Kalifornia

by Marc Laidlaw

The Poppies were not the only wire-fen in evidence. One waiting room they passed was filled with people saying in unison, “Go ahead, Dr. McNguyen, you can level with me. It—it’s terminal, isn’t it?” They could have been tuned to any number of shows—or commercials. A few young kids hopped by on clumsy chicken-foot grafts, in emulation of the ever popular Rooster Man.

  Intensive care proved to be a circular room with a perimeter of sealed, sanitized transparent chambers surrounding it. Sandy pushed through a crowd of doctors, nurses, and medical programmers, spotting his father in one of the clear rooms. He rapped on the glass until Alfredo nodded for him to come in.

  A nurse stopped him at the airlock. “I’m sorry, we don’t allow anyone but family members inside.”

  “I’m her brother,” Sandy said.

  “No.” She indicated Cornelius. “I meant him.”

  The sealman stiffened.

  “But he’s part of the family,” Sandy protested.

  “We wouldn’t let the family dog in either.”

  “That’s all right,” Cornelius said coldly. “I can see her well enough through the glass.”

  Sandy glared at the nurse, a curse on his lips, but he figured it was hospital policy, however tortious. He passed through the airlock. In the halfway chamber, a violet light purged him of microscopic hitchhikers, then a bell chimed and the inner door opened.

  “Sandy,” his father said. “I’m glad you made it. She’s . . . in a coma.”

  A cat’s cradle held Poppy in careful suspension. She was swathed in skinplast with pins protruding from every part of her body, like needles in an acupuncturist’s training manikin. The head of each pin bore a tiny bead of emerald light, all of them blinking—at times randomly, at times phasing into sequence.

  The only bits of flesh he could see were her eyelids, half-shut, the merest orange crescents visible beneath them. She hardly seemed to be breathing.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Last night. She was in the Mojave working on her series. She was hit by a truck.”

  “An accident?”

  Alfredo hesitated. “Nobody knows precisely what happened—or why. Starko was there, but the way he tells it, well . . . I’m not so sure.”

  Sandy swallowed.

  Neither of them wanted to speculate openly, but Sandy couldn’t help seeing the obvious. Poppy had been broken by her baby’s disappearance. Taking too many drugs to control her mood. The last time he’d spoken with her, she had seemed to be loitering far beyond her usual zones . . . defeated.

  “What’s the point of living?” she had said, just a throwaway line, another sob among many. People always said those things in moments of misery. It was a standard wire-show plaint. It hadn’t registered as realism until now.

  Too late.

  If there was anything accidental about the incident, it was probably the fact of her survival.

  Sandy bowed his head, wishing he could hear a heartbeat, anything, to know that she lived. The blinking pins made her look like some kind of alien insect in a hanging chrysalis.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should have been there for you, Poppy. I should have kept in touch, so you’d’ve had someone to call. I should have helped you find your . . . my niece.”

  Not so much as a tremor of understanding ran through her eyelids. His own eyes began to tear with the effort of looking at her; the blinking green needles dizzied him. Alfredo’s hand closed on his shoulder.

  “I can’t stay here,” Sandy said.

  “Will you meet me at the house, son? Mir and Ferdi are there. I’d like us all to be together right now. I’ve made arrangements to bring Poppy home as soon as she’s stable. It’ll be good for her if we’re all there when she wakes up.”

  “When is that supposed to happen?”

  Alfredo stared at the transparent wall as if it were made of brick. He didn’t answer. A commotion passed through the outer ward, but it was already dying down. Cornelius came out of the crowd and stood near the glass, looking brisk and efficient.

  Sandy squeezed his father’s arm. “I’ll see you at home.”

  Cornelius joined him outside the airlock. “How is she, sir?”

  “In a coma. God, Corny, I’ve been so pale and selfish. So fucking tawdry . . .”

  Sandy stumbled, but Cornelius caught him. Sandy’s shoes were squeaky with water.

  “Let’s get out of here. Get home.”

  “The canyon house?”

  “Where else?”

  ***

  The Figueroa house, so full of memories, lay beneath them now, a felicitous nightmare of conflicting architectural styles—Bauhaus, Victorian, SoCal Freestyle, Spanish colonial. Somehow it all worked in spite of itself. Sandy loved the place, with its confusion of slate and skylights and red tile roofs, merloned towers and gable windows, in places both maudlin and stark. It lay couched in cactus and flowering succulents, birds of paradise peering everywhere, purple jacaranda blossoms fluttering across the balconies and off into the warm depths of the canyon, frozen red oceans of bougainvillea spilling over the brink. If only this homecoming weren’t such a sad affair.

  Sandy saw a group of tourists at the outer gates, pointing out the descending car. “I see we’re in the news again,” he said. “I’m surprised the hospital wasn’t mobbed.”

  “When you were in with Poppy, a man came through the ward selling bootleg copies of her surgery cubes.”

  “Hey-Seuss! Where’d he go?”

  “I sent him to the emergency room with a broken finger.”

  Sandy opened his hatch and jumped out into a baking wind; bars of lime cloud lay in layers across a rainbow-sherbet sky. Cool shadows filled the house. Memories boiled up from the walls and floor, like reruns on a channel he couldn’t change. All this stuff inside him ran much deeper than the wires.

  Corny headed straight for the kitchen seafood-tank. Sandy heard splashing and laughter at the back of the house. He walked toward the indoor pool. Poking his head into the bright room of rippling light, he saw Miranda leaping nude from the high-dive into a pool full of naked men, while a plump balding old guy he vaguely remembered as a pestering pitch-man stood at the edge of the poolside, waiting till she surfaced to rattle off more of his sure-fire ideas:

  “It’s a natch, Mirry! We’ll hook the little boys of all ages! ‘Lolita Versus Megalon’! With your looks and Jap special effects—”

  It took Sandy a few seconds to get control of himself. His first urge—suppressed—was to scream at them all to get out, to berate his sister for frolicking in the face of a tragedy. But she didn’t live by his rules. She would only laugh and tell the stranger to ignore her stodgy older brother. It’s my house as much as yours, Sandy. Poppy’s condition was only another odd development in the life she had mistaken for a wire show.

  He fled the noise and laughter. Halfway down the hall, he was surprised by Ferdinand, who came padding toward him dripping wet, also nude, and eating a gooey sandwich.

  “Hey, bro, water’s just right. Bunch of studleys out there, eager to please. You coming in?”

  “No, uh . . . thanks, Ferdi. How have you and Miranda been doing in your search for Calafia?”

  “Cala-who? Oh, that? We gave up. I mean, come on, what’s she to us? Poppy can worry about her own show. Between you and me, Mir and I’ve got a project in development. ‘Child Bride’! It’s really a vehicle for her, but there’s this whole incest angle that no other show’s really pursued, and I’m pretty sure I’ll play the part of her husband—”

  “Sounds like new territory for you,” Sandy said, and shuffled past him.

  Kids, he told himself. They’re just kids. You can’t expect any more out of them. . . .

  Out in the living area, he found another stranger, a black man, looking out into the chasm where pigeon-gulls circled and pecked each other into flocks of bloody feathers. He looked vaguely familiar. He was nibbling on a string of brown chewing-rope that led into his pocket, and spitting frayed bits into the
abyss.

  The man saw Sandy and put out his hand. “Santiago?”

  “Have we met?”

  “Not in person, but I’ve heard lots about you. Used to follow your show faithfully. I’m Clarence Starko. Clarry.”

  Sandy shook his hand. “Poppy’s wireman? You . . . you were there when . . . ?”

  Clarry shivered. “I was there. I was with her till your Dad showed up. He was nice enough to invite me over here till we got some news on her.”

  “No news,” Sandy said, shaking his head. He walked to the glass and looked down into the shadows. “What really happened last night?”

  “Oh, man. That. It was the worst thing ever happened to me. Poppy was really depressed. We’d got this false lead about the baby, you know? Went all the way out there on a wild goose ride. You can imagine how she felt, her hopes all up and everything, and then a big zee, total bust. It’s like her spirit finally broke. That’s all the show’s been about anymore. Poppy’s quest. We were even gonna change the title.”

  “She was depressed?”

  Clarry nodded, spat over the balcony. “Something about the desert made it worse. Even got to me. She seemed tired so I got us some motel space, and I thought she’d gone right to sleep. But I’m sitting there at the editor, looking out the window, and all of a sudden I see her outside, walking toward the road, this busy-as-hell highway, kind of like she’s in a trance. I thought she might be sleepwalking, so I went after her.” He shook his head. “I wish she had been asleep, so I could have woken her up and brought her in again. But she was wide awake. She stared at me when I asked what she was doing. Stared and said, ‘Don’t try to stop me, Clarry.’”

  Sandy went cold. “Suicide,” he whispered.

  “I did try, though—of course I did. But she went crazy. Tore away, went running down the highway. I was so close to catching up with her . . . so close . . . when she threw herself out in front of a truck. Just like that. I thought it was all over.”

  Starko stood silent for a moment, looking at his feet, shaking his head. His hands opened and closed on empty air. Several inches of baccorish slithered into his mouth.

  “She wasn’t quite dead,” he said after a while. “The trucker called for help. Turned out to be a mobile hospital on the road nearby. If it had been a mile farther off, she wouldn’t have survived at all.”

  “I’m not so sure she did survive,” Sandy said.

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  Sandy suddenly had a chilling thought. “She wasn’t recording when it happened, was she?”

  “No. We were on standby, but none of it’s on ice.”

  “I just thought, if it was recorded, and if that crystal got out . . .”

  Clarry nodded. “The ghouls would eat it up, you’re right. But you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “You were there for the kidnapping, too, weren’t you?” The man looked startled. “Yeah. Of course I was. I produced that show. I’ve been there for everything. Poor Poppy.”

  “Do you still have the master cube?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I’d like to go over it myself. See, I had the sense when I finally felt the broadcast that it had been edited. There was a kind of . . . thin quality to it. Synthetic. I used to do some of the editing on our old show, so those things kind of leap out at me. You must know what I’m talking about.”

  Clarry Starko shifted from foot to foot, chewing his rope. “Maybe. Yeah. The cops grabbed that master and kept it quite a while. You’re saying somebody screwed with the image?”

  “Maybe the cops,” Sandy said.

  “Now why would they do that? What could they be hiding?”

  “I don’t know,” Sandy said. “It’s just a funny feeling I had that the whole scene wasn’t real.”

  Clarry shook his head. “I never had the heart to watch it again, but now you’ve got me interested. The Sens8 in my van has a long memory; the original recording’s still in there—I always keep them in case something happens to the master cube. We could dupe a new crystal and play it against the cube I gave the cops, see if there are any changes.”

  “When could you get it?”

  Starko was already heading for the door. “Right now. I’m parked up top.”

  ***

  Clarry unwrapped a blank cube and downloaded the original kidnapping sequence from the deck in the van. As he sat tapping his fingers on the master that had gone to the cops, gobbling baccorish, he thought about Sandy. Her brother. How similar they were. He didn’t want to let him down; that would be like shoveling dirt over Poppy, burying her alive. He couldn’t undo his betrayal, but maybe he could help straighten things out. It was like an unexpected second chance.

  Besides, that bitch in black was trying to set him up somehow, he was sure of it. If he worked fast, maybe he could stop her. Which meant finding her. She’d held the advantage right from the start, breaking in with those snuff jobs he’d done on his way up from the gutter, those crystals he wished he’d never agreed to record—not that he’d had any choice at the time. It’d been blackmail then, too; his addictions had betrayed him, held him captive on a daily basis.

  Not that—and it was hard to admit it now—there hadn’t been a little hate in his heart back then, motivating him. Hate of the system, which had nailed a white-as-rice family to the top of the ratings in a state where whites had been a distinct minority for years. The Spanish surname Figueroa couldn’t disguise the fact that they were white, white, white. There were ethnic family programs, but they seemed to succeed in spite of the support they didn’t receive, and their wholesome, untroubled life-styles, so out of touch with ghetto and barrio realities, seemed even more artificial than the Figueroas’. Consequently they never gathered any loyal following or touched any deeper nerve. So, yes, he’d done his part in the kidnapping mainly because of the knife held to his throat . . . but there had been a darker spot of delight in him at first. Until he got to know Poppy as a person, and not as a symbol of his frustrations. And then his sense of being out of control had begun steadily to worsen. . . .

  Well, now was time to take back control. Get the bitch where she lived. Make some of his own moves for a change, instead of just jumping whenever anyone poked him.

  He went back into the house with a cube in each hand. Sandy showed him a huge console in the den. It was an elaborate system, with whole panels of function keys Clarry had never seen before. Sandy dropped the cubes into twin player slots.

  “One thing,” Sandy said. “Don’t say a word about this to my father, all right? I don’t want him getting his hopes up.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Thanks, man. If Poppy trusted you, I guess I can.”

  The thought of Poppy’s trust was like a dagger. Clarry forced a smile. He had a mouthful of rope juice and wasn’t sure where to spit it. Sandy made him nervous. He swallowed.

  “Sure thing,” Clarry said again.

  “Okay, now lead me through it. The police cube first. The broadcast I saw.”

  Clarry bent over the console, already feeling a professional envy. What a system! Finding exactly the spot he wanted was as easy as drawing a breath. It came bleeding up from his wires, pervading him, a scene frozen in time.

  Here’s where I went too far, he thought. Past the point of no return.

  For a moment he felt an inexplicable panic. He was afraid to feel it again, to relive it.

  But the panic was not entirely his own. Some was Poppy’s, wire-borne, as the scene started moving.

  Night. Vertigo. He stared down at the crowds, hearing the sounds of pursuit. A wagon stalled below.

  Now, came a soft, subvocal cue, just like one of his own thoughts, but in a girl’s soft voice. Poppy’s voice.

  He hugged a small body close to his breast for a fleeting instant. The baby. Which I never even got to hold or touch, except for patting Poppy’s belly.

  Before he could appreciate Calafia, he let go of her.

  He watched the soundl
ess fall, saw the swaddled infant plunge into the bed of the station wagon, saw the car start forward into traffic. A pang came from somewhere deeper than the wires. He’d lost something of himself in that instant—something irretrievable.

  “Back up,” Sandy said from outside the scene.

  The image blurred and held. Then the wagon rolled back into place, the child fell upward into Poppy’s arms, the crowd babbled like a group of maniacs drowning in reverse.

  It all started again.

  Panic. The child falling. The wagon moving.

  Full stop. Reverse. The wagon moved backward, the child tumbled up toward his/her outstretched hands. Froze in midair.

  “Okay,” Sandy said. “Call up the other copy, same point.”

  It took only seconds to match the two scenes. Clarry focused on the baby, fixing her at the same point of her fall in both versions. Both channels held simultaneously. He was Poppy twice over now, Clarry inside of Poppy inside of Poppy inside of Clarry. An embodied echo. Both versions of Poppy were identical. He saw no discrepancy in the baby, either.

  But down below, in the street, it was another story.

  Sandy said it first: “Something’s wrong.”

  “The wagons,” Clarry said. “They’re completely different. Look at that—different color, model, everything. The driver’s different, too. There’s no wood paneling in the original.”

  Suddenly it was obvious. The master crystal had been altered—but how? And by whom? The police wouldn’t tamper with it. This was their only clue to tracking down the vehicle.

  Unless they—or someone with access to evidence—hadn’t wanted the vehicle to be found.

  In the master cube that the cops had seized and returned, the driver was a tall white man with thinning hair. In the original recording just now taken from the van deck, the driver was a huddled figure wrapped in black.

  The wagon in the cops’ cube was white with fake wood paneling along the sides, the one in the original, black and bare-sided—like the wagon he’d arranged for the substitution. If he had watched the sequence after getting the master back, he would have noticed the change immediately. But he’d never bothered. And the police had been looking for a white wagon driven by a white man.