Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “Stop talking, Arlo.”

  He sighs again. “I’ll tell you what. Come and sit down across from me and we can look at this together.”

  “Look at—what?”

  “At the file." He taps it with two fingers, gazing at me evenly. As if he has been waiting for me to discuss it. As if we had an appointment, and I am late.

  “Come, Laszlo. I wish you would have a seat.”

  He points with his chin to the chair opposite his, and I can feel the energy in the room changing. I am the investigating officer who has come upon his prey, but at the same time I am the younger man, less experienced, a pupil in the presence of his tutor, a child in the presence of the adult.

  I grimace, keep my gun up. “You are under arrest for—” For what, Laszlo? For everything. For all of it. “For murder in the first degree.”

  “Okay. I plead guilty. We will come to all of that, Mr. Ratesic. Justice will be done. Please. Sit.”

  There is a chair across from him. I sit, but I keep my gun out, in my hand.

  “This is a CSE file, Laszlo. Do you know the nomenclature used down here? In the labyrinth?”

  “CSE,” I say. “Collated Significant Event.”

  “Very good.” His smile brightens, gold star for me, and he begins reciting from memory, his favorite trick. “Incidents of self-evident public importance are to be cross-cataloged into a master file, to include all relevant information from all relevant captures, gathered together in a permanent and comprehensive manner to put on Record the full truth of the incident in question.”

  Arlo slides his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and turns the file around so I can see it more clearly. He lays one finger beside the title on the tab. “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

  I look up sharply. “What the fuck is going on here, Arlo?”

  “So many things, Laszlo. So many things.”

  He angles his head, gazes at me thoughtfully through the glasses. It’s the same old head, the same old man, the large ears and small black eyes. His thin white hair is flecked with blood.

  The man has murdered four Librarians. He set me up to attack Laura Petras, laid out the bread crumbs that I eagerly devoured. He framed her, framed me, did irreversible damage to the reputation of the Speculative Service he has served his whole life. Him, and me. And Charlie.

  I open the file. I close it again, terrified of what it's inside.

  It is cool in here, climate-controlled. I can hear every thump of my heartbeat. I can feel the dull whoosh of my blood.

  “Go on now, son,” says Arlo. "Have a look.”

  I open it again and begin to turn the pages inside. Transcripts of Charlie on the thirtieth floor, explaining the shocking extent of what he had discovered: the Off Record house, the ring of brazen liars, the clandestine organization calling itself the Golden State. Still photos of Charlie in the Spec Service. Still photos, lifted from video captures, of Charlie in his hospital bed, struggling to survive the multiple gunshot wounds he suffered in the Keller house raid.

  While I glance through it all, plunged back into this memory, Arlo speaks softly.

  “I, of course, have had extraordinary access to this file. At will access, so to speak. Firstly because I was the senior officer who brought Ratesic onto our force. Secondly because I was the man charged with overseeing his undercover efforts.” He takes off his glasses, idly works at a freckle of blood with his thumbnail. “And lastly, of course, as the author of the novel inspired by these extraordinary events.”

  I turn over a page and stop, and read it, and read it again, and then I look up at Arlo, who is looking back at me carefully, very carefully, waiting to see what I will say. What I will do.

  The page is a précis, a kind of executive summary, compiled from edited transcripts. It details how Charlie Ratesic was recovering from his injuries until he was murdered by his younger brother, Laszlo Ratesic, who willfully increased the dosage of Charlie’s pain-reducing medication until he died.

  “That’s—” My head is shaking. I am shaking my head. “No. No, that’s not right. I didn’t do that. Why would I?”

  Arlo turns the page over, and on the back side are a series of photographic stills, taken from the hospitalroom captures. There I am in the pictures. I am standing at Charlie’s bedside. I am crouching at his bedside. I am examining the machines. I am turning the dials.

  “I suppose you didn't know that I knew,” says Arlo, “What you did, I mean. But I have always known, Mr. Ratesic. I have always known what you did.”

  “But it’s not—” I find my voice. I say it loud. “That never happened." Louder. “It’s not So.”

  “Come now, Laszlo. It’s on the Record. We’re looking at it.” He puts his fingertips firmly on the photograph. It is black-and-white. My face is distinct. “Look!”

  “Why?” I look at Arlo, my face hot with grief. “Why did I do that?”

  “You were jealous of Charlie. You had always been jealous, and now—well now, the man had become a genuine hero. The greatest hero the State has ever produced. You couldn’t bear it, Laszlo. I am absolutely sympathetic, I have always been so. Which is why I have kept my silence for all these years.”

  “Oh.”

  I turn the page over and over again, the words on the front and the pictures on the back, turn them over and over, as if I can shake the letters and the images right off the paper, make it all go away, but it won’t go away, because it is true. I remember it now. I spent these years unremembering it but now it is coming back, rushing back, grabbing at me, clutching at my heels like speculation: the bitter sting of envy I felt in Charlie's presence, the hatred for him that seethed below the surface of my adoration. How easy it suddenly seemed to be done with those feelings. Done with him, done with him forever. I remember the bitter smell of the room, the beep of those machines, how easy it would be, how easy it was.

  “Oh fuck, Arlo. Oh no.” I tilt back from the table and turn my face away from him in the dim light of the Record and weep at what I did, at what I am. “Oh no.”

  “It will be all right.” Arlo rises, comes over to my side of the review desk, and lays a hand down on top of mine while with the other hand he gently strokes my woolly head. “It will be okay. Look, Laszlo. Look.”

  There is another CSE on the table, beside the first one. I lean forward, baffled, pushing tears out of my eyes with my thick fingers. It is the same file, the same blue, the same label. Exactly the same. “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

  “What?” I say. “What is this?”

  “This is the file that lives here, On the Record. It is a forgery, Laszlo.” “Forgery”: old word, dead word. The word itself an artifact. “The file that you just read—that one”—he points at the first file, the one in which Laszlo Ratesic betrays his beloved brother—“this file has lived for all these years at my home, Laszlo. I could not bring myself to destroy a piece of the Record, but it does not live here. And I replaced it with this one.”

  He lifts this second file and places it on top of the first one, hiding the first from view. We sit in the silence of the enormity of this crime of forgery, of purposefully removing truth from the Record and replacing it with false. Rewriting the Record. A grave assault upon the truth. And for what? For me. I flip open this second file. It tells the story that I knew and have known for the last decade, the story I have long taken for truth. It shows how Charlie was gravely injured in the raid, how he struggled to survive for days and then weeks, how the doctors were able to stabilize but never reverse the course of the opportunistic infections that ultimately claimed his life. There is no murder in this file. No envious Laszlo, tampering with the dials. The man was wounded, and then he died from his wounds. A martyr.

  “I replaced this file”—Arlo lifts a corner of the new file, gives a quick furtive glimpse of the old one before covering it again—“with this. Because I believed that we would be better off with you in the world than
not in it. To defend our world and protect it. Especially with Charlie gone. I made that call. I made that decision.”

  “Oh, Arlo. Thank you.” I reach out across the table, new tears on my cheeks, and I grab his shoulders, push my forehead against his. “Thank you.”

  He pulls from my grasp. He stares at me. His eyes behind his glasses are dark with sadness.

  “I cannot believe it,” Arlo says softly, his voice a weary rasp. “Every time I see it I still cannot believe it.”

  “Believe—” I peer at him. “Believe what?”

  “You saw it, didn’t you? In your mind. You saw yourself murdering your brother. It was true inside your heart, that you killed the one person you love more than anyone in the world. Oh, Laszlo. I have spent a melancholy lifetime contemplating the impermanence of reality, and yet I am constantly stunned anew.”

  With precise deliberate movements, Arlo picks up the forged file and then he picks up the real one—and yet another file is revealed. This is how I do it, of course, how he taught me to do it, lining up the paper, getting everything in order, revealing one fact at a time. And this new file is the same again, the same CSE a third time through: “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

  I look at Arlo. I look at the file. I open it.

  Murder again. The text and the pictures together tell the story: Charlie, incapacitated and vulnerable, is defenseless against the stealthy approach of the monster…except the monster is Arlo. It is Arlo Vasouvian who lurks at the bedside, Arlo Vasouvian who crouches, and then Arlo Vasouvian with the dials in his hands.

  Memories drop out of my head. The truth reverses itself, scrambles and reforms. I pick up my gun again. Arlo leans back and stares at me, not like a friend now. Like a scientist, examining, considering. I raise the gun and he does not flinch. Around us hangs the solemn stillness of the Record.

  “That file is the real one,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “You killed Charlie.”

  “I did.” Arlo, blood-splattered, gentle-eyed, stares back at me evenly. “That’s correct. That is accurate. To the extent that that word owns a definition.” The three blue files are still on the desk, and now, as he talks, Arlo shifts them around, places a palm down on one and moves it in an idle circle, then does the same with the others, rearranging and rearranging their places, shuffling and reshuffling their order. “He was good at his job. Very good. I never thought—” He shakes his head in wonderment. “Never for a moment did I think that his undercover operation would be a success, but as you know, it was. With long effort and clever skill he destroyed nearly all we had built, and he had found nearly every member of our Golden State. As it was constituted, I should say, at that time. I could not let him find me too. He was, as you know, a very talented man.”

  “Arlo Vasouvian,” I say, summoning the voice I need, “you are under arrest.”

  “No,” he says, “I’m not.”

  “You just confessed. It's all—” I look around the room, gesturing up at the captures. "It's all on the Record."

  "Oh, right. The Record. Inviolable. Impregnable.” He sighs. “You’re not listening, Mr. Ratesic. Or you’re listening but wishing not to hear.” His hands pause in their endless rotations. He picks the file that was on the top, flips it open. It’s me, in the photograph, me crouched to the dials.

  “But that’s not—”

  “Real!” He stands abruptly and snarls, contorted with contempt. “Would you stop it? Would you stop? With ‘real’ and ‘not real,’ ‘fake’ and ‘not fake,’ ‘true’ and ‘not true.’ Stop!” He sweeps all three files from the desk and rushes out of the room.

  I chase him. He is moving quicker than I’ve ever seen him, flying from narrow hallway to narrow hallway in the weak light. I follow his footfalls, follow his thin shadow. At the stairway shaft he turns and snarls, holding all the files up, clutching them to his chest like a shield.

  “Do you know why they built the Record underground?”

  There is a true answer to that question, as true as two and two, and I give it automatically: “Because there is infinite room for expansion.”

  “No. Bullshit! It’s a metaphor. Everything is a fucking metaphor.” He holds the files out, over the side of the railing. A couple of pages slide out of the files, flap and flutter out into the empty air of the stairwell. “They built it belowground so everyone could walk around feeling like the truth was beneath their feet. You see? We—we here, I mean—we in this dumb and blinded land, we live our lives believing that beneath us there is foundation. That there is something there. Permanence. A record. ‘The Record.’” He puts the phrase in sneering quotes. “But it’s not so!” He flings one of the files downward, one of the three official versions of “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.” I watch it as it flies and flutters and falls, spilling end over end into the descending darkness of the empty stairwell.

  “Under us is nothing, Laszlo. Dear Laz. Nothing.”

  “And so what—what—” Fury of my own is rising. My body is trembling. My face bends into a snarl. “You want what? Nothing? You think it would be better to have no truth at all?”

  “No. No, poor Laszlo. Dear Laz. Laszlo, my love.” He lets go another of the files and it flaps open, empties as it falls, its two wings bending upward like a bird’s. “Letting go of the fantasy of objective and provable truth would not be better or worse. It would be accepting reality and figuring out what to do next.”

  There is only one of the three files left now. He holds it up. “Shall we open it, Laszlo? Shall we see what’s left? See what the truth ended up being?”

  I don’t take the bait. I have taken too much bait, been too easily led. “You are under arrest, Arlo Vasouvian.”

  “You’re not going to arrest me,” he says. “I already told you that. You will let me go, or you will shoot me dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  He smiles sadly, looks across the darkness. “I am only speculating.”

  I’m not going to shoot him. I won’t shoot him. I won’t do that. I can’t. But I step toward him with the gun still raised, reaching for the cuffs on my belt. I am going to do this correctly. I will take him in. He will confess. The truth will be rebuilt. There must be a mechanism to do that. There must be a form that can be filled out, a process that can be initiated, to reconstitute that file, reinstitute the truth, remake reality as it was. There will be a way.

  “It was her idea, you know,” says Arlo, as if something has just occurred to him. “To use you in this way. Once we had concluded that starting again with Off Record houses was too simple, too literal, too small. Once we had decided we needed to achieve something larger—to send a shiver through the bulwark, as they say. I needed someone to make that happen. It was her idea. This marvel of string pulling that brought you along.”

  I stop. “Her”: Silvie? “Her”: Tester? Her—

  He is watching me. Narrow-eyed, examining. Watching my face as this miserable new truth breaks through. “Ms. Paige.”

  “Yes, Laszlo. Aysa is ours. She was always ours. Her parents were ours and so was she.”

  I close my eyes. No more. I can’t take any more.

  “I had told her all about you,” he says, “during her training. I told her all about brave Charlie’s poor kid brother who never measured up. This sad unfortunate younger brother, who doted upon and resented heroic Charlie in equal parts. And Aysa thought—it's really quite remarkable—Aysa thought, well goodness. Perhaps this younger brother will be eager to finish what his brother began. How hungry he must be for his own moment in the sun. In the good and golden sun.”

  I am shaking my head. I am back in the house on Mulholland, side by side with my junior partner, the two of us in silent wonder at the lies to which we were bearing witness, and not just witnessing but feeling, and not just feeling but seeing.

  “But she saw them just like I did,” I tell Arlo. “She saw Petras’s lies and denials. Th
e same as I did, she saw them.”

  “You saw her say she felt Petras lying. You saw her say she saw it.”

  I blink, trying to grab hold of my own memories, corner my own mind. I am not the hero, confronting the villain. I am a lost and tiny man, diminished and confused and uncertain. I am nothing.

  “So she was, what, an actor? She was acting?”

  “Actor.” “Acting.” Old words from an old world, concepts with dim ancient references, half hidden by time. The old world, not to be known.

  “Yes. Just so,” says Arlo. “An actor. Like Crane, the roofer, whose name was really Ortega, by the way, except it’s not, not really. It’s Ortega, it’s Crane, sometimes it’s Mortenson. Once, for a week, we called him Joe Dill, just to see how that felt. He practiced so often how to throw himself off a roof and make it look like he fell. See? See, Laszlo? Can you imagine doing that? Just that moment of letting go, letting your body slide? To him it was worth it. Aysa allowed herself to be sacrificed, just like Crane, who taught himself to fall off a roof. And both of them knew what I know, which is that it was worth it. Worth it.”

  “No. It can’t—none of this can be true.”

  “Yes!” He laughs, a short burst of happy laughter, and brings his hands together. “Now you see it. That’s the whole point, Laszlo: that’s the whole point. Laszlo—Laszlo—” He rushes forward and grabs my arm, smiling, eyes wide with delight. “Laszlo—I’m not even standing here right now.”

  “What—what are you talking about?”

  “The figure you are talking to is a projection. I am hidden somewhere else in this building, preparing to make my escape.” He says it in a melodramatic voice, making a face, playing a game. “Unwilling to risk capture at this late moment in my long-planned scheme.”

  “That’s impossible. That’s insane. Something out of a—”

  “Out of a what, Laszlo?” He steps closer. “A novel? Why can’t it be true, Laszlo, if all the rest of it is true? I have power over stretches, I have power over people. Why not power over the air itself?”