Sleepless. Part 33

He turned the empty gla.s.s in his hands.

"Sorry. It's late. I'm tired. Sometimes the frustration just comes out. It's. It's hard to look at the world and. It's hard."

He set the gla.s.s on the little table next to his chair.

"We were talking about Junior. And his interpretation of business. Long story shorter, I should have paid more attention, trusted my gut, said no. He turned it into a game. That crazy distribution, the caches, making people, sleepless or their family members or friends, stumble around town with RFID scanners looking for hidden bottles of Dreamer. Like it was a d.a.m.n Easter egg hunt. And of course he lost interest, anyway. Just let someone else run the whole thing for him. Supposed to turn the money around, put it back in, buy more Dreamer, put it on the market, take his margin and do whatever he wanted with it. Put it in that sad club. I don't know. But he didn't. None of that money came back, not to pay the advance I gave him to acquire the first pallets, not to buy more. It was a small loss in terms of A-ND, but it needed to be covered. I did it out of my own personal accounts. On principle. It was my mistake. I paid for it. And I confronted the boy, told him to return what hadn't been sold. Make good his debts. He offered me a spreadsheet of GPS coordinates. Told me he wasn't even getting paid for most of the Dreamer. He was trading it outright for goods to equip his gaming teams. Bartering for 'character art.' Other things I didn't understand. To my shame, I slapped him. Never did that before. Don't believe anything good comes of striking your flesh and blood. And, well, that was that. It didn't matter much what he was doing with the Dreamer once I covered the loss. His distribution method is slow, inefficient, and cruel, but you are correct, it's nearly invisible. I asked some people in law enforcement to keep an eye on the streets, told them that some Dreamer might have leaked from the system. They understood. Set something up so they'd know if rumors started spreading, make sure the general public didn't find out. Word got out that my son was dealing Dreamer, half the country would likely get burned down by the other half. We're just that close to the edge of what people can understand and endure without running mad in the streets. And. And that's about it. Pathetic is how it sounds. When I say it all aloud."

Park stared at the man.

"The murders."

Senior nodded.

"The murders."

He shrugged.

"I never met the people Junior was in business with. But they were doing the nuts and bolts for him. Maybe they stepped on another dealer's turf without realizing it. Started selling to sleepless south of the Santa Monica. We supply some very aggressive Dreamer franchises down there. Very protective of their clientele. And very traditional in terms of how they deal with compet.i.tors. Gangland sound like their style. Maybe it wasn't even about Dreamer. That gold farming, if the numbers Junior showed me are real, that's serious money. Could have been a compet.i.tor in that s.p.a.ce. But Junior? Pulling the trigger? Or having those two ex-SEAL supermodels of his do it for him? No. He's a, a difficult boy, frivolous, but there's no killing in him. I may not be best friends with my son, but I know him that well. That well, at least."

They sat in silence for a moment.

Senior looked at the empty snifter again.

"I keep telling myself I may as well have another, but I hear my wife saying that one is enough."

Park was slumping slightly, his elbow coming to rest on his thigh.

"Sir. SLP."

Senior kept staring at the gla.s.s.

"No, you're wrong about that. I wish I could tell you we poisoned the well. That there was a reason for it. Greed. It could be undone. But there is no peace of mind to be had there."

He looked at Park.

"We did it, all right, people, I mean. We did it, but it wasn't about greed. It was about hunger. Are you certain you want to hear this?"

Park didn't move.

Senior closed his eyes.

"Not enough food. The people who were paying attention, they knew it was coming. No shock to a lot of us when the price of corn and beans and rice started to jump. Too many people. Not enough food. Poor distribution for what there is. The hungry getting hungrier. At its root, yes, it was market exploitation, seeking to take advantage of a ma.s.sive demand, but it was also plain necessary."

Park had straightened.

"What was necessary, sir?"

Senior opened his eyes.

"Know anything about transgenic plants, Officer?"

Park shook his head.

Senior nodded.

"GMOs?"

Park shook his head again.

Senior looked once more at his gla.s.s.

"Well, you've eaten a load of them. Genetically modified organisms. Unless you're hooked up with an organic shared farming operation, you've eaten plenty of transgenic maize. Genetically altered corn. High-yield corn. More specific to this discussion, pest-resistant corn. Heard of a thing called a European corn borer? No, no reason why you should unless you're a farmer. Far back as 1938, in France, they were spraying corn with something called Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt. A naturally occurring biotoxin that kills beetles, flies, moths, b.u.t.terflies, and the European corn borer. Problem with a spray is, it wears off the surface. If you could get the stuff inside the corn, then you'd be set. Corn borer eats corn with Bt in it and it ends up with holes in its digestive tract. Dies. Bt, it contains two cla.s.ses of toxins: cytolysins, or Cyt toxins, and crystal delta-endotoxins, or Cry toxins. Those are the ones that kill the corn borers. Smart people, they identified the genes encoding the Cry proteins."

Park licked dry lips.

Senior picked a new thread from his bathrobe.

"Yes, proteins; it's all about proteins. Cry9C is a pesticidal protein, a naturally occurring product of Bt. But it can be produced as a designed material. And introduced to the genetic code of regular old-fashioned corn. And it was. There were a few fusses about it, fears that people were reacting to the Cry9C, allergies, but n.o.body died, the fuss faded. And what people didn't realize was that it was far too late to go back anyhow. h.e.l.l, by 1999 thirty percent of all corn, globally I'm saying, was Bt-modified. Sure, there were concerns around the turn of the century; Cry9C corn was supposed to be limited to nonhuman consumption. But if you use it for feed, and humans eat the animals, well, proteins don't die. They don't wear out. They just are. By 2008 it was all moot. Between world hunger and ethanol, the market for corn was booming. In August '08 the FDA proposed eliminating all safety limits on Bt toxins in transgenic foods. And soon after it was so. Even if they hadn't, the horse was out of the barn. In 2001, down in Mexico, transgenic artificial DNA had been found in traditional cornfields. It was spreading, cross-pollinating. Anyhow, Cry9C wasn't the issue. It was Cry9E."

He was wrapping his finger with thread again.

"They tried to make a super bug killer. A protein that would kill off all corn pests. Superresilient corn. That was in 2000. It worked. Too well. Killed off just about any bug that crawled on the corn, pest or not. Well, even the lab boys knew that wouldn't fly in the ecosystem. But it was already out. Cry9E corn got mixed in with Cry9C, no one really knows how. And it got distributed. And it cross-pollinated. And there was what a white paper I read once called Lateral Transfer of Antibiotic Resistance Marker Genes."

Park had leaned forward, focusing on the other man's mouth. An insistent thrum, as if his hands were cupped over his ears, grew within his head.

Senior was pulling the thread tight, the tip of his finger becoming intensely purple.

"And that's it. Cry9E, a designed materials pesticidal protein. We ate it. Or we ate something that ate it. Or we breathed it when it was burned as ethanol. And what it was meant to do to the digestive system of an insect, it did to our brains. It spread through conformational influence and ate holes in our brains. Innocent as all h.e.l.l, trying to feed and fuel the ma.s.ses, some a.s.shole in a lab somewhere created a species-killing prion. Without even knowing it."

He pulled the thread tighter.

"Took eight years from 2000 for it to spread, become recognizable as something clearly other than fatal familial insomnia or mad cow or CJD. And another two years for us to get here. One out of ten symptomatic."

Park stood.

"What's?"

He looked around the room.

"How do we? We have to."

He looked at Senior.

"We have to. Symptomatic?"

Senior rose.

"Ten percent symptomatic. Infection rates are way beyond that level. And it's still spreading."

Park took one step and froze.

"People are, no one has said anything. Who knows? People are eating corn. People are."

Senior took his empty gla.s.s to the bar.

"No one figured this out quickly. By the time anyone knew where SLP came from. It was. h.e.l.l. And what do you do? Tell people to stop eating corn? Tell them, 'We know it's all you have, all you can afford, and we know we can't afford to distribute alternatives to you, so just be quiet and starve, will you?' I saw a projection, one of these think tank types, a projection based on what would happen if someone could just kill off all the corn, spray it, something; this man's projection combined an a.s.sumed zero yield in corn with the impact of drought on rice and ended up with ma.s.s cannibalism in less than a decade. Socially accepted cannibalism."

He set his snifter on the bar.

"There's no one to tell. There's no one to save. There's no going back. A lot of people, most of us, are going to die. It's going to take some years, but that's the endgame. Society, what's out that front door, it's going to keep breaking down smaller and smaller. People are going to get more and more afraid. They're going to rely on what they know, what they can count on. It's too big already, too big to stop. People, people who know, people like me, we're just trying to tap the brakes, slow everything down, keep it as normal as possible, keep people as comfortable as possible. As long as possible."

He took the stopper from the bottle of cognac, then put it back.

"The slower it happens, the better the chance it won't all just crash and burn. The less people know, the lower the chance they'll go crazy all at once and just tear everything down. And the projections on that scenario, you don't want to know about those. If the statistics I've seen are half-right, there's still a better than even chance that someone somewhere will set off a nuke before this all shakes out. And then all the models break down. No one can say who might start pushing b.u.t.tons."

He faced Park, the forgotten thread still around his finger.

"People in despair, Haas, they don't curl up and die. They are foolish and dangerous. We've lost the fight against SLP It had won before we knew what it was. Now we're fighting despair. Trying to convince people there's a reason to watch TV, go to work, clean up after the dog, pay the bills, obey traffic laws, not go next door and kill your neighbor's kid for playing his guitar too loud in the garage."

He noticed the thread and began to unwind it.

"Just let them believe for a little longer that there is hope and a reason to live."

He dangled the thread from between his fingers.

"Because some people will live. There's an immunity. Something to do with alterations in the prion gene. Whether you're heterozygotic plays into it. Some people are going to live."

He pinched the ends of the thread and stretched it between his hands.

"And we have to make sure there's something left for them."

The thread broke.

Park finished taking the step he had started moments before.

"I'm going to arrest your son."

Senior dropped the pieces of string.

"Haas. No. What is going to happen is my people, those former Mossad and Shabak agents that work for me, they are going to escort you from the property. At the Bel Air gates you will be photographed by the Thousand Storks contractors that handle security up here. Then you will be driven to your car. And you will go home. And you will never come back here again, or come near my son, or you will be killed. Now, I don't expect you'll accept anything from me. Not as a bribe, I mean, but in the way of help. Nonetheless, I would like to help you and your family. All you have to do is ask, but you must ask now."

He stopped speaking, and nothing was said in the room for a moment, and he nodded and continued.

"As I expected. However, you had among your possessions when you were picked up, a bottle of Dreamer. It will still be with your possessions when they are returned to you at your car."

He tightened the belt of his bathrobe.

"In this house, the main house, I mean, are many members of my extended family. They are here because I can care for them. Most of them are sleepless. Some are in the suffering. They have almost unlimited access to Dreamer. They can take a cap or two whenever they feel disoriented or in pain, and sleep and dream. And wake feeling almost like themselves. Unlike most anyone else in the world, they can do that for as long as several months, until they die. Not just the last few weeks like they do in the hospitals. Or, if they choose, if they are tired and spent and sad with the world, they can swallow twelve to eighteen caps of Dreamer at once and go deeply to sleep. The sleep lasts for several minutes to several hours, it is characterized by a general relaxation of all muscles, brain waves fall into continuous deltas, profound REM dreaming, no indications of unsettled or unpleasant dreams, and as the muscles relax further, the lungs slowly stop expanding, and the heart stops beating. From everything I have seen, it is a peaceful and merciful death."

He stood at the door.

"As I say, that bottle of Dreamer will be with your possessions when you are sent home. It is yours. To do with what you will."

He twisted the k.n.o.b.

"Odd to think, I'd not have met you if it wasn't for my son's unwillingness to use a proper security detail. I'm forced to have my boys spy on him from a distance. That's the only reason they caught wind of the man at your heels. If it had just been you, I don't imagine I'd have gotten involved. But I saw the file on that man. Jasper. No last name. Never a good sign, no last name. Not someone you want near your family. Some of my people had it in their heads the two of you were working together. But I can see pretty clearly they were mistaken. Any idea why he was following you?"

Park was at sea now, barely treading water, so he saved his breath.

Senior patted his hair.

"Well, I wouldn't say it was nothing to be concerned about, drawing the attention of such a man, but he won't be an issue for you or yours. Or for anybody. And the world will be a better place without him."

He opened the door.

"I'm grateful to him, in any case, for giving me an excuse to meet you. It was a pleasure, Officer Haas. I wish you peace of mind. Goodbye."

He stepped out of the room, leaving Park alone in the new world.

Chapter 24.

ROSE GARDEN HILLER, STAUNCHLY FEMINIST, LIKED HER OWN last name. So she kept it. But she thought hyphenated last names were stupid and was happy to give her daughter the name Haas.

She was born in 1982. Her parents were divorced but remained on friendly terms and shared the raising of their daughter, though she did live primarily with her mother in what was little more than a cabin in the Berkeley hills.

When forced by circ.u.mstances she could not thwart to fill out any official paperwork, Rose's mother would describe her profession as Social Activist. She and her ex had set divorce terms that did not include alimony. She'd refused any offer of "patriarchal patronage." She was, however, practical enough to have agreed to accept a stipend on Rose's behalf. There was no hypocrisy. Every penny of the checks she received was allocated to Rose's care. Any money left over at the end of the month went into Rose's college fund. She fudged only very slightly in that she occasionally used a small amount of Rose's money to help cover the utilities. Rationalizing to herself that water and power were both necessary to raising a healthy child, but always doing her best to eke the difference out of her own earnings so that she could pay back what she had taken out.

One of Rose's earliest memories, perhaps her single earliest, she couldn't be certain, was of riding on the back of her mother's Schwinn, holding her arms out straight from her shoulders, airfoiling her hands in the breeze as they careened down the steep potholed streets into town. Days spent at co-op vegetable gardens, on picket lines, going door-to-door with pet.i.tions, at the campaign offices of independent candidates for local office, watching her mother holding young women's hands at Planned Parenthood, and then sleeping in the same seat, as her mother pushed the bike back up the hills in the evening if no one from one of the causes had been able to put it in the back of her Volvo and drive them home.

Her father was a lawyer. Devoted to social change, but not so much that he was willing to work totally without recompense, he was a junior, eventually full, partner at a firm that specialized in environmental law. An early memory of days with her father involved, not coincidentally, standing unrestrained on the pa.s.senger seat with her face stuck above the windscreen of his 1973 Porsche 911 roadster as he drove them across the Golden Gate Bridge from his Marin home to his office in the city. Mornings spent in progressive pre-K, afternoons tagging along with him to inspect a stretch of wetlands where abuses were suspected, sitting on his office floor in a small corral of law books, being pa.s.sed off to one of the women he dated monogamously for long periods of time before becoming distracted and gently showing them the way out of his life, women who almost invariably took her to the Exploratorium, then being bundled into the Porche for a sleepy ride back to the house for a spaghetti dinner and a bedtime song, Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."

Parker Haas had been a surprise. In truth, he had been more of a tectonic shift in everything she had ever thought she wanted and desired from life. What she thought she'd wanted was unfettered freedom. A long string of lovers who were strikingly beautiful to look at but emotionally uncomplicated. Men and women who were, she would freely admit, not unlike her father in those qualities. Whether she chose to finish her fine arts degree or not, she wanted to pursue her interest in digital video manipulations. What she called, when pressed by a particularly cute grad student who taught one of her studio cla.s.ses, "culturally ironic metatations." Said with utter seriousness and no pretense. She wanted children, or a child, but couldn't fathom marriage. She welcomed the idea of a coparent, but only if that person could be as respectful of her time with the child as her parents had always been of each other's.

When, during her soph.o.m.ore year at Cal, her father died of a heart attack at forty-six, she found she wanted to stay close to her mother, who, it turned out, had been secretly and irreparably heartbroken the moment he had sat next to her on their bed three weeks after he had turned twenty-nine and told her that he thought their roots were too tangled and he needed new soil. The heartbreak was revealed at home after his memorial service, after the spilling of his ashes in the bay, when she collapsed in the middle of the kitchen floor and began wailing. A wail that continued intermittently for three days. Rose had had no idea of the depth of her mother's love for her father. She bestowed her own love freely and with abandon. She loved her parents, her surviving grandparents, her two aunts, three uncles, and five cousins, she loved her many friends, she loved her lovers. But she loved all of them lightly. As if the wide disburs.e.m.e.nt of her love had diluted it somewhat. What she saw from her mother in those three days, and not infrequently over the rest of her mother's life, was alien and terrifying. Pa.s.sions in both her parents had been reserved for cases of social injustice, the idiocies of governments, wonder in nature, and certain works of art. She knew that emotion of that intensity focused on another person was binding. Contrary to the freedom she saw as her natural element. It shocked her. Yet, rather often, usually in the day or two after she had jettisoned an especially endearing lover, she sometimes caught herself reimagining that display of grief, subst.i.tuting herself for her mother. Those imaginings were never very detailed, they took place not in her mother's kitchen but in a blank nons.p.a.ce, the fate of her lost love was never specified, nor was his or her ident.i.ty. She literally could not imagine who it was she might suffer for so. If she had forced herself to go deeper into this fantasy, to construct a vague ideal, that person would not in the least have resembled Park.

She couldn't remember the name of the boy she'd gone to The Game with. She couldn't remember why she'd agreed to go to The Game at all. The annual meeting between Cal and Stanford was a local holiday and call to arms, but her interest in sports faded the moment she walked from the soccer field where she played a bruising, slide-tackling style of defense in occasional pickup games. She could remember the boy's ridiculously handsome face. Vulnerable to beautiful things, it was that face that had blinded her to the fact that he was clearly a p.r.i.c.k. As the day and the game had both ground along, his p.r.i.c.kish nature had risen on the tide of beer he swilled. Hardly a teetotaler herself, Rose was nonetheless disgusted by anyone who couldn't hold his own. Uninterested in the game, rapidly finding her date's face less and less of interest, she began to people watch the crowd, and found as her eyes swept back and forth that the same young man in the Stanford section several rows away seemed to be just looking away from her every time her eyes fell upon him.

Her first thought regarding Park was out of place. Not just out of place in the stadium, not just out of place wearing a red sweatshirt in that blot of red fans in the middle of the blue and gold crowd, not just out of place sharing a high five with one of his schoolmates after the Cardinal sacked Cal's quarterback, but out of place in his skin. Under his hair, behind his eyes, on top of his feet, out of place in all his physical dimensions. She couldn't understand how anyone could be watching the game when there was such a unique spectacle to behold: a man entirely without ease. His discomfort was profound. She knew he would misinterpret her looks but couldn't keep from staring at him whenever he looked away from her. She wished for a camera. Why hadn't she brought a camera? She needed to shoot him, needed video evidence of his fabulous awkwardness. Someone started a wave, and it washed over them. She watched as he refused to lift his arms in the air, but did faintly shrug his shoulders and flap his hands. Later, in the jumble of bodies pouring out of Memorial Stadium down toward University Drive, she'd see him ahead, hanging at the end of a trail of fellow Stanford supporters. With little effort she'd steered her drunken date through campus, across Bancroft, and followed Park into a house party hosted by a Cardinal alum who'd washed up on Durant Avenue.

It wasn't long before Park noticed her. But he didn't approach until her date, realizing he'd been dragged into the den of the enemy, began acting up and hurling abuse about the room. Asked to leave by the host, he snapped his fingers at Rose, who showed him her middle finger, and then he walked out after calling her a c.u.n.t. She saw Park, standing nearby and straining to appear disengaged from the scene that had caught everyone else's attention. And she knew that he'd just barely held himself back from taking a swing at the p.r.i.c.k.

He was clearly a difficult man. Awkward, judgmental, opinionated, guarded, uncomfortably intense, possibly violent, pensive, emotionally constrained. He possessed definite stalker potential. A list of traits any one of which could disqualify a potential lover, any two of which in combination most certainly would. Not that she had any intention at all of sleeping with him, but if she was going to somehow incorporate the idea of the man into her art, she had to at least speak with him.