Videodrome

by Jack Martin

  When Max heard the VIDEODROME cassette pop up, he whirled and leaped across the carpet to stop her.

  “Don’t touch that!”

  His fingers dug into her arm, spun her around.

  Her face was deceptively innocent. He could almost believe she did not know what she was doing.

  He slapped her across the mouth. A trickle of blood ran from her lip.

  The impact splayed her hair to one side, masking her features. He noticed that there was a streak in the hair. He hadn’t seen it before. When the hair fell back into place, he saw that it was not Bridey. It was Nicki, Nicki! How had she gotten in here?

  He raised his hand, angled it like a knife and slapped her again, harder.

  Her hair covered her face, then fell away. It was Bridey, after all.

  Then he was simply standing there again, holding her by the arm.

  She tossed her hair back from her forehead.

  “Jesus, Max. You scared me. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  He squinted at her until the strobing stopped.

  “I dunno,” he said, stunned. He scratched at his belly. “I—I think I’m gettin’ a rash or somethin’.”

  Bridey played dumb. “What?”

  He was ashamed by her limitless capacity for forgiveness. “Are you all right? Bridey, I’m s—I didn’t mean to hit you.” He released her arm, embarrassed. What could he say, do to explain?

  “Hit me?” Her clear eyes searched his face solicitously. “You didn’t hit me.” She said it calmly, as if for her it hadn’t happened, as if she hadn’t noticed.

  It was true. There was no blood on her mouth. She had had no chance to wipe it off. He had been watching.

  He could trust his own eyes, couldn’t he?

  He could trust Bridey.

  “No,” he agreed quickly, “no, no! I know I didn’t hit you. I . . .” He breathed heavily, fighting for control. He felt like a fool.

  She stood close.

  “You want me to stay here?” She started to touch his face.

  He drew back. “Uh . . .”

  “You look awful. Can I get you something?”

  She really didn’t know.

  He thought of the gun in the kitchen. He tried to imagine what he had been about to do with it. What he might do with it. Suddenly he was afraid. For Bridey.

  “No, uh—no, I’m just, uh . . .”

  His eyes roamed the familiar iconography of his living room, seeking something to settle on, a solid point of reference. All he could focus on was an old poster of the Apollo astronauts, a smaller photograph of the moon clipped to the center. Now it seemed to be a doorway to the uncharted regions of an alien landscape.

  “Uh . . . I’m exhausted.” He threw himself on her mercy. He affected a strained laugh. “I was in a deep sleep when you knocked. I—I guess I’m still not out of it.”

  She nodded sympathetically.

  He led her to the door. “I’ll remember to set the timer. Don’t worry.”

  “If you’re sure,” she said uncertainly.

  “I’m sure.” He wanted her out of there. Now.

  “Are you sure.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Bridey. Tomorrow.”

  He opened the door for her.

  She hung back, her brow troubled. “Max, that other cassette is from the office of Brian O’Blivion. I promised I’d hand-deliver it directly to you.” She touched his cheek. “Will you call me if you need me?”

  “Yeah.”

  He closed and locked the door after her. He leaned there. He made himself take deep, regular breaths. Until everything. Was. All right.

  Now, then . . .

  The cassettes she had brought. They were on top of the TV.

  He lurched to the set. His belly still itched—what he had told Bridey was true. He was getting some kind of rash. But there was no time to worry about that now.

  One cassette was his wake-up message, as she had said. He grabbed the other one, opened it—

  And saw it move in his hand.

  His eyes widened in horror as the black plastic softened and quivered on his palm. The take-up reel melted and sagged, its edges flowing into a new shape. It was breathing.

  He dropped it.

  This isn’t happening!

  It lay there on the carpet, inanimate object that it was.

  See?

  Oh, man, you must have tied one on last night . . .

  He probed it with the toe of his shoe.

  It was dead, all right. Okay? A piece of inert, injection-molded plastic loaded with ninety minutes of half-inch iron oxide videotape. That was all.

  He snickered and shook his head, and stooped to pick it up.

  The timer on his playback deck read 10:44 as he inserted the cassette. With no further hesitation he turned the set on and started the tape.

  An image blipped on.

  Standard color bars filled the screen from top to bottom. The bars jittered into alignment, then disappeared to be replaced by a medium-close shot of the Professor at his desk.

  Max turned up the volume and sat.

  It was the desk at the Cathode Ray Mission, no doubt about it. The stained glass, the tapestries . . .

  O’Blivion shuffled papers, set them aside, folded his hands and looked up, addressing the camera.

  “The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena. The VIDEODROME . . .”

  The Professor moistened his lips and twitched the sensitive antennae of his moustache.

  “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” he continued lecturing, though not discernibly from notes or cue cards. He was speaking his mind, and he was one with his words. “Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality and reality is less than television.”

  The way he put it, it sounded eminently logical. Or did it?

  “Love comes in at the eye. The eye is the window of the soul. And VIDEODROME . . .”

  He encircled his eyes with his fingers.

  “. . . is the ultimate spectacle.”

  Max laughed at this last pun.

  The television O’Blivion raised his eyebrows, as if taking notice.

  “Max . . . I’m so glad you came to me.” His voice sounded tired now, more confidential. “I’ve been through it all myself, you see.”

  What is this? wondered Max.

  How does he do it? How did he know I’d be sitting here . . . ?

  But of course. The tape was intended for me, wasn’t it? The pause, the shift in tone—it was a calculated guess. A perfectly accurate one, as it turns out. He’s a pro. Media Prophet, isn’t that what they call him? It’s a little spooky.

  Max heard his own voice ask, “What’s going on?”

  “Well,” said O’Blivion, “you have a nice little addiction going. You have to be careful now.”

  “Addiction?” said Max. “To what?”

  “Why, to the VIDEODROME signal, of course.” Perfect timing again. The ultimate in synchronicity. “They got you to start watching, they seduced you, and now you’re hooked.”

  “But how does it work?” Max wondered aloud. “What does it do?”

  “For those who have a natural propensity for its imagery, it’s a kind of bio-electronic heroin. Your brain has already become an electron gun. Your retinae have become video screens. Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you’re not careful, it will become total hallucination. You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world . . .”

  The television soundtrack jingled metallically.

  “The brain tumor is undoubtedly forming,” said O’Blivion, as a black-hooded figure dressed in chain mail entered the frame.

  “I had a brain tumor, and I had visions . . .”

  The hooded figure pinned one of O’Blivion’s hands to the desk and clamped irons around the wrist. The
Professor kept talking.

  “I believed that the visions caused the tumor and not the reverse . . .”

  His other hand was wrenched down and his wrists locked together.

  “I could feel the visions coalesce and become flesh,” he said, trying to get his message across while there was time, “uncontrollable flesh . . .”

  The executioner slipped behind the chair and produced a garrote, looped its wire around O’Blivion’s throat.

  “But when they removed the tumor,” he choked, his eyes fixed on the camera, on Max, “it was called . . . VIDEODROME!”

  The wire tightened, cutting into O’Blivion’s windpipe as it strangled him.

  “I . . . I was . . . VIDEODROME’s . . . first . . . victim!”

  O’Blivion succumbed and was dragged off his chair. Papers and pens scattered. His feet kicked in a death dance.

  Max stood, swaying unsteadily.

  “Who’s behind it?” he asked earnestly, asked it or thought it, he didn’t know which. As if he could still be heard. As if he could ever have been heard. But he had to know. “What do they want?”

  The hooded figure stepped into frame again, coiling the wire. Then the figure leaned into camera, taking O’Blivion’s place, and ripped off the hood.

  “I want you, Max. You.”

  It was Nicki Brand.

  “Come to me . . .”

  She advanced on the camera so that her face filled the entire nineteen-inch screen. She licked her lips.

  “Come to Nicki . . .”

  She began to twist her new earring, tugging at it just enough to hurt, enjoying the small pain.

  “Come on . . . ”

  Her enlarged face pressed out into the room in extreme close-up, all wet teeth and red cupid’s-bow lips. He heard the crackling lilt of her breathing in his ears as the speaker cone vibrated and stretched out to him, a living orifice.

  Max approached the set as if in a dream.

  He fell to his knees before her image.

  “Don’t make me wait . . . !”

  As he grasped the breathing sides of the set, her larger-than-life lips distended to meet his forehead, the glass of the tube melting and ballooning outward to touch his skin.

  He pressed his face into her face as the electron guns shot their images directly into his brain.

  The set throbbed like an animal in heat.

  Max’s eyes closed. He no longer needed them to see. Nicki Brand fired through his eyelids as though they were no longer there, a mere technicality. He licked the screen, the soft screen, distorting the plastic face of Nicki Brand as he strained toward the possibility of acceptance and release in her, caressing her, sinking deeper into the pores and pulsing veins, the wet membranes of her flesh. The mouth widened in response. Her teeth opened, revealing the glistening sea of her tongue, the video scan lines growing wider, separating horizontally and opening to receive him between their strobing, deeper and deeper into the swelling red lips, until he was totally engulfed by the darkness in her throat.

  “Come to me now. Please . . . oh, please . . . !”

  Chapter Eight

  “Where’s Harlan?”

  “Hi, Max! How are—?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Where is he? I called the lab but there’s no answer.”

  “I haven’t seen much of him. In fact, I haven’t seen him at all. Max, you’re wearing your shades again. That means you didn’t sleep right after I left. I’m sorry. Why don’t you let me put everything off till this afternoon? Go home, go back to bed, and I’ll come over at lunchtime to—”

  “I don’t need to sleep anymore, Bridey. All I do is have bad dreams. You positive you haven’t seen Harlan?”

  “Um, he might be up in studio VTR. Did you check there?”

  “I checked there.”

  Max spotted Moses’s fringe of curly hair above the crowd in the hallway and decided on the opposite direction.

  He turned back.

  “One more question.”

  “Anything, boss.”

  “Has Harlan been hallucinating lately?”

  Bridey flashed her dimples as though he had made a joke. “No, I don’t think so. Should he be?”

  “Yes,” said Max. “He should be.”

  Max opened the padlocks and let himself into the lab.

  The place smelled of oil and burned resin. As ever, nothing was in its place, if indeed there was a place for anything. On the main work surface an assortment of metric socket wrench fittings surrounded a skeletal chassis like silver mushrooms grown up overnight out of the dirty bench. It was all exactly as it had been when he last saw it. The lights were on.

  Harlan could not have gone far.

  Still, what if he did not show up?

  Max sat down at the video recorder, whipped off his dark glasses and fished the steno notebook out of his coat pocket. He leafed it open to the “VIDEODROME Transmission Pattern” page and propped it before him on the bench. The notes in Harlan’s scrawl remained all but indecipherable, as though set down in code to preclude Max’s direct access to the broadcasts without a technical go-between.

  He did manage to deduce a general pattern to the transmission times, which varied from day to day. Max projected the approximate hour of the next broadcast and set the automatic timer, then pressed the RECORD/DELAY button. Then he pushed away from the bench to ease his back.

  He ached all over. He would have to trust the timer; it was too long to wait.

  But what if he was off in his calculations? And what if the signal resumed evasive action today and Harlan did not return in time to track it? Shouldn’t he stay just in case? But he wouldn’t know how to lock onto it. Besides, he couldn’t allow his entire day, his life to revolve around a pirate transmission, even if—

  A voice behind him said, “Bridey told me you came in.”

  It was not the voice of his engineer. This one was huskier, more of the nose.

  Max had no time for it. He closed the notebook.

  “What are you doing down here, Max? We’ve got a board meeting upstairs. You should be there to defend yourself.”

  Max saw Moses’s elongated reflection in the dark glass of the monitor screen. The Executive Director rocked on his heels, hands nervously clinking coins in his pockets. His voice was flat, his tone guardedly confrontational. He did not attempt to come any closer. He had ventured onto someone else’s turf and knew it.

  “Oh?” said Max, pocketing the steno book. “Am I under attack?”

  “Damn right you are.” Moses was as humorless as at the most desultory of policy meetings. “I told Bridey to tell you we got trouble over this so-called lab—”

  “She never told me anything of the kind. You aren’t even supposed to know about it.”

  “—and what happens to you?” Moses rocked faster, savoring his point. “You don’t even show up at the deli for our off-the-record, let’s-save-our-asses meeting with Aubrey Reusch.”

  Max expected him to say, Now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch. But what exactly have you caught me at, Mose? he thought. Insuring that our station stays on the air? How would you have done that? Right—there’s no answer to that one. That’s why I’m the President of Civic TV and you’re not. I’m the one who had the guts to let Harlan do whatever was necessary to keep us afloat. Would you have voted your approval if I’d let you in on it? No. Of course not. And we’d all be peddling our programs on streetcorners by now. So back off.

  Moses was waiting for an apology at best, at least an explanation. Well, there was no time for any of that now.

  Max perused a stack of cassettes next to the recorder. They appeared to be dupes of the VIDEODROME transmissions. If so, they should not be left lying around. He closed his fingers around them.

  Then he had a sinking realization, and righteous anger welled up inside him.

  “What happened to Harlan? Did you fire him?”

  “Max . . .” Moses turned sad, taking the part of noble victim. “Suddenly I don’t k
now who I’m talking to. From what he tells me, you fired him. He’s not here because of you.”

  I should have seen it coming, thought Max. Now I’m finally on my own.

  Max wanted to get gone. But first he had to do something with the tapes. No telling what would happen to them now. There was a green plastic garbage bag hanging from a nail in the wall. He unhooked it and emptied it onto the floor. Paper towels, ends of wire, tissues, sandwich bags, yogurt containers, pencil shavings, lumps of solder like miniature splashes of cooled lava dumped out between the two men. Moses danced away from the detritus and pretended to be shocked. He played it to the limit. But his act was still kids’ stuff, a bore.

  “Okay, Moses. Out. I’ve gotta lock up.” Max shook out the bag and dropped the tapes into it.

  “You come upstairs with me and you talk to the boys.”

  The boys, thought Max. That’s what they are. He bagged the last tape and sidestepped the refuse. He took Moses by the arm and hauled him to the exit.

  “Not today, Moses. You handle it.”

  Max got him out, closed the door after them and set to refastening the three padlocks that he had left hanging from their steel loops.

  Moses yanked his elbow.

  “I’m your partner, Max. Don’t you push me around.”

  Max shrugged him off and returned to the locks. He was having trouble; his hands were shaking.

  Moses went for his elbow again.

  Instinctively Max resisted. He felt the other’s presence like a shadow behind him and imagined the locks clicking around his own wrists. It was not so far-fetched, was it?

  He ducked, crouched and spun around, bringing his white-knuckled fist up into Moses’s chin.

  The jaw and teeth snapped together like a clapboard.

  Moses staggered back. His eyes bulged, uncomprehending.

  Max recocked his fist and smashed him in the face again.

  Only a part of his brain took it seriously this time. The rest of him watched it happening. It was interesting. So realistic. That was the power of the subjective point-of-view. I could always tell drug real from real real, but video real is something else, he thought, as the rays of light in the hall outside the lab contracted into video lines, creating an image of old Moses going down for the count. Max stepped over him, being careful to glance down. He did not want to miss the dramatic shift in perspective.