Sleepless. Part 17

SLP is somewhat worse.

Primarily this is due to the fact that it takes longer to do its work. When SLP lodges in a healthy body and begins the process of conformational influence that mutates the proteins around it, it attacks the thalamus directly. The seat of sleep, the thalamus is also a switching station for communications and telemetry within the brain, a key target where a terrorist of the mind with only one bomb at his disposal might choose to blow himself up. In doing so, said terrorist would be particularly successful in the ultimate goal of his trade. For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to question one's own abilities and judgment, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.

SLP could not be more effective if it entered the body wearing a balaclava and a vest packed with C-4. Detonated, it spreads, instead of shrapnel, copies of itself. The copies chain, reproduce, and the thalamus forgets how to sleep. Signals are sent, telling the body and varied territories of the brain what to do and when, but they are hopelessly scrambled. And there is no rest.

Once the bomb has gone off, the infrastructure of the body begins to degrade as a result of sleep deprivation. But the greater portion of the brain is untouched. Nights of restless sleep turn into hours of wakefulness staring at the ceiling, punctuated by the occasional sudden plunge into deep sleep, jarred back to the surface by dreams of stinging vividness. Segue to pacing marathons, pitiless channel flipping in the wee hours, aimless drives to no destination. And when no denial can possibly remain for comfort, end in absolute insomnia, shuffling out to join the wakeful millions, burning the midnight oil.

What was left of it.

I watched them, in the light cast from the gla.s.s face of the Staples Center, as they s.h.i.+fted and wandered through the Midnight Carnival.

Despite the hunger for entertainment and distraction, professional sports were not being played. Not on their previous scale.

At a certain point, leagues and owners had realized that uninfected fans had become gun-shy about enclosing themselves in ma.s.sive venues with tens of thousands, a significant number of whom were statistically predetermined to be carrying SLP. Add to that fear the quite natural disinclination to be in such a place should there be one of the ever-increasing blackouts, and one found some remarkable bargains available at online ticket exchanges. The teams played on, TV revenue still being a big enough carrot that could draw the beast toward the unreachable end of the stick.

Things didn't fold entirely until a NAJi blew himself up inside Wrigley Field. It wasn't home run b.a.l.l.s falling on Waveland Avenue that afternoon.

It didn't take more than a week for the leagues to suspend operations. The a.s.sumption being that once things were in hand the seasons that had been halted in progress would resume. Some months at most. Well into the second full lost season, there were no indications that the arenas and stadiums would be reopening any time soon.

Oddly, or ironically, perhaps, in South America and throughout Asia the football stadiums were still packed. Soccer was at last becoming the breakout U.S. spectator sport that television executives had long despaired it would never become. One heard that even Great Britain, almost immediately quarantined when SLP was thought to be mad cow disease, still packed the pitches for matches, and increasingly violent riots. Both of which found their way to the Web as pirate video, drawing fans to the teams and the hooligans of the more vicious clubs.

Without its regular tenants, and considering that the convention trade had also run a bit dry, the Staples Center was falling into disuse just as the Midnight Carnival evolved. It began as an open-air market, part of an infrastructure that had accreted around the new borders of Skid Row as it burst from its traditional limits above Seventh and east of Main, consuming office blocks as they were emptied by bankruptcy, absorbing Little Tokyo along with the Wholesale and Fas.h.i.+on Districts. The ranks of the homeless swelled as every week brought a new firestorm, landslide, or pogrom to rid a particular neighborhood of whoever happened to be deemed undesirable in that locale. Clearly a population as dense as the one sprawling now from Alameda to the Harbor Freeway, from the Santa Monica to East Third, just blocks from L.A. Water and Power and the munic.i.p.al and U.S. district courts, was a commercial opportunity. All of it loomed over by the squalettes on the roof and upper floors of the unfinished L.A. Live tower.

Taco truck drivers, dumpster-diving salvage experts, industrious home vegetable gardeners with ample yards, buskers, medicos whose licenses had been rendered useless for years after they crossed the border to El Norte, breeders of cats and dogs who knew from hard experience that qualms about where the meat comes from are the only thing soothed by true hunger, dealers in the looted contents of abandoned Inland Empire McMansions, oil drum barbeque chefs, experts in s.h.i.+atsu ma.s.sage, mechanics with a knack for cars that predated a preponderance of silicon chips, biodiesel siphon bandits with unfiltered bootleg fryer oil, pickpockets and wh.o.r.es, those with a gift for distilling caustic spirits from corn husks and potato peels, and the a.s.sorted enforcers and homegrown security who watched over them all, keeping the peace, or shattering it, depending on who was or was not paying.

Naturally, the city let it fester. And equally naturally, once it was settled with a degree of permanence that could not be defeated with anything short of bulldozers (an option championed by a city council member who was soon after dumped, partially eviscerated, from the open door of a speeding car at the emergency entrance of King Harbor Hospital), the city set out to regulate and tax the new outbreak of free trade. In terms of logistics this had resulted in a fence, a price for admission to the market, and a large deployment of former parking enforcement officers who, in the face of obsolescence, had been pressed into duty as ticket takers. They were supported in dire extremes by a small contingent of SWATs who emerged from their command trailer from time to time to fire shots into the air, quelling the more than occasional riots that threatened to break out each time the city upped the cost of a ticket. Industrious visitors circled the fence until they found one of the many rents that were opened daily in the chain link, always more holes than the harried crew of repairmen were capable of or, for their own well-being, cared to be seen sealing.

The Anschultz Entertainment Group saw their own opportunity and seized it, creating a kind of indoor annex to the market within the Staples. The goods and services were slightly more high-end; there was ample seating, plumbing; the ventilation system functioned, if not the AC; security was more present and less likely to shake one down; and it had the rea.s.suring familiarity of a mall. There also tended to be a number of spontaneous parties breaking out of luxury suites that had been rented by slummers, or erupting in the aisles when the DJ who commanded the PA system played an especially groove-worthy track.

Initially only pockets of both markets served beyond midnight, but as more and more sleepless were drawn to the candle flames, wood-burning grills, and improvised bars built on cinder block and sc.r.a.pped Formica countertops, more and more shopkeepers began to extend their hours. It was a matter of only a few months before the market's late-night trade was catering specifically to the sleepless demographic, a segment of the population that as often as not had little or no foreseeable need to keep its savings intact or to cling to personal possessions of value.

The Midnight Carnival was a name of unknown origin. And for any cheer it might suggest one could more realistically draw to memory the fetid smell of summer midways, the gap-toothed carneys, and the inevitable greasy stickiness unpleasantly covering one's hands at the end of the day.

Honestly, I have no idea why I loved the place.

Vinnie the Fish worked from the back of a permanently immobilized late-model El Camino. The tailgate, dismounted and resting on waist-high stacks of milk crates ballasted with chunks of broken concrete, served as his work surface and service area. Standing behind this improvised counter, he'd reach into one of the dozen or so coolers that filled the open bed of the El Camino and pull out calico ba.s.s, California sheeps -head, bonito, the occasional horn shark, yellowtail, or moray, and gut, scale, debone, or fillet the fish to order.

A wobbly Webber grill was home to three cast iron frying pans that he'd occasionally squirt with olive oil, tossing in fistfuls of mussels, smelt, and rock shrimp. A damp rag wrapped around his hand, he'd toss the mollusks, crustaceans, and fish, sprinkling them with salt and pepper, waiting for the mussels to open, the skin of the smelt to crisp, and the shrimps to pinken before dumping them onto thick folds of newspaper, datelines from two years gone by, garnished with half a lemon, a dollop of his wife's homemade tartar sauce, and a white plastic spork.

I sat on an upside-down bucket at the counter, watching as he pa.s.sed one of these packages to the potbellied Cambodian he paid in fresh fish to sit on the roof of the El Camino with a sawed-off Louisville Slugger across his knees and the b.u.t.t of a Smith & Wesson AirLite .41 Magnum sticking from his belt. The guard was only a few years younger than myself, bald, with a scar that should have been mortal running from ear to ear. He squeezed lemon over his meal and sporked it to his mouth, bite by bite, his eyes never ceasing to roam over the customers and the jostling crowd in the immediate area.

Vinnie dipped a meat hook into one of the coolers, brought out a two-foot kelp ba.s.s, and held it before a stout Salvadoran abuela attended by a whippetlike teenager with MS-13 tattoos on his neck and face who eyed the Cambodian much as his grandmother eyed the dead fish. She ran her fingers down its flank then held them to her nose and gave a sniff, instantly shaking her head and complaining in loud Spanish about the price Vinnie had chalked on a piece of broken slate in front of the counter.

Vinnie's only reaction was to drop the fish back in its cooler, lift one of the pans from the grill, give the contents a toss, and nod at the next customer, a young Chinese housewife who immediately requested the immaculate ba.s.s, setting off a wail of protest from the granny claiming prior owners.h.i.+p. The gangster grandson made a move toward the housewife, and the Cambodian slipped off the roof of the El Camino, half-finished dinner in one hand, stubbed baseball bat in the other. The boy struck a pose, chin out, arms akimbo, but his grandmother hooked him by the elbow, hissing in his ear, dragging him from the path of the bowlegged Cambodian, both of them disappearing into the crowd, trailed by the hood's string of threats and promises of retribution for the disrespect shown his grandmother.

He had good reason to love his grandmother, as she'd undoubtedly just saved him from a severe maiming. Watching the Cambodian carefully set his meal atop the roof before boosting himself back onto his watchtower, I was sure she had seen as clearly as I the easy menace of a death squad veteran. Though she would have remembered the look from National Republican Alliance soldiers; it was much the same in the face of a former Khmer Rouge.

Vinnie completed the sale of the disputed fish to the Chinese housewife, gave the pan a final toss, emptied it into a wad of paper, and pa.s.sed my dinner to me, steam rising, oil and fluid from the mussels already seeping through the bottom.

I tossed one of the smelts in my mouth, the skin popping, soft flesh all but melting, tiny bones crunching.

A perfect moment. But for the murderer atop the car.

Two of us in such close proximity was a grave imbalance of things. But such was the world now. It was not rare to find two sets of hands covered in so much blood dining at the same establishment. And it would become less rare with every pa.s.sing day. Our numbers would grow. That was the shape of things.

Sad world.

Vinnie took advantage of a pause in the line of customers and pulled a can of Tecate from one of the coolers, popping it open as he came around the counter and lowered himself onto another of the buckets.

"Mara Salvatrucha c.o.c.ksuckers. That kid, he brought his grandmother here to try and start s.h.i.+t. One of their jefes was by last week. They're trying to lay claim to the fish trade. They already take a piece of every job down on the ports. All those empty s.h.i.+pping containers that piled up in '08, '09, MS-13 is running protection on the Inland Empire drought refugees FEMA has been stuffing into those things. Those are the lucky ones. Newcomers are being housed in the cars that never got off the docks when the dealers went belly up. Anyway, they run the ports, they think they should have a piece of anything that comes out of the Pacific. This punk, tattoos on his eyelids, like red monster eyes on his eyelids. His thing is, he tells you what he wants, what he's gonna take from you, then he goes eye to eye with you, but he closes his eyes. Supposed to freak you out, those monster eyes, plus the idea that he's so tough he can close his eyes in front of you and not worry about what you're gonna do. Vireak there was over at the port-o-potties. And don't think it was some d.a.m.n coincidence that the a.s.shole came around to baksheesh me while Vireak was taking a c.r.a.p. So he tells me there's a new tax on fish. They're gonna be needing one pound out of every three I bring into the carnival. One-third of what my uncle Paulo and my cousins catch on my boat. A third of what I buy from the guys who ride their catches over from the piers every sundown. Guys who still hang their lines over the rail and put their catches in wicker creels and ride it here on bicycles. Not just from Venice and Santa Monica; I got a guy who rides up from Huntington. One-third. So he tells me that's the new tax, and then he puts his face close to mine, and he closes his eyes. And stands there waiting for me to fold."

I sucked a mussel from its sh.e.l.l, bit into it.

Vinnie took a long drink of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of a thick forearm stained with a faded blue network of nautical tattoos.

"So what I did was--"

He smiled, showing big square teeth the color of old scrimshaw.

"I went back to work. a.s.shole is standing there, ten, twenty seconds, half a minute maybe. People who'd been watching this go down, they're starting to giggle. I'm fileting some yellowtail for the sus.h.i.+ guy down the way, a.s.shole is standing there with his eyes closed. And he's not alone. Got his posse with him. Three more a.s.sholes with face tattoos, standing there, they don't know what to do. Looking at each other. What do we do? I don't know. What they know is, none of them wants to be the one to tap jefe on the shoulder, have him open his eyes and see I've just thrown him a steaming pile of disrespect. No one wants to be looking at him when he realizes just how much face he's lost. So they all stand around, the crowd is laughing now, and then the a.s.shole opens his eyes."

Vinnie spit between the scuffed toes of his chef's clogs.

"He wanted to make a move pretty bad. But I had the filet knife in my hand, the meat hook right there where I could get to it. Him and his boys were packing G.o.d knows what, but none of them had fisted up. He knew he made a move, he was gonna get opened up a.s.shole to gullet whether his boys capped me or not. So we did the Salvadoran/Italian-American standoff thing for a few seconds. Then Vireak came back from the c.r.a.pper."

He chugged the rest of his beer, crushed the can, tossed it back into the cooler he'd taken it from, and belched.

"And that was pretty much that. They shoved some old ladies around, stole a few oranges from the produce cart over there, swore I'd be eating my own c.o.c.k within the week, and f.u.c.ked off."

He took a box of Ukrainian knockoff Salems from a pocket of his black-and-white checked pants and lit one with a disposable Chiapas Jaguares lighter.

"That a.s.shole today was the first any of them have come back. Promise you, the play was supposed to be that he brought his grandma because she always starts some kind of argument with the baker or the butcher over prices. He was gonna step in, shank me, and get the f.u.c.k out. No one told him that even if he stuck me he was gonna end up dealing with Vireak. No one told him s.h.i.+t because I guarantee you that he's someone's a.s.shole baby cousin and no one is looking out for his a.s.s. They figure maybe he gets lucky and puts the knife in me and I take a dirt nap. Whether or not he gets wasted they don't give a s.h.i.+t. Main thing is, they want me to know it's not over. But they wanted at least for him to get his blade out and cut me a little. Something. Didn't count on grandma being more savvy than all their a.s.ses combined. That old broad, she knew what the score was. Got her nino out of here. Good for her. Not that the world couldn't have afforded one less a.s.shole around, but good for her getting him out."

He took a long drag and sent a plume of smoke up into the night.

"Good for her."

I poked through the empty mussel sh.e.l.ls, trying to find one I might not have already eaten, looking for a last shrimp or smelt hidden at the bottom, but alas, it was not to be. I balled the now sopping paper around the sh.e.l.ls and tossed it into another of the white plastic buckets.

"Delicious, Vinnie."

He flicked ash from his cigarette with a thumb callused and scarred by a thousand fishhooks.

"You let me, I'll make you something for real. One of those ba.s.s, I'll score it, pour some olive oil over it, rub in some sea salt and some pepper, shove a couple lemons inside, and drop the whole thing on the grill just like that. Get some red potatoes from the potato lady, wrap 'em in foil, drop 'em in the coals. Some arugula from the lettuce lady. When the ba.s.s is done, skin is crispy, the eyes are starting to pop out, I'll put the fish over the greens, toss the potatoes with some oil and salt and pepper and some dill, put 'em on the side, give you a lemon. Eat it just like that. Grilled ba.s.s alla salad. s.h.i.+t, I'll even give you a real fork. You say the word, you can have that whenever you want."

I held up my hands.

"It sounds more than delightful."

I gestured at my rumpled slacks and jacket.

"But I'd have to come properly attired for such a feast. Evening clothes. Nothing less would do."

He smiled.

"You do that; you put on your tux and come down here. I'll find a tablecloth. Somewhere in here, someone is selling linens. I'll get a tablecloth and a napkin you can tuck in your collar. Real cla.s.s."

I took a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my greasy fingers and lips.

"Something to look forward to."

He dropped his cigarette b.u.t.t and let it hiss out in a puddle of melted ice that had drained from the coolers.

"Yeah, something to look forward to. Who couldn't use something like that?"

I carefully folded my handkerchief away.

"Vincent, there was something I did want to have a word with you about."

He reached over the counter, took one of the empty frying pans from the grill, and banged it on the side of the El Camino. In response, the pa.s.senger door creaked open and a chubby brown teenager in a b.l.o.o.d.y white ap.r.o.n and checked pants climbed out, rubbing his eyes.

Vinnie rose and replaced the pan on the grill.

"Gonna take a walk, Ciccio."

The boy nodded, yawning.

Vinnie pointed at the coolers.

"Push the eel before it goes bad."

The boy scratched at a head covered in curly red hair.

"Si, Zio Vincenzo. Anguilla. Si."

I rose, dusting my backside, and followed Vinnie away from his fish stand, winding through the aisles of the carnival, away from the food stalls and carts that cl.u.s.tered near the gates where they could be easily accessed by visitors who did not care to take in the esoterica that lay deeper within.

If those outer layers of the carnival bore the character of a frontier marketplace, long on commerce and short on law enforcement, the interior felt much like a war-zone souk, bristling with opportunities to lose oneself, figuratively, literally, mortally. It was entirely of your choosing how far you cared to penetrate.

As the desires catered to became more perverse, the density of the sleepless increased. Existing on the far verge of human experience, there were tastes only they could reasonably be expected to acquire. The appeal, for instance, of being injected with ma.s.s volumes of amphetamine and then sealed in a sensory deprivation tank escaped even myself. But it was a service with popularity attested to by a long and twisting line of the haggard.

The concentration of sleepless in the darker zones of the carnival had led to rumor and superst.i.tion. A belief among the ignorant that one could contract SLP in this area simply by breathing the air. As if the sleepless were shedding and exhaling the SL prion in thick clouds. Not so. Of course one could be infected if one inhaled a sufficient quant.i.ty of SLP, but the sleepless did not walk about in a miasma of the illness.

Now, if there had been an incinerator on the site cremating sleepless remains, that would have been a definite threat. Prions, notoriously resilient, remain active even when burned. Prion ash is every bit as infectious as a wad of it residing, for the sake of argument, in a hamburger. Early in the course of the pandemic, before it was even known as such, CDC guidelines had called for the burning of SLP corpses.

SL response teams in orange vests would appear at hospitals, and increasingly at homes, unpacking electric saws. The bodies of the sleepless dead were decapitated so that tissue from the brains could be catalogued. Anomalies were sought, anything that might give promise of a cure. No one wanted to throw away the brain that might hold the key. But once the heads were packed in dry ice and sealed in a bucket, the bodies had to be dealt with.

Infection rates around crematoriums and landfill incinerators were well above national and global averages. Eventually the incongruity was noticed. Sleepless were no longer burned. They were limed and buried in concrete-lined ma.s.s graves. Deep.

Some countries were still burning. If one cared to track such things via the many thousands of SLP-related blogs, one gathered that the hinterlands of civilization had not gotten the word. In wide swaths of Africa and Asia, corpse pyres burned nonstop, the new dead piled on by the lowest castes. The longer the fires burned, the larger they grew, their plumes of smoke and infection creating more fuel. I'd been told by a Navy airman I'd met in casual circ.u.mstances that his carrier strike group fighter wing had flown escort for tankers dropping flame r.e.t.a.r.dant on those blazes. The natives restarted their fires in short order, and the strategy s.h.i.+fted. Before his group had been recalled to waters closer to home, the airman had flown multiple missions firing Maverick missiles at towering piles of burning human bodies. The logic behind this new strategy, if one can use the word "logic" in this scenario, was not only to decimate the burn site but to terrorize the populace out of the practice of corpse burning. The fact that the attacks rained SLP ash and mist upon the locals seemed to be considered an acceptable level of collateral damage.

I never saw the airman again, naturally, but I have occasionally thought about him. He woke in the middle of the night, crying. He had reason. And I held him until the sun brought some light into the room and he said he had to go. His CSG was setting sail again, for where he was not certain. But the George Was.h.i.+ngton was soon offsh.o.r.e of Venezuela, and I am certain he became embroiled in that bit of twenty-first-century gunboat diplomacy. Finding new raw materials for his nightmares.

No, contagion was not an issue, no matter how deeply or extensively one chose to plumb the Midnight Carnival. Which is not to say that there wasn't an ample supply of unpleasant deaths available to the unwary. Along with perversity in their desires, many sleepless also brought with them an absolute disregard for their own well-being. So it was that Vinnie and I maintained a prudent watchfulness as we strolled.

A thick-bodied boy in a faded Los Angeles Raiders hoodie shuffled past, offering a whispered chant.

"Dreamer. Dreamer. Dreamer."

It would be bootleg, of course. A compound of heroin and ketamine most likely. Called double horse, it was the most popular home brew version of the real drug. So potent, it could knock even a late-stages sleepless to his knees and offer a brief period of sensation that I'd been told felt much like severe food poisoning without the diarrhea and vomiting. That this should be desirable was all one really needed to know about the ravages of SLP.

At a table filled with hand-painted miniatures of stock nonplayer characters and creatures from Chasm Tide, Vinnie paused to look over the selection.

"The kid back there, Ciccio, he loves the game."

I stood at an angle to him, keeping an eye on the aisle at his back.

"A nephew?"

He shook his head, inspecting the detail on an ogre.

"Grandson of one of my uncle's war buddies. His mom is Italian. His sc.u.mbag dad who split on the kid and his mom, he's American. We were able to get some paperwork done, make something happen. Got him out of the Mid-European Quarantine Zone. Traveling with that accent, kid must have caught s.h.i.+t everywhere. You know, they still haven't unsealed the Italian border. Known for how long that SLP and FFI aren't the same thing, but the UN still won't open the d.a.m.n border."

He put the ogre down and picked up a Chasm Wraith.

"Once he was out of the MEQZ, he went into the pipeline. A guy who used to handle mostly Bulgarian girls for the skin trade when you had to reach overseas for that kind of thing, got him across for us. Dealing with INS once he was here, that was an exercise in bulls.h.i.+t that I never want to repeat. Finally, I asked some guy in an office downtown what the h.e.l.l it would cost, theoretically, to get the kid out of processing, with or without papers."

I nodded.

"And what was the theoretical cost?"

"Ten theoretical grand. U.S. Cash money. a.s.shole. I could have done double that if he'd asked. Cheapskate corruption."

He held a Kraken between thumb and forefinger.

"How much?"

The proprietor looked up from the elf he was painting, squinted.

"Fifty."

From the neck of his fish gut-stained butcher's smock Vinnie pulled a plastic card on a chain. The miniatures painter took an RFID interrogator from below his table, aimed it at the card, and pulled the trigger, reading the details from the chip embedded in the card as they scrolled on the small screen at the b.u.t.t of the interrogator.

"Fishmonger?"

Vinnie nodded.

"I got eels, fresh as daisies, give you ten pounds."