Charlie Huston - Sleepless

My finger was on the trigger. Omaha was still crying. The moment filled with dissonance.

I lowered my gun and, at this extremity of life, allowed myself the indulgence of knowing things.

“Officer Haas, who do you work for?”

He looked at his own gun.

“LAPD.”

He looked at me again.

“I’m a cop.”

The truth of it, so simple and bare, unadorned with deceit, that I almost laughed.

“Yes, you are, aren’t you.”

He saw the other dead bodies.

“Why did you lead them here?”

I raised a hand in denial.

“No, these are not mine. I killed mine earlier. These were sent for you. And for your family as well.”

He was shaking his head before I finished.

“They’re Afronzo personal security.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Your name is Jasper.”

I nodded.

“It is.”

He was looking at his gun, weighing it.

“He said you were dangerous. ‘Someone you don’t want near your family,’ he said.”

I nodded.

“I think he was correct in that. May I ask who?”

“Parsifal K. Afronzo Senior. He thought you were dead.”

I cocked my ear for a moment. I could have been listening to Omaha but was in fact hearing the strange tune produced by the twining of this man’s life with my own. Something I’d never heard before. Dissonance becoming assonance, perhaps.

I nodded again.

“I believe that the world may have become more mysterious these last few days.”

Park had eyes only for his gun.

“More mysterious than a marriage.”

I watched him watching the gun in his hand.

“I was married only very briefly, at a very young age, and still I know you exaggerate.”

He may have smiled.

“Only a little.”

“Yes, that I will agree with.”

His finger had crept nearer the trigger.

“What’s gone wrong? With the world? Why aren’t people trying to fix it?”

My gun was still lowered, but my finger was curled on the trigger.

“I believe it is because they don’t believe there is anything to fix. They have been raised to fatalism and slaughter. A feeling of powerlessness pervades the average person’s interactions with the world at large. They want it comfortable and familiar. But they’ve stopped thinking about tomorrow in any tangible sense. They don’t believe in it any longer. Because they don’t want to think about it. How hard it will be. For the ones left.”

He was still looking at his gun.

“I wouldn’t have a chance, would I?”

I couldn’t be certain what he meant, so I answered the question at hand.

“No. If you try to raise your weapon, I will shoot and kill you. And the long conversation we should have, the mysteries we should unravel, will be lost. Much to my regret.”

He eased the hammer forward on the small pistol, thumbed the safety up, and dropped the gun next to the man he’d killed.

I still held my own pistol.

“I need the travel drive, Officer.”

He turned away.

“You can’t have it.”

He took a step, presenting the back of his head to me.

“It’s evidence in a crime.”

I raised my gun.

“I need it.”

He shook his head.

“No. I have to check on my family now.”

He moved, beginning to pass out of my aim, down the hallway.

“We can talk after I see them.”

Down the hallway, walking to his family, away from the dead, and I did not kill him.

Instead, I whispered a poem to myself, very brief and made up on the spot.

“Parker Haas, crying Omaha, and his sleepless Rose.”

There are other things in this life than killing. I felt a chance to be near them. If only briefly.

OMAHA CRIED. AND ROSE WAS INCREASINGLY UNWELL.

The vibrancy she’d shown in the hours she and I had spent talking before Park came home had faded. She was no longer buoyed by the past but wallowing again in the present. I watched from the bedroom door as Park told her the truth about what had happened moments before. In her condition virtually any lie would have sufficed and perhaps been more merciful. Circumstances that made the honesty shine with greater brightness.

I left them then, for several minutes, long enough to drag the bodies out the back door, across the lawn, and into the converted garage. Animated skeletons danced on three monitors. I watched them for a moment, then returned to my task. I found a bundled tarp and took it into the house, draping it over the largest of the blood puddles in the living room. Not much else could be done. An armful of towels from the bathroom scattered over the floor soaked through from underneath. By the time I went back to the bedroom my burns were seeping similarly into the legs of my slacks.

Park was holding his crying daughter, tucked into the crook of his left arm, while placing a damp cloth on the back of Rose’s neck. Rose was facedown on the bed, muscles jumping in her jaw, the backs of her legs, her upper lip. She made a claw of her right hand and dragged it down the sheets in long strokes, her chewed nails rasping quietly on the weave.

She whispered.

“Up arrow, up arrow, shift, space, space, space, right arrow, tab, tab, up arrow, space.”

Park looked at me.

“They’re keystrokes.”

I nodded.

“Yes. The Clockwork Labyrinth. She told me she’d memorized the sequence that got her through.”

Her chant continued. A whispered incantation, the epic of her achievement.

I pointed at the floor.

“May I sit?”

Park didn’t answer. I remained standing.

He was still now, crying baby in his arms, fading wife wide-eyed on the bed.

“I have to do something.”

I pulled at my slacks where they continued to stick.

“Yes, as do I.”

He looked at me.

“Why are you here?”

It was only when he asked the question that I realized how little I understood the answer. Why was I there? Surely I should have been gone long before. The travel drive in my possession, the dead in their places, all other concerns swept away as I discharged my contract with Lady Chizu.

I spoke without thought, letting my words inform me.

“I am here to complete something. Something I have been working on for many years. My whole life.”

Omaha twisted suddenly and almost slipped from his arm onto the floor. He caught her, the movement disrupting Rose’s recitation long enough for a moan to slip from her lips.

Park closed his eyes.

“I can’t take care of both of them.”

He opened his eyes.

“I need help.”

I didn’t move.

He came off the bed, walked to me, and put the baby in my arms.

I had realized long before that a gun is a kind of philosopher’s stone. Only rather than transmuting all that it touches into gold, a gun transmutes the entire atmosphere around it. Hardening edges, sharpening the air, a glitter of clarity. Fear. Even an unloaded gun can turn the air in any room to pure fear. In the moment Park handed me his daughter, I discovered something else that could transmute everything in its vicinity. Creating an element that was also part fear but equally made of astonishment.

Omaha settled into my arms, stopped crying, closed her eyes, and slept.

WE TOLD EACH other our stories. The last few days of our paths looping and twisting over one another.

He would not give me the travel drive, but he did let me look at its contents.

I followed his directions, and found and opened the secret file. He explained to me the coordinate sequences. I thought about our dying city, seeded with secret Dreamer. I knew, of course, the great value of this information, but I did not see how it could relate to Lady Chizu. Certainly she might deal in Dreamer, but the idea of her buying and selling by the bottle was absurd. She was more likely to provide security and shipping for container loads of the drug being sent to Asia, or to finance a lab reverse engineering the drug.