“Hi, Harry,” Weller said gently, forcing himself to swallow his anger. “Are you playing along with this silent treatment too?”
Harry deliberately met his eyes for a moment, then looked down at his plate.
“I see,” Weller said. “Because you’re afraid not to?”
Harry looked up. His expression hardened. He glared at Weller. The meaning of it seemed totally incomprehensible.
“Do you even know why this is happening?”
Harry looked down at his plate.
Weller found that the anger was quickly leaching out of him, replaced by a certain sadness, not for himself, but for the poor zombies who were willing to eat this kind of shit, play this stupid game, without even knowing why. But as he thought of the games he had successfully run on Maria Steinhardt and the way he had faced down Gomez, that sadness became less sympathetic, became overlaid with contempt. The suckers and the suckees … he thought.
“You know, Harry, I feel sorry for you,” he said. “You’ve got to feel like a fool doing this. They’ve made you into a gutless coward. You want to be a processor, but don’t you also want to be a man?”
Harry looked up angrily. His lips began to move as if he were about to break the silence. Then he caught himself, gave Weller a hang-dog look, and got up and walked away.
Weller sat there, isolated, but taking a certain comfort in it now. After all, he thought, I never really wanted to have anything to do with these people anyway, and this doesn’t exactly make them more attractive. Now, at least, they’ll really leave me alone.
He cut off a piece of frankfurter and forked it into his mouth with some baked beans. Yech! The food was greasy and tasteless as usual, but by now it was also as cold and limp as a wet washcloth.
Fourteen
Weller took a sip of his honest-to-God mint julep. Across the courtyard the fountain gurgled, and the sweet smell of blossoms filled the cooling evening air. Maria Steinhardt sat on the bench beside him, dressed in a brocaded kimono, her hair wild around her shoulders, her eyes smoky with satiation. Money, sex, and languor perfumed the atmosphere. It all seemed light-years away from the grinding, sullen tension of the set, the vicious, nerve-shattering silence of the Transformation Center.
“At first it really didn’t get to me,” Weller said. “But now. … I come back from work, and I eat by myself. They point and grunt at me in the kitchen while I’m washing the goddamn dishes. I walk into a room, and conversation stops as soon as I get within earshot. Even at work no one talks to me unless it’s in the line of duty. It’s beginning to drive me a little nuts. I mean, I know I’m becoming a bastard on the set. If it keeps up much longer, I’m afraid I’m going to start talking to myself. ”
Maria shrugged, not very sympathetically. “You knew what you were getting into, Jack,” she said. “I can’t do anything about it.”
Weller took another cooling sip of his drink. “I didn’t ask you to,” he said. “Frankly I don’t give much of a damn about improving my present situation. I want to get to the Institute. If that ends up being impossible, or if I’m kept waiting much longer, I’m just going to pack it all in.”
“All of it?” Maria said, arching an eyebrow and moving closer.
“All of it,” Weller said evenly. And I’m beginning to mean it, he thought. I’m pressuring her, but I’m not just pressuring her. If I can’t get to the Institute, there’s no further point in torturing myself. I’ll release my own copies of the damned Master Contact Sheet and let the fur fly where it may.
“Well I’ve spoken to John,” Maria said. “Twice …”
“And?”
“And he’s amused.”
“Amused?”
“John loves to think in twelve directions at once,” Maria said. “I could tell that the idea of starring in commercials tickled him. But, of course, he knows about you and your wife and why you’re doing what you’re doing. And that amuses him too, on a different level. I have the feeling that this Coventry directive was his idea. He’s playing with you. He’s toying with you. He’s running one of his silly experiments.” She put a hand on Weller’s thigh. “And of course, he knows all about us,” she said. “That amuses him too.”
“I don’t think I follow that one,” Weller said sourly.
Maria placed her hands on her knees, leaned back, and stared up at the darkening sky as she spoke.
“It’s hard to explain, and it’s not very pretty,” she said. “Our arrangement permits me my little affairs, but John doesn’t exactly like it. It’s more of a quid pro quo. If he forced me to stay at the Institute, or if he expected me to be totally faithful to him while he was off playing the Great I Am, it would be divorce-court time, ducks. Aside from the fact that my divorcing him would drive John crazy, it would be one holy horror for Transformationalism, because this is a community-property state, love, and I have enough on John and his whole movement to drag it through the gossip columns for months.”
She looked at Weller and smiled rather sadly. “So John permits me my little affairs,” she said. “ ‘Your little ego-booster shots,’ he calls them. Not that there isn’t truth in that, not that there isn’t a certain amount of love in it too. I mean, he understands me, he knows what a beating my ego has to take as the wife of the God-Of-All-He-Surveys. But John is a man too—even though he likes to pretend he’s transcended all that—and it does give him a perverse satisfaction to be able to view what I’m doing in as tacky a light as possible.” She patted Weller’s knee. “And the idea that you’re … servicing me for the most obvious of ulterior motives amuses him on that level.”
“Pardon me while I puke,” Weller grunted. What she had told him made him feel small and toadlike indeed. I think I’m running numbers on them, and all the while I’m a spear carrier in their loathsome little porno movie. Blech!
“Takes one to know one.” Maria said. “In the Biblical sense of course. ”
“Well, where does your charming little psychodrama leave me?” Weller asked.
“Leave us not be crude, my pet,” Maria said gaily.
Weller was beginning to steam. He had a fantasy impulse to smash his fist into her face.
“I mean what do you think John is going to do,” Weller said, through grinding teeth. “Is he going to turn me down, or do I eventually get to the Institute?”
“Always an eye for the main chance, hey?” Maria said teasingly. She laughed. “Oh, I believe John will eventually want to see you,” she said blithely. “After he’s extracted the maximum amusement from this little situation. You just have to hang on, love.” She gave him a cold, hard look. “And make sure that I don’t tire of you before then,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Weller said belligerently. Maria stared into his eyes. “I don’t think you like me very much now,” she said. “Well, I can tolerate that. I can even be amused by it. Because like me or not, you have to please me, don’t you, lover?”
Weller glared back at her, seething with rage and loathing. Maria laughed cruelly. “It does something for this old lady’s poor battered ego to have a young man like yourself in her power. And at the moment the way you feel about me just makes it all the tastier.”
She stood up, reached down, picked up the hem of her kimono, and lifted it, exposing her bare fur of dark pubic beard.
Weller jumped to his feet, grossed out by this unlikely act. Maria laughed. “Right now I want you to eat me,” she said. “Right here, just like that. On your knees.”
Weller’s hands convulsed into fists. He took a half step forward, violence pounding through his arteries. “You lousy—”
“Of course, you don’t have to do it,” Maria said. “We can just call it quits right now. In which case. …” She let the sentence dangle around a smug, amused smile.
Weller stood there frozen, his mind unable to function, while his treasonous body found itself being turned on by the very vileness of the situation, the pure brutal animalism of her domineering command.
Weller plodded numbly down the hallway to his room, passing one of the fading Coventry notices taped to the wall. He had to admit that the silent treatment had finally gotten to him.
His life had become a dreary tunnel of isolation—from meaningful human contact, from anything that gave even a dim and feeble pleasure. He felt like a rat in a totally deterministic maze. A tasteless silent breakfast in the commissary, eight hours at Changes Productions shunned by his fellow workers and communicating only on a technical level, a grim lonely dinner at the Center, an hour of dishwashing, then walking around the Center like an invisible ghost or reading nothing in particular in his room until he was sleepy enough to blot out the world and begin the cycle again in the morning.
Now he understood what the Monitors were doing. Gomez, and beyond him, Torrez wanted him out, but thus far Maria was preventing them from simply declaring him a regressive, so the only way they could get him out was to make him leave of his own volition. So they were making his life a torture to be endured. All that kept him going was waiting for a summons from Steinhardt to go to the Institute. That was the contest he was locked into with the Monitors: could he endure the silent treatment until word came down, or could they drive him into giving up?
Even his hours with Maria were now part of it. Sex with her had become a contest of wills in which he held a losing hand. If he didn’t please her, he would be at the nonexistent mercy of the Monitors. Maybe she had even lied to him. Maybe she had never spoken to Steinhardt about his proposal at all. Maybe that was part of a cruel mind game too: something to make him endure the agony of Coventry forever, to lock him in perpetual stasis which would eventually break him to their will.
Weller reached his room, went inside, took a piss, and sat down on the edge of the bed to wait until the dining room opened so that he could pass another hour shoveling bad food into his face in stony silence. I’ve got to get out of this, he thought. I’m starting to feel like the walls are closing in on me.
Well, why not? he thought. I’ve got two hours till I have to show up to wash dishes, I could go out to eat. Most of the restaurants in the area were greasy joints, and he really didn’t have the time to drive somewhere else, but there was a pretty good Chinese restaurant on Cahuenga, and he’d have time to get there, eat, and walk back. Why not?
He bounded off the bed, combed his hair, took the elevator to the lobby, and walked defiantly out of the Transformation Center, past the deliberately unseeing eyes of the guards and inmates, and out into the non-Transformationalist reality of the streets.
During the short walk to the restaurant, Weller found himself enjoying the anonymity of the streets, the tackiness of the porno shops, the bars, the sleazy massage parlors, the very scurviness of the denizens of downtown Hollywood. Although this had never been his world, it was very much like the world he had lost in a basic human sense: chaotic, plotless, random; uncontrolled by Monitors, life directives, or Transformationalist mind games. Like his lost world it was full of frustrations, boredom, desperation, and thwarted dreams, but at least it was a world of natural human evolution and natural human conflicts, not a hermetically sealed universe proceeding according to the plans, scenarios, and whims of one man and the power structure he had built to contain it.
That thought gave Weller some comfort, but it also made him feel somewhat alien out here in the free air, less than human, a creature of the psychic catacombs, a halfling.
The Chinese restaurant was a rather plain storefront with an extensive menu posted on the window. Inside, dim lighting, square tables with white clothes, Chinese paintings and instruments on the walls, and a land of gilt-and-red pagoda facade across the entrance made a pass at atmosphere. At this early hour the place was almost empty. But as a waiter led him toward an isolated table-for-two, Weller spotted Johnny Blaisdell, his sometime press agent, eating at a table in a comer with his wife Madge. A moment later Johnny spotted him.
“Jack! For Chrissakes! Are you alone? Come over and eat with us.” Johnny waved at him, very Beverly Hills with his silvery hair, air force shades, and mint-green leisure suit, with his honey-blond wife in a tightly tailored denim dress festooned with turquoise and silver.
Uneasily Weller went over to their table. The Blaisdells were an apparition out of his old life, the world he had lost. Once he had inhabited their reality and been one of them. Seeing them now and feeling his own sense of alienation, he had a sickening floating feeling of not knowing who he was or whether he still had a reality.
“What are you doing here, Johnny?” he asked as he sat down. “This isn’t exactly your usual turf.”
“We’re going to an early sneak preview up on Hollywood Boulevard,” Madge said.
“Yeah. Hey, you want to tag along? I can probably bullshit you in.”
“No thanks,” Weller said automatically. “I’ve got to be back at the Transformation Center by a quarter after seven.” He could’ve bitten his tongue off after he said it, the way both of them looked at him as if he were the carrier of some loathsome disease.
“Yeah, I heard you had gotten really involved with Transformationalism,” Johnny said. “How’s your head, boy? You still just chasing Annie, or have they got you hooked?”
“How did you find out?” Weller blurted, and then realized how paranoid he sounded.
Johnny shrugged. “Word gets around,” he said. Then the waiter appeared and sidetracked the conversation while Weller ordered a Martini, hot-and-sour soup, and chicken with peanuts and hot chilies.
But after the waiter left, Johnny returned relentlessly to the subject. “Look, Jack, I know where you’re coming from, but don’t you think you might be getting in over your head?”
“What are you talking about?” Weller said guardedly.
Johnny laughed rather humorlessly. “Hey, don’t get paranoid,” he said. “I only mean you haven’t worked for a long time and—”
“I’m making commercials for Changes Productions,” Weller said defensively.
“Who the hell is Changes Productions?”
Weller sighed. “A Transformationalist company,” he admitted in a very small voice.
“Oh shit, you’re working for them?” Johnny said. “Jesus, if you’re that hard up, I ought to be able to—”
“Not, it’s not like that, Johnny,” Weller said. “I have to keep working for them; it’s the only chance I have of finding Annie.”
“So they’ve still got her somewhere.” Madge said.
Weller nodded glumly. For some reason he found that he was very reluctant to discuss the whole thing. He recognized that as paranoia in himself, which made the conversation doubly distressing.
At this point the waiter arrived with Weller’s food and drink. There was another break in the conversation during which Weller gulped down half his Martini and began to feel a little looser. After all, these were friends of his, sort of, and they cared about him, they were worried about him. They surely weren’t agents of the Monitors or anything like that.
“Just how deep into Transformationalism are you, Jack?” Johnny asked. “I mean you’re working for them. …” He studied Weller more narrowly for a moment. “I mean, you’re not, you know, converted, are you?”
“Shit, no!” Weller exclaimed. He gulped down the rest of his drink and began picking at his food with chopsticks. “No fucking way!” he said vehemently. “You have no idea what i
t’s like. I mean, they’ve got me living at the goddamn Transformation Center! It’s a loathsome, Fascist organization, and all I want to do is find Annie and get us both out. ”
“Sounds like a tall order from what I hear,” Johnny said.
“I can handle it,” Weller told him. “Worse comes to worse, I’ve got some inside information I can—”
“Jesus, he’s beginning to sound like Rich Golden,” Madge muttered.
“Who?”
Johnny Blaisdell groaned and shot his wife a warning look.
“Who’s Rich Golden?” Weller insisted.
“Just some nut,” Johnny said, with obviously forced casualness.
“I think maybe Jack should talk to him,” Madge said.
“Oh, for Chrissakes, Madge,” Johnny snapped. “What will Golden do but make him more paranoid?”
“That’s the point,” Madge insisted. “If Jack’s really so involved with Transformationalism, it might do him some good.”
Johnny fingered his chin thoughtfully. “You might have a point,” he mused.
“Will someone please tell me what this is all about before you drive me crazy?” Weller demanded.
Johnny shrugged. “Well, what the hell … ,” he said. He looked at Weller with as serious an expression as Weller had ever seen on his face.
“Richard Golden is … or was … a hotshot journalist a few years ago,” he said. “Mostly film stuff, but a pretty good muckraker now and again too. The girl he was living with— I forget her name—got gobbled up by Transformationalism, just like Annie. Well, Golden was a tough, hot-blooded son of a bitch with an exaggerated idea of the power of the press, and instead of playing whatever game you’re playing, he went after their asses. Nosed around and started writing magazine pieces about Transformationalism, even had a contract to do a book about it at one point, I think.”
The Mind Game Page 27
