Madlands Read online

  The lecturer put on an academic, wryly amused look at this last bit from his own mouth, and the audience smiled collectively in return. What a cold, heartless bunch they were. This was a bad daydream, and I really only had myself to blame for it. I could have ended it at any time, but I didn’t. I let it roll on.

  “Very well—we have established the nature of this substance, the human vitamin, the o-positive. What, then, was the relationship of our supposed d-rangers to this substance? The engines of rumor and folklore in the Madlands had it that the d-rangers lived on o-positive, draining it from their victims’ bodies and souls—the comparisons to vampires and bloodsucking are inevitable and obvious. Though nothing so crude as sharp teeth plunged into sleepers’ necks, and tongues lapping up pulsing flow, was thought to have been involved; the feeding process was believed to take place invisibly, outside the shade of human perception. This, of course, made identifying the feared d-rangers much more difficult, if not impossible. Your best friend could have been one, and sat next to you on the couch watching television, and all the while your human essence was being siphoned off. The best parasites—best in terms of their own sleek survival—are the subtle ones. Who operate undetected, until it’s too late and the damage to the host organism is done.”

  Well, yes—I nodded, both lying on my bed and sitting in my daydream’s imagined audience. That was another good point. Nobody knew the advantages of essentially invisible operation better than I did.

  The lecturer lifted his pointer from the stand, and swung it toward the figures drawn on the chalkboard. “How much more repellent people would have regarded the d-rangers, if they’d known the truth about this appetite-sustenance equation!” The lecturer bit the words off, the working of his jaw indicating a genuine fury on his part. “As long as it could be said that the d-rangers ate, that the ineffable o-positive substance was their food, then the possibility existed that they could be forgiven, even in the hearts of the victims, as long as those victims had hearts and not just some squamous amoeboid cell material where the human bits used to be. But there would have been no chance of forgiveness, of absolution—if the d-rangers had wanted it!—if it had been known that the d-rangers’ so-called appetite for the o-positive substance had been entirely a function of economics. Of commerce! The d-rangers were small-scale entrepreneurs, merchants in the airy glue and brick of the human soul!”

  The bastard was ranting now, but effectively so. I touched my face—in the dream I did, or lying on my half-awake bed, I couldn’t tell which—and found my cheeks wet with the tears of shame. I was glad that the others in the audience were hypnotized by the lecturer’s oratory, and didn’t notice me burning.

  This daydream was completely out of hand now; it rolled over me like a train. At the same time, I was pinned to the tracks by its onrushing light, the light of unpleasant revelations. I had been here before, and knew what was coming.

  The lecturer’s face had darkened, his anger bottled and sealed behind his stormy brow. “In fact, or as much as facts pertain to the mythic natural history of our hypothetical d-rangers, the o-positive substance, the soul blood of their neighbors, that which enabled the Madlands’ habitués to organize both their external and internal realities, that invisible substance was soaked up by the d-rangers and sold, ladies and gentlemen, sold to the one party who had particular need and use for the commodity. That party? The king, the ruling presence of the Madlands—Identrope. The o-positive substance, gathered and sold by the d-rangers to Identrope, is the source of his growing control over the Madlands zone. Identrope’s ability to control the reality within the zone increases as the ability of others, the habitués, the victims who come into the zone and the unseen mercantile system of the d-rangers, their ability to keep reality organized decreases as their reserves of o-positive are drained away, to the point of contracting the n-formation disease. In a very real sense, the mysterious and omnipresent Identrope derived a double benefit from this commerce. Not only did he, from the accumulation of excess reality-organizing ability, become empowered to turn the zone’s innate chaos into a reality of his own choosing, the shabby noir landscape of a pseudo-L.A. dredged up from the archives, an urban landscape where he himself operated most efficiently as an archetype wired into people’s thoughts and memories; but he also, from the depletion of others’ reality-organizing ability, was ensured of a constant supply of recruits into his church, converts desperate to avoid the terminal multi-cancer stages of the n-formation disease. These converts, Identrope’s flock, achieved their salvation by being incorporated into the expanded neural web of the very architect of their damnation. Identrope got it both ways, coming and going, as above so below. It was a good deal for him.

  “What about the d-rangers themselves, the source of supply for Identrope? What did they get out of the arrangement? Undoubtedly, there was some financial compensation—money can also be thought of as a reality-organizing substance, that works both inside and outside the human soul. Identrope and the d-rangers could be thought of as simply exchanging one form of reality for another, whichever the other party found more convenient for his or her purposes. Thus it was for the first group of d-rangers, the d-ranger alpha. Unfortunately for them, the alpha d-rangers had short careers; deriving no direct benefit from the o-positive in which they dealt, they all eventually came down with the dreaded n-formation disease themselves. The obvious analogy is to ancient drug dealers of one stripe or another, who, through their constant exposure to their stock of illicit substances, wound up addicted themselves, and finally dead, the victims of their own commerce. Sic semper d-rangers alpha; they didn’t have the smarts for the long haul.

  “A simple matter of evolution brings us to d-ranger beta.” The pointer’s tip rapped on the chalk sketches of Eastern and myself, up on the board. “Nature may or may not abhor a vacuum, but the realm of predatory merchanthood certainly does. Every appetite-related niche will eventually be filled by a creature tooled either by circumstance and Darwinian selection or by the cleaner scalpel of self-will. These two—” Tap-tap on Eastern’s sketched clavicle, then mine. “Having brains and keen desire, fit into the latter category. They—and there might have been others as well—became the entities necessary to supply Identrope with the o-positive substance gleaned from the hapless Madlands habitués. Just as with the alpha d-rangers; but with this difference: these two gained a measure of control over the process sufficient to protect themselves from the alpha consequences. Beta gained conscious control over the mercantile relationship, which exceeded that of Identrope. To some degree, the poor bastard did not know what was going on in a sphere of activity of which he had previously been the master.”

  This struck me as being an unusually sympathetic note for the lecturer to hit. There weren’t a lot of people who had ever felt sorry for Identrope. And since this person was imagined inside my own head, that presented me with an interesting readout of my own feelings for my employer. I’d have to think about that sometime.

  The dream lecture was already rolling on, and I’d missed a few words. “. . . essentially, what these two—the d-rangers beta—accomplished was to inject a new element of subterfuge into the proceedings. Deception now prevailed on both ends of the transfer of the o-positive substance from the victimized source to the ultimate consumer, with only the middlemen truly knowing what was going on. If even they did. What enabled the d-rangers beta to pull this off was their newly acquired ability to shuffle bodies, to put their own consciousness in the driver’s seat of another human form. In this, the d-rangers beta gained a measure of control over the n-formation disease itself; they had learned to use the disease for their own purposes. The ongoing presence of the disease in the Madlands created a situation of slipperiness. The zone’s habitués were infected with the disease; so were these new d-rangers. But with this difference: the mutual state of infection enabled the d-rangers to slide in and out of other people’s bodies, like putting on a mask; they could do this before the undesired n-formatio
n symptoms, the lethal progress into multi-cancer, appeared. In fact, these two d-rangers put their own original bodies effectively on ice, operating exclusively thenceforth out of borrowed bodies, and thus reducing exposure and risk to themselves to a minimum. They could crash as many ‘cars’ as they liked; there was always an inexhaustible supply of new ones to shuffle themselves into. This also enabled them to operate in secret, concealing both their true natures and identities from their o-positive customer Identrope. Indeed, in the case of the d-ranger beta known to us as Trayne, the individual in question not only supplied Identrope with the o-positive substance drained off from various Madlands habitués/victims and sold to Identrope through a rotating bank of body guises, but also worked for Identrope in an entirely separate capacity, that of choreographer for Identrope’s regular series of religious broadcasts. A perfect deception; Identrope apparently never realized—or if he did know, he never let on—that his trusted employee Trayne was working both sides of the street, operating both inside and outside of that extensive organization.”

  The dream lecture came over me in waves, hammering me into an enveloping, suffocating darkness. The cigar had gone out, and its ashy taste lay foul on my tongue.

  I gripped the edge of my seat, and felt the bed’s mattress yield under my fingers. My stifled cry, the rush of my dizzying breath, had attracted attention; all around me in the dream’s auditorium, faces turned toward me.

  The lecturer went on, shouting now.

  “A perfect deception! A nice deal, a sweet setup! How wonderful for this Trayne, to have fooled everyone this way . . .”

  I knew what was coming, I’d heard it before.

  “But what of his soul? He was able to put his body in the fridge, but what became of that other part of him, separate from his slippery mind? Did that get lost along the way? Did he leave it somewhere, like a matchbook in the pocket of a coat given to the Salvation Army? Did he step on it and crack it open while he was looking for his keys? Did he, did he did he—”

  The shout a roar now. But no one was listening to him. All the faces in the auditorium turned toward me. And the faces were all different, and they were all mine.

  And none of them were.

  Something new happened that had never happened before in all the repeats of the dream that I’d put myself through. The auditorium shook from a giant’s blows, over and over, the walls and ceiling trembling.

  I opened my eyes. The front of my shirt was covered with grey ash from the dead cigar.

  The blows came again, not as loud as in the dream’s magnification. There was somebody at the door, beating on it with a fist. Outside, in the dark streets, machinery snarled and rasped, circling the building like a wolf pack.

  SIXTEEN

  I WENT into the bathroom to splash cold water in my face. I felt stiff and weird, still entombed in sleep—at some point, my daydreaming had slipped into the soft iron of real dreaming, the straight uncontrolled stuff. Dreaming’s a hard row when you know you’re dreaming and can’t do anything about it.

  How much of my senses were still logging that bad nocturnal/neurological input, I didn’t know. Somebody was still pounding on the apartment’s front door, and there was all that snarling machine noise outside the building—maybe that was just dream hangover, taking a long time to ebb away. After all, I could still hear the voice of that lecturer with my face crying inside my ear. Echoes and ghosts; the world was full of them.

  I decided to ignore the door-pounding for a little while longer. If it was happening in the real world, or what passes for it around here, whoever it was could goddamn well wait until I’d pulled my act together. It sounded as if the person really wanted to see me; let him earn the privilege. I turned on the cold tap full blast and, bent over the gurgling sink.

  Raising my dripping face, I leaned on the sides of the porcelain and gazed into the mirror. Past the layered clouds of soap film on glass; I didn’t recognize the face I was wearing. I didn’t even know where it had come from, unless the dream residue had totally polluted my optic processes, and the face was one from the lecture audience that had goggled at my transfigured weeping.

  The pounding on the door was still going on, loud enough to make my toothbrush shiver in its holder. I was fully awake, unfortunately. The machines outside hadn’t gone away, either. The combined noise was enough to jog my memory into gear.

  I’d shuffled into this body last night—picked it up as it’d been strolling away from a liquor store on Pico, the kind of place that never rolled back the steel grilles over the windows. Luckily, the previous occupant had only started to get a buzz on—the paper-bagged bottle of Wild Irish Rose in his mitt had only had a few nips taken off the top. Most people walk around with their minds so blank, anyway, that walking in and taking over is like strolling through the unlocked door of an empty house. I rubbed a hand over my new face. I’d have to give it a shave pretty soon, but that could wait. Not too unhandsome, a little more Mediterranean than I generally cared for. I could feel a little jangle along the spine, probably the first stages of the n-formation disease that had given me access across the corporeal barrier. I’d have to rotate out of this sucker in a couple of months, but that gave me plenty of time to do what I’d planned.

  It was all coming back to me. The dreaming had sat on me so hard that it’d temporarily blanked a whole section of short-term memory. Now I remembered why there was somebody knocking at my door. And the machines outside. This was all stuff that I’d arranged. I toweled off the new face and headed for the front door.

  Rasty Mike stood there in all his sweaty glory. I’d caught him in mid-stroke, pulling the door open just as his ham-like fist descended. The big-knuckled appendage, its ridges permanently stained black with thirty-weight and road-dirt, stopped in midair a couple of inches from my left ear. The bananoid fingers unfolded into what a grizzly bear’s paw would look like if it could touch-type and dial a telephone. The wrist fur sprouting from the cuff of the ratty stained sweatshirt was thick enough to knit. You wonder why an ape like that wears clothes at all.

  The machine noise came in louder with the apartment door open. The lugging cough of big-bore Harleys, mixed with the higher whine and rasp of a few vintage Triumphs and BSAs, flowed over me like the high tide of an ocean under offshore-drilling platforms, the air sweet with the aroma of gasoline and other petroleum by-products. The wind of the mechanical world that the rats out in the junkyard would have extracted their human spines to live in.

  “You the guy who called me?” Rasty Mike jabbed a telephone pole with a broken fingernail at the end of it toward my gut. “Said we had business to talk about?”

  “That’s me.” Right off the bat, I couldn’t remember what kind of pseudonym, if any, I’d arranged this rendezvous under. That had been the whole point of my picking up a new body—and face—so Rasty Mike wouldn’t know exactly who he was dealing with, and latch onto my game.

  “This better be good.” Rasty Mike, the L.A. biker king, lumbered past me into the apartment. He filled the front room as though I’d fired up a hot-air balloon in there, but some of the presence was mere body odor.

  As the train passed before me, I saw the words and emblem stitched onto the back of his sleeveless denim jacket.

  “Stone Units” across his shoulder blades in big letters, in that corny Barnum & Bailey typeface with the little spiky bits that bikers all think is so classy-looking; matches the retro circus lettering on the gas tanks, I suppose. In the center a big piston, computer-diddled to give the image a granite texture. The rocker patch on the bottom read “Madlands L.A.” They dug on this weirdness being their home turf.

  Rasty Mike pulled up one of the windows, leaned out, and shouted at his entourage out in the street. “Hold it down, you fuckin’ assholes! We’re trying to talk in here!” The revving of engines ebbed for a moment, then climbed back up, punctuated with a few empty bottles smashing against the stucco. Rasty Mike didn’t care about the noise, anyway; it had been a show for m
y benefit, to demonstrate that he could say rude things to a bunch of one-eyed murderers and other perpetual hard-ons.

  He deposited himself in an armchair. His scraggly beard, marked with a few strands of statesman-like grey, folded over the mound of his gut. The section of sweatshirt riding over his stomach looked as if he’d had his breakfast bacon and eggs served on it. The guy exuded ugly street radiation, asphalt smegma. Like the machines outside, the Stone Units’ rolling fleet: not pretty polished show Harleys, such as the ones that had already started cropping up underneath entertainment biz butts around Sunset and La Brea. But bad-ass grunge buckets, with frayed duct tape peeling from cracked battery cases and exhaust pipes rattling with an out-of-tune tuberculosis.

  “How’d you get our clubhouse number?” Rasty Mike folded his hands over his gut.

  I leaned against the wall. “I’ve got my contacts.” Dialing straight in like that was what had gotten Rasty Mike to turn out for business talk; anybody who had their headquarters’ direct number must be an important person. What he didn’t know was that he’d given me the phone number himself, some time back, when I’d been wearing a different face. I’d done him and his jolly crew a favor.