by Jack Martin
Moses looked up, his eyes strobing, and began crawling away toward a corner under the stairs.
It was getting pretty intense. Now there was blood, too. Max gave the image a parting kick in the side, in what he presumed was the general area representing the ribs, and closed his eyes to ring down the curtain on this episode.
When he opened them, Moses was cowering under the stairs but the video lines had dissipated.
The release of energy left Max more in control of himself. He succeeded in fastening the last of the locks and made ready to leave.
“You fucking maniac!” Moses screamed at the top of his lungs. “You asshole! You hit me! You hit me!”
Max hesitated.
Now this was certainly a new wrinkle in characterization. From pompous corporate executive to hysterical, groveling toady. Complete with smashed glasses and bloody nose. Was this projection the way he had always seen Moses subconsciously? It had to be. It was a creation of his own mind and no one else’s, wasn’t it?
Max sloughed the bag over his shoulder like a slightly fried Santa Claus and said benignly, “I didn’t hit you, Moses.” He was on his way up the stairs as the image of his partner continued crawling away to escape his terrible wrath. The tableau did not displease Max. It had a certain flavor of truth about it; in some respects it was right as rain. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “I didn’t hit you.”
His spirits lifted by the showdown, he let himself out the back door and followed the alley to his car.
He considered it a demonstration of his competency, proof of his ability to cope with the growing subreality of an intruding inscape. He could function effectively when required to do so. And, with any luck, gain from the experience and pass his wisdom on to others. The audience of Civic TV, his audience, could not in their wildest drug-induced fantasies imagine what was in store for them under his tutelage. Television fit for the eighties.
By the time he got to the Cathode Ray Mission, he began to see his problem as a kind of test.
“. . . As our players attempt to cross this bridge . . . and win a prize package worth five thousand dollars!”
Max’s attention was captured briefly by the effusions of a game show announcer. He located the voice. It was coming from a cubicle close to the stairs. Through an opening in one of the partitions, he saw a compressed black-and-white image worming on the picture tube of a taped-together TV set.
On the screen what appeared to be three oversized playing cards—a king, a queen and a jack—cavorted for the amusement of an unseen audience, as well as for a saucer-eyed bum in a misshapen overcoat and lumpy sweater who sat transfixed in his own viewing area. Momentarily diverted, Max’s eyes followed the antics of the red queen. But before he could see what she was up to, his visual access was blocked as a matron entered the cubicle and set a sweating glass of orange juice before the bum.
Max was jarred by the interruption. He blinked, remembering where he was and what he was here for, and repositioned himself on the staircase so that he could oversee as much as possible of the first floor.
The matron with her tray progressed along the aisle between the partitions, pausing to exchange words with a tall young woman in a black turtleneck sweater and white smock. The tall woman issued further instructions and, at last, veered off in the direction of the stairs.
Max rose to intercept her.
She did not glance up from her clipboard.
“Exciting,” said Max. He held out the cassette she had sent him. “Very lively.”
Bianca O’Blivion finally acknowledged him. Almost fearfully she took back the cassette and slipped it into her pocket.
“Careful. It bites,” he said.
He ascended the stairs with her. Though she kept her eyes straight ahead, he felt her disapproval. He adjusted the cuffs of his clean shirt.
“I dressed up,” he said, “and nobody noticed. That’s not very supportive.”
Bianca gave him only a cursory glance. “You’re looking very . . . brisk today.” The word seemed to give her some trouble. Her lips hardly moved.
Once again he gave up trying to win any points with her.
As they entered the privacy of the office, she turned to him with her full attention at last.
“So you’ve watched the cassette.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“It changed my life,” said Max sarcastically.
Bianca paced.
“I’m not surprised,” she said softly, not unsympathetically. “It’s dangerous, you know.”
Max pressed the topic. “Because your father admits he’s somehow involved with VIDEODROME?”
“More than that. It bites. Isn’t that what you said?” She assessed him, her penetrating eyes locking on him from behind her large glasses. “What kind of teeth do you think it has?”
Now he felt nailed to the floor, pinned in place for her detached, scientific observation. Like one of her subjects, patients, whatever they were, down below.
“Why don’t you tell me?” he suggested.
“You look very uncomfortable, Mr. Renn. You have the demeanor of a man who is hallucinating. Are you?”
“Is it obvious?”
“To me it is. Just like my father. Before the brain operation.”
“Oh, really? Just what was it that was wrong with him?”
“He’ll tell you all about it himself. But for now, I’m interested in your reaction to the tape. Father would be, too.”
“It triggered off a series of hallucinations, yes,” Max admitted. He massaged his temple. “Uh, I woke up with a headache.”
Bianca’s gaze probed deeper. “The first time ever?”
What did she want from him? At this point he had no choice but to play it her way. She—and her father—were holding most of the cards. He had come here for answers and it was clear that no information was going to be offered up gratis. He had to do it Mission-style. For the time being.
“No,” he said, “I’ve been hallucinating for a while.” So don’t give yourself too much credit, he thought. “Ever since . . .”
“What?”
She was using a clinical, non-directive approach to press him to it, to a realization that would not mean anything to him unless he arrived at it on his own, a prearranged epiphany, as it were, but an authentic revelation nonetheless.
“Since I first saw VIDEODROME,” he said.
Suddenly he wanted to sit down.
He waited for her to begin making notes on her clipboard.
“How did you come to be exposed to it?” she inquired neutrally, gathering data, keeping her distance.
“Pirate satellite dish,” he confessed. “A—an accident. I made some tapes.”
Bianca removed the Professor’s tape, the one Max had just returned, from her pocket and held it up like a specimen. “This is part of my own VIDEODROME collection.”
“But that tape was just your father sitting at his desk.” Was she deliberately trying to confuse him?
“The tone of the hallucination is determined by the tone of the tape’s imagery. But the VIDEODROME signal, the one that does the damage—it can be delivered under a test pattern, anything.”
“Damage?”
“Brain damage. The signal induces a brain tumor in the viewer. It’s the tumor that creates the hallucinations.”
A familiar theory. Only this time, hearing it from a second party, did the full weight of it sink in. Max’s blood pressure surged.
“And you let me watch it?”
“I expect them to come to me eventually. To hurt me.” The rigid, affected cadence of her voice faltered for the first time. “I thought it might be you. I thought you had taken the trouble to disguise yourself the first time you came here.” She drew a broken breath, filling her lungs and standing straighter than ever. “But now I realize you’re just another victim. Like Father was.”
She looked and sounded surprisingly fragile. Max controlled the instantaneous sympathy he fel
t for her now, held it in check for the moment along with the rage. “Where is your father? I—I think I’d better talk to him.”
Bianca placed a hand on the wall near the desk and pushed. Cracks of darkness, then light showed through in the shape of a vertical rectangle. A door.
So that was how the executioner got into the room, thought Max. On the tape. No, not an executioner—Nicki. But of course it had not really been Nicki. It had not really been anyone. Obviously not, if the Professor was waiting even now on the other side.
Bianca stood aside to allow Max to enter first. “He’s in there.”
The time to hesitate was through. He brushed past her and ducked under a piece of modern sculpture hanging from the wall. It was a stylized rendering of a human figure suspended in midair. Max recognized it in passing as a representation of a crucified man without the benefit of a cross for support.
“I’m afraid he’ll disappoint you,” said Bianca.
Max opened the door.
The light from the office extended unevenly onto the concrete floor beyond. He passed through a wide green door into a large, spartan room of rigorously pragmatic design. The concrete was softened by a few throw rugs here and there, but row upon row of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves suggested nothing so much as a medical or scientific library. The gray military paint added to the functional, high-tech effect.
Max came to the first shelf. It was packed not with books but with videocassettes, filed by date and subject. He examined the spine of one. The Influence of Cinematic Techniques on Dreams and Visions—Feb. 16, 1972.
Bianca joined him as he read the label.
“This is it,” she said. “This is all that’s left.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Brian O’Blivion died quietly on an operating table eleven months ago.”
He did not have the time or energy to challenge her. He accepted it at face value. She wasn’t lying, he was sure of it. She was too literal-minded a person to deceive directly. To mislead by omission, perhaps; but not to lie.
“The brain problem?” he asked.
“The VIDEODROME problem.” She considered him with what he took to be genuine regret. “You have it, too.”
“But he was on that panel show with me.”
“On tape. He made thousands of them, sometimes three or four a day. I keep him alive as best I can. He had so much to offer.”
Max was nonplused by the disparity between the distant, faintly melancholy expression etched onto her face and the body language of her brave, unswerving stance. She was a courageous young woman, and she was pulling it off. But the tension left its mark around her eyes and mouth.
“My father helped to create VIDEODROME. He saw it as the next phase in the evolution of man as a technological animal. When he realized what his partners were going to use it for, he tried to take it away from them. But they killed him. Quietly. At the end, he was convinced that public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh. He wasn’t afraid to let his body die.”
Max forced himself to breathe in, out, remaining calm. The air between them became grainy with dust as she moved between the stacks, removing one, two, three, four tapes from their ordained places. Beams of sunlight filtered down at the end of the row, through crosses outlined in the stained glass of the high arched windows which disclosed the room’s true nature.
“Tell me about my VIDEODROME problem,” he said.
She held the tapes out to him and bowed her head.
“My father knows much more about it than I do. Listen to him.”
Chapter Nine
“. . . I am my own brain surgeon. I shape my own environment, and thus my own perception of reality, and thus I operate my own nervous system. There is a sense, then, in which I am responsible for my own brain tumor. Did I not willingly expose myself to VIDEODROME? I did. The brain surgeon at work. But in this case I am more like a plastic surgeon because I am adding as well as taking away. Well, let me add more . . .”
Max could not get comfortable on his sofa.
O’Blivion was seated calmly at his desk, or so anyone would adjudge, hands folded solemnly as he delivered his monologue. But Max was finding it increasingly more difficult simply to sit and listen. He scratched his belly absently with growing discomfort.
The air was stale in his apartment. It made him nauseous. Or something was making him nauseous. His stomach wouldn’t settle down. Had he forgotten to eat? Probably. But the idea of food made him even sicker. He needed nourishment, but that which could be taken in by mouth just didn’t cut it anymore.
He lowered the volume of the TV.
He needed for something to happen. He needed to do something about his predicament. He needed actions. Words were after all only words; there was a definite limit to how far abstractions alone could take him.
He thought: We use words to try to come to terms with things for which there are no words. But one day, if we manage to get beyond symbols, maybe we won’t need words at all. Feelings that are thoughts, thoughts that become deeds. The living word. That’s all that really counts when the chips are down.
Or so it seemed to him.
Nothing was clear anymore.
He stopped the tape on the latest of O’Blivion’s lectures. The Professor was developing his thesis with convoluted, self-reflexive logic. Probably well worth my time, Max thought. What else have I got going? I’ll have a lot better handle on what’s happening once I’ve absorbed it all and made it a part of me.
Only not now. Not just now, okay? You know what I mean? I’ve got one mean itch, it won’t let up, and all the words in the world aren’t going to help me get rid of it.
He was sweating and trembling like a malaria sufferer. The rug felt thick and bumpy under his feet. It took him a ludicrously long time to get across the room.
He wondered if the motor centers were the first to go in such cases. VIDEODROME cases, if there was even such a thing. VD for short.
Reconsider the possibilities.
The old Professor might be pulling your leg, did you ever think of that? O’Blivion could be sitting in his office right now having the time of his life making these tapes for you, Max old boy. The perfect hoax. In the beginning you thought it might be a phonied-up head-trip, didn’t you? And his daughter is in on it, naturally. And Nicki Brand. Say these aren’t videotapes at all that you’re seeing; you’re getting a direct feed from the second floor of the Cathode Ray Mission. Plus they’ve got the apartment wired for two-way sound. And someone, probably Nicki, slipped you some kind of powerful timed-release mind-altering drug of the psychedelic persuasion so that your senses would exaggerate it all out of proportion.
Or, banality of banalities, you’ve been imagining or dreaming the whole thing in your—in my—own mind. At any rate harmless enough, so far. Have there been any really serious or significant consequences? No. Except for missing a lot of time at the station, nothing. Channel 83 is still broadcasting. The business hasn’t gone to hell. It was already halfway there, but Harlan and Raphe and Bridey and the others will hold it together just fine. Until I get back and straighten things out again.
My absence might even prove to be a blessing in disguise. For all I know our ratings may have doubled in the last few days. I wonder . . . ?
And so on and on in a similar vein.
Words, he thought. So many words. To what avail? I still hurt like one sorry son of a bitch and no words are going to change that.
And, so thinking, he picked up his gun, slung the holster over his shoulder and shuffled to the bathroom.
He had a numbing, mind-splitting headache, as if there were a small revolution going on inside his skull.
If that was true, then one thing was abundantly clear: he was losing.
Max drew a tub of water and fired up the old hydromassage which was clamped to the side at a crazy angle like a vintage outboard motor. The machine clanked away, feebly stirring the water into a pathetic semblance of a
whirlpool.
He stripped and watched the rising currents churn and eddy, the waters turning opaque, a crystal ball within the depths of which a misty portent might be about to assume form and shape. He stooped and regulated the speed of the mechanism. In the center of the tub the water swelled like expanding gelatin, mounding and hissing with aeration. He steered clear of it, shuddering.
You’re okay, he told himself, see? Really, now.
He faced the mirror over the sink for confirmation. But the small room was rapidly filling with steam. As he stared into it, the glass frosted over and the reversed image of his own face and body smeared into a formless cloud and disappeared.
The hell with it, he thought. I’m all right, you’re all right, we’re all all right. Just give us a few minutes here to unwind, to sink down into the soothing waters and be cleansed and revived. Nothing like a good soak to smooth things out. When you get out of here you’ll feel like you’ve been born all over . . .
He tested the water with one toe. The claw feet of the tub creaked into the boards and seemed to curl under, gripping the floor as the sweating cast iron legs buckled under his weight. The air cleared momentarily and he recognized that it was only an optical illusion. He lowered his other foot and eased down, removing the holstered gun only at the last moment and laying it carefully on the end table next to the tub.
He sat.
God, it felt good. He let the hump of aeration buoy his legs so that the lower half of his body was nearly weightless. Steam collected in his eyebrows and lashes, clotting his vision. Fine. He had seen enough recently to last him for a long while.
He rested his head on the back of the tub, dunked a washcloth, squeezed it out and plastered it over his face to blot out the light.
The porcelain sides warmed under his arms, his legs rose in suspension, his head tipped back and he floated free. The physical reality of his body receded until it no longer mattered. He breathed evenly through the moist heat of the washcloth and permitted the white sound of respiration in his ears to blend with the hissing of the waters which supported him. The warm light showing through the membranes of his eyelids melted into darkness and he descended by degrees of sensory deprivation into a state of non-being that was like the suspended animation provided in utero. The material world no longer mattered to him. He gave up his tenuous contact with it until it ceased to exist.