The Mind Game

by Norman Spinrad

  Her eyes brightened, and she began to radiate energy, peace, genuine contentment. “You can’t see that till you get out of it,” she said. “Not till you find what was missing all along. And I’ve found that in Transformationalism. I feel whole now. I feel home. This is my life, this is what I was meant to do. I feel it completely. All I need to be totally happy is to have you share it with me.”

  Weller finally felt the full force of the vast gulf that had opened up between them. He could no longer hold back the knowledge that had been building in him since that very first reunion in Steinhardt’s house. He was losing her. Winning her back from Transformationalism had turned into another dead dream. And beyond this terrible pang of impending loss was something that was almost envy. Though the cause might be delusion and Transformationalist programming, she genuinely felt the kind of fulfillment he had always longed for. Where he was empty, she was filled. What she had was something he both loathed and envied, a state of consciousness that might be Steinhardt’s conjuring trick, but one that he craved to experience.

  I wish I could, he found himself thinking without fully understanding it. If only I could!

  “I want to share what you feel too,” he said. “But I’m not sure that Transformationalism is something that can get me there.”

  “It can be, Jack,” Annie said, snuggling against him. “All you have to do is let it. ”

  “That’s what John says too,” Weller said wearily.

  “Well, there you are …”

  “And where is that?” Weller sighed.

  “Let me show you,” she said. “Let me take you home.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, with as much love and sincerity as he had ever felt.

  He kissed her back with the same depth of feeling in his heart, made more poignant by a foreshadow of doom. But their realities didn’t seem to connect, it was as if rubber gloves sheathed his whole body, like making love through a condom.

  After awhile he let her lead him into the bedroom, and she clutched him fiercely as they made love, as if she wanted to absorb him into herself, into that which filled her. He longed to let himself go, to merge with the woman of his heart, and let that surrender take him where it would.

  But something held him separate. He could no more bear to lose himself than he could to lose her. He could not follow her this final mile any more than she could follow him. Their trajectories had diverged. He felt that he had entered the twilight of their life together, that from here on in any time they made love might be the last.

  And yet, he thought, as she sighed into his ear, it doesn’t have to happen. All I have to do is not make it happen. What is it that I’m clinging to that makes me throw everything else away? I don’t even know.

  Yet whatever it was, it seemed too precious to lei go of. Even if it cost him the death of their love. For surrendering himself to Transformationalism for her sake, sweet though the rewards would be, seemed also like a kind of death.

  That night, while Annie was attending some staff meeting, there was an unexpected knock on the door. When Weller opened it, John B. Steinhardt was standing in the doorway.

  He wore black pants and a white shirt open almost to the navel. With his gut hanging out and his eyes quite bloodshot, he looked like a beery truck driver, and the unopened bottle of Jack Daniels he held by the neck completed the image. By the look and smell of him, he was half shit-faced already.

  “Come on outside, bucko. We’re going to get drunk together in the moonlight,” he said. Weller stared goggle-eyed at this apparition, not knowing what to say to such a proposal.

  Steinhardt took hold of him by the bicep and pulled him outside into the clear, fragrant night air. “Kiddo, I’ve talked with you, I’ve gone over Annie’s reports fifty times, I’ve watched you in action, and I still can’t make up my mind about you,” he said. “It has finally occurred to me that maybe the reason is that you’re having the same trouble with me. So I said to myself, let’s have this out man-to-man, let’s share the old sacrament and get pie-eyed together.”

  He paused, reached into a pocket, and took out a pint of green fluid. “Better chugalug this eptifier first,” he said, handing the bottle to Weller. “I’m talking about serious drinking.”

  Automatically Weller found himself choking down the vile stuff as they walked away from the cabin toward the margin of the woods. The idea of getting drunk with Steinhardt held its terrors, but it also intrigued him. In some absolute way he found himself agreeing with Steinhardt that it was the right and manly thing to do, and that made him feel something like affection for the son of a bitch.

  “Good a place as any,” Steinhardt said, picking out the trunk of a big tree and lowering himself to the ground against it. He uncapped the bottle of bourbon. “Have a slug,” he said, handing the bottle up to Weller. “Take a good big one and wash that crummy taste out of your mouth.”

  Weller took a long swallow of whiskey and sat down beside Steinhardt. From where they sat halfway up a gentle slope, the bungalows of the Colony were half-hidden in the trees, the guards and fences were invisible, and a bright half-moon cast silvery shadows down into the hollow. The cool night breeze carried no scent of the things of men. They might be anywhere. They might be anyone.

  “Have some more,” Steinhardt rumbled. “You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. ”

  Weller shrugged and took another long drink, feeling the warmth of it filling his belly and radiating out toward his fingers and toes. He handed the bottle over to Steinhardt, who took a big gulp, then handed it back with a drink-up motion of his forearm.

  Weller took another drink. The moonlight seemed to flow and glow like a river of water. Crickets hummed in his ears.

  “What do you really think I am?” Steinhardt said. “A drunken old phony who lucked into something good, right?”

  Weller felt a direct circuit opening up between the top of his head and his mouth, bypassing caution and logic. Well, what the fuck? he thought, taking another belt of Dutch courage.

  “You got to admit, John, you’re not exactly the ideal vision of an ascetic guru,” he said.

  Steinhardt took the bottle and gulped down a drink. “Fuckin’-A,” he said. “I’m a complex son of a bitch.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Weller asked.

  Steinhardt laughed. “To save the world,” he said. “To make an easy buck. Because it’s there. You think I know?”

  “I mean why are you getting me drunk?”

  Steinhardt handed back the bottle. “Because you’ve got a bad case of psychic constipation,” Steinhardt said. “Think of it as Ex-Lax for the mind.”

  Weller took another drink. “Yeah?” he said. “Seems to me some people I could mention have verbal diarrhea. ”

  “For sure, laddy-buck,” Steinhardt said, snatching away the bottle. He took another drink. “I got onto the booze in the old days. When you have to crank out twenty thousand words a week just to survive, verbal diarrhea is a survival value. And it hasn’t done me wrong, now has it? Y’know, I believe I was half shit-faced all the way through Transformational Man. When I discovered Benson Allen’s little fan club, I had to read my own damned book just to find out what the hell I had written.”

  “Did ya like it?” Weller giggled, recovering the bottle.

  Steinhardt laughed. He shrugged. “It was what we used to call a good read,” he said. “Just between you and me, lad, I wasn’t the world’s greatest science-fiction writer. Lots of ideas, but sitting down there and typing was torture. Fortunately I could type sixty words a minute even dead drunk. ”

  Somewhere behind the fog that was rolling into the forefront of Weller’s mind, he sensed that Steinhardt’s drunkenness was focused, that he was taking all this somewhere, that these self-deprecating revelations had a purpose. But he couldn’t figure out what it was. Maybe another drink would help.

  “What about you, kiddo?” Steinhardt said. “You gonna tell me that you were an ivory-tower aesthete? I mean, directing m
onkey shows? Did you really think you were doing anything but making a buck as best you knew how?” He winked and snatched back the bottle. “One old hack to another, Jack?”

  Weller shrugged. Out here in the woods, his head reefing in the moonlight, all that seemed so far away and unreal, something he could be as detached about as Steinhardt apparently was. “Takes one to know one, I suppose,” he admitted.

  “Then why won’t you come the rest of the way with me?” Steinhardt said.

  “Huh?”

  Steinhardt stood up, leaned against the tree with one hand, and looked down at Weller. “What you just admitted to me is not something you would have admitted to yourself before you had the benefits of Transformationalism, now is it?” he said. “You’re not a hack mentality now any more than I am. I’ve brought you that far, now haven’t I?”

  Steinhardt’s figure looming above him seemed huge and powerful, ancient and wise, outlined in the moonlight. “I suppose you have,” Weller admitted quietly.

  “So why not accept the next stage of your evolution like a man?” Steinhardt said. He sat down again and handed Weller the bottle. “I’ve gotten you off your treadmill to nowhere,” he said. “So why don’t you let me take you along for the best part of the ride?”

  “Onta your treadmill?” Weller blurted boozily.

  “I don’t notice the ground moving backward under my feet,” Steinhardt said. “Which is more than I think you can say for yourself right now, bucko.”

  “Offa the TV con and onta the Transformationalist con,” Weller grunted stonily.

  “So you really think it’s all a con?” Steinhardt said in a voice gone hard and ominous.

  The chirping of the crickets buzzed angrily in Weller’s ears. “Fuck this!” he snapped. “Don’t you think it’s a con, John?” Steinhardt clapped him on the shoulder. “Yer a kid after me own heart!” He grabbed the bottle and took a long, long swallow.

  “Of course, it’s a con!” he exclaimed. “It’s the best goddamn con in the world! An income in seven figures, a billion dollars worth of capital to play games with. Learjets, Institutes, city townhouses, country retreats, Cuban cigars, and the devout dues-paying worship of millions. You ever hear of a better con?”

  “You tell me it’s a con, and then you expect me to swallow it?” Weller said thickly.

  “Why not?” Steinhardt said. “It’s such a good con that I swallowed it myself.”

  “Huh?” Weller grunted. His head was reeling, the halfhidden rooftops of the bungalows below seemed to flash and shimmer, and Steinhardt’s eyes were a silver sheen of reflected moonlight. Words were becoming sounds that were hard to follow logically.

  “That’s the whole point,” Steinhardt said. “I’m the best advertisement there is for Transformationalism because I knew it was a con when I took over Benson Allen’s nut cult of the great me. Where I was coming from, everything in Transformational Man was drunken ravings I tossed off in six weeks for fifteen hundred bucks. I didn’t see any potential at all. Harry and Maria had to browbeat me into taking over the movement, and even then the best I hoped for was to get my ass out of debt and get a few months ahead on the rent.” Steinhardt paused and took another drink. Weller couldn’t believe where he was or what he was hearing, though he knew it was only confirmation of what he had always believed. But for John B. Steinhardt to be sitting there, drunk as a skunk, admitting that he was nothing but a sleazo con artist, that was totally unreal.

  “But as the changes marched on, strange things began to happen in the old coconut,” Steinhardt said. “Suddenly I woke up, and I was the leader of a mass movement, and I was rich, all off this low-grade scam. It put me beyond money, beyond the need to feed my ego; I had all of that I could ever want. So I said to myself: John, what the fuck is going on here?” Steinhardt stood up and began pacing in small circles in front of Weller, punctuating his words with the bottle, like some bemused old rummy. “So I reread the Word according to me as if I were my own disciple—all the pamphlets and theories and bullshit encyclicals I had reamed out over the years to keep things going and create more product to sell. ” He paused to take a long, rather slobbering drink. “Jesus, I was amazed at my own unsuspected brilliance, I lad you not,” Steinhardt said with utter seriousness. “Somehow all this wisdom had come out of some place inside of me without my really even being aware of it. Even Transformational Man reads like the stuff of destiny now. And I had even previously explained that kind of transformation to my followers without realizing it. I couldn’t see who I was until I was freed from that science-fiction-hack persona I had been stuck in. I had to become a phony guru to get enough changes between me and that to understand the previous level. And once I saw the process I had put myself through, I couldn’t just be a phony guru either, because, goddamn it, the stuff I had used to set up the con was the real thing, and I had proven it on myself.” Steinhardt sat down close beside Weller and grinned at him crookedly. “Can you guess what I did then?” he asked rhetorically.

  Weller managed to nod a woozy no.

  “I put myself through all the bullshit processes I had invented,” Steinhardt said. “I secretly had Benson Allen run them all on me. Partly to find out whether they really worked, partly I had some idea of breaking my writer’s block. Well, I didn’t break the block, but I found out I didn’t want to. I found out that the thing I had become was the optimized me and all I had to do was accept it.”

  He handed the bottle to Weller, who drained what little was left. “I transformed myself through the Transformational processes I had dreamed up as a con,” Steinhardt said. “Drink to that, laddy-buck! Drink to the ultimate self-made man!” Shakily Weller dropped the empty bottle. The treetops were whirling through a starry sky. His head was roaring with the buzz of the crickets. His mouth could hardly form coherent words. Sweat was breaking out on his forehead. Steinhardt studied his face.

  “Hey, you look awful, kiddo,” he said. “Better walk you home.” He dragged Weller unceremoniously to his feet and steadied him around the shoulder for a moment with a sureness and energy which Weller, in his present condition, found amazing.

  “Why … why … why are you telling me stuff like this?” he managed to say as they walked slowly toward the cabin, with his knees trembling and swaying as if he were on stilts.

  “Because I want you to understand that I came into all this with at least as cynical an attitude as you did,” Steinhardt said. “What’s more, I don’t have to believe that Transformationalism’s the real thing to get anything I could ever want out of it. But I believe in it, even knowing a lot more shit than you do about it, sonny boy. ”

  Halfway to the cabin a bubble of anger burst in Weller’s reeling brain. He pulled himself away from Steinhardt’s support and stood there, weaving, but standing alone on his own two feet. “What about the ripoffs, John?” he said. “What about what you’ve done to my wife? What about the mind-fucks and the control programs? What about the way you screw up people’s lives?”

  Oh, my god, Weller thought, after he had heard himself. What have I done?

  But Steinhardt laughed, put his arm around his shoulders, and continued helping him back to the cabin, unruffled by anything. “Yeah, that’s the bottom line between us, isn’t it?” he said. “Somehow you got it in ya head that because I’m offering you the goodies of the world, that ya gotta fork over your soul.”

  They reached the cabin then, and Weller disengaged himself from Steinhardt and leaned up against the doorframe. His vision was beginning to go cloudy and a bubble of nausea was forming in his gut. “Yeah, well ain’t that it?” he gargled.

  “What the hell do I want your soul for?” Steinhardt shot back. “What am I gonna do with it, claim it as a tax deduction?”

  “You wanna make me someone else.” Weller woozed, really beginning to feel sick to his stomach.

  “So what?” Steinhardt said. “I’ve done that to you already. Whatsa big deal, I do it to myself all the time. It’s ongoing change, lad. You
can’t stop it, you can only try to find the best wave to ride. The one you got off of has already passed.”

  “I don’t want anyone screwing around with my head,” Weller said, holding onto the doorframe with both hands now. “It hurts like hell but itsa only one I got. I wanna stay me.”

  “Come, kiddo, you’re not the old persona you’re trying to cling to anymore,” Steinhardt said. “You can’t be. Too many changes. All you can choose is who you’re going to become, there’s no retum-trip tickets on the train we’re riding. The Jack you are now is twisting you up in knots trying to hold onto a past that’s gone and can’t come back.”

  Weller could only dimly understand what Steinhardt was saying now. Sounds and thoughts were crowded to one comer of his mind by the surging green demand of his guts, by a need to puke that was becoming his most immediate and fondest desire.

  “Unrrr …” he groaned.

  “All you’ve got to do is let it go,” Steinhardt said. “Accept the gifts of destiny. Be a fuckin’ Transformational Man. Accept where you are now, and let yourself be what you’re becoming. Let it all come out.”

  Let it all come out? That seemed like an idea of transcendental wisdom for sure at the moment. He was holding back an awful sour gag at the back of his throat. Steinhardt was absolutely right. There was on reason not to puke, no reason to hold it back any further.

  “Goddamn it, you’re a genius, and I’m an asshole,” he groaned. “You’re absolutely right, ya are. That’s exactly what I’m gonna do right now, let all that stuff go, and get it the hell out of me.”

  Steinhardt stuck his face in Weller’s. The smell of his breath made Weller gag, and he just barely held his gorge down. “Really?” Steinhardt said, blinking eyes as pink as elephants. “You’re really ready, kiddo? No shit?”

  “No shit,” Weller muttered around a suppressed gag that this time seared the back of his throat with acid vomit. “Immediately!”

  “Ya, well, we’ll have to talk about it tomorrow when we’re both sobered up,” Steinhardt said. “Yer okay, kiddo!” He slapped Weller on the back, nearly causing him to lose his precarious balance. “But ya sure can’t drink with the old master,” he said. “You kids got no stamina.”