Is that ironic? I think it is. I mean, I know it is. I think. Rose could tell me.
Rose.
After my paperwork was processed, Captain Bartolome cuffed me and took me to his unmarked. Dawn again. They had me all night.
He drove me back across the checkpoint. A column of Guard vehicles was forming up on the west side, getting ready to do a show-of-force patrol. Part of the response to the suicide bombing. We drove past the tanks and Humvees, a contingent of Thousand Storks, and neither of us said anything. When we were past all of them, he pulled over and he uncuffed me and drove me to my car.
It was still there. That was no surprise. No one steals cars anymore. But no one had drained the tank. Bartolome waited while I got in, made sure it started up, then stuck his head out his open window and told me again, “It’s not your beat. Stay off it.”
I should have told him about the hard drive then. But he doesn’t want to follow the investigation where it wants to go. He only wants to follow it toward those “busts of scale.” I don’t know if that’s where the gold farm murders lead. And it doesn’t matter.
Yes, Dreamer is my beat, but Hydo and his guys were murdered on my beat. And I don’t have to explain why that’s the way it is to Bartolome.
Or to anyone else. It just is.
I called Rose. She answered after half a ring. I told her I was fine. I told her I’d been caught in traffic all night, that a blackout had taken down the cell towers where I was and I couldn’t call. She said she’d waited up all night. And laughed at her joke. The way she laughs when she knows she’s the only one who thinks it’s funny. I asked about the baby, but I didn’t need to. I could hear her crying in the background. Rose said she’d just started, that she’d been quiet for hours. That she’d been “sleeping like an angel.”
That’s how I knew she was lying. Rose never says things like “sleeping like an angel.” Rose says things like “She was out like a drunken sailor on shore leave after fucking all night at the whorehouse.” But she hasn’t said anything like that in forever. Not since the last time we were sure the baby slept.
I told her I loved her and that I’d be home in a couple hours. And then I drove to Srivar Dhar’s and took him one of the Shabu dragons in my stash. To keep him from going back to Kargil. A worse place than this.
PARK AND HIS family lived in a subprime short sale in Culver City. As far as Park was concerned, there was initially little else to say about it. He felt the taint of others’ misfortune whenever he pulled into the driveway next to the unwatered brown lawn that matched all the lawns on the street.
He’d resisted buying, but Rose had been pregnant, and had wanted a house, and had fallen in love with the place on first sight. Once he saw Rose, with a swollen belly, smiling as she stood at a kitchen window and looked out at a yard still canopied in trees, there was nothing left to do but engage in some dispirited haggling with the seller. Both of them seeming in a hurry to give in to the other’s demands.
Now there was no separating the place from himself. The house where his daughter was born, in their bed, on a covering of secondhand hospital sheets. The house where his wife’s illness first manifested, where she slowly began to erode, losing layers of herself, being stripped slowly in front of him to thin strata of fear, anger, and want.
Standing at the back of the car, he watched as two boys from up the street took their skateboards over a ramp they’d made from bricks and a sheet of plywood. Coming off the lip of the ramp, flipping the boards with their feet, landing on hands and knees as often as on wheels. One of them caught him watching and waved. Park waved back, then took his gun, his father’s watch, the travel drive, and his drugs from the car and went inside, where he could hear the baby howling.
The baby was on her back in the middle of the living room floor, sprawled on a play mat, limbs flailing at the dangling ornaments and chimes above her. Park let the screen door swing shut. The cooler morning air from the Pacific had already baked away, and the thin foreshadow of a Santa Ana was snaking through the open windows and doors, shifting dust from corner to corner of the hardwood floors.
Park knelt next to the baby, called her name, cooed, and caught her eye. Just a few weeks before, her face would have opened into a wide smile at the sight of him, but that was when she was still sleeping, before the crying started. He called Rose’s name, waited, called her again.
He knew it meant nothing, the lack of a response, but still he went through the house with dread.
And found her in the detached garage that they had converted into an office, seated at her workstation, eyes darting back and forth across three linked wide-screen monitors that showed the same looping frames from an old black-and-white cartoon, skeletons dancing on loose bones in a graveyard.
At first he thought she was lost in Chasm Tide again, but then he registered the two-dimensional craft of hand-drawn animation.
“Rose.”
At the sound of her name she tilted her face slightly upward, eyes still on the screens.
“Hey, babe. Which one?”
Park came nearer.
“Which one?”
A finger lifted from a wireless mouse.
“Which one do you like better? I’ve been on this all fucking day, trying to get a loop that times at exactly three fucking seconds to run during that old school scratch Edison ’s Elephant has in the chorus of their new track. See, the song they’re scratching is off a Putney Dandridge seventy-eight called ‘The Skeleton in the Closet,’ and I thought it’d be cool to use this clip from a Disney Silly Symphony. ‘The Skeleton Dance,’ yeah? No one will have a fucking clue what they’re scratching; it will be like a subliminal clue. But there’s no three seconds from the original that works as is. I’ve been clipping frames but still trying to keep that great cell animation fluidity. So these are the three best I’ve got. And I’ve been staring at them so fucking long, I don’t know which one is best for the video. And where’s my fucking kiss?”
Park bent and kissed her. Both their lips dry and cracked.
She pulled away.
“What the fuck, Park?”
She was staring at the gun he still had cradled in his hand.
“You know I don’t want that fucking thing in the apartment. Leave it at the goddamn station, will you.”
Park clipped the holstered weapon to his belt at the small of his back, out of sight.
“Rose.”
She was staring at the screens again.
“Yeah, what? I’m trying to work, babe.”
“The baby’s crying.”
“What?”
“The baby.”
Her finger clicked the mouse, one of the screens froze, she moved a green slide at the bottom of the screen a fraction of a millimeter to the left and released the button, and the skeletons danced for her again.
She looked up at him.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Park touched the top of her hair, where they gray was coming in along the center part.
“The baby, Rose; she’s crying. She’s alone in the house, and she’s crying.”
When she changed, it was not so much like a veil was lifted but more like a briefly surfaced diver, perilously short on oxygen, was dragged below again after a moment’s respite.
Park watched the memory of his wife submerge and her present self come bobbing to the surface.
“The baby. Christ. Fuck. How long? Fuck, Park, how long were you going to let me?”
She was out of her ergonomic editor’s chair, leaving it spinning as she went to the door.
“Was she crying when you got home? I mean, is there a reason you didn’t just pick her up, for fuck sake?”
“I have my gun.”
She stopped at the door.
“Of course you do, I mean, of course you can’t pick up your crying daughter because you have your gun in your hands.”