Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  The SWAT snapped his visor down and waved to the side of the road.

  “Pull on in here, I’ll move the wire.”

  Hounds rolled slowly forward as the SWAT carefully pulled aside one of the corkscrews of wire, giving the cop a nod as they accelerated toward the checkpoint.

  “That fucking guy and this duty he’s on, I got one thing to say about that guy.”

  He nodded to himself.

  “Better him than me, man. Better him than me.”

  Park was looking out the right side window, down at the I-5.

  Some stretches were still entirely open. This one, directly under a checkpoint, was sealed by barricades of abandoned cars a quarter mile to the north and the south. From what Park heard, the middle sections of the barricades would be rigged with charges to blow the cars out of the way if a military or law enforcement column needed to pass. Through most of the length of the 5, from the Mexican to the Canadian borders, a lane was supposed to be kept open for military traffic, but there were long unpoliced stretches of the interstate where road gangs set tariffs, using the lane to cruise north and south, pulling motorists over and siphoning their gas. Down here that kind of thing wasn’t much of a worry. There was the more basic worry regarding the many choke points where abandoned cars had accumulated like plaque in an artery.

  Like the plaques left behind on a sleepless brain, blocking its normal function, leading it to Baroque variations on its usual course of business.

  Park thought about all these accretions of debris, within the body and without, driving it to more bizarre extremes. The Crown Vic rolled to a stop at the checkpoint, and he looked up at the hanged man twisting slightly to and fro in a hot shaft of air rising from the generators.

  The cops in the front seat showed ID and badges to the cops manning the checkpoint, showed the ID they’d taken off Park, and were waved along with specific instructions about how to approach Silverlake Station.

  Coming off the overpass, the bed of the Los Angeles River behind them, they passed the Los Feliz Golf Course, only slightly more brown now than it had been before severe water rationing became mandatory.

  The boulevard here was all but empty. The bars and restaurants that had been outposts of East Side gentrification were gated, boarded up, or burned out. A few sleepless walking aimlessly, scratching their heads, rubbing their eyes, talking to themselves. Some Griffith Park refugees had managed to cross the I-5 and the river below the checkpoint and were scavenging in the abandoned storefronts. Not that there was much left. But once the boulevard dipped under the railroad just past Seneca, the blocks started to repopulate.

  Heavily armed vatos, favoring AR15s and Tec 9s, were on every street corner. Sandbags lined the edges of rooftops, gun barrels peeking out from behind. Taco trucks and tamale carts were at the curbs, vendors sporting holstered sidearms. Kids played in the street, running in and out of the night traffic, young mothers calling to them in Chicano Spanish. Older men sat at tables on the sidewalks, playing cards or dominoes.

  Hounds pulled his Glock from its holster and tucked it between his thighs.

  “I find out who fingered us for this fucking detail, I’m gonna get his home address, come back here, and pay one of these vatos twenty bucks to go burn his house down with him and his family inside. I mean, look at this shit. Like another fucking country. What the fuck.”

  Kleiner stuck one of Park’s Demerols between his lips.

  “Be like this in the Fairfax pretty soon. The Jews, they’re starting to put up sawhorses at the ends of their blocks. Yarmulkes and Uzis. Gonna change the name to Little Israel any day now.”

  They drove past a dropped 1980 Chevy Stepside, a man perched on the fender, leather holsters crossed over his chest Pancho Villa style, mad dogging them.

  Hounds gritted his teeth.

  “Give me the eye. Find your ass west of the Five, break your ass down you look at me like that. Fucking savages over here. Goddamn jungle. Show me now, show me the guy who thinks building a border fence would have been a bad idea, and let me make that asshole run naked through this shit.”

  Down San Fernando, just before Treadwell, they came to the concrete anti-car bomb barriers that closed the street around Silverlake Station. Freshly spray-painted across one of the barriers, over the tangle of tags, a new graffito:

  The retrofitted minigun on a Stryker infantry fighting vehicle turned and trained its cluster of barrels on the Crown Vic, an amplified voice blaring.

  “Welcome to Silverlake Station. Get out of the fucking car with your hands in view and get your fucking face on the pavement.”

  Hounds killed the engine.

  “Fucking jungle.”

  DRIVING DOWN SKID Row had always been a prospect not unlike visiting the set of a George Romero movie. But with the advent of the sleepless prion, that effect had started to envelop the entire city. The sidewalks, malls, movie theaters, tourist attractions, beaches, and restaurants becoming populated with stiff-necked, shuffling sleepless.

  Zombie jokes were common. Gallows humor being about all the situation made room for.

  Movies themselves had not stopped shooting. Certainly production had been scaled back, and more than one studio had gone under or, more accurately, been consumed whole by somewhat heartier competitors, but even as energy costs spiked, even as all cities, most suburbs, and many rural areas, experienced outbreaks of organized violence, even as the standing army was deployed with obvious permanence to the oil fields in Alaska, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Brazil, even as the draft was reinstated and the gears of the economy audibly snapped their teeth and ground to a squealing halt, even as the drought extended and crops withered, even as the ice caps melted and coastal waters rose, people still liked a good picture.

  The fact of millions of sleepless wandering about trying to fill the dark hours meant an expansion of one market, even as it contracted in other areas.

  Sleepless provided other new opportunities as well.

  I’d been told by a client about an independent horror movie he was helping to finance. A zombie picture. The zombies played almost exclusively by sleepless extras.

  A new standard in zombie verisimilitude.

  Or so he said.

  I said nothing, sometimes finding that even I can be rendered speechless. A not unpleasant sensation, except for those times when it is engendered by the rising of my gorge.

  In any case, the traffic jam I found myself caught in was not caused by the shooting of this breakthrough in cinema, but it was indeed the result of a film crew somewhere in the waning afternoon light, ahead of me on Santa Monica.

  SOP in traffic jams, and therefore SOP whenever one got in one’s car, was to roll down the windows and turn off the engine. It was no longer a simple matter of common sense, it was also now enforceable by law. Sitting in deadlocked traffic with your engine running, powering your stereo, AC, seatback TV, game console, and recharging your various portable devices, was both unpatriotic and illegal.

  Not being a patriot, giving not a damn about getting a ticket, and having more than enough wealth to fill the tank of my resolutely gas-guzzling STS-V, I blasted the air conditioner, listened to a bootleg MP3 of an original recording of Giuseppe di Stefano performing Faust at the Met in 1949, and ran my Toughbook off the AC outlet. I did, out of courtesy, keep the windows up, not wanting the people sweltering around me to grow resentful, but I suspect the low grumble of the V-8 gave me away. Certainly I registered a few nasty looks shot at me through the tinted glass, but those would have concerned me only if the glass, indeed the whole car, were not bulletproof. Had I been so inclined, I could have rammed my way straight through the mass of traffic and come out the other end with little more to worry about than scratched paint and a few dents, but I was surfing the Net, reading up on di Stefano’s biography, so I endured.

  Ten percent of the world’s population could not sleep.

  They were dying, yes, but it took the average sleepless as much as a year to die after becom
ing symptomatic. Once the oddly stiff neck, pinprick pupils, and sweat manifested, insomnia shortly followed, gradually worsening, until it was absolute. Months were endured by the sufferers, months of constant wakefulness, plunging in and out of REM-state dreams without ever falling asleep, alert, always, to the terrible wrack of their bodies. There was no cure, death was inevitable, and while one’s self might gradually slip away, one’s awareness of the pain and physical chaos never ceased.

  The most sensible thing was to dose on massive quantities of speed.

  By the time the sleepless entered the later stages and sleep became an utter impossibility, there was little the average amphetamine could do to the human body that it was not already doing to itself. But it could lend some artificial burst of vigor, it could also sharpen and focus the mind and sometimes stave off the disorienting slippage into dream and memory. Condemned to disquietude and fueled by bennies, one-tenth of the world’s population not only wanted to go to the movies at midnight, they also wanted to surf the Internet.

  At first glance it would appear a losing proposition to market to this demographic, seeing as they were set to expire. And that would have been true if the disease were not spreading.

  It hadn’t, after all, always been ten percent that were infected. It had, of course, started quite small. Indeed, in its infancy, the sleepless prion had been little more than a boutique disease. A fringe illness known as fatal familial insomnia. The name tells you all you need to know about its quaint beginnings.

  Familial.

  For virtually all of the 245-odd years of its recorded history, FFI had restricted itself to less than a handful of genetic lines. How and why it widened its scope so terribly and suddenly was, you’ll understand, a subject greatly debated.

  To be more precise, the sleepless prion was not the same as the FFI prion. For better or worse, FFI offered a much quicker, and therefore, many would say, more merciful death.

  SLP was something else.

  SLP.

  Sleepless.

  Or, to the kids,

  A slang variation playing off the chemical designation used in the patent for the only known treatment for the symptoms of SLP.

  Commercial name: Dreamer.

  Chemical designate: DR33M3R.

  A wholly fortuitous alphanumeric, speaking in terms of marketing, that is. So serendipitous, so instantly obvious to even the most slack-jawed account exec, that one could almost be made suspicious.

  If one were of a suspicious mind.

  I am suspicious of very little, having, in my sixty years, been assured time and again that people are an utter waste and capable of anything when contemplating their own fortune and well-being. With such a worldview, there is little need for suspicion. Easier to simply assume the bastards are screwing everyone else, out for their own good.

  Indeed, I was living proof of my own thesis, sitting there in my final generation Cadillac, listening to Gounod, my brow chilled by the cold air coming from the vents, reaping the benefits of a diseased population’s need for distraction as manifested in the continued availability of broadband wireless service in the L.A. basin.

  Humanity endures.

  Excelsior.

  I was so at peace with the world and myself that when the shockingly sinewy vegan in the Mercedes 300 plastered with biodiesel stickers got out of her car and started rapping on my window, screaming at me that I was “killing the planet and the children,” I almost didn’t roll down that window and point at her face the Beretta Tomcat I’d pulled from my ankle holster.

  The Tomcat is a stunningly slight weapon, its 2.4-inch barrel virtually useless beyond the length of one’s arm. In appearance, when wielded, it is often mistaken for a toy or tool of some kind. The nubbin of barrel poking from the fist doesn’t appear to be a serious threat at all.

  But it feels serious when crammed under your chin. And it sounds serious when the hammer is thumbed back. And in case she was in any doubt, I made certain she knew that both I and the gun were quite serious.

  “You are going to die in front of dozens of witnesses, and none of them will do a thing to help you or avenge you. Because they know exactly what you know: The world is ending. The difference being, they have surrendered and are willing to watch it pass away as long as they can do it in relative comfort. You, on the other hand, are squandering what few resources of personal will and energy you have left by trying to stop an avalanche. Give up. Things are as bad as you fear they are. People are as self-serving as you fear they are. The universe does not care. And neither do you. Not really. Go find a warm body you can huddle against for animal comfort. Go get in your car and don’t look at me again. I’m getting bored of talking now. Go away before I get bored of not pulling the trigger and not watching your brains fountain out the top of your head.”

  She made a noise deep in her throat, and then she walked away, eyes fixed at a level just above the roofs of the cars, in a gait that could be taken for sleepless but was merely despair.

  And I touched a button, a button the engineers at GM, before going bankrupt, had considerately designed so that I did not need to hold it down while the window rolled up, and was sealed again in the perfect cool dimness of what the brochure had described as the car’s cockpit, pressing the thumblike barrel of the Tomcat into the hollow below my jaw.

  But even with the perfect lyric accompaniment, this was not the moment.

  So, as the traffic began, mystically, to flow, all of it parting around the stalled Mercedes containing the sobbing woman, I slipped the gun back into its moleskin holster, and was carried smoothly on the pitted road, past the location shoot (an artfully reproduced scene of a traffic accident), wondering at the noise she had made, how in perfect dissonance with di Stefano’s diminuendo on the high C in “Salut! Demeure” it had been:

  I greet you, home chaste and pure,

  I greet you, home chaste and pure,

  Where is manifested the presence

  Of a soul, innocent and divine!

  I greet you, home chaste and pure.

  PARK WAS HAVING trouble breathing.

  It wasn’t just the fact of the bag over his head, it was the fact that he was far from the first prisoner to have worn it. Stiff with old sweat, crusted at the open end with dry vomit, the black canvas sack stifled more than just air.

  And his knees hurt.

  He’d already learned not to try to lower his buttocks to his ankles for relief. Having done so once and received a truncheon blow across his shoulder blades.

  And he’d lost feeling in his fingers.

  That was a concern, but a far greater concern was that he’d started not to feel the zip-strip where it dug into his wrists. Losing circulation to the fingers was one thing, having it cut off from his hands entirely was more disquieting.

  The man to his right moaned something in Spanish.

  Boots crossed the tile room, echoing, and a nightstick bounced off a skull.

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  Park felt the man tumble against him and struggled to somehow catch him, leaning his body far backward, trying to support the man’s weight against his torso. The muscles in his thighs, already trembling, gave out, and they both fell to the floor.

  “Up! Get the fuck up!”

  Someone grabbed a fistful of his hair through the bag and hauled him back up to his knees.

  “Stay up! Up, asshole!”

  A lazy fist caught him across the ear.

  “Fucking shoot your ass now.”

  A loud buzz shocked the room, vibrating the rank air, a bolt slammed back into its socket, and a door opened, letting in a draft of fresher air that Park could just feel on his upper arms.

  Sneakers squeaked on the tiles. Some papers rustled.

  “Adam, three, three, zero, hotel, dash, four, dash, four, zero.”

  His arms were jerked as someone tried to get a look at the plastic bracelet fastened around his wrist.

  “Yeah, that’s this asshole.”

 
The truncheon dug into his ribs.

  “Up, asshole.”

  He tried to unfold his legs and rise but only succeeded in falling over again.

  “Fucking.”

  The shaft of the truncheon crossed his throat, and he was dragged choking to his feet, stumbling, almost falling again, and caught under the arms.

  “I got him.”

  “Yeah, well, fucking enjoy. And try not to leave too many marks.”

  Blind and lurching, led out into a quiet hallway where the air, only a couple of degrees cooler, felt like a spring breeze. Tripping over his own numb feet, saved again and again from falling, and then leaned against a wall.

  “Can you hold yourself up for a second?”

  He nodded but didn’t know if it could be seen through the hood.

  His voice cracked like his dry lips.

  “I think so.”

  The hands left him, and he kept his feet.

  Keys were jingled, one fitted to a lock, and another door opened.

  “In here.”

  The hands took him again, not carrying him as much as guiding him this time, feeling coming back into his legs and feet.

  “Sit.”

  A chair.

  “Lean forward.”

  He leaned, found a table, and rested his head on it, his eyes sliding shut, almost instantly asleep. And brought back in seconds as the zip-strip was clipped from his wrists and blood rushed into his hands, filling them with needles.

  The sack was yanked from his head, and he coughed on the sudden oxygen, blinking his eyes against hard fluorescents.