A Scanner Darkly (32 page)

“They’re not paranoid about him.”

“No,” Mike Westaway said.

Donna said, “Are you personally convinced they’re growing the stuff?”

“Not me. It’s not what I believe. It’s them.” Those who pay us, he thought.

“What’s the name mean?”

“Mors ontologica.
Death of the spirit. The identity. The essential nature.”

“Will he be able to act?”

Westaway watched the cars and people passing; he watched moodily as he fooled with his food.

“You really don’t know.”

“Never can know until it happens. A memory. A few charred brain cells flicker on. Like a reflex. React, not act. We can just hope. Remembering what Paul says in the Bible: faith, hope, and giving away your money.” He studied the pretty, dark-haired young girl across from him and could
perceive, in her intelligent face, why Bob Arctor— No, he thought; I always have to think of him as Bruce. Otherwise I cop out to knowing too much: things I shouldn’t, couldn’t, know. Why Bruce thought so much of her. Thought when he was capable of thought.

“He was very well drilled,” Donna said, in what seemed to him an extraordinary forlorn voice. And at the same time an expression of sorrow crossed her face, straining and warping its lines. “Such a cost to pay,” she said then, half to herself, and drank from her Coke.

He thought, But there is no other way. To get in there. I can’t get in. That’s established by now; think how long I’ve been trying. They’d only let a burned-out husk like Bruce in. Harmless. He would have to be … the way he is. Or they wouldn’t take the risk. It’s their policy.

“The government asks an awful lot,” Donna said.

“Life asks an awful lot.”

Raising her eyes, she confronted him, darkly angry. “In this case the federal government. Specifically. From you, me. From—” She broke off. “From what was my friend.”

“He’s still your friend.”

Fiercely Donna said, “What’s left of him.”

What’s left of him, Mike Westaway thought, is still searching for you. After its fashion. He too felt sad. But the day was nice, the people and cars cheered him, the air smelled good. And there was the prospect of success; that cheered him the most. They had come this far. They could go the rest of the way.

Donna said, “I think, really, there is nothing more terrible than the sacrifice of someone or something, a living thing, without its ever knowing. If it
knew.
If it understood and volunteered. But—” She gestured. “He doesn’t know; he never did know. He didn’t volunteer—”

“Sure he did. It was his job.”

“He had no idea, and he hasn’t any idea now, because now he hasn’t any ideas. You know that as well as I do. And
he will never again in his life, as long as he lives, have any ideas. Only reflexes. And this didn’t happen accidentally; it was supposed to happen. So we have this … bad karma on us. I feel it on my back. Like a corpse. I’m carrying a corpse— Bob Arctor’s corpse. Even while he’s technically alive.” Her voice had risen; Mike Westaway gestured, and, with visible effort, she calmed herself. People at other wooden tables, enjoying their burgers and shakes, had glanced inquiringly.

After a pause Westaway said, “Well, look at it this way. They can’t interrogate something, someone, who doesn’t have a mind.”

“I’ve got to get back to work,” Donna said. She examined her wristwatch. “I’ll tell them everything seems okay, according to what you told me. In your opinion.”

“Wait for winter,” Westaway said.

“Winter?”

“It’ll take until then. Never mind why, but that’s how it is; it will work in winter or it won’t work at all. We’ll get it then or not at all.” Directly at the solstice, he thought.

“An appropriate time. When everything’s dead and under the snow.”

He laughed. “In California?”

“The winter of the spirit.
Mors ontologica.
When the spirit is dead.”

“Only asleep,” Westaway said. He rose. “I have to split, too, I have to pick up a load of vegetables.”

Donna gazed at him with sad, mute, afflicted dismay.

“For the kitchen,” Westaway said gently. “Carrots and lettuce. That kind. Donated by McCoy’s Market, for us poor at New-Path. I’m sorry I said that. It wasn’t meant to be a joke. It wasn’t meant to be anything.” He patted her on the shoulder of her leather jacket. And as he did so it came to him that probably Bob Arctor, in better, happier days, had gotten this jacket for her as a gift.

“We have worked together on this a long time,” Donna said in a moderate, steady voice. “I don’t want to be on this
much longer. I want it to end. Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, I think, shit, we are colder than they are. The adversary.”

“I don’t see a cold person when I look at you,” Westaway said. “Although I guess I really don’t know you all that well. What I do see, and see clearly, is one of the warmest persons I ever knew.”

“I am warm on the outside, what people see. Warm eyes, warm face, warm fucking fake smile, but inside I am cold all the time, and full of lies. I am not what I seem to be; I am awful.” The girl’s voice remained steady, and as she spoke she smiled. Her pupils were large and mellow and without guile. “But, then, there’s no other way. Is there? I figured that out a long time ago and made myself like this. But it really isn’t so bad. You get what you want this way. And everybody is this way to a degree. What I am that’s actually so bad—I am a liar. I lied to my friend, I lied to Bob Arctor all the time. I even told him one time not to believe anything I said, and of course he just believed I was kidding; he didn’t listen. But if I told him, then it’s his responsibility not to listen, not to believe me any more, after I said that. I warned him. But he forgot as soon as I said it and went right on. Kept right on truckin’.”

“You did what you had to. You did more than you had to.”

The girl started away from the table. “Okay, then there really isn’t anything for me to report, so far. Except your confidence. Just that he’s duked in and they accept him. They didn’t get anything out of him in those—” She shuddered. “Those gross games.”

“Right.”

“I’ll see you later.” She paused. “The federal people aren’t going to want to wait until winter.”

“But winter it is,” Westaway said. “The winter solstice.”

“The what?”

“Just wait,” he said. “And pray.”

“That’s bullshit,” Donna said. “Prayer, I mean. I prayed a long time ago, a lot, but not any more. We wouldn’t have to do this, what we’re doing, if prayer worked. It’s another shuck.”

“Most things are.” He followed after the girl a few steps as she departed, drawn to her, liking her. “I don’t feel you destroyed your friend. It seems to me you’ve been as much destroyed, as much the victim. Only on you it doesn’t show. Anyhow, there was no choice.”

“I’m going to hell,” Donna said. She smiled suddenly, a broad, boyish grin. “My Catholic upbringing.”

“In hell they sell you nickel bags and when you get home there’s M-and-M’s in them.”

“M-and-M’s made out of turkey turds,” Donna said, and then all at once she was gone. Vanished away into the hither-and-thither-going people; he blinked. Is this how Bob Arctor felt? he asked himself. Must have. There she was, stable and as if forever; then—nothing. Vanished like fire or air, an element of the earth back into the earth. To mix with the everyone-else people that never ceased to be. Poured out among them. The evaporated girl, he thought. Of transformation. That comes and goes as she will. And no one, nothing, can hold on to her.

I seek to net the wind, he thought. And so had Arctor. Vain, he thought, to try to place your hands firmly on one of the federal drug-abuse agents. They are furtive. Shadows which melt away when their job dictates. As if they were never really there in the first place. Arctor, he thought, was in love with a phantom of authority, a kind of hologram, through which a normal man could walk, and emerge on the far side, alone. Without ever having gotten a good grip on it—on the girl itself.

God’s M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can’t perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting
heirs. Paltry people who will not know the dreadful war we’ve gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen.

There should be a monument somewhere, he thought, listing those who died in this. And, worse, those who didn’t die. Who have to live on, past death. Like Bob Arctor. The saddest of all.

I get the idea Donna is a mercenary, he thought. Not on salary. And they are the most wraithlike. They disappear forever. New names, new locations. You ask yourself, where is she now? And the answer is—

Nowhere. Because she was not there in the first place.

Reseating himself at the wooden table, Mike Westaway finished eating his burger and drinking his Coke. Since it was better than what they were served at New-Path. Even if the burger had been made from groundup cows’ anuses.

To call Donna back, to seek to find her or possess her … I seek what Bob Arctor sought, so maybe he is better off now, this way. The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love the most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.

So maybe we saved him from something worse, Westaway concluded. And, while accomplishing that, put what remained of him to use. To good and valuable use.

If we turn out lucky.

“Do you know any stories?” Thelma asked one day.

“I know the story about the wolf,” Bruce said.

“The wolf and the grandmother?”

“No,” he said. “The black-and-white wolf. It was up in a tree, and again and again it dropped down on the farmer’s
animals. Finally one time the farmer got all his sons and all his sons’ friends and they stood around waiting for the black-and-white wolf in the tree to drop down. At last the wolf dropped down on a mangy-looking brown animal, and there in his black-and-white coat he was shot by all of them.”

“Oh,” Thelma said. “That’s too bad.”

“But they saved the hide,” he continued. “They skinned the great black-and-white wolf that dropped from the tree and preserved his beautiful hide, so that those to follow, those who came later on, could see what he had been like and could marvel at him, at his strength and size. And future generations talked about him and related many stories of his prowess and majesty, and wept for his passing.”

“Why did they shoot him?”

“They had to,” he said. “You must do that with wolves like that.”

“Do you know any other stories? Better ones?”

“No,” he said, “that’s the only story I know.” He sat remembering how the wolf had enjoyed his great springing ability, his leaping down again and again in his fine body, but now that body was gone, shot down. And for meager animals to be slaughtered and eaten anyhow. Animals with no strength that never sprang, that took no pride in their bodies. But anyhow, on the good side, those animals trudged on. And the black-and-white wolf had never complained; he had said nothing even when they shot him. His claws had still been deep in his prey. For nothing. Except that that was his fashion and he liked to do it. It was his only way. His only style by which to live. All he knew. And they got him.

“Here’s the wolf!” Thelma exclaimed, leaping about clumsily. “Voob, voob!” She grabbed at things and missed, and he saw with dismay that something was wrong with her. He saw for the first time, distressed and wondering how it could happen, that she was impaired.

He said, “You are not the wolf.”

But even so, as she groped and hobbled, she stumbled; even so, he realized, the impairment continued. He wondered how it could be that …

… such sadness could exist. He walked away.

Behind him she still played. She tripped and fell. How must that feel? he wondered.

He roamed along the corridor, searching for the vacuum cleaner. They had informed him that he must carefully vacuum the big playroom where the children spent most of the day.

“Down the hall to the right.” A person pointed. Earl.

“Thanks, Earl,” he said.

When he arrived at a closed door he started to knock, and then instead he opened it.

Inside the room an old woman stood holding three rubber balls, which she juggled. She turned toward him, her gray stringy hair falling on her shoulders, grinning at him with virtually no teeth. She wore white bobby socks and tennis shoes. Sunken eyes, he saw; sunken eyes, grinning, empty mouth.

“Can you do this?” she wheezed, and threw all three balls up into the air. They fell back, hitting her, bouncing down to the floor. She stooped over, spitting and laughing.

“I can’t do that,” he said, standing there dismayed.

“I can.” The thin old creature, her arms cracking as she moved, raised the balls, squinted, tried to get it right.

Another person appeared at the door beside Bruce and stood with him, also watching.

“How long has she been practicing?” Bruce said.

“Quite a while.” The person called, “Try again. You’re getting close!”

The old woman cackled as she bent to fumble to pick the balls up once again.

“One’s over there,” the person beside Bruce said. “Under your night table.”

“Ohhhh!” she wheezed.

They watched the old woman try again and again, dropping the balls, picking them back up, aiming carefully, balancing herself, throwing them high into the air, and then hunching as they rained down on her, sometimes hitting her head.

The person beside Bruce sniffed and said, “Donna, you better go clean yourself. You’re not clean.”

Bruce, stricken, said, “That isn’t Donna. Is that Donna?” He raised his head to peer at the old woman and he felt great terror; tears of a sort stood in the old woman’s eyes as she gazed back at him, but she was laughing, laughing as she threw the three balls at him, hoping to hit him. He ducked.