People see us—people like Renner, I mean, and even people like Elena Tester, people who ought to know better—and get weird. Wary. They talk slow or fast, fidget from side to side or stand statue still, arms crossed, protecting the midsection as if from a blow. Afraid of the rules we enforce and the punishments we are empowered to dole out.
But what you should be afraid of, and what I think most people really are afraid of, deep underneath—buried truth, truth of the soul—is what would happen if we were gone.
What they ought to be afraid of is the truth of the world beyond the Golden State, the truth of the wilderness, which is no truth at all.
I’m talking about what happened to the rest of it, to the world beyond our world of bright blue skies and ocean breezes and crystalline epistemology.
We are the world that is left, and the future of the Golden State depends on the fierce defense of what is Objectively So. It depends on the transcriptionists and archivists and librarians of the Permanent Record and the collectors and checkers and double-checkers of the Trusted Authority; it depends on the Acknowledged Experts, up on Melrose Avenue, scurrying from committee room to committee room; and it depends somehow on us, on me, me in my rumpled suit, clinging to the steering wheel like a ship’s captain, looking longingly at the House of Pies as it sails by on Vermont Avenue. Aysa Paige riding shotgun upright and at attention, her excitement dimmed not a bit by her first foray into the field.
It’s already eleven. I know that to be a true fact because the bells are ringing from the high tower of the old movie palace on Sunset, and strangers are stopping on the street to tell each other it’s eleven, agreeing that it’s true, shaking hands and reinforcing what is Objectively So.
I wonder fleetingly what Silvie is doing right at this exact minute; this is something I used to do all the time, before we went our separate ways. I would pause somewhere in the middle of my day and wonder what she was doing, right at this exact minute. It would be the thought of her, out there in the city, maybe filing forms in her orderly sub-basement office, maybe meeting her friend Lily for silken tofu soup on Beverly Boulevard, just Silvie out there doing her thing—the thought of her out enjoying the universe would reliably buoy my own dull spirits. That’s love, as best as I can figure it: love isn’t how you feel when you’re together, it’s how you feel, how often you feel it, when you’re apart.
“All right, so look,” I say abruptly. “I gotta say something.” And Ms. Paige immediately says “Yes, sir,” and I immediately stop.
“Yes? Mr. Ratesic?”
I sigh. I hate this conversation. I hate conversations, just in general. I wish I was alone. I wish I could stop, alone, at Donut Sam’s or one of the other greasy anonymous places with the laminated posters in the windows, with the cheap tin napkin dispensers on the grimy plastic tables, with the rows of colorful fluorescent doughnuts under glass like costume jewelry.
“So,” I say to Paige. “You were right.”
“Yes, sir.”
“About this event. This incident.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop calling me ‘sir.’ We are both officers of the same service, Ms. Paige.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. So—but—” She clears her throat. She looks at me. “Do we do it now?”
“No.” I sigh, shake my head. “And don’t ask again because I will tell you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I will tell you when it’s time to speculate.”
We’ve come all the way downtown on Vermont Avenue by now. We’re passing the blocks of factories, long, low smokestack buildings pumping out textiles and tin cans and small electronics, we’re passing the wheat fields and cotton fields and dope fields, all the architecture of our self-sufficiency. Through downtown and out again into University City.
“First we need a few more facts.”
“You people friends of his?”
The woman who’s appeared a few steps down from the landing wears a long loose-fitting black garment, some kind of sweater, apparently, although it’s almost like a cape, the way it drapes around her thin shoulders, hanging down with ragged majesty onto the unswept concrete landing.
The apartment block where Crane lived is organized around a flat stone courtyard, gray steps leading up to each individual unit, cement catwalks between the doors, like a motel. A poky little capture observes from above the doorway, green light blinking. After two minutes of knocking and trying to see in through the small smudged window, Ms. Paige and I have just about satisfied ourselves that there is no one home, and I have concluded it’s time to force my way in. I’ve been in the Service for nineteen years, but I was regular police once upon a time. I know how to force a door when I need to.
But here instead is this funny old lady, grinning up at us in her black caul of a sweater, wearing a lot of clunky jewelry, with her skinny arms crossed over her chest.
“Nope,” I tell her. “Not friends. I’m Mr. Ratesic, and this is Ms. Paige. We’re with the Speculative Service. A dolphin is a mammal.”
“So’s a bat but not so is a bee. I’m Dolly Aster. I live downstairs.” I tip my pinhole and she smiles impishly, interest flashing in her milky eyes. Her hair is wild, curly and gray. “Don’t know that I’ve seen a pair of you before. I thought you people traveled alone. Like wolves.”
“No, ma’am,” I say. “Not wolves.”
“I said like wolves, young man. It’s a figure. Do you people do figures of speech, or is an idiom considered a species of lie?”
“Idioms don’t register as falsehoods, ma’am,” says Paige, quickly and authoritatively, giving out the Basic Law like she’s one of the recordings made for schoolchildren. “Given that their intention and literal meaning can be gleaned from context and familiarity. They’re like humorous remarks in that regard.”
“Well, aren’t you sharp,” says Aster, her grin broadening. “Sharp as a box of tacks.”
Unlike Renner, back at the mansion, unlike most people, Ms. Aster seems to show no sign of intimidation or nervousness in our presence. To the contrary, she’s fascinated, inching up the stairwell with one old hand clutching the banister, licking her lips. “The Speculative Service on my humble stairwell in a fearsome little pack.” Her small features narrow to a fascinated point, savoring the mysterious syllables of the occupation. “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“We’re here about your tenant, Mose Crane.”
“What did he do?” she says. “He murder someone?”
“No,” I say, thinking, Interesting assumption. “No, ma’am. He’s dead.”
“Murdered?”
I’m about to say no, and I find that I can’t do it. My throat refuses to form the word, my instinct refuses to certify it as part of what’s So. So I merely smile, dance sideways around the question. “We are hoping to take a look at his apartment. Hoping you can help us out with that.”
I’m digging her, this old lady—she has a tough sinewy look about her, like an old snake, not dangerous but built to navigate danger. She hands me her Day Book and I hand her mine, and I stamp hers and she stamps mine, and then she does the same with Paige.
“So. What’s it like,” she asks, “enforcing a world of absolute truth?”
“I don’t know,” says Paige, deadpan. “It’s my first day.”
Ms. Aster likes that a lot. She laughs, loud and cackling, hands on her hips, and gives me a wink. “You better watch out for this one, young man. Watch out!”
I raise my eyebrows, give her a tight smile, indulging the joke, but Aster has got it wrong—dead wrong, 180 degrees in the wrong—which she’s old enough to know. I do not believe and have never believed that our mission is to enforce a world of absolute truth. If such a world could be built we would have long ago built it already.
People are going to lie: they want to—they need to. Lying is born into the species. You know this is true as well as I do. There is something perfect in a lie, something seductive, addictive; telling a lie is like licking sugar off a spoon. Think of children, think of how children lie all the time. We have imaginary friends, we blame our misbehavior on our playmates or our siblings, we claim not yet to have had dessert so we can cadge a second cookie. Me and Charlie used to have contests, as a matter of fact, two brothers each trying to slip a fake fact under the other one’s radar: “I beat up a kid at school”; “I saw that dog, the neighbor’s dog, jump over a fence”; “I’m the fastest runner in my class—”
You go back far enough in history, ancient history, and you find a time when people were never taught to grow out of it, when every adult lied all the time, when people lied for no reason or for the most selfish possible reasons, for political effect or personal gain. They lied and they didn’t just lie; they built around themselves whole carapaces of lies. They built realities and sheltered inside them. This is how it was, this is how it is known to have been, and all the details of that old dead world are known to us in our bones but hidden from view, true and permanent but not accessible, not part of our vernacular.
It was this world but it was another world and it’s gone. We are what’s left. The calamity of the past is not true, because it is unknown. There could only be hypotheses, and hypotheses are not the truth. So we leave it blank. Nothing happened. Something happened. It is gone.
What we know of the past is enough to be afraid, enough to build this world, our good and golden world, around preventing a repeat of the mistakes that destroyed the world before.
The preservation of reality’s integrity is the paramount duty of the citizenry and of the government alike. What kind of mad society would be organized otherwise?
I shake my head a little, out here on Crane’s landing, and blink myself back into the moment. Into reality unfolding. “So listen, Ms. Aster. Do you have a way of getting into the apartment?”
“How about a key? Will a key do?”
There is something grimly tragic about a Golden State apartment with no outdoor space: no balcony, no patio, nowhere to go and feel the blessing of sunshine on your cheeks. Crane’s U City apartment is grim and dark, a second-story bat’s nest, three narrow rooms connected by a carpeted hallway. Out the two small windows there’s a sorry view of Ellendale Place, stray sheets of Authority and hamburger wrappers tumbling down the street, the roots of trees warping the sidewalk stones into strange shapes, like children hiding under a rug.
I wander through Crane’s apartment slowly, following no particular rhythm or route, developing a sense of the man’s life from the dull shapes and muted colors of his habitat: from the pair of beat-up shoes at the door, apparently the only pair he owned besides the pair he died in; from the three faded family photographs, tacked up unframed, brother and sister and mom faintly smiling, squinting into the sun on the pier; from the tiny kitchen table with the one chair, the coffeemaker with two-day-old grounds still thick and gritty in the filter. The fridge is mostly beer, the garbage mostly takeout containers.
No speculation required. This was the home of a bachelor who worked long days at hard, sunburnt labor, who came home to piss and sleep and shower and get ready to go back to work.
Paige is pursuing her own slow perusal of the apartment, and she has her Day Book out to gather all these same lonely details. One armchair, one floor lamp, one cup at the kitchen table. One bookshelf, squat and brown.
I take a closer look at the books and find all the usual stuff: a volume of Maps and Legends, a copy of Recent Reference and one of What Things Are Made Of, this year’s edition of Flat Facts for Everyday Use. All of the volumes produced by the Publishing Arm, the State’s constant effort to ensure that we all know the same things, that we all know everything. All of the books look basically brand new, as pristine as when the State published them. Crane, I figure, was lacking in either the time or the inclination to do a lot of reading. Probably both.
Not surprisingly, the man has hardly got any novels at all—although there is, right on the top shelf, a copy of Past Is Prologue. I lay two fingers reverently on the wide scarlet spine. I’ve read it—you’ve read it—everybody’s read the big book, most of us many more times than once. But I slip Crane’s copy into my hand nevertheless and flip through it slowly, feeling its words under my fingertips, giving myself the gift of its serenity. I fight an urge to just sink down to the floor and read the thing, pick a spot at random in the long and beautiful history of the first days and years of the Golden State, of our seven heroic founders and the obstacles they overcame and the gifts they left in their passing. Before I put it back I find one of its many black pages and place my hand down on it flat, feeling that power. Black pages; invisible truths; redacted facts about the time before, unknown and unknowable.
Man, this novel, I think, sliding it reluctantly back into place on Crane’s top shelf. So fucking good.
“Anything?” Ms. Paige says, from the other side of the room, and I say, “Nope.” And then, “Wait. Yes.”
All of the man’s books are like his copy of Past Is Prologue, showing little evidence of ever having been read, except for one, jammed in on the bottom shelf, and when I bend down with a grunt to see what it is, it’s the fucking dictionary.
I turn it over in my hand. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary, one of the little hardback editions with the cheap paper sleeve.
I tilt back the brim of my pinhole and look closer. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary is what it sounds like, a quick and dirty lexicon for basic use, and judging by the wear on the spine there’s no question that this one has been heavily used. I feel like I know Mose Crane just a little bit better than I did a second ago, and I like him a little bit better, because this book has been read, and it’s great, it’s damn terrific, because who reads the dictionary? It makes me wish for a sideways moment that I was at home, right now, in my own small gloomy lair, sitting in a heavy chair and reading the dictionary. Adding small facts, bits of truth, the meanings of words, like stray twigs to my nest.
Everybody has a dictionary; you’ve got to have one. Common knowledge is a bulwark. But—I smile, holding the dictionary in my palm—but nobody sits around reading the damn thing.
“Hey. Mr. Speculator.” Ms. Aster is pointing at the sofa. “Is she all right?”
“What?”
It’s Paige, standing by the sofa, frozen in place with one hand in the air, the other hand on her hip, her mouth slightly open like she was about to say something and then just stopped.
“Hey,” I say. “Ms. Paige?”
I snap my fingers.
“Goodness. What is going on?” Aster snaps her fingers too.
“Paige,” I say, a little louder, and she blinks, straightens up.
“Yeah. Sorry. But—are you—are you getting that?”
“Getting—” I look around. Now I recognize what I am seeing in her eyes, even though I’ve never worked with her before, never seen the way she reacts, because we all react differently. But it’s happening to her like it did to me two hours ago at Terry’s, when I found myself unable to continue with the simple act of living because the air had been bent by the Tarjin boy’s insistent lie. Now, though, I’m clean. I’m undisturbed. I’m not catching anything. The only person in the room besides us two Specs is frank old Ms. Aster, and Aster isn’t even talking, she’s just staring, grinning, loving this new wrinkle, the unaccustomed excitement, the witchy strangeness, Speculators on her property…and now this, whatever this is.
But what is this?
It’s not a deceitful utterance that Paige has got on to, that much is clear, it’s something deeper, something in the bones of the moment. She is standing there in the thrall of some dissonance, and I am not, and this is why Arlo wanted her in my car in the first place. She’s like Charlie is what I’m thinking, and the thought is so clear and complete it is like snapping awake from a long and dreamless sleep.
She is like Charlie.
“What are you catching, Ms. Paige?” I say, and she doesn’t answer, just stands there uncertainly.
“Tell me where it’s coming from.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Aysa. Where is it?”
“I—” She shrugs. She looks around. She takes one step toward the kitchen, then one step back toward the door. She can’t figure it. It’s like we’re kids and we’re playing a game—it’s hotter…colder—with Ms. Aster a fascinated observer.
Then I get it, it rushes up in me, solution to problem, because maybe I don’t have what Paige has, maybe I’m no Charlie, but I’ve been doing this a long fucking time, okay? I’m slow but I ain’t stupid.
“Ms. Aster,” I say. “Are Crane’s boxes on-site?”
“Of course they are,” she replies, with a proud thrusted chin. “What kind of place do you think I’m running here?”