12
FATAL FAMILIAL INSOMNIA AND THE SLEEPLESS PRION ARE strikingly distinct from each other. The most essential of their many differences is that whereas FFI is a genetic disorder inherited by mischance of birth, SLP is communicable through a number of agencies.
Nearly immortal, if that can be said of something that is not entirely alive to begin with, the malformed protein that joins with healthy proteins and influences them to twist as malignantly as it has can be inherited. But it can also be communicated in exchanges of fluids, accidentally consumed when present in tainted meat, or, in fearsome concentrations, inhaled.
It can also be loaded into a syringe and injected.
If one should be inclined to do so.
The second most essential difference between the two is that the insomnia brought about by FFI does not manifest until the prion’s work is well under way, forming amyloid protein plaques, literally eating holes in the brain, leaving star-shaped astrocytes.
With SLP, insomnia does not follow months or even years of other symptoms, as it does with FFI, but is almost always the first definitive indication that one has been infected. One could easily clear physical space around oneself with some alacrity by mentioning that one had been sleeping poorly of late.
The lack of sleep, the absence of rest for the body or the mind, is the final twist of FFI’s dagger. By that time it has already eaten vast holes in the brain, leaving a cratered landscape, one of the side effects being the loss of sleep. Once insomnia does set in for sufferers of FFI, the end comes quite swiftly, if no less grotesquely. Twitching and covered in sores, sweating puss, nearly all homeostatic functions of the body malfunctioning at some level, FFI’s victims lose the ability to communicate, may or may not lose their sense of self, but never become senseless. And as the body rots around them, the breakdowns become so complete that traditional pain relief no longer has any application. Chemical receptors no longer accept soothing shapes that might dull the agony.
It is, with no irony intended, a hell of a way to die.
SLP is somewhat worse.
Primarily this is due to the fact that it takes longer to do its work. When SLP lodges in a healthy body and begins the process of conformational influence that mutates the proteins around it, it attacks the thalamus directly. The seat of sleep, the thalamus is also a switching station for communications and telemetry within the brain, a key target where a terrorist of the mind with only one bomb at his disposal might choose to blow himself up. In doing so, said terrorist would be particularly successful in the ultimate goal of his trade. For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to question one’s own abilities and judgment, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.
SLP could not be more effective if it entered the body wearing a balaclava and a vest packed with C-4. Detonated, it spreads, instead of shrapnel, copies of itself. The copies chain, reproduce, and the thalamus forgets how to sleep. Signals are sent, telling the body and varied territories of the brain what to do and when, but they are hopelessly scrambled. And there is no rest.
Once the bomb has gone off, the infrastructure of the body begins to degrade as a result of sleep deprivation. But the greater portion of the brain is untouched. Nights of restless sleep turn into hours of wakefulness staring at the ceiling, punctuated by the occasional sudden plunge into deep sleep, jarred back to the surface by dreams of stinging vividness. Segue to pacing marathons, pitiless channel flipping in the wee hours, aimless drives to no destination. And when no denial can possibly remain for comfort, end in absolute insomnia, shuffling out to join the wakeful millions, burning the midnight oil.
What was left of it.
I watched them, in the light cast from the glass face of the Staples Center, as they shifted and wandered through the Midnight Carnival.
Despite the hunger for entertainment and distraction, professional sports were not being played. Not on their previous scale.
At a certain point, leagues and owners had realized that uninfected fans had become gun-shy about enclosing themselves in massive venues with tens of thousands, a significant number of whom were statistically predetermined to be carrying SLP. Add to that fear the quite natural disinclination to be in such a place should there be one of the ever-increasing blackouts, and one found some remarkable bargains available at online ticket exchanges. The teams played on, TV revenue still being a big enough carrot that could draw the beast toward the unreachable end of the stick.
Things didn’t fold entirely until a NAJi blew himself up inside Wrigley Field. It wasn’t home run balls falling on Waveland Avenue that afternoon.
It didn’t take more than a week for the leagues to suspend operations. The assumption being that once things were in hand the seasons that had been halted in progress would resume. Some months at most. Well into the second full lost season, there were no indications that the arenas and stadiums would be reopening any time soon.
Oddly, or ironically, perhaps, in South America and throughout Asia the football stadiums were still packed. Soccer was at last becoming the breakout U.S. spectator sport that television executives had long despaired it would never become. One heard that even Great Britain, almost immediately quarantined when SLP was thought to be mad cow disease, still packed the pitches for matches, and increasingly violent riots. Both of which found their way to the Web as pirate video, drawing fans to the teams and the hooligans of the more vicious clubs.
Without its regular tenants, and considering that the convention trade had also run a bit dry, the Staples Center was falling into disuse just as the Midnight Carnival evolved. It began as an open-air market, part of an infrastructure that had accreted around the new borders of Skid Row as it burst from its traditional limits above Seventh and east of Main, consuming office blocks as they were emptied by bankruptcy, absorbing Little Tokyo along with the Wholesale and Fashion Districts. The ranks of the homeless swelled as every week brought a new firestorm, landslide, or pogrom to rid a particular neighborhood of whoever happened to be deemed undesirable in that locale. Clearly a population as dense as the one sprawling now from Alameda to the Harbor Freeway, from the Santa Monica to East Third, just blocks from L.A. Water and Power and the municipal and U.S. district courts, was a commercial opportunity. All of it loomed over by the squalettes on the roof and upper floors of the unfinished L.A. Live tower.
Taco truck drivers, dumpster-diving salvage experts, industrious home vegetable gardeners with ample yards, buskers, medicos whose licenses had been rendered useless for years after they crossed the border to El Norte, breeders of cats and dogs who knew from hard experience that qualms about where the meat comes from are the only thing soothed by true hunger, dealers in the looted contents of abandoned Inland Empire McMansions, oil drum barbeque chefs, experts in shiatsu massage, mechanics with a knack for cars that predated a preponderance of silicon chips, biodiesel siphon bandits with unfiltered bootleg fryer oil, pickpockets and whores, those with a gift for distilling caustic spirits from corn husks and potato peels, and the assorted enforcers and homegrown security who watched over them all, keeping the peace, or shattering it, depending on who was or was not paying.
Naturally, the city let it fester. And equally naturally, once it was settled with a degree of permanence that could not be defeated with anything short of bulldozers (an option championed by a city council member who was soon after dumped, partially eviscerated, from the open door of a speeding car at the emergency entrance of King Harbor Hospital), the city set out to regulate and tax the new outbreak of free trade. In terms of logistics this had resulted in a fence, a price for admission to the market, and a large deployment of former parking enforcement officers who, in the face of obsolescence, had been pressed into duty as ticket takers. They were supported in dire extremes by a small contingent of SWATs who emerged from their command trailer from time to time to fire shots into the air, quelling the more than occasional riots that threatened to break out each time the city upped the cost of a ticket. Industrious visitors circled the fence until they found one of the many rents that were opened daily in the chain link, always more holes than the harried crew of repairmen were capable of or, for their own well-being, cared to be seen sealing.