John: Maybe we can make it out to the lake this weekend. Edna: Supposed to be clear, in the seventies, I heard on the weather . . .
This season John had been acting stranger and stranger, even during their mealtime sharing. His conversation was becoming more and more foulmouthed and even incoherent. He had taken to appearing in elaborate character roles even over breakfast, and yesterday's real-time-shared breakfast had been just about more than Edna could take.
He'd voiced her over the. night before and invited her to breakfast the next morning in Hawaii, where they had real-time-shared their honeymoon in the dim, distant past-so many seasons ago that no recording tape of it existed; none had been made way back then, before anyone had even dreamed of retiring to Total Television Heaven. It had been a very long time indeed since John had invited her to realtime-share their past at all, even in a reconstructed version, and so when he told her he had customprogrammed breakfast on the beach in Hawaii, Edna had been so thrilled that she agreed to time-share his breakfast program against what had lately been becoming her better judgment.
The program wakened her to sunrise on the beach, the great golden ball rising out of the dark sea in speeded-up stop-motion animation like a curtain going up, illumining the bright blue sky that suddenly flared into existence as she found herself lying on the sand beneath it.
This to the theme of an ancient primetime show called Hawaii Five-O, as a majestic breaker rolled and broke, rolled and broke, again and again, in a closed loop beyond the shoreline foam.
John appeared in the role of a tanned, blond, muscled Adonis wearing a ludicrously short grass skirt. A breakfast table was set up at the edge of the sea itself, in the foot-high wash of foam kicked up by the eternal rolling wave that towered and broke, towered and broke, above them.
Naked, godlike Polynesians-a youth for her, a maiden for John-helped them to their feet and escorted them to the wicker peacock chairs on either side of the strange table. The table was a block of polished obsidian on Victorian-looking brass legs; there was a depression in the center, out of which a grooved channel ran to the seaside edge of the tabletop.
This was certainly not their Hawaiian honeymoon as Edna recollected it, and she didn't need a tape in order to be sure of that!
"Welcome, O love goddess of the north, to my groovy pad," John crooned in a strange, cracked voice. He clapped his hands. "An oblation in thine honor."
The naked maiden produced a squealing piglet, which she pressed into the pit in the center of the
table. The naked youth handed John a huge machete. "Hai!" John screamed, hacking the piglet in half with a swipe of his blade. Blood pooled in the pit in the table, then ran down the groove to the edge and dripped off into the sea. As the first drops of blood touched the ocean, the water abruptly changed color, and for a few moments a towering wave of blood arched over them.
A few moments later, when the eternal wave was blue water again and Edna's viewpoint angle returned to a shot on the table, the gory mess had been replaced by a white tablecloth, two plates of ham and eggs, a pot of coffee, and a bottle of dark island rum.
"Oh, John," she said disgustedly, "it's all so . . .
SO-99
"Eldritch? Excessive? Demented?" John said petulantly, crotchety annoyance cracking his handsome, twenty-year-old features. "You're such a timid bird, Edna. No sense of fun. No imagination."
"Killing things is not my idea of either fun or imagination," Edna retorted indignantly.
John laughed a weird, nervous laugh. A whale breached not far offshore, and immediately a giant squid wrapped tentacles around it. A fight to the death began. "Killing things?" John, said. "But there's nothing alive here to kill!" This is Heaven, not Earth, and we can do anything we want without consequences. What else can we do?"
"We can have a normal, civilized breakfast like decent human beings."
"Normal, civilized breakfast!" John shouted. "Decent human beings!" A volcano erupted somewhere inland. Terrified natives fled before a wall of fiery
lava. "Who cares about being decent human beings when we're not even alive, my princess?"
"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," Edna said primly. But of course some small part of her did, and that part was chilled to the core.
"Sure and begorra, you do, Edna!" John said mockingly. "Avast, matey, what makes you so sure we're still alive? For lo, how many television seasons has it been since we retired? A hundred? Two hundred? Verily and forsooth, time out of mind. Can you even guess, my slave girl? I can't."
Edna blanched. She didn't like this kind of talk at all. It was worse than his machismo adventure programs, worse than the porno programming he enjoyed putting her through, worse on a whole other level she had trained herself not to contemplate.
"Of course we're alive," she said. "We're real-timesharing now, aren't we?"
Bathing beauties water-skied in a chorus line through the curl of the wave. A flying saucer buzzed the beach. A giant crab seized their servants in its pincers. It whisked them away as they screamed.
"Ah, mine Aphrodite, how can we be sure of that? Thou couldst be croaked and I could be tuning in to an old tape where you still lived. Har-har, I could be dead except in this program of yours."
"This is certainly no program of mine, John Rogers!" Edna shouted. "Only you could have invited me to a breakfast program like this!"
"I stink, therefore I am," John cackled. Lightning rattled. Schools of porpoises leaped in and out of the great wave.
And so it had gone. Nubian slaves lighting ciga-
rettes. Dancing gulls. An orgy sequence. And all throughout it, John babbling and ranting like a demented parrot in his beachboy body. Only one thing had kept Edna from tuning him out and tuning in a breakfast soap, and that was the dim, distant thought that to do so might precipitate the final break between them, the break between her and something that she could no longer conceptualize clearly.
John: (rising from the table) What's for dinner tonight, by the way? Edna: Roast chicken with that corn bread stuffing you like.
He kisses her briefly on the lips.
John: Mmmmm . . . ! I'll try to pick up a bottle of that German wine on the way back from work if I'm not too late.
He opens the door, waves, and exits.
Edna: Have a good day.
But now, while she watched her image bid good-bye to John as he left for work on that dim, fuzzy old tape she found so soothing, Edna wondered how long it would be before she would consent to real-timeshare a meal with the "real" John again, a John she no longer recognized as the husband in her domestic tapes, a John she was not sure she wanted to know about.
After all, she thought, turning to Elizabeth the
Queen, her favorite historical romance of this season, too much of that could ruin her domestic tapes with John for her, and then where would she be if she could no longer live comfortably in her past?
Right now she was seated on her throne in the early evening light, and Sir Walter Raleigh was bowing to her with a boyish twinkle in his eye that made her quiver.
Rolling among naked teen-aged girls in a great marbled Roman bath. Popping off Indians with his Remington repeater. Swinging on a vine through a jungleful of dinosaurs. Leading the pack around the last turn at the Grand Prix de Monaco.
Boring, boring, boring! Irritably John flipped through the broadcast channels, unable to find anything capable of holding his attention. What a lousy season this was, even worse than the last! There wasn't a single adventure program that had any originality to it; the porno channels made him think of Edna and her damned disapproval of anything still capable of turning him on; and old domestic tapes, he knew, would just make him furious.
Of course he had a big file of classic recordings and custom-programmed favorites to draw upon when real-time programming got boring, and so he started flipping through his videx, desperately looking for something to fill this time slot.
Flying his one-man space fighter low over an alien glass city, shattering the crystal towers with his shock wave as he rose to meet the bandits. Chasing a fat merchantman under a full head of sail: Avast, me
hearties, prepare a broadside! Auctioned as a sex slave to a mob of horny women. Doing a smart left bank around a skyscraper, with Lois Lane in his arms.
He really had some choice footage in his tape library, but he had run all of it so often down through the long seasons that every bit of it seemed engraved in his real-time memory. He had lost the ability to surprise himself, even with how gross he could get, and he had to go further and further out to avert . . . to avert . . . to avert . . .
Onward, the Light Brigade! Thousands of screaming teen-aged groupies mobbed the stage, grabbed his guitar, tore off his clothes. "Frankly, Scarlett," he said, as she sank to her knees, "I don't give a damn."
If only Edna had the gumption to be a real wife to him! Lord knew, he tried to be a real husband to her. Didn't he regularly invite her to real-time-share the porn channels with him, and didn't he take pains to choose the most far-out sex programming available? Didn't he invite her to all his best adventure programs? Didn't he invite her to the best mealtime custom programming instead of the same old domestic tapes?
He did his best to make her programming day interesting and surprising, and what did he get from her in return? A lot of whining about his dirty mind, a determination to get him caught in one of those saccharine historical X's with her, and a dreary desire to mealtime-share the same musty old domestic tapes over and over again. What was the purpose of retiring to Total Television Heaven in the first place if you were afraid of grossness, if you insisted on realism, if
all you wanted was to watch endless rer.uns of the same old, boring past?
Striding through the jungle, a great, hairy gorilla beating his chest while the natives flee in terror. Executing a snappy Immelmann and coming up on the Red Baron's tail, machine guns blazing. Getting head from the legendary Marilyn Monroe.
