Bailor shrugged, gave him a slightly embarrassed grin, held out his right palm. “You owe me another hundred dollars,” he said.
“All right now, let’s get this damned shot in the can so we can go home,” Weller said, mopping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He checked his watch: almost seven o’clock. Shit!
The big processing session, the terminal session, was at eight tonight. Bailor had told him that the four-week course was designed to make the mark feel bad about himself, to make him feel that some unformed question was gnawing at him and that Transformationalism was the answer. Well, the four weeks were up tonight, and they were going to ask him to sign up for meditative deconditioning at a fat forty dollars a session, the sinking of the hook into the baited brain. And he was going to tell them it was quid pro quo time, enough was enough, they had to tell him where Annie was.
He had to make tonight’s session, but this shot had to be finished today because this week’s shooting was already nearly half a day behind. They’d have to shoot till eight tomorrow anyway to wrap up this week’s segment in time to keep a gaping hole from forming in the air schedule. There had already been five blown takes, each one lousier than the last, so this one had goddamn better well be it!
Weller checked out the setup one more time. Hal Leer, who played Daddy Carson, was sitting in the big overstuffed chair on the basic living room set, looking pissed off at Weller and thirsting for his long-delayed first drink of the day. Barry Greenfield, the obnoxious little brat who played Timmy Carson, was waiting at the right of the set to make his entrance, shuffling back and forth as if he had to pee. Beside him hunkered Scuffles the chimp, looking mean and morose in his white ballerina outfit, while Lindstrom, the trainer, whispered whatever it was you whispered to a temperamental ape into the creature’s ear. It was really such a simple shot—Timmy enters from the right into an establishing shot, delivers his line, cuing Scuffles, who pirouettes into the shot with the pie, the camera moves with him as he dances toward Daddy, and pow, right in the kisser!
Such a simple shot, but first the ape had dropped the pie, then Timmy blew his line, then Scuffles pissed in the middle of the take, then Leer blew his line, then the goddamn chimp had ground the pie into the top of Leer’s head, screeching and baring its yellow teeth. Tempers were getting hot. Leer had been his usual hung-over, temperamental self all week, and Weller, with random patterns of block-auditing words and phrases whirling through his brain when he wasn’t thinking about Annie, had had no patience for Leer’s crap and had told him so on several occassions. The last take, with Leer redfaced and screaming with pie ground into his hair, hadn’t helped matters. Barry the Brat was already whining about how hungry he was and had to have candy bars shoved into his face after every take to shut him up, and the loathsome Scuffles was, well, behaving like an ape.
“… transcendence … blood… nightmares … steak tartare… orgasm … virgin … urine… masturbation… God … changes…” Yeah, that was the sequence that kept running over and over again through his memory. It seemed to be the land of programming Bailor had warned him about, and he had been alert to it, but he still couldn’t keep it from repeating in his conscious mind, grinding its way into the deeper levels. And there were other sequences like that, dozens of them these past four weeks, that he couldn’t keep out of his head, as if someone were murmuring them over and over again in his ear.
Bailor would analyze the sequences that stuck in his head, but he couldn’t analyze them to death. The interpretations of the program only served to make him remember the sequences, and maybe the sequences were even picking up meaning from the so-called deprogramming. To think of Annie was to think of Bailor saying, “This one’s building up Annie as a goddess in your mind,” was to hear murmuring over and over again, “love … Cadillac … Annie … 747 … Athens … springtime. …”
It seemed to be getting more obvious as the block-auditing progressed, but it was also getting heavier—such a crude but powerful form of brainwashing that even being able to watch it work didn’t stop it dead in its tracks. My God, if I had never met Bailor, if I had staggered into this like an ignorant schmuck… .
“Jack? Jack?”
“Huh? What?” Weller blinked back into reality. The cameraman was looking at him with barely contained exasperation. “I was telling you I was ready to get this damned shot over with,” he said.
“Oh yeah, sure,” Weller said. Damn it, he had been spacing out into running block-auditing sequences again when he had to concentrate on getting this damned day’s shooting finished. Screw up your marriage and then screw up your job, is that it, Weller? Hold on, he told himself, maybe this whole thing will be over tonight.
And it was already seven-ten.
“All right,” Weller shouted. “Lights … sound. …”
On came the shooting lights, and the cameraman hunkered back down behind his camera, shaking his head and moving his lips in a silent mutter. Snap! went the clapboard.
“Monkey Business, scene thirty-four A, take six!”
“Speed, ” said the chief sound man.
“Action,” Weller called, dully and mechanically.
Barry the Brat minced onto the set from the right. “Look, Dad, Scuffles has taken up ballet, too!”
The trainer grunted “go” at Scuffles, and the chimpanzee, after a nerve-shattering hesitation, toe-danced toward Leer in its tutu, balancing the pie over its head on the palm of its hand. Leer rose from his chair to marvel at this piece of monkey business, but as he did, Scuffles lurched suddenly closer and dropped the pie in the crotch of his pants.
“Motherfucker!” Leer screamed as Scuffles gave him a ripe raspberry, and Barry the Brat covered his ears in wounded mock innocence.
“Cut!” Weller shouted. He stared at the mess on the set without saying anything else for a long moment. The trainer was recovering control of the ape, but Barry the Brat was trying to taunt it into some new outrage, and Leer was snarling at the wardrobe people who were mopping at the pie-encrusted front of his pants. Weller looked at his watch: seven-twenty. There just wasn’t time to get the set in order, change Leer’s pants, do another take, and get to the Transformation Center by eight. And no guarantee that the next take would work, either.
“All right, that’s a print,” Weller finally shouted. “We’ll have to use that take.”
“WHAT?” Leer howled. “You’re going to use that? A chimpanzee dropping a pie in my pants?”
“I thought it turned out funnier than the script,” Weller said. “Your reaction was beautiful, Hal. It saved the take. Your expletive can be deleted from the sound track.”
Leer brushed away the wardrobe people and came toward Weller. “What’s the matter with you, Weller?” he said when he had reached confidential earshot. “You seem to give even less of a damn than usual lately. You can’t turn in footage like that. ”
“Since when did you consider Monkey Business a serious artistic show, Hal?” Weller asked.
“Artistic? Are you kidding? Forget what an idiot I look like in that shot, you can’t give them a pie in the crotch on a kiddie show. Network continuity will never pass that.”
“Then that’ll be their problem later,” Weller told him. “They can always tell me to reshoot it, but in the meantime we’ll have this segment in the can on schedule tomorrow. Or would you rather stick around here another hour or two to get the damned thing right?”
“Boy, do I love television,” Leer sighed, and then took off in the direction of the nearest bar.
Weller checked his watch again. Another five minutes gone! Not even time enough to grab a hamburger on the way to the Center. Just what I need, to face tonight with a head full of Monkey Business and an empty stomach!
Weller arrived at his processing room on time, but Clark Bums wasn’t there. Instead he was greeted by a slim, darkhaired woman in her late thirties, with hard piercing eyes and an angular face that would have been attractive if it weren’t such a mask of ice.<
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“Who are you? Where’s Bums?”
“My name is Sylvia Paoluzzi,” she said, barricaded behind the brain wave monitor. “I’m a meditative deconditioner. Please sit down, Jack. I’ve got good news for you.”
Weller lowered himself into the hot seat. Good news? Are they finally going to let me get in touch with Annie?
“We’ve completed your psychomap,” Sylvia Paoluzzi said.
“That’s why I’m here instead of Clark. Tonight we’re going to introduce you to meditative deconditioning.”
Weller was caught off-balance. “Look,” he said, “before we get into any of that, I want to talk about my wife. ”
“Your wife?” She looked genuinely puzzled. She glanced through some papers on her clipboard, then looked up at Weller with new comprehension. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”
“I’m glad you see,” Weller said irritably. “This is the last session of my four-week course, and I was promised I could see my wife when I had been processed. ”
“Been processed?” Sylvia Paoluzzi said. “You mean you think you’ve been processed?” Her tone was not so much sarcastic as incredulous.
“I’ve been plugged into this damned machine two nights a week for a month,” Weller snapped. “What the hell would you call it, Miss Paoluzzi?”
“Sylvia,” she said with synthetic geniality. “And what I would call it is psychomapping. Meditative deconditioning is the first step in real processing, and that’s what we’re going to begin tonight.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Weller said. “I’ve spent two hundred and fifty dollars for these eight sessions, and now you tell me it’s nothing, that I haven’t even begun processing?”
Sylvia looked at him with a hard, unwavering gaze. “We’re arguing over words,” she said. “Of course, four weeks of block-auditing isn’t nothing; it’s an absolutely essential preparation for meditative deconditioning.”
“Well, what about seeing my wife?”
“That’s not my province,” Sylvia said. “Meditative deconditioning is. You have a scheduled meeting with a life counselor after this session, and you can discuss your life-situation problem with him. Now you have already paid for this first deconditioning session, so shall we begin? We’ve already wasted the first five minutes.”
Weller studied the woman barricaded behind the brainwave monitor, behind the stonewall of her refusal to discuss anything beyond the procedure she was impatient to begin. Could she really not discuss Annie or was that just part of the game? Either way he knew that he was going to have to get through this session before he got to confront the life counselor, whatever that was.
“Okay,” Weller said resignedly, “you win.”
“Very good,” Sylvia said crisply. “Now as you know, the purpose of block-auditing is to prepare a psychomap of your areas of psychic blockage. It’s basically a diagnostic technique. It tells us what areas we now have to work on with meditative deconditioning, which is a treatment, in medical terms, or a process, as we like to call it. Now do you see what I mean about your processing having not yet begun?”
Weller nodded. First they screw up your mind undercover of their so-called diagnosis, then they sell you the cure for the mess they’ve made of your head. No wonder there’s a special low price for block-auditing! It’s the come-on; they suck you in with it and then sell you “meditative deconditioning” at forty bucks a session! Very cute.
“Well now,” Sylvia said, “meditative deconditioning is in a sense the reverse of block-auditing. Now that we know in what psychic areas your brainwave plot deviates from the optimum pattern, we concentrate on eliminating those blocks.” She fitted the electrode band onto Weller’s head, plugged it into the brainwave monitor, and sat down behind the machine again. “Even an untransformed mind functions at optimum at certain times,” she said. “During successful lovemaking, during creative work, in a relaxed meditative state, and so forth. Just as the brainwave monitor detects blocks by variations in your brainwaves, it can also identify optimum mental states. A fully Transformed mind remains in an optimum state in any life situation, independent of the external environment. The ultimate purpose of meditative deconditioning is to eliminate all blocks, to reach this optimum state, to give you what we call a ‘fully eptified consciousness.’ Do you follow all this?”
“I think so,” Weller said. The theory made sense, assuming that the brainwave monitor did what they said it did. But block-auditing used the same rationale to cover some heavy brain-washing games, and he wondered what numbers they ran under cover of this “meditative deconditioning.” Well, I’m about to find out, he thought warily.
“Excellent,” Sylvia said. “What I do is give you a series of ‘life scenarios’ keyed to blocks on your psychomap, imaginary situations designed to concentrate your consciousness on specific areas of blockage. You meditate on the scenarios as I give them to you and attempt to reach a calm, meditative, eptified state of brainwave activity in your blocked areas. Once you have succeeded, the block will be gone, and once all the blocks have been processed away, you’ll have reached a fully eptified state of consciousness, able to function optimally in any life situation.”
“Question,” Weller said, raising his hand sardonically, like a schoolboy. “Just what are the areas of blockage on my psychomap?”
“Your relationship to your wife. Your attitude toward changing your consciousness. Your creative functioning. Your difficulty with identifying with anything beyond your own egoistic ambition.”
“I see,” said Weller. Brother, do I see! They’re zeroing in on why I’m here and my resistance to Transformationalism. Not to mention my dissatisfaction with my nowhere career. This sounds like it’s going to get very heavy.
“One more question,” Weller said. “Just what am I supposed to do? How do I make my brainwaves calm in fantasy situations designed to make me uptight?”
Sylvia glanced impatiently at her watch. “I can’t really answer that,” she said. “You must develop your own technique. Continued confrontation with your blocks will force your mind to learn how to eptify itself in negative life scenarios. It’s like learning to ride a bicycle, a feel thing … Please, Mr. Weller, may we begin now?”
Weller shrugged. “I guess I’m as ready as I’m going to be,” he said.
Sylvia fiddled with the controls of the brainwave monitor. “All right,” she said. “Here’s your first scenario. Your wife has told you that she’s signed a contract to play a starring role in a major film that’s going to be shot in Spain. She’ll be gone for four months, during which you must remain in Los Angeles to work on your childrens’ television show. ”
“Jesus,” Weller whispered. The dirty bastards had really keyed into his most shameful fear! How many times had he listened to Annie’s end of a phone conversation with her agent, fearing just such a moment? A few times such a role had appeared to be a remote possibility for a while, and during those periods the question had run through Weller’s mind over and over again: what’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to us? How could a star stay married to a failure? And just thinking that way made him loathe his own smallness of soul. He couldn’t tolerate the idea of Annie being more successful than himself, and he couldn’t stand the shame of his own true feeling.
Sylvia’s hard, cold eyes peered at him over the brainwave monitor. “Now try to control that reaction,” she said. “Hold the thought in your mind but try to erase your negative feelings about it.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Weller snarled.
“Try to imagine the best possible way of facing the situation,” Sylvia suggested. “Try to imagine where your mind would have to be to do that and put it there.”
Despite himself Weller found himself trying to play the game. All right, Annie, congratulations, you’ve got your break. I dig your happiness, I’m proud of your success. Yeah, and if you can do it, it proves that I can do it, doesn’t it? And if you become a star, you’ll have power
, and you can use it to help my career. What’s so terrible about that? Wouldn’t I do the same thing for you? Couldn’t you accept it from me? Only stupid male chauvinist ego makes me feel that there’s something wrong with that, that a real man doesn’t ride his wife’s coattails, that a real woman couldn’t respect a man who did. What good does that do anyone? It cuts us off from half the possibilities of helping each other along through life… .
Aw, what a pack of shit all this is! Weller thought, looking across the monitor at Sylvia and wanting to knock the machine off the table and stomp it to bits.
Sylvia looked up from the scope. “Not bad for a first try,” she said. “There actually was some change in the readings for a while. Let’s try another one.”
She paused, then read off a sheet of paper on her clipboard. “You’ve gotten the chance to direct a major film. But only because the male star is a homosexual who is strongly attracted to you. And his production company is making the film, so he’s also your boss. And he’s telling you how to direct. And he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If you do things his way, the film will be a failure. If you fight him for creative control, he can fire you.”
“What the hell is this?” Weller shouted.
“It’s a life scenario,” Sylvia said evenly.
“It’s a piece of slime!”
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, is it?” Sylvia said slyly. “Is that how you would cope with it? By throwing a temper tantrum? Do you walk away from all of your creative problems?” All the while she was studying the oscilloscope, where Weller could picture his damned brainwaves jumping all over the place. He glared at her. She did not look up at him.
“Try,” she said. “Imagine yourself riding with the change, adapting your creative powers to the situation, overriding your emotions, using yourself at optimum, eptifying the situation.”
Weller closed his eyes and tried to disengage his mind from the anger that was coursing through him. All right, we’ll play your little game. That’s ail it is, after all, a silly mind game. It couldn’t happen, Weller? The fuck it couldn’t! If it were a female star, you’d tease her pussy throughout the whole shooting. You’d lock into that sexual energy and twist it around yourself, you’d use it to get what you wanted like a fisherman playing a marlin on light tackle. And you’d ball her, if that was what it ended up taking, wouldn’t you? Annie or no Annie. Or don’t you have what it takes? Because that is what creativity is all about—turning yourself into your own instrument and doing it with utter ruthlessness. Transmuting whatever lousy raw material you’re stuck with into what you want… .
The Mind Game Page 10