I nodded, fully understanding the trigger-happy gung-honess of American troops on high-stress posts.
“Yes.”
He pointed at his watch.
“Thirty minutes’ notice. Call on approach. I’ll be ready to fly.”
He made a button-pushing gesture with his thumb, and I handed him my Penck KDDI, a phone I carried when working because its metal finish recalled exactly the sheen of certain grades of weaponized steel. And thus helped to keep me focused. While looking quite stylish as well.
The pilot flipped it open, keyed in a number, and, after a moment, “Le Boudin” was sung by a full regiment in a utility pouch on the shoulder of his flak vest. He took his own Siemens M75 from the pouch, tapped a red hieroglyph, and returned it to its pouch, while offering me the Penck.
“You have my number. Sooner is best. After the human bomb, airspace has been down twice since then. If it shuts down again, I will call you. To make your own way home. If you wish. Or wait here. For how long, I cannot say.”
My own way back, indeed.
Fifteen miles to Century City. Six miles to the relative safety to be found north of Venice Boulevard. I had little doubt of my ability to traverse these distances intact, but to do so in something close to utter assurance would require perhaps twenty-four hours. My compulsions would insist on frequent lay-lows. I could picture myself, rolled in mud and weeds, belly-crawling culverts and gutters, surveying intersections for long hours until convinced that the probabilities of a sniper waiting for me to break cover were suitably low enough to allow me to scamper across.
No, once I allowed myself to enter that mode of thought, that pattern of behaviors, I could operate only by entrenching myself there. Were I to strip to the most basic of my instincts for organization and harmony, those dealing with my own survival and the elimination of any obstacle that might interfere with that end, I would soon find that the carefully arranged trinkets and fetishes deployed in defense about my civilized veneer had been blown asunder, scattered, both willy and nilly Long to be reassembled. If ever.
And some many people, who might otherwise not have to do so quite as soon, would certainly die.
I smiled at the pilot.
“I will make haste.”
Hefting my Tumi shoulder bag, walking away from the helicopter, the Thousand Storks logo on its side gleaming pearlescent in the lights of an inbound A380 from Hong Kong, I found myself oddly uplifted. Was it, perhaps, the fact that the pilot had chosen to call his phone from mine, so that we now had each other’s numbers, that lightened my mood? After all, he could quite as easily have told me his.
A French helicopter pilot. Dashing in the broken-nosed manner of a Marseilles flic. One who flew humanitarian missions in Darfur. One who was clearly very good at what he did. Lady Chizu’s mercenaries being nothing if not the best. And one who, judging by his ring tone, was a former legionnaire. The imagination could be excused if it ran a bit wild with all of that.
A black Acura with the Thousand Storks logo discreetly stickered in the lower right corner of the rear window was waiting nearby, keys in the ignition. I swung the door open and tossed my bag onto the passenger seat, whistling to myself, “Le Marseillaise,” putting myself in mind of liberation, before going to recover Lady Chizu’s desire.
7/9/10
ROSE DOESN’T WANT me to go. When I came back into the house she was in the nursery with the baby. The baby was in the crib with her sleep machine making wave noises. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t crying. Her eyes looked glazed, like she wasn’t seeing anything. She made little noises, like someone talking in her sleep. Rose says this is how she sleeps now, the baby. She says it’s not that the baby has stopped sleeping, it’s that she sleeps with her eyes open now. She says the baby isn’t sick. The baby is colicky so she cries all the time and the crying exhausts her and she falls asleep with her eyes open. She says this is the way the baby is responding to all the stress in the house.
Rose says the baby isn’t sick.
But she won’t let me have her tested for the SL prion.
She says the risks of the test are too high. Besides, she says, the baby isn’t sick.
I watched her eyes in the crib. But I can’t tell if she’s sleeping. She doesn’t look like she’s sleeping. She looks like Rose when Rose loses herself in a REM state but is still awake.
She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, laptop propped on her legs, going at the Labyrinth again, taking Cipher Blue down a new route, marking the way with little glowing bulbs of water that floated inches above the floor.
When the baby was born, before Rose stopped sleeping and the baby started crying, when we knew about the diagnosis but it hadn’t gotten bad, Rose used to fall asleep in the nursery all the time. The sleep machine would put her out faster than it did the baby. She’d curl on the floor, one hand reaching up, fingers through the slats of the crib, one of the baby’s hands holding her pinkie.
Rose is so tiny, she could have curled up in the crib herself. I used to tease her about it. Told her that I had two babies.
Standing there and looking at them both, I wanted to scoop Rose off the floor and tuck them into the crib together, the baby nestled inside Rose’s curl, like she was for months.
The grinding jaws of a steam-driven wyvern the color of pitted brass snapped through Blue’s neck. A shadow Blue flew out of the dead body. A translucent digital soul. It would fly to the bottomless pit at the heart of the world, where the character would be reborn. And Rose could take her again to the Labyrinth for another attempt. Alone.
Rose closed the computer and her eyes.
She sighed and opened her eyes and saw me.
“How am I going to be able to look after you?” she asked.
I shook my head and told her I didn’t know, and she kind of sighed like she always does when she thinks I’m not getting something.
“No, I mean, really, how am I gonna look the fuck after you?”
I told her she didn’t have to look after me, that I was okay.
She was staring at the ceiling.
“You’re such a, God, I hate the word, but you’re such an innocent. I mean, how am I supposed to walk away from that?”
I didn’t say anything, starting to understand.
She shook her head, wondering at something.
“I’ve known you how long? Already I can see it. You’re destined to walk into traffic while reading a book. Or to get stabbed by a drunk asshole in a bar when you try to defend some tramp’s honor. Or do something even stupider like join the Marines and go get killed for oil because you think it’s the right thing to do.”
I said her name. But she kept talking.
“And how am I supposed to keep you from doing something like that if you’re up there and I’m down here? I mean, where did you come from?” I said her name again and she looked at me this time and I said to her, “Rose Garden Hiller. It’s 2010. We’re married and we live in Culver City. You are a video editor and I am a police officer. We have a baby.”
She blinked, and the swimmer dove away from me.
She said she knew all that. She said, “I was just remembering.”
And she told me she didn’t want me to leave until Francine came back. Until evening. And I told her I would stay. All day. That I would stay and help with the baby and she could relax. She closed her eyes and opened them. “Parker,” she said, “I want to take the ferry into the city tonight and go to that free concert in the Panhandle.”
I didn’t tell her we didn’t live in Berkeley anymore and that there were no more free concerts in Golden Gate Park. I just told her yes, and that it sounded like fun, and kissed her.
Beenie said Hydo knew “the guy.” Afronzo Junior was a client.
I am a police officer. I must not jump to conclusions.
I must investigate.
THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY for Parsifal K. Afronzo Junior was lengthy and showed signs of being constantly updated and edited by members of the Afronzo family publicity apparatus. The entry emphasized his charitable foundation, KidGames, his sponsorship of several professional video gamers, his fascination with massively multiplayer games, the drive and innovation that he had brought to that area, and the nightclub he’d opened within the borders of the Midnight Carnival, gutting and rebuilding the old Morrison Hotel to create a replica of his Chasm Tide castle, Denizone. Meanwhile, paragraphs regarding charges brought against him for identity theft, Internet fraud, online bullying, virtual pornography, and assorted civil complaints associated with hacking in vast legal gray areas of the Net were heavily flagged as needing proper source citation.