17.

Everybody keeps everything. Archiving is a bulwark. You do it. I do it. We have to do it.

I do it now, down in the crawl space beneath my small house. I unpack all of the flat facts I’ve collected, the whole paper trail of the day that was, a day’s worth of living. Conversation stamps and stamps of presence, the receipt from passing through the gate arm at the administrative campus, the receipt for every cup of coffee and doughnut consumed, the record of my interrogation by the regular police in the hallway outside Judge Sampson’s chambers. The slip of stamped paper I was handed on the seventh floor of the Service building, when we turned over Sampson’s Night Book to evidence processing.

I tear today’s pages of notes clean from my Day Book, one at a time, careful to leave the carbons in place.

My motions are deliberate, slow, careful. I have performed this ritual many times. Once for every day of my adulthood. Those notes relating to Crane, to the death I was investigating and am not investigating any longer I fold in half, and then fold in half again, make of them a small hard square, a stiff packet with four sharp corners, and this I slide last into the bag and seal it. Mose Crane is dead, but his death is not an event for me. It is gone from my mind.

When I’m done, I don’t get up. I stare at my boxes, thinking maybe I’ll start opening things up. It’s tempting. It’s always tempting. I could just sit here for a while, rummaging through years gone by, digging up scraps of the past for consideration. People do it. I have done it. Sort through the old years, seek out certain incidents, key days, fragments of memory, spread them out on the ground and just wallow for a while, before sweeping it all back together and stamping the bags “Unsealed and resealed.” I could waste hours in reflection, self-abasement, and recrimination. There are people who fall down that rabbit hole and never come up.

Not me. Not tonight.

I rise stiffly, keeping my body very still. Wriggle back out of the crawl space, walk slowly back up the stairs.

“Fuck.”

I find my face in the mirror, in the darkness of my empty house. Silvie took a lot of the furniture when she left, but this standing mirror is still here, by the front door, leaning against the wall. “It might be fun to look at yourself in the morning sometimes,” she used to say. “Before you leave the house.”

There is blood still on my forehead, up by my hairline, at the level of the roots. Blood still in my eyebrows, small flecks like red dust.

I pass through the kitchen into the bedroom, peeling off the rest of my clothes as I go. Coat and pants, shirt and tie.

I knew a one-legged policeman once. When I was still on the regular force, before I followed my brother’s lead and drifted into Service. His name was Rafael, and we used to drink together, after shift, at a bar on Grand Avenue north of downtown. He lost the leg, he told me, when he was a teenager, but he could still feel it. “Sometimes I swear I could touch it. Sometimes I swear if I look away, and look back—” He was pretty drunk. I was drunk too. He never told anyone, he said, about how he still felt like the leg was there. “Please, Laz, keep it to yourself, okay? They’ll jack me up on that shit,” he whispered, beery breath in my ear. It was late at night, just taxis on the street outside. “On that Clarify. They’ll kick me the fuck over the wall.”

He still felt the leg and he liked to feel it. He liked to believe that it was real.

I will miss my case but my case is gone.

I stumble into the bathroom and piss and splash water on my face.

I come out into the bedroom and see a dark shape in the greater darkness of my unmade bed. Nested like a dead animal in the mass of rumpled sheets.

A book. The book. Still in the cover that says The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary, but I know what it is, I can see its true face through the mask. The Prisoner: A Novel. By Benjamin Wish. It’s on my bed.

What the fuck?

It is open, facedown, spine bent, pages riffled, like a bird shot out of the sky.

It’s impossible, of course. It’s fucking impossible.

Because I jammed the book into the dresser this morning. Didn’t I? I did. I think back, throw my mind out backward, like feeling behind you in the darkness. This morning. To the diner, to the office, Kelly Tarjin begging me for help, Silvie at the Record, the judge, the expert, the day replaying itself, but I know—I know—I know that book was in the dresser when I left.

It sings to me.

From the bed, it is singing.

I can hear it singing.

I left it in a drawer. Didn’t I? I did. I know that I—

“No,” the voice sings, the visiting voice. “You—”

I clutch at the side of my head. I’m in my T-shirt and underpants, alone in this room except that I’m on the Record. In this room there are three captures: one above the door, one embedded in the floor lamp, one on the ceiling fan. It’s just lucky the jacket is still on the book, but if someone was in here—if someone came in—

No one came in.

I am staring at the book, and I take a step toward it.

I want you. The thought dances to life. Like a stranger, a visitor, an alien voice.

I turn my back on the book.

I take my weapon out of the bedside table and perform a careful circuit, room by room. I am seeking an intruder, but as I move slowly through the house, I begin to feel like I am the intruder myself, stalking through the handful of rooms in my little house and seeing each one anew. I can picture myself, as if from above, a dark figure, moving in shadow.

I don’t find anything. In the kitchen, my juice glass is still on the kitchen counter, lightly stuck in the place where I left it, and my plate is in the sink. The light is on in the bathroom. My pile of last night’s dirty clothes is still in the laundry room. I peer out each of the windows, checking for signs of entry. I crane my head up and down the street. Across the street is a wide field filled with lima beans and lettuces. Down the slope from my backyard is a four-lane road, and across the road are acres planted with avocado.

It doesn’t matter how long I look: I won’t find anything. Nobody’s been here. The front door was undisturbed and no one has a key, and who would break in and take nothing, disturb nothing, only take out a book and not even take it—just open it and leave it on the bed?

No one. No one would do that.

So I return to the bedroom living in two realities at once—We always are, aren’t we, despite all our efforts we are—believing and not believing that someone was or is in the house with me, knowing and not knowing that I am alone with The Prisoner: A Novel.

I know exactly what it wants. It wants me to read it. That can’t be so, of course, because it is an inanimate object, possessing no impulses or desires of its own. The book does not carry intentionality. It simply is, but there it is, having somehow crawled from my drawer and thrown itself open on the bed, willful and desperate for attention.

I grab my head with both hands, press my flattened palms to my temples like I am trying to keep my head from toppling off, and growl.

The book wants me to read it, and I want that too. I want it very badly.

I should go to the fridge and find a beer and drink it, maybe drink another one. I should turn on my wall-mounted and watch some stream, any stream, fucking “Slipping on Sidewalk Cracks” or “Old Men Walking Dogs.” Anything. I should brush my teeth and wash the blood from my hair, and fall into bed like a tree, get up in the morning, and see what Alvaro has written on the board for me to pursue.

Yes, there was a case at 3737 Vermont Avenue, there was a dead man on the ground at that address, there were certain associated anomalies, but all of that is gone now. That matter is unknown and unknowable, and that is a part of the job—it is part of living in the world. There are certain things that cannot be known and can never be known, and this must be accepted, our safety and our future depend upon it, and I am trying to bear it and depend upon it, and it is like knives, it is like holding the blades of knives.

Charlie could have done it. Charlie would have outsmarted them before he could be outsmarted, Charlie would have sensed the maneuverings of the gray man in the corner, seen the wall the Expert was building and tunneled under it, flown over it. Charlie would have come back laughing with the whole truth and nothing but, dangling from his clenched fist like a monster’s severed head.

Every time I close my eyes my body hums for solace, and every time I open them I see the novel lying on the bed.

I put down my weapon. I pick up the book. I need it.

I start at page one.

“Listen, lady,” said Shenk very slowly, shaking his head. “You’re in the wrong place. Okay? You need to find yourself a lawyer.”

“You are a lawyer.”

“Yes. I’m a lawyer.” Shenk smiled. He felt weary. He was tired of smiling. “But what you need is, you need a lawyer lawyer. A real lawyer. You understand?”

That’s how it starts, page one, the page after the title page. A lawyer in his office, morose and deflated, visited by a needful stranger, and already I can feel the book’s claws in me, the claws of fiction. Who is the lawyer and who is the woman, what is their past and future—

I put the fucking thing down. I put it down on the edge of the bed and then I pick it up again and throw it against the wall.

I stand up and grit my teeth and stare out the window at the sleeping city. The tops of palm trees, the distant movement of brake lights. Reality all around me.

I know what is going to happen already, I can feel it happening. I have been warned of this my whole life. We all have—I have and you have. I have spent my whole life protecting against alternate realities, and now this one is like an injection, it is like pushing poison directly into my veins, and I can’t stand it, I can’t allow this to happen, but then I yell “Fuck!” and I storm across the room and grab the book with greedy fingers and find the page I was on and start to read again.

The Prisoner is the story of a boy named Wesley Keener, who becomes gravely ill after a botched surgery, and it’s about his family, desperate for his recovery, desperate and scared and sad, and it’s about the lawyer that they hire—that’s the lawyer from the opening passage—his name is Shenk, and he is a sad and furious man when we meet him but then we understand that he wasn’t always that way, it was this case, this broken boy who made him so, and it’s about the boy himself, who lies for most of the story in silence, in a vegetative state on a hospital bed with some sort of mysterious alien life moving inside him—that’s the part I saw yesterday, the section I already read, the part I glanced at accidentally in my office. I charge on, I read and read. It’s all happening in a city called Los Angeles, within a state called California, which is related somehow to the Golden State, bearing some similarities in the detailing, in weather and geography and here and there in street names, landmarks—which is disquieting and yet mesmerizing and the thing about the book is that none of it is true, nothing is confirmed or certain. The book speaks in the voice of various of its characters, and each of them—the lawyer, the boy’s father and his mother, the doctor—has an opinion about what must have happened, each of them marching around shaking their own version like a fist, and so it is a riot of subjectivities, a violence of truths, and the fuck of it is—is that as I read I am beginning to cry, tears rolling hot down my heavy cheeks and disappearing into my beard because I do not understand this—

And then I feel like I do understand it, what it means, of course I do, but I can’t think about it, it doesn’t bear consideration, it—

The world as I have understood it is slipping out from under me and I ought to stop but I can’t. I can’t stop. I keep reading and as I read the book settles down over me, it becomes reality as I read it, the air becomes fuzzed, to the point that when I look up it is like the reality of my room is less real than the reality inside the book.

I read it for hours, curled forward over the small artifact of the book, sitting on the wood floor of my house, feeling the real world under my ass, leaning against the wall and feeling the steadying actualness of drywall and plaster against my back, and this extraordinary struggle plays out inside the boy, but really the novel revolves around the people outside him, who have no idea what’s going on, just as I, reading it, have no idea really what is going on, and I want to know what is real even though I know that none of it is real, that a novel is just a book of lies, a bundle of falsehoods like sticks lashed together with sentences for wires, the boy invaded by alien intelligence and the doctor drinking himself sick over his failure and the father seeking his own truths in a maddening truth-diffusing system of systems called the Internet, and I can feel all of this non-sense, all of this not-true, it’s all watering my eyes and itching my throat, burning me down from the inside, and still I can’t stop—

I am approaching the end of the book. The stars have shifted the sky. The father and the doctor and the lawyer have traveled to a different city, a glittering vacation city, in search of a last chance, a hope they know to be a wild and impossible kind of hope. This city is called Las Vegas, and the author, Wish, describes it as “a place where, famously and dangerously, big gambles are known at times to pay off.” And as I read, as I travel along with the people who love the boy, on their desperate mission to find the one man who might save him, as they barrel in an old car through the heat of what feels like an endless desert in search of this mirage of hope in this place Las Vegas, which cannot be real, I am as close as I have ever been to understanding what happened—what really happened—what laid us low—what cut the Golden State adrift and cloistered in its own truth at the edge of the world, as close as I have ever been to the old world that left us or we left, and it is like I am driving in a car through the desert toward the inscrutable past—

Toward the truth—

I read to the end, faster and faster, I can’t stop, I keep reading, pushing forward through this dream of something that is Not So and never has been, and by the time I reach the final pages, however many hours later, I am curled up beside my bed as if in hiding from the world outside, hiding from the Moon, my back against the wall and my knees curled up against my chest. I am reading the end pages and not wanting it to end, I am shaking, my body in full revolt against all my manly efforts to hold it still.

  

Later on—much later, I don’t know how much later—there’s a noise.

I roll over and raise my head, confused and weary. Baffled. I’m on the floor, somehow, with the book beside me. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how much later it is.

But then the noise, again. Something crashing against something else. It has a texture to it, a wooden thump.

I moan. I’m in a hospital bed.

I am an unconscious child.

I’m on the floor and the book is nearby, closed and angled away, its spine turned away from mine, like we are lovers who’ve quarreled in the night. False reality is clinging to me like the dust of an old world, gritty at the corners of my mind.

My family is clustered around my bed, consumed with worry.

I shake it away. I stand, slowly, and brush myself off, wiping bits of falsehood off my chest and my arms.

It’s knocking, that’s all. Someone is knocking at the door.

The Moon hangs like a lamp outside the window, shedding a grudging half-yellow light. I don’t like the sound of the knocking. I find my gun and chamber a round. I get up, slow and deliberate, and, holding the gun in front of me, I walk to the door.

The pounding continues.

I am the father. It is the doctor at the door. He is here to lay scorn on my desperation for a cure, my sad need to pick and choose my own truth.

No. It’s my son at the door, my boy, alive at last, back from the dead.

Come on, Laszlo. Come on. Get it the fuck together.

“Who is it?” I stand at the door, gun drawn but not aimed, just like I learned in the academy.

“It’s me. Mr. Ratesic? Laszlo. It’s me.”

I keep my weapon drawn as I look through the peephole and there’s my trainee, in jeans and a T-shirt, no pinhole, hair pulled back and tied, looking up into the door’s eye with raw urgency on her young face.

I glance back into my bedroom, the sliver of it visible through the door. The novel just out of sight. And I think—what have I done?