Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball

by Scott Spencer

  Carl Stein unwound from full lotus, stood up, and turned off the set. “Madness,” he said. “They take a viable concept and turn it into Loony Toons. Cretins. Every week I watch this, every week I feel sick. You know, their ratings are very good. It was my idea, the whole show. Yes. But not like this. There is no catharsis here. Only tiresome screaming and laughter. There is no sense. People are too worked up to listen to the commercials. Did you know that? Sit down, why don’t you. Please be comfortable. Yes, the ratings go up, but the advertisers are unhappy. Too much excitement. No one listens to the commercials.”

  Carl Stein spoke slowly, with volume, dodging the Germanic diphthongs that, even after almost thirty years in America, shadowed his speech like a sleuth. I regarded him. Flaxen hair, high shining forehead with a large vein that beat out a telegraphy of blood. It suddenly occurred to me that Carl was the only person I knew who wore a bow tie. I looked at his perfectly squared fingernails, the smooth, yellowish hands. I knew I was speaking into a battery of hidden electronic ears. Of this I was certain. I had been told. I wondered what my approach would be. If he was trying to expose NESTER, was there any way I could clue him in to my sympathies without killing both of us? Clearly, I had no choice but to act in Mr. Worthington’s interests. Not in Carl’s, not in mine. Besides, there was no reason to trust Stein. Perhaps he was spying on me. Perhaps he was a Maoist or a Nazi. Or a homosexual, I added, looking again at his bow tie, which was not the kind you clip on but the kind you actually tie.

  We bantered back and forth for a couple of hours. I was amazed, and a little hurt, to realize how much more responsibility he had than me. He controlled entire communities. He was given extensive use of two- way transmitters, which meant that not only did he receive neural data but he could create it; he could stimulate or obliterate parts of the brain at his own discretion. Only three people in NESTER had that privilege, he told me, after his fifth glass of peppermint schnapps. Everything he said was pronounced with a pinch of pride. He said he left Germany in 1941, and said it in a way that implied it was the year to leave, that to leave Germany in 1940 would have been a sign of hysteria and that to leave in 1942 would have been proof of complicity. He said he had never married, as if his bachelorhood were a grand experiment in the human condition. It became eleven o’clock and he took out a box of crackers covered with sesame seeds, which he did not offer me. After every sentence—Carl Stein is one of those people who gives you the impression he is speaking with punctuation—after every sentence he took two small bites from a round cracker. Clearly he was insane. As it neared eleven-thirty, I despaired of ever getting any information from him. I was having no success directing the conversation. Carl was dominating me completely, implicating me in his most passing thoughts. I would look at him with steel in my sockets and say: “The Boys Upstairs suspect you to be a traitor and what do you have to say to that?”

  Instead, I began to say small, disloyal things, trying to trap him into agreement. What I actually said could not, by any means, be called treasonous, but there was a drum beat of dissatisfaction beneath my words and if he wished to dance that particular dance he could recognize the rhythm. I made fun of the computer technicians. I mentioned my salary and said I needed more. I told him my desk had a slight wobble. Carl didn’t pick up on any of it. He was drinking schnapps and eating, with that mad meticulousness, sesame seed crackers. He was diverting me with his habits, hypnotizing me with his pace. He would take a sip of schnapps, and take two small bites of a cracker. Then he would utter a sentence. Then two more bites of cracker. A pause. Small sip. Sentence. Two small bites of cracker. A pause. Legs crossed. Sentence. Uncrossed. Two small bites of cracker. A sip. How could I get through to him? In desperation I said things I shouldn’t have. I felt, even though every word was monitored, Mr. Worthington would understand that what I was saying was strictly in the line of duty. Still, I was indiscreet. I said I sometimes felt sorry for my subjects. He sipped, took two bites, said something completely unrelated to my words. I mentioned my disappointment in not being allowed to witness my funeral. No reaction. I looked at a spot in the wall where I imagined a camera might be and winked at it conspiratorily. Covering all bets, as it were. I said the food we got was boring. I said I would like to try LSD. No reaction. Nothing. Boldly, I took the glass of schnapps from his small, yellowish hands and took a sip, hoping to derail him, to throw a wrench in his ritual. He stared at me impassively, like a panelist on “You Be the Judge.” “You know that Miss Mitchell,” I said, “the woman who trains the Force Recruiters?”

  Slowly he took the glass from my hands. He looked at the glass and then at me. I listened to the purring precision of an electric clock that sat between us on a small table. Carl produced a white handkerchief from his smoking jacket and wiped the rim of the glass where my lips had touched it. The clock purred on. He folded away his handkerchief with intriguing care. Finally, in a rather soft voice, he said, “You are scum, did you know that? You are scum. You have been in my home for hours and nothing but complaining. Why are you here? You are womanish and cowardly. Observe how your hands tremble when I confront you with what you are. History has somehow permitted you to enjoy a place in one of her greatest moments and you think of nothing but objections. Wobbling desks, poorly seasoned soups. You are an impossible man. Childishly fixated on everything that matters least. I should report you, but I will not. It is not to my liking to indulge in office politics. Besides, you are yourself your own worst enemy.” He screwed the cap onto the nearly empty bottle of peppermint schnapps, closed the box of crackers, and stood up. Though he was very angry he showed virtually no emotion. “You will please leave now. It is late and I am in need of rest. I have much to do and we are not friends.”

  I attempted to say something but could find no words. I slowly got up and made my way to the door. He quickly walked across the room and opened the door for me. “You are truly scum,” he repeated. By now his voice was showing the strain. He was quivering around the vowels. “I dislike you with such intensity it is necessary for me to strike you.” And as I attempted to walk past him and out into the hall, he punched me in the shoulder blade with all his might.

  I staggered back to my room and immediately tore off my shirt so I could see the damage that had been done. There it was! A bruise. In the center of my pink back, a boysenberry badge.

  I stopped my morning’s work today about a quarter to twelve. I was hungry and somewhere, somehow through NESTER’s antiseptic hush I smelled curried shrimp from the cafeteria. I was damn hungry. Hungrier than I could remember being for months. So hungry, in fact, that I wondered if some hideous hypothalamic stimulator-depressor wasn’t busily at work, lousing up my limbic system. Certainly the thought of the tables turning was a constant one. More so since the night with Carl Stein. How easy it had become to imagine my unconscious being piped into the insatiable electronic jowls of the computer downstairs, mercilessly masticated and belched up as some surefire sales approach, or a way to marshal opinion in favor of some new and insane government project.

  These were my thoughts as I hastily stacked some stray papers and prepared to leave for lunch. The feeling of hunger was, however, so pleasant, so human that I dismissed my fears and prepared to go to the cafeteria. Carl Stein and I were no longer eating together. He had apparently requested a transfer after our evening together and the Boys Upstairs, acknowledging my total ineffectiveness as a sleuth, readily complied. So I was looking forward to a pleasant lunch, and as I left my cubicle I felt positively happy.

  I closed the door to my office, searched vainly for my reflection in the frosted glass window, turned around, and was met by Tom Simon’s vaguely unpleasant stare. We looked at each other for some short period of time and then old trusty Tom looked at his watch. Trusty Tom’s watch told him, naturally, that I was leaving a little early for lunch and he checked it a second time with a mock sense of justice. “It’s lucky I caught you,” he said. He paused here, waiting for me to agree that, yes, it w
as lucky he caught me.

  Instead I said, “What do you want me for?”

  “I don’t want you for anything,” he answered with a chill. “Mr. Worthington, however, wants to see you in his office.” Then, pausing cruelly, he stared at his watch again. “Well, let’s be going. I’ll walk with you.”

  I stared at him, uncomprehending. Had I come this far in life only to be led from room to room, regardless of my wishes? What was it about the world that every day you seemed to have less freedom, less choice? And what if I didn’t want to go to Mr. Worthington’s office? And what if what if what if? What had happened to all my what-ifs?

  The long walk. With Tom Simon silently beside me, checking his watch and looking … expectant. (Think of my hands, my feet, the beating of my blood.) The endlessly echoing corridors. Where was everyone? Where were my fellow employees? Why this silence? Hello? Hello? Before long we reached Mr. Worthington’s office. Tom paused impressively before the door, which was embossed with a huge W. God, I thought to myself as I regarded the enormous initial, that’s class. That’s for me. We stood there, Tom and I, united for a moment by a shared awe, a nascent greed, as if a garden of forbidden delights awaited us. Didn’t we know? Couldn’t we remember? It would only be Mr. Worthington, in the office with the green rug. And he’d be sitting there. Of course, his desk is enormous, and there’s an array of telephones, Dictaphones, recorders, buzzers, the screen of a closed-circuit television built right into his desk. But on the debit side, his hair is dull gray and he would be sucking a mint. He would offer us a mint. Perhaps he wouldn’t offer Tom a mint. But me, certainly he would offer one to me. Was there anything in this man to be afraid of?

  My first surprise on entering the office was that it was in a state of total disarray. Lined along the walls were various pictures and plaques that had been taken down (a black, brown, gray, and white oil painting of turn-of-the-century factory workers walking through a snowstorm was my favorite). There were pale rectangles on the walls where the pictures had once hung. Boxes filled with books—the bookcases empty. Some of the telephones were disconnected and stray wires lay across the floor like faults in the earth.

  Mr. Worthington himself seemed to be in an uncharacteristic state of agitation. He was opening then closing then opening again a drawer in his desk, shuffling violently through a stack of onion-skin papers that made fragile, helpless sounds as he pawed them. The outer office and waiting room, where his rotund secretary had once resided, had vanished. Her desk was gone, as if it had been traded in for the patch of bare floor that now took its place. The wall that once separated her nook from his domain had been knocked down or slid away and the office looked immense and unsafe. And Mr. W. looked smaller, angrier, apt to do something rash. Tom and I swayed deferentially, standing as far back as we could, waiting to be noticed.

  He found what he had been looking for, apparently, for he withdrew a piece of paper from the drawer, made a small satisfied sound, and shook his head bewilderedly. He looked at the paper quickly and ripped it into tiny pieces, dropping the confettied information into a Lucite wastepaper basket. Then he looked up and nodded at us and we stepped forward. “Thank you for bringing him, Tom,” he said, as if I were some inanimate object that had been delivered.

  “Will that be all, Mr. Worthington?” asked Tom.

  “That it will, Tom,” answered Mr. Worthington in such a way that I sensed some bit of feud between them. Two of the phones on his desk began to ring. He picked them up and hung them up in one motion.

  Tom left and I was comfortably seated in a high- backed pigskin chair, offered a mint, and, since nothing had been said yet, given sufficient time to dread my fate. My first fearsome thoughts were very general, having to do with a vague feeling of persecution rather than a sense of being punished for anything specific. I had a brief run of pain fantasies, thinking of the most excruciating tortures. Then regret, the old familiar, Why did I get into this in the first place? I began to wonder what exactly I was wanted for at this moment.

  Mr. Worthington was leaning back in his soft leather chair, swirling in a 45-degree arc. Then: an abrupt stop and his body veered forward, his elbows propped suddenly on the desk. “You didn’t meet with any great success regarding the matter of Carl Stein. I realize it was a difficult assignment. Not really your lie—pardon me, not really your line. We had hoped that your effect on Mr. Stein would be more neutral. I am afraid we did not envision you as such a controversial friend. Oh, do try and smile. There is nothing so bad in all of this. You tried. We know that. How is your back? It was a nasty sock he delivered, we understand.”

  I shifted my weight, as if the mention of my bruise had somehow activated it. As a matter of fact, I had forgotten about my back. Being in Mr. Worthington’s office made me think more of other parts of my body: my heart, my bowels, my jugular vein. “Oh, it was nothing. Line of duty and all that. Ha ha ha.” I wondered why Mr. Worthington never laughed at any of my jokes. Why he never even did the old broad-smile- and-head-shaking routine that is possible when a laugh can’t be forced. Inflexible bastard. I loathe people who put such a premium on being “authentic.” Or was it that he was recalling my treasonous words in Carl’s room?

  “However,” he continued archly, “we have not been without success in the matter of the good Mr. Stein.” He chuckled lowly, a barely audible eek of amusement. “No, not without certain very real rewards for our concern. Are you interested in hearing how our little melodrama concludes?”

  I stared at him, not really understanding this was my cue. After a bewildering three quarters of a minute had dragged by, I said, “Yes.”

  “Well, it seems that Carl, Mr. Stein, was using our scientific information for most unscientific purposes.” He paused reflectively and, noticing my mouth had stopped making those small sucking motions, offered me another mint. “Yes, Carl was one of the originals, as I may have told you. An excruciatingly brilliant man. Who knows? Perhaps the most brilliant man working here.”

  I felt a twinge of jealousy.

  “His passing will be a great loss to NESTER—though there are those who insist he had outstayed his welcome. A brilliant man—why do you frown when I say that? You were not impressed with him? Oh, at any rate, who is to say what is brilliance? Carl Stein turned out to be, after all, a petty larcenist—and a bungling one at that. But in the field of information gathering, extrapolating, and projection—the best. Among the younger people in the field there are more very good ones but fewer, far fewer of the greats.”

  There was a knock on the door. Mr. Worthington’s pale, placid eyes turned upward in exasperation, profoundly expressing his obvious annoyance—he was just getting into it. “Yes,” he said, deliberately stripping the word of any quizzical intonations. The door opened slowly and Ira Robinson peeked in, as if he were an emissary from a different dimension.

  “You asked to see me?” he inquired, still unwilling to enter the office.

  “Yes, I asked to see you,” replied a weary Mr. W., “but I said one o’clock. You’re early.”

  “Oh.” A pause. Ira was in inexplicable agony over the innocent mistake. “I’m sorry. My secretary said as soon as possible.”

  “Your secretary was in error.”

  “Oh. I am sorry.”

  Then with an unexpected flourish of generosity, Mr. Worthington conceded, “Or perhaps my secretary was in error. It has been known to happen. As you see, things are rather unsettled here. But be that as it may, it is not time for our meeting. If you would be so kind as to be patient and keep yourself available, I’ll buzz your office in a few minutes.”

  The usual ruffled moments passed in the wake of Ira’s departure. Then Mr. W. continued, “Yes. While a few minutes are still available to us, let’s conclude the sad and miserable tale of one Carl Stein. As you know, Carl had perhaps more power than any nonadministrative person in this entire organization. He had been with us for a long, long time.” Mr. W. paused and a soft mist passed slowly over his gray eyes as
he remembered, no doubt, the good old days, when a brain thief was a brain thief. “For years Carl had been initiating projects—most of them charged with his special genius. K-eleven-six-b was his, from start to finish. All of our latent hostility projects came from him. He was, among other things, a master of anxiety. A dip in a chart, a squiggle on an EEG and—poof—Carl would have a product. He was, for instance, the father of feminine hygiene.

  “Now, looking back over his career, I hold myself somewhat responsible for his going wrong. I trusted him perhaps too completely, was too easily carried away by his infectious enthusiasms. Carl would come to me with a plan, a new approach, and I could never say no. If it was a question of money I would have the budget budged. Equipment—no problem. Helpers? Fine. He had only to mention his needs and I would make quite certain they were satisfied. And believe me, my faith and trust in him helped NESTER become what it is today. Most of the people here, we have found, work better when closely supervised—too much freedom frightens them, depresses them. Yet Carl was different. He was the master of the modern slogan, a poster poet. Make Love Not War was his. As was Register Communists Not Guns. Was there anything he could not do? If one criticism were to be leveled, it would be that his ideas were too fresh, too ahead of the times. For instance, he would invent a slogan and it would sometimes take six months for it to catch on. And even though all of us knew that eventually it would be on the tip of the national tongue, the waiting produced its own anxiety. Clients would be nervous beyond description. Black Power, for instance. That took years and years to really catch fire. Carl was a little psychic, I should say. In some ways it was merely a matter of experience, of course. A matter of knowing that A and B most often led to C. But with Carl one couldn’t help feeling there was something else involved, some mysterious machinery of genius.”