Horse Latitudes

by Richard Kadrey
You may read these files, copy, distribute them, or print them out and make them into little hats. You may do anything you like with them as long as you do not change them in any way or receive money for them.
I've put METROPHAGE and HORSE LATITUDES into free distribution on the Net, but I retain all copyrights to the works.
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Richard Kadrey
May 1995
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This story is excerpted from my novel, KAMIKAZE L'AMOUR (St. Martin's Press, 1995). It first appeared in OMNI BEST SCIENCE FICTION, Vol. One.
Horse Latitudes
by Richard Kadrey
Fame is just schizophrenia with money.
I died on a Sunday, when the new century was no more than four or five hours old. Midnight would have been a more elegant moment (and a genuine headline grabber), but we were still on stage, and I thought that suicide, like masturbation, might lose something when experienced with more than 100,000 close, personal friends.
I don't recall exactly when I accepted the New Year's Eve gig at Madison Square Garden, the band had never played one before, but it became inextricably tied in with my decision to kill myself. Somehow I couldn't bear the idea of a twenty-first century. Whenever I thought of it, I was overwhelmed by a memory: flying in a chartered plane over the Antarctic ice fields on my thirtieth birthday. A brilliant whiteness tinged with freezing blue swept away in all directions. It was an unfillable emptiness. It was death. It could never be fed or satisfied--neither the ice sheet nor the new century- -at least, not by me.
No one suspected, of course. Throughout this crisis of faith, I always remained true to fame. I acted out the excesses that were expected of me. I denied rumors that I had invented. I spat at photographers, and managed to double my press coverage.
The suicide itself was a simple, dull, anticlimactic affair. The police had closed the show quickly when the audience piled up their seats and started a bonfire during our extended "Auld Lang Syne." Back in my room at the Pierre I swallowed a bottle of pills and vodka. I felt stupid and disembodied, like some character who had been written out of a Tennessee Williams play--Blanche Dubois' spoiled little brother. I found out later that it was Kumiko, my manager, who found me swimming in my own vomit, and got me to the hospital. When I awoke, I was in Oregon, tucked away in the Point Mariposa Recovery Center, where the movie stars come to dry out. There wasn't even a fence, just an endless expanse of lizard green lawn. Picture a cemetery. Or a country club with thorazine.
I left the sanitarium three weeks later, without telling anyone. I went out for my evening walk and just kept on walking. The Center was housed in a converted mansion built on a bluff over a contaminated beach near Oceanside. I had, until recently, been an avid rock climber. Inching your way across a sheer rock face suspended by nothing but your own chalky fingers is the only high comparable to being on stage (death, spiritual or physical, being the only possible outcome of a wrong or false move in either place). It took me nearly an hour to work my way down the granite wall to a dead beach dotted with Health Department warning signs and washed-up medical waste. I checked to see that my lithium hadn't fallen out on the climb down. Then, squatting among plastic bags emblazoned with biohazard stickers, and scrawny gulls holding empty syringes in their beaks, I picked up a rusty scalpel and slit the cuffs of my robe. Two thousand dollars in twenties and fifties spilled out onto the gray sand.
I left my robe on the sand, following the freeway shoulder in sweat pants and a t-shirt. In Cannon Beach I bought a coat and a ticket on a boat going down the coast to Los Angeles. My ticket only took me as far as San Francisco. We reached the city two days later, in the dark hours of the early morning. As we sailed in under the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco was aglow like some art nouveau foundry, anesthetized beneath dense layers of sea fog. Far across the bay, on the Oakland side, I could just make out the tangle of mangrove swamp fronting the wall of impenetrable green that was the northernmost tip of the rainforest.
Six weeks later, I left my apartment in the Sunset District and headed for a