The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter
A novella in 8 episodes. Episode 2: Headshot
“She lives on her computer, you know. Maybe that’s where she went.”
The experiment continues!
Last week, I posted the first episode of my novella, The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter, a thriller about lost TV shows, missing friends, and flyover small towns. The response so far has been small in number, perhaps, but what readers have told me has been quite positive. It appears I may be fated to a be a cult favorite. I’ll take it!
Episodes will be released every Thursday over the next eight weeks, all leading up to the thrilling SEASON FINALE! Episodes one and two will be free. The rest will be available for paid subscribers, all of whom are extremely cool and smell good. Subscribe to follow along!
Also, each Sunday over the serialization window, I’ll be writing about books and TV. Last week, I wrote about The Rehearsal and the avant-garde British novel that seems to anticipate it. I’m quite excited about this, actually—it’ll give me the chance to read and write about some books that have tarried on my shelves for far too long.
Enjoy!
Previously, on The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter . . .
Emma received a mysterious message from Melinda. When she went to her apartment, she was accosted by a strange presence—The Figure. When her boss Dorothy pressed her on what happened between her and Melinda, Emma said she had played a trick on Melinda—one she had never told anyone else about . . .
Episode 2: Headshot
Excerpt from The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter by Melinda Midge:
When he was ten years old, Paul Gass had an experience. Was the experience mystical? Supernatural? Irrational? He would spend his life trying to answer that question.
Paul was playing in the park with his older brother, Jason. The usual: jumping off swings, climbing up slides, digging up worms. Then: Paul was struck with a vision. Jason, in the parking lot. A car, swerving toward him. Jason, struck.
Paul, at the time, did not think of this as a vision or any other adjacent experience. He thought it had really happened, that his brother had been struck by a car, that he would be, from now on, an only child. He leapt off the swing and ran to the parking lot. But Jason was not splayed on the asphalt. He stood, at the edge of the parking lot.
Paul called out Jason’s name, his voice cracking. Jason turned, wondering why Paul was acting so weird. And just as he did, a car sped through the parking lot, tires squealing. The same car Paul had seen in his vision, striking Jason.
Only Jason was not struck. He remained standing at the parking lot’s edge, wondering what was up with his brother.
Was Paul’s vision a glimpse of the future, one that enabled him to prevent it from happening? Granted him, perhaps, by a benevolent deity that Paul, even at the age of ten, didn’t really believe in? Was his glimpse not of the future, but of some other reality where his brother did get struck by a car? Was that glimpse granted by, perhaps, some other version of himself?
He never arrived at a satisfying answer. Instead, his questioning informed the television show he created decades later, MindShifter.
In one of the few genuinely interesting creative decisions he’s made over his career, Gass centered MindShifter around, not a young boy with special abilities, but a young girl, identical to his age when he experienced the vision. Why a girl rather than a boy? Gass has never given an adequate answer in any of his interviews. It is likely that, being a man of limited intelligence and talent, he doesn’t know himself. But it was, it must be said, a masterstroke, one that elevated MindShifter from a lesser fate as yet another instance of compensatory male wish fulfillment.
Young Eliza Danvers is the titular mindshifter. Her brain, having made some inexplicable evolutionary leap, possesses a trait known as quantum cognition. This allows her brain to perceive—to shift—between different quantum realities, like cards in a deck. Her ability has been nurtured by Dr. Delano Rathbone, researcher for a secretive, or perhaps simply obscure, governmental outfit called the Department of Ontological Inquiry. To keep DOI from losing its funding, Rathbone suggests a practical application. Pair a government agent with the DOI to make use of Eliza’s mindshifting abilities, as a kind of investigative consultant. FBI agent Thomas Trammer gets the assignment, though he is highly skeptical of Eliza’s supposed abilities. But he comes around when, in the pilot, Eliza helps locate the runaway daughter of a diplomat just before a teenage biker gang can mistreat her.
(Teen bikers in the year of 2000? Gass, as ever, remained hopelessly dated in his cultural references. But the anachronism comes off as charming rather than distracting. Chalk that up to the actors elevating the material to greater heights than it had any right to.)
The pattern was set. Each episode, Eliza, Agent Trammer, and Dr. Rathbone would investigate some mystery, with Eliza’s mindshifting abilities sparking a breakthrough in the third act. Competent storytelling, with above-average acting, and below-average production values. This was a syndicated show, rather than a network one, which necessitated the designers and special effects team to stretch their meager budget further than physically possible. The clearance section from Ace Hardware never looked so good.
All the pieces were in place for a modest success. Three or four seasons, maybe. Licensing deals in former Soviet satellite states. Actors appearing at C-tier cons to sign autographs.
Then:
tragedy.
Planes and buildings.
Bodies falling.
And among them, one Harold Lieber of Los Angeles, better known to the few fans of MindShifter as Dr. Rathbone. Aboard the plane that had left from Newark. Returning to the coast after a press junket in advance of the second season premiere, which would never air. Its secrets unrevealed.
Did Gass experience a vision of it too, same as when he was ten years old?
Or had he known about it in advance? Had he, in some manner, at a certain level of remove, played a role in bringing it about?
Emma sat before the camera. Looked into its eye, all pupil and no white. Occupying the position Melinda should have occupied. Speaking the words she should have spoken. Unless she was here, now, controlling all of this? Emma her puppet, Melinda pulling the strings from some unreachable height, causing her jaw to move and her arms to gesticulate?
Was she even speaking in her own voice?
Emma had told Dorothy what she had done. The trick she had played on Melinda in high school. And Dorothy did not become mad, or not exactly. If she did, she kept it to herself. Instead, she did what she did best. She did her job.
Emma needed to tell the story, the story she had just told to Dorothy, to the camera. To get it on tape, for possible use in the Fan Files episode. Who knows, probably not, but better to have it on hand and not end up needing it, than to need it and not have it.
Emma knew that to step out from behind the camera and place yourself before it, beheld by its whiteless eye, was to give up all control. Cede it to the producers, the editors, to do with as they saw fit. And she feared losing control. Losing her position in the hierarchy. But Dorothy asked it of her. Saying no to her would have guaranteed losing her job. Say yes, give her what she asked, and perhaps something could still be salvaged from this crumbling edifice.
“Melinda and I were friends. Best friends. The basis of our friendship was a TV show. MindShfiter. Every week, I came over to her house to watch it. She was the bigger fan. The real fan, she would say. She had all these ideas about what the show meant, where it was going. She got on the internet and discussed it with other fans. I had never been on the internet before. I didn’t have a computer in my home. But I liked the show, especially Eliza. I wanted to be like her. I wanted to be her.
“When the accident—no, when the tragedy happened, Melinda went crazy. She was on the computer all day. She tried to tell me what was going on, but I didn’t understand what she was saying. I wanted to move on to something else, some other show, but she wouldn’t budge. I didn’t have any other friends, so I felt like I was losing the only friend I had.
“One day at school, after Melinda left me alone in the cafeteria, a group of girls approached me. Popular girls. Girls I could never be friends with. They asked me what was going on with Melinda. Just some show, I said, trying to brush them off. But they wanted to hear more, so I explained as best I could. About MiindShifter, about the actor who died on 9/11, about Eliza. Sounds like you’re a good friend, and she’s not, the girls said. I said nothing. Sounds like Melinda needs to learn a lesson, they said. If you were our friend, we could help you teach her one.
“So they came up with a plan, and I set it into motion.
“Two weeks later, Melinda showed up, alone, at the Penguin Point on Detroit Street. She ordered a small soda, as instructed, and sat in the back corner. She waited, and waited, and waited. She was waiting for none other than Chloe Rachel Mann, the young actress who played Eliza on MindShifter. Chloe had set up an anonymous account on the message boards Melinda frequented. She’d become enamored with Melinda’s theories, saying that she understood the show better than anyone else. So well, in fact, that Eliza believed she could entrust Melinda with some highly sensitive information, about what had really happened to Harold Lieber. Why he was really on that plane. But not online. It had to be in person. She wanted to come out to Indiana, where Melinda lived. Her mom would take her. What she had to give Melinda, it had to be in person.
“Outlandish, yes. A child actress traveling to some Midwestern small town to meet some fan. But Melinda believed it. All of it. I made sure of that.
“Now Melinda was here, at the designated location, waiting for Chloe Rachel Mann to appear. Only to see me, Emma Henig, standing outside the Penguin Point. Reaching into my bag, taking out a photo, and holding it against the window for Melinda to see. A headshot, the sort actresses use. A headshot of Chloe Rachel Mann.
“I started laughing, silently, on the other side of the window. Melinda’s face twisted, furious. She stood and left the Penguin Point, leaving her soda at the table. In the parking lot, a car full of the popular girls were laughing at her, too. She turned and saw me coming around the restaurant. I held the headshot in front of my face like a mask. Melinda ran off. We never watched MindShifter again.”
Telling the story from beginning to end, going into greater detail than she ever had with anyone else, even herself, Emma had the sense she was a criminal confessing to some great crime, and Dorothy was the judge who would decide her fate. Yet when she finished, Dorothy simply gave a nod to the cameraman, who stopped recording. “Alright,” she said.
Had that happened? Had Emma even said anything? If she had, surely some consequence would carry over now that she said all of it. Yet the room was unchanged.
Or perhaps not. After Dorothy showed the cameraman out of the room, she went over to the dresser. She opened a drawer and took out a small briefcase. Its appearance charged the room with significance, even menace. As if Dorothy were about to open it and take out a revolver. When she did open it, though, and took out what was contained therein, it proved not to be a gun. It was far more consequential than that.
It was a videotape. A VHS cassette, wound with magnetic tape that awaited a VCR to decipher it. Such a crudely physical piece of technology in this age of wifi and streaming. And that very crudeness imbued it with a totemic holiness. A relic from a lost civilization. The land of Mu at the bottom of the sea.
“Is that it?” Emma said. Dorothy nodded. Leaving the truth unspoken. This was “Zero Hour,” the lost episode of MindShifter. The relic Melinda had sought since she was a teenager. And Emma sat in its presence, arriving here seemingly without effort. She looked over her shoulder, as if she expected Melinda to appear at that moment, walk through the door and claim “Zero Hour” as her rightful property. Yet the door remained unopened.
Dorothy returned the videotape to the bag, placed it back in the drawer. She said to Emma, “Where do we look for her?” Emma said, “Home.”
Melinda’s home had been a refuge for Emma. Emma had grown up in a small apartment with a single mother, where they constantly stepped on each other’s toes during simple trips to the bathroom. But Melinda’s house was expansive. Two stories, and a finished basement. Melinda and her mother each had their own rooms. Her father had a study. There was a room on the second floor that served some vague purpose, storage or some such. An extra room. The notion struck young Emma as impossibly luxurious.
Dorothy drove the rental car to the Midge home. She even knocked on the door, as if she were chaperoning Emma for an afternoon at the roller rink.
Melinda’s mother opened the door. Her name was Janet, as she had always insisted Emma call her. “Hello, Janet,” Emma said. Janet toggled back and forth between the two women on her porch, one unfamiliar and the other long absent. “Come in, come in,” she said.
She invited Emma and Dorothy to come sit in the living room. She made them coffee. She loved playing hostess. Those afternoons Emma had come here to watch MindShifter with Melinda, Janet had always delighted in catching up and fetching them snacks. For her own sake, as she was naturally extroverted, and hopefully for the sake of her daughter as well, whose solitary nature worried her. Perhaps if she had known that Melinda’s friendship with Emma would result in Melinda retreating fully into her own private world, Janet never would have welcomed Emma into her home.
Emma tried, and failed, to explain what had happened at Melinda’s apartment earlier that day. She stopped, she started, she stammered. At her unexplained mention of police, Janet grew extremely concerned that Melinda was in serious trouble.
Dorothy intervened. She streamlined, she massaged. She told Janet that they had plans to interview Melinda for a television project, but when they arrived at her place, she was nowhere to be found. No mention of the police or The Figure. Her professionalism soothed Janet.
“We’re wondering if you might know where Melinda is?” said Dorothy. She did not glance at Emma. She did not need to. Emma knew she was teaching her a lesson, showing her how to calm subjects. Perhaps she could learn how to do that herself.
“If she’s not at her place, I couldn’t really say where she is,” said Janet. “She lives on her computer, you know. Maybe that’s where she went.” Dorothy said, “The computer?” Janet said, “You know,” then made a gesture that involved pinching her fingers and yanking her arm, as if she were unclogging a drain, accompanied by a sucking sound she made rather deftly with her lips. Dorothy didn’t know how to respond.
Dorothy said, “Does she have any friends she sees?” Janet said, “All her friends are on that computer.” She glanced at Emma as she said this, her expression one Emma couldn’t read. Dorothy said, “Maybe she went to visit one of her computer friends. Do you know where any of them live?”
“They live on their own computers!” said Janet.
Dorothy was hitting a wall. She looked at Emma and held out her hand. Did she want Emma to take her hand? Stroll through the living room like bride and groom? Dorothy’s fingers twitched, beckoning. Emma raised her hand, extended it slowly towards Dorothy’s. But when Dorothy saw her hand was empty, she whispered something sharply. Emma couldn’t make it out. She looked at Dorothy’s lips as Dorothy repeated herself. “Phone,” she said.
Emma reached into her pocket, retrieved her phone, and placed it in Dorothy’s impatient hand. Dorothy swiped at Melinda’s message from his morning: p0pcorrn. This morning: it felt like another life.
Dorothy showed the message to Janet, explaining it was from Melinda. “Do you know what this means?”
Janet stared at it for a full moment, her scrutiny giving Emma a brief hope that she might be able to decipher it. But she only crimped her lip, shook her head, and said, “I never know what any of this means.” She said to Emma, “Do you know? You were the only one who understood what she went on about.”
“I’m sorry,” Emma said.
Emma and Janet lowered their heads as if they were synchronized animatronics. Dorothy glanced at the two of them. First Janet, then Emma. She said to Janet, “What did Emma understand about Melinda, that no one else didn’t?”
Janet said, “The two of them watching that TV. Watching that show. When it was over, Melinda talked Emma’s ear off about it. I never understood a word of it. I don’t know that you did, either,” she said to Emma, “but the way you listened to her made Melinda feel you understood everything she said.”
“Emma is a good listener,” said Dorothy. “It must have been hard after their disagreement. Melinda didn’t have anyone who understood her.”
Emma’s eyes went wide. Her head shook. She tried to speak, tried to dissuade Dorothy from saying anything more, but her lips wouldn’t open and the words were trapped in her mouth.
“Disagreement?” Janet said. Now Dorothy’s words were trapped in her mouth. She glanced at Emma and saw the look of danger in her eyes. Dorothy realizing what she had done.
Janet turned to Emma. Anger flickering in her eyes. “What did you do?” she said. “You two, I thought you just–you grew apart. I always worried you would outgrow her. But you did something, didn’t you? You hurt her. You did. I know it’s hard to tell she has feelings, but she does. You should have known that. You! Should have!”
Emma managed to say, “I’m sorry.” Janet said, “And now you can’t find her? Can’t make your little movie?”
Dorothy, redirecting, said, “We’re just concerned for Melinda’s safety. The–the police are involved. When we went to the apartment, Melinda wasn’t there. There was something else, though. Emma got into an altercation with someone. Knocked her to the ground.” Dorothy paused, giving Janet the opportunity to ask if Emma was alright. She did not take it. Dorothy said, “We want to make sure Melinda is alright, too. Make sure she’s not right.”
Imply that her daughter may be in danger as a means of getting her to cooperate. An effective play for gaining the confidence of subjects. Emma had witnessed Dorothy deploy it before, to great effect. But not only did it not work now–it backfired.
“She’s not hurt? You hurt her. You hurt me. I liked you too! You were my friend! You were the—the—” She steeled herself to say it. “You were the daughter I wished I had!”
None of them knew what to say after that. Not even Dorothy, whose job was managing emotional crises such as this one. Each of them sat in silence, unable to meet the others’ eyes. Waiting for it to end.
The silence extended into the drive back to the hotel. It was broken only once, when Dorothy said, “I’m sorry.” She said it genuinely, full of feeling, like an actor hitting her mark.
Emma retreated to her room. She sat on the bed and opened her laptop.
She summoned Melinda’s YouTube page. All of the videos she had posted over the years, dozens of them. Some of them mini-documentaries of their own, consolidating rumor and information from countless different sources. Episode analyses. Looser, more informal front-facing videos, where Melinda ranted charmingly about the latest developments in the MindShifter Cinematic Universe. The realm she lorded over. Most other internet personalities were adept at one or the other type of video, analytical or conversational, theory or personality. Yet Melinda was preternaturally skilled at both. Monetizing engagement. Linking back to her website, where she sold her self-published books, of which The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter was the shining example. She was cagey with numbers, but throughout their correspondence of the last few months, convincing her to appear on Fan Files, Melinda had produced receipts showing The Guide had sold more than 40,000 copies, and counting. Huge numbers for a one-woman operation. The long tail flexing and snapping.
She was so conventional compared to Melinda. Her ideal of success was secondhand, outdated. Move to city, ascend ladder, receive title in end credits. A Xerox from the era of Nielsen ratings and print subscriptions. Melinda trailblazed vast swathes of digital acreage, claiming the wilderness for herself. Not asking for permission or approval. Earning smaller figures on paper, perhaps, than more straightforwardly successful creatives. Your filmmakers, your actresses, walking through the doors held open by their wealthy, influential parents. Yet Melinda possessed heat. Cache. Attracting the attention of producers like Dorothy. All while staying in the nowhere Indiana town that Emma had fled in pursuit of the success she believed she deserved.
The trick she had played on Melinda, impersonating Chloe Rachel Mann, was an escape hatch. A way to force herself from Melinda’s abrasive personality and achieve renown, popularity, mainstream recognition. At the level of high school, and then the world. Yet such renown had diminished drastically since the epochally distant fall of 2001, while niche popularity had only grown. And niches were Melinda’s native habitat.
Take her latest video, posted two weeks ago. Nothing special, six minutes long, Melinda speaking to the camera about James Evan Pace guest-starring on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Yet it had racked up almost 400K views. More than a thousand comments appended to it. Vast quantities of personalized attention, directed squarely at Melinda. Surely she earned more from monetization than Emma did with her NowPlay salary. Money and fame.
Emma had read all of the comments, as she always did with Melinda’s videos. Compelled by jealousy or masochism or some other emotional disorder that could only be detected by a tier of psychotherapy she couldn’t afford. So when she saw that another comment had been made, and that it had been made today, at 6:02am, she knew it was meant for her.
p0pcorrn87: the mask doesnt fit you you fuckin bitch