Kalifornia

  KALIFORNIA

  by Marc Laidlaw

  Freestyle Press

  “Write like yourself, only more so.”

  marclaidlaw.com

  ISBN: 978-1-5323-1077-5

  This ebook edition published in 2016 by Marc Laidlaw

  Copyright © 1993 by Marc Laidlaw

  First U.S. edition published by St. Martins Press in 1993

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at marclaidlaw.com.

  This ebook is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws, which provide severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material. Please do not make illegal copies of this book. If you obtained this book without purchasing it from an authorized retailer, please go and purchase it from a legitimate source now and delete this copy. Understand that if you obtained this book from a fileshare, it was copied illegally, and if you purchased it from an online auction site, you bought it from a crook who cheated you and the author.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design © 2016 by Nicolas Huck (www.huckworks.com).

  Cover photocollage created by Marc Laidlaw based on a photograph by Marc Laidlaw.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  S01E01: LIVE BIRTH

  S01E02. SEASCRAPER SOIRÉE

  S01E03. A HAG-RIDDEN COACH WITH NO WOOD ON THE SIDES

  PART TWO

  S01E04. REVOLT OF THE WAGE SLAVES

  S01E05. SEERSUCKERS

  S01E06. POPPIES WILL MAKE THEM SLEEP

  S01E07. TRAUMA IN TINSEL-TOWN

  S01E08. KALIFORNIA, HERE I COME

  PART THREE

  S01E09. THE MEATPUPPET MASTER

  S01E10. BA-HA-HA

  S01E11. WHO WILL BABYSIT THE BABYSITTER?

  S01E12. ZING! WENT THE STRINGS

  S01E13. SEQUELITIS

  It is not unreasonable to expect almost any kind of irregularities in so distant and neglected a department as California.

  —1 California Reporter 582 (1906)

  Previews

  Feedback.

  “Happy birthday, California.

  “Have a nice death. . . .”

  You’ll thank me in kisses and credit.

  The forest of slick deformities loomed up like something vomited from the floor of the sea.

  “There’s a hairball in your root chakra.”

  “Tan, man. Totally tan.”

  Kali-Kali-Kalifornia!

  “He wishes to have his wires removed.”

  “People want to get inside her; they want to feel what she feels.”

  —free of their dim ectoplasm.

  “Way tawdry . . .”

  “You can feel yourself being sliced limb from limb, while at the same time you’re the one doing the slicing.”

  “Suddenly I want sushi.”

  —hot chocolate and fried onions.

  “Just because pleasure frightens you.”

  My daughter . . .

  “Welcome to Libidopolis!”

  Feedback.

  —glittered in the dark entryway as candlelight went flowing up and down the slender rods and wires.

  “This is Newsbody Ninety.”

  “But I felt you die!”

  “Not a family show?”

  “I forgot you weren’t acting.”

  “Krrrawww.”

  “Madam, there’s no need to slaughter innocent babes.”

  “But that’s not her!”

  “It’s coppertone, baby.”

  “A dream, a dance. Maya.”

  “The child owes a birthdebt!”

  “—food for giant buzzards!”

  “And you call yourself a seal?”

  “Kali-ma! Kali-ma!”

  “Is it true you dogs have poor long-term memory?”

  “You’ll be blind and white as cave fish soon.”

  “I prefer to think of it as synthetic.”

  The Official Crone knew a penis when she saw one.

  “Tumbling . . . with the tumbling tumbleweeds.”

  “I suppose you no longer utilize wardrobe consultants?”

  “Sort of an Iron Toddler look.”

  “Jeez, now I know you were hatched in a tube.”

  “The only mother she’ll know is our dark goddess.”

  —crashed against the office windows, sucking at limpets that clung to the glass.

  “They study the things God doesn’t bother with.”

  Flesh is so . . . icky.

  “Men! Dogs and men!”

  Shrimps and rice. Very nice.

  “Daddy, make him stop! He’s wrecking my sex toys!”

  “She has complete control of the militia.”

  “Kali-Kali-Kali-ma!”

  By then, the nuns were already firing.

  “So few seals in the audience.”

  “Now look in my eyes.”

  “Elvis lives!”

  Feedback . . .

  NEXT!

  PART ONE

  S01E01: Live Birth

  Almost midnight.

  Poppy lay in darkness. And out of it.

  Sweat coated her face like a cosmetic mask. Her gasping sounded like the cries of a stranger. But that was only half of her.

  The other half floated in a rippling, muscled silence.

  Mother and child.

  Giving birth to herself.

  The blistered plaster and paper walls of the old hotel deadened her cries. Her fingers gouged holes in a crumbling foam mattress. Blood pooled in the plasticized sheets; warm liquid pulsed from her womb in rhythmic gushes, leaving her feeling drained but not yet empty. Exhausted, she couldn’t imagine going on. But the hardest part still lay ahead.

  The fetal wires had been live since the seventh month, broadcasting on a private umbilical wire that was shielded from any other receivers. She could enter her daughter through this wire, which served as a two-way channel until the cord was cut. Through infant eyes, heavy-lidded, she peeked at orange darkness, her fluid-filled ears picking up the pounding of her mother’s and her own heartbeat. This part of Poppy was not entirely Poppy. The girl child, tentatively named Calafia, had a life of her own. Her soul was a bright fish that wouldn’t be caught in the seine of wires. Sometimes Poppy wondered if her daughter ever crept up the umbilicus and into her mother’s wires, to look out through Poppy’s eyes, to listen with her ears.

  There was nothing here worth seeing. Nothing she’d want a child to remember.

  Ugly walls. A warm yellow lifebulb patched into an antique electric socket overhead. Bent Venetian blinds hung like thin ribs among the folds of musty drapes. It seemed a shame that this would be her daughter’s first view of the world—this decrepit room holding no trace of beauty, no sign of the modern time’s wonders. Poppy’s wireman, Clarry Starko, had dreamed up the juxtaposition of sleazy hotel with new life. She never had intended to let him talk her into it, but her contract favored him on such vague points of creative control.

  Clarry was somewhere nearby, unseen as always; she could almost feel his fingers on her soul. He was busy in the studio van, monitoring all this, checking sensory quality, recording everything, yelling at the crew. A dozen people hung on her perceptions—millions more waited for the broadcast of this night—but none of them was any help. She was all alone here, in the grip of an ancient pow
er.

  She felt herself shifting, squeezed, squeezing.

  The two sets of perception slid together, overlapping, growing confused. Her breathing seemed full of warm salt liquid. The room went dark and quiet, while her womb suddenly flooded with light and noise.

  The clock chimed in her inner ear.

  Midnight.

  It was September 9, 2050.

  Two thousand and fifty years since Christ, whoever he was. Another god among the thousands worshiped in California.

  From the streets came screams of celebration. Strangers welcomed the child without knowing it. California was two hundred years old tonight, and Calafia, ten seconds old, was being shoved out of darkness by a force as irresistible as that which would one day pull her back into it.

  The pain eased slightly, promising release. This was it.

  Like a watermelon seed, she squirted free. Light everywhere now; no part of her remained in darkness. Her ears roared with the sound of the sea. Two sets of ears heard the clamoring crowd. California on a warm September midnight. The midnight of her birth.

  Even as Poppy collapsed, she felt strength surging into her. She closed her eyes for just a moment—

  And a second pair of eyes trembled, flew open. Gaped at a blurred yellow brightness. She shivered in the dry air, so cold by comparison to the place from which she’d come.

  She opened her mouth and began to wail.

  Poppy sat up. Her daughter lay between her legs, gazing at the ceiling. For a moment she saw exactly what her daughter saw. Blurs of light and color, somehow beautiful and marvelous despite the reality of the room. Then a warm, scented shape; her own hands cradling her, bringing her up to peer into her own face.

  As the eyes of mother and daughter met, a blinding pain raced through both of them. Feedback. Poppy nearly dropped Calafia. The pain poured through every sense, threatening to shatter both psyches, even the fledgling one.

  Poppy set her daughter down. A gleaming, translucent coaxial cable, bright thin wires of several hues twined together, ran from Calafia’s groin into Poppy’s vulva. Poppy tugged a few more inches of cable from her womb, revealing a small black connecting ring. Twisting the ring in her fingers, she neatly severed the umbilicus, experiencing a dull twinge that fell somewhere between thought and sensation.

  She felt . . . diminished.

  Two eyes again, two ears. She was herself, alone, and no one else now. Nothing extra.

  She tugged on the cable trailing out of her, felt corresponding twitches deep inside. Clenching her teeth, she jerked once more, as hard as she could, and the paraplacenta gave way with a sharp, tearing pain. A net of polymesh slithered out onto the bed, slick with blood, looking like the root system of an exotic seaweed. Except for the bruising memories of labor, fading already, she felt no further pain. And there was no danger of feedback now that her circuits were separate from the child’s. In fact, no one would be able to monitor Calafia’s wires until several adjustments were made, manually, to her wire system. The child now had a privacy not granted to Poppy.

  Pain and exhaustion were replaced by joy.

  My baby, she thought. My daughter.

  The girl lay quietly stirring, tiny limbs pressing the air, mouth and eyes twisted up in soft knots. Poppy lifted her carefully, and the eyes tipped open again.

  Orange eyes, bright as two flames. Molten, liquid, dancing eyes.

  Figueroa eyes.

  Poppy’s eyes were the same shade of orange as those of her brothers, Sandy and Ferdinand, and her sister, Miranda. But it was her father, Alfredo, whom the baby most resembled. Like him, she was wrinkled and balding; even the sour, befuddled expression was Alfredo’s.

  Appropriate enough.

  Calafia had been his idea, after all.

  Only the latest and best technology for the newest addition to the Figueroa clan.

  Calafia was the first child born to wires.

  And already she was a star.

  Poppy sighed, holding the infant close to her breast, thankful for these few moments of peace. The price of stardom was an intrusive plot. Clarry Starko was never one to linger on a tender moment. Long silences in his wirecasts were always broken by a scream or an explosion.

  Sometimes she wondered if Clarry was the most suitable director for someone with her tropes. When he’d approached her with his idea for the series—at a time when she’d been desperate for work, doubting her whole career in the wires—she had been grateful for his enthusiasm. How could she have turned him down? And it had worked out well for her, so far. But something in the forced, frenetic pace of the program clashed with her natural inclinations. In the old show, the family show, she had always been the sensitive one. The task of raising her brothers and sisters had often fallen on her as their mother’s ever more analytical schemes carried her farther afield. Her sibs had often looked to Poppy for what tenderness they needed, if they desired it at all. She often felt the need for quiet times, sentimentality, meaningful conversations. But Clarry was hooked on the breakneck pace, double-crossed plots, unexpected violence, reality distortions, and twisted endings. They made an unlikely pair—in short, exactly the sort of hybrid Hollywood was famous for. Tense. Unpredictable.

  Sometimes she had to admit she hated it. But it was all she had. Her show.

  And, now, her daughter.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Let’s get you clean and bundled up.”

  Towels and swaddling were stacked on the night table. She wiped Calafia carefully, giving particular attention to the genitals, such as they were. A length of cable ending in a shiny silver adaptor protruded from the skin of the baby’s groin. Poppy unplugged the umbilicus still dangling from the child and dropped it by the bedside. She bundled the baby in a soft cotton cloth, then in a firm inner layer of Shock-Pruf (whose purpose she tried not to think about), then in more bunting. While she worked, she whispered.

  “Calafia, that’s a pretty name, isn’t it? Your birthday is the same as California’s. Tonight’s the bicentennial of statehood. Isn’t that a nice coincidence?”

  It was hardly a coincidence; she spoke for the sake of the show. Livewires picked up everything but thought; she inserted loose bits of script when there was time, so that the eventual audience wouldn’t experience these events in a void. All but the most cryptical livewire stars talked to themselves like madmen, busily keeping the audience up to date. It was the Golden Age of the Monologue.

  Not that there wasn’t plenty else to hear tonight. The streets of the city, the sounds of celebration, got wilder by the minute.

  Any time now . . .

  Somewhere near, glass shattered. She couldn’t tell if it was inside the hotel or not.

  Hugging the child, she went to the window, pulled the drapes, raised the blinds, and looked down at the street.

  Eleven flights down, the world was far gone. She felt as if she were gazing into an abyss.

  Behind her, in the hall, she heard whispering.

  They had found her. The figures of Clarry’s twisted plot, meant to add suspense to his bicentennial special. She could almost hear the promos: “Trouble for Poppy and her newborn babe, on the next episode of ‘Poppy on the Run’!”

  She tuned her ears to the slightest sounds. Was that a stuffy, rasping voice? Heavy panting? Footsteps?

  A dog began to bay.

  The sound was pure terror.

  There was hope in the night, though. The building was old enough to retain a fire escape. Streetlights, neon figures, and the moving lamps of traffic winked up through slats in the old metal ramp, promising a moment’s advantage. Better than none.

  “We have to get out of here,” she whispered. “Oh, poor baby. They found us. They always do.”

  She searched the windowsill for an electric switch but found only dust and dead spiders. The hotel was too old for automatic amenities. Paint clogged the ancient locks; no amount of prying would free them. She leaned against the pane, feeling the emptiness of night beyond. The glass had flo
wed like slow water down the years, rippling and distorting the view. If she broke it, the sound would betray her.

  All her old tropes went into motion now, catching her up in snares of habit. She ceased to think of this as a livewire show, a performance. This was her daughter she carried, and the danger to both of them felt real.

  So few places to hide. So many pursuers. Poppy was always on the run.

  Poppy closed the drapes. The child kept quiet; clutched up close to her, she weighed next to nothing. Poppy set her on the bed and pulled swaddling over her face to shield the new eyes from broken glass. She looked around the room until her eyes settled on a rusted metal folding chair leaning against the wall.

  From the hall, a low growl.

  No time for further caution. She grabbed the chair, still folded, and rushed at the window, shoving the metal legs like battering rams through the glass. The drapes muffled the crash only slightly.

  Footsteps padded down the hall, approaching.

  She snatched up Calafia. “Out we go.”

  The dusty curtains protected her from the worst effects of jagged glass as she ducked through the window.

  Outside, the sinuous stop-and-start flow of congested traffic, eleven stories down, dazzled her. Hand lanterns bobbed and swayed, vanishing through doorways; fireworks exploded between buildings, causing stark shadows to bloom on the brickwork and slide slowly upward as the rainbow flares descended. She looked to the night sky for relief and saw the full moon hanging like a hypnotist’s pendulum frozen in motion. She flashed on all the hypnotic sessions she had endured to emphasize her tropes, immerse her in the action, intensify the believability of moments, and images, like these.

  She stared at the moon, the tortious moon, the moon where everything had gone to hell.

  Then came an explosion—

  Fireworks!