Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball

by Scott Spencer

  For hours I watched the films. Our subjects are mostly white and middle class. Some of them looked strangely familiar. There were more than fifteen consecutive minutes of various men lifting the black nighties of various women. Up/Cut/Up/Cut/Up/Cut. Tummies and tits and some hands so hairy that they looked gloved. What were these films supposed to prove? My head rolled, my eyes gazed, yet my attention remained with the films as if attached to their banalities by a steel thread.

  There was one particular rounded, gently fuzzed belly that looked like Lydia’s.

  A shot of a woman’s buttocks. The cheeks are grabbed by a pair of strong, masculine hands. They are kneaded and then forced apart. The screen momentarily darkens as he brings his body close to hers. There is no sound. Then, like a third party, the man’s erect penis approaches the woman’s backside. A clock is superimposed over the image. As he inserts himself into her the second hand begins to move. Then superimposed on the lower left-hand corner are twin grids representing the subjects’ EEGs and in the lower right are similar grids representing their EKGs. They are heaving and grinding, the second hand is sweeping. EEG and EKG lines are scrunching, leveling, peaking, falling, flattening, and leaping, and I am virtually in shock from the whole thing. Perhaps it is all stimuli for a test they are running on me.

  I kept at it until I fell asleep at my desk. Then I gathered up some folders (my neck was a little stiff from dozing in my chair) and brought them to my room, where I looked at them until midnight.

  Some years ago, in the middle of a brutal winter, my wife and I gave an open-house party to celebrate our first anniversary. By the time it was ten o’clock, it was obvious no one was going to attend our little affair, save the three or four life-long friends who were already there, picking their way through the cold cuts and drinking heavily. Lydia, I remember, gave me a long accusing stare and then burst into tears. She was biting on her fist, mumbling all sorts of vilifications—oh, it was awful. She has always been a denouncer—and I the denounced—but that night she outdid herself. Even God was on the carpet, Hat in Hand.

  I hustled our guests out, literally shoving their overcoats into their arms and sweeping them out onto our front porch, where, for all I cared, they could spend the rest of the evening. Lydia was still in tears when I returned—if anything, she had gotten worse. Careful not to disturb her, I began collecting all the plates of virtually untouched food. I emptied the mixed nuts into their original can. The Hershey’s Kisses found their home in a plastic bag. The plates of cheeses and crackers were covered with plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator. The cream cheese and celery concoction, the dainty Norwegian flatbread, the assorted Swiss chocolates—I wrapped them all very carefully. Then the long, delicately arranged plates of salami, ham, roast beef, and turkey. It was necessary to wrap the different meats separately. I used tin foil, making a boatlike compartment for each cold meat and then sealing it tightly. In half an hour it was impossible to tell that the house had once been prepared for a night of festivities.

  I sat next to Lydia, who was curled into our corduroy couch, still sobbing. I ran the tip of my finger over the bristling fuzz on the back of her neck and then, in one easy motion, squeezed her shoulders, with both of my hands. She cringed and shook her head violently. So I went to bed. I undressed slowly, took a sedative, and read something tedious as I lay in bed. The sounds of her crying filled the house.

  They are really piling it on. Lackeys invade my office with a ceaseless flow of new information—new films, new print-outs, small cassettes in pearl gray plastic that contain warbles, sighs, and moans, and manila envelopes filled with 3-by-5 black-and-white snapshots. There are pictures of women naked and alone in bed, men on toilets, strangers on a train. There is a teenage girl in shiny black boots and a flimsy white T-shirt—nothing else. There is a picture of a woman mounted on a man and two small boys seated at the foot of the bed gazing at them forlornly. There is a picture of a man in a business suit turning around and staring at a young woman who has fallen down on a city sidewalk and exposed one ponderous thigh. This male was Subject #312-s-15. I looked at the picture for quite some time.

  It is the theory of the Boys Upstairs—I don’t know why I call them that, my Boy Upstairs is in the basement—that studying stills supplies us with certain information that we can’t get from the motion pictures. First of all, there is the physical thing, the fact that holding a picture in your hand helps you focus your attention on it. Then there is the portability factor. A snapshot can be looked at anywhere, any time, whereas looking at movies is a minor technical ordeal. But the most important benefit of the stills is that they demand an involvement from the brain thief, an involvement that perhaps your average brain thief is not accustomed to. The snap extracts his imagination. We are pretty spoiled here. Stereoscopic, stereotaxic, stereophonic data are readily available to us. Results are neatly tabled, categorized, and computerized. Our research can become mechanistic. With the photographs, we must work for our clues. The snaps are merely moments, however cleverly snatched from an alien, unsuspecting life-span, and it is up to us to make sense of them.

  Upstairs now, the Force Recruiters kick down the doors in perfect unison. Miss M. has whipped them into shape in no time.

  I no longer have the slightest interest in sleeping with her.

  I am staring at the pictures.

  I am staring at my hands.

  I am wanting a life of my own.

  On a piece of yellow paper with light green lines I am keeping a list of names and addresses of NESTER victims whose files have passed over my desk. I keep the paper—no, I won’t say where. Perhaps at any moment a fury of Force Recruiters will come kicking into my room to arrest or demolish me. Why should I tell them anything? Let them tear this place up looking for the things I’ve hidden.

  Assuming, however, that I do make my way out of here—a plan has not presented itself to me as yet—I will find these NESTER-ized people. I will travel through the Dakotas or up to Vancouver or down into Alabama, wherever my victims reside, and I will put it to them: You have been used as a subject in a ruthless, illegal experiment. I will probably get punched. I will probably be laughed at. I will sit on a train and cross the names off my list one at a time. I will meet someone on the train who will fall in love with me.

  For I realize, finally, that more will be expected of me. It will not be enough, after all, to testify before that congressional subcommittee. Screaming the facts over all the airwaves is likewise insufficient. I must help undo what has been done.

  How helpless and alike we are. I have never in my life been moved by human frailty but now the mere thought of it—our delicacy, our foolishness, the shortness of our lives—brings tears to my eyes. I have taken to crying myself to sleep and thinking about God.

  When I was eight years old I detected a certain impossibleness in the story of Noah and the Ark and began calling myself an atheist. When classmates asked me what religion I was (there was in my school a fierce Protestant-Catholic competition) I would say I was an atheist and often I would get pushed down. I would come home sooty and torn and my mother would ask me what had happened. I would tell her I’ve been shoved about for my unpopular beliefs and she would stare at me with faint horror, for she knew this meant I had trumpeted my atheism outside her house, something I’d half promised never to do. “Well, what do you expect?” she would say, biting her lip and turning away.

  Grief stamps about in my heart like a petulant child. My loneliness can find no object to fixate itself upon; my sorrow can find no subject upon which to dwell. Prisoners of war, I imagine, can fall asleep with tearful visions of homes and families undulating in their consciousness. Mother, father, the wife, the kids, the old backyard, the pool hall, buddies. Prisoners in federal penitentiaries stare at wrinkled photographs of loved ones, fantasize about times past and things to come. But I have nothing. There are Lydia and Andrew, no more real to me than shadows in the water. I think of Andrew in Forest Hills with the walkie-talkie I
bought for him … nothing. I think of the soft fuzz on the back of Lydia’s neck and I stare at the tips of my fingers, scarcely able to believe there was ever any contact between the two—that fuzz, these fingertips.

  If I were to bust out of here right this moment, where would I go? I try to imagine myself in Lydia’s mother’s apartment building in Forest Hills, the Grover Cleveland. I am standing in the elevator, lurching toward the fifteenth floor, staring at myself in the small round mirror that is somehow supposed to stop crime in elevators. I am padding down the narrow, bright hall, then rapping on the door. They let me in. (I have already been announced by the surly doorman.) Lydia is wearing a flowered, quilted robe and furry slippers. She has been under the sun lamp and her nose is red. “I’m back,” I say. “I’m alive.” Lydia’s mother comes in, an old lady with blue hair and small wet eyes. She is carrying Andrew in her arms. He is wearing pj’s with a cowboy and Indian pattern on them. He has a cast on his arm. The cast is autographed by his new friends. He is far too big to be carried about. His feet are dragging on the floor. He obviously recognizes me but he considers my presence some kind of threat. I am standing there, hat in hand, sweating like a pig, consumed by the mistaken idea that if I could only think of something witty to say everything would be a lot better. “I was a brain thief and I wish to repent,” I blurt out. Lydia’s mom drops the kid and races toward the telephone. She wants to have me arrested for impersonating the dead.

  8

  I TOOK SUPPER ALONE in the cafeteria this evening. My tablemates, Freddy McCarthy, who is in pharmacology, and Irwin Glass, who is a psychiatrist, had recently departed, leaving in their wake a barely sampled cherry parfait and a small bit of apple brown Betty. I put these aside and started on my tomato rice soup, my creamy coleslaw, and my grapefruit juice. As I was finishing this three-part prelude to sliced turkey, Tom Simon sat down at my table. He was grinning so wildly I thought his usually rigid face would crack. The strips of overhead light blinked in my silver fork as I turned it over in my hand. “Hello, Tom,” I said. “You get transferred to this table?”

  “No, I just wanted to tell you that I’ve been kicked upstairs.”

  “Oh?” I said, not really understanding.

  “Yup. I’ll be occupying Mr. Worthington’s old office. It’s fantastic. I mean, I never expected it.”

  It was my turn to speak but my throat was slowly closing.

  “Anyhow,” Tom continued, “I wanted you to know, since I’ll be supervising you in certain ways. Now you understand”—and here he reached over and gave my arm a small squeeze, causing me to lose half a forkful of coleslaw—“you understand that I’m not a scientist. My duties are administrative. I make the things work.” He locked the fingers of both hands. “I make the gears mesh.” He noticed I was staring malevolently at his hands and he dropped them to his sides. “Anyhow,” he went on, “my only wish is to make your work easier, more pleasant, and, of course, more fruitful. You’ll have to bear with me these first couple weeks,” he said with a small laugh that told me this was the sixth or seventh time he had delivered this speech verbatim. “I’ve got a thousand little details to tend to, and frankly, it’ll take a while for me to hit my stride. During that time I would suspect that I’ll often be calling on you and your associates for assistance. My only wish is to make your work easier, more pleasant, and of course—of course we will all of us do our best to make this administrative transition as smooth as possible. I want you to feel free to drop into my office at any time. And I will be paying you many unexpected visits.” Here he paused, waiting for that veiled threat to undress itself in my mind. “Anyhow, it’s going to be interesting. As you can imagine, I’m a little beside myself with excitement. I feel deeply honored to be promoted to this position. And I will do everything in my power to show myself worthy of NESTER and worthy of—”

  “Tom,” I said with a wave of my hand. “Please.”

  A brief silence. Tom stood up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of candy. “Care for a mint?” he asked. Shocked beyond belief, I took one. Tom said good-bye and walked away. I stared at the circular white mint that sat in the palm of my hand. Who was he kidding? Tom was striding jauntily toward the cafeteria exit. I closed my hand over the mint and then, without really thinking, I threw it at Tom. It was a pretty good toss, though it did not hit him. It skipped a few inches away from his feet and then shattered. He stopped in his tracks and looked at the pieces. Then he turned around and looked at me. I stared fearlessly in his general direction.

  Later that day in my office I ran some recently acquired films from the sexing experiments. I sat behind my desk and watched the luridly flickering screen with one eye and doodled absently on a pad of yellow paper. Hearing of Simon’s promotion had put me into a deep funk. A series of montages materialized. I watched. Suddenly impotent men having their heads cradled by their unfulfilled mates floated before me. There were shots of the horrified males biting back tears of rage and shame and close-ups of the women. Some women seemed really annoyed, some frightened and guilty, some faintly amused, but most surprisingly calm and compassionate, an attitude which, according to the requirements of this particular study, is not experimentally significant but which rather surprised me and raised my opinion of women two or three percentage points.

  It was Friday. At the end of every week each employee must submit a brief report of whatever he is working on, and if available, a synopsis of his findings. We are given lime green folders in which we are required to clip six or seven pages of reports and they are usually collected in the late afternoon. I had mine ready since Thursday evening and the shiny green folder sat on the front of my desk with my name and the date inked onto a piece of white tape at the bottom left-hand corner. At about four o’clock a tall man with gray hair and a skimpy blue sports jacket entered obsequiously and flashing what is known as a “shit-eating grin” grabbed my weekly reports and tucked them beneath his arm, where he carried a couple dozen identical green folders. “Afternoon, sir,” he said, turning away. He opened the door and I saw his aluminum pushcart in the hall, stacked high with folders as well as unbound manuscripts, print-outs, and long yellow writing pads.

  I had always assumed that my reports were sent directly to Mr. Worthington, who thus kept tabs on me and my work. I wondered if this new batch was being carted to Tom Simon—a depressing, sickening thought, as disturbing to me at that moment as hearing that a piece of emotional poetry I had written had fallen into the hands of an enemy who read it aloud at a party to which I was not invited. That was something, by the way, that actually happened to me back in high school, though I don’t bring it up with the hope of excusing any of my subsequent behavior. Suddenly I had to know if my reports were delivered to Worthington or Simon.

  I opened my door and peered down the corridor. There at the far eastern end was the tall old man with his pushcart. He was waiting for the elevator and I raced down the hall to catch him, leaving the projector running. (When I returned, the film had run its course and the top reel was spinning uselessly while empty white light poured from the lens.) Trotting toward him, I wondered how to solicit his attention. I have always been confused as to how one addresses people one doesn’t know. Hey, buddy? Hey, Mac? Hey, pal? The “hey” seemed fairly constant so I contented myself with that. “Hey,” I called, “just a second. I want to talk to you.”

  The elevator had just opened and he had backed into it, pulling the cart in after him. It was one of those elevators whose doors seem terribly anxious to close as quickly as possible and, luckily for me, the doors hit the cart and grudgingly opened again just as I caught up to him. “Where are you taking those?” I asked him, holding on to the door and applying all my strength to keep it from closing.

  He looked pretty rattled, though I couldn’t tell whether it was me or the elevator that was upsetting him. His thin lips had the sheen of eggplant skin and they twitched nervously. “Let me alone,” he said.

  “Where are you taking
those?” I repeated. I noticed that my folder was on the top of the heap and I grabbed it. “Who sees these?” I asked, shaking the folder.

  The poor man must have been tottering for quite some time because my faint threat toppled him. He squeezed his hands together and his milky eyes rolled around in his head like a cartoon patsy’s just after a sledgehammer blow. “No rough stuff,” he asked. “Let’s just take it easy.”

  “I’m just asking a question,” I said, slightly alarmed at the thought of violence. “Who sees these, now? Worthington or Simon? I’ve got a perfect right to know.”

  He was pressed flat against the elevator wall. “Neither,” he said in an exceedingly small voice.

  “Then who?” I said, feeling my strength.

  “Most of them just get burned unread. I take them to be burned.” He was practically weeping from fear.

  I was in no shape to press my advantage just then. “What?” I said, stepping back. “What?”

  As soon as I stepped back he pulled in the cart the rest of the way and the elevator doors closed with a quick clap, as if dismissing me.

  The elevator was operated with a key I did not possess so I could not pursue the old man. I slammed my fists rather hard against the smooth green doors for a few seconds and then, without really thinking, I began to run toward the west wing, where there was an elevator I could operate. I wanted to see Mr. Worthington immediately. My only theory was that he was being victimized by some dreadful middle-management conspiracy and was deprived of the lion’s share of the data being produced. What did I care? Was I sucking up to him? Well, these questions did not present themselves to me and if they had I’m certain I would have sidestepped them with precious little thought, for what concerned me then (as now) were certain irritating irregularities in NESTER’s functioning, gaps, non sequiturs, breaks in the film.