Abnormal Occurrences: Short Stories

by Thomas Berger

  The Krafft technique was successful in all areas of life, e.g., getting the best restaurant tables without enriching maître d’s; nonviolently subduing the pugnacious maniacs encountered from time to time on city sidewalks; winning political arguments with dinner-party zealots; inducing purveyors of luxury goods such as high-performance motorcars, custom-made clothing, and vintage portables to offer large discounts. Of course it could not be used by telephone, fax, or email. One’s living presence was required. And Devlin discovered another limitation on the windy day when some foreign matter was blown into his left eye, which subsequently he could not keep open. That the waiting room of the eye clinic was jammed with fellow sufferers meant little to him until he tried to dominate the receptionist with the Krafft stare.

  “I’ll go first,” said he, his one functional eye focused between her two.

  The woman snorted. “You got to be kidding.”

  He waited three hours, but learned a valuable lesson: on windy days he henceforth wore sunglasses, even it the sky was overcast, removing them when the Krafft technique was required, for to be efficacious the stare had to employ both eyes with maximum intensity. It was as if drilling a hole through the frontal bone and penetrating the soft tissue of the brain, not a pretty thing to visualize for someone as squeamish as Devlin, but he forced himself to disregard unattractive matters and take pleasure in the evidence that the effects seemed permanent.

  Miranda continued to regard him as exemplary even after, developing a new way of fireplace cookery, he burned down a wing of her house. At work, each of his policies was proving worse than the last, bringing the firm ever nearer ruination. Yet, while others were fired, his salary kept rising. The irony was that only now did he at last understand why, throughout his life until the discovery of the Krafft technique, other people had not taken him as seriously as he would have liked. It was simply because his ideas were rotten. But it would be asking too much of any successful human being to stop doing that from which his success came, just because it could not be called honorable, else many celebrated professions would provide a living for few. And there was no law against staring between someone else’s eyes.

  He did wonder why the technique was not more widely known, and for that matter, why H. Krafft had not made more of a mark on the world—unless of course he discreetly had done so, as in Devlin’s own case. Tyrannical leaders of many kinds, from political despots to the robber barons of industry, were often said to have an almost hypnotic influence on their underlings. There had been people who professed to hate Hitler but were helplessly mesmerized by his presence. Perhaps Krafft had had more pupils than one might think from the apparent modesty of his business. But that was unlikely. Why would he have remained so obscure if his technique had been used by others to conquer countries and make billions?

  It seemed more probable that many other people, in fact just about everybody who did extremely well in life, had discovered Krafft’s trick, or some variant of it, on their own... Yet Devlin had been face to face with a few persons of power—had shaken the hand of a senator whose name was a household word, given some papers for signature to a noted publishing magnate, negotiated with a famous general whom his firm paid to endorse their products—and had never seen any of them stare between his eyes. But then he had already been in a subservient position with all and furthermore had behaved so obsequiously that further domination would have been a waste for men whose time was in such demand. The real test would be to observe how they acted toward those who resisted them. But surely the defiant were few up there on the heights, and were dealt with on lower levels by junior dominators. What complicated the whole business was that rebels also often dominated others, beginning with their own natural constituencies, the allegedly disenfranchised of whichever area of life was represented, and if successful went on to establish masteries at least as absolute as those they replaced.

  But before very long it occurred to Devlin that to be truly dominant was to become so habituated to the exercise of power as to forget about how it was acquired: one should rule as it there were no alternative. With this understanding he became secure—except in one minor area. The Krafft stare had no effect on Miranda’s dog, the female Sheltie who had in effect, with its diet of cooked chicken, brought them together. There was a choice of reasons why the technique did not work on Georgette. It was hard to arrest the animal’s mobile face long enough to stare between its eyes, short of seizing its snout, which Devlin was reluctant to do since the toothy, nervous creature disliked him to begin with. Then he had heard somewhere that Mace, which will repel a 200-pound mugger, is ineffective against dogs because the latter have no tear glands. Perhaps something else was lacking in canines that kept them immune to the stare: Devlin liked to think it was an incapacity to aspire to that which was beyond basic animal needs. In a word, Georgette was not human, despite Miranda’s conviction that it was. But of course he could not produce such evidence without revealing the source of his own power, without which, he now realized, he had no special value to anyone. It was perversely gratifying to him to reflect on his low opinion of himself, as if looking down in derision upon an impotent stranger.

  Though exercising power over others so easily nowadays, he had not yet grown tired of doing so. He could have afforded to travel exclusively by limo, but with such a mode of transport there was only the driver to dominate. Thus he frequented public carriers and taxis when they were scarce, at rainy rush hours, for the pleasure of reducing otherwise aggressive, even hostile people to toadies who made way for him, holding doors and smirking. He began to yearn to go into politics and was only waiting for the first face-to-face meeting with his father-in-law. Meanwhile, by acquiescing in his wishes in all matters, Miranda had begun to bore him, and he frequented other women, some of whom he would allow to show a stimulating resistance before being subdued at a moment of his choice. Among his conquests was a young movie star often in the news, to whose presence he made his way at a premiere party and, after kraffting her bodyguards, put her under his power by staring between her famous emerald-green eyes. He also kraffted the hovering gossip columnists, lest news of his latest score become an item, with possible adverse effect on his political ambitions.

  Then one day when he was at his office—the big corner one surrendered to him by the CEO, whose career was on the brink of collapse because of the policies he had been kraffted into adopting—Devlin’s assistant announced that a visitor wanted to see him without an appointment.

  He angrily roared into the intercom. Since learning the technique of domination, he had never had to raise his voice. He was not only furious now; he was frightened. This was an unprecedented example of the wearing off of the effect. His assistant, a lively young woman with a natural tendency toward insolence, had long since been stared into sycophancy. It was unthinkable for her to disobey explicit orders. Could it be only the first of many defections? Or could he take corrective measures, administer booster shots of the stare, as was done with certain types of inoculations when their residual potency had diminished? He could not risk any further insubordination.

  He was about to start for the door when it was opened by the offending assistant. “Aha!” he demanded. “Look at me!”

  She brazenly ignored him and turned instead to the person she was ushering in. “Mr. Devlin will be happy to see you now.”

  A stocky figure marched into his office, a woman in her middle years, with graying hair and glasses the temple pieces of which dipped below the level of the eye rather than staying up where normal ones did. He was made uncomfortable whenever he saw glasses of this type, associating them with the memory of a teacher he had had many years before in grade school: she usually found him wanting in class participation.

  In his state of annoyance, Devlin decided to get rid of the intruder without ceremony. Who was she, with those eyeglasses and her navy-blue suit and capacious black purse: someone collecting for a charity? “Sorry,” he said, trying to stare between her eyes
, “I’m too busy to see you now. You’ll have to leave.”

  Advancing on him, the woman disregarded his stare. “I’m Hilda Krafft,” she said. “Some time ago you sent me a nasty letter.”

  “Good God,” he blurted. “I didn’t realize! You are H. Krafft.” It was not a question, though he was incredulous. He came around the desk. “God, Ms. Krafft, you’ve taken me by surprise... Your technique is all it claims to be. I shouldn’t have—I forgot... Look, I apologize. I should have written back, not only to beg your pardon but to tell you how effective the technique has been for me!” But could she be the real thing? To have discovered the secret of domination and remain so commonplace in appearance?

  “Victor, you’re a silly little person,” Hilda Krafft said, more in schoolteacherly reproof than in anger.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said respectfully, looking down. “But please tell me this, if you don’t mind. Why aren’t you famous? Your technique is truly miraculous.”

  “You moved,” Hilda Krafft said reprovingly. “But it’s just as well I’ve found you at work: I hear you’re destroying this firm, Victor.”

  Devlin raised his eyes. “You’re right, of course. I’ll resign immediately. Also, you’ll be relieved to know I’ll offer a divorce to my wife. All I want to do in life henceforth is to serve you.”

  “Why am I not famous?” Hilda Krafft shook her head in contempt. “The technique doesn’t suit someone like you, Victor.”

  “I’m stupid,” Devlin readily confessed. Having surrendered his will to her, he could not be hurt by anything he said about himself.

  “I suspect,” said Hilda Krafft, “that your mistakes are due not to a weak mind but to your weak character. Apparently you have regarded my technique as a cheap trick.” She brought the big bag up, rummaged in it, extracted a fat wallet, and rounding out the sum, repaid him two hundred thirty dollars.

  “I could learn,” Devlin pleaded. “Please take me with you!”

  “Certainly not,” Hilda Krafft said in her positive way. “I would have no use for you.” She turned and marched out of his office on her thick-heeled shoes.

  It was remarkable: she had given him the stare only briefly and not again, but he had been so thoroughly in her power that for some moments he did not believe he could survive bereft of a connection with her. And once she returned the fee, the Krafft technique no longer worked as performed by him. People assumed he was rudely staring at a pimple on their forehead or displaying a new tic, and were annoyed or appalled as the case might be. At the office, his bygone errors forgotten, he was soon reduced to his old status as a comfortable mediocrity, and business picked up.

  Miranda severed their connection though was decent about it, letting him take along the gold cufflinks and the expensive cologne. Strangely enough, now that he had lost his power, Georgette the Sheltie took an unprecedented liking to him, nudging his ankle with an affectionate nose and whining piteously as he left for good. But then, nobody was easier to take, by one and all, than the old Vic Devlin.

  Granted Wishes: TV Star

  EVERYTHING ABOUT MABEL BODGE was contradictory, beginning with the relation of her name to her persona. She had been extraordinarily beautiful even as a baby, and by the time she was five or six she was so spectacularly lovely as to frighten off a career child-molester who was on the point of trying to lure her into his van when by accident he actually looked into her sapphire eyes. He flinched and said, “Sorry, miss! I thought you were my niece.” “No, you didn’t,” said little Mabel. “You are a sex criminal.” At which he accelerated away, but not before she memorized the numbers on his license plate. The pervert was soon apprehended, and Mabel got a special commendation from the police, who were in awe of her self-possession.

  As to her names, first and sur-, neither “Mabel” nor “Bodge” seemed suitable for a person with hair like a silken skein of gold and velvet skin. Her mother had chosen “Mabel” with the confident expectation that it had been so long out of fashion that it would definitely have returned by the time the girl had grown up, putting her ahead of the curve, but it failed to do so. As to “Bodge,” there was no reasonable explanation for why it had awkward sound, for “Lodge,” “Dodge,” and “Hodge,” distinguished only by their initial consonants, did not. However, when the bearer of “Mabel Bodge” was someone with the attributes of the girl at hand, the misnomer was a harmless irony that provoked a smile. Not to mention that Mabel had no enemies, being far too superior, in every area, to incur envy, which we can feel only when within a seemingly overcomable distance from our competitors: silver- and bronze-winners envy the taker of gold; the slowest runner does not. Mabel was as bright as she was beautiful, her strength in high school and again in college being mathematics, to which at the latter she added Mandarin Chinese as a twin major.

  She acquired a succession of learned degrees from a series of institutions that included Harvard, M.I.T., and, abroad, the universities of Bologna and Beijing. When she had at last completed her formal education, her problem was what to do with it. Teaching did not appeal to her; now past the midmark of her twenties, she had yet to experience life as it is lived by the preponderance of humanity elsewhere than in the groves of Academe. Her parents, solid citizens both of whom worked in lower-level jobs and though okay-looking would not turn heads, could with the best will in the world provide no guidance, sharing as they did the awe that Mabel inspired in all, and she was as notable for her modesty as for her intelligence and beauty.

  Government intelligence agencies soon get wind of students who show an aptitude in difficult foreign languages that are peculiarly useful in the contemporary world, and several made overtures to Mabel, whose mathematical prowess was attractive to big businesses in various fields, technology of course, but also in the complex projections of high finance and the actuarial calculations of the insurance industry.

  But the offer Mabel accepted was from a television network news department, which had been looking for a youthful replacement for an aging legend in that field, the renowned Millicent Bridgewater, who could remember in detail every presidential scandal of the last five administrations, but had proven so discreet about them that she had been a confidante of every White House. Millicent, who with her pugnacious jaw and squinty eyes had had to work the hard way up from internship to seven figures (still less than the male anchors elsewhere), naturally resented Mabel’s quick ascent, with no experience whatever, from zero to stratosphere, and could only assume it was due to the cut of Ms. Bodge’s jib and not the breadth of her intellect, but was astonished and overwhelmed when the young woman confessed that Millicent had been her lifelong idol—an enthusiasm easy enough to fake, but Mabel proceeded to cite some of the major coups of the Bridgewater career, the interviews with mass-murderer dictators who never talked publicly with anyone else; the pope’s revelation, the first made to anyone out of the Vatican, that he had been born of a Jewish mother (Millicent’s response, which became instantly famous, was “like Jesus”); the hilarious give-and-take with the action star and former wrestler Huck Webb, who insisted he was, beneath the loincloth, a woman and insisted she check him out: of course it turned out to be a joke, but as Millicent told him, “You had me goin’ for a while!”

  Mabel displayed such winning ways that Millicent found herself miraculously liking the youngster, with an emotion she had never before genuinely felt for anyone female including her mother. (Her addiction to men, invariably the most deceitful of them, had ruined her private life.) So she took Mabel under the formidable Bridgewater wing, supplying her with a wealth of TV newsroom lore, including many foolproof tricks of a trade notorious for them, not confined to on-air technique but also dealing with the all-important sources, government leakers, industry whistleblowers, et al., and ingratiating oneself socially with the powerbrokers of Manhattan and its Hampton adjunct as well as DC and environs.

  Mabel’s immediate success was bitter-sweet for Millicent, whose ratings had fallen consistently throughout the prece
ding three years, but who now felt at least partially responsible for the rocketlike rise that began with the first appearance of her replacement on the Evening News. Male media reviewers were at pains to deny that Bodge’s pulchritude had had any effect on Mabel’s having been hired, on the public that tuned in in droves and stayed on for the week, then the months, or on their, the critics’, assessment of the job she did, which in objective point of fact was outstanding, extraordinarily well-informed yet never condescending, sincere yet enlivened by a wit without a hint of mean-spiritedness. The females who wrote about Mabel made no reference however slight to her corporeal self but commended her lavishly for an unprecedented display of the principal abstract virtues; in some cases this was at the expense of poor old (55) Millicent, who was accused by her once favorite critic as often “unable to conceal a growing acerbity.”

  Yet Mabel was so genuinely sweet (and having seen them all come and go, Millicent knew when graciousness was horseshit and when it was real) that her successor could not be resented, and declaring the young woman her protégée, with Mabel’s wholehearted acquiescence, made it possible to participate in a triumph instead of degenerating in defeat, though sometimes, in secret, it was a hard pill to swallow when Mabel soon began to threaten Millicent’s record, the product of decades, in getting exclusive interviews with world leaders and show-biz headliners (and the little bitch was still under thirty!), in the course of every one of which startling news was made: Premier Georges DeLattre of France revealed he had once been arrested for procuring; the latest teen sensation, the singer who billed herself as Chrysanthemum, confessed to having been sixty years of age before her transformation to nineteen by state-of-the-art surgery and chemistry; and the terrorist Abu bin Yussef, whom Mabel met at an undisclosed location (thought at first to be in remote Pakistan but actually at a Motel Seven in Oklahoma), when asked what he did to relax after a session of torture and murder, said simply, “Drink beer and watch porn.”