by Jack Martin
There was only the fizzing of the whirlpool to keep him awake. Nothing else.
He sank deeper until the water level covered his ears.
A stream of tiny bubbles broke free from his back and tingled up his spine.
He relaxed his muscles and waited for the tickling sensation to stop. It did, and once more he was undistracted.
Except for the itch.
He submerged one hand and pumped bathwater against his irritated abdomen. But the itching did not go away. In fact it got worse.
There was no such thing as merciful oblivion in this life, after all. Not while one lived and breathed and remained bound to the corporeal. It was a useless delusion which had not even lasted a minute. There was always a wild hair, some discomfort; even in the mothproof closet would always be found a moth. There was no getting away from it. The spirit might be willing to leave all this excess baggage behind, but the flesh, as long as it lived, would be weak. The philosopher-theologians were right about that part of it.
He sighed and dragged the cloth from his face to see what it was he was scratching.
Through the glistening milkiness of the water, he detected an angry red line on his stomach.
He sat up.
The skin was raw and inflamed where he had scratched it. As the water slid away, the line of irritation revealed itself to be a swollen welt, a vertical ridge of red skin extending upward six or seven inches from his navel.
Max bent forward for a closer look.
The water lapped over his belly. In its swirls he seemed to see the reflections of stretched anthropomorphic figures, liquid wraiths of light and darkness caught in their transformations as if by the lens of a circular mirror.
He glanced up quickly.
There was only the mist collecting in the closed room, lifting like smoke to the cracked ceiling and coiling back down the narrow walls.
The pressure in the room was building; he felt it throb dully against his eardrums like a drum beaten underwater.
The bar of soap on the table was soft, spongy; it appeared to be melting into the dish which rested on the warped veneer. He blinked wetly. The layers of wood split apart and separated, ungluing in the humidity. The leather holster creaked.
The rash on his stomach itched worse than ever.
He splashed water over it and smoothed it with his hand, and blinked again.
The fiery line intensified until the mark on his body raised in a long weal. The water ran off, leaving the line puckered. It resembled a seam.
His hands were puckered, too, his fingers wrinkled as prunes. That was all it was. Nothing unusual. A rash, the texture of his skin shrinking in the bath.
He looked away, and blinked again.
The air was grainy with steam.
Shapes congealed out of the mist, as if the door to his bathroom had swung soundlessly open on the outlines of dark figures emerging from the other side. The stippled air solidified into gray bands, horizontal lines which began to roll in phosphorescent heat mirages . . .
The mound of aeration in the center of the tub grew larger, more convex, as air bubbles in the shape of something white and decayed gathered and pushed at the surface.
He pushed himself up and stepped hurriedly out of the tub, and reached for his pistol.
The automatic was slippery with condensation but the weight of it was reassuring in his hand. He held it out from him and, using the short barrel, nudged the door open.
The steam began at once to dissipate into the hallway. The mirror cleared.
He bellied up to the sink and examined the reflection of his body. The skin of his abdomen was only slightly reddish, undoubtedly from his own persistent scratching. He stroked the skin. Almost nothing—no inflamed, puckered seam, no raised welt. As he watched, most of the redness faded.
Nerves, he thought. Keep your hands to yourself, Maxie. Quit playing around.
He felt better.
Just wait till you get your head together again. Till then, no more VD. Listen to everything O’Blivion and the rest of them have to say, until you know enough to beat them at their own game. Pretty soon the conditioning, the drugs, whatever it was will wear off and they won’t be able to get to you. You’ll see. Just wait.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded back to the living room.
But he took the holster and gun with him.
The Professor’s tape resumed where it had left off.
“. . . I believe that the growth in my head—this one, right here—I think . . . I think that it is not really a tumor, not an uncontrolled, undirected little bubbling pot of flesh, but in fact is a new organ, a new part of the brain. I think that massive doses of the VIDEODROME signal will ultimately create a new part of the human brain which will produce and control hallucination to the point that it will change human reality. After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?”
O’Blivion laughed grimly.
“You can see that, can’t you?”
Max didn’t know what he could see anymore.
He only knew that his head was hurting again. It always started right behind the eyes. It could be that the problem was not only VIDEODROME. It could be video, period.
He thumbed the remote control and reduced the volume. His ears were ringing; he wasn’t sure what he was hearing. At this point it all ran together. The Professor mouthed on at his desk. Max touched another button and froze the tape on a single frame. The Professor’s hands remained locked rock-firm on the desk, his mouth opened quizzically on a tunnel of darkness.
Max slouched on the sofa. He felt listless, bone-weary. That was what the bath had done for him. Too much of a good thing was worse than no help at all. His muscles were rubber. The damp towel was still wrapped around him; it held him to the cushions like adhesive. It would require the greatest effort of will to move from this spot, to change tapes, for instance, or to get himself something to eat . . .
He was hungry, by God, physically hungry at last. He ran through a mental list of what he had left in the kitchen. Not much. Nothing there that he needed.
He wondered what he did need.
Without realizing what he was doing, he scratched himself with the stubby barrel of the gun. His stomach was itching again.
He felt the gunsight catch on something. An unnatural fold of skin, probably, created by his nearly supine position. He blinked and glanced down sleepily.
The seam running up his belly was back.
Only this time the raised line was puckered up into a protuberant ridge. Two parallel ridges, to be precise.
As he watched, the twin halves of the seam engorged and separated like dry mucous membrane, pulling apart to reveal a livid interior.
Max moaned, shook his head. No, no, no, no, no . . .
He stretched his eyelids fully open and moved his head on his shoulders to take in the rest of the room, to regain perspective.
There were the familiar appurtenances of his life, each piece of furniture located exactly where he expected it to be, the reassuring disorder of his possessions, the videocassettes scattered like leaves at his feet, the half-empty cup of cappucino balanced on the arm of the sofa, the floating milk on top streaked and scummy, Professor O’Blivion’s face frozen in an anticipatory expression, mouth open in amazement. All was as it had been. The edges of every object were outlined hard and clear with no veil of granularity to confuse him, no video lines twitching before his eyes . . .
His stomach convulsed.
He looked down.
It was still there.
Now the sides of the seam opened and closed, lips alive with their own rippling rhythm.
His breath came quick and shallow.
The slit opened wider and he saw deep red folds within, wet and hungry, pulsating like an ever-widening mouth.
He clenched his teeth and forced his lungs to breathe in, out, as deeply and regularly as possible. His spine stiffened and he pressed his back into the cushions. Bu
t he could not escape. It was here.
What he saw was happening to his own body and there was no way to get away from it.
Shaking, he probed it with the barrel of the gun.
The slit expanded wider, two, three inches across. Now the opening extended halfway up his chest. Layers of blood-filled tissues were clearly visible within, throbbing wetly. Then, like an anemone which has been disturbed, the incision contracted, the edges folding inward on the wound.
He probed deeper, more forcefully, his chin pressed to his chest in horror.
There was no pain, but the tissues did not respond.
He pushed more firmly.
The flesh opened again and gave way under the pressure, and the full length of the gun was suddenly sucked into his body, including his hand up to the wrist.
He threw his head back and bit off a scream.
He pulled, pulled again harder.
The seam closed like a toothless mouth around his wrist.
He lurched to his feet.
“No,” he said aloud. “No. C’mon, now. No no no no no . . .”
His breath came in spasms, his chest heaving for air. He staggered desperately around the room, careening between table, lamp, TV set . . .
“Professor O’Blivion,” he choked. “What is—?”
Without warning his hand slipped back out of his stomach, disgorged.
The hand was covered with a red, gelatinous substance, bits of flesh and muscle clinging to it.
The gun was no longer there.
He looked down at his belly.
There was only a faint red line, the rash that he had been scratching.
He touched it.
Normal skin. Nothing more.
His eyes darted wildly around the room.
He searched every surface, the top of the TV, the table, the sofa . . . nothing. It was impossible. The gun couldn’t be in his body. It could not.
I will not have this! he thought.
He tore at the cushions. Jammed back into the corner of the sofa was the holster.
The empty holster.
He pressed his hands to his abdomen. It did seem swollen. Or did it? He flattened his hands against his stomach and pressed. Could there be a lump, a shape . . . ?
No. Nothing.
“Professor O’Blivion,” he said intensely, “what is going on? Really, now? You can’t be serious. This isn’t . . .”
The face on the screen, held suspended in a single freeze-frame, began to lose its clarity. The color desaturated as the image destabilized, broke up into distortion and finally washed out completely. The last thing Max saw was the darkness in the mouth spreading out of an open throat to fill the screen, diffusing widely to dim the living room, and then nothing.
The phone rang shrilly.
Max broke down and laughed. What was happening to him was too insane. It was—
The phone rang again, again.
He found it and lifted the receiver.
A distant voice said, “Max?”
“Yeah.” He waited. Static on the line. “Who is this?”
“Why don’t you take a look and see?” A woman’s voice.
“Look where?”
“Where do you always look to find out what’s really happening?”
A pink light flickered in the room.
He shot a glance at the console TV set. A picture was taking shape. He saw his own reflection in the picture tube glass, naked now before the set, the hair on his head drying in spikes like energy lines. Then his image was blotted out by the face of a woman. She was holding a telephone receiver. Her lips moved.
“It’s Nicki,” said the voice on the phone.
“Fuck!”
“I sent you a video love letter. Did you get it?”
“Bitch! I thought you were dead.”
“Dead?” Nicki laughed through her nose. “I wouldn’t die without letting you in on it. Didn’t you know that? Besides, nobody really dies on VIDEODROME. But I couldn’t resist, lover. I knew you’d be watching.”
Max held to the phone, swaying. He met her eyes dead on. “I watched it a lot. Over and over.”
“Oh no, Max. That’s not good. That’s . . . it’s very complicated, lover. It’s not what you think. It’s not what anybody has ever thought before. But I know what’s happening to you. Come to me. Come to Nicki.”
He weighed his options. He did not exactly have an unlimited slate to choose from. And he had to know. He had to regain control. Somehow.
“Night flight to Pittsburgh?” he said.
Nicki laughed again onscreen and repositioned her head as though to see him, his face, his body. “I’m right downstairs, waiting for you.” Her lush, cupid’s-bow lips parted enticingly, her red tongue thick and lubricated. “I wanna take you for a ride. Come to Nicki now.”
She winked and hung up.
The receiver went dead in his hand.
The screen blanked out, then brightened again with an extreme close-up of O’Blivion, no longer at his desk but now floating in a kind of two-dimensional electronic limbo. His voice came from the TV set’s speaker grille.
“I think you should do it, Max. I think you should go. When they reached the point where physics became philosophy, they asked me to help them. Now they’ve reached the point where philosophy becomes flesh—and they need you. It’s a good position to be in. Take advantage of it.”
Part Four:
The Ultimate
Spectacle
Chapter Ten
Max tossed down a few ounces of his best Scotch. It burned his insides but it warmed him. It wasn’t enough, however. He felt a chill spreading from his toes and fingertips, up his arms and legs, closing in on his heart.
He dressed in his bulkiest clothes and heaviest overcoat and made for the stairs.
The lobby of his apartment building was cold and empty as a mausoleum. The inner workings of his body, his own breathing and the labored pumping of blood through his veins reverberated in his ears. He balanced at the foot of the stairway, one hand on the railing for support, not knowing what to expect.
On the other side of the heavy glass doors the night was punctuated by the lights of the city and of a great dark ship anchored offshore, waiting. The faint lanterns on its bridge winked at him like impatient insect eyes, beckoning.
He moved forward, dragging his feet slowly over the tiles, as though underwater.
The street was deserted. Except for a few parked cars bunched near the end of the long block the area was lifeless at this hour, a forgotten movie set from a backlot ghost town.
He squinted up and down the block. Only a scrap of newspaper in the shape of a crushed dwarf blew toward him along the pavement, frog-marching between the shadows of battered trash cans. He lit a cigarette and pitched the sizzling match into the gutter. A cold breeze blew around the corner and numbed his face.
He retreated to a spot under the eaves of his building to get his bearings.
In the distance a long, dark car crossed an intersection and purred toward him with its lights off.
He doused his cigarette and started off in the opposite direction.
The long car glided up to the curb next to him. It was a stretched silver-and-black Lincoln limousine. The windows were tinted so Max could not see who, if anyone, was at the wheel. He flipped up his collar and kept walking.
The limo started up again. It paced him for a few yards, then accelerated ahead and braked about a hundred feet up the block.
Max made a decision. And his fear left him like a physical presence lifting and flapping away overhead. He unclenched his fists in his pockets.
He ambled on until he was even with the vehicle, veered to the curb without looking up, opened the giant wing of the car door as easily as if it were something he did at least twice a week, and got into the back seat.
He sank heavily into the leather upholstery.
The driver was all but invisible beyond the smoked glass partition separating the passengers�
� compartment from the driver’s seat. The man at the wheel could have been anyone, or no one. The bill of the chauffeur’s cap cast an impenetrable shadow across the face.
Max heard a dull thud as the door locked automatically. Then the chirp of thick tires as the driver sped away from the curb. For a few seconds Max heard nothing else. The soundproofing was obviously very effective. The car was as silent as a padded coffin. The interior was ridiculously plush. He noticed a wireless telephone. It was not the style Nicki had used a few minutes ago, on his TV.
Then there was a crackling and a metallic voice said, “Good evening, sir.”
Max could not see the driver’s lips move, if indeed he had lips.
“You’ll find newspapers and magazines under the folding seats,” said the voice, “as well as food, coffee and soft drinks in the cabinet. Welcome aboard.”
“You mean there’s no television set?”
“Yes, sir. I was just getting to that. If you’ll please direct your attention to the walnut-veneer panel in front of you, Mr. Renn. My employer, Mr. Convex, has recorded a little introductory speech for you.”
Another name out of left field to contend with, thought Max. Nice. I guess.
He released the catch. The panel slid aside to uncover a small ten or twelve-inch monitor screen. It was already on.
It was watching him. A yellow-and-green graphic of a human eye glowed in close-up, overlaid with the words: SPECTACULAR OPTICAL—Keeping an Eye on the World.
The logo dissolved through to a medium-close shot of a crisp salesman-type against a plain, undistracting background. The fellow seemed to be smiling directly at Max.
“Hi! I’m Barry Convex, Chief of Special Programs, and I’d like to invite you into the world of Spectacular Optical—an enthusiastic global corporate citizen. We make inexpensive glasses for the Third World, and missile guidance systems for NATO.”
