Sleepless (48 page)
Chizu thought for a moment.
"Her father was killed?"
I nodded.
She thought for another moment.
"And her mother committed suicide?"
Standing in the Culver City house, I had looked at Rose's body in Omaha's crib and thought of all the beautiful things that I had left behind in my house to be destroyed by either fire or water. My apocalypse collection, not one work among it casting a greater foreshadow than the dead body of a sleepless mother in her daughter's crib.
I shook my head, still awed by what I had seen.
"Her father killed her mother."
"Ah."
I watched her eyes, an act more brazen than I would have dared just a day before.
"Does that deepen the beauty of Cipher Blue?"
She looked at Rose's laptop, resting now in the center niche of the display wall.
"It intensifies what I feel when I look at it."
She touched Omaha's cheek.
"She is a quiet baby."
I watched her chewing the buckle of her grandfather's watchband.
"Her parents are dead. She's sad."
"No. Babies cry when they are sad, Jasper. She is watchful. Listening."
Both of us, childless, watched the silent baby.
We left Chizu in her tower, with her digital ghosts, the remains of the dead sleepless who made them.
In the lobby outside her office, I found that her ever-efficient greeters had packed certain mementos into a small box as I'd requested. They would see it delivered safely, just as soon as I told them to whom it should be addressed. I paused for a moment to consider, the greeter waiting, pen poised over the Thousand Storks label that adhered to the box.
Inside were the travel drive with Dreamer coordinates, the backup copy of Park's reports, scans of the last few days' entries from his journal, his phone with call log and the various relevant pictures he'd taken over the last few days, a voice recording I'd made on my own phone, our long conversation dubbed to a micro SD card, and a bloodstained left shoe with tread that matched the footprints from the gold farm, taken from the floor of Cager's closet. Although, considering the box contained as well the security disk showing Cager committing the murders, some of those items seemed redundant.
I could not guess what the addressee would do with the box. A person of a particular kind of intelligence and survival instinct would destroy it in the moment he became aware of its significance. The murders of the Afronzos would be sending massive shock waves through the world very soon. Revelations that suggested why they had been murdered would quite possibly tip the scale a final feather's weight into chaos's favor. That was the desirable course from my perspective. Nothing screens a retreat quite so efficiently as confusion and disarray. Which may explain why I sent the box to Hounds rather than Bartolome.
As described to me by Park, his captain sounded every inch a self-preservationist. I doubt he was aware of the true nature of the assignment he had placed on Park, but neither do I doubt that he was more than willing to do what was most expedient when pressure was applied. Obviously a man who valued social structure. And the following of orders. Hounds had rather the aura of an anarchist. I found it easy to imagine him as a boy, breaking things for no other reason than the pleasure of seeing them in pieces. I also recalled Bartolome's observation that Hounds had no love for "Washington suits."
And there was the gesture of the watch.
A grace note that spoke well of his humanity. Whatever meaning one may wish to ascribe to such a quality.
In all, I thought he might be damaged enough in his own person to be dangerous should he find out some of what was at the root of the world's ills. The very type to survey the gasoline poured about a powder keg in the basement and light the final match, so as to bring down the crooked house above before any more unfortunates could be injured within. The consequences to be dealt with later.
I also included the remains of the bottle of Dreamer. Whatever latent prints might be intact on its exterior, it was the contents that I thought would most interest him. As regarded his stepmother. A gift that seemed in keeping with Park's spirit. Something foremost on my mind at the time.
The box disposed of, Omaha and I rode the elevator to the roof. In addition to the air defense batteries, there was the helipad from which I had been carried to LAX just two days before. Chizu's gift to Omaha: transportation away from the city. I'd contrived several years before to have a final point of retreat. A house in the lower foothill of the Sierras several hours northeast. A few miles' walking distance of a small town, it sat on a property of several acres that included a length of freshwater stream. As the years had progressed, I'd thought to never use the house. It was out of balance with the times and my age. And then, suddenly, it made sense again. Was purposeful. As if I had known all along I would have something that needed protecting.
I reflected on this as we emerged to the rooftops, the Santa Ana whistling through the thatch of missiles. I looked up and saw a helicopter on approach, and carried the baby to the edge of the pad. My travel kit had been brought up already. In the duffel were Rose and Park's journals. His gun, her pictures and letters.
The helicopter dropped lower. It would carry us from the sleepless city. Was it too much to ask that it would be piloted by a mercenary legionnaire with a humanitarian past and a scar that pulled down the corner of his left eye, giving him a perpetually winking air?
Even in a sleepless world, a man could hope.
Even I, the Vitiated Man.
EPILOGUE:
THIS STORY WAS DIFFICULT TO ASSEMBLE. I'VE WORKED FROM your mother and father's journals. His reports. The great and wandering conversation I had with your mother as she told me that night about "Rose and Park Falling in Love." Your father's memory allowed him to tell me in detail what he had experienced in the last days of his life. In some things I have been forced to use supposition concerning their states of mind. Your own readings of Rose and Park's journals will tell you whether I have overstepped my bounds. I think I have been accurate more often than not. Though in all my study I have never achieved fluency in their language, and the translation has no doubt suffered.
I have aspired to honesty, but, as Park's father said, we cannot always be certain what lies we tell ourselves. Park did not lie to himself when he put you in my care. Your mother was dying. He knew he could not protect you in the world that was emerging. Knew that he could not teach you how to live in that world. He could only try to save the old world. Bring crimes to light. Be who he would want you to want him to be. A man of justice. Doing what he believed was right, knowing what it would cost.
He tried to leave order in his wake. But there is no order.
How else to explain that I, more than twice his age, should be better adapted to the future than he? Why else should I, an unrepentant killer, share an immunity with you when your mother did not?
Or, perhaps, that is true order. Bringing what is needed into proximity with need. How else to explain the drift of my life into theirs? An aging creature whose nature was honed for an era of chaos to serve as protector to a child.
When I took you in hand, I wanted to leave only conflagration behind us. The higher the flames burned, the more cover they would give to our flight. As deeply as I needed to know what had happened to Park, going to the Afronzo estate and killing the father and his son were acts of purest reason and logic.
So I said to myself then.
However, it was not all logic.
As coolly as I proceeded, I can confess now that I acted in anger. Cager was correct in that perception. But it was far more shocking, what I felt when I pulled the trigger: justified. A disorienting sensation, when all I'd ever felt before at killing was the deep satisfaction and wellness of doing that of which I was most capable, most excellent.
A tremor of feeling that I have yet to resolve.
For though I can describe with anatomic detail the actions I took, what I saw and heard, the sequence of events, I know now that it is all warped.
My life was an accumulation of moments and objects. Actions and absences. A creation of my own. The dense kernel of obsession that had kept me alive in war was set in peace to the task of assembling a mosaic that could be completed only by my death. Putting the tiles in place had taken far longer than I had expected. I kept having to step back for perspective, to see if I was done or if one fragment more might make it complete. And finally, in a plague of sleeplessness, in a city at the edge of ocean and land, I'd been certain that death was at hand. Culmination imminent.
It is shocking to be so infinitely wrong. To discover that the point of your existence is not your death, but someone else's life. At the foot of your crib, your mother's body resting inside, I'd taken one more step back and seen that the wall on which I'd been creating my masterpiece did not stand alone; there was another that braced it, its pattern yet to be started.
Everything that I can remember of myself in this story about your mother and father is blurred by the gravity of that moment. Time bent around the mass of you when I realized that I would not leave you with Chizu, that I could not complete my work until I had ensured that you would be able to start your own. And I cannot say any longer if the person I have described here is me as I truly was, the killer of men and women and children, or a warped reflection of that man, his true brutality obscured by a lens of distortion.
A native speaker of your parents' language, and a deft student of my own, you will have to decide if I have bared all or, as warned against by your grandfather, exposed myself through lies.
For Omaha, the story you ask most often to hear,written in my own hand,JasperGrass Valley, November 13, 2022
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