Charlie Huston - Sleepless

Tending my hurts, I began plotting a route that would take me from my ruined house to the home of Officer Parker Haas.

PARK WASN’T SLEEPLESS. HE KNEW HE WASN’T SLEEPLESS. After Rose had been diagnosed, he’d been tested at once. Rose had been typically explicit. If we both have it, I’m ending the pregnancy.

Park’s results had been negative. He wasn’t sleepless. Whatever Ian Berry thought he saw in Park’s eyes, it was just fatigue and stress and amphetamine.

But tests could return false negatives. And it had been almost a year since the test. If the test had been wrong, or if he had contracted SLP soon after the test, he could be symptomatic by now.

But he wasn’t. He knew he wasn’t sleepless. How could he be? If he was, who would take care of the baby? It was unthinkable. Therefore, he didn’t think about it.

Faking as if he had received a vibrating call, he took the phone from his pocket, nodded at Cager, and walked from the room. Standing in the hall with the phone to his ear, he watched while Cager simultaneously bought several of Berry’s photographs and talked Chasm Tide with the teenagers who had overcome their awe long enough to request autographs.

Automatically, he spoke into the dead phone.

“I don’t know when I’ll be home. I hope soon. At a gallery. A house, really. But they have art. You’d like some of it. I think you’d make fun of the people. Too much money, mostly. Yes, but trying to look like they don’t have any money. Or the opposite. The funniest I’ve seen is a guy at the foot of the stairs right now. He has a comb-over, but it’s a Mohawk comb-over. I can’t really tell. It’s like it’s so long he can push it up in the middle. I can’t. Because it’s embarrassing. And I don’t like taking pictures of people so I can make fun of them. It’s different to just talk about them. Anyway, I’m not making fun, I’m just telling you who’s the funniest person here. Business. A guy I have to see. It’s about business. He may know something I need to know. Because. Because I think the world is getting too dangerous. Just too dangerous. Too dangerous for everything. For you. For the baby. I have to go. I love you.”

He put the phone back in his pocket as Cager came out of the room, one of the photographs in his hands.

“Kuru. Do you know this one?”

Park was sweating; he could feel it running down the small of his back.

“A little.”

Cager held up the photo.

“The first identified prion disease. Papua New Guinea, the Fore tribe. Supposedly they were cannibals. Kuru was thought to spread when they ate the infected brains of their enemies. It made them crazy. Of course, they didn’t think it was a sickness. The Fore didn’t need to be told what it was. It was a curse. They put the kuru on their enemies, and their enemies went mad and died.”

He traced the shape of the kuru prion with his index finger.

“And I think sometimes, what if the scientists were wrong and the Fore were right? What if kuru was a curse? Maybe SLP is also a curse. Which leaves a big question.”

He looked up from the photo.

“If mankind has been cursed with SLP, who did it? Who is the enemy that cursed us?”

He pointed a corner of the photo at the ceiling.

“It must be God. No other explanation.”

He lowered the photo.

“Cursed by God. How can there be any escape from a curse like that?”

Park wiped sweat from the back of his neck.

“I don’t believe in curses.”

Cager opened his messenger bag and slipped the photo inside.

“If you spent a little time in Chasm, you would.”

“That’s not real.”

Cager was parting his hair again. He stopped.

“It’s real. What’s happening in there, that’s what counts. God is done with us out here. Reality is what we make now.”

Park shook his wrist from side to side, winding his father’s watch. He wanted a new watch, one that would tell him there was time left, enough of it to make things right again. A watch that would still be poised before midnight, allowing him the time he needed to repair his world.

He took the toilet paper tube from his side pocket and showed it to Cager.

“Same as before.”

Cager had finished with his comb and was looking at his phone.

“No signal. Adrift.”

Park was cradling the tube in his palm.

“Yes or no?”

Cager flicked the screen, and a long string of names rolled across it.

“I have the numbers for over fifty dealers in here. None of them are interesting at all. You seemed interesting. Smart. Emotionally opaque. I thought if I showed you amazing and beautiful things it would elicit an emotional reaction. But mostly you just act anxious. I think that’s the emotion. Like you want to be somewhere else. That’s boring for me. And I’m tempted to call another dealer and let you go where you like.”

“I don’t care, Cager.”

He stopped scrolling, took out his comb, and raked the tines with a thumbnail.

Park displayed the tube.

“I don’t care about your pronouncements. I don’t care about your attitude. I don’t care about your bodyguards. I don’t care about your game. I care about if you can pay me. I’m a drug dealer. I’m not here to play straight man. I’m not here to give you all the cool lines. I’m here to sell you drugs and to sell your friends drugs and to go home. This is Shabu. Same stuff as last night. Same price. Do you want it, or should I sell it to one of these other lame people?”

Cager looked over his shoulder at nothing, smiled, and looked at Park.

“You are smart.”

He reached into his bag. He brought out his hand. He opened it. And he began to shuffle through a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills.

“If you’re really this focused in your business, you may be the first dealer to retire with a dime. Not that the money will be worth anything.”

He held out a sheaf of bills.

“But if it’s what you want, here’s your fifteen thousand.”

Park was looking at the money as if Cager had offered him a handful of kale.

“What?”

“I placed some bets on the War Hole tournament. Inside information, really. The gladiator Comicaze Y was facing in the Final lost his twin sister the day before the match. I know that’s the kind of thing that bothers people.”

He offered the money again.

Park took a half step back.

“I don’t want that. I want the other thing. Like last night.”

Cager brought the comb out.

“The other thing.”

Cager was waving to Magda at the end of the hall.

“I don’t have that. I have money. You want my money. Here it is.”

Magda approached.

“Boss?”

“Do you have signal?”

She touched her Bluetooth, took a slab phone from a pouch on her gun belt, and looked at it.

“No signal.”

“I’m becoming disconnected.”

Cager pocketed the comb and held his hand out to Park.

“Your phone, please.”

Park didn’t move.

Cager folded the thick wad of money and stuffed it in his bag.

“If you want to work something out, give me your phone, please. I need signal. It will take me hours to reenter the flow of my communications if I’m away for too long.”

Park took the phone from his pocket and handed it to him.

Cager looked at it, frowned, dialed, looked at it again.

“Where’s your signal?”

He moved a few steps to his right.

“Is this where you were standing when you took that call?”

Park shook his head.

“I.”

“No signal.”

His thumb flicked across the navigation buttons just below the phone’s screen.

“Your software is miserable.”

He looked up.

“There’s no call in your log.”