While Julius Arnold was a far from attractive figure, his brief visit made me feel much better and I spent the next hour studying the literature he left with me. I assumed my position behind my desk, which at that time did not wobble, and read the pamphlets with great care, underlining sentences of particular interest. (I am always like that in new situations, meticulous, optimistic, enthusiastic. For instance, when I was in school, the highlight of the semester would always be the buying of new texts and new loose-leaf notebooks. I would pat them, sign them, put them in perfect order, ready for the months ahead. After that it was all downhill.) The pamphlets were vague but well done. NESTER, I noted, was born in 1904 (the same year, I remembered, that Pavlov received the Nobel Prize). It had been a small organization, cloistered and secret. The literature was so vague that I only got glimmerings of facts that flashed like golden fish in murky waters. NESTER, it said, had always been a secret organization. That much I knew before. It was one of the main attractions. It was secret, slightly subterranean, but authoritative, well financed. I loved that. The real meat of the literature was an explanation of why they couldn’t say anything substantive in the pamphlets. They could, they said, show pictures of the numerous recreational facilities, the sophisticated scientific technology, the living quarters, the officers … but it would be an unnecessary risk of the security and tranquillity of the NESTER compound, the NESTER quest.
I leaned back in my swivel chair—glad to see that it did not tip and lurch as my chair at the university had—and took quiet pleasure in my new job. I was certain of having made a brilliant choice. I thought of NESTER being secret—how nice that was. Secret. Shhh, don’t tell anyone but I’m revolutionizing the world. Oh, that was pleasing.
Soon there was a knock at the door and old Julius Arnold, accompanied by the man I was later to know as Tom Simon, was there to take me to the auditorium.
During the short walk we, or rather they, talked excitedly about a new kind of exercise belt that was supposed to take an inch a day off one’s waistline. They had heard of and tried many such belts but this particular one was supposed to be the finest, it was actually supposed to work.
The auditorium was huge, with a domed green ceiling. Instinctively, I put my hand to my throat as I entered. The air was cold, very cold. There were hundreds of souls there, coming from all walks of life. Some looked like finicky, asthmatic geniuses, others had the bearings of plumbers or trapeze artists. All, I assumed, were necessary and, in their own way, deserved to be there.
The seats were made of stone. Long white stone benches that had been carved in rows accommodated thirty people with proper indentations where one actually sat. I was charmed at the sight of them but, as I mentioned, it was very chilly in that huge domed room and sitting on stone tended to make matters worse.
The auditorium was filled nearly to capacity, so Julius, Tom, and myself had to sit separately. I found a single space near the front. To my left was a huge, red-haired, very mild looking man wearing a green jumpsuit with NESTER embroidered over his breast pocket. On my right was a rather beautiful young woman wearing outrageous quantities of make-up and a pigeon-foot-pink mini skirt from which her ample legs rushed in all their fuzzy splendor. It was amusing to survey the room and see who my fellow NESTER- ites were. I decided to turn around and take a good look at whoever it was that sat behind me—I had picked up some of his conversation and he seemed to be talking about DNA, my old specialty. But as I turned, the lights went out suddenly and I, along with everyone else, was cast into darkness.
We all stayed like that, cast into darkness, for a good minute and a half. Then thick green curtains parted at the front of the auditorium, revealing a supernaturally white movie screen. Music filled the hall, a joyful crescendo of trumpets and violins. What followed was a fairly routine, almost tedious film that extolled the wonders of NESTER. There were charts whose thrusting upward lines clearly described the remarkable financial progress of the organization. There were brief statements made by two members of the previous Presidential cabinet in which they commended NESTER’s work and looked forward to the day when such an organization could exist openly in our great nation. (This wafted an audible oooooh through the enthralled hundreds.) What else? There were pictures of the location where the NESTER compound now sat, pictures taken before the buildings had been erected. A field of grass, the crumbling remains of an ancient well, a skinny red dog that nosed around worrisomely. “And out of this … ” the narrator extolled, and next we were presented with a picture of the cream white compound that we now lived in, as if it had been inexplicably beckoned by the moon.
Soon, if not soon enough, the movie ended and the lights in the auditorium were restored. Over the speakers that had carried the music and the soundtrack of the film, a voice announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Ira Robinson.” There was a very warm burst of applause.
“Well,” began Ira with a folksiness that rather surprised me, “I see a lot of familiar faces here. I’m always glad for these get-togethers. It’s good to have a chance, once in a while, for us to see who we are.” (I straightened up in my seat and pushed my chin forward. I hoped, for some reason, that Ira would look at me as he spoke. I felt a little isolated.) “Now the dynamics of our organization here don’t allow us to really get to know each other and, in the course of your hardworking and demanding days, some of you may lose sight of the fact that this is a large group of people working together toward a goal. So I thought we would all just sound off and introduce ourselves. Let’s just start from the front here: stand up, tell us your name and where you work. I guess it’ll be a little hard to keep track since there’s so many of us, but I think it’ll help.” He pointed to an elderly, very fat man in a white suit. “Bill, why don’t you start off?”
For the next forty-five minutes, two hundred of the chosen stood up and screamed out their names.
That was a long time ago and I wish to repent. I am a brain thief and I am no kid. My heart is heavy, my step slow; I am no kid. I am ahead of my time and request, sir, permission to sit down while the rest of the world catches up. I am the evil genius. I am the Enigma of the Airport. I am Sea to Shining Sea Man. Come here my lovelies and look. I am the rain beating on the roof.
2
SOON, SOON ENOUGH I will leak my secrets. It is about ten in the evening now, as I sit writing furtively, fearsomely into this thick notebook with thin lined paper. On the outskirts of the city … The city? I’ve neglected to mention where I’m living now—these security precautions I promised to observe when I first began this confession interest me less and less. NESTER and I are located several miles outside Boston, Massachusetts. Perhaps you’ve guessed. Or perhaps these memoirs are already common knowledge as you read them. Or perhaps I’ve been found face down and bloated, floating in the filthy Charles River, an unknown man. Or perhaps I’ve had a burst of drunken courage and sold this searing exposé to the Public Broadcasting Corporation and have been a key witness in some spectacular Senate investigation. (Though I think this unlikely. Who in the Senate would dare expose my superiors? Even if I would.) What I really plan to do is smuggle this confession into, say, northern Europe, contact some courageous publisher, and have it printed under an assumed name. Then … then I will be hidden in the Danish woods, hosted gloriously by a beautiful blond ex-socialist, to whom I shall teach English. But there will only be momentary repose and for years, forever, my life will be a series of disappearances and reappearances along a vast network of underground railways, always in the loving, carnal care of people who admire my selfless sacrifice of personal safety. (“Personal safety,” I will say, and make an ambiguous gesture.)
Now, so I will deserve the hoopla I like to think awaits me, I will tell you a little about how NESTER works. It’s really quite extraordinary in some aspects. In others it’s as banal as the Gestapo. We employ phone taps, we intercept mail, we spy with high-powered telescopes, we employ an unscrupulous dentist who puts radio transmitters in certain patients
’ fillings. We wear tan trench coats and follow people down crowded boulevards, we rub up against them in rush hour subways, we panhandle them, we falsely represent charitable organizations and solicit people right in their own living rooms. We pose as insurance and reference book salesmen, we dress up as scout masters and try to sell raffle-tickets, we pose in official uniforms of all sorts—anything to get to people and do our nasties. We even have brief, unbelievably intense affairs with them, if necessary.
Less banal than this, we have our crews of reality synthesizers: the camera and sound crew, those celluloid ghosts, those human shadows. Our understanding of a subject is based largely on the raw material presented us by the film crew. It is quite interesting and very valuable for us to see how the subject walks, gestures, sits, smiles, sleeps, defecates, makes love, jumps back in total terror. We become used to him. He becomes part of our world, our mythic present. In some cases, in the peculiar glow of our offices, he becomes our best friend, the object of our most baroque passions.
The third point in NESTER’s six-prong fork is the surgical team. NESTER surgery is done in some undesignated place—but sometimes a low moan, a squeal, or even a deafening antiseptic hush makes me believe the operations are taking place right here, beneath me, or above me, or is it there, behind some hidden panel, some sliding door. The surgeons are the most hideous and necessary part of the NESTER approach to information seeking, for without their insertion of the microelectrode, without their utterly scientific snooping and snipping, without their stereotaxic wizardry, we would be without the necessary neuronal data. We would be, in short, out of business.
The surgeons would have no one to operate on (think of it!) were it not for our fourth division, the Force Recruiters. This collection of paroled criminals, ex-prize fighters, wildly aggressive immigrants, and ex- servicemen is trained by our Violence Coordinator, NESTER’s laconic label for perky Miss Mitchell whom, as you know, I would like to lay. The Force Recruiters, or, as the cafeteria comedians sometimes call them, the Heavies, capture our chosen subjects and bring them to us for the simple, very simple, quick, very quick, painless, entirely painless insertion. They bring them to us. For the insertion. They hit them on the top (or, perhaps, the side) of the head and stuff the limp, soon to be violated body into a long black car, which in some cases is dark maroon. The Heavies, while unquestionably loyal to NESTER, exhibit unconcealed contempt for everyone else in the organization, except the men at the very top, whoever they may be.
After the microelectrode is placed in the subject’s brain, he is hypnotized and all memory traces of the brief trauma are erased. The hypnotists act as a liaison between the surgeons, Heavies, and my slice of the NESTER pie, the psychologists. (The hypnotists, or the Trauma Erasers, do an impeccable job of concealing from the conscious mind what has befallen the brain; but good hypnotists are few and in most cases we are left with no other recourse but to blot out the incident by giving the subject a rather pungent dose of electroconvulsive shock.)
While my specialty is experimental psychology, the scientific portion of NESTER cannot be contained by any one discipline. We have some of the most prominent behaviorists in the world, more than one Zen psychiatrist, an old student of Jung, dozens of psychoanalysts of Freudian or Adlerian persuasions, neurochemists, and a French pharmacologist who was hired especially to deal with euphoric drugs with which we can introduce microelectrodes into the brains of younger subjects, thus saving us the expense of surgery. It is our collective function to give meaning to the vast bulk of data coming from our subject’s brain. In some cases we may be analyzing changing resting axon potentials, or we may be doing a quick run-down of the somatic sensory system, or comparisons of photo pigments—or we may deal with less technical information like conversations, photographs, slips of the tongue. While we can tell whether a particular dream our subject is having is pleasant or not, we cannot, with any great confidence, ascertain the exact content of the dream. Dream language is too idiosyncratic, too personal. However, when the subject becomes familiar enough to us, certain educated guesses can be made. So to my way of thinking, we are the most important part of the outfit, the most diversified. (Even in the midst of my revulsion I cannot contain my insane pride.)
The sixth prong is the computer boys, who, like the rest of us, consider themselves the most important part of NESTER. I see the computer as a bank that saves what the rest of us earn, and it is only a certain Calvinist craziness that leads some to believe that the saving of a thing is more important than the thing itself. But I can’t blame those nice crew cuts for feeling the way they do about their giant machine, for it is conceivably the finest ever built. It extrapolates and reclassifies as fast as a rabbit’s heartbeat and is wired with more interconnections than the human brain—which is saying quite a bit, since there are about twelve billion nerve cells in a man’s brain and the possible interconnections between them are greater than all of the atomic particles in the universe.
Actually, there is a seventh division in the organization, NESTER’s “apostrophes,” as it were. These are the miscellaneous employees, who are, in fact, the largest single group. They are technicians and assistants. The disgruntled housewife who now reads an oscilloscope, the Hungarian handwriting expert who used to work in nightclubs, several feisty old Irishmen who work as guards. We have a middle-aged woman who, I’m told, is a disciple of B. F. Skinner and who runs experiments on specially bred rodents to see if the data we’ve robbed from our human subjects can be used to predict animal behavior. Someone, somewhere, has designs on everything that breathes. Aside from these people, the “apostrophes” consist of field representatives, who recruit new talent into the fold and sell NESTER’s services to dignitaries of all kinds—congressmen, chairmen of the board, manufacturers, foreigners, anyone who’ll pay. Also in this category are the administrators, the supervisors, the cafeteria help, the scrubwomen, paymaster, secretaries—all carefully chosen, all security-checked, all with life-time contracts. Whether they know it or not.
So that’s how it works. It may not mean too much to you now. A little abstract, but you get the drift. Sleuths, camera and sound crews, surgeons, Force Recruiters, scientists, computer programmers and operators, and the possessives. As you have already discovered, the purpose of NESTER is to get inside—deep inside—the human brain. Oh, poor delicate little beast! We pierce the pons, maul the medulla, heist the hypothalamus. Object: control. Object: manipulation. Object: power. They are brain thieves and I wish to repent.
For my first two months here I was a Missing Person, but now I am dead. As soon as NESTER was certain my talents were valuable they killed me. I have been buried, lightly eulogized, briefly mourned, and virtually forgotten. This little prank is played on most of us here. I was aware of this possibility about a week after moving in, but I figured my life on the outside had been so uncomplicated, so barren, that it wouldn’t be necessary in my case.
Apparently, it was necessary. It was nothing they discussed with me, nothing we planned together. One day, over coffee in a Styrofoam cup, I was reading the Boston Globe and I noticed my name on page 11.
UNIVERSITY PROF DEAD
IN STORROW CRASH
A man identified as Paul Galambos, a professor of psychology at——University in——, was found early this morning near the Mystic Bridge. He was alone in a car that apparently had gone out of control. Although the body was badly burned, positive identification was made through Mr. Galambos’ documents which escaped the flames that engulfed him and his late model car. Mr. Galambos had been reported missing from the——Hospital, where he disappeared more than two months ago. He was in the hospital being treated for injuries sustained during a fall.
I was furious. I went straight to Mr. Worthington, who turned out not to be so inaccessible after all, and, waving the newspaper in his face, I demanded to know why I was dead, why I had not been consulted, why why why.
“It is common procedure,” he said, with an elegant wave. “And your
wife had hired a private detective to look for you.”
“She had?” I found that hard to believe.
“That also is common procedure.” He smiled.
“I don’t believe Lydia would spend a dime looking for me,” I blurted, resting my hand on his gleaming desk.
“That is a conundrum you are free to pursue on your own time,” he answered coldly. He glanced at my hand as if it were something he planned to wipe off his desk. Then he looked at me. “Oh, but look how unhappy you are,” he crooned. He rose from his deep chair and walked over to me. He clapped his hand on my shoulder and then sat on the edge of his desk. He crossed his legs—a slash of white appeared between his pants cuff and the tops of his black socks. “Look at the positive side,” he suggested. “You are now more firmly than ever a member of our team. We have already raised your pay scale. You can double-check this with accounts, but I believe something on the order of three hundred and fifty more dollars a month are being put into your account. And there’ll be another salary review in three months. Three months! Not a year, not six months. Not bad, hmmm?” He slid off the desk and walked around his office, shaking his narrow shoulders within his plush blue jacket. “We don’t ask you to join us in discovering a new world so we can make your life unpleasant. Your life is, I trust, quite pleasant. And as you become more used to it and become richer and better at your work, your life will increase in its pleasantness. You are already what is known as a well-to-do man. You are paid handsomely and your expenses are virtually nonexistent. Someday you will be rich. Perhaps you will take your money one day and live in a foreign country—I often think of it for myself—at which time you will be uncommonly rich. But that isn’t all, is it? You are gaining knowledge. You are on board a ship of destiny. A marvelous and unheard-of adventure. We are making everything obsolete. We are discovering America.” He stood now in front of me and rested his pale spotted hand on my shoulder. “That’s what we’re doing. Discovering America, brain by brain.”
Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball Page 3
