The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  “Goddamn it!” Weller snarled, crumpling up the note.

  What the hell is all this about? Reflexively, he looked in the refrigerator and saw a big mound of salmon salad on a platter, artfully surrounded by lettuce, tomato wedges, cucumbers, green onions, and endive. There was a small cruet of fresh salad dressing next to it. But his hunger had evaporated. What in blazes is she doing at the Los Angeles Transformation Center? Just what is the Los Angeles Transformation Center?

  He closed the refrigerator door with an angry slam, stood there stupidly for a moment, then went into the bedroom, where, he remembered, Annie had been collecting a pile of Transformationalist literature on her night table over the past couple of weeks.

  He had not been paying much attention to it at the time, but during their last two visits to the Celebrity Center, Annie had spent some time upstairs while he was making conversation at the bar and had come home with pamphlets and flyers stuffed into her pocketbook. They had gone upstairs together on their second visit to the center; the come-on hadn’t impressed Weller much then, and he had paid no further attention to it. But come to think of it, Annie had seemed to be interested, now that he remembered it through hindsight’s eyes.

  They had been standing at the bar with an out-of-work production executive named Harry West. West had been standing on the unemployment line for a while, but he had produced four reasonably long-running series and had also done three or four television movies, so he seemed like a good guy to get to know. Sooner or later he would get another assignment, and when he did, having gotten friendly with him when he wasn’t working could turn out to be a double advantage.

  Unfortunately all West seemed interested in talking about was Transformationalism. “I’ve only had a few months of processing, but I can sense the changes in my consciousness already. They’re really onto something, I tell you. I’d be in bad shape without it.”

  “Really?” Annie said. “You really feel different?” At the time Weller had assumed that Annie was just playing the game, that that look of earnest interest was part of the act.

  “Well, when Dog Days got canceled, I found myself without regular work for the first time in years,” West said. “The entire pattern of my life was fractured. Two weeks on the unemployment line and I was starting to panic without knowing why. Then I ended up here, went upstairs, and got talked into trying some processing—gaming it through, role reversal, block-auditing, a little meditative deconditioning, just the basic stuff. After awhile I found my whole perspective changing. I was trying to cling to a previous pattern that had already been destroyed instead of riding the changes. That’s where the panic was coming from. I was trying to cope with now in terms of then; my behavior reflexes were stuck in the previous reality.”

  “And now?” Annie asked.

  “Now at least I’m riding the wavefront,” West said. “I don’t perceive myself as an out-of-work producer. I’m a creative individual with certain skills, certain contacts, a certain track record, all of which are intrinsic factors that I carry along with me as I evolve through the now. But I’m not trying to hold together an obsolete instantaneous personality, I’m open to my further personal evolution.”

  The Transformationalist jargon made West begin to seem like a brain-barble case, and it took a certain effort for Weller to refrain from pointing out that all this advanced consciousness hadn’t gotten him another job. Fortunately Annie was carrying the ball, so he was able to just lay back and shut up.

  “I’ve got a feel for what you’re saying,” she said, “but I’m not sure what you mean by ‘instantaneous personality’ or ‘riding the changes’ or any of that stuff.”

  West’s eyes widened. “You mean you kids don’t know anything about Transformationalism?” he said. There was something definitely unwholesome in his eager tone of voice as far as Weller was concerned.

  “We’ve only been here twice,” he said.

  “Never been upstairs?” There was a bit of the school-yard pervert in West’s expression now.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, come on. You must let me show you.”

  “Okay,” Annie said brightly, “I’d like to.” Weller caught her eye with his protesting vibrations. Annie looked back at him with that cool, determined set to her eyes that always meant it would be less hassle to do things her way than to follow his own instincts which were now telling him that this Harry West was a blown-out turkey. But Annie apparently still felt that he was worth humoring, and maybe she was right; certainly they had nothing to lose.

  So they let West lead them up a flight of stairs near the stage to a cool blue hallway with five open doorways leading off it, and they took the quickie tour.

  In the first room a guy was hooked up to a complicated-looking brainwave-monitoring machine and a male Transformationalist was studying an oscilloscope as he read off a series of words. “Mother… prick … boss … faggot… communism … Adolf Hitler …”

  “Block-auditing,” West whispered. “Measures direct brainwave reaction to loaded words, locates areas of psychic blockage quickly and scientifically. …”

  They just peeked into the next room, which was given over to tables of literature, some of it free, and some of it for sale. In the third room, a female Transformationalist was engaged in what seemed like a very weird argument with a well-dressed middle-aged man in front of a small audience.

  “… I won’t do it, I don’t like the taste,” he said.

  “You don’t have to taste it if you take it all the way back in your throat,” she said.

  “It’s too big. It’ll choke me.”

  “If you haven’t tried it, how do you know you won’t like it?” she said.

  “You’re just saying that because you enjoy having it sucked.”

  Out in the hall a bewildered Weller turned to West. “What the hell was that?” he asked.

  “The role-reversal game,” West said. “She plays him, he plays her. I think they were role reversing a blow job!” He grinned sheepishly. “They ran that on me once,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ!” Weller had to admit that it was funny, in a sardonic way, but it seemed to him that this kind of thing went too far, that there was a deliberately nasty element of humiliation in it, viciousness for its own sake.

  But Annie burst into infuriating giggles. “Very interesting ” she said in a mock German accent. Weller felt a surge of genuine anger toward her. A feminist she was not, but she was not above occasionally using the stance to irritate him with a gamester feminine superiority. It was as if this role-reversal game was an outside sanction of the aspect of her personality that he found least pleasing, a wedge inserted into their solidarity as a couple, an unpleasant reminder that no male-female relationship was quite as unified as either mate would like it to seem. The fact that he took it more seriously than she did only added an extra edge of gall.

  In the fourth room four people were being put through a standard psychodrama, apparently set in a Nazi concentration camp, with a man and a woman playing gas-oven victims and two men playing guards. Even more vicious, Weller thought, but a lot less closer to home.

  The fifth room was just a recruiter behind a desk laden with sign-up forms and charts explaining the cost of various processing package deals, and Weller managed to get them out of there fast.

  The whole setup had seemed like just a reasonably slick con to Weller. He had naturally assumed that Annie, being an intelligent person like himself, had taken it the same way, that her approval of the blow-job role-reversal game had just been a superior female amusement of the land he was used to, that her apparent interest in the psychodrama had been professional.

  But now, sitting on the edge of their bed and leafing through all the Transformationalist literature she had brought home, he realized that he had been pigheadedly blind to what was going on, that he had taken old level-headed Annie too much for granted, which was an occasional nasty habit of his. It was always hard for him to realize that really different t
hings could be going on inside her head when they were in the same situation together. Parties that he wanted to leave when she turned out to be in the process of making a connection, that single stupid orgy which had Olympianly amused him and disgusted her…

  And now this. Every time they had been at the Center, he had been so absorbed in hustling people that he had just assumed that she was attracted to the place for the same reason; he had been too inside his own head to notice the way this Transformationalist garbage had been capturing his own wife’s attention.

  Some director you are, Weller! he thought, scanning the stuff Annie had been reading right there in bed beside him. Some husband, with your head stuck up your own asshole while your wife was drifting off into a whole other trip! What was this stuff that was doing this to her?

  “TRANSFORMATIONALISM AND YOU!” the basic sales pitch, complete with a list of famous Transformationalists including a baseball player and a couple of minor actresses, but no one else Weller had ever heard of. A brochure on the Los Angeles Transformation Center, describing the processing that was available there. Something on a Transformational Desert Retreat. Little booklets on “BLOCK-AUDITING,” “GAMING IT THROUGH,” “ROLE-REVERSAL,” and “MEDITATIVE DECONDITIONING.” A flyer pushing TRANSFORMATIONAL MAN, a science-fiction novel by Steinhardt, a $7.95 hardcover self-published by Transformationalism.

  Weller disgustedly tossed the literature back onto the night table. I should’ve noticed, he thought. Goddamn, I should’ve noticed. He checked his watch. Five after six.

  Might as well eat, he decided, going into the kitchen, taking the salad out of the refrigerator and sitting down at the kitchen table. As he picked at the food, he ran through the past week in his mind, and in retrospect, he realized that the signs had been there, if only he hadn’t been too bloody self-involved to notice.

  Last Wednesday, when Harry called Annie and told her she hadn’t gotten that commercial part, there had been no tirade, no tears, no talk about looking for a new agent, just a dull acceptance of the inevitable. “Why am I even wasting my time going after commercials?” she had said. “Do we really need the money that badly? Am I really going to be discovered in some stupid perfume commercial? It’s just playing out a tired old pattern, Jack, jumping at whatever dull crap I think might come my way. If I want to act in features, I should be going out for feature parts and stop kidding myself that the rest of it means anything.”

  That hadn’t seemed like the usual old Annie, Weller thought. In the past that kind of attitude had been a signal of her boredom and frustration, foreshadowing things like a bout of swinging or an argument or a rap about going to New York and becoming a serious stage actress. But he had been too damned pissed off at how badly the shooting had gone that day to pay any real attention to it. And all the hamburgers she’s been serving up lately, he thought. The Colonel Sanders Chicken. Annie cared about what she put on the table— except when she was signaling dissatisfaction with him, and then the slovenly meals were deliberate gestures, at least on a subconscious level.

  Weller’s appetite deserted him again. The half-eaten cold supper became an affront to him, a chastisement, a symptom of what had been going on, unnoticed, under his very nose, for at least two weeks. He put the remains back into the refrigerator, went into the living room, thought about making himself a drink, decided against it, put on the news, and immediately ignored the drone of the television set, pacing around the living room, into the hall halfway to the bedroom, back to the living room again. Damn, damn, damn! Schmuck that you are, Weller!

  The jargon that had crept into her vocabularly! Now, with the house echoing to her absence, he could see it. They were both forever grumbling about how much television they found themselves watching, but what had she said only two days ago … ? “It keeps pumping out the same cultural matrix, the whole country sucking up the same static brain-freeze, including the people who create it.” It was what they had both thought of the tube all along, so he hadn’t noticed that the words came from somewhere else.

  What had she said when her friend Sally came over to bitch about her old man’s reaction to her consciousness-raising group? “Game it through, Sally. Get into his head. He’s confronting a discontinuity.” And that business about the new network guidelines. “You’ve got to ride the changes,” she had said, “not let them wash you over. ”

  Oh, it’s insidious stuff! Weller thought, perching for a moment on the arm of the couch. That Transformationalist jargon slides into what you’re thinking about, and without realizing it, you start thinking in their terms, and then you’re thinking their thoughts, thank you Marshall McLuhan! No wonder I didn’t pick up on what was happening. They add a little this and a little that to your vocabulary, and while you’re not looking, it soaks into your brain.

  Weller turned off the television set angrily, hyperaware, indeed almost paranoid now, about being caught and programmed by random, unnoticed word patterns. He spent the next forty-five minutes in silence, trying to clear his mind for the inevitable confrontation ahead.

  Finally he heard the rumble of Annie’s Porshe pulling into the driveway. Vibrating with tension, he met her at the door.

  “Hi Jack,” she said brightly, looking cool, casual, and relaxed. “How was your day?”

  “How was my day? Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  She did a short take, a look of puzzlement. “Oh,” she said, striding ahead of him into the living room, “you want to hear about my processing.” She sprawled on the couch, kicked off her sandals, put her feet up on the coffee table. “Well, it was very interesting,” she said. “They start you off on block-auditing, you know, they hook you up to a brainwave monitor, feed you key words, and map your brainwave reactions so they finally end up with what they call a ‘psychomap’ of—”

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute!” Weller shouted, standing in front of her listening to this goop, not knowing how to start, not even knowing precisely what it was that he wanted to start. “That’s not what I want to know. ”

  “Then what do you want to know?” she asked, looking up at him evenly. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Already feeling somewhat foolish and impotent, Weller hesitated, his body locked in tension, then collapsed onto the couch beside her. “What I want to know is why you went to the Transformation Center,” he said slowly.

  “To try some processing. They don’t do it at the Celebrity Center.”

  Mentally Weller counted to ten as he studied Annie’s calm, untroubled face. Game it through, he told himself sardonically. We’re obviously not on the same wavelength, and it’s at least as much my fault as hers. I can’t let this alienation I feel escalate into a shooting match. But there was still that feeling of talking to a stranger as he said, with tense exaggerated patience: “What I want to know is why you wanted to try Transformationalist processing. ”

  “Oh,” Annie said. She thought quietly for long moments. “Well, as we both know, we don’t exactly feel satisfied with our lives. We’re still knocking on the same doors and getting the same wrong answers. So I figured, maybe it’s not the world, maybe it’s me. So why not give Transformationalism a try?” She looked at him, touched his cheek. “Oh, you’re upset about dinner,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why did you just go off and do it?” Weller asked. “Why didn’t we talk about it first?”

  “It was a spontaneous decision,” Annie said. “Besides, I’ve sensed that you’re not too receptive to the whole idea. Am I wrong?”

  “No,” Weller said. “I think it’s all an insidious crock of shit.”

  Annie nodded. “That’s what I thought. So I figured that if I went by myself and you saw it was doing me some good, then I could get you to try it. ”

  “And you plan to continue?” Weller said unhappily.

  “I’ve signed up for the four-week trial course,” Annie replied. “Oh shit!”

  Annie reacted by drawing away from him, into a cool, annoyed, slightly sup
erior shell, an attitude toward him that he had rarely experienced before from her. “I don’t see why you’re acting this way. I’m trying to do something to better myself. Just because you—”

  “How much is this four-week course costing?” Weller blurted, and instantly wished he could take it back. It immediately put the whole thing on the tackiest possible level.

  “For Chrissakes, Jack, it’s only two hundred fifty dollars for eight sessions, which is a lot cheaper than the usual forty dollars for two sessions.”

  “Two hundred and fifty bucks! Forty dollars for two hours! For crying out—”

  “This is certainly a new side to you, Jack Weller! I’ve never seen you as Uncle Scrooge before. Besides, it’s my own money.”

  “Oh, now it’s your money and my money, is it? What happened to our money? Besides, it’s not that we can’t afford it ...”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I don’t like watching my wife being ripped off by a scam like Transformationalism,” he said. “Can’t you understand that?”

  “Now you’re going to forbid me to spend my own money for my own good? From Uncle Scrooge to Porky Pig!”

  “Damn it, don’t try to run that number on me. You know I wouldn’t forbid you to do anything even if I could, which I can’t. I’m just trying to tell you in my chauvinist way that I think you’re being conned, that this whole thing smells.”

  A curtain of clear, impenetrable tranquility descended across Annie’s face. “Why are we shouting at each other?” she said. “Let’s—”

  “I know, I know, let’s game it through.” They both laughed, fracturing the tension at least temporarily if somewhat artificially.

  “Just listen to us,” Annie said. “Listen to you. Don’t you really think you might benefit from—”

  “Please” Weller said, holding up his palm resignedly. “Peace. But please.”

  “Okay,” Annie said. “For now let’s be civilized and just agree to disagree.” She snuggled up to him, kissed him lightly on the lips. “No need to get so serious about it anyway, is there?” she said.