Sleepless

18

BEENIE WASN’T ANSWERING HIS PHONE.

He hadn’t gone with Park to the gallery. When Cager had made a point of not inviting him along, Park had been about to insist, but Beenie had shook his head. His long day was over. He had miles to ride to get back home. He was looking forward to smoking a little of the opium before the ride. Taking a bicycle in and out of the stalled and abandoned cars of L.A. was a surreal pleasure. He wanted to compound that enjoyment. And he was looking forward to sleep. He knew his sleep would not be truly dreamless, but with a little luck he wouldn’t remember the dreams when he woke.

He’d told Park not to worry, he didn’t want to go to the gallery. He didn’t want to be driven home. He wanted to ride and to sleep. Outside Denizone, when Park had reached out to shake hands, Beenie had given him a one-arm embrace that was too brief for Park to return.

“If you’re around the farm tomorrow, I’ll maybe see you there, bro.”

Park had wanted to tell him not to go to the farm. Stay away. But Cager was nearby, Twittering, texting, messaging, sending his thoughts into the night.

He planned to call Beenie early. Tell him he’d heard there was trouble at the farm. Keep clear. It could wait until then.

But then everything had gone wrong. Too much time had passed. And Beenie wasn’t answering his phone. The Washington suits had photographs of Park and Cager at the club. They had to have photos of Cager and Beenie as well.

And Beenie wasn’t answering his phone. Park pictured him with his wrists chained to ankle restraints, a bag over his head, in the air somewhere between Los Angeles and Guantanamo.

Driving southwest on Washington Boulevard, Park hit redial again, and again it flipped over to voice mail. He’d tried the call fifteen times. For half of the attempts he’d not been about to get service at all. The network was jammed.

Waiting in line at a new checkpoint just east of the PCH, Park looked back toward Hollywood. Above the north-south border of the Santa Monica Freeway, the sky was thick with gunship searchlights. Smoke rose, lit from below in flickering yellow, orange, and red. Without any elevation, it was difficult to pinpoint which areas had been blacked out, but it was clear from the quality of the ground light that entire neighborhoods were without power. Whether that was by design of SoCal TOC, caused by the usual unannounced easing of strain on the grid, or the result of an attack like the rocket Bartolome had told him about, was impossible to know.

What was clear, the only thing that was clear, was that a great deal of hell was breaking out. If he needed any further evidence, he could simply look at one of the lighted signs that loomed at intervals all over the city. The usual traffic advisories, long become a local joke, had been replaced by a single flashing message:

MARTIAL LAW HAS BEEN INVOKED IN THE FOLLOWING AREASLOS ANGELES COUNTYSANTA MONICAMALIBUWEST HOLLYWOOD

And so on. The list was long. It ended with a scrolling notice that if you were reading the message, you should go immediately to someplace where you could no longer read it. Get the hell inside. Advice that most people seemed to be heeding. The traffic had not flowed so smoothly even before the outbreak of SLP.

Park had seen the LAPD directives for martial law. He knew the extraordinary police powers invoked through Patriot II. Knowing what the police were empowered to do, he assumed the military had a weapons-free policy that would allow them to shoot at the least provocation, without regard for consequences mortal or legal.

Long before it was his turn at the checkpoint, he had hung his badge from his neck and done a mental inventory of the car to assure himself that there were no drugs or weapons anywhere but in the spare tire. When he pulled forward to the barrier of abandoned cars resting on blown-out tires and bent rims, he realized that the greatest danger was not that he would be shot as a suspected looter, but that one of the terrified young Guards might flinch at the sound of distant gunfire and riddle his car with an entire M4 clip.

A very young black man with sergeant’s bars and a drawl from well below the Mason-Dixon approached the car.

“Sir, turn off your vehicle, please, sir.”

Keeping his left hand visible on the steering wheel, Park switched off the engine with his right and brought it immediately back into view of the Guards.

“Sir, your ID, please, sir.”

Again leaving his left on the wheel, Park lifted the badge from his chest, ducked his head out of the lanyard, and offered it to the young man.

There was a pause while the sergeant raised a hand in the air, flashed several fingers at his squadmates in quick succession, like a catcher running through his signals, and stepped forward, reaching for something on his belt. Park almost ducked as the RFID interrogator was raised, a gesture that surely would have required a few rounds fired, but he recognized the device at the last moment and remained still as the Guard aimed it at the badge, pulled the trigger, read the results, and flashed another series of signals that resulted in most of the weapons in the immediate vicinity being aimed in other directions.

“Sir, Officer Haas, sir, I need to ask what your business is, sir.”

Park dropped the badge back around his neck and replaced his hands on the wheel.

“I’m on assignment, Sergeant. Venice Beach.”

“Sir, I have to ask if this assignment is urgent business, sir. If it is not, I have to request that you return to your home or domicile.”

Park knew it wasn’t by chance that this Deep South native had found his Guard unit dropped in California. Patriot II policy was to deploy the Guard away from their native states when suppressing civil unrest. The fewer the connections the soldiers had to the locals, the more easily they would pull the trigger when necessary.

Park looked at the other Guards. All as young as this one, nearly all black or brown, arrayed behind the barricade of cars that they knew would do little to stop any remotely decent firepower. Let alone provide cover from an RPG or, God forbid, a car bomb. Neither of the two Humvees parked behind the barricade had been up-armored, and only one was equipped with a heavy machine gun. The young woman behind the machine gun kept pushing her helmet up as it repeatedly tilted down over her eyes.

“Yes, Sergeant, my investigation is urgent.”

The NCO pulled a logbook from one of the side pockets of his fatigues.

“Sir, I’ll need an address, sir.”

Park gave him a random sequence of numbers and the first Venice Beach street name he thought of.

The sergeant wrote it down, returned the logbook to his pocket, nodded at Park, and leaned against the car, dipping his face close to the open window.

“Sir, I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything, sir.”

Park shook his head.

“I was just about to ask you.”

He looked over his shoulder at his command and smiled.

“He was gonna ask me what the fuck is going on. Believe that?”

A round of weary soldiers’ laughter went through the squad.

He looked back at Park.

“They ain’t told us shit. We get what y’all get from the radio. Some bad guys shot a rocket at some of our guys. We hit Little Persia. Little Russia. Things didn’t get kerfucked until we hit a Church of the New American Jesus in Hollywood and a couple flash-bangs started a fire and burned the fucking thing down. That was around thirteen hundred hours. We got rolled here by fourteen hundred. Haven’t heard shit from the space ants since.”

Park nodded.

“Wish I knew something I could tell you, Sergeant.”

The sergeant flashed another sequence of fingers, and the Humvee with the gun mount backed up a few yards to clear a space in the middle of the barricade.

“Shit, we ain’t worried.”

He pointed at the hood of the Subaru, and Park started the engine.

The sergeant looked north, where all the trouble was.

“This is America, motherfuckers. We’ll be just fine.”

He waved a hand, and Park drove through the opening. West, away from the worst of it.

The few other cars on the boulevard were driven by those whose cares were great enough to take the risk, who were stupid enough not to see the danger as real, brave enough to face it with a desire to find some way to help, or the sleepless. No reason to fear anything, they wandered the sidewalks and drove the roads. Sudden bursts of speed, violent turns, or constant meandering between lanes tipped one off that the car ahead should be given a wide berth.

After turning south onto Oxford, Park found another checkpoint at the Admiralty Way entrance to Marina Del Rey This one manned by an impromptu militia of boat owners and sail buffs who had failed to get their vessels out before the Navy sealed the marina to cut it off from use by smugglers bringing arms in to the NAJi.

Carrying sporting shotguns last used shooting skeet from the decks of their yachts, a few illegally modified assault rifles ostensibly necessary for repelling South Asian pirates but more often fired during drunken barbeques in international waters, two flare pistols, and one spear gun, they told Park to turn around and fuck off.

He showed them his badge.

They asked him who he was there to see.

He told them to get out of the way and stop interfering with police business before he put in a call to the Guard checkpoint on Washington and told them there was a well-armed insurgent group raiding the marina.

They let him pass, and he drove out Bali Way onto one of the relatively low-rent piers, parked, walked to the end of the fourth dock, found Beenie’s day cruiser floating in its slip, and crept on board, his Walther PPS in his hands.

Coming down the steps from the deck into the cabin, the boat bobbing gently, he leaned back to duck under the hatch and found his left ankle grabbed from below, his leg pulled from underneath him. Twisting, he fell to the side, his hip, elbow, and shoulder cracking against the steps. The gun slipped partially from his grasp, and he fumbled his finger inside the guard while bringing it up.

Someone waved an arm from beneath the steps.

“What the fuck! What the fuck!”

Park froze, the weapon half-raised, and waited as Beenie emerged.

“What the fuck, Park? I could have killed you, man. Hail the vessel before you come aboard.”

Park lowered his gun.

“I thought. Was anyone here?”

Beenie put down the steak knife he was holding.

“No, man. Who’s going to be here? No one is going anywhere. No one except Guards and. Oh, Jesus.”

Park followed Beenie’s eyes down to the badge hanging from his neck.

“Oh, Jesus, Park.”

Park got up slowly, stretching his arm and leg, rubbing his hip, determining that nothing was broken.

He holstered his gun.

Beenie dropped onto his bunk and put his face in his hands.

“Fuck, Park. I told you shit.”

He looked up.

“I mean, fuck. We were friends.”

Park looked around, found Beenie’s day pack and held it out to him.

“We need to fill this with anything you can’t live without.”

When they drove away from the marina Beenie’s favorite trail bike was in the back of Park’s car along with his helmet, elbow and knee pads, riding clips, and halogen lamp, along with a solo tent and mummy bag strapped to the frame with loops of bungee cord. The day pack was in Beenie’s lap. Inside were his laptop, several accessories, a jumble of thumb drives and cards, tangled chargers, an ounce of British Columbian weed, some clean socks, biking shorts and jerseys, his phone, a copy of On the Road, a set of silk long underwear, and a thick envelope filled with pictures of his wife and a letter he had never been able to read, written by her for him to open after she died.

Park had helped Beenie collect those things, opening drawers and digging under piles of dirty laundry as directed while Beenie changed into hiking pants with zip-off lower legs, an EMS Techwick shirt, and a boot-style pair of mountain biking shoes. He’d recognized the unopened light blue envelope with the frayed edges not because he’d ever seen it before, but because Beenie had described it to him one evening nearly a year before. On the anniversary of her death, uncharacteristically sober, he had told Park about it while they waited in line at Randy’s Donuts. He’d told him that he kept trying to lose it. Carelessly flipping it to the back of a drawer, finding it after a few months and stuffing it into his pocket, leaving it there when he tossed the pants into a laundry pile, only to have it fall out before they went into a machine weeks later. On the boat, Park had found it poking from the bottom of a stack of cycling magazines, pulled it free, and, without asking, slid it in with the photos.

In the car, Beenie put the finishing touches on a joint and showed it to Park.

“Any objections?”

Park shook his head; Beenie lit the joint and took a hit.

“Were you going to bust me?”

Park concentrated on the car ahead of him. It zigged across two lanes as if to make a last-second right at Ocean Avenue and then zagged back to the middle, straddling the broken white line, blocking both westbound lanes.

Beenie blew smoke out the open window.

“If whatever’s happening hadn’t happened, were you going to bust me?”

Park shifted into fourth, swung the Subaru into a gap in the sparse eastbound traffic, and passed the car, stealing a glance at the stiff-necked driver, an old man wearing no shirt, howling like a dog along to a German death metal song that was cracking his speakers.

He pulled back into the westbound lanes.

“Yes. I would have busted you.”

Beenie looked at the joint pinched between his fingers and frowned.

“But now?”

Park drove them over the small bridge that crossed the Grand Canal, the water on either side scummed with a thick pelt of algae broken by flotillas of plastic bottles.

“If I bust you, I think someone might kill you.”

Beenie brought the joint to his lips, took it away without inhaling, and flicked it out the window.

“What’s it about, Park?”

Park edged the car to the curb on Strongs Drive.

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.”

Park 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.