Anger began to wash over Weller’s despair. Cowardice? Isn’t that it? You don’t have the balls to quit! You were ready to do it this morning, but you lost your courage over a greasy commissary hamburger. You want out, but you don’t have the balls to do it yourself.
Reach for the positive aspect? If the show were canceled, I’d be out of there, that’s the goddamn positive aspect! I’d be broke, I’d have to do God-knows-what to keep up this processing—do porn, maybe—but I’d be free. Free from Barry the Brat! Free from Leer! Free from directing a fucking ape!
A blast of energy went through Weller as he imagined life without Monkey Business. His mind soared like an uncaged bird. I’d get off my butt, find my own center again, do work that mattered or nothing at all, the way I always promised myself I would. I’d have one hell of a huge monkey off my back!
“Very good,” Sylvia said. “You found it, didn’t you? See, you can do it.”
Weller opened his eyes. He blinked. The life scenario was run and over, but that wonderful energetic feeling remained. He felt great. He felt better than at any time since Annie had left him, since God-knows-how-long before Annie had left him.
I don’t want to lose this feeling, he thought. I won’t lose it. This one was my life, I won’t let this slip away. I was right the first time! Quit the fucking job!
“Jeez,” he said, “something happened there, it really did.” What he was putting out synched perfectly with the act he was supposed to be putting on, but it was also him; his act was synched into his true self for the first time in longer than he could remember.
Sylvia smiled at him. “You appear to believe you’ve made a Transformational breakthrough,” she said. “And I think you may be right.”
“If this is Transformational Consciousness, it’s okay, it’s sure okay,” Weller said, feeding her the line, conscious of projecting the desired effect, but at the same time feeling his current instantaneous personality resonating with the truth of what he was saying. Is it really true? he wondered. Can this stuff really work for me if I let it?
Entering his semidarkened living room, thick with dust, cluttered with old pizza cartons, stacks of unread newspapers, and unwashed sticky glasses, Weller felt a jarring discontinuity between what he felt like inside and the midden that his external life had become. He hurried to the phone and dialed the emergency exchange number that Garry Bailor had given him. A metallic female voice answered on the fourth ring. “Garry Bailor’s exchange. May I help you?”
“This is Jack Weller. I have to talk to Mr. Bailor immediately. Will you please give him the message?”
“Will you please give me the number you’re calling from.”
Weller gave her his number, hung up the phone, and waited nervously. More of Bailor’s security paranoia. He wouldn’t give out his home number, afraid that someone might find out where he lived from the exchange digits, even though the number was unlisted. The only way to contact him without a scheduled appointment was to call the exchange and hope he’d call back. And Weller couldn’t wait. He had to talk to Bailor now.
When he left the Transformational Center, he had known he was going to quit his job tomorrow, but on the drive home he had begun to distrust his own head. The center of his being vibrated with the rightness of the decision he had made. Contemplating life without Monkey Business felt wonderful.
But where and when had he made that decision? During a processing session at the center! How could he completely trust this wonderful feeling? The move seemed to be his, he had made it once before today, but how could he be sure he was in control even of what seemed like his essential center? He was the focus of conflicting fields of psychic energy that bombarded him with programming and counterprogramming on every level. Could he really be a creature of his own free will, or was what he felt just the interface between conflicting programs? He had been through too much to believe with total confidence in the existence of an untouched core of free will at the center of all that psychic determinism. Is the me who thinks he’s his own man really his own man?
He desperately needed some external anchor, and Bailor was the only person in the world who could understand the nature of the problem, who could give him an outside-observer’s viewpoint on his own inner workings.
Finally the phone rang. Weller snatched it up before the first ring of the bell had died. “Garry?”
“Yeah, Jack. What is it?”
“I’ve just come from the Center. I’ve had quite an experience. I think I’m going to quit my job tomorrow.”
“What? What in blazes did they run on you to make you do that?”
“It’s my own decision,” Weller said. “At least I think it is… . I mean, that’s why I called you. There was a life scenario, but. …”
“You sound spaced,” Bailor said. “Give me the whole story sequentially, from this morning on.” Even over the phone, Weller could sense Bailor’s skeptical, analytical, merciless attention. It helped him organize his own confusion. Bailor was like a psychic computer: feed him all the data, and he would organize it logically and extract the pattern, the implied conclusion. Weller poured the whole story into the phone, in cold, logical, clipped chronological order, feeding in the data without attempting to analyze it.
When he had finished, there was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Weller could all but hear the relays clicking.
Finally, Bailor spoke. “They’ve gotten to you,” he said flatly.
“What do you mean, they’ve gotten to me?”
“You’ve been programmed,” Bailor said. “Can’t you see it? You’re about to make a real life decision on the basis of something that happened to you during a processing session. Isn’t it obvious?”
“But why would they want me to quit my job?” Weller asked defensively. “That doesn’t make sense.” Wondering just what it was he felt compelled to defend.
“But they don’t even know about that, now do they?” Bailor said sarcastically.
“Then what are you talking about?” Weller said, feeling some nameless dread cracking his well-being like ivy crumbling a stone wall.
“Before you got into this, you would never have quit your job, would you?”
“No. …” Weller said grudgingly, beginning to see where Bailor was going.
“So your head has been changed during processing,” Bailor snapped. “By processing!”
Woodenly Weller peered silently into the mouthpiece. Was it true? Could such a feeling of rightness be false? An illusion? Something that had taken control of him?
“That’s called programming, isn’t it, Jack?” Bailor said. “Something in your mind has been altered.”
“You could be right.” Weller admitted. “But isn’t learning the same essential process?” he said more strongly. “Learning something about myself and then acting on it.”
“Will you cut the shit?” Bailor said in exasperation. “Look at the damn content of the reprogramming, will you? Can’t you see what’s happened?”
“You tell me,” Weller snapped irritably. “That’s what I’m paying you for.”
“That’s right, buster,” Bailor said coldly. “So listen and get your money’s worth. You’re now ready to abandon about all that’s left of your previous life and leap into some etherealized ego-trip pipe dream. Are you stupid? Don’t you see what that adds up to as a mind set from the Transformationalists’ point of view?”
“Oh shit,” Weller said, feeling like a schmuck but also feeling as if he had just been robbed of something he was learning to treasure.
“That’s right, Jack. Suggestibility. Ready to follow a program that was accidentally implanted. Ripe for the picking when they throw the real thing at you.”
Bailor’s tone of voice changed, became distantly sardonic. “Of course, you could look on the bright side. At least your act is working. If I can keep you from picking up programming like this well enough to make sure it stays an act until they buy it, we’re gonna get there.”
/> Weller could see it now, he could see the whole infernal thing. And yet wasn’t it possible to make the right decision for the wrong reason? Couldn’t his own best interest coincide with the head space they had brainwashed him into? Maybe quitting his job was the right thing to do even if he had been brainwashed into believing it. Wasn’t blindly opposing anything that happened to float through his mind during processing a perverse form of mind control too? Bailors brand of brainwashing?
“But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t quit, does it?” he said. “I’ve always hated that damned job.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line, and when Bailor spoke again, his voice was like a razor. “Right. Quit your job. Then where do you think you’re going to get the money to continue processing, huh?”
Bailor paused again, and once more his voice changed; now it was sinuous and coaxing. “Now that we’re really getting somewhere, you don’t want to throw it all away for some silly whim you’ve gotten into your head. Are you forgetting why you got yourself into this in the first place? You’ve got to hold on, man. You’ve got to keep making money. When we’ve gotten Annie back and deprogrammed, then quit your job, if that’s still your thing. But doing it now would be totally self-destructive. ”
Bailor’s words were like a bucket of ice water in Weller’s face. Of course he was right. Pragmatically right. Totally right. Inescapably right. Heroic gestures were something he simply just couldn’t afford now, and Bailor had effectively rubbed his nose in it. He had to keep working because Transformationalism wasn’t on credit cards. And neither, he thought angrily, is Bailor.
“And, of course, you also have a financial interest in my keeping my job, don’t you, Garry?” he snapped.
“You get what you pay for,” Bailor said diffidently. “You knew that when you hired me.”
“So I did.”
“Well, Jack, are you going to stick it out, or has it been nice knowing you? My dinner is ready.”
“You know damn well I have no choice,” Weller said wearily. Bailor’s tone lightened immediately, became friendly in a mode that Weller now perceived as hacked out of plastic. “No hard feelings then, Jack. This is a heavy game, and feelings get upset, and tempers get tight. See you on Saturday, right?”
“Yeah, Garry,” Weller grunted. “No hard feelings.”
But when he hung up the phone, he found himself hating Bailor. Not only because Bailor had let the mask slip and bluntly reminded him that he was just a paid mercenary who would be with him just as long as the money held out. But for raining on his parade, for taking away something vague that he had always wanted, that had been just within his grasp. For leaving him with this sullen, angry feeling of having been robbed of the first bit of something good that had drifted into his life since … since Annie had left. For this undefined but quite real sense of loss.
Fittingly it was raining the next morning when Weller drove to work, a leaden Southern California downpour that matched his mood perfectly. He parked the Triumph in his regular space just in front of the sound stage, but by the time he had dashed inside, his clothes were already damp and a lock of hair was plastered to his forehead.
Perfect, he thought, just bloody perfect, as he wiped the wet hair off his face with the back of his hand and walked past stacks of old scenery toward today’s shooting set.
Then he saw that the set was empty.
The flat of the kitchen set was set up, the furniture, the props, the cameras, sound equipment, and lights. But no crew. No actors. No Scuffles. No trainer. Just the dead, empty set, tiny and forlorn, dwarfed by the shadowy gray vault of the sound stage, like a section of a bombed-out abandoned city, moldering in the cavernous graveyard silence of the huge empty building.
Then Weller saw that the set was not quite empty. A short, balding man emerged from the shadow of a stack of flats and walked toward him, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the silence. It was Morris Fender, the producer of Monkey Business.
With his heart sinking toward his rubbery knees, Weller walked toward Fender, and they met alongside the main camera. Fender looked at Weller with utter disdain on his tanned, wrinkled face; his lips were clenched in tightly controlled anger, and behind his air-force-style glasses his eyes were hard as marbles.
“I’ll make this short, but it won’t be sweet, Weller,” he said. “You’ve ruined our goddamn chimpanzee. The trainer is threatening to sue the studio. Leer refuses to work with you again, and Barry’s mother doesn’t want the lad around your foul mouth. The stuff you’ve been turning in for the past few weeks has been garbage, and it’s been late. Ordinarily I’d fire you.” Weller stood there awash in Fender’s anger and disgust, unable to react, unable to even feel what was happening. Bong, bong, bong, went a deep-throated ball in his head.
“The good news,” Fender said, “is that I don’t have a show left to fire you from. It’d take weeks to get another chimp ready for the part. Three of your last segments can’t be aired without extensive reshooting. So Monkey Business has been canceled. You’re a lucky man, Weller.”
“Lucky … ?” Weller muttered inanely. Lucky?
Fender nodded. “This way you haven’t been officially fired. Your credit list won’t have ‘this bastard was fired’ in big red letters, since the show you would’ve been fired from has been canceled. But don’t expect to ever work for this studio again. Don’t expect to work on a show on the same network. Don’t expect to work for any producer I’ve ever talked to.”
Weller could say nothing. His brain felt like frozen mud. I’ll quit, I won’t quit, I’ll quit, I won’t quit—and now this! Elation? A sense of freedom? He felt as if he had been hit over the head with a baseball bat.
“Now take anything you’ve got here and get off this lot,” Fender said. He turned, shook his head to himself, and walked off toward the exit.
Only long after Fender had disappeared into the shadows did Weller begin to react to what had happened, and the first thing he felt was anger. At himself. How many times have I wanted to tell that creep to get stuffed? he thought. How many times have I rehearsed my parting shot to that little bastard in my mind? And now what do you do, Weller? Do you punch him out? Do you tell him what you think of him and his lousy show?
No, you stand there stupidly like a lox. You don’t say a damn thing as he fires you. You take it like a clumsy servant being dismissed by the lord of the manor.
“Fuck you, Fender!” he shouted into the emptiness. “Fuck you, you wormy little bastard!” It only made him feel even more foolish and futile.
Woodenly he collected his few things and walked outside to his car. The cloudburst had subsided and water was steaming off the hood above the still-warm engine. The sky remained gray and threatening.
Weller leaned up against the side of the car, not caring that the wet metal was soaking his already-damp pants. What am I going to do now? he wondered. Now that the life scenario had become reality, there was no sense of freedom, no surge of energy and determination. Under the ominous gray sky what it boiled down to was that Transformationalism had cost him both his wife and his job. What was next, the house and the car? His sanity?
He felt empty, husked, drained. How was he going to keep going? And what was he supposed to keep going for?
The only meaningful thing left in his life was the wan hope of someday, somehow being reunited with Annie, and even that was vaguing out into an abstraction as it receded further and further into the future, became more and more … divorced … from his day to day reality.
And in a week or two he would no longer be able to pay for his processing, and then even the hazy hope of seeing Annie again would be gone.
He got into the car and started the engine. Through the seat of his pants the throaty rumble infused his body with a faint artificial vitality. At least that! he thought. They’ve got to let me see Annie now. Why shouldn’t they? There’s no money left; they’ve sucked me dry.
He released the emergency brake, slammed the car in
to gear, and roared toward the gate trailing a rooster tail of foam.
I’ll go see Benson Allen, he decided. I’ll wheedle, I’ll threaten, I’ll beg if I have to, but this thing has got to end now, today.
It will end, one way or the other, he realized bleakly. I just don’t have the money to go on.
As he drove through the studio gate, the sides opened up again, and a fusillade of hard rain spattered off the hood like machine-gun bullets, momentarily obscuring the windshield behind an impenetrable veil of water.
Seven
Getting into Benson Allen’s office proved to be easier than Weller had anticipated. He got by the desk by asking to see Rohrer, the life counselor, and Rohrer quickly got him in to see Allen once Weller made it clear that the problem concerned his inability to pay for any more processing. Perhaps his disheveled state and the confused bewilderment he was more or less projecting had something to do with it too. Bureaucrats like to get rid of messy-looking maniacs as quickly as possible, he thought, as he entered Allen’s office, and if they can’t pass the buck down, they do their best to pass it up.
But whatever the reason, here he was, and he knew that he had to keep himself under tight control and do the best and most important piece of acting of his life.
Allen was sitting on one of the white plush couches, eating some concoction of nuts, fruits, and yoghurt with a spoon. In his white shirt and pressed blue jeans he looked strangely out of place in the Hollywood-elegant office, as if he were the hippie houseboy of the absent owner.
Weller found his perception of the man strangely altered. Sitting there surrounded by the Persian rug, the big paintings, the garishly lavish furniture, Allen didn’t seem like the allpowerful head of the Los Angeles Transformation Center but like some blond beachboy type who had lucked into something way beyond his depth. I can handle this guy, Weller thought.
I really think I can handle this guy. From the pit of his current hopeless position, he found himself drawing energy, an irrational sense of his own power and competence. He had hit the bottom, there was nothing left to lose, and now he was going to turn the corner, because the only way out was up.
The Mind Game Page 13