The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  Sara nodded.

  Part of Weller was mightily pissed off at the chutzpah of Steinhardt’s damn wife actually ordering him to go to her bloody party. But another part of him was curious to meet her. Steinhardt’s wife. As close to the center of Transformationalism as you could get. Be honest with yourself, Weller, if you weren’t being ordered to go to this thing, you’d damn well want to go. There was a certain fascination to the idea of actually meeting someone who slept with the Great Man.

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you there.” He had to admit that he felt a certain excitement at the notion of penetrating to the very eye of the storm.

  His hands soaking in a galvanized iron sink full of hot, greasy suds, pulling out plates, giving them a lick with a sponge, dipping them in the rinse tub, stacking them on the rack, Weller had his nose rubbed in the incongruities of his position and the kind of total power over his life that they implied.

  In the hermetically sealed little world of the Transformation Center, he had had a certain notoriety and status thrust upon him, virtually against his will. By now everyone knew he was a director at Changes, and he could become a center of attention whenever he so chose and all too many times when he didn’t. Tomorrow night he would be a guest at Maria Steinhardt’s party, and the poor nerds at the center would go crazy with envy if he let them know about that.

  Yet at the same time, here he was, forced to do the lowest scut work as if they were carefully reminding him that the movement giveth and the movement taketh away; all power to the movement. As if? What else was it but a deliberate demonstration of their total power over his life? You vill go to Maria Steinhardt’s party. You vill wash dishes. You vill demonstrate the proper enthusiasm. Jawohl, and you vill like it!

  It was also an object lesson in the dichotomy at the heart of Transformationalism. The penniless people who lived at the center, dedicating their lives and free labor to the movement, were no less suckers than the millions paying through the nose for processing. Whatever the marks had to give—money or labor—Transformationalism took. The slavies and the taxpayers were just two aspects of the same undermass that supported an elite which began with the processors, and narrowed up into the Monitors, the Allens and the Lazlos, and peaked into a Steinhardt mansion in Bel Air.

  And they had set it up so that Weller was both a member of the elite and one of the lowliest peons simultaneously— parties at the Steinhardt mansion and dishwashing at the Transformation Center. Perhaps that’s what they’re trying to do, he thought, force me to identify with the elite by rubbing my nose in the alternative. Or maybe what they’re telling me is that there is only one real elite and its name is John B. Steinhardt.

  Weller finished the last dish in the sink, wiped his hands, and walked out of the kitchen into the hallway, paying no attention to his fellow scullions. I’m not one of these suckers, he told himself’, but I’ll be damned if I’ll become one of the suckees, either.

  “Hi, Jack, why don’t you come along to our rap session?” Tina Davies had accosted him again—a tall, gangling blond in her mid-twenties, who had been trying to latch onto him for about two days now. There didn’t seem to be anything sexual in it—in fact, come to think of it, there was a vast lack of sexual energy at the Center, considering that there were so many young people jammed together in a communal situation —rather it seemed to be a kind of evangelical fervor, the desire to be the one to lead this enigmatic figure fully into the fold. “We’re going to discuss the roads to Transformationalism.”

  “The roads to Transformationalism?”

  “You know, what brought us as individuals to the movement.”

  Weller studied her intense, angular face. What did bring these people to Transformationalism? He had to admit that the question intrigued him, and he also realized that if he stayed away from all the optional activities much longer, he would risk blowing the whole thing. So—what the hell… ?

  “Okay,” he said, “why not?” He only hoped he could walk the right line when he was forced to tell them why the hell he was there.

  The rap session was being held in a fair-sized room on the fifth floor. Couches along three walls formed a kind of rude conversation pit. Four people were already there: Harry the would-be processor, a young kid named Bill whom Weller had met briefly once before, and a couple sitting thigh-to-thigh on one couch whom he hadn’t yet seen. Tina and Weller sat down on the empty couch, and she did the honors.

  “This is Jack Weller, Jack, you already know Bill and Harry, and this is Ted and Lori Brenner.” She paused while everyone nodded foolishly to each other.

  “Well, I guess I might as well start things off,” Tina said. She took a deep breath and began to recite, as if the whole rap were rehearsed.

  “I was one of the last of the college radicals, just old enough to become a political activist as the movement was dying out. So I found myself with a degree in nothing-in-particular and a life commitment to working for social change, with nothing dynamic to work through. I couldn’t get behind the religious trips everyone was getting into, not after being so heavy into scientific socialism.

  “And then a friend of mine dragged me to the Transformation Center. I tried a couple of processing sessions, and then I found myself reading in the space of a couple of weeks everything John had ever written. I found that Transformationalism was something I could get behind. The old New Left didn’t reach into the mind, and the religious cults and consciousness-raising groups weren’t into changing society, but Transformationalism had it all together—historical perspective, a plan for transforming society, the organization to carry it out, and scientific methods for transforming individual consciousness. Transform society as you transform your own life, John says, and for me that says it all.”

  There was a long and somewhat embarrassing silence; the others seemed to feel almost as uncomfortable as Weller after listening to this little set speech. Finally Bill spoke up hesitantly.

  “Man, I wasn’t into anything like revolution. What I was into was smack. I won’t go into that whole bummer. But I finally did manage to get off the shit through Synanon. And then who was I? I could identify with being an ex-junkie, or I could be nothing. So I left Synanon, and of course it wasn’t long before I was shooting smack again. Well, I knew enough about where that was at to get really freaked out, so I got myself into the Narcon program, not even knowing it had anything to do with Transformationalism, I mean, I hadn’t even heard of Transformationalism.

  “Well, they got me off smack again, but the processing didn’t stop there. They got my head into the emptiness that got me into shooting smack in the first place. They showed me how it was the frozen reality we live in that fucked me up, and they showed me how we could change it. They gave me something to live for besides the next fix, a way to keep changing and be a something instead of an ex-something. Why am I into Transformationalism? Man, because it’s my life; it’s made me something more than a nothing.”

  This time there was no silence afterward; old Harry started rapping immediately.

  “Same thing with me, only I didn’t even have anything like heroin, I was such a zero. I could’ve gone to college, but I didn’t give a shit. I started working shit jobs right out of high school, and then I got drafted, did two years in Texas, never even got to Nam, out of the army and into more shit jobs. Fucked a lot of women, never lived with one for longer than three months in my life, and then one morning I woke up and I was over thirty, and I had no one, and I was nobody going nowhere. I went through a year or so of bumming around, doing stupid cheap burglaries, getting sauced all the time, and I was such an invisible nobody, I couldn’t even get myself busted.

  “One day I just wandered into this Center pissed out of my mind, and instead of calling the cops, the people here took me in, dried me out, and started processing me. It was like coming in out of a fog I’d been in all my life. Now I have a purpose. I want to be a processor. I’m in Transformationalism because it told me what I wan
t to be when I grow up.” Weller stared across the room at the Brenners. They stared back at him with what seemed like the same reluctance to speak. A would-be revolutionary, an ex-junkie, and a nobody wanting to be somebody, Weller thought. Empty people waiting for something to fill them with itself. He wondered what the Brenners’ story was, and he wondered what they thought his story was. He gave them the old Transformationalist Stare, forcing them to speak first. Finally they relented, speaking in turns with a single voice like some musical-comedy team.

  “It was our marriage,” Ted Brenner said. “I had a good job as a computer programmer, and Lori was teaching school. We had bread, we had things to do, and we loved each other, but somehow it was adding up to nothing.”

  “We started swinging,” Lori Brenner said. “Ted started fucking everything in sight, and so did I.”

  “But it was boring,” Ted said. “Just a stupid game of cocks and cunts. All we were doing was punishing each other for punishing each other, and we weren’t really even getting off behind that trip. ”

  “We quit our jobs, took our savings, bought a VW bus, and drove around playing hippies for a year. But it all seemed dead-inside.”

  “We couldn’t even get into hating each other,” Ted said. “And we couldn’t even find anything else to hate. So we got new jobs and started going heavy into all the consciousness trips.”

  “You name if, we tried it. Esalon, Arica, Scientology, the whole number. Finally we tried Transformationalism because we had tried just about everything else.”

  “And Transformationalism finally showed us what was wrong,”

  Ted Brenner said with sudden fervor. “All the personas we tried on didn’t fit because we were looking for roles to wear like new suits of clothes, final forms for our consciousness, when the only thing that’s really real is change.”

  “We must have known that on some level because we kept putting ourselves through changes, but the mistake we made was trying to find a permanent fit.”

  “But now we’ve got something to be committed to together that keeps changing and keeps growing and isn’t trying to find a place to stop,” Ted Brenner said. “We’re in Transformationalism so that we can keep evolving together through the movement. ”

  Weller cringed inwardly as all eyes inevitably turned toward him. The Brenners were a little too close to home. Maybe he and Annie had never gone in for guru trips or done hippie escape acts—their careers had sucked up all that bored thirst for growth and change—but hadn’t they also been perpetually reaching for personas that were always out of reach, model lives that were never fullfilled, wet-dream fantasies of the future that allowed them to hide from the boredom and emptiness of the everlasting now?

  Maybe that’s why Annie got sucked into this thing in the first place, he realized. And me? Isn’t that really why I’m following her into Transformationalism? Because without this dumb quest, without Transformationalism, without these mind games, what would I really be but a lonely nobody going nowhere?

  He had to say something, and he could hardly get away with an outright lie, so he let it bubble up from his guts, editing out only the worst of it at his lips.

  “I was directing a lot of shit, and my wife was an actress who was going nowhere, and we were trying to live in a dream world where I was forever about to do my first feature and she was going to be a star next week. And then my wife got involved in Transformationalism and left me. …”

  He paused, sighed, spit it out. “Okay, so I joined strictly to get her back,” he said. “Well, I haven’t gotten her back, and here I still am. Why? I don’t know. Because I’ve got nowhere else to be? Because I have to find out what the fuck happened to Annie?”

  He laughed bitterly. “Sometimes I think I’m here just because I have to find out why I am here. Because I know I’m not who I was, and I don’t know who the fuck I am now. Transformationalism is always talking about riding the changes; well, I guess that’s what I’m doing. Transformationalism started putting me through changes when my wife left; I didn’t like it then, I’m not sure I like it now. But it hasn’t stopped, and as of now, I’ve got no direction home. I’m here because I’m here because I’m here. It may not be as inspirational as all your little stories, but it happens to be true.”

  Weller collapsed against the back of the couch, feeling purged, as if after a thoroughly necessary puke. That really is the truth, he thought. I don’t even know these goddamn nerds, and now I’ve spilled my guts to them. How about that? What does it all mean?

  Hiey were all eyeing him uneasily now, as if he had somehow violated the sanctity of the process, as if his lack of inspirational bullshit to match their own were some kind of personal insult. As if they were all a cabal of goddamn Monitors, weighing him, and finding him wanting.

  Well, fuck you! he thought. You wanted to hear about my road to Transformationalism, and that’s what you got, with no bullshit. I said it, it’s the truth, and I’m glad. If you don’t like it, go stick it up John B. Steinhardt!

  Twelve

  The Steinhardt house turned out to be a walled compound within the private community of Bel Air. Only the parking lot, close by the main gate, was outside the perimeter, and the gate itself was a massive steel affair overlooked by a closed-circuit television camera.

  It was open as Weller arrived, but it was guarded by two big bozos in incongruous red carhop uniforms with pistols holstered to their waists. Nine thirty and there were already twenty or thirty cars in the lot and a minor jam on the street outside. Weller gratefully gave the Triumph to a real carhop and walked up to the gate fingering his printed invitation somewhat uneasily. There were half a dozen people at the gate ahead of him—no one whom he recognized personally or famewise—and the guards were collecting their invitations and passing them inside with a cold and intense scrutiny that gave Weller the impression that they were really Monitors.

  Weller gave his invitation to one of the guards, endured a professionally suspicious eyeballing, and entered the grounds of the estate. The house itself was a big two-story pseudo-Spanish job, all white stucco and red tile, set back from the wall across a wide expanse of well-manicured lawn studded with an eclectic selection of palms, oaks, and evergreens, and hedged with bright red and overpoweringly fragrant bougainvillea. Everyone was walking straight down the flagstone path to the entrance; a “Keep-Off-The-Grass” sign would have been superfluous.

  Inside, the ground floor was a series of large, airy parlors opening onto a central Spanish-style courtyard, with a low central fountain, short shade trees, bright beds of flowers, a maze of marble pathways, and a sprinkling of pseudo-Greek statuary. A second-story balcony ran all the way around the courtyard, dripping ivy. There were about a dozen people in the courtyard, and two or three dozen more scattered throughout the ground-floor rooms. These were all furnished as sitting rooms, with plush couches and chairs, brocaded or lavishly papered walls, nondescript representational paintings of landscapes, still lives, and figures, and endless little tables and wall shelves all stuffed with figurines, floral arrangements, and assorted bric-a-brac. The upper story of the house seemed to be off limits.

  There was a buffet set up in each room, with a single waiter serving the usual conspicuous-consumption items: caviar, assorted hot hors d’oevres, smoked salmon, sliced beef, turkey, ham, endless salads, and pickles. There were six parlors, and in the largest two, which took up entire sides of the first floor, full bars had been set up. Quiet, indeed almost subliminal, Muzak murmured everywhere.

  Weller got a Wild Turkey and water at one of the bars and wandered aimlessly from room to room, feeling at once alienated from his surroundings and peculiarly at home. He had certainly been to parties like this before, if never quite in a place on this scale or reeking quite this much of money. The sort of Hollywood party that was usually put on by a hot shot new director or producer rolling in bread but short of connections. Every celebrity in town would be invited, but if half a dozen real heavies showed up, it would be a
smashing success. So the house was papered with invitations off every PR, freebie, and agent list in town, filled with unknown people who usually didn’t even know each other, extras to create a crowd scene.

  Here, however, celebrity spotting seemed a futile game. There were a few faces that Weller recognized from TV commercials or long strings of bit parts, but nothing that he could even connect a name to. There were some striking-looking Plasticine women in gold lamé, silk pants suits, plunging necklines, and bare backs, but they seemed to be window dressing for older men who might be minor-league producers, or just as easily successful Beverly Hills realtors. There were some lavishly dressed older women with clean-cut beachboy-type consorts in tow, but there were no rich hippie types, no conspicuous displays of tailored denim, beads, or feathers, and what few younger men he saw were, with the exception of the gigolos of the rich bitches, random loners like himself.

  As far as Weller was concerned, it was instant boredom, so much so that after about half an hour, he found himself actually longing for the Changes Productions people to show up already and at least give him someone to talk to.

  He was getting his third drink when he finally spotted a familiar face. It was Harry Lazio, resplendant in a royal blue suit, white shirt, and red ascot, elbowing his way to the bar with a honey-blond young starlet type on his arm, luscious dark eyes, and a totally vacuous expression on her face.

  As Lazio ordered drinks, Weller maneuvered himself into position so that they would come face-to-face, hoping that Lazio would recognize him; much more couth under the circumstances than forthrightly reintroducing himself. Lazio’s gaze intersected his; there was a flicker of recognition, and that would have to do.

  “Jack Weller, Mr. Lazio.”

  Lazio smiled a broad Hollywood smile. “Oh yeah, our pro TV director,” he said. “How’s it going? What do you think of this little bash?”

  Weller let a little grimace flicker across his face. Lazio laughed, held up a palm. “Don’t answer that,” he said. Then, sotto voce, “Have you ever seen such a collection of phonies?”