Charlie Huston - Sleepless

She couldn’t remember the name of the boy she’d gone to The Game with. She couldn’t remember why she’d agreed to go to The Game at all. The annual meeting between Cal and Stanford was a local holiday and call to arms, but her interest in sports faded the moment she walked from the soccer field where she played a bruising, slide-tackling style of defense in occasional pickup games. She could remember the boy’s ridiculously handsome face. Vulnerable to beautiful things, it was that face that had blinded her to the fact that he was clearly a prick. As the day and the game had both ground along, his prickish nature had risen on the tide of beer he swilled. Hardly a teetotaler herself, Rose was nonetheless disgusted by anyone who couldn’t hold his own. Uninterested in the game, rapidly finding her date’s face less and less of interest, she began to people watch the crowd, and found as her eyes swept back and forth that the same young man in the Stanford section several rows away seemed to be just looking away from her every time her eyes fell upon him.

Her first thought regarding Park was out of place. Not just out of place in the stadium, not just out of place wearing a red sweatshirt in that blot of red fans in the middle of the blue and gold crowd, not just out of place sharing a high five with one of his schoolmates after the Cardinal sacked Cal’s quarterback, but out of place in his skin. Under his hair, behind his eyes, on top of his feet, out of place in all his physical dimensions. She couldn’t understand how anyone could be watching the game when there was such a unique spectacle to behold: a man entirely without ease. His discomfort was profound. She knew he would misinterpret her looks but couldn’t keep from staring at him whenever he looked away from her. She wished for a camera. Why hadn’t she brought a camera? She needed to shoot him, needed video evidence of his fabulous awkwardness. Someone started a wave, and it washed over them. She watched as he refused to lift his arms in the air, but did faintly shrug his shoulders and flap his hands. Later, in the jumble of bodies pouring out of Memorial Stadium down toward University Drive, she’d see him ahead, hanging at the end of a trail of fellow Stanford supporters. With little effort she’d steered her drunken date through campus, across Bancroft, and followed Park into a house party hosted by a Cardinal alum who’d washed up on Durant Avenue.

It wasn’t long before Park noticed her. But he didn’t approach until her date, realizing he’d been dragged into the den of the enemy, began acting up and hurling abuse about the room. Asked to leave by the host, he snapped his fingers at Rose, who showed him her middle finger, and then he walked out after calling her a cunt. She saw Park, standing nearby and straining to appear disengaged from the scene that had caught everyone else’s attention. And she knew that he’d just barely held himself back from taking a swing at the prick.

He was clearly a difficult man. Awkward, judgmental, opinionated, guarded, uncomfortably intense, possibly violent, pensive, emotionally constrained. He possessed definite stalker potential. A list of traits any one of which could disqualify a potential lover, any two of which in combination most certainly would. Not that she had any intention at all of sleeping with him, but if she was going to somehow incorporate the idea of the man into her art, she had to at least speak with him.

The prick left, the unsettled moment settled, someone told her she should stay until it was clear the prick wasn’t lurking outside, or at least not leave without company. A woman offered to call the campus escort service, Rose shook her head, said she’d stay awhile, walked to Park, and put out her hand. “I’m Rose. I was kind of fucking staring at you at the stadium.” He took her hand. “Parker Haas. Yes, I noticed that. It was unnerving. I’m leaving. Would you come with me?”

She left the party with him and discovered that her assumptions about him had been more or less correct, except they left out his open honesty, thoughtfulness, generosity, remarkable manners, dry humor, eclectic and deep knowledge, challenging intelligence, and amber eyes that compensated more than evenly for his windburned angular features and narrow build. She took him home after they’d walked most of the night, slept with him, woke a few hours later to make love with him for the first time, and, lying next to him, his fingers drawing tiny circles around each bump of her spine one by one, had that vision of herself in the blank space, wailing as her mother had, all for the sake of Parker Haas, whom she had met just hours before. He asked her what was funny when she started laughing, and she said “nothing.” Two weeks later they drove to Reno and got married.

There was more. She was complicated herself. Temperamental and judgmental and, raised by a lawyer and a social activist, rarely without opinions. Her mother died. She lost interest in her art, became more interested in pop culture and the technical components of video. He moved to Berkeley. She saw ghosts of her parents everywhere in the Bay Area and tired of inventing new routes to avoid the memories. He saw the daily progression of dark clouds on the front pages of newspapers, heard the voice of his father often, Cassandra in his head, and began to doubt the usefulness of philosophy. A doubt, oddly, that he had never before entertained. She was offered work in Los Angeles. Riding BART into San Francisco one Saturday, he saw an ad recruiting for the SFPD, and felt a sudden physical need to be useful. That evening he went online and researched the LAPD and LASD. And they moved south. Not long after he was hired and began at the academy, the strange outbreaks of FFI-related BSE and CJD that had been receiving greater coverage of late were redefined as a new disease: SLP. Park graduated from the academy. Rose alternately loved and hated her job. The world became more complicated, more daunting. Someone they knew well contracted SLP and died. They talked about leaving Los Angeles but didn’t know where else to go. Rose became pregnant. And was soon after diagnosed.

There was more. But some of it was deeply personal and related to the secrets of a marriage that should not be shared. And some of it was incoherent, tangles of her life in the real world and of Cipher Blue and her life in Chasm Tide. What was relevant is what I have related. What she told me when I appeared unannounced at her home in the very wee hours of the morning and began to ask questions that one would not normally answer to a stranger, but which she did so willingly, once I explained why I was there.

7/11/10

I HAVE TO go inside. I have to go inside. I have to go inside.

I have to.

What do I do?

Have I been lied to? My father said the way to determine if you’d been told a lie was to first determine if the person you were dealing with could benefit in any way by telling the lie. If they could benefit by a lie, they were likely lying.

He said it was human nature. He said most people couldn’t resist an opportunity to improve their position when it was offered them. I asked him if he ever lied. He told me that he sometimes did in the course of his duty, as a matter of statecraft. I asked him if he ever lied to me. He thought for a moment and nodded and said, “I confess to having told you that Santa Claus was real. Also, you once wrote a paper of which you were very proud and asked me to read it. I did. I found the argument spurious and unsound but told you I thought it was quite good. I’m not certain why I didn’t tell you the truth and challenge you to defend your points. I may simply have been very tired.”

Parsifal K. Afronzo Senior has told me several things. He has told me the details of A-ND sanctioned and controlled black market trade in DR33M3R. He has told me that the source of SLP is genetically modified corn. He has told me that far more people than the general public has been told of are infected. He has told me that infection rates are rising. He has told me that there will not be a cure. He has told me that most of the people in the world are going to die. He has told me that there is nothing left to aspire to but to see that something is left for the people who are immune. The people who will survive when the rest die.