Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  At the back of the closet he found his uniform wrapped in a dry cleaner’s plastic. It had been over a year since he had worn it. In that time he’d become less disciplined in his workouts. The extra fifteen pounds he’d built up for the street through daily weight training and nonstop calorie cramming had fallen off. He had to snug his belt an extra notch, and his shirt hung loose at the shoulders and neck. He couldn’t find his pepper spray. His baton was buried under a pile of shoes. His hat, on a top closet shelf, carried a thick layer of dust. He had only one pair of navy socks to wear, holes worn in both heels. The Walther did not fit the holster as well as his old nine-millimeter had, but it would serve the same task if needed.

  Uniformed, Park drove north.

  He was still stopped at checkpoints but was never asked to exit his vehicle. He’d thought about digging his red magnetic roof strobe from the garage and trying to use the emergency center lane on the 405, but feared getting pinned in traffic amid uncleared wreckage. As it turned out, the surface streets were nearly as barren as the night before.

  He saw few people on the sidewalks, and those rarely farther than several steps from their own yards or the doors to the occasional businesses that were open. A knot of them congregated around a storefront that had been pushed in and looted. He saw a man with an unmounted hunting scope scanning the eastern horizon, apparently trying to find the source of a smoke plume rising from the cluster of downtown towers. A hot wind was breaking up that plume and the others that were newly sprouted in Hollywood and south of the Santa Monica, a Santa Ana smearing the smoke over the basin all the way to the sea.

  At the Pico check he overheard two Guards talking about a siege at the Scientology compound on Sunset. Three Super Hornets streaked overhead in tight formation, and they paused to watch them scream eastward.

  One of them pointed.

  “Navy.”

  The other nodded.

  “Looks like the Reagan just hit town.”

  The first slapped his sidearm.

  “About fucking time we got some righteous air support. See what the NAJis think of car bombs with a fucking carrier group offshore.”

  The second shook his head.

  “Fuck the NAJi. Those L. Ron Hubbard motherfuckers got more money than Jesus. Half the assholes in Hollywood are members. Don’t even want to know what they’ve been spending it on. Hear they got an armory in there, all the stuff Saddam was supposed to have, they really got. Say fuck the NAJis, drop some ordnance on that crowd before they have a chance to go Dianetics on all our asses.”

  The Guard scanning Park’s badge waved him through.

  There was a protest on Olympic, hundreds of sleepless shuffling down the street, silent except for occasional moans or a scream. A single banner poking from the middle of the crowd: DREAM.

  At the Bellagio gate he was politely asked if he had an appointment. The Thousand Storks man asking the question wore nearly seventy thousand dollars’ worth of body armor, communications and computing equipment, and weaponry. Park told him his business was official. The Storks man looked at Park’s ill-fitting uniform and beaten-up Subaru. He looked at the badge he’d already scanned. It was valid. He nodded and told Park he’d have to be escorted to his destination.

  The Afronzo estate was tucked at the end of the curl of Madrono Lane. Surrounded by the grounds of thirteen other homes, it lacked any views to speak of but was almost perfectly sequestered. Anyone caring to approach could either take the road or risk crossing the property of one of the neighbors before trying the security on the Afronzo grounds itself.

  Driving in on the road, followed by two Storks in an open fast attack vehicle, Park pulled into the cutout before the road circled to the back of the house. There, with the Storks waiting, he sat in the car and wrote in his journal. Finished, he left it on the passenger seat and got out of the car.

  Going up the steps, he straightened his clip-on tie. Unlike some of his fellow cadets, he’d been smart enough when he bought his first uniform not to ask why a clip-on. Those who asked were never answered, receiving a grunt of disgust at most. Rose had giggled at the tie, clipped it to her T-shirt collar. He’d laughed with her. Never explaining that it was worn because a normal tie might be grabbed by a perp during a scuffle and used to choke the wearer.

  The door was opened as he stepped in front of it, held aside for him by Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior.

  “Park.”

  He waved to the Thousand Storks men, and they cut a tight U-turn and buzzed back down the road.

  “Thousand Storks. I always get the feeling they’re in a constant state of sexual arousal under those uniforms. They’re nearly as fetishistic as Imelda and Magda.”

  He looked at Park.

  “Your uniform doesn’t fit.”

  Park placed a hand on his holstered weapon.

  “Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior, you are under arrest.”

  Cager turned and walked into the dark interior of the house.

  “Come inside, Park.”

  Park took a step inside, hand still on his weapon.

  “You are under arrest for the murders of Hydo Chang and his associates.”

  Cager stopped walking and looked back at him.

  “For what?”

  Park pointed.

  “Place your hands against the wall and spread your legs.”

  Cager stayed where he was.

  “For the murder of Hydo Chang. That’s. Not what I expected. My dad made it sound like you suspected much more. Much worse.”

  He began to comb his hair.

  “It was kind of flattering. Being thought a mastermind.”

  Park walked to him, took him by the left wrist, swept it behind his back and pushed it up toward his neck while putting a knee in the back of his right leg. Cager went to the floor and Park finished the takedown, pushing his face flat against the marble while unclipping the cuffs from his belt.

  Cager grunted.

  “What are you doing, Park?”

  Park snapped the first bracelet over his wrist.

  “I’m arresting you.”

  “Why?”

  Park snapped on the second bracelet.

  “Get up.”

  Cager let himself be pulled to his feet.

  “You don’t understand even a little about me. You don’t understand what I was trying to do. What Hydo did to ruin it.”

  Park stopped walking him toward the door.

  “What? What did he do? What does a person do to get murdered? What does that take in this world?”

  Cager wrenched free.

  “It takes being greedy and stupid!”

  He looked at the floor.

  “I’d like to comb my hair.”

  Park didn’t move.

  Cager turned around.

  “Will you comb my hair for me, please. It’s out of place. I can feel it.

  Park took the comb from Cager’s back pocket and combed his hair back into place.

  Cager relaxed slightly.

  “Thank you. Can you put the comb back, please.”

  Park put the comb back.

  Cager nodded.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry I lost my temper. But thinking about Hydo upsets me. And I’m not used to being upset. That’s probably why I reacted the way I did. But I gave him so much. I gave him the Dreamer. I’d tried so hard to make something physical with it. I thought it would be a way to push people into a quest mentality. Increase the investment in their lives. Get them thinking and feeling with the same level of commitment as they do in Chasm. But they didn’t want to be that aware. They said, Give me the Dreamer. Here’s my money, give me the Dreamer. Like you. I was trying to open eyes to the possibility that there was room left, time left for magic in this world, and they just want to score. If that’s all people want, they can score off Hydo. I didn’t even take anything up front. It was credits in my account at the farm. And he couldn’t even get me the codex I needed. But I told him, one rule only. I told him, ‘no selling to m
y gamers.’ No selling to my sleepless. My sleepless, they are living at the absolute verge of human evolution, pushing barriers back. Not just living but creating. They’re planting seeds. Because after we’re all sleepless, Park, after we all die, something will persist. Information, energy coded as information, that will last when we are dust. When the last generator runs out of fuel, when the last windmill rusts and falls over, when the last solar panel cracks, the Web will stop, but the information will persist. After 9/11, they recovered hard drives in the ruins. They could still be read. Flesh turned to paste and mist, but data survived. When our society is excavated, our data will be our relics. And the characters, the personas the sleepless are creating, those will be the most unique, the most durable, the most diverse, the most cherished artifacts. They’re what we’re going to leave behind. And Hydo, he was killing that. Selling Dreamer to my sleepless, he was killing the future. Our future. So arrest me for murdering Hydo and the others. I did it.”

  Park was thinking again about the gun he’d used earlier to kill the man who’d come out of his daughter’s room. The room where he’d left his wife. He thought of how it had looked, lying on the floor next to blood. He was glad it wasn’t in his hand.

  He took Cager by the arm and pulled him toward the door.

  “You’re under arrest.”

  “Officer Haas.”

  He stopped and looked back down the foyer.

  Senior stood there, still in his pajamas and robe, Imelda and Magda just behind him.

  “I’m sorry to see you again, Officer Haas.”

  Park nodded.

  “I’m arresting your son for murder.”

  Imelda and Magda moved away from each other, creating firing lines.

  Park put his hand back on his weapon.

  “I’m arresting your son.”

  Senior’s hands were buried in his pockets.

  “It’s not that I don’t understand, Haas. I just can’t allow it. You take those handcuffs off now, and you go home.”

  Park saw that Imelda and Magda had their weapons in hand already. Not the submachine guns that would spray indiscriminately, but high-accuracy SIG 1911s.

  He shook his head.

  “Your men already came to my home, sir. They’re dead.”

  Cager shook his head.

  “Dad.”

  “Be quiet, Junior.”

  “Dad, I can’t believe you did that.”

  Senior took his hands from his pockets and plucked at a loose thread.

  “That was something I had to do. I don’t take any pride or enjoyment from it. And it’s my own fault for talking at such length with you, Haas. But everything is at stake now. The whole world. Blood relations aside, arresting my son would cause too many questions to be asked. There’d be chaos. Too soon for that. Too much left to do.”

  Park opened his mouth, but he had no more to say. Instead he turned and pushed Cager toward the door. He’d never drawn his weapon. He never did.

  Walking, he thought about what it had been like when he first felt himself made vulnerable by his love for Rose. The fear. How that had been compounded to terror when Omaha was born. How willingly he had embraced the horror that he might lose them one day, in exchange for their miraculous presence in his life.

  He said something then, but it was lost in a sudden noise.

  30

  LADY CHIZU’S TOWER WAS SURELY SAFE FOR A DAY, BUT IT would not do over time. Nor, for that matter, was Chizu herself safe. She was sleepless, dying. And when she died, so too would Thousand Storks. And the maggots that would crawl out of that instrument of destruction would ravage anything she had touched. I saw her last when I returned from the Culver City house for Omaha. She was not disappointed to see me, but there was some regret, I think, when I took the baby girl from her arms and placed Park’s father’s watch in Omaha’s hands. She stared at the light reflecting off it, and began to chew on the leather band.

  Chizu thought for a moment.

  “Her father was killed?”

  I nodded.

  She thought for another moment.

  “And her mother committed suicide?”

  Standing in the Culver City house, I had looked at Rose’s body in Omaha’s crib and thought of all the beautiful things that I had left behind in my house to be destroyed by either fire or water. My apocalypse collection, not one work among it casting a greater foreshadow than the dead body of a sleepless mother in her daughter’s crib.

  I shook my head, still awed by what I had seen.

  “Her father killed her mother.”

  “Ah.”

  I watched her eyes, an act more brazen than I would have dared just a day before.

  “Does that deepen the beauty of Cipher Blue?”

  She looked at Rose’s laptop, resting now in the center niche of the display wall.

  “It intensifies what I feel when I look at it.”

  She touched Omaha’s cheek.

  “She is a quiet baby.”

  I watched her chewing the buckle of her grandfather’s watchband.

  “Her parents are dead. She’s sad.”

  “No. Babies cry when they are sad, Jasper. She is watchful. Listening.”

  Both of us, childless, watched the silent baby.

  We left Chizu in her tower, with her digital ghosts, the remains of the dead sleepless who made them.

  In the lobby outside her office, I found that her ever-efficient greeters had packed certain mementos into a small box as I’d requested. They would see it delivered safely, just as soon as I told them to whom it should be addressed. I paused for a moment to consider, the greeter waiting, pen poised over the Thousand Storks label that adhered to the box.

  Inside were the travel drive with Dreamer coordinates, the backup copy of Park’s reports, scans of the last few days’ entries from his journal, his phone with call log and the various relevant pictures he’d taken over the last few days, a voice recording I’d made on my own phone, our long conversation dubbed to a micro SD card, and a bloodstained left shoe with tread that matched the footprints from the gold farm, taken from the floor of Cager’s closet. Although, considering the box contained as well the security disk showing Cager committing the murders, some of those items seemed redundant.

  I could not guess what the addressee would do with the box. A person of a particular kind of intelligence and survival instinct would destroy it in the moment he became aware of its significance. The murders of the Afronzos would be sending massive shock waves through the world very soon. Revelations that suggested why they had been murdered would quite possibly tip the scale a final feather’s weight into chaos’s favor. That was the desirable course from my perspective. Nothing screens a retreat quite so efficiently as confusion and disarray. Which may explain why I sent the box to Hounds rather than Bartolome.

  As described to me by Park, his captain sounded every inch a self-preservationist. I doubt he was aware of the true nature of the assignment he had placed on Park, but neither do I doubt that he was more than willing to do what was most expedient when pressure was applied. Obviously a man who valued social structure. And the following of orders. Hounds had rather the aura of an anarchist. I found it easy to imagine him as a boy, breaking things for no other reason than the pleasure of seeing them in pieces. I also recalled Bartolome’s observation that Hounds had no love for “Washington suits.”

  And there was the gesture of the watch.

  A grace note that spoke well of his humanity. Whatever meaning one may wish to ascribe to such a quality.

  In all, I thought he might be damaged enough in his own person to be dangerous should he find out some of what was at the root of the world’s ills. The very type to survey the gasoline poured about a powder keg in the basement and light the final match, so as to bring down the crooked house above before any more unfortunates could be injured within. The consequences to be dealt with later.

  I also included the remains of the bottle of Dreamer. Whatever latent pr
ints might be intact on its exterior, it was the contents that I thought would most interest him. As regarded his stepmother. A gift that seemed in keeping with Park’s spirit. Something foremost on my mind at the time.

  The box disposed of, Omaha and I rode the elevator to the roof. In addition to the air defense batteries, there was the helipad from which I had been carried to LAX just two days before. Chizu’s gift to Omaha: transportation away from the city. I’d contrived several years before to have a final point of retreat. A house in the lower foothill of the Sierras several hours northeast. A few miles’ walking distance of a small town, it sat on a property of several acres that included a length of freshwater stream. As the years had progressed, I’d thought to never use the house. It was out of balance with the times and my age. And then, suddenly, it made sense again. Was purposeful. As if I had known all along I would have something that needed protecting.

  I reflected on this as we emerged to the rooftops, the Santa Ana whistling through the thatch of missiles. I looked up and saw a helicopter on approach, and carried the baby to the edge of the pad. My travel kit had been brought up already. In the duffel were Rose and Park’s journals. His gun, her pictures and letters.

  The helicopter dropped lower. It would carry us from the sleepless city. Was it too much to ask that it would be piloted by a mercenary legionnaire with a humanitarian past and a scar that pulled down the corner of his left eye, giving him a perpetually winking air?

  Even in a sleepless world, a man could hope.

  Even I, the Vitiated Man.

  EPILOGUE

  THIS STORY WAS DIFFICULT TO ASSEMBLE. I’VE WORKED FROM your mother and father’s journals. His reports. The great and wandering conversation I had with your mother as she told me that night about “Rose and Park Falling in Love.” Your father’s memory allowed him to tell me in detail what he had experienced in the last days of his life. In some things I have been forced to use supposition concerning their states of mind. Your own readings of Rose and Park’s journals will tell you whether I have overstepped my bounds. I think I have been accurate more often than not. Though in all my study I have never achieved fluency in their language, and the translation has no doubt suffered.