Golden State
Page 19
“Yes,” she says, snapping her fingers impatiently, pointing at the upper-right corner of the screen. “There’s no one home. Look at the time.” The stamp at the top right shows 10:54. “We’re going to be there at eleven oh one.”
“Who is?”
“You and me. Laszlo. Come on. It’s yesterday. It’s the day he died. It’s ten fifty-four. He’s already dead. He’s at the morgue by now, and we’re going to get to this apartment in a few minutes.”
“And no one was home.”
“That’s correct.”
“Aster comes up the stairs. She lets us in.”
“Yeah, but watch. Back ten.” The stretch backs up ten seconds and then resumes, and Doonan knocks again, and the door opens again. There is someone inside. A shadow of a person, and Doonan is laughing at whatever the person says, a murmur of low happy greeting, and then he steps inside.
“Whoa,” I say. I’m leaning closer in my chair. We slow it down to watch it again, frame by frame.
Paige is good, but I’m good too, and I can see that what Petras’s right hand is enacting here is a kind of dumb show. He is playing for the captures. He puts his hand on the handle, seemingly trying it but really picking the lock, working the cheap lock quickly and expertly with small tools. And then he stands back, makes a big show of checking his watch, and then the door opens, as if from inside, but it’s really Doonan pushing it open, with the tip of one of those brown shoes he pushes the door open and turns his body to block the person at the door, because there is no one at the door. He says hello to nobody, laughs at a pleasant word of welcome that nobody makes, and enters at nobody’s invitation.
“Shit,” I say, and Paige says, “I know,” and then we watch it again slow. I explain to Paige how he does it, how Doonan, the soft unassuming administrator, is traveling with tools, hidden in his coat, secreted up his sleeve. He’s breaking in, and he knows that the stretch will be watched. He’s breaking in and he knows to make it look like he’s not breaking in, and he knows how.
“He’s there to take those days,” I say. I stand. I start to pace, making tight circles in my narrow house, from wall to wall. I have shaken off the last tendrils of my dream, emerged from the world created by The Prisoner. It’s like rising from a pool of water and shaking the droplets free.
“He’s there to go down to that basement and steal days out of Mose Crane’s Record.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.”
I don’t just think. I know. I know. It strikes me with the force of certainty, as clear as daylight, as true as doors on houses. And other things are becoming clearer too.
“This is two hours after Crane dies? They know—Petras knows, Doonan knows—that the Specs are going to go search Crane’s house, and they know what they’re going to find. On those days in particular. If we were to go to the ninth floor and ask Woody Stone for the stretches from the alley outside—between the building and the Chinese place—five minutes after he goes in? We’d see this guy coming out, four minutes from now, putting the door back quick and careful and scurrying off.”
Paige is pacing too; now we’re pacing together, back and forth, making parallel grooves in my small front room. “He’d have to know, right?” she says. “That we would get into the dead man’s boxes and find that days were missing? He’d have to know.”
“So it must be—” I stop. Speculation is here—it’s in the room—I feel it, a swell tide of darkness, speckled with possibility. “Whatever it is they’re hiding. It is worse.”
“Worse than missing days?”
“Yeah. Yes. Because—listen, Aysa—nobody would risk stealing two weeks of someone’s days, swiping them so brazenly, unless the risk of them being found was a thousand times worse than the risk of the theft.”
The stretch is still rolling in the background, the light of the wall-mounted creating the only illumination in my barren house. And suddenly, as we’re talking, we appear on the screen—a few minutes after Petras’s man disappears inside, here we come up the steps. We almost saw him. We were just there. Then we appear on the screen, and Ms. Aster comes out, and we watch ourselves in conversation. The old versions of Ratesic and Paige, from the day before. Another reality. A different world. I stare at my own broad back on the screen with disgust, at the way I hold myself, how I loom over Paige, who after all is so much smarter than me, so much the nimbler mind.
How I comport myself with the contemptuous affect of the senior Spec, moving blithely with undeserved confidence through a world I think I understand.
“Stop,” I say, and the images freeze on the monitor.
“Mr. Ratesic? Laz, are you okay—”
I would say yes, but she knows. It’s already happening. It’s happening and I can’t stop it, it is grabbing me and taking me, speculation rolling me down into itself, into deeper and deeper darkness, and I want it—I let it. I feel it now.
I let my eyes drift close, and a single candle’s light kisses and winks to life in the dark room of my mind, and it burns warmer, sending out a radiance of light in which I can find the whole truth of this. The entirety of truth.
—the right hand—
—Petras’s right hand in Crane’s doorway—
—Crane the blackmailer, Crane the obscure, skull split—
All the things he knew and never said, all the small truths that flamed out and died along the lines of his neurons, died in his brain the moment he died too.
My eyes fly open.
“A construction worker,” I say, three syllables joined in a simple word, I say it just quietly, just to myself, stunned by the suddenness of my understanding, and liberated by it too. Liberated by the knowledge of what I have to do. Because in that moment I know. I know what it is. All of the pieces are flying into place, circling in like birds finding their roost.
“Laszlo?” She is staring at me, her eyes wide and bright in the dim light of my house.
“Do you remember when we talked to Renner?” I ask.
“At the death scene? Crane’s boss?”
“Yes. Do you remember—he told us that Crane worked odd jobs.” Renner, the construction boss in a sweaty panic, struggling to dig from his anxious mind every possible detail, spitting out facts as fast as he remembered them. “He said that Crane frequently did other jobs in his off-hours. That he was always coming from other work.”
Working under the table on some mansion in the Hills…
“You read Petras’s file, right?”
Nobody likes cheap labor more than the rich…
“Yes, sir. Yes, Laszlo.”
“What was her address—the home address?”
“I forget the number. It’s on Mulholland, though. Mulholland Drive. Laszlo—”
And now I’m seeing it in my mind’s eye, a memory as clear as reality: a slim red binder, unmarked. Doonan pulling it from Petras’s shelf, hiding it away as the conversation approached a crisis.
“Laszlo. Where are we going?”
I am scrambling into my clothes. Jeans and a work shirt, whatever’s at hand. Aysa isn’t in her uniform and pinhole, and neither am I. I’ve got my car keys, I’ve got my weapon. I’m halfway out the door.
I ask Paige, as we head to the car: “Did Arlo ever tell you the whole story?”
“What whole story?”
“Of what happened to my brother. To Charlie.”
Main text (cont.):
Charlie Ratesic paced restlessly before the glass windows of the Service, glaring out at the State. It was the middle of the night, and the buildings sparkled gloriously below, but all eyes were on Ratesic, rubbing the months of stubble on his chin, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
He had returned to the Service building after months undercover, and his colleagues had gathered to hear his report, to try to understand what it was he had been working on in darkest secrecy for all that time.
“They call themselves…the Golden State,” he said.
We looked at each other in baffl
ement. Most of the unit was there, gathered around to listen: Carson and Burlington, Cullers, Alvaro. Laszlo, our hero’s younger brother, was leaning by the elevator wall, hands buried deep in his pockets.
“The Golden State?” I said slowly. “I had understood from your earlier reports, Mr. Ratesic, that this was a conspiracy against our good and golden State.”
“Yeah.” He pulled out another cigarette. Cigarette after cigarette. “See, the fuckers—they think it’s funny, okay? To call themselves that.” He sneered. “They think everything is funny.”
He told us what he had learned, and we listened in horror. This criminal conspiracy, this self-styled Golden State, met nearly every night at the warehouse in Glendale, where they had removed all the captures and replaced them with duplicates. “Dummies” was the word Charlie used. Dummies. Machines cleverly styled to look like the recording devices that forge our reality, but are not connected to anything.
The whole building was dead to the eyes of the world so that lies could be told within its walls with impunity. This Golden State, Charlie told us, was meeting off the Record, disconnected from ongoing reality.
“But…why?” asked Carson, her face reflecting the fascinated horror that we were all feeling.
“To lie. Just to lie.”
We could not conceive of it, the willful depravity of this place that Charlie had been inside of: good and golden citizens parading about in full and luxuriant disregard for the truth, announcing themselves to have new names, telling each other that they were pirates, or millionaires, war heroes, thieves. Relating stories from their personal histories, reveling in changing the details every time they told them, making themselves funnier or braver or better looking in retrospect. Making up stories about their friends, about history, about public figures and private friends.
They were spewing out so many and such extravagant lies that every time Charlie approached this warehouse, willing himself back into character as one of the conspirators, he could practically see the effusions of their dishonesty billowing out from behind the doors.
“It’s fucked up,” he told us. “These people are seriously fucked up.”
“So what are we waiting for?” said Alvaro. “Let’s bust in there and shut the place down.”
“No!” shouted Charlie loudly, wheeling on poor Alvaro, who backed away, putting his hands in the air. Charlie’s eyes were wild, red-rimmed. His hair was a mess, sticking out in all directions. “We can’t.”
“But Charlie,” I said softly, trying to calm him. “Why not?”
The answer was simple, at least as he saw it: Charlie didn’t want us to end the conspiracy because he had convinced himself that there was someone else involved he had not yet managed to identify. “Give me more time. A little more time. I have to find the monster.”
We all looked at each other. Laszlo, over by the elevator, stood up straight.
“The monster?”
“That’s right.”
It was increasingly clear, the longer the great Charlie Ratesic stood there, staring at us, staring out the window, that something was wrong with him. Something was very wrong indeed. His lips were flecked with spittle. His eyes were wild.
“They say—” He ground out his cigarette, lit a new one. “These fuckers say that the Golden State—the real one, our one—is all bullshit. They say that the real golden state—like, ‘state’ like ‘state of being,’ ‘state of understanding’—the real golden state is accepting that there is no such thing as truth. They think we’re fooling ourselves to think we can be protected from lies. They say that all of it—the Record, the captures, the Service…” Ratesic was staring out the window again, out at the glittering majesty of the dark city. “They think it’s some kind of fallacy, that we’re, like—what do they say?—playing make-believe.”
We were all looking at each other, looking at Charlie, trying to take the measure of what was happening inside his mind by the wildness in his eyes.
“They’re writing a book,” he said. Lighting a new cigarette with trembling hands. “A Night Book, they call it, because it’s a book of real truth, truth underneath the truth. Just like a real Night Book, but…but it’s a joke. It’s a sick joke.” Charlie took a deep drag of the new cigarette and launched again, a single long sentence curling out with the smoke. “They say the real truth is that there is no such thing as truth at all, there’s only perception, okay, because everything you think is true can only be proved by pointing to some other truth, but that truth rests on another one, too, and so on forever, and they say that what this means is that there is no permanent actual reality, there is no Objectively So, and all that we have built, the good and golden truth that surrounds us, is nothing.” He stopped finally, then, and stood trembling with tears in his eyes. “Not truth but it’s opposite. It’s absence.”
“Okay, Charlie,” I said softly. “Okay.”
“Don’t do that, Vasouvian.” He sprang back to life, snarling, and grabbed my collar. “Don’t condescend to me. These assholes want to take the whole State off the Record. They say that whatever happened”—he let go of me and gestured wildly, gesturing to the ancient inscrutable past, the unknowable calamity that happened to the rest of the world—“that we oughta let it happen here. We oughta make it happen here.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“It’s not. It’s not! There’s a monster. There’s a monster and the monster is going to make it happen. Unless we stop it.”
“A monster?”
“What?” said Ratesic. “You think I’m lying?”
It was, I realized, time to talk to Charlie alone. I took him aside. We sat down at my desk and I poured us both coffee. The man had been undercover for six months, and I told him that in my expert opinion it was time for him to come in from the field. Monster or no monster.
“No,” he said. He did not drink the coffee. “No, Arlo.”
“What I’m afraid of, dear Charlie, is that the work—being so exposed, for so long—that it is affecting you.”
“What? No. The work doesn’t affect me. You know that. I don’t get symptoms. I don’t—”
“On the inside, Charlie. I’m afraid that it is affecting you inside.” I didn’t use the phrase that had occurred to me, as I looked with horror at the sallowness in his cheeks, the wildness in his eyes when he raved about his monster. I was afraid he had begun to rot from the inside out.
“I am worried, Charlie, that there is an alternate reality that has its hooks in you. As your superior—as your friend—”
“Enough,” He slammed down his coffee cup. He grabbed his jacket. “I’m going back in there. I’m going to find the monster.”
He stormed toward the elevator, wrestling himself back into his coat.
“Hey. Charlie?”
Laszlo Ratesic stopped his brother by the elevator door. He was bigger than Charlie by half a head, maybe, but you never really noticed him when Charlie was around. Charlie smiled to see him, though. He had his jacket on now. He was ready to go. “Yeah, buddy?”
“I just wanted to say be careful out there.” He knew his brother too well to try to stop him. “Okay?”
Charlie nodded. “You got it.” He patted his brother on the cheek, and stepped into the elevator. We watched the door close.
The next time we saw him he was in his hospital bed.
19.
“Is that all true?” says Paige.
“Everything is true,” I tell her.
I’ve told her the whole story,
The only part I left out was the distressing exultant feeling I got while I was listening to him that day, raving to old Arlo about this terrifying conspiracy he penetrated, this Golden State that was not the real Golden State, that wanted to make of us our inverse, build a world of pure thin truthlessness with no Record, no captures, everybody walking around with no burden of truth upon them, no prison of truth around them, and how what I felt on hearing all this was a kind of inchoate sideways longing.
Wouldn’t that be something…
Same way I felt three hours ago, reading The Prisoner, immersing myself in alternate realities, soaking in them, all the things that could be but aren’t…
Come on, Laz. Come on. Get it together.
You can’t see much of Petras’s house from here. It is a modern structure, a single slab of deep gray, its frontage mostly hidden by hedgerow, its full shape obscured by moonlight. A thing of stone and glass, arrogantly defiant of gravity, built back from the road and cantilevered out over the valley below.
The house radiates. The house holds the monster. The house is a monster, looming, reaching into the darkness.
Paige has questions. One or two more questions formulating in that nonstop mind of hers, I see them bubbling in her, but more than that I can see the energy itself—she has questions but they’re all incidental. Fuel for the fire. She is ready to roll. She is itching to go. This is something, man—that’s what Ms. Paige is thinking.
I remember her on the bench outside the judge’s chambers, my young partner, trying to puzzle out the judge’s act of self-slaughter, her lip curling at the idea of such a radical reaction to something so small.
Whatever else she knows, she knows that this—the story I’ve told her, the story of Charlie, the story we’re part of now—this is not small.
“Your brother went back into that house?”
“He did. There was no way to stop him. He thought—the way he put it—he thought he had to catch a monster.” I look at her. She is looking through the windshield at Petras’s house in the darkness. “He thought there was a monster.”