Golden State

by Ben H. Winters

Not good enough. Deep truth—bone true—true as daylight, true as doors on houses. Never good enough.

  Part Two

  Our desire to know the whole truth is what makes us human. Our understanding that it can’t be known is what keeps us alive.

  —Various Authors, Past Is Prologue: A Novel of Our Good and Golden Beginnings

  20.

  Death is the truest thing. Binary and unambiguous, permanent and forever.

  The bells are ringing for Aysa Paige, one for each of her years, and I’m standing with my head ducked as rain sneaks into the collar of my coat. A miserable rain that drips over the brim of my pinhole, soaks into my beard, inches its way along the line of my neck up the sleeves of my black coat.

  The others in the crowd are holding umbrellas, most of them, but I’m not part of the crowd. Not really. They’re over there, standing around the hole in the ground, the hole they’re going to lower Aysa into. I stand with my head bent, far enough away to be at a distance. Forest Lawn. Charlie is here. He’s right over there. I don’t come and visit because there’s no reason to. I won’t come and visit Aysa Paige either.

  The bells ring for the twenty-fourth time and then give way to silence. The rain hisses on the leaves of the trees.

  Today I am being hailed for my courage and dedication, for my valor and service to the State. It’s heavily featured in the Trusted Authority, in both the print and radio editions, early reports of the extraordinary valor of two Speculators, one of whom was injured, the other injured in the line of duty. More details to emerge in time. There will be a novel. I will be one of its heroes.

  That word is wrong. It feels wrong. Hero.

  Charlie carried himself like a hero long before he was one. When we were kids I would call him a hero, and he would tell me I was right. When in due time he became a hero for real, when they put the mantle on him, it fit perfectly and he wore it with ease, like his favorite jacket or his beat-up boots.

  Me, though? The word hero sits heavily in my gut. It mewls and rolls. It disputes itself.

  I spent the morning alone, staring out the window of my small house, trying to ignore the sour rolling in my stomach, the dark sense that any version of reality in which Laszlo Ratesic has become a hero, as a matter of Record, is a reality in which something is deeply fucked up.

  My gut tried to convince me not to go to the funeral at all, to stay home and make myself frozen waffles and curl up in a corner and read the novel again: The Prisoner by Benjamin Wish.

  But I had to come. I needed to, so I ignored my gut. I did make waffles, and I drowned them in syrup and ate them over the sink while I burned the novel in the toaster oven, and then I put on my black clothes. And now here I am, with rain dribbling into my beard, inside one of those moments when one’s inmost truth sits in uneasy disagreement with the acknowledged truth of the world.

  Charlie was a hero. Aysa was a hero. I am a skulker, a pretender, a fool. I got lucky, I was dragged by Aysa Paige to the scene of my heroism and now I am standing at a respectful distance from the hole they dug for her, clutching my wounded shoulder, rain collecting in my collar and in my pockets, and she’s the one in the box.

  The eulogies are short. Recitations of who Aysa was, where she came from. Among the speakers are a clutch of children. A small girl, holding a ragged teddy bear and blinking up at the microphone that has been angled down so she can reach it, has Aysa’s same neatly arranged curly hair and big, expressive sweetheart eyes. A teenage boy, reciting a comical anecdote from Aysa’s first day of high school, has her same proud chin and steel spine, her same way of becoming most upright and composed in the moment of highest distress.

  There are captures even here, even among the headstones. Up in the trees, down in the bushes, pointing out from the dashboards of the cars parked in a ring around the site. A crew is out too, a three-person: main capture, aux capture, boom mic. The funeral is happening. Reality is in progress.

  There’s a pretty young woman in black pants and a black top and stiff black shoes that look brand new, bought special for this miserable occasion. She looks stunned with grief, confused to find herself here, standing on the lip of a fresh-dug hole. I can’t remember the name. Do you have a sweetheart? I’d asked Aysa, none of my business, and I can’t even remember the name.

  The main theme of all of the orations is that Aysa Paige was a clever and confident young woman, intuitive and direct, whose hard childhood blossomed into a promising adulthood when her gift was recognized and she determined to join the Service. There are glances stolen in my direction. Here I am, avatar of the Service, the culmination and embodiment of her dream fulfilled. I look down at my muddy black boots.

  I cast my mind backward, backward to Petras’s house. To the swimming pool, the bullets from the second-floor window. Our Acknowledged Expert in the Enforcement of the Laws, frantic and cornered, brandishing the knife. How had I let it happen? How had I let the brief story of Aysa Paige end this way?

  Backward, backward. The worst and most useless form of speculation. The sour mealy worm of speculation, crawling backward in search of better paths.

  The last of the eulogists is a small and sturdy old darkskinned woman, and she, too, has Aysa in her face, in the flicker of wry humor that accompanies even the saddest movements of her speech. As she speaks, she never releases the arm of the equally ancient man who has helped her approach the microphone. The two of them are supporting each other through the ordeal of recalling the girl they raised.

  Her parents are nowhere to be seen. Fuck my parents.

  No one talks about what Aysa might have become one day. No one is going to dishonor the memory of the dead Speculator by speculating at her funeral.

  But I do it in my mind. Nothing to stop me from standing and wondering. A glorious career, the heights of Service, the Arlo Vasouvian of her generation, or an early and sensible retirement, walking away while she could still walk on her own—a politician, an architect, an Expert. My pride in her will remain forever speculative. I can be proud of her in a thousand different alternate futures.

  The machine makes a dull whirring sound as the coffin is levered downward into the greenery. It is the most hackneyed of clichés to compare a body being buried to a Record being sealed.

  There are two gravediggers, waiting. They’re both rail thin, bareheaded, in long black coats, like ragged Speculators moonlighting in a workman’s trade. They are leaning on their shovels, waiting to finalize the transaction by heaping dirt onto the box when all of this talking is done. One smokes mutely, looking up at the fingers of the trees, while the other leans on his shovel handle, reading the Authority. Then he looks up at me, and nudges the other man.

  The second one nods. He has a page of Authority in his pocket—the afternoon edition. Authority updated. He unfolds the page, scans it quickly, runs one dirty finger along it, and then they begin to murmur to each other, the two gravediggers.

  My gut was right. I know it instantly. My gut was on target, and the world is righting itself. It’s happening now.

  A black car pulls up to the outskirts, and three men get out, two from the front seat and two from the rear. One walks in front and the other two follow, moving quickly toward me across the muddy ground. The two in the back are regular policemen. I watch them come. Rain trickles down the side of my face. I have the avid attention of the gravediggers now, and of the rest of the funeral crowd: all of Aysa’s look-alikes, older and younger, looking sidelong at my approaching visitors.

  I detach myself from the crowd. Push my wet pinhole down onto my hair.

  “Mr. Alvaro?”

  “Mr. Ratesic.”

  My boss stops before me but does not put his hand out. His own pinhole is pushed down over his eyes, and when he pushes it up his eyes are unfamiliar. Troubled. Baffled. Distressed. But his voice does not waver.

  “I need you to come with me.”

  “What are you talking about?” I rub my hand through my beard. “What for?”

  I
glance back at the grave. The machine is really whirring now, the low hum of the machine that will bear Aysa into the ground.

  “Laszlo. You gotta come with me right now.”

  “Tell me what’s going on, Alvaro.”

  “It’s the captures, Laszlo.”

  “What captures?”

  The humming behind me stops. The operation is complete. She’s in the ground. The gravediggers step forward but they don't start shoveling. They’re listening to us.

  “From your raid last night. You and—” He points behind me, toward the ground. “You and the kid. The house on Mulholland. We have the stretches.”

  The full truth of this arrives all at once.

  I stare at Alvaro and he stares at me, but it’s not him I’m seeing. I’m seeing the house. I’m seeing the driveway, dead captures looking up from the pavers, dead captures in the palm trees.

  If what Alvaro is saying is true—and of course it is, it has to be, how can it be otherwise—then those captures weren't dead. They weren't dummies. Petras’s house wasn’t off the Record at all.

  “It’s five o’clock,” says someone from over by the burial ground, and then suddenly everybody is saying it. “It’s five o’clock.” “It’s just turned five.” “It’s an hour since four.” Truth filling up the funeral yard.

  Alvaro just waits, pointing to his car.

  “Like I said, Laszlo. You gotta come with me.”

  My gut was right. I'm no hero.

  The truth is a bulwark, until it’s not anymore. Until it crumbles beneath your feet, slips out from under you, throws you sideways like seismological activity buried deep within a hillside.

  On the thirtieth floor of the Service building, all the screens are showing the same thing. There is one stretch being played, but all the monitors are linked, and it’s playing on everybody’s desk. Everybody looks up when I come in, and then they go back to staring at their monitors.

  Watching Paige and myself tiptoe as a team across the lawn on Mulholland Drive, very late last night, very early this morning. We creep together.

  I watch the whole thing, beginning to end. I am conscious of everybody watching the stretch—all of them, Burlington and Carson, Cullers, Alvaro with his arms crossed. Everybody watching me watching myself, watching me lead Aysa to her doom. Watching me make the worst mistake anyone has ever made. Everybody is here. Everybody understands how bad this is. Nobody can understand what I did, but everybody understands what I’ve done.

  Everybody is here, except for Arlo. Where is Arlo?

  On the screen I crouch and point to the capture embedded among the footlights that line the driveway.

  “Here,” I watch myself say, on the screen. “Look.”

  “Fuck’s sake,” somebody mutters in the still air of the room. “For fuck’s sake.”

  I command the stretch to go back, ten seconds back, and watch us again, me and Aysa doing our thing. It’s a nice clean stretch, multiple angles, a good tapestry. We walk together across the lawn, crouch again to the capture, and again I listen to myself explaining to Aysa that it’s dead, a dummy, that it’s not recording.

  We pause at the doorway, listen to the bark of the dog. A moment’s hesitation, and we proceed around to the back.

  And now here I am, accusing Laura Petras, Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws, of having torn out the roots of the captures in her own home, of having participated in a conspiracy against the security of the Golden State, an assault on the Objectively So. And here is Petras, stunned and horrified, telling me I'm wrong, telling me it's a mistake, and here I am insisting, because she was lying—I saw that she was lying—except the captures have it. It's all on the Record.

  “Laszlo—” Alvaro puts a hand on my shoulder, but I shake him off.

  On the stretch, the gunfire begins. We duck behind the table. Aysa leaps, the knife plunges into her stomach, and I say “Stop” to the screen and it stops.

  Silence in the room. Cullers breathes out the words “Oh, Laz,” just like that. “Oh.”

  I turn to Alvaro.

  “How…”

  I’m asking him the question that I know he can’t answer. I take back “How…” I swallow “How…” Instead I say, “What next? What happens to me?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” says Alvaro, but then Burlington is up, arms raised, face incredulous.

  “You? What happens to you?” Burlington with his bristle mustache and bald head, his scalp red with fury. “What happens to you, Laszlo? Fuck you.”

  “I mean, Laz. Laz. What happened?” Ms. Carson stands behind Cullers, her arms crossed. They’re not all as worked up as Burlington, but no one is defending me either. Nobody understands. I don’t understand.

  “I had—proof…” I say, start to say, but the word crumbles on the edges of my lips. Proof? What proof did I have? What was I doing? Cullers is right: How could I do this? I’m the only person who can answer. I’m supposed to be able to tell truth from lies; I’m supposed to be able to stare at the air and see where it’s been bent by falsehood. We all are. So what was I seeing? The mistake I made should have been impossible.

  “Do you have any idea what’s happening out there?” Burlington continues, and points to the glass windows, waving his hand, taking in the whole of the State. “This could be years of damage you’ve done. A decade at least. Public faith in our work is a bulwark. You ever heard that? Public trust is a fucking bulwark, you fucking idiot.”

  “All right, people,” says Alvaro. “Let’s get to work.”

  “We can’t,” says Burlington, turning and grabbing his coat, storming toward the elevator. “That’s the fucking point. We can’t.”

  Alvaro shakes his head, sighing, as Burlington disappears behind the elevator door. “He’s not wrong, you know. If people don’t trust us, we can’t do the job. They rely on our abilities. This…” He points at the screen. “This is bad. This is…it’s very bad, Laszlo.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “Very bad.”

  And then he goes, too. They all go. Out to do the work of the people. If they can.

  I sit. I watch the stretch again. Ms. Aysa Paige and Mr. Laszlo Ratesic, creeping across the lawn. Waving their hands in front of the dead captures.

  I stood in that house and I felt it, and Aysa felt it too, we stood there together, firm in our understanding of what we discovered. Petras was lying, and the more we pressed her the more fervently she lied, the more vividly we were aware of her lying. Those captures were fakes. The house was a new version of the old conspiracy, this was the final chapter of the case that my brother started—

  Except it wasn't. I was wrong, and now it’s exactly as Burlington said. Public trust is a bulwark, and I somehow have dealt that trust a catastrophic blow. So what happens now?

  I am alone in the office. The sun is getting ready to set, and long shadows are painted on the sides of the Hills, dousing the gold glint of the skyscrapers one by one, like candles being blown out in turn.

  I stare out the windows as I have done a thousand times, and I see that there is something new in the air, gently settling on the rooftops and on the streets. It may be my imagination—I don’t know; it may not be. It’s like dust, like grit, a particulate matter coming down slowly from the sky, like it’s being sifted onto downtown in great slow drifts. And I did this. It was me.

  The phone rings on my desk and I leap for it. I have been waiting for Arlo to call. To tell me that this is going to be okay, and how.

  “Hey, Mr. Speculator. You want to take a walk?”

  I blink. The world spins and rights again. It's not Arlo.

  “Silvie?”

  “I’m in the lobby. Will you come down?”

  “You didn’t—have you not heard?”

  “That you fucked up big-time? Oh, I heard. Come down to the lobby. Take me for a walk.”

  Silvie’s tone is crisp, deadpan. I am staring out the window. The city is hazy, shrouded. The skyline, the mountains, the s
trip of gray sky. Everything in a new and watery light. The air in the city has changed.

  “I’m supposed to stay here,” I tell Silvie. “I’m supposed to stay in my office.”

  “Did someone tell you that you can’t leave the office?”

  “No.”

  “Alvaro? Is that his name?”

  “Yeah, Alvaro. But—yeah, no.”

  “So come get some air with me.”

  “Why, Silvie?”

  “Come down,” she says again. “I’m in the lobby.”

  21.

  There are dozens of Silvies waiting for me in the lobby. A hundred Silvies. A thousand of them. She waits in the long mirror-lined lobby of the Service, her reflections reflecting on each other, multiplying her and multiplying her again. Rows of Silvies smiling, waiting, each of them raising one hand in greeting.

  I step off the elevator and lope toward the army of Silvies. One of them steps from the crowd and takes my hands.

  “You look like shit, Laszlo.”

  “That’s subjective.”

  “Not today it’s not.”

  I manage a laugh.

  “How’s that shoulder?”

  “It hurts.”

  “Should have thought of that before you got shot.”

  The Silvies turn and collapse back into one as she strides briskly from the lobby. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  I might have thought the day couldn’t tilt further from its axis. My ex-wife calling out of nowhere and inviting me for a stroll. There is still funeral dirt clinging to the insides of my shoes. There is still Burlington’s red face, stern and huffing, vivid in my mind: “You, Laszlo? Fuck you.”

  The world is looking at me as we step out of the building, as Silvie takes my arm. The bustling crowd on the Plaza, the zealots on the steps of the Record, the businesspeople with their briefcases, the Authority hawker in his kiosk. Everybody staring, and I can read their minds.

  “I should go back upstairs,” I tell Silvie, my gut turning over. “I want to go back upstairs.”