by Jack Martin
Max broke the strained silence. “A terrific idea,” he said. “I need a sense of direction.”
Convex nodded decisively. Max almost expected him to click his heels and present arms.
“Max, I’d like you to try her on for size. I would like you to record one of your hallucinations—now. Then I would like to take that tape back with me to home base for analysis.”
“How do you know my hallucinations will be any better than the others?”
“Max . . . we’re dealing in mental images on tape, done not the way it’s always been done before, but directly. If it could be controlled, you could create a video narrative directly from your brain. Thousands of characters, exotic locales, amazing special effects. All for free. Why hire a thousand people just to fill a frame this big? Just think them into it.”
Convex set the Accumicon helmet gently on the table, where it balanced on its base like a scaled-up model of some devolved insect’s head.
“Can you grasp the opportunity I’m giving you? The artists of the future would be those individuals who could focus their VIDEODROME hallucinations, shape them, control them . . . I’m talking about you, Max. I think you’re the first.”
“You might want to think twice before you recruit me, Barry. See, I’ve got a problem or two I’m wrestling with right now, and I’m not quite sure I’m winning. My dreams are actually pretty messy. Not what you’d call suitable prime-time fare.”
“Oh, we know all about that. What you’ve been experiencing is nothing more than—”
Max cut him off. “For instance, I have this big TV set that follows me around like a dog and talks to me, tells me things. He even talks about you. He told me not to trust you. Should I believe him?”
“I’d only listen to him if he’s an established brand name.”
“Is that supposed to be a pun?”
“Seriously, Max . . . Your imaginary friend sounds to me like a hallucinatory self-projection of your unconscious. An unusual manifestation of alter ego. It’s really just you, telling yourself what you’re afraid of.”
“Where did you learn jargon like that?”
“That was why Dr. Brand was recruited for the project. We felt we needed a professional psychological interpretation of the hallucinatory graphics.”
“You know what?” said Max. “I’m beginning to think that you—and this invention of yours—are my greatest works. I’m finding it hard to keep believing in you, even though I know I’m imagining the whole thing.”
“Then why not immortalize us on tape? We’d look good in a frothy sitcom, don’t you think?”
Max considered, conscious of the inescapable visceral revulsion he felt for the thing on the table between them.
Convex touched a concealed switch and the helmet activated with a high-frequency whine at the very borderline of human hearing. Its circuitry powered, the helmet began to glow with an unearthly light.
Max stalled. “Do I get to keep the copyright? I mean, I’d hate to see it show up as a Movie-of-the-Week and not get paid for it.”
“Max, I’m trying to help you.”
“What makes you think I need your help, Barry?”
“None of our test subjects has returned to, well, to normality. They’re all in need of intensive psychiatric care. Now, you seem to be functioning reasonably well—so far. I’d like to find out why. And I think an analysis of one of your hallucinations would be the right place to start.”
“Do I get to choose my own analyst?”
Convex rotated the helmet so that its streamlined visor was pointing at Max.
“How about Nicki Brand? I want to see her. I want to see Nicki.”
“Oh, you’ll see her. Well?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Max picked up the helmet. It was lightweight, no heavier in his hands than styrofoam, though the underside contained a complex roadmap of flexible circuitry. As he held it the top glowed more luminously. Bundles of wiring showed through the curved plastic, suggesting X-rays of neurological connections.
“Will it hurt?”
“It won’t hurt you. You may find yourself moving in and out of hallucination for a while after this is all over. You’ll wake up tomorrow morning with a headache.”
“I’ve already got one. What do you want me to do?”
“I think you’ll find that a little S&M will be necessary to trigger off a good, healthy session.”
“Why not a TV talk show? Safer, cheaper, no special effects to dream up . . .”
“Something to do with the effects of exposure to violence on the nervous system. It opens up receptors in the brain and the spine that allow the VIDEODROME signal to sink in.”
Oh.
Max sat. With the salesman’s help, he lowered the helmet onto his shoulders. The visor was up, the optical apparatus not yet in position. But already he felt the seductive self-reflexiveness of a giant seashell wherein his own pulse and respiration would create an ocean of sound into which he might submerse himself, be reborn . . . or drown.
This was going to be interesting.
And not really irresponsible, he rationalized. It was part of his job. After he made the tapes, Channel 83’s programming would never be the same again. The new schedule would kick ass all up and down the ratings.
As he waited for the process to begin, further questions occurred to him. Convex was dickering with the left-eye opticals. Max imagined himself a football player girding for the ultimate battle in a Superbowl of the future. He spoke while he had the chance.
“Why not football?” he asked. “That’s violent.”
“But socially acceptable. And not very sexy.” Convex’s breath was minty on Max’s face. “It’s the thrill of forbidden fruit that gets those little synapses to spread their legs. That’s the way Dr. Brand puts it.”
“My TV set friend tells me that those little synapses turn cancerous under the influence of VIDEODROME.”
Convex snickered and poised his hand to lower the eye shield.
“I said we’d help you, Max, and we will. First, by proving to you that your fears aren’t real.”
“Yeah? Nobody dies on VIDEODROME?”
“They’re all third-rate actors. A death scene is the easiest thing to do. Ask Dr. Brand.”
Max was already feeling claustrophobic. Convex’s lily white hand shuttered the visor down over his eyes. The salesman’s face broke up into a video grid.
“I think I’d like to. I’d like to ask her right now. If you don’t mind.”
“You’ll have your chance.” The voice was far away. “Now get ready.”
“You mean I’m going to have to hurt you, Barry?”
“Not me.” Convex made final adjustments and pressed a recessed switch in the molding. “Hey, I was wrong. You do look good in glasses . . .”
An electrical tone surged, wound down to a hum, then rose in pitch and crackled like video machine-gun fire.
The squares of the video grid turned yellow, then white, then blurred as the room lights were amplified into a blazing, scorching conflagration.
He closed his eyes quickly. But his eyelids were thin as ricepaper lanterns. He saw the blood in the veins at the backs of his retinas starting to boil. He threw his arm across the visor.
“I can’t take it! Shut it off! It’s too bright!”
“Christ, yes. Sorry.” Convex scampered for the lights and flipped them all off except for a small worklamp in a far corner. “I forgot. How’s that?”
The coruscation softened to a bearable level, the audio monitor sputtering down to a steady hum. Through the Accumicon optics, even the worklamp was amplified into a white-hot bloom of fire.
“Yeah. That’s—that’s better.”
A multiplied repetition of Convex’s face came close as another switch was flicked on the back of the helmet. Instantly a liquid crystal numerical display appeared at one side of the viewer, a digital readout accurate to a hundredth of a second.
“Okay,” said Convex, “we’re rolling. The taping mechanism’s self-contained. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”
Max practiced aiming the helmet on his neck. He discovered that by an effort of concentration he could keep the field sharp. It reminded him of racking an image in and out of focus in a TV camera viewfinder, using only the muscles of his eyes.
He panned with Convex as the salesman found his way to the door.
“I’ll come back for you later. You’ll forgive me if I don’t stay to watch. I just can’t cope with the freaky stuff.”
A sliver of light from the showroom stabbed in like an icepick, then faded as Convex closed the door behind him.
Max sat alone and waited for something to happen.
The Accumicon optics boosted the semi-darkness into the red end of the spectrum. The effect was warm and cozy.
He turned his head to the left.
Piles of cartons, the spaces between them red shadows, their amplified surfaces breaking up into pits and valleys.
He turned right.
More of the same, and a wall. He inclined toward it an inch, two inches and saw details he could not have discerned without the helmet. Cracks and flaws in the plastic wood surface, scuff marks that were craters, splinters that opened on the interior depths of a microworld beyond the limits of ordinary sight.
He racked the focus closer.
The empty space between his new eyes and the wall was, he discovered, made up of millions of minute grains or particles smaller than dust motes and as plentiful as atoms; the reddish tinge of the magnified light suggested that the particles might be blood cells coursing through living plasma. The rusty color reminded him of something else, too, something he was reluctant to remember. But he couldn’t escape it now. It was everywhere. It was the very air he breathed. It was the whole world.
You know me, he thought. I stay away from the scary stuff. Me and Barry. He’s not so dumb, is he? Either he is, or I am.
He pointed the viewer down.
There were his legs, his hands. He had never before seen his own hands so clearly. They had hairs which were as varied and remarkable as bonsai trees growing out of the backs, out of the pores. His skin had a texture not unlike the earth itself, with hills and valleys, underground streams of capillaries rushing beneath the surface . . .
“Well . . .”
A voice, filtered by the electronic humming in his ears.
“. . . here we are at last.”
A woman’s voice? Yes. He heard sharp high heels clipping toward him across the room. He raised his masked head.
“Right where we ought to be . . .”
The network of squares in the viewer overran with redness. He concentrated and brought them together into the shape of a dress.
“. . . on VIDEODROME.”
She stopped a few feet in front of him.
“Nicki?!”
“That’s right, lover.”
He stood too quickly and reeled under the unnatural bulk of the headpiece.
And saw that the room was not what it appeared to be. It had changed.
Disoriented, he took a step backward, felt for his balance.
There was no longer chair or table near him. Only the slats of a wooden grille underfoot.
A few scant inches below the boards, water was collecting.
The wall behind him. The soft, sweating wall.
Now he saw it as never before. The strange hooks and loops, the trickling water, the electrical switch, the handprints burned into the clay . . .
He could feel the texture without reaching to touch it. The room was pressurized with humidity, alive with moisture, tickling his skin.
He raised his hand.
There was something in it. A long, heavy tube of snakeskin, slithering across his palm.
A whip.
Had Nicki handed it to him? He couldn’t remember.
He scanned the room. He was alone except for a squat, aged console television set.
Like everything else, it seemed to be breathing.
He circled it slowly, trailing the tails of the lash in water.
The front of the television set, the screen, was a view of pink skin against a red clay wall. The frame showed a woman stripped to the waist, her arms raised above her head as though manacled together out of camera range. She twisted around coyly and said over her shoulder, her scarred shoulder:
“What are you waiting for, lover? Let’s perform. Let’s open those neural floodgates!”
Then Nicki offered him her back, and waited.
He tried to speak but his tongue was thick and hot in his mouth. His face, his body felt feverish and swollen, flushed, sweating, like the room.
His head was heavy with machinery, his brain overheated in a closed loop which fed off itself and only nourished the desire. There were no words for any of it. He couldn’t have spoken to her if he wanted to now. The emotion was all and it was accumulating fast, building for relief.
He approached the set, whisked the lash over the cabinet.
She was waiting.
The thick red membranous walls around him. Glowing and pulsating from within and from without.
The whip was transformed into a living extension of his being.
He flicked his wrist. The whip snapped.
Nicki’s image flinched.
He snapped it again, more strongly.
Nicki cried out in pain.
Ahh.
He slashed.
Each time Nicki screamed louder. The whip rained down furiously. The set itself shuddered and groaned; blood and white fluid oozed from the long wounds in its cabinet.
Max’s arm grew weary. He paused to catch his breath. Nicki’s image heightened to never-before-seen clarity.
Only now it was not Nicki.
It was Masha.
Masha, tears streaming down her face as she cringed away from him, her video image fluorescing hideously.
Max wielded the lash again, again. With each new flaying the close-up twitched more grotesquely, until it smeared off into video darkness.
Chapter Twelve
The next stroke was his last.
A rustling of video static filled the air.
Max stopped his arm. No longer could he see clearly. The forked tail of the whip snapped back and fell to rest on his own body, his own shoulders and head. He turned away, exhausted.
But he couldn’t leave. The braided strands vined around him, tighter and tighter. He tried to fling them off. The tips of the lash obscured his field of view. He tore at them, dislodged what was covering his face—
Max twisted free and rolled away.
He could see.
A long distance away, a television set sputtered in a cyclone of snow and white noise. A console, like his own. It was a TeleRanger. In fact, it was his own TV. And around it a familiar disarray of books, a coffee table, a chair with clothes strewn over the back, all of it seen from far off through a framing window as in the wrong end of a telescope . . .
He flung the pillow completely away and liberated one shoulder from the tangle of sheets.
He was in his own bed. The television set churned on in the blue darkness of his living room, visible through the open bedroom door.
And then I woke up, he thought. It was all a dream.
And all he had to show for it was a migraine headache. Hardly worth the effort.
He laughed at himself.
Listen, he thought, listen—the thing is . . . what does it mean? It’s all in the meaning. That’s what’s important. What does it mean? Okay? Okay . . .
It was very late. Or very early. Same thing. His watch was too dark to read. And his hair was in his face. He combed his fingers to clear away the cobweb-like strands on his forehead. But a latticework remained over his eyes. The hairs had an unpleasantly rough texture. And they were gray.
He stopped laughing.
The hairs did not belong to him.
He sat bolt upright.
; A long, clumped form lay wrapped in the covers next to him. It was hidden except for a spray of gray hair that had fallen onto his side of the bed.
His heart caught in his chest, then began pounding like a jackhammer.
Trembling, he eased the sheet down.
In the dim room he thought he recognized the cuts on the shoulders and the sensuous curve of the arms joined above the head, the wrists bound, the hair mysteriously gone white—
He touched the shoulder. Cold.
He rolled her over.
Her eyes were open and glassy, a leather gag strapped across her mouth, a belt that could easily have been his own buckled around her wrists. Old wrists, bulging with blue veins. The face a tragic portrait of debauchery that this time had gone too far.
“Masha,” he whispered. His throat wouldn’t work right. “Oh, Masha.”
Masha did not respond.
He ripped away the sheet and blanket.
She was half-nude, bound hand and foot, the hospital gown open at the back where day-old welts and lash marks gaped like vertical mouths cut into a rubber doll.
A very old, very cold rubber doll.
He scrabbled away from the bed. He backed to the bedroom door, then walked around to her side and very gently drew the sheet up over her head. He backed off again, and made it into the living room.
There was no one on the television screen to tell him what to do this time.
The phone was in front of the TV. He knelt. In the blue salt-and-pepper strobing his clothes appeared wrinkled, stretched, like crumpled sacks. He punched the TV off and dialed.
The phone rang for a long time.
“Yeah?”
“Harlan?”
“Yeah. What time is it . . . ?”
“It’s Max.” He had to get it out before his voice failed completely. “Can you come over to my apartment? Right away.”
A groan on the other end of the line.
“And Harlan? Bring a camera.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
Max was having a discussion with himself in the bathroom mirror.
