Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball

by Scott Spencer

  I took the elevator down to the computer center and found the next elevator, with Mr. Worthington’s initial, which would take me the rest of my descent. Unfortunately, I had no electromagnetic doodad with which to open the doors and no sooner did I ponder that than the doors slid miraculously open and who should emerge but a small, European-looking man whom I could have sworn was Carl Stein. I stared at him and he seemed more than faintly surprised to see me—but maybe he was merely a stranger taken aback by my hot stare. He wore a top coat and a hat and everything happened so quickly. How could it have been Stein?

  But I did not ponder. My foremost thought was to catch the elevator doors before they closed. Succeeding in this, I leaned against the wall and scrunched my feet into the fur-carpeted floor. Lights flashed on and off. The elevator reached its destination, discharged me, and I went directly to the speeding yellow car which would carry me the length of the chill tunnel to Mr. W.’s lair. Again, I enjoyed the ride.

  Miss Andrews spotted me from her glass cubicle and her features did nothing to suppress the alarm she felt upon seeing me. Not wanting to give her time to react or concoct, I leaped from the Krazy Kar and bounded forward. “I want to see Mr. Worthington,” I said, rushing her. Before she could answer, I turned and saw the door leading to his inner office. Abandoning fear, sense, and self-preservation, I threw it open and entered.

  Mr. W. sat at his desk, his hands behind his head, and he seemed to be breathing rather heavily. His face was damp and for a moment it seemed as if he’d just been weeping, but, looking more closely and coming a little closer to my senses, I realized he had merely washed his face. “I’m sorry to burst in,” I said, quickly establishing both my lowliness and culpability.

  He merely nodded.

  “But there’s something I need to know,” I continued. “I just received some upsetting information.”

  “What have you heard, Paul?”

  “Someone told me that the weekly reports were going to be burned.”

  “And?”

  “And?” I shook my head. “I thought you should know.”

  Mr. Worthington sighed and leaned forward onto his desk. He looked as if he were about to say something but then he raised his hand and pressed his fingers against his eyes. He seemed to be mumbling to himself.

  “What’s that, Mr. Worthington?” I asked.

  He looked up at me. “With what agonizing slowness do people change. With what thunderous stupidity and vanity do they live their days.”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Worthington,” I said in my best teen-age voice.

  “Please, Paul, leave me alone. This is one of my sad days. This is one of my throw-in-the-towel days.”

  “But what about the reports?”

  “I’m aware of what happens in these offices, Paul. Far more aware than you are. The time when you come bursting in here to tell me what’s going on is a long way off.”

  “Are you telling me that I work up those reports just to feed some damn fire?”

  He rose slowly from his chair and stood behind his desk with his hands at his side. Not quite looking at me, he said, “Of course not, Paul. Why would I permit such a thing?” He folded his hands, raised his eyebrows, and tilted his head to the side. “Now, please. I need silence and solitude and I need it now. And you, I am sure you have much to do. We have given you enough to keep three men busy. We’ll talk again. Soon.” As if on cue, his phone rang and he picked it up quickly. “Hello?” he said into the receiver.

  I stood there for a few moments, working my jaw back and forth and trying to formulate one piercing question that would open an avenue to that old man, that cart filled with reports, that gentleman with the overcoat and the uncanny resemblance to the former Carl Stein. But at the same time there was a mixture of humming and ringing in my ears, my mouth was so dry it felt as if I had been chewing on a wad of cotton, and there seemed a good possibility I might collapse in a quivering, confused heap at any moment. So, rather than make any more of a display of myself, I turned on my heel. “Wait a minute, now. Just slow down,” Mr. Worthington said. I turned around with a start, but he was talking to whoever it was on the other end of the line.

  9

  I AWOKE TODAY and how pure and clear my life seemed. How shabby and hesitant I had been up until now. It is no longer a matter for conjecture: I am not much longer for this life. My time with NESTER is drawing to a close. I washed my face and looked in the mirror. Behind that mirror may be cameras, my toothbrush may be a microphone, every inch of my biologic territory may be at this very moment totally overrun by information-seeking hordes, carrying away the bounty of my secret self. I smiled at myself in the mirror above the sink, letting the toothpaste fall carelessly from my mouth. With a haircut, a shave, and a conservative tie I would be more than ready to testify before that quaking congressional committee.

  In the meantime, I have developed talents of my own. Yes. I will not be easy prey. I have learned to create a counterpunctual screen for my most compromising thoughts. Even blatant brain thievery would fail to discern what I am thinking about. For instance, I may be thinking about what a miserable creep Tom Simon is—not that I would give him any thought, but let’s just toss that out for an example. Well, simultaneously with the formation of that attitude I am reciting the results of classical experiments in neurophysiology or simply counting to 99 by threes. In the forefront of my consciousness is always some diverting bit of irrelevance, while the thoughts that are most vital to me are like shadows on the water, sensed more than seen. My brain has become a cryptogram, opaque and impossible for the malicious probings of your average brain thief. As I write these very words I am deeply engrossed in a slew of innocuous childhood memories, having to do with bicycles and biscuits and frosty Thanksgiving afternoons. Everything I want to say is stored in my fingertips, is beeping in the marrow of my bones, and all my brain needs to do is direct the elementary pull and tug of muscle necessary to move my pen.

  I must write very slowly. I shudder to think this may be all illegible. That I will be found, monstrous and dead, in the Charles River and all the inquest will turn up is this notebook filled with indecipherable scrawlings. There is very little light. I am taking extreme caution. We are saying our prayers and Grandfather said his eyes were turning cold, his eyes were freezing right in their sockets. I am under my blankets, lying on my stomach. There is a crack of light to my left where I have raised the blanket about a quarter of an inch. The only other light is the luminous face of my wrist watch which I move down the page as I write this.

  The final problem is that of audio detection. No matter how light my touch, there is a certain sound that a pen makes when it glides, no matter how gracefully, over paper and I must conceal this sound. So I am under the blankets, I am writing by the luminous face of my wrist watch—with not enough light actually to read my words but sufficient glow to make certain that I am writing on the lines of my ruled paper—and to cover the tiny hiss of pen on paper I am humming to myself. Rock-a-byes, hit tunes, nursery rhymes, anything with a simple lilting melody. Somewhere unseen eyes, unseen ears are taking all this in. They see me in my dark room, huddled beneath my blankets. I am projected on the screen to their left. They are wearing earphones and they hear I am humming, la-la-la-ing. They probably take me for crazy. All of my cousins had bicycles before I did but did their eyes open when I finally unveiled my crimson beauty, and how the spokes sparkled in the sun as I wheeled it in a slow circle for their envious amazement.

  Sitting at my desk, leafing through some new print-outs on the sexing experiments, fantasizing about an escape and a new life, and wondering if I was being watched, I lifted my head and opened my eyes wider. I had recently spilled a half cup of coffee onto the floor and at my feet was a soggy mass of paper napkins. Did I, I wondered, seem a trustworthy employee to the casual company spy? Was I photogenic? I filled my mind with extraneous information, hastily assembled trains of thought—thoughts of baseball box scores and Colonial history, memo
ries of the mambo and English formal gardens, anything to present a neutral neuronal appearance if my brain waves were being zeroed in on.

  It was the first of June and, I was soon to discover, my day to go into town. I had completely lost track of the days and had no idea it was my day to go to Boston. But my door suddenly flew open (not only was my heart in my mouth but I’d say my liver and pancreas were up there, too) and there they were, three of my coworkers and a Force Recruiter (recently retired from active duty) who was to act as our chauffeur, which meant in actuality he was to make certain all of us refrained from accosting strangers with pleading, wild tales and came back. “Come on, come on, hurry up, please,” said Freddy McCarthy, beside himself with excitement. They were peering at me anxiously. I shuffled my papers and blinked back at them, cursing myself for not having prepared for the outing. Perhaps it was the day for my escape—I could leap out of the car at a red light and tear ass through Back Bay, ducking into luncheonettes, barreling through alleyways, waving my arms and screaming. But even such a chaotic escape takes a certain amount of cunning and forethought and this excursion caught me unawares. It would be a month before a similar opportunity presented itself to me …

  I looked up and smiled, a faintly sick expression on my face. Our keeper, a burly old French-Canadian named Toulouse, stroked the ends of his white mustache and moved his muscles in a rippling warning beneath his short-sleeved, yellow Ban-lon turtleneck shirt.

  In the car, a white Buick, there was an inordinate amount of horsing around, so excited were my coworkers about their little excursion. Normally, I share in this general gaiety but today I sat pressed far back in the seat, not talking, not smiling, barely blinking, my mind trembling with plans and revelations. Freddy McCarthy and Buddy Herzberg played Botticelli with a new psychologist, a birdish, prematurely bald boy with a rasping voice whose name was Ferris Ohnsorg. To add to the fun of the game, the new boy answered all their questions in a mock Mexican accent. Is it a movie star, they would ask, and he would answer, “No, seenyour, eat eaze not Seed Chyrisse,” and the three of them would grin silently.

  And so we cruised, the Force Recruiter firmly at the wheel, past small suburban plots.

  A horse, a bar and grill, a father and two daughters playing basketball in their driveway, which held a white Buick exactly like the one that took us so quickly past them, a billboard advertising a downtown Boston hotel, a gas station—all of those worldly sights and hundreds more glided gently by me, softened and prismatically brilliant through a nostalgic mist. I wiped my eyes, dabbed at my tear ducts with the pads of my trembling fingers, and lowered my head. Toulouse readjusted the rearview mirror.

  We entered Boston, made our way down Storrow Drive, and haggled with each other over how the day would be spent. We all had money to burn. Toulouse had given each of us a lime green envelope filled with cash. There were many things I wanted to buy: expensive pens, a terrific watch, jackets, paints, art books, a gun. We had previously agreed that we would all see a new Dirk Bogarde movie, but that would take us only to 1:49. We had between then and six o’clock to do whatever else we wanted.

  The arguments were nagging and hostile, the suggestions shrill. You wouldn’t have believed the demands, the threats, the wheedling. Toulouse puffed on a Gauloise in contemptuous silence. One of us wanted to go see where a strange hippie cult lived on Mission Hill, one wanted to shop for antique bottles, someone else wanted to ride the swan boats in the Public Garden; then one wanted to wander around Harvard, one wanted to sample organic restaurants—one wanted this, one wanted that. All brain thieves, I suppose, are a little desperate and compulsive. We were irreconcilable. Tempers flared. Ferris was practically in tears. Toulouse was just driving around the block, listening to us make fools of ourselves. We were confirming every dirty little story a Force Recruiter had ever heard about a psychologist.

  On his third time around the block that contained the movie theater we had agreed on going to, I noticed an elegant-looking stationery store and remembered how I yearned for expensive pens. I screamed for him to stop, which much to my surprise he did. At my urgent bidding, we all piled out of the car and went into the store—it seems pointless, but where one goes all must follow, as if we were a road gang.

  It was a small store, meticulously arranged with a thousand crannies and shelves, dimly lit, and presided over by a heavyset woman in her early seventies, who wore a long-sleeved rose-colored dress and wheezed uncomfortably. She must have been a little startled to see us charge into her shop (which she probably ran for the sake of privacy), and her milky eyes surveyed us with bulbous anxiety as I bought pen after costly pen and my coworkers stood along the wall sighing impatiently.

  I returned from Boston and stumbled into my room. My arms were loaded with the purchases of a free- spending afternoon and I dropped everything in a heap on the faintly dusty floor and threw myself onto my narrow, unmade bed. My interior decorations, normally a matter of utter indifference to me, struck me as sad and repellent as I surveyed the circumscribed quarters I was forced to call home. The lights, for example, were poorly, almost aggressively placed, casting metallic shafts in certain areas and leaving other patches in a kind of dank, gray half light. Since my windows do not open, my room had not known fresh air since its completion and the air that was pumped in by the ventilation system gave the place the feel of the Holland Tunnel, only cooler.

  I had spent $500 on new clothes. I had successfully bullied my colleagues into going to some of Boston’s better stores and I had bought an English suit, a pair of gray, delicate shoes, and a blue hat with a yellow band, quite similar to the one depicted in my Van Gogh print, worn by the neutral boy with the heartbreaking mustache. Perhaps, I thought, looking at the boxes and bags I had dumped onto the floor and resolving with an inward groan to hang up my things, perhaps I should grow a mustache. Anything.

  I thought of my suit, my shoes, my hat, my gloves, my socks, my handkerchiefs, my tube of West German after-shave cream, and then there was an exceedingly effacing knock on my door. I was too tired and too demoralized to muster my usual torrents of fear and I merely groaned, “Come in.”

  There entered a short, stout man wearing a multicolored shirt, which made him look something akin to an Easter egg. His face, however, was gray and forlorn. Suffering, one might say. He was at least fifty years old and the turn of his mouth was positively ulcerous. His skin was deeply creased and his large pale eyes were intersected by thunderbolts of red. “Hello,” he said in a grating voice.

  “Why … hello,” I said, sitting up.

  “I’ve just been put on your visiting schedule,” he rasped. “My name is Dr. Popkoff.” He closed the door behind him and walked stiffly toward me with his hand extended.

  I stood up and shook his hand, a small cold thing with steely fingers. “Pleased to meet you,” I said, staring at him. I had never before been visited and exploding through the fatigue that had moments ago blanketed my senses was a small sense of cunning and a large dose of dread. Why was this man in my room? I sat at the edge of my bed. Popkoff plopped on the couch.

  “I’ve seen you in the cafeteria,” he parried.

  “I eat there,” said I.

  “Yes,” he agreed, nodding solemnly. Two or three minutes of silence ensued.

  “Is there anything special?” I asked finally. He was sitting with his legs crossed, his hands folded in his lap, his chin dropped onto his chest, and I felt he might soon drift off.

  “Hmmm?” he said, jerking up his head and forcing a smile. His teeth were enormous and a couple of them flashed in the light.

  “I wondered why you decided to stop by,” I said, rephrasing my question and frowning at him.

  “Mr. Worthington suggested I stop by and have a chat with you,” Popkoff replied with surprising candor.

  “Oh?” I managed to say, an eagle taking flight in my digestive tract.

  He nodded and sighed, shrugged, and lifted his hands. His hands fell back onto his lap and he sai
d, “I’m a pharmacologist. I’m adviser on the Pandium project.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, feeling suddenly reckless and strong.

  “Pandium? Oh, that’s a new drug I’ve—we’ve developed. Part barbiturate, part stimulant, part hypnotic, part transistor. We sell them to the Now Generation.”

  “The ‘Now Generation’?” I repeated, with a mocking voice and a grimace.

  “You know,” Popkoff pled.

  “I’m sure I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.” I felt good now. I was smart, tough, and composed.

  “The kids. The dopers. We sell it to them and then they’re ours. No surgery necessary. No force recruiting. They’re just a swallow away.”

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Oh … yes,” he said, “it’s really something.” His hand went to his forehead and he tugged at the skin there. His large, moist lower lip quivered perceptibly. A long, whistling, piercing sigh escaped from him.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “Matter? Oh, tired I guess. Very … tired. Sometimes I think”—and here he clenched his teeth—“they do everything in their power to drive us mad.”

  My palms moistened in response to his treasonous remark. However, I was far from convinced by it. I remembered that when I was running errands for Mr. W. making treasonous remarks was one of my techniques. “What do you mean?” I asked in a neutral voice.

  “I’m crazy for saying this,” he began, “but the way this place is run strikes me as cruel and unnecessary punishment.”

  “Punishment?”

  “Certainly. The regulations, the isolation, the tempo. And the experiments themselves. I’m so sad.”

  “You are?”

  He nodded. “I’ve been here six years. I’m bored to the brink of madness. Whatever made me think I’d be interested in these experiments? I feel really only revulsion over them. I’m making a huge salary, but what good does all the gold in the kingdom do me when I can’t swim in the pool here because my eyes flare up from the chlorine?”