The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  “That’s the correct attitude,” Karel said. “But then, you’d know that, wouldn’t you?”

  “If you say so,” Weller said. “Ah, is there anything else? I’ve had a tiring day …”

  “That will be all for now,” Karel said solemnly.

  “Well then, see you around …”

  “You will,” Karel said, then turned and walked off, leaving Weller standing there in the cold wake of his passage. Bro—ther! If this character were typical of the Monitors, he could see why they made even Benson Allen nervous. It was going to be some pleasure working around here. For a mad moment he felt a twinge of nostalgia for the good old days of Monkey Business.

  “It’s a screwed-up mess, really, it’s incredible,” Weller said, pacing around Garry Bailor’s tacky living room, feeling tiredly superior, an emotion which gave him little satisfaction. “I’ve worked four different shoots now, and nobody seems to really know what they’re doing. But they think they do. Oh brother, do they think they do!”

  Bailor looked up at him from the couch, over the top of a can of beer. “Why does that surprise you?” he said. “You just told me that only Sara English has any real experience, and that was pom.”

  Jesus, Weller thought, is this guy really that dense? “But they keep getting assignments,” he snapped. “They’re booked solid for the next month. How can they keep getting work off the crap they turn out?”

  “You told me that Transformationalism owns at least a dozen companies through fronts, including an advertising agency which funnels assignments to Changes,” Bailor said. He shrugged. “One hand feeds the other. …”

  Weller collapsed onto the couch beside Bailor. “Obviously,” he said. “But it’s not all in-house work. They’re doing stuff for all kinds of companies that don’t seem to have anything to do with Transformationalism. Hell, they’re even going to do some political spots for a mayoral candidate upstate. And it’s all the same—technically horrible and loaded down with not-very-subtle Transformationalist propaganda. How the flick do they get away with it?”

  The more he learned, the less sense it made. Every script seemed to be written on two levels. If it were a vegetable-chopper commercial, the machine “transformed kitchen chores into creative cooking art.” Ticky-tacky houses in a crummy development were “at the leading edge of Los Angeles’s expansion into the twenty-first century.” Lawrence Savings and Loan “transformed your money into the instrument of a better tommorrow.” You could “eptify your bodily functions and cleanse your mind of metabolic blockages” with Walden Health Foods. If they were selling a laxative, they’d probably say that you could “ride the changes out your asshole.”

  What were they doing with all this? Bombarding the public with a few key Transformationalist terms over and over again so that when old John Q. came across Transformationalism itself, it would seem familiar and have positive connotations? It reminded Weller of the “subliminal advertising” paranoia of the 1950s, when people were convinced that their television sets were sneaking secret messages into their subconscious minds. Was Transformationalism actually doing that?

  For that matter where did the scripts come from? He had yet to see a writer, and a few times he had seen Owen Karel handing bound scripts to Sara. Were the Monitors making this stuff up?

  If this game were only being played with companies owned by Transformationalism, he could understand it. But banks? Political candidates? Restaurants? Why were they continuing to shell out good money for bad commercials loaded with subliminal Transformationalist crap?

  Bailor took a sip of beer. “Maybe they have their hooks into everyone they’re making commercials for,” he suggested.

  Weller snorted. “Banks?” he said. “Used-car lots? Kitchenware companies? An aerospace outfit? Man, if they own everything that they’re making commercials for. …”

  “They wouldn’t have to own all their clients,” Bailor said. “All they’d need would be Transformationalists in key places. An account executive … a vice-president … a sales manager …”

  “A political candidate?”

  Bailor looked at him peculiarly and shrugged.

  “You’re making me paranoid,” Weller said. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  Bailor grimaced. “That kind of stuff I don’t want to know,” he said. “In my line of work it’s very unhealthy. As long as I just take a few followers away from these outfits, I’m merely an annoyance. They tolerate my existence. But if I start getting into their corporate involvements, if they think I’m becoming a threat to them on an organizational level. …” He shuddered. “Jack, if you find out anything like that, be sure not to tell me. Let’s keep this strictly on a one-to-one deprogramming level, okay?”

  “Thanks a lot,” Weller grunted. Bailor’s see-no-evil attitude frightened him more than anything else had. The son of a bitch knows more about Transformationalism than I do, and he doesn’t want to know any more. What should that tell me? And with “Monitor life analysis” starting tomorrow, too, whatever that is… .

  “Do you mind if we talk about the Monitors, Garry?” he said sardonically. “Or is that subject taboo too?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Bailor said. “But I’ll be honest with you. I’ve never worked with anyone that’s been this far in before, not someone who’s working for them and dealing with the inner organization. ”

  “Inner organization?”

  “That’s what the Monitors seem to be,” Bailor said. “A kind of Transformationalist secret police, under Steinhardt’s direct control. It’s a big, complicated organization with lots of fronts, and it would seem that Steinhardt uses the Monitors to make sure the accounting stays honest, to make sure everyone who works for the movement toes the line. As I understand it, a directive from Fred Torrez, who runs the Monitors for Steinhardt, can even overrule the heavies like Allen and Lazio. That’s about all I know.”

  “And all you want to know,” Weller said bitterly.

  “You got it. I don’t mess around with people like that because I don’t want them messing around with me. ”

  “Marvelous,” Weller snapped. “Fucking marvelous!”

  Bailor looked at him coldly. “You didn’t ask my advice when you decided to go to work for them, now did you?” he said.

  “And what would you have told me?” Weller snapped. “To stay unemployed? That you’d put my bill on the cuff?”

  Bailor shrugged. “Maybe that you should rethink the question of whether or not all this is worth it to you,” he said.

  “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” Weller said. “Now what about this damned life analysis thing?”

  Bailor took a long pull of beer. He squirmed on the couch. He looked really uncomfortable. “I don’t think it’s another process,” he said. “More like a security check. I suppose what you can expect is some pretty heavy but straightforward interrogation.”

  “Bright lights and rubber hoses?” Weller said. Jesus, all this was getting positively unreal. What have I gotten myself into? Bailor doesn’t even want to know. Do I? Can I really handle this?

  He looked at Bailor and tried very hard to suppress the hostility he felt toward the cowardly bastard. Bailor was beginning to look sleazy, weak, and not exactly a man to lean on should the going get rough. Yet there was no one else he could ask, no one else to talk to about it.

  “Do you really think I’m in too deep?” he asked. “Are you saying I should pull out of this thing now, while I can?” Bailor leaned back and spoke softly and slowly. “You’re about through with meditative deconditioning, and we seem to have pulled that much off,” he said. “If you keep playing the same part, you’ll probably get through life analysis too. And after that we should be home free to Annie. … Of course, it is your decision …”

  “Yeah, but what would you do in my place?”

  Bailor laughed humorlessly. “I wouldn’t get my ass into your position in the first place,” he said. “But there is another factor. You�
��re working for them. The Monitors have already ordered a life analysis. You know things about their operation that are not exactly public knowledge. …”

  A chill went through Weller. “What are you saying?”

  “I guess I’m saying that it wouldn’t be so easy for you to pull out now,” Bailor said. “Probably nothing earthshaking, but they wouldn’t like it. So if you’re going to have to go through that shit anyway, you might as well go ahead for a few more weeks till you get to Annie so at least what you’ll have to go through will be worth it. ”

  “What are you talking about?” Weller hissed. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “Probably just some pressure,” Bailor said cavalierly. “Phone calls at all hours. Ominous letters from the Monitors. Threats. Stuff like that. Why do you think I rent this dump and make it impossible for anyone to get my home phone number?”

  “Now you tell me?” Weller said. His stomach felt as if it were filled with ice. Suddenly he felt small and powerless and Bailor seemed to be talking to him across an immense and isolating distance.

  “Hey, don’t freak out, ” Bailor said. “It’s not as if they were going to plant bombs in your car or send hit men after you.” He frowned. “A least I’ve never heard of them going that far… .”

  “That’s comforting,” Weller said wanly. “That’s very comforting. ”

  Bailor seemed to be thinking some private thoughts, and from the look on his face they weren’t too reassuring.

  “Are you thinking of bugging out on me, Garry?” Weller asked sharply.

  Bailor snapped out of his reverie. He smiled a horrid plastic smile. “Take it easy, Jack,” he said. “We’ll come through it okay. ”

  “Sure we will,” Weller said sourly. It’s us against them, he thought, regarding Bailor narrowly. Only them keeps getting bigger and us keeps getting smaller. He remembered the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto surrounded by a horde of hostile Indians. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto, and he says, “Well, it looks like we’ve had it, Tonto.” And Tonto looks at the Lone Ranger, and he says: “What do you mean we, white man?”

  Weller took the elevator up to the seventh floor of the Transformation Center in the grip of a strange psychic flatness compounded of ennui, boredom, and a growing sense of superiority to the Transformationalist milieu in which he had become immersed. He couldn’t even work up much of a healthy sense of paranoia about the imminent opening round of Monitor life analysis.

  Working as a cameraman for Changes Productions was even more tedious and creatively noninvolving than directing Monkey Business. Being a cameraman meant standing around waiting interminably for the next shot to be set up under the best of circumstances, whereas directing even the worst schlock meant attention to business at all times. Indeed the director was the guy who kept the cameraman standing around waiting for him to get his shit together, as Weller soon rediscovered when the roles were reversed.

  And when the directors were as incompetent as the amateurs he was being forced to work under, the cameraman spent his whole day in a state of impatient, contemptuous boredom. Further, when the mind behind the viewfinder was that of a director, it took to second-guessing every take of every shot in advance, setting it up, instructing the actors, and shooting it over and over again mentally before the actual director on the set did it his way. And of course, nine times out of ten, the Changes Productions directors did it wrong, extracting footage far inferior to what Weller was shooting inside his own head. So even the advance second-guessing soon became a tedious mental ritual, a mind game that ran automatically in his head, programmed by boredom, edged by contempt.

  What gave the tedium a lunatic piano-wire tension was that Weller knew he was the only person in the building who felt that way; he was surrounded by enthusiasm and dedication and people who were ecstatically convinced they were doing work of cosmic significance.

  Georgie Prinz turned out to be a former dope dealer who had been in processing for two years and who lived and breathed Transformationalism twenty-four hours a day. The other two directors he had worked with were an aging pornographer filled with guilt for what he had been and a one-time New Left media freak who was now convinced that Transformationalism was the true Revolution and that the commercials he was shooting were the highest form of media guerilla warfare. Between them, Georgie Prinz, Max Silver, and Shano Moore put out enough rhetoric and useless energy to light Pasadena, but without the skill and talent to focus it, it just kept the actors and crew in a perpetual state of ideological fervor and working confusion.

  When he saw Sara English, he felt that he could cut the sexual vibes with a knife, but if it were anything beyond his own hominess and her background as a one-time porno starlet, she had yet to acknowledge it with a word or gesture. So far it was just one more turn of the screw.

  Weller found himself locked inside his own skull, bored, angered, confronted with his own hominess, and alienated on his mountaintop of professional disdain.

  Even the meditative deconditioning sessions were losing their bite as Weller sensed the process drawing to a conclusion. Now that he was locked inside his own mind all day, double thinking his way through the life scenarios became just another automatic mind game. He knew exactly what Sylvia was looking for, and feeding it to her was as easy and mechanical as giving the directors the stupid shots they were calling for.

  From the speed with which the scenarios were coming and Sylvia’s attitude, he could tell that he was giving her optimized readings on the brainwave monitor almost as fast as the words came out of her mouth. Worship and trust for the Great Man? Just adjust the focus a hair. Self-sacrificing dedication to the Cause? Zoom in for a medium close-up, please. His mind was becoming as precise a mechanical instrument as his camera. It couldn’t be long before he was officially declared an “optimized consciousness.” The process was almost over, and that was all that kept him going. Even Annie was no more than a faceless abstraction shimmering in the distance across a desert of dull gray boredom.

  So now it was time to confront Monitor life analysis, the last barrier. Satisfy these bastards, he told himself as he entered the room, and the whole horrible game would be over.

  Once again he was in a small cubicle like the meditative-deconditioning room, but this time the man behind the desk didn’t even have a brainwave monitor in front of him, just a fat manila envelope and a ball-point pen. The Monitor himself was a wiry, streetwise-looking Chicano in his late twenties, with short black hair and hard, uncompromising eyes.

  “I’m Gomez, I’ll be doing your life analysis,” he said in a thick emotionless voice. “Sit down, Mr. Weller.”

  Automatically Weller sat down. That voice sounded as if it were used to giving orders and just as used to having them obeyed.

  “Understand what this is up front, so we won’t get locked into personalities,” Gomez said, scanning some material in the folder as he spoke. “My job is to evaluate your life—not just your consciousness, but how you live, what you’re likely to do, where you’re really at, the whole picture. Processing is for you, but this for the movement. If you’re going to be one of the people presenting Transformationalism to the world, Transformationalism has to be sure of you. Dead sure. And the movement has to come first, not your personal feelings. Got that?”

  “I understand,” Weller said.

  “Good.” Gomez looked up and his heavy lips creased in a faint smile. “Because you’re gonna think I’m a pretty mean hombre before this is over. You may hate my guts. You may think I’ve got it in for you personally. None of that is true. I’m serving the movement as I’ve been directed to, and your directive is to cooperate totally. We’re both working for the same thing, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. Got that?”

  Weller nodded, somewhat stunned by this belligerant assault, this seemingly deliberate provocation to paranoia. He hated Gomez already, and he wondered whether that was not precisely what he was being programmed to feel.

  “Okay
,” Gomez said, “let’s get moving.” He paused and fingered the folder. “I hope you’re not surprised to hear that this is your dossier, and that we have pretty complete data on the obvious stuff. So we won’t waste time on a lot of trivial things we already know. Up front, Weller, what kind of lames do you think we are? Who do you think you’re kidding?”

  “What?”

  “Okay, let’s get rid of that one right now. Your wife gets a life directive to split because of your hostility to the movement, and you run in here and do an apeshit act, and then suddenly you join Transformationalism and bullshit your way into working for Changes. You think the Monitors are that stupid? You think we’ve never seen this number run before? You’re here to con us into letting you see your wife. Don’t call me an asshole by denying it, man !”

  Weller reeled, totally unprepared for Gomez’s instant, contemptuous, and sure insight into the true nature of the game. Watch it! he told himself. This is a new ball game, and this guy is sharp. But it seemed to him that if they had let him come this far, the game was still on, and this must be a tactic. He wants me to react. What kind of reaction would the convert Jack Weller have? Anger is too obvious… .

  Instead Weller slumped in his chair and issued a mournful sigh. “How can I deny that that’s what brought me to Transformationalism?” he said. “But don’t you have enough faith in the movement to believe that it could’ve Transformed me, even against my will? Don’t insult my intelligence. The movement wouldn’t have had anything to do with me if you didn’t think that were possible.”

  Gomez’s face became neutrally blank. “Explain,” he said evenly. It seemed like an encouraging sign.

  “Explain what?” Weller said. “That meditative deconditioning showed me where I was coming from? That the guy who came in here to get his wife back had his face rubbed in his own smallness? That Transformationalism gave me the balls to quit a lousy job that was turning me into a zombie? That I finally want to do something meaningful with my life?”