The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  “But how do I keep it from becoming a self-fullfilling prophecy? I mean, what’s the difference between meditative deconditioning and what you’re telling me to do? You’re giving me a goddamn life scenario too!”

  “You know what scenarios to watch out for. The true-believer stuff. The seeker-after-higher-consciousness stuff. So when they run one of those on you, play your game, not theirs. Concentrate on something different, something that will put your mind in the so-called eptified state of consciousness they’re looking for, but with different content. Like if they run a number about dedicating yourself to the church, think about shooting the last scene of a successful movie. Get it?”

  “You mean run my own life scenario on top of theirs? I’m glad you’re not suggesting anything too complicated …”

  So the meditative-deconditioning sessions had become games within games within games. Run his own scenarios within Sylvia’s scenarios, split himself in half, or was it in thirds? It was getting to the point where he looked forward to certain life scenarios—the creative fantasies, the scenarios where he and Annie were reunited—as the only moments when he could bring himself together, let himself experience the totality of Jack Weller and feel good inside his own skin. Everything else was a paranoiac acting exercise or sleepwalking. He had reached the final irony—he only felt real, authentically himself, during unreal fantasy situations! If only he could reverse fantasy and reality, if only he could live out the life scenario of Jack Weller, the committed creator, if only… .

  Oh, my God Weller suddenly realized that he had been tripping out into his own head games on the set again, and this time right in the middle of a take! How long had Scuffles and the Brat been tossing that baseball back and forth? Well screw it, they can just cut away as much of this lead-in as they want to. He brought his right hand up and dropped it sharply, cuing Hal Leer.

  Leer seemed to give Weller a look of pure poison before he delivered the fine. “Here, let the old man have it. Let’s see if Scuffles can hit the old curve ball.”

  The Brat tossed the baseball to Leer and went down into a catcher’s squat as Scuffles picked up the bat and took a right-handed hitter’s position, thumping the bat on an imaginary home plate and ad-libbing ape grunts.

  Leer went into a woozy, ludicrous double-pumping pitcher’s windup, then brought his arm forward with the pitch. But at the moment of release, he seemed to get tripped up in his own stupid feet, and he stumbled forward, half falling down.

  The ball hit Scuffles right on top of the head, a perfect beaner.

  The ape screamed in feral outrage, bared its yellow teeth, and shambled across the set toward Leer with blood in its eyes. Leer snarled and balled his hands into fists.

  “Cut!” Weller screamed. “Stop that goddamn chimp!” He dashed forward as Scuffles leaped at Leer, who sidestepped clumisly and hit the chimp a glancing, ineffectual blow on the shoulder as Scuffles, chittering, slammed into his left side and knocked him on his ass.

  Then the trainer and two grips grabbed the howling ape from behind, pinned its arms behind its back, and dragged it, screeching and kicking, away from Leer.

  Weller reached Leer, took him by the hands, and tried to help him to his feet, but Leer angrily pulled away from him. “Get your filthy hands off me, you imbecile!” he shouted.

  At the right of the set the grips were still holding onto Scuffles while the ape struggled and gibbered, and the trainer tried to calm him with soft sounds in his ear. Barry the Brat stood nearby, taunting the chimp by pretending to throw phantom baseballs at its head.

  Weller exploded in a fit of blind rage. “Cut that shit out, you little bastard, or I’ll break both of your arms!”

  “Up yours!” the Brat screamed and stomped off toward his dressing room.

  Weller stood there confronting a red-faced Leer. Aside from the gibberings of Scuffles, there was dead silence on the set. Cameramen, grips, and sound men were staring at Weller as if he were a maniac.

  “Weller, you are without a doubt the—”

  “Shut up, you goddamn drunken sot!” Weller shouted in Leer’s face. “You show up drunk or hung over on this set again and I’ll have your ass canned!”

  The intake of breath from the crew was all but audible. Still red-faced with anger, Leer spoke in clipped, tightly controlled tones. “You’ll have me canned, will you, Weller? You’ll have me canned? We’ll just see about that. We’ll see who gets fired after this little exhibition.”

  Weller took a deep breath, then took half a dozen quick steps backward, the director commanding the set. “We will break for lunch now,” he announced loudly. “After which we will continue today’s shooting, and we will get it right. I hope all of you have got that straight.”

  The crew continued to stare at him with unconcealed, silent hostility. “Scuffles is through for today,” the trainer said. “I only hope that’s the worst of it.”

  “Then we’ll shoot around him this afternoon,” Weller said grimly. “And tomorrow he had better be ready.”

  “Or what?” the trainer snarled.

  “Or else,” Weller shot back at him, and stalked off in the general direction of the commissary, unable to bear looking at the mess on the set a moment longer—the glowering Leer, the contemptuous sullen eyes of the crew, the stinking goddamn gibbering ape.

  That does it! he thought. I can’t take another week of this! I’ve got to get out of here, I can’t stand it any more. I’m going to quit this fucking job. I’m going to quit Friday. I can’t bring back Annie, I can’t get my head out of this quagmire, there’s only one thing I can do to try to make my life endurable, and that’s get rid of this miserable cretinous insanity. Enough is enough! I’ve had it! I’ll sell my car, I’ll take a second mortgage, I’ll dig goddamn ditches, but I can’t take any more of this.

  By the time he had reached the Transformation Center, Weller’s energy level was about an inch off the floor, and his will was drained dry. After he had choked down a hamburger at the commissary and returned to the set, the idea of quitting his job had become just another unreal life scenario.

  Sell the car? Maybe he could get two grand, but how long would that last at three hundred and eighty dollars a week for processing and Bailor, not to mention mortgage payments and minor matters like utilities and eating? And if he walked out on his contract, no one would ever hire him again; he’d be broke, unemployable, and wheelless, which in Los Angeles was like having three broken legs. A second mortgage on the house? Fat chance, if he couldn’t even show a bank enough income to carry the first one! Dig ditches? Sure. Wash dishes? Right. The town was just full of shit jobs that would pay an out-of-work director four hundred dollars a week.

  So he had slogged through the afternoon’s shooting in even more of a trance than usual. The crew was sullen, silent, and agonizingly slow, as if they were punishing him for the morning’s outburst, as if they wanted nothing more than to get his ass off the set. Leer came back with booze on his breath, but Weller dared not openly notice it; as it was, the necessary conversation was conducted in grunts and snarls, and shooting was hopelessly behind already. Barry the Brat he could at least intimidate into working with implied threats of violence; he at least had enough authority left as an adult for that. But throughout the endless afternoon a slow funeral going seemed to be beating in his head; he felt dead inside, and indeed cultivating that anesthesia of mindless zombiehood was the only way that getting through the day seemed possible.

  He slunk into the Transformation Center, took the elevator to the third floor, walked into the processing room, and dropped his bone-weary body into the chair in front of the brainwave monitor like a sack of potatoes. Even cold, clinical Sylvia was able to feel his trapped, defeated, exhausted mood.

  “Are you all right, Jack?” she said, with You look awful! written silently across her face.

  “No,” Weller said sullenly.

  “Would you like to see a life counselor?”

  “No,” Weller said. Yet
another brand of mind game was hardly what his present mood called for.

  “Do you feel you’d like to cancel tonight’s session?”

  “No,” Weller said automatically. Did I drag my ass here for nothing tonight, you nerd? Besides, tripping out into a harmless scenario or two might be some kind of relief from the awfulness of reality.

  Sylvia snapped back into her robotic persona. She fitted the electrode band on his head and plugged him into the console. “Well then,” she said brightly, turning on the machine, “maybe tonight’s session will do you some good.”

  “Maybe it will,” Weller said, half surprising himself with the sincerity he heard in his own voice. “I could do with forgetting about what’s happened today.”

  Sylvia favored him with a tiny smile. “That’s the right attitude,” she said. “Move along the time track with the changes. What’s past is memory, don’t let it become a block.” Weller nodded. A tiny ray of light pierced his clouds. For the first time today he felt as if he had accomplished something, a little piece of role playing that had advanced him some infinitesimal distance toward Annie. If that were what it was. He tried to force his tired mind further toward full alertness, sensing that he had set the stage for a session that might go a long way toward convincing them that he was moving swiftly toward true conversion. You were zero as a director today, Weller, let’s see if you can at least act.

  “All right now, ready for your first scenario?” Sylvia said. “Your wife has just had a baby boy. She’s gotten an offer to do an important supporting role in a movie. In order for her to accept, you must stay home all day for three months to take care of the baby. She’ll be making good money, so that won’t be a problem, and you’ve decided to make the sacrifice for her sake.”

  Weller could all but feel his brainwaves going wild. This was one that he and Annie had gone through a dozen times, and it was why they had made the cold-blooded decision not to have children, at least not now, not until they had both made it, not until it wouldn’t interfere with Annie’s chances to advance her career. The idea that he might stay home to take care of a baby had never even been discussed; it was unthinkable.

  But here was the sacrifice-for-Annie motif again, and with a vengeance. He had to give them what they were looking for, tonight of all nights, when the attitude he had walked in with had already established a lot of credibility for his making the “major breakthrough” in his processing that they were watching for.

  And, he realized, Bailor’s advice would work like a charm here; all he had to do was apply a little reverse English in his mind.

  So he imagined the exact opposite of the scenario Sylvia had given him. Annie had had a baby boy, and he was working on a feature film while she stayed home to take care of the child. Every evening he came home from a successful day’s shooting to a wife mellowed by motherhood. As the boy grew, so did his film, his reputation, his creative powers, his feeling of at last being on top of the Hollywood heap. And Annie was content, because she knew that once the finished film was released to critical acclaim and socko box-office figures, he would be in a position to give her career a boost up, just as the baby was ready for a daytime nurse, just as they reached the point where they could afford it. It would be all they had wanted, all they had dreamed about, and now it was happening… .

  Sylvia looked up from the scope and wrote something on the form on her clipboard. For a moment Weller got a glimpse of her full face, and he thought he saw the ghost of a satisfied smile—smug, perhaps, but satisfied. Only then did his control waver and a wave of sadness break over him. For after all, what he had constructed in his mind was a fantasy within a fantasy, an ironic negative image of the true reality—no Annie, no child, no feature film, just the awful aloneness and the endless grinding days of Monkey Business spiraling down, down, down… .

  “Very good,” Sylvia said. “I think we’re really making progress in that area. ”

  Weller smiled a wan eat-shit smile. It was the first time she had actually betrayed a reaction, and she was eating it up. It was possible to fool the bastards. At least in this one thing he wasn’t a total failure.

  “Let’s see if we can keep it up,” Sylvia said, and Weller felt even more strongly that his processing was entering a new phase, that they were buying his act, that Bailor’s strategy was working.

  “Now then,” Sylvia said, “you’ve been asked to direct some commercials for a presidential candidate. The candidate is a true man of the people, so the political and economic establishment are all against him, and his campaign is financed strictly by the dimes and dollars of poor people, and every dollar counts. He’s offered to pay you a small salary, but the man is so sincere, so dedicated, such an underdog, and so obviously what the country needs that you can’t accept even that. Because you know that people all over the country would be missing meals to pay your salary. So you tell him that you’re honored to work for him, but you can’t accept any payment. It’s got to be your own personal sacrifice for the cause.”

  Oh brother! Weller thought. John B. Steinhardt for President? Our Peerless Leader in the White House off the nickels and dimes of the poor? It symbolized the whole Transformationalist setup. The poor schmuck so dedicated to the cause that he wants to work for nothing is exactly the kind of follower the bastard wants. And exactly the kind of schmuck I’ve got to convince them I’m becoming.

  So he imagined that a long-forgotten great aunt had died and left him five million dollars. He was going to finance his own film with part of the money. He had gotten a great script written by one of the top writers in Hollywood, and every agent in town was calling to push the greatest stars alive for parts in his movie. He was having trouble deciding between Paul Newman and Robert Redford for the male lead—they were both so pathetically desperate for the part—but he had already cast Annie as the female lead. And now he was walking into the office of Morris Fender, producer of Monkey Business, and he had the latest awful script rolled up into a tight cone in his hand, and he was going to tell Fender exactly where he could stick it. Then he was going to buy Scuffles the chimp and sell him to a dogfood factory… .

  “It’s quite surprising, Jack,” Sylvia said. “You’re doing very well tonight, though you came here in a very de-energized mood.”

  “Yeah, well maybe when you don’t want to think too much about what’s going on in your life situation, it’s easier to get your head behind alternate life scenarios,” Weller said truthfully.

  “When you can accept your current life situation with the same optimized consciousness you achieve during the scenarios, you’ll find that starting to improve too,” Sylvia said. “After all, that is the ultimate goal of meditative deconditioning. ”

  “Do you really think I’m getting there?” Weller asked in as humble a tone as he could muster.

  “You’re progressing, Jack, you’re progressing.”

  “I really wish all this was helping my life situation more,” Weller said, continuing to string her along.

  “When you’ve achieved a fully eptified consciousness, you’ll find that the Transformation will automatically improve your interaction with the external environment.”

  “I hope so,” Weller said quietly.

  “Shall we get on with your processing?” Sylvia said. Weller could sense a certain edge of impatience. He had run this little number just about far enough. I’ve eptified the current situation, he thought sardonically.

  “Sure,” he said, with what he hoped was just the right tone of subtle, subdued enthusiasm.

  “All right now, you’ve reached the end of your current contract for the show you’re working on, and the producer has told you that it’s been canceled. You’re out of work, you have no immediate offers, and all you have to live on is what savings you’ve accumulated, enough to keep you going for a couple of months.”

  Sylvia’s words knocked the psychic wind right out of Weller, flung him right back into the bottomless pit of Monkey Business—today’s fiasco, L
eer’s threats, the hostile eyes of a crew whose respect he had lost, the futility and frustration dragging on and on forever, the funeral gong peeling in his head.

  Good God, do they know? But that was sheer paranoia, that was impossible. … or was it? How long was their reach?

  Sylvia looked up from the oscilloscope, frowning. “You’re blocking very heavily,” she said disapprovingly.

  Get ahold of yourself, Weller, get ahold of yourself! Don’t blow this too! Desperately, he tried to come up with a counterscenario that would move those readings toward optimum, but he came up dry. His mind was clogged with memory images of today’s shooting, and nothing could drive them out.

  “Let me help you,” Sylvia said. “You’re obviously fixating on the negative aspects of this scenario, and that’s very regressive. I’m surprised at you. Look at the other side, ride with the change, try to fix your consciousness on the positive aspects. They’re there, reach for them. …”

  With an audible sigh Weller closed his eyes and gave up trying to play the countergame Bailor had taught him. It just wouldn’t work in this situation. This scenario was too close to reality. Too close? It was reality, or only an inch away. It was how he had felt this morning, when he was determined to quit the goddamn show. All those feelings came rushing back. Quit the damn job! Dig ditches! Get rid of it! This life scenario was him. It’s where you want to be, Weller, admit it to yourself. Use this process to learn something for once.

  He let himself float down into the center of the scenario, playing the meditative-deconditioning game in earnest for the first time. Reach for the positive aspects? Well for one thing, Weller, you hate every bloody minute on the Monkey Business set. And it’s not taking you anywhere near where you really want to be. It’s making you hate the act of directing itself, isn’t it? It’s ruining you for anything better. Every day on that set is an extended act of cowardice that chips away at the Jack Weller you want to be.