Videodrome

by Jack Martin

He rechecked the footage counter and peered at Max over rimless glasses. His eyes were neutral but unblinking.

  Max couldn’t pick up a clue. He pressed closer.

  “It’ll come through on that one. We only got about fifty-three seconds, so keep your eyes open.” Harlan actually sounded apologetic. “They’ve got an unscrambler scrambler, if you know what I mean. It sensed that we were unscrambling and, ah, automatically changed its code on us.”

  Why would they go to that much trouble to protect an entertainment broadcast? wondered Max. There must be quite a few Harlans doing mischief in the world lately. Somebody’s getting hip.

  “What satellite is it from?”

  “Snooker,” said Harlan, then added, “I think.”

  “Country of origin?”

  “Ah, well. Assuming that fifty-three seconds represents the period of delay, I’d say somewhere in, ah, Malaysia?” Harlan pushed his glasses up and started the tape. “Here we go. This is it.”

  Rolling.

  A mesh of interference pulled the vertical out of alignment for two or three seconds, and then the image stabilized.

  It did not look like any show Max had ever witnessed before.

  The camera did not pan and it did not dolly; neither did it zoom. There were no cutaways, no close-ups, no reaction shots. It appeared at first sight to be an actuality broadcast. Except that the color was rich and dark, not the work of a portable location unit. The lighting was extreme and dramatic. And red. There was lots of red.

  Max leaned in until his nose was about to touch the tube.

  “What the hell is that, clay?” he asked. He was curious. He also had a need to override the peculiar soundtrack with his own voice. He felt acute embarrassment. And something else.

  “Clay,” said Harlan matter-of-factly. As if discussing a sporting event. “Wet clay.”

  There was no music. Only the pleading and the screaming, as a woman was dragged across a room toward a moist, unevenly-sculpted wall by two men in black hoods. Her clothing, what was left of it, dangled in tatters over what appeared to be a wet gridwork floor. Yes, it was wet. The two men wore rubber boots, the boots sloshing through rising water.

  The last of the cloth was stripped from her by the single powerful swipe of a gloved hand.

  Manacles at the edges of the red clay wall. Her limbs were spread and her wrists roughly strung up. She screamed even louder when she saw the electrical switches.

  Her eyes were those of a trapped animal, the length of her naked body writhing in the prelude to a death spasm. Her mouth opened, her lips cracking until they bled, a darkness in her throat as the room became red, redder . . .

  Her eyes were looking at—

  A spatter of static obliterated the screen.

  Then blackness.

  Harlan stopped the tape. “That’s it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Grotesque, huh?”

  Max shuddered, tried to cover the response. “Can you hang a searcher on it next time it shows?”

  “Already workin’ on it.” Harlan’s tone brightened as he rewound and removed the reel. He seemed relieved. As if he had already managed to forget it. “I was pretty insulted when it just shrugged us off in less than a minute.” To him, the technical challenge was all that mattered. “Well, patrón?”

  Max considered the possibilities.

  One, it was an ordinary commercial transmission.

  Two, it was an uncensored movie for pay TV.

  Three, it was vérité footage.

  Four, it was a hoax.

  He couldn’t make up his mind based solely on what he had seen. But he had a feeling already, he had a feeling.

  Max was staring at the spot where the picture had been.

  Harlan was staring at him. “Interested?”

  Max shook it off and stepped back casually. He adjusted his coat. His tie was loosened. He didn’t remember doing that.

  “Yeah . . .” he said noncommittally, letting his voice trail off. His vocal cords were dry. He pretended to check his watch and made a beeline for the stairwell door.

  DANGER, warned one of Harlan’s signs, 600,000 VOLTS. Some joke. Gingerly he reached for the doorknob to let himself out.

  “Oh, Harlan,” he called back. He paused to get the technician’s attention, which was already on other matters.

  Max touched his knuckles to a posterboard on the door. HOME OF THE BUCCANEERS—PIRACY ON THE HIGH FREQUENCIES!

  “Could you do something about the labels?” He showed Harlan his teeth. “This is supposed to be a clandestine operation . . .”

  Right? he nodded.

  Harlan hung his head, as a headache began to pound behind Max’s eyes, making the room seem red and grainy.

  Chapter Three

  “I guess you can’t help being a little nervous,” Max was saying, “even—even if you’ve been doing it all your life. Don’t you think?”

  He leaned across the padded arm of his contour chair and tried to lose himself in conversation with the woman in the red dress.

  He was playing a game with himself, behaving as though the live audience were not out there waiting for the show to begin. But it wasn’t working. He heard their restless shiftings beyond the key lights.

  She was playing, too, but not for the same reasons. She kept her eyes focused not on him but on the red light that had come on atop Camera Two. She was not ignoring him. Quite the contrary. It was her way, her role, and she was playing it to the hilt.

  “Yeah,” she answered easily, “oh yeah.” She flicked her cigarette over the canister ashtray between them. The filter tip was stained a brilliant iridescent red. “Of course, that’s part of the excitement of it.”

  “Mmm.”

  Max wanted to avail himself of the pitcher of water on the low table before them. But his hands felt slippery. He didn’t trust himself.

  A burst of canned music reverberated off the sleek, poured-concrete walls of the Town Hall. The audience moved their hands together in a rising tide of white noise.

  Max blotted his hands on his trousers and sat higher, facing forward with his best, most boyish smile. He kicked one foot out and swiveled slightly. Mr. Confidence.

  He tried to steal a glimpse of himself on the monitor to see how he was doing so far. But the pole-mounted set next to the other woman, Rena King, wasn’t on him. There was the face of a man, but it was not his face. It was much older, with less hair. The man looked strangely familiar . . . Max spotted another monitor at the side of the stage, but it was too far away to make out. He gave up and decided to fly blind.

  The audience response died down. Then there was only a rustling susurrus.

  Max maintained his smile.

  Let them watch, he thought. What do I care? Besides, I’ve got a hell of a lot riding on our public image at the moment. Keep them happy and they won’t sic their watchdogs on us.

  “AND NOW HERE IT IS, THE RENA KING SHOW! AND THIS EVENING RENA’S GUESTS ARE MAX RENN, CONTROVERSIAL PRESIDENT OF CHANNEL 83 . . . NICKI BRAND, RADIO PERSONALITY AND PROBLEM-SOLVER . . . AND MEDIA PROPHET PROFESSOR BRIAN O’BLIVION . . . TAKE IT AWAY, RENA!”

  The woman Max had been unintentionally cold-shouldering for the past few minutes adjusted the hem of her purple dress and nodded at her friend, the camera. Her head moved but her hair did not.

  She folded her hands in her lap to indicate that this was a serious occasion and angled her shoulders to include the table and other chairs. She opened her throat. Max got a whiff of Listerine.

  “Max Renn . . . your television station offers its viewers everything from soft-core pornography to hard-core violence.” Her mascaraed eyes darted to the cue cards below the camera. She smacked her lips dryly. “Why?”

  There was lipstick on her teeth.

  “Well, it’s a matter of economics, Rena.” Max fell into his role with ease. “We’re, uh, small. In order to survive, we have to give people something they can’t get anywhere else. And, uh, we do that.”<
br />
  Max was pleased with himself. That’s something they can grasp, he thought, something they can sympathize with. Isn’t it? His eyes adjusted somewhat and he squinted at the sea of faces beyond the blue-white lights for confirmation. But they were silent as judges.

  He inclined his head toward Nicki Brand, the pop psychologist waiting to be interviewed on his left.

  She only stared straight ahead into the lighted camera, as unruffled as a hometown beauty queen at a dinner-dance.

  The hostess wouldn’t let him off the hook quite so easily.

  “But don’t you feel that such shows contribute to a social climate of violence and sexual malaise? And do you care?”

  Blah blah blah, thought Max. He had heard all the arguments before. He centered his white tie against his brown shirt and nodded sympathetically.

  “Certainly I care,” he answered promptly, fielding the question with ease. “I care enough, in fact, to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and frustrations.” He opened his palms, showing them empty and innocent. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s a socially positive act.”

  He avoided the glare of Rena King’s steely contact lenses and waited to juggle her next bombshell. Besides, with that purple dress of hers, the stenciled makeup, she blended in only too well with the lifeless background, the sterile decorator designs of the set. The layout was too pat; he longed to inject even a moment of raw disorder into the proceedings, to subvert it, so to speak. It was too perfect a target; it cried out to be defiled, to be brought alive by the parturient breath of real life, if even only for one second.

  Just now he allowed himself a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye. One of the fronds of the potted jungle palm behind her swayed in an updraft of convection. For an instant it threatened to close in, pinioning her in its lush Asian foliage. Was there another plant behind him? He hoped not; he had forgotten to look.

  He waited a beat, then located the monitor at the side of the stage. The camera was tight on Rena King. She looked better on TV, he concluded.

  But she passed him over and moved on to the psychologist. Max felt slighted. She doesn’t like my answers, he thought. They’re too glib, even for her. What about the audience? Let’s hear it out there . . .

  “What about it, Dr. Brand? Is it socially positive?”

  The psychologist was caught offguard. She stopped primping long enough to answer Camera One instead of the moderator.

  “I think we live in overstimulated times,” she said, moving right along. “We crave stimulation for its own sake. We gorge ourselves on it. We always want more, whether it’s tactile or emotional or sexual. And I think that’s bad.”

  Max jumped in. You’re not just whistling Dixie, he thought. “Then why’d you wear that dress?”

  “Sorry?”

  He was fascinated by her fingernails, which were lacquered a deep scarlet, the color of arterial blood, pointed around the white length of her cigarette. She lowered the cigarette to her knee. No stockings, he noticed. And the slit on the side of her dress ran all the way up to—

  He managed to recapture his concentration. “That dress. It’s very stimulating. And it’s red. You know what Freud would have said about that dress.”

  A faint, flirtatious tic curled the edge of her full mouth. She blinked her lidded eyes at him, forgetting the camera for the first time.

  “And he would have been right,” she said shamelessly. “I admit it,” as if total honesty were her defense and salvation. “I live in a highly excited state of overstimulation.”

  And the truth shall make you free, thought Max.

  He disregarded Rena, the audience, the prying cameras and turned ninety degrees, presenting his body to her.

  “Listen . . .”

  He felt ridiculous; the hell with it. Nicki Brand’s image on the monitor, the deepcut peekaboo Oriental neckline, the fetishistic chains—it was all too much. He gave up.

  “I’d really like to take you out to dinner tonight,” he said.

  At his right side, Rena King squirmed.

  Nicki batted her eyes. She was looking at the camera again.

  Too bad for old Rena, thought Max. She’s lost the last potential ally for her kneejerk Sunday supplement point of view. Old Brian What’s-his-name didn’t show tonight. He must be smarter than the rest of us. He has to be; he’s a professor.

  Nicki was sucking her cigarette down to the last millimeter of the wet, red tip.

  Rena shuffled her notes.

  “Professor O’Blivion, do you think erotic TV shows and violent TV shows lead to desensitization, to dehumanization?”

  A tinny voice replied, “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.”

  Spooked, Max spun around.

  Incredibly, Rena was attempting to hold a conversation with the graying man on the TV monitor next to her.

  Would electronic wonders never cease? Max’s mind wandered again. He winked at Nicki.

  “Yes?” said Rena, pretending to understand the professor’s prepared answer.

  “That’s why I refuse to appear on television—except on television. It’s an ethical imperative, I feel, if not a moral one. And of course O’Blivion is not the name I was born with. It’s my television name. Soon we will all have special names, names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate . . .”

  “Yes.”

  It was the only comment Rena King could come up with. She was out of her league. The moderator swiveled back around, beads of flopsweat blossoming through the pancake makeup on her upper lip. Her eyes sparked.

  “Dr. Brand, is Max Renn a menace to society?”

  “I’m not sure.” Nicki laughed, retrieving her hand and stubbing out the butt which Max had just used to light up one of his own. “He’s certainly a menace to me.”

  Max stifled a laugh himself. He leaned an elbow on the back of his chair and feigned continuing interest in the show, stroking his temple thoughtfully with one finger.

  Now he was sweating profusely. The lights were getting to him.

  Beyond the hovering, dipping cameras, repositioning constantly, moving in for the moment of truth, he felt the unseen audience leaning forward, unsticking from their chairs in flames of static electricity, bending their necks out of morbid curiosity at the spectacle of a TV talk show moderator shriveling in a hot seat of her own design. The air onstage became grainy with rising smoke; the eyes of the cameras ran with reflections like melting glass under the glare. Max felt an oppressive tropical steaminess rising around him, as if the cement-block walls of the auditorium were beginning to soften under the force of humidity and exude moisture from their cracks, their very pores.

  “Something I said?”

  “No. It’s just . . .” Max sought for a clever excuse. “Just the brain tumor.”

  “Oh. Is that all?”

  “I think so.”

  “Show me where it is and I’ll kiss it better.”

  “Here. Just below the belly button.”

  “Mm. I see it . . .”

  He tried to get into it. But it wasn’t easy. It should have been, but it wasn’t.

  Max heard the whispering of her red dress as she moved over him. He raised his head, tucking his chin into his chest, watching her.

  A cool blue light washed in on them. The curtains of his apartment were not drawn, but the blinds screened the moon’s cold rays, translating them into stripes of shrouded light and darkness. His body and the top of her head were illuminated only by a filtered mesh that looked uncomfortably like scan lines.

  After an embarrassing period of time, Nicki gave up and sprawled onto her back.

  “I didn’t make it better,” she said.

  Max closed his eyes, but the gridwork of lines would not go away. A wind from nowhere blew through his chest.

  “I think I’m getting weird.” He sighed tiredly. “I didn’t used to be weird.”

  Nicki kicked off her spike heels and raised to one elbow. �
�Well, don’t fight it. It’s kinda sexy, you know? Weirdness, I mean.”

  “Are you really a shrink?”

  “I used to be. I think I’ve edged over into show biz—but don’t tell my listeners that. I’ve got a radio show. Remember radio?”

  “Is that the sort of advice you give? ‘Don’t fight it, it’s sexy’?”

  “Stick around and find out. You might learn something.”

  Max would not be moved from the vending machine until he had extracted a cupful of vile coffee that tasted like an unholy alliance of chicken soup and molé sauce. It wasn’t even hot. As he stood there in the hallway of her station, a procession of overly cheerful CRAM-FM employees passed him by, avoiding the machine like the plague.

  He avoided them too, out of self-consciousness. He didn’t need to be recognized. His eyelids were still partially stuck together and his shirt clung to his body like ricepaper. It had been a long night.

  He hid the cup in a trash can as though it were a bomb and moved on, following the sound of the live radio monitors until he had retraced his steps to the flashing red ON THE AIR sign.

  He waved at Nicki through the glass window of the studio, giving her a thumbs-up sign.

  She didn’t need the encouragement. She was working even harder than she had last night: not sitting but standing behind the control board, patching in her own calls, jumping between telephone lines and playing to her listeners’ questions with primal abandon, like some manic exercise leader.

  She should be on television, he thought.

  The purple sweat-band restraining her hair, the loose warm-up clothes, the pastel tennis shoes—he wondered if anyone had bothered to tell her that this was only radio. Maybe she wants it that way, he thought. So that no degree of self-consciousness can come between her and her listeners—her clients, in a sense. Do they imagine how much she’s putting into this? A hell of a lot more than Dr. Joyce Brothers. Why, it’s almost as therapeutic for her as it is for them; in fact, I don’t see how they could possibly be getting as much out of it as she is. It’s her morning psychodrama session, her release. It’s physical, almost sexual. He noticed the clock on the wall: 9:25. It’s her wake-up workout, he realized.