Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “Perhaps.” Arlo turns then, at last, and looks me full in the eye. “But not the better course for the Service.”

  Modest as he is, Arlo will not apologize for choosing the integrity of the truth, and the safety and welfare of the State, ahead of the safety and welfare of any single individual. And I’m too sour and inward to express what I am already feeling, which is that I am grateful to Arlo for the opportunity to work with Aysa Paige. To take her under wing, lead her into greatness.

  I scan the edges of the Plaza, but lunchtime is over, and the food trucks are going or gone. I see the Dirty Dog, a black truck with pink piping, a hot dog truck I’ve been wanting to try for years, but it’s just now driving away, turning down Alameda Street in a cloud of exhaust. In the wake of this disappointment I register another truth about Aysa Paige, the other way I am feeling and have felt since Crane’s apartment, which is a burning envy—I could die of jealousy, I swear to it, that is big true, I could die of jealousy, but because I love the State, I love the work, I will raise her up. Show her the works. Take her along.

  “So we are set then?” Arlo says quietly, reading my mind. “I can entrust young Ms. Paige with confidence to your care?”

  “Requires subjectivity to answer,” I say. In the pond, the ducks execute a U-turn, still in their flotilla. “Requires an assessment of future events.”

  “But you’ll try.”

  “I’m trying already.”

  “Well, then keep it up.”

  The man in the wheelchair has gone, and for once the wall is deserted, this stretch closest to us, and I almost stand up and go over there myself. I’ve never gone in for it myself, the displays of faith. I’d be embarrassed to do it, to put my private devotion on public display, but right now I want to put both of my hands against the Record, press my forehead against the stones of its wall, and whisper, “Thank you. Thank you…for the world we have built, in which everything is known and can be known, in which everything that is so is known to be so, and has been known and will be known tomorrow.” Because just imagine—just imagine the alternative, the world in which a man encounters some scrap of information, about the murder rate in his neighborhood, or about the presence of troops on the northern border, or what time the bus is supposed to come—any of the small and large pieces of information a person encounters in the course of a day or a lifetime, personal or political, substantive or trivial—and then the next hour or the next day he hears something different, and it is impossible, literally impossible, to know which version is the real one.

  Madness creeps in very quickly at the edges of such speculation. Not just madness but a kind of horror, a flickering red field closing in. Just the thought of it.

  The bell begins to ring from the Grand Hall of the Record, and everybody on the Plaza stops moving and turns to a nearby stranger. “It’s one o’clock,” say a dozen different voices, loud and confident, affirming general truth.

  “It’s just turning one.”

  “In one hour exactly it will be two.”

  I never did pick up the book. It is lying still where Arlo left it, and now he picks it up again, holds it in his lap while he slides his glasses slightly down his nose. “The Prisoner,” he murmurs when the bells have stopped. “By Benjamin Wish. I think perhaps—” He weighs it in his hands. “Perhaps our best move after all, as far as this goes, is to bring it to Ms. Petras.”

  “Oh.” I should feel relief. This is what I wanted. This is exactly what I wanted only moments ago. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes, yes.” He sets the book down again, gazes at the jacket, taps it with two fingers. “Bring it to Ms. Petras’s office and let them do their thing.”

  Laura Petras is Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws and thus the ultimate supervisor of both the Speculators and the regular police, one of twenty committee members who oversee the administration of the Basic Law. I’ve only met her once, seen her maybe five times in my life, a bland-smiling blonde woman in a tan suit and sensible shoes who, along with her fellow committee members—Our Acknowledged Expert on Trade and Commerce, Our Acknowledged Expert on Transportation, and all the rest of them—administers the fine points of State governance. The various committees and their staffs are not headquartered down here, among the majestic showpiece buildings of the State, but at the Melrose Avenue facility, a sprawling administrative campus of one- and two-story sandstone bungalows, with venetian blinds in the windows and conference tables in every room.

  Among its many other responsibilities, the committees have ultimate jurisdiction over facts and artifacts that can be proved neither true nor untrue, and which therefore must be consigned to oblivion. Put out of mind. Not to be thought of again. What Arlo is proposing is to take my artifact and spirit it away, drive up to Melrose and hand it to Petras or Petras’s people, to be referred in due time to the assembled committees, to be declared a part of the unknowable past, either known nor unknown, neither true nor false, forever.

  After that, it probably gets thrown in a box or set on fire. Who knows?

  I pick up the book from the bench between us, feeling suddenly protective of it. The prospect of it being declared unknown and unknowable seems—I don’t know. Wrong. Unfair, somehow. Must Crane’s prized secret possession be consigned to oblivion, just because he was?

  “No, you know what?” I say. “I think I’ll hang on to it for now. Just in case it becomes relevant to the investigation.”

  “Very well,” says Arlo, sounding less than entirely convinced. But I nod—good. I’ve convinced myself. It’s my investigation, my strange artifact, my responsibility. There is something else too, isn’t there? I hold the book tightly, gripping its corners with my fingers. It wants me to read it—it wants to be read.

  I drop the book back in my bag and zip it up.

  “And how is your novel coming, by the way?”

  “Oh, it’s coming,” Arlo answers with a long happy sigh. “It’s coming along. You’ll be the first to see it when I’m done.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  An old joke between Arlo and me, one of thousands, part of the private language of old friends. He’s been working on his novel, supposedly, for eleven years; it is an achievement, he likes to say, to which he has long aspired, to produce a novel of his own: a true story organized into chapters or incidents, featuring a historical character…implying an inspirational message about the nature of the Golden State. Every time I ask whether I can get a look at the damn thing, he says it’s not quite finished, he’s still tinkering at the edges, smoothing the transitions, fine-tuning the ending, but I’ll be the first to see it when he’s done.

  Which is only right, after all. It’s about my brother.

  Main text:

  “This makes no sense,” spat Ratesic. “This makes no sense at all.”

  “You wanna tell me what you’re talking about?” hissed Mr. Alvaro at his tough-talking colleague, hiding his admiration and envy behind a sneer. Mr. Ratesic was universally admired. That was a true fact, solid as steel, permanent and unbending. Among his fellow Speculators, among those who had worked with him, among dirty liars who’d had the bad luck to cross his path, he was considered a force of nature. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a strong jawline and intense, brooding eyes, Ratesic lifted a match to his cigarette and stared out the wide glass windows of the thirtieth floor of the Service.

  “What do you mean, it makes no sense?” Mr. Alvaro was incensed. “This good-for-nothing punk was hustling fake IDs, and I caught his dumb ass. End of story.”

  Mr. Alvaro was filling out the paperwork on an arrest he had made, a twenty-three-year-old street kid named Bert Pepper, sunglasses and a skateboard and ragged jeans, a shoulder bag filled with forged identifications. A serious crime, an out and out perversion of the truth and Alvaro was working his way through the charging documents.

  But he should have waited. He should have known. When Charlie Ratesic sensed a discrepancy, when he caught wind of an anomaly,
it was because there was an anomaly on the wind. He was brash and he was headstrong, but Mr. Charles Ratesic did not make mistakes.

  “I want to talk a run at this kid.”

  “He’s my arrest,” Alvaro protested.

  “A kid like that needs a source for that kind of paper. I wanna ask him about the source.”

  “Why don’t you worry about your own arrests, Ratesic?”

  The rest of the gang watched as the two men butted heads. Carson raised her eyebrows to Burlington, who sighed. There was no question who was in the right, though: Ratesic was always right.

  He’d come from a family of Speculators. His father, Nelson, had served with distinction, and Charles’s brother, Laszlo, had followed both of them into the Service. Laszlo Ratesic was there too, watching quietly, eyebrows raised, while his older brother persuaded Alvaro to let him have five minutes alone with Bert Pepper. There was no one like Mr. Ratesic.

  He was always right and he was right this time. There was more to the case of Bert Pepper than he knew.

  Pepper and his bag full of fake paper was just the beginning.

  Ratesic went in to talk to the kid, and the five minutes grew into ten, and the ten into twenty. Alvaro paced outside the interrogation room, watching the live feed stitched from the room’s four-corner captures, smoking and pacing, more and more angry, until at last Ratesic emerged, grinning ear to ear.

  He was right. He was always right.

  Pepper did indeed have a conspirator. His name was Armond Kessler, and he ran a small Mid-City print shop whose clients included the Publishing Arm of the Golden State itself. This Kessler sonofabitch was using the State’s own templates to press fake identifications.

  “Well done, Mr. Ratesic,” I told him. “Let’s go pick up this Kessler and see what he has to say.”

  “You know what?” Charlie said, grinning. “There’s something else I wanna try.”

  9.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Ratesic. I thought it would be okay for me to use your desk.”

  “I do mind, actually. As a matter of fact.”

  I mind very much. I like my desk the way I like it, with my takeout menus in the pile where I keep them, arranged not alphabetically or by cuisine but in the order of the days in which I use them. I like my phone in the spot where I like it to be, and I especially like my chair without somebody else’s ass in it. And now here is Ms. Paige, pulled right up to the desk, staring at my screen, biting her lower lip in concentration, holding a pen angled to her Day Book, ready for action. She doesn’t turn around, even with me looming behind her. She keeps her eyes glued to what she’s watching.

  “What are you looking at, anyway?”

  “The stretches.”

  “What stretches?”

  Now she turns, and while she’s turning she says “Stop” and the playback stops.

  “The stakeout stretches you asked me to retrieve. From Crane’s door?”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No. Why? They couldn’t put together the death scene yet, but they’re working on it. It’s a—what did he call it?”

  “A tapestry.”

  “Right. Yes. But these—” She gestures to the stretches, the neat stack she’s made of them on my desk, beside the screen. “He said these were easy. Static shot, front door. He pulled them for me, right away.”

  “Who did? Stone?”

  “Right. Mr. Stone. Woody—he said to call him Woody. He said—why—what? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because…”

  I trail off, examining the image frozen on the screen, as if I’m misunderstanding somehow, as if she were lying. But no, there it is, the drab gray courtyard at Ellendale Place where we were just walking three hours ago, that sad little fountain, the wilted chrysanthemums in their cracked clay pots. Crane’s front door. She’s gotten all angles on the doorway of Crane’s residence, exactly what I asked her to ask for, although never in a million years would I have suspected she’d get it so quickly.

  “So you just—asked?”

  “Well. I asked nicely.” Ms. Paige gives me a tentative smile. “I explained how it was important.”

  I laugh. I actually laugh. Everybody who goes to the ninth tells Woody it’s important. It’s practically tautological: if you are going to the ninth floor, if you are asking for a piece of reality to be cued for review, then what you’re working on is important.

  “You asked Woody to release two weeks of reality and he just said ‘Okay.’”

  “Well, no.” She checks her Day Book. “He said ‘No problem.’”

  “He said ‘No problem.’”

  I mean, I am fucking flabbergasted here. Doesn’t matter how many capture feeds we’re talking about, or how few. When I ask, when most people ask, what happens is that Woody Stone with his big gut rises slowly, sighs heavily, makes a big show of searching his office for the right forms—as if it’s a serious and unwelcome imposition on his valuable time, as if responding to capture requests from the thirtieth floor isn’t 95% of the man’s job description. But Ms. Aysa Paige has got the first stretch already cued and the rest of them stacked up beside the screen, ready to go. No problem.

  I’m feeling it strong now, feeling it despite myself, staring at Aysa where she sits at my desk, clearly anxious to reengage with the stretch. Envy. Red spirit. Unwelcome friend. I am conscious of the brittleness it puts in my voice.

  “All right, Ms. Paige. Did you find anything?”

  “Not yet, no. I’m going frame by frame.”

  “As you should.”

  “So it’s going to take some time.”

  “Okay.”

  She turns back to the work, says “Play” and then “Fast,” and I stand awkwardly behind her, arms crossed, watching her watch. On the screen, in the courtyard, minutes pass in speeded-up motion, a blur of minutes in which nothing happens: water sputters in the fountain, summer breeze riffles the glossy leaves of the potted plants. Aysa’s attention is steady on the screen, her whole body hunched at attention, her eyes narrowed like a bird’s, watching for prey, watching for any movement.

  “Listen, Ms. Paige,” I say finally. “Aysa.”

  She says “Stop” and turns around.

  My voice is a bit different now; I’m speaking in a different key. “I spoke to Mr. Vasouvian about you. Just now. And he mentioned to me about—he gave me a bit of background. About your parents.”

  “Yeah?” Her voice, too, is in a different key, and it’s not the same as mine. Her words are cold, hard, and flat. “What about them?”

  “That they have been gone. Since you were young. I only wanted to say I was sorry to hear that. That can’t have been easy.”

  “Respectfully, Mr. Ratesic? Fuck my parents.”

  And she goes right back to it, sliding one stretch out of the slot on the side of the screen and replacing it with the next. “Play,” she says, and I watch her watching, not sure what to say, not sure what a good mentor does with Fuck my parents. What I’m thinking, though, is that we gather impressions of other people very quickly, and they harden and fasten in our minds, and it is very hard after that to imagine that there is more, but there is always more, deeper truths, lower levels, and most people don’t even know what all is down there.

  “All right, kid,” I say softly. “You ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  I raise my eyebrows and she grins. She knows what I mean. We’ve got enough. More than enough. The anomaly of the missing days. The anomaly of the schedule. And that’s all before we even get to that damn novel, wrapped in its fake jacket, hiding in plain sight. The sort of thing a man like Crane has no business owning, the sort of thing that shouldn’t rightly exist in the first place. Ms. Paige, pain in the ass though she may be, has been right from the beginning, has been right all along: there is something in this, a crosshatch of anomalies that needs to be reconciled. Truth that needs to be found, and there is only one way to do it.

  “Stop,” she
tells the screen, and then turns fully to face me. “We’re going to speculate?”

  “Well, I am,” I say, and I snag an extra chair from next to Bright’s desk and drag it over. “I don’t know what you’re going to do.”

  I sit down. I close my eyes. I can’t see Ms. Paige but I know what she does: she settles back and closes her eyes beside me.

  I shift in my chair, arch my back slightly, clench my teeth. This is the part I hate, the moment of descent, how it’s like a trap door opening, the world giving away beneath you, a lurch and a drop, down into dark below. I jerk and twitch. One forearm shoots out rigid, fingers clutching, my body instinctively seeking to keep a grip on the world, and then I let go but I hate how it feels: something grabbing at me, speculation clutching a foot and a leg and dragging me into its darkness—

  Which is just what it is for me—a darkness: a cold room, cold and dark, a cave or a cavern, filled with shadow. I can’t see the edges of it, don’t know how far it goes. It’s only a dark room, lit by a single candle, a small, fierce orange glow, and now they float forward—stray postulates like tiny, shifting, orbiting stars, glinting in the hazy penumbra cast by the single light.

  Crane was a burglar.

  Simple. The closest fire.

  “A burglar,” I say out loud, twitching in my chair, and Aysa says it back.

  “A burglar.” And then, “A Peeping Tom.”

  “A Peeping Tom,” I say, sending that spark out into my own darkness, watching it take up orbit.

  “A burglar—a ring of burglars,” says Aysa beside me.

  That’s what it is, that’s all we do, trading back and forth, dancing together toward and then away from possibilities, scattered sparks, the void pinpricked by glitters of speculation, the mind glowing and dimming, glowing and dimming, and you sit there with head turned, the body just a body, a hollow thing grimacing in a chair while inside—

  A burglar—