Kalifornia (16 page)

The sealman stiffened.

“But he’s part of the family,” Sandy protested.

“We wouldn’t let the family
dog
in
either.”

“That’s all right,” Cornelius said coldly. “I can see her well
enough through the glass.”

Sandy
glared at the nurse, a curse on his lips, but
he figured it was hospital policy, however tortious. He passed through the
airlock. In the halfway chamber, a violet light purged him of microscopic
hitchhikers, then a bell chimed and the inner door opened.

“Sandy,” his father said. “I’m glad you made it. She’s . . . in
a coma.”

A cat’s cradle held Poppy in careful suspension. She was swathed
in skinplast with pins protruding from every part of her body, like needles in
an acupuncturist’s training manikin. The head of each pin bore a tiny bead of
emerald light, all of them blinking—at times randomly, at times phasing into
sequence.

The only bits of flesh he could see were her eyelids, half-shut,
the merest orange crescents visible beneath them. She hardly seemed to be
breathing.

“When did it happen?”

“Last night. She was in the Mojave working on her series. She was
hit by a truck.”

“An accident?”

Alfredo hesitated. “Nobody knows precisely what happened—or why.
Starko was there, but the way he tells it, well . . . I’m
not so sure.”

Sandy
swallowed.

Neither of them wanted to speculate openly, but Sandy couldn’t
help seeing the obvious. Poppy had been broken by her baby’s disappearance.
Taking too many drugs to control her mood. The last time he’d spoken with her,
she had seemed to be loitering far beyond her usual zones . . . defeated.

“What’s the point of living?” she had said, just a throwaway
line, another sob among many. People always said those things in moments of
misery. It was a standard wire-show plaint. It hadn’t registered as realism until
now.

Too late.

If there was anything accidental about the incident, it was
probably the fact of her survival.

Sandy
bowed his head, wishing he could hear a
heartbeat, anything, to know that she lived. The blinking pins made her look
like some kind of alien insect in a hanging chrysalis.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should have been there for you,
Poppy. I should have kept in touch, so you’d’ve had someone to call. I should
have helped you find your . . . my niece.”

Not so much as a tremor of understanding ran through her eyelids.
His own eyes began to tear with the effort of looking at her; the blinking
green needles dizzied him. Alfredo’s hand closed on his shoulder.

“I can’t stay here,” Sandy said.

“Will you meet me at the house, son? Mir and Ferdi are there. I’d
like us all to be together right now. I’ve made arrangements to bring Poppy
home as soon as she’s stable. It’ll be good for her if we’re all there when she
wakes up.”

“When is that supposed to happen?”

Alfredo stared at the transparent wall as if it were made of
brick. He didn’t answer. A commotion passed through the outer ward, but it was
already dying down. Cornelius came out of the crowd and stood near the glass,
looking brisk and efficient.

Sandy
squeezed his father’s arm. “I’ll see you at
home.”

Cornelius joined him outside the airlock. “How is she, sir?”

“In a coma. God, Corny, I’ve been so pale and selfish. So fucking
tawdry
 . . .”

Sandy
stumbled, but Cornelius caught him. Sandy’s shoes were squeaky with water.

“Let’s get out of here. Get home.”

“The canyon house?”

“Where else?”

***

The Figueroa house, so full of memories, lay beneath them now, a
felicitous nightmare of conflicting architectural styles—Bauhaus, Victorian,
SoCal Freestyle, Spanish colonial. Somehow it all worked in spite of itself. Sandy loved the place, with its confusion of slate and skylights and red tile roofs,
merloned towers and gable windows, in places both maudlin and stark. It lay
couched in cactus and flowering succulents, birds of paradise peering
everywhere, purple jacaranda blossoms fluttering across the balconies and off
into the warm depths of the canyon, frozen red oceans of bougainvillea
spilling over the brink. If only this homecoming weren’t such a sad affair.

Sandy
saw a group of tourists at the outer gates,
pointing out the descending car. “I see we’re in the news again,” he said. “I’m
surprised the hospital wasn’t mobbed.”

“When you were in with Poppy, a man came through the ward selling
bootleg copies of her surgery cubes.”

“Hey-Seuss! Where’d he go?”

“I sent him to the emergency room with a broken finger.”

Sandy
opened his hatch and jumped out into a baking
wind; bars of lime cloud lay in layers across a rainbow-sherbet sky. Cool
shadows filled the house. Memories boiled up from the walls and floor, like
reruns on a channel he couldn’t change. All this stuff inside him ran much
deeper than the wires.

Corny headed straight for the kitchen seafood-tank. Sandy heard
splashing and laughter at the back of the house. He walked toward the indoor
pool. Poking his head into the bright room of rippling light, he saw Miranda
leaping nude from the high-dive into a pool full of naked men, while a plump
balding old guy he vaguely remembered as a pestering pitch-man stood at the
edge of the poolside, waiting till she surfaced to rattle off more of his
sure-fire ideas:

“It’s a natch, Mirry! We’ll hook the little boys of all ages! ‘Lolita
Versus Megalon’! With your looks and Jap special effects—”

It took Sandy a few seconds to get control of himself. His first
urge—suppressed—was to scream at them all to get out, to berate his sister for
frolicking in the face of a tragedy. But she didn’t live by his rules. She
would only laugh and tell the stranger to ignore her stodgy older brother.
It’s
my house as much as yours, Sandy.
Poppy’s condition was only
another odd development in the life she had mistaken for a wire show.

He fled the noise and laughter. Halfway down the hall, he was
surprised by Ferdinand, who came padding toward him dripping wet, also nude,
and eating a gooey sandwich.

“Hey, bro, water’s just right. Bunch of studleys out there, eager
to please. You coming in?”

“No, uh . . . thanks, Ferdi. How have you and
Miranda been doing in your search for Calafia?”

“Cala-who? Oh, that? We gave up. I mean, come on, what’s she to
us? Poppy can worry about her own show. Between you and me, Mir and I’ve got a
project in development. ‘Child Bride’! It’s really a vehicle for her, but
there’s this whole incest angle that no other show’s really pursued, and I’m
pretty sure I’ll play the part of her husband—”

“Sounds like new territory for you,” Sandy said, and shuffled past
him.

Kids, he told himself. They’re just kids. You can’t expect any
more out of them. . . .

Out in the living area, he found another stranger, a black man, looking
out into the chasm where pigeon-gulls circled and pecked each other into flocks
of bloody feathers. He looked vaguely familiar. He was nibbling on a string of
brown chewing-rope that led into his pocket, and spitting frayed bits into the
abyss.

The man saw Sandy and put out his hand. “Santiago?”

“Have we met?”

“Not in person, but I’ve heard lots about you. Used to follow your
show faithfully. I’m Clarence Starko. Clarry.”

Sandy
shook his hand. “Poppy’s wireman? You . . . you
were there when . . . ?”

Clarry shivered. “I was there. I was with her till your Dad showed
up. He was nice enough to invite me over here till we got some news on her.”

“No news,” Sandy said, shaking his head. He walked to the glass
and looked down into the shadows. “What really happened last night?”

“Oh, man. That. It was the worst thing ever happened to me. Poppy
was really depressed. We’d got this false lead about the baby, you know? Went
all the way out there on a wild goose ride. You can imagine how she felt, her
hopes all up and everything, and then a big zee, total bust. It’s like her
spirit finally broke. That’s all the show’s been about anymore. Poppy’s quest.
We were even gonna change the title.”

“She was depressed?”

Clarry nodded, spat over the balcony. “Something about the desert
made it worse. Even got to me. She seemed tired so I got us some motel space,
and I thought she’d gone right to sleep. But I’m sitting there at the editor,
looking out the window, and all of a sudden I see her outside, walking toward
the road, this busy-as-hell highway, kind of like she’s in a trance. I thought
she might be sleepwalking, so I went after her.” He shook his head. “I wish she
had been asleep, so I could have woken her up and brought her in again. But she
was wide awake. She stared at me when I asked what she was doing. Stared and
said, ‘Don’t try to stop me, Clarry.’”

Sandy
went cold. “Suicide,” he whispered.

“I did try, though—of course I did. But she went crazy. Tore away,
went running down the highway. I was so close to catching up with her . . . so
close . . . when she threw herself out in front of a truck.
Just like that. I thought it was all over.”

Starko stood silent for a moment, looking at his feet, shaking
his head. His hands opened and closed on empty air. Several inches of baccorish
slithered into his mouth.

“She wasn’t quite dead,” he said after a while. “The trucker
called for help. Turned out to be a mobile hospital on the road nearby. If it
had been a mile farther off, she wouldn’t have survived at all.”

“I’m not so sure she did survive,” Sandy said.

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

Sandy
suddenly had a chilling thought. “She wasn’t recording
when it happened, was she?”

“No. We were on standby, but none of it’s on ice.”

“I just thought, if it was recorded, and if that crystal got out .
. .”

Clarry nodded. “The ghouls would eat it up, you’re right. But you
don’t have to worry about that.”

“You were there for the kidnapping, too, weren’t you?” The man
looked startled. “Yeah. Of course I was. I produced that show. I’ve been there
for everything. Poor Poppy.”

“Do you still have the master cube?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I’d like to go over it myself. See, I had the sense when I
finally felt the broadcast that it had been edited. There was a kind of . . . 
thin
quality to it. Synthetic. I used to do some of the editing on our old show, so
those things kind of leap out at me. You must know what I’m talking about.”

Clarry Starko shifted from foot to foot, chewing his rope. “Maybe.
Yeah. The cops grabbed that master and kept it quite a while. You’re saying
somebody screwed with the image?”

“Maybe the cops,” Sandy said.

“Now why would they do that? What could
they
be hiding?”

“I don’t know,” Sandy said. “It’s just a funny feeling I had that
the whole scene wasn’t real.”

Clarry shook his head. “I never had the heart to watch it again,
but now you’ve got me interested. The Sens8 in my van has a long memory; the
original recording’s still in there—I always keep them in case something
happens to the master cube. We could dupe a new crystal and play it against the
cube I gave the cops, see if there are any changes.”

“When could you get it?”

Starko was already heading for the door. “Right now. I’m parked up
top.”

***

Clarry unwrapped a blank cube and downloaded the original
kidnapping sequence from the deck in the van. As he sat tapping his fingers on
the master that had gone to the cops, gobbling baccorish, he thought about Sandy. Her brother. How similar they were. He didn’t want to let him down; that would be
like shoveling dirt over Poppy, burying her alive. He couldn’t undo his
betrayal, but maybe he could help straighten things out. It was like an
unexpected second chance.