Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball

by Scott Spencer

  Unlike the Carl Stein mission, this visit to Leon Anderson promised no financial rewards for me. Maybe I was still working for the original $1000. An annoying prospect since, if my memory serves me right, Mr. Worthington deducted a couple hundred of that fee because I more or less failed. I must remember to inquire about my financial position. I am losing track of the details of my life …

  Thanks to another from-the-top decision from the personnel department, Leon Anderson was put on my visiting cycle and I was free to stop in and see him at any time. (Visits to anyone not on your official cycle are, of course, forbidden.) When I entered his room he didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. (I know if someone just popped into my room I would be, well, very surprised.) “Who are you?” he asked me. I introduced myself and he nodded quickly as I spoke. His room was essentially the same as mine, except there were no windows at all and there was complete disarray. His bed was unmade, clothes hung out of half- opened dresser drawers, little balls of tightly squeezed tissue paper lay in an indecipherable pattern across the room, and everywhere, everywhere there were telephones. Telephones and tape recorders. There must have been at least thirty telephones and six tape recorders. As I let myself in, Leon was holding a telephone to either ear while a tape recorder made electronic noises of varying pitch. Aside from the telephones and tape recorders, there were mysterious yellow boxes, three of them, with tiny red needles that quivered over crescent-shaped gauges. And folders and folders of computer print-outs.

  “I just felt like stopping in,” I said. “I had no idea you were busy. Why don’t I come in some other time?”

  “Hogwash,” said Leon with a genuinely friendly smile. “I’m always busy. But never have been too busy to visit with a friend. No sir, I’ve never been that busy.”

  He was a small man and he wore a brown-and- green-checkered sports jacket and green slacks. His glasses were too large for his face and his watch too small for his wrist. He had sandy hair which he wore in a crew cut and there was a little dotted line of perspiration above his lip, as if that were the place one was supposed to rip his head in two. He shook my hand with depressing effusiveness; I regarded him with an unmistakable distaste.

  I had no idea what Mr. Worthington wanted me to discover about Mr. Anderson, other than his rodent- like loathsomeness, which was immediately apparent. Was Leon also suspected of disloyalty to the lofty ideals of NESTER? If so, I would have gladly exposed him, since I had no wish to strike an alliance or even come to a gentleman’s agreement with him. Or was I merely supposed to check him out, see how he was doing with his projects, judge him as a human being in some semifinal way? Or perhaps it was part two of Mr. Worthington’s trap to catch me making some treasonous statement. That possibility depressed me no end. Not that I wasn’t guilty of disloyalty that would undoubtedly far exceed his most malignant suspicions. No, I was guilty, all right. But how could Mr. W. think I was so stupid? He was dealing with a master of deceit and he was treating me like a fool.

  Anyhow, since I didn’t know what was expected of me, I decided to make my visit brief and play it by ear. I looked for a place to sit and, finding none, edged myself onto a corner of Anderson’s bed. “How long have you been here, Leon?” I asked him, deliberately using his Christian name.

  “I don’t know,” he said with his abrasive twang, “are we supposed to tell people that? I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re supposed to tell people that.”

  “I’ve been here a year,” I said very casually.

  “Oh, really? I don’t know if you’re supposed to tell people that.” He began to fidget with the telephones around him, moving them this way and that. He picked up some needle-nosed pliers, looked at them, and then put them down again.

  “You’re never at any of the meetings for the psychologists,” I said. “At least I’ve never seen you.”

  “You know why that is?” he asked with a slight smirk.

  “No, why?”

  “Because I’m not a psychologist.” He laughed uproariously at this, going so far as to whip off his glasses and rub his left eye.

  “Oh.” I was beginning to feel uneasy. I felt my chest, half-expecting some cruel cardiovascular prank. “What do you do, then?” I asked, determined to keep sanity in the conversation for as long as possible.

  He looked at me suspiciously, running his small brown hands over several phones, as if he expected them to answer my question without his permission. “I’m a communications expert,” he finally said after tremendous delay. He looked at me, hoping he had satisfied my curiosity. I just stared back at him blankly. “Communications,” he repeated with a shrug, gesturing at the shiny black barrage of telephones that surrounded him.

  My eyes made their way around the walls of his room, wondering where were the peekaboo cameras, the hidden mikes. It was my usual routine, something I’ve come to do automatically whenever entering an area of unexplored space. If Mr. W. went to the trouble of suggesting I visit Leon Anderson, then the chances were this was being monitored and I wanted to do well. I decided to put him a little more at ease. “Where you from, Leon?”

  He thought for a moment, either trying to remember where he was born or trying to decide if he was allowed to tell the people that. “Oklahoma,” he answered with a smile, confident that he had done the right thing.

  “Oklahoma, huh. I had a sister-in-law that lived in Tulsa. Are you from around there?”

  “Let’s just say that I’m from Oklahoma.”

  I pushed back his rumpled green blanket and made a little more space for myself on the edge of the bed. I tried another approach. “You know, Leon, I fully appreciate your concern for security in these matters. Believe me, I’m one person who can understand that. Yet I think there are limits. After all, we’re all on the same team, we’re all aiming our shots at the same mark, and I think it’s important that professionals in the same field take the same time to discuss their work. Especially if they’re working on different aspects of the same problem. You’re in communications. Now, you might not believe this, but I’m not even certain what that means. Do you follow me? Right now, I’m doing work on the ventromedial nucleus of the lateral hypothalamus and I’ve done some pretty classy things with the gamma motor neuron.”

  Leon nodded eagerly as I spoke. He seemed terrifically interested in everything I said, an exasperating response but one that softened my attitude toward him. “You’re a psychologist, right?” he responded.

  “That’s right.” I nodded. “And you’re in communications.” I had decided to treat him as a lunatic. “Isn’t it great to be here? I mean, to have an opportunity to participate in all of these wonderful projects. This is undoubtedly the most advanced center for this kind of work in the whole world and it’s a great honor for any professional man to be here. Don’t you agree?” I shot a glance toward where I had decided the camera was hidden.

  “Oh yes, you bet it is,” Leon chimed. “Yes sir.”

  “Then you like it here?”

  “Like it here?” Leon whipped off his glasses. “Hell’s bells, this is a dream come true for me. I’ve got everything … ” His voice suddenly trailed off and he put his glasses back on. He picked up his pliers again and picked a half moon of dirt from beneath his thumbnail. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this,” he said softly, “but I’ve only been here a couple of months. Before that I was working about fifty miles outside Oklahoma City. I was working at this place … well, it’s a long story. It was kind of a telephone and radio outfit. Nothing fancy. We just made parts mostly. I was an engineer there, you know. And I’d be screwing these transistors into these mounts and all day long my head would be popping—just popping—with ideas. I mean, let’s face it. You got a product that goes into every home in the world. Right? O.K., you take that product and you monkey around with it this way and that and if you know what the hell you’re doing pretty soon you got yourself a situation where you can influence all those people that are using your product.”

&nb
sp; “That’s right, Leon,” I said. “I’m learning how to do that with foods.”

  “Foods? Well, that’s great. Foods.” He whipped off his glasses. “Foods? You put something in their foods, right? Like something that makes them want to screw all the time. That’s great.” Glasses replaced. “Well, right now I’m working on the dial tone. You follow me?” He picked up the phone that rested against his knee. “Every time you pick up a phone you hear a dial tone. A clear signal. Why should we waste it? Every day, millions and millions of people hear that sound. That is the most listened to noise there is, if you’re talking about a noise that’s the same every time. Now, some of you boys down in psychology have been doing some checking on this and there’s no doubt that certain pitches of sound can make the brain do certain things. Like dull a pain, or make your ticker beat quicker. Well, I want to take it a step or two further. I want to put a very subtle sound through this phone and I want that sound to make whoever hears it feel so afraid he won’t want to go out of the house. I’m not going to be stupid about it. I don’t plan to have him feel the fear as soon as he hears the clear signal. That would be dumb. It’ll be a slow-acting thing. And it’ll build up over a period of months. They won’t know what hit them.”

  “You mean the whole world’s going to be hiding beneath their couches?”

  “No, not the whole world. At least I’m not going to be.” He smiled. “But some one person or group of persons will certainly be in a lot of trouble. I’m not going to say who but I think you know what I mean. This thing can be controlled. Certainly our friends aren’t going to be using phones like these.”

  “Well, how’s it coming?”

  “It’s coming, it’s coming. Just a matter of working out the details—and you know how hard this is sometimes. Hard as picking an eel out of a bucket of snot. But I’ve been thinking on this little idea for quite some time, and now that I’m here I can just completely devote myself to it.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “You bet it is. It’s what I’ve always wanted. It’s a dream come true. I can’t hardly tell you how badly I wanted this.” He paused and stared at me with a scary intensity. “I prayed for something like this,” he rasped.

  “Really?”

  “On hand and knees. Through many a long and lonely night.”

  “Lonely?”

  “Lonely as a fish on a cactus.”

  “Mmmm”

  “Hard times.”

  “I bet,” I said.

  “I took to playing crazy games with myself.” His voice was getting furry. “They ain’t secret. The people in charge know about them. I took to pretending that people were following me. I played at being hunted. I committed the newspapers to memory and then put them in a paper shredder I purchased at considerable personal expense.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, looking back on it, I see I was pretending to be reading, you know, secret documents.”

  “Oh.”

  “Seem familiar?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Just a habit. Whenever I get to talking about myself I always ask that question.”

  “What other games did you play with yourself?”

  He drummed his small fingers on top of one of his telephones. He dragged his tongue over his teeth. He took a deep breath, as if at that moment he expected the room to fill with water. “Games?” he asked, exhaling and raising his thin beige eyebrows.

  I made a rolling, please-continue gesture with my hand. “You were saying … ?”

  “I wasn’t saying shit,” Anderson mumbled. “I mean if my problems don’t even sound the least bit familiar to you.”

  “No, I wasn’t saying that … ”

  “Then you admit it!” he said, coming back to life.

  “I really don’t know what to say.”

  “We all of us have pasts. Faint, moist mosaics that make us what we are.” He paused. “Do you know who said that?”

  “No.”

  “A man who works here. Name of Worthington. Do you know him?”

  “No,” I lied. “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s top-drawer. Gives me everything I want. I don’t know that he’d understand what I’m up to but he supplies the materials and gives me the time.”

  “Sounds all right.”

  “I already told you,” he said slowly, “it’s a dream come true.”

  7

  IT’S BEEN DAYS since you’ve heard from me. I wish I could tell you that in this time I have planned my escape from and exposure of this place or I have made contact with an ally here and together we are cooking up some succulent scheme … but in fact I’ve been quite alone and my thoughts have been steamy and inward. I have been, that is, acquainting myself with some data for Mr. W.’s promised sex experiments. The work is driving me into a deep, voluptuous sorrow. NESTER takes things for granted that, in my previous life, I used to relegate to the realm of remote, fantastic delights. We are, for example, comparing alpha deltas for anal intercourse, oral intercourse, and multiple sex. (We have detected a brief period of spindling that the three have in common and can already shift brain patterns to stimulate—in a perfectly chaste situation!—sexual responses until now associated with congress of profound immorality.)

  I have been reading the files, checking the charts, perusing the print-outs, and it is driving me mad. My own sexual fantasies have been so … lame. For instance, I have always dreamed of walking alone through a spacious public park and coming upon a thin, dark-haired girl in a raincoat who is sitting on a bench and sobbing softly. The exotic thrill that that fantasy holds is I ask her no questions, but only sit next to her, take her hand in mine, and press my lips fervently onto her palm. She looks at me with the world’s sorrows in her eyes and I take her deep into the woods and undress her. Then we make love. Such is the meager heat and cunning of my own erotic imagination.

  Even as a married man, my sexing was self-conscious and infrequent. Lydia always claimed that I physically neglected her, but there was a look in her eyes when I got into bed that told me she did not want me to touch her.

  Today I was permitted to view some data extracted by the reality condensers (film crew). The movies are supposed to bring us into closer, more intimate contact with our subjects, though they have never affected me so. The cast of characters changes too quickly; subjects are here today and gone tomorrow. In the time we have with subjects we get to know them pretty damn well, obviously. But intimacy? Never. We mull over a lime green folder filled with charts, watch perhaps a few thousand feet of tightly edited film, correlate our data, figure out a pattern, and if possible make a few tentative remarks. But is this love or even friendship? Once a project is over the subject becomes invisible to us once again. True enough, he is perpetually wired and forever ready to go, but ninety-nine times out of one hundred you never see or hear him again. He is integrated into a new experiment and some other equally fickle doctor is recording the beeps and blips of the subject’s secret self. The subject’s brain is treated as a whore whom we all abuse in turn.

  Ah, but the films! The films! They are delivered to my office in dark brown film cans girdled by a black canvas belt. They are labeled with code numbers which correspond to files of data. Such a batch was waiting for me when I came in this morning, and upon finding them my mouth went dry. These were the first I’d seen. I sat at my desk, routinely considering my fate and drumming my fingers on the film cans. I pressed a triangular plastic button near my telephone and a humming filled the slowly darkening cubicle as black curtains were drawn over the small window with sinister slowness and a projector slithered into sight from behind a wall panel. Then I stood on a straight- backed chair and, tiptoeing tensely, hooked my pinky into a copper ring with which I pulled the sparkling white screen down from its metal cocoon near the ceiling.

  Upstairs, at this very moment, Miss Mitchell was putting the Force Recruiters through their paces. Clatter clatter bang. They must be a new
batch. Heaven help me …

  I had planned here several pulsating paragraphs describing the fleshy shenanigans represented in the films, but looking through the notes I kept while watching them I see that they were, in a sense, like the first moon shot (and all of the subsequent thrusts toward that piece of dead rock)—more exciting in conception than in actuality. When we thought about our sweet boys adrift in those rockets and aloft on the moon our blood quickened, but when they were actually there, dragging themselves about and trying to remember the things they had been coached to say, it was all we could do to keep our eyes open and more than a few of us wished that the telecast would be interrupted by an urgent message from “My Three Sons.” So it is with pornography. Although I have never attended a pornographic movie, I am certain the most arousing part of the experience is after the purchase of the ticket when you are standing alone in the pink and black lobby, checking your reflection in the smoky mirror. Once you are actually confronted by the bodies in all their imperfect nakedness, heaving at each other, grimacing and grunting, going at it with all the poignancy and grace of tractors, exposing their genitals to the smooth glassy camera—it is true, classic, quintessential boredom. Perhaps there is an inverse relationship between the psychic power of a conception and that concept’s resonance in the physical world. Yes. The more interesting and moving a thing is to think about, the less interesting it is actually to see, for instance juggling or socialism.