Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  It came to him, as it always did in bad moments.

  She has a lover, he thought. Somewhere, tucked away, she has a man. It was a suspicion he had tracked down through the strata of his own jealousies. A man, a shadow, someone she loved. Grow up, he thought. Won’t you ever grow up? That old green malignant deity again. She has the opportunities, doesn’t she? You’re not always around to see what she’s doing; even when you take her on trips like this, you can’t be expected to watch her every moment of the day, goddam—a lover, someone she meets, someone she gives herself to, someone she screws. Dark rooms. Furtive little phone calls. Obscure restaurants. Inscrutable motel rooms—

  Drunk. A drunken uneven sleep, a dream of his brother John, a vague dream that eluded him on waking—and yet he felt exhausted, as if at some point the dream had become nightmare, a nightmare he couldn’t remember in the gray light of morning.

  4

  1.

  Prints and illustrations hung against the walls of the large office. They suggested a continuum of Soviet history, a line linking past with present, tradition with technology, the indomitable Russian spirit sanitized of its occasional blood-lettings. The Eve of Revolution Day gathering in the Mayakovsky subway station, November 6, 1941: Stalin had been strategically omitted and the photograph showed only Party dignitaries and Trade Union leaders; a group of antique Abkhasian peasants seated around a table, dipping pieces of abusta into various sauces; a gruesome picture, made the more awful by its grainy authenticity, of several dead German soldiers lying in the Moscow snow; Yuri Gagarin, smiling, dressed for his orbital trip in 1961.

  Andreyev was depressed by the collection: it bludgeoned him with something he had no urge to feel. But time and again, irritated by the droning voices in the room, he found his attention drawn to the gallery of illustrations—Mother Russia. Was he supposed to believe that Domareski had somehow contrived to fall from a moving train? That the Physician had by chance opened a door and—given the treachery of ice—lost his footing? Andreyev shook his head, watching Sememko play with a bunch of papers. The ugly Politician, constantly patting his moustache or tugging at the lower extremities of his vest, was talking about the Ussuri experiment to a room filled with those members of the Presidium whose function it was to plan the future strategies of science and scientific discoveries. His voice droned, and Andreyev, looking up at the blurred grin of the cosmonaut Gagarin, caught only a few words and phrases: naturally too early to say if there’s any useful potential here … experiment seemed successful.… There was a reference to acorns and oak trees, something clichéd and banal. Andreyev looked out of the window. Sleet lashed the city; the day was gray, the sky sullen with a sense of repressed violence.

  Acorns and oak trees.

  Andreyev clasped his hands together. He looked around the room, wondering at how the occupants managed to affect a physical resemblance to one another, as if there were some family relationship shared by each of them. Blunted faces, dark suits, white shirts, those thick necks that seemed to have been shaved as close into the skin as was humanly possible without bloodshed.

  Sememko, looking self-satisfied, had stopped talking. He was sitting back in his chair, content with himself. Now Koprow had risen to his feet. Koprow the Hatchet, Andreyev thought—a thickset man, his head shaved bald and shaped like a bullet: you could imagine Koprow in other incarnations—a treacherous Renaissance monk, a strong-arm man in a circus, the assassin who emerged from a darkened doorway. It was Koprow who secretly liaised between the KGB and the Ministry of Science.

  Andreyev realized that Koprow was looking directly at him. The stare was both cold and definitive; Andreyev could hear something buzz in his own head—the edge of some alarm, a quickened fear.

  “I’ve read the reports, of course,” Koprow said. The sudden fast smile that appeared on his face and then abruptly faded reminded Andreyev of a flawed neon.

  “It’s my understanding,” said Koprow, pausing, gazing across the faces in the room in the fashion of one taking a roll call. “It’s my understanding that to all intents and purposes the Chinese infantryman was dead on arrival. I refer, of course, to brain death. I also understand that certain tests were made and that these showed a total absence of reflex, coordination, an absence of any of the normal responses one associates with life.”

  Andreyev caught Koprow’s eyes, then looked away, coughed, studied his papers.

  “The question in my mind,” Koprow said, smiling again, a leprous expression, “is simple. If the woman has such a destructive capacity, if her ability is such that she can, quite literally, destroy a mind, how are we to make use of this particular talent?”

  Andreyev said nothing. He glanced at Sememko; the square fat hand was working the strands of the reddish moustache. Andreyev longed all at once to be out of this room: the trapped heat was suffocating him.

  “Perhaps Professor Andreyev …” Koprow inclined his head toward Andreyev, then sat down.

  There was a silence in the room; the awful silence of a clock suddenly stopped. Andreyev realized that he should stand, deliver his prepared speech, his explanation, but he felt oddly numb. I am paralyzed, he thought. Why had Domareski disappeared? Fool, he thought. You don’t need the gift of clairvoyance for that one. He remembered Katya standing in her compartment, her reflection in the window; in his imagination he saw a coiled snake and heard the vicious rattle in the tail of the creature. Slowly, fumbling his papers, he stood up. The faces concentrated on him.

  His own voice was flat, dry, his mouth opening and closing slowly. Someone was riffling papers. A fan blew warm air. Sleet rattled the window suddenly.

  “I might begin with some background,” he said. Why did his own voice fade in and out like the signal on a faulty piece of radio equipment? “Mrs. Blum was brought to my attention by a researcher in the town of Sokol, which happens to be her home. The researcher—all this, of course, is contained in my files—was pursuing the kind of work being done by Professor Sergeyev at the Uktomskii Physiological Laboratory in Leningrad … again, I refer you to my files.”

  He paused. The room was still, perfect as a photograph, nothing stirring: even the hot-air fan had thermostatically switched itself off. He hated it: the center of attention, everyone looking at him, everyone waiting. He hated this messianic sensation. He wanted to say: I have answers to nothing, nothing.

  “The specific field I refer to is psychokinesis, or PK, which as you know”—he stared around at their faces: how blank they were, how insipid all at once, awaiting his definitions, his explanations—“is the ability to move objects by mental means. There has been considerable research done in this area. You are doubtless already familiar with Wolf Messing and with …” He dried up; his memory blanked, the roof of his mouth had become dry. “… Nelya Mikhailova. And you are no doubt acquainted with the research that has been done in that direction.”

  Andreyev took a sip of water. “You will see from the documents that have been prepared that what we have in Mrs. Blum far exceeds the capabilities of any of the subjects we have previously tested under laboratory conditions.”

  Koprow had begun to tap a finger impatiently upon the surface of the table. It was a hooklike finger, curled over, skinny. Andreyev was mesmerized by its movements: he had to wrench his eyes away and look back down at his papers.

  “I am not going to say that we understand to any degree the nature of this woman’s abilities. We’ve postulated, for the sake, frankly, of convenience, the existence of an x—call it what you like—an x that represents psi-force. I’m not going to claim that this label is truly helpful, because it isn’t. We don’t know why she can do what she does, we don’t know how she can do it.… Some form of mental wave, some kind of evolutionary throwback, some kind of energy that presently we have no means of measuring and therefore no way of comprehending … there have been any number of theories. You can pick and choose among them as you like. The fact remains that Mrs. Blum has the ability to interfere with the operat
ions of other minds.”

  Koprow suddenly closed his folder and laid his hands flat on top of it; his skull gleamed beneath the overhead lights. Impatiently he said, “With respect, Professor Andreyev, we in this room are not exactly enthralled by theories. We are practical men.…” He looked at his various colleagues conspiratorially, searching for and finding a measure of assent. Practical men, Andreyev thought. They are all practical men. The euphemism was appalling. Koprow was smiling, as if he were attuned to Andreyev’s discomfort. “As practical men, we are somewhat more interested in functions than in hypotheses. And what we have to ask ourselves is rather simple. What good is this woman to us?”

  Andreyev turned his hands over, stared at the damp palms, at how sweat glistened in the lines; the collective tensions in the room unnerved him. He felt unsteady on his feet, weak, something vital draining out of him. He thought: A freak show, a sideshow, trickery. Why in the name of God couldn’t it be as simple as that? Why couldn’t it be mumbo-jumbo? The whole psychic bag of tricks? Palmistry, messages from the ether, the divine revelations of fake practitioners of trances, phony voices, bells ringing in pitch-black rooms, ectoplasmic materializations—why couldn’t it be the simple lunacy of indulging in a conversation with a tomato plant? Why did it have to be real?

  What good is this woman to us?

  Koprow was still talking and Andreyev realized he hadn’t been listening. “… There’s the further matter of our control over this woman. Are we doing enough to ensure control? What guarantees do we have?”

  Control, Andreyev thought. What control? She could turn on you and blow your mind into oblivion, into death.

  Koprow said, “I understand that morphine has been administered to the point of dependency. And that she expects an exit visa for Israel in return for her cooperation. Is that correct?”

  Andreyev nodded his head, feeling a tightness in the neck muscles, a dull pain beneath the scalp. Morphine, the perpetual daze of the dream, the languid glide into torpor, a freedom from pain—the promise of a way out, as if such a promise would ever be kept. He watched Koprow, seeing iron determination there, in the way the man held his head, clenched his hands, the firm set of the mouth.

  “And all this is enough?” he asked.

  Andreyev shrugged.

  “Is it enough?” Koprow raised his voice and there was a faint echo in the room.

  “I can’t honestly answer that.”

  Koprow looked at his colleagues with mock exasperation. “Then what would you suggest, Professor?”

  Andreyev stared at Koprow. “She’s only interested in leaving the Soviet Union, Comrade Koprow. That’s the only thing she lives for.”

  “Then why doesn’t she simply spirit herself away?”

  There was subdued laughter around the room, the tuning-up of instruments with Koprow as conductor. Andreyev understood: he was being challenged to say that the woman was under total control, that domination was complete.

  Koprow was shaking his head. “The importance of control,” he said. “I don’t think we should leave any of that to mere chance, do you?”

  Andreyev was suddenly meek, seeing himself small and redundant in the room, a nothing whose services might easily be dispensed with; initials on a piece of paper, the passing down of a judgment—how easy it would be for them to remove him. He wanted to say that she was very old, that her heart was tired and strained, that no more control was needed—but he fell into a silence.

  “Her family in Israel,” Koprow said. “It would be a simple matter, for instance, to have them … watched. Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be simple, Professor?”

  “Yes,” Andreyev said. The shadow of the gun. Dear God. He had seen her beloved snapshots.

  Koprow was silent for a time. He tapped his index finger upon the table and appeared to be gazing at the illustrations on the walls.

  “I will recommend further control of the woman by means of her family,” Koprow said. His words came now in short, stabbing sequences. “And I will also recommend—” and here he paused, letting his presence sink through the room, “—the possibility of a further experiment with Mrs. Blum.”

  Andreyev looked at Sememko. The Politician was picking his teeth absentmindedly, as if what was being discussed here were an agricultural plan, perhaps the introduction of a new rotation of crops, perhaps the feasibility of an increase in tractor production—but it was all one and the same thing, wasn’t it? It was all a part of technology and its functions, material or immaterial; what did it matter in the long term?

  He closed his folder, pressed his fingers to his eyes, and let the room dwindle to nothing in his brief self-imposed blindness.

  2.

  Rayner found something faintly enjoyable in listening to Haffner as he tried, in his circumspect way, to instill some sense of diplomatic etiquette into the Vice President. Lindholm, you could see, had his head inclined as if he were really listening, but some absence of light in his eyes suggested he was elsewhere—planning, calculating, thinking other things. The old prairie dog, Rayner thought. You can’t teach him to jump through new hoops at this stage of the game.

  They were sitting in the dining room of the hotel. Breakfast had just been eaten—rather tasteless eggs, dark bread, lukewarm coffee; Rayner surveyed the ruins of the meal. Four Secret Service men sat at the next table, eating with a kind of purposeful silence as if they suspected a Communist plot involving cyanide in the water pitcher. It was odd, he thought, how they never seemed to communicate with one another, how strangely introverted they were in their vigilance. Who could tell? Maybe they had developed a sophisticated means of communicating through head movements, gestures, a form of secretive freemasonry.

  The dining room was otherwise empty. Lindholm’s presence had obliged the management to feed its less illustrious guests elsewhere. There were at least sixty empty tables set for diners who would not show up. Spooky, Rayner thought—all that linen, all those napkins, knives and forks. A banquet for ghosts.

  Lindholm was rubbing his jaw, squinting now at Haffner. Rayner knew the expression: You can’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs, sonny. Haffner droned somewhat, slipping at times into a kind of silence that suggested his uncertainty, how far he could go in offering a cram course in diplomacy to the Vice President.

  “I don’t want you to take this all the wrong way, sir,” Haffner said. “I just don’t think it advisable to sound off—”

  “Sound off?” Lindholm looked at Rayner, half smiling. It was a political expression: he met his hecklers with that same quizzical look. “Was I sounding off, Ricky?”

  Ricky, Rayner thought. He didn’t much care for the folksy abbreviation. “I think Stewart’s trying to tell you that it doesn’t do much good to give the Soviets the impression that you and the President are in disagreement over certain policies.”

  Lindholm rubbed his eyelids. “You boys are pretty mad at me, huh?”

  Rayner looked across the table at Haffner, who, squirming, raised a crumbling piece of dark bread to his mouth and chewed on it absently.

  “I been kicking around politics a long time,” Lindholm said. “Local politics. State Senate. The Congress of the United States. You boys know that. Hell. I never expected to be the Vice President.”

  What’s coming? Rayner wondered. Was there going to be an edited version of the fable? Poor boy makes good? Land of opportunity and you don’t need no silver spoon in your mouth?

  “When I was offered the slot, hell, I took it.” Lindholm stared at them in turn, as if he expected a response, as if this statement was an accusation: You’d have done the same, wouldn’t you? “I kicked around long enough to know that it’s a bunch of bull no matter what way you cut it. A Veep is a walking ceremony, that’s all. He does nothing and he’s expected to do nothing. But it doesn’t mean that Mallory’s got a goddamn dog collar around my throat and that when he says roll over, Rover, I goddam roll over.”

  Rayner listened to the small man’s voice rise, surpr
ised a little by the hint of passion in the tone. He saw Lindholm’s hand settle momentarily on Haffner’s wrist; he saw Haffner look as if he had never had human contact before.

  “So you boys get a little hot under the collar. That’s nothing. You really think the Russkis give a monkey’s turd about what I say? They’re being polite. They know I can say what I like and it doesn’t change a goddam thing. Because they know something you don’t seem to know. I’m only the Vice President—which makes me approximately nothing.”

  The Vice President, Rayner thought. A heartbeat away.

  “I got one thing Mallory needs,” Lindholm said. “I can turn out a couple of million voters for him. And that makes a difference—because these are people that would sooner vote the straight Republican ticket than put their John Hancocks to any Eastern liberal. Are you boys with me?”

  Haffner swallowed his dry bread. “I appreciate the frankness, Mr. Vice President. But at the same time, I don’t think—”

  “At the same time crap,” Lindholm said, and started to rise from the table. “I may have one of the most vacuous jobs in the goddam world, Haffner. But I don’t need to bite my tongue when I feel I got something to say. And that’s something. That’s really something.”

  The Vice President dropped his napkin on the table and walked away, surrounded at once by the Secret Service men. Rayner watched them sweep out of the dining room, an incongruous vision: the orangutans crowding the small prairie animal.

  Haffner sighed. “I tried,” he said.

  “I heard you,” said Rayner. He looked at his watch. There was to be a tour of some new automobile plant later—strictly Intourist stuff—and a half-finished letter lay upstairs in his room, a letter to John. He stood up. There was still time to finish it before he had to run the gamut of spot welders and paint sprayers and inspectors—and listen to the standard speeches concerning Soviet greatness. And never a word about Siberia.