“I’m quite happy here,” I countered cagily.
“I know, I know. That’s why Mr. Worthington suggested I come to see you. I’ve been—been spouting off about this for quite some time now and I’ve even spoken to my superiors about it. He told me you were particularly happy here—though not without your difficulties—and that it would be helpful for me to speak with you.”
He heaved another deep sigh, slapped his hands onto his knees, and stood up. “They told me in the beginning,” he said, pacing about, “that there’d be a period of adjustment and I was to be patient. But now I’m quite accustomed to everything and it’s no better for me, no easier. Worse, actually. I don’t enjoy the experiments. Perhaps if they gave me something new to do, something bigger. I guess all of us had our plans and dreams about what we’d like to be doing when we reached a place like NESTER. We are all of us ambitious people. But they don’t tell you everything. It’s really a goddamned bureaucracy. Memos, appointments, protocol, secrecy—I wanted to live in a community of scholars and technicians, and instead I end up in some ten-foot-square room with faulty ventilation. I wanted to sit beneath redwood trees in a pair of madras shorts and have leisurely, important conversations with my intellectual peers, but instead I find myself isolated, under constant suspicion, stymied, and the only recreation I get—well, I told you about the pool. Look at my eyes! I spend half my time in the infirmary getting treatments for them. God!” His fists went to the sides of his head and remained there for a few long moments, as if he were posing for a picture. “It’s not worth it,” he said, his voice shattering. “It’s not worth all of their money, it’s not worth their seventy-five thousand dollars a year. It’s not worth their … ”
But I lost track of what followed, so astonished was I to hear that the pissed-off Popkoff was pulling in a full thirty-five thousand dollars more a year than I was. Not that such things mattered so awfully much—I was leaving NESTER, about to blow it wide open, and even if I wasn’t there was little opportunity to spend and enjoy one’s money while slaving away here—but it was sobering to realize just how much a toad they had played me for.
“It’s not worth their—” he was saying.
“Well, just what in the hell are you going to do about it?” I interrupted, pounding my fist into my open hand and putting out my lower lip.
“What can I do? As I’ve been told, I’m not the first person here to become unhappy about the situation I find myself in. But what am I supposed to do about it? I’m seeing a psychiatrist three times a week—fifty bucks a throw. I’m trying to teach myself yoga and meditation. I do a little watercoloring but I don’t have any talent and my pictures are morbid.” Suddenly he stopped his shrugging and pacing, looked at me with cold, frightened eyes, and said, “I think about escape.”
“Oh?” If indeed I had at that point been hooked up to a NESTER-ine recording device I think my convulsive reaction to the word “escape” might have short- circuited several sophisticated barometers.
“Yes, yes, yes, I do,” he said with a frightening wildness coursing over his features. “I see myself in dreams riding in a car, beneath a low sky filled with clouds and World War One-type airplanes and I am listening to the radio and my arm is around a young woman and we are talking about where to stop for our picnic. This is a dream I have often. The sky grows lighter as I continue on. But no one leaves here, of that I’m quite certain. The doors are locked. There are guards before each one. The lawn is undoubtedly electrified. There are probably searchlights and machine guns surrounding this place.” He lifted his eyes and I noticed a wormish pink scar along the side of his throat. He rubbed his hands together and sat down. He swallowed, tried to get a grip on himself. “Well,” he said, “what do you think?”
“What do I think?”
“Yes. What’s your impression? What’s your advice?”
“I think you should put all foolish thoughts out of your mind,” I said very slowly. It was perhaps a cruel thing to say but I could take no chances. My freedom was worth more than his peace of mind. There was, first of all, no reason to believe in Popkoff’s legitimacy—I myself had gone on these investigative missions for Mr. W.—and even if Popkoff’s agony were genuine he would benefit, in the long run, more from my eventual escape and worldwide prominence than he would from a few kind words. “There is no chance of your leaving here,” I continued. “No one has ever left NESTER, unless the people in charge have chosen so.”
“I know, I know,” he said forlornly, shaking his head. “But how I yearn to be on my own. How I long to see old friends—friends with whom I had really very little in common but whose memories now haunt me and fill me with unbearable sadness. I would like to see my wife—her name is Jane and I never loved her, at least I thought I never loved her. But now, here, after all this time, I see her face, even smell her. I wonder where she is. She has probably remarried. An attractive woman, beset with annoying yet forgivable habits. We were childless. She has now probably a dozen children. She is English.”
“She couldn’t possibly have a dozen children,” I said. “You haven’t been away that long.”
“Yes, of course. How silly of me,” he said, taking no particular comfort in the fact.
“And you’ve no reason to believe she’s remarried at all,” I said. “She may choose to spend the rest of her life in solitude.”
“Is that what your wife chose?”
“What makes you think I was married?”
“Mr. Worthington told me. Her name is … Lydia? Do you think she now lives in solitude?”
I experienced an unpleasant, queer feeling, like a small elevator rising up from the base of my neck through my skull. “I don’t know,” I said a trifle breathlessly. “I don’t think about it. About her. I’m a better brain thief than I was a husband.”
“Brain thief?” He paused for a moment. “Oh, yes, I see. Well, yes, I suppose that’s the position most of us find ourselves in. Fantasies about returning to one’s old life or even beginning a new one are rather stifled by the realization that one has never done anything but one’s work with any degree of competency, that one’s personal life has been a washout, that friendships, marriages, and even casual relationships lie behind one in shambles. That one has taken no joy in either God or Nature or even, for that matter, organized sports. That one’s dreams have always been riddled with yearnings for unwholesome power, unreasonable influence.”
“Well,” I said, “you seem to have it pretty much figured out. With such a sensible analysis of your situation here I don’t see how you allow yourself these dreams of escaping, of finding yourself still another life. Why don’t you just accept what you have?”
“I knew you’d say that,” he said, getting up.
“What else can I say?” I said flatly, absurdly hoping that if he were on my side he would sense I was on his.
Both of our faces drained of expression, as if we both simultaneously remembered the tucked away cameras that were recording our engineered encounter. The next cameras, I vowed, that I would stand before would be television cameras at some none too distant press conference where I spilled the brain- picking beans to a slackjawed room of reporters.
“May I come to see you again?” Popkoff asked, moving toward the door.
“Whenever you like.”
He opened the door. “Thank you. And you may, quite naturally, drop into my room whenever you choose. I feel there’s more to say about this matter. I’m on the ground floor—I’ve no view at all. Room one-twelve. How ironic that they put me there. Perhaps they knew when I came here that I’d have dreams of flight as soon as my dreams of pharmacological power had been fulfilled. I mean, my room is right next to a main exit. No one guards it except an old man named Mr. Acoraci. He’s all that stands between me and the great outdoors.” Popkoff shook his head. “But I’ll never leave. So what’s the use?” He closed the door behind him without a good-bye.
My head was pounding from the strain of his visit. The pres
sure of listening to him, answering him, and camouflaging my real thoughts had strung electric wires of pain about my skull and I was weak from it. I paced the room. I heard voices, noises, sounds, scrapes. The ticking of a clock sounded like water dripping on a microphone. I put my hands over my ears and it was louder still.
I knew in the marrow of my bones that I was on my way out. Suddenly, the moves and the countermoves meant very little to me. I was on my way. Soon. Now. Tomorrow. I briefly reflected on the world I was going to see, the natural wonders, the human misery. And suddenly my room took on a surreal clarity—my life was supernatural. I threw open the door and looked down the empty corridors. From behind closed doors I heard muffled conversations. I closed the door after me and strode through the halls, swinging my arms and breathing deeply. I wanted to take it all in. The porcelain drinking fountains, the faintly antiseptic odor. I arrived at the stairway and decided to trot up to my office.
I opened up the frosted glass door, the neon lights shook the room back and forth as they struggled to turn on, and I sat on the couch and looked around. My office, too, was wild with previously unperceived life. Objects seemed to tremble, others appeared to glow. Then I noticed there were scuff marks on the woodwork going all around the room, as if someone had been kicking at it. I had never done any kicking in my office. It must have been a previous tenant. It was funny I had never noticed them before. I had also never noticed that the color of the woodwork was lemon yellow, which exactly matched the color of the ceiling. That was pretty obvious but I had never noticed it, or it never registered. The couch I sat on was covered in some kind of plastic and the plastic was cracked from heat or wear, and the seat was traversed by thousands of delicate lines. I stood up and, as if by inspiration, I figured out why my desk wobbled. There was a screw right in the center that attached the desk top to its mount and that screw had worked itself loose—or was it sabotage? I dropped to my knees and tightened the screw with my hands, covering my fingertips with my handkerchief.
The whole cubicle had come alive for me, as if my senses had thawed. After all these months. Years! I wasn’t used to it, wasn’t equipped. I walked over to my window. It was twenty minutes before nine o’clock and I watched the summer night close over the last bit of sun. The window threw my reflection at me, as if my image had been summoned by the night. As it grew darker my reflection grew sharper. I looked at my sad, practically dead eyes with eerie objectivity. I had, I said aloud, bitten off more than I cared to chew. I slowly rubbed the back of my head. My eyebrows, I noticed, were growing together a little. That would have to be taken care of. “My name is Paul Lloyd Galambos,” I whispered, momentarily enshrouding my reflection with my hot breath. Quickly, the light film of steam evaporated and I saw a lone young tree at the far end of the NESTER compound bend in the wind like a servant girl. No, much more graceful than that—a ballerina. I was no longer bothering to conceal my thoughts. My synapses were humming with anticipation, with vague plans for flight. By the time my thoughts had been processed and deciphered I would be gone. I must get out of here. That’s what I thought. Unadorned, unmistakable, a direct statement. It filled my head like a gaudy red balloon.
10
LOOKING BACK ON IT NOW (months have passed and I have learned to write left-handed) I dwell on the rather meaningless fact that I never bothered to open my packages of clothes, never tried on that English suit or that blue and yellow wide-brimmed hat. Now in tatters, living alone in the heart of this country—and the heart, my friends, is barely beating, the heart in fact has stopped—I think back to those dandy duds and in my feverish and secretive mind they take on an onerous, symbolic load they were never meant to carry and under which they collapse in an exhausted, depleted heap.
I will abandon those clothes in that room and with them I will similarly ditch any impulse that tempts me even momentarily from the barest thread of my narrative. What happened that night and the long, humid day that followed it will be enough to explain for one man, and a broken, profoundly confused man at that.
I have been leafing through this journal preparing for this, my final entry. Some of it is frankly illegible and perhaps may never be deciphered. Some of it pulls me back to those days on the outskirts of Boston, puts me in that speeding subterranean car, in that office, beneath that desk. But what most magically conjures that final evening are the two long, wide strips of pale blue on the journal’s navy blue cover, the remnants of the tape with which I secured the notebook to my back right before I bolted. Looking at those long skid marks, I can see myself shirtless in the harsh light of my sleeping quarters, my chest heaving, a glacial pool of perspiration forming in the small of my back, my eyes as large as walnuts. I was taping the journal to my back, reeling with the vague, absurd hope that if I were to be gunned down or drowned the journal might be discovered and would tell the story in my place. (Brief fantasies of a hero’s burial: pan shots of weeping crowds, my wife, desolate and red-eyed, leaning on two secret service agents.) I put down my pen and ran my fingers over those bald strips.
It will take me years, it seems, to learn to write properly with my left hand. But I don’t mind. It’s something to do.
All right. Enough.
After I taped my journal to my back I put on my shirt. I was wearing a dark blue shirt and black pants—quite by coincidence, but they were perfect for slithering through the nighttime lawn on my way to some superhighway. I thought about Popkoff’s projections of NESTER security: the machine gun turret with the curls of ammunition on the perforated metal floor, the searchlight roaming ominously through the night, illuminating here a phalanx of moths and there a retreating heel. I had to move fast. There was no doubt in my mind that I had been for quite some time under observation—my hope was, in fact, that my observers had contented themselves with tape recorders and cameras and had not gone INSIDE for their ill-gotten information—and my only chance was that there was no one directly responsible for the ongoing cameras and such but that they were emptied of their revelations every morning or so by a low-level functionary who brought them to someone else for cursory examination. I thought for a moment about that shuffling lackey, rising at dawn and going from camera to camera for each incriminating cassette and dropping them into an aluminum basket with the nonchalance of a peasant gathering unbreakable eggs. I waved good-bye to a point in the wall where I felt the camera may have been placed.
I decided to take nothing with me. I didn’t want to be slowed down and I had, I think, the foolish, degrading idea that if I were apprehended in the halls or on the grounds I could get away with saying I was merely taking a stroll. I had no money. Since there was nothing within the compound to spend money on we were given our cash only on outing days and after the outing it was re-collected from us. It made it more difficult to take little outings on one’s own.
There followed fifteen minutes of hopeless fright.
Finally, I had composed myself sufficiently to open up my door and peek down the corridor. Droning in the nether lands of thought were Popkoff’s observations which, if taken at face value, added up virtually to instructions to me. He had said he was in Room 112. On the ground floor. Next to a main exit. Only one guard. An old man. Mr. Acoraci! My faith in these instructions was far from secure: it existed like the yolk of a frying egg whose perimeter quivers incessantly, always just about to splash open and run helplessly into the seething, crackling white that surrounds it. But it was the only hope, the only plan I had. I closed the door behind me and stepped into the hall.
Running on tiptoe past the rows of closed doors—every so often a shaft of yellow light would spill from beneath one of them and I would hop over it—I made my way to the stairwell. Holding on to the smooth, chilly banister, I ran down the stairs. I had decided speed was my friend. There was no percentage in creeping about, of lurking in corners, of hiding behind fire extinguishers. Just go, go quickly. I reached the bottom of the stairs and stood before a double lime green door: ground floor. I pressed against one
of the doors. It did not budge. I clenched my hands and looked upward—five flights of flat gray stairs grew toward the roof in right angles. I saw myself racing up them, finding some trap door to the roof, and leaping into the—I leaned against the other half of the swinging door and it opened easily.
Above me, a fluorescent square of light quivered and the corridor, encompassed in its stuttering illumination, jerked and swayed. Resisting a tidal wave of nausea, I made my way down the freshly waxed hall, my leather soles slipping dangerously here and there. Soon I came upon Room 112. I filled with fury. I thought of Popkoff’s information and fatefully accepted the possibility that as I passed his door it would fly open and from it would pour a trio of heavies who would pummel me floorward. Well, fuck them, I thought with anger and stupidity. There was every reason to believe that each piece of Popkoffian perfidy had been constructed as a clumsy yet effective trap into which yours truly was inexorably stumbling, but personal safety seemed, at that stage, a heavily shrouded concept, essentially incomprehensible to my excited senses. I even momentarily considered opening Room 112 myself, saying good-bye to morose Dr. P., or inviting him to come along with me, or telling him to keep heart and trust me eventually to get him out of the mess he was in, or spitting on his floor. But as I glanced at the frosted glass window on his door I noticed to my left a small red and black sign: exit. And beneath that sign was a small old man in a military cut lime green uniform, replete with black-billed cap and brass buttons. He sat at a table which was bare save an enormous black telephone. He was staring at me with torrid little eyes.
I approached him. “Hi,” I said, grinning.
He placed his powder white hands on the beige table.
Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball Page 13