Charlie Huston - Sleepless

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 fuck 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, God, 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 asshole 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 sponsorship of several professional video gamers, his fascination with massively 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 identity theft, Internet fraud, online bullying, virtual pornography, and assorted civil complaints associated 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 classic techno and rap had spawned the screen identity P-KAJR, behind which he’d anonymously become one of the most notorious trolls of the Web. Assuming 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 identity was revealed, by his own design, he announced via podcast that he was assuming the phonetic of his screen identity as his legal name. Cager was born.

There was more, of course. Analysis of his disassociation 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 assets 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-pronounce 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 documented 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 massive multivenue club he’d had built, assorted legal defenses and settlements, and a wholesale investment in funds that had been bulwarked all but entirely by shares in several Icelandic banks.

This snapshot of the wealthy scion of an international pharmaceuticals conglomerate was all Park had time to learn of the man. Looked up and printed in a small break during another day spent wrangling the baby and his wife. Immersing himself in the constantly replenishing swirl of tasks that engulfed a household with both a baby and someone fatally ill. Exhausted before he began the first load of laundry, not certain he could keep his feet through the day, he was repeatedly shocked to look up and see another hour had passed.