“You and he will be the first subjects,” Hollis confessed.
“And you’re confident nothing will go wrong?”
“I’m not confident at all,” Hollis said quietly. “It ought to work; but it might make both of you gibbering lunatics instead.”
“And still you’re ready to try this on me?” Jenner asked.
“I wouldn’t want you going into it without a warning. But the odds are good in favor of a successful outcome; otherwise I wouldn’t dream of asking you to play along with me.”
Jenner stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. He glanced around at the books on the shelves, at the single painting, at the austere furniture. “How long will it take?”
“About six months. I have to edit two tapes, don’t forget. And we can’t do all the work overnight.”
“Will it cost me anything?”
Hollis laughed. “Mark, I’d pay you to do this if you wanted me to. I want to help you—and to see if my theories were right.”
“I hope they are.” Jenner stood up, coming to his full height, squaring his shoulders, trying to play the role of a successful actor even now, when he was nothing but a hollow has-been. “Okay,” he said in the resonant Jenner tones. “I commit myself into thy hands, Holly. I’ve lost everything else a man can lose; I guess it doesn’t matter much if I lose my mind.”
Jenner woke up in the middle of the next afternoon. He had been asleep for thirteen hours, and he had needed it. Hollis was gone, having left a note explaining that he had to attend a rehearsal in Manhattan and would be back about five. Jenner dressed slowly, remembering the conversation of the night before, realizing that he had effectively pledged his soul to the unmephistophelean Hollis.
He turned Hollis’ sheet of notepaper over and scrawled his own note: “Going downtown to settle my affairs. Will return later tonight.” He took the undertube back to Manhattan, taxied from the tube station to his hotel, and checked out, settling his bill with cash. For two years he had lived in a twenty-dollar-a-week room in a midtown hotel, with no more personal property than he needed. Most of his possessions had been in storage since the breakup with Helene in ’87; he kept hardly enough in the hotel room to fill a single suitcase.
He packed up and left. Dragging the suitcase that contained three changes of clothing, his makeup kit, his useless script for Misty Isle, and the 1986-89 volume of his scrapbook, Jenner set out for the tube station again. It was five-thirty. If he made good connections, he could reach Hollis’ place a little after six. And that gave him time for a little bit of fortification first.
He stopped at a Lexington Avenue bar and had two martinis. On the third drink he shifted to gibsons. By the fourth, he had acquired a slatternly-looking bar girl with thick orange lipstick; he bought her the requested rye and soda, had one himself, then went into the washroom and got sick. When he came out, the girl was gone. Shrugging, Jenner wandered to another bar and had two more martinis, this time successfully keeping them down. A hundred yards up the block, he had another gibson.
He reached Hollis’ place at half past ten, sober enough to walk on his own steam but too drunk to remember what he had done with his suitcase. He kept insisting that Hollis call the police and have them search for the grip, but Hollis merely smiled amiably and ignored him, leading him to the bedroom and putting him to bed. A moment before he fell asleep, Jenner reflected that it was just as well he had lost the suitcase. With it, he had lost his pitiful press clippings of the last four years, as well as his makeup kit and his final script. Now he could shed his past with alacrity; he had no albatrosses slung around his neck.
He woke up at nine the next morning, feeling unaccountably clearheaded and cheerful. The smell of frying bacon reached his nostrils. From the kitchen, Hollis yelled, “Go take a quick shower. Breakfast’ll be ready when you come out.”
They breakfasted in silence. At twenty of ten, they finished their coffee. Hollis said quietly, “All right, Mark. Are you ready to begin?”
Walt Hollis had rigged an experimental laboratory in his fourth room and he installed Jenner in the middle of it. The room was no more than twelve by fifteen, and it seemed to Jenner that there was an enormous amount of equipment in it. He himself sat in a comfortable chair in the center of the room, facing a diabolically complex bit of apparatus with fluorescent light rings and half a dozen theatrical gelatins to provide a shifting pattern of illuminated color. There was a big tape recorder in the room, with a fifteen-inch reel primed and loaded. There were instruments that Jenner simply could not identify at all; he had no technical background, and he merely classified them as “electronic” and let it go at that.
The room’s window had been carefully curtained off; the door frame was lined with felt. When Hollis chose, he could plunge the room into total darkness. Jenner felt an irrational twinge of fear. Obscurely, the machine facing him reminded him of a dentist’s drill, an instrument he had always feared and hated. But this drill would bite deep into his mind.
“I won’t be in the room with you,” Hollis said. “I’ll be monitoring from outside. Any time you want me, just raise your right hand and I’ll come in. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jenner muttered.
“First I’ve got a pill for you, Mark. Proclorperazine. It’s an ataractic.”
“A tranquilizer?”
“Call it that; it’s just to ease your nerves. You’re very tense right now, you know. You’re afraid of what I’m going to do.”
“Damned right I’m afraid. But you don’t see me getting up and running out!”
“Of course not,” Hollis said. “Here. Take it.”
While Jenner swallowed the pill, Hollis busily rolled up the actor’s sleeve and swabbed his arm with alcohol. Jenner watched, already relaxing, as Hollis readied a glittering hypodermic.
“This is the hypnosis-inducing drug, Mark.”
“Sodium pentothal? Amytal?”
“Of that family of ego-depressants, yes.” Hollis deftly discharged the syringe’s contents into one of Jenner’s veins. “I’ve had medical help in preparing this project,” he said. “Sit back. Stretch your feet out. Relax, Mark.”
Jenner relaxed. He was vaguely conscious of Hollis’ final reassuring pat on the shoulder, of the fact that the small man had left the room, that the room had gone dark. He heard a faint hum that might have come either from the tape recorder or from the strange apparatus in the middle of the room.
Colored lights began to play on him. Wheels of bright plastic whirled before his eyes. Jenner stared, fascinated, feeling his tension drain away. All he had to do was relax. Rest. Everything would be all right. Relax.
“Can you hear me, Mark?”
“I hear you.”
“Good. Do you feel any discomfort?”
“No discomfort.”
“Fine. Listen to me, Mark.”
“I’m listening.”
“I mean really listening, now. Listening with your brain and not just your ears. Are you listening to me, Mark?”
“I’m listening.”
“Excellent. This is what I want you to do for me, Mark. I want you to go back and think about your life. Then I want you to tell me all about yourself. Everything. From the beginning.”
Spring, 1953. Mark Jenner was four years old. Mark Jenner’s brother Tom had reached the ninth of the twelve years he was to have. Tom Jenner had been fighting, against his mother’s express orders, and he had been knocked down and bruised.
Mark Jenner stared up at his older brother. Tom’s cheek was scraped and bloody, and one side of his mouth was starting to swell puffily.