“I like the idea that I’ll pass the little guy off to someone who will sell him to some nice wealthy couple who will raise him as their own son. Here he is justifying his role in human trafficking: The end-user is too terrifying to contemplate and quickly provokes in Will a soothing stream of delusions. Will won’t have any real misgivings about his line of work until his next assignment, when the trade-off involves far more innocent fare: a 3-week-old baby. But Liandro is in no mood, and his weeping turns intense.
Will does his best to keep things light, supplying Liandro with hits from a blunt and offering to play board games with him in their downtime as the two head east through the Bonneville Salt Flats. The particulars of Liandro’s debt are as vague as the future awaiting him, though to tell by the ankle shackles and the many tears shed, Liandro isn’t optimistic.
“Sleepwalk,” Dan Chaon’s fourth novel, begins with the mercenary Will Bear, a mild-mannered Mad Max in a tricked-out camper van, delivering a debtor named Liandro into the hands of his creditor.
