Face Value

by Lia Matera

  “Do you have anything going on of a nonsexual nature?”

  “I wish. But lately, that’s what people come to me for. I sometimes think if they don’t find a cure for AIDS, this decade will become the craziest in the history of the planet. People’s sexuality is festering right into psychosis.”

  A heavy statement for a man with a degree in … what? “What did you study in college?”

  “Physics. I started out in mathematics, but I found it merely descriptive and predictive: you track phenomena by numeric progression, hoping some emerging pattern will enable you to make predictions. That kind of approach is just reportage on an abstract level. But physics—on the subatomic level, most purely—is philosophy, theosophy, poetry. It’s where the real debate is, where the best chance of discovering God is. If we can ever understand the photon, we’ll know God.”

  I wasn’t holding my breath. I didn’t need—and wouldn’t trust—that knowledge, anyway. “Do your theories on sexuality track current psychological thought?”

  He looked surprised, brows ingenuously raised. “I don’t know. I’ve never checked.”

  “You give a lot of advice. You experiment with techniques that could be called therapy. Your lack of training and credentials might become an issue now that you’re distributing videos.”

  “But all I do is turn a mirror on people,” he protested. “I tell them—or now, with the videos, I show them—what I see in them, what I see coming out of them. I suggest ways to free themselves to explore new concepts. The emphasis on sexuality was more their choice than mine.”

  I wondered if his passivity would play well to a jury. After watching the videos, hearing what he’d instructed his followers to do, I wasn’t impressed by it.

  Still, I’d expected a lecherous spouter of pompous love talk. Brother Mike was a pleasant surprise in that regard.

  “Why did you decide to market the videos?”

  “Money,” he said simply. “My equipment costs a fortune—more than this island, if you can believe that. It’s such new technology. Truly magic stuff, but outrageously expensive. My accountant was the one who suggested distributing the videos. Something about having non-gift income to use as the basis for credit for the things I’m going to buy next. I figure, if it makes sense to him, fine. If it gets me a Cray XMP and a couple of Sun Stations, fine. From my point of view, the videos were crucial because they taught me how to communicate—especially, as I said, to the television generation. The medium itself has limitless potential, and I mean that literally. And the videos gave me footage to experiment with; making spectral changes, adding auras and animation, three-dimensionality. You’re not technically supposed to use film you didn’t shoot yourself. Copyright issues, I’m told. And also the videos got me into reimaging, so that no one would be recognized. Those techniques opened a world of technology to me.”

  “I recognized Gretchen Miller.”

  “She had me change her back. She wants the ax to fall.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His look was almost pitying, as if he spoke to a mentally impaired person. “Her law firm will find some excuse to fire her, don’t you think? As soon as someone tells them about the video.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  “She can come here, if she wants.” He didn’t sound as if he cared much one way or the other. “Wait till I show you my video puppeteering equipment. It’s still in its infancy, but I’ve got some ideas …” He looked at me, his face aglow.

  For the first time that afternoon, he looked crazy enough to be a preacher.

  I finally asked the question uppermost on my mind. “What can you tell me about Margaret Lenin?”

  “Margaret?” He raised his graying brows. “Gretchen told me she was okay with all this now. Isn’t that right?”

  “I thought some insight into her … complaints would be useful. Have you heard from her or seen her lately?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember. Maybe the last time I was in the city. The Rs could tell you.”

  “So she hasn’t phoned recently? To your knowledge? You haven’t spoken with her or counseled her?”

  “No.” Then, with an Igor accent, “Won’t you join me in my laboratory?”

  16

  My room was an eight-by-eight square with unadorned blue walls, a bed scratchy with army blankets, and a tiny table and chair under the sole window. I flopped onto the bed. I’d spent two hours in a huge basement jammed with color monitors, televisions, “frame-accurate” videocassette recorders, oscilloscopes, and a slough of things that had to be identified for me: digitizing boards, timegraph editors, transparency (and at least three other types of) scanners.

  For two hours I’d watched Brother Mike hop from electronic sketch pad to keyboard to VCR showing me ways to turn film stills and drawings and geometric shapes into three-dimensional graphics. He added grid lines that fanned around objects like wire exo-skeletons. He displayed menus of colors and textures, wrapping his choices over the skeletal frames. He rotated the “texture-mapped” forms, changing the intensity and location of the light source, the angle of the “virtual camera.” He created motion by “front-projecting” reflections of passing surroundings, adding “motion blur” as they picked up speed. But the most interesting part of the demonstration (to me, that is; Brother Mike seemed to enjoy every minute of it) was computer puppeteering. He laser-scanned human images onto the computer screen, moving them around by sticking his hands into and rotating the concentric half-spheres of something called a Waldo Motion Device.

  It was also interesting to watch him change videotaped faces one frame at a time. He did this a few different ways, from building grids over cheeks and chins and “painting” on textures and colors to grabbing part of a face—an eyelid, for example—and pulling it lower or higher, retouching as necessary with colors and textures taken from surrounding skin. He could make two pictures merge or “morph” into one another, selecting in advance the percentage of each to remain in the final product. He even had department-store software that altered makeup and hairstyles.

  I didn’t understand much of the patter accompanying his manic two-hour demonstration. It didn’t matter. If it became necessary, I’d learn. I’d seen hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, though. That interested me. I’d seen gorgeous graphics and impressive animation. I’d watched faces change and move. But it hadn’t looked like life, not quite. Some images were too slick and fluid, like entries in an animation festival. Others were just jerky enough to appear unnatural.

  But I supposed Brother Mike could do better than the quick, probably elementary stuff he’d shown me. Perhaps I’d see his prowess in the videos he’d made for his followers.

  Right now, I didn’t care. Right now, I just wanted to be alone.

  I’d spoken on the phone to Sandy. His call brought the welcome enervation of relief: Margaret was alive. Margaret was fine. Margaret had gone to work early this morning; had been sitting at her desk at Graystone while I pounded on her apartment door.

  That being the case, she must have calmed down last night after phoning me. She must have gone home and gone to sleep, not realizing she’d sent me out in the middle of the night.

  At least, that’s what I assumed. For the sake of a couple of hours’ nap, a brief draft of tranquility, that’s what I chose to believe.

  Tomorrow I’d talk to Margaret. Right now, I’d relax.

  My client had reminded me at least six times that there would be a “workshop” that evening. I knew I should go. But Brother Mike’s facile and fallacious, even sexist, analysis of me had been off-putting, to say the least.

  And I was sick of being with people.

  I stretched out on the bed and closed my eyes.

  I lay there for a couple of hours, lights off, trying not to think. Then I reluctantly roused myself to go to Brother Mike’s ses
sion. I couldn’t justify wasting an opportunity to observe his techniques firsthand. If I was going to get prudish, I had no business taking his money.

  I couldn’t possibly have been any grumpier as I made my way down the oak stairs. It was a cold, damp night. Condensation beaded on every window I passed—no need for curtains when yours is the only house on an island.

  Two of Brother’s devotees stood at the foot of the stairs, apparently discussing me.

  A tall, lank-haired man in his thirties was saying to a short pear-shaped brunette, “She’s supposed to be like a superlawyer. She’ll take care of Arabella. Let it go”

  “Well, it’s not that big a deal for you, Roy, but I’ve got kids and about fifty other relatives. I don’t need a ton of publicity about The Energy of Bondage.”

  He nodded as if he’d heard her say so many times.

  “What if a list of who’s in the videos gets printed in the paper or something?” she continued.

  He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Why would it?”

  “If it gets to be part of a court proceeding, it’s public record. I think.”

  “Probably she’ll drop the whole thing. But you were beautiful, you know? I mean, let’s face it, the whole point was to open yourself up. Don’t let Arabella shut you down, Rhonda.”

  “Like I said, Roy”—her voice was steely—“it’s not such a big deal for you.”

  “Maybe not, but maybe it’ll do us all good to come out of the closet, in a sense. It’s like the Freemasons had all these secret rituals during Catholicism because it wasn’t okay to be a free thinker. We’re kind of like that now—free thinkers. That’s not a disgrace. Arabella’s outing us, in a way. Like Queer Nation was doing to famous gay people.”

  “But what’s her agenda?” Rhonda’s voice rose in pitch. “First she gets a whole bunch of people hot on the idea of videotaping, which I never liked the idea of in the first place—”

  Roy spotted me standing on the stair pretending to look out the window. “Are you Laura?” he asked.

  “Laura Di Palma.”

  “Has a legal case been filed yet?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Rhonda turned away, but not before I saw her painful flush.

  “My name’s Roy, this is Rhonda. We live here pretty much year round. If Mike goes to San Francisco for more than a week or so, we go down with him.”

  “You don’t call him Brother Mike?”

  Roy grinned. “He hates that. But you know people. They keep wanting to give him a title. It’s better than ‘Oh Exalted Mighty One,’ I guess. I suggested Brother. Kind of sounded like a monk. Kind of Russian.”

  “So you lived with him before he moved here?”

  “Yup. I’m head cyberpunk around here. Well, maybe cyberhippie’s more accurate. Anyway, yeah. Mike still stays down in the city part of the time. If he goes down to buy machines, usually I go, too. Unless I’m elbow-deep in videotape or computer guts. Or frame-by-frame changes, which are majorly time-consuming—there are thirty video frames a second, so you can imagine.”

  “Does he go down to the city often?”

  “Not too much anymore. He gets overrun. He needs space to think. Rhonda grew up around here; she knew this place. When one of Mike’s people offered it, we grabbed it.”

  I made a mental note to examine the deed, find out the form of ownership.

  “I overheard you talking about Arabella.”

  “Arabella, yeah. Heavy energy around sex.” He shook his head, but there was an appreciative glint in his eye.

  “Did you know she was beaten up before work last night?”

  “No.” Roy stood very still. “Did you know that, Rhon?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Is she all right?”

  “Yes. But quite battered, apparently. You didn’t know anything about it?”

  Both said no. Both remained motionless.

  “Any guesses who might have done it?”

  Rhonda ran a thick-fingered hand through her hair. “It’s not the best neighborhood.”

  Had I mentioned where Arabella was attacked?

  “You heard about the six employees being killed?”

  “Yes. We definitely heard about that.”

  But they hadn’t wondered if one of the women was Arabella?

  As if divining my thought, Roy said, “The news tonight listed their names.”

  I wondered if they’d passed the information on to their guru.

  “Did you know any of them?”

  “Just barely. Pretty awful.” Roy’s shoulders climbed. “Crappy way to die. I’d take almost anything over suffocation.”

  I must have looked surprised.

  “I almost drowned when I was a kid. I hate the feeling of not getting enough air.”

  I supposed Rhonda did, too. She turned away with a shudder.

  I had to change the topic before I visualized it.

  “I heard you say Arabella shifted the group’s focus?”

  “That she did.” A slight frown creased Roy’s forehead. “Rhonda was thinking she changed the dynamic, you know, from more of a head trip to a sex thing. But Mike said that was okay—the thing’s got to be fluid and change to suit who’s around, like a good conversation. That’s what a religion should be.”

  “You consider this a religion?”

  He nodded emphatically. “I came here from Da Love-Ananda. You know, the Great Tradition. I think Mike’s one of the incarnations. He doesn’t like that vocabulary, but it’s definitely what we feel from him.”

  “Do you agree?” I asked the face-averted Rhonda.

  She glanced at me, glanced away, then seemed to force herself to imitate Brother Mike’s eye-contact shtick. “I think that’s why we’re all here, really. What we see in Mike is something we’ve never seen in any other living creature.”

  “Da Love-Ananda’s cool,” Roy interjected. “There’s more than one incarnation, some generations.”

  Rhonda nodded. Her round, thick-browed face was paling almost to normal hue. “It’s not that we think he’s the only wise man on earth or anything like that. But he is truly wise. He can cut right to the core of you within minutes of meeting you. It’s like his insight comes from someplace special that most people never start to get to.”

  “Is that what you do here? Try to get to that place?” I felt silly even speaking in those terms.

  “Yes. We want to grow from his insights into us and what they teach us about ourselves and the world and the spirit. And we also want to get closer to his place of being able to see into people—”

  “And concepts. He sees into ideas. Whether they’re bullshit or not.”

  Again Rhonda agreed with Roy. “Once you know him, you can’t leave him. He’s like a conduit to higher consciousness, to true insight.”

  “He’s a physics and computer genius,” Roy added. “A lot of us here have that background.”

  Rhonda nodded. “But to go beyond a certain level of understanding, you have to access a different part of your consciousness. That’s what’s superdeveloped in Mike. That’s the part that Roy would call god-consciousness.”

  “What do you call it?” I wondered.

  “A window into the psycho-physical. Into the future.”

  A voice called out, “We’re set up, Rs.”

  “Are you coming to the session?” Roy sounded dubious.

  Rhonda said, “Unless you plan to fully participate, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. It’ll make people shy.” Her flush returned. It would obviously make her shy.

  “Brother—Mike urged me to attend.”

  Rhonda turned away as Roy said, “In that case.” He slipped his arm casually around my shoulders and began squiring me down the corridor.

  I wanted to bat his arm away. I wanted to flee now, before I
had to see in person what I’d seen on the videos.

  “Do you know Margaret Lenin?”

  His grin was a little smug. He’d had intercourse with her, probably often; that was my interpretation. But that was probably true of most of the women in Brother’s circle. “Haven’t talked to her in a while, but sure.”

  We’d reached an open doorway. I glimpsed a circle of people on cushions.

  I preceded “the Rs” into the room, trying to comport myself with surface sangfroid. I regretted my decision almost immediately, as others in the room began eyeing (or maybe I imagined this) my body.

  Brother Mike was sitting in a rattan rocker. Over his cardigan, a leather harness anchored a video camera to his chest just below his left shoulder. He wore horn-rim glasses, making him look even more like a nerdy engineer. He motioned me to a stool in the corner, a good fifteen feet from the circle.

  Roy closed the door behind us and dropped onto an unoccupied cushion. Rhonda settled in beside him.

  I looked the group over. They seemed to be in their thirties and forties, most of them. Two men sported ponytails. One woman had sixties’ natural hair and another had a multicolored razor cut. The others looked like urban professionals, with tidy haircuts and Eddie Bauer clothes.

  No one in the room was extraordinarily attractive or unattractive. They might have been chosen at random from a Seattle bookstore.

  Brother Mike squinted into the camera’s periscopic eyepiece. He said, “We’ve got a group of go-slowers tonight.”

  The people regarded each other warily, I thought.

  “We’ve got a group of people into holding back the energy until they know damn well what they’re going to get in return; that’s what I’m feeling.” Brother stood, beginning a slow prowl. The camera on his chest made a faint whirring sound.

  A few members of the circle hung their heads, a few grinned sheepishly. They seemed to agree. But then, couldn’t he have said the same about most groups? Wasn’t that life in the nineties?

  “So I guess we’ll have to go with that energy.” He sounded sad about it. “We’ll have to do some bartering, get the whole thing out on the table. How about, as a starting proposition, men get sucked after every woman in here has been licked?”