Now Jenner allowed himself to be deposited in a comfortable armchair, while Hollis, ever tense, paced the worn broadloom carpet in front of him. Jenner felt completely helpless. Hollis was his last hope.
Hollis said, “Mark, I’m going to be ruthlessly frank in everything I say to you from tonight on. You aren’t going to like the things I say. If you get annoyed, blow off steam. It’ll do you good.”
“I won’t get annoyed,” Jenner said tonelessly. “There isn’t a thing you could say about me that wouldn’t be true.”
“You will get annoyed—so annoyed that you’ll want to punch me in the face.” Hollis grinned shyly. “I hope you’ll be able to control that. You’ve got me by fifty or sixty pounds.”
He paced back and forth. Jenner watched him. For twenty years, Mark Jenner had felt a sort of pity for Hollis, for the timid and retiring electrician whose only pleasure seemed to be in helping others. Sure, Hollis made good pay, and he was the best in his business. But for all that, he was just a backstage flunky. Now he was much more than that; he was Jenner’s last hope.
Hollis said, “You’re going to have to withdraw from your regular activities completely for six months or so, Mark. Give up your room. Move in here with me until the treatment’s finished. Then we’ll see what we can do about getting you back on Broadway. It may not be easy—but if things work the way I think they’ll work, you’ll be climbing straight for the stratosphere the month I’m done with you.”
“I’ll be satisfied just to work regularly. Suppose you tell me what you’re going to do to me.”
Hollis spun around and jabbed the air with a forefinger. “First let’s talk about your past. You were a big hit once, Mark, then you started slipping. Now you’re nowhere. Okay: Why did it happen?”
“Yeah. You tell me. Why?”
“It happened,” Hollis said, “because you failed to adapt to the changing times. You never developed the kind of emotional charge that an actor needs now, if he’s going to reach his audience. You stayed put, worshiping the good old status quo. You acted in the 1973 way for fifteen years, but by 1987 it wasn’t good enough for the public or for the critics.”
“Especially the critics,” Jenner growled. “They crucified me!”
“The critics are paid to slap down anything that isn’t what the public would consider good entertainment,” Hollis said thinly. “You can’t blame them; you have to blame yourself. You had an early success, and you stuck at that level until you were left behind.”
Jenner nodded gravely. “Okay, Holly. Let’s say I frittered away my talent. I’d rather think that than that I never had any talent in the first place. How can you help me?”
Hollis paused in his nervous march and came to light like a fretful butterfly, on a backless wooden chair. “I once explained my technique to you, and you nodded all through it, but I could see you weren’t listening. You’ll have to listen to me now, Mark, or I can’t help you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I hope so. Briefly, what I’m going to do is put you through a sort of lay analysis…”
“I’ve been analyzed!”
“Keep quiet and listen for a change,” Hollis said with a vigor Jenner had never heard him display before. “You’ll be put through a sort of lay analysis, under deep narcohypnosis. What I want, actually, is a taped autobiography, going as deep into your life as I can dredge.”
“Are you qualified to do this sort of thing?” Jenner asked.
“I’m qualified to build the machine and ask the questions. The psychiatric angle I’ve researched as thoroughly as possible. The rest comes out of you, until we have the tape.”
“Okay,” Jenner said. “So what do you do with this tape biography of me?”
“I put it aside,” Hollis said. “Then I take another tape, put you under hypnosis again, and feed the new tape into you. The new tape will be one that I’ve taken from some other person. It’ll be carefully expurgated to keep you from knowing the other person’s identity, but you’ll get a deep whiff of his personality. Then I take your tape and pipe it into the man who made the other one.”
Jenner frowned, not comprehending. “I don’t get this. Who’s the other person? You?”
“Of course not. He’ll be a man you never met. You won’t ever see him; you won’t ever know who he is. But you’ll know what kind of food he likes and why; what he thinks when he’s in bed with his wife; how he feels on a hot, sweaty summer day; what he felt like the first time he kissed a girl. You’ll remember his getting whopped for stealing cigarettes from his father, and you’ll remember his college graduation day. You’ll have all his memories, hopes, dreams, fears. He’ll have yours.”
Jenner squinted and tried to figure out what the little man was heading toward. “What good will all that do—to peek into each other’s minds?”
Hollis smiled. “When you build up a character on stage, you mine him out of yourself—out of your own perceptions and reactions and experiences. You take the playwright’s bare lines, and you flesh them out by interpreting words as action, words as expression, words as carriers of emotion. If you’re a good actor—which means if you have enough inner resource to swing the trick—you convince the audience that you are the man the program says you are. If not, you get a job selling popcorn in front of the theater.”
“So…”
Hollis swept right on. “So this way you’ll have two sets of emotions and experiences to build on. You can synthesize them into a portrayal that no actor can begin to give.” Hollis locked his thin hands together over one knee and bent forward, his mild face bright with enthusiasm now. “Besides, you’ll have the advantage of being inside another man’s skull, knowing what makes him tick; it’ll give you a perspective you can’t possibly have now. Combining his memories with yours, it’ll be that much easier for you to get inside the audience’s collective skull too, Mark. You see the picture now? You follow what I’m driving at?”
“I think so,” Jenner said heavily. With awkwardly deliberate motions he pulled a cigarette out of Hollis’ pack on the table, and lit it. Jenner did not actually smoke; he valued his throat too highly. But now he needed something to do with his hands, and the cigarette-lighting ritual provided it. “But tell me this—what does this other fellow get out of having my tape pumped into him?”
“He’s a politician,” Hollis said. “By which I mean a man who’s in public life. He wants to run for a high office. He’s a capable man, but with your talent for projection, combined with his own inner drive, he’s sure to win.”
“You mean you have the other man picked out already?”
“He’s been picked out and waiting for nearly a year. I told him I would get a great actor to serve as the counterweight on this little seesaw. He’s been waiting. I had you in mind, but it took this flop tonight to make you come around. You will go along with this, won’t you?”
Jenner shut his eyes for a moment and drew the burning smoke deep into his lungs. He felt like gagging. He was drained of all strength; if Hollis had snapped off the light, he would have fallen asleep on the spot, clothes and all.
He said, after a moment, “So, I’ll be taking another man into my head with me. And that supposedly will make me a star again. Ah—have you ever tried this stunt before?”