Charlie Huston - Sleepless

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 Médecins sans Frontières 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 cockpit.

“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 sunglasses.

“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 fucking Army closes airspace. 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 hit by a gangbanger. Lucky shot with a Soviet-era Strela. Yes?”

I nodded.

He shook his head.

“Merde. Fucking bullshit.”

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 button-pushing 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, airspace 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 assurance 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 willy and nilly Long to be reassembled. 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. Dashing in the broken-nosed manner of a Marseilles 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 passenger seat, whistling to myself, “Le Marseillaise,” 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 brass 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.