Abnormal Occurrences (12 page)

The so-called Lesson 10 was printed on the second piece of paper yielded by the envelope. The sheet was of standard size though its message could have been accommodated on a notepad with room to spare. Reading it alone in the elevator, Devlin sounded a loud, bitter laugh. As soon as he reached his apartment, he threw his parcels of food onto the kitchen counter and sat down to write a furious answer.

Dear Crook:

That’s it? That’s the great secret at the end of all this? To dominate a person, all you have to do is stare between his eyes? For this your dupes pay (counting the first $29.95) 2,029.45?

You dirty son of a bitch, don’t think I’m going to take this lying down. I intend to report you to every authority I can find.

Your nemesis,

Victor Devlin

But the fact was that when his indignation had had time to subside, Devlin was left only with the kind of disgust that saps the will, and he did nothing to carry out his threat. His life proceeded as before. At work he was jollied along by his colleagues, and the boss rarely passed his desk without patting him on the shoulder, but when it came to staff conferences, his proposals—including that for an exciting new marketing procedure on which he had been laboring for months—were politely, even affectionately tabled.

He failed to encounter the attractive dog-owner on many consecutive visits to the deli. He went to dinner once with a woman from the accounting department of his firm. All she talked about was her own divorce, and continued to be oblivious to his efforts to compare notes on something at which he had had much experience. At the restaurant door she shook his hand, saying, “Thanks, Dick. Next time it’s my treat,” and caught her own cab.

His luck changed, one evening when he stopped off at the deli to buy cornflakes for the next breakfast. He was standing before the dairy case, trying to remember the expiration date on the carton of milk at home, when he saw
her
reflection in the glass door. He eagerly spun around.

“Hi!”

“Do I know you?” She was dubious but not quite hostile.

“You buy cooked chicken for your dog.”

She nodded judiciously. “I’ve certainly done that in my day.”

“I’ve been looking for you for some time,” Devlin said with some urgency.

“Why in the world?”

The fact had to be accepted that she had no memory of him whatever. Suddenly he was desperate enough to try anything nonviolent. He stared at an imaginary spot on her forehead, just above the nose, midway between her eyes. “You don’t recognize me?”

For an instant she seemed to tremble slightly. Then she said, with animation, “Of course! You’re the best-dressed guy who comes in here. Those fabulous paisley ties, and the great belts!”

He brought his eyes down to hers. It was remarkable to have one’s belt noticed, let alone admired. “Thank you. I’ve been thinking about that chicken. They charge an awful lot for it here. Your savings would be enormous it you bought it fresh at the supermarket and just boiled it up, and probably better for the dog anyhow.”

“What a great idea!”

“If you’ve got a minute, we could go there right now.” He assumed she was aware that the store was just around the corner.

She smiled. “If
you
have the time, I’d really be grateful for your company. Those places make my head spin: too many colors, too many choices.” Her voice was as silken as her jacket, and obviously she was prosperous, to speak so cavalierly of supermarkets. However, it was clear that he had assumed authority.

They had almost reached the door when a tall young man loped through it and thrust a huge pistol at the clerk nearest the cash register. Though as yet the gunman had ignored the half-dozen customers and the two remaining deli workers, all froze in position as if so ordered. But in Devlin’s case this was true for less than a second, after which he stepped near the would-be robber, spoke sharply to him, and when the man turned malevolently, stared between his fierce eyes.

Now it was the gunman who froze. Devlin put out a hand. “Give me that.”

The other docilely, politely, surrendered the weapon, butt-first.

“Now, you,” Devlin said to the ashen clerk at the register, gesturing at the front window with the gunbarrel. “See those cops in the car in front of the drugstore? Go to the door and yell at them. Quicker than dialing nine-eleven.”

When this had been done and Devlin saw one of the officers leave the vehicle, he gave the pistol to the clerk. “I’ve got an appointment. If he moves, pull the trigger.” Even so, the deli employee, a thin, graying man, stayed frightened. Devlin therefore stared between his eyes and said, “You can do it. He’s unarmed now. He’s nothing.”

The clerk grinned cockily. “Sure.” He brandished the weapon at the criminal. “Hit the desk, face down, and spread ’em.”

Devlin and the young woman walked to the nearby supermarket, just outside the entrance to which she stopped and said, in a certain awe, “
That
was impressive. I know you took it in your stride, but
I
can’t. I’m still shaking. Are you some kind of detective? How in the world—?”

Devlin had impressed himself, insofar as he believed the incident happened in fact and not in a waking dream. “I don’t know,” he said with genuine modesty. “I just had an idea, and it worked. Come on, let’s find that chicken.”

Miranda turned out to have an executive position in the advertising department of a major television network. Her marvelous body came from nature: like him, she hated exercise for its own sake though would swim some, when the spirit moved, in the pool at her weekend house, or bike over to see the new ducklings on the town pond. They also shared a preference for Indian food over the cuisines from farther East. Neither liked horror films; gaudy running shoes; any kind of pasta but the standard three: spaghetti, macaroni, noodles; and rude drivers. Both enjoyed the British convention of afternoon tea as a light meal; going without socks in the country; privately deriding those who used the word “graduated” without an accompanying “from”; and listening to vintage jazz on ten-inch 78’s of the late 1920’s, recorded on only one side. Actually, these tastes were originally Devlin’s. Whether or not Miranda would have shared them without special preparation was probably not important. What mattered is that she could be counted on to agree with him on every opinion and taste. This situation was all the more gratifying in that she was otherwise a dominant person, successful in her career, beautiful, and even more prosperous than he was aware until after they had lived together for a while at her midtown duplex and decided to get married: she was the only child of an investment banker who had close links to the current Administration.

Devlin had yet to meet his prospective father-in-law, who was abroad at the moment, advising the Chinese on the free market, but he was anxious to try on this powerful individual the technique of H. Krafft. If it was effective on the likes of Virgil C. Harrelson, with his access to the White House... But Devlin tried to restrain himself from too extravagant projections. Life was going fabulously well as things stood. He had certainly used the technique to good advantage at his company, where staff conferences now went as he wanted them to. His marketing system had been instituted and though the early results were disappointing, putting the firm a good four points behind their chief competitor, nobody whose eyes he had stared between blamed him, including the head of the department, who had in fact been asked to resign, whereas Devlin had got himself elevated to the newly created post of special assistant to the CEO, a place of the most power conjoined with the least responsibility, much preferable to that of the conspicuous chief executive, who could too easily be made a target by press and government snoops and disgruntled stockholders.

The Krafft technique was successful in all areas of life, e.g., getting the best restaurant tables without enriching maître d’s; nonviolently subduing the pugnacious maniacs encountered from time to time on city sidewalks; winning political arguments with dinner-party zealots; inducing purveyors of luxury goods such as high-performance motorcars, custom-made clothing, and vintage portables to offer large discounts. Of course it could not be used by telephone, fax, or email. One’s living presence was required. And Devlin discovered another limitation on the windy day when some foreign matter was blown into his left eye, which subsequently he could not keep open. That the waiting room of the eye clinic was jammed with fellow sufferers meant little to him until he tried to dominate the receptionist with the Krafft stare.

“I’ll go first,” said he, his one functional eye focused between her two.

The woman snorted. “You
got
to be kidding.”

He waited three hours, but learned a valuable lesson: on windy days he henceforth wore sunglasses, even it the sky was overcast, removing them when the Krafft technique was required, for to be efficacious the stare had to employ both eyes with maximum intensity. It was as if drilling a hole through the frontal bone and penetrating the soft tissue of the brain, not a pretty thing to visualize for someone as squeamish as Devlin, but he forced himself to disregard unattractive matters and take pleasure in the evidence that the effects seemed permanent.

Miranda continued to regard him as exemplary even after, developing a new way of fireplace cookery, he burned down a wing of her house. At work, each of his policies was proving worse than the last, bringing the firm ever nearer ruination. Yet, while others were fired, his salary kept rising. The irony was that only now did he at last understand why, throughout his life until the discovery of the Krafft technique, other people had not taken him as seriously as he would have liked. It was simply because his ideas were rotten. But it would be asking too much of any successful human being to stop doing that from which his success came, just because it could not be called honorable, else many celebrated professions would provide a living for few. And there was no law against staring between someone else’s eyes.

He did wonder why the technique was not more widely known, and for that matter, why H. Krafft had not made more of a mark on the world—unless of course he discreetly
had
done so, as in Devlin’s own case. Tyrannical leaders of many kinds, from political despots to the robber barons of industry, were often said to have an almost hypnotic influence on their underlings. There had been people who professed to hate Hitler but were helplessly mesmerized by his presence. Perhaps Krafft had had more pupils than one might think from the apparent modesty of his business. But that was unlikely. Why would he have remained so obscure if his technique had been used by others to conquer countries and make billions?

It seemed more probable that many other people, in fact just about everybody who did extremely well in life, had discovered Krafft’s trick, or some variant of it, on their own... Yet Devlin had been face to face with a few persons of power—had shaken the hand of a senator whose name was a household word, given some papers for signature to a noted publishing magnate, negotiated with a famous general whom his firm paid to endorse their products—and had never seen any of them stare between his eyes. But then he had already been in a subservient position with all and furthermore had behaved so obsequiously that further domination would have been a waste for men whose time was in such demand. The real test would be to observe how they acted toward those who resisted them. But surely the defiant were few up there on the heights, and were dealt with on lower levels by junior dominators. What complicated the whole business was that rebels also often dominated others, beginning with their own natural constituencies, the allegedly disenfranchised of whichever area of life was represented, and if successful went on to establish masteries at least as absolute as those they replaced.

But before very long it occurred to Devlin that to be truly dominant was to become so habituated to the exercise of power as to forget about how it was acquired: one should rule as it there were no alternative. With this understanding he became secure—except in one minor area. The Krafft stare had no effect on Miranda’s dog, the female Sheltie who had in effect, with its diet of cooked chicken, brought them together. There was a choice of reasons why the technique did not work on Georgette. It was hard to arrest the animal’s mobile face long enough to stare between its eyes, short of seizing its snout, which Devlin was reluctant to do since the toothy, nervous creature disliked him to begin with. Then he had heard somewhere that Mace, which will repel a 200-pound mugger, is ineffective against dogs because the latter have no tear glands. Perhaps something else was lacking in canines that kept them immune to the stare: Devlin liked to think it was an incapacity to aspire to that which was beyond basic animal needs. In a word, Georgette was not human, despite Miranda’s conviction that it was. But of course he could not produce such evidence without revealing the source of his own power, without which, he now realized, he had no special value to anyone. It was perversely gratifying to him to reflect on his low opinion of himself, as if looking down in derision upon an impotent stranger.

Though exercising power over others so easily nowadays, he had not yet grown tired of doing so. He could have afforded to travel exclusively by limo, but with such a mode of transport there was only the driver to dominate. Thus he frequented public carriers and taxis when they were scarce, at rainy rush hours, for the pleasure of reducing otherwise aggressive, even hostile people to toadies who made way for him, holding doors and smirking. He began to yearn to go into politics and was only waiting for the first face-to-face meeting with his father-in-law. Meanwhile, by acquiescing in his wishes in all matters, Miranda had begun to bore him, and he frequented other women, some of whom he would allow to show a stimulating resistance before being subdued at a moment of his choice. Among his conquests was a young movie star often in the news, to whose presence he made his way at a premiere party and, after kraffting her bodyguards, put her under his power by staring between her famous emerald-green eyes. He also kraffted the hovering gossip columnists, lest news of his latest score become an item, with possible adverse effect on his political ambitions.