Sara… I can’t cry for you Sara, don’t have any tears left in me. But… I can kill for you, baby, kill that fucker Howards! Oh, yeah, I can kill for you, all right! Can hate, all right! Maybe you were right in your own dumb way, ’cause you’re gonna get what you wanted, you and those hundred million dumb bastards out there.
Yeah, I’ll do a show like no-one’s ever seen! They want their fucking hero, I’ll give him to them on a silver platter, see how they like it! Let the stupid bastards out there see where it’s really at for once in their lives… How’s that for a television first?
The vidphone began to chime. Barron made the connection, and Vince Gelardi’s face appeared on the screen, ashen, stunned, and Barron knew that he knew even before Vince muttered: “Jack… the police just called… Sara…”
“I saw it all happen, Vince,” he said quickly, determined to spare Vince the agony of telling him. “Don’t say anything. Don’t even tell me how sorry you are. I know… I know…”
“Jack… I hate to have to bring it up but we go on the air in nine minutes. I’m trying to get through to the network brass so we can run an old tape, so you don’t have to…”
“Forget it!” Barron snapped. “I’m gonna do the show tonight, gonna do it for Sara! Show biz, baby… the show must go on, and words from the same picture…”
“Jack you don’t have to—”
“But I do, man! More than any show in the history of this whole dumb business, this one’s gotta go on! See you in the studio, Vince—but thanks anyway.”
“Jack,” Vince Gelardi said over the intercom circuit, his face gray and lifeless, all too real to come off real in the network-reality world behind the control booth glass, “look, you don’t have to go on the air. I checked with the powers that be, and I got the okay to run one of last month’s tapes if you… I mean…”
Jack Barren sat down in the white chair behind the black-wash-over-kinesthop background, clocked the cameraman (cameraman he never noticed during the show) staring ashen-faced at him, saw that the promptboard was live and showed “3 Minutes,” and somehow he could sense the disaster-aura reaching all the way to the monkey block behind the control room.
And it bugged him. Fucking network brass coming on like they really care how I feel with Sara Sara… Yeah, sure, all they want to know is does it mean a fiasco if I go on the air with her body not yet cold, where’s that crazy Barren’s head at now, Gelardi, think he can go on the air? Jeez, if we do a rerun unannounced now, after the stuff he’s been rapping out these past few weeks… Oh, my aching Brackett Count!
But that, Barren thought, is show biz. The show must go on, there’s no business like show business, and like that. But why must the show go on? No big secret, it don’t go on, that audience out there might get the idea that there was only a human being like them behind the image, and that would screw up the ratings. Which is enough reason in this business to do anything.
Yet Barren felt pissed that the whole damn crew was preparing its ulcers for a massive disaster. The show must go on—bullshit, sure, just a dumb ass-game, but what the hell isn’t? This show’s gonna go on, all right, and the brass won’t believe the ratings ’cause this is kamikaze night, and they’re gonna get the Big All, the topper to end all toppers, the greatest show on earth: Two living-color stars of stage, screen, and gutter politics going at each other for blood.
“Snap out of it, Vince!” Barron said, cracking his voice like a whip for control. “I’m going on the air, and this is gonna be a show like no one’s ever seen. Stick with me, baby, keep me on the air no matter what I do, believe me, I know what I’m doing, and if you cut me off, and the network doesn’t back you up, you’re fired.”
“Hey, man…” Vince crooned in a wounded tone of voice as the promptboard flashed “2 Minutes.” It’s your show, Jack…”
“Sorry, Vince, I didn’t mean to threaten you, I just gotta be sure you’re on my side and I stay on the air no matter what, and to hell with the network and the FCC,” Barron said. “There’s a thing I gotta do that’s bigger than the show, and I have to know you won’t try to stop me. It’s nitty-gritty time, buddy: who you working for, the network or me?”
“Where was I eight years go?” Gelardi said, still hurting. “You’re the best in the business, you are this show. It’s your baby, not the network’s and not mine. You didn’t have to ask—you know I work for you.”
“Okay, then hang on to your hat. Get me Bennie Howards on the line—and don’t worry, I guarantee he’ll go on,” Barron said as the promptboard flashed “90 Seconds.”
“Calling out first?”
“That’s the way we play it tonight. A television first—I Bug me.”
Gelardi shrugged, and a ghost of the old crazy-wop smile came back. “Who you want in back-up and safety?” the old Gelardi said. Good old one-track Vince!
“No back-up or safety tonight, just me and Howards—mano a mano.”
Gelardi shot him a funny, scared look, then a wan grin, and went to the phones as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.”
As he waited, Barren stared at the gray-green face of the monitor. With his guts so damn empty—a musty cavern haunted by unreal ghosts—there was something hypnotic about it; he felt the vacuum within reach out for the waiting vacuum in the cathode-ray tube, meet, merge, form a reality-to-reality tunnel across the nonspace of the studio, as if there were nothing real in the whole Universe but himself and that screen and the circuit connecting them. Even the network that logic said connected him with a hundred million other screen-realities didn’t seem to exist. Just him and the tube.
The monitor screen came to living-color life, a phosphor-dot image straight to the backs of his eyes: his own name “BUG JACK BARRON” in red Yankee-go-home letters, with the barroom voice behind it.
“Bugged?”
Then the montage of anger-sounds, and the voice again:
“Then go bug Jack Barron!”
And then he was staring at his own face, a living-color mirror-reality that moved when he moved, the eyes shadowed, the mouth grim and heavy. He backed off a bit from what he felt, saw the face on the screen become less tense, less savage, responding to his mind like a remote-controlled puppet.
As they rolled the first Acapulco Golds commercial he pulled himself away from that vertiginous rapport with the screen, saw that the promptboard said “Howards on Line”—and it was like a nerve in his own body reporting back on the readiness of his fist. Indeed, it was hard for him to feel the interface of his own body—his consciousness seemed as much in the promptboard and the monitor as in his own flesh. He was the room, was the studio setup, the monkey block-controlled-booth-studio gestalt. It was part of him, and he of it.
And everything else—memories of Sara, slug-things inside him, all he had ever been—was locked away, reflex-encapsulated, unreal. Though he felt the mechanism activating and knew it for what it was—electric-circuit-anesthesia—he was grateful for it, knowing that his gut wouldn’t have to feel what was going to happen, living-color kick-’em-in-the-ass image-Jack Barron was back in the catbird-seat and knew what to do.
His face was back on the monitor screen. “This is Bug Jack Barron,” he said, feeling the flesh of his mouth move, seeing it duplicated in the image before him, cell by phosphor-dot image cell, “and tonight we’re gonna do a show that’s a little different. You’ve been bugging me out there for years, folks, using me as your voice to get to the vips. Well this is worm-turning night, folks, tonight we play the old switcheroo. Tonight I’m bugged, tonight it’s my gripe, tonight I’m out for blood on my own.”