Charlie Huston - Sleepless

Rose Avenue. I tried to call. She didn’t answer. The phone might be off. She might have forgotten about it. Somewhere inside Chasm Tide, trying to beat the Labyrinth. I’m asking myself, did she see when the feds opened my safe? Did she see the bottle? Did she see that I had Dreamer? Did she know it was in the house and that I didn’t give it to her? It doesn’t matter. She knows. She knows me. She wouldn’t expect anything else. But I didn’t even think of it. The bottle in my hand, I didn’t even think about giving it to her.

Rose Avenue.

Stay with the story. Someone will care.

Rose will care. Won’t you, Rose?

There were searchlights on top of the twin apartment towers between Hill and Ashland. They swept back and forth, up and down the beach and the surf line. Looking for refugees trying to float up from Venice.

Are there machine guns up there as well? There can’t be. We haven’t gone that far. Not yet. Not that far yet.

Another checkpoint when Gateway went under the 10.

Waiting in a line of cars, I looked up and saw men and women in black uniforms without insignia, rappelling from the freeway, dangling on lines underneath, stringing wire and attaching small satchels. Rigging explosives to blow the Santa Monica Freeway just west of the 405.

After I passed through, not far from the 405, I glanced down a side street and saw a man running from a gang of sleepless skaters. Tweens, kicking their boards down the street after him, making a buzzing sound with their lips. A fake snoring sound sleepless kids make when they go after a “sleeper.” I’d heard about the attacks, read the accounts on news sites, but never seen one. I turned around in the middle of the block, but by the time I got back to the side street they were all gone. Sleeper and sleepless. And I wasn’t sure I’d seen them at all.

Another checkpoint at Wilshire and Westwood Boulevard. Most of Westwood Village and the UCLA campus have been sealed off. I could see the lights from Marshall Field, and a Thousand Storks helicopter landing there.

No checkpoint at Wilshire and Whittier, but the Beverly Hills Hilton was lit up and there was heavy private security. Limos and armored SUVs. Men in tuxedos, women in gowns. Part of the parking lot taken up by news vans, video trucks. An awards show? Bleachers on the sidewalk for fans of whatever the event was. They were full. From a distance it seemed that every seat was taken by sleepless.

Driving north on Whittier, I could hear shots fired in Hollywood.

Everything west of La Cienega and north of Beverly appeared to be blacked out. Even the hills were dark. Not in Bel Air, but east of Coldwater Canyon.

The L.A. Country Club golf course was still green this side of Wilshire. Hidden from the traffic along the boulevard, they’re still running the sprinklers. I could hear them, softer than the gunfire and more constant. A big house with a crescent drive. I had to park a block away. The street was clogged with cars. Smart Cars mixed in with battered diesels adapted for bio, but mostly the kind of sports cars and SUVs that Rose likes to run her key over if she walks past one in the street.

She used to only talk about doing that. But a few moths ago she did it for real. I looked at her, and she shrugged. “If not now, when?”

She’d have worn her keys out at the XF-11 house.

Security at the foot of the drive. Bouncers I may have seen at Denizone, wearing plain black T-shirts and slacks for this job. They asked to see my invitation, and I showed them my phone, the email and attachment Cager had sent me displayed on the screen. There was no bracelet, but they offered me a gift bag that I declined.

Usually when I make deliveries to parties with gift bags, I take them. Rose and I would go through them at home and laugh. Then I would catalogue the contents and put the bags in the back of the closet. But every now and then I’d find a bottle of apricot-lemon body wash in the shower and know that Rose had been in the bags.

Is it all hypocrisy, the things I laughed at when Rose did them? Keying expensive cars? Stealing useless evidence that I only catalogued to avoid any suggestion that I took gifts from suspects?

Should I have been mad at her? At myself for allowing it?

Smoke spewed from somewhere behind the house. Not a fire. Artificial smoke, like at one of Rose’s rock concerts. A show she might drag me to because she had free tickets that a band gave her when she worked on their video.

A huge cloud, from a big machine, or several of them. Projected on the smoke, a loop of video, a double-prop plane with an odd tail assembly. A stutter of stills in black and white, and then color and movement as it crashed into several houses, setting the last on fire. And repeating.

I went inside. He was out back. Through the smoke pouring from the machines, lying on the end of a diving board over an empty pool, his legs dangling. He was holding his phone in the air and waving his arm back and forth. He saw me and asked, “Do you have signal?”

I looked at my phone; it showed two bars. He pointed at my phone. Said, “It’s because your phone is mostly a phone. It’s telling, the features we pack our phones with. Mine is weighted heavily toward messaging.

When it comes to small talk, I’m more comfortable in text. Chat upsets me in the personal mode. Text conversations of some depth expose a person’s emotional states more clearly to me. But it’s the gaming components of my phone that make it less reliable as a phone.” He sat up and picked up his bag from the foot of the diving board and dropped the phone inside and said, “Let’s move. Not having signal is like being a stateless person. I don’t like it.”

He put the bag over his shoulder and stood up and walked up the board. It bobbed slightly under him. He looked into the empty pool and said, “If I fell in and broke my neck it would make this house famous again. But not for very long.”

He had something he wanted me to see, and we walked through the cloud of smoke toward the house. He pointed up at the projection and said it was a “Fahlala installation. His commentary on the end of the age of manned flight. Have you seen the Reapers yet? They deployed here this week. Flying robot death machines. Very hard to shoot down in Armored Assault. Not that I really play anymore.”

His bodyguards came out of the bushes at the edge of the yard. He told them he wanted them “lurking in the darkness.” Imelda said she knew that, but they couldn’t do it if he was going inside. He looked at the crowd packing the inside of the house and pointed at it and said, “Make an entrance for us, please.” Imelda went into the house ahead of us. She had a kind of crowd jujitsu, applying extra weight to someone’s back and shifting whole knots of bodies at once. We followed, Magda behind us making sure no one tried to slipstream Cager’s route.

A wall in the living room was covered in black velvet paintings, portraits of sleepless with their eyes made huge and weepy like the little girls and puppies and cats by Margaret Keane.

Rose had a Keane print on the back of the bathroom door in the big house she shared on Telegraph. I told her it made me feel sad and guilty. She said that’s what made it good kitsch.

The paintings of the sleepless made me angry.

Cager was talking about Imelda and Magda. He wanted to know what I thought of their “look.” I told him they looked effective. He said he thought the Matrix thing was “over” and he wanted something new. He was thinking about Road Warrior, but he was afraid it might be too early. He didn’t elaborate on what it was too early for. But I knew what he meant.

I rarely want to hit people just for being who they are. But I wanted to hit him. Instead I told him the truth, I told him he was right, it was too early. I told him he should try Blade Runner. He liked that. I knew he would.