Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  And so the preservation of reality’s integrity is the paramount duty of the good citizenry and of this government alike. Imagine what kind of mad society would be organized otherwise.

  I shake my head a little, out here on Crane’s landing, and blink myself back into the moment. Into reality unfolding. “So listen, Ms. Aster. Do you have a way of getting into the apartment?”

  “How about a key? Will a key do?”

  There is something grimly tragic about a Golden State apartment with no outdoor space: no balcony, no patio, nowhere to go and feel the blessing of sunshine on your cheeks. Crane’s U City apartment is grim and dark, a second-story bat’s nest, three narrow rooms connected by a carpeted hallway. Out the two small windows there’s a sorry view of Ellendale Place, stray sheets of Authority and hamburger wrappers tumbling down the street, the roots of aspen trees warping the sidewalk stones into strange shapes, like children hiding under a rug.

  I wander through Crane’s apartment slowly, following no particular rhythm or route, developing a picture of the man’s life from the dull shapes and muted colors of his habitat: from the pair of beat-up shoes at the door, apparently the only pair he owned besides the pair he died in; from the three faded family photographs, tacked up unframed, brother and sister and mom faintly smiling, squinting into the sun on the pier; from the tiny kitchen table with the one chair, the coffee maker with two-day-old grounds still thick and gritty in the filter. The fridge is mostly beer, the garbage mostly takeout containers.

  No speculation required. This was the home of a bachelor who worked long days at hard, sunburnt labor, who came home to piss and sleep and shower and get ready to go back to work.

  Paige is pursuing her own slow perusal of the apartment, and she has her Day Book out to take down in carbon all these lonely details I’m absorbing: she’s taking inventory, creating a list of flat facts to refer to later. One armchair, one floor lamp, one cup at the kitchen table. One bookshelf, squat and brown.

  I take a closer look at the books and find all the usual stuff: a volume of Maps and Legends, a copy of Recent Reference and one of What Things Are Made Of, this year’s edition of Flat Facts for Everyday Use. All of the various State-issued volumes produced by the Publishing Arm, the constant effort to ensure that we all know the same things, that we all know everything; Common knowledge is a bulwark. All of the books look basically brand new, as pristine as when the State published them; Crane, I figure, was lacking in either the time or the inclination to do a lot of reading. Probably both.

  Not surprisingly, the man has hardly got any novels at all—although there is, prominently displayed on the top shelf, a copy of Past Is Prologue. I lay two fingers reverently on the wide scarlet spine. I’ve read it—you’ve read it—everybody’s read the big book, most of us many more times than once. But I slip Crane’s copy off the shelf nevertheless and flip through it slowly, feeling its words under my fingertips, giving myself the gift of its serenity. I fight an urge to just sink down to the floor and read the thing, pick a spot at random in the long and beautiful history of the first days and years of the Golden State, of our seven heroic founders and the obstacles they overcame and the gifts they left in their passing. Before I put it back I find one of its many black pages and place my hand down on it flat, feeling that power. Black pages; invisible truths; redacted facts about the time before, unknown and unknowable.

  Man, this novel, I think, as I slide it reluctantly back into place on Crane’s top shelf. So fucking good.

  “Anything?” Ms. Paige says, from the other side of the room, and I say, “Nope,” and then, “Wait. Yes.”

  Because the thing is, all of the man’s books are like his copy of Past Is Prologue, showing little evidence of ever having been read, except for one, and when I bend down with a grunt and slip it off the shelf, I’m surprised to learn what it is: the fucking dictionary.

  I turn it over in my hand. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary, one of the little hardback jobbers with the cheap paper sleeve.

  I tilt back the brim of my pinhole and look closer. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary is what it sounds like, a quick and dirty lexicon for basic use, and judging by the wear on the spine there’s no question that Crane has used it heavily. I feel like I know Mose Crane just a little bit better than I did a second ago, and I like him a little bit more too, because this book has been read, and it’s great, it’s fucking terrific, because who reads the dictionary? It makes me wish for a sideways moment that I was at home, right now, in my own small gloomy lair, sitting in a heavy chair and reading the dictionary. Adding small facts, bits of truth, the meanings of words, like stray twigs to my nest.

  Everybody has a dictionary; you’ve got to have one. Common knowledge is a bulwark. But—I smile, holding the dictionary in my palm—but nobody sits around reading the damn thing.

  “Hey. Mr. Speculator.” Ms. Aster is pointing at the sofa. “Is she all right?”

  “What?”

  It’s Paige, standing by the sofa, frozen in place with one hand in the air, the other hand on her hip, her mouth slightly open like she was about to say something and then just stopped.

  “Hey,” I say. “Paige?”

  I snap my fingers.

  “Goodness. What is going on?” Aster snaps her fingers too.

  “Paige,” I say, a little louder, and she blinks, straightens up.

  “Yeah. Sorry. But—are you—are you getting that?”

  “Getting—” I look around. Now I recognize what I am seeing in her eyes, even though I’ve never worked with her before, never seen the way she reacts, because we all do it differently. But it’s happening to her like it did to me two hours ago at Terry’s, when I found myself unable to continue with the simple act of living because the air had been bent by the Tarjin boy’s insistent lie. Now, though, I’m clean. I’m undisturbed. I’m not catching anything. The only person in the room besides us two Specs is frank old Ms. Aster, and Aster isn’t even talking, she’s just staring back, grinning, just loving this new wrinkle, the unaccustomed excitement, the witchy strangeness, Speculators on her property—and now this, whatever this is.

  But what is this?

  It's not a deceitful utterance that Paige has got on to, but something deeper, something in the bones of the moment, and I am seized by a sudden understanding of what Aysa Paige is all about, of what this is all about—she is standing there in clear reception of some dissonance, and I am not, and this is why Arlo wanted her in my car in the first place. She’s like Charlie, is what I’m thinking, and the thought is so clear and complete it is like snapping awake from a long and dreamless sleep.

  She is like Charlie.

  “What are you catching, Ms. Paige?” I say, and she doesn’t answer, just stands there uncertainly.

  “Tell me where it’s coming from.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Aysa. Where is it?”

  “I—” She shrugs. She looks around. She takes one step toward the kitchen, then one step back toward the door. She can’t figure it. It’s like we’re kids and we’re playing a game—it’s hotter…colder—with Ms. Aster an intent observer.

  Then I get it, it rushes up in me, solution to problem, because maybe I don’t have what Paige has, maybe I’m no Charlie, but I’ve been doing this a long fucking time, okay? I’m slow but I ain’t stupid.

  “Ms. Aster,” I say. “Are Crane’s boxes on-site?”

  “Of course they are,” she replies, with a proud thrusted chin. “What kind of place do you think I’m running here?”

  6.

  The Permanent Record is downtown, right across the Plaza from the Speculative Service, but the Provisional Record is everywhere—in storerooms and spare rooms and sheds, in crawl spaces underneath homes and attics atop them.

  Aster’s, she tells us, is in a basement, so off we go in a small parade, marching in single file back onto the exterior landing. It’s one flight down to the courtyard, through a narrow entrance between apartme
nt doors and one more flight down to the basement, then through a bleak unswept hallway to the morgue. Ms. Aster leads the way with her flashlight, me just behind her, and Paige bringing up the rear, tuned in, keen.

  The basement is still and cold and full of boxes, lit by three banks of flickering fluorescents. A record room like other record rooms all over the State, in every residential building and private home, climate-controlled and easily accessible.

  Everybody keeps everything. You know it; I know it. Archiving is a bulwark.

  At age seventeen you’re issued your first package from the Preservation Office, a full set of boxes and bags accompanied by four small-type pages of instructions and warnings, making detailed reference to the relevant text of the Basic Law. It’s thrilling at the outset, to come out of your parents’ boxes and assume this solemn responsibility borne by all good and golden citizens: taking the time every evening, before it gets to be midnight or before you go to sleep, whichever comes first, to curate the day that has passed. To compile all interaction stamps, all recorded observations, all receipts and paperwork from the day that was, gather it all up into a Mylar bag, seal it and mark it and file it amongst all the other days of your life. We carry our individual archives, our Provisional Records, moving through the present with our past enturtled on our backs.

  Otherwise how would everybody know, for sure and forever, that the things that have happened have actually happened? How would the law know for sure? How would the future?

  Of course, most daily bags remain sealed for the rest of your life, because most truth never needs to be unsealed. But if the State should need it, there it is: every day can reviewed if necessary, every flat fact can be exhumed, held up to the light, double-checked and reverified, compared and contrasted with other relevant archives. And then one day death comes, and a team from the Record comes in afterward, bears your papers away, and your Provisional becomes a part of the Permanent, one more tributary flowing into the main trunk.

  They’ll be here by the end of the day for Crane’s records, I don’t doubt, and I’m glad to miss ’em. Strange people, the death collectors. I’ve known a few.

  Aster has her tenants’ respective archives organized into different areas of the room, and she finds Crane’s section with no trouble. I step around her and hover my flashlight over the topmost box and nudge it with my toe.

  “Is this the first pallet?” I ask her.

  “First and last.”

  I look at her in the dim light, and then back at the pallet. A single pallet. Six boxes.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Absolutely sure?”

  “What am I going to do?” she says. “Lie?”

  The room feels colder than it was. Colder and darker. I glance at Ms. Paige, and she looks uneasy, standing behind me with her hands on her hips.

  “Ms. Aster.” My voice is in neutral. My mind is going ten different ways at once. “How old was this man again? If that’s a fact you’re—”

  “Fifty-four,” says Aster, busybody, knowledge collector. She knows.

  I grunt. I crouch to the pallet. Fifty-four years. Same as me. I shift my weight to talk over my shoulder to Paige.

  “Hey. What’s your gut?”

  “What?”

  She looks caught out, confused. But this is how it works: you are confronted with something and you make a decision. Anomaly, whispers of anomaly. What do you do?

  “Come on, Ms. Paige. Come on. Your gut.”

  “Dig,” she says quietly. “My gut is we dig.”

  “Okay.” I shrug. “So? Dig.”

  She crouches down beside me and we open our satchels. I keep all the special small tools for this kind of investigation in a zippered inner pocket: the slicing tool for clean-cutting dailies, the highly specialized adhesive tape for officially and properly sealing them back up and stamping them opened/examined next to today’s date. We pry off the lid of the first box and start digging.

  Crane has got everything in order, just like he’s supposed to, just like everybody: each day’s pocket flotsam is gathered together in its own Mylar bag, each week of days is gathered together in a durable hard-paper sack and sealed. We paw through Mose Crane’s days, and we are both thinking the same thing: they are thin. Some days only have one or two pieces of paper in them, one or two conversations, or just a couple of receipts, or none. Aster watches Paige and me, unsealing thin bag after thin bag—days without incident, nothing worth recording, no transactions, no conversations at all. There’s one Saturday, three weeks old, with a parking ticket, an unlucky lotto ticket, and a note to himself, torn from the corner of his Day Book, scrawled in pencil, indecipherable.

  But most days are even thinner. Employer-stamp slips and nothing else: Crane worked and went home, worked and went home. The combined Record of his life adds up to just six boxes, and six boxes is nothing. I’ve got nineteen boxes, personally. Same number of years, thirteen more boxes of days. Receipts for beers with friends from work, carbons of wedding invitations, of my wedding invitation, pictures and postcards and memories.

  And listen, I’m fucking nobody. I’m no social butterfly. I don’t like people, I don’t talk to strangers, I don’t have hobbies. Fifty-four years wandering around our good and golden land, some people have got dozens of boxes, hundreds.

  But our man Crane is sitting on six. Six.

  And listen, there’s a part of me processing this as a trained Speculator, a law enforcement official with a wealth of institutional experience on which to draw. Six boxes isn’t much, but it’s not off the charts. Some people are just lonely, that’s all. Some people don’t get out. It’s just more evidence of the kind of life that Crane led, like the dumpy apartment, like the single ratty pair of shoes: introverted, dull, absent of incident. A bachelor, a day worker, working and eating and sleeping.

  “You doing all right, Ms. Paige?” I am bending to the second to last of the boxes.

  “No,” she says, a strangled single syllable, and I turn. I didn’t notice, but Paige at some point has stopped digging. She’s come up out of her crouch halfway and is frozen like that, legs bent, one hand over her mouth. Aster has lapsed into expectant, curious silence, her lips pursed and her eyes caught and held.

  “Paige?”

  Nothing. Here we go again. “Ms. Paige?”

  “There’s—” She shuts her eyes, longer than a blink, tries again. “There’s—”

  “Ms. Paige?”

  “There’s—look—” She swallows hard, and I swear I can feel it, the pulse of pain that jams her up a second, before she manages to explain, sticking her hand into the one box I haven’t gotten to yet, the most recent one. “Look.”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “There are two weeks missing.”

  Commencement:

  And so the novel begins!

  After several episodes of raw investigation, in which our curiosity is piqued and our appetite whetted, our attention now returns to the majestic glass-walled downtown office complex that houses the Speculative Service, in company with our hero, the most remarkable representative of that selfsame agency!

  Our readers will not need to be reminded of the various mechanisms, extraordinary and subtle, that work together to protect the Golden State from the ever-present danger of falsehood in its variegated forms. These mechanisms include, for example, the Trusted Authority, daily beacon of new and accurate information; the Gazetteer and Book of What Is So and all the other volumes of reference, regularly issued and updated by the Publishing Arm to disseminate good and golden facts so that we all may operate, in all places and at all times, with the benefit of common understanding; and the “comprehensive capture mechanisms,” or simply “captures,” those ubiquitous small recording devices, some carefully hidden and some purposefully visible, capturing what happens, at all times and in all places, so that reality can be preserved for later reference. So there may be one reality, true and permanent and universal.

>   And of course the Record itself, where the events which occur are forever housed, so that no one may say one thing and subsequently claim not to have said it; so that no controversy may go unresolved; so that no disruption of fact can long go uncorrected.

  Preeminent among the variety of truth-defending mechanisms, though, is the Speculative Service, that elite corps of law enforcement officials who are solely empowered, and uniquely qualified, to detect and destroy the stuff of lies. A created member of our Service has cultivated that superior discernment necessary to catch falsehoods as they emerge, and the skill to conjure falsehoods of his or her own. Confronted with a “mystery,” a blank space on the canvas of reality, the Speculator concocts potential truths, in order to test the plausibility of each until he or she deduces what really happened. Like the poison control man, like the radiologist, like the firefighter, Speculators are licensed to deal in danger, and they do so bravely, for the preservation of what is real, and for the protection of us all.

  Three cheers for the Service!

  And three cheers for Mr. Ratesic, a leading light among them, who even now—“now” in the sense of “at the time he emerges in the telling of the tale, at the time you, dear reader, are given the pleasure of joining his company”—even now Mr. Ratesic is confronted with a set of flat facts which, though each taken individually is true, piled together like a cairn, arranged with fiendish purpose to cover over a yawning darkness…

  7.

  “Cigarette?”

  “No thank you, sir.”

  “Come on.”

  I am digging through my pockets one at a time, scowling and huffing. You might think that after all these years of stalking the world in this damn coat I’d have decided where the cigarettes go, but no such luck. At last I find the pack, yank out two smokes together, and poke one at Paige.

  “No thank you.”

  I feel myself bristle, I don’t know why. I light my cigarette, inhale deeply, and then exhale slowly. We’re still on Ellendale, standing beside the car, across the street from the courtyard building, looking up at Crane’s window, the same window we were looking out of a half hour ago. What if we could see ourselves? Look out on us from the window, while looking up at ourselves from out here?