She told the old man, “I will find him.”
“I know, because you have to,” he said.
Monica left.
The old man sat down at the kitchen table. He had read history books and knew the power of governments, and he felt scared for Monica.
Monica drove to her house to see her father and pick up a few things. She went inside the house. She felt strange looking at it. She felt like it might be the last time she ever looked at the house. It made her look deeper at the pictures of her and her father standing by the ocean. Everything seemed more real, full of color, the couch, the kitchen, even the bathtub, all the objects in the house were full of memories.
She came out of her bedroom carrying a backpack. Her father, sitting on a recliner watching television, said, “Where you off to, Monica?”
“On a little vacation.”
“How come you never told me about it?”
“It just came up. It’s only for four days. Going to Chicago.” She thought Chicago sounded nice. Chicago was her favorite place to go for a few days at a time.
“Oh, well give me a hug.”
She knew that every time she went on vacation, they would tell each other ‘I love you.’ This would give her a perfect chance to do so without revealing her true plans.
They hugged and told each other ‘I love you.’ She hugged her father for an unusually long time. After she walked out the door, she began to cry.
Dr. Charles Nevitsky
Monica experienced terrible anxiety while driving to Nevitsky’s house. She pulled the car into a gas station parking lot. She opened her purse and took out a Xanax and an Adderall and swallowed them both at once. She liked the feel of the Adderall pumping her up. Adderall made her excited, gave her powerful feelings of confidence. She would take the Xanax to calm the anxiety caused by the Adderall. She had never told anyone that she regularly took pills to feel good. Mike knew and took them sometimes with her, but mostly she kept it a secret.
Monica felt that pills made life exciting. It was exciting to troubleshoot on a computer, it was exciting to have sex, it was exciting to take a hike in the woods. But it did not make her body feel excited. She considered pills a little vacation for her body.
She decided that to do this whole thing, to find Mike, she needed drugs. She wasn’t going to be able to be confident and strong without drugs. She knew that without drugs she was a timid little girl who just wanted to play on her computer. She knew the situation required her to live up to the task.
Monica arrived at Dr. Charles Nevitsky’s house. It was a large two-story house. It was old but well-kept. She looked at his house, afraid, but she wanted to find Michael, wanted to hold Michael again. She liked cuddling Michael at night and she didn’t want that to disappear from her life.
She knocked on the door.
She waited.
The door opened.
An old man stood there, feeble and sad. He was bald, had red blotchy skin and long bushy eyebrows that stuck straight out. He looked professional though. He had on a nice shirt and nice pants. He still had grace and composure. He was elegant, he was strong, a man to be feared.
Monica looked at him and he looked at her.
Nevitsky said to Monica, “What would you like?”
Monica’s Adderall had kicked in and she felt awesome. She said, “I need to find my man.”
“Come in,” he said.
They walked into the living room. Nevitsky walked slowly, limping a little from brain cancer he’d had several years ago. Nevitsky had not changed his habits from his youth. He knew negotiations required liquor. Nevitsky poured some scotch and said, “What do you drink? I don’t think your generation drinks scotch, no?”
“Do you have any spiced rum?”
“Spiced rum. What a generation.”
Nevitsky found some spiced rum and poured her a glass. He handed it to Monica and said, “So what is the problem?” He sat down, took on an active listening pose.
“I work at a place called NEOTAP. NEOTAP is a government treatment center for criminals. Well, I work IT, but my boyfriend works as a guard and, like, now he’s disappeared. And some of the prisoners have also disappeared. So has another employee.”
“But what does it have to do with me?”
“Well, the place is based on your book Reality Conversion.”
Nevitsky sat there thinking, trying to remember writing Reality Conversion, why he wrote it, what was going on in his life when he wrote it, what that book meant to his life. Finally he said, “They are still using that book?”
“Yes.”
“My god, that book was written to defeat the Soviets. The Soviets have been gone for twenty years. There is no reason to use that book anymore.”
“What? I don’t understand,” Monica said, confused.
Dr. Charles Nevitsky, besides being a psychologist, was a professor for a good portion of his life. He was a man who liked to talk, but he hadn’t had an audience in over ten years. Everyone had forgotten him and how he was a great psychologist. Sometimes a student writing a doctoral thesis would come by and ask him a few questions, but that was becoming rarer as the years passed. He grew excited to talk. This girl looked like one of his students from the past: young, pretty, and full of life.
Dr. Charles Nevitsky began to talk, “Reality Conversion was written in the late fifties by request of Eisenhower. Eisenhower requested a secret commission, an elite group of psychologists, scientists, political scientists, philosophers, geologists, geographers, theologians, historians and even a few novelists and marketing men. Our meetings took place in CIA headquarters. We all got a letter from the CIA stating that if we participated, we would receive a yearly sum of money and a wonderful pension, so we went. It was a wonderful event to me. The room was full of the best people America had to offer. It felt like I was in ancient Athens or Florence during the Renaissance. It made me so happy to be in that room with those extraordinary people.
“We all sat at a roundtable in a very efficient room. Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, came in the room. I was very impressed by him and felt nervous to be in his presence. I was thirty years old then and was still starting my career, and still nervous about such things. Allen Dulles told us that we needed to defeat the Soviets, but there was a problem of belief that was coming. He stated that God had died and there was nothing that could produce a feeling of security and motivation in the lives of men. He stated that he had traveled the world and knew history, that the comfort of religion was vital to man’s happiness and his will to do his duty to his country. He said that America needed a religion that would make the people do their duty and be strong, confident Americans, which meant going to work, rearing their children and not becoming communists. The most important thing was not becoming communists.
“We all agreed that this was vital to America. He gave us a year to do research on the project. He said the government would give us all the money we wanted for our research. The government was handing us a blank check. On top of everything else, we received free housing.
“After a year, we presented our research to Allen Dulles. We knew the most enduring religion was Islam, and what was Islam founded on? Five simple pillars. It’s basically belief in one God, prayer, tithing, visiting Mecca, and fasting. These things are simple. No need to even think about them. So we tried to emulate that, and this is what we came up with. One: Go to work and do your job. Two: Care for your children. Three: Pay your bills. Four: Obey the law. Five: Buy products. These were simple rules to follow and we could notify all citizens of these rules through television, movies, literature and commercials. Allen Dulles loved it. Eisenhower loved it. Of course, there were objections. I told them that this was materialism. This was what the Soviets were doing. They make people into things. They didn’t let people live and become what they wanted. A geologist argued that we needed to incorporate environmental values into the new religion. A philosopher stated that this method was too rigid and that we would become a decadent civilization. The novelist, to our surprise, said that America has had extraordinary people since its founding, that the country only invites the extraordinary, and this method of living would turn people into television-watching consumer automatons, that our children would become weak in mind. He said that we might become complacent, that established paradigms and procedures ranging from government to novels to how we run businesses would not be changed, there would be no innovation, bureaucracy would contaminate everything, that people should run the procedures and not the other way around. That innovation would be destroyed.