“I don’t believe this!” says Quentin. “You can’t turn me into a freak show! Anyway, who’d pay to look at a bunch of cut-off heads? This is a joke! I’m not awake!”
“Oh, it’s much more than the heads,” says Dr. Derwent. “It’s hardly a living waxworks. Biographies, gossip sites, reality TV, they’re all obsolete. With our patented blend of neurology and technology, we can activate any memory or imagined scene or even dream you’ve ever had, and then we can project the images onto a viewing screen. Sound is included.”
“But that’s, but that’s… call my lawyer!” says Quentin. He can hear the futility in his own voice.
“None of this is precluded by the terms of the contract,” says Dr. Derwent. “While you’ve been asleep, we’ve been running your programs, so we could offer the clients a wide selection.”
“My favourite is the one where you screw me with your new big dick—you have a kind of light-up effect with that—and then you kick me out onto the street naked,” says Suzie. “Actually it’s kind of a turn-on.”
“It’s been popular with the general public,” says Dr. Derwent. “They find it very amusing. I myself relish the sequence in which you humiliate me in front of my peers and then fire me. I’ve played that several times. That werewolf episode is in heavy demand as well, and we can up the price now you’re awake. The fans love it when the, ah, when the former—when the headslave has to watch too.”
“Sid Bryant likes the one where he’s a driveling senile old guy in a retirement home and you visit him and then abuse him,” says Suzie. “He laughs a lot when you call him a carbuncle. He’s ordered a clip of that so he can have it on the video-art screen in his office.”
The two of them smile at him happily. Then they kiss, a lingering, smouldering, hormone-sodden kiss, nothing faked about it. Suzie presses herself against Derwent’s lab-coated, discreetly logo’d torso. She utters a soft moan. Quentin feels himself writhing in pain, even though he has nothing left to writhe with.
“Want a demonstration?” says Dr. Derwent. “Of the system. It’s really remarkable, very hi-def images. You can watch the screen right along with the viewers. But you don’t have to, because the exact same thing is playing in your head.”
“Even if you close your eyes,” says Suzie. “Maybe Quent would like to see the one where he beats up his first wife. The umbrella whippy accessory is so totally weird! It’s kind of a rape thing too, though that part doesn’t go too well. But there’s some good lines, aren’t there, darling?” She nibbles Derwent’s ear. “You couldn’t make it up!”
“That one’s been a general favourite,” says Dr. Derwent. “Or the one where he’s whimpering, and his mother pulls down his little jeans and hits him with a—”
“Get me out of this bottle!” Quentin howls.
“Oh no, Quentie,” says Suzie. “That would kill you. And none of us would want that, would we?”
I read Ray Bradbury as a teenager, and those stories really sank in, especially “The Martian” and the other
Chronicles, and Fahrenheit 451. Some writers jump straight to what we might call “deep metaphor,” writing at a mythic level, and that is what these stories do. To quote Elias Canetti in The Agony of Flies: “To withhold meaning: nothing is quite so unnatural as the constant uncovering of meanings. The merit and the true power of myth: its meaning remains concealed.”
My own story is just a pale little riff. Cut-off heads were one of the tropes of ’50s science fiction, both written and filmed; perhaps “Headlife” is another, more sinister version of The Illustrated Man.
HEAVY
Jay Bonansinga
At one of the tallest buildings in Los Angeles the contractor arrives after dark. Riding the crystalline glass elevator up to the lavish, gleaming spires of the upper floors—where the law offices and consultants burn the midnight oil to finance their BMWs and alimony payments—the contractor finds Room 1201 and pauses.
He unsheathes his Browning nine-millimeter semiautomatic from its holster inside his sport coat. He calmly screws the silencer into the muzzle, checks the magazine, then moves his six-foot-six, 260-pound frame through the doorway and into the richly appointed outer office of Zuckerman Gold and Fishel Artist Management.
Over the bubbling fish tanks and frothing infinity fountain, the contractor hears the shrill voice of Marvin Zuckerman drifting out of his opulent inner office: “Morris, she happens to be a very talented young lady… and this offer is unacceptable, a disgrace, a dishonor to her fine…”
The contractor steps into Zuckerman’s inner sanctum, holding the Browning at his side like a parcel.
The agent raises one hand, as if to say give me a second, while continuing to chatter on his wireless headset: “Okay, so she’s had a few problems with Oxycontin… Morris, she has lower-back pain—”
“Excuse me,” the contractor interjects, squeezing the gun.
“Hold on a second, Morris.” Zuckerman looks up. “I had the pastrami on rye and the German potato salad, and I hope you left the mayo off this time because—”
“I’m going to need you to move away from the window,” the contractor says, now aiming the gun at the general vicinity of Zuckerman’s toupee.
The realization on Marvin Zuckerman’s face could be etched over a painting of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the way his mouth goes slack and his droopy, bloodshot eyes widen. The headset falls from his ear and clatters to the floor. “Who sent you? Was it Schacter at Universal?”
“Move. Away.”
“Was it because of the Tom Cruise disaster?”
“From. The. Window.”
As Zuckerman slowly rises, the spark of terror in his eyes kindles into something like inspiration, like the look of a rat suddenly faced with the prospects of gnawing off its leg to escape a trap. Somewhere deep in his primordial brain stirs his instinct—as innate as the migratory patterns—that everything is negotiable. “You’ve come to whack me, I understand that, but before you do, may I ask—if you’ll pardon my impertinence—have you ever done any acting? On film I’m talking about… Because what I’m seeing here—and you must understand, this is my business—is that you have something extraordinary in the way you carry yourself, and the way you handle that firearm, and if I may be so bold, I think you make Robert De Niro look like RuPaul—and forgive me for having a natural propensity for commerce, but I think I could make you a significant amount of money in this business they call show—but, of course, that would necessitate my not being whacked at this time, so I’m just throwing that out there.”
The pause that follows, as the contractor ponders the little toupee-wearing agent, feels longer to Zuckerman than it takes glaciers to cleave mountains.
“If you do not move away from the window,” the contractor finally explains with the grudging patience of a dog trainer, “I will relocate the back of your skull to that far wall over there with that nice Picasso.”
Marvin Zuckerman edges around the desk with hands raised and mouth working. “I have—I have a daughter—in Boca Raton, if I may be specific—she’s in H-Hebrew college—please, please—she’s studying to be a rabbi—a saint this girl—and if I may add at this juncture that I am also supporting a little boy in boarding school—he’s ADD and he’s got a—”