Sleepless (41 page)

He stood at the door.

"As I say, that bottle of Dreamer will be with your possessions when you are sent home. It is yours. To do with what you will."

He twisted the knob.

"Odd to think, I'd not have met you if it wasn't for my son's unwillingness to use a proper security detail. I'm forced to have my boys spy on him from a distance. That's the only reason they caught wind of the man at your heels. If it had just been you, I don't imagine I'd have gotten involved. But I saw the file on that man. Jasper. No last name. Never a good sign, no last name. Not someone you want near your family. Some of my people had it in their heads the two of you were working together. But I can see pretty clearly they were mistaken. Any idea why he was following you?"

Park was at sea now, barely treading water, so he saved his breath.

Senior patted his hair.

"Well, I wouldn't say it was nothing to be concerned about, drawing the attention of such a man, but he won't be an issue for you or yours. Or for anybody. And the world will be a better place without him."

He opened the door.

"I'm grateful to him, in any case, for giving me an excuse to meet you. It was a pleasure, Officer Haas. I wish you peace of mind. Goodbye."

He stepped out of the room, leaving Park alone in the new world.

Chapter 24.

ROSE GARDEN HILLER, STAUNCHLY FEMINIST, LIKED HER OWN last name. So she kept it. But she thought hyphenated last names were stupid and was happy to give her daughter the name Haas.

She was born in 1982. Her parents were divorced but remained on friendly terms and shared the raising of their daughter, though she did live primarily with her mother in what was little more than a cabin in the Berkeley hills.

When forced by circumstances she could not thwart to fill out any official paperwork, Rose's mother would describe her profession as Social Activist. She and her ex had set divorce terms that did not include alimony. She'd refused any offer of "patriarchal patronage." She was, however, practical enough to have agreed to accept a stipend on Rose's behalf. There was no hypocrisy. Every penny of the checks she received was allocated to Rose's care. Any money left over at the end of the month went into Rose's college fund. She fudged only very slightly in that she occasionally used a small amount of Rose's money to help cover the utilities. Rationalizing to herself that water and power were both necessary to raising a healthy child, but always doing her best to eke the difference out of her own earnings so that she could pay back what she had taken out.

One of Rose's earliest memories, perhaps her single earliest, she couldn't be certain, was of riding on the back of her mother's Schwinn, holding her arms out straight from her shoulders, airfoiling her hands in the breeze as they careened down the steep potholed streets into town. Days spent at co-op vegetable gardens, on picket lines, going door-to-door with petitions, at the campaign offices of independent candidates for local office, watching her mother holding young women's hands at Planned Parenthood, and then sleeping in the same seat, as her mother pushed the bike back up the hills in the evening if no one from one of the causes had been able to put it in the back of her Volvo and drive them home.

Her father was a lawyer. Devoted to social change, but not so much that he was willing to work totally without recompense, he was a junior, eventually full, partner at a firm that specialized in environmental law. An early memory of days with her father involved, not coincidentally, standing unrestrained on the passenger seat with her face stuck above the windscreen of his 1973 Porsche 911 roadster as he drove them across the Golden Gate Bridge from his Marin home to his office in the city. Mornings spent in progressive pre-K, afternoons tagging along with him to inspect a stretch of wetlands where abuses were suspected, sitting on his office floor in a small corral of law books, being passed off to one of the women he dated monogamously for long periods of time before becoming distracted and gently showing them the way out of his life, women who almost invariably took her to the Exploratorium, then being bundled into the Porche for a sleepy ride back to the house for a spaghetti dinner and a bedtime song, Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."

Parker Haas had been a surprise. In truth, he had been more of a tectonic shift in everything she had ever thought she wanted and desired from life. What she thought she'd wanted was unfettered freedom. A long string of lovers who were strikingly beautiful to look at but emotionally uncomplicated. Men and women who were, she would freely admit, not unlike her father in those qualities. Whether she chose to finish her fine arts degree or not, she wanted to pursue her interest in digital video manipulations. What she called, when pressed by a particularly cute grad student who taught one of her studio classes, "culturally ironic metatations." Said with utter seriousness and no pretense. She wanted children, or a child, but couldn't fathom marriage. She welcomed the idea of a coparent, but only if that person could be as respectful of her time with the child as her parents had always been of each other's.

When, during her sophomore year at Cal, her father died of a heart attack at forty-six, she found she wanted to stay close to her mother, who, it turned out, had been secretly and irreparably heartbroken the moment he had sat next to her on their bed three weeks after he had turned twenty-nine and told her that he thought their roots were too tangled and he needed new soil. The heartbreak was revealed at home after his memorial service, after the spilling of his ashes in the bay, when she collapsed in the middle of the kitchen floor and began wailing. A wail that continued intermittently for three days. Rose had had no idea of the depth of her mother's love for her father. She bestowed her own love freely and with abandon. She loved her parents, her surviving grandparents, her two aunts, three uncles, and five cousins, she loved her many friends, she loved her lovers. But she loved all of them lightly. As if the wide disbursement of her love had diluted it somewhat. What she saw from her mother in those three days, and not infrequently over the rest of her mother's life, was alien and terrifying. Passions in both her parents had been reserved for cases of social injustice, the idiocies of governments, wonder in nature, and certain works of art. She knew that emotion of that intensity focused on another person was binding. Contrary to the freedom she saw as her natural element. It shocked her. Yet, rather often, usually in the day or two after she had jettisoned an especially endearing lover, she sometimes caught herself reimagining that display of grief, substituting herself for her mother. Those imaginings were never very detailed, they took place not in her mother's kitchen but in a blank nonspace, the fate of her lost love was never specified, nor was his or her identity. She literally could not imagine who it was she might suffer for so. If she had forced herself to go deeper into this fantasy, to construct a vague ideal, that person would not in the least have resembled Park.

She couldn't remember the name of the boy she'd gone to The Game with. She couldn't remember why she'd agreed to go to The Game at all. The annual meeting between Cal and Stanford was a local holiday and call to arms, but her interest in sports faded the moment she walked from the soccer field where she played a bruising, slide-tackling style of defense in occasional pickup games. She could remember the boy's ridiculously handsome face. Vulnerable to beautiful things, it was that face that had blinded her to the fact that he was clearly a prick. As the day and the game had both ground along, his prickish nature had risen on the tide of beer he swilled. Hardly a teetotaler herself, Rose was nonetheless disgusted by anyone who couldn't hold his own. Uninterested in the game, rapidly finding her date's face less and less of interest, she began to people watch the crowd, and found as her eyes swept back and forth that the same young man in the Stanford section several rows away seemed to be just looking away from her every time her eyes fell upon him.

Her first thought regarding Park was out of place. Not just out of place in the stadium, not just out of place wearing a red sweatshirt in that blot of red fans in the middle of the blue and gold crowd, not just out of place sharing a high five with one of his schoolmates after the Cardinal sacked Cal's quarterback, but out of place in his skin. Under his hair, behind his eyes, on top of his feet, out of place in all his physical dimensions. She couldn't understand how anyone could be watching the game when there was such a unique spectacle to behold: a man entirely without ease. His discomfort was profound. She knew he would misinterpret her looks but couldn't keep from staring at him whenever he looked away from her. She wished for a camera. Why hadn't she brought a camera? She needed to shoot him, needed video evidence of his fabulous awkwardness. Someone started a wave, and it washed over them. She watched as he refused to lift his arms in the air, but did faintly shrug his shoulders and flap his hands. Later, in the jumble of bodies pouring out of Memorial Stadium down toward University Drive, she'd see him ahead, hanging at the end of a trail of fellow Stanford supporters. With little effort she'd steered her drunken date through campus, across Bancroft, and followed Park into a house party hosted by a Cardinal alum who'd washed up on Durant Avenue.

It wasn't long before Park noticed her. But he didn't approach until her date, realizing he'd been dragged into the den of the enemy, began acting up and hurling abuse about the room. Asked to leave by the host, he snapped his fingers at Rose, who showed him her middle finger, and then he walked out after calling her a cunt. She saw Park, standing nearby and straining to appear disengaged from the scene that had caught everyone else's attention. And she knew that he'd just barely held himself back from taking a swing at the prick.

He was clearly a difficult man. Awkward, judgmental, opinionated, guarded, uncomfortably intense, possibly violent, pensive, emotionally constrained. He possessed definite stalker potential. A list of traits any one of which could disqualify a potential lover, any two of which in combination most certainly would. Not that she had any intention at all of sleeping with him, but if she was going to somehow incorporate the idea of the man into her art, she had to at least speak with him.

The prick left, the unsettled moment settled, someone told her she should stay until it was clear the prick wasn't lurking outside, or at least not leave without company. A woman offered to call the campus escort service, Rose shook her head, said she'd stay awhile, walked to Park, and put out her hand. "I'm Rose. I was kind of fucking staring at you at the stadium." He took her hand. "Parker Haas. Yes, I noticed that. It was unnerving. I'm leaving. Would you come with me?"

She left the party with him and discovered that her assumptions about him had been more or less correct, except they left out his open honesty, thoughtfulness, generosity, remarkable manners, dry humor, eclectic and deep knowledge, challenging intelligence, and amber eyes that compensated more than evenly for his windburned angular features and narrow build. She took him home after they'd walked most of the night, slept with him, woke a few hours later to make love with him for the first time, and, lying next to him, his fingers drawing tiny circles around each bump of her spine one by one, had that vision of herself in the blank space, wailing as her mother had, all for the sake of Parker Haas, whom she had met just hours before. He asked her what was funny when she started laughing, and she said "nothing." Two weeks later they drove to Reno and got married.

There was more. She was complicated herself. Temperamental and judgmental and, raised by a lawyer and a social activist, rarely without opinions. Her mother died. She lost interest in her art, became more interested in pop culture and the technical components of video. He moved to Berkeley. She saw ghosts of her parents everywhere in the Bay Area and tired of inventing new routes to avoid the memories. He saw the daily progression of dark clouds on the front pages of newspapers, heard the voice of his father often, Cassandra in his head, and began to doubt the usefulness of philosophy. A doubt, oddly, that he had never before entertained. She was offered work in Los Angeles. Riding BART into San Francisco one Saturday, he saw an ad recruiting for the SFPD, and felt a sudden physical need to be useful. That evening he went online and researched the LAPD and LASD. And they moved south. Not long after he was hired and began at the academy, the strange outbreaks of FFI-related BSE and CJD that had been receiving greater coverage of late were redefined as a new disease: SLP. Park graduated from the academy. Rose alternately loved and hated her job. The world became more complicated, more daunting. Someone they knew well contracted SLP and died. They talked about leaving Los Angeles but didn't know where else to go. Rose became pregnant. And was soon after diagnosed.

There was more. But some of it was deeply personal and related to the secrets of a marriage that should not be shared. And some of it was incoherent, tangles of her life in the real world and of Cipher Blue and her life in Chasm Tide. What was relevant is what I have related. What she told me when I appeared unannounced at her home in the very wee hours of the morning and began to ask questions that one would not normally answer to a stranger, but which she did so willingly, once I explained why I was there.

7/11/10

I HAVE TO go inside. I have to go inside. I have to go inside.

I have to.

What do I do?

Have I been lied to? My father said the way to determine if you'd been told a lie was to first determine if the person you were dealing with could benefit in any way by telling the lie. If they could benefit by a lie, they were likely lying.