Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  “Yeah, I see her.”

  “Well I’m pretty much right under her, trying to decide if it’s worth going up there and risking getting my spine ripped out for a shot at living a junior high sex fantasy.”

  Park started moving.

  “I’m west of you, circling around the tables.”

  “Good call, man. You don’t want to be on the floor right now. Not unless you had your shots and got a lifetime supply of condoms and dental dams with you. Swear to God, man, I have never seen it get so freaky in here.”

  Park took a look at the dance floor, a single heaving mass, no way to tell who was meant to be dancing with whom, people clinging to one another, hoping not to get dragged down alone.

  He stopped moving, looked up at the catwalks, found the Sonya.

  “I’m about ten yards southeast of your dream girl. Can’t see you.”

  “Draw a line from her to the back wall, where they’re flashing that tavern fight.”

  “Okay.”

  “Look straight down from there.”

  “Okay.”

  “See the sconce that’s been knocked crooked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m just to the, wait, I see you. Don’t move.”

  Park didn’t move, and a moment later Beenie was in front of him, buzzed head dripping sweat, narrow almond-shaped eyes bloodshot and dark-bagged, wearing his usual biking shorts and powder blue Manchester City FC jersey.

  Beenie slid his phone closed and tucked it into the pouch on one of the shoulder straps of his tightly cinched backpack, leaning close to shout in Park’s ear.

  “Good to see you, bro.”

  Their hands met, the little ball of opium passing.

  Beenie wrapped an arm around Park’s shoulders and gave him a light squeeze.

  “Thanks for hitting me back so fast on this shit. That’s above and beyond, man. What do I owe you?”

  Park looked around, found an archway that led to one of the alternative spaces in the club, and pointed. Beenie nodded and followed him around a knot of bodies, through the arch, into the reduced volume of a room shaped like the interior of a conch shell, center reached after a swirl of corridor, walls ringed with cushions and pillows, a haze of incense added to the cigarette and pot smoke, all of it fluoresced by a lighting system that was cycling slowly through various cool shades of green and blue. Clubbers reclined on the pillows or swayed to a slow trance beat.

  Park moved them away from the arch, found an acoustic pocket where he could speak.

  “You said something the other day.”

  Beenie shook his head.

  “Okay.”

  “You said Hydo maybe knew the guy.”

  Beenie winced.

  “Yeah, I guess, but I don’t know if I knew what I was talking about.”

  Park stared at him.

  He liked Beenie. Liked him better than was smart. Knowing that Beenie was someone he’d have to bust eventually, Park shouldn’t have liked him at all. Not because Beenie was a criminal, which he barely was, but because no one wants to put the cuffs on someone he almost thinks of as a friend. Most undercover cops are vastly skilled at compartmentalization. It is a talent as valued as lying. They seal off their real feelings and create imitation emotions. Easily torn down when it’s time to show the badge, drag someone downtown, and sit across from him in an interrogation cell and tell him how fucked he is now.

  That is what they tell themselves, anyway. Talking up how deep they can get, how far into their cover. Bragging about the secrets their friends on the other side of that cover have revealed to them. Not the criminal stuff, but the real dirt.

  Park had heard them when he was in uniform. Undercovers playing shuffleboard at the Cozy Inn, off duty, sharing secrets about assholes who had cried on their shoulders as they told about the time they tried it with another guy, lost their temper and hit their kid, screwed their brother’s wife, wished their old man would hurry up and die, had their mother put in a home so they could sell her house and use the money for gambling debts, turned the wheel of a car to hit a stray dog to see what would happen. They laughed about it, talked about how they’d use the information to break the assholes when they made their busts.

  Coming away from the bar with a beer and a seltzer, Park had watched how they slammed their Jack and Cokes, shots of Cuervo, double Dewars on the rocks, and had recognized the fierce talk and drinking of troubled men. Returning to the corner table where he and Rose were going over lists of baby names, he’d been grateful that he didn’t have to concern himself with such deceptions. With his badge on his chest, his job was not easy, but it was straightforward.

  Without a badge, his default setting of cool and distant actually attracted rather than held off his customers. Most illegal drugs are used socially or for self-medication. Social users find it hard to get a word in edgewise with other social users. Conversely, the isolationists are entirely alone. Without trying to, Park projected his natural aura of trustworthiness. And his customers responded, sharing more than their shames and petty crimes, exposing themselves in ways that the undercovers at the Cozy would not have recognized as valuable. But they were treasures for Park, those tales: secret dreams of an artist’s life abandoned for money, the detailed story of an epiphany that changed a lifetime of faith, a revelation about receiving a healthy kidney from a deeply estranged sister, and the recitation of a poem that had won an award when the writer was thirteen.

  That these intimacies were painful to Park, being based on a lie, his lie, was not unusual at all. Any intimacy was painful to him. Another exposure. Another rough flange that could be sheared away from him. Another potential loss in this world.

  Sitting in customers’ living rooms, listening to them as they spoke about the intensity of their love for a particular painting by Botero and how seeing it for the first time had changed how they saw their own body, watching as they went to a shelf to find the book where the painting was reproduced, Park would silently beg, Don’t share this with me. I am not who you think I am. I will betray this trust. But even with his business completed, he would not get up and walk away, so addicted had he become to these barbed disclosures.

  So he knew that Beenie was Korean by birth, had been adopted by a white American couple who could not have children of their own, that he’d been raised in Oklahoma, where assimilation was not the easiest thing for an Asian, that he took up bike riding because it put distance between himself and the other kids, that his parents had loved him but had never been able to adjust to his innate alienness as they had assumed they would, that he didn’t blame them at all for that fact, that loving them hadn’t made it any harder for him to leave home the moment he got the chance, that he chose to take on enormous debt in order to attend UCLA rather than stay at home and let his parents pick up the tab for OU, that he’d felt almost as estranged being a Sooner in Los Angeles as he had felt being a Korean in Liberty, that he’d met a girl and fallen in love and that she’d helped him get over it, that he’d married the girl while still in school, that she’d been pregnant twice and miscarried both times, that the reason for the miscarriages was related to the lupus she suffered from, that she died after they had been married only five years, that Beenie had quit his job as an in-demand art director for video games, that he’d sold both his cars, lived now on a day cruiser berthed at Marina Del Rey, and devoted himself to cycling. That he started every day with a joint to help create a cloud around what he had lost, that as the day progressed he thickened and thinned this cloud with various concoctions and combinations of pot and coke and heroin and pills and alcohol, that periodically throughout the day he slipped an Area-51 laptop from his bag and entered Chasm Tide, where he played a character named Liberty, a wandering Cliff Monk who he used to accumulate gold and artifacts that he dealt to other players and to farmers like Hydo, and that he rode hundreds of miles a day without ever creating distance between himself and what was at his heels, evading it for at best a few hours a night, when
exhaustion and the chemicals in his body dragged him into the dreamless sleep he craved more than anything, other than to see his wife again.

  Because Park knew all this, he was able to say what he had to, leaning close to Beenie so no one else in a room of strangers could hear.

  “My wife has it.”

  Beenie flinched again.

  “Oh. Shit.”

  He looked at the swirled walls of the room, ended up looking at his feet.

  “The baby?”

  Park knew this would be the next question. He thought he’d be ready to hear it, but he was wrong. He tried to find an answer that would allow for the maximum window of hope. But there was really only one thing that could be said.

  “We don’t know.”

  Beenie was shaking his head now, shaking it as he looked up at the low ceiling, the span of a night sky painted there, the constellations of Chasm Tide, unreal astronomies.

  “This world, man. It tries to break us.”

  He looked at Park.

  “It’s not a place to be brittle.”

  Park thought of his father putting the barrels of his favorite shotgun beneath his chin. He didn’t move, his eyes on Beenie’s.

  Beenie put a hand on top of his own head and pressed down.

  “I need to get high now.”

  “Beenie.”

  Beenie didn’t move.

  Park put his hand on top of Beenie’s.

  “The guy you mentioned, is it the guy who owns this place?”

  Beenie’s mouth was twisting, his eyes moving from side to side like a man who felt something coming up behind him.

  “Yeah, he’s the guy I meant.”

  “And do you know him? You’ve done something with him? Business? He’s a gamer. You’ve sold to him?”

  “We’ve done some things.”

  “I want to meet him.”

  Beenie pulled his hand from under Park’s.

  “Honestly, Park, I got to tell you, if you want something from this guy, I am probably not the one to handle the introduction. He’s not too cool with me these days. We should look for an alternative.”

  Park kept his hand on top of Beenie’s head.

  “I don’t have time for an alternative.”

  Beenie took hold of Park’s wrist and squeezed.

  “Yeah. I know. Just let me get high really quick, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  He let go of Park, ducked away from the larger man’s hand, and headed toward the bathrooms, one of the generation that believed in doing their drugs out of sight.

  11

  PARK WATCHED THE UNDULATED BLADE OF A FLAMBERGE pierce the side of the Northerner and rip upward, unzipping the huge barbarian’s rib cage in a spray of blood. He watched it again and again as the highlight replayed on the screens of the main gaming salon on the basement level below the thumping dance floor.

  The bass reverberated from the ceiling, frequently lost in the screams, applause, and cheers from the crowd that had packed in to watch the gladiators.

  A banner over the bar announced that this was a North American Video Gaming Federation Regional War Hole Tournament. The winner of the regional would face off against three other gladiators in a national championship, and the winner of that event would then be sent to the Global Champs in Dubai. Standing at the back of the long room Beenie explained it to Park, as the reptilian wielder of the flamberge flexed onscreen at the command of a prototypically slouching, rail-thin Asian gamer sitting in one of the two articulated black mesh chairs on a raised dais at the middle of the room.

  There seemed little reason for having the gamers on the platform. All eyes were riveted on the main screen, a massive composite made of four fifty-two-inch Sony LCD displays, or on one of the dozens of smaller screens jutting from the walls and ceiling. For all practical purposes, the gamers could be at home, comfortably ensconced in the custom-pressed ass grooves of their sofa cushions. Or so Park thought until he saw the press of fans forming as the gamer rose, casually dropped his heavily customized controller on the chair, flipped up the collar of the shiny nylon logo-covered jacket draped over his shoulder like a cape, and descended the three steps into the mob, plucking from their hands the scraps of paper, War Hole T-shirts, NAGVF caps, glossy eight-by-tens, and assorted other mementos offered to be autographed.

  Beenie was shaking his head.

  “I never much got into the hack-n-slash scene myself, but that dude there, Comicaze Y, he just laid some wicked shit on that barbarian.”

  Park rubbed his eyes. They felt grainy, almost pebbled, like they were sprouting sties. He couldn’t stop grinding his teeth; his jaw muscles had started to cramp. He knew it was the speed, but knowing the cause of the symptoms gave him no relief. He knew only one of two things would make him feel any better: sleep or more speed. He wanted to be home, held by Rose, the baby safe between them

  He opened his mouth wide, stretching his jaw, snapped his teeth together.

  “I don’t like games where people just kill each other.”

  Beenie took a sip of his screwdriver.

  “Like I said, it’s not my thing either, but I’ve played a couple rounds. It’s like golf. You may not like it, but you try it once or twice and you know how hard it is. After that, every time you see those guys on tour, all you can think is that they must be witches with the things they make the ball do. Comicaze Y, the other guys at the top, they’re like that. Voodoo with the controller.”

  Park understood that there were people who tired of the endless puzzles and problem-solving scenarios of Chasm Tide, the social dynamics that needed to be mastered if a player was going to integrate into a raiding party or quest. Advancement in the game required long hours spent picking at tangles of logic and personality, as well as hacking and slashing. He himself had no particular interest in the game. If it wasn’t for Rose, he’d never have built a character of his own, let alone logged several hours adventuring and exploring the terrain. He lacked the ability to suspend disbelief to the extent required to make the experience immersive, but he admired the skill and workmanship that went into the building of the thing, the attention to detail. And he respected the values inherent in the system of levels that characters progressed through as they became more powerful. Certainly those levels could be bought with blood or gold, but the rewards for ingenuity and teamwork were far larger. Multiple levels could be jumped in a single bound if the right riddle was answered or puzzle assembled. He liked the idea of a world where mental acuity and the ability to play well with others were valued more highly than blood-lust or greed.

  War Hole was a Chasm Tide spin-off for players who felt otherwise. Of whom there were many. War Hole rewarded their virtual brutality abundantly, but asked that something be risked. Whereas death in Chasm Tide led to an inconvenient reincarnation in the heart of the Chasm, gamers in War Hole could advance to the highest levels of proficiency only by permanently risking the lives of their warriors. Avatars killed in tournaments such as these did not emerge to fight again; they were lost. All record of them obliterated from the War Hole servers, locally stored copies locked from reloads.

  Observing a squat, bald forty-year-old, silently sobbing as he drank the repeated shots of tequila poured for him by his sullen handlers, Park guessed that he was one of the erased. A defeated fighter who had seen the fruit of hundreds of hours of gaming cut down and dispersed into the unknown.

  He ground his teeth.

  “This is depressing.”

  Beenie sipped his drink.

  “What isn’t?”

  An announcer’s voice came over the PA, informing the fans that there would be a thirty-minute break before the final match, thanking various sponsors, listing drink specials, and tipping his hat to the evening’s host.

  “Cager!”

  Several pin spots swarmed, raced around the room, convened on a bastion of banquettes and divans, settling on a reedy young man in black Levis that rode high at the cuffs to show a few inches of sagging mismatch
ed red and blue socks, and a vintage sleeveless black Tubeway Army T-shirt. Hunched over the silverfish glow of a smartphone screen, he took a black comb from his back pocket and used it to recut the side part in his immovably greased towhead blond hair. He tucked the comb away, vaguely acknowledged the crowd with a flip of fingers, and returned attention to his phone, thumbs dancing over a slide-down qwerty keyboard.

  A brief cheer rose from the crowd, the spots went back to swimming the walls, and everyone moved toward the bar or the bathrooms. The screens cross-faded, tournament highlights replaced by pictures and snippets of video, taken and messaged by camera phone and smart device, the work of this evening’s club patrons. Dance floor action, a couple shooting themselves having sex in a bathroom stall, a boy puking, several people doing assorted drugs, flashed anatomy, and a brawl in the valet line.

  Park stared at the young man.

  Child of great fortune, infamous wastrel and libertine, source of endless gossip-blog fodder. Suspected plague profiteer. He looked like nothing so much as any number of wallflower students Park had known at Stanford. Acolytes in fields of obscure digital study; he’d not socialized with them but recognized in their eyes the same desperate fever that had possessed the Ph.D. candidates in the philosophy department.

  He finished the bottle of water he’d been sipping at, his tense stomach resisting, and set it on a cocktail table crowded with empty glasses stuffed with cigarette butts.

  “I want to meet him.”

  Beenie finished his drink, set the glass aside, rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder, and bounced on the balls of his feet.

  “Let’s go see the prince.”

  The low tables and couches in the VIP section were littered with gadgets; minivideo recorders, gaming handhelds, ultraportable DVD players, a small stack of phones that someone appeared to have been using for an improvised game of Jenga, thumb drives, a fistful of memory cards, and all the attendant detritus of instillation disks, twist-tied USB cables, styro-foam and cardboard packing materials, rebate cards, and low-quality AA and AAA batteries.