Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “We’re going to need to know your name.”

  I start to answer, but then I don’t want to. I can’t. I remember the thud of the boots in my side in the hot dog truck. Not falling for that again. “I don’t have a name.”

  “Look,” she says. “If we don’t know who you are, you’re dangerous. If you’re dangerous, we have to handle you as we handle any threat.”

  As if to underscore the tall woman’s point, the woman with the gun raises it a little higher. Rick brushes his fingertips along the holster of his own weapon but doesn’t draw. The last of the officers, the perimeter man with the thin gray mustache, has his hands in his pockets, but he’s looking at me closely.

  I am going to die here, I think. Wherever this is—one way or another—I’m going to die. I might as well go out with my name on.

  “My name is Laszlo Ratesic,” I say.

  “You’re Golden State?”

  “Yes.”

  She says it like that, not “Are you from the Golden State?” but “You’re Golden State?” and I wonder what that means.

  “You’re a refugee?”

  “I—I’m sorry. I—”

  “Exile.” She interrupts, impatient. “You’re an exile.”

  I squint. I can’t hear her clearly. Maybe she said “in.” You’re “in exile” or you’re “an exile.”

  “Yes,” I say, the answer is the same either way, and feel the pain of longing for my homeland, which strangely enough appears to me as the pleading, earnest face of Kelly Tarjin, whom I only met three days ago. I think of her in the doorway of her small home in Faircrest Heights, her face worn with care. I recall telling her there was a version of the world in which I would come back to her, buy her a hamburger, tell her funny stories. I imagine her now with a stab of regret, imagine her waiting, imagine arrogantly that she cares, that she’s standing in her doorway in fruitless anticipation of my return. The weakest form of speculation: fantasy.

  I miss her. I never really met her. “Home” is a word with no definitive meaning.

  Meanwhile, the mustache guy trots over to the captain and mutters in her ear. She looks baffled, but then she shrugs and hands him the bullhorn. He starts to talk, it doesn’t work, he puzzles at the mechanism and starts again.

  “Hey, would you say the name again?”

  “Laszlo,” I say.

  “The whole name.”

  The captain is watching him. He’s watching me.

  “Laszlo Ratesic.”

  He confers with the captain, and then with the other two cops, who lift their visors to join the conversation, until he speaks again into the bullhorn. “All right, then. We will not be killing you for the time being.”

  The dark-skinned cop with the gray mustache has a partner, too, a young woman with a black ponytail. She’s driving and he’s in the shotgun seat, and I’m in the back, and they don’t talk while they take me where we’re going, a short ride down the avenue—the Strip, is what it’s called. That’s what Wish calls it in The Prisoner; I remember it now. But in their easy comfort with each other, in the clear mutual respect I sense between the two, I am reminded helplessly of Aysa Paige, my old friend, my first and last and only partner.

  My thick head lolls back and I think maybe I sleep a little, in the air-conditioned back seat of this taxicab that is a police car, in this city that did not exist until half an hour ago, heading to who knows where. I drift off to sleep deciding that the best thing to do is remember Aysa forever as the Aysa I knew first, the one who never betrayed me and never intended to. Let that truth be the one that lasts, let that be the real bone truth of her and me.

  When the cops open the back door and tell me to wake up, we’re at a hotel called the Mirage. It’s a simpler, shabbier building than some of the others—a pair of identical buildings, each a massive rectangular slab of concrete, striped with glass, angled backward toward a tower in the center that connects them. It looks like a book open to the street.

  In the parking lot, as we get closer to the rear door, there is what looks very much like a giant pile of rotting pumpkins, hundreds of pumpkins smashed to pieces in a shifting pile, covered in flies.

  I don’t ask. I am done, for now, with questions. I follow my escorts inside, and I am overwhelmed by noise: a vigorous open-air bazaar is in full swing in the lobby of the Mirage, with market stalls set up and lines of customers haggling over clothing and food and small housewares.

  “Six bucks? Fuck you,” says a beefy guy, shaking his head at a small woman with wiry hair and a handkerchief over the lower half of her face.

  “No,” she says, tugging down the kerchief so she can enunciate better, “fuck you.”

  The beefy guy steps up to the lady, making fists of both hands. The cop with the mustache steps toward the confrontation, but his partner, the young woman, stops him. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I got it.”

  She strides over, hand on her gun, as I dodge a wheelbarrow laden with what looks like toasters and pencil sharpeners. Mustache takes my arm.

  “You doing okay?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I bet you’re not. C’mon.”

  He leads us through the lobby, past the elevator bank, into a quiet dark room, and the feeling of the place is immediate and unmistakable: across all space and time, in whatever universe I may stumble into, the smell and feel of being in a bar remains the same. People are scattered at small tables throughout the room, nursing small glasses, and there’s a bored-looking bartender, a guy in round sunglasses with spiky hair, reading a book with the paper cover folded back. Before him, across the bar, is a man in a gigantic motorized wheelchair, nursing a glass of his own.

  “Hey,” says the cop, and everybody looks up. But he’s talking to the guy in the wheelchair. “Hey Charlie. I believe this man belongs to you.”

  The man in the wheelchair moves his right hand, just his right hand, to work a device on his armrest. Slowly the machine turns, and I can see his face.

  “Charlie,” I say. “Oh, Charlie.”

  The chair moves slowly toward me, and I walk toward him, almost as slowly as he comes toward me, so baffled am I, so weighted with astonishment. My feet plant and lift themselves one heavy step at a time as he rolls across the tile floor of the bar, the mechanics of his chair whirring as he comes. The cop steps back and crosses his arms, watching our reunion, and the bartender goes back to his book. Halfway across the bar, the front wheel of Charlie’s chair catches on a lip of tile, and the whole thing nearly totters over backward. He stops, fusses with his buttons, and navigates the obstacle.

  “Lashed to the mast”. The phrase appears in my head. My long-lost brother, living still, is lashed to the mast.

  We meet in the center of the room, and I crouch before him and put my hands on his narrow shoulders.

  He cannot move his neck.

  He says something, but I can’t hear him. His mouth barely moves and the words are faint and garbled. I bend closer.

  “Heya, dickhead,” he whispers.

  I follow him as he moves across the hotel, through the crush of people in the market. Old decommissioned casino games are shoved against the walls, unplugged. Felt tables have been made into market tables laden with goods. Way up above me are hotel rooms, doors hung with wreaths. Clotheslines are drawn between the mezzanine railings.

  I stand beside Charlie in the elevator, shaking my head. His whole physical self is gone, his broad swaggering body is blasted and burned and shriveled, but I would know him anywhere. I would know him a thousand times.

  “Welcome to”

  Charlie writes those two words and I take the paper and wait while he writes more.

  “my swinging”

  I am smiling already, but I wait for it, for the third scrap of paper. He holds the nub of a pencil in his hand, between middle and pointer finger, clutching it fiercely between two knuckles, and it trembles wildly as he writes.

  “bachelor pad”

  I laug
h. His face does not move. He is frozen. His face is a mess of old scars and burn marks, pocked and pitted and locked in place. His mouth is a sideways oval, a bent O angled toward his right cheek.

  Charlie can’t talk. Not really. Each word he utters is a triumph of sustained effort and still comes out as a strangled, unearthly whisper.

  “Charlie,” I keep saying, tears rushing down my cheeks, a hot rush. I feel like a dummy.

  He has a sheaf of loose papers balanced in his lap. He writes, holds up papers for me, one at a time.

  “Knock it off”

  And then:

  “you baby”

  I would knock it off if I could. Instead I crouch down before him and hug his withered legs. His body is a coil of wire, bent up into a seated shape. He is impossibly thin, and immobile, slumped into the movable chair, head fixed in a half tilt, the muscles of his face unmoving.

  I have presumed my brother dead for so long, though, and here he is, alive. There is terrified joyful movement inside my chest, small birds opening their wings.

  The balcony of Charlie’s room’s has a view of the central courtyard of the hotel. From Charlie’s room you can look across at other rooms just like it, look up and down at other floors just like this one. The bazaar I walked through on my way in continues down below: as we talk, the sounds of haggling, contentious commerce waft up in a continuous stream.

  The room is full of paper. There are the loose pages scattered on Charlie’s lap for these small conversational notes, but that’s just the beginning of it. His coat is overflowing with paper, his jacket pockets stuffed with paper. The room is full of filing cabinets, shelves, boxes, and I am certain that they’re stuffed with paper.

  “You OK?”

  I shake my head. “Not really. I went to your funeral, Charlie.”

  He writes. The pencil jiggles between his knuckles.

  “Me too”

  I laugh. Good old Charlie. He’s still writing, writing two words at a time, writing—

  “Arlo: smart”

  I read it and his fingers are curling for me to give the note back. I do, and he scribbles, crosses out and amends, and hands it back.

  “Me: smarter”

  I don’t have to ask him about what happened next, once he disappeared from the Golden State. I spent twenty-four hours, give or take, in exile, in the desert between the Golden State and this place, whatever this place is. I know how I feel now, burned and blasted, twisted and wracked. My throat still feels dry and full of sand. So here’s my Charlie, after my day in the desert, plus months. Plus years. However long until he made it here.

  He’s looking at me while I look at him, and then he does his effortful writing again, creating just one word:

  “Beard?”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I say. I put my hands up to my face self-consciously. “I started it after you were gone. I dunno why. Just—I dunno.”

  His eyes don’t move. They are settled on my face. His chin ducks down then, very slightly, which seems to be the extent of movement he’s got, as far as moving his head. I crouch down before him, put my ear to his thin lips.

  “It looks like shit.”

  I laugh. He is not laughing but I know that he is.

  “Fuck, Charlie,” I tell him. “You cheated death.”

  His pencil moves across the paper. I wait for it.

  “No. The”

  I wait. Listen to the noise of the bazaar. Look around the cluttered, paper-ridden room.

  “other way around”

  It takes a long time for Charlie to explain everything that he wants me to understand. And it is a mark of how much Charlie remains Charlie—world-beating, stubborn, domineering Charlie—that he does not give a shit how long it takes.

  Whatever he has to say, it is worth waiting for, because it is Charlie who is saying it.

  Charlie was in the desert for a long time. He doesn’t know how long. He does not know how close he came to dying, but he knows it was damn close.

  And then at last he made it here. It took him a lot longer than it took me, because there was no Ms. Wells then, no outrider from Vegas making sorties into the State, finding exiles and pointing them in the right direction.

  “What is this place? Why is everything indoors?”

  Charlie writes.

  “Under my ass.”

  “What?”

  He points to the paper again. “Under my ass.”

  I crouch before him to perform the peculiar intimate act of reaching under the fragile structure of his body, leveraging him up slightly with one hand while I feel around with the other under his bony rear end until I find the wiry spirals of a notebook. More paper. Paper everywhere.

  The cover of the notebook is blank.

  The notebook is only a few pages long. Still squatting, I flip it open and read it.

  It is the provisional understanding of the people of Las Vegas that at some (currently) indeterminate time in the past, an enemy (???) of what was then known as “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (with “enemy” to be [provisionally] defined as EITHER an external adversary OR an internal adversary OR some combination of the two) did inflict (EITHER over time OR “at a strike”) irrevocable damage upon “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”.

  The text in the notebook is hard to read. There are many strikeouts and erasures, with some passages in pen and others in in pencil, and with much of it written in, over, and around earlier text. There are arrows at the ends of lines, directing the reader to skip a paragraph or turn the page over to find the continued thought on the back. Each notebook page is a patchwork of smaller pages, smaller pieces of paper, taped and stapled on.

  This (postulated) irrevocable damage done to “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” was realized by taking advantage of the nation’s highly interconnected energy infrastructure, coupled with the (near-??) total reliance of that “grid" (term?) on computerized control mechanisms which were highly vulnerable to interference (“sabotage”). The postulated “enemy” (internal OR external OR combined, as noted above) was thus able to take advantage of

  A) “systemic flaws" in this “grid” AND/OR

  B)“systemic flaws” in the general population’s ATTITUDE TOWARD authority, i.e. DISTRUST for any statement issued by the “government” (including, FOR EXAMPLE, an announcement relating to an attack on the “grid”) AND/OR

  C) “systemic flaws” in the population’s ATTITUDE TOWARD the “media” (term?), such that—

  I close the notebook for a second and take a look at Charlie. It’s hard to tell but he might be sleeping. His mighty presence has momentarily departed the room. I try to find my place in the book but it’s hard, among the wandering lines of texts, the arrows and cross-outs and redirects. So I just pick a page, a few pages on from where I was.

  —a BLAST RADIUS measuring dozens (hundreds? +++?) of miles in diameter. The effects of this accident (term?) were COMPOUNDED by the inability/ unwillingness of survivors to communicate [i.e., severe distrust toward fellow survivors, refusal to accept or solicit assistance, presumption of “enemy intent”]. Lacking the tools to measure, we can feel uncertain—

  Someone had written “we can feel certain,” and someone else, or maybe the some person having second thoughts, had gone back and made the certain into uncertain.

  —that despite the intervening passage of [???] years, the environmental hazard that was the result of the explosion(s) still pervades the atmosphere in (some but not all) of “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

  That’s the last word on that page, “America,” and then it skips down a few lines and someone else in different handwriting has written, in parentheses and in very small letters, (“term?”).

  It goes on. I can’t read anymore. I laugh at myself, shaking my head. I sit with the book in my lap, looking out the window of Charlie’s little room. The sky isn’t poisoned with lies, you idiot. It’s poisoned with poison.

  “Hey,” says Charlie, working hard to get the word out. “Hey.”

&n
bsp; He is holding out his working hand for the notebook, and I hand it to him. He flips back to the first page, takes his pencil and presses down hard, underlining a single word, the fourth word in the paragraph: “provisional.”

  The roof of the Mirage is all farmland.

  I followed Charlie up here in the elevator, and now I lope behind him through yet another alternate universe, a landscape of self-sufficiency rolled out high above the street.

  The rooftop has been covered in soil, built over with greenhouses and silos. I follow in Charlie’s wake as he maneuvers past patches of unsown field, cornstalks growing in bent rows. He ably navigates the bulk of his chair between piles of mulch and a clatter of unused shovels and rakes. Dark soil is laid out right to the lip of the roof, with roots twisting into it deep, with the bulging, uneven bulbs of pumpkins twisting up out of the dirt.

  Charlie writes.

  “Mine all mine,” his note says.

  He owns the pumpkin patch. He has papers for it. Other pieces of this common garden are owned by other people, all of it pipelined to the bazaar down below. The people of Las Vegas determined, one way or another, to create a civilization, dragging themselves along as they go.

  Charlie angles his chair very close to the edge of the building to show me what he wants me to see: a wooden machine that he built, or maybe had built, right up at the lip of the roof. It’s a very simple structure, just a plank of wood balanced on a triangle, like a teeter-totter, suspended in place with a thick elastic band. And there’s a pumpkin placed, delicately, at the near end of the plank. It’s a catapult, and it's loaded. Waiting to fire.

  We regard this primitive invention for a moment in silence. I feel the heat of the day finally starting to dissipate as it gets closer to nighttime.

  Charlie writes one of his notes, and I bend over him to read it:

  “What happens?”

  “What do you mean?”