by Jack Martin
“Two wonderful years,” admitted Harlan.
“Why?”
“To get you involved,” the engineer answered sincerely. “To expose you to the VIDEODROME signal.”
Harlan was as earnest and apologetic as when he had played back that first fifty-three seconds. Max remembered him standing by helpfully.
With his back to the screen the whole time.
“It didn’t affect you because you never watched it!” said Max. “You knew what was there. You didn’t have to see it.”
“Yeah. It really does work on just about anybody.”
“Nicki Brand?”
Convex took over as if on cue. “Nicki’s a special case, Max. She already had a certain built-in tolerance to that sort of material when she came to us. However, with the way we’ve refined our techniques lately, I think I can safely say, yes, everybody who watches it.”
He came forward and peered into Max’s eyes.
“But why would anybody watch it? Why would anybody watch a scum show like VIDEODROME? Why did you watch it?”
Max stared him down. “Business reasons.”
“Sure,” said Convex smugly. “Sure. And what about the other reasons? Why deny that you get your kicks out of watching torture and murder?”
Max wanted to fill in the cute cleft in Convex’s chin with his white knuckles. But Harlan restrained him.
“You murdered Masha Borowczyk, didn’t you, fuck? Did you enjoy that?”
Convex easily sidestepped the blow. As it was his plastered-down morning wet-look hair did not even get mussed. Harlan separated them.
“North America is getting soft, patrón,” said the engineer, a faraway look shading his dark eyes. “And the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We’re entering savage new times, and we’re going to have to be pure, and direct, and strong to survive them.”
He reseated his wire rims higher on his nose, and the grim, humorless attitude of the fanatic set his lips in a pencil-thin line. Now Max really did see him for the first time. At last, he thought. The worm finally turns.
“You,” Harlan continued, lecturing like a Trotskyite, “and this, ah, cesspool you call a television station, and your people who wallow around in it, and, ah, your ‘viewers’ who watch you do it . . . you’re rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot.”
“We’re going to start with Channel 83, Max,” Convex said. “We’re gonna use it for our first authentic transmissions of VIDEODROME. I have a hunch it’s gonna be very popular—for awhile.”
Max backed away. It was a cosmic joke, a dirty trick played by God. “I’ve got to be hallucinating now, right? I mean, you two can’t possibly be real.” His lips curled back at the absurdity of it.
“We did record your hallucinations, Max,” said Convex placatingly. “As I said we would. And we did analyze them.” He reached into his breast pocket. “You’re ready for something new.”
“That’s terrific.”
Convex held up a videocassette. Its casing was black and shiny, glinting like the soft, polished body of an arachnid.
And it was breathing.
Max wanted to knock it from his hand and crush it underfoot. But something held him back. He felt a force like a mighty wind blowing against him, from the cassette itself.
“What do you want from me?” he shouted over the energy field that was howling in his ears.
“Why, I want you to open up, Max. Open up to me.”
Convex grabbed him under the ribcage with his short arms and unzipped Max’s jacket, unbuttoned his shirt.
The room, the walls, the charged air began to twitch and distort.
Max watched as if it were happening to someone else. He saw himself flattened against the wall in the center of a video storm, his shirttails flapping aside to expose the slit opening in his stomach again as the weakness in his gut gave way to admit Convex’s prerecorded missal.
“I’ve got something I want to play for you.”
Convex rammed the cassette in, his hand entering up to the wrist.
“Do yourself a favor, Max. Don’t try to fight it. It’s too late for that now. You’re only making it difficult for yourself. Don’t take it so hard.”
He removed his hand and Max collapsed forward, clutching his innards to hold himself together. He felt that he had been gutted. He tried to stand. He couldn’t.
“Give us what we want. Then it won’t hurt anymore. Come on over with the white folks. It’s what you’ve secretly wanted all along, isn’t it? Be a part of us. We’re the Big Picture now. Be a part of the future . . .”
Max attempted to crawl. He saw Harlan bending over him guiltily. For old times’ sake.
“We want what you’ve got, Max,” said Convex. “And we’re going to get what we want one way or another. It will be so much better this way. Believe me . . .”
Max doubled over, gasping for breath.
Convex left him and strolled to the door, chest out, swinging his arms confidently.
Max needed a hand. He reached out for something to hold onto.
“Harlan . . .” he wheezed.
But, despite the ambivalence in his eyes now, Harlan straightened and loped out of the lab, following Convex.
Max was alone.
He reached down into the depths and found what didn’t belong there. It was hard to get a grip on it. It was slippery but he held on and would not let go.
He pulled his hand out.
He had something. It came out into the open partially digested, colored by the soft parts of himself.
It was not the cassette.
It was the gun he had introjected and absorbed the other night. By now it was slimy and veined, jellied and pink and ready to be born anew—the Walther PPK automatic pistol.
Clinging fast to the last thing he had to hold onto, he dragged his body out of the lab and propped up against the crumbling plaster beneath the stairs. He was seething inside, trying to heal.
He raised his bloody fist and took a good look at what he had to work with.
The handgun had attached itself, fused to his marrow. It retained its basic character under the layers of flesh and bone which had accrued around it. As he watched, the protective placentalike membrane burst open and extensions of living gun metal grew out of the stock and wrapped tightly around his wrist, burrowing into the back of his hand and deep into his forearm, connecting with his arteries and sinews. Animated cables snaked out of the clip and penetrated his palms like living nails. The pistol fibrillated and expanded as it pumped his blood, his life through its gears and chambers.
What pain there was did not last as his hand metamorphosed and became potent, larger than life. And he knew that nothing would ever hurt again.
The new living weapon that was his body wouldn’t let it.
He buried his hand under his jacket and zipped the front halfway. With his old arm he pulled himself to his feet. His legs were wobbly, but he would make it.
He dragged himself up the stairs after them all.
“Max! Wow . . . !”
Bridey ceased slitting open the morning mail and dropped the letter opener. She came around to help him.
“Max? God. Do you recognize me?”
“I look that bad, do I?”
She brushed paint flakes from the back of his jacket and led him behind the desk. Only two or three sleepy people were passing in the hall. They hardly looked up. From an open door somewhere a typewriter clacked away in a death-rattle.
“You’ve been gone for days, Max. Are you all right?”
“I haven’t been gone for days. Just seems like it.”
“You have, Max. What have you been doing? You smell, well . . .”
“I sweat a lot when I work. Where are they?”
“Where’s who? You better let me get you cleaned up. Coffee?”
Max laughed, a sputter with a little red bubble at the end. “Where’s Moses?”
“Oh, he’s in a meeting with Raphe.” She
took his face in her hands. “You promised me you were going to take care of yourself.”
“As a matter of fact, I talked to a psychiatrist yesterday. A lady shrink.”
“You’re lying to me, Max.”
“I don’t lie, Bridey. You don’t either. I trust you. Tell me what I need to know.”
“I don’t know what to say. Um, I think you’d better get yourself together and get in there soon, though. Something’s going on.”
“Ahh. Comes the revolution.”
“It’s very weird, Max. They won’t even tell me about it. Moses and Raphe have been talking about a new approach for Civic TV. Are you gonna come back and turn it around again? ’Cause I’m gonna quit if you don’t.”
“I don’t have to come back, Bridey. I never left. I invented Civic TV. It came right outa here.” He tapped his temple with his left index finger. “Where are they now? Board Room?”
“I could tell them you want to talk.” She picked up the inter-office phone. “But first you ought to get—”
He took the phone from her, hung it up.
“Don’t. Don’t tell them anything.”
“But Max—”
“I’ll be in my office. And Bridey? No calls.”
He staggered past her and let himself in. He bumped the door shut and leaned there. He kept his right hand under his jacket, holding himself Napoleon-style.
The office was dark, the blinds down. But he didn’t need any more light. He didn’t need anything more than what he had with him.
He opened the connecting door a fraction of an inch.
Sticky intervals of koto music echoed out of the Board Room.
Moses and Raphael sat with their backs to him, clicking pens against their teeth. They were watching Samurai Dreams.
“I know it’s kinda slow and formal,” Moses was saying in that languorous, bored voice of his, “but that’s my point. It’s a natural breakthrough show for the family audience at, say, six p.m. It’s historical Japan, it’s got costumes. We play it educational . . .”
“With that girl in it?” said Raphael. “C’mon. I think you’d have a better shot playing it for laughs. We dub in a funny track and it’s a comedy. Nice, gentle . . .”
“Aha.” Moses’s cap of dry hair nodded, catching the luminosity of the TV screen in front of the long table like a halo. “And you’d be the one to write it.”
“Yeah, I would! I used to write in high school. I haven’t lost it.”
Max swung the door open.
The two men ducked at the intrusion.
“Hi, Max,” said Moses, getting up.
Raphe wheeled around in his chair. “Max! you’re just in time to throw some light on an interesting problem . . .”
Max drew his handgun.
“Don’t!” suggested Moses.
Without one more second’s deliberation Max aimed, cocked and opened fire.
The first bullet smashed into Moses’s elbow, the second tore through his chest, the third struck God knew where; it didn’t make any difference. Moses hit the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Max, God! Don’t!” Raphe cowered against a mural representation of the skyline of the city he was licensed to serve.
Two more shots drilled ragged holes straight through Raphe’s shiny pate. Blossoms of blood decorated the wall in the shape of poinsettias. Raphe slid to the floor, taking several glasses and ash trays with him.
Max’s aim was improving.
A babble outside. Running feet. The door burst open.
Bridey let out a shriek.
“Max! Are you hurt? What happened? What—?”
“They killed us,” he said, doubling over and staggering to the door so as not to lose his balance, his momentum. “They killed us . . .”
Chapter Fourteen
Somebody else started to scream.
Bridey went into action. She held back the crowd with her wiry arms and pleaded, “Give us a chance, will you? Give us some air to breathe!”
Then she attended to Max, ready to comfort him, to take his head in her lap if need be, to tear off a piece of her petticoat if she had one, to bandage him if she could but find the wound.
“Maxie? What’s going on?”
But he wrenched free before she had a chance. Bent in half, he bulled his way through the congregation of curiosity-seekers and hobbled into the hall.
Their faces tilted and swam before him.
They seemed as much in a slate of shock as Max. Where had they come from? It was one of life’s imponderables. But here they were, the crowd from nowhere that never misses an accident.
Max caromed by a bewildered woman from the secretarial pool. She was excavating the bottom of her purse, perhaps to find an Instamatic. He shouldered into the storage room next to the Canada Dry drink machine, heaved the door shut.
A second later Bridey slipped away and followed him in.
She had a miserable, just-tell-me-what-you-want look on her face, like a wife who has been abandoned on her wedding day.
“Max . . . !”
He ignored her and tunneled deeper between boxes of supplies, stationery, staple gun ammunition, rubber bands and rubber cement, all useless now. He found the other door, the delivery entrance. It was unlocked.
“God damn it, Max,” she called after him, “why won’t you let me help you?”
Her eyes were brimming. For the first time her makeup was less than perfect. It didn’t matter. She looked better this way. She didn’t know that, of course, never would, and wouldn’t believe it if anyone tried to tell her, especially him. But it was true.
At her back silhouettes grouped outside the frosted-glass door. She would do her best to stall them till Hell froze over or he told her otherwise. He loved her for that. He had never thought of it until now, but it was true.
And pointless. A few years ago, about the time he came out of college hunting up his first job—perhaps if he had met her then it would have worked. But he had ignored the nesting instinct, and now it was too late. Too busy laboring to make real his private fantasies, his chance had passed away as quietly as a pouring of sand and there was no way left to make it up. It had not occurred to him that he was ever in danger of missing anything important; if anyone had tried to tell him, he had not heard. Bridey was timid; he probably would not have listened to her, either. And now his options were used up, gone and never coming back.
“So long, Bridey,” he said. “And thanks. Try not to worry.”
“But—”
“Where I’m going, I won’t have anything to worry about. Believe me.”
“I—I want to come with you.”
The tide was rising higher outside the hall door. A security guard knocked repeatedly.
“You wouldn’t like it there. Trust me. This time I know what I’m talking about.”
He opened the delivery door with his left hand.
“Remember the way it happened, and tell it right. The truth, Bridey. Only the truth.”
“You know me, boss.”
“And you know me.”
“But I don’t know what the truth is anymore. Whatever happened back there in the office—you don’t have to go! I can say—”
“They’d never believe it. Besides, you’d only betray me, too, sooner or later. You wouldn’t mean to, but you would.”
“But I—I love you, Max!” There. She had said it, for all the good it would do. “I’d never—”
“That’s why. And that’s a fact. I never lie, either.”
I’ll never see the inside of the station again, he thought. Not in this life.
In the alley, a carpenter was shouldering the weight of new doors and window frames to the studio loading bay without complaint. Max felt for him. It was uphill all the way.
Max hid his face and marched toward an underpass. He zipped his jacket, stuffed both hands into his pockets and did not stop when he reached the street. He moved ahead at a fast pace and lost himself in the cheerless procession o
f conditioned sleepwalkers on their way to work.
It was easier than it should have been. No one paid him any mind. Each one he passed appeared totally self-absorbed, too busy starring in the movie of his or her own life to notice one more extra lurking in the background.
For a few blocks he wished he could change places with any one of them. Permanently.
But he had something more to do, a mission. There was no way to get around it. What lay ahead was bound to be even more important than what had gone before.
It was also too crucial to chance a misstep now from weariness or fatigue. He needed breathing space, time to think. Besides, were he to be picked up by the authorities now, before it was done, it would all have been for nothing. And the stakes were too high to let that happen.
The morning was warm, a buttermilk overcast wending in from the shore to raise the humidity to an unendurable level. The nearer he got to the docks the more oppressive was the hothouse effect. The streets became narrower and less dense as the air became stickier with moisture that was like mucilage. His clothing stuck to him like flypaper.
The streets on this side all funneled down to the docks. Once there, he might jump and shimmy across to stow away on one of the foreign-bound freighters. But he couldn’t let himself do it. He had been put here for a purpose; no matter that the full pattern had not yet unfolded. It was his lot.
A dark ship of unknown registry was lying at anchor in the bay, taking the morning light on its black, unmarked bow. Perhaps through a temperature inversion it appeared closer now than the last time he had seen it. Wet ropes and lanterns hung motionless in the thick, still air. Beyond, partially obscured by mist, the hump of Centre Island loomed like a watery grave marker for the city.
Max clambered through a rent in the chain link fence, skirted the few private pleasure craft and hurried on to the unrented berths, moving quickly to avoid attention. He catwalked dilapidated pilings until he arrived at the first of a fleet of several small commercial fishing vessels tied up for repairs.
ELIZABETH DANE II, read the nameplate.
She was abandoned and listing at an alarming angle, taking on water below deck. Her sides were corroded with mineral streaks the color of rust, like dried tears of blood. An official notice proclaimed, THIS VESSEL CONDEMNED. Next to the notice a row of dead starfish had been brutally crucified to the starboard side with heavy construction nails.