Charisma

by Steven Barnes

  “A setup?” Renny was aghast.

  “Sort of. Receiving stolen property—something about some files from Marcus’s house. At any rate, I know there’s a copy of it buried in his personal effects. Interested?”

  “I’m salivating already.”

  “Then I’ll see what I can do,” she said, smiled again, and left.

  He sighed a deep sigh of relief when she vanished, and turned back to the computer.

  The computer’s lime-green cursor blinked at Sand patiently, his wish its command.

  The breath seemed to catch in his throat. He wasn’t aware of where he was, or even what he was. It was as if a stone had been lifted from his head, or heart. The pain he felt was a childish pain, a disillusionment pain, the agony of having your favorite fairy tales ripped brutally out of your heart. The dirty, molten, eager joy was an adult joy. Despite whatever pain he felt, the joy, germinating within him, stronger with every passing moment, was greater still.

  For the first time in almost six years, he was a reporter again.

  “Holy shit,” he said. And meant it.

  31

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA, WEDNESDAY, MAY 30

  Every city has a jungle. During the day, many of them are commercial strips near residential districts, often near airports or other high traffic areas. They are usually in moderate-to-low-income areas. Industrious and bustling during the day, twilight signals a tawdry metamorphosis.

  Shuttered windows, barred doors, emptied parking lots … these create an entirely new habitat whose denizens are both predator and prey.

  Although pharmaceuticals are often available nearby, few of the animals in this jungle are, in the strictest sense, drug dealers or addicts. The drug they sell is fantasy, or physical release. The drug they seek is money, or a sense of control. They are female in body and male in personality. They dress for display of and swift access to, the wares they offer.

  Their customers rarely approach on foot. Depending on the time of the month, the time of the night, and the need for a fix, it is either a buyer’s or seller’s market.

  * * *

  One car is cruising the jungle, like a lion stalking the Serengeti. In the car is a buyer. He is a white man, taller and heavier than average. He is in his late fifties, but the extra weight is muscle. His motions are very precise as he steers the wheel, searching for what he needs.

  He doesn’t know exactly how to find what he’s looking for. He does know that for years now, ever since that wonderful, terrible revelatory time in Southeast Asia, he has been able to find it. He watches, considers, and discards several possibilities before finding the one he wants.

  This one, the one in the iridescent green hot pants, is not tall, not short. Her face, scrubbed clean of makeup and graced with an honestly joyful expression, would be pretty. It is not pretty now. It is too … specific. She is selling a product and whoever she is, whoever she woke up as this morning, is irrelevant. Whatever small beauties she might have had to offer, she is not beautiful now, no more than a can of Comet or a Craftmaster hammer is beautiful, except in its utility. It is not dark yet, not even twilight, but she is already on the prowl.

  Both predator and prey.

  When he pulls his car up next to her she turns to him and begins the conversational dance. Both want to know how much, what, where, how. Each has reason to be cautious. Different reasons. Early in the conversation he says the magic words, “I’m not a cop.” Prices and services are negotiated. He tells her that he wants her to meet an important man. She says that’s fine, but even if it’s only him it’s all right, because he looks nice. She would like to get to know him better. He opens the car door and she climbs in. The last thing she says before the car begins to move down the boulevard is “My name is Talisa.” She holds out her small, soft hand as if to shake.

  “Hi,” he says, both of his hands steady on the wheel. “My name is Tristan. Tristan D’Angelo.”

  32

  Journal Entry #6: Imprintation Methodology

  Our goal is simple: to provide disadvantaged children with the core psychological and emotional tools requisite for success. Of course, this involves identification of desirable traits, formulation of such traits into a coherent template, and transference of that template to the experimental group.

  Even before the primary determiners are extracted from the Model, the subject of imprintation methodology must be addressed. The ultimate decision was that the combination of several differing approaches would achieve optimal effect. In summary, those approaches are:

  1) Nutritional optimization. This is multiphasic. Children must be supplied with all basic nutrients essential to physical and mental growth. Experiments in the Third World suggest that this can be accomplished for a few cents a day per child. In addition to ideal levels of proteins, carbohydrates and healthy fats, it is possible to go even further to provide a perfect physiological environment. Neuroenhancers—acetylcholine and norepinephrine precursors are considered to be the safest of the effective ergogenic psychotropics. These will be selected from only those compounds most thoroughly tested, erring on the side of inefficiency rather than placing any child at risk. We believe that a suitable “cocktail” can be derived from 100% safe, organic compounds.

  2) Window of imprintation. All evidence, especially research following in Piaget’s footsteps, suggests that the ages from 2 to 5 years are most conducive to the kind of imprintation we propose. The acquisition of a test group suitable for double-blind testing, a minimum of 2,000 children within this age range, is a major logistical challenge.

  3) Mechanical methodologies. Several are suggested. Psychophysiological “patterning” requires an actual adjustment of physical movement patterns. Although there is no parallel to this in Western education, esoteric Eastern disciplines such as Sufism, martial arts and yoga have long theorized a body-mind feedback loop, where an improvement or true modification of body performance affects the mind, and vice versa. By studying and extracting unconscious micro (i.e.: subliminal reflex habits and skin conductivity patterns) and macro (breathing patterns, body language, coordination, etc.) physical responses, then embedding as many of these as possible at the pre-conscious level, it is probable that deeper levels of correspondence to the Model are achievable. Physical games, dances, specialized “jungle gym” apparatus and other tools can all be used to mold the subjects into the Model’s idealized patterns. Subliminals, implanted In both auditory and visual modes, have proven effective in laboratory settings, but they must be of “burst” duration (less than .1 second), ultra-high frequency, low-volume, reverse-masked and “blended” with the auditory track. The information is therefore “everywhere” and “nowhere.” Similar multiphase techniques can be applied visually.

  4) The acquisition of a suitable Model’s belief systems, physiology, thought habits, philosophies, value structures, problem-solving modes, and emotional anchors mapped in a multidimensional grid gives us a personality matrix so complete that computer games can be formulated to literally mold a Target’s subconscious while never conveying a single overt instruction. In combination with the above factors, we feel that there is an excellent potential for transferal of the deepest and most powerful programming from one ideal mind to thousands of young subjects. And once the window of imprintation is closed, external factors will have less influence than the implanted programs, which, like the most potent seeds imaginable, will continue to germinate.…

  CLAREMONT

  The preschool’s shell was boarded and cold now, a dead spot on the local map. Patrick still felt drawn to it, like a rat continuing to search a maze long since bereft of cheese.

  They snuck back inside about once a month. Lee Wallace, the most agile of them, had discovered the way in. He’d climbed up a rainspout, then edged his way around the roof, finding a trap door where workmen gained access to the evaporator cooling system. From there, Lee worked his way to the attic, and from there to a trap door in the back bathroom, the one where old Mrs. Coffe
e used to squat and stink the place to kingdom come. From there, he could easily open the office door, and then the side door. Then they were in.

  There were no lights in the building, but daylight still glimmered outside. Summer was almost here, and in the Pacific Northwest the sun shone from six in the morning until almost eight at night. The louvers were tilted to catch and slot the late afternoon light.

  Patrick felt like a pilgrim returning to the land of his birth, a supplicant entering a temple. Perhaps an archeologist excavating the tomb of a lost pharaoh.

  The dust lay thinly on the floor, undisturbed for weeks. All of the fancier equipment was gone, but chairs were stacked against the wall, as if awaiting the return of the students who had once filled them.

  Patrick closed the door quietly behind him, and the five stood gazing, feeling something very much like awe.

  “It looks so small,” Destiny said.

  “That’s just because your butt’s gotten bigger,” Frankie said, and there was slightly nervous laughter all around.

  It was true—the room did look smaller than it once had. More than that, it seemed unutterably sadder.

  Patrick remembered the first day he was ever brought in. How scared he was. How his mother had introduced him to the nice lady in the pink and blue floral-patterned dress, and had said: “Patrick, this is my friend Mrs. Coffee. She’s going to take care of you today. Won’t that be fun?”

  He realized now that it had been a kind of ritual, something to help him feel more at ease, that Mrs. Coffee, the woman decked in wildflowers, hadn’t been his mother’s friend at all. That day, he had been shown around the schoolhouse and the yard with all of the jungle gyms and the moving, spinning, balancing things. At first he had been frightened by all of the noise and color and motion, then raw pleasure took over. He recognized some of the kids who were in his own trailer park, and others he had seen at the Fred Meyer store, or the Twin Rivers Mall. He was only four, but he was a Big Boy. With that facility only children possess, Patrick made instant best friends, and before twenty minutes had passed was playing and running, and jumping and singing and laughing as if they were all his long-lost cousins.

  Patrick glanced over at Destiny, remembering the first time he had seen her at the preschool. She’d been playing a video game, something that looked a lot like one of those shooting games—Doom, or Duke Nuke ’em or something like that. The kind of game with puzzles and monsters and a terrific selection of lethal weapons. There were differences: there was no blood in this game. The “monsters” were more like triangles and rectangles and other things. From time to time they would flash, and then change to another shape. You had to be fast to shoot them and stop them from shifting.

  After watching her for a minute, he realized that there was a pattern to the game, a relationship between the colors and the shapes. Every time you shot them in one way, one thing happened. When you shot them in another way, another set of things happened. He was delighted, and tried to take the gun away from her, but she held on for dear life.

  He stopped yanking because he didn’t want to be a Bad Boy, and maybe not be able to come back to this place, because he was already beginning to love it. He didn’t want to miss out on something that might just turn into more fun than he had ever had before.

  So he sat and watched her. Finally he realized that she was really good at this, and laughed, and clapped delightedly, almost as if he himself had been the one playing the game.

  After a while, she stopped playing and turned it over to him. Mrs. Coffee came over to him, and said, “Hi, Patrick. This is what you should do. Do you know how to spell your name?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good.” She gave him a plastic gun with a little lightbulb at the end of the barrel. She fiddled with the television set, and the alphabet appeared. “Go ahead,” she said.

  At first he was confused, but when he pointed the gun at the screen a tiny dot of light appeared. Moving the gun moved the light, and every time it touched a letter, the letter began to sparkle. He pulled the trigger when the “P” gleamed. There was a snappy pow sound, and the P appeared on a line at the bottom of the screen.

  He understood! One letter at a time, he shot his name off the screen. After he was done, and the letters PARTRICK EMORY glittered on the television, Mrs. Coffee touched the set again, and the triangles reappeared.

  The two triangles floated around. When he shot and hit them they began to line up, and when they were on top of each other the gun in his hand tingled, and made happy sounds.

  He gurgled with joy, temporarily unable even to express himself in words. This was fun! This was good. He spent the next hour making the triangles and squares and circles line up. There were certain patterns that earned him a little tingle, others where music played, and a few where the plastic gun buzzed, and a little metal band around the handle shocked him just enough to make him frown.

  And every day after that, if he played there were different tingles. Some of them felt good and warm. Some of them hurt just a tiny little bit, and when that happened, boy, he didn’t want to do that again, but by that time he liked the cartoons and the tingles and the sounds of the music, and everything was just great.

  Patrick could hardly wait to come to the center every day. There were always different games, and new songs, and cartoons. He never saw these cartoons on his TV set at home, although sometimes they actually featured familiar characters. They didn’t look quite as good as on television, a little simpler maybe, but there were Fred Flintstone, and Space Angel, and the Gummi Bears. The voices didn’t sound quite the same, either, but it was still a load of fun.

  And so were the games. Where did they get all the games? Had the ladies who ran the center created them? Some were games of hiding, and coloring inside or outside lines, depending on the sounds and colors from the television box. And video games. But there were other things too.

  There was a man who came in and led them through exercises that were kind of like Jackie Chan kung-fu stuff, where arms and legs were moving in weird ways, and it was impossible not to say Hyahh! and Hah!, and everybody laughed.

  But when he did it right, he felt good somehow, as if the movements he made in the air were shapes, like the triangles and rectangles in the games. He felt good when he did it right, and somehow bad when he did it wrong.

  After a while he was just enjoying the movements. He wasn’t learning kung-fu stuff, because when he got into a little fight with one of the other kids in the trailer park, he couldn’t use it at all, and ended up with a black eye.

  But when he played softball, or soccer, somehow he and the other Claremont Daycare kids were just a little quicker than the others. He liked that, so sometimes he would practice the exercises at home, make a little dance out of them. If two of the daycare kids got together at the same party, and there was music, they would dance together using the moves. They called it the Claremont Groove, and the other kids thought they were goofy, but cool.

  Mrs. Coffee found out about the dancing, and asked them to do it for her. When the dance was performed, Mrs. Coffee got excited and made a phone call. Two weeks later, when they put a video into the television, it featured a man and a woman and a bunch of kids, and they were doing the Claremont Groove to music, and having fun. Patrick really giggled at that, because he knew where it came from.

  And all the games! And all the songs, and poems! The snacks weren’t all that good-tasting, but he always had energy to play all day long, and his dreams were brighter and louder than they had ever been.

  Dreaming began to change. Some of the books at the preschool were about kids who could wake up inside their dreams, who could make their slumber worlds into anything they wanted. Those kids would walk around all waking day saying “Am I dreaming now?” and stuff like that, and then they started saying it in their dreams, and they would wake up inside their dreams, and take control.

  And darned if it didn’t actually work! In fact it worked so well that maybe
half of his dreams were “awake,” where he could turn monsters into sheep, mountains into clouds, or fly faster than a jet, on command.

  And every day, the daycare ladies asked him to draw pictures from his dreams. He did, and no matter what he drew they loved it, as if they didn’t care how well he drew, as long as he did. Every morning he drew one of those pictures, from the dream he remembered best.

  Even when his dreams started to become nightmares.

  * * *

  Patrick, Destiny, Frankie, Shermie and Lee sat in a circle on the floor, holding hands. This was a game that they had learned in the school a long time ago. There was no one to play it with now, except each other.

  They had to laugh, at first, because this part of the ritual was so silly. But they managed to quiet themselves, then started breathing with slow and steady control. As usual, their exhalations were interrupted by giggles. Destiny said “Shush!” and they started quieting down a little.

  And then it began. The trick was, without any kind of plan, to all begin to breathe in the same way, in the same pattern. Inhales and exhales together. This wasn’t something that they had been taught. It was something that had started happening spontaneously.

  They remained in that state for almost twenty minutes, just breathing, descending into a well of peace and contentment so deep that when Destiny’s watch beeped them back to awareness they felt a sense of resentment.

  Lee was the first to find words again. “One of the times that my mind drifted, I thought about Mrs. Coffee. Remember her?”

  Patrick did remember her, and her memory triggered an oppressive sense of loss and confusion. Patrick thought of the last time he had seen the woman who had nurtured them. She hadn’t looked huge and powerful and all-knowing that last time. She seemed shrunken and somehow lost, peering out at the courtroom as if somewhere, in one of those faces, she could find the answers.

  “Why do you think that Darnell lied like that?”