“You’re Mr. Acoraci, aren’t you?” I asked, swaying back and forth and trying to think of something else to say.
“Lemme see your assignmenting papers,” he said in a small meanish voice.
I wasn’t certain what he meant. “I don’t have them with me. But I’m on an important assignment. Project number four-fifty-six-w-twenty-one, if you know what I mean.”
“Sorry,” he said, “I don’t let no one out without seeing the papers and then I call.” He looked at me suspiciously. “Don’t you know that?”
My leg muscles tightened. I had to get out. A quick, clumsy plan developed. I leaned toward the old man and with one finger tipped his hat off his head. It bounced onto the floor, quivered for a moment, and then was still. Acoraci looked at me with the indignant anger of the very old. As he leaned over to pick up his hat I took the telephone receiver off the hook and smacked him with it on the top of his head. Three times, maybe four. The receiver, now partially red, dangled from the table as I raced toward the door.
I pressed down on the silver bar and it opened to the night, the stars, and all my dreams of freedom.
I scarcely knew what was happening anymore. Instinctively, I ran toward the sounds of the highway. The lawn was damp and squeaked beneath my frantic footfalls. I tripped over a garden hose and fell face forward onto the moist green grass. I stayed there for a moment, enamored by the cool, sweet aroma. Scrambling up, I chanced a quick glance behind me. No guards came forth with fixed bayonets, no finger of light leafed curiously through the pages of night. My breath was coming in spurts. I found myself in a half- empty parking lot. A band of pain wrapped itself around my abdomen. It had been months since I’d run. Decades. I was giggling. I couldn’t believe how easy it had been. I couldn’t believe it had actually happened.
A small, grassy knoll presented itself and I ran over to it. There before me, perhaps fifteen yards below my not very imposing perch, lay the highway, a bright gray strip of concrete with luminous markers on either side that were ignited by the headlights of every passing car. I had no idea which way it was to town. I closed my eyes and tried to remember that morning’s outing. The big white Buick … but replacing the chic, toothy car in my mind’s wide eye was a vision of that dangling red telephone and Mr. Acoraci slumping slack-jawed to the floor.
I skidded down the knoll and tried to flag down a car, for a minute abandoning concern over my destination. Cars whizzed by, buffeting me with the air they displaced. I heard the sound of a siren and, after buckling momentarily from the force of a cardiovascular contraction, I dived into a mane of free-growing weeds at the side of the road. The whooping grew louder and soon I saw spots of red light dancing over the surface of the road and, as a few courteous motorists pulled to the side, an ambulance flashed past. My shirt was wet from the moisture of the earth and my socks were, too.
I scrambled up. I was shivering, a little. Two diesel trucks roared by, filling my ears with their smoky confusion and shaking the ground beneath me. I began to run. Before I tried to get a ride, I wanted to get further from the compound. As I trotted along the pebbly roadside I made ineffectual arm gestures at passing cars, which the drivers either ignored or were repelled by. When I had run about 500 yards I stopped and tried seriously to flag down a whizzing motorist. I waved my arms over my head and leaned into the road as if I were at any moment about to baptize myself in that stream of traffic. No one stopped. I whistled and shouted; my energetic waving had pulled my shirt tails from my trousers. No one stopped. Some drivers, though not many, would stare curiously at me. One man shouted something from the safety of his speeding vehicle.
I decided I looked too strange to be picked up. Too frantic, too close to the edge. Then I had a bit of rare good luck. Before me, about fifty yards away, was an abandoned car. It was quite badly damaged and had been vandalized, but I figured if I stood near it—though not too near—I might be mistaken for a motorist in distress and that role and situation would be familiar enough to convince some benevolent soul to interrupt his or her journey momentarily and take me along.
As I stood there with my thumb extended, I wished I were part of something larger, something organized, some well-ordered conspiracy. I hadn’t stopped dreaming. I wished there had been, say, a mouse-gray Rolls ready to scoop me up and away to safety. A steady driver with a cloth cap, and someone from the press, and a blond woman with skinny legs. They all should have been there, waiting. That would have been perfect. As it was, it was chaos. Uncomfortable and unlikely. “Step on it,” the emaciated Danish lady would have said … Cars roared by me. It wasn’t, I realized, terribly far to Boston, but I didn’t have the strength to walk. I barely felt the strength to stand. I was terrified of being apprehended, afraid of that car, or that one, or the next one stopping and unloosing a seething claque of armed heavies who would shower me with rabbit punches and drag me back to NESTER. I yearned for the city, where I’d have a better chance to hide, to escape, and to implement my plan of alerting and informing the world of my crimes through the medium of the international press. Cars of all makes and models flashed past. I was passed by snazzy Peugeots and dumpy Volkswagens, a type of car, we have discovered, that holds particular appeal for men dominated by women. Rebels, Chargers, Mavericks, Comets, Galaxies, Mustangs, Stingrays, Barracudas, and Gremlins all passed Paul Galambos by. I was passed by trucks carrying horses, trucks carrying turnips, trucks carrying oil, bottled water, lumber, and baby food. I was passed by jeeps. My hands were briefly illuminated by a pair of headlights and I noticed my fingers had wispy red smears on them. I cleaned them by spitting on them and wiping them on the starlit grass.
I’ve had to take a rest. I thought I could spew this whole thing out in one shimmering aqua stream, but my left hand has developed none of the endurance necessary to write more than an hour or so at a time and I am too broke (not to say broken) to afford even a tiny typewriter.
I’ve had it with machines, anyhow.
But I’ve been exercising it, my hand that is, faithfully. As I walk the boring streets of this faintly hostile town I am squeezing a salmon-colored rubber ball, past the Variety Store, past the Jewel Supermarket, out toward the outskirts of town where I am momentarily joined by a curious black dog with a sooty bandage on its left front paw. Sunset. The cornfields turning purple.
As I was saying, a car finally did stop for me on that starry, frightened night. It stopped about fifty feet beyond me (it was a light blue compact and it stopped with a series of short hops toward the side of the road) and I ran to it with entrancing visions of myself sitting in a Senate office behind a crescent of microphones. I had played out this self-serving fantasy many times and it was reaching one of its predictable, ego-maniacal climaxes (the stampede of roaring reporters beating their way toward the telephones in the back of the chamber) as I put my hand on the car’s door and opened it up. “My car’s broken,” I said, leaning into the little car and facing the young, bespectacled driver, who tugged thoughtfully on the end of his dark mustache.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Boston,” I said, uncertainly.
“O.K. Hop in.”
I hopped; oh, did I hop. I practically severed a foot, so anxious was I to get in and get going, so relieved was I that the kindly car was pointed Boston-ward.
I was thinking of adding a bit of suspense to this, of leading you to believe that I somehow made it into town, called the night desk of the Boston Globe, arranged for a press conference the very next day, and then spent the night preparing my statement in the Parker House hotel, drafting my statement and making long-distance phone calls. But the terrible truth of the matter is that I didn’t get very far. No sooner had the young man pulled back onto the highway—I slouched deep into my seat, getting ready to pass the NESTER complex—than we were struck from the side by a battered maroon station wagon. “Oh, my God,” the driver cried, as we spun helplessly toward the gravel and the weeds, “this is my sister’s car.”
Since I was hunched down in the car’s terrycloth- covered seat, the impact shook me only slightly. My would-be rescuer was firmly belted into his seat and he merely doddered as his sister’s car swerved this way and that and then finally was creased and crunched by a metal roadside marker. A thin line of inky smoke rose from the hood. Faces from rapidly passing cars stared at us. The aggressive station wagon pulled in behind.
It did not take any special occult abilities to realize that the monstrous maroon car did not simply hold a reckless driver or a drunken construction worker or a careless divorcée, but encapsulated instead a sinister stunt driver in NESTER’s employ who had just, with awesome ease, stymied my escape, wrecked my chance for revelation, and, for all I knew, insured my execution. I opened up the door, rolled out of the car, and began to run. “Wait!” screamed the boy. I turned to make an apologetic gesture and saw the maroon station wagon open forth and from it emerge a hulking heavy in a gray suit who began ambling in my direction. He, too, shouted, “Wait!”
I had no choice but to race back toward the NESTER complex. I knew I was sunk but I was determined to make them work for it. I was getting my second wind. My feet pounded onto the undergrowth with vigor and authority. A gust of damp night wind filled my shirt and my hair was blowing wild, BRAIN THIEF RUNS TO WEST COAST IN SEVEN HOURS!
From the darkness, a hand grabbed out at me just as the muted white glow of the compound came into view. I attempted to leap back, but the hand had grabbed me with strength and accuracy and if I were to have escaped it would have meant, literally, leaping out of my shirt. As I squirmed, my captor came into view (a square, stupid face whose blandness was marred only by a sick smile) and he was joined, a second later, by his short, bony assistant, who carried, in compensation, an imposing black pistol. “You come with us,” said the little one, whose face was as long and narrow as a carton of cigarettes.
The hulking heavy grabbed me under my arm and his (I feared) trigger-happy helper shoved the gun’s eager muzzle into the small of my back. Both of them led me over that small grassy knoll, through the parking lot, and toward the very door through which I had so hopefully burst. I knew my number was up. “Are you going to get it,” promised the larger of my captors.
“I care,” I bravely countered, sneering at him.
The little one jabbed the gun into my spine.
“Stop that,” I demanded. I attempted to turn around but his powerful partner held me firmly. He opened the side door to the compound and pushed me in.
Mr. Acoraci was there with seven or eight other people. The old man’s lime green uniform was bloody—a streak of red beginning at the collar and ending in a full red moon at the breast—and he dabbed uncertainly at the cut on his head with a rolled up handkerchief. Curiously, the blow to his head had revitalized his Italian accent. “That’sa heem,” he said, sounding like Chico Marx.
In less than a second the batch of brutes was upon me. With a sudden surge of courage, speed, and dexterity that I cannot to this day understand, I slipped from the hands of my captors (risking a fiery pellet in my back), sensed a pocket of light in the flying wing of Force Recruiters that closed in upon me, and ran—flew!—down the quiet, brightly lit corridor. “Don’t shoot,” I heard a voice behind me say, “we got orders not to hurt him.” “Oh lemme, lemme,” another voice pleaded. I pushed open the door to the stairwell and took the smooth gray steps three at a time.
I reached the fourth floor, where my living quarters had been. I flew blindly, panting, crazy, and scared. I looked for an escape, a hiding place, an ally. Yes! I had an idea. Allies. I would alert my colleagues, organize a general protest, a revolution. I ran down this more familiar corridor, trying to find it within me to howl bloody murder. Arise! Arise! Together we can free ourselves. But all I could manage was a guttural plea for help. I began throwing open doors. Most of the rooms were dark, filled with the sounds of sleeping. In a few, I saw amazed men and a few women looking up from their desks and staring at me with considerable distaste. In one room, the occupant was viewing slides of human eyes in extreme close-up. “You goddamned fool,” I said to him, and slammed the door.
I looked up and down the hall and saw no one coming after me. I shoved my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall; my heart beat out a rapid telegraphy of terror and exhaustion. I shook my head and made my way to my room. Perhaps, I thought, they won’t kill me or turn me into the house guinea pig, fouling up my frontal lobes and turning my medulla into community property, and perhaps I will sometime in the not too distant future have another crack at freedom. Maybe, I thought, succumbing to the most unrealistic kind of optimism, I can make a break for it during my next outing to Boston.
I came to room number 162—my room—and I opened the door. The lights were dim. There was a faint odor of—incense. I looked around the room, closed the door behind me, looked around again, and then saw Mr. Worthington sitting on the edge of my bed, his hands folded primly in his lap. “Mr. Worthington!” I gasped.
He rose quickly and stretched his arms out to me. He glided across the small, jumbled room and embraced me. “Oh my, oh my,” he said huskily. “The risks you have taken this night. This night of nights.” He released me from his sharp, uncomfortable embrace, stepped back two steps, and gazed fondly at me. “How proud, how very proud I am of you.”
My lips quivered and, not knowing why, I found myself on the verge of tears. I found myself on the verge of tears with the jolt of surprise and horror felt by a blindfolded man who finally whisks off the playful kerchief and realizes himself to be on the edge of a precipice. And is it merely your imagination, or is every shimmering, windblown shrub begging you to plunge?
“You are my first success,” Mr. Worthington said. “After all of these long hard years. My very first success.”
Still breathing with some difficulty I said, “You mean I’m the first one who’s gotten caught?”
“First one caught?” Mr. W. asked with a light chuckle. “Paul, you’re the first one to even try to leave.” He shook his head.
I felt I could be frank with Worthington. “Are you going to kill me?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “what ever gave you that idea?”
“Are you going to perform experiments on me?”
He laughed. He clasped his old hands together, threw back his head, and laughed almost soundlessly.
“You are, then?”
“No, no,” he said, looking at me again and smiling. “Not at all. In fact, in a few moments I am going to conditionally release you from the contract here. I suspect that my confidence in you is premature, perhaps even misplaced, but you have taken extraordinary risks and you deserve, I believe, another crack at things on the outside. Oh, I will be criticized, of that I am more than certain. We believe that those who come here deserve fully to stay here. But when NESTER was set up in the beginning of this century—it was not called NESTER then, for acronyms were neither popular nor common—but when this organization was first set up we said that rehabilitation was one of our prime objectives. Yet we have rehabilitated no one. Our only service has been to occupy our clients, to give them every opportunity to live out their destructive desires, and our sole comfort is in the fact that they are harming no one, that their so-called administrative abilities and scientific insights go no further than the orbit we have allowed them.” He stopped, took another step, and looked at me. “But there I go,” he said. “Rambling on like this. By the look of you, I’m quite sure you haven’t the vaguest idea what I am talking about. Do you?”
I shook my head. I felt limp.
“Well, there’s still a little time. I want to get you out of here. I’ve already reported to my superiors”—he glanced upward—“that I am releasing you from the compound, and I want to make that a fact before someone decides to contradict me. I’m not going to have this success taken from me.”
“You mean I’m going back to my old life?”
“I mean no such thing. Don’t even mention that.
Put it completely out of mind. Your old life ended when you answered our advertisement. It is gone forever. And I’m afraid I have nothing particularly enticing to offer you in its place. But whatever you do or wherever you go, you will at least be out of here. I swear to you, Paul, I’ll never understand why more of you boys don’t bolt. We do everything to encourage you to hightail it out of here, but you’re my very first chicken to fly the coop. Oh goodness, I keep saying that. I’m still beside myself. Well, come on. My car’s waiting below.”
We took an elevator down past the ground floor into the basement. The doors glided open and we got off in the data-processing chamber. The giant computer was still whirring away but there was only a skeleton crew minding it, pacing around the enormous instrument, holding clipboards and jotting notes, playing hasty arpeggios on handy key punch machines. Mr. Worthington and I were unnoticed. We walked through narrow aisles, past empty desks separated by frosted glass partitions, until we came to a heavy metal door guarded by an old man in a lime green uniform, exactly like the one worn by Mr. Acoraci.
“Good evening, Mr. Kilke,” Mr. Worthington said to the elderly guard.
“Good evening, Mr. Worthington,” said the old man with a smile.
“I’ll be out for perhaps an hour, Mr. Kilke.”
“Very well, sir,” said the old man, rising. He shuffled over to the heavy metal door and pulled it open with some effort. Beyond the door was a long black limousine. The sleek car’s motor was idling, and its expensive purr echoed subtly on the smooth concrete walls that surrounded it.
“Oh good, my car is here,” said Mr. W. He took me by the arm and led me to it. The windows were draped in light gray curtains. In the front seat sat a uniformed driver with a young, tan face and perfect, expressionless features. His blond hair curled out from beneath his black chauffeur’s cap.
I got into the car and it began to move almost undetectably up the concrete ramp. “You’ve had quite a night,” said Mr. Worthington, patting my arm.
Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball Page 14
