Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

  “It’s nice to see you, Laszlo.”

  “Yeah. You too.”

  And it is nice to see her—of course it is. I mean, what am I going to do, lie? It’s nice to see her, and it also stings; it’s nice to see her, and it also brings me right back close to a whole bank of memories I spend a lot of time trying to look away from.

  “So, what? Falls off the roof, right?” says Tester. “Dies on the ground?”

  “That’s certainly what the flat facts suggest.”

  She glances at the spot on the lawn, the bent green stalks, patches of red blood. The body is long gone, en route to the morgue, where the doctors will do their thing, gathering up any final facts from inside the dead man’s body before they put it underground.

  “So who called you people?” she asks.

  I adjust my pinhole. “You don’t know?”

  “Why would I know?”

  “What?”

  We peer at each other, mutually bemused, and then we both start laughing at the same time. I like Elena well enough—not a lot, but I don’t really like anybody a lot. Elena Tester is a colleague, in that loose definition of the word that includes all law enforcement officers in the Golden State, or might even take in the whole government, depending on your definition of “colleague.” The Speculative Service and the regular police operate in different but frequently overlapping realms, and Elena and I have worked together a couple dozen times over the years. Mainly I know her personally.

  “It’s been a while,” says Elena softly, and I nod, start to say “Yup,” and because I’m a hollow version of the sturdy old bear I think I am, my throat catches on the small flat word, so I just swallow it back and don’t say anything. Because of course I mainly know Elena through Silvie, and in the long declining curve of my marriage, I haven’t seen much of Silvie’s friends. Not lately.

  It takes me a second to fight out of that little prison of a moment, and Tester allows me to take the time I need. She’s a pretty decent soul, Captain Tester, not that she shows it off too often. Short-haired and tight-featured and direct, she’s a tough nut, professional and severe, droll when she wants to be. Like all regular police, she wears an octagonal blue cap with a short brim and a pinhole capture in the center of it to gather up reality; right now it’s pointed at me as mine is pointed at her, our respective points of view entering simultaneously into the Record.

  “You were going to tell me who called it in,” she says.

  “It’s not clear,” I say. “Old Vasouvian got it as a tip from one of yours, some overeager officer of the law, and instead of tossing it in the junk heap as was most likely merited, Alvaro sent us along.”

  “‘Us’? I thought you folks worked alone. You especially.”

  “Oh, I do, Elena. Believe me, I prefer to.”

  I tilt my head toward Ms. Paige. “I’m supervising someone. The, uh—” For some reason it’s embarrassing. I jut my big chin toward the trees. “Young lady over there.”

  Officer Paige is diligently reinterviewing her way through the crowd of Crane’s coworkers, scribbling furiously in her gilded Day Book.

  “Laszlo the teacher. Wise mentor. How’s that playing out?”

  “Oh, you know. Fine. Although I did shout at her for no reason.”

  “Laz.”

  “Not no reason.” I cross my arms. “She tried to get ahead of the facts. Unwarranted speculation.” I scratch the heat on the back of my neck, feeling a fresh wave of self-recrimination. “It wasn’t a big deal, really. I guess I took a bit of a tone with her over it.”

  “You did?” says Tester, wide-eyed. “I’m shocked.”

  “Ha ha.”

  She was not actually shocked, obviously. It was a joke, a fact clear from the context—not a lie but a distortion of truth for intentionally comedic effect, understood as false on its face by everyone present, not to mention anyone listening in the provisional office right now, or listening later for the Record. You know all this already; you know the rules. You are familiar with the Basic Law. Humor causes no oscillation in the So, any more than any other form of small social falsehood: comic generalizations, inoffensive teasing, plain flattery—the whole constellation of innocuous and lubricating half-truths.

  “Okay. Well.” Elena shrugs. “Let me know, will you, if there’s anything to it.”

  “To what?”

  “To this. The—” She points at the lawn. “The matter at hand.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey. Are you okay, Laszlo?”

  I sigh. “No.”

  “Is it Silvie?”

  “For the most part.”

  “You miss her?”

  “Yes. Yes. I do.”

  Tester nods. That’s all she’ll get out of me, and she knows it. No deeper forms of truth will reveal themselves upon further inquiry, and she knows well enough not to dig. A question is a cup you hold out to be filled, and there are those who will always fill it to the brim, pour in all the truth they can think of, until it overflows and spills out and spreads across the table. That’s not me. Me, I’ll give you what’s precisely true and no more; I’ll answer your question and move right along.

  “Captain Tester? What about you?”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She furrows her brow, just for an instant, as if surprised by the question, and I don’t know if it’s my own state—exhausted, stuck in my own damn head, thinking suddenly and painfully of Silvie, frustrated by the limits of my own stubborn soul—but for whatever reason my attention goes keen around that momentary pause of hers. Suddenly the clean sunlit air is alive with drifting particles, flickers and flecks. I don’t know what.

  “I caught it on the scanner,” Captain Tester tells me. “I live near here, you know? On Talmadge.” I’m watching her face. I don’t know what I look like to her, I don’t know if she can tell what I’m thinking, but she keeps talking. “Sometimes I like to stop by a scene. Sometimes these…” Another half second pause. “Anyway. As long as I was in the area, I thought I’d babysit the homeowner while the scene officers did their thing. Take something off their plate. You know the figure?”

  “Of course.”

  “Just procedure,” she says with a final nod, and I’m wondering at her words, wondering at myself for wondering. Is Captain Tester reminding me of the division between our respective domains, between the world of police business and that of speculative affairs? Is she brushing me back? Does she know she’s doing it? The wind teases at the tops of the fat-trunked aspens and the skinny palms that shade the yard. The lenses of the captures hum unseen in the greenery.

  “Anyway.” Captain Tester smiles, gives me a reassuring pat on the shoulder, colleague to colleague, and heads back to her car.

  Officer Paige is over on the far side of the lawn. She has finished with the workmen and she’s watching me—she has been watching the whole time; I can tell from here that she has never lost track of me for a second. Ardent young seeker, wanting so badly to enter this beguiling and suspicious world I inhabit.

  All right, then.

  “Hey,” I say. “Paige.” I crook a finger and she comes springing across the lawn like a deer.

  “Yes, sir. What is it?”

  I refocus my attention on Tester, who’s climbing into her unmarked car. She raises a hand to me, and I raise one back. A captain of the regular police.

  “Do we know whose house this is?”

  5.

  People see us—people like Renner, I mean, and even people like Elena Tester, people who ought to know better—and get weird. Wary. They talk slow or fast, fidget from side to side or stand statue still, arms crossed, protecting the midsection as if from a blow. Afraid of lying, but also afraid of being thought to be lying, afraid of the rules we enforce and the punishments we are empowered to dole out.

  But what you should be afraid of, and what I think most people really are afraid of, deep underneath—buried truth, truth of the soul—is what would happe
n if we were gone.

  What they ought to be afraid of is the truth of the world beyond the Golden State, the truth of the wilderness, which is no truth at all.

  I’m talking about what happened to the rest of it, to the world beyond our world of bright blue skies and ocean breezes and crystalline epistemology.

  We are the world that is left, and the future of the Golden State depends on the fierce defense of what is Objectively So. It depends on the transcriptionists and archivists and librarians of the Permanent Record and the collectors and checkers and double-checkers of the Trusted Authority; it depends on the Acknowledged Experts, up on Melrose Avenue, scurrying from committee room to committee room; and it depends somehow on us, on me, me in my rumpled suit, clinging to the steering wheel like a ship’s captain, looking longingly at the House of Pies as it sails by on Vermont Avenue. Aysa Paige riding shotgun upright and at attention, her intensity dimmed not a bit by her first foray into the field.

  It’s already eleven. I know that to be a true fact because the bells are ringing from the high tower of the old movie palace at Vermont and El Segundo, and strangers are stopping on the street to tell each other it’s eleven, agreeing that it’s true, shaking hands and reinforcing what is Objectively So.

  I wonder fleetingly what Silvie is doing right at this exact minute; this is something I used to do all the time, before we went our separate ways. I would pause somewhere in the middle of my day and wonder what she was doing, right at this exact minute. It would be the thought of her, out there in the city, maybe filing forms in her orderly sub-basement office, maybe meeting her friend Lily for silken tofu soup on Beverly Boulevard, just Silvie out there doing her thing—the thought of her out enjoying the universe would reliably buoy my own thick, dull spirits. That’s love, as best as I can figure it: love isn’t how you feel when you’re together, it’s how you feel, how often you feel it, when you’re apart.

  “All right, so look,” I say abruptly. “I gotta say something.” And Ms. Paige immediately says “Yes, sir,” and I immediately stop.

  “Yes? Mr. Ratesic?”

  I sigh. I hate this conversation. I hate conversations, just in general. I wish I was alone. I wish I could stop, alone, at Donut Sam’s or one of the other greasy anonymous places with the laminated posters in the windows, with the cheap tin napkin dispensers on the grimy plastic tables, with the rows of colorful fluorescent doughnuts under glass like costume jewelry.

  “So,” I say to Paige. “You were right.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “About this event. This incident.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Stop calling me ‘sir.’ We are both officers of the same service, Ms. Paige.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay. So—but—” She clears her throat. She looks at me. “Do we do it now?”

  “No.” I sigh, shake my head. “And don’t ask again because I will fucking tell you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I will tell you when it’s time to speculate.”

  We’ve come all the way downtown on Vermont Avenue by now. We’re passing the blocks of factories, long, low smokestack buildings pumping out textiles and tin cans and small electronics, we’re passing the wheat fields and cotton fields and dope fields, all the architecture of our self-sufficiency. Through downtown and out again into University City.

  “First we need a few more facts.”

  “You people friends of his?”

  The woman who’s appeared a few steps down from the landing wears a long loose-fitting black garment, some kind of sweater, apparently, although it’s almost like a cape, the way it drapes around her thin shoulders, hanging down with ragged majesty onto the unswept concrete landing.

  The apartment block where Crane lived is organized around a flat stone courtyard, gray steps leading up to each individual unit, cement catwalks between the doors, like a motel. A poky little capture observes from above the doorway, green light blinking. After two minutes of knocking and trying to see in through the small smudged window, Ms. Paige and I have just about satisfied ourselves that there is no one home, and I have concluded it’s time to force my way in. I’ve been in the Service for nineteen years, but I was regular police once upon a time. I know how to get in when I need to.

  But here instead is this funny old lady, grinning up at us impishly in her black caul of a sweater, wearing a lot of clunky jewelry, with her skinny arms crossed over her chest.

  “Nope,” I tell her. “Not friends. I’m Mr. Ratesic, and I’m with the Speculative Service, and this is Ms. Paige. A dolphin is a mammal.”

  “So’s a bat but not so is a bee. I’m Dolly Aster. I live downstairs.” I tip my pinhole and she smiles impishly, interest flashing in her milky eyes. Her hair is wild, curly and gray. “Don’t know that I’ve seen a pair of you before. I thought you people traveled alone. Like wolves.”

  “No, ma’am,” I say. “Not wolves.”

  “I said like wolves, young man. It’s a figure of speech. Do you people do figures of speech, or is an idiom considered a species of lie?”

  “Idioms don’t register as falsehoods, ma’am,” says Paige, quickly and authoritatively, giving out the Basic Law like she’s one of the recordings made for schoolchildren. “Given that their intention and literal meaning can be gleaned from context and familiarity. They’re like humorous remarks in that regard.”

  “Well aren’t you sharp,” says Aster, her devilish grin broadening. “Sharp as a box of tacks.”

  Unlike Renner, back at the mansion, unlike most people, Ms. Aster seems to show no sign of intimidation or nervousness in the presence of the Speculative Service. To the contrary, she’s fascinated, inching up the stairwell with one old hand clutching the banister, licking her lips. “The Speculative Service on my humble stairwell in a fearsome little pack.” Her small features narrow to a fascinated point, savoring the mysterious syllables of the occupation. “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “We’re here about your tenant, Mose Crane.”

  “What did he do?” she says. “He murder someone?”

  “No,” I say, thinking, Interesting assumption. “No, ma’am. He’s dead.”

  “Murdered?”

  I’m about to say no, and I find that I can’t do it. My throat refuses to form the word, my instinct refuses to certify it as part of what’s So. So I merely smile, dance sideways around the question. “We are hoping to take a look at his apartment. Hoping you can help us out with that.”

  I’m digging her, this old lady—she has a tough sinewy look about her, like an old snake, not dangerous but built to navigate danger. She hands me her Day Book and I hand her mine, and I stamp hers and she stamps mine, and then she does the same with Paige.

  “So. What’s it like,” she asks Paige, “enforcing a world of absolute truth?”

  “I don’t know,” says Paige, deadpan. “It’s my first day.”

  Ms. Aster likes that a lot. She laughs, loud and cackling, hands on her hips, and gives me a wink. “You better watch out for this one, young man. Watch out!”

  I raise my eyebrows, give her a tight smile, indulging the joke, but Aster’s joke has got it wrong—dead wrong, 180 degrees in the wrong—which she’s old enough to know. I do not believe and have never believed that our mission is to enforce a world of absolute truth. If such a world could be built we would have long ago built it already.

  People are going to lie: they want to—they need to. Lying is born into the species. You know this is true as well as I do. There is something perfect in a lie, something seductive, addictive; telling a lie is like licking sugar off a spoon. I mean, think of children, think of how children lie all the time. We have imaginary friends, we blame our misbehavior on our playmates or our siblings, we claim not yet to have had dessert so we can cadge a second cookie. Me and Charlie used to have contests, as a matter of fact, two brothers each trying to slip a fake fact under the other one’s radar: “I beat up
a kid at school”; “I saw that dog, the neighbor’s dog, jump over a fence”; “I’m the fastest runner in my class—”

  You go back far enough in history, ancient history, and you find a time when people were never taught to grow out of it, when every adult lied all the time, when people lied for no reason or for the most selfish possible reasons, for political effect or personal gain. They lied and they didn’t just lie; they built around themselves whole carapaces of alternate truth in which to live like beetles. They built realities and sheltered inside them. This is how it was, this is how it is known to have been, and all the details of that old dead world are known to us in our bones but hidden from view, true and permanent but not accessible, not part of our vernacular.

  It was the world. It was this world but it was another world and it’s gone. We are what’s left. The calamity of the past is not true because it is unknown: we do not know what happened or how it happened or why it happened—and therefore it is by definition not true. There could only be hypotheses, and hypotheses are not the truth. So we leave it blank. Nothing happened. Something happened. It is gone.

  What we know of the past is enough to be afraid, enough to build our world, this world, our good and golden world, around preventing a repeat of the mistakes that destroyed the world before.

  The contrary situation is untenable. If we did not exist, “we” meaning the Service, meaning the State and its many mechanisms. If we eased off, as some argue we should, if people were allowed to experiment, to push at the boundaries. If we unplugged the captures and burned down the Record, closed the doors of the Service and ushered its officers gently into retirement. We know what would happen. We know. What happened out there would happen here; what happened back then would happen now. And just saying that, just imagining it, just speculating, you get a shiver of what that would mean, what it would feel like. You can see the shimmer of that terrible prospect on the horizon.