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THE MIND GAME

Chapter Six

Hal Leer, red-eyed and ashen-faced even with the benefit of the best possible makeup, lurched around on rubbery knees in the center of the set while Barry the Brat and Scuffles, wearing matching Little League unifoms and baseball gloves, tossed the ball gently back and forth to each other -- left, right, left, right.

Weller, standing behind the rolling camera, watched the take with bleary, hostile boredom. Stupid brainless garbage! he thought. Like life in prison without possibility of parole, like life without Annie, like night after night of meditative deconditioning, the same brain-bonging routine over and over again. Start a segment on Monday, be half a day's shooting behind by Wednesday, work like a maniac on Thursday and Friday to catch up, accepting any crap that was halfway usable as a print, wrap it up on Friday half-dead on his feet. And for what? So he could begin at the top of the cycle again on Monday morning. So he could collect his lousy five hundred dollars and pay out three hundred eighty dollars of it to Bailor and the Transformationalists. So he could keep going in order to keep living. He felt like a creaky robot, badly in need of oil, on an accelerating treadmill to nowhere.

Only during his sessions with Sylvia did he feel really alert, and that was a state of heightened awareness almost too convoluted to bear. Bailor's so-called counterprogramming only seemed to crank up his paranoia a turn of the screw tighter. Knowing what was going on only made it worse....

"They're ping-ponging your head," Bailor had told him. "They feed you scenarios keyed into your fears and guilts and dissatisfactions designed to drop your self-esteem through the floor, and then they hit you with a superman fantasy that lets you feel like the king of the hill. They move your sense of self-worth from your life as you've lived it into the whack-off fantasies of the life scenarios. Soon you want to be that Jack Weller, not the nerd sleepwalking around in the real world. The classic cult program."

"So what do I do?"

"Give 'em what they're looking for," Bailor had said. "Stop asking about Annie. Talk about your work problems. Throw in a few questions about Transformationalism here and there. But do it grudgingly and slowly -- you've got to convince them that you're coming around against great internal resistance."

"But how do I keep it from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, what's the difference between meditative deconditioning and what you're telling me to do? You're giving me a goddamn life scenario too!"

"You know what scenarios to watch out for. The true believer stuff. The seeker-after-higher-consciousness stuff. So when they run one of those on you, play your game, not theirs. Concentrate on something different, something that will put your mind in the so-called epitifed state of consciousness they're looking for, but with different content. Like if they run a number about dedicating yourself to the church, think about shooting the last scene of a successful movie. Get it?"

"You mean run my own life scenario on top of theirs? I'm glad you're not suggesting anything too complicated ... "

So the meditative-deconditioning sessions had become games within games within games. Run his own scenarios within Sylvia's scenarios, split himself in half, or was it in thirds? It was gelling to the point where he looked forward to certain life scenarios -- the creative fantasies, the scenarios where he and Annie were reunited -- as the only moments when he could bring himself together, let himself experience the totality of Jack Weller and feel good inside his own skin. Everything else was a paranoiac acting exercise or sleepwalking. He had reached the final irony -- he only felt real, authentically himself, during unreal fantasy situations! If only he could reverse fantasy and reality, if only he could live out the life scenario of Jack Weller, the committed creator, if only....

Oh, my God! Weller suddenly realized that he had been tripping out into his own head games on the set again, and this time right in the middle of a take!  How long had Scuffles and the Brat been tossing that baseball back and forth? Well screw it, they can just cut away as much of this lead-in as they want to. He brought his right hand up and dropped It sharply, cuing Hal Leer.

Leer seemed to give Weller a look of pure poison before he delivered the line. "Here, let the old man have it. Let's see if Scuffles can hit the old curve ball."

The Brat tossed the baseball to Leer and went down into a catcher's squat as Scuffles picked up the bat and took a right-handed hitters position, thumping the bat on an imaginary home plate and ad-libbing ape grunts.

Leer went into a woozy, ludicrous double-pumping pitcher's windup, then brought his arm forward with the pitch. But at the moment of release, he seemed to get tripped up in his own stupid feet, and he stumbled forward, half falling down.

The ball hit Scuffles right on top of the head, a perfect beaner.

The ape screamed in feral outrage, bared its yellow teeth, and shambled across the set toward Leer with blood in its eyes. Leer snarled and balled his hands into fists.

"Cut!" Weller screamed. "Stop that goddamn chimp!" He dashed forward as Scuffles leaped at Leer, who sidestepped clumsily and hit the chimp a glancing, ineffectual blow on the shoulder as Scuffles, chittering, slammed into his left side and knocked him on his ass.

Then the trainer and two grips grabbed the howling ape from behind, pinned its arms behind its back, and dragged it, screeching and kicking, away from Leer.

Weller reached Leer, took him by the hands, and tried to help him to his feet, but Leer angrily pulled away from him. "Get your filthy hands off me, you imbecile!" he shouted.

At the right of the set the grips were still holding onto Scuffles while the ape struggled and gibbered, and the trainer tried to calm him with soft sounds in his ear. Barry the Brat stood nearby, taunting the chimp by pretending to throw a phantom baseball at its head.

Weller exploded in a fit of blind rage. "Cut that shit out, you little bastard, or I'll break both of your arms!"

"Up yours!" the Brat screamed and stomped off toward his dressing room.

Weller stood there confronting a red-faced Leer. Aside from the gibberings of Scuffles, there was dead silence on the set. Cameramen, grips, and sound men were staring at Weller as if he were a maniac.

"Weller, you are without a doubt the --"

"Shut up, you goddamn drunken sot!" Weller shouted in Leer's face. "You show up drunk or hung over on this set again and I'll have your ass canned!"

The intake of breath from the crew was all but audible. Still red-faced with anger, Leer spoke in clipped, tightly controlled tones. "You'll have me canned, will you, Weller? You'll have me canned? We'll just see about that. We'll see who gets fired after this little exhibition."

Weller took a deep breath, then took half a dozen quick steps backward, the director commanding the set. "We will break for lunch now," he announced loudly. "After which we will continue today's shooting, and we will get it right. I hope all of you have got that straight."

The crew continued to stare at him with unconcealed, silent hostility. "Scuffles is through for today," the trainer said. "I only hope that's the worst of it."

'"Then we'll shoot around him this afternoon," Weller said grimly. "And tomorrow he had better be ready."

"Or what?" the trainer snarled.

"Or else," Weller shot hack at him, and stalked off in the general direction of the commissary, unable to bear looking at the mess on the set a moment longer -- the glowering Leer. the contemptuous sullen eyes of the crew, the stinking goddamn gibbering ape.

That does it! he thought. I can't take another week of this! I've got to get out of here. I can't stand it any more. I'm going to quit this fucking job. I'm going to quit Friday. I can't bring back Annie, I can't get my head out of this quagmire, there's only one thing I can do to try to make my life endurable, and that's get rid of this miserable cretinous insanity. Enough is enough!  I've had it!  I'll sell my car, I'll take a second mortgage, I'll dig goddamn ditches, but 1 can't take any more of this.

***

By the time he had reached the Transformation Center, Weller's energy level was about an inch off the floor. and his will was drained dry. After he had choked down a hamburger at the commissary and returned to the set, the idea of quitting his job had become just another unreal life scenario.

Sell the car? Maybe he could get two grand, but how long would that last at three hundred and eighty dollars a week for processing and Bailor, not to mention mortgage payments and minor matters like utilities and eating? And if he walked out on his contract, no one would ever hire him again; he'd be broke, unemployable, and wheelless, which in Los Angeles was like having three broken legs. A second mortgage on the house? Fat chance, if he couldn't even show a bank enough income to carry the first one! Dig ditches? Sure. Wash dishes? Right.  The town was just full of shit jobs that would pay an out-of-work director four hundred dollars a week.

So he had slogged through the afternoon's shooting in even more of a trance than usual. The crew was sullen, silent, and agonizingly slow, as if they were punishing him for the morning's outburst, as if they wanted nothing more than to get his ass off the set. Leer came back with booze on his breath, but Weller dared not openly notice it; as it was, the necessary conversation was conducted in grunts and snarls, and shooting was hopelessly behind already. Barry the Brat he could at least intimidate into working with implied threats of violence; he at least had enough authority left as an adult for that. But throughout the endless afternoon a slow funeral gong seemed to be beating in his bead; he felt dead inside, and indeed cultivating that anesthesia of mindless zombiebood was the only way that getting through the day seemed possible.

He slunk into the Transformation Center, took the elevator to the third floor, walked into the processing room, and dropped his bone-weary body into the chair in front of the brainwave monitor like a sack of potatoes. Even cold, clinical Sylvia was able to feel his trapped, defeated, exhausted mood.

"Are you all right, Jack?" she said, with You look awful! written silently across her face.

"No," Weller said sullenly.

"Would you like to see a life counselor?"

"No," Weller said. Yet another brand of mind game was hardly what his present mood called for.

"Do you feel you'd like to cancel tonight's session?"

"No," Weller said automatically. Did I drag my ass here for nothing tonight, you nerd? Besides, tripping out into a harmless scenario or two might be some kind of relief from the awfulness of reality.

Sylvia snapped back into her robotic persona. She fitted the electrode band on his bead and plugged him into the console. "Well then," she said brightly, turning on the machine, "maybe tonight's session will do you some good."

"Maybe it will," Weller said, half surprising himself with the sincerity he beard in his own voice. "I could do with forgetting about what's happened today."

Sylvia favored him with a tiny smile. "That's the right attitude," she said. "Move along the time track with the changes. What's past is memory, don't let it become a block."

Weller nodded. A tiny ray of light pierced his clouds. For the first time today he felt as if he had accomplished something, a little piece of role playing that had advanced him some infinitesimal distance toward Annie. If that were what it was. He tried to force his tired mind further toward full alertness sensing that he had set the stage for a session that might go a long way toward convincing them that he was moving swiftly toward true conversion. You were zero as a director today, Weller, let's see if you can at least act.

"All right now, ready for your first scenario?" Sylvia said. "Your wife has just had a baby boy. She's gotten an offer to do an important supporting role in a movie. In order for her to accept, you must stay home all day for three months to take care of the baby. She'll be making good money, so that won't be a problem, and you've decided to make the sacrifice for her sake."

Weller could all but feel his brainwaves going wild. This was one that he and Annie had gone through a dozen times, and it was why they had made the cold-blooded decision not to have children, at least not now, not until they had both made it, not until it wouldn't interfere with Annie's chances to advance her career. The idea that he might stay home to take care of a baby had never even been discussed; it was unthinkable.

But here was the sacrifice-for-Annie motif again, and with a vengeance. He had to give them what they were looking for, tonight of all nights, when the attitude he had walked in with had already established a lot of credibility for his making the "major breakthrough" in his processing that they were watching for.

And, he realized, Bailor's advice would work like a charm here; all he had to do was apply a little reverse English in his mind.

So he imagined the exact opposite of the scenario Sylvia had given him. Annie had had a baby boy, and he was working on a feature film while she stayed home to take care of the child. Every evening he came home from a successful day's shooting to a wife mellowed by motherhood. As the boy grew, so did his film, his reputation, his creative powers, his feeling of at last being on top of the Hollywood heap. And Annie was content, because she knew that once the finished film was released to critical acclaim and socko box-office figures, he would be in a position to give her career a boost up, just as the baby was ready for a daytime nurse, just as they reached the point where they could afford it. It would be all they had wanted, all they had dreamed about, and now it was happening....

Sylvia looked up from the scope and wrote something on the form on her clipboard. For a moment Weller got a glimpse of her full face, and he thought he saw the ghost of a satisfied smile -- smug, perhaps, but satisfied. Only then did his control waver and a wave of sadness break over him. For after all, what he had constructed in his mind was a fantasy within a fantasy, an ironic negative image of the true reality -- no Annie, no child, no feature film, just the awful aloneness and the endless grinding days of Monkey Business spiraling down, down, down....

"Very good," Sylvia said. "I think we're really making progress in that area."

Weller smiled a wan eat-shit smile. It was the first time she had actually betrayed a reaction, and she was eating it up. It was possible to fool the bastards. At least in this one thing he wasn't a total failure.

"Let's see if we can keep it up," Sylvia said, and Weller felt even more strongly that his processing was entering a new phase, that they were buying his act, that Bailor's strategy was working.

"Now then," Sylvia said, "you've been asked to direct some commercials for a presidential candidate. The candidate is a true man of the people, so the political and economic establishment are all against him, and his campaign is financed strictly by the dimes and dollars of poor people, and every dollar counts. He's offered to pay you a small salary, but the man is so sincere, so dedicated, such an underdog, and so obviously what the country needs that you can't accept even that. Because you know that people all over the country would be missing meals to pay your salary. So you tell him that you're honored to work for him, but you can't accept any payment. It's got to be your own personal sacrifice for the cause."

Oh brother! Weller thought. John B. Steinhardt for President? Our Peerless Leader in the White House off the nickels and dimes of the poor? It symbolized the whole Transformationalist setup. The poor schmuck so dedicated to the cause that he wants to work for nothing is exactly the kind of follower the bastard wants. And exactly the kind of schmuck I've got to convince them I'm becoming.

So he imagined that a long-forgotten great aunt had died and left him five million dollars. He was going to finance his own film with part of the money. He had gotten a great script written by one of the top writers in Hollywood, and every agent in town was calling to push the greatest stars alive for parts in his movie. He was having trouble deciding between Paul Newman and Robert Redford for the male lead -- they were both so pathetically desperate for the part -- but he had already cast Annie as the female lead. And now he was walking into the office of Morris Fender, producer of Monkey Business, and he had the latest awful script rolled up into a tight cone in his hand, and he was going to tell Fender exactly where he could stick it. Then he was going to buy Scuffles the chimp and sell him to a dogfood factory....

"It's quite surprising, Jack," Sylvia said. ''You're doing very well tonight, though you came here in a very deenergized mood."

"Yeah, well maybe when you don't want to think too much about what's going on in your life situation, it's easier to get your head behind alternate life scenarios," Weller said truthfully.

"When you can accept your current life situation with the same optimized consciousness you achieve during the scenarios, you'll find that starting to improve too," Sylvia said. "After all, that is the ultimate goal of meditative deconditioning."

"Do you really think I'm getting there?" Weller asked in as humble a tone as he could muster.

"You're progressing, Jack, you're progressing."

"I really wish all this was helping my life situation more," Weller said, continuing to string her along.

"When you've achieved a fully eptified consciousness, you'll find that the Transformation will automatically improve your interaction with the external environment."

"I hope so," Weller said quietly.

"Shall we get on with your processing?" Sylvia said. Weller could sense a certain edge of impatience. He had run this little number just about far enough. I've eptified the current situation, he thought sardonically.

"Sure," he said, with what he hoped was just the right tone of subtle, subdued enthusiasm.

"All right now, you've reached the end of your current contract for the show you're working on, and the producer has told you that it's been canceled. You're out of work, you have no immediate offers, and all you have to live on is what savings you've accumulated, enough to keep you going for a couple of months." 

Sylvia's words knocked the psychic wind right out of Weller, flung him right back into the bottomless pit of Monkey Business -- today's fiasco, Leer's threats, the hostile eyes of a crew whose respect he had lost, the futility and frustration dragging on and on forever, the funeral gong peeling in his head.

Good God, do they know? But that was sheer paranoia, that was impossible.... or was it? How long was their reach?

Sylvia looked up from the oscilloscope, frowning. "You're blocking very heavily," she said disapprovingly.

Get a hold of yourself, Weller, get a hold of yourself! Don't blow this too! Desperately, he tried to come up with a counterscenario that would move those readings toward optimum, but he came up dry. His mind was clogged with memory images of today's shooting, and nothing could drive them out.

"Let me help you," Sylvia said. "You're obviously fixating on the negative aspects of this scenario, and that's very regressive. I'm surprised at you. Look at the other side, ride with the change, try to fix your consciousness on the positive aspects. They're there, reach for them...."

With an audible sigh Weller closed his eyes and gave up trying to play the countergame Bailor had taught him. It just wouldn't work in this situation. This scenario was too close to reality. Too close? It was reality, or only an inch away. It was how he had felt this morning, when he was determined to quit the goddamn show. All those feelings came rushing back. Quit the damn job! Dig ditches! Get rid of it! This life scenario was him. It's where you want to be, Weller, admit it to yourself. Use this process to learn something for once.

He let himself float down into the center of the scenario, playing the meditative-deconditioning game in earnest for the first time. Reach for the positive aspects? Well for one thing, Weller, you hate every bloody minute on the Monkey Business set. And it's not taking you anywhere near where you really want to be. It's making you hate the act of directing itself, isn't it? It's ruining you for anything better. Every day on that set is an extended act of cowardice that chips away at the Jack Weller you want to be.

Anger began to wash over Weller's despair. Cowardice? Isn't that it? You don't have the balls to quit! You were ready to do it this morning, but you lost your courage over a greasy commissary hamburger. You want out, but you don't have the balls to do it yourself.

Reach for the positive aspect? If the show were canceled I'd be out of there, that's the goddamn positive aspect! I'd be broke, I'd have to do God-knows-what to keep up this processing -- do porn, maybe -- but I'd be free. Free from Barry the Brat! Free from Leer! Free from directing a fucking ape!

A blast of energy went through Weller as he imagined life without Monkey Business. His mind soared like an uncaged bird. I'd get off my butt, find my own center again, do work that mattered or nothing at all, the way I always promised myself I would. I'd have one hell of a huge monkey off my back!

"Very good," Sylvia said. "You found it, didn't you? See, you can do it."

Weller opened his eyes. He blinked. The life scenario was run and over, but that wonderful energetic feeling remained. He felt great. He felt better than at any time since Annie had left him, since God-knows-how-long before Annie had left him.

I don't want to lose this feeling, he thought. I won't lose it. This one was my life. I won't let this slip away. I was right the first time! Quit the fucking job!

"Jeez," he said, "something happened there, it really did." What he was putting out synched perfectly with the act he was supposed to be putting on, but it was also him; his act was synched into his true self for the first time in longer than he could remember.

Sylvia smiled at him. "You appear to believe you've made a Transformational breakthrough," she said. "And I think you may be right."

"If this is Transformational Consciousness, it's okay, it's sure okay," Weller said, feeding her the line, conscious of projecting the desired effect, but at the same time feeling his current instantaneous personality resonating with the truth of what he was saying. Is it really true? he wondered. Can this stuff really work for me if I let it?

***

Entering his semi-darkened living room, thick with dust, cluttered with old pizza cartons, stacks of unread newspapers, and unwashed sticky glasses, Weller felt a jarring discontinuity between what he felt like inside and the midden that his external life had become. He hurried to the phone and dialed the emergency exchange number that Garry Bailor had given him. A metallic female voice answered on the fourth ring. "Garry Bailor's exchange. May I help you?"

"This is Jack Weller. I have to talk to Mr. Bailor immediately. Will you please give him the message?"

"Will you please give me the number you're calling from."

Weller gave her his number, hung up the phone, and waited nervously. More of Bailor's security paranoia. He wouldn't give out his home number, afraid that someone might find out where he lived from the exchange digits, even though the number was unlisted. The only way to contact him without a scheduled appointment was to call the exchange and hope he'd call back. And Weller couldn't wait. He had to talk to Bailor now.

When he left the Transformational Center, he had known he was going to quit his job tomorrow, but on the drive home he had began to distrust his own head. The center of his being vibrated with the rightness of the decision he had made. Contemplating life without Monkey Business felt wonderful.

But where and when had he made that decision? During a processing session at the center! How could he completely trust this wonderful feeling? The move seemed to be his, he had made it once before today, but how could he be sure he was in control even of what seemed like his essential center? He was the focus of conflicting fields of psychic energy that bombarded him with programming and counterprogramming on every level. Could he really be a creature of his own free will, or was what he felt just the interlace between conflicting programs? He had been through too much to believe with total confidence in the existence of an untouched core of free will at the center of all that psychic determinism. Is the me who thinks he's his own man really his own man?

He desperately needed some external anchor, and Bailor was the only person in the world who could understand the nature of the problem, who could give him an outside observer's viewpoint on his own inner workings.

Finally the phone rang. Weller snatched it up before the first ring of the bell had died. "Garry?"

"Yeah, Jack. What is it?"

''I've just come from the Center. I've had quite an experience. I think I'm going to quit my job tomorrow."

"What? What in blazes did they run on you to make you do that?"

"It's my own decision," Weller said. "At least I think it is.... I mean, that's why I called you. There was a life scenario, but...."

"You sound spaced," Bailor said. "Give me the whole story sequentially, from this morning on." Even over the phone, Weller could sense Bailor's skeptical, analytical, merciless attention. It helped him organize his own confusion. Bailor was like a psychic computer:  feed him all the data, and he would organize it logically and extract the pattern, the implied conclusion. Weller poured the whole story into the phone, in cold, logical, clipped chronological order, feeding in the data without attempting to analyze it.

When he had finished, there was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Weller could all but hear the relays clicking.

Finally, Bailor spoke. "They've gotten to you," he said flatly.

"What do you mean, they've gotten to me?"

'"You've been programmed," Bailor said. "Can't you see it? You're about to make a real life decision on the basis of something that happened to you during a processing session. Isn't it obvious?"

"But why would they want me to quit my job?" Weller asked defensively. "That doesn't make sense," wondering just what it was he felt compelled to defend.

"But they don't even know about that, now do they?" Bailor said sarcastically.

"Then what are you talking about?" Weller said, feeling some nameless dread cracking his well-being like ivy crumbling a stone wall.

"Before you got into this, you would never have quit your job, would you?"

"No...." Weller said grudgingly, beginning to see where Bailor was going.

"So your head has been changed during processing," Bailor snapped. "By processing!"

Woodenly Weller peered silently into the mouthpiece. Was it true? Could such a feeling of rightness be false? An illusion? Something that had taken control of him?

"That's called programming, isn't it, Jack," Bailor said. "Something in your mind has been altered."

"You could be right ...", Weller admitted. "But isn't learning the same essential process?" he said more strongly. "Learning something about myself and then acting on it."

"Will you cut the shit?" Bailor said in exasperation. "Look at the damn content of the reprogramming, will you? Can't you see what's happened?"

"You tell me," Weller snapped irritably. "That's what I'm paying you for."

"That's right, buster," Bailor said coldly. "So listen and get your money's worth. You're now ready to abandon about all that's left of your previous life and leap into some etherealized ego-trip pipe dream. Are you stupid? Don't you see what that adds up to as a mind set from the Transformationalists' point of view?"

"Oh shit," Weller said, feeling like a schmuck but also feeling as if he had just been robbed of something he was learning to treasure.

''That's right, Jack. Suggestibility. Ready to follow a program that was accidentally implanted. Ripe for the picking when they throw the real thing at you."

Bailor's tone of voice changed, became distantly sardonic. "Of course, you could look on the bright side. At least your act is working. If I can keep you from picking up programming like this well enough to make sure it stays an act until they buy it, we're gonna get there."

Weller could see it now, be could see the whole infernal thing. And yet wasn't it possible to make the right decision for the wrong reason? Couldn't his own best interest coincide with the head space they had brainwashed him into? Maybe quitting his job was the right thing to do even if he had been brainwashed into believing it. Wasn't blindly opposing anything that happened to float through his mind during processing a perverse form of mind control too? Bailor's brand of brainwashing?

"But that doesn't mean I shouldn't quit, does it?" he said. "I've always hated that damned job."

There was a pause at the other end of the line, and when Bailor spoke again, his voice was like a razor. "Right. Quit your job. Then where do you think you're going to get the money to continue processing, huh?"

Bailor paused again, and once more his voice changed now, it was sinuous and coaxing. "Now that we're really getting somewhere, you don't want to throw it all away for some silly whim you've gotten into your head. Are you forgetting why you got yourself into this in the first place? You've got to hold on, man.  You've got to keep making money. When we've gotten Annie back and deprogrammed, then quit your job, if that's still your thing. But doing it now would be totally self-destructive."

Bailor's words were like a bucket of ice water in Weller's face. Of course he was right. Pragmatically right. Totally right. Inescapably right. Heroic gestures were something he simply just couldn't afford now, and Bailor had effectively rubbed his nose in it. He had to keep working because Transformationalism wasn't on credit cards. And neither, he thought angrily, is Bailor.

"And, of course, you also have a financial interest in my keeping my job, don't you, Garry!''' he snapped.

"You get what you pay for," Bailor said diffidently. "You knew that when you hired me."

"So I did."

"Well, Jack, are you going to stick it out, or has it been nice knowing you? My dinner is ready."

"You know damn well I have no choice," Weller said wearily.

Bailor's tone lightened immediately, became friendly in a mode that Weller now perceived as hacked out of plastic. "No hard feelings then, Jack. This is a heavy game, and feelings get upset, and tempers get tight. See you on Saturday, right?"

"Yeah, Garry," Weller grunted. "No hard feelings."

But when he hung up the phone, he found himself hating Bailor. Not only because Bailor had let the mask slip and bluntly reminded him that he was just a paid mercenary who would be with him just as long as the money held out. But for raining on his parade, for taking away something vague that he had always wanted, that had been just within his grasp. For leaving him with this sullen, angry feeling of having been robbed of the first bit of something good that had drifted into his life since ... since Annie had left. For this undefined but quite real sense of loss.

***

Fittingly it was raining the next morning when Weller drove to work, a leaden Southern California downpour that matched his mood perfectly. He parked the Triumph in his regular space just in front of the sound stage, but by the time he had dashed inside, his clothes were already damp and a lock of hair was plastered to his forehead.

Perfect, he thought, just bloody perfect, as he wiped the wet hair off his face with the back of his hand and walked past stacks of old scenery toward today's shooting set.

Then he saw that the set was empty.

The flat of the kitchen set was set up, the furniture, the props, the cameras, sound equipment, and lights. But no crew. No actors. No Scuffles. No trainer. Just the dead, empty set, tiny and forlorn, dwarfed by the shadowy gray vault of the sound stage, like a section of a bombed-out abandoned city, moldering in the cavernous graveyard silence of the huge empty building.

Then Weller saw that the set was not quite empty. A short, balding man emerged from the shadow of a stack of flats and walked toward him, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the silence. It was Morris Fender, the producer of Monkey Business.

With his heart sinking toward his rubbery knees, Weller walked toward Fender, and they met alongside the main camera.  Fender looked at Weller with utter disdain on his tanned, wrinkled face; his lips were clenched in tightly controlled anger, and behind his air-force-style glasses his eyes were hard as marbles.

"I'll make this short, but it won't he sweet, Weller," he said. "You've ruined our goddamn chimpanzee. The trainer is threatening to sue the studio. Leer refuses to work with you again, and Barry's mother doesn't want the kid around your foul mouth.  The stuff you've been turning in for the past few weeks has been garbage, and it's been late. Ordinarily I'd fire you."

Weller stood there awash in Fender's anger and disgust, unable to react, unable to even feel what was happening. Bong, bong, bong, went a deep-throated ball in his head.

"The good news," Fender said, "is that I don't have a show left to fire you from. It'd take weeks to get another chimp ready for the part. Three of your last segments can't be aired without extensive reshooting. So Monkey Business has been canceled. You're a lucky man, Weller."

"Lucky ... ?" Weller muttered inanely. Lucky?

Fender nodded. "This way you haven't been officially fired. Your credit list won't have 'this bastard was fired' in big red letters, since the show you would've been fired from has been canceled. But don't expect to ever work for this studio again. Don't expect to work on a show on the same network. Don't expect to work for any producer I've ever talked to."

Weller could say nothing. His brain felt like frozen mud. I'll quit, I won't quit, I'll quit, I won't quit -- and now this! Elation? A sense of freedom? He felt as if he had been hit over the head with a baseball bat.

"Now take anything you've got here and get off this lot," Fender said. He turned, shook his head to himself, and walked off toward the exit.

Only long after Fender had disappeared into the shadows did Weller begin to react to what had happened, and the first thing he felt was anger. At himself. How many times have I wanted to tell that creep to get stuffed? he thought. How many times have I rehearsed my parting shot to that little bastard in my mind? And now what do you do, Weller? Do you punch him out? Do you tell him what you think of him and his lousy show?

No, you stand there stupidly like a lox. You don't say a damn thing as he fires you. You take it like a clumsy servant being dismissed by the lord of the manor.

"Fuck you, Fender!" he shouted Into the emptiness. "Fuck you, you wormy little bastard!" It only made him feel even more foolish and futile.

Woodenly he collected his few things and walked outside to his car. The cloudburst had subsided and water was steaming off the hood above the still-warm engine. The sky remained gray and threatening.

Weller leaned up against the side of the car, not caring that the wet metal was soaking his already-damp pants. What am I going to do now? he wondered. Now that the life scenario had become reality, there was no sense of freedom, no surge of energy and determination. Under the ominous gray sky what it boiled down to was that Transformationalism had cost him both his wife and his job. What was next, the house and the car? His sanity?

He felt empty, husked, drained. How was he going to keep going? And what was he supposed to keep going for?

The only meaningful thing left in his life was the wan hope of someday, somehow being reunited with Annie, and even that was vaguing out into an abstraction as it receded further and further into the future, became more and more ... divorced ... from his day to day reality.

And in a week or two he would no longer be able to pay for his processing, and then even the hazy hope of seeing Annie again would be gone.

He got into the car and started the engine. Through the seat of his pants the throaty rumble infused his body with a faint artificial vitality. At least that! he thought. They've got to let me see Annie now. Why shouldn't they? There's no money left; they've sucked me dry.

He released the emergency brake, slammed the car into gear, and roared toward the gate trailing a rooster tail of foam. I'll go see Benson Allen, he decided.  I'll wheedle, I'll threaten, I'll beg if I have to, but this thing has got to end now, today. It will end, one way or the other, he realized bleakly. I just don't have the money to go on.

As he drove through the studio gate, the skies opened up again, and a fusillade of hard rain spattered off the hood like machine-gun bullets, momentarily obscuring the windshield behind an impenetrable veil of water.

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