The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  “Karl, show Mr. Weller to Benson Allen’s office.” Karl opened the gate for Weller and closed it behind him like a hotel doorman.

  Whatever I did, it sure worked, Weller thought as he was led to the elevator. He began to feel a little more on top of things. Instinct, so far, had served him well.

  The elevator went all the way up to the eighth floor. Here the hallways were paneled in walnut, there was dark blue plush carpeting on the floor, and the light came from modern fixtures set flush in the ceiling. Executive country, for sure— a sharp contrast to the peon region below.

  His escort opened a door at the end of the hall and closed it behind him with a flourish as Weller stepped inside.

  Benson Allen’s office had a rich patina of Peter Max hippie elegance. The ceiling was tented with emerald velvet. A huge Persian rug covered most of the floor. There were two big corner windows. There were large op-art paintings, all psychedelic swirls and zigzags of primary colors, festooning the peach-colored walls. There were two low white plush couches and three leather beanbag chairs. Allen’s desk was a kidney-shaped swirl of loud paisley patterns. It was all too much, too much like a set, too unreal.

  The man behind the desk wore a fancy paisley velvet shirt and white pants. Allen had very carefully styled shoulder-length blond hair, and soft, warm puppy-dog eyes set in a beachboy face gone ever so slightly to fat. He looked about thirty-two—a rich, aging flower child. It was hardly what Weller had expected.

  “Sit down, man,” Allen said in a casual, all-too-mellow voice. “I knew you had to make it here. ”

  Hesitantly Weller perched uncomfortably on the edge of a beanbag chair in front of the desk. “I’ll bet you did,” he said. “Where is my wife?”

  “Everything’s cool, Jack,” Allen said pleasantly. “She’s at one of our residential dorms. She’s fine. No need for hostile vibes. ”

  “Then if you’ll just give me her address, 111 leave.”

  Allen leaned back in his chair. He smiled softly. “You know that’s not in the program,” he said.

  “Surely you must know you can’t get away with this,” Weller snapped. “I’m her husband. I’ll … I’ll go to the police. I’ll sue you… . I’ll. …”

  Allen laughed, an infuriatingly mellow sound. “We’re a very heavy outfit,” he said. “Man, you think we haven’t had to deal with this trip before? You think we don’t have lawyers telling us what’s cool? You think we would do this kind of thing if we didn’t know it was legal? Try to sue us, try the police, if you want to run that program. No bad vibes in that. Your old lady is an adult, and she left of her own freewill.”

  “I’ll go to the newpapers,” Weller said. “I’ll go to the district attorney. I’ll have your whole organization investigated.” But his words sounded futile, even to him.

  Benson Allen looked at him sadly, almost sympathetically. “Be real, man,” he said. “You can’t threaten us. We’re too heavy. We’re too powerful. We’re legally righteous. If you can get into this life situation instead of running paranoia scenarios, then we can rap about what can really be done.”

  “All right,” Weller said. “For the moment I’ll let you do the talking.”

  “Groovy,” Allen said. He reached into a drawer, took out two manila folders, and laid them down on the desk top. Leafing through one of them, he said, “Anne Weller has had five weeks of processing. Her psychomap shows blockages in creative commitment and career satisfaction, which externally translates into dissatisfaction with an acting career that hasn’t made it and probably wouldn’t result in eptifying her consciousness even if it did.” He put down the folder and smiled at Weller. “Good news for you, Jack,” he said.

  Weller looked at him blankly.

  “Nothing in here about blocking on you, man,” Allen said. “Most of these kind of cases show heavy marital dysfunction. But according to the psychomap a fully transformed and eptified Anne would still love you. The relationship would not dissolve. Other things being equal. ”

  “So what the hell is all this about?” Weller said. “If that’s what you believe in your vast wisdom, why won’t you tell me where she is?”

  Allen began leafing through the other folder. “Because according to your file—”

  “My file?” Weller shouted. “You’ve got a goddamn dossier on me?”

  “For sure,” Allen said mildly. “We always start one when somebody signs up at the Celebrity Center. And of course we’ve added the data we’ve gotten from your wife’s processing. We have to be into our members external environment if we’re going to epitify their lives, don’t we?”

  “Of all the—”

  “Now dig it,” Allen said more loudly, overriding Weller without cracking his facade of sympathetic cool. “Your file show’s that you’re a heavy regressive influence on Anne. You’ve got a very negative attitude toward Transformationalism which you’ve been laying on her. Your head is full of blocks. You’ve got a low career-satisfaction index, so we can predict that you would get down on her if her satisfaction index started to go up. And of course this factor comes down very heavily on the evolving state of her Transformational consciousness. In your present state it just bums you out. The relationship could only stabilize if you dragged her back down to your level. ”

  Allen paused, leaned forward, gave Weller a warm, concerned lock. “Or,” he said, “if we brought you up to her level.”

  “Which brings us back to square one,” Weller said.

  “We never left it,” Allen said. “You can dig that our first concern must be for Annie, our current member. We can’t let you bring her down to your regressive level of consciousness. But we also care about you.” Again he fingered Weller’s dossier, probably for sheer effect.

  “Jack, you’ve got heavy problems,” he said. “Can’t you see that? Your work is bumming you out, you can’t find a way to change your karma, and you probably couldn’t dig it even if you did. Game it through, man: what if your problem isn’t with your luck but with your head?”

  “What?”

  “Get behind why you’re afraid to try Transformational processing,” Allen said. “Your blocked personality is what’s afraid because it doesn’t want to be transformed into something else, it’s afraid of dying in a way. Man, it’s the most common syndrome there is; your kind of hostility to processing almost always turns out to be a badly blocked personality matrix fighting to keep control of your head.”

  “What a crock of shit!” Weller said. “Because I don’t want you people messing around with my mind, I’m crazy?”

  “No,” Allen said, “because you’re crazy, you don’t want us to process your mind. I mean, look at your scenario. You want to get back together with your wife. Now the only way that is going to happen is for you to agree to processing. Run whatever number you want, you’re gonna find that out. So you’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose, but you still fight it. Now is that really having your head on straight?”

  “Nothing to lose? What about a little thing like money?” But that rang falsely to Weller even as he said it. I wouldn’t spend a few hundred dollars to get Annie back? Can I kid myself that that’s really the reason?

  “Okay, man, if that’s your cop out, I’m going to take it away from you,” Allen said. “I’ll show you that you’re your only enemy in this scenario. I’ll authorize a free introductory lesson and demonstration for you. It usually costs fifteen dollars, but you can be my guest.”

  Weller felt as if he were slogging through glue. Threats had proven useless, and now Allen was working on him, being so totally helpful, benign, and sympathetic that there was no way of coming on hostile without feeling like a nerd and an ingrate. But in the process he was not only closing off every possibility save his agreeing to be processed, but rolling out the red carpet to Room 101. Why don’t I just play it their way? he asked himself. If it’s not going to cost me any money, what’s really stopping me?

  He studied Allen’s benign, assured, puppy-dog face,
and he had the sudden urge to smash it with his fist. This son of a bitch thinks he has me trapped! he thought. He’s sure he’s in control. And that, Weller realized, was why he couldn’t agree to processing. If Allen were able to dictate this first step, that was frightening. Weller finally had to admit that he was afraid of being processed by Transformationalism. Annie, after all, was an intelligent, perceptive, reasonably together person, and look what had happened to her once they got their hooks in. And that business about how he felt about his career had cut too close to the bone, had given him a taste of his own potential vulnerability.

  “Well, what do you say?” Allen said. “You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “The first shot is free, kid, is that it? The price only starts to go up once you’re hooked.”

  Allen sighed. “That’s really lame,” he said.

  “Is it?” Weller snarled.

  “You really are resistant, Jack,” Allen said, perhaps with a hint of petulance.

  “You bet your ass I am!” Weller said. “In feet, that’s exactly what you’re betting. We’ll see what the police really have to say about this! And the district attorney, too. How do I know you didn’t really kidnap her? How do I know you didn’t have a gun to her head when she called me?”

  “Oh wow,” Allen said, with a disdainful little laugh.

  “Oh yeah?” Weller said. “Seems to me if I made such a charge, they’d at least have to investigate, and then they’d have to question Annie, and if you didn’t produce her then, you’d be obstructing justice. ” It began to sound plausible to Weller himself.

  “Oh man,” Allen said softly, “you’ve got to run it ail the way up that blind alley, don’t you? Maybe you’d feel better if you went ahead and gave it a try.”

  “Don’t think I won’t!”

  “I can see you will,” Allen said benignly. “That’s cool. Maybe it’s for the best. Just remember that there won’t be any hard feelings. My offer will still be there when you’re ready to take it. We want to straighten you out, Jack, and we will. We will.”

  Weller stood up. “Your last chance, Allen,” he said. “If I walk out of here now, I go straight to the police. ”

  Allen just smiled, opened his arms, and shrugged.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Allen,” Weller snarled, heading for the door.

  “Not good-bye, Jack,” Allen said. “Just … later.”

  Steaming with rage and frustration, Weller slammed the phone receiver back onto its cradle. The police had given him the politely sympathetic stone wall, and now the district attorney’s office had in effect told him to get lost. When it had come down to it, Weller had been morally and psychically incapable of feeding either the police or the district attorney’s office a cock-and-bull story about a kidnapping. It had sounded all very well as a threat in Benson Allen’s office, but when he got the cool, authoritative desk sergeant on the phone, he found himself telling that impersonal voice the unvarnished truth. The thought of inflaming the Los Angeles police with a phony kidnapping charge was more than he could contemplate in a real-life situation.

  “When did you last see your wife?”

  “Last night.”

  “Did she give any indication that she was being held against her will?”

  “No, but I have reason to believe she’s been brainwashed. …”

  “Look, Mr. Weller, to tell you the truth, we get lots of calls like this these days. Not just about Transformationalism, either. Est, the Jesus Freaks, the Moonies, people get involved with them, and their wives or their husbands or their parents don’t like it, so they call us. If you’re talking about an underage minor, sometimes we can do something, consider them a runaway and at least try to track them down. But when it’s an adult, it’s just not our business. No crime has been committed. You don’t have any evidence of a crime being committed, do you? Mail fraud? False advertising? Anything?”

  “No, but—”

  “Well then, I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

  “But this whole Transformationalist racket—”

  “If you think you’ve got a consumer-fraud case against them, you can try the DA. Okay?”

  Weller had hung up, feeling, in a curious way, as he had in Benson Allen’s office. The police too had a procedure for cutting off your avenues of possibility, for forcing you to accept their interpretation of the situation, for controlling your possible responses. Any bureaucracy interfaced with the individual on its own terms, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get it to accept your viewpoint on reality.

  So he had tried the district attorney’s office, and what he had gotten there was even worse. Yes, we have had many complaints of this sort against Transformationalism. Yes, we have looked into their operation. Three times in the last five years. No, we have never uncovered grounds for prosecution. No, we won’t start another investigation. Why? Because we’ve already wasted tens of thousands of dollars of the taxpayers’ money investigating Transformationalism. Because getting involved in another investigation would be a political liability, Mr. Weller. Because we have no evidence of any illegal activity, and neither do you. Good-bye, Mr. Weller.

  It seemed to Weller that there had been something else going on too, some strange undertone of uneasiness in the voice of the assisstant DA, as if he were slightly afraid to even talk about the case, as if the line he was handing Weller had been the Word passed down from on high. Could Transformationalism have political connections at City Hall?

  Well, maybe that’s an angle to try, Weller thought, dialing the number of Johnny Blaisdell, a press agent he had had some dealings with. I’ve done Johnny a few favors, maybe he can do me one.

  He got Blaisdell on the line, and laid out the whole story. Johnny started out interjecting questions, making little comments, like his usual bouncy self, but before Weller was more than half through, he was talking to dead silence on the other end of the line.

  “So what do you want me to do, Jack?” Blaisdell asked dubiously when Weller had finished.

  “Call up some of your press contacts. Have someone from the Times come and get my story. Maybe instigate a little good old-fashioned muckraking reporting.”

  “Oy,” Blaisdell said, “I love you like a brother, Jack, but you don’t know what you’re asking. Better you should ask me to plant some gossip-column items on the sex lives of Mafia dons.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” Blaisdell said, “that presswise Transformationalism is poison. Let a line about them appear in print, and they sue—the paper, the writer, the writer’s doctor’s dog. It doesn’t even matter if you can prove what you’re saying, they just nibble you to death with court costs on nuisance suits. There isn’t a reporter in town who will go near them. ”

  “You’re kidding,” Weller said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Har-har,” Blaisdell said in a sepulchral voice.

  “You can try. …”

  “Yeah, I can try,” Blaisdell said. “But don’t expect me to succeed. Like they say, don’t call me, I’ll call you. And Jack—?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful, man, be really careful,” Blaisdell said, and hung up.

  Weller collapsed onto the couch. That son of a bitch Allen was right, he thought. The police won’t help, the district attorney won’t do anything, and even the press won’t go after them. He felt small, powerless, and isolated—one man going up against a huge monolith of an organization without a friend or ally. Without even Annie to back him up.

  But the other side of that sense of impotence was frustrated rage, and he flipped back into it almost immediately. Fuck you, Transformationalism! he thought. Fuck you, Benson Allen! Fuck you, John B. Steinhardt! You’re not going to do this to me, not to Jack Weller, you don’t!

  He picked up the phone. There was still one more thing to try—Wally Bruner, his lawyer. Wally was a sharp guy; maybe he could come up with a legal angle.

  “Wally? Jack Weller. Look, I feel like
I’ve told this story a million times already, so pardon me if I give it to you as quickly as possible.”

  “Shoot, Jack,” Bruner said crisply. “You really sound upset.”

  “I am. To make it short, Annie has gotten involved with Transformationalism. They’ve got her brainwashed. They ordered her to leave me if I wouldn’t join the club, and she did. I don’t know where she is, I have no way of contacting her, they won’t tell me, and the police and the district attorney have told me to get lost. What the hell do I do?”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line; Weller could all but hear the gears grinding in Wally’s head. He’ll think of something, he’s got to.

  “Well,” Bruner finally said, “if the police won’t get involved and the DA won’t get involved, charges against Transformationalism are a legal dead end.”

  “There’s nothing I can do?” Weller asked plaintively.

  “I didn’t say that, Jack. There is one thing we can try, but I warn you, it’s heavy.”

  “What could be heavier than what’s already going on?” Weller said. “Let me have it.”

  “Speaking as your lawyer,” Bruner said, “I’d advise you to file divorce proceedings against Annie on the grounds of abandonment.”

  “What?” Weller shouted. “That’s crazy? I’m trying to get her back, and you tell me to divorce her?”

  “I’m talking as your lawyer,” Bruner said. “If you filed against Annie, sooner or later she’d have to appear in court or let the divorce go through uncontested. It’s the only way I know of to force her to contact you.”

  “And then what?” Weller snapped. “I drag her into court against her will, and that’s supposed to convince her to come home? That’s crazy, Wally. She probably wouldn’t even show up. And what would I have then—a divorce I didn’t want.”

  “I can only give you legal advice, Jack,” Bruner said. “I’m a lawyer, not a shrink.”

  Weller found himself folding up inside. He wanted to scream and run around the house breaking things. He wanted to go after Benson Allen with a sawed-off shotgun. He wanted to cry. And he knew that all of those impulses were just hallmarks of stupid, trapped, impotent frustration.