The city, my city, when at last it appears, is a dim gleam on the horizon: a collection of fairy lights in the desert, yellow on yellow, showing itself through the heat and haze as I crest yet another low rise.
And then I see a cluster of buildings, the tops of buildings, just barely visible above the rolling dunes, just their tips peeking up, and I follow a long bend in the road, until all at once it is unveiled: the Golden State, bright late-day sun glinting off the glass surfaces of the world, returned to me. I grin, jubilant, my dry lips cracking from the effort, and I yelp and smack the center of the steering wheel, a grateful holler to ricochet back across the silent desert to mad Ms. Wells.
I smash down on the gas pedal, and my heart kicks into double time.
I did not believe you, Ms. Wells, I did not know what you were, but I should not have doubted your fluttery and sporting mind. Because there it is, here it is, the Golden State getting taller and clearer as I close out the miles, and just in time, because the gas needle is inching perilously close to empty.
I’m home. I’m back. Oh, Ms. Wells, I’ll never doubt you again.
I come into the city on a broad avenue I don’t yet recognize, three wide and empty lanes in either direction, running between towering buildings, and I am trying to figure out what district I’m in, what section, and I’ve just about decided I’m downtown, it has to be downtown—but what part of downtown?—when one of the car’s front tires explodes and the steering wheel jumps out of my hand.
“Shit,” I say as the car skids and flies, bounces with a rattling bang off a streetlamp and careens in a new direction, totally out of my control. I struggle to get the wheel steady in my hands but it shivers and rolls, flying through my fingers. The car caroms to the other side of the road and my head cracks against the driver’s side window, sending a flash of pain across my skull.
“Fuck,” I say, rolling back from the blow. “Fuck.”
The car sputters and stops, perpendicular to the roadway, steam hissing out from under the hood. The air-conditioning dies along with the engine, and in an instant the car becomes a furnace. I take deep breaths, fighting to steady my shaking hands. The sun is blinding, burning, magnified by the glass of the windshield. There is an ominous hiss coming from somewhere in the mechanics of the car. Blood is trickling into my right eye. I must have cut my head when it hit the window.
“Get out of the vehicle.”
The voice is mechanized. Loud. Coming through a bullhorn or a speaker, some kind of amplification system. I squint through the cracked windshield, rubbing blood out of my eye with my knuckles, trying to see who’s addressing me. My head is a thick knot of pain.
“Get out of the vehicle.”
I grasp the door handle, take a breath, and step out into the blasting heat.
An even, flat expanse of asphalt spreads in either direction. A long street, dotted with street lamps, lined with buildings. I still don’t know where I am, exactly, just that I’m home. I peer up at the street lamps, looking for captures. I had forgotten that I’m barefoot. It was okay driving but now the heat of the pavement sears the soles of my feet.
“Hello?” I call feebly, hands in the air, turning in a slow circle. I don’t see anyone. If somebody shot out my tire, I don’t see them now. Enormous buildings, majestic constructions of concrete and glass, rise on either side of me, up and down the street, each of them with its own giant-scale architectural style. There’s a building that is itself an entire skyline, each of its towers fashioned to look like the top of a downtown skyscraper. To one side of me is a pyramid, its front-facing sides made of sheer black glass, rising many stories into the air.
Whoever told me to get out of the car I don’t see anywhere, but it feels like I should have my hands in the air, so I keep my hands in the air. I walk gingerly from where my car stopped to the traffic island at the center of the lanes.
There are no buildings like this downtown. Maybe I’m not downtown. Maybe I’m up in Pasadena or Glendale, down in the beach cities. Some reach of the State my travels rarely took me.
“Stay exactly where you are. Keep your hands visible.”
The voice again, from nowhere and everywhere.
“Okay,” I say. Now, squinting upward into the haze, I can make out a kind of catwalk, an elevated hallway with a glass bottom, suspended across the road and spanning it, connecting one of the insane buildings on one side to one on the other. I squint up at the catwalk, in search of the source of the voice. I think I can spot figures shifting about up there, dark shadows floating above the roadway, but I can’t be sure.
“Don’t shoot me,” I say to whoever it is. Wherever they are. “I don’t want to die.”
I do, though. A little bit, I do. It hurts to speak. My feet are burning and bleeding. My face is peeling, flakes of hot skin coming off my cheeks above my beard.
“You can’t be out here,” says the voice.
I spin around. I don’t know where the voice is coming from. “Okay,” I say.
Then I see them. Two of them, coming across the road toward me, with guns aimed at my head. They are Speculators, is what they are—black suits, black shoes, black hats—and I am about to call out in happy greeting, ask them their unit, tell them who I am, but then I see that they’re also wearing thick aprons that cover the whole midsection and helmets, black helmets with tinted visors that cover the whole face.
The words come to me again, and the truth of the words: I don’t know where I am.
They are approaching me swiftly, like shadows, like creatures risen from some impossible deep to come and claim me and drag me away. There is a crispness in their movements, a panther-like military integrity that reminds me with a burst of sad longing that I used to be like them. It reminds me that I’m standing here barefoot, broken, bleeding from my head.
“Please don’t shoot me,” I say. “Please.”
They stop, guns still drawn and aimed, and the shorter of the two raises the faceplate and holds up a stubby bullhorn. It’s a woman, pale-faced, staring at me impassively.
“We will not shoot you unless given cause to do so.”
“Okay,” I say. And then, ridiculously: “That’s great.”
“Please provide your identification.”
“I don’t have any.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I don’t have any.”
“None?”
I shake my head.
She is stymied. Irritated, even. Leaving her faceplate up, she turns to her partner to confer. He is shorter than her, broad around the middle, and when he flips up his own faceplate I see a round, pocked face. They press their foreheads together and talk so I can’t hear them. I see figures moving about on the catwalks, clustering together. People. Dozens of people. Staring at me. I turn to one of the glass buildings, on one side of the street, and I see that I am being watched from there, too. And from the building on the opposite side. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, thousand, maybe, are watching.
I know at last where I am. A skyline that is not a skyline but a cluster of overlapping skylines. I know it from The Prisoner, from when, toward the end, Dave Keener arrives in that glittering and hopeful city in search of the wrecked alcoholic doctor who may or may not hold the secret that can save Dave’s son. When he arrives, it’s late at night, and he drives his car down a broad avenue—this same broad avenue—into a throbbing crowd of partygoers and happy revelers, and his own grief and panic are drawn in sharp contrast to the footloose alcoholic joy of those he is forced to pass through en route to his salvation and that of his family.
The whole world of the book returns to me in a flash, a world layered over this one, Dave Keener unable to deal with the traffic, throngs of cars going on either side, so he pulls over and gets out on the side of the road and climbs up on top of his car, scanning in both directions, while the exhaust of a hundred cars blows up into his eyes and coats his throat.
I am in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, as it turns out, is a real place.
The two officers have come to some sort of disagreement, presumably about my fate. The short fat one raises his gun and points it at me, and the other one, the one who spoke to me, pushes it down. I step off my traffic island and head toward the two officers—or soldiers, or whatever they are—hoping to engage them, but they ignore me, continue their squabbling. Their voices float over to me in patches, ribbons of conversation.
“…I don’t know what you want me to do—”
“You know what you have to do. Directorate just issued new instructions on this.”
“What directorate are you fucking talking about?”
“Main Directorate.”
“Main Directorate of Identification, or Main Directorate of Border Security?”
“I don’t know!”
“You just said you did know!”
“Can we just call it in? Let’s call it in.”
“Fine. Fine, Rick.”
Rick holsters his gun and digs under his heavy apron and comes out with a radio, a small black box of a make I’ve never seen before. He murmurs into it while his partner watches, and then the three of us stand baking in the sun.
“Hey,” I say, realizing suddenly how brutally thirsty I am. “Can I—”
“Remain where you are.”
“Remain where you are.”
“Do not move.”
“Do not move.”
“Stay.”
So I wait, unmoving, under the watchful eyes of the two officers in their thick lead aprons and black face masks, and under the eyes of everybody in those hotels that line the street, because that’s what they are. Hotels. I know them from The Prisoner, I have been given a map in advance: a guide book. That’s Luxor, Caesars Palace, New York–New York. Purpose-built simulacra of real places, once built for pleasure. Inside them now, I think, I presume, are people—the people who live in Las Vegas now, who live here now in the present like there are people who live in the Golden State. These people, the Las Vegas people, were never real to me before this instant—but neither were they were unreal. I had no reason to conceive of their existence, nor reason to doubt it. They were unknown and unknowable.
But now they are real, and I can feel their eyes staring from the glass windows above and around me.
Sweat is running in streams from my brow down into my beard. Blood has caked in the corner of my eye, and it bubbles at the cracked blisters on my lips.
Two cars pull up at the same moment, from opposite directions, one on either side of the traffic island where I’m standing. The cars are yellow, each with the word “TAXI” stenciled on its side. Nobody gets out of the cars. One of the officers, the woman, remains with her gun pointed at me, while the other hustles over to the window of one of the taxis.
For a long moment he talks to whoever is in there, and then he trots back over to his partner as the door opens and a new officer comes out—a tall, thin woman, no apron, no mask, dressed all in blue.
She has a bullhorn, and she lifts it to her lips.
“Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
She doesn’t repeat herself. She just waits, watching. My fingers are clumsy, swollen, wrestling with the buttons of my shirt. While I struggle out of my clothes, an officer emerges from the second taxi and methodically puts four traffic cones in a square around me. There is another cop inside his car, I see her waiting, watching him tensely from behind the steering wheel. My pants are burned onto my skin, and I have to fight them off, wrestle them down, unpeel myself from myself. When the new officer, who is older, black, with a thin gray mustache, is done with the traffic cones, he strings yellow caution tape from cone to cone, cordoning me off.
At last I stand in my underpants, the sun flaying my broad red back.
I am becoming aware of life in the corners of this picture. A man and a woman sit on a decorative concrete wall in front of one of the hotels, dangling their feet. A little boy is on a bicycle, swooping in curious circles closer and closer to the conversation. Half a block up there’s a statue of a towering figure in a draped toga or cape, lording proudly above the intersection.
The first officer keeps her gun on me while Rick waits beside her along with the perimeter. He takes off his hat and wipes sweat from his brow while the tall woman, the one with no mask and no apron, lifts her bullhorn again.
“We’re going to need to know your name.”
I start to answer, but then I don’t want to. I can’t. I remember the thud of the boots in my side in the hot dog truck. Not falling for that again. “I don’t have a name.”
“Look,” she says. “If we don’t know who you are, you’re dangerous. If you’re dangerous, we have to handle you as we handle any threat.”
As if to underscore the tall woman’s point, the woman with the gun raises it a little higher. Rick brushes his fingertips along the holster of his own weapon but doesn’t draw. The last of the officers, the perimeter man with the thin gray mustache, has his hands in his pockets, but he’s looking at me closely.
I am going to die here, I think. Wherever this is—one way or another—I’m going to die. I might as well go out with my name on.
“My name is Laszlo Ratesic,” I say.
“You’re Golden State?”
“Yes.”
She says it like that, not “Are you from the Golden State?” but “You’re Golden State?” and I wonder what that means.
“You’re a refugee?”
“I—I’m sorry. I—”
“Exile.” She interrupts, impatient. “You’re an exile.”
I squint. I can’t hear her clearly. Maybe she said “in.” You’re “in exile” or you’re “an exile.”
“Yes,” I say, the answer is the same either way, and feel the pain of longing for my homeland, which strangely enough appears to me as the pleading, earnest face of Kelly Tarjin, whom I only met three days ago. I think of her in the doorway of her small home in Faircrest Heights, her face worn with care. I recall telling her there was a version of the world in which I would come back to her, buy her a hamburger, tell her funny stories. I imagine her now with a stab of regret, imagine her waiting, imagine arrogantly that she cares, that she’s standing in her doorway in fruitless anticipation of my return. The weakest form of speculation: fantasy.
I miss her. I never really met her. “Home” is a word with no definitive meaning.
Meanwhile, the mustache guy trots over to the captain and mutters in her ear. She looks baffled, but then she shrugs and hands him the bullhorn. He starts to talk, it doesn’t work, he puzzles at the mechanism and starts again.
“Hey, would you say the name again?”
“Laszlo,” I say.
“The whole name.”
The captain is watching him. He’s watching me.
“Laszlo Ratesic.”
He confers with the captain, and then with the other two cops, who lift their visors to join the conversation, until he speaks again into the bullhorn. “All right, then. We will not be killing you for the time being.”
The dark-skinned cop with the gray mustache has a partner, too, a young woman with a black ponytail. She’s driving and he’s in the shotgun seat, and I’m in the back, and they don’t talk while they take me where we’re going, a short ride down the avenue—the Strip, is what it’s called. That’s what Wish calls it in The Prisoner; I remember it now. But in their easy comfort with each other, in the clear mutual respect I sense between the two, I am reminded helplessly of Aysa Paige, my old friend, my first and last and only partner.
My thick head lolls back and I think maybe I sleep a little, in the air-conditioned back seat of this taxicab that is a police car, in this city that did not exist until half an hour ago, heading to who knows where. I drift off to sleep deciding that the best thing to do is remember Aysa forever as the Aysa I knew first, the one who never betrayed me and never intended to. Let that truth be the one that lasts, let that be the real bone truth of her and me.
When the cops open the back door and tell me to wake up, we’re at a hotel called the Mirage. It’s a simpler, shabbier building than some of the others—a pair of identical buildings, each a massive rectangular slab of concrete, striped with glass, angled backward toward a tower in the center that connects them. It looks like a book open to the street.
In the parking lot, as we get closer to the rear door, there is what looks very much like a giant pile of rotting pumpkins, hundreds of pumpkins smashed to pieces in a shifting pile, covered in flies.
I don’t ask. I am done, for now, with questions. I follow my escorts inside, and I am overwhelmed by noise: a vigorous open-air bazaar is in full swing in the lobby of the Mirage, with market stalls set up and lines of customers haggling over clothing and food and small housewares.
“Six bucks? Fuck you,” says a beefy guy, shaking his head at a small woman with wiry hair and a handkerchief over the lower half of her face.
“No,” she says, tugging down the kerchief so she can enunciate better, “fuck you.”
The beefy guy steps up to the lady, making fists of both hands. The cop with the mustache steps toward the confrontation, but his partner, the young woman, stops him. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I got it.”
She strides over, hand on her gun, as I dodge a wheelbarrow laden with what looks like toasters and pencil sharpeners. Mustache takes my arm.
“You doing okay?”
“No,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “I bet you’re not. C’mon.”
He leads us through the lobby, past the elevator bank, into a quiet dark room, and the feeling of the place is immediate and unmistakable: across all space and time, in whatever universe I may stumble into, the smell and feel of being in a bar remains the same. People are scattered at small tables throughout the room, nursing small glasses, and there’s a bored-looking bartender, a guy in round sunglasses with spiky hair, reading a book with the paper cover folded back. Before him, across the bar, is a man in a gigantic motorized wheelchair, nursing a glass of his own.
“Hey,” says the cop, and everybody looks up. But he’s talking to the guy in the wheelchair. “Hey Charlie. I believe this man belongs to you.”
The man in the wheelchair moves his right hand, just his right hand, to work a device on his armrest. Slowly the machine turns, and I can see his face.
“Charlie,” I say. “Oh, Charlie.”
The chair moves slowly toward me, and I walk toward him, almost as slowly as he comes toward me, so baffled am I, so weighted with astonishment. My feet plant and lift themselves one heavy step at a time as he rolls across the tile floor of the bar, the mechanics of his chair whirring as he comes. The cop steps back and crosses his arms, watching our reunion, and the bartender goes back to his book. Halfway across the bar, the front wheel of Charlie’s chair catches on a lip of tile, and the whole thing nearly totters over backward. He stops, fusses with his buttons, and navigates the obstacle.
“Lashed to the mast”. The phrase appears in my head. My long-lost brother, living still, is lashed to the mast.
We meet in the center of the room, and I crouch before him and put my hands on his narrow shoulders.
He cannot move his neck.
He says something, but I can’t hear him. His mouth barely moves and the words are faint and garbled. I bend closer.
“Heya, dickhead,” he whispers.
I follow him as he moves across the hotel, through the crush of people in the market. Old decommissioned casino games are shoved against the walls, unplugged. Felt tables have been made into market tables laden with goods. Way up above me are hotel rooms, doors hung with wreaths. Clotheslines are drawn between the mezzanine railings.
I stand beside Charlie in the elevator, shaking my head. His whole physical self is gone, his broad swaggering body is blasted and burned and shriveled, but I would know him anywhere. I would know him a thousand times.
“Welcome to”
Charlie writes those two words and I take the paper and wait while he writes more.
“my swinging”
I am smiling already, but I wait for it, for the third scrap of paper. He holds the nub of a pencil in his hand, between middle and pointer finger, clutching it fiercely between two knuckles, and it trembles wildly as he writes.
“bachelor pad”
I laugh. His face does not move. He is frozen. His face is a mess of old scars and burn marks, pocked and pitted and locked in place. His mouth is a sideways oval, a bent O angled toward his right cheek.
Charlie can’t talk. Not really. Each word he utters is a triumph of sustained effort and still comes out as a strangled, unearthly whisper.
“Charlie,” I keep saying, tears rushing down my cheeks, a hot rush. I feel like a dummy.
He has a sheaf of loose papers balanced in his lap. He writes, holds up papers for me, one at a time.
“Knock it off”
And then:
“you baby”
I would knock it off if I could. Instead I crouch down before him and hug his withered legs. His body is a coil of wire, bent up into a seated shape. He is impossibly thin, and immobile, slumped into the movable chair, head fixed in a half tilt, the muscles of his face unmoving.
I have presumed my brother dead for so long, though, and here he is, alive. There is terrified joyful movement inside my chest, small birds opening their wings.
The balcony of Charlie’s room’s has a view of the central courtyard of the hotel. From Charlie’s room you can look across at other rooms just like it, look up and down at other floors just like this one. The bazaar I walked through on my way in continues down below: as we talk, the sounds of haggling, contentious commerce waft up in a continuous stream.
The room is full of paper. There are the loose pages scattered on Charlie’s lap for these small conversational notes, but that’s just the beginning of it. His coat is overflowing with paper, his jacket pockets stuffed with paper. The room is full of filing cabinets, shelves, boxes, and I am certain that they’re stuffed with paper.
“You OK?”
I shake my head. “Not really. I went to your funeral, Charlie.”
He writes. The pencil jiggles between his knuckles.
“Me too”
I laugh. Good old Charlie. He’s still writing, writing two words at a time, writing—
“Arlo: smart”
I read it and his fingers are curling for me to give the note back. I do, and he scribbles, crosses out and amends, and hands it back.
“Me: smarter”
I don’t have to ask him about what happened next, once he disappeared from the Golden State. I spent twenty-four hours, give or take, in exile, in the desert between the Golden State and this place, whatever this place is. I know how I feel now, burned and blasted, twisted and wracked. My throat still feels dry and full of sand. So here’s my Charlie, after my day in the desert, plus months. Plus years. However long until he made it here.
He’s looking at me while I look at him, and then he does his effortful writing again, creating just one word:
“Beard?”
“Oh. Yeah,” I say. I put my hands up to my face self-consciously. “I started it after you were gone. I dunno why. Just—I dunno.”
His eyes don’t move. They are settled on my face. His chin ducks down then, very slightly, which seems to be the extent of movement he’s got, as far as moving his head. I crouch down before him, put my ear to his thin lips.
“It looks like shit.”
I laugh. He is not laughing but I know that he is.
“Fuck, Charlie,” I tell him. “You cheated death.”
His pencil moves across the paper. I wait for it.
“No. The”
I wait. Listen to the noise of the bazaar. Look around the cluttered, paper-ridden room.
“other way around”
It takes a long time for Charlie to explain everything that he wants me to understand. And it is a mark of how much Charlie remains Charlie—world-beating, stubborn, domineering Charlie—that he does not give a shit how long it takes.
Whatever he has to say, it is worth waiting for, because it is Charlie who is saying it.
Charlie was in the desert for a long time. He doesn’t know how long. He does not know how close he came to dying, but he knows it was damn close.
And then at last he made it here. It took him a lot longer than it took me, because there was no Ms. Wells then, no outrider from Vegas making sorties into the State, finding exiles and pointing them in the right direction.
“What is this place? Why is everything indoors?”
Charlie writes.
“Under my ass.”
“What?”
He points to the paper again. “Under my ass.”
I crouch before him to perform the peculiar intimate act of reaching under the fragile structure of his body, leveraging him up slightly with one hand while I feel around with the other under his bony rear end until I find the wiry spirals of a notebook. More paper. Paper everywhere.
The cover of the notebook is blank.
The notebook is only a few pages long. Still squatting, I flip it open and read it.
It is the provisional understanding of the people of Las Vegas that at some (currently) indeterminate time in the past, an enemy (???) of what was then known as “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (with “enemy” to be [provisionally] defined as EITHER an external adversary OR an internal adversary OR some combination of the two) did inflict (EITHER over time OR “at a strike”) irrevocable damage upon “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”.
The text in the notebook is hard to read. There are many strikeouts and erasures, with some passages in pen and others in in pencil, and with much of it written in, over, and around earlier text. There are arrows at the ends of lines, directing the reader to skip a paragraph or turn the page over to find the continued thought on the back. Each notebook page is a patchwork of smaller pages, smaller pieces of paper, taped and stapled on.
This (postulated) irrevocable damage done to “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” was realized by taking advantage of the nation’s highly interconnected energy infrastructure, coupled with the (near-??) total reliance of that “grid" (term?) on computerized control mechanisms which were highly vulnerable to interference (“sabotage”). The postulated “enemy” (internal OR external OR combined, as noted above) was thus able to take advantage of
A) “systemic flaws" in this “grid” AND/OR
B)“systemic flaws” in the general population’s ATTITUDE TOWARD authority, i.e. DISTRUST for any statement issued by the “government” (including, FOR EXAMPLE, an announcement relating to an attack on the “grid”) AND/OR
C) “systemic flaws” in the population’s ATTITUDE TOWARD the “media” (term?), such that—
I close the notebook for a second and take a look at Charlie. It’s hard to tell but he might be sleeping. His mighty presence has momentarily departed the room. I try to find my place in the book but it’s hard, among the wandering lines of texts, the arrows and cross-outs and redirects. So I just pick a page, a few pages on from where I was.
—a BLAST RADIUS measuring dozens (hundreds? +++?) of miles in diameter. The effects of this accident (term?) were COMPOUNDED by the inability/ unwillingness of survivors to communicate [i.e., severe distrust toward fellow survivors, refusal to accept or solicit assistance, presumption of “enemy intent”]. Lacking the tools to measure, we can feel uncertain—
Someone had written “we can feel certain,” and someone else, or maybe the some person having second thoughts, had gone back and made the certain into uncertain.
—that despite the intervening passage of [???] years, the environmental hazard that was the result of the explosion(s) still pervades the atmosphere in (some but not all) of “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”
That’s the last word on that page, “America,” and then it skips down a few lines and someone else in different handwriting has written, in parentheses and in very small letters, (“term?”).
It goes on. I can’t read anymore. I laugh at myself, shaking my head. I sit with the book in my lap, looking out the window of Charlie’s little room. The sky isn’t poisoned with lies, you idiot. It’s poisoned with poison.
“Hey,” says Charlie, working hard to get the word out. “Hey.”
He is holding out his working hand for the notebook, and I hand it to him. He flips back to the first page, takes his pencil and presses down hard, underlining a single word, the fourth word in the paragraph: “provisional.”
The roof of the Mirage is all farmland.
I followed Charlie up here in the elevator, and now I lope behind him through yet another alternate universe, a landscape of self-sufficiency rolled out high above the street.
The rooftop has been covered in soil, built over with greenhouses and silos. I follow in Charlie’s wake as he maneuvers past patches of unsown field, cornstalks growing in bent rows. He ably navigates the bulk of his chair between piles of mulch and a clatter of unused shovels and rakes. Dark soil is laid out right to the lip of the roof, with roots twisting into it deep, with the bulging, uneven bulbs of pumpkins twisting up out of the dirt.
Charlie writes.
“Mine all mine,” his note says.
He owns the pumpkin patch. He has papers for it. Other pieces of this common garden are owned by other people, all of it pipelined to the bazaar down below. The people of Las Vegas determined, one way or another, to create a civilization, dragging themselves along as they go.
Charlie angles his chair very close to the edge of the building to show me what he wants me to see: a wooden machine that he built, or maybe had built, right up at the lip of the roof. It’s a very simple structure, just a plank of wood balanced on a triangle, like a teeter-totter, suspended in place with a thick elastic band. And there’s a pumpkin placed, delicately, at the near end of the plank. It’s a catapult, and it's loaded. Waiting to fire.
We regard this primitive invention for a moment in silence. I feel the heat of the day finally starting to dissipate as it gets closer to nighttime.
Charlie writes one of his notes, and I bend over him to read it:
“What happens?”
“What do you mean?”
But he doesn't write anymore. He holds up the same paper again. “What happens?”
Meaning, I gather at last, dense Laszlo, what happens when you fire it? When you let loose the pumpkin? What happens?
“It’ll—it’ll go down. Fly over the side.” He waits. I look at his rickety machine, and then back at Charlie, still holding his paper, the scrap of interlocution, patient, insistent. “It’ll fly down and then smash on the ground below.”
I peek over the edge of the hotel, shade my eyes. I think I can see, just barely, the parking lot, littered with the smashed carcasses of pumpkins.
I step up to the machine. I haven’t seen him do it before, and I would have said it was impossible, but Charlie arches his eyebrows: mischievous. Daring.
So I fire the pumpkin. Release the band, step back, and watch the pumpkin fly off the board and disappear over the edge. Together we watch it go: hurtling down and down, arcing outward, tracing a long wobbling parabola until it makes its satisfying smack, loud on the pavement, and bursts into its gore atop and around the existing pile.
I look at Charlie. I’m grinning, weirdly exuberant. He’s already writing.
“Again”
“Again?”
“Again”
We fire the gun over and over. Six pumpkins, ten. The orange corpses pile up far below us.
I’m trying to figure out what the point of this is, what Charlie wants me to see by showing me his jury-rigged pumpkin-firing machine. But after the third or fourth pumpkin I’m mainly lost in the spectacle, holding my breath each time we launch a new projectile and it flips and spins in its ballistic descent toward the climax, the explosive moment of contact with the hard, flat parking lot, the bursting into chunks and lumps of stringy goo. And I laugh with delight and turn to Charlie and he’s waiting, head angled toward the pile, waiting for me to load the next one. This is not just fun, this is a demonstration of some kind, I’m sure, some lesson to be learned about the Golden State, about how we have huddled fearfully away from the edge of the world, burrowing molelike inside our small store of truth, blinding ourselves to the possibility of more. Or maybe the idea here is something even more elemental, more base—Charlie sphinxlike in his wheelchair, watching me work the machine, waiting for me to get it—maybe the message is that Arlo and his revolutionaries, with their contempt for the very idea of truth, that they are wrong, too, and that they are even wronger. Maybe what Charlie wants me to get is just that when you shoot a fucking pumpkin off a roof the same thing happens every time. Every single time.
But then when we’re done, when we’ve depleted our whole pile of pumpkins, before we go back to the elevator, my brother struggles his one working hand off the armrest, lifts one finger to jab me in the center of the chest. He pushes at my sternum, above my heart, with a push that is surprisingly firm. Then he takes the same finger and slowly pushes it into his own chest. Drawing an invisible line between his heart and my own.