Jacubois and Mrs. Wilcoxen. I never cared much about computer games—they’re strictly for dickbrains, in my humble opinion—but I could keyjack like a mad motherfucker. Pug used to drop by and watch me, sometimes.
“I can’t believe you,” he said once. “Man, you got that thing smokin and tokin.”
I shrugged. “Any fool can peel the Apple,” I said. “It takes a real man to eat the core.”
So Ma believed it (she might have had a few more questions if she knew the Trans Corporation was flying me out to Illinois in a private jet, but she didn’t), and I didn’t miss her all that much. But I missed Pug, and John Cassiday, who was our other friend from our Supr Savr days. John plays bass in a punk band, wears a gold ring in his left eyebrow, and has just about every Subpop record ever made. He cried when Kurt Cobain ate the dirt sandwich. Didn’t try to hide it or blame it on allergies, either. Just said, “I’m sad because Kurt died.”
John’s eventual.
And I missed Harkerville. Perverse but true. Being at the training center in Peoria was like being born again, somehow, and I guess being born always hurts.
I thought I might meet some other people like me—if this was a book or a movie (or maybe just an episode of The X-Files), I would meet a cute chick with nifty little tits and the ability to shut doors from across the room—but that didn’t happen. I’m pretty sure there were other trannies at Peoria when I was there, but Dr. Wentworth 239
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and the other folks running the place were careful to keep us separated. I once asked why, and got a runaround. That’s when I started to realize that not everybody who had TRANSCORP printed on their shirts or walked around with TransCorp clipboards was my pal, or wanted to be my long-lost Dad.
And it was about killing people; that’s what I was training for. The folks in Peoria didn’t talk about that all the time, but no one tried to sugarcoat it, either. I just had to remember the targets were bad guys, dictators and spies and serial killers, and as Mr. Sharpton said, people did it in wars all the time. Plus, it wasn’t personal. No guns, no knives, no garrotes. I’d never get blood splashed on me.
Like I told you, I never saw Mr. Sharpton again—at least not yet, I haven’t—but I talked to him every day of the week I was in Peoria, and that eased the pain and strangeness considerably. Talking to him was like having someone put a cool cloth on your brow. He gave me his number the night we talked in his Mercedes, and told me to call him anytime. Even at three in the morning, if I was feeling upset. Once I did just that. I almost hung up on the second ring, because people may say call them anytime, even at three in the morning, but they don’t really expect you to do it. But I hung in there. I was homesick, yeah, but it was more than that. The place wasn’t what I had expected, exactly, and I wanted to tell Mr. Sharpton so. See how he took it, kind of.
He answered on the third ring, and although he sounded sleepy (big surprise there, huh?), he didn’t sound at all pissed. I told him that some of the stuff they were doing was quite weird. The test with all the flashing lights, for example. They said it was a test for epilepsy, but—
“I went to sleep right in the middle of it,” I said. “And when I woke up, I had a headache and it was hard to think. You know what I felt like? A file-cabinet after someone’s been rummaging through it.”
“What’s your point, Dink?” Mr. Sharpton asked.
“I think they hypnotized me,” I said.
A brief pause. Then: “Maybe they did. Probably they did.”
“But why? Why would they? I’m doing everything they ask, so why would they want to hypnotize me?”
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“I don’t know all their routines and protocols, but I suspect they’re programming you. Putting a lot of housekeeping stuff on the lower levels of your mind so they won’t have to junk up the conscious part . . . and maybe screw up your special ability, while they’re at it.
Really no different than programming a computer’s hard disk, and no more sinister.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“No—as I say, training and testing are not my purview. But I’ll make some calls, and Dr. Wentworth will talk to you. It may even be that an apology is due. If that’s the case, Dink, you may be sure that it will be tendered. Our trannies are too rare and too valuable to be upset needlessly. Now, is there anything else?”
I thought about it, then said no. I thanked him and hung up. It had been on the tip of my tongue to tell him I thought I’d been drugged, as well . . . given some sort of mood-elevator to help me through the worst of my homesickness, but in the end I decided not to bother him.
It was three in the morning, after all, and if they had been giving me anything, it was probably for my own good.
XII
Dr. Wentworth came to see me the next day—he was the Big Kahuna—and he did apologize. He was perfectly nice about it, but he had a look, I don’t know, like maybe Mr. Sharpton had called him about two minutes after I hung up and gave him a hot reaming.
Dr. Wentworth took me for a walk on the back lawn—green and rolling and damned near perfect there at the end of spring—and said he was sorry for not keeping me “up to speed.” The epilepsy test really was an epilepsy test, he said (and a CAT-scan, too), but since it induced a hypnotic state in most subjects, they usually took advantage of it to give certain “baseline instructions.” In my case, they were instructions about the computer programs I’d be using in Columbia City. Dr. Wentworth asked me if I had any other questions. I lied and said no.
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You probably think that’s weird, but it’s not. I mean, I had a long and sucky school career which ended three months short of gradua-tion. I had teachers I liked as well as teachers I hated, but never one I entirely trusted. I was the kind of kid who always sat in the back of the room if the teacher’s seating-chart wasn’t alphabetical, and never took part in class discussions. I mostly said “Huh?” when I was called on, and wild horses wouldn’t have dragged a question out of me. Mr. Sharpton was the only guy I ever met who was able to get into where I lived, and ole Doc Wentworth with his bald head and sharp eyes behind his little rimless glasses was no Mr. Sharpton. I could imagine pigs flying south for the winter before I could imagine opening up to that dude, let alone crying on his shoulder.
And fuck, I didn’t know what else to ask, anyway. A lot of the time I liked it in Peoria, and I was excited by the prospects ahead—new job, new house, new town. People were great to me in Peoria. Even the food was great—meatloaf, fried chicken, milkshakes, everything I liked. Okay, I didn’t like the diagnostic tests, those boogersnots you have to do with an IBM pencil, and sometimes I’d feel dopey, as if someone had put something in my mashed potatoes (or hyper, sometimes I’d feel that way, too), and there were other times—at least two—when I was pretty sure I’d been hypnotized again. But so what?
I mean, was any of it a big deal after you’d been chased around a supermarket parking lot by a maniac who was laughing and making race-car noises and trying to run you over with a shopping cart?
XIII
I had one more talk on the phone with Mr. Sharpton that I suppose I should mention. That was just a day before my second airplane ride, the one that took me to Columbia City, where a guy was waiting with the keys to my new house. By then I knew about the cleaners, and the basic money-rule—start every week broke, end every week broke—
and I knew who to call locally if I had a problem. (Any big problem and I call Mr. Sharpton, who is technically my “control.”) I had 242
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maps, a list of restaurants, directions to the cinema complex and the mall. I had a line on everything but the most important thing of all.
“Mr. Sharpton, I don’t know what to do, ” I said. I was talking to him on the phone just outside the caff. There was a phone in my room, but by then I was too nervous to sit down, let alone lie on my bed. If they were still putting shit in my food, it sure wasn’t working that day.