A Copy-Cat Gets A New Idea

The sky over the institute and hot, robin's-egg colored sea, was the thick orange of now always burning Summer. Cliffside, young Oliver skirted the Big Sur coastline toward the new K building, avoiding the cicada strewn central lawn. He was here to get a bullet in the chest, do some character-building, not chat.

Not calm at all, he was nearing the building and in a state sure to see him react all wrong to the lesson and flunk out of the Roosevelt cohort right when success was to become near assured.

With buds stuck in his ears, a song was selected to try and evoke a big feeling of new life unfurling, of possibilities bounding faster and faster, turning back to him and saying, "it's all up ahead of you, all of it, and more every day. Go, go!" A song to push back on his thoughts of the corridor, walls collapsing in on themselves and forming a flat narrow sheet. I chose this way, he told himself, but right now I am immensely uncomfortable with my footsteps’ decisions to keep walking it. Oh stop it! Gather calmness and you will see it better. The song was helping. The narrow sheet lifted and pulsed in his mind, agitated like a bass string under a heavy strum. He found he could lock-in that pulsing, and when locked-in his narrow way was not so narrow and stressing. The music and pulsing path pulled him in, pulled him towards his future.

Peel off California Route 1 three hours down from San Francisco and you’ll find the Esalen-Lilly Institute. Its long, skinny twenty-seven acres of land a historic site now suffering under, or renewed by, an invasion — old redwood cabins, halls, and great firs now almost completely subsumed by glass and white painted sheet-steel overgrowths. Not long ago, some new industry had exploded in or descended on (debate continues) this quiet breath-in, breath-out retreat. But despite the undeniable complementary-color contrast between the old sea and the new sky, between old redwood Esalen and new white Esalen-Lilly, its product had remained the same: new people.

Esalen-Lilly’s psycho-tech human capital program, the latest and likely last new new thing to come out of California, actually originated in South Korea. Within the shabby gray headquarters of the Soo-Man (SM) entertainment company, some lost genius found a method of molding people that is radically more precise and durable than ever before. Practiced in the art-science craft of pop idol formation, SM employee #919's remarkable muddling of drugs, stagecraft, and multimedia reproduced, given time, the great idols of old with uncanny delicacy and depth. The breakthrough cohort ran twenty years, 2025-2045, and bore not one but two eerie recreations of revered politician Kim Dae-jung. Incredible, but incredible waste! — the boss had shouted as he stung #919’s cheek, Dae-jung is no singer. Nervously, a reply: but sir, forgive me, this new Dae-jung can sing.

The Soo-Man method took almost a year to take root in the United States, and naturally started life in the acting schools of LA and New York. A now dejected nation, losing control of its control of the earth, but still ostensibly in charge, the USA greeted the method’s most devoted and successful students with adoration as they first appeared in its entertainment, ten years or so after Dae-jung 1 and 2 debuted on Korea’s airwaves. The past had never felt so vital, actually brought back to life, and in a nostalgic swell the slow cancellation of the future, which looked grim anyway, was complete. Society folded back in on itself. Soo-Man’s Method went on sale, and everyone, Hollywood, corporate America, the well-endowed colleges, and congress, was buying. Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can, of course you can.

Method-man Theodore exhaled heavily through his mask and tried to settle a jittery hand against the back of his neck as he looked up for a gasp of wide-open space before the corridor. Look what they’ve done. My god they really messed it all up. And I’m supposed to fix it by playing politician? But he didn’t have a better idea, and he was walking-talking proof that at least some of the morning past could be brought back. A great American conservationist, a Presidential man. So much was irrefutably going wrong in this new dark age, but at least in this, Gramsci’s interregnum, Esalen-Lilly were boiling piss and yielding bright white phosphorous: old idols in new bodies.

Before the end of the bridge he gripped his wriststrap and commanded: LOOP IT. The pulsing would take him through this whole ordeal, or at least until there was no turning back. At the door of K building, just before striding inside, he spun one-eighty and regarded accidentally, at ninety, the central lawn. There she was, dredged back from memory and placed amongst the crowd. He squinted as an old life and old flame burst into view and wet his eyes— Prospect Park, teeming with shouts and smiles, dogs chasing children in and out of the lake. He sat against a tree, warmed in the evening sun but slightly sick with anticipation of an important audition; she twirled with a friend as a stranger’s electric guitar buzzed and hummed on a blanket nearby. Her mandala sun dress wrapping and unwrapping brown legs as black army boots criss-crossed, made divots and brought up blades of grass. A Helena or Hermia? He wondered at the time, and knew that this dancing girl who had the attention of the whole lawn would be either, superbly, and wouldn’t mind.

Inside its cold white skin, K building overwhelmed its visitor with eclectic detail, so many props and ephemera, ready to take part in the construction of key scenes. Theodore hastened through the common amenity spaces, closing in on his waypoint check-in, a kind of green room for evaluating progress, health, and general readiness. He would not be attending his assassination if he hadn’t calmed down.

My god, you’re actually here? he coughed out, just as the waypoint room’s entrance snapped closed behind and sealed them in together.

Yes, Theodore, please take a seat. So pursed together, she’d had the advantage of expecting him. He was splitting apart.

So many years in now, you know the drill. By accounts, you’re doing fabulously, even granted a chance to lend an early hand in Washington. I’m going to check your baseline, and then after that help perform necessary prep before you head in for the big event. Let’s begin: who is depended on more greatly, the farmer or the businessman?

Down to business then, he thought. The farmer and his interests are interwoven most deeply with the interests of all. As with his precious soil, we have skinned the body of the farmer whose prosperity was society’s prosperity. The businessman has his role, under the people’s control.

Where is your favorite park?

Not a park, but the great plains of Dakota, its dry grass and Bison. I loved catching creek turtles in my net, so as to draw them but not hurt them. Yes, Dakota plains.

Alia smiled, but seemed stiff in the legs and hips. It’s wonderful, really wonderful. You’re just like him. The best I’ve seen, and I don’t mind you knowing.

At last, she moved around him. Motioning for Theodore to place down his arm, Alia swanned right past it around to his back, rotated the chair, and only then bent to cuff the arm tightly in a pressure gauge. Electrodes next, were stuck near his knuckles — this order: July, August, June, September, May, October, April, November.

Now, some simple word association. I’ll say a word and you give me the first thing that comes to mind. Country.

Why are you here? I know you were in-program too, Alice Paul or somebody. You obviously flunked out.

Country.

These United States.

Please focus, Teddy. Don’t put me on trial — People.

Friends.

Climate Change.

Trial. Are you a janny? If I flunked I wouldn’t be kept here in purgatory, halfway between her and her, a bipolar living amongst bipolars in bipolarville. Pathetic.

He’d surely just failed his baseline and flunked out too, just like that. Speaking out of turn like they were both back in 2051; he had no right. She, on the other hand, had every right to write him off, cancel his speech, and send him back into the world a full-on bipolar himself. But she said nothing, did nothing, merely trapped the glint of a tear in the corners of her eyes, and moved on.

It's supposed to hurt, and going to hurt, as it hurt them before. I have to tell you that, protocol, but try and be surprised. Being surprised was hardest for me. Take these pills now. There’s a glass of water beside on the table.

What happened to you?

Alice? Dragged by the hair into the street; beaten with cop clubs; pelted with horse muck. Two years ago, but still doesn't feel like that long. Then, with obvious remembered pain, a forced smirk: I hope you’re prepared for your surprise at the speech. Well prepared? Know that long speech in your heart?

Yes, I know how it goes. Let it come up to you naturally, unawaited. A change in the weather.

She looked at his readout, betrayed little feeling, and turned back to say,

By my assessment you’re going all the way, my boy. I do look forward to seeing you take your place in government, seeing us through this troubled time.

He waited tensely until she’d finished his report and given his copy, then…

I know I shouldn’t say this, go back there, but after I was cut I went searching for an anchor attached to the old me. I stopped at Prospect Park, audition night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Remember us there? …We are both so young. My stern boy, with all the talent in the world, already booked his first Hollywood role, but wants something better than that. I want just you to dance with. Neither of us knows where our lives are going to go—it smells like a carnival, wet dogs, no smog—and that dance with you, fumbling around, is the best one I ever have.

He’d lingered too long, missed his cue to leave and now sat stunned against his chair, saccading between haunted corridor and this spirited, revanchist provocation.

I’m afraid I don’t remember the dance, but I thought you were just capital in that play.

They shared the next few minutes together icey and silent, and at close of proceedings Theodore did not wait to be asked to move on. In no mood for report reading, he shunted himself into the corridor and wanted to just close his eyes and be out of it as soon as possible. But before folding the report into his breast pocket alongside the speech, he felt an added note stapled to the front:

Prick. I wasn’t a flunk out, Oliver. They dropped the whole cohort, didn’t want an Alice Paul no more. You don’t know what I could have been, they don’t either. No one does. — 𝒜.𝒫

Esalen-Lilly in all its psycho-technical majesty had brought Oliver/Theodore thirteen years and a million Pavlovian moves right to the point where he was walking knowingly into his assassination — and able, impossibly, to take it with surprise. And yet, improbably, they’d erred in having Ms. Pilcrow of all people stationed at his waypoint, and let her split him up with that note? The one and only Alia, skipping around him in the dry grass, forcing on Oliver one last time the challenge of really getting to know someone new.

Feeling entirely sorry for himself, Theodore moved down one of K's throbbing throats towards what might be his final training scene. Used from basically day one of the Soo-Man program, these audio-spatial convulsing tubes performed form-molding on your temperament. Soo-Man manipulation is characterized by occasionally noticeable but never traumatic micro-adjustment: stretch, pluck, shave, biopsy, polish. But for him these corridors lately were traumatic, each step increasing a process of chelation, Soo-Man forcing his past and the future selves through a seive. This time, or surely next time, he would turn his heart and mind back to find Oliver trailing him on the path, but there would be nothing. Only Theodore would remain.

Out, and sweating, there it was for him, a quite astonishing recreation of the Hotel Gilpatrick, its interior and crowd detailed to the satisfaction of a historian’s eye. A weak and retreated Oliver saw an unavoidably ridiculous assemblage, diorama elevated to an insane degree. But it was Theodore’s stage, and so it pulled the latter into itself so much that the crowd’s hum and buzz filled him with that performer’s and public speaker’s nervousness; the coming bullet almost slipped his mind.

Friends, friends.

He motioned the crowd to settle as he ascended to the lectern, but as he turned to face them, a dozen or so were still shuffling here and there, even talking. Alia entered stage left, as the last one of the crowd remained up and about, a man of stout figure, fidgety in his jaw and with whatever he kept in his ratty jacket pocket. The man at the lectern did not see him, because there was she, arcing her body around rows of people and tables, coming, it seemed, to interrupt proceedings.

And he wanted her to. He leant on the lectern and let himself beam at this girl and the beautiful kinetic mess she was about to make in his life. As she spun herself through the remains of the throng, Alia kept gazing up at him, and recognizing they now shared a nascent conspiracy, a smile curled fast up her face until she interrupted it to shout—

You do know you’re fucked, don’t you? You won’t die, but you’ll get hell!

¶ I do.