A Scanner Darkly (17 page)

Donna and a couple other chicks looked so foxy—they had on halters and hot pants, or tank tops with no bras. He could hear music although he could not quite distinguish what track it was from what LP. Maybe Hendrix! he thought. Yeah, an old Hendrix track, or now all at once it was J.J. All of them: Jim Croce, and J.J., but especially Hendrix. “Before I die,” Hendrix was murmuring, “let me live my life as I want to,” and then immediately the fantasy number blew up because he had forgotten both that Hendrix was dead and how Hendrix and also Joplin had died, not to mention Croce. Hendrix and J.J. OD’ing on smack, both of them, two neat cool fine people like that, two outrageous humans, and he remembered how he’d heard that Janis’s manager had only allowed her a couple hundred bucks now and then; she couldn’t have the rest, all that she earned, because of her junk habit. And then he heard in his head her song “All Is Loneliness,” and he began to cry. And in that condition drove on toward home.

In his living room, sitting with his friends and attempting to determine whether he needed a new carb, a rebuilt carb, or a modification carb-and-manifold, Robert Arctor sensed the silent constant scrutiny, the electronic presence, of the holo-scanners. And felt good about it.

“You look mellow,” Luckman said. “Putting out a hundred bucks wouldn’t make me mellow.”

“I decided to cruise along the street until I come across an Olds like mine,” Arctor explained, “and then unbolt their carb and pay nothing. Like everyone else we know.”

“Especially Donna,” Barris said in agreement. “I wish she hadn’t been in here the other day while we were gone. Donna steals everything she can carry, and if she can’t carry it she
phones up her rip-off gang buddies and they show up and carry it off for her.”

“I’ll tell you a story I heard about Donna,” Luckman said. “One time, see, Donna put a quarter into one of those automatic stamp machines that operate off a coil of stamps, and the machine was dingey and just kept cranking out stamps. Finally she had a marketbasket full. It
still
kept cranking them out. Ultimately she had like—she and her rip-off friends counted them—over eighteen thousand U.S. fifteen-cent stamps. Well, that was cool, except what was Donna Hawthorne going to do with them? She never wrote a letter in her life, except to her lawyer to sue some guy who burned her in a dope deal.”

“Donna does
that?”
Arctor said. “She has an attorney to use in a default on an illegal transaction? How can she do that?”

“She just probably says the dude owes her bread.”

“Imagine getting an angry pay-up-or-go-to-court letter from an attorney about a dope deal,” Arctor said, marveling at Donna, as he frequently did.

“Anyhow,” Luckman continued, “there she was with a marketbasket full of at least eighteen thousand U.S. fifteen-cent stamps, and what the hell to do with them? You can’t sell them back to the Post Office. Anyhow, when the P.O. came to service the machine they’d know it went dingey, and anyone who showed up at a window with all those fifteen-cent stamps, especially a coil of them—shit, they’d flash on it; in fact, they’d be waiting for Donna, right? So she thought about it—after of course she’d loaded the coil of stamps into her MG and drove off—and then she phoned up more of those rip-off freaks she works with and had them drive over with a jackhammer of some kind, water-cooled and water-silenced, a real kinky special one which, Christ, they ripped off, too, and they dug the stamp machine loose from the concrete in the middle of the night and carried it to her place
in the back of a Ford Ranchero. Which they also probably ripped off. For the stamps.”

“You mean she sold the stamps?” Arctor said, marveling. “From a vending machine? One by one?”

“They remounted—this is what I heard, anyhow—they relocated the U.S. stamp machine at a busy intersection where a lot of people pass by, but back out of sight where no mail truck would spot it, and they put it back in operation.”

“They would have been wiser just to knock over the coin box,” Barris said.

“So they were selling stamps, then,” Luckman said, “for like a few weeks until the machine ran out, like it naturally had to eventually. And what the fuck next? I can imagine Donna’s brain working on that during those weeks, that peasant-thrift brain … her family is peasant stock from some European country. Anyhow, by the time it ran out of its coil, Donna had decided to convert it over to soft drinks, which are from the P.O.—they’re really guarded. And you go into the bucket forever for that.”

“Is this true?” Barris said.

“Is what true?” Luckman said.

Barris said, “That girl is disturbed. She should be forcibly committed. Do you realize that all our taxes were raised by her stealing those stamps?” He sounded angry again.

“Write the government and tell them,” Luckman said, his face cold with distaste for Barris. “Ask Donna for a stamp to mail it; she’ll sell you one.”

“At full price,” Barris said, equally mad.

The holos, Arctor thought, will have miles and miles of this on their expensive tapes. Not miles and miles of dead tape but miles and miles of tripped out tape.

It was not what went on while Robert Arctor sat before a holo-scanner that mattered so much, he considered; it was what took place—at least for him … for whom? … for Fred—while Bob Arctor was elsewhere or asleep and others
were within scanning range. So I should split, he thought, as I planned it out, leaving these guys, and sending other people I know over here. I should make my house super-accessible from now on.

And then a dreadful, ugly thought rose inside him. Suppose when I play the tapes back I see Donna when she’s in here—opening a window with a spoon or knife blade—and slipping in and destroying my possessions and stealing.
Another
Donna: the chick as she really is, or anyhow as she is when I can’t see her. The philosophical “when a tree falls in the forest” number. What is Donna like when no one is around to watch her?

Does, he wondered, the gentle lovely shrewd and very kind, superkind girl transform herself instantly into something sly? Will I see a change which will blow my mind? Donna or Luckman, anyone I care about. Like your pet cat or dog when you’re out of the house … the cat empties a pillowcase and starts stuffing your valuables in it: electric clock and bedside radio, shaver, all it can stuff in before you get back: another cat entirely while you’re gone, ripping you off and pawning it all, or lighting up your joints, or walking on the ceiling, or phoning people long distance … God knows. A nightmare, a weird other world beyond the mirror, a terror city reverse thing, with unrecognizable entities creeping about; Donna crawling on all fours, eating from the animals’ dishes … any kind of psychedelic wild trip, unfathomable and horrid.

Hell, he thought; for that matter, maybe Bob Arctor rises up in the night from deep sleep and does trips like that. Has sexual relations with the wall. Or mysterious freaks show up who he’s never seen before, a whole bunch of them, with special heads that swivel all the way around, like owls’. And the audio-scanners will pick up the far-out demented conspiracies hatched out by him and them to blow up the men’s room at the Standard station by filling the toilet with plastic explosives for God knows what brain-charred purpose.
Maybe this sort of stuff goes on every night while he just imagines he’s asleep—and is gone by day.

Bob Arctor, he speculated, may learn more new information about himself than he is ready for, more than he will about Donna in her little leather jacket, and Luckman in his fancy duds, and even Barris—maybe when nobody’s around Jim Barris merely goes to sleep. And sleeps until they reappear.

But he doubted it. More likely Barris whipped out a hidden transmitter from the mess and chaos of his room—which, like all the other rooms in the house, had now for the first time come under twenty-four-hour scanning—and sent a cryptic signal to the other bunch of cryptic motherfuckers with whom he currently conspired for whatever people like him or them conspired for. Another branch, Bob Arctor reflected, of the authorities.

On the other hand, Hank and those guys downtown would not be too happy if Bob Arctor left his house, now that the monitors had been expensively and elaborately installed, and was never seen again: never showed up on any of the tape. He could not therefore take off in order to fulfill his personal surveillance plans at the expense of theirs. After all, it was their money.

In the script being filmed, he would at all times have to be the star actor. Actor, Arctor, he thought. Bob the Actor who is being hunted; he who is the El Primo huntee.

They say you never recognize your own voice when you first hear it played back on tape. And when you see yourself on video tape, or like this, in a 3-D hologram, you don’t recognize yourself visually either. You imagined you were a tall fat man with black hair, and instead you’re a tiny thin woman with no hair at all … is that it? I’m sure I’ll recognize Bob Arctor, he thought, if by nothing else than by the clothes he wears or by a process of elimination. What isn’t Barris or Luckman and lives here must be Bob Arctor.
Unless it’s one of the dogs or cats. I’ll try to keep my professional eye trained on something which walks upright.

“Barris,” he said, “I’m going out to see if I can score some beans.” Then he pretended to remember he had no car; he got that sort of expression. “Luckman,” he said, “is your Falcon running?”

“No,” Luckman said thoughtfully, after consideration, “I don’t think so.”

“Can I borrow your car, Jim?” Arctor asked Barris.

“I wonder … if you can handle my car,” Barris said.

This always arose as a defense when anyone tried to borrow Barris’s car, because Barris had had secret unspecified modifications done on it, in its

• (a)  suspension
  

• (b)  engine
  

• (c)  transmission
  

• (d)  rear end
  

• (e)  drive train
  

• (f)  electrical system
  

• (g)  front end and steering
  

• (h)  as well as clock, cigar lighter, ashtray, glove compartment. In particular the glove compartment. Barris kept it locked always. The radio, too, had been cunningly
  changed
  (never explained how or why). If you tuned one station you got only one-minute-apart blips. All the push-buttons brought in a single transmission that made no sense, and, oddly, there was never any rock played over it. Sometimes when they were accompanying Barris on a buy and Barris parked and got out of the car, leaving them, he turned the particular station on in a special fashion very loud. If they changed it while he was gone he became incoherent and refused to speak on the trip back or ever to explain. He had not explained yet. Probably when set to that frequency his radio transmitted
  

• (a)  to the authorities.
  

• (b) to a private paramilitary political organization.
  

• (c)  to the Syndicate.
  

• (d)  to extraterrestrials of higher intelligence.
  

“By that I mean,” Barris said, “it will cruise at—”

“Aw fuck!” Luckman broke in harshly. “It’s an ordinary six-cylinder motor, you humper. When we park in it downtown L. A. the parking-lot jockey drives it. So why can’t Bob? You asshole.”

Now, Bob Arctor had a few devices too, a few covert modifications built into his own car radio. But he didn’t talk about them. Actually, it was Fred who had. Or anyhow somebody had, and they did a few things a little like what Barris claimed his several electronic assists did, and then on the other hand they did not.

For example, every law-enforcement vehicle emits a particular full-spectrum interference which sounds on ordinary car radios like a failure in the spark-suppressors of that vehicle. As if the police car’s ignition is faulty. However, Bob Arctor, as a peace officer, had been allocated a gadget which, when he had mounted it within his car radio, told him a great deal, whereas the noises told other people—most other people—no information at all. These other people did not even recognize the static as information-bearing. First of all, the different subsounds told Bob Arctor how close the law-enforcement vehicle was to his own and, next, what variety of department it represented: city or county, Highway Patrol, or federal, whatever. He, too, picked up the one-minute-apart blips which acted as a time check for a parked vehicle; those in the parked vehicle could determine how many minutes they had waited without any obvious arm gestures. This was useful, for instance, when they had agreed to hit a house in exactly three minutes. The zt
zt zt
on their car radio told them precisely when three minutes had passed.

He knew, too, about the AM station that played the top-ten-type tunes on and on plus an enormous amount of DJ chatter in between, which sometimes was not chatter, in a
sense. If that station had been tuned to, and the racket of it filled your car, anyone casually overhearing it would hear a conventional pop music station and typical boring DJ talk, and either not hang around at all or flash on in any way to the fact that the so-called DJ suddenly, in exactly the same muted chatty style of voice in which he said, “Now here’s a number for Phil and Jane, a new Cat Stevens tune called—” occasionally said something more like “Vehicle blue will proceed a mile north to Bastanchury and the other units will—” and so on. He had never—with all the many dudes and chicks who rode with him, even when he had been obliged to keep tuned to police info-instruct, such as when a major bust was going down or any big action was in progress which might involve him—had anyone notice. Or if they noticed, they probably thought they were personally spaced and paranoid and forgot it.

And also he knew about the many unmarked police vehicles like old Chevys jacked up in the back with loud (illegal) pipes and racing stripes, with wild-looking hip types driving them erratically at high speed—he knew from what his radio emitted in the way of the special information-carrying station at all frequencies when one buzzed him or shot past. He knew to ignore.

Also, when he pushed the bar that supposedly switched from AM to FM on his car radio, a station on a particular frequency groaned out indefinite Muzak-type music, but this noise being transmitted to his car was filtered out, unscrambled, by the microphone-transmitter within his radio, so that whatever was said by those in his car at the time was picked up by his equipment and broadcast to the authorities; but this one funky station playing away, no matter how loud, was not received by them and did not interfere at all; the grid eliminated it.