Kalifornia

by Marc Laidlaw

  Clarry whistled. “We may have to put that teegee down.”

  Cornelius stiffened, leaped to his feet. “He didn’t ask for the life you gave him. And now you mean to snatch it away?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t my idea turning animals into people. No offense, I’m all for animal rights, but I don’t think it was good for either party.”

  Cornelius gave Starko a cold stare, which warmed only slightly for Poppy. “I’ll tell your father you can’t make it. Please call him when you can.”

  “I will.” She stood up on tiptoes to kiss him on the snout. “Get some healant on that.”

  He bowed his farewell and wove away through the crowd. Several people approached him hesitantly for an autograph, but he passed without acknowledging them.

  “Don’t worry about the baby,” Clarry said around his baccorish. “We’ll have her safe and sound.”

  “She’s not gonna be in any more shows.”

  Clarry wanted to dispute this, but the night’s events had proved her fears real enough. He only shrugged.

  “You’ve got me,” she said. “It’s my show, and that should be enough. I won’t have my baby subjected to this kind of life.”

  He shrugged, spreading his hands. “Tan, Poppy, totally tan. It was just such an irresistible idea, you know? The bicentennial. The birth. A chase scene . . .”

  “A kidnapping.”

  “Whoa, now. What’s that? Don’t go saying stuff like that. This isn’t a crime. This is a bit of bad luck.”

  “You mean there just happened to be an identical station wagon in the place of the studio wagon? And it just happened to be under the fire escape when I dropped my baby? That was bad, but it sure wasn’t luck.”

  He looked embarrassed. “Well . . .”

  “I don’t think it was an accident, Clarry. But just in case it was, you’d better keep looking. Meanwhile, I’m calling the police.”

  “Not yet, Poppy. What if she comes back?”

  She smiled, though her thoughts were bleak. “She’s twenty minutes old, Clarry. You think she’s gonna walk to us? No, I’m calling the police. You should be glad, though. It’s free publicity.”

  S01E02. Seascraper Soirée

  Prone on his warm squishy Jell-O-bed futon, Sandy Figueroa filled his lungs with tasty, resinous redweed primo, inhaled and kept inhaling, gulped a little bit more, lungs cramping now, like a pearl diver filling his chest before a particularly deep and difficult plunge. Then, lying back, releasing the hookah’s filter tip, he closed his eyes and let his body channels switch at random.

  Getting zee’d to ride the wires was his favorite indoor pastime, and he rarely did one without the other. The live-wire frequencies modulated in accord with his thoughts, which, after the deep drag, had turned totally chaotic. Half a thousand channels flipped through him in half a second, none quite in synk with his mood. He waited for something to grab him.

  Most of the broadcasts were garbage, a polluted ether of advertising and you-are-there game shows. Bad media lurked in his polynerves like an Alzheimer’s prion, waiting to crystallize. He lost a little control and a bit more discrimination when he was zoned. That was part of the fun, but it made for a hairy ride. The redweed put an edge on his mood, making it easier for the freak shows to grab him. Now, for instance, he was snared by—Bugs!

  Jessie Christo! They crawled from his pores, tickled his feet, cast off his nails like manhole covers and scurried for the shelter of his face and genitals. He didn’t know whether to cover his nose or his crotch. In a panic, he tried to change channels, but his fright mired him in the signal, making it virtually impossible for him to tune anything else. There was no waking from this nightmare until it had run its course.

  This was no horror show; they didn’t grip so ruthlessly. This was a commercial.

  Suddenly, a cooling aerosol spray covered him from head to foot. A purple-brown cloud of lilacs and chocolate dissolved the chittering little monsters an instant before they reached his face or pubes. Iridescent wings, scaly carapaces, manifold eyes, and quivering antennae—all vanished, leaving him limp and grateful for the spray, whatever it was.

  “Doctor McNguyen’s Soothing Antipsychotic,” whispered a sexy voice in, curiously, only one ear. “Now in aerosol cans.”

  Sandy was too drained to tune another channel. He stayed on the line, letting the peaceful feeling and comforting scents fade. The wires carried him straight into a regular wire show.

  “Look at Sandy,” someone said, and immediately he felt his diaphragm convulsing with canned laughter. It was a disorienting sensation. His older sister Poppy stared at him, one hand over her mouth, suppressing her own unforced laughter. If he let go of his identity, he would slide over into her point of view. And it was tempting, since his body was wrapped python-tight and getting tighter. This was as bad as the bugs. He was starting to suffocate. Despite this, his father stood at Poppy’s shoulder, observing him with an expression that edged on hilarity.

  “Where’d you two come from?” Sandy tried to ask. But his mouth wasn’t quite in his control.

  Instead he heard himself say, “How do I get out of this?”

  More laughter. His ribs ached when he resisted it, but they ached even more from the splintering grip surrounding them. As he struggled, the pressure altered slightly, becoming less violent but still threatening in its way: it was as if his clothes were beginning to pulsate, especially around his groin. Clasping and relaxing, like an exploring hand.

  This was all starting to seem familiar.

  A flicker. His identity wavered and he became someone else—someone taller, heavier, with a deeper voice. Someone who was saying, “Sandy, what are we going to do with you?”

  He was his father.

  Oh no. As the redweed rush passed, he realized what was going on.

  Reruns.

  For some dark reason, he had tumbled into the twenty-four-hour Figueroa channel.

  From his father’s POV he saw himself quite clearly, tangled in a contraption of Playtex, leather straps, and chrome manacles. He looked about fifteen years old, so this episode of the “Figueroa Show” dated from about five years back. He couldn’t remember making it, but he’d spent most of those days zipatoned on weirder drugs than redwood marijuana. By age twelve he’d needed a dose of ET to get out on the right side of bed; then he’d sprinkle his cereal with MMSG for more paisley visions with every crunchy bite; by noon he’d be totally brain-soaked from sipping ESP-3 and TAB-synth; and he would only taper onto mild, relaxing weed or BeastMaster around midnight, to get to sleep. None of his internal stimulation carried through the wires, of course; in this way, drugs supplied him with the nearest thing to privacy that a wire star could purchase.

  His baby sister Miranda toddled into the rerun room, bawling her head off when she saw Sandy caught in the straps. “Daddy, Daddy, make him stop! He’s wrecking my sex toys!”

  Sandy couldn’t bear a return to his own wretched POV. He watched his younger self fumble with the straps for a moment longer, then drop his hands in exasperation. “I give up,” that Sandy said, his adolescent voice still brittle. “I thought it was a Chinese puzzle-suit.”

  A warm hand fell on his father’s shoulder, and a warmer voice said, “He certainly takes after you, Alfredo.”

  Sandy, startled by the voice, slipped back into his tangled, gawky point of view. From this vantage, which fit him about as well as a child’s neoprene wet suit, he saw his mother for the first time in years.

  “Mom . . .”/“Mom . . .”

  Both of them spoke, Sandy-then and Sandy-now. She came forward carrying the key to the manacles. His eyes brimmed with tears as she knelt to release him. Her own eyes were dark brown, for she was the only Figueroa to have shunned the orange iridic implants.

  “Mom,” he murmured. “Mommy . . .”

  He couldn’t take any more. The initial zee’d confusion passed, leaving him enough control to detune. He jerked himself free of the broadcast and lay breathing heavily. E
very now and then, his inhalations caught on the ragged edges of a sob.

  Mom. Seeing her alive again was the crudest sort of torture, worse than being devoured by insects. No spray can of psychic balm could heal that pain.

  He couldn’t bear to ride the wires again tonight, though there were a million other shows that might have cheered him. He didn’t want false cheer right now. If he’d really wanted that, he wouldn’t be sitting alone in his apartment, smoking dope and riding the wires while the rest of California celebrated its two-hundredth birthday.

  He checked the antique Kit-Kat clock above the futon, next to the old signed photograph of Danny Bonaduce. Rhinestone eyes and a switching fur tail—the clock’s, not Danny’s—told him it was well past midnight.

  Happy birthday, California. From me and Danny.

  The faded picture had been his father’s—“Hey, Alf! Roll with the punches! Danny B!”—but even over the gulf of years, Sandy felt a spiritual kinship there. They were sitcom brothers, separated by nearly a century, but still, without “The Partridge Family,” would there have been a “Figueroa Show”?

  It was hard for you, too, wasn’t it, Danny boy? Hard when the lights shut off and the wires went dead and everybody thought of you forever in that frozen zone of rerun adolescence. You were out raising hell and divorcing that Japanese babe and teaching karate, and people meeting you years later (even the cops taking your DNA prints, I suppose) would do a double take and say, “Hey, you’re that brat from ‘The Partridge Family’!” Was, you asshole. I was that brat.

  Yeah, Danny. Like me. I’ll never get older than seventeen. Except in real life, of course—but what does that count for?

  He got up and raised the bamboo blinds a fraction of an inch to peer out the window. By day, he would have had a view of fields, tractors, and towering redwood-marijuana hybrids, a dense forest of mighty, smokable trees. Tonight he saw lights in the field, heard music and laughter. The mulch hands and trimmers sure knew how to party. They banged out odd, percussive rhythms on steel drums and played their band saws like dangerous kazoos.

  It was stupid of him to sit here all night when his employees were out there having a good time. They would think him pale indeed if he didn’t put in an appearance.

  So, out the door and down the creaky stairs he went. From the porch, the smell of pine, pot, and fresh-trampled earth was invigorating. He watched the workers dancing outside their long, low quondos, whooping and hollering, leaping high. Rather than break the festive mood, he sank down on the porch of the two-story shack he called home, and simply watched. It was like gazing at another planet. No matter how dirty he got, no matter that he dressed in blues and grew his hair long and snarly and talked in a weird patois, he just never fit in with the regular folk. He was ever and always the wire-show star, intimately known to all—the most private moments of his youth soaked up by strangers whose lives would forever be a mystery to him. No one understood why he’d given up S/R status. What sender/receiver would choose to become a receive-only like everybody else? They couldn’t comprehend why he wanted to be one of them, a plain RO, after tasting the luxury life of the world’s most popular broadcast family.

  But people knew only what the wires told them, and the wires were polynerves, not real ones. What the audience perceived as pleasure, Sandy had experienced as hollow and meaningless. His whole live life had been a string of situations dreamed up by a board of “creative consultants” and then enlarged upon and improvised by his family. He had dreamed of an existence where things simply happened, without contrivance; where he could ride the waves and do only what had to be done, or what he felt like doing, and never again need go looking for “situations.” A lazy life, if necessary. A life of lying around, getting zipped, tuning in whatever stupid shows were on the wires—and never, ever sending again. The wonderful life of a simple RO.

  He had wanted to retire as early as possible, but his parents wouldn’t consent. He’d intended, as soon as he turned eighteen, to pull out and leave his family to fend for themselves.

  He never had to wait that long.

  When he was seventeen . . .

  Oh, Mom.

  He didn’t want to think about it. Not now. It didn’t bear considering at the best of times, let alone tonight, when the sound of laughter and music already had him feeling depressed.

  He had wanted the show to end, sure. But not that way. Not on the moon.

  Well, he had patched together a life for himself, like the rest of them. Poppy had her spin-off and was welcome to it. Dad was in big business, though Sandy couldn’t feature him as the executive type. That had been more Mom’s style; she’d been the real pusher in the family, the ambitious one who cut the hard deals with the network execs. No wonder without her they’d lost the heart to carry on.

  In a way, Sandy was happy now—as happy as he could hope to be owning a ranch that ran itself and living off the proceeds. And his royalties.

  His main problem these days was boredom. Too much time on his hands: time to think, to surf, to twist, to zero in, to ride the wires, to deepen his tan. He owned the plantation, but didn’t exactly run it. He wouldn’t have known where to begin. He lived on the edge of the farm, communed with the workers, attended board meetings, and accepted his dividends. The rest of the time he rode either the wires or the icy waves of the rock-gnarled NoCal coast.

  Such was life without creative consultants and situation mongers. Ten years, half his life, had been planned out for him: he still wasn’t sure how to invent meaningful routines of his own. His younger sibs, Mir and Ferdi, were even more lost, having been born when the show was well underway, raised in the context of a wirecast routine; even before they went S/R with wires of their own, everything they had known was an artifice, a contrivance, though they didn’t know it. Still didn’t, in fact. For them, certain borders had never been properly drawn.

  Footsteps padded toward him.

  “Mister Figueroa?”

  At first he didn’t recognize the voice. He insisted that the farmhands call him Sandy and pretend to be his pal.

  A figure in a tattered suit stepped onto the porch. A bandage decorated the visitor’s long snout; his doglike whiskers were twisted and bent like used pipe cleaners.

  “Corny?”

  The sealman bowed as low as he could, an apology on his thin black lips. Sandy let out a glad cry and threw his arms around him.

  Cornelius remained characteristically stiff. He reciprocated the embrace, but awkwardly, as if it pained him. He had always been uncomfortable with human displays of affection.

  “Greetings, young sir. Excuse my appearance. I had a run-in with an autograph hound.”

  “Who cares about your appearance? You look great to me. But what are you doing here?”

  “Your father is throwing a birthday celebration tonight, and he misses you and Poppy terribly. I offered to do my best to convince you to come along.”

  “So where is she?”

  “I, ah, couldn’t convince her.”

  “Is this a big party? I mean, like, really big? Or is it just a family get-together?”

  “It’s rather large, sir.”

  Sandy sighed. “I hate those things. You think he’ll be upset if I don’t make it?”

  “He’ll be very disappointed if both of you fail to attend. And it will look very bad for me.”

  “Oh, all right,” Sandy finally said. He was suddenly eager to go, although he knew he would hate it. “I suppose I should dress for the occasion.” He swept a hand at his threadbare jeans, which stank of sweat and marijuana resins. “Or would this be appropriate?”

  “You know your father’s tastes, Santiago.”

  Cornelius followed Sandy into the house and upstairs to his room. The sealman was more than slightly neurotic after all the gene tinkering and mental programming that had gone into his creation. He stayed in the exact center of Sandy’s room, as if reluctant to come in contact with the grimy walls or furniture or even the cluttered floor. S
tuffed and mounted, he could hardly have looked less lifelike. Corny’s obvious discomfort prompted Sandy to make a diligent search for clothes. He was rewarded with two moderately scent-free tabi-socks (one red, one green) and a pair of worn sponge thongals that made his ankles tilt inward. His only clean pants were swim trunks bearing shimmering tropical patterns. He found a reasonably fresh black chamois teashirt, over which he pulled a vest of very fine (if somewhat tarnished) chain mail. He crowned his efforts with a Greek fishing cap.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  Cornelius trembled slightly. “I suppose you no longer utilize wardrobe consultants?”

  Sandy grinned. “You kidding? Everything I wore had to be brand name when they were dressing me. Keep the advertisers happy! Every time I dropped my drawers to take a crap, I was supposed to look down at the label on my underwear.” He deepened his voice to imitate a livewire voice-over. “‘Yes, Santiago Figueroa wears Ample Briefs, the shorts of the stars.’”

  Cornelius made no comment. He pivoted on a polished heel and held the door open.

  Sandy said, “Shall we take my truck?”

  “Not unless it has wings. We’re running late as it is.”

  ***

  The dark cannabis preserves of Humbocino passed quickly beneath Cornelius’s airborne Jaguaero and the view gave way completely to the state-spanning metropolis of SanFrangeles. From Tijuana in the south to the bustling northern factories of Weed, the Frangeles “Franchise,” or “Lunatic Frange,” stretched with little interruption. Sandy often skipped up in the company SkyScout to ogle the pretty colors. Normally the sight was spectacular enough to keep him enrapt for a zoned eternity, but tonight its beauty was beyond belief.

  As far south and east as he could see (which was fairly far, this being a fogless night), the city was fired up for celebration. Gouts of flame rocketed from the hearts of habimalls, exploding harmlessly (one hoped) amid the air traffic. The sky was full of giddy cars, all circling and spiraling to take in the sights, and consequently becoming part of the spectacle. The land looked like a carpet of burning jewels, heaped into hills and terraces, some spilling out upon the water. And it was seaward that Cornelius steered the car, away from the thrilling chaos of the Franchise, into the near total dark.