Golden State

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 strip 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.”

“Five minutes, Laz.”

“I should wait for Arlo.”

“Hey. Laszlo. You need a friend right now. Let me be your friend.”

She keeps her hand on the crook of my elbow, and we walk together, along the lip of the fountain, where the ducks regard us impassively. We move counterclockwise around the pond. I try not to look at people, at the good and golden citizens who still throng the Plaza but are looking at me like I have betrayed them. Like I and my Service have betrayed each of them personally. It is visible and invisible in the atmosphere, like motes of dust, and we walk through its unseen presence. If the Service can’t be trusted, then why the Authority? What about the Record itself?

Something new in the eyes of the world.

But Silvie’s attitude is relentlessly normal, almost maniacally upbeat. She is holding my arm but it feels like it is she who is holding me up.

“You want to eat something?” she asks. “Should we find a food truck?”

“No.”

“I think I saw that hot dog truck a bit ago.”

“The Dirty Dog.”

“Yes. Should we—”

“No.”

I say “No,” and also I think, I should have kept loving you. I should have loved you forever. What happened?

And then I remember. Judge Sampson comes crashing in. Sampson beaming, leering, opening his Night Book and laying down his finger on just the right page. I stop walking. I put my hand up over my eyes.

“Silvie,” I say. “Silvie—”

She looks up at me and smiles, innocent.

“Yes?”

“I—”

But I can’t do it. I won’t. Here she is, after all, having come for me in my darkest moment, rousted me, come to give me comfort in my darkest hour.

“Forget it.”

“Forgotten.”

We stop at an empty bench and she tells me to sit.

“Now. Laszlo.” She reaches into her bag. “I wanted to let you know the disposition of the matter you asked me to look into.”

“The—what?”

“The what, he says. Come on, Laz. Scour your memory.”

“Oh right. That.”

“Yes. That. Mr. Mose Crane. A small apartment in University City. Worked as a roofer, odd jobs before that. Currently dead. All ringing a bell now?”

Her tone is absolutely normal, for her, for us: teasing, cutting, kind. My Silvie’s voice, comfortingly familiar to me as the voice I have known in thousands of conversations. And yet—it isn’t. Her voice is different. How is it different?

“Listen,” I tell her. “It doesn’t matter. It’s inscrutable. That whole case.” I make a noise in my throat, some sort of laugh. Aysa is in the ground. I fucked it up. Somehow, I did. “Unknown and unknowable. That case is over.”

“Yes, so I understand,” says Silvie with exaggerated sweetness. “Because, you know, I worked my ass off digging facts up for you. And then, just as I was building the reconstructed days, I received a communiqué from the Office of Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws.”

“Yeah, no. I know.”

“Turns out the circumstances of the man’s death were abruptly declared unknowable, and any investigative actions relating thereto were to be ceased immediately.”

“Yeah, that’s—that’s my fault.”

“Seems like everything is these days.”

“Seems like it is.” She’s laughing, but there is some different truth active in her eyes. “But you know, Laszlo…”

I lean in closer. If you asked me last week, I would have said I knew all the sounds of Silvie’s voice, but there is something new in it now, something I have never heard before. Light is reaching me as if from a distant star. We are sitting near the dead center of the Plaza, in the midday shadow of the Record itself, the Service behind us, Trusted Authority to the east.

“I’m sorry not to have more for you.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry it was a… like you said. A waste of your time.”

“Oh, Laz,” she says. “Not like it was the first time.”

We are speaking in a secret language. I don’t know how else to explain it. You live with someone long enough, you have enough conversations with them, just the two of you, and a language builds itself underneath the actual words. But something—something is going on here. Silvie is not here on a mission of sweet mercy, to drag me out of the far recesses of my depression: she is here to tell me something serious. She looks at me, and I look back at her.

“Silvie?”

“Yeah?”

“I appreciate it. I do in all seriousness appreciate it.”

“Yeah,” she says. She takes off my pinhole, touches my forehead with tenderness, tries to smooth my sweaty mass of hair down onto my scalp. “You know what I was thinking? We should do the wall.”

“What?”

She hops up, adjusts her skirt. Behind her, at the wall, the fervent and the zealous are doing their thing, tearing strips from their Day Books and inserting their small truths into the wall’s cracks and crevices.

“Come on, Laz. It’ll be fun.”

She turns, takes the few steps to the wall, and gets out her Day Book. I watch her, astonished. Papering truth into the wall is for day-trippers, fanatics. If Silvie and I ever discussed it, it was to roll our eyes at the very idea. But now I get up, move close to where she’s standing by the wall, and watch her write, dashing words with her small pen onto one small corner of a fresh page. A scrap of truth, some small detail of her private heart. I wonder what it is, as I wondered the whole time we were together what was happening in those parts of her truth that were forever inaccessible to me and my grasping interest.

She tears out the page, one small corner, folds it up tight, and jams it into a crack in the wall.

And maybe it is because of the context, or maybe because I don’t know where else my life is supposed to go, but in that moment, standing close to my ex-wife, I want her back. Fuck the judge. Fuck him. Fuck the past. Surely the truth of right now weighs more than the truth of six months ago or a year ago. What is the rate of decay of old truths? When do they dissolve and disappear forever? Surrounded by strangers, hot and uncomfortable in the sunlight, I stand inside a powerful rush of longing for Silvie Ratesic. Watching her perform this small intimate act fills me with tenderness for her, a desire to know her secrets and protect them. She looks up and I look into her eyes, hoping, I suppose, to find some reciprocal desire.

But what her eyes bear, when I look closely, is something else entirely.

“Silvie?”

“Yes, Laszlo? What is it?”

There’s a word I know, a word I heard in my training, but which I have not used or spoken since: “subterfuge.”

I am pretty sure that if we were never in love, I wouldn’t have known what to do next, but we were in love. It’s one of the good strong truths of my life, a good piece of true that I keep fixed and firm, a thing of great and secret value, like a gold bar in the back of my closet: never will I use this, always will I know it is there. Once I was in love with Silvie, and once she was in love with me.

She’s staring at the wall and I know what I’m supposed to do.

I write my own message, in a small corner of my own book. What I write is true—“I’m scared”—and I tear it out and fold it up small, and Sil is standing very close, and I put my message right next to where she put hers, and with the minutest tug, my body huddled around the paper to block the captures, I let her paper fall out into my hand, and we in this way engage in a small piece of private spy craft, use the old mechanism of love to exchange a secret truth before the very eyes of, and in the very citadel of, the Golden State.

And then, knowing the precipice upon which I am trembling, knowing that I brought her into it, thinking, therefore, somehow, that I owe her something now, I speak to her a piece of myself.

“I miss you.”

“I miss you too.” She reaches out and brushes my cheek. “A very little bit. Take care of yourself, Laszlo.”

It is not until I am back in my car that I understand what she meant by “Take care of yourself.” It is a phase with multiple potential meanings faceted into it, and in this instance the meaning is clear: by “Take care of yourself” she is not saying goodbye; she is saying “Be careful.”

She is saying “Watch out.”

On the paper, in her neat careful hand, in all capital letters, are the three words she conspired to keep from the eyes of the State.

“NO SUCH SOUL.”

22.

While I drive I think about what it means, but I already know what it means. I understand the tiny slip of paper as soon as I read it, I understand “NO SUCH SOUL” immediately and completely. Mose Crane was not the victim of a robbery. Nobody snuck into his basement to spirit off two weeks of his days. Mose Crane never existed in the first place. It’s not about the days that were stolen, it’s about all the rest of them—all the days of a life that never existed at all.

Crane isn’t real, and if there is no Crane, then the whole thing was a setup from the beginning. I was supposed to puzzle over those missing days. I was supposed to wonder about Mose Crane. I was supposed to speculate, and to follow the trail of my speculation from Aster’s basement to the judge’s chambers, and from the judge to Laura Petras, and from Petras to my terrible mistake, when with blundering force I smashed into the public trust in my Service, and dealt a blow to the foundation of the State.

But why would that happen?

No, not why, but who? Who set me on the trail? Who laid out the puzzle for me to solve?

And the truth is, the blood truth, bone truth, is that I know, I think I know, I don’t want to know but I do, and I just drive. I just focus on the road, on the 10 west, and I drive.

There is this remarkable ability your mind has, sometimes, this trick it is able to play, where you have something figured out all the way, but you refuse to allow yourself to know it. When the flat fact is there in you but it remains below the clouded surface of the water, half drowned, waiting for you to dredge it up.

“NO SUCH SOUL” is a grand anomaly, radiant at the center of a circle of related anomalies, but I can’t see it yet. I’m not ready yet to know. All I am ready now to know is that I am standing at a green door, heavy wood, hung in a red doorframe. A small house in Faircrest Heights, between a coffee shop and a drug store, one of a handful of pretty houses on what is otherwise a commercial street a half dozen modest one-family homes with fruit trees in the yard, each home painted its own pleasing color. I find the right house, an address I memorized without setting out to do so. I am knocking and my whole body is trembling very slightly, recalling in me the barely discernible tremor of the small earthquake at Petras’s house.

All I am capable of knowing right now is what is right in front of me, what I can feel with my hands, my calloused knuckles banging on a green door in a red doorframe, in a small house in Faircrest Heights. There is a little octagonal window set in the center of the door, and I shade my forehead and try to see in through the frosted glass, see if anybody is home. That’s what I’m doing when the door flies open.

“Oh no.” Ms. Tarjin is terrified to see me. She takes a stumbling half step backward, and a hand flies up to her mouth and she speaks through it. “It didn’t work.”

“What?”

“You were going to forgive him. You said the, the prosecuting attorney would drop it, if you forgave him.”

“Oh. Right. No. Not forgive. Absolve.” I’m such an idiot. “Ms. Tarjin. It’s okay.”

“It is?”

“It is.” My fears drove me here. I didn’t stop to think of how it would make her feel, this poor lady, to find me washed up on her shore. “I contacted the PA’s office, and formally absolved Todd of the false representation he made to me. Just like I said I would. Okay? Like I said.”

She exhales, her hand trembling. “Oh—Okay. Okay.” Then she steps back and tilts her head. “Then what… what are you doing here?”

“Well.” I take off my pinhole, push a hand through my hair. “I need to ask you a question.”

A few moments later, and we are arranged in her small dining area.

I ground myself in the reality of the small house. A handsome wood dining table ringed by mismatched chairs, a low-hanging light fixture with six bulbs. Steam rising from teacups, the smell of baking bread. The wall-mounted plays on in the kitchen behind us, turned to a stream called “Eating Lunch Outside.” I’m across from Ms. Tarjin, who leans forward on her elbows, looks at me carefully. There are freckles across the bridge of her nose.

Eddie, the other son, is home. He emerged from the back of the house while Ms. Tarjin fixed tea, and now he’s looking at me with plain distaste, arms crossed. He watches us sit, half hidden behind a room divider, anxiety and dislike plain in his eyes.

“What does he want?” he asks, and then, to me directly: “What do you want?”

“Help,” I say. Call out over his mother’s shoulders. I need your help.” And turn to Ms. Tarjin, who is trying to puzzle me out from across her table. “You and your mom.”

Eddie doesn’t come over. He stays where he is. “What kind of help?”

“Okay, so, the other morning,” I say. “The other morning at the diner. At Terry’s diner. I heard you. I heard you talking, and I—I stood up and I came over. And we talked for… for three minutes? Four minutes?”

“Yeah,” says Eddie warily. Trying to figure this out. While we’re talking the wall-mounted is cycling through short stretches: a picnic in Griffith Park, a barbeque at one of the crowded State beaches.

“Yeah. And—look, there is a radio on my belt. A radio.” I am talking too fast. Tripping over myself, talking sideways. “Do you remember?”

“Yes,” says Ms. Tarjin.

The first anomaly—what was the first of the anomalies?

“When I approached you, in the restaurant—”

The first of the anomalies. Not on the lawn—

Tarjins, mother and son, exchange glances, trying to figure out what’s going on here. Ms. Tarjin leans forward, reaches past the cup of tea she has poured for me, and places a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Breathe. Hey. Mr. Speculator? You gotta breathe, okay?”

She is empathetic. Kind. I follow her instructions. I breathe; take a sip of the tea.

“What do you need to ask us?”

“When I was in the act of arresting your family, did my radio go off? The radio I wear on my hip—this.” I point to it, the black box, black dials, red lights, shift my body weight awkwardly forward to angle my hip toward them. “Did it make any noise? Was there a call that I ignored?” They look at each other again. “Please try to remember.”

Ms. Tarjin puckers her lips. Unsure, unwilling to lie.

But Eddie is shaking his head. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. You were—you didn’t move. There was no radio call. I’d remember it. I remember thinking, Well, that thing is cool.”

“The radio?”

“Yeah. Even though I was scared, I was thinking, That thing is cool. I wanted to see it work.”

“And if it had gone off, you would have noticed.”

“I would have noticed. Yeah.”

“Are you sure?” I say again.

He nods. Of course he’s sure. I’m sure too. I can see the truth that I feared rising up slowly from below.

Ms. Tarjin stops me on the way out, calls my name at the green door.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” I tell her. “I’m not.”

“Are you in danger?”

“I—” It sounds so stupid. But it’s the truth. “I am. And—we all are. I think the whole—” I shake my head at the enormity of it. The ridiculousness. “I think we may all be in danger.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure yet. I don’t know. But I’m going to try to stop it.”

This is a strange thing to say, and surely it is a strange thing to hear said. But Ms. Tarjin just nods, looks at me, at the life of the State proceeding behind me. The coffee shop next door, the brightly painted small houses. One of those palms that stands taller than all the ones surrounding it, extending itself far above the world, as if straining with curiosity.

“Okay. Well.” Ms. Tarjin smiles and places her hand on the side of my face. “Come back. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say, and I linger just a moment more, just a half a moment, before I get back in my car.

Maybe there will be a world where that happens. Maybe the world will unfold in such a way that I do return, find my way back to the green door in the red frame. It’s the smallest moment that I’ve experienced in a long time, small and immediate, shared between two humans, but it’ll keep me going awhile. I know it will. I will live in a world for the next little while in which everything works out, and I come back like she said, and then who knows what happens after that?

For now I point the car back downtown, and back toward the Plaza.

The anomalies did not start on the lawn in Los Feliz, they did not start in the apartment on Ellendale. The first of the anomalies was in my own fucking office.

The upstream untruth, from which all the others flowed, was Arlo Vasouvian saying that he radioed about a car crash outside Grand Central. A case that, had I been dispatched to handle it, as I should have been, would have prevented me from being assigned to the Los Feliz case. To Mose Crane.

Arlo said he radioed but my receiver did not register the call, and that was the unaccountable event. That was the first anomaly.

“Oh no,” I say, my hands tight on the steering wheel, the city racing past me. “Oh no.”

I press the button for the ninth floor, shaking off the memory of Aysa Paige insisting that we go now.

Stone of the ninth floor, big Woodrow Stone, the Spec Service’s Chief Liaison Officer to the Permanent Record, works at a big desk with a bowl of popcorn in front of him at all times. He pushes handfuls into his mouth with one hand while he runs his consoles with the other, staring at seven different screens at the same time, weaving together stretches with a magician’s touch. He is a master of the various dials. He is an assembly artist. He is not a pleasant human being.

“What?” he says when he sees me come in, jabbing a thick finger at Stop on the machine in front of him, bringing whatever piece of reality he’s watching to a sudden freeze frame. “What do you want?”

“There’s a stretch I need to see.”

He sighs, a heavy man’s heavy sigh, making sure I know how irritated I have made him by my presence. I tell him what I need, and he says, “Isn’t that the same thing your partner was wanting? That girl?”

“Ms. Paige.”

“Right, right. Well guess what? It’s already processed for return.”

“But it’s still here?”

“Yeah. Well… yes. Physically. But it’s been processed.” This is his fiefdom, his keep, and Woody in his sluggish way is active in its defense. There is a process that defines the request I’ve just made: officer engages with the Liaison, the Liaison files with the Record, the Record upon due consideration produces the desired stretch or stretches. Woody heaves himself up out of his chair, pulls open the filing cabinet behind him. “Lemme get you a G-9.” He looks at his watch. “Actually, it’s after six. So this’ll be tomorrow. Or, actually—”

“Actually,” I say, “I need to see it right now. Where is it, Woody?”

“What?”

“I need to watch it now.”

I reach across him, to the slot on the side of his screen, and eject the stretch he’s been reviewing. For a split second I imagine someone watching us, in some far future, in the basement of the Permanent Record, some officer or archivist who for some reason has requested this stretch for review, the reality being generated in this room, right now: Laszlo Ratesic makes a rash demand of Woody Stone, who pushes back…

“The fuck are you doing, Ratesic? No.”

“Where is that stretch?”

“Ratesic. C’mon.”

Woody’s eyes make an unconscious flicker to the rolling cart parked in the corner, behind me, loaded with unsorted stretches marked for return. I can feel it in there, sense what I need, and it comes to me too, how to get it.

“Woody,” I say, finding the right voice for it. Reining myself in. “Did you know that she’s dead?”

“Who?”

“Ms. Paige, Woody. My partner.”

“The…” Woody’s voice catches, he has to start again. “The girl?”

“Speculator,” I say. “Agent. My partner.” There are more words. Hero. Martyr. I skip them. I’ve got him already: Woody is gawping at me, his face slack with sad disbelief.

“That girl is dead? Dead how?”

“It was in the Authority.”

“I didn’t—” He looks at me imploringly, his thick chin trembling a little.. “I didn’t see it. I’m in here, man. I’m working. Will you tell me?”

He liked Aysa in their brief moments together, and he’s stricken now. I take it. I use it.

“She and I cracked an anomaly, okay? A big one. There was a grave assault in progress, and Aysa died in the field.”

“Wow.” He shakes his head, and then, in his bafflement and grief, requests a two-step verification, confirmation of what he knows he heard. “She died?”

I nod. He keeps shaking his head. He’s as big as I am, Woody Stone, maybe even a little bigger. Bigger around the middle, with a sagging gut and thick legs. Stubble and sallow cheeks, a life lived staring at screens. “But you cracked it? The anomaly you were working? You dug it down to the truth?”

I am silent. “I’m trying, Woody. I’m trying.”

I wait. He grits his teeth. Glances up at the capture above his desk, bearing witness. “All right. Well—all right.”

He goes over and crouches at the laden cart and paws through it. He scatters stretches like playing cards on his rug and sorts through them until he finds the one I’m after. He slides it in and cues it and steps away, back into the far corner of his office, his mouth twisting in discomfort at his role in this malfeasance.

“Play,” I tell the machine, and I watch it how Charlie would have watched it. I watch it how Aysa would have watched it: leaning forward, eyes narrowed, pulse active, alert and alive.

And then, before Woody can stop me, I tell it to play again.

Three times I watch Mose Crane crawl up the pitch, and three times he falls, flailing, and three times I stare at that smudge of shadow, which is pointing in the wrong direction. It is pointing west—a shadow that would be cast in the late afternoon, not at daybreak. The shadow makes no sense. Except it makes sense as a marker, a symbol, a representation of an idea—that this is supposed to be a clue. This is supposed to draw me in. There is no question. The shadow is there and there is no question that it is there, but it is not a shadow cast by a person, it is not the shadow of the frame of a skylight. It is a shadow of something that was never there, a mark left to draw me, a false clue.

The clue drew Aysa’s attention and then it drew mine, but the clue was planted there. An anomaly is a mismatch of facts, suggesting a deliberate falsehood beneath the surface truth. But what if the anomaly is itself the deliberate falsehood?

This stretch was altered subsequent to creation to include the shadow so that we would see it.

The stretch is still rolling. I tell it to stop, just as Mose Crane hits the ground again, and the machine obeys and the room fills with the subsequent silence.

I wish I could say “Stop” to everything, to all of this, shout “Stop” and let reality hang in the balance for a minute, or forever. Stop, I think.

What truth is confirmed by the lie I’ve found?

“Hey, Stone.”

“Yeah?” His voice is hesitant. I don’t know what I look like, what kind of wildness has come into my eyes, but I’m making Woody nervous.

“How does a stretch get changed?”

“What?”

“Reality, Woody. Is there a way to alter one of these stretches of reality, once they’ve been captured and transferred?”

Woody stares back at me, scratches his thick neck. I have reached the edge of his understanding. He looks at his machine. Dumbfounded. It is like I am asking if there is any way to alter a dog so that it can fly, to alter a fish to make it stand up and walk across the street.

“No,” he says finally, but there is a tremble in his voice. A truer answer, just beneath: I have no fucking idea.

“‘No’ because you know the answer to be no, based on evidence?”

“‘No’ because—‘No’ because—” Woody is stammering. It is like he is caught in a loop, a half hitch of reality, as if his reality has been altered, spooled around on itself to say “‘No’ because” and only “‘No’ because” forever.

“‘No’ because—” Finally, with a deep breath: “‘No’ because nobody would ever do that.”

“I know,” I say, but the problem is, I’ve already figured out that yes, somebody would do that, and now I’ve come down hard on a bone truth, on the brutal bone truth that if there is ever anything that somebody could do—something violent, something vicious, something cruel and unconscionable—if there is ever anything that somebody is able to do, somebody will find a way to do it, somebody is going to do it, somebody has already done it.

So of course someone has figured out how to alter stretches to make them reflect reality that never occurred. Someone has done it. Someone has done it to this one, the same person who invented Mose Crane so I might find him.

The only question is who did it, but that isn’t a question anymore.

I know it, I have known it, I can’t not know it anymore.

“Woody?”

“Yeah? Yes?”

He is wary of me now, I’m an animal set loose in his small office, charging in circles. He doesn’t know what I’m going to do next. “I need to do a live watch.”

“Well—”

“Don’t say no. I need to connect to live captures.”

“Where?”

“The Record.”

“I—come on. Laszlo. I can’t.”

“You can.”

He can’t because the world is watching. Because reality is always being captured. Because if anyone sees him do such a thing willingly, he will face the consequences. So he will have to do it unwillingly, that’s all.

I draw my weapon and aim it at Woody. “A live feed. Right now. A tapestry. Every basement. Now.”

Woody turns back to his deck and I keep the gun aimed at him, continuing the performance, until he presses a final button and the blackness of his screen lights up into a thousand subdivided screens. The Record itself has eyes inside it, of course it does, the Record is on the Record, and Woody the magician can open its eyes, open all of those thousands of eyes at once. He turns his screen into a tapestry of screens, divided into a dozen boxes which then scroll, each of them, and we are suddenly everywhere inside of those famous basements, peering into the catacombic guts of reality itself.

It doesn’t take long to find him.

Arlo Vasouvian in the dim subbasement light, moving with deliberation along a narrow carpeted space between two file cabinets.

“What the fuck?” says Woody. As we watch, the old man peels the lid off a box. His bifocals are perched on the tip of his small nose; he’s squinting, looking for something. “Is that—”

“Yes,” I say. But I can’t say the name. It is too painful. There would be glass in my throat. It is one thing to suspect that your heart has been broken, another thing to know.

“What floor is he on?” I croak. “Which capture are we looking at?”

“Uh—sub nine,” says Woody. “What’s he doing?”

“What’s on sub nine?”

But before Woody can answer, Arlo turns to the capture that is watching him, turns and looks at us watching him, and smiles.

“What the fuck?” says Woody, pushing away from his machines and looking at the ground.

Arlo’s smile widens into a grin as he is looks right at the capture and raises one hand in greeting, because he knows we’re watching. He can see us seeing him, and his cheery acknowledgment is as sharp and violent as a punch. He is inside reality, looking out.

I turn away from the screen at the sound I hear behind me, the sound of Woody being quietly sick into the trash can besides his desk. I breathe deep and fight off the same unsettling need, because I am wobbling too, walking slow, dizzy, through a world shuddering under my feet.

-

Agent Charlie Ratesic, the hero laid low, muttered from the depths of his unconsciousness while his head lolled back and forth in his hospital bed. The machines keeping him alive and free of pain beeped endlessly in the small room, their rhythm like a mechanical pulsebeat.

I was sitting on a chair by the edge of his bed, as I had been sitting for a week, keeping him company, telling him stories, waiting for him to wake.

“I’m sorry, Charles,” I said, as much to myself as to him, as much to the captures in the room as to the person who lay before me, past the reach of hearing. “I am so dreadfully sorry.”

I had said these words so many times already. Others had come and gone. Charlie’s heartbroken parents, our colleagues bearing flowers, cards, the doughnuts they knew he loved, which at the end of each day I took out with me and distributed to the doctors and nurses. Poor Laszlo’s, Charlie’s brother, had come every day, come and sat silently beside me for hours after his own shift was through.

Technically, I had little to apologize for. I had told Charlie not to return to that warehouse. Indeed, I had not only warned him but ordered him not to. He knew that it would be my duty and my responsibility to take the steps necessary to shut it down: an Off Record house could not be countenanced, and I had to act.

He knew we would be going in there, and that we would come in with weapons blazing.

And yet when the decisive day came, and we swept in with the full force of the State, there he was, still undercover, skulking among the conspirators, unable to free himself from the idea that there was a monster left for him to find.

He had been caught in the cross fire. Shot six times, including twice in the stomach and once in the chest—a bullet that pierced the lungs and brought him perilously close to dying right there, off the Record, on a dirty warehouse floor in Glendale.

And perhaps that would have been better, I thought with sadness as I listened to the machines breathing for him. As I watched the medicine dripping into his arm. Drip, drip.

“Arlo?”

I had fallen asleep, I suppose. My eyes opened to find his looking into mine. Charlie, dear Charlie. He spoke, clearly but with difficulty. “The monster,” he said, and I closed my eyes. Still. “I have to…” He cleared his throat. Turned his head to one side.

“Goodness, Charlie,” I told him. I opened my eyes, leaned forward and took poor Charlie’s hand. “I wish you would take pleasure in your success.”

“Success,” he murmured. “Success.”

It was like he could not accept the word. Like he was rolling it around in his mouth, tasting it, unsatisfied. The machines beeped and hummed.

“Yes, Charlie,” I said. “Success. Numerous arrests were made. A grave assault on the Objectively So was ended. All because of you, Charlie. Because of you.”

“The monster—could be anyone.” He couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t. My old friend, still in the thrall of this wild idea. What was to be done? He looked up at me. Desperate that someone believe him. “What if it were an Expert, Arlo? What if it were someone from the Office of the Record?”

“Or”—I stood up, wiped my hands, leaned as far over his bed as I could, whispered as quietly as possible—“a Speculator?”

23.

All four of them are dead, each with a single neat bullet hole through the center of the forehead.

The duty team, caught unawares by a familiar face. I recognize them all, Librarians who worked the entrance of the Record, rigorous and polite and efficient.

The first is just inside the door, thrown back against the wall, still wearing a stunned expression, blood in a frozen trickle from the bullet hole down into the line of the eyebrows.

The second is centered in the lobby, slumped at the wanding station, thrown across the small desk with one hand outstretched, clutching his weapon as if caught just before he could fire.

The third is at the elevators, between the two shafts and just beneath the keypad, and she sits with legs outstretched and arms slack, and her face turned toward the elevator just to her right, where the fourth of them is wedged between the elevator door and the wall of the car itself, half in and half out, keeping it from closing, inviting me in.

The lights in the elevator car are dim but I can see the button panel, and there is a dark red fingerprint on the button marked 9, a clue so glaring and egregious it has to have been purposeful. A taunt.

Subbasement nine. That’s where you’ll find me. Come along, now… down we go…

I push the button gingerly with my forefinger and it comes away tacky.

At the last minute, though, I don’t take the elevator. I step off before the door can close, step around the fallen bodies of the Librarians, and take the spiral stairs instead.

I go down slowly, one floor at a time with my weapon drawn, and listen at every floor. Pause at sub four, where Silvie’s offices are tucked away. Pause again at sub five and then again, halfway between six and seven, where I hear or think I hear the minute click of a file drawer shifting open. The blood button was 9 and that may be where he is, or it may have been another artful misdirection, another signal rigged to catch my eye and hold it while worlds move in shadow all around me.

One more clue for me to find, one more part of the trap that was set for me, for my clumsy feet to stumble into.

With each footfall the ornate structure of the staircase shimmies beneath my heavy frame. The metal stairs are very old. There is gold detail at every balustrade.

I breathe heavily as I descend.

“I can hear you, Mr. Ratesic. Laszlo.” The, low and wavering in the stillness of the Record. “I can hear you coming.”

I’m halfway down, between sub eight and sub nine, and I stop and perch on the edge of a stair. His gentle creak of a voice echoes from somewhere close by.

“You were never one for sneaking up.”

There are no offices on sub nine, as Silvie’s office sits on four. Just endless intersecting hallways, file rooms, and review rooms. The hallways are dim, lit only by the cool red emergency lights of the Record after hours. Helpless to do otherwise, I go in the direction of Arlo’s voice. And it is even easier than that: there is blood on the floor, dark fresh heel prints on the tile.

I follow those footsteps, still not believing, still not wanting to believe, that it’s him I am following. Still unwilling to live in the world in which he is the villain at the end of the hall.

And yet here he is. Around a corner, the sixth door down. He is seated at a table, examining a file. He looks up and squints behind his glasses, gives me his old fond smile as I come into the room with my gun raised and aimed at his head.

“Get up, Mr. Vasouvian.”

He shakes his head and murmurs, “No, Mr. Ratesic.”

The file on the review desk is deep blue: a CSE. Collated Significant Event. I take two steps into the room. All around me are files. Cabinets full of folders; binders on shelves. Up to the ceiling, down to the floor. Collated truth, running from floor to ceiling and to the ends of the walls.

My gun is aimed at Arlo’s head and I am deciding whether I would really do it.

“You have to get up, Mr. Vasouvian. You have to stand up and come with me.”

“No, no. No, I’m not doing that.”

He seems glad to see me; he seems as he always does. He smiles, and scratches his nose, and sighs. There are flecks of blood on his glasses, a smear on his necktie and on one rumpled lapel of his corduroy jacket. He has killed four people, and left their bodies for me to find.

“I’m not going to do that,” he says. “This is not a normal situation. You can’t think you are going to—what?—arrest me? You will shoot me, Mr. Ratesic, but not right away.”

“Stop talking, Arlo.”

He sighs again. “I’ll tell you what. Come and sit down across from me and we can look at this together.”

“Look at—what?”

“At the file.” He taps it with two fingers, gazing at me evenly. As if he has been waiting for me to discuss it. As if we had an appointment, and I am late.

“Come, Laszlo. I wish you would have a seat.”

He points with his chin to the chair opposite his, and I can feel the energy in the room changing. I am the investigating officer who has come upon his prey, but at the same time I am the younger man, less experienced, a pupil in the presence of his tutor, a child in the presence of the adult.

I grimace, keep my gun up. “You are under arrest for—” For what, Laszlo? For everything. For all of it. “For murder in the first degree.”

“Okay. I plead guilty. We will come to all of that, Mr. Ratesic. Justice will be done. Please. Sit.”

There is a chair across from him. I sit, but I keep my gun out, in my hand.

“This is a CSE file, Laszlo. Do you know the nomenclature used down here? In the labyrinth?”

“CSE,” I say. “Collated Significant Event.”

“Very good.” His smile brightens, gold star for me, and he begins reciting from memory, his favorite trick. “Incidents of self-evident public importance are to be cross-cataloged into a master file, to include all relevant information from all relevant captures, gathered together in a permanent and comprehensive manner to put on Record the full truth of the incident in question.”

Arlo slides his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and turns the file around so I can see it more clearly. He lays one finger beside the title on the tab. “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

I look up sharply. “What the fuck is going on here, Arlo?”

“So many things, Laszlo. So many things.”

He angles his head, gazes at me thoughtfully through the glasses. It’s the same old head, the same old man, the large ears and small black eyes. His thin white hair is flecked with blood.

The man has murdered four Librarians. He set me up to attack Laura Petras, laid out the bread crumbs that I eagerly devoured. He framed her, framed me, did irreversible damage to the reputation of the Speculative Service he has served his whole life. Him, and me. And Charlie.

I open the file. I close it again, terrified of what it’s inside.

It is cool in here, climate-controlled. I can hear every thump of my heartbeat. I can feel the dull whoosh of my blood.

“Go on now, son,” says Arlo. “Have a look.”

I open it again and begin to turn the pages inside. Transcripts of Charlie on the thirtieth floor, explaining the shocking extent of what he had discovered: the Off Record house, the ring of brazen liars, the clandestine organization calling itself the Golden State. Still photos of Charlie in the Spec Service. Still photos, lifted from video captures, of Charlie in his hospital bed, struggling to survive the multiple gunshot wounds he suffered in the Keller house raid.

While I glance through it all, plunged back into this memory, Arlo speaks softly.

“I, of course, have had extraordinary access to this file. At will access, so to speak. Firstly because I was the senior officer who brought Ratesic onto our force. Secondly because I was the man charged with overseeing his undercover efforts.” He takes off his glasses, idly works at a freckle of blood with his thumbnail. “And lastly, of course, as the author of the novel inspired by these extraordinary events.”

I turn over a page and stop, and read it, and read it again, and then I look up at Arlo, who is looking back at me carefully, very carefully, waiting to see what I will say. What I will do.

The page is a précis, a kind of executive summary, compiled from edited transcripts. It details how Charlie Ratesic was recovering from his injuries until he was murdered by his younger brother, Laszlo Ratesic, who willfully increased the dosage of Charlie’s pain-reducing medication until he died.

“That’s—” My head is shaking. I am shaking my head. “No. No, that’s not right. I didn’t do that. Why would I?”

Arlo turns the page over, and on the back side are a series of photographic stills, taken from the hospitalroom captures. There I am in the pictures. I am standing at Charlie’s bedside. I am crouching at his bedside. I am examining the machines. I am turning the dials.

“I suppose you didn’t know that I knew,” says Arlo, “What you did, I mean. But I have always known, Mr. Ratesic. I have always known what you did.”

“But it’s not—” I find my voice. I say it loud. “That never happened.” Louder. “It’s not So.”

“Come now, Laszlo. It’s on the Record. We’re looking at it.” He puts his fingertips firmly on the photograph. It is black-and-white. My face is distinct. “Look!”

“Why?” I look at Arlo, my face hot with grief. “Why did I do that?”

“You were jealous of Charlie. You had always been jealous, and now—well now, the man had become a genuine hero. The greatest hero the State has ever produced. You couldn’t bear it, Laszlo. I am absolutely sympathetic, I have always been so. Which is why I have kept my silence for all these years.”

“Oh.”

I turn the page over and over again, the words on the front and the pictures on the back, turn them over and over, as if I can shake the letters and the images right off the paper, make it all go away, but it won’t go away, because it is true. I remember it now. I spent these years unremembering it but now it is coming back, rushing back, grabbing at me, clutching at my heels like speculation: the bitter sting of envy I felt in Charlie’s presence, the hatred for him that seethed below the surface of my adoration. How easy it suddenly seemed to be done with those feelings. Done with him, done with him forever. I remember the bitter smell of the room, the beep of those machines, how easy it would be, how easy it was.

“Oh fuck, Arlo. Oh no.” I tilt back from the table and turn my face away from him in the dim light of the Record and weep at what I did, at what I am. “Oh no.”

“It will be all right.” Arlo rises, comes over to my side of the review desk, and lays a hand down on top of mine while with the other hand he gently strokes my woolly head. “It will be okay. Look, Laszlo. Look.”

There is another CSE on the table, beside the first one. I lean forward, baffled, pushing tears out of my eyes with my thick fingers. It is the same file, the same blue, the same label. Exactly the same. “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

“What?” I say. “What is this?”

“This is the file that lives here, On the Record. It is a forgery, Laszlo.” “Forgery”: old word, dead word. The word itself an artifact. “The file that you just read—that one”—he points at the first file, the one in which Laszlo Ratesic betrays his beloved brother—“this file has lived for all these years at my home, Laszlo. I could not bring myself to destroy a piece of the Record, but it does not live here. And I replaced it with this one.”

He lifts this second file and places it on top of the first one, hiding the first from view. We sit in the silence of the enormity of this crime of forgery, of purposefully removing truth from the Record and replacing it with false. Rewriting the Record. A grave assault upon the truth. And for what? For me. I flip open this second file. It tells the story that I knew and have known for the last decade, the story I have long taken for truth. It shows how Charlie was gravely injured in the raid, how he struggled to survive for days and then weeks, how the doctors were able to stabilize but never reverse the course of the opportunistic infections that ultimately claimed his life. There is no murder in this file. No envious Laszlo, tampering with the dials. The man was wounded, and then he died from his wounds. A martyr.

“I replaced this file”—Arlo lifts a corner of the new file, gives a quick furtive glimpse of the old one before covering it again—“with this. Because I believed that we would be better off with you in the world than not in it. To defend our world and protect it. Especially with Charlie gone. I made that call. I made that decision.”

“Oh, Arlo. Thank you.” I reach out across the table, new tears on my cheeks, and I grab his shoulders, push my forehead against his. “Thank you.”

He pulls from my grasp. He stares at me. His eyes behind his glasses are dark with sadness.

“I cannot believe it,” Arlo says softly, his voice a weary rasp. “Every time I see it I still cannot believe it.”

“Believe—” I peer at him. “Believe what?”

“You saw it, didn’t you? In your mind. You saw yourself murdering your brother. It was true inside your heart, that you killed the one person you love more than anyone in the world. Oh, Laszlo. I have spent a melancholy lifetime contemplating the impermanence of reality, and yet I am constantly stunned anew.”

With precise deliberate movements, Arlo picks up the forged file and then he picks up the real one—and yet another file is revealed. This is how I do it, of course, how he taught me to do it, lining up the paper, getting everything in order, revealing one fact at a time. And this new file is the same again, the same CSE a third time through: “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

I look at Arlo. I look at the file. I open it.

Murder again. The text and the pictures together tell the story: Charlie, incapacitated and vulnerable, is defenseless against the stealthy approach of the monster… except the monster is Arlo. It is Arlo Vasouvian who lurks at the bedside, Arlo Vasouvian who crouches, and then Arlo Vasouvian with the dials in his hands.

Memories drop out of my head. The truth reverses itself, scrambles and reforms. I pick up my gun again. Arlo leans back and stares at me, not like a friend now. Like a scientist, examining, considering. I raise the gun and he does not flinch. Around us hangs the solemn stillness of the Record.

“That file is the real one,” I say.

“Yes.”

“You killed Charlie.”

“I did.” Arlo, blood-splattered, gentle-eyed, stares back at me evenly. “That’s correct. That is accurate. To the extent that that word owns a definition.” The three blue files are still on the desk, and now, as he talks, Arlo shifts them around, places a palm down on one and moves it in an idle circle, then does the same with the others, rearranging and rearranging their places, shuffling and reshuffling their order. “He was good at his job. Very good. I never thought—” He shakes his head in wonderment. “Never for a moment did I think that his undercover operation would be a success, but as you know, it was. With long effort and clever skill he destroyed nearly all we had built, and he had found nearly every member of our Golden State. As it was constituted, I should say, at that time. I could not let him find me too. He was, as you know, a very talented man.”

“Arlo Vasouvian,” I say, summoning the voice I need, “you are under arrest.”

“No,” he says, “I’m not.”

“You just confessed. It’s all—” I look around the room, gesturing up at the captures. “It’s all on the Record.”

“Oh, right. The Record. Inviolable. Impregnable.” He sighs. “You’re not listening, Mr. Ratesic. Or you’re listening but wishing not to hear.” His hands pause in their endless rotations. He picks the file that was on the top, flips it open. It’s me, in the photograph, me crouched to the dials.

“But that’s not—”

“Real!” He stands abruptly and snarls, contorted with contempt. “Would you stop it? Would you stop? With ‘real’ and ‘not real,’ ‘fake’ and ‘not fake,’ ‘true’ and ‘not true.’ Stop!” He sweeps all three files from the desk and rushes out of the room.

I chase him. He is moving quicker than I’ve ever seen him, flying from narrow hallway to narrow hallway in the weak light. I follow his footfalls, follow his thin shadow. At the stairway shaft he turns and snarls, holding all the files up, clutching them to his chest like a shield.

“Do you know why they built the Record underground?”

There is a true answer to that question, as true as two and two, and I give it automatically: “Because there is infinite room for expansion.”

“No. Bullshit! It’s a metaphor. Everything is a fucking metaphor.” He holds the files out, over the side of the railing. A couple of pages slide out of the files, flap and flutter out into the empty air of the stairwell. “They built it belowground so everyone could walk around feeling like the truth was beneath their feet. You see? We—we here, I mean—we in this dumb and blinded land, we live our lives believing that beneath us there is foundation. That there is something there. Permanence. A record. ‘The Record.’” He puts the phrase in sneering quotes. “But it’s not so!” He flings one of the files downward, one of the three official versions of “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.” I watch it as it flies and flutters and falls, spilling end over end into the descending darkness of the empty stairwell.

“Under us is nothing, Laszlo. Dear Laz. Nothing.”

“And so what—what—” Fury of my own is rising. My body is trembling. My face bends into a snarl. “You want what? Nothing? You think it would be better to have no truth at all?”

“No. No, poor Laszlo. Dear Laz. Laszlo, my love.” He lets go another of the files and it flaps open, empties as it falls, its two wings bending upward like a bird’s. “Letting go of the fantasy of objective and provable truth would not be better or worse. It would be accepting reality and figuring out what to do next.”

There is only one of the three files left now. He holds it up. “Shall we open it, Laszlo? Shall we see what’s left? See what the truth ended up being?”

I don’t take the bait. I have taken too much bait, been too easily led. “You are under arrest, Arlo Vasouvian.”

“You’re not going to arrest me,” he says. “I already told you that. You will let me go, or you will shoot me dead.”

“How do you know?”

He smiles sadly, looks across the darkness. “I am only speculating.”

I’m not going to shoot him. I won’t shoot him. I won’t do that. I can’t. But I step toward him with the gun still raised, reaching for the cuffs on my belt. I am going to do this correctly. I will take him in. He will confess. The truth will be rebuilt. There must be a mechanism to do that. There must be a form that can be filled out, a process that can be initiated, to reconstitute that file, reinstitute the truth, remake reality as it was. There will be a way.

“It was her idea, you know,” says Arlo, as if something has just occurred to him. “To use you in this way. Once we had concluded that starting again with Off Record houses was too simple, too literal, too small. Once we had decided we needed to achieve something larger—to send a shiver through the bulwark, as they say. I needed someone to make that happen. It was her idea. This marvel of string pulling that brought you along.”

I stop. “Her”: Silvie? “Her”: Tester? Her—

He is watching me. Narrow-eyed, examining. Watching my face as this miserable new truth breaks through. “Ms. Paige.”

“Yes, Laszlo. Aysa is ours. She was always ours. Her parents were ours and so was she.”

I close my eyes. No more. I can’t take any more.

“I had told her all about you,” he says, “during her training. I told her all about brave Charlie’s poor kid brother who never measured up. This sad unfortunate younger brother, who doted upon and resented heroic Charlie in equal parts. And Aysa thought—it’s really quite remarkable—Aysa thought, well goodness. Perhaps this younger brother will be eager to finish what his brother began. How hungry he must be for his own moment in the sun. In the good and golden sun.”

I am shaking my head. I am back in the house on Mulholland, side by side with my junior partner, the two of us in silent wonder at the lies to which we were bearing witness, and not just witnessing but feeling, and not just feeling but seeing.

“But she saw them just like I did,” I tell Arlo. “She saw Petras’s lies and denials. The same as I did, she saw them.”

“You saw her say she felt Petras lying. You saw her say she saw it.”

I blink, trying to grab hold of my own memories, corner my own mind. I am not the hero, confronting the villain. I am a lost and tiny man, diminished and confused and uncertain. I am nothing.

“So she was, what, an actor? She was acting?”

“Actor.” “Acting.” Old words from an old world, concepts with dim ancient references, half hidden by time. The old world, not to be known.

“Yes. Just so,” says Arlo. “An actor. Like Crane, the roofer, whose name was really Ortega, by the way, except it’s not, not really. It’s Ortega, it’s Crane, sometimes it’s Mortenson. Once, for a week, we called him Joe Dill, just to see how that felt. He practiced so often how to throw himself off a roof and make it look like he fell. See? See, Laszlo? Can you imagine doing that? Just that moment of letting go, letting your body slide? To him it was worth it. Aysa allowed herself to be sacrificed, just like Crane, who taught himself to fall off a roof. And both of them knew what I know, which is that it was worth it. Worth it.”

“No. It can’t—none of this can be true.”

“Yes!” He laughs, a short burst of happy laughter, and brings his hands together. “Now you see it. That’s the whole point, Laszlo: that’s the whole point. Laszlo—Laszlo—” He rushes forward and grabs my arm, smiling, eyes wide with delight. “Laszlo—I’m not even standing here right now.”

“What—what are you talking about?”

“The figure you are talking to is a projection. I am hidden somewhere else in this building, preparing to make my escape.” He says it in a melodramatic voice, making a face, playing a game. “Unwilling to risk capture at this late moment in my long-planned scheme.”

“That’s impossible. That’s insane. Something out of a—”

“Out of a what, Laszlo?” He steps closer. “A novel? Why can’t it be true, Laszlo, if all the rest of it is true? I have power over stretches, I have power over people. Why not power over the air itself?”

“It’s a lie, Arlo.”

“Okay, then. So, can you see it?”

“See…”

“If it’s a lie, can you see the lie?”

I look wildly around the room. I step backward from Arlo and I look at the air around us and I don’t feel it and I don’t see it. No crackle in the atmosphere, no bending at the edges. Nothing.

“I’ll say it again, dear Laszlo. A firm declaration, posited as fact, that you say is not So.” He makes his hands into a bullhorn, trumpets it: “I’m not really standing here. I’m a hologram. Well? Now? Are you discerning anything now?”

He says it with scorn, contempt, mocking the idea on which I have based my life.

“If I’m lying, you’d be feeling it, right? Right?”

He’s right. I would see it in the air. Wavelets of telltale in the atmosphere, ripples in the very air—I would be feeling it, just as he says, and now I do not, now the air is crystalline and calm, just Arlo walking toward me saying he is not, after all, Arlo, proving his bastard point, showing me that I cannot trust in what I know. I am discerning nothing. I hold the gun steady, hold it up and straight.

Now, very slowly, he pulls out his own gun and aims it at me, as I am aiming mine at him.

The cold air of the basement is perfectly still.

“I doctored all of those stretches,” says Arlo. “I put a forgery on the Record. I convinced two people, two that you know of, to sacrifice their lives, knowing that it was worth it. What makes you think I couldn’t create a hologram of myself, and it’s the hologram you are talking to now?”

“No,” I tell him. “Yes. I don’t—I don’t know.”

“So if I’m telling the truth, then you can shoot me.”

“What?”

“I’m not here.” He takes a step closer. His gun is pointed at my face. “It’s not me. So shoot. Go on. Shoot—”

I pull the trigger and I feel the kick of discharge, and Arlo’s chest explodes in a red blur and he flies backward and slams into the stair rail. I run to him, and I don’t know if I’m crying because he is my friend, my oldest friend and I love him and he is dying in my arms, or because of what has happened. He is cradled in my arms, his real body, no hologram, the real Arlo, his real flesh body. Then I hear footsteps crashing down toward us, the whole staircase is shuddering with the force, and now it all makes itself clear to me in retrospect, every inch of this nightmare playing itself out in reverse and filling in its details, right up to this moment—this moment right now! He never stopped playing mastermind, arranging details, right up until this moment, with the regular police pouring off the stairs and him bleeding in my arms—

“Freeze,” they are shouting. “Do not move!”

Captain Elena Tester and six other officers, a small army of regular police filling up the narrow space around the stairs, surrounding us with guns drawn.

“Wait,” I say, turning, body hot with confusion and fear. “Wait.”

Tester and her officers crowd around me, closing in. She is staring, astonished; Arlo is collapsed in my arms, sprawled across my lap.

“Laszlo,” she says. “What have you done?”

“Nothing. I haven’t done anything. It was… He…”

They step closer, one step at a time, guns raised. Arlo, in my arms, bends his body upward slowly. Cranes his lips up to my ear and says, “Worth it.”

Tester circles me warily, keeping the gun leveled at my face, and the other officers fan out behind her. Arlo is cradled in my lap, his blood on my pants, his blood on my arms and on my face, his blood is smeared all over my black coat. What am I going to say? He tricked me. He said he wasn’t real. He said that shooting him wasn’t shooting a real person.

I feel that there is nothing I can do but explain myself, and that I would be a fool at the very least not to try. So I tell Captain Tester she’s making a mistake.

I tell her that Arlo Vasouvian rigged the whole thing, that he is trying to frame the Speculative Service, that he is purposefully attempting to erode the trust in our Basic Laws, to bring the State crashing in, that he has cooked up an elaborate scheme to kick away the pillars that have supported society, to smash in the walls that have kept us safe inside the Objectively So. While Arlo’s body lies in my arms and Tester’s officers keep their guns trained on my face, I say, “You have to believe me, you have to believe me”—I say all the things that are the only things I can say, and she reacts exactly as I would have predicted.

“You know, Laszlo,” she says flatly, “that sounds like the wildest bunch of lies that I have ever heard. But you tell me.” She crouches beside me, pulls out her handcuffs. “You’re the expert.”