Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “I know.”

  Truth, a sliver of weaponized truth.

  “That’s what happened to you and Silvie. In case you didn’t know. You were never, ever good enough.”

  I stop at the charmingly gritty Asian market just down the road from my house, near

  where Bundy turns into Centinela. Tucked inside is a brightly lit food court where you can get seven different kinds of ramen, including the kind I love, miso broth swimming with thick-cut slabs of pork and sprinkled with sliced green onions. In line for the soup, I’m thinking never good enough. Digging out a handful of crumpled bills, muttering “Thanks,” driving home with the bag balanced precariously on the shotgun seat, and I’m thinking Never, ever good enough.

  I get home from the market and there’s no chance she’ll be waiting for me on the porch as I would have found her six months ago, sipping wine on the green glider we bought together at a Palms yard sale, awaiting me in the waxy moonlight, raising her glass in an ironic toast as I trudge toward her up our steps.

  And yet my heart fills with dumb hope as I shut the car door. The Moon is in fact waxy in the sky, and the green glider is on the porch, and the breeze is easing it gently back and forth, but Silvie isn’t on it.

  I put my dinner down in the living room and tell the wall-mounted to turn on. The wall-mounted is just like the screen at work, except it’s bigger and flatter and you don’t control it—it’s more like you’re at its mercy. In the office you can requisition reality in the official capacity, get the stretches you want and slide them into your screen and say “Go.” But with the wall-mounted, you just pick from among whatever happens to be on. It’s all slices of life, culled from captures all over the city, arranged by the entertainment professionals into themed streams: “Arguments in Restaurants,” “Surprise Proposals,” “Searching for Small Lost Things.”

  I flip around for a while in search of something suitably nontaxing, maybe one of the unpopulated streams, “Traffic Lights Cycling” or something like that. I settle for “Mildly Comical Misunderstandings.” I unpack my soup and eat it slowly, trying not to get too much on my coat because I know I’ll be wearing it tomorrow. I say “Play” to the wall-mounted and watch some poor asshole waiting at the Superior Java on Finley Avenue, checking his watch, while his date on split screen waits at the Echo Park location, checking her’s.

  When I’m done I turn off the screen, chuck the empty containers in the trash, and head downstairs to do my archiving.

  My own Provisional Record is in a crawl space underneath the house, dimly lit, thick with dust and spiderwebs no matter how often I clean it out, which is not nearly often enough. I tear from my Day Book the duplicate copies of the six pages I’ve gone through today, fold them neatly, and put them in a fresh Mylar bag. I add all the purchase receipts from my meals, the conversation stamps from everyone I talked to, all the detritus from the day that has been. I seal the bag and mark the date and time and open the box and put the bag in and close the box again.

  And there, at the very bottom of my bag, resting and pulsing with menace like unexploded ordnance, is the book.

  The Prisoner.

  Forged material. A piece of Not So. The air dissonant around it.

  I turn it over in my hands. Take it away with me, back upstairs, back upstairs to the kitchen. And there, in the kitchen, in the silence of my house, it occurs to me for the first time that it might have been the book and not the missing days that caught the attention of Aysa Paige’s remarkable discernment in Mose Crane’s own empty home. The book and the missing days. Regardless, neither aberration caught me.

  I put the book on the kitchen table and look at it. The day, my day, is over. It’s on the Record. There is darkness at every window. But here I am, awake and alive in the nighttime silence, contemplating this strange novel.

  Still wrapped in its pretend jacket, the Everyday Citizens Dictionary. I wish to read it. I want to. I want to know what Mose Crane was doing with this otherworldly artifact, and aside from that—more than that—I am overcome with a desire to do what we don’t do, what the world will not allow, what is prevented by the Basic Law and common sense and conscience, which is to immerse myself in an alternate reality and luxuriate in it, feel it rise up and over me and bear me away.

  The book wants me to read it, but I don’t. I put it away in my bureau, its true face hidden behind the pretend jacket and I go to bed.

  11.

  I rise with effort from my bed and dress with deliberate movements, force my body to move. I feel like a creature of the forest, draggled, wild-eyed, and sullen. I did not sleep well. I suspect that I dreamt, a suspicion I do not like. I piss and I brush my teeth while in the corners of my eyes I see unknown faces, alien landscapes, splintered pieces of foreign facts.

  When I’m dressed I give myself a warning glare in the mirror, turn on my heel, and face the dresser, where, in the top drawer, I have deposited Mose Crane’s quote-unquote novel like a dead bird among my socks and underwear.

  “You can fuck off,” I tell The Prisoner by Benjamin Wish through the thin wood face of the drawer. “Fuck off and leave me alone.”

  I wrestle my body into the civilizing structure of my suit. Push my hair down flat, rake through the tangles of my beard. Get in the car, hiss at my reflection in the rearview, and drive to work.

  There’s a cluster of activity on the thirtieth floor this morning, everybody gathered around my desk and murmuring, like my day decided to get started without me, like I’ve shown up late for my own life. Aysa is at my desk already, and so is Arlo and also a woman—middle-aged, thick-haired, looking agitated and restless, and I know her right away. Damn it. I stop just beyond the elevator door, with the wide vista of the city glimmering through the glass walls all around me, and I wish the elevator would come back and take me down again.

  “You,” says the lady, pointing at me, leaping up from my chair, where Arlo has sat her. “You.”

  “Ms. Tarjin.” From the diner. With the boys. The liar and the thief. Great. This is great. “There are twenty-four hours in the day.”

  “Please help me,” she says, blowing past the truth I’ve handed her, tears standing in her eyes, tears staining her cheeks. “You have to help.”

  The son Eddie, the younger one—the one who is not in jail—is standing just behind her, looking miserable, embarrassed, a reluctant second on her fool’s errand. “And seven days in the week,” he mumbles, completing the circuit on her behalf, and Arlo nods at him approvingly.

  “Good man,” he murmurs. “Good man.” Eddie studies us both for a second and looks back down.

  I sit down heavily in my chair, set down my sad man’s breakfast. “Ms. Tarjin, look—”

  “No, please, just listen,” she says, and wipes at her eyes with the back of her wrist. Her son, the one who stole the drugs, shifts on his feet behind her, digs a ratty tissue out of the pocket of his jeans and pressing it on his mother. “Let me talk,” she says, “because they’re saying Todd could go to jail for ten years.”

  “Ten?” That doesn’t sound right. The coffee I am holding, a medium with two sugars from the Donut Star that feels like the only thing tethering me to civilization, is growing cold before my very eyes.

  “Yes, ten, because he told the same lie, they say, they said he told the same lie twice, to two different people. To me and then to you.”

  Of course. The same false utterance made to multiple parties means multiple counts. But I don’t know why this lady is here—I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.

  Arlo gives Eddie a sympathetic smile and shuffles over to his desk. Aysa hangs on the outskirts of the conversation, making the moment a part of her training, studying the way I handle this particular law-enforcement situation: the human refuse of a successful arrest, washed up miserable on my shore. She stands against the side wall, beneath portraits of famous dead Speculators, including Charlie, of course, Charlie captured in his customary pose: smiling cocky, chin jutted out,
arms confidently crossed.

  “The rules are the rules,” I tell Ms. Tarjin.

  “Yeah, well, and what if the rules are wrong?” she says, looking back at me defiantly. “What if they’re not fair?”

  “You are very much entitled to that opinion,” is my answer. “That is an expression of opinion, and opinions are subjective, and as long as your expressed opinion reflects your honest interior position…” I trail off. I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a prick, so I just go ahead and sound like a prick. “Then it doesn’t matter what you think. Your son lied. He broke the law. And he has to face punishment, and the punishment is prescribed by the State. You should understand that the punishment could be worse.”

  “He’s right, ma’am. He knows.”

  Aysa speaks gently, all the “Yes, sir,” “No, sir” sharpness replaced by a gentle reassurance. Ms. Tarjin turns her pained eyes toward her. “What do you mean?”

  “Well—it just—” Aysa clears her throat. “It could really have been a lot worse.” She’s too kind to make it explicit, what she knows, what we all know: liars are subject to exile. Had Todd Tarjin’s misrepresentations been judged inflammatory, or intended to disrupt the business of the State, or in any way outrageous to the common good, he could have been sent away entirely. Forget about Folsom, San Quentin, or Pelican Bay, forget about ten years. There is a version of this story that ends with Todd in the desert—beyond the desert. Beyond whatever is beyond that.

  It happens. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

  Eddie, meanwhile, stands diffident, trying to figure out how to feel. This is all because of him, and he is bearing the weight of that knowledge while still glad not to be facing the terror of prison. Guilt, relief, and anger—a welter of emotion moves crosswise on his face.

  “Okay, but—I mean.” Ms. Tarjin crouches before me, her voice ragged with need. “There has to be something you can do. Anything.”

  She is looking at me with tearful eyes, sadness and need coming off her in waves, her hands pushing into her hair. Eddie is behind her, twisting a torn tissue, miserable with helplessness. Aysa is watching too, and old Arlo, and Charlie from the wall, from behind the shield of his crossed arms, from the distant past.

  “Ms. Tarjin, the rules are very clear, and as it happens, they are quite specific. Punishment for falsehood is a bulwark. It’s—”

  She snorts at the word “bulwark,” as if I were speaking a curse, an insult. Invoking some demon, instead of the whole system of good works that protect the Objectively So.

  “It’s part of what keeps us safe, ma’am.”

  “It’s not keeping Todd safe. It’s not keeping my family safe.”

  “Respectfully, Ms. Tarjin, your son chose to tell a lie.”

  “He was desperate! He was trying to help his brother. He—”

  “I am aware of the context. I understand the nuances. I was there, remember? But I’m telling you: strip away the context and the foundational truth is that he lied. In a public place, purposefully and specifically, he told a purposeful and specific untruth.”

  I get up, and she can’t help but recoil, step back from my height, my weight, just the breadth of me. “Imagine if everyone did it. Imagine if each person was allowed the luxury of claiming their own truth, building a reality of their own in which they can live. Imagine the danger that would pose, how quickly those lies would metastasize, and the extraordinary threat that would pose to the world. To our world. To the good, golden, safe world we have built and in which we all live together.”

  I am conscious as I make this statement that it is true and it is also simultaneously a kind of performance of truth. I am performing for Arlo, my mentor and friend; I am performing for Aysa Paige, who stands deferentially listening, absorbing. I am performing for Charlie, hung up there on the wall. But even as I deliver my pronouncement, chapter and verse of the Basic Law, and of the reasons behind the law, I am confronted with the fact that this is not a case study, this is not a training module for the edification of Ms. Aysa Paige, this is a real human person whose life is in the balance, whose heart right now is a bubble I hold in my hand. Ms. Tarjin with her gray-streaked hair and determined chin is a professional problem, and she is an unanswerable conundrum and she is at the same time a person. A person clutching the arm of her unstrung son, her dark eyes alive with emotion, a person in low heels and a green blouse, frantic, desperate, trying to exist in the world, trying, like we all are, all the time, to bend the world into a shape in which we can fit.

  Ms. Paige stands patiently, her hands behind her back, looking down at the floor. She is too respectful a junior partner to let me see how she feels about the matter, but she’s also too decent a person for me not to be able to tell.

  “Okay, well, then,” says Ms. Tarjin with soft bitterness. “I guess I’ve wasted my time.”

  “No. You’ve registered your opinion on the matter,” I say quietly. “You have told your truth, and that cannot be counted as wasted time.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”

  There is a crimp in the air, a mild bend, as my own half-truth, cynical and self-protecting, rolls through. Ms. Tarjin nods tightly, a single tear running down her cheek, and then Eddie breaks his silence, speaking suddenly in a rapid burst. “Yeah but what if—what if, you know—what if we change places?”

  I look at him. “What?”

  Arlo looks up from his desk, shakes his head, looks down again.

  “Is there some sort of—I don’t know. Is there, like, a mechanism, or…I don’t know.” He looks at me, then over at Aysa, perhaps having sensed that she’s the one with a foot in the world as it exists thirty floors down from here, outside the Service, out in the world.

  Eddie must know on some level that his suggestion is preposterous. He is making a performance of his own; it is for his mother’s benefit. It is something he can do.

  Paige does me the small mercy of answering in my stead. “No, Eddie,” she says softly. “The law does not allow for anything like that.” She gives me a quick look, and I take a breath, look up at the ceiling, keep my eyes there while I go on.

  “All right, Ms. Tarjin. Listen.”

  “Yes?” I look at her. The excitement of possibility shivers across her face. “Yes?”

  “The one thing I can do is, I can call the prosecuting attorney.”

  “You can?”

  “Yes. Just about—”

  “Oh—oh! Will you do that?”

  “Just as far as—”

  “Can you promise me?”

  She clutches my shoulders. I wriggle in her grasp. “Yeah. I mean—sure. I promise. I can say—not as an official, but as a person—I can formally absolve Todd of that one lie, the one he told me.”

  “Is that like—” This is Eddie now, trying on an adult voice, a formal persona. “Like not pressing charges?”

  “Not exactly,” I say. “Not really. The PA is under zero obligation to listen to me.”

  “But they will. They will, though. Right? They will.”

  Ms. Tarjin is hugging me. Kelly is her name, I remember that now, Kelly Elizabeth Tarjin. She is pressing her face tightly against my wide chest. My eyes are still on the ceiling. I close my arms around her, just for a second. “It means his sentence, and I mean if the prosecutor agrees—”

  “Could be half,” says Eddie.

  “Uh, yes. Could be. Yeah.”

  Ms. Tarjin lets go. She steps back. Musters a smile, just a hint of one, and I nod, hoping now I can sit down, drink my coffee.

  “Okay,” I say, and then Ms. Tarjin reaches up and grabs a small tuft of my thick red beard and tugs it, just enough so I can feel it. I blink, and she lets go, and pats the side of my face. It’s like I’m a wayward animal, and she is—sweetly but firmly—bringing me to heel. I don’t know if I blush or not, but anyway, I feel like I’m blushing.

  “And you promise?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay.”

  A
nd then they’re gone. I am aware of Paige looking at me, and of Arlo over at his desk looking at me also, and Mr. Cullers maybe even stirring from his stupor, but I just focus on my white paper bag, taking out the first of the doughnuts and taking a greasy bite.

  “That was nice,” says Paige quietly.

  I chew. I shrug. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay. I just wondered what the circumstances are that allow for that kind of decision.”

  “We’re not talking about it,” I tell her.

  “Okay.”

  Arlo is smiling at his desk. I can feel him smiling. I scowl, turn to Aysa, press the point: “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I take a sip of my coffee at last. Sweet and lukewarm. “How’s the review going? Of the courtyard stretches.”

  “Slowly.”

  “All right, then.” I point at my chair, at my desk, at the monitor. “Better get back to it, then.”

  “It’s just—”

  “What?”

  By now I know the look: keen, attentive, hesitant to just burst out with whatever realization she’s locked into, but determined not to let me move on with my life before she’s enlightened me. “Go on, Paige. What is it?”

  “I had a bit of a speculation. This morning. I woke up and I just—because of what you found out yesterday, about the homeowner, his affair with the…the policewoman…” She is slowing down, waiting for me to interrupt, to tell her to sit down like I said and watch the damn stretches. Which I should do. I should lean on her with the full weight of my authority, tell her we will speculate further on this matter when I have decided that it has ripened anew for speculation. I’m supposed to be the ballast, after all. The problem is, so far she’s always been right.

  “Go on, Ms. Paige. I’m waiting.”

  “So we have Crane, right? We have this roofer—this mysterious roofer.”

  “Adjectives,” I say, scowling, waving a hand, and she says, “We have this roofer. He’s there early, he’s there off schedule, right? Flat facts. Anomalous.”