Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

He paused, waved the paper at the camera like a bloody shirt.

“This is my contract,” he said.

And the promptboard flashed “Off the Air.”

The commercial rolled, and behind the glass of the control booth Barron could see the confusion, the deathwatch smell, and Vince’s face seemed ten years older as he stared through the glass and then spoke into the intercom circuit:

“Jack what are you—”

“Keep me on the air, Vince,” Barron said.

“What in hell is going on? Do you realize what you’re doing?”

Do I realize what I’m doing! Barron thought. Did I ever realize what I was doing before tonight?

“Just keep me on the air, Vince,” Barron said, “and make damn sure Howards stays on the phone.”

Gelardi hesitated, and Barron could read the pain on his face as he said: “The network brass is screaming. You’ve laid them open to the biggest libel suit in history. They’re ordering me to keep you off the air. I’m sorry…”

“This is my show, Vince,” Barron shouted, “and you can tell those fuckers to get stuffed! You can also tell them that every word I’ve said is true, and the only way they can avoid a libel suit is to keep me on the air and let me prove it.”

“That’s pretty dirty pool,” Gelardi said as the promptboard flashed “60 Seconds.”

“It’s a pretty dirty world, Vince,” Barron said, and he broke the intercom connection.

How’s this for the old power-junk, Barron thought. Benedict Howards totally raving out of his mind, and I’ve got him trapped on my turf where I make all the rules, can change ’em anytime I want. Howards, with all his power, with his dirty fingers in every Democratic pie, I can do more than save myself—that’s no real sweat now—I can kick the whole cabal that runs the country to pieces, throw the next election so wide open anyone might win. Right here, right now, live!

A dream, yeah, a Jack-and-Sara dream, just me standing at the focus of everything and kicking the whole rotten schmear apart. Dream made reality—I got the monster that knows where all the bodies are buried (shit, who you think buried them in the first place!) right where I want him, ready to pick him apart…

Sara! Sara! If only you were here to see the show now, baby! Bug Jack Barron goes down, it’ll go down with a bang that’ll take the whole sorry mess with it. Sara… Sara… it’s the only way I know how to cry for you.

He stared at the meaningless commercial on the monitor as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds,” and knew that in half a minute his image, a reality that was realer than real, would burn into a hundred million eyes as if they were in the room with him.

No, they would be sucked in deeper than that, they would be in his head, behind his eyes, seeing and hearing only what he wanted them to, nothing more and not a phosphor-dot less.

And in a strange reversal of perspective, he saw that if they all were a part of him, the image-Jack Barron was also a part of them. What he had always avoided had come at him from where he least expected it— Bug Jack Barron, like it or not, was power, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.

And as the promptboard flashed “On the Air’, Jack Barron knew there was only one way he could play it. Been called a lot of things, he thought, but humble was never one of them!

On the screen, the pack of Acapulco Golds fades out and is replaced by a face, an expanded vidphone image, gray, fuzzy, somehow bloated. There is something inhuman about the eyes, a too-bright rodent emptiness and the mouth is trembling, the lips beaded with spittle.

Over this close-up of Benedict Howards, a voice, controlled, unwavering, yet with an undertone of suppressed agony that gives it total conviction, the voice of Jack Barron:

“Surprise! Surprise! We’re back on the air, and in case you tuned in late, the man you’re looking at is Benedict Howards. The man you’re looking at thought he could buy anyone in the United States, me included, and you know something—he was right.”

The black and white face on the screen seems to shout something soundlessly at this, as if the words will not come, and then suddenly it is gone and the face of Jack Barron, in close-up, fills the screen. His sandy hair is a tangle as if the pregnancy of the moment has forbidden him to comb it; his eyes seem huge, leaping out of the screen from deeply-shadowed pits, and somehow he looks older and younger all at once.

“Think you couldn’t be bought, out there?” he says, and the words are bitter, knowing, yet also somehow ironically forgiving. “Pretty sure of that, aren’t you? So was I, baby, so was I. But what if the man that was buying was Benedict Howards, and the coin he was paying for your bod was eternal life? You so sure now? Really? Then think about what it’s like to be dead. You say you can’t? Of course you can’t, ’cause you can’t nothing when you’re dead. Think about that, because you’re all going to die, gonna be nothing— dead. Unless Benedict Howards thinks he has a good reason to give you eternal life. And he thought he had a good reason to buy me—so he bought, and I sold. No excuses, friends, I just didn’t want to die. Would you? So now I’m immortal, with the glands of a dead child sewn inside my hide. How’s that grab you? You hate me—or is that twinge in your gut just envy? But before you make up your mind…”

Now the left half of the screen is filled with the face of Benedict Howards, a gray specter of menacing madness that Jack Barron pins with his big green eyes as he says: “Go ahead, Howards, tell them the rest.”

“Rest…?” Benedict Howards mumbles like a lost little boy. “What rest? Isn’t any rest, just facing black circle life leaking away in plastic tubes eviscerated niggers… you’re killing me, Barron, throwing me to the black circle of death closing in choking me choking me… you’re killing me! Rest…? Rest…?”

Jack Barron’s sky-blue sportjac and yellow shirt, his sandy hair and wounded eyes, seem like an oasis of embattled humanity beside the gray gray madness that radiates from the left half of the screen, as unreal and preternatural as a grainy newsreel of Adolph Hitler.

“You forgot your little kicker, didn’t you Bennie?” Barron says. “Back in Colorado, folks, Bennie told me I’d never have the b—, ah, cojones to do what I’m doing now. Remember, Bennie? Remember the contract? Remember the special clause you wrote in just for this occasion? Remember what you said you’d do?”

Howards’ face seems to expand like a gray balloon, and it fills the entire screen and he begins to babble, his voice dopplering upward in pitch as the words pour out faster and faster: “I’ll get you, Barron, swear I’ll get you for this, you murderer you killer on the side of the fading black circle closing in, you killed me, Barron, get you kill you like you’re killing me…”

Jack Barren’s living-color image appears in the lower-lefthand quadrant, a frail, vivid splotch of fleshy humanity, threatened by yet somehow more cogent than the gay newsreel monster surrounding him, a contrast that makes you proud to be a man.

“Got your name on the contract in black and white,” Howards babbles shrilly, “a legal confession in any court in the country. Murder! Yeah, he’s a murderer, accessory to murder, I can prove it, got his name on the contract accepting legal liability for the results of the immortality treatment—if it’s murder, sends me to the chair, you fry with me, Barron; you’re a murderer too!” Coming from the gray unreal monster, the words are unreal, and there is a blessed relief of tension when the images reverse and Barren’s flesh-and-blood face fills three-quarters of the screen, and Howards’ black and white newspaper photo face appears tiny in the lower-left quarter of the screen, as if a more natural order has been restored.