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THE MIND GAME |
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Chapter Five "The same thing as the first session," Weller said, looking at Garry Bailor. "He just plugged me into the brainwave monitor and shot words and phrases at me for an hour, no pattern that I could figure out." Bailor sat there on the couch beside him, rocking back and forth imperceptibly, encouraging Weller to go on only by his silence. Although Bailor just silently studied him like a bug under a microscope while Clark Burns, the block-auditing processor, droned on incessantly during the sessions, Weller was beginning to get the same feeling of tense boredom that he had experienced during his two block-auditing sessions. The lack of human feedback response was the same, and so was the feeling of two people in a room together locked into their own private universes. Burns was a balding, colorless little middle-aged man, and that first night he had simply introduced himself, fitted an electrode band on Weller's head, plugged it into the brainwave monitor, sat down, and given his brief instructions as if he were reading them off an idiot card, as if he were merely an extension of the machine. This is a brainwave monitor. It measures four channels of your brainwaves. I'll read you a series of words and phrases and note your brainwave responses on the chart. Since I'll be reading your brain's responses directly off my oscilloscope, you don't have to respond verbally, though you may do so if you wish. Are there any questions?" The brainwave monitor was a gray console, about the size of a portable television set, on the table between Weller and Burns. Facing Burns was an oscillosocpe and a series of knobs and switches. All Weller could see now was the top of Burns's head, down to his eyes, peering at him over the featureless back of the machine. Burns had a clipboard and a ball-point pen poised to fill in the spaces on Weller's "psychomap." It all seemed cosmically silly somehow. "No questions," Weller said, though he would have liked an explanation of the circuitry of the device. But he had the feeling that the brainwave monitor was as much a mysterious "black box" to Burns as it was to him, and he doubted that the processor would have explained anything technical to him even if he could. "Good," the processor said. ''We'll begin. Try to clear your mind of any strong emotional thoughts so I can get a level reading...." Burns's eyes, looking strangely disembodied with the rest of his face hidden by the machine, glanced down at the scope. "Good enough," he said, and started reading from a form on his clipboard. "Mother.... A pause, a glance at the scope, something jotted on the form. "Father...." Pause, glance, scribble. "Fuck .... Kill.... Shit.... " It only took a few minutes of this brainless procedure for the process to seem interminable to Weller and infuriatingly boring. "A large dog is barking on your lawn .... Cock.... One hundred thousand dollars.... Heil Hitler...." Just the eyes above the console, glancing at him, the scope, the form, and back again, in a regular, mechanical rhythm, and the flat voice mouthing random words -- sometimes obscene, sometimes meaningless, sometimes downright silly. After awhile Weller began to feel that they were both just extensions of the machine, lumps of flesh plugged passively into the electronic circuitry. At first this feeling was infuriating, then it became somewhat frightening, but finally it just helped him melt into the mindlessness of the whole process. "Wife.... oral sex.... middle age.... gum disease...." Weller felt his mind drifting in a sea of total boredom. The words and phrases that kept coming at him had just enough intermittent momentary meaning to prevent his mind from floating off into any extended reverie about anything outside this cosmically boring situation, to interrupt any coherent train of independent thought that might be starting to form. He tried to keep himself alert by looking for some kind of pattern in the words Burns was reading, but although most of them were loaded with emotional connotations in the heavy areas of sex, death, love, fear, success, age, and money, they seemed to jump back and forth; there seemed to be no pattern, no trend, no line of development. "Transformationalism.... Cunt.... Sigmund Freud...." For a while Weller tried giving verbal responses, as if it were some classical Freudian word-association game. "Toothache Pain...." "Jackhammer...." "Bank loan...." "Feature film...." "Syphilis...." "Orgasm...." But Burns didn't respond at all. Just the eyes looking at him, looking at the form, a word or phrase, a glance at the scope, back to the form, flick, speak, flick, flick. Flick, speak, flick, flick. He soon gave up on talking back to the process and simply endured the boredom of what was going on like a good soldier. ".... four score and seven.... black leather underwear.... you're fired.... pregnant.... the phone is being disconnected.... "It seemed to go on for a century," Weller told Bailor, "just like Tuesday. And afterward he just told me that the session was over and he would see me next week." Bailor continued to study Weller with his cold ball-bearing eyes. "Well?" Weller demanded. He was beginning to get thoroughly pissed off with robotic nonresponses in general. "There had to be some trends in the words he was using," Bailor suddenly said sharply. "That's the way it works." "I told you there weren't any," Weller snapped irritably. Bailor drummed his fingers annoyingly on the coffee table. "Maybe you're not catching it. Though it could be too early. Nobody seems to know what the brainwave monitor really does, or even if it does anything. But the whole point of the process is programming through boredom." "Huh?" Bailor stood up suddenly and began pacing in small circles, snapping off his words like strings of firecrackers. "Whether they really map areas of resistance in the mind doesn't matter," he said, "because that's just a front for the programming. Bored out of your mind, weren't you? Literally. The only input you get is those random words, but you're getting that continually, so you can't concentrate on anything else either. Creates a suggestible state. Boredom is a powerful hypnotic device, especially when it's being used to focus your attention on a single controlled input. Get it?" "Yeah ... " Weller said slowly. "I'm beginning to see what you mean." Bailor suddenly stopped pacing, stood directly above Weller, pointed a finger at him, and quizzed him like an irate schoolteacher. "So think! There had to be a pattern --" "I told you --" "Hold!" Bailor snapped, cutting him off. He began to pace again. "Forget the simple first order sequence. If they're programming you, the goal has to be to affect your attitude toward Transformationalism, probably through your sense of self-esteem. The words in between would be just so much static, designed to distract your conscious attention from what they're planting subliminally." He paused halfway across the room and looked back at Weller. "Now think -- just the words relating to Transformationalism and self-esteem, blocking the other stuff out of the sequence. Any pattern there?" Weller looked at Bailor blankly. What does this guy think I am, a fucking computer? he thought. But, obediently, he strained his mind, trying to remember some pattern, something from the second session. "Processing.... hemlock.... home .... cunnilingus .... garbage.... grace.... baby .... Red China....high school .... helplessness.... beer saloon .... Steinhardt.... elephant.... power.... grandfather...." Was that it? Was there really something there, or was Bailor just making him paranoid? "Processing, home, grace, Steinhardt, power, grandfather," he muttered. "Do you think that's a meaningful sequence? I think I remember that right, with the other words taken out. Or am I just creating a pattern where none exists?" "If there's a pattern in your head, there's a pattern in your head," Bailor said. He sat down on the couch, studied Weller. "Do you notice any change in your attitude toward Transformationalism?" "Yeah. In addition to everything else, it's starting to bore the piss out of me." Bailor frowned at him disapprovingly. "This isn't funny," he said. "You've got to keep your mind alert during processing. If you let yourself drift, that's when you start to pick up programming." "Jesus Christ," Weller said, "I'm not in a paranoid enough situation, you've got to get me picking patterns out of endless strings of random words?" He had a terrible vision of a world in which everything had an ominous subliminal meaning -- random bits of conversation, radio commercials, the sequence of parked cars, every third word in newspaper headlines. "Don't worry about picking out patterns," Bailor said. "The important thing is just to be aware of the possibility and not let any programming take hold. You've got to assume that these people are out to capture your mind, and paranoia is therefore your best ally. It's an accurate perception of your reality." "My God...." "Don't worry," Bailor said much more softly. ''You're doing okay. You don't have to concentrate on all this consciously. What we've discussed tonight will stay with you. Kind of a 'clearing program' I've put in your head to help filter out whatever your processor will be trying to plant. Just slay alert, stay skeptical, and let what I've planted work." "Shit...." Weller muttered tiredly. The whole thing was turning into an insane nightmare -- the processing sessions, the absence of Annie, this dingy dump, and a guy telling him that he was being counterprogrammed to counteract the Transformationalist programming, that paranoia was an accurate description of reality. And yet the block-auditing had gotten to Annie. And Bailor was an expert. If the whole thing were insane, the insanity was not in his mind or in Bailor's but in the life situation itself. "Is this all real, Garry?" he asked quietly. "Secret patterns? Programming? Counterprogramming?" "Welcome to modern reality," Bailor said dryly. "Yeah, it's real. It's all around you. Transformationalism. TV news. Advertising. Political propaganda. Movies. Books. Magazines. We're swimming in a sea of mind-programming. Everything has programming hidden in it, especially when the content seems to be random. Even the language itself programs our heads. It's always been like that -- the difference now is that there are people out there like Steinhardt who know it and know how to use it. Aside from the money why do you think I'm in this racket? Because I don't like the situation any better than yon do." Weller looked at Bailor speculatively. For what he had said was strangely like the line Steinhardt himself had spouted on the orientation tape: free the mind from the total matrix of cultural programming. In Steinhardt's case that seemed to boil down to substituting new programming of your own. And wasn't that what Bailor was really doing too? Could you really deprogram the mind by using programming techniques? Or was that like lifting yourself by your own bootstraps? Now Bailor seemed to be studying him. "Something wrong, Jack?" he asked sympathetically. "Nothing," Weller sighed. What was the point in creating more paranoia in this paranoid situation? "Okay," Bailor said, "so go home and get some rest." Bailor smiled at him quite warmly, clapped him on the thigh. "Okay, Garry," Weller said, getting up and walking toward the door. "So long. See you next week." "Jack?" Weller turned to look at Bailor, who stood in front of the couch, waiting expectantly for something. "What is it?" he asked. Bailor shrugged, gave him a slightly embarrassed grin, held out his right palm. "You owe me another hundred dollars," he said. *** "All right now, let's get this damned shot in the can so we can go home," Weller said, mopping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He checked his watch: almost seven o'clock. Shit! The big processing session, the terminal session, was at eight tonight. Bailor had told him that the four-week course was designed to make the mark feel bad about himself, to make him feel that some unformed question was gnawing at him and that Transformationalism was the answer. Well, the four weeks were up tonight, and they were going to ask him to sign up for meditative deconditioning at a fat forty dollars a session, the linking of the hook into the baited brain. And he was going to tell them it was quid pro quo time, enough was enough; they had to tell him where Annie was. He had to make tonight's session, but this shot had to be finished today because this week's shooting was already nearly half a day behind. They'd have to shoot till eight tomorrow anyway to wrap up this week's segment in time to keep a gaping hole from forming in the air schedule. There had already been five blown takes, each one lousier than the last, so this one had goddamn better well be it! Weller checked out the setup one more time. Hal Leer, who played Daddy Carson, was sitting in the big overstuffed chair on the basic living room set, looking pissed off at Weller and thirsting for his long-delayed first drink of the day. Barry Greenfield, the obnoxious little brat who played Timmy Carson, was waiting at the right of the set to make his entrance, shuffling back and forth as if he had to pee. Beside him hunkered Scuffles the chimp, looking mean and morose in his white ballerina outfit, while Lindstrom, the trainer, whispered whatever it was you whispered to a temperamental ape into the creature's ear. It was really such a simple shot -- Timmy enters from the right into an establishing shot, delivers his line, cuing Scuffles, who pirouettes into the shot with the pie, the camera moves with him as he dances toward Daddy, and pow, right in the kisser! Such a simple shot, but first the ape had dropped the pie, then Timmy blew his line, then Scuffles pissed in the middle of the take, then Leer blew his line, then the goddamn chimp had ground the pie into the top of Leer's head, screeching and baring its yellow teeth. Tempers were getting hot. Leer had been his usual hung-over, temperamental self all week, and Weller, with random patterns of block-auditing words and phrases whirling through his brain when be wasn't thinking about Annie, had had no patience for Leer's crap and had told him so on several occasions. The last take, with Leer red-faced and screaming with pie ground into his hair, hadn't helped matters. Barry the Brat was already whining about how hungry he was and had to have candy bars shoved into his face after every take to shut him up, and the loathsome Scuffles was, well, behaving like an ape. ".... transcendence.... blood.... nightmares .... steak tartare....orgasm.... virgin.... urine.... masturbation.... God.... changes...." Yeah, that was the sequence that kept running over and over again through his memory. It seemed to be the kind of programming Bailor had warned him about, and he had been alert to it, but he still couldn't keep it from repeating in his conscious mind, grinding its way into the deeper levels. And there were other sequences like that, dozens of them these past four weeks, that he couldn't keep out of his head, as if someone were murmuring them over and over again in his ear. Bailor would analyze the sequences that stuck in his head, but he couldn't analyze them to death. The interpretations of the program only served to make him remember the sequences, and maybe the sequences were even picking up meaning from the so-called deprogramming. To think of Annie was to think of Bailor saying, ''This one's building up Annie as a goddess in your mind," was to hear murmuring over and over again, "love ... Cadillac ... Annie ... 747 ... Athens.... springtime...." It seemed to be getting more obvious as the block-auditing progressed, but it was also getting heavier -- such a crude but powerful form of brainwashing that even being able to watch it work didn't stop it dead in its tracks. My God, if I had never met Bailor, if I had staggered into this like an ignorant schmuck.... "Jack? Jack?" "Huh? What?" Weller blinked back into reality. The cameraman was looking at him with barely contained exasperation. "I was telling you I was ready to get this damned shot over with," he said. "Oh yeah, sure," Weller said. Damn it, he had been spacing out into running block-auditing sequences again when he had to concentrate on getting this damned day's shooting finished. Screw up your marriage and then screw up your job, is that it, Weller? Hold on, he told himself, maybe this whole thing will be over tonight. And it was already seven-ten. "All right," Weller shouted. "Lights ... sound...." On came the shooting lights. and the cameraman hunkered back down behind his camera, shaking his head and moving his lips in a silent mutter. Snap! went the clapboard. "Monkey Business, scene thirty-four A, take six!" "Speed," said the chief sound man. "Action," Weller called, dully and mechanically. Barry the Brat minced onto the set from the right. "Look, Dad, Scuffles has taken up ballet, too!" The trainer grunted "go" at Scuffles, and the chimpanzee. after a nerve-shattering hesitation, toe-danced toward Leer in its tutu, balancing the pie over its head on the palm of its hand. Leer rose from his chair to marvel at this piece of monkey business, but as he did, Scuffles lurched suddenly closer and dropped the pie in the crotch of his pants. "Motherfucker!" Leer screamed as Scuffles gave him a ripe raspberry, and Barry the Brat covered his ears in wounded mock innocence. "Cut!" Weller shouted. He stared at the mess on the set without saying anything else for a long moment. The trainer was recovering control of the ape, but Barry the Brat was trying to taunt it into some new outrage, and Leer was snarling at the wardrobe people who were mopping at the pie-encrusted front of his pants. Weller looked at his watch, seven-twenty. There just wasn't time to get the set in order, change Leer's pants, do another take, and get to the Transformation Center by eight. And no guarantee that the next take would work, either. "All right, that's a print," Weller finally shouted. "We'll have to use that take." "WHAT?" Leer howled. "You're going to use that? A chimpanzee dropping a pie in my pants?" "I thought it turned out funnier than the script," Weller said. "Your reaction was beautiful, Hal. It saved the take. Your expletive can be deleted from the sound track." Leer brushed away the wardrobe people and came toward Weller. "What's the matter with you, Weller?" he said when he had reached confidential earshot. "You seem to give even less of a damn than usual lately. You can't turn in footage like that." "Since when did you consider Monkey Business a serious artistic show, Hal," Weller asked. "Artistic? Are you kidding? Forget what an idiot I look like in that shot, you can't give them a pie in the crotch on a kiddie show. Network continuity will never pass that." "Then that'll be their problem later," Weller told him. ''They can always tell me to reshoot it, but in the meantime we'll have this segment in the can on schedule tomorrow. Or would you rather stick around here another hour or two to get the damned thing right?" "Boy, do I love television," Leer sighed, and then took off in the direction of the nearest bar. Weller checked his watch again. Another five minutes gone! Not even time enough to grab a hamburger on the way to the Center. Just what I need, to face tonight with a head full of Monkey Business and an empty stomach! *** Weller arrived at his processing room on time, but Clark Burns wasn't there. Instead he was greeted by a slim, dark-haired woman in her late thirties, with hard piercing eyes and angular face that would have been attractive if it weren't such a mask of ice. "Who are you? Where's Burns?" "My name is Sylvia Paoluzzi," she said, barricaded behind the brain wave monitor. "'I'm a meditative deconditioner. Please sit down, Jack. I've got good news for you." Weller lowered himself into the hot seat. Good news? Are they finally going to let me get in touch with Annie? "We've completed your psychomap," Sylvia Paoluzzi said, "That's why I'm here instead of Clark. Tonight we're going to introduce you to meditative deconditioning." Weller was caught off balance. "Look," he said, "before we get into any of that, I want to talk about my wife." "Your wife?" She looked genuinely puzzled. She glanced through some papers on her clipboard, then looked up at Weller with new comprehension. "Oh," she said. "I see." ''I'm glad you see," Weller said irritably. "'This is the last session of my four-week course, and I was promised I could see my wife when I had been processed." "Been processed?" Sylvia Paoluzzi said. "You mean you think you've been processed?" Her tone was not so much sarcastic as incredulous. ''I've been plugged into this damned machine two nights a week for a month," Weller snapped. "What the hell would you call it, Miss Paoluzzi?" "Sylvia," she said with synthetic geniality. "And what I would call it is psychomapping. Meditative deconditioning is the first step in real processing, and that's what we're going to begin tonight." "What the hell are you talking about?" Weller said. ''I've spent two hundred and fifty dollars for these eight sessions, and now you tell me it's nothing, that I haven't even begun processing?" Sylvia looked at him with a hard, unwavering gaze. "We're arguing over words," she said. "Of course, four weeks of block-auditing isn't nothing; it's an absolutely essential preparation fur meditative deconditioning." "Well, what about seeing my wife?" "That's not my province," Sylvia said. "Meditative deconditioning is. You have a scheduled meeting with a life counselor after this session, and you can discuss your life situation problem with him. Now you have already paid fur this first deconditioning session, so shall we begin? We've already wasted the first five minutes." Weller studied the woman barricaded behind the brainwave monitor, behind the stonewall of her refusal to discuss anything beyond the procedure she was impatient to begin. Could she really not discuss Annie or was that just part of the game? Either way he knew that he was going to have to get through this session before he got to confront the life counselor, whatever that was. "Okay," Weller said resignedly, "you win." ''Very good," Sylvia said crisply. "Now as you know, the purpose of block-auditing is to prepare a psychomap of your areas of psychic blockage. It's basically a diagnostic technique. It tells us what areas we now have to work on with meditative deconditioning, which is a treatment, in medical terms, or a process, as we like to call it. Now do you see what I mean about your processing having not yet begun?" Weller nodded. First they screw up your mind undercover of their so-called diagnosis, then they sell you the cure for the mess they've made of your head. No wonder there's a special low price for block-auditing! It's the come-on; they suck you in with it and then sell you "meditative deconditioning" at forty bucks a session! Very cute. "Well now," Sylvia said, "meditative deconditioning is in a sense the reverse of block-auditing. Now that we know in what psychic areas your brainwave plot deviates from the optimum pattern, we concentrate on eliminating those blocks." She fitted the electrode band onto Weller's bead, plugged it into the brainwave monitor, and sat down behind the machine again. "Even an untransformed mind functions at optimum at certain times," she said. "During sucoessful lovemaking, during creative work, in a relaxed meditative state, and so forth. Just as the brainwave monitor detects blocks by variations in your brainwaves, it can also identify optimum mental states. A fully Transformed mind remains in an optimum state in any life situation, independent of the external environment. The ultimate purpose of meditative deconditioning is to eliminate all blocks, to reach this optimum state, to give you what we call a 'fully eptified consciousness.' Do you follow all this?" "I think so," Weller said. The theory made sense, assuming that the brainwave monitor did what they said it did. But block-auditing used the same rationale to cover some heavy brain-washing games, and he wondered what numbers they ran under cover of this "meditative deconditioning." Well, I'm about to find out, he thought warily.
"Excellent," Sylvia said. "What I do is give you a series of 'life scenarios' keyed to blocks on your psychomap, imaginary situations designed to concentrate your consciousness on specific areas of blockage. You meditate on the scenarios as I give them to you and attempt to reach a calm, meditative, eptified slate of brainwave activity in your blocked areas. Once you have succeeded, the block will be gone, and once all the blocks have been processed away, you'll have reached a fully eptified state of consciousness, able to function optimally in any life situation." "Question," Weller said, raising his hand sardonically, like a schoolboy. "Just what are the areas of blockage on my psychomap?" "Your relationship to your wife. Your attitude toward changing your consciousness. Your creative functioning. Your difficulty with identifying with anything beyond your own egoistic ambition." "I see," said Weller. Brother, do I see! They're zeroing in on why I'm here and my resistance to Transformationalism. Not to mention my dissatisfaction with my nowhere career. This sounds like it's going to get very heavy. "One more question," Weller said. "Just what am I supposed to do? How do I make my brainwaves calm in fantasy situations designed to make me uptight?" Sylvia glanced impatiently at her watch. "I can't really answer that," she said. '"You must develop your own technique. Continued confrontation with your blocks will force your mind to learn how to eptify itself in negative life scenarios. It's like learning to ride a bicycle, a feel thing ... Please, Mr. Weller, may we begin now?" Weller shrugged. "I guess I'm as ready as I'm going to be," he said. Sylvia fiddled with the controls of the brainwave monitor. "All right," she said. "Here's your first scenario. Your wife has told you that she's signed a contract to play a starring role in a major film that's going to be shot in Spain. She'll be gone for four months, during which you must remain in Los Angeles to work on your childrens' television show." "Jesus," Weller whispered. The dirty bastards had really keyed into his most shameful fear! How many times had he listened to Annie's end of a phone conversation with her agent, fearing just such a moment? A few times such a role had appeared to be a remote possibility for a while, and during those periods the question had run through Weller's mind over and over again: what's going to happen to me? What's going to happen to us? How could a star stay married to a failure? And just thinking that way made him loathe his own smallness of soul. He couldn't tolerate the idea of Annie being more successful than himself, and he couldn't stand the shame of his own true feeling. Sylvia's hard, cold eyes peered at him over the brainwave monitor. "Now try to control that reaction," she said. "Hold the thought in your mind but try to erase your negative feelings about it." "How am I supposed to do that?" Weller snarled. "Try to imagine the best possible way of facing the situation," Sylvia suggested. "Try to imagine where your mind would have to be to do that and put it there." Despite himself Weller found himself trying to play the game. All right, Annie, congratulations, you've got your break. I dig your happiness, I'm proud of your success. Yeah, and if you can do it, it proves that I can do it, doesn't it? And if you become a star, you'll have power, and you can use it to help my career. What's so terrible about that? Wouldn't I do the same thing for you? Couldn't you accept it from me? Only stupid male chauvinist ego makes me feel that there's something wrong with that, that a real man doesn't ride his wife's coattails, that a real woman couldn't respect a man who did. What good does that do anyone? It cuts us off from half the possibilities of helping each other along through life.... Aw, what a pack of shit all this is! Weller thought, looking across the monitor at Sylvia and wanting to knock the machine off the table and stomp it to bits. Sylvia looked up from the scope. "Not bad for a first try," she said. "There actually was some change in the readings for a while. Let's try another one." She paused, then read off a sheet of paper on her clipboard. "You've gotten the chance to direct a major film. But only because the male star is a homosexual who is strongly attracted to you. And his production company is making the film, so he's also your boss. And he's telling you how to direct. And he doesn't know what he's talking about. If you do things his way, the film will be a failure. If you fight him for creative control, he can fire you." "What the hell is this?" Weller shouted. "It's a life scenario," Sylvia said evenly. "It's a piece of slime!" "It's not beyond the realm of possibility, is it?" Sylvia said slyly. "Is that how you would cope with it? By throwing a temper tantrum? Do you walk away from all of your creative problems?" All the while she was studying the oscilloscope, where Weller could picture his damned brainwaves jumping all over the place, He glared at her. She did not look up at him. "Try," she said. "Imagine yourself riding with the change, adapting your creative powers to the situation, overriding your emotions, using yourself at optimum, eptifying the situation." Weller closed his eyes and tried to disengage his mind from the anger that was coursing through him. All right, we'll play your little game. That's all it is, after all, a silly mind game. It couldn't happen, Weller? The fuck it couldn't! If it were a female star, you'd tease her pussy throughout the whole shooting. You'd lock into that sexual energy and twist it around yourself, you'd use it to get what you wanted like a fisherman playing a marlin on light tackle. And you'd ball her, if that was what it ended up taking, wouldn't you? Annie or no Annie. Or don't you have what it takes? Because that is what creativity is all about -- turning yourself into your own instrument and doing it with utter ruthlessness. Transmuting whatever lousy raw material you're stuck with into what you want... " But a faggot.... Weller felt his flesh crawling. He'd never let himself be violated like that. Yet he also felt a flash of shame, for a part of him was saying, maybe you would, maybe you should. Because if you were in deadly earnest about your creative commitment, you had to detach yourself from your own personality, you had to let yourself burn, you had to be a monomaniac.... "Very good," Sylvia said, looking up from the scope. "Very good indeed. You're an excellent subject." Weller became aware of the fact that be was sweating. His body was vibrating with fatigue, but it was a triumphant, almost sensual sort of fatigue. He felt very much as he did during those rare peak moments when he was really cooking on the set, when he could feel the camera, the actors, the very film moving behind the lens, as extensions of his own being. It felt something very much like creativity itself. "Quite a little game you've got here," he admitted grudgingly, half hating himself for responding to it the way he had. This was not at all like a block-auditing. It didn't make him feel confused and scattered; it actually did seem to focus his consciousness. to put him more fully inside his own mind. Jesus, he thought warily, I could get to like this. I had better watch my ass! Sylvia's eyes seemed to smile for the first time, though her full expression remained enigmatically hidden behind the brainwave monitor. She glanced at her watch. "We have time for one more," she said. "This time you're a crippled beggar in ancient Jerusalem, a man of no faith, no belief in anything beyond himself. Jesus has just touched your lame leg and commanded you to rise. You get up, and your body is whole and healthy. You look into His eyes, and you are confronted with a clearly transcendent being, a creature superior to you in every way who loves you and has made you whole. Your skepticism is no longer tenable because your own body proves the reality. You worship him, you are transfigured and transformed." Weller regarded Sylvia sourly, suddenly brought down from that energetic creative state. This was just a little too transparent. Superior being, huh? Transfigured and ... transformed, huh? My skepticism is no longer tenable, huh? Jesus B. Steinhardt, huh? ''This one is just a little too silly for me," he said. "Is it?" Sylvia said evenly. "That's funny, you're reacting very strongly to it. It really makes you uptight." Oh, come on ..." "Come on yourself, Jack. You're really blocking. Are you so afraid of such a concept that you don't even dare fantasize about it? Does the concept of a man who is greater than you terrify you that much? Is your mind so rigid you won't even try?" "Oh, all right," Weller said. I've put up my resistance, he thought, so maybe this is an opportunity to plant the sort of thing they're looking for. If I can show that I'm wavering, that somewhere a tiny part of me wants to worship John B. Christ.... He tried to imagine that he was looking up at a Jesus who had just healed him, that he believed, that he worshiped.... But it was impossible to even think about it with a straight face. Maybe I should try what they're really after, he thought. Okay, I'm sitting in a room with John B. Steinhardt. Annie and I have been reunited and I've got a fat contract to do a feature film, all through the good offices and wisdom of Steinhardt, who has helped me despite my own worthless self. Wouldn't I love him? Wouldn't I think he was hot shit? Wouldn't I just sit there grinning like an ape and basking in the munificent wonderfulness of his being? Weller tried to hold this ludicrous concept in his mind, to impress it upon his brain deeply enough to affect the brainwave traces Sylvia was studying while trying to discern how he was doing by reading her expression from the top half of her face. Talk about Method Acting! he thought. Am I getting through? Good old wonderful John, who has given me wealth, success, my wife back, a Tranformed mind in a healthy body, sweet breath and clean white teeth.... Ah, shit! "How am I doing?" he finally said when he could take it no longer. "About as well as could be expected at this point, Sylvia said, looking up at him with unreadable eyes. She checked her watch. "I'm afraid our time is up, she said. You see the life counselor now, Mr. Rohrer in room two-oh-six. About signing up for meditative deconditioning. And you did want to talk to someone about seeing your wife...?" ''Yeah," Weller said. blinking himself back into hard reality, remembering what it was that had brought him here in the first place. He tried to recapture the determination to force an immediate showdown that he had carried with him into the center tonight, but it seemed very difficult to connect with that mundane reality at the moment. For something new and unforeseen had happened. Sure, the last scenario had been an obvious brain lavage, but the other two.... They had turned him on, gotten his mind moving along new parameters. This goddamn process really worked! As advertised. And now, despite himself, he felt an unwholesome fascination toward it. "I'll be seeing you next week, won't I?" Sylvia said with a knowing little smile. "Mr. Rohrer will handle the details of scheduling." "I guess so," Weller muttered. Now he realized that there never had been any chance that they were going to let him see Annie at this stage. After this one session it was clear that everything up till this point had been low-level stuff designed to lead him into meditative deconditioning, had only been the baiting of the hook. Because this stuff really seemed to work the way it was intended. They had won round one. They had gotten him interested in the game for its own sake. He sensed that some positive change in his life might come out of this meditative deconditioning thing. He shuddered. If that power were really there, what other, deeper, more subtle, and less benign changes could this process unfold in what he had once supposed was his immutable soul? *** Rohrer was a pasty-faced little man in his forties, and his office was little more than a cubicle; his persona was that of a paper shuffler, a low-level functionary who just filled out forms. He listened to Weller's opening demands to see Annie with a bureaucratic weariness that no amount of verbiage could penetrate, letting Weller go on till he simply ran out of steam. "Really, Mr. Weller," he finally said, "my job is to arrange your meditative deconditioning, not discuss life directives which are a matter of policy set at a much higher level. Besides, from what's in your file it's perfectly obvious that you're not going to be allowed to see her until you've been processed to her level. So shall we get down to what we're here for, eh?" "I'm not signing up for any meditative deconditioning until I see my wife," Weller insisted, but with little internal conviction. "And you're not going to see your wife until you've had meditative deconditioning," Rohrer said, "We seem to be at an impasse." "So we do," Weller said wearily. Rohrer stared out into space for a moment. Then a lightbulb seemed to come on in his bead so transparently that Weller was sure it was some kind of act. "I almost forgot," he said, reaching into a desk drawer. He pulled out a white envelope and placed it on the desk top with his palm over it. "This may make a difference," he said. "What is it?" "It's an authorized communication from your wife," Rohrer said. "My directive is to give it to you after you've signed up for meditative deconditioning." Weller leaped half out of his chair and reached for the envelope. Rohrer looked startled, but slickly and quickly slipped the envelope back in the drawer. "Give me that or I'll --" "You'll what?" Robrer said. ''Violence will be entirely counterproductive from your point of view. You don't imagine you can overpower me and get out of this building with the letter do you? And to what end?" Weller slumped back into his chair. The wormy little bastard was right. They really had him. They knew he would have to see the letter. Of course, he could sign up for the course, get the letter, and then refuse to pay them ... "Shall we get on with it?" Rohrer said. "All right," Weller sighed. "Let's discuss my meditative deconditioning. How long is it going to take me to reach the level where you'll let me see my wife?" "That depends...." "On what?" Weller snapped. "On how well you respond. On how many sessions a week you have." "Goddamn it, can't you give me a straight answer? How many sessions is it going to take me to be processed to Annie's level?" "The usual range would be twenty to thirty sessions," Rohrer said. "On the other hand, your wife will he continuing her processing in the meantime, so how long it takes you to catch up will also be a function of how rapidly you take the necessary processing." Good God! Weller thought. Thirty sessions at forty bucks each is twelve hundred dollars! At two sessions a week, that's fifteen weeks, and another fifteen hundred dollars! "Do you realize what you're saying, man?" he said. "Twelve hundred dollars! Fifteen weeks before I get to see Annie! Money aside, don't you people have any heart?" The future spread out before Weller in an endless bankrupt headache throb. "It's not as bad as all that," Rohrer said blandly. "You seem to assume that we're limiting you to two meditative deconditioning sessions a week. If the time factor concerns you, I'd suggest you sign up for the crash course." "Crash course?" Rohrer nodded. "You can have a session every night in the week if you want to," he said. "That way, the whole process would only take about a month. In fact it's our experience that people who take the crash course finish the process in fewer sessions. You get into it more deeply that way. You might achieve fully eptified consciousness in as little as twenty sessions in as little as three weeks. Possibly at a savings of four hundred dollars." Weller did some fast mental calculations. Seven sessions a week would cost him two hundred and eighty dollars, plus another hundred for Bailor. He was making five hundred dollars a week, so that would leave him four hundred and eighty a month to meet the mortgage payment and live on. He should be able to squeeze through. And he would save almost fifteen hundred dollars in the long run. More to the point, he might be able to handle this situation for another four weeks, but fifteen weeks more was unthinkable. There was no way he could endure that! "And at the end of the month I can see Annie?" he asked plaintively. "I have no authority to tell you that one way or the other," Rohrer said. "Oh, for God's sake..." Rohrer leaned across the desk and seemed to crack his bureaucratic persona with a man-to-man smile that seemed totally bureaucratic in itself. "Well then, just between you and me, off the record, you understand," he said. "it's been my experience that in a case like this the life directive would usually be rescinded once you complete meditative deconditioning. Does that help?" Weller nodded. He sighed. There was Annie's letter locked away from him in the desk drawer. I have to have that. There's no way I'm going to leave here without it and only one way I'm going to get it. He thought of tonight's session, the strange mixture of crude brainwashing and ... and something else, something that had held an almost morbid fascination for him at a deep, deep level. Who are you kidding? he thought. You knew you were going to sign up before you came in here, before you even knew about the letter. This little fencing match was just a sham from word one. Get it over with, and get that letter! "All right," he said. "I guess you've sold me the crash course." Like a man struggling in quicksand, every move he made just seemed to suck him in deeper. *** Weller rushed out of the Transformation Center with the still-sealed envelope burning in his hand. He had resisted the impulse to tear it open the moment Rohrer handed it over; whatever was in it, reading it in this place would be more than he could bear. He ran the two blocks to his car, got in, and tore open the envelope. Inside were two sheets of Transformationalism, Inc. letterhead covered with perfect electric typewriting. Annie could not type worth a damn. Son of a bitch! It meant that someone had read what she had written, passed it, and retyped it -- if Annie had really written the damn thing at all. His hands trembling slightly, Weller began to read: Dear Jack: How are you, love? I know you must be feeling better because I wouldn't be allowed to write this letter unless your processors knew they had put you through some meaningful transformations. I've been going through some heavy transformations myself. I'm feeling better and stronger and more myself every day and the only block was missing you and worrying about you being left behind. But now I've been told that you're on your way home to me, and it's given me the strength to go on and endure the waiting with a happy heart. Knowing you, I know that you must still be confused and uncertain. You started your processing out of love for me, not because you thought you really needed it; we all know that. But by now you must see that something inside you has drawn you to Transformationalism for its own sake. I was enough to get you started, but now you're not sure why you're going on. I hope it isn't making you doubt your love for me. I hope you're not thinking you're somehow betraying our love by continuing for your own "selfish" reasons. I also hope that you're not hiding your real reasons from yourself out of some guilty, twisted loyalty to me. Because there is no selfishness here. When two people love each other, they both want each other to be the best possible persons they can. What enhances your self enhances us, and so enhances me. I had to leave you for a time because you didn't understand that in relation to me. Now, love, you must be feeling what I felt. So no blame, no guilt. What you do for you, you do for us. So take care, love, feel free, do what you have to do for you, knowing that I understand you're doing it for us. Take heart in knowing, as I do, that we'll be back together soon -- enhanced, fulfilled, eptified, a better you, a better me, a better us. Much love, Carefully, mechanically, Weller folded the letter and slipped it back in the envelope. The signature in ball-point pen at the bottom of the letter had unquestionably been authentic. So whether Annie had written the letter herself or not, she had definitely at least read it and at least to that extent collaborated in its writing. But in another way it seemed like a Transformationalist document, another carefully calculated piece of brainwashing, even if every word had come straight from her heart. The timing was too perfect, what the letter had said was too close to what he had been feeling. It was all too perfectly crafted to psychologically reinforce the tentative decision he had just made for it to be just a random personal letter from his wife. Wearily he started the engine and put the car into gear. The letter that had seemed to be so much before he had read it now had proven to be nothing at all. Nothing was changed; he knew no more than before. Except, perhaps, that even his own motives might not be what they seemed, maybe he couldn't entirely trust himself either.
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