Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “Just call them!”

  He is craning his neck to see past her, trying to see in, seeing me and the ruined body of the judge, the two of us like drunk lovers on the ground. “Your honor?” the bailiff says.

  I’m covered in Judge Sampson's blood, my tie dangling over his spit-stained chin and cheeks.

  “Call them!” shouts Paige.

  The rest is a fog of red, of shapes rushing within it. A swell of noise from outside on Grand Avenue, a clatter of footfalls and shouts.

  Me and Paige are outside chambers, instructed to wait by a regular policeman with his sleeves rolled up. We are seated on a hard-backed bench, side by side.

  In my mind, the judge vomits blood and pinwheels down toward the carpet, and then again, and again. Reality cued and re-cued.

  He is dying and he is in the kitchen at a party in Silver Lake, leaning in the doorframe after I have gone, and he’s sharing a joke with my wife. Ex-wife.

  The courtroom has been emptied of litigants and lawyers, and they bustle about in the hallway, curious, reluctant to leave such excitement.

  Ms. Paige has her Day Book out and she’s organizing her thoughts, trying to piece together what we have learned. I am slumped, hollow, staring straight ahead. There is a pane of frosted glass inset in the dead center of the chamber door, and I stare at the glass, finding abstracted patterns.

  This is what the world is, I’m thinking as the busy incident aftermath rushes around me, police and ambulance personnel, archivists, and documentarians. One explosion after another, the Earth opening up again and again, sending out gouts of loose dirt, covering us up.

  I am exhausted, but Aysa does not stop. She can’t. Aysa has her Day Book out and she has the judge’s blood-splattered Night Book out too, between us on the bench. Aysa has already apologized for letting herself be distracted by the verdict on Ms. Wells; apologized and then moved swiftly on. Aysa focuses on the work. Aysa carries on, puzzling through her notes undeterred and undeterrable.

  This is even though she, like me, is speckled with blood, dark droplets crusting on her forehead and on her neck. Even though we sit but feet from where his body still lies, awaiting the attentions of the regular police, of the medical examiner, the record officers who are angling around with their captures and their mics, forging this remarkable event into history. The coroners who will, when it’s all over, bear him away.

  Regular police keep arriving at the scene, and there are now multiple capture teams on-site. We are being filmed even now, in our extremity, both of us smeared in gore.

  We’ve already been interviewed, of course, and we’ll be interviewed again.

  We are pursuing an anomalous death.

  The judge may or may not have had relevant information…

  We may never know…

  “Okay, so,” says Aysa, flipping through her notes, forward and back, forward and back. “Here is what I don’t get. So the man is married. Okay. So he’s—he’s unfaithful.” She glances at me, a fleeting embarrassed wince. “He has affairs. Multiple affairs. Okay. So—but—”

  I finish the thought, my voice empty and toneless. “But so what? Right? So what?”

  “Right!” She nods slowly, twice. “Exactly.” A new cluster of cops swoop by, officious, belts jangling with their radios, a couple of boom ops close behind them.

  “So what was the big risk here?” says Aysa. “That maybe he would, what? Lose his job, right?”

  I shrug. “Perhaps.”

  “Maybe she would lose her job? Tester, I mean.”

  I shrug again.

  “But still, to—” She shakes her head. “To drink poison. Okay, the Specs are here, we’re asking questions. Bad luck, yes. A guy dies on his roof, we start rooting around, find out he’s a bad husband. But it’s kind of—”

  “An overreaction.”

  “Yes.” She snaps her fingers. “Exactly. It’s just…small.”

  “Yeah. Also…” I press my knuckles into my eyes. Trying to wake up. “Also, the man had poison to hand.”

  “Right!” says Aysa. “Right! So why? Why? Why is he that worried about his affair with Tester being discovered? Unless that’s not what he was worried about. Maybe that’s what Tester was worried about. Maybe Sampson was worried about something else.”

  “Huh,” I say, and I feel her waiting for me to say more, but I don’t.

  She is dying for it. She wants the two of us to sit here on this cold bench, shoulder to shoulder, and close our eyes and be borne away by speculation. She wants us to sit here in the illuminating darkness and churn through the maybe so’s, fill the courtroom air with possibilities, test each for soundness, jump off from this platform to the next one.

  But I’m in no mood for it. I’m in a kitchen doorway in Silver Lake, bearing witness to my own mortification. I’m trapped inside the judge’s cruel crocodile smile, feeling the jaws of his revealed truth snap closed around my neck. His blood and viscera are on my coat.

  I am contemplating a thousand things I thought I knew and never did know.

  I am watching him pitch around in circles, blood from his mouth like a sudden exclamation. In my head, his hands are on Silvie's waist, just barely, the first time. Just the backs of his hands.

  My personal and professional existence is built on the idea that everything can be known, that everything must be known, and now here I am, on a bench outside judge’s chambers, and I’m on a green glider in Mar Vista pierced by understanding that nothing can be known at all. Something has opened up inside me that never can be closed.

  Aysa beside me lifts the judge’s Night Book. The cover is misted with blood, the pages are gummed together. Carefully she begins to unstick them, page by page.

  In spite of myself, I am curious. I am interested.

  “Is the rest of the Night Book like the part he read?”

  She nods. “Yeah. Pretty much it is.”

  She scans sections, murmurs a line or two aloud to me. It’s all lust. It’s all sex and the desire for sex, the delicate small observations and sudden fierce movements that are prelude, the altered locutions and idiosyncratic motions that define the event itself. There are Night Books that overflow with sedition, with epistemological heresy or criminal confession, but this, it seems, was the only form of proscribed detail the judge thought worthy of preserving; he took pride in the full truth of his ability as a seducer, and he felt that the Record, the complete archive of the truth of the world, would be incomplete if it did not include them. His personal history of conquest and debauch, organized by name. “Stole away with J after court.” “Brought L back to chambers for a frank discussion, which led down the hoped-for path.”

  Aysa carefully peels the blood-gummed pages from each other, until she finds it—

  “Here,” she says. She holds it up. “E. E for Elena?”

  I shrug. I nod. “E for Elena.”

  “Whoa.”

  “What?”

  She holds out the open book to me. My body is moving on its own, hand opening on its own. She puts the Night Book in my flat palms and I stare at the words, looking through eyes rimmed with blood. “Again I find myself with E,” it says at the top of the page, in the judge’s precise cursive—followed by nothing. Or, rather, followed by nothing that once was something.

  After “Again I find myself with E,” there is inky blackness, lines and lines of it. Sentences that have been crossed out, blacked over, comprehensively redacted.

  Aysa leans in eagerly, her knees jiggling with excitement, as I turn over pages. Two pages, three pages, four. Whatever happened between the judge and this Ms. E, it has been neatly and comprehensive excised from his Night Book.

  What has the man made hidden, even in his book of hidden truths? Too secret to be told, even to himself?

  Aysa, meanwhile, has returned to her own Day Book, and she is tapping it, nodding, glancing back and forth between the judge’s book and her own.

  “It’s the same days,” she announces.

  �
��What?” I close Sampson’s book, lift my fingers from its tacky hide.

  “The date range, sir. Laszlo, the dates are the same.”

  She holds up her Day Book, hands it to me so I can read the notes she made in Dolly Aster’s basement, and I two-step verify them in my own. The entry that begins “Again I find myself with E” falls exactly among Mose Crane’s missing days.

  I breathe in and then out again. It’s like my blood froze when Sampson did what he did and now it is flowing again—not flowing but racing, rushing.

  “Ms. Paige. Do you have your radio?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do me a favor, will you? Can you raise Alvaro?”

  “Why?”

  “Just raise him for me. Raise him.”

  We’d driven in angry silence all the way to Silver Lake. That night. Silvie and me.

  Forty minutes of cold silence because of some offhand idiot remark I’d made in our driveway, on the way to the car.

  I’ve made my way outside now and I’m standing on the courthouse steps, blinking in the sunlight like a bear emerged from his cavern. I’m waiting for Aysa to raise Alvaro so our next step can be ratified. Meanwhile I’m smoking a cigarette and staring at the dirty steps and trying to move forward, to beat back the past. Gather my spirit and forge it into something strong.

  Silvie was beautiful that night: a gold dress with small pearl buttons; earrings and heels; a ceramic butterfly clip lifting her hair into a crown. Silvie was in an expansive mood. She stopped me in the driveway, seized me by the elbow, and pointed at the sky.

  The stars were just coming out, and she told me that they were diamonds.

  “And you see those three—those ones there?” She was holding a bottle of red wine by its slender neck. I had the keys. “That’s a necklace. A pretty diamond necklace like the one you’ve never bought me.”

  She laughed, making sure I knew she was joking, but I couldn’t even muster a smile.

  “The stars are like diamonds,” I said.

  Obviously she wasn’t lying; obviously she wasn’t purposefully misrepresenting the nature of the stars. She was enjoying the feeling of the twilight sky, the sturdy feeling of her hand on my arm. She was feeling good, feeling gentle, sharing a plain metaphor with her man. But something in me wasn’t in the mood. I had had a hard day at work, trudging through a world thrumming with lies. I was feeling small, miserable, literal.

  “The stars. They’re not diamonds, Sil. They’re masses of hydrogen and helium, millions of miles wide and millions of miles away.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “I know.”

  She took her hand off my arm. We drove across town in silence. I left the party early and on my own.

  Now Ms. Paige finds me, out on the street. She is holding up her radio. An archivist trails her, and a capturer trails the archivist, her capture bobbling on her shoulder. Ms. Paige holds up the radio. “I’ve got Alvaro.”

  Paige watches me curiously while I talk to our boss.

  “Quite a day you’re having, Laszlo.”

  “Yeah.” I take the last long drag of my cigarette and stub it out. “I know. Listen. I need you to set something up for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “I don’t like anything. Might as well ask.”

  16.

  There are aspects of the physical city that can be seen but not fully understood: visible etherealities, manifestations of a time buried under present time. Like there’s this one building on West Adams, near a hoagie place I like, a soaring construction of heavy gray stone with elaborate stained-glass windows and long, low steps that lead up to wide, tall doors. It’s a State site, accessible only to authorized personnel, in which files damaged by fire or flood or other emergency are carefully reconstructed by experts and archivists. If the building with the stained-glass windows used to be something else, it is nothing else now. It holds its past but holds it in secrecy, unknown and unknowable.

  It’s like the sign up in the Hills, up at the crest of Mount Lee. You can just about make it out from where are now, idling at the Gower Street Gate, waiting for the man in the guard house to come over and check us in. Nine tall white letters on the side of a hill, spelling a word that if it meant something to somebody once, means nothing to anyone now. Nothing that can be known.

  “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, sir. My name is Laszlo Ratesic, age fifty-four, and I’m a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sums of the squares of the other two sides.”

  “Good morning. Pi represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.”

  “My name is Aysa Paige, age twenty-four and a two-day veteran of the Speculative Service.”

  “Did she say two days?”

  “She did.”

  The gate man peers past me at Aysa in the shotgun seat and grunts. “Huh.”

  I’m impatient. I’m ready to go. “We need to see Laura Petras, Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws.”

  “You have an appointment?”

  “No,” I say, and add hurriedly, “but I believe my supervising officer called over. Mr. Luis Alvaro?”

  The gate-arm man looks skeptical. Like, what? I’m going to lie?

  “Give me a moment, sir,” he says, and retreats into his little house and picks up his radio.

  While we wait, while the guard checks our identifications, while he checks his call log, while Aysa looks through the windshield at her first view of the vast complex that contains our collected Expertise, I happen to turn my head at just the right moment to see the Dirty Dog food truck as it cruises through the green light at Gower and Waring, the intriguing black hot dog–shaped truck with the pink piping, and I allow myself the fleeting fantasy of leaving Aysa to her own devices for this next phase of our investigation. How pleasant it would be to leap from the driver’s seat, chase the truck down the street, and then, once I have caught it, sit on a bench and eat a works with cheese, watching seagulls circle the sky.

  From his little booth, the guard hands us back our identifications and the gate arm goes up.

  “Okay.” The guard is squinting at us. “You folks know where you’re going?”

  “Not really,” I say, and he hands us a folded-up paper map, which Aysa takes and unfolds.

  “When you’re done, you gotta come out by this same gate,” he says finally, and I nod.

  “Okay.”

  “Did you hear me?” he says, like I didn’t answer. “Same gate.”

  The complex is enormous, and I haven’t been here in a long time. Aysa holds the map and calls out directions. We drive past long low buildings with flat tar roofs, painted on their sides with various of the State’s mottos. Pedestrian walkways snake between the buildings, each marked with its department: Expertise in Transportation and Infrastructure, Expertise in Commerce and Trade, in Monetary Policy, in Agriculture. Each of the little bungalows houses the offices of a different Expert.

  Dotted across the lawns that separate the buildings are cafés, kiosks, and small fountains, each a miniature version of the one in the Plaza downtown. The whole campus is organized around the water tower, seven stories high, painted brightly with the Bear and Stars, and which can be seen from anywhere on the campus—and which, on a clear day, you can see for blocks all around. It’s almost always a clear day.

  It’s all old. From before. This place, its walkways and bungalows, its sprawling open spaces and its water tower—it all is and it is all built on something that was. And if your mind wants to wonder what it was, what was here before this was here, you remember to understand that it is not known and not knowable, and you let the thought drift across your mind and then away and soon enough you turn one last corner and find the building you were looking for.

  We pull up outside Building 6892, the Enforcement of the Laws. It’s a modest two-story bungalow, the sa
me as all the others, the same flat sandstone and painted doors, wooden staircases at either end of the building connecting upstairs and down.

  Before we get out of the car I put a warning hand on Paige’s arm. “Okay, Ms. Paige. I’m going to do the talking here, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We are going to get the information we need, and we are going to get out of there. These people do not fuck around.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  She smiles. I smile. I don’t believe her for a second. I mean, I do—she’s not lying. She really believes she is capable of playing this situation straight. But she would have said the same thing outside the judge’s chambers, but then she couldn’t do it: she couldn’t hold her tongue. She is what she is. Even now it is rising up in her, and when the moment comes she will be unable to help herself.

  I run a hand through my hair, tilt the pinhole down to shade my eyes, and ring the bell.

  “It is my understanding that you do not have an appointment?”

  “That’s correct. My boss called your office about half an hour ago.”

  “Normally we don’t take any visitors who do not have an appointment.”

  “I understand that, ma’am.”

  Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws looks exactly like her photograph. The bland, unlined face and short neat hair, the probing and studious expression. The office is orderly, lined with filing cabinets and bookshelves, a ceiling fan turning mutely overhead. There is one staff member in the corner, a man in a pressed gray suit at a desk covered in notebooks.

  “Obviously this office respects the crucial work of the Speculative Service, and we are therefore willing to provide any aspects of our Expertise that might be useful to the reconciliation of any anomaly.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Having said that, and I apologize if there was a miscommunication in this regard, but the appropriate protocol requires you to put any such requests in writing and submit them to your supervisor, who would be—”

  She pauses, eyebrows raised.