Sleepless. Part 10

The Yankee dollar ruled again.

The combined weight of the subprime fiasco, collapsed investment and commercial banking, credit freeze, and the GDP-sucking military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran had certainly wounded the beast, but once the United States declared de facto bankruptcy by refusing to pay its international creditors, it roared back to life.

The roads and bridges were crumbling, the waterways drying and clogging, the forests burning, the last-ditch conversion to national health was a Byzantine horror for the millions and millions forced into its clutches, power failed with great regularity, gasoline was nigh unto a luxury item, and one could not always be certain that the local supermarket would have received a toilet paper delivery this week, but the standard of living had been so vastly higher in the United States than in most of the rest of the world that there was still quite a distance left to fall before hitting the ground.

Global food shortages that might have struck deeper in the United States with the slaughter of the beefs were offset when the grain that had fed the bulk of the herds was redirected to human consumption. Corn, long bioengineered to pest and drought resistance, was the new American staple, as it was the world over; we just had more of it.

Free from the illusion that its debts could ever be paid, America was rich again. Yes, it did draw inward, a spine-backed turtle bristling with ICBMs, expeditionary forces establis.h.i.+ng kill zones around the oil fields in Iraq, Venezuela, and Brazil, but still, in one way or another, it was the source of a dream.

Dreamer, a pillar of the new new economy.

There were mutterings.

It seemed odd that something so specific as DR33M3R should be so far along in development when the SL prion struck. After all, why should anyone have antic.i.p.ated the need for an artificial hormone that could induce, in even the most damaged brain, one crippled by growths of amyloid plaques and peppered with star-shaped astrocytes, the long rolling delta waves that cradle bursts of REM sleep?

Congressional hearings were a must. Closed congressional hearings. And from what one heard, they seemed to answer all questions. Or, in any case, all questions that were asked. Whatever those may have been. In any case, when the doors opened, the patent holders on Dreamer came out smiling.

And why not? The world might have been ending, but Afronzo-New Day Pharm had what everyone wanted while the credits rolled. You could see it in the smile on Parsifal K. Afronzo Sr.'s face, as he read his prepared statement: A new day was clearly dawning.

And Park, in the month during which the chances of being infected with SLP had grown to one in ten, with the name Afronzo, Parsifal, K., Jr., on the screen of his computer, thought about what Beenie had said, that Hydo knew "the guy." He opened the file, a spreadsheet unfolding, cells filled with long number sets that struck a distant chord without imparting any meaning. But he listened to that chord and wondered if he heard a cracking in the ice around the world. Uncertain to say if it was the sound of a fracture announcing a thaw or another layer freezing over.

Chapter 6.

CASTING MY EYES TOWARD LAX FROM CENTURY TOWER NORTH the evening before had been, as it turned out, prophetic. While a call from the National Guard for close air support for an operation east of the I-5 required a redistribution of resources, still the dawn found me a Thousand Storks International airs.h.i.+p, cruising at an alt.i.tude that would hopefully make us an outside chance for any Crenshaw denizens wis.h.i.+ng to amuse themselves by taking potshots as we crossed their airs.p.a.ce on approach. Not that the risk was excessive. Yes, a certain amount of military-grade ordnance was making its way into the community, but only a handful of Stingers or other surface-to-air missiles had been confirmed as fired thus far. And only one target struck.

Changing our heading above South Vermont, I could see, over the shoulder of the door gunner and her M60D, the rearmed compound of the Crenshaw Christian Center, a sign painted across the parking lot proclaiming it to be still THE HOME OF THE FAITH DOME, despite the fact that over half of said dome had been gutted by fire when the ATF task force raided it.

Well, like hope, faith, I've been told, springs eternal. So why not its dome?

Then we were dropping over the sprawling shantytown that had come to occupy the long-term parking lots surrounding the airport. Refugees fleeing insurgent-gang warfare in Inglewood.

Coming in low over the firetrap maze, the helicopter pilot's voice, French-accented, came across the headset radio.

"I flew a Bell for Medecins sans Frontieres in 2007. In Darfur. Before the final genocide."

Leaving it to the gunner and myself to decipher why he felt the need to interject this bit of biography into the silence.

On the ground, my headset off and having taken a moment to ruffle my hair back into some kind of shape, I slipped on my vintage Dunhill 6011s and leaned into the c.o.c.kpit.

"I'll be at least two hours."

The pilot continued flipping switches, completing his shutdown.

"On thirty minutes' notice, we have clearance to take off."

My eyebrows, I confess, rose behind the oversize lenses of my sungla.s.ses.

"Thirty minutes?"

He jerked his thumb at the sky.

"Not as it was. The traffic. Thirty minutes' notice, you can fly."

He pointed in the direction of the U.S. Department of Defense-commandeered southern airstrip of LAX.

"Unless the f.u.c.king Army closes airs.p.a.ce. Then."

He turned his thumb to the ground.

"Then we all crawl."

"Even Thousand Storks?"

He shrugged.

"Thousand Storks carries the guns, but Pentagon pays the bills. All birds, when they say, we become dodo. Or."

He made his fingers like missiles, aimed at the sky.

"Shoot first. No warning."

He tilted his head east.

"That Air India flight, they say it gets. .h.i.t by a g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger. Lucky shot with a Soviet-era Strela. Yes?"

I nodded.

He shook his head.

"Merde. f.u.c.king bulls.h.i.+t."

He spit out the window toward the olive drab tents.

"Gung-ho. Trigger-happy. Yes?"

I nodded, fully understanding the trigger-happy gung-honess of American troops on high-stress posts.

"Yes."

He pointed at his watch.

"Thirty minutes' notice. Call on approach. I'll be ready to fly."

He made a b.u.t.ton-pus.h.i.+ng gesture with his thumb, and I handed him my Penck KDDI, a phone I carried when working because its metal finish recalled exactly the sheen of certain grades of weaponized steel. And thus helped to keep me focused. While looking quite stylish as well.

The pilot flipped it open, keyed in a number, and, after a moment, "Le Boudin" was sung by a full regiment in a utility pouch on the shoulder of his flak vest. He took his own Siemens M75 from the pouch, tapped a red hieroglyph, and returned it to its pouch, while offering me the Penck.

"You have my number. Sooner is best. After the human bomb, airs.p.a.ce has been down twice since then. If it shuts down again, I will call you. To make your own way home. If you wish. Or wait here. For how long, I cannot say."

My own way back, indeed.

Fifteen miles to Century City. Six miles to the relative safety to be found north of Venice Boulevard. I had little doubt of my ability to traverse these distances intact, but to do so in something close to utter a.s.surance would require perhaps twenty-four hours. My compulsions would insist on frequent lay-lows. I could picture myself, rolled in mud and weeds, belly-crawling culverts and gutters, surveying intersections for long hours until convinced that the probabilities of a sniper waiting for me to break cover were suitably low enough to allow me to scamper across.

No, once I allowed myself to enter that mode of thought, that pattern of behaviors, I could operate only by entrenching myself there. Were I to strip to the most basic of my instincts for organization and harmony, those dealing with my own survival and the elimination of any obstacle that might interfere with that end, I would soon find that the carefully arranged trinkets and fetishes deployed in defense about my civilized veneer had been blown asunder, scattered, both w.i.l.l.y and nilly Long to be rea.s.sembled. If ever.

And some many people, who might otherwise not have to do so quite as soon, would certainly die.

I smiled at the pilot.

"I will make haste."

Hefting my Tumi shoulder bag, walking away from the helicopter, the Thousand Storks logo on its side gleaming pearlescent in the lights of an inbound A380 from Hong Kong, I found myself oddly uplifted. Was it, perhaps, the fact that the pilot had chosen to call his phone from mine, so that we now had each other's numbers, that lightened my mood? After all, he could quite as easily have told me his.

A French helicopter pilot. Das.h.i.+ng in the broken-nosed manner of a Ma.r.s.eilles flic. One who flew humanitarian missions in Darfur. One who was clearly very good at what he did. Lady Chizu's mercenaries being nothing if not the best. And one who, judging by his ring tone, was a former legionnaire. The imagination could be excused if it ran a bit wild with all of that.

A black Acura with the Thousand Storks logo discreetly stickered in the lower right corner of the rear window was waiting nearby, keys in the ignition. I swung the door open and tossed my bag onto the pa.s.senger seat, whistling to myself, "Le Ma.r.s.eillaise," putting myself in mind of liberation, before going to recover Lady Chizu's desire.

7/9/10.

ROSE DOESN'T WANT me to go. When I came back into the house she was in the nursery with the baby. The baby was in the crib with her sleep machine making wave noises. She wasn't asleep, but she wasn't crying. Her eyes looked glazed, like she wasn't seeing anything. She made little noises, like someone talking in her sleep. Rose says this is how she sleeps now, the baby. She says it's not that the baby has stopped sleeping, it's that she sleeps with her eyes open now. She says the baby isn't sick. The baby is colicky so she cries all the time and the crying exhausts her and she falls asleep with her eyes open. She says this is the way the baby is responding to all the stress in the house.

Rose says the baby isn't sick.

But she won't let me have her tested for the SL prion.

She says the risks of the test are too high. Besides, she says, the baby isn't sick.

I watched her eyes in the crib. But I can't tell if she's sleeping. She doesn't look like she's sleeping. She looks like Rose when Rose loses herself in a REM state but is still awake.

She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, laptop propped on her legs, going at the Labyrinth again, taking Cipher Blue down a new route, marking the way with little glowing bulbs of water that floated inches above the floor.

When the baby was born, before Rose stopped sleeping and the baby started crying, when we knew about the diagnosis but it hadn't gotten bad, Rose used to fall asleep in the nursery all the time. The sleep machine would put her out faster than it did the baby. She'd curl on the floor, one hand reaching up, fingers through the slats of the crib, one of the baby's hands holding her pinkie.

Rose is so tiny, she could have curled up in the crib herself. I used to tease her about it. Told her that I had two babies.

Standing there and looking at them both, I wanted to scoop Rose off the floor and tuck them into the crib together, the baby nestled inside Rose's curl, like she was for months.

The grinding jaws of a steam-driven wyvern the color of pitted bra.s.s snapped through Blue's neck. A shadow Blue flew out of the dead body. A translucent digital soul. It would fly to the bottomless pit at the heart of the world, where the character would be reborn. And Rose could take her again to the Labyrinth for another attempt. Alone.

Rose closed the computer and her eyes.

She sighed and opened her eyes and saw me.

"How am I going to be able to look after you?" she asked.

I shook my head and told her I didn't know, and she kind of sighed like she always does when she thinks I'm not getting something.

"No, I mean, really, how am I gonna look the f.u.c.k after you?"

I told her she didn't have to look after me, that I was okay.

She was staring at the ceiling.

"You're such a, G.o.d, I hate the word, but you're such an innocent. I mean, how am I supposed to walk away from that?"

I didn't say anything, starting to understand.

She shook her head, wondering at something.

"I've known you how long? Already I can see it. You're destined to walk into traffic while reading a book. Or to get stabbed by a drunk a.s.shole in a bar when you try to defend some tramp's honor. Or do something even stupider like join the Marines and go get killed for oil because you think it's the right thing to do."

I said her name. But she kept talking.

"And how am I supposed to keep you from doing something like that if you're up there and I'm down here? I mean, where did you come from?" I said her name again and she looked at me this time and I said to her, "Rose Garden Hiller. It's 2010. We're married and we live in Culver City. You are a video editor and I am a police officer. We have a baby."

She blinked, and the swimmer dove away from me.

She said she knew all that. She said, "I was just remembering."

And she told me she didn't want me to leave until Francine came back. Until evening. And I told her I would stay. All day. That I would stay and help with the baby and she could relax. She closed her eyes and opened them. "Parker," she said, "I want to take the ferry into the city tonight and go to that free concert in the Panhandle."

I didn't tell her we didn't live in Berkeley anymore and that there were no more free concerts in Golden Gate Park. I just told her yes, and that it sounded like fun, and kissed her.

Beenie said Hydo knew "the guy." Afronzo Junior was a client.

I am a police officer. I must not jump to conclusions.

I must investigate.

THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY for Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior was lengthy and showed signs of being constantly updated and edited by members of the Afronzo family publicity apparatus. The entry emphasized his charitable foundation, KidGames, his sponsors.h.i.+p of several professional video gamers, his fascination with ma.s.sively multiplayer games, the drive and innovation that he had brought to that area, and the nightclub he'd opened within the borders of the Midnight Carnival, gutting and rebuilding the old Morrison Hotel to create a replica of his Chasm Tide castle, Denizone. Meanwhile, paragraphs regarding charges brought against him for ident.i.ty theft, Internet fraud, online bullying, virtual p.o.r.nography, and a.s.sorted civil complaints a.s.sociated with hacking in vast legal gray areas of the Net were heavily flagged as needing proper source citation.

A brief sentence explained the evolution of his taken name. How his love of cla.s.sic techno and rap had sp.a.w.ned the screen ident.i.ty P-KAJR, behind which he'd anonymously become one of the most notorious trolls of the Web. a.s.suming the persona of a thirteen-year-old polymath, he'd become legendary for baiting the most even-tempered of bloggers into raging email flameouts, rife with misspellings, often concluding with impotent physical threats. Emails that would soon be posted on high-traffic sites devoted to the given blogger's area of expertise. When his ident.i.ty was revealed, by his own design, he announced via podcast that he was a.s.suming the phonetic of his screen ident.i.ty as his legal name. Cager was born.

There was more, of course. a.n.a.lysis of his disa.s.sociation from the family business dovetailed with standard biographical boilerplate about how the Afronzos had come through Ellis Island, name intact, found their way improbably to Carolina coal country, remained there, name still intact, becoming, after years of sweat and toil, a bootstrap American success story that blossomed when Cager's grandfather took out patents on a number of drills and saws that eventually proved especially useful in African gold mines. Cager's father, P.K.A. Senior, had taken the modest Afronzo family fortune and acquired a variety of a.s.sets related to the production of industrial solvents used to lubricate the hardware in those same mines before making a lateral move that involved purchasing a small chain of Eastern European vitamin and wellness stores, motivated primarily by the fact that they held the patent on an herbal sleep aid of tremendous popularity throughout the Balkan states that he, an insomniac himself, had found tremendously effective while traveling in that part of the world on a pleasure junket with Israeli government officials he was hoping would subsidize the construction of a new solvent plant in the industrial zone of northern Haifa. The deal was completed, but Afronzo International exports of drilling solvents to various Mediterranean oil-producing states were never as profitable as hoped. An unhappy fact that was offset when, after three years of bureaucracy in action, the herbal sleep remedy received FDA approval for over-the-counter sale in the United States, and almost immediately became the top-selling cure for insomnia.

It was the enormous profits from this windfall that allowed Afronzo to launch a hostile takeover attempt against the much larger New Day Pharmaceuticals, an attempt that was doomed from the outset but destined to cost NDP vast treasure, an inevitability that forced the NDP board into a merger, ceding control, and top billing, to the charismatic and populist Afronzo Senior. Affable and folksy, his soft Carolina country accent provided him with an impressive Americana aura, more than offsetting his difficult-to-p.r.o.nounce name. A cult-of-personality business figure before the advent of SLP; Dreamer had put him on an equal media footing with Gates, Trump, Murdoch, and Redstone.

The last Wikiparagraph relating to Cager's family ended with a blue-tinted mention of Dreamer, linking to what was, at the time, the fourth longest Wikipedia entry, trailing Christianity, Islam, and, at the top, SL Prion.

The entry proper on Afronzo Junior went a bit further, mentioning a well doc.u.mented public spat between father and son (link to a cellphone-quality YouTube video of the two men screaming obscenities at each other backstage of a humanitarian awards dinner at which Senior was the guest of honor), excerpting a magazine profile wherein Junior had opened up about the distance between the two ("It sucks not liking your dad. But sometimes people just don't like each other. Me and my dad, we don't like each other. I can live with that. It seems like it's most everybody else who has a problem with it."), and summing with the theory (again flagged as requiring a proper source and footnote) that Junior's personal wealth was, in fact, not his at all. That whatever resources that became his when he came of age had been rapidly sucked away by the ma.s.sive multivenue club he'd had built, a.s.sorted legal defenses and settlements, and a wholesale investment in funds that had been bulwarked all but entirely by shares in several Icelandic banks.