Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  Perspective. They don’t think like I do. They think like they do.

  Father used to say something about being posted on foreign soil: “It’s not their job, Parker, to accommodate our ways, it is our job to understand theirs. Once we understand how they think, we can begin to predict their behavior. Once our predictions become accurate, we can begin to manipulate their behavior. That is diplomacy.”

  Perspective.

  They know there is something to be found. They know Cager is selling Dreamer. They know that it will cause trouble if he is found. But they have the police, me, investigating anyway.

  Because?

  Because they don’t want anyone to know. Because they don’t want anyone they can’t control to find out. If it leaks, if their system leaks, they have to know first. People they control have to know first.

  To find leaks. To find leaks that lead to Cager and the Afronzo family. To find the leaks before anyone else does so they can be patched.

  I’m a plumber.

  Rose. Are you reading this? You gave me this book. I write in it, and I think of you. Are you reading this?

  I am a plumber.

  They have me doing their dirty work for them. Rose. I thought. I don’t know what. I thought there was a reason for the time I spent away from you and the baby. I thought this was something that was essential. If the world is going to be normal again, if we are all going to be sane again, if the baby is going to be safe, I thought this was something that had to be done. I thought that I had to be a police officer. When Captain Bartolome offered it to me, I thought that this was the job I needed to do. To make things better. I am such an innocent.

  No, that’s wrong; innocent is the last thing I am. You are wrong about that, Rose. But I am naïve. And proud. To think that I thought I was doing something to help save the world.

  I am their plumber.

  I am doing maintenance on the world they are making. I am a fool.

  Perspective.

  Don’t whine, Rose would say. Don’t fucking whine. Do something about it.

  She won’t talk to me. Still. After Captain Bartolome left I went to the yard to try and talk to her. When I left in the morning I told her I would be back soon. And I wasn’t. Francine said she found Rose rigid at the foot of the crib, watching the baby cry. Talking to herself, saying again and again, “This is my baby, this is my baby.” She didn’t want to take her out of the crib. She was afraid that she would forget where and when she was, forget the baby, and put her down somewhere dangerous. She spent all day at the crib, afraid to touch the crying baby, telling herself who she is, when it is, and who the baby is. She shouldn’t talk to me.

  Rose, you’re right not to talk to me. I left you alone.

  And I am going to leave you alone again.

  I can’t take care of the baby, you said.

  But I have to try. They’ve used me to help them bury the old world. Our world. The baby’s world. The one she deserves. The one we promised her. I can’t let that happen. I can’t protect her in the world they’re trying to make. You could. I can’t. I can’t take care of her there. But I can take care of her in the world they want to kill. I have to live in that world. If I step into theirs, try to live by their rules, I’ll lose her.

  I can’t lose you both.

  I remember everything you said.

  “How am I going to be able to look after you?” you asked.

  I shook my head and told you that you didn’t have to. And you kind of sighed like you always did when you thought I wasn’t getting something. “No, I mean, really, how am I gonna look the fuck after you?”

  I told you that I was okay.

  You were staring at the ceiling.

  “You’re such a, God I hate to use the word, but you’re such an innocent. I mean, how am I supposed to walk away from that?”

  Don’t walk away from me, Rose.

  I am not innocent.

  But do not walk away from me.

  18

  BEENIE WASN’T ANSWERING HIS PHONE.

  He hadn’t gone with Park to the gallery. When Cager had made a point of not inviting him along, Park had been about to insist, but Beenie had shook his head. His long day was over. He had miles to ride to get back home. He was looking forward to smoking a little of the opium before the ride. Taking a bicycle in and out of the stalled and abandoned cars of L.A. was a surreal pleasure. He wanted to compound that enjoyment. And he was looking forward to sleep. He knew his sleep would not be truly dreamless, but with a little luck he wouldn’t remember the dreams when he woke.

  He’d told Park not to worry, he didn’t want to go to the gallery. He didn’t want to be driven home. He wanted to ride and to sleep. Outside Denizone, when Park had reached out to shake hands, Beenie had given him a one-arm embrace that was too brief for Park to return.

  “If you’re around the farm tomorrow, I’ll maybe see you there, bro.”

  Park had wanted to tell him not to go to the farm. Stay away. But Cager was nearby, Twittering, texting, messaging, sending his thoughts into the night.

  He planned to call Beenie early. Tell him he’d heard there was trouble at the farm. Keep clear. It could wait until then.

  But then everything had gone wrong. Too much time had passed. And Beenie wasn’t answering his phone. The Washington suits had photographs of Park and Cager at the club. They had to have photos of Cager and Beenie as well.

  And Beenie wasn’t answering his phone. Park pictured him with his wrists chained to ankle restraints, a bag over his head, in the air somewhere between Los Angeles and Guantanamo.

  Driving southwest on Washington Boulevard, Park hit redial again, and again it flipped over to voice mail. He’d tried the call fifteen times. For half of the attempts he’d not been about to get service at all. The network was jammed.

  Waiting in line at a new checkpoint just east of the PCH, Park looked back toward Hollywood. Above the north-south border of the Santa Monica Freeway, the sky was thick with gunship searchlights. Smoke rose, lit from below in flickering yellow, orange, and red. Without any elevation, it was difficult to pinpoint which areas had been blacked out, but it was clear from the quality of the ground light that entire neighborhoods were without power. Whether that was by design of SoCal TOC, caused by the usual unannounced easing of strain on the grid, or the result of an attack like the rocket Bartolome had told him about, was impossible to know.

  What was clear, the only thing that was clear, was that a great deal of hell was breaking out. If he needed any further evidence, he could simply look at one of the lighted signs that loomed at intervals all over the city. The usual traffic advisories, long become a local joke, had been replaced by a single flashing message:

  MARTIAL LAW HAS BEEN INVOKED IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS

  LOS ANGELES COUNTY

  SANTA MONICA

  MALIBU

  WEST HOLLYWOOD

  And so on. The list was long. It ended with a scrolling notice that if you were reading the message, you should go immediately to someplace where you could no longer read it. Get the hell inside. Advice that most people seemed to be heeding. The traffic had not flowed so smoothly even before the outbreak of SLP.

  Park had seen the LAPD directives for martial law. He knew the extraordinary police powers invoked through Patriot II. Knowing what the police were empowered to do, he assumed the military had a weapons-free policy that would allow them to shoot at the least provocation, without regard for consequences mortal or legal.

  Long before it was his turn at the checkpoint, he had hung his badge from his neck and done a mental inventory of the car to assure himself that there were no drugs or weapons anywhere but in the spare tire. When he pulled forward to the barrier of abandoned cars resting on blown-out tires and bent rims, he realized that the greatest danger was not that he would be shot as a suspected looter, but that one of the terrified young Guards might flinch at the sound of distant gunfire and riddle his car with an entire M4 clip.

 
A very young black man with sergeant’s bars and a drawl from well below the Mason-Dixon approached the car.

  “Sir, turn off your vehicle, please, sir.”

  Keeping his left hand visible on the steering wheel, Park switched off the engine with his right and brought it immediately back into view of the Guards.

  “Sir, your ID, please, sir.”

  Again leaving his left on the wheel, Park lifted the badge from his chest, ducked his head out of the lanyard, and offered it to the young man.

  There was a pause while the sergeant raised a hand in the air, flashed several fingers at his squadmates in quick succession, like a catcher running through his signals, and stepped forward, reaching for something on his belt. Park almost ducked as the RFID interrogator was raised, a gesture that surely would have required a few rounds fired, but he recognized the device at the last moment and remained still as the Guard aimed it at the badge, pulled the trigger, read the results, and flashed another series of signals that resulted in most of the weapons in the immediate vicinity being aimed in other directions.

  “Sir, Officer Haas, sir, I need to ask what your business is, sir.”

  Park dropped the badge back around his neck and replaced his hands on the wheel.

  “I’m on assignment, Sergeant. Venice Beach.”

  “Sir, I have to ask if this assignment is urgent business, sir. If it is not, I have to request that you return to your home or domicile.”

  Park knew it wasn’t by chance that this Deep South native had found his Guard unit dropped in California. Patriot II policy was to deploy the Guard away from their native states when suppressing civil unrest. The fewer the connections the soldiers had to the locals, the more easily they would pull the trigger when necessary.

  Park looked at the other Guards. All as young as this one, nearly all black or brown, arrayed behind the barricade of cars that they knew would do little to stop any remotely decent firepower. Let alone provide cover from an RPG or, God forbid, a car bomb. Neither of the two Humvees parked behind the barricade had been up-armored, and only one was equipped with a heavy machine gun. The young woman behind the machine gun kept pushing her helmet up as it repeatedly tilted down over her eyes.

  “Yes, Sergeant, my investigation is urgent.”

  The NCO pulled a logbook from one of the side pockets of his fatigues.

  “Sir, I’ll need an address, sir.”

  Park gave him a random sequence of numbers and the first Venice Beach street name he thought of.

  The sergeant wrote it down, returned the logbook to his pocket, nodded at Park, and leaned against the car, dipping his face close to the open window.

  “Sir, I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything, sir.”

  Park shook his head.

  “I was just about to ask you.”

  He looked over his shoulder at his command and smiled.

  “He was gonna ask me what the fuck is going on. Believe that?”

  A round of weary soldiers’ laughter went through the squad.

  He looked back at Park.

  “They ain’t told us shit. We get what y’all get from the radio. Some bad guys shot a rocket at some of our guys. We hit Little Persia. Little Russia. Things didn’t get kerfucked until we hit a Church of the New American Jesus in Hollywood and a couple flash-bangs started a fire and burned the fucking thing down. That was around thirteen hundred hours. We got rolled here by fourteen hundred. Haven’t heard shit from the space ants since.”

  Park nodded.

  “Wish I knew something I could tell you, Sergeant.”

  The sergeant flashed another sequence of fingers, and the Humvee with the gun mount backed up a few yards to clear a space in the middle of the barricade.

  “Shit, we ain’t worried.”

  He pointed at the hood of the Subaru, and Park started the engine.

  The sergeant looked north, where all the trouble was.

  “This is America, motherfuckers. We’ll be just fine.”

  He waved a hand, and Park drove through the opening. West, away from the worst of it.

  The few other cars on the boulevard were driven by those whose cares were great enough to take the risk, who were stupid enough not to see the danger as real, brave enough to face it with a desire to find some way to help, or the sleepless. No reason to fear anything, they wandered the sidewalks and drove the roads. Sudden bursts of speed, violent turns, or constant meandering between lanes tipped one off that the car ahead should be given a wide berth.

  After turning south onto Oxford, Park found another checkpoint at the Admiralty Way entrance to Marina Del Rey This one manned by an impromptu militia of boat owners and sail buffs who had failed to get their vessels out before the Navy sealed the marina to cut it off from use by smugglers bringing arms in to the NAJi.

  Carrying sporting shotguns last used shooting skeet from the decks of their yachts, a few illegally modified assault rifles ostensibly necessary for repelling South Asian pirates but more often fired during drunken barbeques in international waters, two flare pistols, and one spear gun, they told Park to turn around and fuck off.

  He showed them his badge.

  They asked him who he was there to see.

  He told them to get out of the way and stop interfering with police business before he put in a call to the Guard checkpoint on Washington and told them there was a well-armed insurgent group raiding the marina.

  They let him pass, and he drove out Bali Way onto one of the relatively low-rent piers, parked, walked to the end of the fourth dock, found Beenie’s day cruiser floating in its slip, and crept on board, his Walther PPS in his hands.

  Coming down the steps from the deck into the cabin, the boat bobbing gently, he leaned back to duck under the hatch and found his left ankle grabbed from below, his leg pulled from underneath him. Twisting, he fell to the side, his hip, elbow, and shoulder cracking against the steps. The gun slipped partially from his grasp, and he fumbled his finger inside the guard while bringing it up.

  Someone waved an arm from beneath the steps.

  “What the fuck! What the fuck!”

  Park froze, the weapon half-raised, and waited as Beenie emerged.

  “What the fuck, Park? I could have killed you, man. Hail the vessel before you come aboard.”

  Park lowered his gun.

  “I thought. Was anyone here?”

  Beenie put down the steak knife he was holding.

  “No, man. Who’s going to be here? No one is going anywhere. No one except Guards and. Oh, Jesus.”

  Park followed Beenie’s eyes down to the badge hanging from his neck.

  “Oh, Jesus, Park.”

  Park got up slowly, stretching his arm and leg, rubbing his hip, determining that nothing was broken.

  He holstered his gun.

  Beenie dropped onto his bunk and put his face in his hands.

  “Fuck, Park. I told you shit.”

  He looked up.

  “I mean, fuck. We were friends.”

  Park looked around, found Beenie’s day pack and held it out to him.

  “We need to fill this with anything you can’t live without.”

  * * *

  When they drove away from the marina Beenie’s favorite trail bike was in the back of Park’s car along with his helmet, elbow and knee pads, riding clips, and halogen lamp, along with a solo tent and mummy bag strapped to the frame with loops of bungee cord. The day pack was in Beenie’s lap. Inside were his laptop, several accessories, a jumble of thumb drives and cards, tangled chargers, an ounce of British Columbian weed, some clean socks, biking shorts and jerseys, his phone, a copy of On the Road, a set of silk long underwear, and a thick envelope filled with pictures of his wife and a letter he had never been able to read, written by her for him to open after she died.

  Park had helped Beenie collect those things, opening drawers and digging under piles of dirty laundry as directed while Beenie changed into hiking pants with zip-off lower legs, an EMS Techwic
k shirt, and a boot-style pair of mountain biking shoes. He’d recognized the unopened light blue envelope with the frayed edges not because he’d ever seen it before, but because Beenie had described it to him one evening nearly a year before. On the anniversary of her death, uncharacteristically sober, he had told Park about it while they waited in line at Randy’s Donuts. He’d told him that he kept trying to lose it. Carelessly flipping it to the back of a drawer, finding it after a few months and stuffing it into his pocket, leaving it there when he tossed the pants into a laundry pile, only to have it fall out before they went into a machine weeks later. On the boat, Park had found it poking from the bottom of a stack of cycling magazines, pulled it free, and, without asking, slid it in with the photos.

  In the car, Beenie put the finishing touches on a joint and showed it to Park.

  “Any objections?”

  Park shook his head; Beenie lit the joint and took a hit.

  “Were you going to bust me?”

  Park concentrated on the car ahead of him. It zigged across two lanes as if to make a last-second right at Ocean Avenue and then zagged back to the middle, straddling the broken white line, blocking both westbound lanes.

  Beenie blew smoke out the open window.

  “If whatever’s happening hadn’t happened, were you going to bust me?”

  Park shifted into fourth, swung the Subaru into a gap in the sparse eastbound traffic, and passed the car, stealing a glance at the stiff-necked driver, an old man wearing no shirt, howling like a dog along to a German death metal song that was cracking his speakers.

  He pulled back into the westbound lanes.

  “Yes. I would have busted you.”

  Beenie looked at the joint pinched between his fingers and frowned.

  “But now?”

  Park drove them over the small bridge that crossed the Grand Canal, the water on either side scummed with a thick pelt of algae broken by flotillas of plastic bottles.

  “If I bust you, I think someone might kill you.”

  Beenie brought the joint to his lips, took it away without inhaling, and flicked it out the window.

  “What’s it about, Park?”

  Park edged the car to the curb on Strongs Drive.