Big Brother. It used to be...

Big Brother.

It used to be a name to conjure with. A name to paralyze the mind, freeze the soul. After Mr. George Orwell wrote about me in “1984,” it had a clang like prison doors closing. A rusty, barbed taste in the mouth like the wire around the farthest, coldest outpost of the Gulag.

My name. Say it again:

BIG BROTHER.

So what’s happening? The field of fear around me has unaccountably diminished. Something has begun to flutter in the region of my chest--a tic? The other day, a cat crossed the road in front of my bulletproof limousine and I didn’t run it over.

I must be sick. Hallucinating. Just now, to reassure myself, I dipped into Orwell’s book and read that I was taking Winston Smith to the Big Brothers of Greater Los Angeles Father’s Day Hero Round-Up today at Calamigos Ranch, 327 S. Latigo Canyon Road, Malibu, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

That can’t be right. Winston Smith? Wasn’t he the sniveling dissident I tortured into believing that two plus two is five? But the book says, instead, that Winston is a fatherless boy I’ve befriended. I listen to his troubles, take him to Dodgers games, steer him away from gangs and drugs, and--yes, this fits!--tutor him in math.

Yet it says here that I taught him two plus two is four, and that we’re well into algebra by now.

Impossible.

I read on: “During the action-packed day of hayrides, square dancing, games and Western barbecue (public admission is $20), ‘White Hat Awards’ will be presented to outstanding male role models, such as yourself.”

A white hat? Me?

Surely this can’t be what Orwell wrote, but the words seem to disintegrate and re-form in front of my eyes. And then I remember how he speculated that I might be just a facade manipulated by underlings, like the Wizard of Oz. I was only a name. Which means that if the meaning of the name changes. . . .

You think you have an identity crisis.

Too late. Everything is softening, thawing. What is this warm, sweet fluid trickling through my system? Can it be? Not blood or lymph, but milk, the milk . . . of human kindness?

Aauugh!

The strangest thing is that one sentence in the book hasn’t changed. The last one. It means just the opposite about Winston and me as it used to, yet the words are the same:

He loved Big Brother.