The lock opened underneath my fingertips with the willing smoothness of oiled salmon, soft and smooth and buttery. Not a creak not a clink not a thunk squeaked loose from the defeated metal, and all that was left now was a flimsy wooden door that was there to stop indecent eyes, not a ruthless predator of the night.
Which I wasn’t. I was just a criminal. The former come in adventure stories, the latter are naturally occurring.
I opened the door. It was the least exciting thing I’d done all night, but the most anticipated. My target lay within, trapped in its useless shell. Beneath the covers it turned and shifted and snored, and I reached out with one (untrembling!) hand, grasped tightly, and pulled smoothly.
Done. Like smoke against my palm, languid and smooth.
There was a snort, a twitch. Eyes roaming quicker beneath shuttered lids; body beginning to shake off the paralysis of the night. He was waking up.
“Mine now,” I said happily, aloud.
And I left for home and for a bed of my own. I’d taken what I came for.
***
It was a fine fat one; it put me under for twelve hours. Dreamless. The good shit.
Yes, that was among the smoothest and clearest sleeps I’d ever stolen. Its owner had been possessed of a good mattress and soft pillows and a conscience untroubled by anything he had or hadn’t done. Most people would wake up from a sleep like that too pleased to even be resentful over its conclusion.
I woke up hungry.
No, it hadn’t been enough. Of course it hadn’t been enough. That had been a good sleep, and I’d been stealing good sleeps for over a decade now. ‘Good’ was no longer good enough. I had my pride, I had my talent, I had my skill, and thanks to my insomnia I had plenty of time to consider the application of all of them.
I phoned Jed.
“Wusszat?”
“It’s me.”
“Besssss? Whi.”
“I need names.”
“’s ungoddleeour.”
“It’s noon.”
“Nuuuh.”
“Pour some coffee in your ears, Jed. I need names, and I need them now.”
“Wha’ kind?”
My fingers were itching. I wished my phone still had a cord; I needed something to twine between them. “The impossible kind.”
***
The hardest part was getting into the base. After that I just had to get into a janitorial supply closet and all of a sudden hey, that lady has a mop bucket and coveralls, who cares what she’s doing.
Okay, getting onto the launch pad was a little tricky, but even if everyone there WAS very attentive they were busy being very attentive to the ten thousand things that each of them had to prevent going wrong, so that helped.
T minus three hours. All the initial work putting you in is done, you’re flat on your back, you’re ready to do something but have nothing to do, your body wants to tense up but you’re too well trained for that, so you relax. And you rest.
And you’re juuuust within arm’s reach if I climb the scaffolding far enough and lean next to the cockpit.
Making it out was much easier, even if I had to stop myself from skipping.
“Six out of ten,” I told Jed.
“Well, nobody said a dozy astronaut would be the most restful-”
“Oh no, the sleep was lovely. Controlled yet loose, ready for anything, better pick me up than a tankerful of coffee. But the challenge was shit. Six out of ten was GENEROUS.”
“C’mon, sneaking into a rocket launch wasn’t tricky?”
“I said I wanted impossible, not tricky.”
“Look, I was half asleep, alright? I gave you something that would be a huge pain in the dick off the top of my head and went back to bed, whaddaya want from me?”
“Well, you’re awake now, so I want something impossible.”
***
Now, I could have made this one easier on myself. Could’ve taken the long way in, subtle insertion by surreptitiously slipping off the side of a cargo ship, crawled my way mile by mile inland, so on and so forth.
But I was in a hurry.
So I snuck my way into the wheel well of an airborne troop transport with an oxygen tank and thermal insulation, exfiltrated the airbase, smuggled myself into overland cargo, then took a six mile hike into the crumbling and eviscerated heart of the city until I found the forward command post’s radio room, where one man was sleeping next to another one screaming over the sound of rocket fire.
I propped him up a little on his pillow, kissed his forehead, and walked off as he sat up and started swearing at his friend.
“Blissful as a sleeping baby,” I told Jed. “But not impossible.”
“You got shot at!”
“I got shot AROUND. Very different, and very easy to take care of if you’re well rested. Which I was.”
“You’ve had high-security, you’ve had high-danger, what the hell else do you want from me?”
“Use your imagination.”
***
Well, I HAD asked for it.
But goddamned, that was the longest voyage of my life. And I’d listened to entirely too many goddamned propellers through the hydrophones before I started hearing the songs.
Tracking them was another matter, another few impossibly long days. And then I had to dive – shallow dive admittedly, but still a dive – while muzzed on a combination of exhaustion and sleeping pills.
Luckily I landed on top of the whale’s head, which shortened my search time considerably. And as my arms pinwheeled like a cartoon clown, one palm slapped its way over that ancient scarred brow and peeled half-a-hemisphere’s-worth of tranquil sedation right out of it.
“Weird,” I said. “But boring acquisition. And a little too dull.”
“Weird?”
“It literally put me half asleep. Half of my brain, not half of my body.”
“Everyone’s been half asleep.”
“Not like this we haven’t. Holy fuck my…everything… still feels weird.”
“Weird, weird, weird. You’ll gripe at everything.”
“I didn’t say BAD weird. But god, that was dull as hell. Marine biology is not my thing.”
“You asked for impossible, whales are pretty rare.”
“Pretty rare isn’t-”
“Impossible, YES I GET IT, Jesus.”
“You don’t have to send me after him, no. But like, something close to him. Difficulty-wise.”
***
This was very much not close to Jesus in any way except difficulty-wise.
Sneaking into the white house had been hard.
Finding a secret service guard who was willing to doze on duty was harder.
And finding food to keep myself alive while I waited was hardest of all. I could only steal so many sandwiches from the employee fridges before someone put two and two together, so I spent a lot of my time emulating an alligator: remaining absolutely still and conserving energy for a final strike.
But I’m not patient when I’m hungry, or when the last nap I’ve had was half a nap coaxed out of a drowsy whale’s brain in the mid-Atlantic a week ago, so in the end I finally decided what my problem was.
I was aiming at something that wasn’t impossible enough.
So I dove off the roof, missed the first secret service member with my fists but hit him with my stomach, flopped aimlessly on the floor like a dead fish, kicked the second secret service member’s gun loose with my feet, and hurled myself through the Oval Office doors.
Just as I’d gambled: the lazy fuck was asleep in his chair.
“AHA!” I shouted, and he woke up.
Oh.
Shit.
***
“So, would you say that fulfilled your expectations?”
“No.”
“C’mon Bess. You said you wanted impossible, and what’s more impossible than something you failed at?”
“I didn’t fail at it!”
“You punched your target in the skull and ran off with his semiconcussed blackout.”
“I got him, anyways.”
“Hah! And how well rested do you feel?”
“Zero out of ten.”
“And the challenge?”
I sighed and rubbed my aching forehead, where the imprint of my knuckles still pulsed. “Eight. Or so.”
“Good enough?”
“No.”
“You’re unsatisfiable.”
I hung up, I looked at the ceiling, and I thought about impossible things.
Then I fell asleep. But I DIDN’T enjoy it one bit.