Philip Dick - A Scanner Darkly

“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.”

“But a photo can get accidentally reversed, too, if the negative is flipped—printed backward; you usually can tell only if there’s writing. But not with a man’s face. You could have two contact prints of a given man, one reversed, one not. A person who’d never met him couldn’t tell which was correct, but he could see they were different and couldn’t be superimposed.”

“There, Fred, does that show you how complex the problem of formulating the distinction between a left-hand glove and—”

“Then shall it come to pass the saying that is written,” a voice said. “Death is swallowed up. In victory.” Perhaps only Fred heard it. “Because,” the voice said, “as soon as the writing appears backward, then you know which is illusion and which is not. The confusion ends, and death, the last enemy, Substance Death, is swallowed not down into the body but up—in victory. Behold, I tell you the sacred secret now: we shall not all sleep in death .”

The mystery, he thought, the explanation, he means. Of a secret. A sacred secret. We shall not die.

The reflections shall leave. And it will happen fast. We shall all be changed, and by that he means reversed back, suddenly. In the twinkling of an eye!

Because, he thought glumly as he watched the police psychologists writing their conclusions and signing them, we are fucking backward right now, I guess, every one of us; everyone and every damn thing, and distance, and even time. But how long, he thought, when a print is being made, a contact print, when the photographer discovers he’s got the negative reversed, how long does it take to flip it? To reverse it again so it’s like it’s supposed to be?

A fraction of a second.

I understand, he thought, what that passage in the Bible means, Through a glass darkly. But my percept system is as fucked up as ever. Like they say. I understand but am helpless to help myself.

Maybe, he thought, since I see both ways at once, correctly and reversed, I’m the first person in human history to have it flipped and not-flipped simultaneously, and so get a glimpse of what it’ll be when it’s right. Although I’ve got the other as well, the regular. And which is which?

Which is reversed and which is not?

When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?

And how much allotment for sick pay or retirement or disability do I get while I dry out? he asked himself, feeling horror already, deep dread and coldness everywhere. Wie kalt ist es in diesem unterirdischen Gewölbe! Das ist natürlich, es ist ja tief . And I have to withdraw from the shit. I’ve seen people go through that. Jesus Christ, he thought, and shut his eyes.

“That may sound like metaphysics,” one of them was saying, “but the math people say we may be on the verge of a new cosmology so much—”

The other said excitedly, “The infinity of time, which is expressed as eternity, as a loop! Like a loop of cassette tape!”

He had an hour to kill before he was supposed to be back in Hank’s office, to listen to and inspect Jim Barris’s evidence.

The building’s cafeteria attracted him, so he walked that way, among those in uniform and those in scramble suits and those in slacks and ties.

Meanwhile, the psychologists’ findings presumably were being taken up to Hank. They would be there when he arrived.

This will give me time to think, he reflected as he wandered into the cafeteria and lined up. Time. Suppose, he thought, time is round, like the Earth. You sail west to reach India. They laugh at you, but finally there’s India in front, not behind. In time—maybe the Crucifixion lies ahead of us as we all sail along, thinking it’s back east.