Madlands Read online

  You could get fucked by a voice and a true smile like that, and you’d enjoy it all the way down the line. Most people did. I had the goods on Identrope—I knew what he really was—and even I had to work to keep my guard up. I nodded. “Yeah, I had a good time.” I wasn’t about to tell him that the souvenir of my vacation was still lying trussed up on the floor of my flat’s back room. “Now we can get rolling again.”

  “Good, good.” Identrope’s smile glittered, but I could see his eyes refocusing into a familiar thousand-yard gaze, his busy mind calculating elsewhere. “I’m looking forward to seeing what you’re going to cook up for us, now that you’ve had your little rest.”

  Nora was standing right next to him, but his presence ate up so much of the studio’s air and space—like a black hole, he seemed to bend even gravity toward himself, pumping out light instead of swallowing it—that it took a moment to detect her. Plus she had that dancer’s weird fade, the bit where they disappear when they’re not actually performing.

  A different smile from her, one that didn’t have megawatts of personality lasering through it. If a deer that was about to bolt back into the forest could smile, that would be it.

  “Hi—” Smiling and looking up through her lashes at me, not even knowing the sweet effect that had. (Or did she? Had she gotten to that point while I’d been away?) “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Standard-issue dancer gear, the stuff they wear that always looks like rats have been at it for their daily fiber quota. Sweatshirt with holes (washed-out motto: “Texas Women’s College Dance Dept.”) over a scooped-neck leotard that would have been revealing if she’d had more than a handful of breast; her ladder-step clavicle stood out farther. Tights with mend scars over smooth-muscled thighs . . .

  I thought she looked fine. But then I thought that even when I hadn’t been away for a while.

  “Well, I’ll let you two get down to work.” Identrope’s smile swept over both of us like a ground-level searchlight. “Trayne, why don’t you swing by after you get things nailed down here? We need to talk.”

  His voice made it sound like it would be pizza and beer and old movies. “Sure. Soon as I get a chance.” Soon as I felt like dealing with him, actually.

  The white suit with Identrope inside disappeared on the other side of the studio door. I turned back around toward Nora.

  The few strands of hair that had escaped from her scraped-back chignon were damp with sweat. She must’ve been going through her own barre before Identrope showed up. She walked away from me to pick up a towel draped over the wooden rail mounted in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

  “I kept the troupe working on the last number you sketched out.” Her voice went muffled when she ran the towel over her damp face. “They’ve got it down pretty cold. We could go live tonight—if you wanted to.”

  My wants were tuned elsewhere at the moment. I stepped up behind her, close enough to smell the sweat filtering through the leotard. I kissed her on the salty angle between neck and shoulder, and a tremble ran through her.

  We went live right then. I locked the studio door—I had to reach behind myself to do it—and laid her down on a gymnastics pad in the darkest corner.

  My fingers locked into the slot of ribs beneath those small, childlike breasts. The white skin was marked with the elastic from the tights, that draped over the edge of the pad like a truncated ghost. I rubbed the marks with my thumb and felt the heat of blood come up from below.

  Even as the room was falling, collapsing into that other, soft familiar room, I couldn’t help thinking how much nicer it would be if she were real. As real as me.

  And then I stopped thinking that.

  SIX

  IN that moment of silence, the moment afterward, that unfolds forever and is sad immortality—

  We lay together on the mat, tucked in the silence of the rehearsal studio. The side of her face against my chest, one skinny arm draped possessively over me; she slept, or seemed to.

  I was awake, and thinking. About a lot of things, and sometimes about her.

  It had been easier with Nora when she had been even less real. Real in the sense of being human; the more human she became, the harder and more complicated everything else became.

  As usual, I had no one to blame but myself. I had made Nora as real as she was. Bit by bit, as much as I regretted the process, I was making her human.

  She stirred, drowsily rubbing her cheek over the spot where my heart should have been. I stroked her disordered hair and went on thinking.

  How it worked—

  When the Madlands had started, come into existence, there had been nothing here. Literally nothing, as in no thing. Space without dimension, shape without form, light without perception, darkness that started inside your skull, then stepped outside to walk around.

  Different theories circulated as to how the zone came to be that way. Some believed the effect was an aftermath of the war; some weapon (tagged in this theory the “reality bomb”) had punched out a hole in the universe. The hole might not be something physical in nature, but neurophysiological; the hole was in the collective sensory percept system of the species. The bomb had gone off down the length of our spinal columns. Perhaps the bomb was still going off; the hole was still there, generations after the war and all its reasons had been forgotten. The old mists of time routine, that amnesia con.

  Nature may or may not abhor a vacuum, but mankind loves a monkey puzzle. Fill in the blanks. One way or another, the Madlands weren’t going to stay empty forever.

  Identrope was the first on the scene. Before him, the nothing. After him, there was something, all right.

  He found the archives. Underground, below the reach of the Madlands’ null-percept field. Or just at the downward vertical limit of the field’s effects; whether the archives’ contents had been scrambled from the hypothesized weapon, or had just suffered the entropic creep of the buried centuries, was impossible to know for sure. But up from the ancient data banks had come the jumbled-together readouts, the old forgotten tapes and encoded crystals—

  The lost world of cheap entertainment.

  Old images filtered into the blank zone, and took it over. Out of all the range of possible reality, one narrow band locked into place. The kicker, the funny part, was that it was a reality that had probably never existed in the first place, except in our ancestors’ fevered little imaginations and the primitive celluloid strips on which they’d recorded all their dreaming and wishing.

  A Los Angeles of the mind—that was what got imprinted onto the Madlands’ blank slate. Palm trees nodding in an ocean-steamed perpetual night and desert highways paced by glitter-eyed coyotes. Pan-Pacific apartment buildings and glass-walled Neutra mansions on seismic hillsides. Matrons with refrigerated money at the Bullocks Wilshire tearoom. All the dark streets folded into one another; the tar pits hissed under the red Santa Ana winds. A starlet leaping every hour from the top of the HOLLYWOOD sign.

  Historical periods all muddled together into one glistening gel. Mainly the black-and-white eras; those were the most powerful image troves from the archives. Gangsters with slouch hats and the glamorous despair of economic collapse. All that greed and fantasy had to be born out of something. The color films in the archives couldn’t compete with those flat grainy archetypes.

  Any powerful image would do. Like the burning dirigible—something that looked that good, the flames roiling in the ancient newsreel depths—the image came over and got incorporated.

  Identrope dug it up and let it all loose, and that became this little world, the perceptual overlay of any nervous system that happened to come wandering into the Madlands. You walked in, you’d bought your ticket to the show.

  And what happened to him’ To Identrope? You can’t mess with stuff like that and not get it on you.

  He found himself in the Madlands. He became himself.

  Another L.A. archetype/image. The media preacher. Aimee Semple McPherson warped all the ones that
came later, that latched onto the true buzz of the airwaves.

  Maybe he was nothing before, just like the Madlands. But he definitely became something.

  Identrope was already the white suit and the silver hair, the outstretched arms and the save-your-soul smile when I came along. The broadcasts were going out—he hadn’t built his studio up under the belly of the burning dirigible; that came later—but they weren’t working. In the real world with real people outside the Madlands, everyone had zipty-ump channels to spin through. If viewers caught Identrope’s show, they’d usually snicker and drop back down to something like Peruvian mud wrestling over a bed of live coals and greased pit bulls.

  He didn’t have his hook yet. The gimmick. He didn’t have me.

  I had come to the zone—don’t ask me why—and started rooting in the archives. There was plenty more stuff down there that Identrope hadn’t gotten into. Working out of a reconstructed L.A. was easier than dealing with the blank that had been there before; plenty of cheap apartments with red-tiled roofs and diners made of jacked-up streetcars. So at least you could find a place to sleep and get something to eat.

  The show choreography of the mid-twentieth century—that’s what I was updigging and downloading from the archives. I didn’t know shit about it when I started, but I was really becoming an expert fast. Heavy on the Jack Cole—forgotten-genius time—with major swaths cut through the more interesting avant-garde sectors, Martha Graham and Paul Taylor, a little Merce Cunningham.

  I was down in a lead-lined bunker three hundred feet underground, unreeling old movies and videotapes out of the micron-thick crystalline data structure into which they’d been encoded. For the more famous ones, famous at the time they’d been doing their work, like Graham, there was still plenty of original source material. Get into the Paul Taylor, who never really did do anything for film, or someone like Jack Cole, who was surrounded by ignorant show biz bastards throughout his whole career, who wound up having his best stuff get thrown down the crapper whenever some dopey Broadway musical folded . . . get into those guys, or a couple dozen others like them, and you’re dealing largely with reconstructions. Fortunately for me, in the late twentieth century, there’d been an explosion of that kind of research, people talking to the dancers who’d worked for Cole and Taylor and the others, when they were still around alive to talk, and even spry enough to show the moves. Dancers have long memories for anything they did with their major motor systems.

  I was building up my own personal trove, complete with cross-indexing by name, probable date of first performance, and image cluster. At the time, I’d had a vague notion of dragging the stuff back out of the zone and peddling it to some mainstream cable network. All those hundreds of hours of light and motion could be boiled down to a half hour of prestige filler, something to run late night after the blockbuster movie, to satisfy the Feds’ cultural programming requirements and give the outfit a little class on the side.

  Then I got the call from Identrope.

  You answer the call, you sign on, and things aren’t ever the same. That’s just life in the Madlands.

  He knew what I was doing down there. He asked me to do a little something else for him. The hook, the gimmick.

  I became the choreographic director for Identrope’s broadcasts. As long as I didn’t have to move on camera, I’d be all right. At least I knew what the stuff was supposed to look like.

  I needed dancers—he created a troupe for me. Out of the same formless void that he’d pulled this pseudo-L.A. from. An even dozen: eight leggy girls, four smiling androgynous boys. You could have popped open any one of their skulls and dropped a quarter in, and you would’ve had to wait a long time to hear the tiny distant splash at the bottom. But they could move, and take direction, and move, and look good on camera.

  Nora I promoted to rehearsal mistress and de facto leader of the troupe, just because there was more of a flicker behind her wide-open eyes than in any of the others’. She could run them through their paces while I was down rooting around in the archives for more material.

  At first I’d figured the gig would only run a couple of weeks, a month at most, until Identrope realized that this wasn’t drawing in the marks, either.

  Three years later, I was still working for him.

  Cursed by success. The dancing caught the viewers—I initially thought the broadcast audience must all be on some huge retro kick, then bit by bit it dawned on me that they actually liked the stuff, and there wasn’t anything else like it, on the cable or elsewhere. And more importantly, for Identrope at least, it wasn’t just a matter of the ratings going up; the marks stayed tuned in for his sermons. Come unto me, ye lambs of God. Come to the Madlands and let me put the tiny glittering pieces of your otherwise insignificant souls into the great mosaic of the web. Tie into the real immortality, folks . . .

  They started drifting into the zone, and Identrope was waiting for them.

  I got into deep grave-robbing, down in the archives. I didn’t have shit for choreographic sense; my big creative strokes would be to mirror-double a nightclub duet for the whole troupe, or insert an angst-ridden Graham pose into the middle of a Cole tango. If my stuff was going over, it just went to show how hungry the broadcast audience was for it. I even achieved my own fifteen minutes of fame, getting introduced from the wings in my severe tux.

  Nora was the side effect. She went from nothing to something; the blank started to get filled in.

  The dancing did it. I’m sure of that. She was the one who showed the others what to do; her mind had to start working with the big concepts, like time, and emotion, even if only the simulation of it. Whatever was inside her pretty skull had to evolve, become more complex, in order to wrap around those notions.

  She started becoming human. She wasn’t there yet, but I could see down the line, to what she would eventually be, and I didn’t know if it was a good idea or not. She was falling from that state of innocent grace, and I was the one who’d handed the apple to her.

  Everything became more complicated. Before, at the beginning, I’d been able to sleep with her, and not a word had to be spoken. And if that was sad in some basic way, it was at least easy. For a few moments, I could drift back down to her preconscious level.

  Now there were words, and questions. There was a lot she wanted to know, to find out. That’s how it all starts. Lying on the mat with her, I stroked her hair and hoped it all wouldn’t be too hard on her.

  Somebody out in the corridor rattled the knob of the locked door. That woke Nora; she reached across me to drag her discarded sweatshirt toward her.

  Questions, like now. Sitting upright, lifting her loosened hair over the sweat’s raggedy collar . . .

  She turned and focused her big eyes on me.

  “Who are all those people trying to kill you?”

  SEVEN

  “AW, Christ—”

  I reached over and pulled my own clothes toward me. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. I seemed to attract every loose cannon in L.A. This time around, I had a deep suspicion that it had something to do with Geldt’s whole jazz.

  As I buttoned my shirt, I watched Nora smoothing her hair back with the flat of her palms and reassembling her chignon. “So who wants to kill me?”

  She looked my way and shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s why I asked you.”

  I tried a different tack. “How did you know that’s what they wanted?”

  Another shrug. “They just looked that way. There was two of them. They came around while you were gone. One of them was that guy you used to hang out with all the time. You know, the one that always looks like he’s just been oiled. And he smells bad.” She wrinkled her nose. That was Geldt, all right.

  “Anything else? Besides the way they supposedly looked?”

  “He walked funny. The bad-smelling one.” Where she sat cross-legged, Nora tilted herself a few degrees. “Like he was hauling around a great big weight in his coat pocket. I could see the lump.
”

  That idiot—Geldt always liked to carry around that piece that just about weighed more than he did.

  I tied my shoes and stood up.

  My own jacket was tugged down by a weight slightly less than Geldt’s gun. I hauled out a sack of videocassettes and handed them to Nora.

  “We’ll go live tomorrow night.” I trusted her that the other dancers were ready; they’d had plenty of time, after all, while I’d been gone. “Take a look at these—” The cassettes were dubbed-off copies of another couple old movies I’d dug up. “Saturday, we can start working up the new routines.”

  She set the tapes on top of the playback unit mounted on the studio’s wall. “Trayne . . .” Her voice sounded as though the words were being bolted together on some slow assembly line inside. “I’ve been thinking . . .”

  “That’s good.” It wasn’t good. Thinking was how she had changed already, and where further sadness lay. As the man says, I’ve been down that road before. “What about?” I was edging toward the door.

  “Oh . . . things . . .”

  The bad things. “Like what?”

  “Like us . . .”

  The old bad things.

  “Us . . . and Identrope . . .”

  That was new. “What about him?”

  Her face went troubled, gaze reflecting inward. “I don’t know, Trayne. I just wonder sometimes. Whether the things we do for him . . . the work and everything . . . whether that’s—I don’t know—okay.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I mean.”

  I did. She had entered the steep acceleration part of the becoming-human slope. First comes consciousness, then, not too much later, guilt. It’s the human condition. Only assholes who are going the other way, becoming less human, like Geldt, slide out of it.

  Her face stayed troubled, turning away from mine to hide, as I held her for a moment. There was nothing I could tell her, except the usual stupid things like Don’t worry about it, or—