Dennis Etchison - The Dark Country

He flicked his pen rapidly between cramped fingers and glanced up, eager to be out of here and home to his own video cassettes. Not to mention, say, a Bob's Big Boy hamburger, heavy relish, hold the onions and add avocado, to be picked up on the way?

"I've been sent here to ask you about last month's Viewing Log," he began. "When one doesn't come back in the mail, we do a routine follow-up. It may have been lost by the post office. I see here that your phone's been disconnected. Is that right?"

He waited while the man used the remote selector. Onscreen, silent excerpts of this hour's programming blipped by channel by channel: reruns of Cop City, the syndicated version of The Cackle Factory, the mindless Make Me Happy, The World as We Know It, T.H.U.G.S., even a repeat of that PBS documentary on Teddy Roosevelt, A Man, a Plan, a Canal, Panama, and the umpteenth replay of Mork and Mindy, this the infamous last episode that had got the series canceled, wherein Mindy is convinced she's carrying Mork's alien child and nearly OD's on a homeopathic remedy of Humphrey's Eleven Tablets and blackstrap molasses. Still he waited.

"There really isn't much I need to know." He put on a friendly, stupid, shit-eating grin, hoping it would show in the purple light and then afraid that it would. "What you watch is your own business, naturally. AmiDex isn't interested in influencing your viewing habits. If we did, I guess that would undermine the statistical integrity of our sample, wouldn't it?"

Morrison and his wife continued to stare into their flickering 12-inch Sony portable.

If they're so into it, I wonder why they don't have a bigger set, one of those new picture-frame projection units from Mad Man Muntz, for example? I don't even see a Betamax. What was Morrison talking about when he said he'd taped The Fuzzy Family? The man had said that, hadn't he?

It was becoming difficult to concentrate.

Probably it was the black light, that and the old Day-Glow posters, the random clicking of the beaded curtains. Where did they get it all? Sitting in their living room was like being in a time machine, a playback of some 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 any original black-light posters, however primitive. The one in the corner, for instance, "Ship of Peace," mounted next to "Ass Id" and an original Crumb "Keep on Truckin'" from the Print Mint in San Francisco, had been offered on the KCET auction just last week for $450, he remembered.

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 The Honeymooners, myself. That Norton." He added a conspiratorial chuckle. "Sometimes I think they get better with age. They don't make 'em like that anymore. But, you know, the local affiliates would be very interested to know that you're watching."

"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 see, 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 The Uncle Jerry Show.''

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 bean-bag 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 is 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 bean-bag 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 be throbbing 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 —»