10.

“The past is a dangerous country.”

“Unknown and unknowable.”

“This is true.”

“And always shall be.”

“Well, well, Mr. Speculator. Twice in the same day.”

“Lucky you, right?”

“Yes, yes. Lucky me.”

Captain Elena Tester beckons me into her cluttered office, and we’re both smiling as she shakes my hand, but there’s displeasure in her smile, right behind the teeth. She doesn’t like me being here in her office this morning; she doesn’t like that I didn’t call first, doesn’t like what any of this implies. It’s one thing to run into each other at a crime scene, two law enforcement professionals crossing paths on the job; it’s another thing entirely for me to be darkening her doorway a few hours later, unannounced but clearly on official business.

Nobody stopped me from coming in, by the way. Not outside, under the fluttering flag of the Bear and Stars. Not in the elevator or coming down the hall. The regular police are prickly about their jurisdiction, but nobody’s going to stop a Spec on his rounds. The black clothes and the pinhole function like a passport, guaranteeing free movement within the Golden State. Stand back, stay clear.

So Captain Tester is surprised to see me, and she’s not happy, but this shouldn’t take long. I just need to clear this up.

I point to one of the three straight-backed chairs that form a semicircle around her desk. “Any one of these?”

“Of course.”

I sit. I pull papers out of my briefcase.

“So. Elena. I have to ask you a few questions.”

“Okay, Laszlo.”

“Four or five questions. Possibly more, depending on your answers.”

She gives out a little impatient puff of air. “Okay, Laszlo. I’m ready. Let’s go.”

I nod and smile. My pinhole is capturing. The room is capturing. Captures on the doorframe, captures in the corners. A capture on her desk rotating slow, taking a sweep.

“I am going to read back to you the statement you gave to me this morning, in Los Feliz. At 3737 Vermont Avenue.”

“Statement?”

“Yes. The statement you gave me this morning, at—”

“We were having a conversation, Laz.”

“Yes.” I clear my throat. “But you did state it. It was a statement.”

“Well, definitionally…” She stops, takes a deep breath. I notice that her hands are tight on the edge of her desk. Holding fast to reality, her reality. “No, it’s okay. You’re right. Of course you are right, Laszlo.” She stands abruptly. “Do you want coffee?”

“I’ve had some. Thank you.”

“I’ll make myself one, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.”

I wait. She drums her fingers on the corner of the little sink along a wall of her office, beneath the wide southerly window, while her machine burbles and brews. We are in two different places at the same time. We are a Speculator and a police captain working together to establish facts, and also simultaneously we are two friends, two people just talking. There are words and there is context; there are declarations and there is the ground in which those declarations are planted.

The coffeemaker issues a small-motor exclamation and hisses out its mud-brown stream. Now that I can smell the coffee I want some after all. Too late now.

“So,” says Elena. “My statement.”

“Yes. I asked you what you were doing at 3737 Vermont Avenue this morning, and you said, ‘I caught it on the scanner.’ You said, ‘I live near here. On Talmadge.’ You said, ‘As long as I was in the area, I thought I’d babysit the homeowner.’” I look up from my Day Book and she’s waiting expectantly. “That was your statement.”

“Okay,” she says flatly, which of course is not an answer.

“Elena. Captain Tester. I’m asking if those are true statements.”

Astonishment spreads through her body, a tightening fury: her back straightens, her hand curls tightly around the coffee cup, denting the paper sides. The pupils of her eyes narrow to knife ends. “You’re asking me if I was lying.”

“Yes, Elena. Captain. Yes.”

“And wouldn’t you know?”

“If you had dissembled outright, Captain, yes. I would have caught it.”

“Smelled it,” she says, giving the words a tight contemptuous spin. “Or—sensed it? Isn’t that it?”

“Well—no. Not exactly. But yes. If you were lying, I would have known. If there was context that was left out, I would need you to tell me that.” I have a file in my lap. A manila folder, plain cover, unmarked tab. Elena is looking at it closely. “I would need you to tell me that now.”

She sets down her coffee and sits glaring at me, and she can be angry if she wants to be, but the woman stood there and made a small proffer that was true but incomplete, and we both know it—at least, I thought I knew it before, but only now, looking at her eyes, feeling the cold fury my questions have inspired, do I know it for sure. She didn’t lie, but she did something just as bad, arguably worse, especially for someone in her position, high on the org chart of the regular police, a pillar of law enforcement just like me: she has not lied, but she has found a way not to have to. She dug herself a rabbit hole of conversational cleverness and slipped inside it. Arlo Vasouvian, the expert, the guru, could tilt his head back, half shut his eyes, and recite the entire statute, the complete philosophical and legislative history of context and omission: if someone says X instead of Y, that is a lie; if someone says X but not Y, we have then a case of relative relevance. Context is everything. Context is infinite.

There is some violation here, but I don’t know yet what it is.

“Was there, possibly, some information that you might not, in the moment, have thought relevant?”

“Yes,” says Tester immediately. “Possibly there was.”

Her eyes remain on mine. Her body has not relaxed. I am conscious of my bulk, my shape inside the tight space of the chair, the room, the moment. I feel myself in the small wood chair, bent toward Elena, hunched and ursine. We stare at each other like two animals in a forest clearing. There are pictures on her desk: her kids. Her husband, Al, who died in the line a few years back. Her friends. I wonder if there are any pictures of Silvie. I want to look. I won’t look. I don’t.

“The house on Vermont,” I say, “is deeded to a woman named Karen Sampson.”

“Stipulated,” says Tester immediately, but I’m not accepting stipulations. She has to know I won’t be. I open the file I’m holding and take out three pieces of paper, material evidence, and I spread them out on the desk in front of her like a gambler laying down cards. The mortgage deed to the house. The certificate of occupancy. A carbon of the purchase from the previous owner.

“Karen Sampson owns that house. Does she live there?”

“Yes.”

The next page is a one-sheet backgrounder on Sampson. These documents I didn’t need to pull from the identity office. I simply went downstairs to the twenty-ninth floor, on my way from my office to here, and spent half an hour on public Record searches. Karen Sampson is a notable individual—a lot of this information I’m now producing came right out of the most recent edition of Notable Individuals.

“Ms. Sampson is a producer of recorded music.”

“Yes.”

“And she has a criminal history. She’s spent time in jail. Various drug offenses. A driving-while-drunk, nine months ago.”

Elena’s answers have started to come less readily. “Yes. That’s—correct. She’s—Karen—has struggled. As we all have.”

I nod. I have made myself acquainted with Karen Sampson’s checkered past. I reviewed her records carefully before coming over here, looking for Tester’s signature on an arrest report or a plea deal. Finding nothing untoward. Not yet.

“Ms. Sampson is one of your oldest friends.”

“Yes. So?”

“Do you need more coffee, Elena? Do you need to take a break?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

More papers come out of my file. Photocopies of pictures of the two old friends together, arm in arm on the beach, a windy day, a much younger and more carefree Elena Tester holding down a floppy beach hat so it won’t blow away.

“Elena, listen to me. I don’t think that you killed anyone. I don’t think you had anything to do with any of this. But I have an obligation, now that a case has begun, to dispel any possible anomalies. Okay?”

She says something very softly, a sound with no motion of the mouth, as if her lips are refusing to move.

“What?”

“I said go ahead, Laszlo. Ask your fucking questions.”

I sigh. I find the right page in my Day Book and ask my next question. “When you heard the address on the scanner, were you concerned about the potential consequences of a death and subsequent investigation on this property?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes,” she says, and gives me my words back to me, my words in my voice, like she’s a deck replaying the cued stretch. “When I heard the address on the scanner, I was concerned about the potential consequences of a death and subsequent investigation on this property.”

“So you rushed to the scene to protect your friend Karen.”

I wait. Elena stares at the ceiling.

I’ve arrived at the heart of it, and I will collect my flat fact, gather up the small piece of the truth I’ve come for, and go back to the roofer and his missing boxes.

“No,” Tester says flatly, and I blink.

“No?”

“No. I did not rush there.”

“So ‘rush’ is imprecise,” I concede, irritated by the quibble, especially now, when she’s in such a hurry to wrap this up, for me to get out of her hair. “I withdraw the ambiguous verb. You went there, with more than typical speed. Okay? To do what? To—”

“I didn’t go there,” says Tester. Truth. Truth and then context: “I was already there.”

“You were…already there?”

I’ve never been a big fan of the figure the mind races. Minds do not race. Mine doesn’t. Thoughts don’t whip in wild circles like small storms, chasing themselves around in pointless frenzies. When I visualize my thoughts I see them emerging half formed from some unseen basal station, bubbling up as if from a seafloor, rising and cohering, gaining mass as they combine. The mind does not race; it conjures, it swells.

“You were already at your friend’s home at six twenty-nine in the morning?”

“Yes,” she says. “I was there.”

“Was Karen in the house?”

“No.”

“Were you alone in the house?”

“No.”

I feel it—I feel it all at once and all over my body, in the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. Not the distinct atmospheric warp of a lie entering the near air, but something more elemental, something plain: understanding, rushing through me like the world tilting. I lean closer, lower my voice, as if there’s any privacy possible. As if the room isn’t capturing every word so each can be transcribed later on, the truth forever bubbling out from itself, the Objectively So endlessly accreting and growing like life, growing like life grows.

“Do you…” I say slowly. “Do you, in addition to your relationship with Ms. Sampson, have a relationship with Ms. Sampson’s husband?”

Elena gives her head a small tight nod, but that’s not enough and she knows it’s not enough. I could get up right now, stuff my papers back in my bag, make some apologetic noises, and go. If this is all it is, it’s nothing. A scrap, a tatter of incidental truth, something that slid off the roof along with the roofer, like a dead leaf that tumbled from the gutter as it tore free. And maybe if I didn’t already find the dictionary that was not—maybe if Mose Crane didn’t have days missing from his Record—maybe I’d even do it. Let Elena off the hook and shuffle backward out of her office.

But I can’t do it now. Now it’s too late.

So I make her confirm it for the Record. I make her say it louder, which she does, too loud, pointedly loud. “I have a relationship with Karen’s husband.”

“And what is his name?”

“Barney Sampson,” she says, and in her voice I can hear that it’s all gone, any trace of residual affection between Elena Tester and myself is gone now, never to return.

Extramarital affairs aren’t illegal, of course; lying about them is illegal, as all lies are illegal, but Elena didn’t do that either. She was simply doing something in secret, hidden from everyone but not from the Record. She hoped that her friend Karen would never find out, and she certainly hoped that no Speculator would ever lope into her office with an investigative agenda that happened to intersect with her infidelity.

Everything is on the Record, just waiting to be discovered: the whispered confession, the stolen kiss. This is not the goal of our good and golden systems; the goal is simply the maintenance of reality as it occurs, so that all can live together within the same sheltering truth, safe within the strong high walls of the Objectively So. We may keep secrets from one another, but not from the Record, and if life is therefore made more difficult for the adulterer or the petty-cash-box pilferer, for the student with his eye on his deskmate’s paper or the worker who clocks in late, surely that’s a price worth paying—or even, looked at differently, not a price at all, but a benefice. A gift we are given by the ever-presence of truth.

Captain Elena Tester, right about now, isn’t seeing it that way. Her face has colored. She stares at me, eyes lit with anger, as I press on.

“How long have you had a relationship with Mr. Sampson?”

“Judge,” she says.

“What?”

“Judge Sampson.”

A judge, as it turns out, in the Court of Aberrant Natural Phenomena. His courtroom is on Grand Street, in one of the old slate-gray justice buildings. Those who come before the ANP are most often referred from the Social Services divisions, but it certainly would not be unusual for the regular police, including officers under Tester’s jurisdiction, to be called to offer testimony before him. These facts paint a certain picture, and I record its outline in my Day Book, keeping my face neutral. Not just an intimate problem but a professional problem, a conflict-of-interest problem. A conflagration of problems for Elena Tester. I have walked in here today and lit a fire on her desk.

“And now here is my question for you, Mr. Speculator.”

Elena stands up, places her palms flat on the desk. Whatever this question is, I am supposed to answer it and then go. Our interview is over. “Are you comfortable, destroying my life offhandedly? Destroying Barney’s life? Because a man happened to fall off his roof? Is that something that makes you happy?”

“No,” I say. “Not happy.”

“But content.”

I think that over for a moment, judging the true, full meaning of the word “content.”

“My professional responsibility is to follow this incident until its truth is full and final,” I say quietly. “My personal hope is that it causes you no unnecessary grief.”

“Oh,” she says. “Great. My personal hope is that you can go fuck yourself. Do you have any more questions for me, Mr. Ratesic?”

“No, Captain,” I say. “Not at this time.”

She glares at me, the rims of her eyes gone red, as I rise to go. I’m at the door with all my papers gathered up, and when I look back, Tester stares at me coldly, as if from a great distance.

“You weren’t good enough for her, Laszlo.”

“I know.”

Truth, a sliver of weaponized truth.

“That’s what happened to you and Silvie. In case you didn’t know. You were never, ever good enough.”

  

I stop at the charmingly gritty Asian market just down the road from my house, near where Bundy turns into Centinela. Tucked inside is a brightly lit food court where you can get seven different kinds of ramen, including the kind I love, miso broth swimming with thick-cut slabs of pork and sprinkled with sliced green onions. In line for the soup, I’m thinking Never good enough. Digging out a handful of crumpled bills, muttering “Thanks,” driving home with the bag balanced precariously on the shotgun seat, and I’m thinking Never, ever good enough.

I get home from the market and there’s no chance Silvie will be waiting for me on the porch as I would have found her six months ago, sipping wine on the green glider we bought together at a Palms yard sale, awaiting me in the waxy moonlight, raising her glass in an ironic toast as I trudge toward her up our steps.

And yet my heart fills with dumb hope as I shut the car door. The Moon is in fact waxy in the sky, and the green glider is on the porch, and the breeze is easing it gently back and forth, but Silvie isn’t on it.

I put my dinner down in the living room and tell the wall-mounted to turn on. The wall-mounted is just like the screen at work, except it’s bigger and flatter and you don’t control it—it’s more like you’re at its mercy. In the office you can requisition reality in the official capacity, get the stretches you want and slide them into your screen and say “Go.” But with the wall-mounted, you just pick from among whatever happens to be on. It’s all slices of life, culled from captures all over the city, arranged by the entertainment professionals into themed streams: “Arguments in Restaurants,” “Surprise Proposals,” “People Searching for Small Things They Lost.”

I flip around for a while in search of something suitably nontaxing, maybe one of the unpopulated streams, “Traffic Lights Cycling” or something like that. I settle for “Mildly Comical Misunderstandings,” unpack my soup, and eat it slowly, trying not to get any on my coat because I know I’ll be wearing it tomorrow. I say “Play” to the wall-mounted and watch some poor asshole waiting at the Superior Java on Finley Avenue, checking his watch, while his date on split screen waits at the Echo Park location, checking hers.

When I’m done I turn off the screen, chuck the empty containers in the trash, and head downstairs to do my archiving.

My own Provisional Record is in the car park under the house, dimly lit, thick with dust and spiderwebs no matter how often I clean it out, which is not nearly often enough. I tear from my Day Book the duplicate copies of the six pages I’ve gone through today, fold them neatly, and put them in a fresh Mylar bag. I add all the purchase receipts from my meals, the conversation stamps from everyone I talked to, all the detritus from the day that has been. I seal the bag and mark the date and time and open the box and put the bag in and close the box again.

And there, at the very bottom of my bag, lying there heavy with menace like unexploded ordnance, is the book.

The Prisoner.

Forged material. A piece of Not So. The air around it warped, thick, shimmering with dissonance.

I turn it over in my hands. Take it away with me, back to the kitchen.

The day, my day, is over. It’s on the Record. There is darkness at every window. But here I am, awake and alive in the nighttime silence, contemplating this strange novel.

It’s still wrapped in its pretend jacket, masquerading as The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary. I wish to read it. I want to. I want to know what Mose Crane was doing with this otherworldly artifact, and aside from that—more than that—I am overcome with a desire to do what we don’t do, what the world will not allow, what is prevented by the Basic Law and common sense and conscience, which is to immerse myself in an alternate reality and luxuriate in it, let it rise up and over me and bear me away.

The book wants me to read it, but I don’t. I stuff it in my bureau, its true face hidden behind its phony cover, and I go to bed.