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THE MIND GAME |
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Chapter Eleven Weller found an overnight parking space only two blocks away, trudged wearily into the Los Angeles Transformation Center, showed his pass to the gatekeeper, took the elevator to the fourth floor, entered his unlockable room, and flopped down on the bed to wait till six-thirty, when dinner, such as it was, would be served. Like a good little Transformationalist he had been taking his meals at the Center during the four days he had been there. The idea of eating alone in tacky downtown Hollywood grease parlors was monumentally depressing, and he never seemed to have the energy to do anything else. Besides, they had him down for dishwashing, and he'd have to be back at the Center by seven-thirty to do his assigned shit work anyway. The room itself was as featureless as such a tiny cubicle could be: a Salvation Army bureau, a closet, a night table with a single lamp, a cheap motel desk and chair set, and a bed. The carpet was a dingy beige, and the lime-green walls were not even adorned with a framed photograph of John B. Steinhardt. A monk's cell, or not even that, since a monk spent a lot of time in his cell contemplating, whereas this room was a place to sleep and nothing more; deliberately designed, no doubt, to be so obnoxious that the occupant would be forced to spend most of his waking hours in the communal areas of the Center, soaking up the Transformationalist group-think. If the Center had not once been a hotel, the toilets probably would've been communal too, with the privacy doors taken off the crappers. Weller checked his watch: five minutes after six. He could start drifting down to the dining room soon. Not that he looked forward to dinner with any enthusiasm, but being awake in this room for any length of time made anything else seem relatively attractive. Well, almost anything else. He could go to the library and browse through Transformationalist textbooks and pamphlets or the complete science-fiction novels of John B. Steinhardt. He could go watch some inspirational tapes in the video room. He could take part in a rap session on some fine point of Transformationalist dogma. He could sign up for some role-reversal games. He could masturbate, if the lockless door didn't make him too paranoid. Or he could go down into the private lobby and chew the fat with some of his fellow inmates and amuse himself by trying to figure out who was a Monitor or who would be reporting what he said to whom. He had done that his first night at the Center, after stowing his clothing in his room, eating a solitary meal, and giving himself his first case of housemaid's hands washing dishes in the kitchen. Might as well find out what I've gotten myself into, he had thought, as he dried his hands. He left the big restaurant-style kitchen, walked down the hall past the dining room, and entered the private lobby, which had probably been a meeting-room in the days when the Center was a hotel. It was a big barn of a room, with a high ceiling, and scars on the asphalt-tile floor where a stage had obviously once stood. Mismatched old couches, chairs, and low tables were scattered around the room in no particular pattern. One lemon-colored wall was graced by the biggest standard photo of Steinhardt that he had yet seen. There was an urn of coffee on a table in one comer, and in another an ancient black-and-white television console was muttering to itself with no one watching. About thirty people drifted around the room in small groups. Most of them were younger than Weller, and most of them, male and female, wore jeans, T-shirts, army-surplus gear, or finery snatched off the racks at the May Company. Weller immediately felt like an alien, as if he had wandered onto the wrong set. He drifted around the room quietly and invisibly, like the Flying Dutchman, absorbing random bits of dialogue. "-- said she had gotten an appointment to the Institute --" "-- one of John's early novels, but you can tell the seeds are there --" "-- is a better meditative deconditioner than Carson, if you ask me --" "-- that's right, the Monitors! At least they're going to give me a preliminary screening --" "-- really a bitch eptifying my consciousness behind that one. It's my major block --" No one seemed to be talking about the Dodgers, politics, dope, sex, career, movies, or anything else that didn't relate to Transformationalism. Could it really be that these people had no private inner lives, nothing beyond the Transformationalist programs they were running on? He glided to the periphery of a group of four: a dark-haired woman in her late twenties, seated on a couch with an intense-eyed young man with a strange 1950s crew cut, two other men standing in front of the couch talking to them, one with longish blond hair, the other a burly type in T-shirt and jeans. "-- of course, it's just a rumor --" "-- sounds possible, and everyone knows they're doing things at the Institute years ahead of anywhere else --" "-- assuming thoughts do have a one-to-one relationship with brainwaves, I don't see why you couldn't produce a given state of consciousness by reversing the polarity of a brainwave monitor --" "-- but John doesn't make that assumption anywhere --" "-- doesn't say no, either --" The woman on the couch looked up at Weller; she was thin, plain-looking, and something about her face made her eyes seem as if they were set too close together. "Hi." she said. "You're new here, aren't you?" Weller nodded noncommittally. "Have you heard anything about the brainwave inducer?" "Not much," Weller said ambiguously. "Are you into mind-matter interface theory?" the woman asked. "None of us really are. Do you know if it's even possible to produce a state of consciousness electronically?" Weller shrugged. "I'm in the media end myself," he said. The blond longhair looked at him strangely. "You work for Changes?" Weller nodded. "What do you do?" "I direct." There was an intake of breath; they were suitably impressed, but there seemed to be something more, a certain tension seemed to have descended on the little group. "Then what are you doing here?" the woman asked. "Just following a life directive." "That's weird," the crew cut said. "That's really weird. There's no one else on that level living here." The four of them studied Weller guardedly. I'm older, I'm in a position way above them, and there's no one else here like me, Weller thought. It must be more Monitor paranoia. He resisted the impulse to play to it; this was definitely a time to maintain a low profile, and for all he knew, one of them could be a Monitor. "So it goes," he said, shrugging, and drifted off, leaving what he was pretty sure would be an altered conversation behind him. Weller glided in and out of a few more conversations -- a discussion about a young man's problems with getting his parents to accept his commitment to the movement, a disputation about the significance of a minor character in Transformational Man, a rehash of last night's role-reversal game -- all of which served only to increase his sense of alienation. This really was a roomful of people who ate, slept, and drank Transformationalism. More than that, the people living at the Center seemed to be the very bottom end of the movement -- shiftless, confused kids without a pot to piss in or a dime to contribute to Transformationalism's coffers. Scooped up as Steinhardt's slavies as they might have been by the Hare Krishna movement or the Jesus Freaks, had they happened to be caught by those wavelengths first. The psychic lumpenproletariat of the seventies. One night of trying to relate to that had been enough for Weller. Better to stay in his room twiddling his thumbs than put himself in a situation where he would be bound to shoot his mouth off sooner or later. There was no way he could keep talking about Transformationalism with these kids without finally telling them a thing or two or being tempted to play Monitor, and they didn't seem to talk about anything else. And he knew that the Monitors would be getting reports on anything he said to anyone. Six-twenty. Time to drift down to the dining room, he thought. If I'm in luck, they'll let me keep to myself. Though he had a hunch that if he seemed to be making an effort to keep to himself, it would be a black mark in a dossier somewhere too. *** The dining room was set up like a high-school lunchroom, or, Weller thought darkly, like something in a prison. There was a line of steam tables behind a counter that ran the length of one wall, and the rest of the room was filled with rows of long tables and cheap plastic chairs. Privacy was a hit-or-miss proposition, a matter of picking an empty stretch of table and hoping it didn't fill up after you sat down. About a dozen people were already eating, and the line by the counter was already fifteen people long, so the chances of being left alone didn't look too good. Weller took a tray and dinnerware, waited dully on line for a few minutes, and finally got his turn at the steam tables. The choice, as it had been every night, was pretty grim. Poisonous-looking tamale pie. Spaghetti with lumpy meat sauce. Knockwurst and sauerkraut. Macaroni salad. Some kind of ghastly bile-green vegetarian stew with brown rice. The food was as cheap and crummy as it could get without inciting a revolution, even among these dedicated servants of the movement. Reluctantly, Weller settled for the knockwurst and kraut, macaroni salad, and coffee, and scouted around for an unobtrusive corner where he might have a chance to be left alone. People were scattered pretty evenly around the room, but there was a stretch of about a dozen empty seats at the end of a table near a big garbage bin. Weller went over and took an end seat right by the garbage, hoping that would be unattractive enough to keep away his fellow inmates, But he hadn't managed to get down more than a few forkfuls of macaroni salad and a single bite of knockwurst when a pimply young man and a guy about his own age sat right down across the table and introduced themselves with friendly enthusiasm. "Hi," said the kid. "I'm Tod and this is Harry." "You're new here," said Harry, "and we noticed you weren't mixing much, so we thought we'd help you get acquainted." "I remember what it was like my first few days here," Tod said sympathetically. "I didn't know anyone, and I figured everyone else had had much more processing than I did and wouldn't be very much interested in a lower consciousness like mine." Despite his better judgment Weller found himself warming to them a bit -- it had been a lonely four days, and they were apparently just trying to be friendly. "I'm Jack," he said, but he still didn't feel like saying more. "How much processing have you had?" Tod asked conversationally, "Block-auditing and meditative deconditioning," Weller muttered. '"You've completed meditative deconditioning?" Harry asked. Weller nodded. "How long did it take? "About a month." Both of them looked quite impressed, even amazed. "I took the crash course," Weller explained. Harry turned green with envy. "You must have a lot of money. I'd love to be able to do that, but I'm broke, and I'm working my way through processing doing the usual shit work, and that only gets me two sessions a week. I want to he a processor, but you've got to go all the way through meditative deconditioning before they'll even consider you, and at this rate it's going to take me at least another two months." Very interesting, Weller thought. Apparently the amount of free processing you get depends on how much they value the work you're doing for them. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch here! ''I'm not rich," he said. "I'm working my way through too." He was trying to be just one of the boys, but he was beginning to realize that people who got sucked in through the Celebrity Center got much different treatment than the peons all the way down the line. "What kind of work are you doing for the movement?" Tod asked. "I'm working for Changes Productions. As a director." "Wow." Now they were really impressed. Sjit. No doubt everyone in the center would know about it by tomorrow. He was being trapped into becoming a local celebrity, and he didn't like it at all. '''Then you must've passed life analysis," Harry said. "Was it rough?" Uh-oh. It was a delicate moment. If he told them the truth, they would think something very strange was going on, but if he lied and told them he had passed life analysis, it would get right back to the Monitors, and that would probably be a heavy black mark. "Pretty rough," he said. "In fact, I'm not quite through." They both looked at him narrowly. "And they're letting you direct?" Harry said suspiciously. ''I've never heard anything like that before." Weller tried a different shrug. ''I'm a pro," he said. ''I've done network directing. Changes Productions has an awful lot of work. I guess they just figured they needed me to help out right away." "Far out," Tod said. "Maybe I've seen something you've done?" But the older man's gaze was still lidded; either he sniffed the odor of the Monitors, or he was jealous, or both. "I hope not," Weller said dryly. "It's all been Saturday morning garbage kiddie shows." "Wow, it must be a big change doing real work for the movement then," Tod said. "I hope I'll find something that important to do." "They seem to be able to eptify your contribution," Weller said. ''I'm sure they'll find you the maximized slot." Jargon, anyone? "You must've met some of the real high-consciousness people," Harry said with open envy. "What are they really like?" ''I've met Benson Allen and Harry Lazlo," Weller said, glancing at his watch. It was getting time to end this little chit chat before it got into dangerous areas. The way these guys were forcing the conversation, they could be Monitors. "They're about what you'd expect -- high-powered, together people." "Hey, maybe you'd like to come to our rap session tonight," Tod said. "We're going to have a block auditor talking about cultural correlations of block patterns." "Sounds interesting," Weller muttered. "But I've got to be on the set early tomorrow, and I'm down for dishwashing." He checked his watch again, this time conspicuously. "In fact, I'd better get going. Been nice talking to you." "We'll see you around," Harry said. "Maybe we can really talk sometime. I'd really like to know what life analysis is all about." "Yeah, sure," Weller said, getting up and shoveling his scraps into the garbage bin. He sighed as he moved off toward the dish-stacking area. Who would've thought I'd ever be glad to go spend an hour washing slimy dishes and cruddy pots? he thought. Well, it looks like I'm going to be forced to interact with these people whether I like it or not. As a local point of interest, yet. He had to admire the way Gomez had set up this test situation -- there wasn't going to be any place to hide. *** "Roll 'em!" "-- BrainWave Monitor, scene five, take two." "Speed." Weller surveyed the set for a moment. The meditative deconditioner was the real thing, so he had no trouble getting a credible performance out of her. The actor playing the client was a real client too, but he was also just enough of a professional to be having difficulty playing the client he really was without overacting. Weller had finally gotten around that by running through each take half a dozen times before he rolled any film, so that he was dulled enough to simply respond mechanically to the processor as he would in the real situation. The lighting was good -- a whole order of magnitude better than anything Georgie or Shano had been able to do -- a medium bright spot on the processor, soft backlighting for the client, establishing the relationship with a subtle visual image. The off-center and slightly low camera angle would give the whole scene an almost imperceptible larger-than-life iconographic quality. He was getting solid professional commercial footage, and he was getting it superfast by Changes Productions standards. Sara had to be pleased.... "Okay," he shouted. "Action!" "You are walking along the beach, and far away over the surf you see an arm waving and hear a cry for help," the processor said. ''You're not a good swimmer, but you dive into the water, going into the center of your fear to rescue the person in distress ..." Then ten seconds of silent concentration on the part of the actor playing the client, which would seem like subjective minutes on film ... Weller wasn't even sure what they were going to do with this mini documentary on the brainwave monitor. The stuff they had given him to shoot would run about three minutes, but the script was full of interpolations like "narration to be added" and "insert stock footage," so he didn't even know how long the finished product would run, or even what it would be like. He cued the next line of dialogue. The client looked up, smiled gently, and said: "I felt physically afraid, but I did it. I really felt I was there, and I was able to conquer my physical fear...." They're really playing it close to the vest, Weller thought. Shoot these scenes like a good little boy, and we'll slap some narration around them. Not only didn't he have any creative control over content, the damn script didn't even tell him what the eventual content would really be. It was almost a laboratory experiment designed to test his purely technical skills without letting him come within a mile of creative control. Almost a laboratory experiment? The processor nodded sagely. "The monitor showed that you really eptified your consciousness behind that scenario, Mr. Carson," she said. "I think you'll now find that you deal with physical fear much better in real time. We're ready to go on to another block." Good stuff, such as it is, Weller thought. They've got to be pleased with what I'm turning out. Unless some Monitor somewhere is analyzing my goddamn lighting and camera angles for subliminal regressiveness and disloyalty to the movement. That seemed like total paranoia, but around here total paranoia had a nasty way of coinciding with reality. "Cut!" Weller shouted. "Okay, very good folks, that's a take. We'll take a ten-minute break, and then go on to scene six." Weller mopped his brow and walked over to the back of the sound stage where Georgie had been watching. He saw that Sara had walked in at some point and was standing beside him, looking pretty pleased. "That was very good, Jack," she said. ''You're doing good work, and you're really keeping ahead of the shooting schedule." Ever since they had both been officially told that it was a no-no for them to go to bed together, she had been all business; she acted as if that little scene in her office had never been played. Which was all right as far as Weller was concerned; what physical attraction he had felt for her had been dissolved away by a distant contempt. "If you ask me," Weller said, "the shooting schedules could stand to be tightened up around here. I mean, I don't really feel I'm rushing anything." ''You're really sharp," Georgie said somewhat ruefully. "I don't think the rest of us could work that fast; we just don't have your experience." Weller felt like a bit of a shit; he really hadn't meant to point out Georgie's deficiencies as a director. "It takes time," he said. "But you'll learn, don't worry about it." "Well, anyway," Sara said, "I just came here to tell you we're all invited to a party Saturday night at the Steinhardt house. ''The Steinhardt house?" Weller said. "We're going to meet John?" Georgie laughed. "No way," he said. "John's hardly ever there, and he never comes to his wife's parties." Weller cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at Sara. ''The Steinhardts have a big bouse in Bel Air," she said. "You could call it a mansion. John's not there very often, but his wife Maria lives there, and she throws these really huge parties." "I've been to a couple," Georgie said. "They're really something. Film people, movie stars, real jet set. You should love it." "It sounds charming," Weller said sardonically. Just what I need, a phony Hollywood party! He looked deliberately at Sara; some random impulse made him want to rub things in. "Will you be my date?" he asked. Sara frowned, but there wasn't any real emotion in it. "You know I can't do that," she said. "We have our life directives." "Not even a lousy date at a giant Hollywood party?" Weller teased. "Even if I swear not to make a pass at you?" Sara began fidgeting. "Please ..." she said plaintively. "Well, then screw it!" Weller snapped petulantly. "I don't want to go to some crummy HolIywood party anyway." "You have to go," Sara said. "Have to go? What the hell do you mean, I have to go?" "An invitation to one of Maria's parties is like a life directive." "What? What the hell kind of shit is that?" "That's the way John wants it," Georgie said reasonably, as if that were a logical explanation for anything. "John and Maria have a very complex relationship," Sara said. "They don't see each other very often, but they're very close. Maria doesn't have any official position in the movement, but she's, well, John's wife." "Sounds like the ideal marriage," Weller said sourly. "But why does she want us there?" Sara shrugged. "Maria likes crowds. She likes show-business people." She smiled forlornly. "She'll probably really like you," she said. "Do you mean that the way I think you mean that?" Weller said. "It could happen," Sara said quietly. "You can pick up your invitation in my office." "And I really have to do this?" Sara nodded. Part of Weller was mightily pissed off at the chutzpah of Steinhardt's damn wife actually ordering him to go to her bloody party. But another part of him was curious to meet her. Steinhardt's wife. As close to the center of Transformationalism as you could get. Be honest with yourself, Weller, if you weren't being ordered to go to this thing, you'd damn well want to go. There was a certain fascination to the idea of actually meeting someone who slept with the Great Man. "Okay," he said. "I guess I'll see you there." He had to admit that he felt a certain excitement at the notion of penetrating to the very eye of the storm. *** His hands soaking in a galvanized iron sink full of hot, greasy suds, pulling out plates, giving them a lick with a sponge, dipping them in the rinse tub, stacking them on the rack. Weller had his nose rubbed in the incongruities of his position and the kind of total power over his life that they implied. In the hermetically sealed little world of the Transformation Center, he had had a certain notoriety and status thrust upon him, virtually against his will. By now everyone knew he was a director at Changes, and he could become a center of attention whenever he so chose and all too many times when he didn't. Tomorrow night he would be a guest at Maria Steinhardt's party, and the poor nerds at the center would go crazy with envy if he let them know about that. Yet at the same time, here he was, forced to do the lowest scut work as if they were carefully reminding him that the movement giveth, and the movement taketh away; all power to the movement. As if? What else was it but a deliberate demonstration of their total power over his life? You vill go to Maria Steinhardt's party. You vill wash dishes. You vill demonstrate the proper enthusiasm. Jawohl, and you vill like it! It was also an object lesson in the dichotomy at the heart of Transformationalism. The penniless people who lived at the center, dedicating their lives and free labor to the movement, were no less suckers than the millions paying through the nose for processing. Whatever the marks had to give -- money or labor -- Transformationalism took. The slavies and the taxpayers were just two aspects of the same undermass that supported an elite which began with the processors, and narrowed up into the Monitors, the Allens and the Lazlos, and peaked into a Steinhardt mansion in Bel Air. And they had set it up so that Weller was both a member of the elite and one of the lowliest peons simultaneously -- parties at the Steinhardt mansion and dishwashing at the Transformation Center. Perhaps that's what they're trying to do, he thought, force me to identify with the elite by rubbing my nose in the alternative. Or maybe what they're telling me is that there is only one real elite and its name is John B. Steinhardt. Weller finished the last dish in the sink, wiped his hands, and walked out of the kitchen into the hallway, paying no attention to his fellow scullions. I'm not one of these suckers, he told himself, but I'll be damned if I'll become one of the suckees, either. "Hi, Jack, why don't you come along to our rap session?" Tina Davies had accosted him again -- a tall, gangling blond in her mid-twenties, who had been trying to latch onto him for about two days now. There didn't seem to be anything sexual in it -- in fact, come to think of it, there was a vast lack of sexual energy at the Center, considering that there were so many young people jammed together in a communal situation -- rather it seemed to be a kind of evangelical fervor, the desire to be the one to lead this enigmatic figure fully into the fold. "We're going to discuss the roads to Transformationalism." "The roads to Transformationalism?" "You know, what brought us as individuals to the movement." Weller studied her intense, angular face. What did bring these people to Transformationalism? He had to admit that the question intrigued him, and he also realized that if he stayed away from all the optional activities much longer, he would risk blowing the whole thing. So -- what the hell....? "Okay," he said, "why not?" He only hoped he could walk the right line when he was forced to tell them why the hell he was there. The rap session was being held in a fair-sized room on the fifth floor. Couches along three walls formed a kind of rude conversation pit. Four people were already there: Harry the would-be processor, a young kid named Bill whom Weller had met briefly once before, and a couple sitting thigh-to-thigh on one couch whom he hadn't yet seen. Tina and Weller sat down on the empty couch, and she did the honors. "This is Jack Weller. Jack, you already know Bill and Harry, and this is Ted and Lori Brenner." She paused while everyone nodded foolishly to each other. "Well, I guess I might as well start things off," Tina said. She took a deep breath and began to recite, as if the whole rap were rehearsed. "I was one of the last of the college radicals, just old enough to become a political activist as the movement was dying out. So I found myself with a degree in nothing-in-particular and a life commitment to working for social change, with nothing dynamic to work through. I couldn't get behind the religious trips everyone was getting into, not after being so heavy into scientific socialism. "And then a friend of mine dragged me to the Transformation Center, I tried a couple of processing sessions, and then I found myself reading in the space of a couple of weeks everything John had ever written. I found that Transformationalism was something I could get behind. The old New Left didn't reach into the mind, and the religious cults and consciousness-raising groups weren't into changing society, but Transformationalism had it all together -- historical perspective, a plan for transforming society, the organization to carry it out, and scientific methods for transforming individual consciousness. Transform society as you transform your own life, John says, and for me that says it all." There was a long and somewhat embarrassing silence; the others seemed to feel almost as uncomfortable as Weller after listening to this little set speech. Finally Bill spoke up hesitantly. "Man, I wasn't into anything like revolution. What I was into was smack. I won't go into that whole bummer. But I finally did manage to get off the shit through Synanon. And then who was I? I could identify with being an ex-junkie, or I could be nothing. So I left Synanon, and of course it wasn't long before I was shooting smack again. Well, I knew enough about where that was at to get really freaked out, so I got myself into the Narcon program, not even knowing it had anything to do with Transformationalism, I mean, I hadn't even heard of Transformationalism. "Well, they got me off smack again, but the processing didn't stop there. They got my head into the emptiness that got me into shooting smack in the first place. They showed me how it was the frozen reality we live in that fucked me up, and they showed me how we could change it. They gave me something to live for besides the next fix, a way to keep changing and be a something instead of an ex-something. Why am I into Transformationalism? Man, because it's my life; it's made me something more than a nothing." This time there was no silence afterward; old Harry started rapping immediately. "Same thing with me, only I didn't even have anything like heroin, I was such a zero. I could've gone to college, but I didn't give a shit. I started working shit jobs right out of high school, and then I got drafted, did two years in Texas, never even got to Nam, out of the army and into more shit jobs. Fucked a lot of women, never lived with one for longer than three months in my life, and then one morning I woke up and I was over thirty, and I had no one, and I was nobody going nowhere. I went through a year or so of bumming around, doing stupid cheap burglaries, getting sauced all the time, and I was such an invisible nobody. I couldn't even get myself busted. "One day I just wandered into this Center pissed out of my mind, and instead of calling the cops, the people here took me in, dried me out, and started processing me. It was like coming in out of a fog I'd been in all my life. Now I have a purpose. I want to be a processor. I'm in Transformationalism because it told me what I want to be when I grow up." Weller stared across the room at the Brenners. They stared back at him with what seemed like the same reluctance to speak. A would-be revolutionary, an ex-junkie, and a nobody wanting to be somebody, Weller thought. Empty people waiting for something to fill them with itself. He wondered what the Brenners' story was, and he wondered what they thought his story was. He gave them the old Transformationalist Stare, forcing them to speak first. Finally they relented, speaking in turns with a single voice like some musical-comedy team. "It was our marriage," Ted Brenner said. "I had a good job as a computer programmer, and Lori was teaching school. We had bread, we had things to do, and we loved each other, but somehow it was adding up to nothing." "We started swinging," Lori Brenner said. ''Ted started fucking everything in sight, and so did I." "But it was boring," Ted said. "Just a stupid game of cocks and cunts. All we were doing was punishing each other for punishing each other, and we weren't really even getting off behind that trip." "We quit our jobs, took our savings, bought a VW bus, and drove around playing hippies for a year. But it all seemed dead inside." "We couldn't even get into hating each other," Ted said. "And we couldn't even find anything else to hate. So we got new jobs and started going heavy into all the consciousness trips." "You name it, we tried it. Esalon, Arica, Scientology, the whole number. Finally we tried Transformationalism because we had tried just about everything else." "And Transformationalism finally showed us what was wrong," Ted Brenner said with sudden fervor. "All the personas we tried on didn't fit because we were looking for roles to wear like new suits of clothes, final forms for our consciousness, when the only thing that's really real is change." "We must have known that on some level because we kept putting ourselves through changes, but the mistake we made was trying to find a permanent fit." "But now we've got something to be committed to together that keeps changing and keeps growing and isn't trying to find a place to stop," Ted Brenner said. "We're in Transformationalism so that we can keep evolving together through the movement." Weller cringed inwardly as all eyes inevitably turned toward him. The Brenners were a little too close to home. Maybe he and Annie had never gone in for guru trips or done hippie escape acts -- their careers had sucked up all that bored thirst for growth and change -- but hadn't they also been perpetually reaching for personas that were always out of reach, model lives that were never fulfilled, wet-dream fantasies of the future that allowed them to hide from the boredom and emptiness of the everlasting now? Maybe that's why Annie got sucked into this thing in the first place, he realized. And me? Isn't that really why I'm following her into Transformationalism? Because without this dumb quest, without Transformationalism, without these mind games, what would I really be but a lonely nobody going nowhere? He had to say something, and he could hardly get away with an outright lie, so he let it bubble up from his guts, editing out only the worst of it at his lips. "I was directing a lot of shit, and my wife was an actress who was going nowhere, and we were trying to live in a dream world where I was forever about to do my first feature and she was going to be a star next week. And then my wife got involved in Transformationalism and left me...." He paused, sighed, spit it out. "Okay, so I joined strictly to get her back," he said. "Well, I haven't gotten her back, and here I still am. Why? I don't know. Because I've got nowhere else to be? Because I have to find out what the fuck happened to Annie?" He laughed bitterly. "Sometimes I think I'm here just because I have to find out why I am here. Because I know I'm not who I was, and I don't know who the fuck I am now. Transformationalism is always talking about riding the changes; well, I guess that's what I'm doing. Transformationalism started putting me through changes when my wife left; I didn't like it then, I'm not sure I like it now. But it hasn't stopped, and as of now, I've got no direction home. I'm here because I'm here because I'm here. It may not be as inspirational as all your little stories, but it happens to be true." Weller collapsed against the back of the couch, feeling purged, as if after a thoroughly necessary puke. That really is the truth, he thought. I don't even know these goddamn nerds, and now I've spilled my guts to them. How about that? What does it all mean? They were all eyeing him uneasily now, as if he had somehow violated the sanctity of the process, as if his lack of inspirational bullshit to match their own were some kind of personal insult. As if they were all a cabal of goddamn Monitors, weighing him, and finding him wanting. Well, fuck you! he thought. You wanted to hear about my road to Transformationalism, and that's what you got, with no bullshit. I said it, it's the truth, and I'm glad. If you don't like it, go stick it up John B. Steinhardt!
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