by Jack Martin
No one could be watching him now, he was sure, though he felt a presence somewhere behind his back. He fought down his paranoia and climbed awkwardly aboard using one hand.
One look in the hold and he knew he was not the first fugitive to take refuge here.
Nets and serpentine ropes had been cleared to make room for three or four man-sized indentations padded with newspapers and rags. Bottles, cans and empty cigarette packages littered every other empty space. He found the clutter oddly heartening.
He eased into a molded depression among the driest of the cardboard cartons, hugged his knees, lowered his head and tried to rest.
His muscles unwound and he began to doze. Lazy water sodden with floating debris lapped the sides of the boat, gently rocking him to the steady crooning of distant harbor activity. His arms drooped, the tension draining out of his body.
“Oh, Maxie, they took you in . . .”
His eyes snapped open.
“They really took you to the cleaners. I said you were under attack . . .”
He wasn’t alone. He sat up apprehensively and focused through the meager light in the scummy hold.
Nestled comfortably opposite him was a TV set. Left here by one of the previous tenants? No such luck. It was the TeleRanger, no longer mutilated but breathing happily in the salt air, quivering as usual. It was the old story. You can run, he thought, but you can’t hide.
He felt something akin to relief.
“I knew you’d be back,” he said.
Onscreen, a two-shot of Moses and Raphael, more or less as they were when Max had interrupted them in the Board Room.
“But you wouldn’t listen.”
“Don’t tell me that, Moses. That’s not what I want to hear.”
“What you want to hear, we’re not going to tell you.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” Raphe chimed in. “Because what you want to hear is not true!”
“We’re dead, Max,” said Moses. “You killed us.”
“What else is new?” said Max.
“Right, right,” said Raphael, a prick even unto death. “Somebody told you we were the enemy and you swallowed it. But I understand. That woman, that Nicki—very hot, very exhilarating. And Barry Convex? Amiable, convincing. Who wouldn’t believe it? You wanted to be convinced that VIDEODROME was . . . what was it?”
“ ‘A giant hallucination machine.’ ”
“Yeah,” added Rahael. “ ‘You watch it and you get stoned.’ ”
The two chuckled and wagged their heads. When their heads stopped moving, they lap-dissolved into the face of none other than Brian O’Blivion.
“But you were thinking skin deep, my friend. You were a skin deep sea diver. The television tube becomes the Fallopian tube of the unconscious, the video word becomes flesh . . .”
Max covered his head with his arms, as O’Blivion dissolved away and became Masha.
“You haven’t joined us yet, Maxie. You haven’t let go. And now they’ve got you right where they want you . . .”
No, it was not Masha.
It was Raphael again.
Max covered his eyes. But he could still see them.
“But at least you’re inside now . . .”
“And now that you’re inside VIDEODROME, you know what you have to do? You become the . . .”
“I know! I know what I have to do. Leave me—”
“What do you have to do, Max? Tell us.”
“I have to—to—”
“Yes? Yes? We’re waiting, and we’ve got an awfully long time to wait. But you don’t. And neither does the rest of the world.”
“I can’t put it into words. It’s not clear. But I’ll know it when it comes. I’ll know—”
“The word, Max, the word is all-important. Give us the word . . .”
Max gestured angrily for them to go away. The handgun waved, uglier and more uncontrollable than ever.
Raphael reached up to cover the screen from the other side, a fruitless gesture.
“No, no, Max! Not again. Please, no . . . !”
Not a bad idea. Leave me alone, he thought.
Through video gridlines, the ticking LEDs superimposed over his field of vision, the figures on the TV were twice distanced from him. Flat, two-dimensional representations. Not real.
So it didn’t matter.
He sighted along the rippling top of his handgun.
“Don’t do it, Max!” Moses implored. “Listen to us! You must hold onto your humanity. Soon it will be all you have. Listen to us . . . !”
Max tightened his muscles, and the handgun fired.
The TV screen erupted blood and living tissue. The cabinet jerked leeward with the impact of a gazelle hit by an elephant gun, then slumped forward convulsing in a death agony.
Max was aware of the helmet’s lingering influence. He could not escape it. It was with him still, controlling his view of the world no matter where he went or what he did, no matter how hard he tried to leave it behind and rely only on the evidence of his own senses. Sometimes he did not even know it was there. It was becoming—or had already become—an operational part of his brain.
Now, however, for the time being, its blood-lust sated, the helmet dissolved from his head and left him with a miserable, pounding headache.
Max retreated into himself. He slid his gun hand into its abdominal berth.
He sat staring into the gathering gloom, waiting without hope for the last vestige of manufactured sensation to dissolve through and leave him as he had been once, a long time ago.
The bleating of a foghorn brought him round.
At first he wasn’t sure where he was. The creaking of rotted timbers, the gentle slapping . . .
Rocked in the cradle of the deep, he thought, now I lay me down to sleep.
He wanted to stay here, not to move.
But the waters were rising.
He heard the skittering of tiny claws, the scissoring of sharp, pointed teeth, saw the red beads of the rats’ eyes closing in.
There could be no safe port till it was over.
It was time to move again.
He zigzagged out of the shipping yard under cover of night. The cloud layer had not lifted but now, with the sun down, the mist thickened with darkness like ink in milk. The lights of the dockyard and the city beyond mimicked tall, overgrown puffballs ripening with spores under an effluvial sky.
He retraced the old side streets for miles, it seemed, before he rounded the corner to the Cathode Ray Mission.
The building was dark as a sepulcher. A sign on the front door: CLOSED FOR ALTERATIONS.
He went to the side, followed a fence around back to a gate and the rear entrance. An arched door was barricaded with trash bags. He kicked the bags aside and tried the door. Locked.
He smashed glass with his elbow, reached through and let himself in.
The main hall of the Mission was unchanged—partitions, cubicles like confessionals—with no sign of alterations of any kind. The only light was the spill from the streetlamps outside the high windows.
It was enough for Max.
But wait. There was another light, a small, yellow cone next to one of the recycled television sets.
Max crept closer.
Yes. A high-intensity mini-worklight beaming down on a makeshift tabletop desk. A portable typewriter, sheafs of papers, a teetering stack of videocassettes, a half-eaten meal. A cup of coffee that was still warm.
Footsteps.
He dodged behind a partition and waited. The footsteps clicked downstairs, came this way—
“Bianca O’Blivion?”
He showed himself.
Her eyes widened with curiosity, but with only slight surprise.
“I run Civic TV. I was on a talk show with your father.”
“So it was to be you, after all. You’ve come to kill me.”
“No, no . . .”
“Then why have you come here?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
He came forward out of the shadows. “I’m Max Renn,” he explained. “I run Civic TV. I don’t . . . I don’t kill people.”
Bianca looked at him as though she did not know him. She held to the videocassettes she had brought downstairs. Her fingers bent and white moons rose on her nails.
“Oh, but you do,” she said. “You’re an assassin now. For VIDEODROME. They can program you, play you like a videotape recorder. They can make you do what they want—and they want you to destroy whatever is left of Brian O’Blivion. They want you to destroy me.”
Her last words triggered something inside him.
“Destroy you,” he repeated in a conditioned monotone.
“Of course. Why else do you suppose you’ve come here? Can you think of another reason, any other reason at all?”
Destroy you, destroy you, destroy you . . .
He took his handgun out of his jacket.
Bianca retreated. By the time he noticed that she had slipped out of his line of sight, she was deep into the maze of cubicles.
He straightened his gun in front of him and went after her.
Miles of cubicles. Clicking feet, then a flash of hair above one partition. He sidled up to it, kicked it down.
On the other side, a woman’s face.
“Nicki?” he said. “Is that you? What are you doing here?”
Inside the cubicle, a TV screen was on a tight shot of Nicki Brand being tortured against a soft wall. It was the same VIDEODROME episode he had watched too many times.
“She worked here,” said Bianca.
Dazed, he stared at Nicki’s silently screaming face. “You—and O’Blivion?”
Bianca said, “She came to Brian O’Blivion five years ago. She studied with him. And saw firsthand what VIDEODROME was doing to him. She also saw what it could be. In the right hands.”
At that instant a wire loop snared Nicki around the throat. Two powerful offscreen hands twisted and tightened, garroting her in extreme close-up.
The tape ran out, and the screen went blank.
“That was the part they didn’t show you,” said Bianca. “I stole it from them just for you to see. They killed her, Max. They killed Nicki Brand. She died on VIDEODROME. They used her image to seduce you after she was already dead.”
“But in the beginning, before—before she went . . .”
“She knew that you were VIDEODROME’s next target. We planned to intercept you, use you to dig deeper into VIDEODROME. She tried to play it both ways. But she got caught in the middle, and they killed her. She would have died in any event. She didn’t realize it, but she was hopelessly addicted. The tumor had begun to take root. She thought she was immune—but she wasn’t. VIDEODROME is death.”
Bianca came up to him, very close, blocking out everything else.
“I know what you’ve become. It may have started out as hallucination, but now it’s real. Don’t you get it, Mr. Renn? You’re the spring line and the new fall schedule. And Barry Convex is the Program Director. But at least you’re inside VIDEODROME now. And now that you are, do you know what you have to do? You become the cancer, you become the tumor that destroys the body. You destroy VIDEODROME!”
She took his gun hand in her two hands without revulsion.
“But we’ll have to go all the way through it, Max. All the way through to the end. We can’t stop where you are now, stuck in the middle. Not us. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
She helped him raise the gun.
“It’s time for you to be deprogrammed, Max. And what better way than with an act of symbolic violence? You must be free, so that you can become the living word, the logos, the manifestation of philosophy made flesh on earth. Do it, Max. Do it before they kill you. Do it now . . .”
Max felt the Walther PPK arm itself. Now his clubbed hand was entirely overgrown with flesh and veins with no traces of metal. His gun arm cocked—
As from out of the television screen emerged a three-dimensional gun identical to his own, attached to a video arm, leveled directly at his chest. It grew out and out, extending two, three or more feet into the cubicle.
And fired at point-blank range.
Once, twice, three times.
There was a roar like thunder in the Mission.
Max sagged to his knees, his own gun arm smoking.
There were three bullet holes in the TV screen.
Bianca bent over him in the near-darkness. “That’s better, so much better. It’s always painful to remove the cassette, to change the program . . .”
She scooted her hands under his jacket and shirt.
He looked down. His skin was smooth, soft. No holes, no wounds, no empty places that needed to be filled up. Perfect, unmarked as a newborn baby’s skin.
“Now that you have, you’ll see that you’ve become something quite different from what you were. You’ve become the video word made flesh. Say it with me.”
She lent him her strength.
“Please say it,” she said.
He sighed, giving up the ghost. Something left him then. It was a weight that had no substance, like the gravity that had held him down since he first came into this world.
“I’m . . . the video word made flesh,” he said.
Bianca smiled for the first time.
“And now that you are, you know what you must do. You must turn against VIDEODROME. They’ve come close this time, Max. They almost got you to make it easy for them. There’s only one more obstacle to stand up in their way—you. You use the weapons they have given you to destroy them. Death to VIDEODROME! Long live the new flesh!”
“Death to VIDEODROME,” repeated Max. “Long live the new flesh.”
Chapter Fifteen
“IT WAS ONLY TWENTY-SIX HOURS AGO, IN THE BUILDING YOU SEE BEHIND ME, THAT A BIZARRE, APPARENTLY MOTIVELESS SHOOTING OCCURRED WHICH HAS TRIGGERED OFF AN INTENSIVE MANHUNT BY METRO POLICE . . .”
Max withdrew out of the sunlight into the doorway of a cigar store in order to get a better view. No one noticed him. He was almost dirty enough now to blend in with the scenery.
“THIRTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD MAX RENN, PRESIDENT OF THE CIVIC TV CORPORATION, IS BEING SOUGHT IN CONNECTION WITH THE SHOOTING DEATHS OF TWO EXECUTIVES OF CHANNEL 83, A SUBSIDIARY OF CIVIC TV . . .”
The passers-by didn’t seem to notice Max. Not even the transient who had set up his homestead in front of the cigar store. He was not even watching his own TV, though the portable was joined to his mittened hand by a short umbilical of frayed rope. He was more interested in the possibility of wheedling a coin or an extra cigarette for the upturned beggar’s hat in his lap.
“RENN WAS LAST SEEN LEAVING THE BUILDING SHORTLY AFTER THE BODIES OF THE TWO EXECUTIVES WERE FOUND IN A BLOOD-SPATTERED BOARD ROOM . . .”
There followed a still photograph of Max, a three-year-old publicity shot from the news archives, sharing a split-screen with a close-up of a Walther PPK.
Max had not taken into account TV reports and newspapers. He felt as conspicuous as a clay duck at a skeet shoot. He inched away from the battered portable. He couldn’t go far or he would lose his stake-out view of the other side of the street. He hunkered deeper into the doorway, trying to watch the newscast with one eye.
“Hey, Teddy . . .”
The derelict started to flap the hat in front of the TV screen: manual image scrambling. He was getting hot under the collar. He had been aware of Max standing there, partaking of the entertainment for free.
“You wanna see the monkey dance, you gotta pay the piper, know what I’m sayin’?”
Max spoke up to distract him before the guy had a chance to notice whose face was on the telecast. “Haven’t I seen you at the Cathode Ray Mission?”
The man switched off his TV, offended. Like other broadcasters supplying a public service, he did not
bother to monitor his own shows. He had more important things on his mind, like survival.
“Hey, Teddy, c’mon! I stole the concept, but I didn’t steal the thing. Ya see what I’m sayin’? The concept, ya see, but not the thing itself . . .”
He’s right, thought Max. Ya got to pay the piper.
He dug in his pocket for change. He turned the pocket inside out. It was empty. Who will cut the barber’s hair? he wondered.
“Hey, you know how much my monkey’s batteries cost? An’ they don’t last in the cold. The cold knocks ’em right out. I can’t dance. You know I would if I could . . . Ya see what I’m sayin’ to ya, Teddy?”
Just then Max caught sight of a red plaid shirt and jacket liner loping along the opposite sidewalk. As Max watched, Harlan disappeared into a tacky storefront under the SUPERIOR OPTICAL sign.
Harlan was on time for his new job.
Max flushed with righteous anger.
“Can’t dance,” the derelict called after him, justifying himself to whoever would listen. “You know I would if I could . . . Ya see what I’m sayin’ to ya, Teddy?”
I can’t dance, either, thought Max, and crossed the street, dodging traffic.
Inside, this particular branch of Superior Optical looked like an undersized version of an all-night drugstore: shopping bag ladies with rolled stockings taking a load off while they pretended to wait for prescriptions, a tubercular wino with broken glasses hanging off his face, a jackbooted cop degloving long enough to have his motorcycle shades adjusted. WE ACCEPT PERSONAL CHECKS, said a placard. Harlan was nowhere in sight.
Max showed the cop his back and played customer with a motley heap of bargain vinyl eyeglass cases.
A lithe Jamaican clerk wandered over to Max.
“Hello! Mornin’, sport. They call me Brolley. May-can I help you, sir?”
“Just looking,” muttered Max.
“Sho’, man. But that’s a good one. There ain’t much to see here, but take your time and have a good look, anyway.”
Brolley was distracted by a lumpen woman in a red headband. He took a slip of paper from her.