Madlands

by K. W. Jeter

  The wind tore me out of Eastern’s loosening grasp. I had one glimpse of her dead face breaking open to a new beauty, radiance unbounding. Then I tumbled in night.

  * * *

  For a moment, I thought I rested facedown on a bed of stars. Then the sensing of gravity returned, and I felt earth and grass beneath me.

  I lay on a rounded hillock, a rain of soft things filling my upturned hands.

  Identrope’s web, as it had come apart, and the secrets of his death had been whispered to me, must have been drifting lower all that time. I could only have fallen a few yards to impact. My spine and shoulder blades ached, but I could move and sit up.

  Morning light tipped the ridge of hills. In that red-tinged light, I looked around myself. Charred pieces of the dirigible’s fabric were scattered around, like pages of a book that had finally been read to the end.

  Another thing of cloth lay nearby, not burnt. The Snow White dress, empty now.

  The soft things fell upon my brow as I looked up. The last pieces of the web separated from each other, each fragment drifting to earth.

  I raised my hands and looked down into them. In my palms, and everywhere on the ground, were orchids of flesh, the petals infused with the transforming blood. The bright sheen of decay was upon them, and the stems were writhing snakes scaled with silver and black gems.

  More things fell. The sky rained frogs, sick ones that huddled on the earth, and awaited their further change, every wet molecule shearing free of its bonds.

  I picked one of the creatures up. It glared at me with red, all-knowing eyes, then convulsed and vomited up a pearl.

  When the pieces of the frog had scurried away, the pearl remained in the hollow of my hand a little while longer.

  Then it melted as well, a teardrop falling into the dark earth.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I WALKED back to the city. What was left of it.

  A lot had already faded away. The bare-bones, plain pipe-racks reality showed through the empty spaces. The bits that remained were muddled together, fragments of my old pseudo-L.A. and poor dead D’s Joadoid world. Places that had enough of their own essence to remain a while longer, like crumbling rocks in a shrinking puddle.

  I was sorry to see it all go. There was one consolation. I’d been worried that I’d been infected with n-formation, to the point of no return. But the disease had been part of this world—if the Madlands faded away, so would the disease. Maybe. I’d have to wait and see.

  I went looking for one place in particular, and found it. That gave me a certain sad pleasure. I wanted at least one person to say good-bye to.

  Paint flaked from the “Beautiful Girls” sign. I climbed the stairs to the ballroom, and found Nora sitting there.

  “Hi.” She smiled at me. She still had on the dime-a-dance dress, but she’d scrubbed her face clean of makeup and pulled her hair back into the ballet chignon I remembered from before. “I was hoping to see you again.”

  I nodded, taking a chair from the stack at the side of the room, and easing down to it. My fall from the burning sky had left me bruised and stiff. I leaned back. “Here I am.”

  “I remember things now.” Nora looked out the dusty windows, then to me again. “The last time you came by, I didn’t. Except that I knew you from somewhere else.”

  My turn to smile. “We go back a ways, don’t we?”

  “When it happened—all the fire and explosions and things—we could see it from here. Me and the other girls. And then they changed. They were all our old dance troupe, from when we did those broadcasts. From up there.” She pointed to the ceiling, and the sky beyond. “That’s when I remembered. Who you were. Who I was.” She bit her lip. “And then they all went away. Just faded and were gone. Until I was the only one left here.”

  I didn’t know if she’d understand, but I tried, anyway. “That’s because Identrope’s gone. He’s dead. And now that he’s gone, the Madlands are going, too. Just fading away . . .”

  “Why?”

  A shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe the Madlands were Identrope; maybe he came from somewhere else, somewhere far away, and brought them with him. Maybe they were something he found here, and he became them. And we all played that happy game with him for a while. I just don’t know.”

  Nora brought her level gaze to my eyes. “Am I going to fade away, too?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You were getting realer and realer all the time. Maybe you’re real enough now.”

  That same smile, sad as my own had been. “It doesn’t matter. Does it?”

  “I guess not.” I shifted in the chair, and winced.

  Silence entered the room and grew large, filling all the space to the walls. The crêpe-paper streamers across the top of the bandstand had turned black, and the dust of distant funerals drifted over the windowsills.

  I studied the knuckles of my hand. There was something I needed to say to Nora, but I didn’t know what it was.

  She looked at me pityingly. “You know what your problem is?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “All the time you were here, with me, and with the others . . . you never danced. You never learned. I suppose you were too busy. Everybody else danced, but you never did.”

  That was true. All the time I’d been a choreographer in a tuxedo, I might as well have been carved in stone. The old tapes I’d brought up from the archives had done all the demonstrations of steps for me.

  The ballroom grew smaller around me, trapping me close to Nora’s words.

  She stood up and pulled me from the chair. “Come on. It’s not too late.”

  The rehearsal studio’s record player was behind the bar. She sorted through the black vinyl discs, found the one she wanted, and put it on the turntable.

  The music started.

  “Here.” She took my hand, her shoulders in the curve of my arm. “Like this . . .”

  I closed my eyes.

  “See?” Nora pulled me around, a thing of wood and blood. “It’s not that hard. Is it?”

  “No.” I shook my head. My feet knew no circular motion, and when they lifted from their iron tracks, stumbled against hers. “It’s okay.”

  It didn’t matter what the music was; we had evolved into some sort of easy waltz. I started to get the hang of it, enough to spin lazily to the center of the floor.

  “That’s it.” Nora laid her head on my shoulder. “Just relax. You don’t have to do anything at all.”

  Some other music came from outside. From the Madlands themselves, and any world they had ever held. A tidal motion, of dissolve and disappearance, until the rolling of that ocean’s dark swell brought them onto the unadorned stone again.

  I didn’t know if Nora heard that music, too. For this moment at least, we were both in time to its constant beat.

  We turned, and danced, in the afternoon’s slow endless light.

  Afterword

  I’VE always felt sad that of all my novels, MADLANDS comes the closest to being something of an orphan. In its original hardcover edition, it received the worst distribution and the least notice of any of my books, a situation which was compounded by it not having a subsequent mass-market paperback release in the U.S. So of all my books, it’s the one which is least likely for readers of my other books to have stumbled upon.

  And what’s sad about that is that I actually consider it to be one of my best books, and one that holds a particularly interesting place in relation to the rest of my writing. In many ways, MADLANDS is something of a commentary upon many of the books I had written before it, as well as a seed-source of a lot of what I’ve written since then. Going over the text in preparation for this e-book edition—and of course, it’s been a while since I’ve actually sat down and read the book—I was struck by how much of what I had always been trying to do as a writer was contained in it. If it’s not my best book—whatever “best” would mean, which I suspect is nothing at all—it is perhaps the one that in its raggedy, messy, spilling-over-the-edges
fashion contains some essential DNA of all my other writing. So much so that if the rest of my books were to vanish from ink-on-paper print and its electronic equivalent, some future bibliophile would be able to reconstruct the others from it.

  When I wrote it, I didn’t intend that to be the case. As always, I was just fumbling about, trying to come up with another decent, readable book in the relatively long series of titles I had already done for its original publisher. There’s quite a bit of material in MADLANDS that I scavenged from the outline for what would have been the second book in a trilogy that began with my earlier novel FAREWELL HORIZONTAL. The image of a tethered, perpetually burning Hindenburg dirigible was originally something that would have been displaced ninety degrees, so it could have been attached to the side of FAREWELL HORIZONTAL’s massive cylindrical building setting. At this remove in time, at the mercy of my failing memory, I’m not sure why I decided to abandon the trilogy notion and instead reshape the material into what became MADLANDS. I suspect it might have had something to do with my continuing obsession with the urban landscape of Los Angeles, both in its real and historical form, as well as my personal/psychological fantasy version of the city.

  One of the things that I like about MADLANDS is that it evokes, in a woozy, dreamlike fashion, my early perceptions of Los Angeles. For somebody born in 1950 such as myself, there was still a lot of the old film noir, Raymond Chandler L.A. to be encountered, even though it was rapidly slipping away. I didn’t grow up there—I was stuck out in dull, lethargic Orange County to the south—so L.A. became my longed-for dream city, a darkly seductive Oz beaming out its radio signal to my sullen, rebellious teenager soul. When I grew old enough to start exploring the city, I was entranced—who wouldn’t have been?—by its seedy melange of urban decay fringed with shaggy palm trees and hot-sauce pachuco culture. In my first novel DR. ADDER, I had been dimly working toward expressing the shock nature of that encounter, liberating as it was upon a strait-jacketed suburban kid. In MADLANDS, I believe I came at least a little closer to getting it right.

  (Where the book fails, I see now in retrospect, is that apart from a few Chinatown references, it doesn’t capture much if any of the Asian nature of Los Angeles at that time. True story: back circa ’81-’82, when I was hanging out in Santa Ana with Phil Dick, just before his untimely death he enthused to me about the production sketches that had been sent to him by the producers of the film BLADE RUNNER, then being filmed. “It’s really futuristic! All the signs on the streets in L.A. are in Asian characters!” More familiar with Los Angeles than Phil was, I sneered: “Big deal. I can take you up to Pico Boulevard right now and all the signs are in Chinese and Korean.” So I was well aware of that aspect of L.A., but somehow it didn’t work its way into MADLANDS’ Okie-Hispanic mixture.)

  Where MADLANDS really hooks up with my other writing is when its retro Los Angeles setting rolls farther back to its Great Depression, Dust Bowl, “Joadoid” version. The obvious connection is to my 1989 horror novel IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD, set in this world’s historical equivalent. The kind of people that John Steinbeck won a Nobel prize for writing about are, genetically speaking, my people—though in fact my family came out to California’s orange-filled Promised Land before the Depression and thus escaped the worst of its rigors. But just as with Chandler’s fading L.A., there were still plenty of remnants lying about. When MADLANDS’ protagonist Trayne speaks of seeing photos of Klan rallies filling the streets of a Depression-era Southern California town, that was my own exact experience. I worked my way through college partly at the public library of a well-known Orange County town (hint: it has a world-famous amusement park in it); prowling through its musty stacks, I came across a set of framed vintage photographs that had once hung in the City Hall lobby, showing just such KKK events. Further investigation convinced me of the assertion made in both IN THE LAND OF THE DEAD and, in rather more didactic fashion, in MADLANDS, that outside the rural South the Klan was not an anti-black organization, but rather an anti-migrant worker campaign whipping white Okies and Arkies into line for the benefit of the big agricultural combines. This is a point that I’m not aware of any other writer, of fiction at least, having remarked upon. Bitter old Marxist that I am, I believe that this sheds a small light upon our current situation, in the sense that the only real struggles are based upon class and not race.

  Politics aside, another aspect of MADLANDS that I like, and which hooks up with my other writing, is its language. Its elliptical hipster prose was something I had been aiming for right from the beginning, but when I wrote DR. ADDER I wasn’t a good enough writer to achieve it. That was something it took me a while to reach. MADLANDS was the purest distillation of the style for which I was always aiming (at least until my more recent short story “Riding Bitch”), but there’s always a little lunar pull from it in a great deal of my other writing. So in that sense, MADLANDS’ language is the theme upon which the languages of many of my other books are more-or-less recognizable variations. Plus, I just like it; I realize that I’m approaching the point at which self-analysis veers into navel-admiring egomania, but there are a bunch of passages in the book, upon having forgotten them and now rediscovering them, that now cause me to immodestly remark, “Boy, I sure could throw it out there back then.” The plot might not make a lot of sense (actually, I think it does, in the manner of those thin double- and triple-cross Gold Medal epics that Trayne admires on my behalf), but the prose’s carrier wave seems to accomplish at least some of what I wanted it to.

  The essence of that jivey hipster prose persists in my latest writing, the Kim Oh Thriller series, though toned down due to being spoken by a protagonist with less personality armor than MADLANDS’ Trayne. I think that’s a testament to how much flexibility there is in that language, the degree to which it can be warped and bent to fit different characters’ views upon their worlds. Though it’s a reciprocal thing; those worlds are certainly colored by the language in which they’re described. In that sense, given their similar aura of bleak, scheming confusion and casual violence, leavened with absurdist humor, MADLANDS seems an obvious progenitor to the Kim Oh books, however separated their dates of creation might be.

  As I said above, my little orphan, sadly neglected by an uncaring world (though it did find at least a few admirers overseas; I’m pretty sure that more people have read it in its French editions than back here in the USA). I’m glad that the advent of the e-publishing revolution has allowed its author to set it loose once more, to wander through its dark streets in search of the love we all so hopelessly crave.

  K. W. Jeter

  Cuenca, Ecuador

  May 1, 2012

  Also by K. W. Jeter

  The Kingdom of Shadows

  The Kim Oh Thrillers:

  Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl

  Kim Oh 2: Real Dangerous Job

  Kim Oh 3: Real Dangerous People

  . . . and more to come

  Farewell Horizontal

  Noir

  Wolf Flow

  The Night Man

  In the Land of the Dead

  Death Arms

  Mantis

  Dark Seeker

  Infernal Devices

  The Glass Hammer

  Dr. Adder

  Soul Eater

  Morlock Night

  The Dreamfields

  Seeklight

  Please visit the Author’s website at www.kwjeter.com.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Start

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWEN
TY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  Afterword

  Also by K. W. Jeter