PARK DIDN’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT MUSIC. HIS IPOD WAS FILLED with playlists that Rose made and loaded for him. Music she thought he should listen to. Or things she just thought he might enjoy. He listened to all of them, trying always to listen to them in the manner she suggested.
Listen to this on the ride to class, she’d said the first time she made him a list. She did this after buying him the iPod as a birthday present and seeing that it hadn’t left the box in the two weeks since he’d unwrapped it. She thought that once he saw how much fun the little gadget could be, he’d start filling it himself, seeking out new music to expand his world. But he didn’t.
What he enjoyed was listening to what she chose for him. He’d never have told her what she came to suspect anyway, that he consciously avoided loading new music onto the player so that she would feel compelled to keep doing it herself. Over the years it gradually filled with music that came to be a part of the day-to-day communication between a woman who didn’t know how to edit a thought or emotion that crossed her mind and a man who barely understood that there might be a need to communicate anything that wasn’t absolutely essential to the immediate situation.
Playlist titles:
The ride to the water
Walking on Telegraph
Mowing the lawn
Missing Rose
We’re having a baby
Cheese sandwich for lunch
Keep your head down
What I’ll do to you tonight
Don’t forget the toilet paper
It’s not that big a deal, I’m not really mad at you, just frustrated with my fucking work
The baby kicked me this morning
Don’t worry so much
She has your eyes
Come home safe
Awake without you
When she asked at the end of a day how he’d felt about a new list, what songs he liked best, he never knew the song titles or the names of the artists. The songs were the messages from her; it never occurred to him to care what they were called or who was playing them. He’d say he liked, That one in the middle, with the happy beat, but it was kind of sad, about the kid falling down on the playing field and everyone looking at him and he just lies there. Or he’d hum the melody as he remembered it. Or, when she insisted, sing a lyric that had stuck in his head.
That’s what he was thinking about as he walked down the line of people waiting to get inside Denizone. Every time the doors, designed to look like the much-battered gates of an under-siege castle, opened to admit another tan and fit young thing, Park heard a bit of a song he’d once sung for Rose. The chorus only, sung to her in a high whisper, with a tempo more appropriate to a waltz than to a rock song: This heart’s on fire, this heart’s on fire, this heart’s on fire, this heart’s on fire.
It froze him for a moment, just before the velvet rope, the doorman, in the blockbuster-fantasy distressed leather and chain mail of a mythical kingdom, nodding at him.
“’Sup, Park?”
The door swung closed, cutting off the song, and Park came back, letting go of the memory, the night he’d sung it for her.
“Priest.”
He offered his hand, and Priest took it, palming an offered vial of powdered Ecstasy.
He held it up between forefinger and thumb.
“Same stuff as before?”
Park shook his head.
“Better.”
Priest pocketed the vial and unhooked the rope.
“Big party tonight. Tournament in the basement. Top gladiators.”
Park waited while the Priest’s counterpart, a young man of similar girth, wearing an equally detailed costume, put a bracelet of brown microsuede around his wrist, fastening it with a pincer that snapped a thin copper rivet into place.
“I’m just meeting a customer.”
Priest waved a macelike baton at the door, tripping an electric eye.
“Hope they’re in there already. We’re at capacity.”
The huge door swung open.
“We’ll find each other.”
Priest offered his fist.
“Have a good one.”
Park gave him a bump, a gesture that never felt genuine to him, but one he’d learned to execute without a grimace.
“Always.”
He passed into an entryway of textured concrete contoured to look like living stone, the mouth of a tunnel hewed into the side of a mountain, the walls pulsing with projected images from Chasm Tide. Desert landscapes of the Wilting Lands, the Aerie’s Village, a pontoon city he’d never seen, it looked scavenged from the remains of a great twentieth-century seaport, and the Lair of Brralwarr, the great dragon worm rampaging on an overmatched band of adventurers.
These would be live player views from gamers currently in-world, snagged and sampled and projected here, stirred and flashing by, perspectives randomly distorted, colors filtered, resolution mixed and pixelated.
A giant ax blade cut down the wall, and he flinched, recognizing a trap from the Clockwork Labyrinth. He stopped, staring, wondering if he might catch a glimpse of Cipher Blue. It was always possible, watching someone else’s game, that you could see, in the distance or close at hand, the avatar of someone you knew, friend or enemy.
But she wasn’t there. And then the scene was gone, replaced by the Precipice Bacchanal, a ceaseless orgy of virtual flesh that endured with ever increasing frenzy in the circular city of Gyre, hemming the edge of the Chasm itself.
A new song was playing. One he didn’t know, one that vibrated through the floor and walls, beating at the doors at the opposite end of the hall, past the coat check and the cashier.
Heaped on the cashier’s table, trinkets of jewelry, packets and tubes of intoxicants, a stack of gift cards from high-end merchants, a few rare coins, a pair of ostrich cowboy boots, a samurai sword, a bowl full of car keys, each with a pink slip rubber-banded to it, several thick wads of cash money, and, on the floor, a fifteen-gallon gas can.
The cashier, a man who had discarded the robe that was meant to make him look like a cleric, wearing instead two-sizes-loose factory-distressed black jeans of recycled cotton held up by wide blue suspenders that draped thin bare shoulders, looked up at Park and pointed a fat plastic pistol.
Park held out his wrist, and the cashier aimed the RFID interrogator at it and pulled the trigger. There was a beep as the device read the signal the tiny silver chip on the bracelet broadcast in response to the interrogator’s prompt. The clerk looked at the code that appeared on an LCD screen on the plastic gun.
“Comp.”
Park offered his hand anyway, slipping the clerk a tiny Ziploc packed tight with gummy buds. He’d learned in the past months that even when he was comped into clubs it always paid to tip the staff. It engendered goodwill. Something a dealer could never have too much of. As it often led to early warnings of trouble. Rival dealers. Unhappy customers. Law.
The Ziploc disappeared into a pocket, and the clerk knocked lightly on his table in acknowledgment while tapping his toe on a floor switch that triggered the inner doors, exposing Park to a blast of bass that went through his chest and slammed against the beat of his heart.
Inside, a scene reminiscent of the Precipice Bacchanal. More clothes in place, less blatant penetration, and no elves, but the same mass spasms of desperation and fear manifesting as revelry. The place reeked of sweat, ganja, cigarette smoke, infused vodkas, and cherry lip gloss. The flashing screen grabs from the hall were here: panoramas projected on the ceiling, crisscrossed by shadows cast by several catwalks that were populated by the most astonishingly beautiful of the club’s clientele, culled from the crowd by unemployed assistant casting directors who traded their expertise for drink tickets. The dancers themselves took their chances on the catwalks, after signing releases against any and all bodily harm, for the pure glory of having been selected, their physical perfection singled out and highlighted.
Park didn’t work Denizone. He didn’t work any of the clubs regularly. Came to them only at the request of regular customers who needed special deliveries. In the early days, before it had become apparent how rapidly SLP was spreading, he had been circumspect in these places. Doing his business in the bathrooms and back hallways, in the alleys where the clubbers slipped out to smoke in the night air. But soon enough everyone was lighting up inside, antismoking laws not carrying quite the same bite any longer, likewise the dangers of indulging the habit, and as the smokers moved inside and multiplied, so too did the drug deals. A subtle handoff was still appreciated as a point of style but was barely a legal necessity. To say nothing of using.
Staying on the cabaret level above the dance floor, moving toward the bar, Park walked past booths where lines of coke were being snorted from the black enameled tabletops, where a girl with a cupped palm full of little blue capsules doled them out to her circle of friends, where a couple snapped amyl poppers under each other’s noses, where any number of people took hits off pipes, joints, or blunts, and where a man slumped half off his banquette, rubber tourniquet still around his upper arm, hypo loose in his fingers, a drop of fresh blood welling amid a hash of purplish tracks in the hollow of his elbow. Park almost stopped to check the man’s pulse but saw him open and close his lizard eyes, a slight smile coming to his lips as he licked them, and so moved on.
These places were not for Park. Rose, on the one occasion when she made the mistake of dragging him to the Exotic Erotic Halloween Ball, thinking that he might lose his self-consciousness in the cheesy exuberance, realized almost instantly that she had made an awful mistake. It wasn’t that Park was a prude. Not by any measure. He was not offended or made uncomfortable by the expanses of flesh, the free displays of human sexuality in all its variations, the men dressed as naughty nuns, the women dressed as Nazi angels; it was simply that the whole affair made him terribly sad. The general air of insecurity and affectation made it too easy for him to imagine these once-a-year fabulous creatures as the cubicle dwellers most of them were in everyday life. Overly sensitive to the jittery signals regarding sex, longing, and rejection that were being bounced around the hall, he soon felt as if his nerve endings were being scrubbed with fine sandpaper. Seeing the look of extreme discomfort on his face, through the zombie pancake she had painted him with, she made the excuse that she wasn’t feeling well and asked if he minded if they left. He did not mind.
Riding BART under the bay, he watched their pale reflections in the dark glass, whited out in beats of safety lights as they swept down the tunnel. Dressed as an especially tawdry Raggedy Ann, Rose put her head on his shoulder.
He was thinking that he was a fool, that it was absurd to imagine that he knew what those people’s lives were like, that his inability to relax and enjoy himself had nothing to do with self-confidence and everything to do with immaturity and insecurity. Only a weak child would be afraid at a party. Stand in the corner. Not talk to anyone. Project his fears onto the people who were enjoying themselves. He added another entry to his personal accounting of his weaknesses. And swore to be better.
But crossing Denizone, turning sideways, plastering himself to the waste-high chains meant to keep people from tumbling onto the dance floor, finding an eddy in the crowd in which he felt for a moment almost alone, he could only look at them all and wonder which had kids at home, unattended, while their parents reveled.
Lost for a moment, he almost didn’t feel his phone vibrating, the tiny sensation lost in the whomping bass notes. When he answered, he could hear only the slightest tinny chatter. Clicking a button on the side of the phone, boosting the volume to max, and sticking a finger in his other ear, he shouted.
“Beenie?”
A barely audible scream.
“Yeah, man. What’s up?”
Overwhelmed by the combination of the noise, the crowd, fatigue, and the speed he’d taken, Park found honesty coming out of his mouth.
“Not much. Just standing here judging people I don’t know.”
He heard Beenie’s gulping laugh.
“Yeah, kinda hard not to in here, isn’t it?”
Park raised himself on his toes and scanned the crowd.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the main dance hall. You?”
“Same.”
“Do you see, look up at the catwalks, do you see the girl dressed like classic Mortal Kombat Sonya?
Park looked up at the catwalks, and in a stutter of strobes found the girl, shaggy blond hair, big dangling earrings, green headband and matching spandex jazzercise gear, dancing, mixing crunk with choreographed kicks and punches straight from the old video game.
“Yeah, I see her.”
“Well I’m pretty much right under her, trying to decide if it’s worth going up there and risking getting my spine ripped out for a shot at living a junior high sex fantasy.”
Park started moving.
“I’m west of you, circling around the tables.”
“Good call, man. You don’t want to be on the floor right now. Not unless you had your shots and got a lifetime supply of condoms and dental dams with you. Swear to God, man, I have never seen it get so freaky in here.”
Park took a look at the dance floor, a single heaving mass, no way to tell who was meant to be dancing with whom, people clinging to one another, hoping not to get dragged down alone.
He stopped moving, looked up at the catwalks, found the Sonya.
“I’m about ten yards southeast of your dream girl. Can’t see you.”
“Draw a line from her to the back wall, where they’re flashing that tavern fight.”
“Okay.”
“Look straight down from there.”
“Okay.”
“See the sconce that’s been knocked crooked?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m just to the, wait, I see you. Don’t move.”
Park didn’t move, and a moment later Beenie was in front of him, buzzed head dripping sweat, narrow almond-shaped eyes bloodshot and dark-bagged, wearing his usual biking shorts and powder blue Manchester City FC jersey.
Beenie slid his phone closed and tucked it into the pouch on one of the shoulder straps of his tightly cinched backpack, leaning close to shout in Park’s ear.
“Good to see you, bro.”
Their hands met, the little ball of opium passing.
Beenie wrapped an arm around Park’s shoulders and gave him a light squeeze.
“Thanks for hitting me back so fast on this shit. That’s above and beyond, man. What do I owe you?”
Park looked around, found an archway that led to one of the alternative spaces in the club, and pointed. Beenie nodded and followed him around a knot of bodies, through the arch, into the reduced volume of a room shaped like the interior of a conch shell, center reached after a swirl of corridor, walls ringed with cushions and pillows, a haze of incense added to the cigarette and pot smoke, all of it fluoresced by a lighting system that was cycling slowly through various cool shades of green and blue. Clubbers reclined on the pillows or swayed to a slow trance beat.
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 Inn, off duty, sharing secrets about assholes who had cried on their shoulders as they told about the time they tried it with another guy, lost their temper and hit their kid, screwed their brother’s wife, wished their old man would hurry up and die, had their mother put in a home so they could sell her house and use the money for gambling debts, turned the wheel of a car to hit a stray dog to see what would happen. They laughed about it, talked about how they’d use the information to break the assholes when they made their busts.
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 innate alienness as they had assumed they would, that he didn’t blame them at all for that fact, that loving them hadn’t made it any harder for him to leave home the moment he got the chance, that he chose to take on enormous debt in order to attend UCLA rather than stay at home and let his parents pick up the tab for OU, that he’d felt almost as estranged being a Sooner in Los Angeles as he had felt being a Korean in Liberty, that he’d met a girl and fallen in love and that she’d helped him get over it, that he’d married the girl while still in school, that she’d been pregnant twice and miscarried both times, that the reason for the miscarriages was related to the lupus she suffered from, that she died after they had been married only five years, that Beenie had quit his job as an in-demand art director for video games, that he’d sold both his cars, lived now on a day cruiser berthed at Marina Del Rey, and devoted himself to cycling. That he started every day with a joint to help create a cloud around what he had lost, that as the day progressed he thickened and thinned this cloud with various concoctions and combinations of pot and coke and heroin and pills and alcohol, that periodically throughout the day he slipped an Area-51 laptop from his bag and entered Chasm Tide, where he played a character named Liberty, a wandering Cliff Monk who he used to accumulate gold and artifacts that he dealt to other players and to farmers like Hydo, and that he rode hundreds of miles a day without ever creating distance between himself and what was at his heels, evading it for at best a few hours a night, when exhaustion and the chemicals in his body dragged him into the dreamless sleep he craved more than anything, other than to see his wife again.
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.
“I don’t have time for an alternative.”
Beenie took hold of Park’s wrist and squeezed.
“Yeah. I know. Just let me get high really quick, and we’ll see what we can do.”
He let go of Park, ducked away from the larger man’s hand, and headed toward the bathrooms, one of the generation that believed in doing their drugs out of sight.