What? Suddenly the silly little game took on new levels. Weller had the feeling that he had really been suckered into something, but he didn’t know what. Well, if that’s the way we’re going to play it… .
“What makes you think you can do that, Jack?” Weller said. “If we’re smart enough to take your wife away from you, don’t you think we’re smart enough to know where you’re coming from?” Jesus! he thought. Why did I say that?
“Because I think you people are stupid enough to think you’re smart enough to use my own motivations to suck me in and convert me,” Don said, plastering a sardonic smirk across his face.
Man, I’ve got to think this through better, Weller realized. This son of a bitch is seeing right through me! Wheels within wheels!
“Are you so sure you know your own motivations that well, Jack?” Weller said. There, that’s better, let him do my work for me.
“What do you mean by that?” the processor said confusedly, and Weller sensed that he was off-balance both as “Weller” and as himself.
“You’re a director,” Weller said. “You think you know how to manipulate people. Don’t you think this is something of a challenge to you, a high-stakes game? Is your head stronger than Transformationalism or is Transformationalism stronger than your head? Don’t you think part of the reason you came here is to find out the answer to that one?”
Weller’s head was aching with the convoluted tensions of this little exercise in mind-fuck. What he had said was carefully calculated, but even as he said it, he realized that it was also an essential truth. Moreover he was in some way enjoying this game; he felt himself filling with energy, he was really cooking. Try this number on a pro, will you?
“Maybe you’re right,” Don said. “One thing is sure, I’m not here because I think I really need Transformational processing. And your job is to convince me I do. ”
Old Don seemed to be walking right into it, Weller thought. Whether he knows it or not, he’s letting me set up the character of “Weller” as a prideful shithead who can be led along into Transformationalism by his ego. Just the rationale I want them to have for the first step of my “conversion!”
“You flatter yourself,” Weller said. “Transformationalism has millions of converts. What makes you think it’s so important for us to snare you?”
“Because I’m a challenge to you,” Don said. “As a director I’m the kind of person it should be hardest for you people to get to. And I’ve come in here hostile and combative. I’ve got my own strong motivation for conning you into believing that I’m really becoming Transformed while I’m really just playacting. If Transformationalism can really get to me under those conditions, it’ll really have proven something, won’t it?”
Weller paused, studied the processor, and tried to fathom what was really going on. It seemed to him that Don was really throwing down Transformationalism’s gauntlet. He was being told that Transformationalism knew exactly where he was coming from and didn’t care. That they were so bloody self-confident that they could know his game and tell him their game and still be sure they would get to him in the end. On the other hand, he himself had at the very least collaborated in setting up that dynamic; it was the only credible motivation for Jack Weller that he could feed to them. Moreover, it was essentially true. Who the hell was conning whom?
“So you see all this is a game between Transformationalism and yourself?” he said, trying to draw out the answer. “The winner is the one with the stronger head?”
Don smiled at him. “It’s the king of games, isn’t it?” he said. “The mind game. If I win, I get Annie back on my terms; if you win, you’ve got me as a willing convert.”
“But if we win, you win too,” Weller blurted. “After all, you get your wife back either way.” Now why the hell did I say that? Weller wondered. Jeez, I must really be getting into this part!
“It depends on what you mean by winning,” the processor said.
“But also on what you mean by losing, Jack,” Weller found himself saying without quite knowing why. For sure he had gotten totally caught up in this game for its own sake. He had gotten caught up in playing the part of the processor to the point where he had been speaking off a processor s motivations, even when they ran contrary to his own. Technically, as an acting exercise, the number that had been run on him fascinated and impressed him. More pragmatically and less happily, it gave him new respect for the psychic cunning of Transformationalism.
Don leaned back, seemed to visibly pop out of character, and revert to his supermarket-clerk persona. “You’re very good at this,” he said.
Weller felt his body relaxing, though his mind continued to spin through the wheels within wheels. “So are you,” he said.
“Has this little demonstration shown you that Transformationalism has something to teach you?”
For a moment it seemed as if they were back playing something like the role-reversal game again. He was going to say yes because he had too—and perhaps incidentally because it was true—and he knew that Don knew what he was going to say, and he knew where it was going to lead, and he knew that the processor knew that he knew… . Who was really seeing through whom?
“I’ve got to admit that it does,” Weller said.
Don looked at him neutrally. “Do you think you’d like to sign up for the one-month course?” he said. “It’s twice a week for only two hundred and fifty dollars. …”
Weller groaned inwardly, then psychically collapsed toward the inevitable. The outcome of all this convoluted fencing had been preordained before he had even sat down, and they both knew it. Enough of this bullshit already!
Weller gave the processor the old Transformationalist Stare. “I think you’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse,” he said.
But he knew, and not without a certain twinge of selfloathing, that there was a considerable part of him that had been seduced by the role-reversal game, not forced by circumstance. The game itself was fascinating, no matter why he found himself playing it. It was as if he were exercising psychic muscles, an aspect of his talent, that hadn’t been extended to the fullest for too long a time. He liked the feeling, he didn’t want to lose it, and the fact that he was playing this acting game for keeps only added a keen existential edge to the contest.
Don had said it, speaking as “Weller” himself—it was the king of games.
Five
“The same thing as the first session,” Weller said, looking at Garry Bailor. “He just plugged me into the brainwave monitor and shot words and phrases at me for an hour, no pattern that I could figure out. ”
Bailor sat there on the couch beside him, rocking back and forth imperceptibly, encouraging Weller to go on only by his silence. Although Bailor just silently studied him like a bug under a microscope while Clark Burns, the block-auditing processor, droned on incessantly during the sessions, Weller was beginning to get the same feeling of tense boredom that he had experienced during his two block-auditing sessions. The lack of human feedback response was the same, and so was the feeling of two people in a room together locked into their own private universes.
Bums was a balding, colorless little middle-aged man, and that first night he had simply introduced himself, fitted an electrode band on Weller’s head, plugged it into the brainwave monitor, sat down, and given his brief instructions as if he were reading them off an idiot card, as if he were merely an extension of the machine.
“This is a brainwave monitor. It measures four channels of your brainwaves. I’ll read you a series of words and phrases and note your brainwave responses on the chart. Since I’ll be reading your brain’s responses directly off my oscilloscope, you don’t have to respond verbally, though you may do so if you wish. Are there any questions?”
The brainwave monitor was a gray console, about the size of a portable television set, on the table between Weller and Bums. Facing Bums was an oscillosocpe and a series of knobs and switches. All Weller could see now was the top of Burns’s
head, down to his eyes, peering at him over the featureless back of the machine. Bums had a clipboard and a ball-point pen poised to fill in the spaces on Weller’s “psychomap. ” It all seemed cosmically silly somehow.
“No questions,” Weller said, though he would have liked an explanation of the circuitry of the device. But he had the feeling that the brainwave monitor was as much a mysterious “black box” to Burns as it was to him, and he doubted that the processor would have explained anything technical to him even if he could.
“Good,” the processor said. “We’ll begin. Try to clear your mind of any strong emotional thoughts so I can get a level reading.” Burns’s eyes, looking strangely disembodied with the rest of his face hidden by the machine, glanced down at the scope. “Good enough,” he said, and started reading from a form on his clipboard.
“Mother… ” A pause, a glance at the scope, something jotted on the form. “Father. …” Pause, glance, scribble.
“Fuck … Kill … Shit… .”
It only took a few minutes of this brainless procedure for the process to seem interminable to Weller and infuriatingly boring. “A large dog is barking on your lawn… . Cock… . One hundred thousand dollars… . Heil Hitler. …”
Just the eyes above the console, glancing at him, the scope, the form, and back again, in a regular, mechanical rhythm, and the flat voice mouthing random words—sometimes obscene, sometimes meaningless, sometimes downright silly. After awhile Weller began to feel that they were both just extensions of the machine, lumps of flesh plugged passively into the electronic circuitry. At first this feeling was infuriating, then it became somewhat frightening, but finally it just helped him melt into the mindlessness of the whole process. “Wife… . oralsex… .middleage … . gumdisease… .” Weller felt his mind drifting in a sea of total boredom. The words and phrases that kept coming at him had just enough intermittent momentary meaning to prevent his mind from floating off into any extended reverie about anything outside this cosmically boring situation, to interrupt any coherent train of independent thought that might be starting to form. He tried to keep himself alert by looking for some kind of pattern in the words Burns was reading, but although most of them were loaded with emotional connotations in the heavy areas of sex, death, love, fear, success, age, and money, they seemed to jump back and forth; there seemed to be no pattern, no trend, no line of development.
“Transformationalism… .Cunt… . Sigmund Freud… .” For a while Weller tried giving verbal responses, as if it were some classical Freudian word-association game. “Toothache pain. …”
“Jackhammer. …”
“Bank loan. …”
“Feature film. …”
“Syphilis. …”
“Orgasm. …”
But Bums didn’t respond at all. Just the eyes looking at him, looking at the form, a word or phrase, a glance at the scope, back to the form, flick, speak, flick, flick. Flick, speak, flick, flick. He soon gave up on talking back to the process and simply endured the boredom of what was going on like a good soldier.
“… four score and seven… . black leather underwear… . you’re fired… . pregnant… . the phone is being disconnected. …”
“It seemed to go on for a century,” Weller told Bailor, “just like Tuesday. And afterward he just told me that the session was over and he would see me next week. ”
Bailor continued to study Weller with his cold ball-bearing eyes. “Well?” Weller demanded. He was beginning to get thoroughly pissed off with robotic nonresponses in general.
“There had to be some trends in the words he was using,” Bailor suddenly said sharply. “That’s the way it works.”
“I told you there weren’t any,” Weller snapped irritably. Bailor drummed his fingers annoyingly on the coffee table. “Maybe you’re not catching it. Though it could be too early. Nobody seems to know what the brainwave monitor really does, or even if it does anything. But the whole point of the process is programming through boredom.”
“Huh?”
Bailor stood up suddenly and began pacing in small circles, snapping off his words like strings of firecrackers. “Whether they really map areas of resistance in the mind doesn’t matter,” he said, “because that’s just a front for the programming. Bored out of your mind, weren’t you? Literally. The only input you get is those random words, but you’re getting that continually, so you can’t concentrate on anything else either. Creates a suggestible state. Boredom is a powerful hypnotic device, especially when it’s being used to focus your attention on a single controlled input. Get it?”
“Yeah …” Weller said slowly. “I’m beginning to see what you mean.”
Bailor suddenly stopped pacing, stood directly above Weller, pointed a finger at him, and quizzed him like an irate schoolteacher. “So think! There had to be a pattern—”
“I told you—”
“Hold!” Bailor snapped, cutting him off. He began to pace again. “Forget the simple first-order sequence. If they’re programming you, the goal has to be to affect your attitude toward Transformationalism, probably through your sense of self-esteem. The words in between would be just so much static, designed to distract your conscious attention from what they’re planting subliminally.”
He paused halfway across the room and looked back at Weller. “Now think—just the words relating to Transformationalism and self-esteem, blocking the other stuff out of the sequence. Any pattern there?”
Weller looked at Bailor blankly. What does this guy think I am, a fucking computer? he thought. But, obediently, he strained his mind, trying to remember some pattern, something from the second session. “Processing … hemlock… home … cunnilingus … garbage … grace … baby … Red China … high school … helplessness … beer saloon … Steinhardt… elephant… power… grandfather…” Was that it? Was there really something there, or was Bailor just making him paranoid?
“Processing, home, grace, Steinhardt, power, grandfather,” he muttered. “Do you think that’s a meaningful sequence? I think I remember that right, with the other words taken out. Or am I just creating a pattern where none exists?”
“If there’s a pattern in your head, there’s a pattern in your head,” Bailor said. He sat down on the couch, studied Weller. “Do you notice any change in your attitude toward Transformationalism?”
“Yeah. In addition to everything else, it’s starting to bore the piss out of me. ”
Bailor frowned at him disapprovingly. “This isn’t funny,” he said. “You’ve got to keep your mind alert during processing. If you let yourself drift, that’s when you start to pick up programming. ”
“Jesus Christ,” Weller said, “I’m not in a paranoid enough situation, you’ve got to get me picking patterns out of endless strings of random words?” He had a terrible vision of a world in which everything had an ominous subliminal meaning— random bits of conversation, radio commercials, the sequence of parked cars, every third word in newspaper headlines.
“Don’t worry about picking out patterns,” Bailor said. “The important thing is just to be aware of the possibility and not let any programming take hold. You’ve got to assume that these people are out to capture your mind, and paranoia is therefore your best ally. It’s an accurate perception of your reality.”
“My God. …”
“Don’t worry,” Bailor said much more softly. “You’re doing okay. You don’t have to concentrate on all this consciously. What we’ve discussed tonight will stay with you. Kind of a clearing program’ I’ve put in your head to help filter out whatever your processor will be trying to plant. Just stay alert, stay skeptical, and let what I’ve planted work. ”
“Shit …” Weller muttered tiredly. The whole thing was turning into an insane nightmare—the processing sessions, the absence of Annie, this dingy dump, and a guy telling him that he was being counterprogrammed to counteract the Transformationalist programming, that paranoia was an accurate description of reality. And yet the block-auditin
g had gotten to Annie. And Bailor was an expert. If the whole thing were insane, the insanity was not in his mind or in Bailor’s but in the life situation itself.
“Is this all real, Garry?” he asked quietly. “Secret patterns? Programming ? Counterprogramming?”
“Welcome to modern reality,” Bailor said dryly. “Yeah, it’s real. It’s all around you. Transformationalism. TV news. Advertising. Political propaganda. Movies. Books. Magazines. We’re swimming in a sea of mind-programing. Everything has programing hidden in it, especially when the content seems to be random. Even the language itself programs our heads. It’s always been like that—the difference now is that there are people out there like Steinhardt who know it and know how to use it. Aside from the money why do you think I’m in this racket? Because I don’t like the situation any better than you do.”
Weller looked at Bailor speculatively. For what he had said was strangely like the line Steinhardt himself had spouted on the orientation tape: free the mind from the total matrix of cultural programming. In Steinhardt’s case that seemed to boil down to substituting new programming of your own. And wasn’t that what Bailor was really doing too? Could you really deprogram the mind by using programming techniques? Or was that like lifting yourself by your own bootstraps?
Now Bailor seemed to be studying him. “Something wrong, Jack?” he asked sympathetically.
“Nothing,” Weller sighed. What was the point in creating more paranoia in this paranoid situation?
“Okay,” Bailor said, “so go home and get some rest.” Bailor smiled at him quite warmly, clapped him on the thigh.
“Okay, Garry,” Weller said, getting up and walking toward the door. “So long. See you next week.”
“Jack?”
Weller turned to look at Bailor, who stood in front of the couch, waiting expectantly for something. “What is it?” he asked.
The Mind Game Page 9
