I didn’t tell him that money meant increasingly less and less to me. I visited the city once a month, and then I was with three or four other colleagues; we had to stick together and it was rare indeed that I had a chance to spend my money. No, I did not tell him that. I stopped waving the newspaper. I asked if my mother had been informed. Mr. Worthington nodded, yes. I asked after a few more people. Then I asked if I might attend my funeral.
He laughed softly. “So many ask that,” he said in a dreamy voice. Then, switching to a far more specific tone: “We’ve traced it to a childhood dream common in many of—us. To attend one’s own funeral. To share in the mourning. To ascertain the loyalty of various friends. To hear what is said.”
“Well, may I?” I asked, feeling like that childish dreamer.
“Negative on that one, Paul. Far too risky. If you were spotted—I mean, after all, what would people think?”
“If I gave a good goddamn about what people thought,” said I, “then I most likely wouldn’t be here in the first place. Right?”
“You’re learning,” said Mr. W. with a fond smile. “You’re getting there, just catching on, you are.”
“Learning what?” I asked, feeling suddenly puzzled and out of my depth.
“Why,” he answered with a rare reverberation of nerves beneath his voice, “learning. Learning, that’s all. Learning who you are, what you can and cannot do, learning why you’re here.”
“I’m here to do experiments,” I said, still tense with desire to attend my funeral. “I’m here because I answered your advertisement.”
“Yes. Well, whatever you say.” He stood up, obviously preparing to dismiss me. He looked at me with concern and deep impersonality, as if the latest stock market quotations were at that moment being flashed across my forehead.
“Why are you looking at me?” I said, feeling snappish beyond words.
“Quite simply, because I like you.”
“You do?” I said in an attempt to prolong our conference.
“Yes, quite a bit. You are a deeply bitter man, filled with … ” His voice trailed off. He turned away and his eyes caught a bit of artificial light that made them look like stones.
“Filled with what?” I asked, uncomfortable with the sound of my voice.
“Passion,” he said, turning toward me. His eyes fixed upon mine and he folded his hands.
“It’s true,” I said, turning quickly away.
“That makes you unusual here, then. Most of our people are men and women who have had passion and sorrow bred out of them at a surprisingly early age. I mean, let’s face it, our business here is not altogether a kind one. No matter what we think the final goals may be, what we are doing now on a day-to-day basis leaves, morally speaking, something to be desired. Hmmm?”
“I don’t know. It’s not something which I find useful or productive to think about. I leave speculations about morality to the specialists,” I said with a hollow laugh.
Mr. Worthington moved close to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I am something of a specialist in these matters,” he said. “And I will be paying particular attention to you, just from precisely that perspective.”
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about and, frankly, it would have been difficult for me to care less. “Why can’t I go to my funeral?” I said. “I’ll be quite careful. I’ll wear a disguise. I’ll stay as far away as possible. There’s really no risk.”
“Then why wouldn’t I just let you go? Do you think I like to argue with you?”
“No, I don’t. But it’s just that—”
“Well, all right,” he interrupted, “then go. Just be careful. I’ll make arrangements.”
“Really?”
“I like to change my mind,” he said.
Indeed he does. The promise to let me attend my funeral was broken. When I think of how happy I was as he showed me out, how I smiled with canine gratitude as he handed me a mint and patted my shoulder, I want to scream. For on the day I was to be buried, three of my subjects reportedly began to exhibit irrational eating behavior—one of them gaining eight pounds in thirty-six hours—and I was told by Tom Simon, a middle-management moron if one ever breathed, that my services would be required all day Sunday. Brains, he said, don’t take holidays and neither do their watchers. I protested. I protested greatly. I said it was unfair. Said I’d been promised. Called him a cheat. The works. No avail. And so, as I was being lowered into the cold cold ground—they’d taken “my remains” back to Pennsylvania, to my hometown choking darkly in the plundered hills—I was engrossed in the ventromedial nucleus of a dude ranch owner living on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I felt a sorrow as long and as lonely as Route 66.
Now this compound of cream white buildings encompasses my entire life. I have been removed from the human alphabet. No friends, no neighbors, I am isolated in the extreme, an unwilling hermit, a martyr without faith. After a full day in my office juggling data, comparing tests, writing reports, and reading other people’s mail, I have dinner with three fellow NESTER-oids in the dining room (in the afternoon we call it the cafeteria) and then come here to my living quarters. My quarters are small but not cramped. I have a window that looks out onto the concrete courtyard. No, there are no machine gunners, no goose- stepping guards, no barbed wire, no inquisitive finger of light leafing through the darkness every thirty seconds. There is, instead, nothing. Nothing, simply nothing. There is a profusion of concrete, but that is of course nothing. There are, to the extreme left, several dozen parked cars, but they are also nothing. Over there to the right is a huge electrical generator, painted orange, which because of its color may be something, but when it is dark, as it is now, it is for all practical purposes nothing. Across the courtyard are a dozen or so separate squares of light, the windows of other NESTER employees not yet asleep, but since I don’t know who they are they are also nothing, nothing, zero.
I pace my room, switching on and off the electrical gadgets that have been granted me. The television, the radio, the stereo set, toaster, blender, coffee maker, and another toaster that doesn’t work. My room is pleasant and normal in the extreme. No clashing colors, no harsh angles, a more than full liquor cabinet, a brilliant mirror attached to the inside of the closet door.
But despite the fringe benefits involved in being a brain thief, I have become, in the past couple of months, more and more unhappy here, more and more determined to leave. My feelings of claustrophobia—difficult to handle even in my previous life—have mounted uncontrollably here and together with the fact that I can never go out act as a constant irritant on my nervous system. I am now earning a fabulous salary, none of which I ever see. The only time I ever actually touch money is on the infrequent days I am taken to Boston on a group excursion, and then it is a very small amount. But I wouldn’t mind that so much if it weren’t for the insecurity. It’s really impossible for me to speak to anyone here. During my very infrequent meetings with certain fellow employees who have been assigned to me as social partners, I feel that my every joke is being scrutinized for treasonous nuances. The fact is that it would be pathetically easy for the Boys Upstairs to have my life completely monitored—after all, it is their stock-in-trade.
There are benefits, however. As I sit here in my room, watching the nonexistent windows across the courtyard blacken one by one by three by four by two, until, only I and one other tortured soul remain awake, I ask myself if I am still haunted by the heartbreaking sense of obscurity that prompted me to seek out NESTER in the first place and the answer is no. Even though Newsweek has yet to mention (or even hint at) my name and Vogue has neither complimented nor ridiculed my sense of style, I no longer carry with me that dreadful sense of unimportance. There are no more pimply girl cashiers in poorly stocked bookstores to treat me like everyone else, no gas station attendants whose gaze drifts uncaringly past me as they hastily wipe my windshield, no gummy waitresses to take my order as if it couldn’t matter less. My life no
longer has that dissipated, arbitrary, thin feeling. My days are dense, my work important. And though we here at NESTER treat each other with an enforced air of impersonality, there lingers even in the anonymity a sultry significance.
I am playing with fire. Since beginning this notebook I have been feeling the walls moving in. For months my loathing of this place has swum along the bottom of my heart like one of those blind scavenger fish that patrols the floor of the ocean at its deepest points. But now that I am beginning to articulate my mangled feelings about this, the grossest error of my faltering life, my ill will toward NESTER and practically everything about it has grown astronomically.
But at the same time—and this is strange to me—my position here becomes more and more respected. You see, I am good at my work, very good. Promotions loom on the near horizon. Who am I to complain? I’ll take everything they care to give. I’ll learn all I can. But in my case it will be different. Every other boob here plans to remain locked behind these doors for the rest of his life. As for me, I will own up to my mistakes. I will take my leave in the dead of night. And repent. I’ll take my chances. It will be a renunciation of Biblical proportions. I’ll blow this joint sky-high. Perhaps it will be necessary for me to spend a little time behind bars, though I doubt that. All the rest of them, however. Yes, they will be imprisoned. They will be held without bail, no visitors allowed, given speedy and secret trials, perhaps roughed up a little bit. Why not? This is surely an unforgivable claque of satans. Meanwhile I will have slipped from the tortured shores of this land, aboard a blinding white steamer due in Copenhagen in eight or nine days, depending on the weather.
My experiments with eating behavior seem to be coming toward some fruitful conclusion. As you may or may not know, things like the stomach or the taste buds have little to do with how much or when we eat—in fact we can remove them and eating behavior remains constant. Like everything else, eating or not eating is controlled by the brain. The part that interests us most here is the area around the lateral hypothalamus. Take a rat or a Russian, a tap dancer, a turkey, it doesn’t matter, almost any living thing, and stimulate the lateral hypothalamus and you will get—presto!—eating behavior. The system that causes us to eat is always on. It’s a freewheeling center that needs no encouragement. The only reason we don’t occupy every waking moment with eating is that when we have had enough, which is to say when our jaws are sufficiently exercised, our gut filled, and our bloodsugar level up to an acceptable count, another system switches on which inhibits the “feed me feed me” beeps of the lateral hypothalamus. This satiety center is the ventromedial nucleus.
Anything that is done in nature can be done experimentally. Weeks ago I postulated a certain chemical additive that could be introduced tastelessly into food and would systematically inhibit the firing of the ventromedial nucleus. Eating a food so treated would actually make you hungrier than when you started. Eat a pound and you’d be famished. If you didn’t wise up and switch to some other snack you could conceivably pass out in an oversatiated stupor. You can easily imagine what the commercial possibilities are.
Unfortunately, our subjects were gaining enormous amounts of weight—four pounds a day wasn’t unusual—and the ethical/practical problems of heart attacks and insanity presented themselves. Then I had the perfectly obvious idea of putting the ventromedial nucleus inhibitor in a very low calorie food. Admittedly, we are a little worried about the effects of this—in a meeting yesterday morning, attended by only a select few, Mr. Worthington himself said we were worried—but a major food product company has just bought the formula and intermediate data from us for millions.
“But why stop at commerce?” I asked. Mr. Worthington stood on the slightly raised stage, charts and graphs hanging behind him, his spotted white hands oddly striped by the podium’s small lamp. The light in the small conference room was dim and I couldn’t read his expression. I did, however, sense the proximity of lunchtime and I sensed also the impatience of my colleagues. “Why stop at commerce?” I repeated the question and rose to my feet. “Couldn’t we use our increased power over the hypothalamus as a way of solving some of the world’s conflicts? Starvation, for instance. If we can turn the ventromedial nucleus off, we can turn it on, and keep whole impoverished nations in a state of satiety. No more hunger. Ever. Man’s oldest dream. I realize we could have fed the world’s hungry millions a long time ago with no problem, but it was believed—and rightly so—that when a subjugated people rise above the starvation level they use the increased energy in very destructive ways, such as revolution or other forms of uncontrolled violence. But with the distribution of free food that would give no real nutrition, and so no new strength, but would significantly tone down the hypothalamus’ hunger signals, we could alleviate much of the grumbling discontent that so plagues many parts of the world and further insure the smooth, peaceful running of society. I think India would be interested in this, Red China, Arkansas. Really, everyone has this problem to a certain extent, except perhaps a few countries in northern Europe.”
There were eleven of us at the meeting. I’d say about three felt any enthusiasm about my idea. Most everyone here is either interested in pure research or in strictly commercial ideas—concepts of long range and absolute control appeal only to a few. There were a few stray comments, an irrelevant question, and then we were dismissed. I was feeling pretty low until Mr. Worthington called out to me. I went to his side and stood there as he put twenty-five or so yellow sheets of note paper back into his pigskin briefcase. Then he looked up at me with a wink. “Brilliant,” he said. “Simply brilliant. Don’t let those guys bother you too much,” he said, jerking his head toward the semicircle of vacated folding chairs. “They work for me.”
Rather than take lunch, I went to my room and changed into my sneakers, gray T-shirt, supporter, and maroon gym shorts. I packed a little shaving bag with a tube of shampoo, a bar of glycerine soap, and a can of deodorant and went to the exercise room (Fitness Chamber). Lacking the courage to face the olfactory affront of the cafeteria, whose air was rife with air- conditioning and turkey noodle casserole, I thought I might work out. There was a tension in me that asserted itself as a stiffness of muscle, a tightness of throat, a brittleness of spine, and I thought that twenty minutes of semistrenuous activity might help to relieve it.
There was something in Mr. Worthington’s eyes when he said, “They work for me,” that had dosed my already staggering nervous system with 30 ccs of strangeness and fear. Yes, there are times when old Mr. W. seems scarcely human to me, times when his manner is deeply, abhorrently ironic, as if he were watching me with the same mixture of amusement, eagerness, and utter objectivity that yours truly has shown watching an experimental rat or, most recently, a Rotarian.
Guarding the entrance to the gymnasium was a man named Eddie Marshall, whom everyone called Cookie, or so he told me. He sat in a gray folding chair near the door, with a folding table piled with clean towels next to him and his short, chunky legs crossed. The first time I made use of the gym he did his best to entangle me in the vines and quicksand of his overheated conversation—he was less suited for a solitary life than any man I had ever met—and this time I was careful not to engage his eyes as I grabbed a rough little towel and made my way into the gym. “How long you going to be?” he asked me in his lonely, wet voice. I shrugged.
The Fitness Chamber is small. There is, above it, a nicely banked track, one tenth of a mile around. In a corner there are some rubber mats and barbells. There are a couple of sets of parallel bars—in the entire course of my life I have never so much as touched a parallel bar. There is a stationary bicycle upon which one has the option of pumping with all of one’s might and going nowhere—perhaps the most arty and existential of all exercises. There is a sandbag with the features of a human drawn upon it which is sometimes punched and sometimes attacked with a long stick. There is also a half basketball court, where I chose to take my exercise. A red basketball had rolled into a corne
r and I shagged it—pat pat pat echoed my floppy sneaks across the varnished yellow floor. I dribbled the ball—it sounded like gunshots in a canyon—and moved across the court. Rising momentarily onto my toes, I tossed the ball at the basket; the ball hit the metal hoop and bounced back in my direction. I ran over to catch it—pat pat pat. I dribbled toward the basket (pat pat bang bang) and tried a lay-up shot. I could already feel a pleasant trickle of sweat in the small of my back. The ball touched nothing when I tossed it up—rather surprising and faintly disheartening, since I was only three feet from the basket. It hit the floor with a sharp warlike crack and, as I raced over to catch it before it rolled away, I noticed that I was not alone.
There, in a dark blue suit, leaning against the door with his hands behind his back, was Mr. Worthington. His snowy eyebrows were highly arched, his lips pressed tightly together, as if he might be considering me for the second string of an intra-NESTER basketball squad. When he saw that I had noticed him, his aspect changed with a speed and thoroughness that was more than a little unnerving and he was smiling at me with that chilling guilelessness I had previously associated only with Eisenhower and my maternal grandfather. “What ho! Mr. Worthington,” I called, sending a bounce pass his way. He caught the spinning red ball in two hands, lifted it chest high and jiggled it for a moment as if he were estimating the ball’s weight. He bounced it back in my general direction—I had to lunge, in fact, to prevent it skipping past me—and he walked toward me, his old spotted hands now folded monkishly in front of him.
Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball Page 4