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.