Sleepless. Part 34

The p.r.i.c.k left, the unsettled moment settled, someone told her she should stay until it was clear the p.r.i.c.k wasn't lurking outside, or at least not leave without company. A woman offered to call the campus escort service, Rose shook her head, said she'd stay awhile, walked to Park, and put out her hand. "I'm Rose. I was kind of f.u.c.king staring at you at the stadium." He took her hand. "Parker Haas. Yes, I noticed that. It was unnerving. I'm leaving. Would you come with me?"

She left the party with him and discovered that her a.s.sumptions about him had been more or less correct, except they left out his open honesty, thoughtfulness, generosity, remarkable manners, dry humor, eclectic and deep knowledge, challenging intelligence, and amber eyes that compensated more than evenly for his windburned angular features and narrow build. She took him home after they'd walked most of the night, slept with him, woke a few hours later to make love with him for the first time, and, lying next to him, his fingers drawing tiny circles around each b.u.mp of her spine one by one, had that vision of herself in the blank s.p.a.ce, wailing as her mother had, all for the sake of Parker Haas, whom she had met just hours before. He asked her what was funny when she started laughing, and she said "nothing." Two weeks later they drove to Reno and got married.

There was more. She was complicated herself. Temperamental and judgmental and, raised by a lawyer and a social activist, rarely without opinions. Her mother died. She lost interest in her art, became more interested in pop culture and the technical components of video. He moved to Berkeley. She saw ghosts of her parents everywhere in the Bay Area and tired of inventing new routes to avoid the memories. He saw the daily progression of dark clouds on the front pages of newspapers, heard the voice of his father often, Ca.s.sandra in his head, and began to doubt the usefulness of philosophy. A doubt, oddly, that he had never before entertained. She was offered work in Los Angeles. Riding BART into San Francisco one Sat.u.r.day, he saw an ad recruiting for the SFPD, and felt a sudden physical need to be useful. That evening he went online and researched the LAPD and LASD. And they moved south. Not long after he was hired and began at the academy, the strange outbreaks of FFI-related BSE and CJD that had been receiving greater coverage of late were redefined as a new disease: SLP. Park graduated from the academy. Rose alternately loved and hated her job. The world became more complicated, more daunting. Someone they knew well contracted SLP and died. They talked about leaving Los Angeles but didn't know where else to go. Rose became pregnant. And was soon after diagnosed.

There was more. But some of it was deeply personal and related to the secrets of a marriage that should not be shared. And some of it was incoherent, tangles of her life in the real world and of Cipher Blue and her life in Chasm Tide. What was relevant is what I have related. What she told me when I appeared unannounced at her home in the very wee hours of the morning and began to ask questions that one would not normally answer to a stranger, but which she did so willingly, once I explained why I was there.

7/11/10.

I HAVE TO go inside. I have to go inside. I have to go inside.

I have to.

What do I do?

Have I been lied to? My father said the way to determine if you'd been told a lie was to first determine if the person you were dealing with could benefit in any way by telling the lie. If they could benefit by a lie, they were likely lying.

He said it was human nature. He said most people couldn't resist an opportunity to improve their position when it was offered them. I asked him if he ever lied. He told me that he sometimes did in the course of his duty, as a matter of statecraft. I asked him if he ever lied to me. He thought for a moment and nodded and said, "I confess to having told you that Santa Claus was real. Also, you once wrote a paper of which you were very proud and asked me to read it. I did. I found the argument spurious and unsound but told you I thought it was quite good. I'm not certain why I didn't tell you the truth and challenge you to defend your points. I may simply have been very tired."

Parsifal K. Afronzo Senior has told me several things. He has told me the details of A-ND sanctioned and controlled black market trade in DR33M3R. He has told me that the source of SLP is genetically modified corn. He has told me that far more people than the general public has been told of are infected. He has told me that infection rates are rising. He has told me that there will not be a cure. He has told me that most of the people in the world are going to die. He has told me that there is nothing left to aspire to but to see that something is left for the people who are immune. The people who will survive when the rest die.

And I ask myself, is there any benefit for him in lying about any of this?

Was he lying?

I have to go inside.

My father said that the worst lies are the ones you tell yourself. I asked him if he ever lied to himself. He said, "I hope, Parker, that I do not. But, being an excellent liar when called upon by duty, I cannot be certain that it is so."

Was Afronzo Senior lying?

And if he was? And if he wasn't?

A lie changes nothing. Not what has happened. Not what will be. Not what you must do.

The truth changes what has happened. It changes what will be. It changes what you must do.

Whether he has lied or not, whether he is right or wrong, whether the frozen world can be saved or is already lost, it does not change what I have to do.

I can't do it. Without me. The baby. Without me. Rose. Who? Without me? Who?

The world, if it can be saved, it must be. If it is lost, something must be saved.

There is what I must do for my family. And what must be done.

Who can be told the truth? Bartolome won't believe. Or will be afraid.

Hounds?

He's a criminal as much as he is a cop.

My father said there is a reason we have laws. He said, "There is a reason we have laws, Parker. We have them to measure a society's devotion to justice. And to show how far a society may have strayed from that devotion."

My father could not lie to himself. He used his favorite shotgun to keep from lying to himself.

I am afraid, Rose, that I am my father's son.

So late. So early.

I have to go inside. They are waiting for me. My family is waiting for me. Inside.

Chapter 25.

IT WAS STILL DARK WHEN PARK RETURNED TO CULVER CITY. The horizon had not lightened; in fact, the sky had dimmed as many fires had burned themselves out. Just one major blaze seemed to remain, what looked like several blocks burning in Hollywood where the Guard sergeant had said the NAJi church had been destroyed.

The drive from Bel Air had taken him through four checkpoints. At one he'd had to get out of his car and lie facedown on the ground while the Guardsmen ran his badge. They searched his car but did not find the hiding place in the spare tire.

Sitting in front of his house, he wrote in his journal. There was no order to his thoughts. He knew this but could do nothing but let himself be tumbled about by what he had been told. He'd been raised to an ordered mind. His ideas, values, emotions, often felt fitted together like brickwork. Or had until Rose had come into his life. But even then order had been the rule rather than the exception. It just took more effort to maintain that order. And the walls of his interior had become more eccentric. Odd modifications had been made to what had previously been a squared structure. Windows where one did not expect them, bits of ornament, an extra door.

It was all a jumble now. Only the keystone was in his hands. The thought that something could be done. That something could always be done. That the world could always be made better. It required only that one act. Do the things one believed in.

He opened the car door and climbed out slowly. In the house were his dying wife and his baby. There was something he had to do. But he had no way of knowing what it was. It was hidden from him. Concealed by its perfect enormity.

Coming through the front door into the lighted house, he was absently pleased to hear nothing. Registering the silence as an indication that his daughter was sleeping or in some similar state that gave her peace. He stood just inside the door and looked at the hall that led past her nursery to the master bedroom at the back of the house. He thought for a moment about peeking in, but feared that he would wake her from whatever kind of rest she had. His mouth and throat were dry. He went through the living room, scattered with foam blocks, a stack of laundered burp cloths, a spilled basket of stuffed animals, through the adjoining dining room where a playpen sat in place of a table, and into the kitchen.

In the past the sink might have been filled with dirty plates and gla.s.ses, testaments to Rose's intense dislike for housework. Not that Park minded. He was a compulsive straightener of things. Until quite recently he had been accustomed to coming home from work and spending a peaceful thirty minutes picking up odds and ends of dirty laundry, cleaning the dishes, wiping a small spill from the floor, closing cabinet doors left open. The slight mess had been a trail of clues he had learned to read, indications of how his wife's day had been. Had she indulged her sweet tooth? If so, she was probably displeased with her work. Was there only one plate in the sink? She had probably been very happy in her work and forgotten to eat. Sweaty socks and sports bra on the couch? She'd been restless, needed to go for a run. CDs left out of their cases on top of the stereo? She'd been listening to old favorites, seeking inspiration. The photo alb.u.m pulled from the bottom shelf of the bookcase? She'd been nostalgic, looking at pictures of their comically small wedding and Yosemite honeymoon.

These days any mess was left by the baby and Francine. Toys and blankies, bottles rinsed and drying in the rack, an unfamiliar black slipper at the mouth of the hallway, a rubber ducky tucked inside. Signs he could not read.

He took a clean gla.s.s from the dish rack and filled it from the filter screwed into the taps. The water was nearly flavorless; neither refreshingly clean nor carrying an urban tang, it seemed to pa.s.s through his mouth and down his throat without wetting. He refilled the gla.s.s and drank again, feeling some relief this time. Still, he filled the gla.s.s once more and drank again, eyes closed. He lowered the gla.s.s and opened his eyes. He was reflected in the window over the sink and did not like what he saw. Someone stretched thin with worry and exhaustion and indecision. He could see quite clearly why Cager had suspected he was sleepless.

He filled the gla.s.s a last time and took it with him, pa.s.sing back through the dining and living rooms, into the hall, past the room where his daughter was silent if not asleep, pausing for a moment to consider again if he could peek in, moving on without doing so, and stopping when he reached the open doorway of the bedroom he shared with his wife.

The man sitting on the three-legged milking stool Rose kept next to her side of the bed as a nightstand seemed to have been waiting for him, looking at the door when Park appeared there.

He rose. Thinning silver hair brushed straight back from a forehead and face that were hardly young but could have been anywhere between a healthy forty and an excellently maintained sixty. His build was athletic, but not oppressively so. His movement, rising from the stool, suggested grace hobbled somehow. Dark slacks and a dark, collared shirt, thin black socks, silk no doubt, that showed a sheen of pale skin beneath. Seeing those stocking feet, Park finally registered that the slipper with the ducky inside had actually been a black leather loafer.

The man tilted his head forward.

"Officer Haas, your wife has been telling me about you."

Rose was on the bed, back cushioned by several pillows, knees drawn up, laptop at her side, the baby sitting up on her stomach, playing with a small flat rectangle that Park did not recognize but that caused a wave of nausea unsettling the water in his otherwise empty stomach.

Rose breathed in very deeply, inflating her belly, making the baby rise and bobble, then let the air out in a whoosh.

"Elevator going up, elevator coming down."

The baby cooed, put one end of the rectangle into her mouth, and bit down on it.

Park had a sudden wish for the gun he'd left in the spare tire in his car.

"Who are you?"

Rose made clucking sounds with her tongue, and the baby imitated her.

"Don't be an a.s.shole, Park."

The man shook his head.

"No, Rose, your husband isn't being rude. I have caused some confusion."

Park tried to see an angle into the room that would put him between the man and his family.

"Who are you?"

Rose was smiling.

"Do you see how happy Omaha is? I haven't seen her like this in so long. Not since Berkeley."

Park took a step toward the bed.

"She wasn't in Berkeley, Rose."

She stopped bouncing the baby on her belly.

"What are you? Yes she was. We."

She turned to the man.

"What was I just telling you, Jasper?"

Park thought of the Hurtin' Man.

His family was in the room. He could not run. He could not attack.

The man nodded at Rose, never quite taking his eyes from Park.

"You told me very many things, Rose, all of which I am grateful for. You are a wonderfully truthful woman. But I'm afraid your husband is correct; you never had a baby in Berkeley. Not unless I missed some part of the story."

Her eyes stirred. Park saw that his old Rose had been in the room, that now she was being submerged again as her confused double surfaced.

"What? No. Of course not. We didn't have a baby."

She looked at Park.

"Where were you? Are you okay?"

A whine came from the baby's chest.

Park took another step, raising the hand without the water gla.s.s, palm out, warding the man from the side of the bed.

"Who are you?"

Rose shook her head.

"He's Jasper, Park."

The man did not move away from the bed, but something changed in his stance, a shift in balance that took him from his heels to the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, bringing menace nearer.

"The confusion was caused, I'm afraid, by a lie I told. You see, Rose, I am not a detective, and Park did not send me to see that Francine went home early or, for that matter, for me to keep an eye on the house because of all the troubles this evening."

Park rapped the rim of the gla.s.s on the footboard of the bed that had belonged to Rose's grandmother. It shattered, leaving him with the jagged-edged base cupped in his hand.

"Take three steps directly back from the bed, keeping your hands where I can see them at all times."

The baby's whine rose in volume and pitch.

The man indicated her with two long white fingers.

"You're making the baby cry, Officer Haas."

Rose was pulling the baby to her chest.

"Park, I don't like it here. It's hot and f.u.c.king no one gives a s.h.i.t about anything but the stupid f.u.c.king business and I miss the rain and my mom hasn't met the baby and I hate guns and I remember when it was better and I want it better again."

Park stepped closer, his arm raised, maneuvering to slip himself between his family and the man who refused to move.

"Back away and keep your hands visible."

The man displayed his hands.

"Keeping my hands visible will not make anyone in this room safer, I a.s.sure you."

Rose was squeezing the baby and starting to rock.

"I am going home. I have defeated the Clockwork Labyrinth, and I am going home."

The man nodded.

"It's true, you know. She did defeat the Labyrinth; I sat here and watched her do it as we spoke."

Park was clutching the broken gla.s.s; he knew that he needed to hold it lightly if it was to be any use as a weapon, but he could not help himself.