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269 pages

English

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A powerful, sprawling tale of a woman betrayed, 'The Land of Is' pulls the reader into a not-so-brave New World rising from the rubble of the American Empire.Wicla the Singer writes to her children to tell them why she murdered their father. She tells them of her life growing up on the broken roads of the US west coast with her mother, the legendary Trader Merri Weer, and how she became a Dylan-like folk hero to a vast legion of dispirited Americans. She recounts how, through their father's myriad betrayals, the world she lived in was lost. Read together with their father's testimony in 'The Summit of Us', a scintillating companion novel, Wicla's letter sounds as a searing elegy of truth.

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Publié par	Distributed by eBookpartnership
Date de parution	01 octobre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839785368
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Land of Is
Vian Andrews

The Land of Is
Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2022
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874
www.theconradpress.com
info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-839785-36-8
Copyright © Vian Andrews, 2022
The moral right of Vian Andrews to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

To my children and my children’s children and their children too

I never hear the word ‘Escape’
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation –
A flying attitude!
I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again!
Emily Dickinson

Song 1
M y minders have grown bored over the years, getting older just as I have, all of us set in the routines that were designed to assure the public the dowager me is as well-tended as the wide lawns that run right to the edge of the cliffs above the river. Mostly, I am quiet and seemly, but these minders know my temper - not the crankiness of a privileged old woman irritated by spilt milk - but a hard, low-voiced, growling bitch of the first order, made more masculine than most on the road to perdition. They leave me alone to ponder my sins, not knowing that I have ways and means to write this record.
I have now completed this history of your father and me, to tell you why I daggered your father’s heart, murdered him in our bed at Castle Forbes. Murdered him for your sake but also for the sake of all the souls who know now how deeply they were betrayed by your father and his disciples. Sitting here in my garden, where the roses war, I don’t give a damn about having anyone else’s forgiveness but yours, but, yes, I will accept the thanks of all and anyone with a sense of justice.
It is a long story that starts with the woman who brought me into the world, because what I did was done to the music that Demeter played into the heart of Persephone, the secret gift of life passed from mothers to their children, one that I now share with you both. But don’t expect to go on a sentimental journey. Ours was a hard one, taken over the landscape of horrible truths, which, now that you have inherited your father’s empire, you have a duty to take.
My mother’s name was Merri Weer. Once she had been set in motion, she never stopped. She was born in Chicago in 2026. July, she said. Her mother and father were still together on that joyous day, but barely. The heat of that summer shrivelled the last of the tenuous cocoon their teenage passions had spun around them, so her father wriggled free and went off on a wing and a prayer, out of the squalid, crumbling, dangerous city to someplace else, where my grandma’s bitching and my mother’s baby howling went silent behind the batting of time.
Merri did not talk about her Chicago childhood, or the prolonged death by a painful cancer of her mother when Merri was in her late teens. I can tell you almost nothing of those days because Merri recounted almost nothing. But she got some schooling there, so she could read and write very well, but not nearly as well as she could deal with numbers. For her, arithmetic and mathematics were a constant revelation of the forces of nature, including human nature, and they accorded well with the practical, no-nonsense, persevering formula of her own character.
A few months after Merri’s mother died, the long awaited ‘big one’ hit the west coast, a vicious quake that killed tens of thousands in an instant as the entirety of the man-made world in which they worked and ate and fucked and slept, came crashing down on their disbelieving selves. The tsunami that swept-in moments later ground the heads and limbs off thousands more. What was left of LA and the other towns and cities along the Pacific littoral after years of inundation from a rising sea, was left in a wet and pulverized ruin upon which were strewn the dazed and drenched survivors drying under a killing sun. The quake’s vibrations carried their calls for help eastward like ripples through a pond.
Merri and a few dozen other young people in Chicago answered the call. Pulling together what they could – medical supplies, potable water, blankets, clothes and other necessities – they formed a long caravan of trucks and cars and headed west, letting the AutoWay take them as far as it could before, about thirty miles from blue water, the highway itself became a broken and undulating heap of fragments and busted bridges that would take two decades for the bankrupt government of the United States of America to stitch back together. Sort of.
The story of the rescue and recovery efforts has been told elsewhere, so no need for me to repeat what is already known. Besides, mother never told me what she herself did there, although even years later, people we encountered on the road (people she would quickly hush if she caught them admiring her a little too much) told me that in the disorganization and chaos of those days on the coast, Merri’s anger at the incompetence, arrogance and punctiliousness of those who purported to be running things, caused her take charge of the crews working in her area.
Intuitively knowing what needed to be done, she barked orders, lashed the indolent with a fierce tongue, breathed new energy into the devastated, and though exhausted in her bones, got things done. Hundreds were saved who otherwise would have perished. Even though she was a mere girl at the time, I don’t doubt it for a minute.
Merri never went back to Chicago to live and, in fact, apart from brief stints here and there, she never lived anywhere again. Not anywhere you might call a place. Instead, she drove her life, and her life drove her, down the broken highways of our broken country, doing as much good as she could, bartering with womenfolk of all kinds, keeping men at a distance, surviving on a little food and a love of song. When she died, it was on the highways of the east. Had it been up to me I would have buried her by the side of a western road that she, and later I, had travelled on, but it was not to be.
Many weeks after the quake, she and one of the men of her crew, were tasked to take one of the huge rescue vans that were put into service by the feds to return to Chicago for desperately needed supplies. The AutoWay was choked with traffic in both directions, so they decided to cut across the south on whatever roads and highways were still driveable, using an ancient road atlas for navigation because the GPS in the van was telling lies. Virtually all the beacon and guide systems that had been installed along these roads in days gone by had been ripped out of their housings and sold by hungry locals for parts.
There was no way to put the van into selfdrive, so off they went, taking turns at the wheel. Keep in mind that Merri was only seventeen or eighteen, beautiful in her bones, raven-haired, high spirited, intelligent, open minded, ready with a laugh, given to touching those who came into her circle without ever realizing that her touch could ignite in others a deep, reciprocal affection, or envy or insecurity or love or lust. You can see for yourself in the 3Ds. Here she is standing on the step of that van at a recharging station near some pass-by town, put into leering focus by, what was his name? Eddington, I think. Yes, Eddington. There he is in those other pix, striking the mistaken pose of a boyfriend, not a colleague.
By this time, 2040 or so, people everywhere, but especially in the parched and increasingly barren regions of the west, had begun to adjust their lives to avoid the pernicious effects of sunlight beating down on earth through the thinnest of those ozone filters that one time had kept humanity safe. The ritualized chants and supplications of ancient priests glorifying the sun from the high tops of slave-built stone piles, to Ra, Helios, Kinich Ahau and dozens of others, could not escape the blistered lips of modern men and women. They hated it, for too much exposure to the sun could kill.
Those of us who chanced to come outside in daylight hours, if on foot, kept to the shadows, moving quickly from one to the other, or we conveyed ourselves in window-tinted selfdrives from one covered lot to another. Most of us worked and played at night, from dusk to dawn, illuminated by a ubiquity of diodic lights that nearly eliminated shadow altogether. We lived in night’s black and white glare and made our way into the over-exposed dimensions of day only when necessary.
Merri and Ed drove all day and night, making good time, one at the wheel, one in the rear sleeping, brewing coffee, scrolling their vice for news, consulting maps and clocks, and, when their bellies growled, preparing both a traveler’s meal. Merri liked to have the radio on as she drove, fiddling with the dash tuner if a signal waivered, or if a song disappointed, or if the DJ took too long spouting nonsense before cueing another tune.
Ed drove with the radio off, so Merri often kicked back with her headset on, lost in the sanctuary of her favorite music, not realizing that Ed did not turn off the radio because he preferred silence, but because he loved to hear Merri’s a capella voice, singing as she listened. It stirred him, so as the vehicle rolled from place-to-place, he gathered a love of Merri like a clinging moss. The non-stop friction of wheels on the roadbed transmuted into a sexual yearning with an increasing kinetic force, but only for him, not Merri’s oblivious and singing self.
It was only later over the course of years the highway, by then a simulacrum of the deep rut of her exhausted mind, that Merri came to deeply k