Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  I run up to the building and then back away, shielding my eyes, turning my face away from the inferno. When I'm able to look again I can still see her, just barely, standing perfectly still in the center of the fire as it engulfs her, and it is her own deliberate doing, I watched her do it, but I can’t just turn away. She is a person born of flesh, as am I. I left my identifications on the hot dog truck but I’m still a person, and so I start to cast about, spin around in a desperate circle. I see a pile of buckets beside the row of gas pumps, buckets full of squeegees for windshields, a thousand years old.

  I grab the topmost bucket and dump the squeegees out onto the ground. I jam the bucket onto my head and I choke at the miniature rain shower of dust that sprinkles into my eyes and mouth even as I bear down and run toward the building, head bent forward, hurling myself like a truck, like a missile, like a bear with his head inside a bucket, and slam into the glass.

  I am flown backward by the impact, and I land, grunting, on the ground. I sit up, groaning, lift the bucket off my head, and Ms. Wells is not on fire but she is about to be, so I put the bucket back on and I start from further back. I give out a wild animal yell, making of myself a battering ram, hurtling toward the glass, and this time it smashes open. I hurl the bucket off my head, kicking through the broken glass while the fire is billowing out, gathering force as it feeds on the rush of oxygen from out here in the rest of the universe, and I find the lady, Ms. Wells, just as the fire reaches her, and I grab her and I carry her, unprotesting, from the fire and out into the slightly lesser heat of the rest of the world.

  Then, for a long time, we are on the ground, lying beside each other and breathing, still as lizards. Baking in the heat.

  Ms. Wells sprawls beside me, I don’t know how she is still living. She should have died in the fire, but then again, so should have I.

  “Are you a hologram?” I ask her.

  “No.”

  “I had a friend,” I tell her, “who said he was a hologram.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I killed him.”

  “Whoa,” she says. Her eyes are closed. My eyes are also closed. “That’s crazy.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Come on,” I say. I open one eye to look at her and find that she has also opened one eye to look at me. “Why did you almost kill yourself? Set yourself on fire. Were you—what, were you testing me?”

  “Do you think I was?”

  “Yes. Did I pass?”

  “Well. Let’s see.” She tugs on her hair, and then nods, satisfied. “I’m alive. Look. It was important to see if you were still human. I don’t mean, are you a hologram? Or a robot, or—anything like that. I mean, ‘Is he still human?’ Like, possessed of a good and golden heart. I thought you were, we thought you were, but—” She sighs. “I had to see.”

  The word “we” catches me. I open my other eye. She is still talking, on and on, with no trace left of madness in her voice or mien. “A lot of people, you know, they lose their identity, they are decoupled from the truth, and something happens to them. Everything gets—burned away. You, on the other hand, you appeared to me as remaining still essentially...present. Still human.”

  “But what if I failed the test? You would have died.”

  “I was very confident in my analysis.”

  “Come on. Come on. Can’t you talk straight for one second?”

  “Oh, you mean like they talk straight in there? Twelve and twelve is twenty-four, and north is the opposite of south, and all of that? All of that ‘truth’?”

  I’m ready to say yes, exactly, all of that truth, but she isn’t stopping.

  “There is truth in scripture,” Ms. Wells tells me. “There is truth in the Brothers Grimm. There is truth in any old map you find. Any old mooted map, with a skull for a compass rose, ‘Beyond here there be dragons’ and all of that. You got truth in that too.”

  She’s up now, animated, pacing back and forth. Behind us is the wreck of the Flying J, which has more or less finished burning down and stands as a desiccated hulk, a black and irradiated heap adding new lines of heat to the wavering world around it. I trot clumsily in the wake of Ms. Wells, staggering to keep up with her, my feet burning on the sand. Now we’ve arrived at a small car, bright green, reflecting viciously bright beams of sunlight from all its chromed edges. The car says “VW” above the rear license plate, and it is painted with flowers and speckled with rust.

  “Is this your car?” I say, and she doesn’t answer. “Can I take this car?”

  “Oh yes,” she says. “You’re going to take it. You have to.” She opens the trunk and pulls out a bottle of water. “Here. Drink.”

  I don’t realize how thirsty I am until I am guzzling the bottle. I finish it in a swallow and she hands me another one, and I drink that too.

  “Okay," she says. “Listen. Do you want the good and golden world?”

  “Yes.”

  She points. “It’s that way.” She fishes in one of the pockets of one of her shirts and holds up a single silver key. “Go and get it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  She puts the key in my hand. “It’s all yours.”

  “Is there enough gas? To get me home?”

  “Home? Is that where you’re going?”

  “Wait—what does that mean?”

  But she’s already gone. I get in the small car. I crane my neck out the open window.

  “Hey,” I call. “Are you coming?”

  “Coming?” She is already twenty steps away, striding with purpose. “I’m a sweeper, boy child. I gotta keep sweeping.”

  And she’s gone.

  26.

  The city, my city, when at last it appears, is a dim gleam on the horizon: a collection of fairy lights in the desert, yellow on yellow, showing itself through the heat and haze as I crest yet another low rise.

  And then I see a cluster of buildings, the tops of buildings, just barely visible above the rolling dunes, just their tips peeking up, and I follow a long bend in the road, until all at once it is unveiled: the Golden State, bright late-day sun glinting off the glass surfaces of the world, returned to me. I grin, jubilant, my dry lips cracking from the effort, and I yelp and smack the center of the steering wheel, a grateful holler to ricochet back across the silent desert to mad Ms. Wells.

  I smash down on the gas pedal, and my heart kicks into double time.

  I did not believe you, Ms. Wells, I did not know what you were, but I should not have doubted your fluttery and sporting mind. Because there it is, here it is, the Golden State getting taller and clearer as I close out the miles, and just in time, because the gas needle is inching perilously close to empty.

  I’m home. I’m back. Oh, Ms. Wells, I’ll never doubt you again.

  I come into the city on a broad avenue I don’t yet recognize, three wide and empty lanes in either direction, running between towering buildings, and I am trying to figure out what district I’m in, what section, and I’ve just about decided I’m downtown, it has to be downtown—but what part of downtown?—when one of the car’s front tires explodes and the steering wheel jumps out of my hand.

  “Shit,” I say as the car skids and flies, bounces with a rattling bang off a streetlamp and careens in a new direction, totally out of my control. I struggle to get the wheel steady in my hands but it shivers and rolls, flying through my fingers. The car caroms to the other side of the road and my head cracks against the driver’s side window, sending a flash of pain across my skull.

  “Fuck,” I say, rolling back from the blow. “Fuck.”

  The car sputters and stops, perpendicular to the roadway, steam hissing out from under the hood. The air-conditioning dies along with the engine, and in an instant the car becomes a furnace. I take deep breaths, fighting to steady my shaking hands. The sun is blinding, burning, magnified by the glass of the windshield. There is an ominous hiss coming from somewhere in the mechanics of the car. Blood is trickling into
my right eye. I must have cut my head when it hit the window.

  “Get out of the vehicle.”

  The voice is mechanized. Loud. Coming through a bullhorn or a speaker, some kind of amplification system. I squint through the cracked windshield, rubbing blood out of my eye with my knuckles, trying to see who’s addressing me. My head is a thick knot of pain.

  “Get out of the vehicle.”

  I grasp the door handle, take a breath, and step out into the blasting heat.

  An even, flat expanse of asphalt spreads in either direction. A long street, dotted with street lamps, lined with buildings. I still don’t know where I am, exactly, just that I’m home. I peer up at the street lamps, looking for captures. I had forgotten that I’m barefoot. It was okay driving but now the heat of the pavement sears the soles of my feet.

  “Hello?” I call feebly, hands in the air, turning in a slow circle. I don’t see anyone. If somebody shot out my tire, I don’t see them now. Enormous buildings, majestic constructions of concrete and glass, rise on either side of me, up and down the street, each of them with its own giant-scale architectural style. There’s a building that is itself an entire skyline, each of its towers fashioned to look like the top of a downtown skyscraper. To one side of me is a pyramid, its front-facing sides made of sheer black glass, rising many stories into the air.

  Whoever told me to get out of the car I don’t see anywhere, but it feels like I should have my hands in the air, so I keep my hands in the air. I walk gingerly from where my car stopped to the traffic island at the center of the lanes.

  There are no buildings like this downtown. Maybe I’m not downtown. Maybe I’m up in Pasadena or Glendale, down in the beach cities. Some reach of the State my travels rarely took me.

  “Stay exactly where you are. Keep your hands visible.”

  The voice again, from nowhere and everywhere.

  “Okay,” I say. Now, squinting upward into the haze, I can make out a kind of catwalk, an elevated hallway with a glass bottom, suspended across the road and spanning it, connecting one of the insane buildings on one side to one on the other. I squint up at the catwalk, in search of the source of the voice. I think I can spot figures shifting about up there, dark shadows floating above the roadway, but I can’t be sure.

  “Don’t shoot me,” I say to whoever it is. Wherever they are. “I don’t want to die.”

  I do, though. A little bit, I do. It hurts to speak. My feet are burning and bleeding. My face is peeling, flakes of hot skin coming off my cheeks above my beard.

  “You can’t be out here,” says the voice.

  I spin around. I don’t know where the voice is coming from. “Okay,” I say.

  Then I see them. Two of them, coming across the road toward me, with guns aimed at my head. They are Speculators, is what they are—black suits, black shoes, black hats—and I am about to call out in happy greeting, ask them their unit, tell them who I am, but then I see that they’re also wearing thick aprons that cover the whole midsection and helmets, black helmets with tinted visors that cover the whole face.

  The words come to me again, and the truth of the words: I don’t know where I am.

  They are approaching me swiftly, like shadows, like creatures risen from some impossible deep to come and claim me and drag me away. There is a crispness in their movements, a panther-like military integrity that reminds me with a burst of sad longing that I used to be like them. It reminds me that I’m standing here barefoot, broken, bleeding from my head.

  “Please don’t shoot me,” I say. “Please.”

  They stop, guns still drawn and aimed, and the shorter of the two raises the faceplate and holds up a stubby bullhorn. It’s a woman, pale-faced, staring at me impassively.

  “We will not shoot you unless given cause to do so.”

  “Okay,” I say. And then, ridiculously: “That’s great.”

  “Please provide your identification.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I don’t have any.”

  “None?”

  I shake my head.

  She is stymied. Irritated, even. Leaving her faceplate up, she turns to her partner to confer. He is shorter than her, broad around the middle, and when he flips up his own faceplate I see a round, pocked face. They press their foreheads together and talk so I can’t hear them. I see figures moving about on the catwalks, clustering together. People. Dozens of people. Staring at me. I turn to one of the glass buildings, on one side of the street, and I see that I am being watched from there, too. And from the building on the opposite side. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, thousand, maybe, are watching.

  I know at last where I am. A skyline that is not a skyline but a cluster of overlapping skylines. I know it from The Prisoner, from when, toward the end, Dave Keener arrives in that glittering and hopeful city in search of the wrecked alcoholic doctor who may or may not hold the secret that can save Dave’s son. When he arrives, it’s late at night, and he drives his car down a broad avenue—this same broad avenue—into a throbbing crowd of partygoers and happy revelers, and his own grief and panic are drawn in sharp contrast to the footloose alcoholic joy of those he is forced to pass through en route to his salvation and that of his family.

  The whole world of the book returns to me in a flash, a world layered over this one, Dave Keener unable to deal with the traffic, throngs of cars going on either side, so he pulls over and gets out on the side of the road and climbs up on top of his car, scanning in both directions, while the exhaust of a hundred cars blows up into his eyes and coats his throat.

  I am in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, as it turns out, is a real place.

  The two officers have come to some sort of disagreement, presumably about my fate. The short fat one raises his gun and points it at me, and the other one, the one who spoke to me, pushes it down. I step off my traffic island and head toward the two officers—or soldiers, or whatever they are—hoping to engage them, but they ignore me, continue their squabbling. Their voices float over to me in patches, ribbons of conversation.

  “…I don’t know what you want me to do—”

  “You know what you have to do. Directorate just issued new instructions on this.”

  “What directorate are you fucking talking about?”

  “Main Directorate.”

  “Main Directorate of Identification, or Main Directorate of Border Security?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “You just said you did know!”

  “Can we just call it in? Let’s call it in.”

  “Fine. Fine, Rick.”

  Rick holsters his gun and digs under his heavy apron and comes out with a radio, a small black box of a make I’ve never seen before. He murmurs into it while his partner watches, and then the three of us stand baking in the sun.

  “Hey,” I say, realizing suddenly how brutally thirsty I am. “Can I—”

  “Remain where you are.”

  “Remain where you are.”

  “Do not move.”

  “Do not move.”

  “Stay.”

  So I wait, unmoving, under the watchful eyes of the two officers in their thick lead aprons and black face masks, and under the eyes of everybody in those hotels that line the street, because that’s what they are. Hotels. I know them from The Prisoner, I have been given a map in advance: a guide book. That’s Luxor, Caesars Palace, New York–New York. Purpose-built simulacra of real places, once built for pleasure. Inside them now, I think, I presume, are people—the people who live in Las Vegas now, who live here now in the present like there are people who live in the Golden State. These people, the Las Vegas people, were never real to me before this instant—but neither were they were unreal. I had no reason to conceive of their existence, nor reason to doubt it. They were unknown and unknowable.

  But now they are real, and I can feel their eyes staring from the glass windows above and around me.

  Sweat is running in strea
ms from my brow down into my beard. Blood has caked in the corner of my eye, and it bubbles at the cracked blisters on my lips.

  Two cars pull up at the same moment, from opposite directions, one on either side of the traffic island where I’m standing. The cars are yellow, each with the word “TAXI” stenciled on its side. Nobody gets out of the cars. One of the officers, the woman, remains with her gun pointed at me, while the other hustles over to the window of one of the taxis.

  For a long moment he talks to whoever is in there, and then he trots back over to his partner as the door opens and a new officer comes out—a tall, thin woman, no apron, no mask, dressed all in blue.

  She has a bullhorn, and she lifts it to her lips.

  “Take off your clothes.”

  “What?”

  She doesn’t repeat herself. She just waits, watching. My fingers are clumsy, swollen, wrestling with the buttons of my shirt. While I struggle out of my clothes, an officer emerges from the second taxi and methodically puts four traffic cones in a square around me. There is another cop inside his car, I see her waiting, watching him tensely from behind the steering wheel. My pants are burned onto my skin, and I have to fight them off, wrestle them down, unpeel myself from myself. When the new officer, who is older, black, with a thin gray mustache, is done with the traffic cones, he strings yellow caution tape from cone to cone, cordoning me off.

  At last I stand in my underpants, the sun flaying my broad red back.

  I am becoming aware of life in the corners of this picture. A man and a woman sit on a decorative concrete wall in front of one of the hotels, dangling their feet. A little boy is on a bicycle, swooping in curious circles closer and closer to the conversation. Half a block up there’s a statue of a towering figure in a draped toga or cape, lording proudly above the intersection.

  The first officer keeps her gun on me while Rick waits beside her along with the perimeter. He takes off his hat and wipes sweat from his brow while the tall woman, the one with no mask and no apron, lifts her bullhorn again.