Videodrome

by Jack Martin

  Max was aware of their eyes scrutinizing him. He was uncomfortable, self-conscious. They would never understand. He decided to make the best of it and bluff his way out. In his most reasonable voice he said, “Yeah. Isn’t there supposed to be one? I always thought—”

  “A witness to what, Max?”

  “For the ceremony. Look, forget it. I really don’t know anything about it.”

  “On the contrary. We’re most interested to hear your suggestions. And you have obviously studied our culture.” The balding man bowed again in the gentle strobing. “But I am afraid this is not that kind of ceremony.”

  “Right. I was looking through a book about Samurai last night, before I went to bed. Research.”

  Shinji beamed. “You have done your homework.”

  They watched awhile longer.

  The loveplay was now horizontal but far from explicit, with kimonos flowing open but not completely removed. Pink knees were raised heavenward, legs opened and closed like butterfly wings. The koto music played on, tastefully masking any hint of heavy breathing. The effect was soothing, even hypnotic.

  Max found himself watching intently, convinced that one of the panels in the wall would open at any moment, admitting another, darker figure.

  “He needs a second,” muttered Max, as a thick-waisted Samurai began panting in extreme close-up.

  Once again they were looking at him.

  Max definitely wanted to be out of there. He could hear himself; he wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. Still . . .

  “You know, a kaishaku, isn’t that what you call it?” He attempted a grin to relax them. “I saw it in a Toshiro Mifune movie once.”

  The two Orientals consulted. Then Shinji turned back and said with infinite patience, “No, Max. A kaishaku, or second, is present only in matters of honor. As in seppuku. Or, as you Westerners know it, hara-kiri.”

  There was an awkward lull.

  Now I’ve done it, thought Max forlornly. Caffeine nerves, insomnia . . . look what happens to you. Get a grip on yourself, boy. I’ve gone and offended another supplier. Have to tell Bridey not to schedule any more early-morning meetings, no matter what. Dreams, TV, it all runs together at this hour. Can I help it? I should have known better.

  Am I supposed to apologize now? How? For what?

  A sudden light animated Shinji’s face, and his eyes squeezed closed with mirth.

  “Ah, I see! Yes. Very clever of you, Max. A second to help him finish, after he has made the first thrust! Hah! A joke . . . !”

  Max nodded quickly, relieved, and slapped the table with them.

  When the laughter subsided, he rose to go. He stopped the tape and ejected the cassette.

  “Let me take this one with me. I’ll have to show it to the brass before I can give you an answer. You’ll hear from me before noon.”

  In the background, the koto music continued behind an ancient ritual.

  Chapter Two

  “What do you think?”

  Max slouched in his chair and waited for a reaction.

  They certainly seemed to be taking it seriously. Appallingly so. Not a good sign.

  He stabbed a pile of papers with his pencil and swiveled back and forth, presenting as disinterested an attitude as possible.

  If he didn’t rush them they might make out the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, without his prodding. Come on, he thought, admit that you’re bored. You’d damn well better decide to move into the future; it’s where we’re all going to have to spend the rest of our lives. Not in some stylized imitation of a past that never really existed.

  “Can we get away with it?”

  Still no response.

  The koto music twanged on.

  “Do we want to get away with it?”

  Moses Janoff turned back to the long desk and dragged his elbows through the papers.

  Here we go, thought Max.

  Moses cleared his sinuses and said in his huskiest, most earnest and most humorless voice, “I think Oriental sex is a natural. I think it’ll get us an audience we’ve never had before.”

  Of course, thought Max. Fits right in, doesn’t it? One chickenshit half-step for Civic TV, one half-step backwards for mankind.

  “I don’t like it,” said Raphael. The Creative Director locked his hands behind his head and kicked back expansively. Max could almost see the wheels spinning behind his bulging forehead, balancing timeslots and projecting overnight shares. At least he’s not brown-nosing, thought Max; or maybe he is. Maybe it’s just that he can read my face, what’s underneath this bland expression, more accurately than Moses. “It’s not tacky enough.”

  Seize the moment. Or else it’s more of the same. Pretty soon we’ll be back to Italian bedroom farces and wet T-shirt movies. And by that time it will be too late. Our audience isn’t going to stay turned on and tuned in to this sort of evasion forever. We’ll have to convert to FM or go out of business.

  “Not tacky enough for what?” Max asked.

  “Not tacky enough to turn me on.”

  And what would turn you on? wondered Max. Gordie Howe in a rubber dress? No, nothing that radical. But it’s okay—we’re getting somewhere. When even Raphael with his short-sleeved shirts and cornfed baby face starts admitting he’s bored, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us, after all. Kitsch is like popcorn: empty calories. It’s not going to satisfy an adult appetite indefinitely. And we’re supposed to be beaming our signal out to an audience of adults. And my executives are supposed to be representatives of that audience. They probably are; more typical than I’d realized.

  So don’t push them too hard. They’ll open up. The barometers of public opinion may move exceedingly slowly; but they do move. Eventually. Give them a chance to think of the alternatives themselves. That way it will stick. They’ll think they invented artistic progress on their own. If I try to ram my own ideas about programming onto the airwaves without their general support, they’ll see me as a threat to what little job security they’ve got now. And I’ll have a mutiny on my hands.

  “Too much class is bad for sex,” Raphael added, as if the idea had just occurred to him.

  Behind Raphael’s head a pair of posters for Channel 83’s Late Night Monster Mash were framed on the wall. UP FROM THE DEPTHS, warned one of the posters, a low-budget horror film the title of which, like most of its kind, promised much more than it delivered; but the promise was amorphous, merely suggestive, so no one in the audience would feel cheated exactly, not in any way that could be defined. The title of the poster next to it was SOMETHING. Max had missed that one. Just as well. He could tell by the ad art that it was another empty come-on, too half-hearted even to say what it was really about. The Horror That Dares Not Speak Its Name. Bullshit.

  But something was about to dredge itself up from the superficial depths of these faint hearts, these steadfastly middlebrow guardians of social stability; he could feel it.

  In fact, Raphael had just now taken the first timid step. Did he himself realize it? Probably not.

  Max pounced, speaking directly to Raphe’s unsocialized backbrain.

  “Maybe,” he said with deliberate understatement. “I don’t know.” Will somebody please turn off that koto music? he thought. “There is something too . . . soft about it.”

  He decided to push them a bit, now that their right hemispheres were open and receptive. This moment might never come again.

  “I’m—I’m looking for something that’ll break through, you know?”

  Let them help me. Let them formulate a policy that will take the station in a direction I’ve already dreamed. That way, if it craps out, it won’t mean my head on a platter for the Board of Directors.

  I’ve planted the seed. Now pick it up, he thought. Take that ball and go. You can do it.

  It was midmorning and the sun was slanting in obliquely through the blinds of the office. Now, at this properly civilized hour, something in him wanted to leap across the desk, tear open the windows and le
t the full harshness of reality shine in. At this point he was ready; he could take it. Could they? He didn’t care anymore. But he felt he was ready for anything. It might burn the skin off his bleary eyes but it would feel good. It would warm him.

  Instead he rubbed his temple in frustration and met Moses’s eyes for the first time this morning.

  “Something . . . tough,” Max added, grinding the word out through his teeth.

  Moses backed off invisibly from the challenge. He shrugged and grinned sheepishly.

  “To me,” he said, “sex is soft. Maybe I’m a sick person.”

  Careful, Mose, thought Max. You ought to give a thought to the direction the world is moving. Don’t spit on anything when the wind’s against you. It might blow back.

  The soft-core costume party blipped off and faded rapidly from the screen, a dream of innocence that was already dissolving into distant memory, and was gone.

  Max swung out of the conference room and into the main artery of the building, suppressing an itch that he didn’t yet know how to scratch. The morning shift was already in full motion. He passed an electrician jangling with tools, a carpenter tracking sawdust out of Studio A, a cluster of schoolchildren on a tour of the facilities, and a huddle of secretaries by the elevator, their high-pitched voices as hard and impersonal as telephones answered directly from the shower, as cold as window glass, and as brittle.

  They said something behind his back but he held himself aloof, pretending not to hear. My fly is probably unzipped, he thought. Either that or the grapevine knows something I don’t. Maybe I should ask their advice. It might help. It sure as hell couldn’t hurt.

  There was Bridey’s tidy desk in the corner, a blockade between his office and the reception area.

  She greeted him. “Hi, Max!”

  “Hi, doll. Got any fresh coffee?”

  She was waving her hands in front of him as if drying her nails in a great hurry. “Maxie, you’ve got a whole boardful of messages.”

  “Already? Give me a break.”

  “There’s no rest for the weary at Bedroom TV.” She scanned her pad. “Um, first I’m supposed to remind you not to forget Rena King. Her people were on the line when I came in. But that’s not till tonight, eight-thirty—seven o’clock for makeup and run-through. Before that—”

  “Who in Christ’s name is Rena . . . ? Never mind.” His heart sank. “I remember.” That woman from Public Television, he thought glumly, the one with the face like an Avon lady and a headful of fluorocarbons. “Got it. Anything else?”

  “I’m trying to tell you, boss. Give a girl a chance, will you?” She defused her persistence with a self-deprecating giggle. “Hiroshima Video phoned three times in the last hour. They’ve got meetings all day. They say they need an answer or the deal is off.”

  “Then tell them it’s off.”

  She took that in stride, made a notation. “Plus Harlan wants you down in the lab. It’s supposed to be important.”

  “It always is. What is it this time? Somebody sabotage our tower again?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Where’s that coffee?”

  She poured him a cup. The tension that held her face together relaxed momentarily, leaving her perfectly-painted eyes and mouth without character. “Boss, will—would you like to have lunch with me?”

  “You know I never eat lunch.” But he had to smile at her doggedness. It was an ongoing game. “What’s the matter, am I getting too thin for you?”

  “Oh, nothing like that. It’s just, well—”

  “You’re beginning to sound like my ex-wife, you know that?”

  That grabbed her by the short hairs.

  “Perish the thought.” Her brow refurrowed and she resumed checking off her list.

  That frosted her knockers, he thought. She doesn’t even know I don’t have an ex-wife. Why should I tell her?

  “Plus Air Canada called again about that ticket to L.A. The VISA card’s overdrawn.” She clicked her ballpoint pen against her straight teeth and blinked up at him again with big, doleful eyes, eyes that gave her away all too easily. “Plus I still need a decision on lunch. How about it?”

  “How about it?” He met her eyes full on and pinned her where she stood. “Your place or mine?”

  Was that a blush? Not bloody likely; there was nothing about Bridey that didn’t show. Still, she wasn’t used to having her bluff called.

  She lowered her head. “If you’re not back here at half-past twelve, I—well, I thought I’d go over to the Flaming Rooster. On Bloor.” She lifted her chin again gamely, her eyes as clear as water on the air. “I could bring something back, if you like. For the office. If you’re too tired to go out. It’s no trouble.”

  Bridey, he thought. God bless you. But something’s missing. I don’t know what it is, I swear to Christ I don’t. But if I figure it out you’ll be the first to know.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Hard to say where I’ll be. You know how it is.” He knew she did. “If I’m here, fine. If I get hung up somewhere, not to worry. Keep on looking out for Number One, right?”

  “That can get kind of old after awhile,” she said.

  “You’re telling me?”

  He squeezed her shoulder and made for the stairs, downing the coffee as he went. It was hot, too hot; it blistered his tongue. But at least he could feel it.

  The electronics lab was a converted laundry room in the basement of the building, which had been built originally as one of the better hotels of its day, and its day was long past.

  Nominally Harlan was only one of several technicians on the payroll of Civic TV. In actuality he was indispensable, the jack-of-all-trades who alone knew how to cobble together impossible recombinations of outdated equipment in order to keep a constant carrier signal feeding to the transmitter against all odds, with or without a budget adequate to cover the frequent needed repairs.

  And, for Max, he performed an additional service: tirelessly and without complaint he contrived endless new methods of pulling in stray signals from intercontinental broadcasts of the sort to which Channel 83’s late-night core audience remained loyal—adult public access cablecasts via microwave from stateside, topless ice skating extravaganzas from Vegas, blue comedy specials staged exclusively for pay service subscribers. Even the occasional golden oldie syndicated rerun from the lower forty-eight. In other words, precisely the kind of raisins in the cake which Civic TV could not afford to acquire legally. In technical terms the practice was piracy; operationally speaking no one cared, at least no one who had the power to pull the plug on the operation. There were no complaints so far, only a few confused calls to the night switchboard operator over unscheduled programming. Apparently the members of the Broadcasting Commission all went to bed early.

  They didn’t know what they were missing.

  For this—for tracking down and taping the signals for de facto replay—Max privately fed Harlan a diet of fat bonuses. Max was still able to pocket what was left over out of each season’s acquisition allowance, after normal daytime programming had been paid for. Which wasn’t much; like everything else, operating costs were climbing astronomically. Which made Harlan only that much more indispensable.

  It had made sense from the beginning, and it made more sense now. With so many pay franchises bouncing their signals off a skyful of communications satellites, there was almost no point anymore to buying in through legal timesharing, even if one had unlimited funds. As long as Harlan made sure he “borrowed” from a mixture of sources, and as long as Max utilized primarily the occasional pirated feature or foreign series to salt an otherwise above-board after-hours schedule, the chances of getting caught with your hand in somebody else’s relay were about as great as finding rocking horse shit in a nursery. There wasn’t a scrambler yet made that Harlan couldn’t juryrig a way to decode, given enough playtime in his very own workshop.

  And Harlan had made the sub-basement recognizably his own and no one else’s, with hand-letter
ed signs decorating hotwired hardware that looked like props straight out of Victor Frankenstein’s toybox. No one else ever came down here, and if they did, what would they see? The nuts-and-bolts underpinnings of a working business. What was so unusual about that? No one would give it a second look. It would take another technician to spot what was going on sub rosa, and why would another Civic TV technician jeopardize his own job by blowing the whistle on the station that was his meal ticket? As for the janitors—well, it was obvious at first glance, nay first whiff, that the cleaning crew had not been on this level in years. Bridey knew, but Max himself would see to it that she was kept happy as a clam over the station’s ratings. She felt she had a personal stake in Channel 83’s future. And so she might; who could say? The wheel turns . . .

  “Hey, Harlan. What you got for me?”

  Harlan with his frizzy hair looked as if he slept patched into a mixing board, as if he dressed himself with whatever was left in the backpack he had toted downstairs his very first day on the job. His cords were dangerously threadbare at the seat; his jacket liner had an aura about it. His geometrical red plaid shirt blended with the multicolored bundles of insulated wiring around him, as if the shirt itself were some new kind of flexible printed circuit he had invented in his spare time.

  “Something you ought to see, patrón.”

  Near his head a handmade sign on the cracked and spackled plaster, above a bank of video monitors of every conceivable size and make: VIDEO BOUTIQUE.

  Max shook his head indulgently.

  Harlan hooked a finger and beckoned to a ½-inch videotape recorder. He boosted the gain on a monitor which was balanced precariously on a metal typewriter table. He made final calibrations on the deck, fine-tuning the wheels with the sensitivity of a safecracker.

  “Okay.” He rewound the tape. A high, oscillating whine sizzled in one speaker. “Here we go.”