Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “Whether the authorities had discovered one in the situation or not,” I say to Judge Sampson, “I believe you were aware there were anomalies.”

  “I know there are anomalies,” he says. “I know, more than most, that such things exist.”

  “I fear, sir, that your statement contains omissions,” I say, picking my words carefully.

  “Well, let’s be serious, son,” he says. “All statements contain omissions.”

  This is more or less the same thing that Captain Tester said to me, more or less the kind of thing people say all the time, as we slide through our lives like roller skaters, skirting and dodging around the hills and valleys of the truth, ducking under it at the last minute.

  But Aysa isn’t having it. “No they don’t,” she says, her voice still hot.

  “Ms. Paige?” I turn toward her again, twisting uncomfortably in the small wooden chair. “Do me a favor, would you?” But Judge Sampson isn’t ready to move on.

  “This is interesting, now, isn’t it? Very interesting. What do you mean, exactly, young lady? Do you object to the statement that all statements contain omissions?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Oh, I think it is, Ms. Speculator,” he says. “Should we requisition the stretch? Ask for a playback?”

  As ever when someone mentions the Record, I become conscious of it, of the captures glittering in the light fixtures, of the captures on the doorframe, all the truth of this moment entering history as it goes. Even so, I know what the judge is doing: he is moving sideways, away from the conversation, using my partner’s righteousness to duck away from my questions.

  “Go ahead,” says Paige. “Requisition the stretch. We’ll watch it together. All I meant was, don’t try to pretend that you don’t know what we’re asking about.”

  I sigh. I shake my head. She’s still too young to know what I knew coming in: that of course he would try to pretend. Of course he would go to any legal length not to answer questions. One day she will know what I have known for years: the extraordinary lengths people will go not to let certain truths pass their lips.

  “We are trying to find out how a man died,” Paige says. “The truth is the most important thing. You have a piece of it, and you are going to hand it over. Now.”

  “Young lady,” the judge says. “Imagine a stone.”

  She blinks. “What?”

  “A stone, dear.” He stands up. He goes so far as to reach into his pocket and come out with a closed fist, pretending, really pretending to be holding a stone. He then places it gently, the fake stone, at the center of his desk. “We place it here. And now we draw a ring around it. Okay? Like so.”

  He does it, with one bony finger, turns his finger into a pen and traces a perfect circumference around his imaginary stone.

  “And now the stone is a flat fact, and everything inside the circle is a relevant supporting fact. And when we are asked to provide context, to say everything we know about the stone, these are the things we say. Are you with me?”

  She doesn’t answer. She stares at him.

  “But now these facts have been introduced. All around this ring, these are relevancies. They support the foregoing; they are part of it. Seen another way, we have one truth. But if you now take this spot, here along the ring, and put a stone here—another ring can be drawn. You see? New relevancies, new relevant facts all along the new outskirts. And each of these spots could, in turn, be made into the center of the circle. And so the truth blossoms outward endlessly, and it is always—always—ultimately the speaker of truth who decides which pieces of it to label, in this case, relevant.”

  I sigh. Enough of this.

  “Your honor—”

  But he’s not finished, and we’re in his house. His chambers. He speaks like a man in full control: of this room, of the State, of the whole universe. “Of course it’s easy for you all,” he continues.

  Aysa’s expression sharpens. “Easy for—women?”

  He smiles. “No. Speculators. You with your vaunted discernment. To simply see a lie, to know one when one is there. Black-and-white. You feel it. But for the rest of us? Who must make our own sorry way? We must make judgment calls.”

  “Your honor,” I say. “We are here to ask you about Captain Elena Tester.”

  He scowls, and his face clouds over. All of his charm, all of his wit, it was all dodging around this moment, which he knew was coming all along.

  “What about her?”

  “You know her?”

  “I do.”

  “How well do you know her?”

  He sighs. The cloud passes; his insouciance recovers itself. “If you are here to ask if I am fucking Captain Elena Tester, then please. Please. Ask me if I am fucking Elena Tester.”

  I wait. Raise my eyebrows. Well?

  “Yes.” He raises both hands in slow synchronicity with the smile on his face. “I am fucking Elena Tester.”

  He then arrives at the next step before Aysa can beat him there, and the calm of his voice now possesses something else. “And before you ask, I opted not to volunteer this information to you, for the same reason, I imagine, that Elena—that Captain Tester—chose not to volunteer it. Because it is private. Because all statements contain omissions.” He gestures to his imaginary ring of stones. “It is better for both Captain Tester and me that the flat fact of our connection not be splattered all over the Record like muddy paw prints by conversations like this one.”

  “Well—” Aysa starts, but the judge marches on.

  “And it is not relevant to your investigation.”

  “And you made that judgment.”

  “Yes, I did. I made a judgment.” He turns to me and winks. “I’m a judge.”

  “Did anyone else know?” asks Ms. Paige, Day Book out, pen ready to press into the carbon. “About this affair? Anyone who might have been interested in extorting you, or the captain? Anyone—”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “What?”

  He shuts his eyes tightly for a moment, and then pops them open, wags his finger at me. “Your wife is that girl, the one with the big personality. Yes? Captain Tester’s old buddy. Yes?”

  “Silvie.”

  He pats his hands on his lap in triumph, exultant. “Silvie! That’s your wife?”

  Heat. Heat behind my eyes and on my cheeks. “Ex-wife.”

  “Ex. Ah. Relationships, right? Very sad. The ex-husband. Doleful, cast out, carrying faded memories like old files. Always something of a tragic figure. Although so, too, can husbands be. A husband, too, can be tragic.”

  Paige, whether out of fealty to me or desire to stay on target, presses on. “Your honor, we need to know who, if anyone, might have known about this affair. Your honor?”

  He keeps his eyes just on me. “Let’s not do this,” says the judge. His face changes for a moment, the eyes fraternal, downturned, and then back to their focus. And he says—just softly, just calmly, just to me—“Listen. This is not worth it. Do you understand?”

  I want to take his offer.

  It feels as if I am on a cliff’s edge, toddling toward the side, and this man is holding out a hand to keep me from tumbling, and I want to reach out to accept his hand but I can’t. I won’t.

  Because Ms. Paige is doing as I have told her, she is hitching her natural powers to her hunches, making decisions on the fly, swimming in the powerful wake of her instincts.

  And because the powerful have no more right than the powerless to hoard their share of the truth. Because the Basic Law guarantees us all the same access to what is real, and the same protection from what is not.

  So I cross my arms over my chest, lean back in the wooden chair, and stare flatly back. “Answer the question, your honor.”

  “Very well,” he says, and turns his gaze slowly from me to her. “Nobody else knew.”

  “Nobody knew, or nobody knew that you know of?”

  “Why, Ms. Speculator,” he says. “If there was someone who knew
of it, and I didn’t know if they knew or not, then how would I know?”

  He laughs without humor, and Paige blinks—no, more than blinks. Squeezes her eyes shut for half a second, and then opens them again, and they are altered—seeing more clearly, keenly, the way I saw them seeing at Crane’s apartment. She’s got something. She’s caught something.

  I stare at her in astonishment for a second and then I look to the floor, hiding the sting of envy. It costs her nothing. Her body does not rack and her eyes do not water. It costs her nothing.

  “Your honor,” she says sharply, eyes open now, trained dead on the judge. “Is there physical evidence of this affair?”

  I watch the judge. His mouth becomes small. A button. “Yes.”

  “Is there physical evidence of this affair in this room with us right now?”

  He does not answer. Paige’s eyes open, and we both watch him rise slowly, turn his back on us, and retreat to his bar cart.

  When he speaks it is again to me only. “Mr. Speculator?” he says quietly, the same between-us-men appeal that he must know by now will not work. I offer him no help. I wait for Paige.

  “Your honor,” she says, boring in, unflinching, unrelenting. “Do you keep a Night Book?”

  He does not answer. The room gets quiet and stays that way, one moment of silence and then another, Judge Sampson looking up at a point behind our heads, and it is so quiet that it’s as if the judge has got some version of the courtroom’s noise canceling device in his chambers. But no. It’s just silence, and it ends when Sampson rises and makes himself busy at his bar cart, uncorking a new bottle, selecting the right size crystal tumbler. He needs something stronger, I guess. He pours but does not yet drink.

  “Yes,” he says at last. “I do.”

  “Precision, sir.”

  “I keep one.”

  “For the Record, sir. You keep one what?”

  “I keep a Night Book.”

  Before he can say anything else, before he can dodge or duck any further, I say, “We are going to need to see that.”

  Judge Sampson raises the glass, but still doesn’t drink from it, sets it right back down and then grins, a cold and crocodile grin.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he says, and then again, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll read it to you.”

  I look at Paige and she at me. “No, sir,” I say. “We will take it with us, and return it to you at the completion of our inquiries.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Speculator,” he says. “Allow me.” His eyes shine, his grin widens, and I don’t know what to make of his sudden shift in attitude. Anxiety flutters to life in my guts like a wind-ruffled banner.

  I’ve never understood what it is that makes a certain kind of person keep a Night Book. Catch that. Correct it: I understand it, but I would never fucking do it.

  On the surface, of course, the impulse is a good and golden one, doctrinaire and State-minded, a laudable individual service provided to our great collective effort. The Night Book writer commits himself to recording not only the flat facts and surface realities of life, the kinds of visible truths that are collected by captures and recorded all day long in Day Books, but to go further, to go all the way, to put on paper all the underlying truths of life, those that move beneath the skin. The Night Book writer records his thoughts, his dreams, his instincts and urges. He puts his private life on his secret pages.

  After all, they’ll tell you, everything that happens belongs to the State, and a thought is just an event that happens in your head.

  And unlike a Day Book, a Night Book only reaches the Record when its author is dead and it passes into the Permanent Record with all the rest of life’s artifacts. Or, let’s say, when a pair of Speculators barge into your office, chasing an anomalous death that happens to intersect with your existence, and they sense the presence of your Night Book and reach for it and pull it out like a loose tooth.

  The judge’s Book is indeed right here in the office with him, hidden in a wall safe behind his official portrait, and before we can object, he has it open on his desk: a slim volume, handsomely appointed. He pulls out reading glasses and adjusts them on his nose and sets in.

  “Sir,” I say, one last time. “We will take the book away with us.”

  “Oh, I know,” he says, flipping the book open. “But first I’m going to read.” And his finger falls on a particular page, and he begins.

  “‘It was the sort of party one is dying to leave until a moment arrives and one never wants to go home.’” Sampson pauses and looks up. “Oh, that’s rather nice. I had forgotten I wrote that. Very nice, indeed.”

  That’s the other thing a Night Book does, of course: it gives a vain person like the judge ample opportunity to indulge that vanity, all under the guise of supreme service to the State.

  Judge Sampson licks his lips and finds his place. “‘We had been introduced at the very threshold of the evening, one among the usual roundelay of how-do-you-dos. If I suspected in that moment that she would be added to my collection, I suspected it without suspecting that I suspected it. I suspected it in my heart alone, or in some other, lower precinct.’”

  He pauses again, looks up over the rim of his glasses at Paige. “‘Collection’ is rather crass. I apologize.”

  Paige is looking at me. She mouths “Tester?” And I do not answer. Knowledge is alive in me; moving; welling up. Sampson with his crocodile mouth carries on: “‘I had promised myself therefore not to leave before she did, and my patience was at last rewarded.’” He pauses, looks up, and sees that he has our attention. I cannot move. I am not moving. “‘We two indeed were among the last to leave, lingering in the doorway between parlor and kitchen, engaged in a very long conversation about nothing at all. Her husband, it seems, had lost patience and retreated, alone.’”

  “Husband?” says Ms. Paige. “Hold on. Captain Tester is a widow. Is this—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” says the judge, looking up, finding my eyes. Looking not at Aysa, who interrupted him, but at me. “Is this not relevant to your ongoing investigation?”

  He’s holding the book open with his palm, still looking at me. “Tell you what. I’ll skip ahead.”

  “‘S. displayed her body in the doorway as if for my personal delectation, belied any dictums about the highest beauty being the product of the greatest delicacy. Her charm, the charm of S., was in her substance, her attractiveness a matter of superabundance and profusion. Tumbling yellow locks and a full flushed face, full lips parted around a red tongue, an admirable plumpness of breasts and of rear. Her body an inviting expanse, demanding circumnavigation.’”

  “That’s enough,” Ms. Paige says, though it cannot be because she has realized what I have realized, that this is Silvie being conjured, Silvie that the judge is recalling with such rich pleasure. S. for Silvie. Silvie laughing at a suggestive joke, Silvie drifting as if by accident into his arms. The description is specific and precise, incontrovertible, slivers of weaponized truth. A husband, too, can be tragic.

  “That’s enough,” says my partner again, but the judge does not stop, he reads on, sentences like wires that fall around Silvie and draw her into an empty bedroom. Lascivious, circling sentences that trace the lines of her body like fingertips.

  I remember that damn party, somewhere in Silver Lake. Forty minutes in traffic to get there, the two of us sitting in stony silence all the way. I knew no one, wanted to meet no one. I left early, leaving Silvie to find a taxi home.

  The judge remembers it too, he has it all written down, and he reads on, word after word: words that carefully unbutton the dress, words that reveal the pale wide flesh of belly and thighs, words that trace the silhouette shape of her waist, words that describe her hips and then clasp at the small of her back, traveling with the gauzy fuzz that climbs upward along her spine as it arches in abandonment.

  I try to say something—I try to say “Stop,” I may even manage to say “Stop,” but he does not stop, he will not, his senten
ces gather steam and rhythm as he approaches the predictable climax of the paragraph, and then he is through, and he has made his monstrous point about the rings of truth, about context and omission: he has illustrated that no matter how much we know, there are parts of the story that are missing.

  There are elements unknown and unknowable, whether we know it or not.

  “Shall I go on?” he says, softly, daringly, wondering if I will take some dramatic action, smash into him with my fists, crash the crooked smile off his face.

  “As I said earlier”—my voice is a coiled wire, my hands clutched into fists at my side—“we will take the book away and return it when we are through.”

  “Very good.” He places the book on the desk, slides it toward me. “Enjoy.”

  Paige reaches for the book as Judge Sampson drinks at last from the tumbler, grins sheepishly, opens his mouth, and vomits a long stream of blood, staggering forward and collapsing across the desk.

  “What…” says Aysa, and I’m up from my chair, up and across the small room and catching him as he tumbles downward, forward, his eyes rolling back while blood is spurting and leaping out of his mouth, dark red mixed with yellow. He flings one hand out, grunting and snorting, and tries to steady himself on the desk, but he misses it entirely and goes toppling, headfirst, banging his forehead on its sharp wood corner. He’s dense in my arms and his front is covered with liquid, with the blood and bile that has exploded from his mouth. He passes, slippery, through my grip, shudders against my legs, and slams into the ground.

  “What did you do?” I say to Judge Sampson, who is convulsing, his whole body shaking, his features swiftly going pale. I know what he did. I get down on the ground beside him and try to arrange him so that he’s sitting up, so he can’t choke on his vomit, but he’s dying before I can do anything. A second wash of blood and gore comes channeling up from his guts and rushes from his mouth.

  Paige, somewhere in the corner of my vision, has thrown open the door of the chambers and is shouting to the bailiff posted outside.

  “Call the regular police,” she tells him, and he shouts, “What did you do? What have you done?”