Mindkiller

by Spider Robinson

  The Fader said that we had been coming back from a large “mutual adventure” when a hijacker tried to take its proceeds from us. The hijacker had laid a sock full of potting soil against my skull, and the Fader had killed him with his hands. Then he had dragged me the rest of the way home, and since he knew the dislock sequence but had not been filed in the perms yet, he had a hell of a time propping me up in front of Kennedy to get the door open. (I added the weight-activated explosives later.) He had been nursing me for the past few days, through delirium and nausea, had run several medical texts through the reader before he decided he could safely refrain from taking me to a hospital.

  This last because I had told him my secret: that I did not exist, that I was an invisible man.

  At some point during my missing six years, and after I had stumbled upon my home, I must have seen the possibilities of its computer, and decided to resign from the human race. I had done a hellishly efficient job. God is an iron.

  In between talking with the Fader, I watched and read a lot of news—and I heard nothing that made that decision seem like a bad idea.

  I could, to my only mild surprise, think of no better place for me in the world than the one I seemed to have made and lucked into. Every goal or dream I ever had that I can recall was destroyed in the jungle. I looked around me and found it good, or at least tolerable. And I could imagine no other occupation or lifestyle that was.

  The Fader showed me what ropes he knew, helped me relearn what life was like in the underworld, steeled me to the rogue. He helped me comb through the ragbag of my mind for scattered bits of memory; helped me try, with the aid of the computer, to find out who I was; helped me get drunk enough on the night that I finally accepted, emotionally, that I might never know. He had done for me what I later did for Karen, and when he had finished it he politely made his excuses and left me alone, visiting frequently for a while and then tapering off. He even found me women, until it became clear that it was a waste of everyone’s time. According to my memory shards I had nothing against sex—but now I found myself as asexual as Karen herself.

  “Jesus,” Karen said at this point in my narrative, speaking for the first time in hours. “How could I read it so wrong? You never wake up hard in the morning, you never get hard at all, and so I figure you must be gay. What a jerk.”

  I looked away. “To be totally accurate,” I said tightly, “I’m a little bit more than asexual. Maybe antisexual is closer.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Arousal frightens me. Angers me. I can remember enjoying sex in the past, but now on the rare occasions that I become aroused, I—I usually have one of those blackouts.”

  Karen shook her head. “Different with me. I just don’t get anything at all. Not since I was a kid.”

  Suddenly I was crying, explosively, convulsively, and she was holding me, holding my head against her breast and rocking me in her lap, and I was hanging on to her for dear life. “I thought I had it tough,” I heard her whisper, and I wept and wept. It was the first time in a long while that I had wept for anything but rage, and it drained away an enormous amount of pain and fear and left me spent. Karen half-carried me to bed, and it was like leaning on a rock with a soft surface.

  There was a new bond between us the next day, and so it was late that afternoon that Karen had her own blowout, that her own psychic kettle came to a boil. I think it was that night that she finally forgave God for creating her father, and I ended up holding her until she fell asleep. A deep and profound sleep, complete exhaustion plus successful catharsis. She never felt me undress her, never noticed me leave the bed, never heard the TV I watched as I mixed myself a drink and finished it. I took another one to the corner chair with the directional reading light, and I sipped while rereading computer printouts for the thirtieth time, trying to make a sensible pattern out of them.

  The drink was long gone when I heard the first sensual moan.

  I looked up and dropped the printout. She had worked the sheet off in her sleep and lay writhing on the bed. She was obviously having a deeply erotic dream. I had never known this to happen to her before, had never expected it to. I felt a trace of the faint distaste that sexual arousal usually elicits in me, and wanted to look away.

  But Karen—scarred, frigid little Karen, my true friend Karen—was whimpering with lust. Perhaps for the first time in years.

  Something had finally unlocked, some door in her mind was opening. If it could happen in sleep it could happen in waking life. My patient was at a crisis. But was it happening? She thrashed on the bed, clenching and unclenching her thighs, making small sounds as she searched for release. Her hands flexed and grasped at her sides; she had never learned to masturbate, could not work it into whatever fantasy was stimulating her.

  Surely a lifetime of deprivation should provide enough back pressure to allow release without any physical stimulus. But what if it didn’t? If this attempt at sexuality ended in frustration, would it be repeated? When would conditions ever be better? Or as good?

  I got up and approached her. She did not seem to feel my weight come on the bed. I looked her over from head to toe, dispassionately, as an intellectual problem. I thought it out. The more input I gave her, the more she had to work into the script of her dream; eventually the effort might bring at least partial awareness and failure. Her arousal was coming in slow waves that built to a peak, ebbed, then caught again. When I sensed a peak coming I reached out carefully. With infinite gentleness I put the tip of an index finger just above the top of her vulva, so slowly that for her there was probably no defined border between not feeling it and feeling it. As the peak arrived I moved my finger delicately down the shaft of her clitoris toward the glans. She was breathing in gasps, whistling on the exhale. As I approached the nub I began using a little fingernail, and when I had reached it my thumb was beneath it, trapping it, and she groaned and went over the edge.

  It was not the spectacular, backbreaking orgasm I had rather expected. It was a mild thing, a gentle upwelling. But it was definite and unmistakable, and it left her soft and buttery and totally unconscious, all angles rounded, all edges softened. It left me with tears on my face and awe in my heart and a hollow feeling that hurt as bad as anything I’ve ever known. My sleep that night was an endless round of nightmares, and when I woke the sheet was pasted to me.

  Two nights later the sequence essentially repeated. Except that she woke up after orgasm, and figured out what had just happened. We hugged and cried then. I had no nightmares that night. The next day she taught herself to masturbate while I was out shopping. She reported her success proudly, and I smiled and congratulated her, and was jovial as hell all that day, but I believe she caught on because she never again mentioned it or did it in my presence.

  But she started spending a lot of time in the bathroom.

  I was confused about my own feelings. For her I felt genuinely happy and gratified. And relieved: I never again remembered that there was still a droud in her skull, which she could still use.

  For me I felt nothing.

  Then came the day when our impatience overcame our paranoia and it was time to begin our campaign. Karen had more than one motive to return to her profession now. Oh, she had cautioned herself not to expect too much. Sex with a random stranger whose only known attribute is that he or she has to pay for it is not liable to be great. But whatever happened, she could definitely abandon her former specialty and switch to straight whoring. She now knew, at least, how to pretend enjoyment. And as it turned out she was third-time-lucky, came several times, and refunded his money. From then on she went about one for three, as near as I could tell.

  My own cover identity was pimp, part-time second-story man, and occasional dope runner. If I was home when she brought a client home, I remained discreetly out of sight in the other bedroom, with my eyes on the TV and my ears cocked for trouble. I wasn’t always there; I had fish of my own to fry and she could handle herself. A good part of what I was doin
g was running down exactly how, after we had established our personae, we would begin expanding her client list to include the people we wanted to get to know better, without its being too obvious that we were moving in that direction. I had to tail a couple of them to the homes of the whores they did patronize, learn what kind of women they liked and what they liked to do with them. I was able to get some information from three women by pretending to be looking for recruits for my own stable. With one of them it was necessary to express horror and shame at my unprecedented attack of impotence, and be laughed scornfully out of her room. I tried a fourth woman, and her man put a notch in my ear and a trivial slice on the back of my arm before I could apologize sincerely enough to suit him.

  It was going well. We were both acquiring authentic reputations in the Halifax underworld, and I was learning just what class of Johns our targets represented, so that we could specialize in that type and acquire them in the natural course of events.

  I had decided to actually move a little coke for the sake of my cover, and I returned from a negotiating session in a pool hall with a tentative commitment and a good deal of optimism. When I got home, two coats were on the living room couch and the door to the working bedroom was closed, so I took coffee into the other room and watched a TV special about a zero-gravity dancer, in orbit. Very interesting stuff, very beautiful. I wondered why no one had ever thought of it before. After a while I heard the phone start to ring, but Karen must have picked up the extension at once because it cut off before I could move. Shortly I heard her door open, then the apartment door, then a male voice in brief conversation with Karen’s, then the door closing. I put my coffee down; Karen’s customer had gone and I wanted to ask her some things.

  Only the customer wasn’t gone. She and Karen sat at the kitchen table, both dressed, portioning out the pizza I had just heard being delivered. I stopped and waited diplomatically for my cue.

  Karen looked up and brightened. I could tell that this had been one of the good ones. “Hi, baby. I didn’t know you were home. Want some pizza? This is my old man,” she said, turning to the client, and then her smile vanished.

  The woman was not a regular. She was about my age, blond and tall and slim, quite beautiful by conventional standards. In my first glimpse of her, bending over the pizza, I had noted in her face and carriage small trace indicators of self-indulgence and bitterness, but I had also sensed strength and courage and will. She wore a starched white uniform, quite unwrinkled and spotless except for where it had been stained when the pizza leaped from her fingers.

  She was staring at me, mouth open, eyes bulging with shock, hands gripping her elbows so tightly that the knuckles were turning white. She was looking at me as if I were death, as if I were all horror and all evil, and I could not for the life of me imagine why.

  “Lois,” Karen cried, “what’s wrong?”

  Her mouth worked. She swallowed. “Norman,” she rasped, and swallowed again. “Oh, my sweet Jesus fucking Christ you are alive.” She tilted her head as if she had heard something, and fainted dead away.

  7

  1995 The last two factors in the complex causal-event-tree that killed Norman Kent were Semester Break and an old address book.

  Each factor by itself was necessary but not sufficient cause. Norman might have gotten through Semester Break if it had not been for the address book; the book would probably not have killed him at any other time of the year. But the two factors coincided, and Norman’s death ceased to be a matter of statistical probability and became virtually inevitable.

  He even knew this when it happened.

  He had followed the advice given him by Minnie and the Bear, had done his level best to declare Maddy dead in his mind. He had gone so far as to initiate the lengthy process of having her declared legally dead, which he had been putting off. The horrible impersonality of the procedure helped make the idea of her death more real to him. In his academic world the tendency was to smother the unpleasant realities of life in empty form—in dozens of empty forms, to be filled out in quintuplicate. It seemed fitting and correct that the bureaucratic world should deal with that most unpleasant reality of life—death—in the same way: by chanting the dry cold facts over and over again, on paper. It made it official, made it real.

  The lesson was clear: pain could be buried, with enough shoveling. Norman had allowed himself to relax for the duration of his friends’ visit, because this let him appreciate them. But when they left he plunged gratefully into the work that had backed up in a week of relaxation, and was soon producing like five driven men again.

  His students began to transcend themselves, reaching new plateaus of insight and understanding almost against their will. He published a new paper, in which he coined a new critical term of fourteen syllables that meant nothing whatsoever and was to remain in serious critical usage for half a century after his death. Under his direction the campus literary magazine not only doubled its circulation and quintupled its readership, but brought several of its contributors reprint fees, and one a book contract. Norman practiced, and even came to enjoy, the art of Lunching for Advancement, which he had formerly considered an unpleasant obligation. Three jealous colleagues tried but failed to knife Norman; one was ruined by boomerang effect. Eighteen students, singly and in groups, in series and in parallel, failed to seduce him. Three carefully selected faculty wives succeeded. MacLeod, who was married to one of them, began to publicly praise his own sagacity in giving Norman one more chance to Find Himself, and dropped hints about early Total Tenure. Even the Chancellor deigned to nod to Norman when they passed one day on the quadrangle, both scrupulously following the unnaturally natural pathways.

  Respect of a similar yet different kind was given to Norman by other teachers and students who were in no way connected with the university. Monday night was Fitness Canada Night at the YMCA, the basic RCAF program with assorted frills: Norman was first made a class demonstrator and then offered a part-time job, which he declined. Tuesday night was Jazz Beginner class at DancExchange: he was by now in the first row. Wednesday night was T’ai Chi, that splendid blend of dance and unarmed combat. Thursdays had given Norman a problem for a while: no course for which he was eligible involving physical exertion was offered anywhere in the city on that night. He settled for a pistol marksmanship class given by the police department. Friday night was unarmed-combat class at the Forces post on South Street, where again he was made a demonstrator. He jogged to and from all these activities—he jogged everywhere he went off campus—and did some serious running on weekends down at Point Pleasant Park. Every night he slept like a dead man, a kind of rehearsal.

  He gave up forever tobacco and alcohol and marijuana and reading for pleasure and sex for pleasure. They were all ways to relax, and he had no wish to relax. He canceled the cable-feed service that brought entertainment and news to his video console. He abandoned all social life save that which would enhance his professional position, and pursued that with energy and something that was frequently mistaken for gusto.

  He attained, in short, as has been said, a drastic kind of dynamic stability, the peace of the dervish, and maintained it for some time. As the work pressure on campus swelled, growing inevitably into the tidal wave of Exam Week, he rode it like a master surfer, until at last, when he was humming along at absolute peak velocity and efficiency, the wave suddenly broke and deposited him, shipwrecked, on the shores of Semester Break.

  All the work, all the students, most of the faculty, all went away. Norman was far too organized to need to plan his next semester, and there was no First Semester work left undone. There was nothing to fill his days.

  His evening prospects were not much better. Three of his five evening classes were also suspended while the students were away; marksmanship and hand-to-hand would continue, but it was easy to see that he would come home from them insufficiently exhausted. As for what might be called his curricular extracurricular activities, only one of his three faculty wives had fail
ed to leave town for the vacation—and by Murphy’s Law she was the least tiring, most tiresome, and least available of the three. There was not much to fill Norman’s nights.

  For the first few nights he bounced around his apartment like a Ping-Pong ball in a blender, a workaholic evading savage withdrawal. He added final touches to already exemplary housekeeping, got his apartment looking like an advertisement, then frowned and rearranged virtually every piece of furniture in it, three times. He cooked himself elaborate meals that required hours of preparation and extensive cleanup—then hours later he would realize that he had forgotten to enjoy them. He designed a way to increase the efficiency of his apartment’s layout by tearing out a single wall, and gave it up only when the building super proved to him that the wall was load-bearing—that every wall in the massive tower was load-bearing. In desperation he dug out his novel, but put it aside after an hour. Writing was hard work, but it was not the kind of work that kept him from being alone with his thoughts.

  He cast his mind back to the days when he had had both time and inclination for a hobby. He had once been something of a low-key computer enthusiast, had in fact built his own Other Head (a machine so versatile that its brand name was fast becoming a generic term) from a kit. He spent two days familiarizing himself with the state of the art, then redesigned and rebuilt and overhauled his system, hardware and software. After a day of playing with it he was again restless and irritable. He found himself hurling a glass against a wall because the grapefruit juice in it had become lukewarm.

  Inanimate objects and total strangers began to conspire to drive him mad. An essential component of his typewriter snapped under no provocation at all—the dingus that held the paper against the platen-roller (it irked him immensely that he could not recall the name of that dingus). Norman did most of his typing on his processor, but the few uses he still had for the old IBM—official documents, fill in the blank forms, and the like—were just important enough to make it a necessity. Typewriter repairmen overcharged mercilessly. Norman decided an epoxy repair might just hold up and reached for his epoxy. Used up in rebuilding his Other Head. He went out into the bitter cold and bought more. When he opened it at home, the resin was solid throughout its tube; he had been sold epoxy several years old. Swearing, he went out again—it was snowing fiercely now—to a different store and purchased a cyanoacrylate adhesive, the kind that bonds skin instantly. He found that the tiny tube was too frail to withstand the force required to break the seal inside its tip, even with a very sharp pin and much care; two of his fingers bonded together before he could react and instinctively he yanked them apart, tearing the skin. Adhesive dripped down the length of his hand, dropped on his expensive slacks. He wanted to clench his fist in rage and did not dare. He bellowed and ran to the bathroom, flushed his hand as clean as possible, and dressed the bleeding finger; when he returned to his office the tube was bonded to the desk. He pierced the side of it to get some fresh adhesive, and made his repair job. The stuff claimed to bond in “seconds,” so he gave it an hour. The join failed instantly on the first test. With trembling hands, Norman removed the tube of adhesive from the desk, scarring the desk irreparably and getting adhesive on his shoes. He found himself in the living room, holding the massive IBM over his head, the power cord tangled on one arm, and realized that he was looking for the most satisfying object through which to hurl the thing. He set it down with great gentleness on the rug, then stood erect and filled his lungs. People who live in apartment towers do not generally visualize God as their upstairs neighbor, but Norman looked upward now and screamed, “What is it, then?”