Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “Five minutes, Laz.”

  “I should wait for Arlo.”

  “Hey. Laszlo. You need a friend right now. Let me be your friend.”

  She keeps her hand on the crook of my elbow, and we walk together, along the lip of the fountain, where the ducks regard us impassively. We move counterclockwise around the pond. I try not to look at people, at the good and golden citizens who still throng the Plaza but are looking at me like I have betrayed them. Like I and my Service have betrayed each of them personally. It is visible and invisible in the atmosphere, like motes of dust, and we walk through its unseen presence. If the Service can't be trusted, then why the Authority? What about the Record itself?

  Something new in the eyes of the world.

  But Silvie’s attitude is relentlessly normal, almost maniacally upbeat. She is holding my arm but it feels like it is she who is holding me up.

  “You want to eat something?” she asks. “Should we find a food truck?”

  “No.”

  “I think I saw that hot dog truck a bit ago.”

  “The Dirty Dog.”

  “Yes. Should we—”

  “No.”

  I say “No,” and also I think, I should have kept loving you. I should have loved you forever. What happened?

  And then I remember. Judge Sampson comes crashing in. Sampson beaming, leering, opening his Night Book and laying down his finger on just the right page. I stop walking. I put my hand up over my eyes.

  “Silvie,” I say. “Silvie—”

  She looks up at me and smiles, innocent.

  “Yes?”

  “I—”

  But I can’t do it. I won’t. Here she is, after all, having come for me in my darkest moment, rousted me, come to give me comfort in my darkest hour.

  “Forget it.”

  “Forgotten.”

  We stop at an empty bench and she tells me to sit.

  “Now. Laszlo.” She reaches into her bag. “I wanted to let you know the disposition of the matter you asked me to look into.”

  “The—what?”

  “The what, he says. Come on, Laz. Scour your memory.”

  “Oh right. That.”

  “Yes. That. Mr. Mose Crane. A small apartment in University City. Worked as a roofer, odd jobs before that. Currently dead. All ringing a bell now?”

  Her tone is absolutely normal, for her, for us: teasing, cutting, kind. My Silvie’s voice, comfortingly familiar to me as the voice I have known in thousands of conversations. And yet—it isn’t. Her voice is different. How is it different?

  “Listen,” I tell her. “It doesn’t matter. It’s inscrutable. That whole case.” I make a noise in my throat, some sort of laugh. Aysa is in the ground. I fucked it up. Somehow, I did. “Unknown and unknowable. That case is over.”

  “Yes, so I understand,” says Silvie with exaggerated sweetness. “Because, you know, I worked my ass off digging facts up for you. And then, just as I was building the reconstructed days, I received a communiqué from the Office of Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws.”

  “Yeah, no. I know.”

  “Turns out the circumstances of the man’s death were abruptly declared unknowable, and any investigative actions relating thereto were to be ceased immediately.”

  “Yeah, that’s—that’s my fault.”

  “Seems like everything is these days.”

  “Seems like it is.” She’s laughing, but there is some different truth active in her eyes. “But you know, Laszlo…”

  I lean in closer. If you asked me last week, I would have said I knew all the sounds of Silvie's voice, but there is something new in it now, something I have never heard before. Light is reaching me as if from a distant star. We are sitting near the dead center of the Plaza, in the midday shadow of the Record itself, the Service behind us, Trusted Authority to the east.

  “I’m sorry not to have more for you.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry it was a…like you said. A waste of your time.”

  “Oh, Laz,” she says. “Not like it was the first time.”

  We are speaking in a secret language. I don’t know how else to explain it. You live with someone long enough, you have enough conversations with them, just the two of you, and a language builds itself underneath the actual words. But something—something is going on here. Silvie is not here on a mission of sweet mercy, to drag me out of the far recesses of my depression: she is here to tell me something serious. She looks at me, and I look back at her.

  “Silvie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I appreciate it. I do in all seriousness appreciate it.”

  “Yeah,” she says. She takes off my pinhole, touches my forehead with tenderness, tries to smooth my sweaty mass of hair down onto my scalp. “You know what I was thinking? We should do the wall.”

  “What?”

  She hops up, adjusts her skirt. Behind her, at the wall, the fervent and the zealous are doing their thing, tearing strips from their Day Books and inserting their small truths into the wall’s cracks and crevices.

  “Come on, Laz. It’ll be fun.”

  She turns, takes the few steps to the wall, and gets out her Day Book. I watch her, astonished. Papering truth into the wall is for day-trippers, fanatics. If Silvie and I ever discussed it, it was to roll our eyes at the very idea. But now I get up, move close to where she's standing by the wall, and watch her write, dashing words with her small pen onto one small corner of a fresh page. A scrap of truth, some small detail of her private heart. I wonder what it is, as I wondered the whole time we were together what was happening in those parts of her truth that were forever inaccessible to me and my grasping interest.

  She tears out the page, one small corner, folds it up tight, and jams it into a crack in the wall.

  And maybe it is because of the context, or maybe because I don’t know where else my life is supposed to go, but in that moment, standing close to my ex-wife, I want her back. Fuck the judge. Fuck him. Fuck the past. Surely the truth of right now weighs more than the truth of six months ago or a year ago. What is the rate of decay of old truths? When do they dissolve and disappear forever? Surrounded by strangers, hot and uncomfortable in the sunlight, I stand inside a powerful rush of longing for Silvie Ratesic. Watching her perform this small intimate act fills me with tenderness for her, a desire to know her secrets and protect them. She looks up and I look into her eyes, hoping, I suppose, to find some reciprocal desire.

  But what her eyes bear, when I look closely, is something else entirely.

  “Silvie?”

  “Yes, Laszlo? What is it?”

  There’s a word I know, a word I heard in my training, but which I have not used or spoken since: “subterfuge.”

  I am pretty sure that if we were never in love, I wouldn’t have known what to do next, but we were in love. It’s one of the good strong truths of my life, a good piece of true that I keep fixed and firm, a thing of great and secret value, like a gold bar in the back of my closet: never will I use this, always will I know it is there. Once I was in love with Silvie, and once she was in love with me.

  She’s staring at the wall and I know what I’m supposed to do.

  I write my own message, in a small corner of my own book. What I write is true—“I’m scared”—and I tear it out and fold it up small, and Sil is standing very close, and I put my message right next to where she put hers, and with the minutest tug, my body huddled around the paper to block the captures, I let her paper fall out into my hand, and we in this way engage in a small piece of private spy craft, use the old mechanism of love to exchange a secret truth before the very eyes of, and in the very citadel of, the Golden State.

  And then, knowing the precipice upon which I am trembling, knowing that I brought her into it, thinking, therefore, somehow, that I owe her something now, I speak to her a piece of myself.

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too.” She reaches out and brushes my
cheek. “A very little bit. Take care of yourself, Laszlo.”

  It is not until I am back in my car that I understand what she meant by “Take care of yourself.” It is a phase with multiple potential meanings faceted into it, and in this instance the meaning is clear: by “Take care of yourself” she is not saying goodbye; she is saying “Be careful.”

  She is saying “Watch out.”

  On the paper, in her neat careful hand, in all capital letters, are the three words she conspired to keep from the eyes of the State.

  “NO SUCH SOUL.”

  22.

  While I drive I think about what it means, but I already know what it means. I understand the tiny slip of paper as soon as I read it, I understand “NO SUCH SOUL” immediately and completely. Mose Crane was not the victim of a robbery. Nobody snuck into his basement to spirit off two weeks of his days. Mose Crane never existed in the first place. It’s not about the days that were stolen, it’s about all the rest of them—all the days of a life that never existed at all.

  Crane isn't real, and if there is no Crane, then the whole thing was a setup from the beginning. I was supposed to puzzle over those missing days. I was supposed to wonder about Mose Crane. I was supposed to speculate, and to follow the trail of my speculation from Aster's basement to the judge’s chambers, and from the judge to Laura Petras, and from Petras to my terrible mistake, when with blundering force I smashed into the public trust in my Service, and dealt a blow to the foundation of the State.

  But why would that happen?

  No, not why, but who? Who set me on the trail? Who laid out the puzzle for me to solve?

  And the truth is, the blood truth, bone truth, is that I know, I think I know, I don't want to know but I do, and I just drive. I just focus on the road, on the 10 west, and I drive.

  There is this remarkable ability your mind has, sometimes, this trick it is able to play, where you have something figured out all the way, but you refuse to allow yourself to know it. When the flat fact is there in you but it remains below the clouded surface of the water, half drowned, waiting for you to dredge it up.

  “NO SUCH SOUL” is a grand anomaly, radiant at the center of a circle of related anomalies, but I can’t see it yet. I’m not ready yet to know. All I am ready now to know is that I am standing at a green door, heavy wood, hung in a red doorframe. A small house in Faircrest Heights, between a coffee shop and a drug store, one of a handful of pretty houses on what is otherwise a commercial street a half dozen modest one-family homes with fruit trees in the yard, each home painted its own pleasing color. I find the right house, an address I memorized without setting out to do so. I am knocking and my whole body is trembling very slightly, recalling in me the barely discernible tremor of the small earthquake at Petras’s house.

  All I am capable of knowing right now is what is right in front of me, what I can feel with my hands, my calloused knuckles banging on a green door in a red doorframe, in a small house in Faircrest Heights. There is a little octagonal window set in the center of the door, and I shade my forehead and try to see in through the frosted glass, see if anybody is home. That’s what I’m doing when the door flies open.

  “Oh no.” Ms. Tarjin is terrified to see me. She takes a stumbling half step backward, and a hand flies up to her mouth and she speaks through it. “It didn’t work.”

  “What?”

  “You were going to forgive him. You said the, the prosecuting attorney would drop it, if you forgave him.”

  “Oh. Right. No. Not forgive. Absolve.” I’m such an idiot. “Ms. Tarjin. It’s okay.”

  “It is?”

  “It is.” My fears drove me here. I didn’t stop to think of how it would make her feel, this poor lady, to find me washed up on her shore. “I contacted the PA’s office, and formally absolved Todd of the false representation he made to me. Just like I said I would. Okay? Like I said.”

  She exhales, her hand trembling. “Oh—Okay. Okay.” Then she steps back and tilts her head. “Then what…what are you doing here?”

  “Well.” I take off my pinhole, push a hand through my hair. “I need to ask you a question.”

  A few moments later, and we are arranged in her small dining area.

  I ground myself in the reality of the small house. A handsome wood dining table ringed by mismatched chairs, a low-hanging light fixture with six bulbs. Steam rising from teacups, the smell of baking bread. The wall-mounted plays on in the kitchen behind us, turned to a stream called “Eating Lunch Outside.” I’m across from Ms. Tarjin, who leans forward on her elbows, looks at me carefully. There are freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  Eddie, the other son, is home. He emerged from the back of the house while Ms. Tarjin fixed tea, and now he’s looking at me with plain distaste, arms crossed. He watches us sit, half hidden behind a room divider, anxiety and dislike plain in his eyes.

  “What does he want?” he asks, and then, to me directly: “What do you want?”

  “Help,” I say. Call out over his mother’s shoulders. I need your help.” And turn to Ms. Tarjin, who is trying to puzzle me out from across her table. “You and your mom.”

  Eddie doesn't come over. He stays where he is. “What kind of help?”

  “Okay, so, the other morning,” I say. “The other morning at the diner. At Terry’s diner. I heard you. I heard you talking, and I—I stood up and I came over. And we talked for…for three minutes? Four minutes?”

  “Yeah,” says Eddie warily. Trying to figure this out. While we’re talking the wall-mounted is cycling through short stretches: a picnic in Griffith Park, a barbeque at one of the crowded State beaches.

  “Yeah. And—look, there is a radio on my belt. A radio.” I am talking too fast. Tripping over myself, talking sideways. “Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” says Ms. Tarjin.

  The first anomaly—what was the first of the anomalies?

  “When I approached you, in the restaurant—”

  The first of the anomalies. Not on the lawn—

  Tarjins, mother and son, exchange glances, trying to figure out what's going on here. Ms. Tarjin leans forward, reaches past the cup of tea she has poured for me, and places a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Breathe. Hey. Mr. Speculator? You gotta breathe, okay?”

  She is empathetic. Kind. I follow her instructions. I breathe; take a sip of the tea.

  “What do you need to ask us?”

  “When I was in the act of arresting your family, did my radio go off? The radio I wear on my hip—this.” I point to it, the black box, black dials, red lights, shift my body weight awkwardly forward to angle my hip toward them. “Did it make any noise? Was there a call that I ignored?” They look at each other again. “Please try to remember.”

  Ms. Tarjin puckers her lips. Unsure, unwilling to lie.

  But Eddie is shaking his head. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. You were—you didn’t move. There was no radio call. I’d remember it. I remember thinking, Well, that thing is cool.”

  “The radio?”

  “Yeah. Even though I was scared, I was thinking, That thing is cool. I wanted to see it work.”

  “And if it had gone off, you would have noticed.”

  “I would have noticed. Yeah.”

  “Are you sure?” I say again.

  He nods. Of course he’s sure. I’m sure too. I can see the truth that I feared rising up slowly from below.

  Ms. Tarjin stops me on the way out, calls my name at the green door.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I tell her. “I’m not.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  “I—” It sounds so stupid. But it’s the truth. “I am. And—we all are. I think the whole—” I shake my head at the enormity of it. The ridiculousness. “I think we may all be in danger.”

  “How?”

  “I'm not sure yet. I don't know. But I'm going to try to stop it."

  This is a strange
thing to say, and surely it is a strange thing to hear said. But Ms. Tarjin just nods, looks at me, at the life of the State proceeding behind me. The coffee shop next door, the brightly painted small houses. One of those palms that stands taller than all the ones surrounding it, extending itself far above the world, as if straining with curiosity.

  “Okay. Well.” Ms. Tarjin smiles and places her hand on the side of my face. “Come back. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, and I linger just a moment more, just a half a moment, before I get back in my car.

  Maybe there will be a world where that happens. Maybe the world will unfold in such a way that I do return, find my way back to the green door in the red frame. It’s the smallest moment that I’ve experienced in a long time, small and immediate, shared between two humans, but it’ll keep me going awhile. I know it will. I will live in a world for the next little while in which everything works out, and I come back like she said, and then who knows what happens after that?

  For now I point the car back downtown, and back toward the Plaza.

  The anomalies did not start on the lawn in Los Feliz, they did not start in the apartment on Ellendale. The first of the anomalies was in my own fucking office.

  The upstream untruth, from which all the others flowed, was Arlo Vasouvian saying that he radioed about a car crash outside Grand Central. A case that, had I been dispatched to handle it, as I should have been, would have prevented me from being assigned to the Los Feliz case. To Mose Crane.

  Arlo said he radioed but my receiver did not register the call, and that was the unaccountable event. That was the first anomaly.

  “Oh no,” I say, my hands tight on the steering wheel, the city racing past me. “Oh no.”

  I press the button for the ninth floor, shaking off the memory of Aysa Paige insisting that we go now.

  Stone of the ninth floor, big Woodrow Stone, the Spec Service’s Chief Liaison Officer to the Permanent Record, works at a big desk with a bowl of popcorn in front of him at all times. He pushes handfuls into his mouth with one hand while he runs his consoles with the other, staring at seven different screens at the same time, weaving together stretches with a magician’s touch. He is a master of the various dials. He is an assembly artist. He is not a pleasant human being.