Soft music filled the car. Strange, compelling music made by vibraphones, flutes, and drums that beat as gently as tiny bird hearts. I breathed deeply. A scent of flowers. “Where are you taking me?” I asked.
The car emerged from the uphill runway and we were in the NESTER parking lot. A light rain was falling and the headlights stabbed into the thickening night. “Let me ask you a question,” said Mr. Worthington. “Where were you going? Be honest.”
We moved onto the highway. “I was going to Boston.”
“Why?”
There was no reason to mince words. “To expose you.”
“Me?” he asked, touching his chest with one finger.
“You, yes. Not you personally. The whole thing. The organization. The whole thing. The illegal experiments. The kidnapings. The electronic implantations. The marketing surveys. The thugs, the madmen … ” I was getting a little worked up again, though I was very fatigued. I sat up straighter, hoping to revive myself a little. “I was going to call a press conference and alert everyone.”
“Oh please,” said Mr. W. “Don’t talk like that. If any of my superiors were to hear that they’d seriously question my wisdom in releasing you from your contract. It reminds one so clearly of your original fantasies, the ones with which you came to us. The fame, the grandeur. It is all the same thing. These desires to be in the newspapers, to testify, to be a celebrity.” He carefully placed a Lifesaver in his mouth, sucked on it for a moment, and then shook his head. “So the less said about that, the better.”
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“I am taking you to Boston. We will say good-bye, Paul. I am, you see, quite determined that you shall be treated as our first rehabilitated recruit. Your period with us, I feel, has been a remarkable one. When you were first brought to NESTER you were a frustrated and angry man whose spiritual malignancy allowed him to agree—not to say desire—to do all varieties of unforgivable experiments. You were, in short, a dangerous man.
“You see, Paul, that is what we do. We collect men such as yourself and keep them away from others so they will do no harm. The experiments are fake. The films are fake. The intercepted letters, the EEGs, the GSRs—all fabrications. You, quite understandably, I suppose, never became aware of that. But you did feel an admirable revulsion with your work, and, believe me, that is rare. Moreover, you were willing to act on your revulsion and that, Paul, has until this night been unheard of. None of the people who visit us ever, ever leave. They never wake up from their dreams. It is deeply sad. But, of course, we can only be happy that at least they are with us, where they can do no harm. Yet we give them every chance to leave. We tempt them at every turn.”
“Every chance to leave?” I said, shaking my head and trying to keep up with him. “Then why the spying, why the guards, why the terror and strict enforcement of rules?”
“Three reasons. First, our clients like it. It amuses, titillates them, and fulfills fantasies that humane conditions never would. Second, it gives work to our non- scientific recruits. Many of our clients are only thugs, lonely men who would, if we did not stop them, join secret police organizations or become soldiers of fortune; others would be, say, tyrannical office managers. We take care of all sorts. And the third reason is that, while our people are with us, we must punish them. We must work them, discipline them, scold them, frighten them, and make them hop. Their nasty little dreams must come true with a vengeance. Charity, Paul, must have its sterner side. The individuals who founded NESTER believed in punishment.”
“You make it sound like an act of God,” I said with a small, frightened sneer.
“I firmly believe,” he answered, “that the will of God is present in everything we do.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“I imagine you would like me to say that it is entirely up to you. But that, sadly, is not the case.” He reached beneath the soft beige seat and produced a wallet. “Here is a wallet with a generous sum of money and cards with which you can establish a new identity. You will become the person whose name appears on the cards. You will receive, for one year, a monthly check. You will not lead a life entirely open to all options. You will not, for instance, live on the east coast. You will not reestablish contact with old friends or family. You will not teach. You will not engage in any scientific activities. And you must start from the beginning, an unknown man, no longer young. We have no halfway houses. You are, as I’ve said, our first rehabilitee.”
We entered the city limits, and lights from signs and stores we passed slipped across Mr. Worthington’s face. He leaned forward and tapped on the glass that separated us from the driver. “Jeremiah,” he said, “please proceed to Boston City Hospital and stop there.”
“Why are you taking me there?” I asked.
He ignored my question. “I only hope that you are truly ready to be on your own. I know the old desires are still with you, like the end of a splinter improperly removed. Yet you have come a long way and I am willing to take a chance on you. Our facilities are limited. We cannot incarcerate every foolish man and woman who wishes to violate the sanctity of the human mind. We have only four installations, aside from this one outside of Boston, and each one can only handle a couple of hundred. Usually we have to wait until a death before we can gather someone new in. And there are so many who rightfully belong with us. This city alone is filled with all kinds of minor-league mind robbers—advertising men, disc jockeys, private detectives—not to mention the mind robbers of the first rank who call this city home. But we can only do so much. Our resources and time are limited.” He smiled at me. “If only our people responded to our environment as you did, then we could really do some good. But we have no turnover. The people we take stay with us for the rest of their lives. Our only break is an occasional suicide. And that’s not very satisfying, is it?”
“No sir,” I said. The rain was falling harder now, splashing onto the car’s long, dark hood and beating soundlessly against the windows.
“Well, our time together is almost up, Paul. I am looking forward to sleep. I’m so tired.”
“I’m tired, too.”
“I can well imagine.” The car glided to a stop. “We are at the hospital.”
“I don’t understand,” I insisted.
“I am going to let you out and you will check into this hospital. You have a Blue Cross card and you will be admitted.”
“Why am I going to the hospital?”
Again, he reached beneath the seat. This time he came up with an enormous knife with a black wooden handle. “And so it is good-bye,” he said.
“Good-bye, sir,” I said, looking at him and feeling for the door handle. I edged away.
“There is one more thing before we part. You see, I am aware that your dissatisfaction with us was not the product of the most notable and humane feelings. Your disaffection was, to say the least, complicated. And some of your unhappiness was, I think, for frankly reprehensible reasons. But you acted, you fought, and that is what we are willing to concentrate on, for now. You are rewarded.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, lunging for the door. It was locked.
He moved closer to me. He rested his hand on my shoulder. “But you cannot altogether escape your punishment. I think that would be too much to expect and I don’t think such utter leniency would do you much good. However, I am completely confident that you will consider this far better—”
“Oh no, sir,” I said, trying the door again. I tried to stand up and I hit my head against the car’s ceiling. I slumped to the seat.
“—you will consider this far better than your previous punishment. You will remember always to be careful.” I tried to squirm from his grip and he held me tighter. Then reaching over quickly with the knife in his hand, he cut off my hand in one smooth, easy motion.
He put me out in front of the hospital and then he and his chauffeur drove away. Numb, I made a few steps in the direction of the receding car. The back lights we
re dark red. The rain was falling with some insistence. My mind was shaking with a thousand questions. I wanted to call out to him. Then I glanced at my bloody wrist and perhaps the pain was awakened by the visual reinforcement, I don’t know. But instead of asking any questions or calling any names I began to scream and that seemed enough—occupying, as it did, more of my brain, my heart, and my soul than anything had in quite some time.
A Biography of Scott Spencer
Scott Spencer is the New York Times—bestselling and award-winning author of ten novels, including the National Book Award finalists Endless Love (1979) and A Ship Made of Paper (2003).
Born in 1945 in Washington, D.C., Spencer moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago at age two. His father, Charles, had been in the army before beginning work in a hot and noisy Chicago steel mill. Charles later wrote and self-published a book titled Blue Collar (1978) about the experience. Spencer remembers his childhood as peaceful despite his family’s tight finances and his parents’ concern over the political climate during the McCarthy Era, both of which were kept secret from Spencer at the time. Charles was a dissident in his union and, Spencer remembers, “sometimes feared for his safety and even his life. There were mornings when he checked under the hood of his car for a bomb before igniting the engine.” The far South Side of Chicago was at the time the set of atrocious racial violence, which Spencer’s parents steadfastly resisted, adding to the home’s sense of peril and purpose.
Spencer was an avid reader from an early age, a passion that his parents encouraged. At age sixteen, he discovered the beatnik subculture and was very much influenced by that literary movement. Though he studied at the University of Illinois and Chicago’s Roosevelt University before earning his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Spencer considers himself above all to be “an alumnus of the Chicago public library system.”
All of Spencer’s novels are intimately related to his life. He wrote his first novel, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975), during and directly following his college years. The novel centers on a control-hungry experimental psychologist and his dangerous experiments, which reflected Spencer’s own experimentation with mind-altering drugs and his studies in behavioral psychology at the time. His second novel, Preservation Hall (1976), is about an ambitious man’s fateful encounter with his ex-convict step-brother while the two are snowed in together in an isolated rural house, not unlike the one Spencer would move to later in life in Rhinebeck, New York. His next novel, Endless Love, explores the obsessive and all-consuming relationship between a young couple and was his first major success, selling more than two million copies worldwide. Endless Love was universally hailed by critics, establishing Spencer as a leading American author, and inspiring the film directed by Franco Zeffirelli.
In 1986, Spencer published Waking the Dead, the story of the tragic love between a career politician and a progressive activist living in Chicago. The book was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and later became a film produced by Jodi Foster and starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly. Spencer followed the success of Waking the Dead with Secret Anniversaries (1990), a coming-of-age story of a young woman in mid-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., and Men in Black (1995), a comedic novel about a struggling author’s unexpected success after penning a book about UFOs. Secret Anniversaries and Men in Black is set partly in the fictional town of Leyden, New York, a town that Spencer revisits in many of his novels. Leyden and many of its residents are modeled after Rhinebeck, and Spencer says that, though he doesn’t directly base his characters on real people, he does draw from them and join different people’s traits together, “giving a red head a limp, a lawyer a dog.”
After Men in Black, Spencer published The Rich Man’s Table (1998), about the strained relationship between a Bob Dylan—like American music icon and his unacknowledged son. Most recently, Spencer has published the novels A Ship Made of Paper (2003), Willing (2008), and Man in the Woods (2010). Spencer’s nonfiction journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and GQ. He has also taught fiction writing at Columbia University and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
This photo, taken around 1945, features four of the people who most influenced Spencer’s life. His father, Charles, is seen in his military uniform (second from the right), with Spencer’s aunt Elfride and uncle Harold to Charles’s right and his mother, Jean, to Charles’s left. Elfride and Harold both moved to Cuba after the 1960 Cuban Revolution.
Spencer’s fourth grade class at Burnham Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Spencer is in the second row, fifth from the left.
Scott and Charles on vacation in Arizona around 1958.
Spencer with Victoria Wilson, his editor at Knopf. Wilson edited many of his books, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, and Preservation Hall. The two have remained friends.
An exhausted Spencer holding his newborn daughter, Celeste, at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City in 1979. Celeste is now a painter living in Brooklyn.
Celeste in 1984, standing in front of the Spencer house on the South Side of Chicago. Spencer remembers Celeste as being determinedly artistic throughout her childhood.
Spencer and his son, Asher, in New Orleans, Asher’s mother’s hometown, in 1987. Asher now lives in Brooklyn and is working toward his PhD in economics from CUNY.
Asher on vacation he took with his father to St. Petersburg, Russia, in front of a restored war ship that the Bolsheviks used to fire upon the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution.
Celeste with her dog, Oliver, in Rhinebeck, New York, taken while she was studying at Bard College.
Charles Spencer, Scott’s father, reading a selection from his second book, Left, Two Three (1986), in a Chicago bookstore, with Scott’s children Celeste and Asher listening on.
Nominees at the PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony in 1995. Among those present are Spencer (front row, second from left), George Plimpton (back row, center), Francine Prose (back row, second from left), and Mary Lee Settle (front row, fourth from right).
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1973 by Scott Spencer
cover design by Joanna Rieke
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0528-0
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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SCOTT SPENCER
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