Sleepless

Park moved them away from the arch, found an acoustic pocket where he could speak.

“You said something the other day.”

Beenie shook his head.

“Okay.”

“You said Hydo maybe knew the guy.”

Beenie winced.

“Yeah, I guess, but I don’t know if I knew what I was talking about.”

Park stared at him.

He liked Beenie. Liked him better than was smart. Knowing that Beenie was someone he’d have to bust eventually, Park shouldn’t have liked him at all. Not because Beenie was a criminal, which he barely was, but because no one wants to put the cuffs on someone he almost thinks of as a friend. Most undercover cops are vastly skilled at compartmentalization. It is a talent as valued as lying. They seal off their real feelings and create imitation emotions. Easily torn down when it’s time to show the badge, drag someone downtown, and sit across from him in an interrogation cell and tell him how fucked he is now.

That is what they tell themselves, anyway. Talking up how deep they can get, how far into their cover. Bragging about the secrets their friends on the other side of that cover have revealed to them. Not the criminal stuff, but the real dirt.

Park had heard them when he was in uniform. Undercovers playing shuffleboard at the Cozy I

Coming away from the bar with a beer and a seltzer, Park had watched how they slammed their Jack and Cokes, shots of Cuervo, double Dewars on the rocks, and had recognized the fierce talk and drinking of troubled men. Returning to the corner table where he and Rose were going over lists of baby names, he’d been grateful that he didn’t have to concern himself with such deceptions. With his badge on his chest, his job was not easy, but it was straightforward.

Without a badge, his default setting of cool and distant actually attracted rather than held off his customers. Most illegal drugs are used socially or for self-medication. Social users find it hard to get a word in edgewise with other social users. Conversely, the isolationists are entirely alone. Without trying to, Park projected his natural aura of trustworthiness. And his customers responded, sharing more than their shames and petty crimes, exposing themselves in ways that the undercovers at the Cozy would not have recognized as valuable. But they were treasures for Park, those tales: secret dreams of an artist’s life abandoned for money, the detailed story of an epiphany that changed a lifetime of faith, a revelation about receiving a healthy kidney from a deeply estranged sister, and the recitation of a poem that had won an award when the writer was thirteen.

That these intimacies were painful to Park, being based on a lie, his lie, was not unusual at all. Any intimacy was painful to him. Another exposure. Another rough flange that could be sheared away from him. Another potential loss in this world.

Sitting in customers’ living rooms, listening to them as they spoke about the intensity of their love for a particular painting by Botero and how seeing it for the first time had changed how they saw their own body, watching as they went to a shelf to find the book where the painting was reproduced, Park would silently beg, Don’t share this with me. I am not who you think I am. I will betray this trust. But even with his business completed, he would not get up and walk away, so addicted had he become to these barbed disclosures.

So he knew that Beenie was Korean by birth, had been adopted by a white American couple who could not have children of their own, that he’d been raised in Oklahoma, where assimilation was not the easiest thing for an Asian, that he took up bike riding because it put distance between himself and the other kids, that his parents had loved him but had never been able to adjust to his i

Because Park knew all this, he was able to say what he had to, leaning close to Beenie so no one else in a room of strangers could hear.

“My wife has it.”

Beenie flinched again.

“Oh. Shit.”

He looked at the swirled walls of the room, ended up looking at his feet.

“The baby?”

Park knew this would be the next question. He thought he’d be ready to hear it, but he was wrong. He tried to find an answer that would allow for the maximum window of hope. But there was really only one thing that could be said.

“We don’t know.”

Beenie was shaking his head now, shaking it as he looked up at the low ceiling, the span of a night sky painted there, the constellations of Chasm Tide, unreal astronomies.

“This world, man. It tries to break us.”

He looked at Park.

“It’s not a place to be brittle.”

Park thought of his father putting the barrels of his favorite shotgun beneath his chin. He didn’t move, his eyes on Beenie’s.

Beenie put a hand on top of his own head and pressed down.

“I need to get high now.”

“Beenie.”

Beenie didn’t move.

Park put his hand on top of Beenie’s.

“The guy you mentioned, is it the guy who owns this place?”

Beenie’s mouth was twisting, his eyes moving from side to side like a man who felt something coming up behind him.

“Yeah, he’s the guy I meant.”

“And do you know him? You’ve done something with him? Business? He’s a gamer. You’ve sold to him?”

“We’ve done some things.”

“I want to meet him.”

Beenie pulled his hand from under Park’s.

“Honestly, Park, I got to tell you, if you want something from this guy, I am probably not the one to handle the introduction. He’s not too cool with me these days. We should look for an alternative.”

Park kept his hand on top of Beenie’s head.