Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  What the fuck?

  It is open, facedown, spine bent, pages riffled, like a bird shot out of the sky.

  It’s impossible, of course. It’s fucking impossible.

  Because I jammed the book into the dresser this morning. Didn’t I? I did. I think back, throw my mind out backward, like feeling behind you in the darkness. This morning. To the diner, to the office, Kelly Tarjin begging me for help, Silvie at the Record, the day replaying itself, but I know—I know—I know that book was in the dresser when I left.

  It sings to me.

  From the bed, it is singing.

  I can hear it singing.

  I left it in a drawer. Didn’t I? I did. I know that I—

  “No,” the voice sings, the visiting voice. “You—”

  I clutch at the side of my head. I’m in my T-shirt and underpants, alone in this room except that I’m on the Record. In this room there are three captures: above the door, on the floor lamp, on the ceiling fan. It’s just lucky the jacket is still on the book, but if someone was in here—if someone came in—

  No one came in.

  I am staring at the book, and I take a step toward it.

  I want you. The thought dances to life. Like a stranger, a visitor, a visiting voice.

  I turn my back on it.

  I take my weapon out of the bedside table and perform a careful circuit, room by room. I am seeking an intruder, but as I move slowly through the house, I begin to feel like I am the intruder myself, stalking through the handful of rooms in my little house and seeing each one anew. I can picture myself, as if from above, a dark figure, moving in shadow.

  I don’t find anything. In the kitchen, my juice glass is still on the kitchen counter, lightly stuck in the place where I left it, and my plate is in the sink. The light is on in the bathroom. My pile of last night’s dirty clothes is still in the laundry room. I peer out each of the house’s handful of windows, checking for signs of entry. I crane my head up and down the street. Across the street is a wide field planted with lima beans and lettuces. Down the slope from my backyard is a four-lane road, and across the road is a vast field planted with avocado.

  It doesn’t matter how long I look: I won’t find anything. Nobody’s been here. The front door was undisturbed and no one has a key, and who would break in and take nothing, disturb nothing, only take out a book and not even take it—just take it out and leave it open on the bed?

  No one. No one would do that.

  So I return to the bedroom living in two realities at once—We always are, aren’t we, despite all our efforts we are—believing and not believing that someone was or is in the house with me, knowing and not knowing that I am alone with The Prisoner: A Novel.

  I know exactly what it wants. It wants me to read it. That can’t be so, of course, because it is an inanimate object, possessing no impulses or desires of its own. The book does not carry intentionality. It simply is, but there it is, having somehow crawled from my drawer and thrown itself open on the bed, willful and desperate for attention.

  I grab my head with both hands, press my flattened palms to my temples like I am trying to keep my head from toppling off, and growl.

  What the book wants is for me to read it, and I want that too. I want it very badly.

  I should go to the fridge and find a beer and drink it, maybe drink another one. I should turn on my wall-mounted and watch some stream, any stream, fucking “Slipping on Sidewalk Cracks” or “Old Men Walking Dogs.” Anything. I should brush my teeth and wash the blood from my hair, and fall into bed like a tree, get up in the morning, and see what Alvaro has written on the board for me to pursue.

  Yes, there was a case at 3737 Vermont Avenue, there was a dead man on the ground at that address, there were certain associated anomalies, but all of that is gone now. That matter is unknown and unknowable, and that is a part of the job—it is part of living in the world. There are certain things that cannot be known and can never be known, and this must be accepted, our safety and our future depend upon it, and I am trying to bear it and depend upon it, and it is like knives, it is like holding the blades of knives.

  Charlie could have done it. Charlie would have outsmarted them before he could be outsmarted, Charlie would have sensed the maneuverings of the gray man in the corner, seen the wall the Expert was building and tunneled under it, flown over it. Charlie would have come back laughing with the whole truth and nothing but, dangling from his clenched fist like a monster’s severed head.

  Every time I close my eyes my body hums for solace, and every time I open them I see the novel lying on the bed.

  I put down my weapon. I pick up the book. I need it.

  I start at page one.

  “Listen, lady,” said Shenk very slowly, shaking his head. “You’re in the wrong place. Okay? You need to find yourself a lawyer.”

  “You are a lawyer.”

  “Yes. I’m a lawyer.” Shenk smiled. He felt weary. He was tired of smiling. “But what you need is, you need a lawyer lawyer. A real lawyer. You understand?”

  That’s how it starts, page one, the page after the title page. A lawyer in his office, morose and deflated, visited by a needful stranger, and already I can feel its claws in me, the claws of its questions: Who is the lawyer and who is the woman, what is their past and future—

  I put the fucking thing down. I put it down on the edge of the bed and then I pick it up again and throw it against the wall.

  I stand up and grit my teeth and stare out the window at the sleeping city. The tops of palm trees, the distant movement of brake lights. Reality all around me.

  I know what is going to happen already, I can feel it happening. I have been warned of this my whole life. We all have—I have and you have. I have spent my whole life protecting against alternate realities, and now this one is like an injection, it is like pushing poison directly into my veins, and I can’t stand it, I can’t allow this to happen, but then I yell “Fuck!” and I storm across the room and grab the book with greedy fingers and find the page I was on and start to read again.

  The Prisoner is the story of a boy who becomes gravely ill after a botched surgery, and it’s about his family, which is desperate for his recovery, desperate and scared and sad, and it’s about the lawyer that they hire—that’s the lawyer from the opening passage—his name is Shenk, and he is a sad and furious man when we meet him but then we understand in time that he wasn’t always that way, it was this case, this broken boy who made him so, and it’s about the boy himself, who lies for most of the story in silence, in a vegetative state on a hospital bed with some sort of mysterious alien life moving inside him—that’s the part I saw yesterday, the section I already read, the part I glanced at grudgingly in my office yesterday, the part the book was opened to. I charge on, I read and read. It’s all happening in a city called Los Angeles, within a state called California, which is related somehow to the Golden State, bearing some similarities in the detailing, in weather and geography and here and there in street names, landmarks—which is disquieting and yet mesmerizing and the thing about the book is that none of it is true, nothing is confirmed or certain. The book speaks in the voice of various of its characters, and each of them—the lawyer, the boy’s father and his mother, the doctor—has an opinion about what must have happened, each of them marching around shaking their own version like a fist, and so it is a riot of subjectivities, a violence of truths, and the fuck of it is—is that as I read I am beginning to cry, tears rolling hot down my heavy cheeks and disappearing into my beard because I do not understand this—

  And then I feel like I do understand it, what it means, of course I do, but I can’t think about it, it doesn’t bear consideration, it—

  The world as I have understood it is slipping out from under me and I ought to stop but I can’t. I can’t stop. I keep reading and as I read the book settles down over me, it becomes reality as I read it, the air becomes fuzzed, to the point that when I look up it is like the reality of my
room is less real than the reality inside the book.

  I read it for hours, curled forward over the small artifact of the book, sitting on the wood floor of my house, feeling the real world under my ass, leaning against the wall and feeling the real world of drywall and plaster against my back, and this extraordinary struggle plays out inside the boy, but really the novel revolves around the people outside him, who have no idea what’s going on, just as I, reading it, have no idea really what is going on, and I want to know what is real even though I know that none of it is real, that a novel is just a book of lies, a bundle of falsehoods like sticks lashed together with sentences for wires, the boy invaded by alien intelligence and the doctor drinking himself sick over his failure and the father seeking his own truths in this maddening truth-diffusing system of systems called the Internet, and I can feel all of this non-sense, all of this not-true, it’s all watering my eyes and itching my throat, burning me down from the inside, and still I can’t stop—

  I am approaching the end of the book, and the father and the doctor and the lawyer are converging in a different city, a vacation city, an impossible city, in hopes of finding a cure. This city, Las Vegas, is described as a place where, as the lawyer keeps saying, “Gambles sometimes pay off.” And as I read, as I travel along with the people who love the boy, Wesley Keener, on their wild-eyed mission, barreling in an old car through the heat of what feels like an endless desert in search of this mirage of hope in this place Las Vegas, which cannot be real, I am as close as I have ever been to understanding what happened—what really happened—what laid us low—what cut the Golden State adrift and cloistered in its own truth at the edge of the world, as close as I have ever been to the old world that left us or we left, and it is like I am driving in a car through the desert toward the inscrutable past—

  Toward the truth—

  I read to the end, faster and faster, I can’t stop, I keep reading, pushing forward through this dream of something that is Not So and never has been, and by the time I reach the final pages, however many hours later, I am curled up beside my bed as if in hiding from the world outside, hiding from the Moon, my back against the wall and my knees curled up against my chest. I am reading the end pages and not wanting it to end, I am shaking, my body in full revolt against all my manly efforts to hold it still.

  Later on—much later, I don’t know how much later—there’s a noise.

  I roll over and raise my head, confused and weary. Baffled. I am, it appears, on the ground. I am on the floor, with the book beside me. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how much later it is.

  But then the noise, again. Something crashing against something else. It has a texture to it, a wooden thump.

  I moan. I’m in a hospital bed.

  I am an unconscious child.

  I’m on the floor and the book is nearby, closed and angled away, its spine turned away from mine, like we are lovers who’ve quarreled in the night. False reality is clinging to me like the dust of an old world, gritty at the corners of my mind.

  My family is clustered around my bed, consumed with worry.

  I shake it away. I stand, slowly, and brush myself off, wiping bits of falsehood off my chest and my arms.

  It’s knocking, that’s all. Someone is knocking at the door.

  The Moon hangs like a lamp outside the window, giving a grudging half-yellow light. I don’t like the sound of the knocking. I find my gun and chamber a round. I get up, slow and deliberate, and, holding the gun in front of me, I walk to the door.

  The pounding continues.

  The doctor is at the door, here to lay scorn on my desperation to find a cure for my son, my sad need to pick and choose my own truth.

  The boy himself is at the door, Wesley Keener, up and about at last, back from the dead.

  Come on, Laszlo. Come on. Get it the fuck together.

  “Who is it?” I stand away from the door, gun drawn but not aimed, just like I learned in the academy.

  “It’s me. Mr. Ratesic? Laszlo. It’s me.”

  I keep my weapon out, but I look through the peephole and there’s my trainee, out of her blacks, in jeans and a T-shirt, no pinhole, hair pulled back and tied, looking up into the door’s eye with raw urgency on her young face.

  I glance back into my bedroom, the sliver visible through the door. The novel just out of sight. And I think, what have I done?

  18.

  “Okay,” says Aysa, breathing heavily, nodding her head, gathering her thoughts. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. So. I went back to the office to finish reviewing it.”

  “Reviewing what?”

  “The stretches. Can I come in?”

  “What stretches, Aysa, did you go back to finish review?”

  “On Crane’s apartment. The stakeout stretches from Mose Crane’s apartment.”

  She holds up her hand and a shiver cuts through me. She’s got one tight in her fist, a slim rectangle of silver plastic. She’s been back to the office, and not only did she review the stretch, she made an echo of it: she burned it and stuck it in her pocket and brought it here.

  “You weren’t supposed to do that,” I say, glancing up at the doorway capture, and I’m trying to be stern but I fear I sound like a child, like a small, scared child. “You can’t have done that.”

  Of course I could be talking to myself. The Prisoner is in the bedroom, still quietly singing. Its alternate truth is still glimmering in here, glossing the furniture, fogging my vision. If she’s broken the rules, then I certainly have too. When these stretches are played, when this reality is requisitioned, when this whole story enters the Record, it will be both of us who are found to have strayed.

  “We were pulled from that case,” I tell Aysa. “That is not a case.”

  “No, I know. Can I just come in? There’s something you need to see.”

  “The State has determined this matter unknown and unknowable. We can’t look, Paige. There’s nothing there.”

  “Well, Petras said so. But just because she says there’s no anomaly, that doesn’t mean there’s no anomaly.”

  I’m stunned. I laugh. “Yes,” I tell Paige. “That’s exactly what it means. That’s literally what it means. Petras was speaking for the State.” The thing is determined. It is done. “We fucked it up.” Catch it. Correct it. “I did. I fucked it up. Investigation complete.”

  She is shaking her head, gritting her teeth. She won’t accept it—she can’t. I wonder with a sudden horror whether Paige is sensing the presence of the novel in my house. She must be: with her discernment, her attention to falsehood, she must feel that it’s here. Is she being polite? Deferential to my superior rank? Or can it be that she is she so focused on the mission that brought her here, frantic in the dead of night, that she isn’t catching it?

  “Can I just show this to you? Can I just tell you what I’m looking at here?”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Paige. No.”

  “Yes.”

  She doesn’t stamp her feet, but she might as well. She is like a defiant child, but somehow serious, more serious than me. She is more of a Spec than I have ever been, has more of whatever it is that puts a person in law enforcement—she has started and she can’t stop. She cannot leave it be and that is her truth, bone truth, deep true, she could not leave the matter of Mose Crane because that’s who she is—and who am I? I’m the one who is told that it is over and just agrees that it’s over, just goes home and gives up. Gets lost in a fake reality, curled under my covers, hiding from what’s real.

  And that’s been it the whole time, hasn’t it? Arlo told me to hold this young Speculator back, to ballast her, keep her calm and deliberate and cautious like I am calm and deliberate and cautious, but I never wanted to. I don’t want to make another me—I want another Charlie. The parts of her I’m supposed to tamp down are the parts I like the best.

  Paige went back to the office because she’s not like me, she’s like him, she’s like
Charlie, she’s Charlie, and she won’t stop. She can’t.

  “All right, kid,” I say, and hold out my hand. She puts the stretch into it. “Let’s see what you got.”

  Two minutes later we are crouched in front of my wall-mounted, in the center of the living room, staring at the front door of Mose Crane’s apartment.

  I glance at Aysa’s somber face, blanketed in the light of the wall-mounted. She has not seemed to notice that I have no furniture. She has not seemed to notice that I am in my underclothes, or that my house is a mess, and she certainly hasn’t looked with curiosity into the bedroom and wondered why there’s a copy of The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary lying on the floor like a spent shell.

  On the screen is the same static shot of Crane’s front door.

  Ms. Paige says “Go” and “Fast,” and reality races past, one minute, two minutes, three minutes passing in a rush, and then here he comes. “Slow it down,” she says, and we watch him enter: a man in a gray suit, moving quickly, eyes cast down, holding his hat down on his head as he rushes up the stairs. The stretch does not show his face. I get as close as I can to the monitor but I can’t see it.

  “Do you see?” says Aysa.

  “See what?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Who?”

  She looks at me, and then back at the screen. I stare.

  “Are you—sure?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Stop,” she says, and the image pauses and I recognize him in that instant—a face turned slightly to one side, a high brow, a chin tucked downward. It’s Doonan, all right.

  Do you know the idiom, my right hand? Mr. Doonan is my right hand.

  “When is this? Is this—is it during the missing two weeks?”

  She shakes her head. “Laszlo. This is yesterday. Two hours and nine minutes after Crane falls off the roof.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Wait.” My mind is pinwheeling, turning over itself, but I can’t keep up with Aysa Paige. “Go,” she says, and Doonan goes, walks briskly up the steps and stands at Crane’s door, his back to us, his face once again hidden from the capture by his hat, and he knocks, shifts on his heels a moment, and then the door opens.“Wait,” I say again. “You said this was yesterday. Two hours and nine minutes after the fall. But doesn’t that mean—”