Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  I nod, sip the shitty coffee, while she barrels on: he’s early, he’s off schedule, he’s got these missing days, and then, meanwhile, we have the judge conducting an affair with a captain of the police, a big no-no for both of them. Aysa gives all of this to me, ramrod straight and rattling it all off, her whole chain of speculation.

  And then the punch line: “I am speculating that Crane was up there on the roof to collect evidence of the affair, in order to blackmail the judge.”

  “Or the captain,” I add quietly, and Aysa blinks. She was waiting for me to tell her she is wrong or crazy, but she is neither wrong nor crazy. She’s on to something. Of course she is.

  “Yes, right,” she says, surprised. “Or the captain.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Good.”

  Since the Tarjins left, the room has returned to its usual bustle. Alvaro has taken up his position by the big board, a cigar stub jammed into the corner of his mouth, furiously updating the chart of ongoing investigations. Specs are coming off the elevator and getting on it, slamming drawers, slinging on their shoulder bags to head out into the field, files clutched under their arms. Arlo is a still point in the chaotic universe, hunched at his small desk, making his small notations. “So, Ms. Paige? What do we do now?”

  “Are you—asking me?”

  “I am indeed.”

  I wait. I am trying to hitch her tremendous powers of discernment to operational effectiveness. If she is going to be Charlie, that’s what she needs to do.

  “We need to get the reality. The stretches showing his death. That’s key. That’s—right?”

  Just at the last moment does her confidence waver; only the little word “right?” comes out uncertain, high-pitched, girlish. I stare back at her evenly, playing the heavy. As if I am one step ahead of her, guiding her along; when in reality I am standing back, letting her go, hustling to stay alongside her.

  “Why is it so important? We know how the man died, Ms. Paige.”

  “Yes, but—” Her eyes narrow. She won't be thrown. “We don’t need to see how he died, Mr. Ratesic. We need to see what he was doing when it happened. Was he trying to get in? Was he trying to see in?”

  “Yes. Correct,” I say. “Anything else?”

  “We need to reconstruct those missing days. Find out when or if Mose Crane crossed paths with the judge.”

  “Or the captain,” I say again, and she nods, pleased, at the end of her presentation.

  “Right. Yeah. Or the captain. Thank you, sir—thank you, Laszlo.”

  I move to put my coat on and realize I never got a chance to take it off. One of these days, I think, I will have a day with hot coffee, a day that’s quiet and peaceful. And I will float through that day, carrying no worries in my pockets. Someday soon, perhaps. Some good day. But not today.

  “Go back down to nine, tell Woody that we need to see the stretch of Mose Crane falling off that roof. Whatever you did to hustle him out of the stakeout stretch from Crane’s front door, do it again. And tell him no shortcuts. I want thirty second margins on either end. Make it clear. And tell him we need to see it today. He’s going to yell at you. Let him. I’m going to work on getting a Contingent Reassembly of those missing days.”

  “Don’t we just file a request for that?”

  “We could,” I say. “But it’ll be a lot quicker if I go over. I know someone over there.” I sigh. “Unfortunately.”

  “Oh. Wait—why unfortunately?”

  I knew this was coming. Somehow from the minute this case started I knew it would happen.

  “It’s my wife,” I say, and then I catch it. Correct it. “My ex-wife.”

  12.

  Whenever I want to, I can hear the bells ringing for Charlie. Shit—there are plenty of times I don’t want to hear them, and I hear them anyway. Hear the bells, and feel the unseasonable chill the air bore that day, and feel the uneven ground of the cemetery, how it was to stand among the throngs of mourners at Forest Lawn, the crowd spread out in all directions. The clouds spitting drizzle, the sky as flat and toneless as a coffin lid.

  My father, hatless, is staring at the ground. Arlo slips among the mourners, holding himself together and everyone else besides. Taking all hands, murmuring condolence into all ears. A kind word for every devastated member of our service.

  I stand alone. Apart from the crowd. A woman is beside me, a substantial woman wearing a black dress and red shoes. She asks me if I have an umbrella, which I don’t.

  “You’re a Speculator,” she says, and I nod. “Did you work with Mr. Ratesic?”

  “He was my brother.”

  Her face changes. The hero of the day. The extraordinary Charlie. All of the exploits were related in Trusted Authority. He was already famous for what he did.

  “Your brother. Oh, wow. I’m so sorry—so sorry for you. For all of us.”

  It takes no great speculation to tell what is happening: abstract adoration for a public hero transmogrified by grief into concrete interest in the bulky sad sack standing in the rain at the hero’s grave, the hero’s only surviving relation. She tugs at the sleeve of her dress, shows me her face, and smiles sadly. Her lips are red. A member of the regular populace discovering herself in the company of the man of the hour, or the next best thing.

  That’s me: the next best thing. Truer words never spoken.

  Me and Silvie stuck it out for ten years, ten years moving together through time and ten years standing together at that open pit, watching the box lowered into the ground, the bells ringing out his years. He was with us the whole time—he was never in the box. For ten years Charlie was at my shoulder, pointing out the ways I was never good enough. Reminding me I was never her first choice.

  “If you could put your hands in the air, sir.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you could turn around for me, sir.”

  “Yes.”

  “A little slower, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  I follow all the instructions. I am being patted down, up along the thick lines of my legs, the torso and the arms.

  Here in the Grand Entrance Hall of the Permanent Record, during the long, careful examination required for entry, there is no exchange of asseverations, no small talk. The attendants remove every item from my bag—my Day Book, tattered copy of yesterday’s Authority, the limp remains of a three-day-old sandwich—and lay it all out on a table and document the contents in a series of photographs. There are four of them doing the work, efficiently checking me in: four matching, neatly creased brown uniforms; four perfectly inexpressive faces. I’ve seen all of these faces before. The Librarians work in teams that rotate in and out in undisclosed schedules, and they surely remember me too. I’ve been in and out of here enough, and part of their job is to remember. But they don’t smile in recognition, they don’t ask me how I’m doing. They are unfailingly polite, but they’re on duty. They’re efficient and rigorous. They’re doing their thing.

  “If you could open your mouth, sir.”

  “Okay.”

  I open my mouth and they shine in a light. Then they shine the beam into my eyes, one at a time, one of them making notes in her Day Book while the other works the light. Another member of the team acts as an in-house capture team, circling us with a handheld, getting it all down. Reality being forged, the Record being made, even here at the threshold of the Record itself.

  “Each of your fingers, sir. Thumbs first.”

  I do as they say, pressing my fingers one by one—thumbs first—into the ink, rolling them onto the pad, affirming my presence in this place and at this time, ten times over. I am here. I am going to be here. I will have been here.

  These are the custodians of the Record itself. They are Librarians, and they do not fuck around.

  “If you could bear your head for a moment.”

  I grimace. This is the part I fucking hate. But I take off the pinhole and bow my head, submissive, silent. Push back my hair.

  “Thank you, sir,” murmurs the Librarian
and she takes out her wand.

  It’s weird because the damn thing is nothing. It’s just a stick, really, a slim metal tube, 14.5 inches long, black metal with a silver cap at either end. And all she does, quiet unsmiling efficient Librarian, is bring it very close to my head, as close as she can without touching, and then move it slowly across my forehead. Not looking at me, not looking at the wand, holding her eyes half shut in concentration, feeling for the minute reverberations in her palm she’ll get or not get as she hovers the wand slowly, very slowly, along the curve of my skull.

  I do, though, I fucking hate it, and I know I’m not alone: everybody hates it. Cullers won’t even go to the Record anymore. He flat out refuses, and just because of the wanding. You can’t even feel it; nothing happens. It’s just so unsettling—no other word for it—the creeping movement of that thing from one side of your head to the other. The abstract sense of invasion, of the mind being opened like a cabinet.

  “Okay, sir.” She puts the wand away. “Enjoy your visit.”

  From the outside, the Record is a two-story building, just the Grand Entrance Hall on the first floor and the modest museum, free to the public, upstairs. It’s only when you begin your descent, down in one of the majestic elevator cars or down the spiral staircase at the precise center of the Hall, that you can begin to understand the size of the place, its dimension, its astonishing shape. Substory after substory, basement upon basement, stacked one beneath the other like the drawers in a dresser, cataloged and cross-cataloged, an ever-expanding library and permanent archive of all that is part of what is So. Rooms full of tapes in rolling bins, cataloged by date and cross-cataloged by event; rooms full of manila file folders hung in narrow metal cabinets, cataloged and cross-cataloged, by person, by location, referenced and cross-referenced into Significant Individuals, Significant Places, Collated Significant Events.

  Each floor is dotted with organizational kiosks, octagonal stations with keyboards and screens on each of their sides, from which the Librarians can perform system scours of the complete collection, summoning forth individual stretches or files or notebooks or boxes for review. Each basement is built on a hub-and-spoke design, a spiderweb of hallways radiating out from the central pole of the staircase, and each could theoretically be expanded out forever.

  And eventually, of course, it will, the Record will be expanded out forever. Because new material is always being added, new reality is always happening, new truth is entering the world every moment, and so new hallways will have to be dug, further excavations undertaken, the bedrock forged of our past to undergird our future.

  I skip the elevator today. I’m not going that far. My boot heels clang melodically on every step as I descend, around and around the spiral, deeper into the sacred heart of the Objectively So, with the metal staircase shivering slightly under my weight.

  Man oh man, whenever I come down here, I get weird. The stairwell is encased in heavy glass, and through each door off each landing I glimpse the dim corridors that bend off into darkness. It is intense and disquieting to be surrounded by so much information, so much truth, everything we know, all of it gathered together. It is oppressive, actually, in a way. In a way, it is terrifying. Down here in the heart of the State, the deep hidden heart of the world.

  Silvie is on Basement Four. I pass the department doors, one after another, along the corridor: the Office of the Permanent Census, the Office of Weights and Measures, the offices of Data Sets and of Facial Recognition and of Element Stability Across Time. And here—the Department of Contingent Reality Reassembly. She’s in there. She’s working.

  You have to press a small glowing button to ring the bell, and it takes me a second to get my shit together enough to ring, and whether that’s because I’m nervous about seeing Silvie or I’m just a little worked up like I always get a little worked up down here in the solemn silence of the Record, I don’t know. But at last I press the stupid buzzer, and a moment later Mr. Willis opens it, scowling.

  “You have no appointment,” he says.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Mr. Willis hates me. Silvie isn’t going to be happy to see me either. What the fuck am I doing?

  Contingent Reassembly is a humble and underdecorated office, ugly gray carpeting and dull yellow lights. It has never been good enough for Silvie, but then again neither was I.

  The furniture is shabby and chipped and dented, and the walls are lined with framed black-and-white nature prints from around the State: rushing waterfalls and towering redwoods, windmills and freight trains, coffee plantations in Santa Barbara and marijuana fields in Sacramento, the majestic smelters that ring the banks of the Salton Sea. But the pictures are washed out, laid indifferently in chintzy frames. All subjects made much less beautiful than they are in reality.

  Willis instructs me curtly to wait. He is the CRR’s pale and tiny office manager, who, with the divorce, has at last been given license to bring his distaste for me out into the open. So I sit in the waiting room, half reading this morning’s Trusted Authority, leafing through the latest economic indicators, the comprehensive lists of the dead and the born. There’s the latest photograph of the committee of experts, and my eyes as they always do scan the plain, unsmiling faces until I find the one I’ve met in person: Laura Petras, Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws. A plain woman, barely smiling, in a gray suit and tan shoes, surrounded by her similarly dressed staff. Professional and dull and inoffensive. I’m—

  “What are you doing here, Laszlo?”

  My heart delivers a single smacking thump, a big mule kick, just at the sight of her: Silvie, my Silvie, mine no more, hands on hips, ruddy and skeptical. My former wife is not as tall as me, but she’s damn tall. The average woman is five foot five and a half, and Silvie is six foot one, buxom and broad-chested, blonde-headed and red-cheeked. I want to gather her up, press her to my body, which is most of what I ever wanted to do for the last ten years: hold her and tell her about all the shit the world was doing to drive me crazy, and listen to her laugh and remind me how lucky I was to be alive in the first place—how lucky we all are to be alive, to be in the Golden State, the two of us especially because we get to serve it.

  For ten years that was all I wanted, until we split up six months ago because I’m a moron.

  “What do you want, Laz?”

  “That’s how we’re going to start? We can’t start nice?”

  “Laszlo. Come on. What is it?”

  Mr. Willis scrutinizes this exchange from his small desk, his allegiance clear. I edge closer to Silvie, trying to screen Willis out of the conversation, and Silvie draws back, as if I’m a predator, a snake in the forest coming in to strike. Her instinctive withdrawal stabs me in the heart. Silvie in her gold earrings, with her masses of thick hair piled up and curled, always almost but not quite corralled, some of it always drifting down to tease her neck. She purses her lips and crosses her arms.

  “The last time we talked you said we weren’t going to talk for a while.”

  “I know. But it’s not a law. It’s not a bulwark. We’re not exiled from each other.”

  “Stipulated.”

  “Do you think we can talk in your office?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Sil.”

  “Is this a personal matter or a professional matter?”

  “Professional, Silvie. Okay? I need your help with a case.” I hold up my hands, like a man surrendering, like a magician proving there’s nothing up his sleeve. “Okay?”

  “All right,” says Silvie after an extended pause. “Come on back.”

  “Are you quite sure?” Mr. Willis puts in, and I can tell Silvie isn’t sure. She’s too smart not to know that me saying I’m here on business is at best the top layer in a complicated multilayered truth. But there is no question that she blames herself for what’s become of us, and she knows that I, grudging child in my heart, I blame her also, and she feels she owes me and she feels she always will.

&
nbsp; It’s what I’m counting on, big clever monster that I am.

  “Five minutes,” says Silvie at last. “I’m not busy, but I don’t like seeing you. It makes me sad.”

  “Okay,” I say, and follow her through the inner doors and down the hall. “Stipulated.”

  Silvie gestures to the chair on the other side of her desk, takes her own seat. Her inner office is a lot more pleasant than the rest of the floor: minimalist and cream-colored, gently lit and full of small cactuses in tidy beige planters. It’s got the cool, understated aesthetic she tried to get going in our home in Mar Vista, an effort forever foiled by my total indifference to my surroundings. There is a small coffee table, with exactly one book on it: Past Is Prologue, of course, the novel of the founding of the Golden State. I kiss my forefinger and brush it across the cover of the book, while Silvie waits, not softening, her eyes watchful and withholding. Clearly determined to play the surface truth of the situation: two professionals settling in to discuss a professional matter.

  “So what is it?” Silvie says warily. “It’s a case?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of case?”

  I smile, lay my heavy arms down on the desk, and swallow the wild urge to confess that I set up the whole thing—I broke into a man’s house and burned two weeks of his days, I clambered up behind him on a roof and pushed him to his death, all to contrive a reason to be here now, sitting across from you, Silvie, with our arms almost touching on your desk.

  Come on, Laszlo. Get it together. Take a fucking breath.

  “I have two weeks of missing days that I need reconstructed.”

  “Whose days?”

  “A man named Mose Crane. A roofer. Construction guy. Recently deceased.”

  Silvie twists her lips to one side, the kind of small unconscious gesture that I watched her make a thousand times, and which I now force myself to ignore. When you have been in love with someone in the past, there are a million small trapdoors you can fall through that would take you right back.