The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  Weller hardened his stare. “Are you calling me an ape?” he said in deliberately threatening tones.

  Franker broke eye contact and laughed, a canned sound, straight off a laugh track. “Quite the contrary,” he said. “The difference between a human and an ape is intrinsic; an ape can never achieve human consciousness, so such a relationship is doomed. But it would be quite easy for you to evolve to Annie’s level and thus make your marriage viable once more.”

  “All I need is a little Transformational processing, I suppose,” Weller said.

  Franker beamed. “Exactly,” he said. “What’s more, we could put Annie’s processing in what we call a ‘holding state’ until you catch up, which could be done in a month—less if you cared to double up on your sessions. I’m sure Annie would be willing to make such a temporary sacrifice for the sake of your domestic harmony. ”

  He turned to Annie and lowered his voice half an octave. “Wouldn’t you, Annie?” he said, making it sound like a command.

  “Uh … if you think it’s best, Clyde,” Annie muttered. She was like another person, withdrawn, fearful, submissive.

  Weller felt a rising wave of protectiveness toward her. He felt his gorge rising; he had had just about enough. “Are you finished?” he said. “Are you quite finished?” Franker started to say something, but Weller cut him off with voice and hand. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m telling you. You are finished. You are quite finished. I’m warning you, there are recourses. In fact I’ve got half a mind to drag your ass out into the parking lot and—”

  “Stop it, Jack! Stop it!” Annie cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “Shut up, Annie!” Weller said, surprising himself.

  “Really, Mr. Weller,” Franker said, “these juvenile threats—” Weller half rose, his hands balled into fists. “Get away from us,” he said. “Get away from this table. Get out of our lives. Leave my wife alone, or I’ll screw your goddamn head off!” Franker cocked an eyebrow at Annie. “This is worse than I thought,” he said. “This will require environmental alteration.”

  “Clyde, please—”

  “We’ll discuss it at our next session, Annie,” Franker said, rising.

  He turned to stare at Weller with a cold, measured gaze. “Jack,” he said, “you will neither believe nor understand this now, but you are a person gravely in need of our help. And you are going to get it. For a time you may think of us as your enemies, but that will pass. One day, you will be thankful. Try to bear that in mind.”

  “Clyde—”

  “At our next session, Annie,” Franker snapped, cracking his cool for the first and only time, then departing.

  Across the table Annie leaned on her hands, on the verge of trembling. “Why did you have to do it?” she whispered. “Why did you have to do it?”

  Warm and weak with the backwash of adrenalin, Weller said, “Because I love you.”

  “I love you too, Jack, but I think you’ve made a terrible mistake. For both of us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  A shiver went through her body. “I don’t know,” she said softly, “but you shouldn’t have acted that way. I just hope to God I’m wrong. …”

  “Wrong about what?”

  But she crawled into a totally uncommunicative shell and categorically refused to discuss it any further.

  Weller sat in the living room glumly picking at a platter of cold cuts, waiting for Annie to get back from her processing session. For two days, ever since the confrontation with Franker, she had refused to do anything but make small talk, totally cutting off the subject of Transformationalism. It was a return to normalcy that seemed as abnormal to Weller as anything could be; a cold, unreal Disneyland simulacrum of their previous life together, as empty as wax-museum figures of themselves, as brittle as glass.

  All during that ominous period Weller had endlessly contemplated forthrightly forbidding her to go to the Transformation Center, but he couldn’t see how he could make it stick, and a part of him lacked the courage to disturb the artificial calm. This morning he had half decided to do it anyway, but Annie remained fast asleep until it was time for him to leave for work, as if anticipating the scene on an unconscious level and willfully cutting off the possibility.

  So there he sat in the silent gloom, nibbling fitfully at his supper, waiting for some unnameable ax to fall.

  Finally he heard the sound of Annie’s Porsche rumbling into the driveway. Then a long, pregnant silence during which Weller stifled the impulse to meet her at the door; there was no point in putting more weight on this moment than it already had.

  Then Annie walked into the living room, ashen, shaken, yet also projecting a manic determination. She walked across the room toward him like a zombie, without saying a word, and sat down on the edge of the couch beside him.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong?” Weller asked.

  Annie looked down into her lap. “Clyde issued a life directive,” she said in a tiny voice. “He gamed it through with Benson Allen himself, and they both made the decision.”

  “Life directive? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Still not meeting his eyes, Annie said, “They’ve decided that it would be evolutionarily regressive for me to continue to live with you unless you begin processing immediately.”

  “What?” Weller hissed, barely containing the impulse to scream it in rage. “What the fuck are you talking about?” Annie began picking at the cuticles of her right hand with the nails of her left. “If you don’t begin processing and I continue living with you, they’ll cut me off from Transformationalism. Totally. Disobeying a life directive would make me a regressive. They’d cut me off and it would be permanent— it’s policy set by Steinhardt himself.”

  Weller’s composure shattered utterly. There were no words to express the enormity, the outrageousness, the monostrosity of what she was saying; indeed he could not even feel an emotion that seemed adequate to the situation. An anesthetic curtain descended over the rational centers of his mind. All he could feel, all he could express, was total, blind rage.

  “That does it!” he shouted. “I absolutely, categorically, totally forbid you to see any of these maniacs again! I’m going to get me a baseball bat, and I’m going to break it over Clyde Franker’s fucking skull! Then I’m going to take what’s left and shove it up this Benson Allen’s ass till he’s shitting splinters!” Annie leaped up off the couch like a startled deer. “Stop it, Jack, stop it, stop it, stop it!” she screamed. “Don’t you see that you’re just confirming everything they’ve said? You’ve got to go for processing! You’ve just got to”

  Weller bounded off the couch and roared into her reddened, contorted face, blood pounding in his temples. “Processing! I’ll give them processing! I’ll process them into dogmeat! I’ll kick their nuts down their throats!”

  “You’re raving like an animal!”

  “I’m raving like an animal? You’re gibbering like a lunatic!” All semblance of Weller’s restraint was gone; his true feelings were exploding through him in a volcano of relief. He sucked up his own rage, welcoming it, almost enjoying it.

  “I can’t give it up! I’m not going to!”

  “THE FUCK YOU WON’T!”

  Tears began to form in Annie’s eyes. Her face was an ugly mask of rage that only fed Weller’s fury. “You’re not going to tell me what to do with my life!” she screamed.

  “I’m telling you, all right. I’m goddamn well telling you!”

  “I won’t listen to this, I won’t take it!” Annie shouted, her hands balled into fists. “If you won’t come in for processing, I’m getting out of here this very minute!”

  “BULLSHIT!’’ Weller shouted. “RAVING LUNATIC BULL-SHIT!

  “It’s no bullshit, Jack,” she shouted over her shoulder as she ran out of the living room toward the front door. “I mean it! It’s real!” Opening the door, she said, suddenly more calmly, “I’ll talk to you in the morning when mayb
e you’ll have come to your senses.”

  Then she slammed the door hard behind her, leaving Weller transfixed in the center of the living room, his body frozen in rage, his mind roaring with emotional white noise.

  He stood there for long moments trying to force rationality back into his screaming brain, trying to break the shocked, stunned, raging stasis that held him in emotional and physical paralysis.

  But before he could move, before he could get himself to the door, he heard the engine of her car start in the driveway. Then, with a roar, the metallic scream of a missed shift, and the howl of an engine revving toward redline, she was gone.

  All at once there was nothing but the echo of the Porshe engine Dopplering away to nothingness in the night, and the ghosts of their shouting voices filling the living room, reverberating in Weller’s throbbing skull.

  Three

  Taking long gulps from his third mug of instant coffee, Weller paced the house, red-eyed and sour-stomached, trying to figure out what the hell to do. He had been up till nearly three the night before doing likewise. Call the Celebrity Center? Go to the L.A. Transformation Center? Call the police? No course of action seemed viable. Calling the Transformationalists would be pointless. What could he tell the police, that he had had a fight with his wife and would they please find her? Even if they would try to track her down, which they wouldn’t, even if they could find her, which they couldn’t, they certainly couldn’t arrest her, and even if they did, it would certainly only serve to turn Annie more against him.

  He had finally knocked himself out with sleeping pills, gotten maybe four hours of fitful, sweaty sleep, then called the studio and told them he had a stomach virus, and was barfing his guts out, and couldn’t come into work. They had screamed and moaned about the schedule, but obviously they couldn’t expect to get work out of a director who was puking every fifteen minutes.

  He had chosen the stomach-virus schtick because that particular bug usually lasted about twenty-four hours, and he just couldn’t believe that this nightmare wouldn’t be over before tomorrow morning. This wasn’t real. Annie hadn’t seriously left him; they had just had a fight, and her car would be pulling into the driveway any minute now.

  In the meantime there was nothing to do but wait and go slowly crazy.

  Through the living room, down the hall, into the mocking, empty bedroom, a shudder, and back down the hall into the living room again. Maybe this will turn out for the best, Weller told himself. Maybe when she calms down and comes home, realizing what insanity this Transformationalism crap led her to last night, she’ll come to her senses and this whole mess will finally be over. Sure, a scene like that is just what it takes to—

  The phone began to ring.

  Weller pounced on it like a hungry hawk. “Hello?”

  “Jack? It’s me.” Annie’s voice on the other end of the wire was leached of all nuance, any hint of emotion.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “What?” Weller shouted, snapping right back into last night’s screaming match. He quickly regained control; the worst possible thing he could do would be to pick up the fight where they had left off. “Never mind,” he said, with some semblance of calm. “Just come home; all is forgiven.”

  “I can’t come home, Jack,” Annie’s distant electronic voice said. “I’m not coming home. You have to come to me. ”

  “All right, all right. Where are you?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Jesus—” Again Weller caught himself, forced an icy calm. “You’re not making sense, Annie,” he said. “How can I come to you if I don’t know where you are?”

  “I’m going to work for Transformationalism,” Annie said, “and I don’t know where they’re sending me. I won’t be allowed to contact you again, except maybe for a letter under certain circumstances. But Benson Alien himself has assured me that we can be together again as soon as you’ve had enough processing to evolve to my level. A month or two, Jack, that’s all. This isn’t good-bye, just so long.”

  “Annie! Get ahold of yourself! You can’t—”

  “I can’t talk any longer, Jack, I have to hang up. It’s a whole new life for me now, doing work that really matters. The only thing I miss is you. I hope you’ll join me soon. … I love you, Jack, I do still love you.”

  “Annie—”

  But the phone clicked loudly, and a moment later the dial tone was buzzing emptily in his ear.

  Woodenly Weller hung up the receiver, forcing himself to think calmly, mechanically, logically. All his shouting, all his emotion, all his pleading had gotten him nowhere or worse than nowhere. I can’t afford to kick and scream and throw things, he told himself. I’ve got to act. In order to be able to act, I’ve got to figure out what I can do.

  The first step had to be to find Annie. Could the call be traced? No, not after she had hung up, and the phone company wouldn’t do it for anyone but the police anyway. Is it time to call the cops?

  Wait a minute!

  “Benson Allen himself has assured me that we can be together again …” she had said. Allen is the head of the Los Angeles Transformation Center. He’d damn well know where she was.

  And I’ll damn well get it out of him! Weller told himself. He felt the panic that he had been holding back receding, his artificial calm firming up into cold resolve. All I have to do is get it out of Allen. They can’t seriously believe that they can get away with this kind of crap. All I have to do is call his bluff.

  The Los Angeles Transformation Center was a small converted hotel in Hollywood, just south of Sunset Boulevard and just west of Cahuenga, not too far from several studios. A fading tan stucco building eight stories high with a dirty red-tiled roof; a brand of cheap hotel common to the area. In the Golden Days of Hollywood it would have been in good repair and filled with bright, handsome young people slinging hash and waiting on tables while they tried to break into the movies. These days such places were inhabited by sleazy failed pornographers, down-at-the-heels hippies, homosexual hustlers, the flotsam and jetsam of seedy downtown Hollywood.

  This was definitely not a location chosen to attract the elite, and from the outside the building had none of the tone and class of the Celebrity Center. A rather crudely lettered sign above the entrance was all that identified it as the “Los Angeles Transformation Center.” And Weller had to park on the street, for the Center had no parking lot—usually a sign of a second-rate operation in car-dependent Los Angeles.

  Sleazo! Weller thought as he walked up the short flight of stairs and through the unlocked outer door.

  He found himself in an open area that had been the hotel lobby. There were benches along three walls, the lime-green paint was beginning to peel and crack, and there was the inevitable giant photo of John B. Steinhardt hung high on the left-hand wall. There seemed to be no central air conditioning, for the lobby was hot and sticky. About a dozen people were sitting around the lobby—mostly under forty, mostly tackily dressed, a lot of long hair and an unusual amount of bad skin for Southern California. Hollywood losers, Weller thought contemptuously.

  A steel fence had been erected across the lobby, cordoning off the flight of stairs and the bank of two elevators that gave access to the rest of the building. Beside the only gate in the fence was a desk with a burly young man behind it, dressed in the informal Transformationalist uniform of white shirt and black pants and presiding over a clipboard, piles of Transformationalist literature, and a house telephone. Two other big bozos, similarly dressed, lurked by the elevators.

  As far as Weller was concerned, the placed reeked of sleaze and grease, but was not without an aura of tight security, which made him wonder whether it was really going to be so easy to bull his way through to Benson Allen. Certainly force was out of the question.

  Weller approached the man behind the desk. He was about twenty-five, hawk-nosed
, with short black hair, and a red-neck-cop look around the eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said with the cold politeness typical of the Los Angeles police. “May I help you?”

  “I want to see Benson Allen,” Weller said.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not Exactly?”

  “Mr. Allen may be expecting me. My name is Jack Weller. ” The man behind the desk looked through some papers. “No,” he said, “there’s nothing here. If you’ll tell me what it’s in reference to, I’ll direct you to the proper official. Mr. Allen sees no one without an appointment. ”

  “My business is with Allen, it’s a private matter,” Weller said. “He’d better see me.”

  The Transformationalist frowned. Something cold, hard, and threatening seemed to exude from his unwavering eyes. “That’s a regressive attitude,” he said.

  “I don’t care what land of attitude it is,” Weller said. “Allen had better see me, and he had better see me now. Use that phone and tell him I’m here.”

  “Transformationalism does not respond to threats,” the man behind the desk said somewhat loudly. The men by the elevators came to alert.

  “Let me put it this way, Charlie,” Weller said. “I know that Allen will want to see me, and I know he’s going to be pissed off at you if you don’t tell him I’m here.” He paused, picked up a certain wavering of the Transformationalist’s assurance, and then, off the top of his head said: “And John isn’t going to like it either.” And gave the seated man a disdainful stare of his own.

  Surprisingly the man almost immediately broke off eye contact, and his whole demeanor seemed to change. He picked up the phone. “Benson Allen,” he said. Pause. “Benson? This is the desk. There’s a Jack Weller to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment, but—” Another pause. Then he hung up the phone and looked up at Weller with respect, submissiveness, perhaps even a little fear.

  I wish I knew what I just did so I could do it again, Weller thought as the Transformationalist at the desk signaled to one of the men at the elevators.