“What ho, Paul,” he said softly, molding his voice precisely to the dimensions of the room, like a cardinal murmuring vespers in a cathedral.
Unsure why he was with me, I bounced the ball back to him. He caught it on the first hop and, in one easy motion, tossed it into the hoop, a perfect swish that scarcely disturbed the netting. The ball smacked to the floor. “What brings you?” I asked, watching the ball bounce, first energetically, then lazily, and then exhaustedly.
He answered with what seemed an obvious lie. “I often come here.”
I didn’t pursue it—he was certainly not dressed for the exercise room, but pointing this out would not have been wise.
“Do you come here often?” he asked, still smiling.
“This is my second time,” I answered in utter frankness.
“It’s important to keep in shape,” said Mr. W., “and it’s important to relax. The Fitness Chamber is a good place to accomplish both. Get the ball.”
Expressing what glimmer of independence I felt in his presence with a quick shrug, I shagged the ball. “Let’s see it,” he said, clapping his hands. In my nervousness, I threw the ball past him. He shook his head and chased it down as it thundered haphazardly against the back wall. He caught the ball and slapped at it until it bounced coherently. Then, taking it in both hands, he tossed it underhand the length of the small court and it fell through the hoop. “Hey!” he called. “Not bad!”
I retrieved the ball and, not wishing to be outdone but aware that I had been, tried an impossible hook shot, lofting the ball over my left shoulder with my back to the basket—better to miss a tricky shot than to muff an easy one. The neutral red ball hit the top of the backboard with a dreadful thwang.
“What kind of shot is that?” asked Worthington, tracking down the ball. “Why is it that when things get difficult people want to surrender all control?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I answered.
After a moment’s harshness, his features were once again benign. “Well,” he said, tossing the ball in front of him and catching it between his outspread palms, “these are the kinds of questions I often ask myself.” He feinted a shot at the basket and quickly passed the ball to me, bouncing it off my chest. “Sorry,” he said expressionlessly, retrieving. Walking toward me, the ball tucked under his arm—straining the button on his suit nearly to the bursting point—he indicated a wooden bench near the barbells and said, “Let’s sit down for a minute.”
I walked a respectful and involuntary half pace behind him, wondering if the old man was going to require me to perform feats of strength with the ponderous black weights. A brief fantasy of being pinned red-faced and hysterical beneath the malice of a quarter-ton barbell and Mr. Worthington leaning forward on the bench saying, “Now lean into it, boy. Give it all you have.”
“I don’t believe in weightlifting,” I said, as soon as we sat down.
Mr. Worthington nodded vacantly and said, “Oh.”
Compulsively pressing my disadvantage, I continued in the same vein. “Weightlifting develops the muscles in unnatural and useless ways. I find bulging muscles disgusting. They restrict movement and the moment you stop working out they turn to blubber.”
“Don’t worry,” Mr. W. said.
“What shouldn’t I worry about?” I countered, ever vigilant.
“Your duties don’t include the lifting of weights,” he said with a knowing laugh. “In fact, I’m surprised you make use of our exercise facilities. Quite surprised.”
“I used to jog.”
“Did you?” he asked. He seemed as if he were truly surprised, as if I’d told him I once taught sky diving. “What else did you use to do?”
“Sit-ups, from time to time.” I slapped my spongy gut.
“Did you ever read the Bible?” he asked, leaning forward and resting his chin in a spidery bridge of locked fingers.
“When I was an undergraduate I took a course in the Bible as Literature.”
“Did you? Now, that’s fascinating.” He straightened up and leaned back. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and, stretching his slender legs in front of him, crossed his ankles. “Did you ever notice how different the Biblical conception of an angel is from our own?”
“I don’t have much conception of angels,” I said with a hint of sarcasm and languor.
“Oh, of course you do. What do you think of when you think of an angel?”
I felt the kind of fear and impatience at his questions one might feel upon being accosted by a violent stranger with a terrible stutter. “I don’t know,” I said. Was he trying to press my already overtaxed imagination to the limits? I wondered. “I think of … some drag queen with a muslin gown and a lute.”
“That’s the best you can do?”
I closed my eyes. “Or a beautiful, tall woman—a Dane or something—with heavy robes and a dove perched on her arm.”
“And is she kind?” he asked in a tight little voice, grasping my arm.
I almost fell off the bench. “Yes, yes,” I said, practically giggling with embarrassment and fear. There was no doubt in my mind that I was the fool in some elaborate trick.
“You see?” he said, clasping his hands together and smiling. “This is a wholly contemporary conception. A mixture of cartoons and greeting cards. But in olden times an angel was no soft-hearted spirit, no fairy godmother. Angels, Paul, are terrible. They are most awful things. That business about terrible swift swords is much more like it than harps and halos. Read your Bible. Or any real spiritual document. Most cases of divine intervention have been anything but comfortable for the humans who have been involved. Angels are usually illogical and harsh.” He fell suddenly silent.
“I didn’t know you were a student of religion,” I said after some time had passed.
Mr. Worthington looked quickly at me, as if I had disturbed a reverie. “Hmmm?”
“I didn’t know you were a student of religion,” I said, having no choice but to repeat what I wished I hadn’t said in the first place.
He shrugged. “Well, I should think you know very little about me, Paul,” he said. He slapped his knees and stood up. He glanced at the sloping track above us and ran his tongue over his back teeth. And for one ice-cold, numinous moment I expected him to spread his old arms and, with a toss of his head and a flutter of feet, rise to the rubber runway like a long gray balloon. My hands clenched the edge of the bench. I felt way out of my depth, like a man in a rented rowboat in the middle of the ocean. I wished I were alone. I felt awkward and thick and ungainly.
He turned slowly toward me and said, “Well, I’ve got to toddle along now.”
3
I WANT EVERYTHING on my own terms. As a child in Pennsylvania I would stare hatefully at my teachers, longing for the day when I could sit behind one of those big blond desks and make a new generation of students as miserable as I was being made. Years later, I was teaching psychology in a very expensive center of higher learning and feeling that my goals had been puny and undistinguished. It was then that my mind began to drift toward the grandiose. I considered spying, advertising, show business, remarriage to an exotic woman, really anything that might make my life more distinctive, unique. Then, of course, along came NESTER and I opted for that …
Anyhow, the conquest of space has left mankind in a particularly demoralized state of mind. An interesting phrase: state of mind. As if consciousness were a government, sending out edicts to the subservient senses. It is, as a matter of fact, as difficult to alter consciousness as it is to upset a political or social order, and the aftermath is equally authoritarian. And the labor pains as mankind ambles toward extinction … you must, please, forgive this babbling but, and here I must write with my pen just barely touching the paper, there is someone outside my door. I’m sure of it. A foot scrapes. Heavy breathing. As I was saying, nostalgia is a sexual problem. Time, of course, is a sea serpent swallowing itself. Remember? Don’t you recall? These are things about which we both agree. Y
ou and I, Contessa. We have spent a lovely amber afternoon discussing these matters …
They’ve left. My heart leaps and beats like an untamed beast in a prison of bone. I am being spied upon. Some supersonic sleuth is detecting my pen’s scratching across these pages and he is attempting to decipher the treasonous content of my words. Excuse me for a moment while I collect myself, have a drink, take off my maroon silk robe which hangs so limply over my body, in mourning for its lost belt. Quite a nice robe, really. These mail-order houses aren’t half-bad.
I’m back. I’ve been away longer than the proximity of these paragraphs suggests. Had that drink and another. Sat on the edge of my bed. Rocking. My head in my hands. Knowing that somewhere in the awfulness of this compound I was being tapped, taped, and tabulated. Oh, the old Triple T! I ransacked my room, looking for, perhaps, a hidden microphone. A tiny, tucked-away tape recorder. A concealed camera. Any evidence that I was being spied upon. I tore off my bedspread, emptied my dresser drawers, shook out an entire tin of talcum powder …
Now it’s late, very late. I must be at work in five hours. I am pulling at my hair. There must be something I can do. Perhaps the gymnasium is still open and I can take a sauna bath or swim some laps in the bluest pool I have ever seen. Or perhaps I’ll check into the infirmary and demand a handful of mind-pulverizing barbiturates. My Venetian blinds are open. I lean my forehead against the thick, unmovable glass window. Across the courtyard are two windows still yellow with electric light. Rather than giving me solace or slight hope, as they have in the past, they fill me with fresh, damp fear.
A very rough morning. Something wrong with the ventilation system and instead of the usual perfect-plus temperature control, an acrid vapor snaked lazily through the bright aluminum vents on my chamber ceiling and I awoke to the odor of rotten meat. Or perhaps it was burning rubber. I’m not sure, the olfactory memory is the most fallible. My eyelids flew open and my eyes floated in their almond-shaped orbits, stinging and wet. My eyes did not drift without purpose—in fact, I never do anything without purpose. They were, my eyes that is, still looking for the concealed camera, some ground-glass peeping Tom. I went so far in my belief that I was at that moment being spied upon that I thought the eyes in my favorite painting—a lovely and remarkable restrained Van Gogh portrait of a youth in a blue hat—were not the eyes Vincent had painted but were the peering, obscene orbs of some NESTER flunky, that the spy had snipped the original eyes away and was standing behind the portrait checking me out. Me. And my every move. The notion was absurd but not so easy to dismiss. I thought I noticed a slight shifting of the eyes. Perhaps a blink. I leaped out of bed, made a few meaningless gestures of diversion, like stretching my arms, touching my toes once, twice—groan—a third time, running in place for something less than thirty seconds. Then unable to further subdue my suspicions, I raced over to the painting and placed my finger tips on the eyes. Those blue, kind, canvas eyes. Not the furious gray jellies I had expected to poke. Those indelible eyes. And oh, how I wish I knew that boy, with his blue hat and wispy mustache. That neutral, interesting boy. How I wish I had even one friend in the world. Sorry, folks.
I walked away from the painting, momentarily relieved. Then, with little warning, I became that hideously hidden, relentless recording camera and, seeing myself in the third person, I laughed inwardly at my antics. What’s he going to do next, I asked about myself. Calmed by the distance afforded by irony, I breathed a little easier and asked myself again: What’s next? Is he going to fall to his knees and start hunting again for microscopic microphones? I had to laugh at this. And continued to laugh as I fell to my knees and looked for the mike, that wire, that shred of evidence. I hunted around, testing a slight crack in the wall near my desk, jammed my fingers into crannies, crevices, corners, nooks, nicks, everywhere. And thought, with a nostalgic throb, of those long-gone days before I was an important man and a bug was something you tried to kill as you spent languid summer evenings discussing sex and taxes on some bore’s front porch. Those fleeting, forgotten evenings, when one could still be reconciled with one’s wife, when one’s career was not in shambles, and all there was to do was suck peacefully on the lime dragged from the bottom of one’s gin and tonic and wonder what was the hour. And oh, that young man with the wispy mustache and canvas eyes and interesting blue hat. I would like to have a hat something like that. And, goddamn it, I’ll get one next time we go to Boston. I’ll get one exactly like that. Mark my words. I’ll drag my cronies through a maze of haberdasheries until I find one. And when our day in town is over I’ll be wearing it when the car brings us back to work, wearing it as a symbol of defiance that only I’ll understand.
A lime green light over my bed blinked on and off and on and off and on on on, signaling me to my office, where apparently I was wanted.
No need, really, to describe my feelings as I took the elevator down three flights and walked through the endlessly echoing corridor leading to my office. My brain seemed poised between the possibilities of catatonia and epilepsy. I made certain I could account for every hour of the past few days. I don’t know what good I thought such information would do me, but there was something calming about so cleverly organizing my immediate past.
After eons of agony I reached my office. I stood before it, breathing deeply, trying to manufacture an occupied look to put across my face. I couldn’t hold it so I settled for vaguely curious. I opened the frosted glass door and saw, sitting on the edge of my strange desk, Tom Simon, his face tense and vindictive. As soon as he saw me he asked, “What time is it?” I looked at my Omega—brand-new—and told him it was 9:40. “I thought so,” he said with a courteous smile that tended to emphasize the insidious rudeness of his question. “For a while I thought my watch was off.” He showed me his Cartier watch. I must learn how to spend my money. “Well, don’t worry,” he quickly added. “I won’t mention it to anyone.” He smiled and waited for gratitude to flood from me. Oh, thank you, Tom, I was tempted to say in my most caustic and effective manner, I am torrentially grateful to you. When he saw I was going to say nothing—in fact, I merely stared at him, the door not yet closed behind me—he went on to say that I had better watch it, however. “Most of those guys in management are sticklers about punctuality.”
“Well, come in, come in,” he said with peevish amusement, his open hand extended in my general direction. I came in. Sat at my desk and pretended to be interested in some stray papers left from the evening before. He waited for a moment, sensing, with uncharacteristic generosity, that I had some composure to gather. My eyes scanned some photostats of intercepted letters. And he waited. I decided to say nothing. If he has something to say, I thought, let him say it. No prompting from me.
Weary of my pause, he began, “You know your work has received a great deal of attention. Believe me. We may be a big organization but we realize we’re only as good as the individuals working here. Without individual effort and achievement NESTER wouldn’t go this far,” he said, describing some tiny bit of space with his thumb and forefinger. My blood began to beat at a slower pace. I had that trustworthy animal sense that this encounter was not a prelude to my ruin. “You in particular are being watched.” (Oh-oh.) “Your work is considered to be of outstanding excellence.” (Ah.) “Of course I only get this secondhand, since my position doesn’t permit me contact with your work.” He made a self-deprecatory shrug, which he undoubtedly felt he could afford since he was making more money than I. “But I am told that you can sense instinctively the ways in which your findings can be used practically. In the real world. Half the psychs here have such an unbelievably sterile approach to this business.” And here he laughed, assuming that we held the same opinion about absolutely everything. “They send in reports that, well, they’re just that. Reports. Lists of numbers, graphs, diagrams. But no creative extra. They leave that to the big shots.” Another laugh. For the hell of it, I joined him. “Or the computer,” he went on. “Now I’m not knocking the computer. Magic M
artha—you guys still call her that?—certainly uses those old facts and figures in the most amazing way. But nothing in this world or the next can replace human effort, the extra ummph, the sudden idea.” He pointed to the orange and magenta sign on my north wall, IMAGINATION: THE BIG PLUS.
I was feeling better. I was feeling an absurd and delightful sense of relief that is only possible when your nerves have been stretched to their extreme. I resented the icy terror that had gripped me a few minutes before and, by association, resented Tom Simon for bringing it on. I stared at him contemptuously, which I knew at that point I could get away with. It galled me that a raving mediocrity could have found such an important place in the NESTER structure. And it galled me even more that he saw Mr. Worthing- ton ten times as much as I would, ever. Tom at his best was innocuous. He would blend into your mood like an invisible, odorless cream. I picked up a Bic ballpoint—damn it, I’m going to invest in some really swell pens, some twenty-five-dollar jobs, mono- grammed—and, in the manner of the go-getter I was being taken for, tapped absently with it on my desk top. Causing it to wobble. (Why didn’t it wobble when he sat on it, with his one hundred and eighty plus pounds?) “Well, Tom, what brings you here? You know what they say about compliments before coffee … ” I forced a loud laugh, knowing full well that he’d join me. He’d never be one to wrinkle a rapport.
“Compliments before coffee,” he said, laughing. “That’s cute. No, I didn’t come here to tell you how grand you are. Mr. W. asked that I give you this personally.” He took out a long, lime green envelope from the inside pocket of his dark blue blazer (Harvard crest on the breast pocket) and put it in my hand. I dropped it in front of me as if it were radioactive. Then I signed a receipt for it—the cursed dread racing like a demon express through bone canals, causing my hand and everything beneath it to shake. Tom tore off the yellow carbon of the receipt and handed it to me. Then he said good-bye briskly. His role finished, his little show all over. Good-bye, Tom.
Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball Page 5
