Channel Blue (4 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, in a clearly unapologetic tone. ‘I’m not at liberty to give out an address or
any
personal information about
any
currently enrolled student.’

‘I just want to return her jacket,’ Perry said.

‘Leave it in the lost and found, two doors down.’

‘Thank you,’ Perry said, in a clearly ungrateful tone, and turned towards the door. Then he had an idea. Using Amanda’s blue jacket as cover, he reached into his trouser pocket, surreptitiously pulled out his house keys and slipped them into one of the jacket’s pockets.

‘Oh no,’ he said, turning back to the secretary. He pulled his keys out of the jacket. ‘Must be her house keys. She’s going to need these tonight.’

The secretary reluctantly gave him Amanda’s work address. Perry looked at his watch: 4:30. He might still find her there. Clutching the blue jacket under one arm, he ran to the faculty parking lot with an energy he hadn’t felt in years outside of a coffee cup.

Minutes later, he pulled up to a large windowless office building on Ventura Boulevard. A large sign in front was already lit, the letters glowing an eerie blue:
GALAXY ENTERTAINMENT
.

Perry knew Galaxy as the cable monopoly in the area; when he’d moved into his apartment, he had been given two choices for cable provider: Galaxy and none at all. Since he was strapped for cash, he’d chosen the latter.

He wasn’t at all surprised that Amanda worked for a company like Galaxy. His students were often from the fringes of the entertainment business, clerks and bean counters desperate to be perceived as creative. Perry stepped out of his car, retrieved Amanda’s jacket from the back seat and walked towards the main entrance.

In a neighbourhood that was home to a mind-boggling variety of ugly office buildings, the Galaxy Entertainment building more than held its own. Its concrete bunker-like design (it seemed to have been poured rather than built) was topped with a thick steel roof painted the garish blue of the company’s logo. Perry walked to the one opening in the foreboding exterior and through swinging glass doors into a large lobby. Beyond a receptionist’s desk and a cluster of low-slung modern furniture was a metal door with a sign on it: ‘Employees Only – No Unauthorised Personnel’. The receptionist, a disarmingly clean-cut young man, ate popcorn earnestly from a red-and-white striped paper bag. He wore a blue jacket like the one in Perry’s hands and a name tag:

D
ENNIS
P
ERKINS

Our Service Is out of This World!

He looked up from his popcorn and noticed Perry. ‘No bills here,’ he said. ‘Please use the entrance on the other side of the building.’

‘I’m here to see an employee. Amanda Mundo.’

‘I’m sorry. Amanda just went out.’

Perry shifted the blue jacket between his hands. He had to deliver it in person. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’

As he turned to go, the glass doors clanked open. Amanda entered the lobby, saw Perry and stopped. He held up her jacket.

She laughed. ‘I’ve been looking all over for that,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe I’d left it in my car.’ She took it from Perry. ‘Thank you, Mr Bunt. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.’

As she took the jacket, Perry again noticed the small blue tattoo on the inside of her left wrist. His mind reeled with all the things he wanted to say to her but finally settled for a lame, mumbled, ‘No problemo’. Then, before he could follow it up, Amanda was moving again, towards the metal door across the room. She pushed an ID card against a scanner, opened the door, waved back at him and disappeared inside.

Do something
, Perry thought. This was it, the moment in the movies when the guy does something dramatic. So Perry did something dramatic. Suddenly possessed with an Olympian speed not accessed since a youthful experimentation with shoplifting, he sprinted towards the closing door. The receptionist jumped up from his desk and shouted something at him, but Perry was already catching the door just before it closed. Without hesitation, he swung it back open and plunged into a long, dimly lit hallway. He vaguely heard footsteps and shouting behind him, but he had Amanda in his sights and wasn’t going to stop now. Breathless, he was suddenly next to her.

‘Amanda,’ he said, ‘I wanted to ask if you—’

He didn’t finish his sentence because he became aware that he was standing in the strangest place he had ever seen: A huge, dark, cathedral-like space lined with what looked like TV monitors – brightly lit squares dotting the walls as far as he could see until they became nothing more than pinpoints of blue light. Flitting between the monitors, like bees from flower to flower, were red-uniformed men and women in flying armchairs. In the midst of all this was a giant round console festooned with lit-up words and images. On an illuminated image of the Earth glowed the words:

B
IZARRE

L
UDICROUS

U
NBELIEVABLE
AND
ALWAYS

E
NTERTAINING

As Perry’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he saw what appeared to be a large moving tree in the centre of the console. As he focused in on it, he saw that he was wrong. It was, in fact, a giant green slug-like creature covered with eyeballs the size of ping-pong balls, all of which were beginning, one after another, to ogle him. A great gap-toothed slit below the eyeballs trembled and opened.

‘We have a visitor in the central control room,’ it groaned.

Perry stood frozen, his mouth agape.

Amanda smiled apologetically. ‘Non-employees aren’t really allowed in here,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Mr Bunt.’

Two uniformed security guards, one short and squat, the other tall and muscular with a moustache, appeared out of the darkness. Before Perry had a chance to react, the tall guard grabbed his arms and pulled them behind his back. The clean-cut receptionist appeared in front of them, panting.

‘I tried to stop him—’ he said, the rest of his words lost in gasps for air.

Perry struggled, but the tall guard’s grip felt like iron manacles on his forearms.

‘Just relax. OK, friend?’ the short guard said. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

The tall guard’s head swivelled to his colleague. ‘You got your eraser?’

The short guard nodded, took a large brass ring from his belt and slid it halfway down Perry’s head to just above his eyes.

Perry, sweating profusely, glanced at Amanda, who still seemed, under the circumstances, ludicrously calm.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Bunt,’ she said, ‘They’re just going to do something to your brain.’ He didn’t have much time to panic before everything disappeared.

CHANNEL 5

LEFT HANGING

Perry Bunt opened his eyes. He was sitting in the reception area of the Galaxy Entertainment building. Dennis Perkins, the clean-cut receptionist, stood over him, snapping his fingers in front of his eyes.

‘Hey! Mister! Hey there! Are you OK?’

Perry surveyed the room, confused. It took him a moment before he remembered the strange chain of events that led to his loss of consciousness. Meanwhile, Dennis Perkins continued snapping his fingers in front of his eyes. ‘Hey! Mister! Can you hear me?’

‘Stop that,’ Perry said, pushing the receptionist’s hand away.  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ He pointed to the metal security door. ‘What’s going on in that room?’

Dennis Perkins furrowed his brow, puzzled. ‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘You came in, asked where Amanda Mundo was, I told you she had just left, and you passed out. Right here.’

For a moment, Perry considered this possibility. The night before, he had taken a Klonopin to get to sleep. Was it possible he was experiencing a delayed side-effect? But what had happened had been so real – the huge room, the giant slug, the annoyed security guards. He looked down at his shirt and saw a faint sweat stain, the result of his sprint after Amanda. He shook his head.

‘No,’ Perry said. ‘I followed Amanda into that room. And there were people flying in chairs and a big... I don’t know... slug monster, like something from a bad science-fiction movie. Then two security guards grabbed me, stuck a metal headband on my head and knocked me out.’

The receptionist laughed in disbelief. ‘That is crazy. That is so crazy. Is that really what you think happened?’

Perry nodded.

‘You have to do it again,’ the receptionist said.

‘Do what?’ Perry asked. But the receptionist wasn’t talking to him. The metal door opened and the same two security guards, one short and squat, one tall and thin, entered the lobby. The tall guard grabbed Perry like an eagle snatching a rabbit. The short guard, smiling apologetically, placed the copper ring over Perry’s head.

‘Stop it. Why are you doing this?’ Perry yelped. ‘Leave me alone! Where’s Amanda?’ He flailed and the room went black.

* * *

This time, when Perry regained consciousness in the empty lobby, Amanda was standing over him. He rubbed his head. His brain felt like a frozen waffle that had been re-toasted too many times. This was because the eraser the security guards had now used twice on Perry’s head was supposed to be used only once. Once was all it took to erase the last hour or so from the average human’s brain. The problem was, Perry wasn’t average. As a result of his childhood tightrope accident, he had two steel plates in his head. So the pulse of energy intended to erase part of Perry’s short-term memory had done nothing more than warm the metal in his head a few hundredths of a degree, a definitely unnerving sensation.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Perry asked Amanda. ‘Why do they keep doing that?’

Amanda bent over, placing her mouth next to his ear so that Perry could smell a fragrance like orange blossoms. ‘Agree with everything I say,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll explain later.’

While Perry was taking this in, the receptionist walked in with a cup of water. Amanda smiled at him. ‘Our patient is awake,’ she chirruped.

The receptionist smiled and gave the water to Perry. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

‘He’s fine,’ Amanda said.

Perry nodded warily and took a sip of water.

‘Mr Bunt just came in here and passed out, right?’ Amanda said loudly, nodding at Perry and smiling as if he were a foreign toddler with a hearing problem.

Perry nodded. The receptionist helped him to his feet and Amanda walked with him out of the building.

‘What’s happening?’ Perry said. Amanda put one finger to her lips. He noticed the tattoo on her wrist again and this time was able to get a better view. It was a tattoo of a blue housefly.

‘I’d better drive you home,’ she said. ‘You might still be a little bleary.’ Despite the strangeness of the last hour, Perry’s heart raced at the thought of Amanda driving home with him. Then he remembered his car.

They arrived at the Ford Festiva. ‘It’s just a loaner,’ Perry mumbled, avoiding her eyes. Amanda held one finger to her lips and the other hand out. He hesitated, then gave her the keys and his address.

They drove in silence down Ventura Boulevard until Amanda pulled over beneath an underpass and killed the ignition. Above them, the traffic on Highway 101 roared in both directions. Perry looked at her, puzzled. This was the kind of place where no one ever pulled over, where encampments of leathery homeless men propagated in the cement crannies.

‘What are we doing here?’ Perry asked, then remembered that he wasn’t supposed to talk.

‘I’ll lose my job if anyone sees me talking to you. This is the only spot on the way to your home that’s safe. Do you see any flies?’ she said.

Perry shook his head, realising that things weren’t becoming normal any time soon.

Amanda carefully surveyed the interior of the car. ‘Keep your windows up,’ she commanded.

Perry couldn’t help but feel hurt by Amanda’s suddenly officious tone. ‘Is it OK to talk now?’ he asked, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

‘That eraser would’ve wiped the short-term memory of any normal person.’

‘Eraser?’ Perry said.

‘The device they put on your head. For some reason, it didn’t work on you. Normally, they would’ve just taken you off to the Green Room.’ Perry had no idea what she was talking about but found himself nodding. ‘You seem like a nice guy, so I made sure that didn’t happen. But if they should somehow find out that you do remember what you saw, it’ll be very bad for you.’ Amanda stared intently into Perry’s eyes. ‘You can’t tell anyone what you saw. And you can never come near Galaxy Entertainment again. Do you understand, Mr Bunt?’

She seemed to be back in deaf-and-foreign-toddler mode, but Perry wasn’t really listening. His twice-fried brain was still revelling in the fact that she’d said he was ‘a nice guy’. Yes, there had been some important-sounding words after that, but how could he be expected to pay attention? Amanda Mundo, the woman of his dreams, had said that he was ‘a nice guy’.

‘I said,
Do you understand
?’ Amanda repeated.

Perry nodded.

‘Good,’ she continued. ‘We can’t be seen together anymore. I’ll get out here.’ She opened the car door, jarring Perry out of his happy fog.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Where are you going? What was going on back there?’

Amanda shook her head incredulously. ‘Did you not hear anything I just said?’

Perry hadn’t, of course, but he wasn’t about to admit it. ‘You can’t just take off like this,’ he said. ‘You can’t knock me out with a cattle prod a couple times and then leave me on the side of Ventura Boulevard under the 101. I mean, I saw a giant slug watching TV!’

Amanda, taking note of Perry’s distress, closed the car door. ‘Look, Mr Bunt,’ she said. ‘I know this all must seem a little odd to you—’

‘
Odd
is not the word for it. I can’t even think of a word for what this seems like.’

‘And I’m sorry if I seem to be in a hurry,’ Amanda continued. ‘But we don’t have much time. If the people I work for find out that I’m talking to you, you could be in terrible trouble.’