Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “It’s a lie, Arlo.”

  “Okay, then. So, can you see it?”

  “See...”

  “If it’s a lie, can you see the lie?”

  I look wildly around the room. I step backward from Arlo and I look at the air around us and I don’t feel it and I don't see it. No crackle in the atmosphere, no bending at the edges. Nothing.

  “I’ll say it again, dear Laszlo. A firm declaration, posited as fact, that you say is not So." He makes his hands into a bullhorn, trumpets it: "I’m not really standing here. I’m a hologram. Well? Now? Are you discerning anything now?”

  He says it with scorn, contempt, mocking the idea on which I have based my life.

  “If I’m lying, you’d be feeling it, right? Right?”

  He’s right. I would see it in the air. Wavelets of telltale in the atmosphere, ripples in the very air—I would be feeling it, just as he says, and now I do not, now the air is crystalline and calm, just Arlo walking toward me saying he is not, after all, Arlo, proving his bastard point, showing me that I cannot trust in what I know. I am discerning nothing. I hold the gun steady, hold it up and straight.

  Now, very slowly, he pulls out his own gun and aims it at me, as I am aiming mine at him.

  The cold air of the basement is perfectly still.

  “I doctored all of those stretches," says Arlo. “I put a forgery on the Record. I convinced two people, two that you know of, to sacrifice their lives, knowing that it was worth it. What makes you think I couldn’t create a hologram of myself, and it’s the hologram you are talking to now?”

  “No,” I tell him. “Yes. I don’t—I don’t know.”

  “So if I’m telling the truth, then you can shoot me.”

  “What?"

  "I'm not here." He takes a step closer. His gun is pointed at my face. "It's not me. So shoot. Go on. Shoot—”

  I pull the trigger and I feel the kick of discharge, and Arlo’s chest explodes in a red blur and he flies backward and slams into the stair rail. I run to him, and I don’t know if I’m crying because he is my friend, my oldest friend and I love him and he is dying in my arms, or because of what has happened. He is cradled in my arms, his real body, no hologram, the real Arlo, his real flesh body. Then I hear footsteps crashing down toward us, the whole staircase is shuddering with the force, and now it all makes itself clear to me in retrospect, every inch of this nightmare playing itself out in reverse and filling in its details, right up to this moment—this moment right now! He never stopped playing mastermind, arranging details, right up until this moment, with the regular police pouring off the stairs and him bleeding in my arms—

  “Freeze,” they are shouting. “Do not move!”

  Captain Elena Tester and six other officers, a small army of regular police filling up the narrow space around the stairs, surrounding us with guns drawn.

  “Wait,” I say, turning, body hot with confusion and fear. “Wait.”

  Tester and her officers crowd around me, closing in. She is staring, astonished; Arlo is collapsed in my arms, sprawled across my lap.

  “Laszlo,” she says. “What have you done?”

  “Nothing. I haven’t done anything. It was…He…”

  They step closer, one step at a time, guns raised. Arlo, in my arms, bends his body upward slowly. Cranes his lips up to my ear and says, “Worth it.”

  Tester circles me warily, keeping the gun leveled at my face, and the other officers fan out behind her. Arlo is cradled in my lap, his blood on my pants, his blood on my arms and on my face, his blood is smeared all over my black coat. What am I going to say? He tricked me. He said he wasn’t real. He said that shooting him wasn’t shooting a real person.

  I feel that there is nothing I can do but explain myself, and that I would be a fool at the very least not to try. So I tell Captain Tester she’s making a mistake.

  I tell her that Arlo Vasouvian rigged the whole thing, that he is trying to frame the Speculative Service, that he is purposefully attempting to erode the trust in our Basic Laws, to bring the State crashing in, that he has cooked up an elaborate scheme to kick away the pillars that have supported society, to smash in the walls that have kept us safe inside the Objectively So. While Arlo’s body lies in my arms and Tester’s officers keep their guns trained on my face, I say, “You have to believe me, you have to believe me”—I say all the things that are the only things I can say, and she reacts exactly as I would have predicted.

  “You know, Laszlo,” she says flatly, “that sounds like the wildest bunch of lies that I have ever heard. But you tell me.” She crouches beside me, pulls out her handcuffs. “You’re the expert.”

  Part Three

  “Look. Look!” Shenk had him by the arm at this point, had him in his clutches, and he wasn’t letting go. “If this kid thinks that he’s an alien from outer space, and he does things based on this belief? That he’s an alien? Then, I mean, on a certain level, guess what? The kid’s a fucking alien.”

  —Benjamin Wish, The Prisoner

  24.

  Hey! I think. As loud as a thought can get, which after all is not all that fucking loud. I’m in here. Hey! I can’t see out the windows of the truck because the windows are blacked out, tinted over, so I do what I can do, which is stare into them and beam my thoughts out uselessly into the passing world as the truck rumbles along: Help.

  I’m in here.

  Help!

  No one can hear. No one can help. The people out there are dim shapes on the street corners. Faceless creatures behind the wheels of their vehicles, glancing with disinterest at the truck and then away.

  I am strapped to my seat. A metal pole runs from floor to ceiling in front of me, and I am shackled to it at wrist and ankle.

  The truck has been stripped of the artifacts of its old design. All that’s telling me where I am is the old stink of cooking water and the shape of the vehicle, tubular, low and long. I am inside a truck that is shaped like a hot dog, and I am both inside this machine, shackled to a plastic bench by my wrists and ankles, and outside it, looking longingly at it as it cruises past. I could not have known, the many times I looked with longing at the Dirty Dog cruising the city, that it is out of service. It has been decommissioned and repurposed as a mobile prison, delivering the exiled to their exile.

  No wonder, I think stupidly. No wonder it never stops.

  Even in the state of dull bafflement with which I have suffered the last two weeks, of trial and sentence, of confusion and fear, of public approbation and private pain, even in my raw confused condition, I can pick up the old scents of boiled meat, of relish and mustard and pickle. I take some very small comfort in the pleasant ancient smells of condiments and meat. And I take comfort, too, in the thought of all the people out there, my good and golden fellow citizens, watching the black truck with the pink piping as it sharks past, wondering idly as I have for years, How come it never stops?

  I can see where the refrigerator once was, up there behind the captain’s-chair-style driver’s seat. I can see where they had a row of compact metal containers for the various condiments, and probably a steam tray for the hot dogs themselves. But now all of these culinary accessories have been replaced by monitor screens, a bank of dials, a map of the city covered in beeping lights and lines.

  One of these dots, it is easy to understand, is us. This vehicle I’m captive inside of. That is easy to figure. Requires zero speculation. We are moving fast now, and the dot is moving fast.

  It’s just me in the truck—me and the driver, me and the driver and the man seated across from me, a narrow man in a tan coat and sunglasses, with a gun in his lap. The gun and the man are both staring at my face.

  Help, I think, sending out my invisible distress call to the people we’re driving past, the other cars and pedestrians we’re presumably passing. Help!

  “Excuse me?” I say to the man, but he doesn’t answer. He looks like a Librarian, except for the sunglasses. He has the same set expression in his be
aring, in his posture. Passive, still, radiant with authority.

  I am forced into a hunched position by the way I’ve been bound, tied to the pole with a set of sleek plastic tethers. I have not been changed into any sort of jumpsuit, nor even stripped of my Speculator blacks. Only my pinhole has been taken from me. Otherwise I am still me. There is heat on the back of my neck.

  I feel miserable, a result of how much I now understand that I never did before, how much I’ve learned in these last days and how much dissonance I’m suffering now; or it might just be because the air inside the decommissioned hot dog truck is stale and close and pungent. It’s hot, and where I’m going it’s only getting hotter.

  “You can lower your weapon,” I tell the man across from me. I don’t know if he’s really a Librarian, but he has become one in my mind. “I’m not going to do anything.” I tug at my restraints, demonstrating how tightly my hands are lashed to the pole. “I can’t.”

  He doesn’t answer. The gun does not move. The driver, absurdly, begins to whistle. The back of his neck is closely shaved, bristling with small dark hairs.

  The truck banks into a turn, and I am shifted to the right, and then the truck speeds up, and I feel it rising, moving uphill, and then it turns again. I don’t know if we’re close or if we’re almost there. I don’t know where there is or how far away it is, or what is going to happen to me, or how I will die.

  Help, I think again, radiate my desperate fear out through the sides of the truck toward whoever might be out there, but this is useless—it’s ridiculous. I am living in a pretend world where empathy has secret supernatural power, where it can fly on wings and burrow into the secret hearts of strangers. And even if my message could sing out through these blackened windows, the truth is, I’m not the good guy. I am not the hero of this novel. I have not been kidnapped by nefarious crooks or dirty liars. I am the crook and I am the dirty liar. I have been tried and convicted for my assault against reality. I have left a trail of blood behind me, and my rendition is a necessary service to the State.

  It has all happened. However I remember it, whatever my own personal truth, it all happened. What happened is what happened and what is So is So forever. It’s all on the Record.

  Time passes. Minutes of it, and then hours; there is no clock on the truck. Miserable as I am, and as terrified, my eyes begin to blink open and then closed, and the hot dog truck becomes the big blue bus my brother and I used to take down to the beach on Saturday afternoons, when we were children still, still in that young and dreaming part of life. We were just teens, experimenting with what kind of adults we were going to be. Shirtless and self-conscious, already thick around the middle, I was awkwardly clutching my surfboard at the bus stop before sunup. Charlie, bouncing from foot to foot, T-shirt wrapped around his forehead like a privateer, was whistling at the sunrise.

  I am on this hot dog truck driving further from the city, deeper into the wild, with my hands bound and my feet shackled with tight straps to the pole, and I am also an awkward teenager on the bus to the beach. I exist in two places at once, listening to the rumble of the truck and listening to Charlie, whistling through his teeth.

  No, though—no. It’s the driver, still whistling. I jerk awake. The driver’s head bobbles slightly as he whistles. My body aches from the shape it has been forced into, for however long it’s been.

  I think we’re going downhill now. I can feel the truck’s pneumatics shifting and purring underneath me. The Librarian seated across from me rises, walks the two paces across the truck, and sits beside me, his right leg pressed against my left.

  “Identifications,” he says. “Where are your identifications?”

  “In my pocket,” I say. “Right side.”

  The Librarian reaches across my lap, unconcerned with the intimacy, and wriggles his hand inside my pocket. It all comes out: birth cert, five-years card, adulthood card, work card, home address attestation. A parade of Laszlo faces, one after the other. Growing older, growing uglier, a flip-book of dissolution.

  The driver keeps on whistling.

  “Is that everything?” says the man, and he sniffs. He’s not a Librarian—no. Some special branch of service?

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  “All right.”

  He gets up again. He’s got a little screwdriver in one of his pockets, and he uses it to open a panel on the metal wall behind him. Behind the panel is a shallow drawer, which he pulls out.

  “What—” I say, as he slides my documents into the drawer. “What are you doing?”

  He doesn’t answer. Maybe he is a Librarian: he’s got a wand. He puts the screwdriver back in his pocket and takes out the slim metal tube, black metal with silver caps on either end, and I feel an instinctual revulsion. What—what is going on? I draw back, pull as far away as I can from the pole to which I’m attached, but he’s not aiming the wand at me. He places my documents in the flat drawer he’s removed from the wall and slowly moves the wand across them, front to back, a slow steady movement, like he’s wanding someone’s forehead, and there is a hissing noise from inside the drawer, and smoke rises from it in a disappearing puff.

  “Hey,” I say. “Hey.”

  But it’s already done. He tilts the drawer forward so I can see the ashes inside of it, and then he turns it over so they scatter on the floor of the hot dog truck.

  “Okay,” he says, and the driver stops whistling long enough to say it too: “Okay.”

  “Now. What’s your name?”

  “Laszlo Ratesic.”

  The truck jerks to a stop, as if we’ve hit something, and I am flung forward from the bench and slam face-first into the pole I am connected to. And the man who is not a policeman, not a Librarian, who I realize now must be some sort of special officer, an officer of some kind of border service known only to those in its employment, he’s up and out of his seat, and so is the driver, and the two men begin to kick me, one and then the other.

  “Liar!” shouts the borderman, kicking me in the center of my stomach.

  “Liar!” shouts the driver, kicking me in the neck.

  “What is your name?”

  “What’s your fucking name?”

  I’m no dummy. “I have no name.”

  The kicking stops. The driver walks back to the driver’s seat, settling back into his captain’s chair. “Now you’re getting it.”

  The other man, though, the borderman in his tan suit, still stands over me, looking down. The truck starts up again. I feel the muscle of its engine purring under the length of my body.

  “What year were you born?” says the borderman.

  “I—I—” I hesitate. I swallow. It hurts badly, and I realize a bruise is developing on my throat—inside or outside it, or both. My wounded shoulder has burst back into hot pain from the kicks.

  “What year,” he says again, staring directly into my face, “were you born?”

  “I was never born.”

  I wince, but that’s it. That was the right answer. The borderman braces himself and lifts me by the armpits and heaves me back to my feet, pushes me back down in my seat. The truck keeps rolling, rolling downhill now, gaining speed, slowing only for the occasional sharp turns that tell me we are switchbacking down the far side of the mountain. Some mountain.

  I am back in my hunched posture, hands again bound before me.

  My gut hurts. My throat, my head, my shoulder.

  For all of my life, exile was just a word, an idea rather than a process, a wall erected around certain behaviors, not an actual thing that happens, not a series of actual physical events. These are those events. This is how it happens.

  If I ever thought of it, I guess I thought of checkpoints. Some kind of physical barrier between this world and the next one—a wall, a partition. Men with long guns up high on parapets, angling their rifle noses down toward attempted incursion.

  But there is no barrier. The truck never stops; the driver never rolls down his window to exchange words or money or doc
uments with some guard at some fence.

  No physical wall separates this world from the next. We simply rise up into the Hills and trace a winding path, which I have by now given up on trying to memorize.

  My eyes flicker closed again and here is Charlie calling my name as he bounds off the old bus, telling me I’d better hurry the fuck up and grab my board and get off the bus, and in the memory I can’t recall what the actual name is. “Hey—” says Charlie, and there is a mute moment, like glitches in audio dropping out of a stretch. “Come on.” My own name has dropped out of my head. A welt is rising on the side of my forehead from where I got kicked. This is how fast the truth can change—one swift kick from a heavy boot and everything is erased.

  The brakes hiss and the body of the truck shudders as it stops. A dragon sighing as it settles.

  The two men rise, the borderman from his seat and the driver from his, and they huddle at the side door of the truck. They ignore me, push their foreheads together and murmur to each other.

  “Two and two is four.”

  “The word ‘serrated’ means ‘lined with jagged teeth.’”

  “A hummingbird is of the family Trochilidae.”

  They speak very quietly, hushed as if fearful, hushed as if in prayer, preparing for battle. Murmuring true statements into each other’s hearing. They are doing exactly what Aysa and I did during our approach to Mulholland Drive, chanting facts, girding ourselves with small pieces of reality like strung beads. Every “is” and “are,” every flat declaration of a true fact, is like a piece of armor, and they are assembling it around themselves.

  I start to do the same, catching up, following their lead.

  “Bricks are heavy,” I say. “Twelve inches to a foot,” I say, and the driver grabs me by the back of the neck, opening the door with his other hand, and I say “Limestone is a sedimentary rock,” and he pushes me, hard, down the short exit staircase, off the truck and down onto the road.

  “Night adders are venomous,” I say, and gasp because the air is thin and it is so bright out here that I can barely see. I squint up at the brutal desert sky. The sky is endless, baked blue, the sun a merciless glare above it.