Sleepless

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 answer. 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.

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 toward 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.”