Peeps

So I lie awake every night, listening to the gnawing, calorie-burning struggle inside me, and getting up for the occasional midnight snack.

That particular long night, I found myself thinking about Lace, remembering her smell, along with another flood of details I hadn’t even known I’d spotted. Her right hand sometimes made a fist when she talked, her eyebrows moved a lot beneath their concealing fringe, and—unlike girls back in Texas—her voice didn’t rise in pitch at the end of a sentence, unless it really was a question, and sometimes not even then.

We’d agreed to meet in my favorite diner at noon the next day, after her morning class. Neither of us wanted to discuss things in front of her friends, and something about the aftertaste of pepperoni doesn’t go with talk of gristle on the wall.

Normally, I don’t like to torture myself, hanging around with cute girls my age, but this was job-related, after all. Besides, maybe a little bit of torture is okay. I didn’t want to wind up like the Shrink, after all, collecting old dolls or something even weirder.

And I figured it would be nice to hang out with someone from outside the Night Watch once in a while, someone who thought I was a normal guy.

So I stayed awake all night, thinking of lies to tell her.

I got up early and reported to the Night Watch first.

The Watch’s offices are pretty much like any other city government building, except older, danker, and even deeper underground. There are the usual metal detectors, petty bureaucrats behind glass, and ancient wooden file drawers stuffed with four centuries’ worth of paperwork. Except for the odd fanatic like Dr. Rat, no one looks remotely happy to be at work there, or even slightly motivated.

It’s a wonder the whole city isn’t infected.

I went to Records first. In terms of square footage, Records is the biggest department of the Watch. They’ve got back doors into regular city data, and also their own paper trails going back to the days when Manhattan was called New Amsterdam. Records can find out who owns what anywhere in the city, who owned it before that, and before that … back to the Dutch farmers who stole it from the Manhattan Indians.

And they’re not just into real estate—Records has a database of every suspicious death or disappearance since 1648 and can produce a clipping of pretty much every newspaper story involving infectious diseases, lunatic attackers, or rat population explosions published since the printing press reached the New World.

Records has two mottos. One is:

The Secrets of the City Are Ours

The other:

NO, WE DO NOT HAVE PENS!

Bring your own. You’ll need them. You see, like every other department in the city, Records runs on Almighty Forms. There are forms that tell the Night Mayor’s office what we hunters are doing—starting an investigation, ending one, or reaching various points along the way. There are forms that make things happen, from installing rat traps to getting lab work done. There are forms with which to requisition peep-hunting equipment, from tiger cages to Tasers. (The form for commandeering a genuine NYC garbage truck may be thirty-four pages long, but one day I will think of some reason to fill it out, I swear to you.) There are even forms that activate other forms or switch them off, that cause other forms to mutate, thus bringing newly formed forms into the world. Put together, all these forms are the vast spiral of information that defines us, guides our growth, and makes sure our future looks like our past—they are the DNA of the Night Watch.

Fortunately, what I wanted that morning wasn’t quite DNA-complicated. First, I requisitioned some standard equipment, the sort of peep-hunting toys that you can pull off the rack. Then I asked for some information about Lace’s building: who owned it, who had originally rented all the seventh-floor apartments, and if anything noticeably weird had ever happened there. Getting answers to these simple questions wasn’t easy, of course. Nothing ever is, down in the bowels of a bureaucracy. But after only three hours, my paperwork passed muster with the ancient form-dragon behind the bulletproof glass, was rolled into a pneumatic-tube missile, and was launched on its journey into the Underworld with a swish.

They’d call me when it came back, so I headed off to meet Lace at my favorite diner. On the way, I realized that this was my first date in six months—even if it was only a “date” in the lame sense of being an arrangement to meet someone. Still, the concept made me nervous, all my underused muscles of dating anxiety springing into action. I started checking out my reflection in shop windows and wondering if Lace would like the Kill Fee T-shirt I was wearing. Why hadn’t I put on something less threadbare? And what was with my hair these days? Apparently, Dr. Rat, the Shrink, and my other Night Watch pals didn’t feel compelled to tell me it was sticking out at the sides.

After two minutes in front of a bank window, trying to stick it behind my ears, I despaired of fixing it. Then I despaired of my life in general.

What was the point of a good haircut when nothing could come of it anyway?

Lace sat down across from me, wearing the same leather jacket as the night before, this time over a wool dress. Under a beret that was the same dark brown as her eyes, her hair still smelled like jasmine-scented shampoo. She looked like she’d had about as much sleep as I had.

Seeing Lace in the daylight, both of us sober, I realized for the first time that she might be a few years older than me. Her leather jacket was brown—with buttons, not black and zippered like mine—and the rest of her outfit looked like something you would wear to an office job. My Kill Fee T-shirt felt suddenly dorky, and I hunched my shoulders together so my jacket would fall across the screaming demon on my chest.

“What up?” she said, feeling my scrutiny, and I dropped my eyes back to the table.

“Uh, nothing. How was your class?” I asked, spattering some more Tabasco over my scrambled eggs and bacon. Before she’d arrived, I’d already consumed a pepper steak to calm my nerves.

“All right, I guess. Some guest lecturer yakking about ethics.”

“Ethics?”

“Journalistic ethics.”

“Oh.” I stirred my black coffee for no particular reason. “Journalists have ethics?”

Lace cast her eyes around for a waiter or waitress, one finger pointing at my coffee. She nodded as the co

“You’re studying journalism?”

“Journalism and the law, actually.”

I nodded, wondering if that was an undergraduate major. Somehow, it didn’t sound like one. I revised Lace’s age up to the lower to mid-twenties and felt myself relax a little. Suddenly, this was even less a date than it had been a moment before.

“Cool,” I said.

She looked at me like I might be retarded.

I tried to smile back at her, realizing that my small-talk muscles were incredibly rusty, the result of socializing only with people in a secret organization who pretty much only socialized with one another. Of course, if I could just steer the conversation to rinderpest infection rates in Africa, I knew I’d blow her away.

Rebecky—at sixty-seven and three hundred pounds, my favorite waitress in the world to flirt with—appeared and handed Lace a cup of coffee and a menu.

“How’re you doing there, Cal?” she asked.

“Just fine, thanks.”

“You sure? You haven’t been eating much lately.” She gave me a sly wink.

“On a diet,” I said, patting my stomach.

Her standard response: “Wish that diet worked on me.”

Rebecky chuckled as she walked away. She’s amazed by my appetite, but her repertoire of where-does-Cal-put-it-all jokes had shrunk to the bare minimum over the last months. As a guy with something to hide, there’s one thing I’ve learned: People only worry about the unca