Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  He slipped the shoe onto Bernal’s foot. It hung there loosely. He had to curl his toes to keep it from falling off.

  “See what I’m saying?”

  “Uh, I’m beginning to. Should I walk around in it?”

  “Oh, no, no, no. No. Not yet. That’s the problem, isn’t it? People look at a foot as something to slap against the ground, and that’s it. But they’re knots of spiritual energy. Too much pressure against Mother Earth’s face, and they get karmic overload. And when that happens, everything else gets constipated. Kind of a chain reaction. Your liver gets hard, you start seeing yellow. Foot reflexology evolved to take care of those issues, but it’s better to hit the problem up front, with shoes, don’t you think? Just sit for a minute, let the energies reflect inside the shoe, and you’ll see what I mean. Here, here’s the other one. Balance the pair.”

  A pale girl slouched past with acromegalic basketball shoes hanging from her thin ankles. Along with the shoes, she carried a bowling bag stained with red.

  “Feeling it? ” The clerk was back, with a stack of boxes.

  Bernal recognized the bag. The head of the third victim of Cheriton’s own serial killer had turned up in a bag just like that one, in the locker room at Memory Lanes, a local alley. Now they did photorealistic knockoffs of it in Indonesia. Bernal watched that element of fashion go by again. He understood that the victim’s sister had sued to recover some of the earnings from sales of the bag.

  The receipt on the pile of shoes in Muriel’s bedroom had been from this store.

  “Yesterday, I think this woman came into your store.” Bernal flashed a photograph of Muriel. “Did you see her in here?”

  The clerk smiled at the photograph. “Muriel? Let me think. . .”

  “You know her?”

  “Sure. She’s, like, a bit out of our demographic, you know? But the girl knows shoes. I think we’re part of her regular cycle. Sometimes it’s us, sometimes it’s a Manolo Blahnik, sometimes it’s a high top Chuck Taylor. I’m okay with that. What’s up with her?”

  “I’m checking up on something for her. She’s away, some kind of business, didn’t really tell me, left me some kind of vague instructions I can’t really understand. Wants me to talk to someone she met yesterday ... so I was down here at the mall and thought I’d see if I could figure it out. If I can’t, she’s just going to have to wait.”

  “Yeah, she always has that oblique way. Wants you to guess. It’s worked for her for a long time. Why should she change?”

  Add shoe salesmen to the list of people we have no secrets from. “Okay, so she came in yesterday. Do you know where she went after she left?”

  The clerk shrugged, “Don’t know. She did have a lot of shoes, though. More than usual. Way more. And those things aren’t light. They’re Gaian anchor points, you know? To dimple the space-time matrix, you need some mass.”

  “Or velocity.” Bernal had taken physics.

  The clerk goggled at him. “Too close to C, and that sizing you think is so important becomes pretty irrelevant, you with me?”

  Bernal felt like he’d just lost his money to a pool shark.

  “Okay. Any idea of where she had been before coming here? Any bags from other stores, anything like that?”

  “Not that I can remember.” He sighed. “She was in an odd mood, now that you mention it. Not herself ... no, that’s not right. Too much herself, maybe.”

  “Too much?”

  “White sugar, distilled alcohol .. . shoes. Needs are signals. But supernormal needs . . . system’s not built to handle it. I never saw Muriel as one of those who wanted to . . . want things too much.”

  This was delicate. The clerk was getting at something, but Bernal wasn’t sure what it was. Drugs?

  “It might have gotten her in trouble,” Bernal said. “What did she do?”

  The clerk glanced around as if embarrassed. “People under the influence support more of our business than you might think. Binge purchasing. But you didn’t hear it from me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You ever hear of ‘tooning’?”

  “Something about it. . .. Personality building?”

  “You can spell that T-U-N-E or T-O-O-N, however you like. Never picked Muriel for the type, actually. She aIways seemed herself, you know what I mean. But then, well, it can happen to anyone. More when you get older, if you’ll excuse me. You get up one day, and you don’t know yourself. Things that you like don’t seem so fun, things you hate are just . .. boring. You don’t care. Not anyone’s fault. It’s a brain chemistry thing. Too much blow can leave you that way; some other street stuff. Screws with the dopamine. Why should Muriel be immune? And I’ll bet she tinkered with the neurochemistry in her younger days, too. . . .”

  It annoyed Bernal that the clerk, not more than ten years younger than he was, was treating him like some veteran of forgotten wars.

  “You think Muriel had gotten ‘tooned’? There somewhere around here to do that?”

  “Um, sure, yeah. Like I said—”

  “Just a name. I won’t connect it with you.”

  “Spillvagen. Norbert Spillvagen. Spill’s got a business therapy cover: motivation, posture and dress, transcend your carpal tunnel syndrome without surgery, that kind of thing, but, really, he’s a hack. He sucks at all that stuff. Not bad at the ‘tooning’ stuff, but I got the names of some better practitioners, you ever think of polishing up a few engrams.”

  “You know where to find him?”

  “Easy enough. He leaves his card here. Maybe that’s how Muriel found him in the first place. We toss them out when we clean the desk, but one might still be back, there. Stop by on your way out and ask.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, you doing the shoes?”

  “Frankly, they’re making me lightheaded. Too much qi in my sinuses, maybe.” Bernal pulled his feet out, and the shoes fell to the carpet like reentering spacecraft.! “You wouldn’t happen to have something in an easy-wear sandal, would you? Size it for thick socks.”

  “Let me check.” The clerk sauntered off in a way that led Bernal to understand he wouldn’t be back.

  Bernal looked around for his own shoes and spotted them in a mesh basket extravagantly grounded by gold-and-silver cables in transparent insulation. A young woman with bone bumps on her cheekbones pulled them out for him. She also found him a bent business card that said NORBERT SPILLVAGEN, PERSONALITY ENHANCEMENT.

  “A lot of negative energy pools in this kind of shoes,” she said. Bernal noticed she wore latex gloves.

  He rubbed his socks on the carpet. As he reached for the shoes he brushed against her. A tiny spark hit her shoulder. She jumped back with a gasp.

  “Better check the leads on that mana drainage box,” he said. “I think it’s getting full.”

  8

  The lawn sloped and was bumpy to boot, but the two kids had set up an idiosyncratic arrangement of croquet hoops and were attempting to play. The older child, a girl with straight blond hair and a matching posture, tapped her ball. It wobbled and came to rest against a hoop’s edge.

  The boy, with curly dark hair but the same look of placid intensity as his sister, swung his mallet as if playing polo, and sent his ball crashing off into the untrimmed shrubbery by a neighbor’s garage. They both stared after it, saying nothing. After a few moments, the ball came back out from under a hanging rhododendron branch, rolling down the slope. It stopped against the wrong side of a goal stake.

  “I think you’re supposed to come hit me now,” the boy said.

  “No.” The girl reached into a bag lying on the grass. “I play another one.”

  “But you have to hit me.”

  “Not if I don’t want to.”

  The boy pouted. “Then I’ll put myself somewhere where you have to hit me.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  She stroked the new ball gently and this time made it through the first hoop. Afterward, however, the ball took a dogleg throug
h a pothole and ended up far to the left.

  “Excuse me.” Bernal paused by a particularly bright orange pickup truck in the driveway. “Is—”

  “Dad’s in the garage.” The boy didn’t even look at him, being intent on setting up another long-distance shot.

  The girl shaded her eyes against the morning sun and examined Bernal. She was reluctantly pretty, just at the point where the smooth course of her life was about to be disrupted by adolescence. “Be careful. He’s in the middle of something.”

  “He’s always in the middle of something,” the boy said.

  “Thanks.”

  ______

  “Muriel Inglis.” Norbert Spillvagen was a pudgy man with thinning hair. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a too-wide tie with gondoliers on it, and looked more like a radar antenna engineer than a therapist. Maybe he had a clientele who found the look of precise and obsolete knowledge comforting. “Maybe. I have a lot of clients. But what about you?” He eyed Bernal. “What do you feel you have lost? Aside from a fight, I mean.”

  Bernal put fingertips to his bruise. “Just an accident, Do people come to you because they feel they have lost something?”

  Spillvagen hooked a wheeled desk chair with his foot and pushed it over to Bernal. “Sure. We collect a bunch of stuff—knowledge, ideas, passions, hopes, fears—then end up losing it all as we go along. And we never seem topick up anything else. It’s a sad state of affairs.”

  “Yes,” Bernal said. “Yes, it is.”

  Spillvagen’s garage office, with its heavy metal desk, its Shop-Vac, and its filing cabinets, looked like the sort of place a retired man was sent by his wife to work on his “projects.” Star charts and astronomical photographs hung on the walls. A bulge-bellied telescope stood on a tripod with complicated motors to control its orientation.

  A menu with looping cowboy motifs—a lasso, a cowboy boot, a branding iron with a spaceship on it—from a restaurant named Near Earth Orbit stood precariously on top of the stacks of paper that covered the desktop.

  Spillvagen examined Bernal sympathetically. “We live our lives. We do what we do. Everything moves smoothly. Then ... we don’t even know how, but we lose ourselves. It’s easy to do. And we don’t feel fully alive, somehow. Those we know seem like poorly acted characters in a second-rate movie. Even the items around us seem like props rather than things we own. Does that sound familiar to you?”

  A little more than was comfortable. “I guess.”

  “Sometimes the people around you seem twodimensional, poorly realized. That’s when you recognize that those wooden characters some people complain about in movies and books are totally realistic. Most people we know, in fact, are flat: an interest or two, a couple of catch phrases, and a defining desk decoration.”

  “That’s a cynical attitude,” Bernal said. “What kind of people come to you for help?”

  “All kinds. We’ve all been dunked in the universal solvent of modern civilization. In a tribe, your evolutionary adapted role, your sense of self is always reinforced. Sometimes oppressively so. People remember who you were and expect you to fulfill the role you have. Modern society is the opposite. Everything is calculated to abrade your sense of self and then offer you items of various sorts to restore it.”

  “So is that what Muriel Inglis came here for? For ‘tooning’?”

  Spillvagen winced. “I know how you’re spelling that, just by the way you say it. I started with ‘tuning,’ like what you used to do to a car, so I’ll pretend that’s what you said.”

  “Maybe there’s a good reason for it. I hear that Muriel came out of here with her personality artificially distorted.”

  “I warn everyone that the procedure’s experimental”

  “For a lot of people,” Bernal said, “‘experimental just means ‘so potent that they don’t want you to know about it.’ ”

  “I should have talked to you before building my practice. But, experimental it is. So, sometimes your gain and saturation end up off. It’s a known risk. A dislike of heights leads to a panic attack on a stepladder. A liking for bicycling leads to saddle sores, a pointless upgrade to Dura-Ace shifters, a Tour de France marathon with a stack of DVDs, an unnatural fascination with Eddy Merckx. What do you claim happened to Muriel?”

  “She was impulsive and would confront people if she thought they weren’t being straight with her. She liked communication that was more mysterious than direct, In the last few weeks, she’s been completely off the scale on everything. I’m worried about her.”

  “Muriel didn’t come here because she was worried her personality was getting vague. Because she’d heard how good I was, down at the shoe store. And you’re not here because you think her personality isn’t vague enough. She kept slipping in questions, like they were about the treatment, but were really about my old job.”

  “I don’t think Muriel cared much about your old job.” Bernal knew better than to chase after it. Spillvagen was being a prima donna and would just clam up in a self-satisfied way if he did.

  “That what she told you?” Spillvagen’s hurt look confirmed that Bernal had picked the right approach.

  “No. She just never mentioned it.”

  “I used to work for a cryobank. Long Voyage. A couple of hundred frozen bodies and heads, waiting for resurrection. A decent-enough enterprise, fully bonded and insured, the works. That’s where I invented my methods of personality enhancement. People were preparing to get themselves frozen for a long journey to the luture. It’s a mission no one has the training for. It’s hard to keep yourself conscious and alive for that. The brain isn’t just a gadget. Well, maybe it is just a gadget, but we’ve put our personalities on top of the gadget’s functions. It’s not very secure. You don’t want to wake up fve hundred years from now only to have to start again from scratch because your personality did not survive the trip.”

  “I’m sure that idea was comforting to your customers.”

  Spillvagen scowled. “I did have problems with my employers. I was a counselor. I prepared people for their future lives. You have to recognize, you could emerge in an economy without money. Or a world without genders. Without sex at all. People might not even be human beings. You might be homeless, or a food source, or... who knows? You might find yourself fighting invading Mongol hordes.. . .”

  “I’m beginning to see why your supervisors might have been concerned.”

  “Listen, it’s all something you need to pay attention to. It’s not like a ride at Disneyland. I used to believe in the future. I did. I preached that gospel.” Spillvagen looked haggard, even a little deranged. “I had the faith. There are solutions. There are ways of taking care of those ancient spiritual problems, ways that are within our grasp. You can still find what I wrote, floating around the Internet: ’If you want to live forever, why die first?’ I was a transhumanist, a propagandist for the future, I believed in it.”

  “And now?”

  “And now I sit in my garage and try to find people’s personalities for them.” Before Bernal could say anything else, there was a knock at the door, and a woman with frosted hair, wearing a clingy denim dress, rolled in a cart with a coffee urn and some bagels on it.

  Norbert sighed. “Bernal, Melissa, the spousal unit.”

  “Hi,” she said. “You’re not here for a treatment.”

  “Melissa!”

  “Oh, don’t fool around, Norbie. I can tell.” She touched Bernal’s shoulder. “Do me a favor: get him involved in something. All he does now is sit around here chewingl over old stuff about Long Voyage. Oh, Norbie, speaking of that, I think she’s been around again.”

  “Who?” Spillvagen said.

  “Who else? That crazy lady with the uncle in the cryobank. What’s her name?”

  “Yolanda.”

  “Yes, her. She’s been walking around through the foxgloves. Clay knocked a ball over there. He and Honor saw her footprints. She wore heels! Here they’re just coming up, and she’s torn them up.”r />
  “I’ll bet it was Ripper.”

  “They say it wasn’t. They say he’s been tied up.”

  “Those people will' say anything, Melissa. Their son has pet weasels, for God’s sake. And I think I’ve seen a snake. Here they have a German shepherd the size of a buffalo, and raccoons still knock their garbage over. Morons. Dog owning is the new smoking. We’re about to realize it.”

  Melissa grinned at Bernal. She had uneven teeth and was cute, the way you always wanted your neighbor’s wife to be. “The Batchelors do have a nice party every summer.”

  She had the sparkle of a habitual flirt. He had to smile back. Bernal was slender and intense and occasionally befuddled. He had smooth skin, clean nails, hair that got unruly when he was thinking too hard, and smelled gently spicy. Women liked most of what he had to offer ind looked forward to fixing the rest. He wasn’t always sure what to do about that. Sometimes he was distracted and missed his chance. And sometimes he fell hard in love, revealed his puppy-dog devotion too clearly, and failed to provide the uncertainty any relationship needed to grow. Any of his, anyway.

  “It’s just an attempt to make us feel guilty for complaining about their stupid animals,” Spillvagen said. They are smarter than most people with annoying habits, I’ll give them that. Most people hide out when they have a barking dog or a sadistic child, get all sullen, threaten you, pee on your leg. These guys put on a Fourth ol July spread and invite the neighborhood. Plenty of beer. So everyone feels guilty about confronting them.”