Mindkiller

by Spider Robinson

  By the time she fell off the edge into sleep, she had cried for so long that every muscle in my body ached from sitting still. She never felt me get up, stiff and clumsy as I was. There was something different about her sleeping face now. It was not slack but relaxed. I limped out, feeling as close to peace as I had since I arrived, and as I was passing the living room on the way to the liquor, I heard the phone.

  As I had before, I looked over the caller. The picture was undercontrasted and snowy; it was a pay phone. He looked like an immigrant construction worker, massive and florid and neckless, almost brutish. And, at the moment, under great stress. He was crushing a hat in his hands, mortally embarrassed. I mentally shrugged and accepted.

  “Sharon, don’t hang up,” he was saying. “I gotta find out what this is all about.”

  Nothing could have made me hang up.

  “Sharon? Sharon, I know you’re there. Jo Ann says you ain’t there, she says she called you every day for almost a week and banged on your door a few times. But I know you’re there, now anyway. I walked past your place an hour ago and I seen the bathroom light go on and off. Sharon, will you please tell me what the hell is going on? Are you listening to me? I know you’re listening to me. Look, you gotta understand, I thought it was all set, see? I mean I thought it was set. Arranged. I put it to Jo Ann, cause she’s my regular, and she says not me, lover, but I know a gal. Look, was she lying to me or what? She told me for another bill you play them kind of games, sometimes.”

  Regular two-hundred-dollar bank deposits plus a cardboard box full of scales, vials, razor, mirror, and milk powder makes her a coke dealer—right, Travis McGee? Don’t be misled by the fact that the box was shoved in a corner, sealed with tape, and covered with dust. After all, the only other illicit profession that pays regular sums at regular intervals is hooker, and two bills is too much for square-jawed, hook-nosed, wide-eyed little Karen, breasts or no breasts.

  For a garden-variety hooker…

  “Dammit, she told me she called you and set it up, she give me your apartment number.” He shook his head violently. “I can’t make no sense out of this. Dammit, she couldn’t be lying to me. It don’t figure. You let me in, didn’t even turn the camera on first, it was all arranged. Then you screamed and…I was real careful not to really hurt you, I know I was. Then I put on my pants and I’m putting the envelope on the dresser and you bust that chair on me and come at me with that knife and I hadda bust you one. It just don’t make no sense, will you goddammit say something to me? I’m twisted up inside going on two weeks now. I can’t even eat.”

  I went to shut off the phone, and my hand was shaking so bad I missed, spinning the volume knob to minimum. “Sharon you gotta believe me,” he hollered from far far away, “I’m into rape fantasy, I’m not into rape!” and then I had found the right switch and he was gone.

  I got up very slowly and toddled off to the liquor cabinet, and I stood in front of it taking pulls from different bottles at random until I could no longer see his face—his earnest, baffled, half-ashamed face.

  Because his hair was thin sandy blond, and his jaw was a bit too square, and his nose was a trifle hooked, and his blue eyes were just the least little bit too far apart. They say everyone has a double somewhere. And Fate is such a witty little motherfucker, isn’t he?

  I don’t remember how I got to bed.

  I woke later that night with the feeling that I would have to bang my head on the floor a couple of times to get my heart started again. I was on my makeshift doss of pillows and blankets beside her bed, and when I finally peeled my eyes open she was sitting up in bed staring at me. She had fixed her hair somehow, and her nails were trimmed. We looked at each other for a long time. Her color was returning somewhat, and the edge was off her bones.

  She sighed. “What did Jo Ann say when you told her?”

  I said nothing.

  “Come on, Jo Ann’s got the only other key to this place, and she wouldn’t give it to you if you weren’t a friend. So what did she say?”

  I got painfully up out of the tangle and walked to the window. A phallic church steeple rose above the low-rises a couple of blocks away.

  “God is an iron,” I said. “Did you know that?”

  I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. “And I’m a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?”

  “If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. Or else He’s the dumbest designer that ever lived.”

  Of a thousand possible snap reactions, she picked the most flattering and hence most irritating. She kept silent, kept looking at me, and thought about what I had said. At last she said, “I agree. What particular design screwup did you have in mind?”

  “The one that nearly left you dead in a pile of your own shit,” I said harshly. “Everybody talks about the new menace, wireheading, eighth most common cause of death in less than a decade. Wireheading’s not new—it’s just a technical refinement.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Are you familiar with the old cliché, ‘Everything in the world I like is either illegal, immoral, or fattening’?”

  “Sure.”

  “Didn’t that ever strike you as damned odd? What’s the most nutritionally useless and physiologically dangerous ‘food’ substance in the world? White sugar. Glucose. And it seems to be beyond the power of the human nervous system to resist it. They put it in virtually all the processed food there is, which is next to all the food there is, because nobody can resist it. And so we poison ourselves and whipsaw our dispositions and rot our teeth. Maltose is just as sweet, but it’s less popular, precisely because it doesn’t kick your blood sugar in the ass and then depress it again. Isn’t that odd? There is a primitive programming in our skulls that rewards us, literally overwhelmingly, every time we do something damned silly. Like smoke a poison, or eat or drink or snort or shoot a poison. Or overeat good foods. Or engage in complicated sexual behavior without procreative intent, which, if it were not for the pleasure, would be pointless and insane. And which, if pursued for the pleasure alone, quickly becomes pointless and insane anyway. A suicidal brain-reward system is built into us.”

  “But the reward system is for survival.”

  “So how the hell did ours get wired up so that survival-threatening behavior gets rewarded best of all? Even the pro-survival pleasure stimuli are wired so that a dangerous overload produces the maximum pleasure. On a purely biological level, man is programmed to strive hugely for more than he needs, more than he can profitably use. Add in intelligence and everything goes to hell. Man is capable of outgrowing any ecological niche you put him in—he survives at all because he is The Animal That Moves. Given half a chance he kills himself of surfeit.”

  My knees were trembling so badly I had to sit down. I felt feverish and somehow larger than myself, and I knew I was talking much too fast. She had nothing whatever to say—with voice, face, or body.

  “It is illuminating,” I went on, fingering my aching nose, “to note that the two ultimate refinements of hedonism are the pleasure of cruelty and the pleasure of the despoliation of innocence. Consider: no sane person in search of sheerly physical sexual pleasure would select an inexperienced partner. Everyone knows that mature, experienced lovers are more competent, confident, and skilled. Yet there is not a skin mag in the world that prints pictures of men or women over twenty if they can possibly help it. Don’t tell me about recapturing lost youth: the root is that a fantasy object over twenty cannot plausibly possess innocence, can no longer be corrupted.

  “Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure—which, given his gregarious nature, would seem a much more survival-oriented behavior. Poll any hundred people at random and you’ll find at least twenty or thirty who know all there is to know about psychological torture and psych
ic castration—and maybe two who know how to give a terrific backrub. That business of your father leaving all his money to the church and leaving you ‘a hundred dollars, the going rate’—that was artistry. I can’t imagine a way to make you feel as good as that made you feel rotten. But for him it must have been pure pleasure.”

  “Maybe the Puritans were right,” she said. “Maybe pleasure is the root of all evil. Oh, God! but life is bleak without it.”

  “One of my most precious possessions,” I went on blindly, “is a button that my friend Slinky John used to hand-paint and sell below cost. He was the only practicing anarchist I ever met. The button reads: ‘GO, LEMMINGS, GO!’ A lemming surely feels intense pleasure as he gallops to the sea. His self-destruction is programmed by nature, a part of the very same life force that insisted on being conceived and born in the first place. If it feels good, do it.” I laughed, and she flinched. “So it seems to me that God is either an iron, or a colossal jackass. I don’t know whether to be admiring or contemptuous.”

  All at once I was out of words, and out of strength. I yanked my gaze away from hers and stared at my knees for a long time. I felt vaguely ashamed, as befits one who has thrown a tantrum in a sickroom.

  After a time she said, “You talk good on your feet.”

  I kept looking at my knees. “I think I used to be an actor once.”

  “I would have gues—”

  Hiatus.

  I was standing by the door, facing out into the hall, and she was still speaking. “I said, will you tell me something?”

  “If I can.”

  “What was the pleasure in putting me back together again?”

  I flinched.

  “Look at me. There. I’ve got a half-ass idea of what shape I was in when you met me, and I can guess what it’s been like since. I don’t know if I’d have done as much for Jo Ann, and she’s my best friend. You don’t look like a guy your favorite kick is sick fems, and you sure as hell don’t look like you’re so rich you got time on your hands. So what’s been your pleasure, these last few days?”

  “Trying to understand,” I snapped. “I’m nosy.”

  “And do you understand?”

  “Yeah. I put it together.”

  “So you’ll be going now?”

  “Not yet,” I said automatically. “You’re not—”

  And caught myself.

  “There’s something else besides pleasure,” she said. “Another system of reward, only I don’t think it has much to do with the one I got wired up to my scalp here. Not brain-reward. Call it mind-reward. Call it…joy. The thing like pleasure that you feel when you’ve done a good thing or passed up a real tempting chance to do a bad thing. Or when the unfolding of the universe just seems especially apt. It’s nowhere near as flashy and intense as pleasure can be. Believe me! But it’s got something going for it. Something that can make you do without pleasure, or even accept a lot of pain, to get it.

  “That stuff you’re talking about, that’s there, that’s true. But you said yourself, Man is the animal that outgrows and moves. Evolution works slow, is all.” She pushed hair back from her face. “It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape, and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thou? That lemming drive you’re talking about is there—but there’s another kind of drive, another kind of force that’s working against it. Or else there wouldn’t still be any people and there wouldn’t be the words to have this conversation and—” She paused, looked down at herself. “And I wouldn’t be here to say them.”

  “That was just random chance.”

  She snorted. “What isn’t?”

  “Well, that’s fine,” I shouted. “That’s fine. Since the world is saved and you’ve got everything under control I’ll just be going along.”

  I’ve got a lot of voice when I yell. She ignored it utterly, continued speaking as if nothing had happened. “Now I can say that I have sampled the spectrum of the pleasure system at both ends—none and all there is—and I think the rest of my life I will dedicate myself to the middle of the road and see how that works out. Starting with the very weak tea and toast I’m going to ask you to bring me in another ten minutes or so. With maltose. But as for this other stuff, this joy thing, that I would like to begin learning about, as much as I can. I don’t really know a God damned thing about it, but I understand it has something to do with sharing and caring and what did you say your name was?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I yelled.

  “All right. What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing!”

  “What did you come here for?”

  I was angry enough to be honest. “To burgle your fucking apartment!”

  Her eyes opened wide, and then she slumped back against the pillows and laughed until the tears came, and I tried and could not help myself and laughed too, and we shared laughter for a long time, as long as we had shared her tears the night before.

  And then, straight-faced, she said, “Wait’ll I’m on my feet; you’re gonna need help with those stereo speakers. Butter on the toast.”

  3

  1994 The room was ripe with the pungencies of sex and sweat. Darkness was total, and now that their pulse and breathing had slowed, the stillness was complete. Norman tensed his stomach muscles briefly, felt the warm honeyed weight of Phyllis from his left shin to left shoulder, felt the barely perceptible movement with which she nestled a breast more comfortably into his armpit, tasted the sour sweetness of her breath. Idly he moved his left hand up and down the smooth length of her, reflected on how pleasant it was to caress a body whose dimensions were not precisely and thoroughly known, how very pleasant to encounter unfamiliar swellings and taperings, and in the encountering to trigger unpredictable responses and quickenings.

  This caused him to wonder why, in all his five years of marriage to Lois, he had never been seriously tempted to be unfaithful. He had been experienced when he met her, aware of the sweetness of novelty, and during the course of their marriage perhaps a dozen women had inspired lust in him at one time or another. But he had allowed only a handful of those temptations to progress even as far as the fantasy stage—and in retrospect those were the only ones where actual fulfillment of the fantasy was out of the question. Ever since their estrangement he had sought no other partner until now. From the vantage point of satiation, he wondered why he had waited so long.

  Well, he answered himself, if you consistently pass up a chance at something very pleasant, it must be because you’re afraid of risking something else, something that’s better than very pleasant. There must be something about long-term intimacy, about familiarity, that is sweeter than variety; something more to life than that spiciest of its spices.

  He considered the lovemaking just now finished, and he thought, Well, that was definitely more…explosive than anything Lois and I have had in years. But he didn’t know if he could say it was more satisfying. There had been clumsinesses, false starts, and missed signals. It is a tricky, finicky road to orgasm, different for everyone on Earth. If this woman and he remained lovers for any length of time, they would have to learn each other’s ways—such a clumsy, self-conscious process.

  And then Norman understood the sweetness of familiarity. Some say it breeds contempt, but he saw now that there was a tremendous security in having someone who knew you inside and out, who had found it worth the time and trouble to learn where your buttons were and when and how to push them, and whose own personal buttons you could find in the dark. It was worth some loss of mystery. In that moment he learned what it had been about his marriage that was so sweet that, over the past half-year, he had bartered away most of his self-respect for occasional morsels of counterfeit.

  And with that learning he knew that the thing he still yearned for so badly—having someone so close to you that they become your other leg—was gone for good, and that counterfeit was all he would ever have of it again from Lois—that it was finally and forever over, irretrievably lo
st, and that he must find someone else and work five more years ever to have anything like it again. The last scrap of hope, nourished for so long, left him at last. His heart turned over inside him, and his eyes stung fiercely.

  Phyllis rolled away from him suddenly. It was a single quick movement, but it was made up of many subtle parts, the drag of breast across his chest, the pleasant pulling apart of fleshes cemented by dried sweat, tiny tugs of intertangled hairs separating, moist sounds from her loins. She left a hand palm up on his belly to maintain contact between them, and rummaged in the tangle of clothing beside the bed. She struggled up into a sitting position, replaced the hand with a leg across his leg, and used both hands to shatter the darkness with a struck match.

  The effect was rather like that of a star shell going off over a deserted battlefield, for Norman’s bedroom was a mess. But he saw only her, the sudden and terrible beauty of her nakedness. She was flat-chested compared to Lois, but he was not comparing her to Lois; Lois was gone from his mind, and his sorrow with her. This was Phyllis, and she was lovely. When her weight had come off him he had automatically taken a deeper breath; now he could not exhale it.

  The sight lasted only long enough for her to light two Player’s and pass one to him; then she whipped the match flame to death. But he took the opportunity to take several mental photographs, apply fixative, and store for easy access. In the sudden return of darkness, his breath left him whistling. He replaced it with tobacco smoke.

  “That,” she said softly, “was good enough to be illegal.”

  “Madam, your son just passed Victorian Poetry.”

  She chuckled. “You bastard. ‘Passed’? That was B-plus at the very least.”