Sleepless

by Charlie Huston

  Driving north on Whittier, I could hear shots fired in Hollywood.

  Everything west of La Cienega and north of Beverly appeared to be blacked out. Even the hills were dark. Not in Bel Air, but east of Coldwater Canyon.

  The L.A. Country Club golf course was still green this side of Wilshire. Hidden from the traffic along the boulevard, they’re still running the sprinklers. I could hear them, softer than the gunfire and more constant. A big house with a crescent drive. I had to park a block away. The street was clogged with cars. Smart Cars mixed in with battered diesels adapted for bio, but mostly the kind of sports cars and SUVs that Rose likes to run her key over if she walks past one in the street.

  She used to only talk about doing that. But a few moths ago she did it for real. I looked at her, and she shrugged. “If not now, when?”

  She’d have worn her keys out at the XF-11 house.

  Security at the foot of the drive. Bouncers I may have seen at Denizone, wearing plain black T-shirts and slacks for this job. They asked to see my invitation, and I showed them my phone, the email and attachment Cager had sent me displayed on the screen. There was no bracelet, but they offered me a gift bag that I declined.

  Usually when I make deliveries to parties with gift bags, I take them. Rose and I would go through them at home and laugh. Then I would catalogue the contents and put the bags in the back of the closet. But every now and then I’d find a bottle of apricot-lemon body wash in the shower and know that Rose had been in the bags.

  Is it all hypocrisy, the things I laughed at when Rose did them? Keying expensive cars? Stealing useless evidence that I only catalogued to avoid any suggestion that I took gifts from suspects?

  Should I have been mad at her? At myself for allowing it?

  Smoke spewed from somewhere behind the house. Not a fire. Artificial smoke, like at one of Rose’s rock concerts. A show she might drag me to because she had free tickets that a band gave her when she worked on their video.

  A huge cloud, from a big machine, or several of them. Projected on the smoke, a loop of video, a double-prop plane with an odd tail assembly. A stutter of stills in black and white, and then color and movement as it crashed into several houses, setting the last on fire. And repeating.

  I went inside. He was out back. Through the smoke pouring from the machines, lying on the end of a diving board over an empty pool, his legs dangling. He was holding his phone in the air and waving his arm back and forth. He saw me and asked, “Do you have signal?”

  I looked at my phone; it showed two bars. He pointed at my phone. Said, “It’s because your phone is mostly a phone. It’s telling, the features we pack our phones with. Mine is weighted heavily toward messaging.

  When it comes to small talk, I’m more comfortable in text. Chat upsets me in the personal mode. Text conversations of some depth expose a person’s emotional states more clearly to me. But it’s the gaming components of my phone that make it less reliable as a phone.” He sat up and picked up his bag from the foot of the diving board and dropped the phone inside and said, “Let’s move. Not having signal is like being a stateless person. I don’t like it.”

  He put the bag over his shoulder and stood up and walked up the board. It bobbed slightly under him. He looked into the empty pool and said, “If I fell in and broke my neck it would make this house famous again. But not for very long.”

  He had something he wanted me to see, and we walked through the cloud of smoke toward the house. He pointed up at the projection and said it was a “Fahlala installation. His commentary on the end of the age of manned flight. Have you seen the Reapers yet? They deployed here this week. Flying robot death machines. Very hard to shoot down in Armored Assault. Not that I really play anymore.”

  His bodyguards came out of the bushes at the edge of the yard. He told them he wanted them “lurking in the darkness.” Imelda said she knew that, but they couldn’t do it if he was going inside. He looked at the crowd packing the inside of the house and pointed at it and said, “Make an entrance for us, please.” Imelda went into the house ahead of us. She had a kind of crowd jujitsu, applying extra weight to someone’s back and shifting whole knots of bodies at once. We followed, Magda behind us making sure no one tried to slipstream Cager’s route.

  A wall in the living room was covered in black velvet paintings, portraits of sleepless with their eyes made huge and weepy like the little girls and puppies and cats by Margaret Keane.

  Rose had a Keane print on the back of the bathroom door in the big house she shared on Telegraph. I told her it made me feel sad and guilty. She said that’s what made it good kitsch.

  The paintings of the sleepless made me angry.

  Cager was talking about Imelda and Magda. He wanted to know what I thought of their “look.” I told him they looked effective. He said he thought the Matrix thing was “over” and he wanted something new. He was thinking about Road Warrior, but he was afraid it might be too early. He didn’t elaborate on what it was too early for. But I knew what he meant.

  I rarely want to hit people just for being who they are. But I wanted to hit him. Instead I told him the truth, I told him he was right, it was too early. I told him he should try Blade Runner. He liked that. I knew he would.

  There weren’t many people in the upstairs room that looked over the pool. Hardly any. The gallerist who had curated the work there stood near the door. Two teenagers in cloaks and buckskin leggings sat on the floor in the middle of the room. And a slight, sweaty man, clucking his tongue obsessively, muscles jumping on his pale bald scalp, skin hanging loose on his upper arms. Sleepless, he paced back and forth across the small room. He was talking to himself, I think, saying, “But it doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t say anything.” The walls were paneled in brand-new plywood veneer. Framed photographs in chrome plate frames from Kmart or Target. The photos were all of glowing white abstract shapes, loops and curls, edges tinged cobalt, on a deep black background.

  Cager nodded at the gallerist and pulled me to the middle of the room near the two teenagers. Both of them stared openly at him.

  I started to say something. Trying to steer the conversation to where I needed it to go. But he wouldn’t listen. He told me to be quiet and to “look at the future.”

  I looked at the photographs. They all looked the same.

  Before I drove from Venice I chipped a claw from the Shabu dragon and let it dissolve in my mouth. It made my tongue numb and tasted like bleach and gardenias. A headache was starting at the base of my neck and climbing over my skull.

  Cager asked me if I saw it.

  I looked again, and I saw it. One of the photos was SLP. A huge negative image blowup of the prion. Looking again, I recognized others from the research I had done after Rose’s diagnosis. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy Kuru. Creutzfeldt-Jakobs disease. Chronic wasting disease.

  The gallerist pointed at the photos, explaining, “Those are the classics, the past. BSE. CJD. CWD. Kuru. Scrapie. These are a series of SLP, the present. The artist has lost his entire immediate family. Mother, father, two brothers, wife, and three sons. All were very early SLP victims. Each of these are photographs of a single SL prion isolated from the brain tissue of his deceased family members. The photographs are end product, but process is the point. The artist is a designed materials specialist.”

  The gallerist pointed at the final series of photos. He told us, “Those are the future. Designed materials. The artist customizes proteins, refolding them, creating new prions. Using applied nucleation, better known as conformational influence, the same process by which prions cause healthy proteins to malform, he allows his self-assembling systems of prions to grow. And then kills them. But not before preserving a visual ghost.”

  The pacing sleepless halted and raised his voice, “Shuguang Zhang Zhang told us, ‘We have had the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the plastic age. The future is the designed materials age.’”

  The gallerist nodded t
oward the sleepless and smiled at us, “Mr. Afronzo, have you met Ian Berry?”

  Cager shook his head and faced the sleepless man and stuck out his hand, “No, that’s why I’m here.”

  A wave of twitches, Rose’s doctor called them fasciculations, ran over the man’s body. He stuck out his own hand, but it waved from side to side. Cager took it in both of his and held it steady. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Thank you for showing me something new.”

  Either the man pulled his hand free or it jerked free of its own will, I couldn’t tell which. Just like I couldn’t tell if the expression on the man’s face was true disgust or if it was the result of his musculature run out of control.

  Cager turned to me and gestured at the man and smiled and said, “Haas, meet the artist.” Ian Berry offered me his jerking hand, and I took it. His eyelids kept fluttering. He said to me, “Don’t be afraid, it’s just the suffering.”

  I pulled my hand back, but he didn’t let go. He asked me, “How long has it been?” I shook my head. He asked me, “How long have you been sleepless?” I shook my head again. He let go of my hand and started pacing again and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just the suffering. It’s just the future coming.”

  20

  THERE WERE THREE TABLES IN MY LIVING ROOM. LEST THIS be thought cluttered, please keep in mind that the house was open floor plan, the kitchen, dining, and living areas all sweeping into one another. Keep also in mind that one of the tables was the very small chrome Dadox cube on which I kept my business phones. The large oval Thor coffee table was central to the room, planted diagonally in the middle of a luxuriously shaggy white alpaca rug. The third table was a rather cheap Sui, chosen because its light color offset the dark hardwood it stood on, and because its ten inches of height placed its surface just slightly over a foot below the top of the Mies van der Rohe daybed it complemented. That difference in height was perfect for Saturday afternoons when I would sprawl on the daybed while listening to live broadcasts from the Met. Without looking or stretching I could find my espresso, any pastry I might have allowed myself, or a bowl of in-season grapes. On the rare occasions I had dinner company we generally ate on the deck or removed our shoes and sat on the rug at the Thor table.

  The men in the room with me at this time had not removed their shoes. Nor had they placed me on the floor and tied my ankles to the thick sculpted end pieces that flowed directly out of the base into the upper surface of the Thor. For that matter, they had not pilloried me on the Dadox cube, arching my back across it, wire running from my neck, lines stretched to my wrists and ankles, the tension of my own muscles keeping my limbs splayed. Instead, they had sat me on the daybed and tied my ankles to the legs of the Sui. Nothing wrong with this arrangement in principle, until the lights went out.

  Curling, I hunched my shoulders so that as I rose I would minimize tension on the wire that ran from my neck to my wrists. The weight of my upper body coming forward was not enough to lift me from the daybed, but my ankles had been tied with my feet quite flat against the floor. Pressing down with the muscles in my upper legs, I lifted myself, lunged, and fell over the Sui table atop the man kneeling between my legs with the soldering iron.

  For a moment the man was pinned between my body and the table. I heard a clunk that might have been the soldering iron, then a cracking of wood as our combined weight splintered the rather delicate piece and I tumbled, tucking my head, turning my shoulder, feeling the wire dig into my throat, the rope on my ankles snagging before slipping loose from the broken table legs.

  Pain cannot be ignored. However, it can be endured. When necessary, a great deal of pain can be endured. Just ask any mother.

  Naked on the floor, in a litter of kindling, third-degree burns on the backs of my knees and inner thighs, I had a moment of instability at the thought of a world that could twice see a man unclothed in such circumstances in the span of a single life. Pain returned me to a semblance of balance. Indeed, I experienced a tremendous amount of pain in silence while listening very carefully for the voice of the man who had been burning me. There was a shuffle of movement that quickly subsided, the other men in the room shifting their positions slightly from where they had been when the lights went out, followed by a single spoken syllable coming from that man on the floor as he made them aware of his own position so as not to end up in the line of fire.

  “Here.”

  “Here,” as it turned out, was just a foot or two away. I knew this already because one of the protrusions poking his shoulder wasn’t a bit of broken table, was, in fact, one of my toes. But the word did serve a purpose, allowing me to develop a clear mental picture of just where his face was. So that when I lashed out with the heel of my other foot, I felt the very distinct sensation of a man’s nose caving in.

  He made another sound, long and loud, and I used it to cover the noise I made as I kicked both legs high into the air, brought them down, and rolled up to my feet, pulling the wire yet deeper into my flesh.

  The initial shock of darkness was fading from my eyes. The canopy of stars that might have given some light during a typical blackout was screened by the smoke that was capping the basin after a day of fires. That left the fires themselves to illuminate the room. A handful of blazes, flickering, none closer than half a mile. There was little at all that could be seen. Shadows of various thickness.

  I changed my ground, keeping close to the north wall to avoid the spot where the floor creaked, and scurried to the kitchen. There was similar shifting happening in the living and dining areas. The scream of the man whose face I’d ruined had passed, settling into a series of moans and grunts, punctuated by gurgles as the blood ran out of his sinuses into his throat and he hacked it up so as not to drown.

  The other three would be attempting to seal the room. The one who had been standing watch at the windows would be very near that same position to cover the glass door. In fact, I could see a small hump of darkness against the slightly brighter darkness outside, not a regular part of the room’s silhouette. The man who had been going through my possessions would be moving to block the hall that led back to the bedrooms and bathrooms. He had the greatest distance to traverse, the most obstacles to avoid. And he would, no doubt, make the most noise. The battle-scarred man would position himself at the entryway that opened from the front door into the living area. A short direct path that would put him closest to me.

  I crouched behind the kitchen island; heard when the man crossing the room stepped into the wreckage of the table and cursed involuntarily; felt the surge in the room’s tension as his coworkers mentally scolded him; and gently ran my fingers over the kitchen tools hanging on the side of the island until I was fully confident that I understood the orientation of the poultry shears on their hook. Lifting it free, I undid the clasp at the end of the grips with my pinkie. The spring bolt opened silently. I drew a long, slow breath and, with a minimum of arching, slipped the upward-curving lower blade between the wire and the small of my back. Nonetheless, the noose around my neck had been drawn beyond the point where it would allow any more arching at all. Tugged a final three centimeters, it sealed my larynx. The wire dropped into the bone notch at the base of the lower blade, I squeezed, there was a moment of resistance, and the wire snapped with a clear twang.

  The reaction was immediate. The floor squeaked.

  Yes, it may not seem very much, but it was a squeak that revealed a great deal of subtext. First, it told me that either the battle-scarred man or the man blocking off the back of the house was approaching me. Second, the fact that I’d heard no footsteps told me that whoever it was had removed his shoes. Third, it told me they were not inclined to simply open fire on me. This final point suggesting that there was more question and answer left to engage in should they recapture me.

  Sufficiently motivated, I hurt myself. I inflicted this pain on myself by lying on my back, drawing my knees up, curling tightly, and slipping my bound hands under my bottom and do
wn the length of my legs. Being naked would usually make this maneuver much easier than it would be clothed, but the friction on my burns more than compensated for the case. It was also impossible to execute without making a great amount of slithery noise. Noise that drew a response in the form of a quick patter of footfalls.

  I still couldn’t breathe. It was that fact that had caused the urgency with which I brought my hands from behind my back. I’d hoped the first thing I’d be doing with them was to dig the wire out of the rut it had worn in my neck. Instead, I joined them together at my chest in a prayerful gesture as I came to my knees.

  When the man crossing the room came around the island, he came low, arms spread, a knife in his right fist, blade pointing down the length of his forearm, edge facing out. Ready to cut or stab, or catch an incoming blade. An advanced knife-fighting technique.

  Intimately close, I could see the shadow of him quite well. I’ve no doubt he could see me even better. At sixty, one does not play games with the southern California sun, I’d not had a tan in decades. I was, I daresay, pale as a ghost. With such an excellent target at hand, he attacked, coming closer yet, leading with the blade, a slash that was meant to drive me flopping onto my back as I tried to avoid it. From that position I might scuttle farther away and into the arms of the man by the glass door. A pitiful defense, but reasonable, as the only other option was to fall forward at his feet, fair game for him to drop his knee into the back of my neck and pin me while his friends came to bind me.

  I fell forward.

  Things went awry for my attacker only when I separated my forearms and exposed the curved blades of the poultry shears I’d been hiding. The shears are made by Wüsthof. Stainless steel, the lower blade has a serrated edge. I’d allowed them to spring open a few centimeters as I brought them down on his right foot. When they sliced through his instep and out his sole, both tips bit into the hardwood floor that extended into the kitchen. Why a man would dress entirely in black but wear white athletic socks is beyond me.