Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “Mose Crane. A bad guy?”

  “No. Well, I don’t know what kind of guy he is yet. That’s why I need the days built.”

  “And you said two weeks? Two weeks in aggregate?”

  “No. A two-week period.”

  “Empty bags or no bags?”

  “No bags. Clean.”

  “No kidding.” Silvie shakes her head at me and puckers her lips. Silvie, with her plain, cheerful face, is an expert at the art of smiling disapproval. “Rather an extensive project you’re dumping in my lap, wouldn’t you say?”

  I shift in my chair. “Is it?”

  “Question with a question is pretty weak, Mr. Ratesic,” she says. “Even for you.”

  But Silvie is interested. Her curiosity adds an intensity to the light in her eyes. She is biting at her lower lip, leaning forward. This is part of what I was counting on, coming to her directly like this: that despite it all she’s intrigued—as curious as I am about how a day laborer, about how anyone, would come to have a precise two-week bite taken out of his Provisional Record. There are many things we never had in common—almost everything—but Silvie, bless her, was ever as interested as her man in the byzantine business of reality maintenance.

  “What happened to those weeks?” she wants to know.

  “That’s part of what I’m trying to find out.”

  “How long ago are they?”

  “Not long. Six months back.”

  “The subject is dead, though, you said?”

  “Dead.”

  “Well, that does make it easier.” Silvie leans back a bit, takes a look at her watch. She told me I had five minutes, and five minutes I shall get. “Talk to Mr. Willis,” she says, “and he’ll take the information, fill out a ninety-four B.”

  “Silvie. I could have done a ninety-four from my desk.”

  “Perhaps you should have.”

  “Silvie.”

  “Laszlo.” A smile flickers at her lips at this old game, batting back and forth, but she stops it up, remembers to glare at me. “When days are lost, there is a process, and the Office of Contingent Reality Reassembly is happy to execute our duties. Fill out the form and we will get to work on it.”

  “I don’t want help from the office in general,” I tell her. “I want help from you.”

  “And you didn’t think it would be uncomfortable, to come to me of all the people in this Department?”

  “I knew it would be uncomfortable,” I say. “But you’re the best.”

  “You are trying to flatter me.”

  “Well, yeah.” I smile, trying to smile with my whole face, put the smile into my eyes, my fat cheeks. “But also, it's true.”

  Silvie rolls her eyes, but I’ve got her, just a little bit I’ve got her. There’s small measure of happiness blooming on her face. The bells are ringing—coming from somewhere, from below and around us—and we are at Forest Lawn, turning to notice each other, standing with no umbrellas while the bells ring for Charlie. She is saying “Oh, wow” when I tell her who I am. Who I’m related to. Every time she smiles I am thrown back to the beginning.

  Now a moment has passed into a different moment, we have reverted to an old way of being, and it’s almost worse. It is: it’s worse. We were in love for a long time, or whatever it was we were in, and for a second, another second, it feels like it would be the easiest thing in the world to pick up right where we left off.

  Except all the rest of it would pick up too: the shadows that never left us alone for long, the pressure of the past on all our present moments. The ghost of a question that was in the room with us every time we were alone.

  The ghost of my dead fucking brother, whose heavy bootsteps I can hear even now—even now—descending the spiral staircase, as he comes and finds us, who even now I can see slipping into Silvie’s neat clean office and making himself at home. In his blacks, grinning on Silvie’s clean white sofa, his confident feet kicked up on her coffee table, to remind me why it would never work. Why it never worked and could never work in the future.

  The same miserable trick he pulled the whole time we were together.

  Silvie writes in her Day Book as I tell her what I have. Mose Crane. The address on Ellendale. The most recent employer and the place and manner of death. This is a big project I’m dumping in her lap, and we both know it. She’s going to have to seek out people who crossed paths with him and take doubles off their pads, find the roads he drove and the paths he walked and dub off the stretches, find the stores where he shopped and pull receipt copies. Build a picture from scratch, off whatever scraps of starting and ending evidence I can give her.

  “I’ll need to know what proportion of his totals the missing days represent,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “So—how many boxes did he have? Total, I mean.”

  “Six.”

  “Six?” She looks up. “Six and what?”

  “Six. Five and a quarter, actually.”

  She leans back. “No shit.”

  “No shit, sister.”

  “And there’s no documentation of some kind of destructive incident? A fire, or—”

  “Nope. No fire. I don’t think there was one, Sil. I don’t. I think…”

  “What, Laz?”

  I leave it there. I don’t know what I think, I don’t know what I’ve been thinking, but a truth has seized me, a truth I can’t see but I can feel, a forearm wrapped around my throat from behind, like a kidnapper’s. Something shy of speculation: a suspicion. An instinct. A fear.

  Silvie sets down her pen. Looks up at the capture in the right-hand corner of her office, then back at me. She can see inside my head, has always been able to see inside my head.

  “Mr. Ratesic,” she says. “I am going to formally suggest once again that you pursue this matter through the appropriate channels.”

  “Mrs. Ratesic. I am going to formally decline. Respectfully. I am after a speedy resolution of this matter.”

  “Our work takes time for a good reason. The whole point of this department is to provide accuracy.” Like she needs to tell me that: the whole point of the whole world is to provide accuracy. All our departments, all our endeavors. All our work together and as one. “What is the deal with this case, Laszlo?”

  “I am trying to resolve an anomaly, that’s all,” I say. “And it’s not even mine. My partner.”

  “A partner?” An amused glimmer in her eyes. “You have a partner?”

  “It was Arlo’s idea,” I say, and leave it there. “But this partner, she thinks that the owner of the house maybe had crossed paths with this roofer at some point in the past, and that his presence on the roof that day was not coincidental.”

  I don’t need to mention who owns that house, and I definitely don’t need to mention who he was sleeping with when his wife wasn’t around. Maybe Silvie knows about Elena and the judge, and maybe she doesn’t. Everybody squirreling away their small scraps of truth. Just because everything said must be truthful does not mean that everything truthful needs to be said. I have promised Captain Elena Tester that I will do my best to minimize the appearance on the Record of the flat facts I have discovered about her, and that’s what I do now. I keep quiet, let Silvie think this over for a second.

  “She sounds like a smart cookie, this partner of yours.”

  “Well.” I raise my palms in a helpless gesture, I am what I am. “I’ll cure her of that in a hurry.”

  Silvie laughs, and I do too, and it is the old laughter we are sharing: laughter of the green glider, laughter of the late-night last glass of wine. Laughter under the low-hanging moon.

  “I can’t promise anything,” she says now, and I say “I know,” and she says “I will work as fast as I can, but,” and I say “I know” again, and then “Thank you,” when what I should really be saying is “I forgive you,” because I think it would be true.

  She smiles and puts her hand on my hand and squeezes, and I carry it out—that moment of tenderness I carry u
p four flights of stairs and back out into the lobby, where I doff my pinhole and suffer myself to be wanded again. Whatever is the state of my mind, it reconciles sufficiently with how it was on my way in.

  “Okay, sir.” The Librarian holsters her wand with a polite half smile. “You have a pleasant day.”

  13.

  Ms. Paige is back at my desk, right at home, hunched forward with her sleeves rolled up and her eyes keen on the screen, as Arlo would say, her vision clear and true, and as I slump into the office she moves no muscle other than to say “Oh good, you’re back” and point with one finger toward a cup of coffee she got me. I lift it like a holy chalice, hold its miraculous heat between my hands, taking what pleasure I can from the warmth burning through its paper sides.

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine. You got the rooftop stretch?”

  “I did,” says Paige, and I don't even ask about Woody, about how she wheedled this new stretch free of him, because of what is in her eyes, the high focus with which she is fixed on screen, fixed on Crane—Crane on the high pitch of the roof, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Blue sky morning. “Sit. I’ve got something that I think you ought to see.”

  And then she waits, impatiently, for me to arrange my bulk beside her. It occurs to me I might be done training Ms. Paige.

  I take a look at the frozen cut. Woody’s office was able to knit together stretches from six or seven captures to build a nice clean multi-view, what the pros call a tapestry: Crane from all angles up on the Sampson roof. Views from below him, pointing upward from the eaves; from the telephone poles along the driveway; from the hoods of the trucks parked along in the driveway.

  Aysa looks to make sure I’m looking and then she says “Play” and the screen jumps to life.

  Crane is alone on the roof. He is smoking, holding a hand-rolled cigarette in his left hand. A roofing tool, an oblong metal plane with a wood handle, is in his right hand.

  The sky is blue behind him.

  He stands and stretches, surefooted on the pitch of the roof, and takes a long drag of the cigarette.

  Specs return in little flecks and flares, my mind overlaying the image on the screen with dancing stars of possibility: Crane the pervert—Crane the thief—Crane the helpless dupe of fate…

  I blink them away, focus on the image as the image is. It’s unsettling to see the man alive, watching him move and breathe and take drags of the butt and be a person. For all this time he has been, in my mind, “the dead roofer.” The entirety of his identity was bound up in the fact that he was no longer living, and now here he is on the roof, his eyes moving, feet planted steady as a billy goat's on the slant.

  Crane flicks the butt over the side. He turns, watching it fall over the side, and—

  “Stop,” says Aysa, and then, to me, “Do you see?”

  “See what?”

  Ms. Paige is leaned very close to the screen, bent forward to take in every granulated detail. She herself is a capture, pulsing with interest, collecting all reality around her.

  And it’s funny, because though she looks not a damn thing like my brother—Charlie was a big, tough, fit white man, heavily muscled and brimming with macho confidence, and Aysa is black and a female and five three in her heavy Speculator’s boots—but her face, the set of her face, the birdlike avidity of her eyes right now—it’s like Charlie’s there, like he is here, living in her, present underneath.

  “Here,” she tells me, “look.”

  Crane returns to his work, bending with his wood-handled planar tool, and then—there, 6:11:19 exactly, as he crouches to return to his labors—Crane’s foot snags on a lip of tile, and he shifts his weight—and now Aysa says “Slow” and the frames click by at a revelatory crawl, each giving way to the next—

  One foot slips out from under his tensed weight—one leg comes kicking out from behind the other—

  —his face registers the sliding confusion of weightlessness as his ass slams into the roof—

  —trying to right himself, he catches his heel on the gutter, which tears free, further jumbles the order of his limbs. He tips forward—over—

  —down—

  It is a hard thing to watch, that tumbling moment, the instant of unloosing. His eyes in that moment, wide with realization. It’s private. There is nothing as intimate as terror.

  Paige says “Back ten,” and the section backs up. Crane, again, standing and stretching; Crane, again, drags on the cigarette, flicking it, watching it fall. Crouching, and—

  “Stop,” commands Paige, and the image stands still, hung between frames, Crane’s eyes half open, his body half up and half down, his last puff of smoke half-dissipated in the air around him, again caught in the instant before the instant that will undo him.

  “So what I’m wondering,” she says, leaning back, “is what’s he even doing there.”

  “What do you mean? On the roof?”

  “No—as high as he is. Isn’t he higher than he ought to be?”

  “What?”

  “Well, the job is down here. Here. See? The job is closer to the eaves. They’re peeling off the tiles here to prepare the roof over the master bedroom for a second story.”

  “So what’s he doing way up there?”

  “That’s the question. There’s no reason.”

  A thought lurches into my head, a rising bubble of speculation, and I murmur it, trying it out: “There is a reason.”

  Paige says “Go” and we watch the man die another time: watch him toss his arms out, watch his legs trip each other, watch him lurch and tumble over the side like a drunken sailor. There is something cruel in this, in playing and replaying it like we are making the puppet of his body dance down to its destruction, watching it happen again and again. A kind of retrospective torture of the dead man.

  Something catches my eye: a smear—a kind of stain—high up on the screen. “Freeze,” I say.

  “Laszlo?”

  “There.”

  “What?”

  “Do you see that?”

  Paige blinks, leans closer. I point to the screen.

  Aysa nods, three times, quickly. “Yes. I see it. Or—is that—”

  “No.” I rub at the screen with a corner of my coat, because it almost looks as if a bug has landed on it, but no, it’s there. A shadow. A shape. The misshapen darkness is not in the room with us, it's in the image of the earlier reality.

  “There’s a shadow.”

  “What?”

  “I think it’s…”

  Now we’re both leaning in, squinting. It’s hard to see. It’s nearly impossible. The shadow is the shadow of something we can't see because it is off-frame, just outside the capture’s view, the kind of mottled wavering shadow that is refracted back by a pane of glass.

  “It’s a skylight,” says Aysa, and I feel a child’s pang of envy that I didn’t say it first.

  Why Mose Crane was crouching. What he was trying to see. Why he was there. A way to look in, or a way to get in.

  The room grows dim at the corners, the dimness like dread, and it’s pulling at me, I feel it pulling. I see the candle inside the darkness, the tiny glow at the center of a vast room, but I’m not ready, not now, I’m not going, not now—Fuck off, I’m not going now…

  I keep my eyes open. Stand up, shake it off. I turn off the screen, leave Mose Crane frozen in his fall.

  “Very fine work on this, Ms. Paige.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Laszlo!” She looks at me, spreads her arms, laughing off my overprotection. “I’m fine! Are you fine?”

  I’m not, not really. My throat is racked; my eyes are burning. I am feeling the familiar toll of our labors. Our gift that does not come free. The discernment of falsehood, the pull of speculation. My chest is tight, wrung, but I’ll just need a breath of air, that’s all, I need the cigarette I’m already diggi
ng out of my pocket, tugging from its pack. I’ll be fine. It’s Aysa I’m worried about, Aysa the unaffected, scrawling notes in her Day Book, no sign of any strain or symptom.

  I’m worried about her because she’s like Charlie who didn’t feel a thing until it was too late, and he felt it all at once.

  And maybe it is like Charlie, maybe she doesn’t feel it and so she doesn’t understand, but let her see it in me. Let me be a map of the dangers.

  “All right, little sister,” I tell her. “Grab your coat. We gotta go talk to that judge.”

  14.

  “Ms. Wells?” says the honorable Judge Barney Sampson of the Court of Aberrant Neural Phenomena. “Ms. Wells, I will need you to settle down and pay close attention when the court is speaking.”

  The owner of the house at 3737 Vermont Avenue sits high on his bench, exercising the solemn duty of his office. His stone-faced bailiff stands beneath him and to the right.

  The subject of the hearing, despite Judge Sampson’s repeated admonitions, will not look up at him and will not stay still, shifting restlessly from side to side and flicking her fingers in weird patterns. I’m settled in my last-row pew, beneath the row of drooping flags that jut from the back wall of the courtroom: the Bear and Stars of the Golden State, the three bars of the city, the bright yellow circle of the Objectively So. There is a dull, airless quality to the courtroom, a tired dinginess, as if the very physical space has been worn down by the grim sameness of the daily proceedings. Watching Judge Sampson work, watching him gravely evaluate this poor lady, I wonder if the man isn’t jealous of his colleagues on the State’s higher benches—the Court of Grave Misrepresentations, the Court of Deliberate Falsity.

  No, I think. He’s happy. Not smiling, of course, but engagedand brightly curious, eyes fixed on the defendant while he toys lightly with his gavel, while the courtroom’s overhead lights gleam off the dome of his scalp and glint off the big gold ring he wears on one pinky. He’s a short man, mostly bald, with tufts of hair ringing the smooth bulge of his scalp like high clouds around a mountain top.

  Aysa and I have been here for five minutes. This docket item was supposed to be cleared ten minutes ago, and my plan was to be waiting for the judge in his chambers when it was done. Instead we’re sitting here in the back of the courtroom, a hard room for anyone to be in, but especially for me. Because the unfortunate Ms. Wells, aside from the shifting and the dancing, aside from the flicking of her fingers, is letting out a steady stream of preposterous and untrue statements, and it is increasingly hard for me to bear.