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
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some debts to source material are more profound than others.
To say that I would have been unable to write this book if I had not first read D. T. Max’s The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is considerably more than an understatement. A book of exhaustive research that plumbs the histories of both fatal familial insomnia and the prion itself, Max’s book is everything that mine is not. Which is to say that it is a book of fact and science. Footnoted and well-referenced, it is a book that one can learn from. And the many mistakes, misunderstandings, and oversights regarding FFI and prions that can be found in Sleepless should be understood as a product of my own ignorance, laziness, and/or liberties taken with reality in the desire to tell an entertaining story.
This is also a book that I would not have written without virtually unlimited access to the Internet. My morning cruises through the Web; clipping, pasting, and archiving, provided a great deal of the primary and incidental details that helped flesh out the world of Sleepless. Some of the sites to which I am most indebted for making me aware, or setting me on the trail, of any number of oddities, technological trends, obscure current events, artworks, and ephemera are Dinosaurs and Robots, warrenellis.com, boingboing.net, beyond the beyond, NewScientist, nytimes.com, and many others.
Source material and references for many of the ideas, settings, and bits of technology found in this book can be found on my own website, www.pulpnoir.com, in the Sleepless category.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLIE HUSTON is the author of the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and the bestsellers The Shotgun Rule and The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.
Sleepless is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
