7.

“Cigarette?”

“No thank you, sir.”

“Come on.”

I am digging through my pockets one at a time, scowling and huffing. You might think that after all these years of stalking the world in this damn coat I’d have decided where the cigarettes go, but I’m not that smart. At last I find the pack, yank out two smokes together, and poke one at Paige.

“Here. Take one.”

“No thank you.”

I feel myself bristle, I don’t know why. I light my cigarette, inhale deeply, and then exhale slowly. We’re still on Ellendale, standing beside the car, across the street from the courtyard building, looking up at Crane’s window, the same window we were looking out of a half hour ago. What if we could see ourselves? Look out on us from the window, while looking up at ourselves from out here?

“All right, look. Ms. Paige.”

“Yes?”

She looks over. Something is different in my voice. Or I hope it is. I’m trying to give her a softer surface. For the time being, anyway.

“Ms. Paige. First of all, like I said, you don’t have to call me ‘sir,’ okay? I’m just like you. All of this, the junior-senior Speculator stuff, it’s just words.” I take a second drag. I feel smoldering, cratered, like a volcano. Like a fire creature breathing smoke. “Rank within the Service is not important, okay? Not to people who matter. So you can call me Mr. Ratesic, or”—I’ve come this far, right?—“Laszlo.”

“Okay.”

“Or Laz. I don’t fucking care.”

“Okay.”

I glare at her.

“Okay, Mr. Ratesic.”

I laugh, just a little, a quiet rasp. “I’ll take it.”

I indulge another drag, studying Crane’s windows, wondering if he ever stood there and took a long moment like this, contemplating the street. I’m guessing not. I hold smoke in my mouth, enjoy the way it feels on the back of my throat.

“What I’m saying is, you might find that it helps. The smoking, I mean. When your throat hurts.”

“It doesn’t.” I look at her. She shrugs. “I don’t actually get that.”

I scratch my neck. “You don’t get what?”

“The throat. The eyes. Uh, coughing. And so on.”

“You don’t get any of it?”

“No.”

“No symptoms of any kind?”

“No.”

“When you’re seeing lies, when you’re feeling them? You don’t feel any physical—any reactionary effects at all?”

“I don’t, Mr. Ratesic.” She gives me a small apologetic smile. “I really don’t.”

“No shit?” I murmur, the words coming out soft with the smoke, like the memory of old words.

“No, sir.” She winces. “Sorry. No, Laszlo.”

I’m catching a chill off that information, as crazy as that sounds. It’s ninety degrees out here, I’m in my long black coat, and still the chill shudders up my spine like a ghost on feet. The chill of Charlie’s presence, out here leaning against the car with us, Charlie making himself known. She really is just like him.

She’s looking at me, curious. “I know that you do—that a lot of people, a lot of Specs, do get sort of a…” she trails off, tentative. “Get sick?”

“Not sick.” I shrug. “It’s more like an allergy. A sensitivity. Not every time, and not always bad. Not usually bad at all. But most of the time, after exposure, you feel it a little bit, that’s all. Your body feels the work.” I finish the cigarette and consider starting a second one. “And especially after speculating.”

“Right. Yeah. I don’t get that.”

I smoke in silence, contemplating my new partner. I don’t get that, she says, like it’s not a big deal. But that’s how it works. The gift and the burden. You do the work, you feel it, that’s all. We all get it—all of us, apparently, except for Aysa. She is at another level. She is in another place.

For some reason this revelation about my young charge registers in me as a kind of grief. I don’t know much about her yet, and I don’t like her because I don’t like anybody, but I can see that she is good. She’s kind and attentive and just fucking dying to do well in the world, to do good and do well. She’s too good to be carrying all of this: the gifts of discernment, of speculation—the “gift”—the burden of it, the responsibility to her fellow citizens, all of it.

“Ms. Paige, are you…”

“Yes?”

“Involved with anyone?”

Her eyes widen as she realizes what I’m asking. “You mean—like—”

“Yeah.” I gesture vaguely with one thick hand, searching the air for appropriate terminology. “Like a—sweetheart.”

Ms. Paige looks genuinely confused. “Why are you asking me that?”

“Because—I don’t know.”

Because I want to protect her, all of a sudden. I want to direct her away from all of this work, from the dullness and the danger, from me in my dark clothes and dark spirit, point her away from the whole preposterous enterprise and out toward the rest of our good and golden world, toward the Venice Beach skate park and the clear blue sky, toward her sweetheart and her future.

I say none of that. I just say, “We’re partners, right? We need to know each other.”

She is looking at me, mystified, probably recalling the Laszlo of an hour and a half ago, in the car on the way to the scene of death, brusquely shutting down her earnest efforts to spill her whole history. She’s trying to make sense of me, and I should tell her others have tried and it’s not worth the effort.

“Alison,” she says softly, with the happy wisp of a smile. “I do have a sweetheart. Her name is Alison.”

“Oh. Okay. Cool.”

“So—should we head back to the office?”

The moment is already passing—it has passed—and I let it go.

  

Arlo gave me to Charlie for a shadow, and he was none too excited about it.

“Are you kidding me, old man?” is what my big brother said, as a matter of Record—Charlie outraged and incredulous, never mind that I was standing right there. “I’m a solo operator. Lone wolf. You know that.”

“I think for a brief period you might open your heart to show what you know to Mr. Ratesic the younger.”

Me standing there in gray, hands stuffed in my pockets, examining the floor. Charlie wasn’t worried about hurting my feelings; of all the half-hidden facts he could discern without trying, one was surely that I would worship him under any circumstance.

And I did worship him. By the end of that first day’s training I worshipped him more than I ever had before, although my worship was tinged with the dawning realization that though I had followed him into Service, I would never in a million years live up to his reputation or abilities.

It was a slow day, my first day of speculation. Watching Charlie, standing back while he reconciled petty anomalies, testified in the Small Infelicities, helped a pair of impossibly dense regular policemen make sense of a bicycle theft.

But then, we’re on the way home, we’re turning right onto Westwood Boulevard, and he jumps the car up onto the curb, slams into park, and yells, “Come on! Come on!”

I run behind him into this little gas station convenience store, and the shopkeeper and the customer spin around at the sight of us: two big men in black and gray, tromping in together, me thinking with a burst of wild pride, We’re here! The Service has arrived!

Not that I knew what the fuck we were doing there. But Charlie does—Charlie has a hunch and Charlie is right. Charlie is always right.

“Hands up, friends,” he says, speaking to the room, smiling and moving slowly across the crowded aisles, grabbing a bag of chips for later. He puts out his hand for the customer’s wallet, and the guy tries to make a break for it, and Charlie snags him quick, slams him down, yanks the wallet from his pocket, and riffles the cash till he finds it.

“Well, what do you know?” he says, still straddling the dude, winking at me. Charlie in his black leather jacket and black boots.

It was a counterfeit bill. One fake, in a wallet in a man’s back pocket, us driving past on Westwood Boulevard.

That was Charlie, floating above us mere mortals, the jacket and the boots and the big stand-back grin, throwing out his hands wide so the world could witness his miracles. He offered to pay for the chips but the shopkeeper wouldn’t hear of it.

  

Aysa Paige and I park on the Plaza and walk together through the glass lobby of the Service, and I’m just getting used to how it feels, to not be walking alone.

But then Paige presses nine in the elevator, and I say, “What are you doing?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing?”

“Why are you pressing the button for the ninth floor?”

“Isn’t that where the Liaison is?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So don’t we need to talk to him?”

“Nope.”

I cross my arms and she crosses hers too. I stare at her and she stares back at me. The elevator door opens on nine and I wait like that, daring her to get off. It slides back closed and we resume our ascent.

“Mr. Ratesic.”

“What?”

“What ‘What?’? Look. We’ve obviously got something going on here, right?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘obviously.’ I’m not a fan of the word ‘obviously,’ just in general.”

“But you don’t think it’s time to at least requisition the stretch?”

“No. I don’t think.”

“Okay, okay.”

I’m guessing the soft edge has come out of my voice. I’m trying to be neutral, just hold a nice, calm, skeptical expression, but Paige is looking at me like I’m about to take a bite out of her neck.

“And what stretch of reality is it you think we need to see?”

“Just—the roof.”

“What roof?”

I’m playing devil’s advocate. I’m being an asshole. I’m somewhere in the charming middle ground between those two. This kid, she wants to jump in, both feet, jump in and grab on to something. But if she can’t make a case, build an argument, I don’t care how sensitive she is.

“On Vermont Avenue. The roof at the moment Crane falls. I think we can both agree, at this point, that there is something anomalous about it.”

“Oh? I recall you agreeing with me that there was nothing anomalous about the death. Should we requisition that stretch? Of us having that conversation?”

“No.” She flushes. “I just mean—the whole incident.”

“There’s no incident.”

“Well, there’s something.”

“Yeah, but is there?”

The elevator stops and settles and the door sweeps open.

“Holy cow,” says Paige, in a different voice, and I sigh, smile very slightly.

“I know.”

It’s the view. She must not have noticed it when Arlo brought her in this morning, or maybe she’s just seeing it again as if for the first time, just like I do every time, even though I’ve been coming off that elevator into this room—just one big room, totally wrapped in glass—for much of my life. We linger at the glass, held by the majesty of the sprawling city: the bright glass towers of downtown, the upright cones and rectangles, the low gray hulks of the garment district. It goes on for miles from here: north to the fields, west to the water. The desalination plants that line the shore north of the pier. The acres of avocados, of wheat and corn, the rice and lettuce, the marijuana plants and the grapes for wine. The electric automobile plants that make the trucks that bring the wheat from the fields and the fish from the harbors to all corners of the State.

Way out to the west is the water; to the east and to the north are the rolling tops of the distant hills, with pockets of clouds clustered across their peaks, their contours crisply outlined by the sun.

Aysa says “Sir,” and I give her a warning look, but the edge has come off my sternness now. That view gets me—it gets me every time.

“Laszlo.”

“Yup.”

“You’ve been doing this longer than me.”

“Well noted, Ms. Paige. You’ve been doing it for, what, three hours?”

I am walking to my desk, raising a hand to Cullers, who barely moves, and Paige tails me all the way, talking nonstop, piling point upon point. Burlington is here, at his desk, grunting, typing out what looks like a long crime scene report, but other than that it’s pretty quiet.

“There are anomalies in Renner’s statement.”

“Renner?”

“The boss. Manager. And there are anomalies in the dead man’s home. In his Provisional. Two weeks of missing days.”

“Which so far as we know have zero connection to his death.”

“Well, sure, but how can we know what we don’t know?”

I sigh. It’s a fair point. I’m just hesitant, that’s all, about going down to nine, engaging with the Liaison Office, jumping through the thousand hoops required to review stretches of reality.

For what? A man is dead but men die all the time. That’s one thing that’s true as it gets: people are dying all day long. I look over at Arlo’s desk, in search of wise counsel, but Arlo’s desk is empty.

“I don’t mean to be contumacious,” says Paige. “But—”

“You don’t mean to be what?”

“Contumacious. It means stubborn.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“Respectfully, Laz, it does.”

“I think I know what words mean.”

Cullers, from his desk, from under the hand towel draped over the top half of his face, makes an amused snort. The whole thing is ridiculous—two stubborn people arguing over whether a word means stubborn or not, two dogs tearing at a bone of truth. This kid, buttons polished, eyes shining, barely out of police academy diapers, pushing back on her immediate supervisor over a minor and irrelevant fact. She is all readiness and upright zeal; she is dying to show me what she’s made of.

“Okay, you know what? Be my guest.”

Aysa’s eyes widen. Her spine straightens perceptibly. “Really?”

I shrug. “Sure. Go down to nine, tell Woody you want to pull a stretch from the Record. You would like to fill out all of the ten thousand forms necessary. If that’s what you want to do, kid, knock yourself out.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Great.”

I’m being hyperbolic about the forms, but just barely. Reviewing material from the Record is a massive pain, even for the Service, one of the few institutional bodies with license to do so in any circumstance. If reviewing stretches of reality were easy, everybody would be doing it all day long: to settle petty arguments, satisfy prurient curiosity, win bets. Forget all that. Access even to fleeting instants of reality requires multiple levels of bureaucratic review and regulatory rigmarole, and that’s not even counting having to reckon with the miserable personality of Woodrow Stone, the Speculative Service’s Chief Liaison Officer to the Permanent Record.

Aysa Paige, undaunted, is heading back to the elevator. I watch her walk, the sun-sparkled heights of downtown like a dream vision behind her, through the windows.

“Hey, actually—Paige.”

“Yeah?”

I tug at my beard a second, think it over. Can’t hurt, right?

“As long as you’re going. One more thing I want you to put in for.”

“Oh?” She takes out her Day Book, clicks her pen open, eager pupil.

“Tell Woody I want stakeout stretches on Mose Crane’s front door.”

“On his—on the door?”

“Yup. You have the address?”

“Yes. What’re stakeout stretches?”

“Woody will know.”

“But can you just tell me?”

“It’s just, like, you know, all the stretches caught by the same capture over a sustained time period. Like, for example, somebody’s front door, all hours, for the week leading up to today.” I think for a moment. “Let’s do two weeks. I want to see if anybody strange was poking around. Besides us, I mean.”

“Okay.” She’s writing. “Front door. Stakeout stretch. Two weeks leading up to today.” She finishes writing and frowns. “That sounds like a big ask.”

“It is. Which is why I’m glad I’m not the one asking. Good luck, Ms. Paige.”

She gives me a smart salute and holds it, and I wait until the door closes before I laugh out loud.

“Contumacious,” I say to myself, shaking my head. “This kid.”

But then the word sort of sticks with me. An awkward set of syllables, jangling and mysterious. Like a magician’s invocation. I say it piece by piece, measuring the word in my mouth: “con,” “tu,” “ma,” “cious.”

Well, let’s just see, Officer Aysa Paige, I think. Let’s just damn well see.

I’ve got plenty of dictionaries, of course, a ton of ’em, along with all the other reference books that crowd the office of our division like they crowd all the other offices in the Service, all the other offices in the Golden State. Gazetteers and Almanacs, encyclopedias and timelines, Notable Individuals and The Book of Weights and Measures. My own well-loved copy of Past Is Prologue, of course, the big book, close to hand so I can take it down when I want and dip into the glorious early history of the State, so I can lay my hands on the black pages and feel their mystery.

Right now though, I just need a dictionary. Along the inner wall of our office is The Full Dictionary of the Golden State, all seventeen volumes, with the bold main entries and the word histories in tiny type, with all the illustrations and charts and diagrams, the latest updates in a series of stapled inserts in the back of each volume.

I’ve also got The Speculator’s Field Dictionary, leather-bound and portable.

And then, of course, closest to hand is Mose Crane’s copy of that same Everyday Citizen’s, the universally issued handheld lexicon.

I like a man who likes his dictionary.

I open it up, about a third of the way in, where the Gs or Hs would be, and I feel all of my blood freeze and stop, and I snap it closed again.

It’s not a dictionary.

There has been, since we left Dolly Aster’s building, a quiet burble of speculation chugging along in the back of my brain, a faint gurgling ever-presence like a creek on the far side of a campground, and now, all of a sudden, it becomes a rush, a crashing wall of water that staggers me up and out of my chair. I push the book off the desk and it slams on the floor and I stare at it lying there, like a feral animal, motionless but radiating menace. Cullers looks up at the sound and then down again, shifts his position, and drifts back to sleep.

I bend warily to pick the book up, slide it back on my desk, keeping my face a good foot from the object itself.

The cover looks like the cover of the dictionary, there’s no question about it. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary, the font and typesetting so familiar I could have drawn it myself. Beneath it, in smaller type: A Product of the Golden State Publishing Arm.

But only the paper jacket is real; the cover has been removed from a real dictionary and wrapped around this book instead, and carefully trimmed, I now realize, cut at top and bottom to fit precisely. Beneath the paper cover of the dictionary, the book has a real cover, pale yellow with stark red letters: “The Prisoner.” And then, underneath it, in smaller type, “A Novel,” and then, in smaller letters still, “By Benjamin Wish.”

A stolen cover or a counterfeited cover hiding a real one. Like snakeskin, like a skein, a shadow truth drawn across the object’s reality like a curtain. A big lie, a forgery, a brazen act of material pretense. I wrap my fingers around the edges of my desk. By instinct, just to feel something real, to grip on to it. With both hands I clutch the desk’s edge like a window ledge and hold on tight.

And then—a deep breath—I open the book again, look down and then up again, just long enough to read a sentence, grab the words without feeling them:

—and what of the boy himself? What was transpiring meanwhile within the fragility of his body, within his mind’s blank interior, while outside him all of this whirl of activity: his doctor’s interventions, his parents’ desperate pleading? His body lay still and seemingly at rest but inside there was life, after all, but life of a kind—

I close the book and press my hands down on top, one hand flat and then the other hand flat on top of the first, press both hands down as if on the lid of a chest to keep it from springing open again.

It’s fiction. For fuck’s sake. It’s fiction.

“Hey. Cullers. Hey.”

“Yup?” He says it with forcefulness, the feigned alert tone people use when they’ve just been woken up.

“Do you know where Mr. Vasouvian is?”

“What?”

“Arlo? Where is he? Where is Arlo?”