I bend warily to pick it up, slide it back on my desk, keeping my face a good foot from the object itself.
The cover looks like the cover of the dictionary, there’s no question about it. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary, the font and typesetting so familiar I could have drawn it myself. Beneath it, in smaller type: A Product of the Golden State Publishing Arm.
But only the paper jacket is real; the cover has been removed from a real dictionary and wrapped around this book instead, and carefully trimmed, I now realize, cut at top and bottom to fit precisely. Beneath the paper cover of the dictionary, the book has a real cover, pale yellow with stark red letters: “The Prisoner.” And then, underneath it, in smaller type, “A Novel,” and then, in smaller letters still, “By Benjamin Wish.”
A stolen cover or a counterfeited cover hiding a real one. Like snakeskin, like a skein, a shadow truth drawn across the object’s reality like a curtain. A big lie, a forgery, an act of material pretense. I wrap my fingers around the edges of my desk. By instinct, just to feel something real, to grip on to it. With both hands I clutch the desk’s edge like a window ledge and hold on tight.
And then—a deep breath—I open the book again, look down and then up again, just long enough to read a sentence, grab the words without feeling them:
—and what of the boy himself? What was transpiring meanwhile within the fragility of his body, within his mind’s blank interior, while outside him all of this whirl of activity: his doctor’s interventions, his parents’ desperate pleading? His body lay still and seemingly at rest but inside there was life, after all, but life of a kind—
I close the book.
Close it and press my hands down on top, one hand flat and then the other hand flat on top of the first, press both hands down as if on the lid of a chest to keep it from springing open again.
It’s fiction. For fuck’s sake. It’s fiction.
“Hey. Cullers. Hey.”
“Yup?” He says it with forcefulness, the feigned alert tone people use when they’ve just been woken up.
“Do you know where Mr. Vasouvian is?”
“What?”
“Arlo? Where is he? Where is Arlo?”
8.
I find him in the first place I look, in his favorite place, just across the Plaza, on the broad majestic steps of the Permanent Record, working his way with stoic determination through a very large sandwich. He’s got his tie tucked punctiliously between the buttons of his shirt, and a paper napkin tucked into his collar, and even in my agitated state of mind I spare a moment to love Arlo Vasouvian, my mentor and my oldest friend in the Service. Probably my oldest friend alive, if you don’t count Silvie, and I can’t count Silvie anymore.
“Ah,” says Arlo, looking up. “Laszlo. Six sixes is thirty-six.”
“And always will be,” I say. I’m holding the book close to my chest, tight at my heart like a breastplate.
“You all right there, Mr. Ratesic?” Arlo lowers his sandwich to his lap, dabs at his lips with the napkin. A wilt of thin white hair falls across his forehead. “You will forgive, I hope, an old man’s lapse into cliché, but you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
That’s it exactly, of course. The thing in my hand, the dictionary that is not a dictionary, novel that is not a novel, is a ghost: phantasmagoric, alarming, inexplicable. I drop down onto the bench beside Arlo, still catching my breath.
“Take time,” says Arlo, and he smiles his faraway smile. “Take time. Gather your thoughts.”
The Plaza is a wide parallelogram of cement and fountains, of tall palms and statuary, of meandering paths and kiosks whose cheerful merchants hawk gum and marijuana cigarettes and the day’s Trusted Authority. The broad and sun-drenched Plaza is the heart of the State, and at the heart of the Plaza is the pond, a narrow, kidney-shaped duck pool surrounded by benches. Food trucks shark around the outskirts of the Plaza at all hours, a constantly rotating array of food trucks representing all the dizzying variety of cuisines that flavor the State: sumptuous pork dumplings and crisp savory crepes and spicy beef empanadas, tacos and tortas and tostadas, fish sandwiches and pâté sandwiches and overstuffed chicken salad sandwiches like the one Arlo is now enjoying. Ringing the Plaza are the three main buildings of the State government: the Service, my own home away from home; the Trusted Authority building, including not only the fact-gathering operations but the rattling enormity of the printing plant, not to mention the studios from which the broadcast arm transmits its hourly and quarter-hourly bulletins; and—last and never least, fundamental and foundational—the Record itself, a modest construction of archways and stone, with its famous approaching staircase and humble brickwork walls. The Record, of course, appears small but is much larger on the inside, underneath, with its endless basements and subbasements.
People approach the Record’s walls, as they are constantly approaching the Record’s walls, to perform the small ecstatic ritual for which it is famous. One guy comes up quickly now, a shaggy Caucasian in sandals and aviator glasses, who, as I watch, hunches over and scribbles madly in his Day Book, scribbling some intimate truth; then he tears off whatever he’s been writing, folds the scrap up small and then smaller, and jams it into a crack in the wall of the Record before he steps back, satisfied, and eruns two fingers along the wall, tracing a slow reverential path across its pitted surface.
Others come and go, they are always, always, coming and going, up and down the stone steps, each to perform his or her own version of the old ritual: a lady in a sundress, striding purposefully, grinning ear to ear; a man with his son up on his shoulders; a girl of fifteen, sixteen, maybe, with a skateboard she tucks under her arm while digging out her Day Book. They’re tearing small pieces from their interior lives, ripping pieces from their Day Books and jamming them like sealant into the cracks in the walls of the Record, good and golden citizens adding their private truths to the greater store, a literal enactment of our figurative truth: everybody builds reality together.
There is one truth, and here it is. One truth, and I too am a part of it.
I watch the kid with the skateboard as she presses her palm against the wall, trots back down the steps, and hops back on her board. It’s funny, how much I dislike people in general but then I see one particular person, one good citizen doing her thing, or his thing, and I feel love like a concavity in my chest—the fearsome love that drove me to join the Service in the first place. The need to protect everybody I see.
“So are we talking about the case, Laz? This business up on Vermont Avenue.”
“Yes,” I say. “In a way.”
“Oh?” Arlo untucks his napkin, crumples it into a ball that then expands out into a nest. “And what way is that?”
His voice, as ever and as always, has a calming effect on me. I find that despite the unease of what I have found, I am able in Arlo’s steady presence, warm and worn, to speak clearly. I give the old man a rapid brief on the morning’s adventures, on the dead roofer, how we had enough anomalies to justify going down to his place of residence, and how, once there, we found—
“This.”
I hold it up. “It’s a novel. A work of fiction.”
“Pardon me,” he says, and frowns. “But a novel is not a work of fiction.”
“I know that, sir. I know what a novel is supposed to be.”
“A novel is a true story about an event or events from the distant or recent history of our State—”
“Arlo, I know.”
That’s the point. That’s why I’ve sought him out. But Vasouvian can’t stop now that he’s started. The old man has got few faults, but among them is a love of reciting, of casually demonstrating how comprehensive is his knowledge of the Basic Law, every bulwark and provision. What I am now witnessing may indeed be Arlo’s favorite state: eyelids drifted down to half shut, head tilted slightly back, glasses perched on the tip of his nose, precisely unspooling a line of text.
“A true story, that is, organized into chap
ters or incidents, featuring a historical character or characters, building to a conclusion, suggesting or implying an inspirational message about the nature of the Golden State.”
“Thank you. Yes. I know all that.”
“It’s true, it’s true,” he says, singsong, with a pleased sigh. “It’s all true.”
“Right, but that’s the point, Arlo.” I hold up the book again, with its plain yellow cover, oversized red letters. “But this thing is not that. It says ‘novel’ on the cover, under the title, but it’s something different.”
“You’ve…read it?” he asks, giving me a look I’ve never seen from him before.
“No, sir.” I shake my head. “I haven’t read it.”
There’s an accusation in his question, a rising sharpness at the end of it that I don’t like. As if I decided to stumble into an alternate reality, to discover a work of make-believe and carry it around. “I only opened it, sir. I looked inside.”
Arlo contemplates me for a moment; another. Behind us, a woman stands very close to the wall, her head bent forward and pressed against the concrete of the building, her hands pressed flat against it. A load-bearing citizen, using the strength of her body to hold up the State.
“And if you only opened it, how do you know that, though it says ‘novel,’ it is not a novel?”
“Well, here.”
I flip it open to the passage on which my eyes landed, I open this fat fraudulent document right there on the steps of the Plaza, right out in the shadow of the Record itself, and I show to Arlo the sentences that scythed into me, the business about the injured boy and the dizzying whirl of activity around his hospital bed, the intimation of some alien intelligence. Clear fabrication, unsupported and unsupportable by any provable fact or facts.
“It’s fiction,” I say flatly, and Arlo murmurs, “So it is,” and closes it, softly but firmly, like a man putting the top back on a box. He thinks and I watch him think, the sunlight glinting off his round glasses, the soft splash of the ducks in the fountain and the bustle of footsteps on the stone all around us.
It strikes me—as it occasionally strikes me—how wondrous are Arlo Vasouvian’s old eyes: deep set and luminous, flickering with the light of careful attention, but always with shadows forming and moving beneath the surface. No matter what the subject under discussion, Arlo has always got some other thing he’s mulling over, somewhere the rest of us can’t see.
He holds up the book, turns it over delicately in his hands. “It’s an artifact.”
“An artifact.” I knew that, I guess. I didn’t want to know it. “From what was.”
“Yes. World that was.”
We are silent, then, silent on the steps of the Record, silent at the center of the State. There is a world there used to be and is gone. We live on it and in it, but we don’t know what it was. Its absence surrounds us.
Arlo turns the book over and over in his worn hands. “A novel,” he says softly. “Quote unquote. Who was this fellow again? The possessor. The man who is dead.”
“A roofer. A construction worker. Crane.”
“Crane.”
“Just a guy.”
“And why would he have a book like this?”
“I don’t know.”
“And do you think this object is something he happened to have, just as he happened to die this morning. Or do you suppose there is a line, a bridge, as yet unseen, which connects those two flat facts together?”
No,” I say, but then I taste it—I feel it. A half-truth. I catch it, correct it. “I don’t know, Arlo. There might be.”
“Well. You better find out.”
“I will,” I say. “That’s what I’ll do.”
He holds out the book so I might take it back, and I find my hands are unwilling to do so. I see now what I wanted, I wanted him to tell me the mystery of the novel is above my pay grade, that the appearance of such an artifact on my trail—a novel that is not a novel, a dangerous relic—means the trail is shut off to me. I want Arlo to relieve me of the burden of this case, which seemed so open-and-shut, so simple—the flat fact of the broken roof, the flat fact of the broken roofer, a simple and clean connection—but which now seems full of wrinkles, a welter of anomalies, a patchwork of unseen connections.
I’m sure Arlo can see it too, that I wish I didn’t have to keep going. That I am—for all of my experience, my gruff exterior, my size and strength—a tiny little man. Not at all like Charlie. He would have seized on the book, the roofer, the mystery, and leapt into whatever danger it all represented, leapt in grinning and torn out the truth. Torn out the truth by the roots or died trying.
Arlo, deep and decent, sets the book down on the bench between us. Captures turn up on the rooftops of the Plaza, panoramic, a slow-spinning capture on the top of every building, recording my insufficiency. My shame.
Arlo chews his sandwich and allows his eyes to linger on the pond in the center of the Plaza. Looks anywhere but at me for a moment, and then clears his throat and changes the subject.
“And how is it going,” he asks, “with young Ms. Paige?”
“Oh. Fine.” I catch it, correct it. “More than fine. She’s…she’s extremely gifted.” I shake my head in wonder, feeling a glad rush of relief to be talking about something other than the book. “Her sensitivity is off the charts—sorry, idiom, lazy—but it is. Man, is it. And not just locutions either. She’s catching targets from three floors up. She’s, uh—” I look at him, and he’s not looking at me. He’s leaning back, considering, gazing up toward the clouds. “She’s like Charlie. Which—by the way—is why you gave her to me.”
I am teasing him. Lovingly, yes, but definitely chiding him for having hidden the full truth of his motivations. But he responds thoughtfully, nodding. “Yes. Yes…although it is true, as I told you, that I assigned Ms. Paige to your mentorship because you are in my estimation—and Alvaro agrees, though he may not…anyway. In the collective estimation, you are the most capable member of the service. However—” Now he pauses, dabs at one corner of his lips with his big wad of napkins. “Yes. I thought…given your history. Your familiar connection…” He shrugs. I wait. “She is as good as he was, Laszlo,” he says finally. “Indeed, she…” And then, softly, as if reluctant to blaspheme. “She may indeed be better.”
I shake my big woolly head and start to deny it, but if there is any fair judge of such matters, it’s Arlo.
“I can’t attest to it, of course, because no one can. But yes, indeed. She might be better.” He nods slightly, as if ticking off a list in his mind, considering things he’s seen. And me too: I’m remembering Aysa, sitting next to me in the car after we went through Aster’s basement, politely declining a cigarette, humble about her remarkable catch, unaffected by exposure.
“Do you recall that I used to give these talks?” Arlo says. “These…these lectures at some of the high schools, as part of the…you know. To gently acclimate young people to their new responsibilities to truth telling, as they aged out of the years of exemption. I met her at one such talk. Nine years ago. It was just after…after Charlie was lost to us, actually. I remember it. She was clearly gifted, clearly registering, you know, and just leaping with excitement. It was truly just…radiating off of her. An eagerness. To join the Service. To do her part, she kept saying. Charming phrase. Do her part. Although her enthusiasm, I must say, was…” He sighs. “Sorry. It’s sad, you know. Her enthusiasm was contrary to the will of her parents.”
Arlo sighs, a long exhalation, weary but pleased. The lunchtime crowd is dying down, but a handful of the faithful straggle still along the wall. A middle-aged man in a wheelchair angles up, just a few feet from us, takes out his Day Book, writes down his small truth, and tears it free and folds it small. Reality is ongoing.
“I know, Laszlo, that you do not relish the company. But there is no one else who can offer this young lady what you can. Do you know what that is?”
“No,” I say.
“Ballast.”
And then he just smiles, the wide and watery smile. And I know exactly what he means. I can picture Aysa Paige, dying to get to the crime scene, dying to ask a thousand questions, dying to speculate, leaping ahead. Bounding, heedless, reckless. Where my qualities tend in the other direction. I am the earthbound man, heavy and stolid. Ballast. That’s me.
Charlie was eager too. Not with Aysa’s wide-eyed acolyte eagerness, but with the swaggering keenness of a big-game hunter, the man who catches a scent and cannot and will not stop, never mind the dangers. Fuck the dangers of exposure, the dangers of living in proximity to dissonance, the dangers of speculation. Sometimes Charlie almost—not quite, but almost—refused to believe there even was any danger.
And Arlo knows as well as I do what happened to Charlie.
I stood beside Arlo at the funeral while the bells were ringing, one ring for each year of his life.
Mr. Vasouvian and Mr. Ratesic, the younger Mr. Ratesic, on the outskirts of the thronging crowd, watching Charlie’s coffin be delivered to the earth, committed to the ground for all time, like a sealed box of files being added to the Permanent Record.
Arlo with his hand on my elbow, holding me gently back from whatever drastic action he was afraid I’d take. As if there was any danger of that: of Laszlo Ratesic flying off the handle, gnashing his teeth, enacting violent revenge. That’s never been my style. I just stood there, hands in pockets, head lowered, listening in silence while my brother’s wild courage was eulogized.
I’d never before seen my father in public without his pinhole on. Never in all of my life.
I’m thinking about him, like I’m always thinking about him, and now I’m thinking about Aysa too, young Ms. Aysa Paige of the Speculative Service, with her whole golden life ahead of her.
“And you didn’t think it was better to simply discourage her from entering the Service entirely? You didn’t think that would be the better course for her?”
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