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THE MIND GAME

Chapter Two

Feeling tired but more emotionally up than he usually did returning home from work, Jack Weller closed the front door on the late May heat and sucked up the first cooling blast of the air conditioning.

For once the shooting had gone smooth as butter, and he had even gotten a little ahead of schedule. A nice dinner, and then later maybe we'll go to the Center and see what we shall see.

They had gone to the Center four times in the last three weeks, and while no hard contacts had yet been made, they had become familiar enough faces to talk casually with anyone there without seeming to come on too strongly. Weller hadn't seen Marsha Henderson again, but he had had a few brief and casual conversations with two prime-time producers and a director who was getting regular work on a cop series. He hadn't come on as an assignment-chaser to any of them, but at least now there were some potentially valuable people who knew who he was. And it seemed only a matter of time before some random talk drifted onto the subject of his directing career and from there to a "come see me at the studio." Maybe tonight would be the night.

He went into the living room to make a drink. Annie wasn't there. "Annie? I'm home!" he shouted in the general direction of the kitchen.

No answer.

"ANNIE?"

Nothing.

He went into the kitchen. No Annie. Nothing on the stove. She must be in the john, Weller thought. Then he noticed the note on the kitchen table, secured under the sugar bowl.

"Dear Jack," it said, ''I've gone to the L.A. Transformation Center, and I won't be home for dinner. There's some salmon salad and vegetables in the refrigerator for you. Be back about eight. Love, Annie."

"Goddamn it!" Weller snarled, crumpling up the note. What the hell is all this about? Reflexively, he looked in the refrigerator and saw a big mound of salmon salad on a platter, artfully surrounded by lettuce, tomato wedges, cucumbers, green onions, and endive. There was a small cruet of fresh salad dressing next to it. But his hunger had evaporated. What in blazes is she doing at the Los Angeles Transformation Center? Just what is the Los Angeles Transformation Center?

He closed the refrigerator door with an angry slam, stood there stupidly for a moment, then went into the bedroom, where, he remembered, Annie had been collecting a pile of Transformationalist literature on her night table over the past couple of weeks.

He had not been paying much attention to it at the time, but during their last two visits to the Celebrity Center, Annie had spent some time upstairs while he was making conversation at the bar and had come home with pamphlets and flyers stuffed into her pocketbook. They had gone upstairs together on their second visit to the center; the come-on hadn't impressed Weller much then, and he had paid no further attention to it. But come to think of it, Annie had seemed to be interested, now that he remembered it through hindsight's eyes.

They had been standing at the bar with an out-of-work production executive named Harry West. West had been standing on the unemployment line for a while, but he had produced four reasonably long-running series and had also done three or four television movies, so he seemed like a good guy to get to know. Sooner or later he would get another assignment, and when he did, having gotten friendly with him when he wasn't working could turn out to be a double advantage.

Unfortunately all West seemed interested in talking about was Transformationalism. "I've only had a few months of processing, but I can sense the changes in my consciousness already. They're really onto something, I tell you. I'd be in had shape without it."

"Really?" Annie said. "You really feel different?" At the time Weller, had assumed that Annie was just playing the game, that that look of earnest interest was part of the act.

"Well, when Dog Days got canceled, I found myself without regular work for the first time in years," West said. "The entire pattern of my life was fractured. Two weeks on the unemployment line and I was starting to panic without knowing why. Then I ended up here, went upstairs, and got talked into trying some processing -- gaming it through, role reversal, block-auditing, a little meditative deconditioning, just the basic stuff. After awhile I found my whole perspective changing. I was trying to cling to a previous pattern that had already been destroyed instead of riding the changes. That's where the panic was coming from. I was trying to cope with now in terms of then; my behavior reflexes were stuck in the previous reality."

"And now?" Annie asked.

"Now at least I'm riding the wavefront," West said. "I don't perceive myself as an out-of-work producer. I'm a creative individual with certain skills, certain contacts, a certain track record, all of which are intrinsic factors that I carry along with me as I evolve through the now. But I'm not trying to hold together an obsolete instantaneous personality, I'm open to my further personal evolution."

The Transformationalist jargon made West begin to seem like a brain-barble case, and it took a certain effort for Weller to refrain from pointing out that all this advanced consciousness hadn't gotten him another job. Fortunately Annie was carrying the ball, so he was able to just lay back and shut up.

''I've got a feel for what you're saying," she said, "but I'm not sure what you mean by 'instantaneous personality' or 'riding the changes' or any of that stuff."

West's eyes widened. ''You mean you kids' don't know anything about Transformationalism?" he said. There was something definitely unwholesome in his eager tone of voice as far as Weller was concerned.

"We've only been here twice," he said.

"Never been upstairs?" There was a bit of the school-yard pervert in West's expression now.

"Nope."

"Well, come on. You must let me show you."

"Okay," Annie said brightly, ''I'd like to." Weller caught her eye with his protesting vibrations. Annie looked back at him with that cool, determined set to her eyes that always meant it would be less hassle to do things her way than to follow his own instincts which were now telling him that this Harry West was a blown-out turkey. But Annie apparently still felt that he was worth humoring, and maybe she was right; certainly they had nothing to lose.

So they let West lead them up a flight of stairs near the stage to a cool blue hallway with five open doorways leading off it, and they took the quickie tour.

In the first room a guy was hooked up to a complicated looking brainwave-monitoring machine and a male Transformationalist was studying an oscilloscope as he read off a series of words. "Mother ... prick ... boss ... faggot ... communism ... Adolf Hitler ..."

"Block-auditing," West whispered. "Measures direct brainwave reaction to loaded words, locates areas of psychic blockage quickly and scientifically...."

They just peeked into the next room, which was given over to tables of literature, some of it free, and some of it for sale. In the third room, a female Transformationalist was engaged in what seemed like a very weird argument with a well- dressed middle-aged man in front of a small audience.

"... I won't do it, I don't like the taste," he said.

"You don't have to taste it if you take it all the way back in your throat," she said.

"It's too big. It'll choke me."

"If you haven't tried it, how do you know you won't like it?" she said.

"You're just saying that because you enjoy having it sucked."

Out in the hall a bewildered Weller turned to West. "What the hell was that?" he asked.

"The role-reversal game," West said. "She plays him, he plays her. I think they were role reversing a blow job." He grinned sheepishly. "They ran that on me once," he said.

"Jesus Christ!" Weller had to admit that it was funny, in a sardonic way, but it seemed to him that this kind of thing went too far, that there was a deliberately nasty element of humiliation in it, viciousness for its own sake.

But Annie burst into infuriating giggles. "Very interesting," she said in a mock German accent. Weller felt a surge of genuine anger toward her.  A feminist she was not, but she was not above occasionally using the stance to irritate him with a gamester feminine superiority. It was as if this role-reversal game, was an outside sanction of the aspect of her personality that he found least pleasing, a wedge inserted into their solidarity as a couple, an unpleasant reminder that no male-female relationship was quite as unified as either mate would like it to seem. The fact that he took it more seriously than she did only added an extra edge of gall.

In the fourth room four people were being put through a standard psychodrama, apparently set in a Nazi concentration camp, with a man and a woman playing gas-oven victims and two men playing guards. Even more vicious, Weller thought, but a lot less closer to home.

The fifth room was just a recruiter behind a desk laden with sign-up forms and charts explaining the cost of various processing package deals, and Weller managed to get them out of there fast.

The whole setup had seemed like just a reasonably slick con to Weller. He had naturally assumed that Annie, being an intelligent person like himself, had taken it the same way, that her approval of the blow-job role-reversal game had just been a superior female amusement of the kind he was used to, that her apparent interest in the psychodrama had been professional.

But now, sitting on the edge of their bed and leafing through all the Tnansformationalist literature she had brought home, he realized that he had been pigheadedly blind to what was going on, that he had taken old level-headed Annie too much for granted, which was an occasional nasty habit of his. It was always hard for him to realize that really different things could be going on inside her head when they were in the same situation together. Parties that he wanted to leave when she turned out to be in the process of making a connection, that single stupid orgy which had Olympianly amused him and disgusted her ...

And now this. Every time they had been at the Center, he had been so absorbed in hustling people that he had just assumed that she was attracted to the place for the same reason; he had been too inside his own head to notice the way this Transformationalist garbage had been capturing his own wife's attention.

Some director you are, Weller! he thought, scanning the stuff Annie had been reading right there in bed beside him. Some husband, with your head stuck up your own asshole while your wife was drifting off into a whole other trip! What was this stuff that was doing this to her?

"TRANSFORMATIONAUSM AND YOU!" the basic sales pitch, complete with a list of famous Transformationalists including a baseball player and a couple of minor actresses, but no one else Weller had ever heard of. A brochure on the Los Angeles Transformation Center, describing the processing that was available there. Something on a Transformational Desert Retreat. Little booklets on "BLOCK-AUDITING," "GAMING IT THROUGH," "ROLE-REVERSAL," and "MEDITATIVE DECONDITONING." A flyer pushing TRANSFORMATIONAL MAN, a science-fiction novel by Steinhardt, a $7.95 hardcover self-published by Transformationalism.

Weller disgustedly tossed the literature back onto the night table. I should've noticed, he thought. Goddamn, I should've noticed. He checked his watch. Five after six.

Might as well eat, he decided, going into the kitchen, taking the salad out of the refrigerator and sitting down at the kitchen table. As he picked at the food, he ran through the past week in his mind, and in retrospect, he realized that the signs had been there, if only be hadn't been too bloody self-involved to notice.

Last Wednesday, when Harry called Annie and told her she hadn't gotten that commercial part, there had been no tirade, no tears, no talk about looking for a new agent, just a dull acceptance of the inevitable. "Why am I even wasting my time going after commercials?" she had said. "Do we really need the money that badly? Am I really going to be discovered in some stupid perfume commercial? It's just playing out a tired old pattern, Jack, jumping at whatever dull crap I think might come my way. If I want to act in features, I should be going out for feature parts and stop kidding myself that the rest of it means anything."

That hadn't seemed like the usual old Annie, Weller thought. In the past that kind of attitude had been a signal of her boredom and frustration, foreshadowing things like a bout of swinging or an argument or a rap about going to New York and becoming a serious stage actress. But he had been too damned pissed off at how badly the shooting had gone that day to pay any real attention to it. And all the hamburgers she's been serving up lately, he thought. The Colonel Sanders Chicken. Annie cared about what she put on the table except when she was signaling dissatisfaction with him; and then the slovenly meals were deliberate gestures, at least on a subconscious level.

Weller's appetite deserted him again. The half-eaten cold supper became an affront to him. a chastisement, a symptom of what had been going on, unnoticed, under his very nose, for at least two weeks. He put the remains back into the refrigerator, went into the living room, thought about making himself a drink, decided against it, put on the news, and immediately ignored the drone of the television set, pacing around the living room, into the hall halfway to the bedroom, back to the living room again. Damn, damn, damn! Schmuck that you are, Weller!

The jargon that had crept into her vocabulary! Now, with the house echoing to her absence, he could see it. They were both forever grumbling about how much television they found themselves watching, but what had she said only two days ago ... ? "It keeps pumping out the same cultural matrix; the whole country sucking up the same static brain-freeze, including the people who create it." It was what they had both thought of the tube all along, so he hadn't noticed that the words came from somewhere else.

What had she said when her friend Sally came over to bitch about her old man's reaction to her consciousness-raising group? "Game it through, Sally. Get into his head. He's confronting a discontinuity." And that business about the new network guidelines. "You've got to ride the changes'" she had said, "not let them wash you over."

Oh, it's insidious stuff! Weller thought, perching for a moment on the arm of the couch. That Transformationalist jargon slides into what you're thinking about, and without realizing it, you start thinking in their terms, and then, you're thinking their thoughts, thank you Marshall McLuhan! No wonder I didn't pick up on what was happening. They add a little this and a little that to your vocabulary, and while you're not looking, it soaks into your brain.

Weller turned off the television set angrily, hyperaware, indeed almost paranoid now, about being caught and programmed by random, unnoticed word patterns. He spent the next forty-five minutes in silence, trying to clear his mind for the inevitable confrontation ahead.

Finally he heard the rumble of Annie's Porsche pulling into the driveway. Vibrating with tension, he met her at the door.

"Hi Jack," she said brightly, looking cool, casual, and relaxed.

"How was your day?"

"How was my day? Is that all you've got to say?"

She did a short take, a look of puzzlement. "Oh," she said, striding ahead of him into the living room, "you want to hear about my processing." She sprawled on the couch, kicked off her sandals, put her feet up on the coffee table. "Well, it was very interesting," she said. "They start you off on blockauditing, you know, they hook you up to a brainwave monitor, feed you key words, and map your brainwave reactions so they finally end up with what they call a 'psychomap' of --"

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute!" Weller shouted, standing in front of her listening to this goop, not knowing how to start, not even knowing precisely what it was that he wanted to start. "That's not what I want to know."

"Then what do you want to know?" she asked, looking up at him evenly. "What's the matter with you?"

Already feeling somewhat foolish and impotent, Weller hesitated, his body locked in tension, then collapsed onto the couch beside her. "What I want to know is why you went to the Transformation Center," he said slowly.

"To try some processing. They don't do it at the Celebrity Center."

Mentally Weller counted to ten as he studied Annie's calm, untroubled face. Game it through, he told himself sardonically. We're obviously not on the same wavelength, and it's at least as much my fault as hers. I can't let this alienation I feel escalate into a shooting match. But there was still that feeling of talking to a stranger as he said, with tense exaggerated patience: "What I want to know is why you wanted to try Transformationalist processing."

"Oh," Annie said. She thought quietly for long moments. "Well, as we both know, we don't exactly feel satisfied with our lives. We're still knocking on the same doors and getting the same wrong answers. So I figured, maybe it's not the world, maybe it's me. So why not give Transformationalism a try?" She looked at him, touched his cheek. "Oh, you're upset about dinner," she said. "I'm sorry. "

"Why did you just go off and do it?" Weller asked. "Why didn't we talk about it first?"

"It was a spontaneous decision," Annie said. "Besides, I've sensed that you're not too receptive to the whole idea. Am I wrong?"

"No," Weller said. "I think it's all an insidious crock of shit."

Annie nodded. ''That's what I thought. So I figured that if I went by myself and you saw it was doing me some good, then I could get you to try it."

"And you plan to continue?" Weller said unhappily.

''I've signed up for the four-week trial course," Annie replied.

"Oh shit!"

Annie reacted by drawing away from him, into a cool, annoyed, slightly superior shell, an attitude toward him that he had rarely experienced before from her. "I don't see why you're acting this way. I'm trying to do something to better myself.  Just because you --"

"How much is this four-week course costing?" Weller blurted, and instantly wished he could take it back. It immediately put the whole thing on the tackiest possible level.

"For Chrissakes, Jack, it's only two hundred fifty dollars for eight sessions, which is a lot cheaper than the usual forty dollars for two sessions."

"Two hundred and fifty bucks! Forty dollars for two hours! For crying out --"

"This is certainly a new side to you, Jack Weller! I've never seen you as Uncle Scrooge before. Besides, it's my own money."

"Oh, now it's your money and my money, is it? What happened to our money? Besides, it's not that we can't afford it ... "

"Then what is it?"

"I don't like watching my wife being ripped off by a scam like Transformationalism." he said. "Can't you understand that?"

"Now you're going to forbid me to spend my own money for my own good? From Uncle Scrooge to Porky Pig!"

"Damn it, don't try to run that number on me. You know I wouldn't forbid you to do anything even if I could, which I can't. I'm just trying to tell you in my chauvinist way that I think you're being conned, that this whole thing smells."

A curtain of clear, impenetrable tranquility descended across Annie's face. "Why are we shouting at each other?" she said. "Let's --"

"I know, I know, let's game it through."  They both laughed, fracturing the tension at least temporarily if somewhat artificially.

"Just listen to us," Annie said. "Listen to you. Don't you really think you might benefit from --"

"Please," Weller said, holding up his palm resignedly. "Peace. But please."

"Okay." Annie said. "For now let's be civilized and just agree to disagree." She snuggled up to him, kissed him lightly on the lips. "No need to get so serious about it anyway, is there?" she said.

***

"If you ask me, Jack -- and you are asking me -- you're taking it too seriously," Bob Shumway said, sipping at his drink. ''That's what women are like, is all."

They were sitting at the bar at the Celebrity Center, and for once Weller wasn't even noticing who was and who wasn't in the place. He felt spooky and strange discussing Annie with Bob. He had never been one to chew over his relationship with his wife with one of the boys, considering it a kind of treason to the primary loyalty in his life. But lately he had come more and more to feel the need to share his troubles with someone. particularly since Annie's growing obsession with Transformationalism was beginning to seem like the same kind of treason to the primary loyalty she owed him. So here I am, he thought, crying in my beer with Bob at the Celebrity Center while Annie is downtown being processed by the same people who run this place. It had a kind of awful symmetry to it.

"If you notice," Bob said, "it's women who tend to get involved in these mind games more than men. Est, Arica, Esalon, the ladies get involved in it first and drag the old man along for the ride. Why, you may ask?"

"Why, I may ask."

"Because while we're out working and home worrying about work, they've got all those empty hours to fill."

"That sounds like obsolete piggery to me," Weller said. "Besides, Annie isn't a bored housewife; she's got her career."

"Which at this stage consists mainly of sitting around waiting for her agent to call, right?" Bob said.

"Sorry. You can't sell me Annie as a victim of the bored hausfrau syndrome."

"Okay, then look at women's lib --"

"You can't sell me Annie as a women's libber either."

"Well, then," Bob said out of the side of his mouth, "would you like to buy a duck? Seriously, Jack, what I mean is that women have been cut loose from their old housewifely roles, and they're thrashing around trying to figure out how the world works now, so they try their consciousness-raising groups, this guru, that guru, Transformationalism, whatever. It's a phase, it'll pass, you're taking it too seriously. After all, what's Annie really doing? Going to the L.A. Transformation Center twice a week. Big deal. Believe me, better that than she should be hanging around with bull-dyke storm-trooper feminists; that I have lived through."

"It's not the lousy two nights a week at the Center," Weller said. "it's living full-time with the deathless words of John B. Steinhardt." Only last night it had even penetrated the bedroom....

Sexually, things bad been screwed up lately to begin with. Something had been keeping them from making love on nights that Annie went for processing. Weller could not bring himself to make an approach. It seemed to him that Annie was putting out totally turned-off vibes, as if what went on at the center was absorbing the same kind of energy that went into sex, or as if his attitude toward the processing made him an object of distaste. Of course, it could also be that his resentment drove the possibility of intimacy from his psyche, but whatever it was, never-on-Tuesdays-or-Thursdays was becoming an iron-clad role.

It was the first time in their marriage that their lovemaking had ritualized into pattern. Spontaneity was lacking, and when they did make love, Annie had trouble coming, or was punishing him by making it difficult, withholding her passion and moving her body from some deep inner distance. And Weller found himself having trouble lasting, or caring less and less about satisfying her. Sex had become an ambiguous battlefield.

Last night they had reached the pits. Weller found himself lying atop her, flesh moving on flesh in a strange, passionless silence, and all at once he perceived himself as a machine, pumping away on another machine to produce a mechanical response. On and on it went, in, out, in, out, like an oil-field pump doggedly working a dry well, and he felt an anger building within him, a trapped weariness not of the flesh.

Finally he got petulantly tired of waiting for her to come, he just didn't give a damn, and he let himself go in an orgasm that was a mere relief from sexual constipation, even an act of self-involved aggression. Then he rolled off her, and they lay side by side glaring at each other in the semidarkness.

Annie finally broke the awful silence. "Don't you think it's time we finally talked about this?" The very reasonableness of her voice made Weller sick inside. They had never gone into sexual postmortems before; they had never had to. Talking about it seemed to be a terrible confrontation with the possibility that something between them might be in mortal danger.

"We've really developed a block in the sexual area," Annie went on relentlessly. ''I've completed my psychomap, so I know where my blocks are. Creative commitment. Motherhood. Competitiveness. But my processor hasn't uncovered any blocks in the sexual area, so it's got to be something you're generating, Jack. I really think you should begin processing now. It's beginning to seem essential to our relationship."

"Listen to you!" Weller exploded. "Listen to how you're talking about us, like some goddamn Transformationalist textbook, like we were bugs under John Steinhardt's microscope! It's unreal, it's inhuman. Can't you see that it's this Transformationalism garbage that's causing the trouble in the first place?"

"Your reaction to Transformationalism is the problem," Annie said. "You're blocking on my Transformation. You feel threatened, left out, even jealous." Her calm, clinical voice spouting the damn jargon was totally, patronizingly, infuriating.

"How long is this crap going to continue?" Weller asked. "Aren't the four weeks up this Thursday?" After that, he hoped, things would get back to normal.

''I've signed up for the next six weeks at the regular rate," she told him.

"Jesus H. Christ!"

"I know you're blocking on this," she said in a tone of maddening sympathy, "but try to understand. I've completed my psychomap, so we know where my blocks are, but I've just started working on them with meditative deconditioning. If I had some disease, you wouldn't want me to stop going to the doctor as soon as it had been diagnosed. You'd want me to keep on till I was cured. Otherwise, what's the point?"

"What's the point indeed!" Weller snarled.

She laid her head on his bare chest, "Won't you give it a try?" she cooed softly. "Even without a brainwave monitor I can feel the block you have on my Transformation. A processor could map it in a single session. I'm transforming, Jack. I feel that: I'm near the takeoff point where transformation becomes permanent and ongoing. I don't want to look back and see you trapped in the same old instantaneous persona while I keep growing. It would break my heart. Don't you want to know why you're reacting this way to my Transformation? Don't you want to get rid of the block?"

Weller stroked her hair; feeling sad, feeling shut out, and yet at the same time determined not to be sucked in. Poor baby, he thought, what are they doing to you? "I want to get rid of this whole business," he said. "Can't you just forget about it? For me. For us."

"No, I can't," she said. "Not even for you. Not even if I wanted to. If only you'd try it. Jack, you'd see what I mean... "

"It's even screwing us up in bed," Weller told Bob Shumway softly.

Bob frowned sympathetically. "Have you tried putting your foot down?" he suggested.

"All the way to the floor."

"I mean making it a me-or-it proposition." Bob said.

A bubble of chill formed in Weller's gut. "I think maybe I"m afraid to do that," he said. "Besides, it's not the way I feel."

Bob's expression brightened artificially. He glanced around the room, bobbing his head at a couple of attractive women. "Well then, maybe a little fresh pussy," he said. "Make you feel livelier, and the smell of it on you just might put the old lady back on her toes."

Weller grimaced distastefully. ''I'm not into playing those games," he said.

Bob Shumway laughed brittlely. He looked down into the depths of his drink. "You do have a problem, boy," he said.

***

"-- no, Harry --"

"-- I don't care --"

"-- well, maybe I should look for a new agent --"

" -- all right, if you want to talk --"

"-- not till next Wednesday --"

Annie hung up the phone and walked back to the kitchen table where Weller was finishing up the remains of his big
Sunday brunch. "What was that?" he asked.

"Harry," Annie said. "The actress who was cast in a refrigerator commercial they're shooting Tuesday got appendicitis, and he got me the assignment to fill in."

"Great."

"Great?" Annie said, taking a sip of coffee. "I turned it down."

"What?"

"I had to. I've got a processing session on Tuesday, and I would've missed it. Besides, I've decided that there's no point in expending energy on something as meaningless as a commercial. "

Weller leaned back in his chair and stared at this strange creature his wife was becoming. "Don't you think this has gone far enough?" he said. "Now you're turning down a part because you don't want to miss a processing session and making up an artsy-fartsy rationalization. Don't you think you've lost your sense of proportion?"

''There's a rule that you're not supposed to miss a session unless you're sick," Annie said. "It would show a lack of commitment."

"What about your commitment to your career?" Weller snapped.

"To what?" Annie said. To making meaningless commercials? To doing walk-ons in stupid television segments? It's all ego, Jack. I'm beginning to understand that now. It's nothing. A maximized person has to have a sense of commitment to something beyond ego-feeding games, to something of absolute value. That's why they have the rule, and it makes sense."

"Annie, Annie," Weller sighed, "can't you see what's happening to you? I'm really getting worried."

"So am I. About us. I think we're in danger of drifting apart."

Hearing her voice his own formless dread sent a pang of fear through Weller. Through career frustrations, swinging, arguments, occasional bad sex, money problems, it had never come to this. Breaking up had never before been a possibility in their universe. However bad things had looked, the assumption had always been that they would work through it together. At the same time, having it out on the table gave him a certain hope. Maybe she was finally ready to face up to what was going on. "It hurts me to hear you say that," he said, "but I'm glad you're at least facing the problem."

"Game it through from my side," Annie said. ''I'm beginning to ride the wavefront. I'm working through my blocks, which means I'm changing, and I can't stop changing. I love you, and I look back and see you frozen in the same old static matrix. I'm moving, and you're standing still. How can we not drift apart? You've got to begin Transformational processing, Jack. You've got to open yourself up to the changes I've opened myself up to. Don't you see how your block on the subject is just a sign of how desperately you need processing? I don't want to have to travel on alone, but I've got to travel on. I don't want to lose you, I want you to share this with me."

Her voice was so tender, her face so sincere, and the thought of losing her to this thing put such an ache in his chest, that Weller made the effort to see it through her eyes. What if it were really true? What if her personality really were expanding and deepening and. he was fighting it out of some mingyness of the soul? What if it were his head that was screwed on crooked ...?

He wrenched his mind out of that mode, for that was exactly the kind of thinking they used against you. Doubt your own center and you were lost. For facts were facts, and the fact was that Transformationalism was doing real damage to Annie. If only their relationship were suffering, he might be able to persuade himself that it was some failing in himself, a lack of courage to dare the leap into the unknown. But here was Annie turning down a part, becoming indifferent to her career, maybe losing her agent. And none of that had anything to do with his head. Reality had to be dealt with and since she was incapable, he was elected.

"And if you had to choose between me and Transformationalism?" he said.

"Don't say that! You don't understand. It's not a matter of choice. I can't go back, I can't be the person I was any more than men can go back to being monkeys. You've got to come to me, there is no way on Earth I can go back to where you are. Don't fight it, Jack. Don't get left behind."

When Weller was ten, a group of his friends had gathered in the school yard to plan a childish shoplifting spree. His whole circle of close friends was in the group, and they all urged, indeed demanded, that he go along. But some moral stubbornness in Weller would not let him do it. They had called him chicken, faggot, ball-less wonder, everything boys can inflict on a kid whose courage is called into question. But Weller had stood his ground, and eventually they left him, alone and friendless in the empty school yard. They'll change their minds, he had thought, through gathering tears, but not really believing it. And eventually they had. After a few days they accepted him back into the group again.

But now Weller felt like that little boy standing alone in the school yard, knowing what was right and feeling forlornly abandoned for his goddamn virtue. It had passed then, and he told himself it would pass now, but a part of him didn't believe it. A part of him already felt that he might end up standing there forever, little boy lost in the empty school yard.

***

It had been a week since Weller had set foot inside the Transformationalist Celebrity Center. As Transformationalism's tendrils insinuated themselves deeper and deeper into the masonry of his marriage, the place had become an object of loathing to him. Indeed he had even begun to conceive a certain irrational dislike for the basically innocent Bob Shumway who just happened to have introduced them to the Celebrity Center.

But when Annie told him that her processor, Clyde Franker, was going to be there tonight and wanted to meet him, that was more than enough to make Weller willing to invade the enemy's ground. Face to face, no third-rate used-guru salesman can be a match for me, he thought, sitting at a table alone with Annie, nursing his drink and waiting for Franker to arrive. I'm a trained director and I'll show this prick up for the phony he is.

Annie sat there nervously, not touching her drink, looking sidewise at the entrance every few minutes. She hadn't really told him what this was about, only that Franker was interested in meeting him and that she felt it was important to her for him to agree. But that was all right with Weller; he didn't care what number the processor thought he was going to run, his adrenalin was flowing, and he was going to direct this little charade.

"Clyde! Over here!" Annie was waving at a tall, thin, grayhaired man in a tan suit who had just entered the room. He walked over to the table, nodded to Annie, handed Weller a somewhat moist palm.

"Hello, Mr. Weller," he said in a smooth bass voice, ''I'm Clyde Franker." His hair was barbered to the point of sculpture, his aging skin looked pink and scrubbed, and his blue eyes radiated insurance-salesman frankness. He looked like a television announcer to Weller, and in fact Weller wondered if he might not have seen him in a local commercial or two.

"Annie's told me quite a lot about you, Jack," Franker said.

"Has she?" Weller said, glancing at Annie, whose eyes were shifting nervously back and forth between Franker and  himself.

"Indeed," Franker said. "As her meditative deconditioner, I would naturally learn something of her external environment, of which you, of course, are a major part."

"Of course," Weller said evenly.

"And Transformationalism seeks to deal with the whole person, not just the mind in isolation." Franker said. "So we must concern ourselves with the objective life of the member in addition to the subjective mental reality."

Weller had deliberately let Franker's hype ramble on, waiting for the processor to set himself up. Now, he thought, this nerd has gone just about exactly far enough. "It seems to me you've made a real mess out of Annie's objective life, Clyde," he said tersely. "You've fucked up her attitude toward her career, and you're on your way to fucking up our marriage."

"Jack!" Annie cried, a look almost of terror on her face. "Don't --"

But Franker cut her off with a raised palm, a cocking of his head, exhibiting a degree of control that Weller found frightening and infuriating. "Such is your perception, Jack," he said calmly. "But I hope we can alter that. First, because your attitude is seriously interfering with the progress of Annie's processing, and second, because we want to help you too."

Franker paused, as if waiting for a response, for the straight line.

Weller let him wait a good long time, breaking the rhythm. Finally he said, "You might as well make your pitch."

Franker hesitated, as if he had been thrown off-stride. But he recovered quickly. "Your attitude is not uncommon," he said. "We know what it is, and we know how to deal with it. Annie has achieved a significant degree of Transformational consciousness. You, without processing, are frozen in a lower evolutionary state. It's as if both of you had lived together as high-school graduates for years, and then suddenly Annie went to college and got an advanced degree. Surely you can see that that is an unstable situation. Annie's Transformation makes you feel insecure and threatened -- which is not paranoia but an accurate perception of reality -- and your lower state of consciousness acts as a drag on Annie's progress."

Franker paused, smiled ingenuously at Weller, got a fish-eyed stare back, then continued, trying to stare Weller down as he spoke. "Experiments have shown that for the first two years of life a human being and a chimpanzee can be raised as equal siblings. However, once the human begins to talk, to develop an inherently higher state of consciousness, such a relationship is no longer possible."

Weller hardened his stare. "Are you calling me an ape?" he said in deliberately threatening tones.

Franker broke eye contact and laughed. a canned sound, straight off a laugh track. "Quite the contrary," he said. "The difference between a human and an ape is intrinsic; an ape can never achieve human consciousness, so such a relationship is doomed. But it would be quite easy for you to evolve to Annie's level and thus make your marriage viable once more."

"All I need is a little Transformational processing, I suppose," Weller said.

Franker, beamed. "Exactly," he said. "What's more, we could put Annie's processing in what we call a 'holding state' until you catch up, which could be done in a month -- less if you cared to double up on your sessions. I'm sure Annie would be willing to make such a temporary sacrifice for the sake of your domestic harmony."

He turned to Annie and lowered his voice half an octave. "Wouldn't you, Annie?" he said, making it sound like a command.

"Uh ... if you think it's best, Clyde," Annie muttered. She was like another person, withdrawn, fearful, submissive.

Weller felt a rising wave of protectiveness toward her. He felt his gorge rising; he had had just about enough. "Are you finished?" he said. "Are you quite finished?" Franker started to say something, but Weller cut him off with voice and hand. "Don't bother," be said. ''I'm telling you. You are finished. You are quite finished. I'm warning you, there are recourses. In fact I've got half a mind to drag your ass out into the parking lot and --"

"Stop it, Jack! Stop it!" Annie cried. "You don't know what you're doing!"

"Shut up, Annie!" Weller said, surprising himself.

"Really, Mr. Weller," Franker said, "these juvenile threats --"

Weller half rose, his hands balled into fists. "Get away from us, " he said. "Get away from this table. Get out of our lives. Leave my wife alone, or I'll screw your goddamn head off!"

Franker cocked an eyebrow at Annie. ''This is worse than I thought," he said. "This will require environmental alteration."

"Clyde, please --"

"We'll discuss it at our next session, Annie." Franker said, rising.

He turned to stare at Weller with a cold, measured gaze. "Jack," he said, "you will neither believe nor understand this now, but you are a person gravely in need of our help. And you are going to get it. For a time you may think of us as your enemies, but that will pass. One day, you will be thankful. Try to bear that in mind."

"Clyde --"

"At our next session, Annie," Franker snapped, cracking his cool for the first and only time, then departing.

Across the table Annie leaned on her hands, on the verge of trembling. "Why did you have to do it?" she whispered. "Why did you have to do it?"

Warm and weak with the backwash of adrenalin, Weller said, "Because I love you."

"I love you too, Jack, but I think you've made a terrible mistake. For both of us."

"What are you talking about?"

A shiver went through her body. "I don't know," she said softly, "but you shouldn't have acted that way. I just hope to God I'm wrong...."

"Wrong about what?"

But she crawled into a totally uncommunicative shell and categorically refused to discuss it any further.

***

Weller sat in the living room glumly picking at a platter of cold cuts, waiting for Annie to get back from her processing session. For two days, ever since the confrontation with Franker, she had refused to do anything but make small talk, totally cutting off the subject of Transformationalism. It was a return to normalcy that seemed as abnormal to Weller as anything could be; a cold, unreal Disneyland simulacrum of their previous life together, as empty as wax-museum figures of themselves, as brittle as glass.

All during that ominous period Weller had endlessly contemplated forthrightly forbidding her to go to the Transformation Center, but he couldn't see how he could make it stick, and a part of him lacked the courage to disturb the artificial calm. This morning he had half decided to do it anyway, but Annie remained fast asleep until it was time for him to leave for work, as if anticipating the scene on an unconscious level and willfully cutting off the possibility.

So there he sat in the silent gloom, nibbling fitfully at his supper, waiting for some unnameable ax to fall.

Finally he heard the sound of Annie's Porsche rumbling into the driveway. Then a long, pregnant silence during which Weller stifled the impulse to meet her at the door; there was no point in putting more weight on this moment than it already had.

Then Annie walked into the living room, ashen, shaken, yet also projecting a manic determination. She walked across the room toward him like a zombie, without saying a word, and sat down on the edge of the couch beside him.

"Jesus, what's wrong?" Weller asked.

Annie looked down into her lap. "Clyde issued a life directive," she said in a tiny voice. "He gamed it through with Benson Allen himself, and they both made the decision."

"Life directive? What the hell are you talking about?"

Still not meeting his eyes, Annie said, "They've decided that it would be evolutionarily regressive for me to continue to live with you unless you begin processing immediately."

"What?" Weller hissed, barely containing the impulse to scream it in rage. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Annie began picking at the cuticles of her right hand with the nails of her left. "If you don't begin processing and I continue living with you, they'll cut me off from Transformationalism. Totally. Disobeying a life directive would make me a regressive. They'd cut me off and it would be permanent -- it's policy set by Steinhardt himself."

Weller's composure shattered utterly. There were no words to express the enormity, the outrageousness, the monstrosity of what she was saying; indeed he could not even feel an emotion that seemed adequate to the situation. An anesthetic curtain descended over the rational centers of his mind. All he could feel, all he could express, was total, blind rage.

"That does it!" he shouted. "I absolutely, categorically, totally forbid you to see any of these maniacs again! I'm going to get me a baseball bat, and I'm going to break it over Clyde Franker's fucking skull! Then I'm going to take what's left and shove it up this Benson Allen's ass till he's shitting splinters!"

Annie leaped up off the couch like a startled deer. "Stop it, Jack, stop it, stop it, stop it!" she screamed. "Don't you see that you're just confirming everything they've said? You've got to go for processing! You've just got to!"

Weller bounded off the couch and roared into her reddened, contorted face, blood pounding in his temples. "Processing! I'll give them processing! I'll process them into dogmeat! I'll kick their nuts down their throats!"

"You're raving like an animal!"

"I'm raving like an animal? You're gibbering like a lunatic!" All semblance of Weller's restraint was gone; his true feelings were exploding through him in a volcano of relief. He sucked up his own rage, welcoming it, almost enjoying it.

"I can't give it up! I'm not going to!"

"THE FUCK YOU WONT!"

Tears began to form in Annie's eyes.  Her face was an ugly mask of rage that only fed Weller's fury. "You're not going to tell me what to do with my life!" she screamed.

"I'm telling you, all right. I'm goddamn well telling you!"

"I won't listen to this, I won't take it!" Annie shouted, her hands balled into fists. "If you won't come in for processing, I'm getting out of here this very minute!"

"BULLSHIT!" Weller shouted. "RAVING LUNATIC BULLSHIT!"

"It's no bullshit, Jack," she shouted over her shoulder as she ran out of the living room toward the front door. "I mean it! It's real!" Opening the door, she said, suddenly more calmly, ''I'll talk to you in the morning when maybe you'll have come to your senses."

Then she slammed the door hard behind her, leaving Weller transfixed in the center of the living room, his body frozen in rage, his mind roaring with emotional white noise.

He stood there for long moments trying to force rationality back into his screaming brain, trying to break the shocked, stunned, raging stasis that held him in emotional and physical paralysis.

But before he could move, before he could get himself to the door, he heard the engine of her car start in the driveway. Then, with a roar, the metallic scream of a missed shift, and the howl of an engine revving toward redline, she was gone.

All at once there was nothing but the echo of the Porsche engine Dopplering away to nothingness in the night, and the ghosts of their shouting voices filling the living room, reverberating in Weller's throbbing skull.

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