“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 The Uncle Jerry Show when the time came to switch channels again, eyed a clock on the wall over the Sony—there was a clock, after all, if only one knew where to look amid the glowing clutter—and half-turned to his visitor. The clock read ten minutes to six.
“What are you waiting to hear?” asked Morrison.
“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 stuff.”
“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 thought. I can see that now.
“Well, I envy you. I went through a Marvel Comics phase when I was a kid. Those are worth a bundle now, too. My mother burned them all when I went away to college, of course. It’s the same principle. But if I could go back in a time machine…” He shook his head and allowed an unforced smile to show through.
“These were our son’s things,” said Mrs. Morrison.
“Oh?” Could be I remind them of their son. I guess I should be honored.
“Our son David,” said Mr. Morrison.
“I see.” There was an awkward pause. The young man felt vaguely embarrassed. “It’s nice of him to let you hold his collection. You’ve got quite an investment here.”
The minute hand of the clock on the wall ground through its cycle, pressing forward in the rush of white noise from the speakers.
“David Morrison.” Her voice sounded hopeful. “You’ve heard the name?”
David Morrison, David Morrison. Curious. Yes, he could almost remember something, a magazine cover or…
“It was a long time ago. He—our son—was the last American boy to be killed in Vietnam.”
It was four minutes to six and he didn’t know what to say.
“When it happened, we didn’t know what to think,” said Mrs. Morrison. “We talked to people like us. Mostly they wanted to pretend it never happened.”
“They didn’t understand, either,” said Mr. Morrison.
“So we read everything. The magazines, books. We listened to the news commentators. It was terribly confusing. We finally decided even they didn’t know any more than we did about what went on over there, or why.”
“What was it to them? Another story for The Six O’Clock News, right, Jenny?”
Mrs. Morrison drew a deep, pained breath. Her eyes fluttered as she spoke, the television screen at her back lost in a grainy storm of deep blue snow.
“Finally the day came for me to clear David’s room…”
“Please,” said the young man, “you don’t have to explain.”
But she went ahead with it, a story she had gone over so many times she might have been recalling another life. Her eyes opened. They were dry and startlingly clear.
It was three minutes to six.
“I started packing David’s belongings. Then it occurred to us that he might have known the reason. So we went through his papers and so forth, even his record albums, searching. So much of it seemed strange, in another language, practically from another planet. But we trusted that the answer would be revealed to us in time.”