The audience, seated at cabaret tables or on a banquette that arced along the curve of wall opposing the screens, shifted, some making entries on their devices, one or two whispering into headsets.
Park heard an acne-scarred boy in an Atari-logo T-shirt speaking softly into a digital voice recorder.
“They’re going classic. Knight, mage, thief, barbarian, elf. Can’t tell if it’s meant as camp or homage.”
Cager’s entrance caused a slight stir, attention shifting from the screens. Nods were tossed his way, returned in the form of a general wave of the comb before he turned his back to the audience and inspected the screens himself.
He scratched the side of his neck with the tines of the comb.
“They know their crowd.”
He looked at Park, nodded him aside to a small bar.
Helmed by a very young girl in Harajuku anime-schoolgirl geisha chic, the service area was sunk several feet below the floor, putting the glossy surface of the bar, collaged with pornographic Disney-inspired animation cels, knee level to approaching customers. Cager knelt and nodded at the bartender. She dipped her head and began filling a small green bamboo pitcher with cold sake. Park squatted on his haunches, waiting as she placed the pitcher and two small, tightly tongue-and-grooved cypress masu boxes before them.
Cager poured both boxes full, picked one up, handed it to Park, took the other for himself, and lifted it.
“Kanpai!”
Park lifted his own.
“Kanpai.”
They drank.
Cager drained and refilled his box.
“I went to Japan for the first time when I was nine. For a year with my dad. Business. I found it alienating until I discovered the otaku. In terms of geek immersion, they were years ahead of me in every way. Of course, they had a natural advantage. All the most interesting technology was being developed for their market. My edge was that, compared to them, I was socially advanced. They trusted me very quickly and gave me access to their kung fu. Not pure code, which I’ve never had a gift for, but they helped me unlock game levels I didn’t know existed. Secret moves. When I came back here, I’d had six months on PlayStation and it hadn’t even been released in the States. It became a pilgrimage for me. Culturally I never penetrated deep. Too opaque. I’m low-affect myself. Not many outbursts like that one you saw with the phone. And I generally have a hard time reading other people’s moods. The Japanese in Japan are very hard for me. With otaku it doesn’t matter. No one cares what you’re feeling. My dad never grasped the fascination. He’s smart enough, but too old. He was over fifty when he had me. A gap like that, we can scream at each other and still not be heard.”
He combed his hair.
“That’s where I tried Shabu. To stay up. Keep playing.”
He put his box down and waited.
Park put his own nearly full box aside and opened the flap on his engineer’s bag. From a cylindrical pouch he tugged a cardboard toilet paper tube capped at either end with rubber-banded squares of cellophane. He undid one of the ends and drew from the tube a small package of crisply folded beige tissue. Untucking one corner of the paper, he peeled it aside, opening the package like a blossom, revealing the milky white coiled dragon nestled inside.
Cager nodded.
“Yes. That’s it.”
He reached for the dragon, Park pulled on the piece of paper it rested on, sliding it away.
Cager looked at him.
“Yes?”
Park placed the tip of his index finger on the barbed tail of the dragon.
“Twenty-five-gram dragon. Pure and real Shabu. Cash only. Up front.”
“‘Cash only.’ That seems a little shortsighted.”
Park shrugged.
“I’m a dealer. It’s a cash business. No one has come up with a barter model that makes sense.”
“They will.”
“Until then, the dragon is fifteen thousand U.S.”
Cager nodded and placed a fingertip on the corner of the paper opposite Park’s.
“Cash, then.”
He started to draw the dragon toward himself.
Park considered the moment.
When Bartolome had offered him undercover and he had accepted the assignment, he’d done as much research as he could on the topic without actually resorting to talking with other cops. No one was supposed to know about the investigation into Dreamer. So Park could ask no one what risks his new job might carry beyond the obvious. Not that he would have asked, anyway. Even his most serviceable relationships within the department were strained. His well-known inflexibility marked him for little more than scoffing dismissal from any undercovers he might cross paths with.
Flexibility was one of their primary job requirements. Average undercovers, most of them working cases that touched at the very least tangentially on the drug trade, had forgotten how to see the world in any colors but muddy gray. The briefest spell spent dealing with the economies of narcotics quickly erased all traditional valuations of right and wrong, good and evil, or, in the end, legal and illegal. The few undercovers Park had dealt with personally had distilled police work to an essence of us and them. Making busts wasn’t a matter of doing the right thing, of enforcing the law or doing your job, it was more akin to sticking it to the other side before they could stick it to yours.
Going undercover himself, Park had had little interest in learning from that perspective. Instead he’d gone to the books. Reading a handful of classic firsthand accounts. Both Sides of the Fence, Judas Kiss, Serpico, Under and Alone. He enhanced this reading with selections from the psych shelves, titles dealing with the pathology of lying, Stockholm syndrome, the limits of identity. And topped off with the copy of An Actor Prepares that Rose found on her own shelf, a leftover from her undergrad years.
Making his first deal, a purchase of a small amount of what Rose declared to be utterly hazardous stinky buds once she had persuaded him that he should let her smell the fruits of his labor just to be certain that he hadn’t been taken, he juggled the various teachings he’d plucked from those tomes. His jargon in place, hair as mussed as its length allowed, newly purchased vintage jeans and Bob Marley T-shirt donned, he’d found himself undone and frozen by the banality of the transaction. Far from feeling that his identity was at risk, he’d felt more as though he’d called for a Pink Dot delivery. His nonchalantly crumpled and balled twenties were a subtlety of character completely lost on the City College student who knocked on his door, asked politely if he was Park, came inside, and delivered a concise and practiced rundown on his current selection of wares, their various potencies, and the scale of pricing. Park barely managed to negotiate the buy without convincing himself that he’d been made and pulling the Warthog he’d put in his ankle holster. That was when the kid asked if he knew who had won the Clippers game. Later, unloading the .45 and locking it in the safe with a deep sense of embarrassment that he’d put it on in the first place, he’d realized that the silent, gaping stare that the out-of-context question had drawn as his initial response had been the most authentic bit of behavior he’d mustered during the entire affair. In those silent moments he’d looked more genuinely stoned than in any of the practiced tics and phrases he’d tried to employ. The fact that he’d known not only that the Clippers had lost but also the final score and the performances of the star players, and that he had sputtered all these details in one rapid burst after his endless pause, had only added, he assumed, to the overall impression of someone who hardly needed to be smoking another bong load.
So he stumbled into his character, the one that came quite naturally, built off his quiet and observant nature, his loathing of and incompetence at executing any and all lies. He was, when all was said and done, just acting like himself.
Yes, he had mastered the language of the trade. Yes, he had come to recognize the twists and kinks of human nature brought to the surface by habitual drug use and/or addiction. And yes, he had come to know what was expected from a d
ealer in terms of both professionalism and disregard for the weaknesses of his customers. But he learned all those intricacies as Park. Employing no techniques for building a sham persona to scrim his true intentions, becoming, instead, genuinely masterful in the skills required of a dealer.
When he was introduced as Park the dealer, there was absolute truth in the description. Just as, simultaneously, he might have been as accurately described Park the cop.
Being inherently Park in both rolls carried minimum requirements. One of those was that when engaged in either job he expected certain rules and standards to be lived up to. And one of the most, if not the most, central of those to his job as a dealer was the one that any and all dealers adhered to as religion: Cash, up fucking front.
As cop it behooved him to remove his finger and allow Cager to take possession of the dragon. It would help build a case, and put him further inside Cager’s good graces. The only cop worry being that to give up the dragon without cash in hand might be out of character for a dealer and arouse some slight suspicion.
Park the dealer had no quandary. For him it was simply a matter of how business was conducted in a professional manner with a new buyer.
The moment considered, he did his job.
“Cash, up fucking front. Please.”
Covering the dragon with the cup of his hand.
Cager flicked the exposed edge of the dragon’s wrapping.
Behind him, a restiveness was taking hold of the room. The audience, anticipation fully whetted, was starting to twitch, attention focusing less on the static scene still holding on the screens and more on the far smaller screens they all had in their possession. The gamers in the ball chairs were still invisible other than their legs, but those legs had begun to shift, cross and uncross; one pair was drawing into their chair slowly, as if the occupant were being slurped inside and swallowed. The characters on the screens remained frozen, unresponsive to the occasional avatar that had approached and attempted to engage them for whatever unknown purposes of commerce, information gathering, combat, or sex.
Cager took in the energy of the room and turned his attention to the bartender.
“Tadj, pass some drinks, please.”
She dipped her head, placed several ceramic choko cups and a 1.8-liter bottle of sake on a tray, and rose, balancing the tray and herself on eight-inch platform Mary Janes as she scaled a stepladder out of the bar well.
Cager waited until she was kneeling well out of earshot in front of one of the members of the audience, holding the tray of cups in one hand, the huge bottle in her other hand, pouring one of the choko full to the point where only surface tension kept the sake from spilling over.
“She’s an artist.”
Park did not disagree.
Cager continued to watch as the boy she’d poured for lifted the cup, his touch disrupting the liquid, perhaps an ounce dribbling onto the tray.
“It’s the presentation. If she looked like a gymnast, the way she controls the tray and bottle wouldn’t be as impressive. But her delicacy, it disguises just how strong she has to be to do that.”
The girl rose, moved a few steps, knelt in front of another fan boy, and poured again. The attention of all the young men had transferred from the screens, their impatience, their toys, and was now focused wholly on Tadj.
Cager shifted.
“Her medium is their imagination. She has a persona, the clothes, the attitude, the skill with the sake bottle, her grace; it makes them think she’s something she’s not. They think she’s anime-schoolgirl bar chick. What she is really is a fairly conservative premed student at UCLA. But she can shape how she’s perceived. Make her physical presentation into art.”
Cager pointed at the hidden gamers in their chairs.
“Them, they’re doing something similar, but on an entirely different level of complexity. We all manipulate how we present in everyday life, yes?”
He paused, and Park had a flash of that self-consciousness from his first deal. Thinking for a moment that Cager had seen through him and was making a point of letting Park know that he knew before summoning Imelda and Magda to deal with him. Which they could do with some ease, seeing as he didn’t have the .45 or any other weapon on his body. But the moment passed. There was, after all, nothing to be seen through. There was only Park. He wasn’t the bartender, carefully grooming herself, playing a role to maximize gratuities. He was himself. Always.
He nodded.
“Yes.”
Cager nodded back.
“We present for work, for our friends, for women, for people we don’t even know anymore. We present an image of ourselves that we think would impress some teacher who told us we’d never amount to anything back in sixth grade. Humans, we’re presenters. We compose what we want people to see, and hope that they read it as we wrote it. Everyone does it. What makes Tadj special is that she gets her show across so clearly. But them, they’re in another medium.”
He was looking at the gamers again.
“They’re creating perceptions out of whole cloth. They don’t work on the canvas of themselves; they work from pure imagination. There’s a palette they have to paint from: the races and character classes and all the elements that the game limits you to, but the variations, once you start manipulating them, are near infinite. And players around the world are constantly adding to the palette, building new artifacts, designing clothes, founding communities, breeding new races, starting fresh guilds. These artists, they use those materials to create second skins, and employ them to tell stories.”
He was looking at the screens, at a landscape stretching without physical limits.
“They’re creating myths and legends, founding empires.”
He focused his gaze on Park.
“They’re slaying dragons.”
He turned.
“Bandoleros!”
One by one, heads peeked out from the mouths of the ball chairs, only the gamer who had been swallowed whole staying hidden. Park stared at them, and they stared at things unseen, eyes focused deep in the spaces between matter, necks at stiff angles, pupils narrowed to pins, seeing otherwise.
Park winced.
“They’re sleepless.”
Cager shook his head at something wonderful.
“Utterly lateral. They do things in there, twist the whole Chasm, make moves that shouldn’t be possible. Because they’re relentless. And seeing something we aren’t. They’ve been someplace we have not and have special knowledge because of it. Like when I went to Japan.”
He touched Park’s hand with the end of the comb.
“But they need focus. To be able to create.”
He opened the flap of his bag.
“I don’t have fifteen thousand dollars.”
He reached into the bag with one hand, waving at the air with the other.
“The club, it breathes money. What comes in, it gets taken apart to keep the place alive; what’s left over goes back out. I can’t interrupt that flow. If I do, I’ll choke off what’s going on down here. The heart of the place. I won’t do that.”
He fumbled with something in the bag, something large and heavy shifting. Pointing now at the audience, where Tadj was pouring the last of the sake.
“These guys, they’ve paid to see something special. They’ve paid to see the artists create. They’re here to see an epic written before their eyes. What they pay, it goes to the costs of keeping this room up and running; that includes paying the crew for their artistry. Any profit I make off recordings of their quest, that goes back into the room as well. It all zeros out.”
He shaped his hair.
“They have to perform tonight. And they need the Shabu to make it happen.”
His other hand came out of the bag.
“This is what I have to offer you, Park.”
He placed his closed fist on the bar, fingers wrapped around a small cylinder of some kind.
Park watched the fingers uncoil, blinked, and lifted his ha
nd from the dragon, releasing it to Cager, who smiled, picked it up with great care, rose, and walked to the sleepless players of the game.
“Bandoleros! “We ride tonight!”
Park didn’t watch them as they broke up the dragon, placed slivers in glass pipes, ignited the pure Chinese crystal meth, and sucked down the perfumed smoke. His eyes remained fixed on the small white bottle on the bar, reading the label again and again to be sure, before picking it up carefully wrapped in the tissue that had cushioned the dragon, Dreamer in his grasp.
12
FATAL FAMILIAL INSOMNIA AND THE SLEEPLESS PRION ARE strikingly distinct from each other. The most essential of their many differences is that whereas FFI is a genetic disorder inherited by mischance of birth, SLP is communicable through a number of agencies.
Nearly immortal, if that can be said of something that is not entirely alive to begin with, the malformed protein that joins with healthy proteins and influences them to twist as malignantly as it has can be inherited. But it can also be communicated in exchanges of fluids, accidentally consumed when present in tainted meat, or, in fearsome concentrations, inhaled.
It can also be loaded into a syringe and injected.
If one should be inclined to do so.
The second most essential difference between the two is that the insomnia brought about by FFI does not manifest until the prion’s work is well under way, forming amyloid protein plaques, literally eating holes in the brain, leaving star-shaped astrocytes.
With SLP, insomnia does not follow months or even years of other symptoms, as it does with FFI, but is almost always the first definitive indication that one has been infected. One could easily clear physical space around oneself with some alacrity by mentioning that one had been sleeping poorly of late.
The lack of sleep, the absence of rest for the body or the mind, is the final twist of FFI’s dagger. By that time it has already eaten vast holes in the brain, leaving a cratered landscape, one of the side effects being the loss of sleep. Once insomnia does set in for sufferers of FFI, the end comes quite swiftly, if no less grotesquely. Twitching and covered in sores, sweating puss, nearly all homeostatic functions of the body malfunctioning at some level, FFI’s victims lose the ability to communicate, may or may not lose their sense of self, but never become senseless. And as the body rots around them, the breakdowns become so complete that traditional pain relief no longer has any application. Chemical receptors no longer accept soothing shapes that might dull the agony.