Sleepless

  The Venice Beach encampment spilled up Washington from the shore. Tents, lean-tos, corrugated shanties, they stretched along the sand from the park at Horizon Avenue to just below Catamaran. A combination of the homeless who had long ago staked their claims to this stretch of oceanfront, canyon country fire evacuees, and refugees from Inglewood and Hawthorne. They had run until they hit the ocean. Those trying to flee farther north hit chain link and barbed wire on the southern edge of Santa Monica and found themselves turned about. No one bothered to go south. Assuming they could skirt the marina, the beach at the foot of the LAX runways was patrolled by Marines. If they somehow made it past either of those hazards, they would surely be machine-gunned by the private security agents at the El Segundo Chevron refinery.

  There was still a great deal of tattered tie-dye and faded army surplus to be found in the encampment, but any vagabond spirit of the past was all but dead. Park had never thought of Venice as anything but a grimy sideshow distraction featuring destitute junkies and aging acid heads so thoroughly burned out that you could all but see the broken filaments behind their eyes. There was no romance in the legend of the place as far as he was concerned, but that didn’t make its present less desperate.

  He switched off the engine and ran his thumb along the teeth of his house key.

  “It’s about Dreamer.”

  Beenie dropped his head and shook it.

  “Fuck.”

  He looked at Park.

  “I introduced you to Cager.”

  Park watched a scramble of dusty boys and girls kicking a soccer ball in and out of the darkness between two unbroken street lamps.

  “I know.”

  Beenie opened his door and climbed out.

  “Fuck.”

  Park got out, went to the rear of the car, opened the hatch, and stood aside.

  Beenie pulled out his bike.

  “Hold this.”

  Park took the handlebars and held the forks off the ground as Beenie reattached the front wheel he’d removed to fit the bike in the back of the small five-do or.

  “Even so, man, Cager is an asshole, but I don’t think he would kill me. I mean, you’re a cop. You can ruin my life, but what can you do to him?”

  Park leaned the bike against the car.

  “Someone hit the gold farm yesterday morning.”

  “Hit it?”

  Park looked at the kids again. An argument had broken out over the boundaries of the field.

  “They killed Hydo and the guys. Shot them.”

  Beenie winced.

  “Keebler?”

  “And Melrose Tom and Tad, and I think his name was Zhou.”

  “With the scimitar earring?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  Beenie nodded.

  “Yeah, that’s Zhou. Fuck. Fuck.”

  He started to cry, stopped himself, started again, punched the roof of the car, and stopped.

  “Fuck. Those guys. They. That’s just fucking stupid, killing those guys.”

  Park nodded.

  Beenie wiped his eyes.

  “Cager?”

  Park looked away from the kids.

  “What was he doing with Hydo, other than buying artifacts?”

  Beenie sat on the bumper and started strapping his clips to his riding boots.

  “Park, how the fuck do I know? I didn’t even know you were a cop.”

  He put his feet down, the clips tapping against the asphalt.

  “Hydo was like his house dealer for anything in-world.”

  He strapped on an elbow pad.

  “Anything Cager wanted for Chasm, anything he wanted for one of his quests, Hydo got it for him. Only reason I was involved is because Hydo subcontracted some of it to me when Cager’s requisition list was too long. I came through, and every now and then Cager would throw me some business.”

  Park reached in the back of the car, pulled out the other elbow pad and handed it to him.

  “Why?”

  Beenie strapped it on, grabbed the knee pads.

  “Because he likes being in the middle. He likes the hustle. Like meeting you and making that Shabu deal on the fly. He could have that shit delivered whenever he wants, but he likes to play. He likes action.”

  He sat with a knee pad in either hand, clacking them together.

  “Me and Hydo talked about it. The way you talk about someone famous when you meet them. Try to figure out what they’re really about. That whole cult of celebrity thing and the way it gets inside your head, man. Like you don’t even want to think about these people, but they’re so relentlessly shoved in your face, you can’t help it. Then you meet someone you only saw before on TV, and you really trip out.”

  Park was again rubbing his father’s watch.

  “What did you guys think?”

  “Thing about Cager is, we thought, he’s all about the game.”

  He looked up at Park.

  “He talks about Chasm different than other people. Lots of players, they talk about it like it’s real. Shit, I do sometimes. But he talks about it like it’s more than real. Or more important than real. The way he games out here, how he plays people, that’s him trying to live the game outside the game. Not like wear a sword or anything, but he loves barter. He loves to put together different teams to take on different tasks. He’s got groups of friends for gaming, groups for dancing, groups for getting into trouble. Different teams for different quests. Like those sleepless he puts together in Chasm. And just like in the game, he likes each person in one of his groups to be a specialist. Look at you.”

  He bent to buckle on a pad.

  Park put his hands in his pocket.

  “What?”

  Beenie buckled on the other pad.

  “The way he swept you up, took you in. He wants to make you part of one of his teams.”

  He sat up.

  “He knows you’re smart. He took you to that gallery show. He probably wants to make you the dealer for his art team.”

  He stood up.

  “He invite you to something tonight?”

  Park was looking at the kids. They had circled up around two girls who were shoving each other back and forth.

  “Yeah. He said to text him, he’d let me know where.”

  Beenie put on his day pack and tightened the straps.

  “Welcome to the court of the Prince of Dreams.”

  Park looked at him.

  “What?”

  Beenie nodded.

  “What he goes by in Chasm. Prince of Dreams. Nice, huh?”

  The fight hadn’t boiled over yet. Park stepped to the back of the car, exposed the spare, and pulled out the engineer’s bag.

  Beenie straddled the trail bike.

  Park flipped open the bag.

  “Hang on.”

  He took out a tube like the one he’d given Cager, put it back inside the spare, and offered the bag to Beenie.

  “Here.”

  Beenie took the bag and looked inside. He looked at Park.

  “If this is an evidence plant, it’s the worst one ever.”

  Park looked north, at the glow of the canyon fires.

  “You can use it. Barter. Sell.”

  Beenie closed the bag.

  “Your bosses don’t keep track of this stuff?”

  “They don’t care.”

  “And neither do you?”

  Park was watching the girls. One had picked up a rock.

  “I do care. I just don’t need it to do my job anymore.”

  Beenie took a dangling bungee from the side of his day pack and strapped the engineer’s bag to the frame of the bike.

  “Thanks. Should be something in there to get me past the Santa Monica fence.”

  The other girl picked up a stick.

  Park shifted on his feet.

  “From there?”

  Beenie scratched the back of his neck.

  “People camped out up in Big Sur, I hear. I always liked it up there.”

  Par
k closed the hatchback.

  “Yeah. It’s nice. Long way.”

  Beenie pointed at the smoke and fires, the searchlights in the sky.

  “May as well be riding somewhere else.”

  Park stepped away from the car.

  “Come back when things settle down. I’ll do my best to get you in the clear.”

  Beenie shook his head.

  “‘When things settle down.’ You’re an interesting guy, Park.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  Beenie shrugged, stood up on his pedals.

  “Take care of the family.”

  Park raised a hand.

  “Travel safe.”

  He didn’t watch Beenie ride away, turning instead toward the brewing fight, wading in, pulling the girls apart, stopping them before they could go too far.

  I WAS REMEMBERING Texas.

  This was odd, as I had endeavored for oh so many years never to remember Texas. Nonetheless, there it was, as if in front of me, the endless brown plain. Scrubby little Odessa. Youth recaptured.

  Specifically, I was having visions of high school. The final month of my senior year, my eighteenth birthday, walking into the army recruiting office with my father and signing the papers, saluting the recruiting officer as I had been taught, turning heel-toe and saluting my father, holding it until he returned it. I was so happy that day.

  I was even happier at Fort Bragg. I wouldn’t be qualified to apply to the Special Forces Recruiting Detachment until after I had finished basic and done a tour, but I could see the soldiers on Smoke Bomb Hill, going after their green berets. Rarely are the dreams of childhood so close and so tangible. Even the drill sergeants couldn’t ruin my mood at Bragg. Brutal and unfair, they were only slightly more abusive than the coaches on my high school football team.

  None of it really prepared me for First Air Cavalry. Pure joy. Jumping in and out of Cobras. Patrols between Da Nang and Quang Ngai. Stringing jungle paths with claymore snares.

  The message stamped on the business end of a claymore mine still strikes me with both its clarity and wisdom: FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.

  Returning after my first tour, the two weeks spent in Odessa were the most difficult. Far more trying than Special Forces Assessment and Selection, more brutal than the six-month Special Forces Qualification course MOS 18B SF Weapons Sergeant. That had been second nature. But trying to hang out with my buddies from the football team after a year in-country had been akin to torture.

  Ah, torture.

  That was why I was reminiscing so vividly.

  Yes, those callow youths. Chasing tail. Trying to tear off a piece. Guzzling Lone Star. Asking me how many gooks I’d killed over there.

  The most troubling aspect wasn’t the tedium, it was the aching desire I felt almost every moment I was with those friends of mine to kill. It would have been quite easy. There was no lack of firearms. Virtually every day of my leave included some form of drunken blasting at small animals or the endless supply of empty beer cans we produced.

  After five days of it I refused their invitations. Preferring to stay at home with my father, sitting on the patio of what had once been the family horse ranch, staring at the horizon beyond the small stone that marked the place where he had buried my mother. We spoke little enough to each other. I knew that he had been with Darby’s Rangers and scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day And he knew that I had seen action myself. What could we possibly say to each other?

  Returning with my beret, assigned to the Fifth Army group at Nha Trang, I walked back into the jungle, only my excellent training and self-discipline keeping a bounce from my step.

  Remembering the jungle made more sense than remembering Texas. If, during torture, you are going to attempt to cast your mind to another time and place, the best strategy is to choose a time and place where you were happy.

  Though it is imprecise to say that I was happy in the jungle, more accurate that I was most myself there. Nowhere else, at no other time, has my nature been so nurtured and rewarded by an environment. By simply relaxing all restraints on my impulses, I thrived. No choking jungle vine flourished as did I.

  Truly, I didn’t wish to come home.

  In fact, it’s hard to say that I did come home. I most definitely did not return to Texas. Nor did I return to the name I had been given at birth. From the great distance I had traveled since then, it was hard to see what connection or relation I could possibly have with the rawboned, sunburned youth grappling at the line of scrimmage on a playing field that was mostly dirt and rock.

  Except perhaps a certain hunger for it to be over.

  That boy’s desire that he could magically turn eighteen right away and begin service. My own desire that the man with the soldering iron could suffer a sudden embolism and die.

  Both of us forced to endure.

  Coming to that conclusion seemed to exhaust the pool of memory, leaving me again in the present, doing my best not to look at the long parallel lines of seared dermis running up my inner right thigh. But that was a fool’s errand. I looked. And I screamed. Shrieked, really. Pain always becomes less bearable and more horrifying when one can see the effect it is having on one’s body. Container for the immortal, or mere meat, the body is what we have to work with. Having it ripped into, sliced, or burned in a manner that leaves no doubt as to the hideous nature of the scars that will mar that flesh if one is lucky enough to survive, brings out the craven.

  It did so in me.

  The battle-scarred man was in the middle of his script at that moment.

  “Are you working with the cop?”

  I cannot honestly say that I had reached my absolute threshold at that point. I feel, in retrospect, that I had endured worse before. It is therefore difficult to explain why I broke at that moment. Why I embraced the sudden soothing wave of relief that came over me when I succumbed to my collapse of will. I was prepared in that instant to answer any and all questions without any hidden agenda. Happy in the knowledge that the soldering iron would be put to the side once I began to speak.

  Accepting the fact that this course led inevitably to my death, I spoke.

  “No, I am not working with the cop.”

  Used to hearing only my panting and rasping breath or my cries of pain, the men all started slightly at the sound of my voice. The man with the soldering iron drew back and looked over his shoulder at the questioner. He, in turn, consulted his script, flipped forward a page, flipped back, and nodded. At which point the man with the soldering iron placed the tool directly against my left kneecap.

  The script, apparently, did not allow for that answer. Caught unprepared, I didn’t scream this time, but rather hissed, a sound very much like the one coming from my knee.

  Then the lights went out.

  And in the dark, with no one to see, I was free to be myself again. At last.

  19

  7/10/10

  HIS TEXT TOLD me to come to the XF-11 house. I texted him that I didn’t know what he was talking about. I could almost hear the sigh in his next text when he told me to Google it.

  805 North Linden Drive. The house where Howard Hughes crashed when test-flying a spy plane he’d designed for the Army.

  Venice Beach to Beverly Hills. Before SLP broke out and things started getting bad, it would have been the kind of a drive that people groan about. In the last year these would have been some of the worst hours to try to drive it. But the streets are as close to empty now as I have ever seen them.

  National Guard trucks. A motorcade escorted by Thousand Storks contractors. LAPD and LACS cars. Marine airships flown up from San Diego. I hit my first checkpoint at Rose Avenue on my way north. Sheriff’s deputies. Mostly trying to steer people away from Santa Monica. Things are still under control there, I couldn’t see any fires anyway, so they don’t want any more people coming in. The deputies didn’t care about my badge. LAPD has no jurisdiction in SM, but they let me cross.

  Rose Avenue. I tried to call. She didn’t answe
r. 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.