly should relieve you of your assignments,” one psychologist said. “Take you off everything. You are impaired, Fred. And will be a while longer. At the very least. After that, no one can be sure. You may make a full comeback; you may not.”

“How come,” Fred grated, “that even if both hemispheres of my brain are dominant they don’t receive the same stimuli? Why can’t their two whatevers be synchronized, like stereo sound is?”

Silence.

“I mean,” he said, gesturing, “the left hand and the right hand when they grip an object, the same object, should—”

“Left-handedness versus right-handedness, as for example what is meant by those terms with, say, a mirror image—in which the left hand ‘becomes’ the right hand …” The psychologist leaned down over Fred, who did not look up. “How would you define a left-hand glove compared to a right-hand glove so a person who had no knowledge of those terms could tell you which you meant? And not get the other? The mirror opposite?”

“A left-hand glove …” Fred said, and then stopped.

“It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all that that implies. And we don’t know yet what that does imply, to see the world reversed like that. Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right-hand glove pulled through infinity.”

“Through a mirror,” Fred said. A darkened mirror, he thought; a darkened scanner. And St. Paul meant, by a mirror, not a glass mirror—they didn’t have those then—but a reflection of himself when he looked at the polished bottom of a metal pan. Luckman, in his theological readings, had told him that. Not through a telescope or lens system, which does not reverse, not through anything but seeing his own face reflected back up at him, reversed—pulled through infinity. Like they’re telling me. It is not through glass but as reflected back by a glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, it is your face, but it isn’t. And they didn’t have cameras in those old days, and so that’s the only way a person saw himself: backward.

I have seen myself backward.

I have in a sense begun to see the entire universe backward. With the other side of my brain!

“Topology,” one psychologist was saying. “A little-understood science or math, whichever. As with the black holes in space, how—”

“Fred is seeing the world from inside out,” the other man was declaring at the same moment. “From in front and from behind both, I guess. It’s hard for us to say how it appears to him. Topology is the branch of math that investigates the properties of a geometric or other configuration that are unaltered if the thing is subjected to a one-to-one, any one-to-one, continuous transformation. But applied to psychology …”

“And when that occurs to objects, who knows what they’re going to look like then? They’d be unrecognizable. As when a primitive sees a photograph of himself the first time, he doesn’t recognize it as himself. Even though he’s seen his reflection many times, in streams, from metal objects. Because his reflection is reversed and the photograph of himself isn’t. So he doesn’t know it’s the identical person.”

“He’s accustomed only to the reverse reflected image and thinks he looks like that.”

“Often a person hearing his own voice played back—”

“That’s different. That has to do with the resonance in the sinus—”

“Maybe it’s you fuckers,” Fred said, “who’re seeing the universe backward, like in a mirror. Maybe I see it right.”

“You see it both ways.”

“Which is the—”

A psychologist said, “They used to talk about seeing only ‘reflections’ of reality. Not reality itself. The main thing wrong with a reflection is not that it isn’t real, but that it’s reversed. I wonder.” He had an odd expression. “Parity. The scientific principle of parity. Universe and reflected image, the latter we take for the former, for some reason … because we lack bilateral parity.”

“Whereas a photograph can compensate for the lack of bilateral hemispheric parity; it’s not the object but it’s not reversed, so that objection would make photographic images not images at all but the true form. Reverse of a reverse.”