by Jack Martin
He beamed into the camera, his high brow polished and gleaming under a blown-dry fringe of brown hair tastefully arranged over his tanned forehead. His voice dropped confidentially.
“We also make VIDEODROME, Max, and as I’m sure you know, when it’s ready for the marketplace, well, it will have quite an impact, to say the least. It can be a giant hallucination machine and much, much more. But it’s not ready. Those were test transmissions you picked up. We thought nobody could tap into them . . .”
“Nobody except the pirates,” said Max.
Barry hoisted his shoulders and said casually, “Well, now that you have, I think we ought to have a little talk, don’t you?”
“Pittsburgh?” asked Max without enthusiasm.
“I thought maybe . . . my place?”
The TV set did not wait for an answer. It held Barry Convex’s slick con man’s visage a moment longer, then blipped off.
The car surged onto a motorway. Max was thrown back into the seat, which enfolded him like a gloved hand. Outside the tinted windows a swarm of night lights streaked past.
I need a drink, thought Max. At least that.
He discovered the bar and poured himself a double Scotch. It was MacAllan single malt, vintage 1964. The best.
“Oh God, Max,” said an all-too-familiar voice. “I’m so excited to see you!”
Max choked on his drink and came close to biting through the lip of the glass.
The TV set was active again. The dim light from the screen threw a pink glaze over the sumptuous interior as the woman’s face leaned into the camera, then pulled away to give him a full view of herself.
“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t tell me. They saw your potential and made you an executive.”
She was not wearing what she had worn on his TV. She was dressed conservatively, functionally, but with a twist of something that suggested rationality taken to the degree of perversion. In fact, she was dressed like a black Saab automobile.
“No,” she said. “This is all for you. They want to meet you. Wanna drink?”
“I’m working on it. By the way, I appreciate the TV.”
“Mm, so do I. We’ve got The Max and Nicki Show right here.”
“And we’re taking it on the road. But where to? You didn’t ask me to bring my toothbrush.”
“It’s not far. When I told them about you—who you were and how you happened to see VIDEODROME—they went crazy.”
“He’s good, that Harlan. A good pirate.”
“What are they like, Max, the hallucinations? Are they weird and incredible and sick and wonderful?” She was touching herself and salivating.
“Then you do know what’s been happening to me.”
“That’s been the whole point. That’s what VIDEODROME really is. You watch it and you get stoned. When it’s officially introduced, the world will never be the same again.”
“What about me? Will I ever be the same again?”
Nicki said thoughtfully, “I don’t know. I don’t think they know. Suddenly you’re their star subject. It doesn’t work on everyone. It didn’t work on me. I wish it had.”
“Do you?” said Max conversationally, draining the last of his drink through his teeth, as if he and Nicki had been having conversations like this for the past twenty years. He tried mightily to take it all in the proper spirit.
“I don’t like it here, honey.” Nicki’s broad face fisted with displeasure. “ ‘The world as we know it’—the commonly-agreed-upon reality. Who needs it? I think I’d like it where you are a whole lot better.”
He was beginning to register the effects of the Scotch. The inside of his mouth was warm and peaty. Like a drunk in an earthquake, everything was feeling A-okay to him. He stifled a belch.
“It’s not very stable where I am,” he told her. “Things change a lot.”
“I’m not a very stable person, lover,” she said seriously, dropping into her best radio voice. “Or haven’t you noticed? The guy they sent up here to see you—he thinks your condition is reversible. He wants to help you. But I personally don’t give a fuck, because I find you more exciting this way. In fact, you’re giving me a contact high right now . . .”
The car coasted off the motorway and up a side road. The inertia pulled him away from Nicki, from her TV image. He narrowed his eyes to keep her in focus. It was a task. He wanted to lie down on the seat, kick off his shoes, curl up with his head in her lap, her video lap.
“Max,” said a hollow, throaty voice, whispering so as not to be overheard, as if the car had ears. It was not Nicki’s voice. It was vibrating thinly out of the rear speakers. “Max, don’t do this alone. Be careful. Don’t try to do this on your own.”
He raised his head to see through the smoked glass into the front seat. The driver was immobile in silhouette, both hands on the wheel, waiting for the light to change.
Nicki looked at Max inquiringly. As if she could see him. As if she really and truly could. But she was used to playing for microphones and cameras. She was an ace actress. She had been good enough to fool him before.
He looked around to see where he was. Outside, a blue-white store window shone coolly back at him like a miniature drive-in movie screen. It was an electrical appliance store. Within the display window was a row of demonstrator television sets, all tuned to the same channel. On each screen was a middle-aged man’s face. It seemed to be looking directly at Max.
He rolled down the back seat window to get a better look. As he did so, the largest of the sets, a nineteen-inch TeleRanger identical to the one he had at home rose up a few inches on its wooden legs and lumbered forward, crashing through the plate glass and oozing down onto the sidewalk amoeba-fashion. Shattered glass rained down on the cement.
Max dropped his empty drink glass and crooked his neck out into the night air to see how good this hallucination really was. Whether it would stand up under close study.
The TeleRanger thumped like a phocomelus to a place on the corner behind two newspaper vending machines. One was for the Toronto Star. Racing Driver Killed in Fiery Crash, read the headline. The other machine was for a local sex paper. The console nudged a space for itself between them and sat down, swelling and contracting with gigantic breaths from the exertion, its fleshy surface (walnut veneer?) rippling with musculature, shot through now with large veins, downy with soft surface hairs backlighted by the mercury vapor street lights.
On the TV screen, pulsing and distorting with each breath of the set, was the face of Brian O’Blivion. The face spoke again, its voice now audible from the set’s speaker grille which was only a foot or two from the curb.
“Be cagey, Max. Be wary. Beware the optometrist . . . the spectacle of him . . . It’s a dinner of truth and lies. Eat it, digest it, but keep in mind that there’s much better cuisine available . . .”
The light changed to green and the limo sped on, leaving the TV set behind. It huddled breathing and shivering on the corner as Max hung his pale face out the window, hoping to catch the last of the broadcast.
Inside the limousine, Nicki could remain silent no longer. She vied for his attention.
“What is it this time, lover? Something I said?”
Aw, shit, thought Max.
He closed his eyes, rested his head on the back of the luxurious seat, felt for the controls to the ten-inch set and played with the knobs until he succeeded in turning Nicki off for the time being.
Max was jolted softly out of his nap.
The limo halted in front of a shabby, cut-rate store in a particularly dark section of a shabby, cut-rate street. It was a neighborhood he did not know. The store’s sign identified it as SPECTACULAR OPTICAL INTERNATIONAL. A wholesale outlet, Max reasoned. No consumer in his right mind would shop here.
The driver kept the motor running and unlocked the back seat doors by remote control. The rear speakers switched on.
“Here we are, sir. Hope you weren’t too cramped back there.”
“I was fine,” said Max
wryly. He rubbed sleep out of his eyes. His back ached. “I guess this isn’t Pittsburgh.”
“No sir, it’s not. Shall I open the door for you?”
“I think I can make it. I’ve made it this far.”
The chauffeur raised his gloved hand to the brim of his hat and saluted in the rearview mirror, snapping his hand down like a pilot in an airline commercial. Max had yet to see his face.
“Au revoir, sir,” came the voice.
“Yeah,” said Max. “You, too.”
He climbed out.
It was either an outlet store or a damned good front. The display in the window was covered with two-year-old dead flies and the window itself was papered with advice on how to get glasses paid for by welfare and old age benefit schemes. CLOSED, warned the sign, PLEASE CALL AGAIN. Max was about to arrange to do just that, when he heard the limousine drive off without him.
He tried the doorknob.
It was unlocked.
Most of the lights were on. The wholesale showroom was crowded with dusty racks of standard junky fashion glasses in the usual disposable styles. Set out in the middle of the floor, however, were a few incongruously sleek plastic cases holding several dozen brand-new frames and sunglasses of a much more exotic and expensive breed. Max circled the cases, trying to figure out what it all meant.
Set up against one wall was a clean, new demonstration counter, basically a light box covered with frames held in place by translucent plastic strips—a salad bar for the nearly blind.
There was definitely no one here. He was alone to make his selection.
He picked a pair of squarish black hornrims from the rack, tried them on. In the small customer mirror, a familiar face stared back at him in stark detail. His own face but changed somehow; with a pretentious air added, like a movie director who took himself too seriously. He scowled and took them off.
The rack had small built-in drawers at the bottom, containing styles there was no room to display. He opened the first level, lifted out another pair, lowered it onto the bridge of his nose.
These frames already had lenses in them. They were sunglasses, much better than the pair he owned. For the moment the reduced glare was a relief.
Max took in the rest of the room, hoping to come upon some detail that would give him a clue as to why he had been brought here.
The decor was what Max had always thought of as Middle American Posh. On the walls were posters and banners advertising the latest generation of Spec Op graphics and slogans. One, styled after a stained-glass church window, declared: THE EYE IS THE WINDOW OF THE SOUL . . . SOULFUL STYLING BY SPECTACULAR OPTICAL. Another, a chic guy-girl-car effort, read: LOVE COMES IN AT THE EYE—W.B. Yeats. SPECTACULAR OPTICAL HELPS.
Either Max was blacking out or the glasses he was wearing were fast-acting photochromatics. He took them off. They were. He squinted up at the guy and girl in the car. They were having a hell of a good time. But they weren’t even looking at one another. Like they had been married for ages.
“If love comes in at the eye,” Max muttered to himself, “what happens when you wear prescription lenses?”
“You get optically correct love coming in at the eye,” said a baritone voice. “That’s even better.”
Max was startled. He turned warily.
“I hope you realize you’re playing with dynamite.”
The tailored salesman came out of the doorway from the back room and approached Max.
“That’s our spring line. Top secret stuff.” He closed in with his hands out, his fingers aimed for Max’s eyes. “I brought them with me for our trade show here in town later this week. I hope you won’t sell us out to the competition.”
Max put the sunglasses back on. He could hardly see the man striding toward him. He braced himself.
“Max Renn? I’m Barry Convex.”
He was. Custom-made suit, starched white shirt, diagonally-striped tie. Very impressive. Like a government spokesman, or an insurance salesman. Instead of shaking hands he reached for Max’s face, removed the photochromatics. He was not wearing glasses himself.
“I think that machinery you’re wearing is a bit too much for the shape of your face. Overwhelms you. Try something more spidery, more delicate.”
Max was having trouble with the overhead fluorescents. They made everything, including Convex’s scrubbed face and the underdone veal cutlet of waved hair on his forehead, too hard to take. He wished he had the shades back on. He riffled through the other glasses in the drawer.
“How about these?” He came up with a pair of wire rims. They rested effeminately on his nose. “Spidery enough?”
Convex adjusted the glasses so they were seated properly, a strangely intimate act. The man’s nails were manicured, buffed and polished.
He withdrew to check his handiwork. Then he reached out and removed the wire rims, closed the drawer on them.
“You look lousy in glasses,” he said.
He patted Max’s back and directed him to the other room of the store.
“Max. Let me tell you something about myself. So you’ll see where my head is at. Where I’m coming from.”
He used the words as if they were catch-phrases in a sales pitch. Max had encountered his type before, back when he was starting out at Channel 83, buying and selling sponsor ad time. It didn’t bother him. He went along with it. He had always believed in playing dumber than he really was. It was a survival technique. It tended to give him the advantage sooner or later.
“Max, I began my career as a lens grinder. Started off grinding lenses for pocket magnifying glasses in school, can you believe that? Got into glasses, then microscopes, then—well, the sky was the limit, know what I mean?”
A veritable rags-to-riches story, thought Max.
“Bear with me. You might find this interesting.” He flashed Max an expression of camaraderie. “We were doing some very, very sophisticated zero light weapon scopes for military application. Developed something called an image accumulator. It used a system of vidicon tubes, a closed circuit where we amplified indistinct signals from tube to tube to tube, to create images where the physics books said there wasn’t enough light for an image to exist. We made a kind of helmet with conical fiber optics—didn’t want to get into lasers—and you know? The damnedest thing happened to some of the boys who were testing her in the field.”
Max thought he knew what was coming. “They all got brain cancer. Came in at the eye.”
Convex shrank from Max like a rejected lover.
“Now that’s a hell of a thing to say. Hell of a damned negative thing.”
A few more steps, however, and he made a full professional recovery. He pumped himself up again. This was too important for him to allow personal feelings to slow him down. He smiled crookedly. Straight teeth, though, Max noticed.
“You’ve got a strange sense of humor,” said Convex.
“Yeah. I thought it was pretty funny.”
“Max. I’m a pretty straightforward kind of guy. And I suddenly find myself dealing with things. You know, freaky things.”
“It must be hard, Barry.”
The salesman ignored the last comment and led Max deeper into the storeroom. Blocks of shipping cartons were piled everywhere, creating a fortress-like maze.
“Anyway.” They came to a cleared area with a small table at the center. Next to the table was a folding chair, and on the table rested one specially reinforced carton, heavier and more durable than the others. “Here she is. This is our little sweetheart, the prototype. The only one in existence right now. This is the little number that started it all.”
Chapter Eleven
Convex dipped his arms into the carton and came up with an extremely futuristic helmet affair, quite large, obviously the product of the latest scientific research.
It reminded Max of a portable eye examination machine built to the specifications of a science fiction illustrator. The engineer-designers had had a field day, constructing one of their patholog
ically practical wet dreams in solid three dimensions.
The salesman brushed away bits of packing foam and cradled it proudly in his arms.
“We got pretty deep into our campaign for her. Gotta sell the hell out of it no matter how good it is. And the name—military boys are suckers for a snappy name. Sales came up with Accumicon—for image accumulator.”
In its way the headpiece was bizarrely beautiful. Almost a techno-interpretation of a piece of medieval armor. It would have fit right in with the rest of the objects in Brian O’Blivion’s office.
“I’d buy Accumicon,” said Max, admiring its perverseness in spite of himself. “Yeah. I’d buy that.”
God help me, he thought.
Convex was reluctant to let go of it. He rubbed a smudge off its molded carapace with a soft finger.
“She worked like a charm in the lab. Light, comfortable, an extension of the body. Turned a man into a zero light fighting machine . . .”
His expression underwent a subtle sea change from pride to petulance.
“But then, under simulated combat conditions, the boys who used her began to hallucinate. Images began to appear that weren’t really there—and the images lasted for hours after they stopped wearing her. Took us quite a while to figure out that the boys were starting to project their own images through the optical accumulator, images that came from their brains and ended up exciting the vidicon mosaic like an electron gun. Video hallucinations, Max, that we have recorded on tape.”
“I’d love to see them.”
“Classified, I’m afraid. That was Army research. We don’t control it.” Convex stroked the headshell lovingly. This was his baby.
Max couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was pleasing to the eye, in an antiseptic, modernist sort of way. He had the sense that he was being interviewed as a potential suitor.
Convex’s cheek twitched.
“But what we would like to control, Max,” he said breathlessly, “is you.”
Neither man moved.
The immaculate lines and sleek, tapered components of the helmet became the absolute center of their attention, its raised visor reflecting the dispersed lighting of the room with the wide-angle efficiency of a fly’s eye.
