Hollywood Sam Katzman or Albert Zugsmith version of the sixties; he almost expected Jack Nicholson or Luanna Anders to show up. Except that the artifacts seemed to be genuine, and in mint condition. There were things he had never seen before, not even in catalogues. His parents would know. It all must have been saved out of some weird prescience, in anticipation of the current run on psychedelic nostalgia. It would cost a fortune to find practically
He tried again.
“Do you have your Viewing Log handy?” Expectantly he paused a beat. “Or did you—misplace it?”
“It won’t tell you anything,” said the man.
“We watch a lot of oldies,” said the woman.
The young man pinched his eyes shut for a moment to clear his head. “I know what you mean,” he said, hoping to put them at ease. “I can’t get enough of
“Not that old,” said the woman. “We like the ones from the sixties. And some of the new shows, too, if —”
Morrison inclined his head toward her, so that the young man could not sec, and mouthed what may have been a warning to his wife.
Suddenly and for reasons he could not name, the young man felt that he ought to be out of here.
He shook his wrist, pretending that his collector’s item Nixon-Agnew watch was stuck. “What time is it getting to be?” Incredibly, he noticed that his watch had indeed stopped. Or had he merely lost track of the time? The hands read a quarter to six. Where had they been the last time he looked? “I really should finish up and get going. You’re my last interview of the day. You folks must be about ready for dinner.”
“Not so soon,” said the woman. “It’s almost time for
That’s a surprise, he thought. It’s only been on for one season.
“Ah, that’s a new show, isn’t it?” he said, again feeling that he had missed something. “It’s only been on for—”
Abruptly the man got up from his beanbag chair and crossed the room.
He opened a cabinet, revealing a stack of shipment cartons from the Columbia Record Club. The young man made out the titles of a few loose albums, “greatest hits” collections from groups which, he imagined, had long since disbanded. Wedged into the cabinet, next to the records, was a state-of-the-art audio frequency equalizer with graduated slide controls covering several octaves. This was patched into a small black accessory amplifier box, the kind that are sold for the purpose of connecting a TV set to an existing home stereo system. Morrison leaned over and punched a sequence of preset buttons, and without further warning a great hissing filled the room.
“This way we don’t miss anything,” said the wife.
The young man looked around. Two enormous Voice-of-the-Theatre speakers, so large they seemed part of the walls, had sputtered to life on either side of the narrow room. But as yet there was no sound other than the unfathomable, rolling hiss of spurious signal-to-noise output, the kind of distortion he had heard once when he set his FM receiver between stations and turned the volume up all the way.
Once the program began, he knew, the sound would be deafening.
“So,” he said hurriedly, “why don’t we wrap this up, so I can leave you two to enjoy your evening? All I need are the answers to a couple of quick questions, and I’ll be on my way.”
Morrison slumped back into place, expelling a rush of air from his beanbag chair, and thumbed the remote channel selector to a blank station. A pointillist pattern of salt-and-pepper interference swarmed the 12-inch screen. He pushed up the volume in anticipation, so as not to miss a word of
“What are
“Yes,” said his wife, “why don’t you tell us?”
The young man lowered his eyes to his clipboard, seeking the briefest possible explanation, but saw only the luminescence of white shag carpeting through his transparent vinyl chair—another collector’s item. He felt uneasy circulation twitching his weary legs, and could not help but notice the way the inflated chair seemed to throb with each pulse.
“Well,” trying one more time, noting that it was coming up on nine minutes to six and still counting, “your names were picked by AmiDex demographics. Purely at random. You represent twelve thousand other viewers in this area. What you watch at any given hour determines the rating points for each network.”
There, that was simple enough, wasn’t it? No need to go into the per-minute price of sponsor ad time buys based on the overnight share, sweeps week, the competing services each selling its own brand of accuracy. Eight- and-a-half minutes to go.
“The system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best way we have so far of—”
“You want to know why we watch what we watch, don’t you?”
“Oh no, of course not! That’s really no business of ours. We don’t care. But we do need to tabulate viewing records, and when yours wasn’t returned—”
“Let’s talk to him,” said the woman. “He might be able to help.”
“He’s too young, can’t you see that, Jenny?”
“I beg your pardon?” said the young man.
“It’s been such a long time,” said the woman, rising with a whoosh from her chair and stepping in front of her husband. “We can try.”
The man got slowly to his feet, his arms and torso long and phosphorescent in the peculiar mix of ultraviolet and television light. He towered there, considering. Then he took a step closer.
The young man was aware of his own clothing unsticking from the inflated vinyl, crackling slightly, a quick seam of blue static shimmering away across the back of the chair; of the snow pattern churning on the untuned screen, the color tube shifting hues under the black light, turning to gray, then brightening in the darkness, locking on an electric blue, and holding.
Morrison seemed to undergo a subtle transformation as details previously masked by shadow now came into focus. It was more than his voice, his words. It was the full size of him, no longer young but still strong, on his feet and braced in an unexpectedly powerful stance. It was the configuration of his head in silhouette, the haunted pallor of the skin, stretched taut, the large, luminous whites of the eyes, burning like radium. It was all these things and more. It was the reality of him, no longer a statistic but a man, clear and unavoidable at last.
The young man faced Morrison and his wife. The palms of his hands were sweating coldly. He put aside the questionnaire.
Six minutes to six.
“I’ll put down that you—you declined to participate. How’s that? No questions asked.”
He made ready to leave.
“It’s been such a long time,” said Mrs. Morrison again.
Mr. Morrison laughed shortly, a descending scale ending in a bitter, metallic echo that cut through the hissing. “I’ll bet it’s all crazy to you, isn’t it? This
“No, not at all. Some of these pieces are priceless. I recognized that right away.
“Are they?”
“Sure,” said the young man. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it reminds me of my brother Jack’s room. He threw out most of his underground newspapers, posters, that sort of thing when he got drafted. It was back in the sixties—I can barely remember it. If only he’d realized. Nobody saved anything. That’s why it’s all so valuable now.”
“We did,” said Mrs. Morrison.
“So I see.”
They seemed to want to talk, after all—lonely, perhaps—so he found himself ignoring the static and actually making an effort to prolong his exit. A couple of minutes more wouldn’t hurt. They’re not so bad, the Morrisons, he
