A Scanner Darkly - Dick Philip Kindred - Страница 21

Many of the previous aristocratic social class knew about maids and gardeners and other serf-type help: a broken vase here, a dropped priceless heirloom that slips out of a sullen hand.

“Why’d you do that, Rastus Brown?”

“Oh, Ah jes’ fogot ta—” and there was no recourse, or very little. By a rich homeowner, by a political writer unpopular with the regime, a small new nation shaking its fist at the U.S. or at the U.S.S.R.—

Once, an American ambassador to Guatemala had had a wife who had publicly boasted that her “pistol-packin” husband had overthrown that little nation’s left-wing government. After its abrupt fall, the ambassador, his job done, had been transferred to a small Asian nation, and while driving his sports car he had suddenly discovered a slowmoving hay truck pulling out of a side road directly ahead of him. A moment later nothing remained of the ambassador except a bunch of splatted bits. Packing a pistol, and having at his call an entire CIA raised private army, had done him no good. His wife wrote no proud poetry about that.

“Uh, do what?” the owner of the hay truck had probably said to the local authorities. “Do what, massah? Ah jes’—”

Or like his own ex-wife, Arctor remembered. At that time he had worked for an insurance firm as an investigator (“Do your neighbors across the hall drink a lot?”), and she had objected to his filling out his reports late at night instead of thrilling at the very sight of her. Toward the end of their marriage she had learned to do such things during his late-night work period as burn her hand while lighting a cigarette, get something in her eye, dust his office, or search forever throughout or around his typewriter for some little object. At first he had resentfully stopped work and succumbed to thrilling at the very sight of her; but then he had hit his head in the kitchen while getting out the corn popper and had found a better solution.

“If they kill our animals,” Luckman was saying, “I’ll fire bomb them. I’ll get all of them. I’ll hire a professional down from L.A., like a bunch of Panthers.”

“They won’t,” Barris said. “There’s nothing to be gained by injuring animals. The animals haven’t done anything.”

“Have I?” Arctor said.

“Evidently they think so,” Barris said.

Luckman said, “If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself. Remember?”

“But she was a straight,” Barris said. “That girl never turned on, and she had heavy bread. Remember her apartment? The rich never understand the value of life. That’s something else. Remember Thelma Konnford, Bob? The short girl with the huge breasts—she never wore a bra and we used to just sit and look at her nipples? She came over to our place to get us to kill that mosquito hawk for her? And when we explained—”

At the wheel of his slow car, Bob Arctor forgot theoretical matters and did a rerun of a moment that had impressed them all: the dainty and elegant straight girl in her turtleneck sweater and bell-bottoms and trippy boobs who wanted them to murder a great harmless bug that in fact did good by wiping out mosquitoes—and in a year in which an outbreak of encephalitis had been anticipated in Orange County—and when they saw what it was and explained, she had said words that became for them their parody evil-wall-motto, to be feared and despised:

IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS

I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.

That had summed up to them (and still did) what they distrusted in their straight foes, assuming they had foes; anyhow, a person like well-educated-with-all-the-financial-advantages Thelma Konnfond became at once a foe by uttering that, from which they had run that day, pouring out of her apartment and back to their own littered pad, to her perplexity. The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they’d meditated on how to ball her, and remained. Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and a drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about.

One time before he got solely into undercover work he had taken a deposition from a pair of upper-class well-off straights whose furniture had been ripped off during their absence, evidently by junkies; in those days such people still lived in areas where roving rip-off bands stole what they could, leaving little. Professional bands, with walkie-talkies in the hands of spotters who watched a couple miles down the street for the marks’ return. He remembered the man and his wife saying, “People who would burglarize your house and take your color TV are the same kind of criminals who slaughter animals or vandalize priceless works of art.” No, Bob Arctor had explained, pausing in writing down their deposition, what makes you believe that? Addicts, in his experience anyhow, rarely hurt animals. He had witnessed junkies feeding and caring for injured animals over long periods of time, where straights probably would have had the animals “put to sleep,” a straight-type term if there ever was one—and also an old Syndicate term as well, for murder. Once he had assisted two totally spaced-out heads in the sad ordeal of unscrewing a cat which had impaled herself within a broken window. The heads, hardly able to see or understand anything any more, had over almost an entire hour deftly and patiently worked the cat loose until she was free, bleeding a little, all of them, heads and cat alike, with the cat calm in their hands, one dude inside the house with Arctor, the other outdoors, where the ass and tail were. The cat had come free at last with no real injury, and then they had fed her. They did not know whose cat she was; evidently she had been hungry and smelled food through their broken window and finally, unable to rouse them, had tried to leap in. They hadn’t noticed her until her shriek, and then they had forgotten their various trips and dreams for a while in her behalf.

As to “priceless works of art” he wasn’t too sure, because he didn’t exactly understand what that meant. At My Lai during the Viet Nam War, four hundred and fifty priceless works of art had been vandalized to death at the orders of the CIA—priceless works of art plus oxen and chickens and other animals not listed. When he thought about that he always got a little dingey and was hard to reason with about paintings in museums like that.

“Do you think,” he said aloud as he painstakingly drove, “that when we die and appear before God on Judgment Day, that our sins will be listed in chronological order or in order of severity, which could be ascending or descending, or alphabetically? Because I don’t want to have God boom out at me when I die at the age of eighty-six, ‘So you’re the little boy who stole the three Coke bottles off the Coca-Cola truck when it was parked in the 7-11 lot back in 1962, and you’ve got a lot of fast talking to do.’

“I think they’re cross-referenced,” Luckman said. “And they just hand you a computer printout that’s the total of a long column that’s been added up already.”

“Sin,” Barris said, chuckling, “is a Jewish-Christian myth that is outdated.”

Arctor said, “Maybe they’ve got all your sins in one big pickle barrel”—he turned to glare at Barris the anti-Semite—“a kosher pickle barrel, and they just hoist it up and throw the whole contents all at once in your face, and you just stand there dripping sins. Your own sins, plus maybe a few of somebody else’s that got in by mistake.”

“Somebody else by the same name,” Luckman said. “Another Robert Arctor. How many Robert Arctors do you think there are, Barris?” He nudged Barris. “Could the Cal Tech computers tell us that? And cross-file all the Jim Barrises too while they’re doing it?”

To himself, Bob Arctor thought, How many Bob Arctors are there? A weird and fucked-up thought. Two that I can think of, he thought. The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? Is Fred actually the same as Bob? Does anybody know? I would know, if anyone did, because I’m the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me?