23.

All four of them are dead, each with a single neat bullet hole through the center of the forehead.

I recognize them all, Librarians who worked the entrance of the Record, rigorous and polite and efficient. The duty team, caught unawares by a familiar face.

The first is just inside the door, thrown back against the wall, still wearing a stunned expression. Blood runs in a frozen trickle from the bullet hole down into the line of the eyebrows.

The second is centered in the lobby, slumped at the wanding station, thrown across the small desk with one hand outstretched, clutching his weapon as if caught just before he could fire.

The third is at the elevators, between the two shafts and just beneath the keypad, and she sits with legs extended and arms slack. Her face is turned toward the elevator just to her right, where the fourth of them is wedged between the elevator door and the wall of the car itself, half in and half out, keeping it from closing, inviting me in.

The lights in the elevator car are dim but I can see the button panel, and there is a dark red fingerprint on the button marked 9, a clue so glaring and egregious it has to have been purposeful. A taunt.

Subbasement nine. That’s where you’ll find me. Come along, now…down we go…

I push the button gingerly with my forefinger and it comes away tacky.

At the last minute, though, I don’t take the elevator. I step off before the door can close, step around the fallen bodies of the Librarians, and use the spiral stairs instead.

I go down slowly, one floor at a time with my weapon drawn, listening at every floor. Pause at sub four, where Silvie’s offices are tucked away. Pause again at sub five and then again, halfway between six and seven, where I hear or think I hear the minute click of a file drawer shifting open. The blood button was 9 and that may be where he is, or it may have been another artful misdirection, another signal rigged to catch my eye and hold it while worlds move in shadow all around me.

One more clue for me to find, one more part of the trap that was set for me, for my clumsy feet to stumble into.

With each footfall the ornate structure of the staircase shimmies beneath my heavy frame. The metal stairs are very old. There is gold detail at every balustrade.

I breathe heavily as I descend.

“I can hear you, Mr. Ratesic.”

I’m halfway down, between sub eight and sub nine, and I stop on the edge of a stair. His gentle creak of a voice echoes from somewhere close by.

“You were never one for sneaking up.”

There are no offices on sub nine. Just endless intersecting hallways, file rooms, review rooms. The hallways are dim, lit only by the cool red emergency lights of the Record after hours. Helpless to do otherwise, I go in the direction of Arlo’s voice. And it is even easier than that: there is blood on the floor, dark fresh heel prints on the tile.

I follow those footsteps, still not believing, still not wanting to believe, that it’s him I am following. Still unwilling to live in the world in which he is the villain at the end of the hall.

And yet here he is. Around a corner, the sixth door down. Seated at a table, examining a file. He looks up and squints behind his glasses, gives me his old fond smile as I come into the room with my gun raised and aimed at his head.

“Get up, Mr. Vasouvian.”

He shakes his head and murmurs, “No, Mr. Ratesic.”

The file on the review desk is deep blue: a CSE. I take two steps into the room. All around me are files. Cabinets full of folders; binders on shelves. Up to the ceiling, down to the floor. Collated truth, running from floor to ceiling and to the ends of the walls.

My gun is aimed at Arlo’s head and I am deciding whether I would really do it.

“You have to get up, Mr. Vasouvian. You have to stand up and come with me.”

“No, no. No, I’m not doing that.”

He seems glad to see me; he seems as he always does. He smiles, and scratches his nose, and sighs. There are flecks of blood on his glasses, a smear on his necktie and on one rumpled lapel of his corduroy jacket. He has killed four people, and left their bodies for me to find.

“I’m not going to do that,” he says. “This is not a normal situation. You can’t think you are going to—what?—arrest me? No. What you will do is kill me. But not right away.”

“Stop talking, Arlo.”

He sighs again. “I’ll tell you what. Come and sit down across from me and we can look at this together.”

“Look at—what?”

“At the file.” He taps it with two fingers, gazing at me evenly. As if he has been waiting here for me so we can discuss it. As if we had an appointment, and I am late.

“Come, Laszlo. I wish you would have a seat.”

He points with his chin to the chair opposite his, and I can feel the energy in the room changing. I am the investigating officer who has come upon his prey, but at the same time I am the younger man, less experienced, a pupil in the presence of his tutor, a child in the presence of the adult.

I keep my gun up. “You are under arrest for—” I stop. For what, Laszlo? For everything. For all of it. “For murder in the first degree.”

“Okay. I plead guilty. We will come to all of that, Mr. Ratesic. Justice will be done. Please. Sit.”

There is a chair across from him. I sit, but I keep my gun out, in my hand.

“This is a CSE file, Laszlo. Do you know the nomenclature used down here? In the labyrinth?”

“CSE,” I say. “Collated Significant Event.”

“Very good.” His smile brightens, gold star for me, and he begins reciting from memory, his favorite trick. “Incidents of self-evident public importance are to be cross-cataloged into a master file, to include all relevant information from all relevant captures, gathered together in a permanent and comprehensive manner to put on Record the full and final truth of the incident.”

Arlo slides his glasses up on the bridge of his nose and turns the file around so I can see it more clearly. He lays one finger beside the title on the tab. “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

I look up sharply. “What the fuck is going on here, Arlo?”

“So many things, Laszlo. So many things.”

He angles his head, peers at me thoughtfully. It’s the same old head, the same old man, the large ears and small black eyes. His thin white hair is dappled with blood.

I open the file. I close it again, seized by a dark horror of what’s inside.

It is cool in here, climate-controlled. I can hear every thump of my heartbeat. I can feel the dull whoosh of my blood.

“Go on now, son,” says Arlo. “Have a look.”

I open it again and begin to turn the pages inside. Transcripts of Charlie’s fevered explanations on the thirtieth floor, describing the shocking extent of what he had discovered: the Off Record house, the ring of brazen liars, the clandestine organization calling itself the Golden State. Still photos, lifted from video captures, of Charlie in his hospital bed, struggling to survive the multiple gunshot wounds he suffered in the raid.

While I flip through it all, plunged back into this memory, Arlo speaks softly.

“I, of course, have had extraordinary access to this file. At-will access, so to speak. Firstly because I was the senior officer who brought Ratesic onto our force. Secondly because I was the man charged with overseeing his undercover efforts.” He takes off his glasses, idly works at a freckle of blood with his thumbnail. “And lastly, of course, as the author of the novel inspired by these extraordinary events.”

I turn over a page and stop, and read it, and read it again, and then I look up at Arlo, who is looking back at me carefully, very carefully, waiting to see what I will say. What I will do.

The page is a précis, a kind of executive summary, compiled from edited transcripts. It details how Charlie Ratesic was recovering from his injuries until he was murdered by his younger brother, Laszlo Ratesic, who willfully increased the dosage of Charlie’s pain-reducing medication until he died.

“That’s—” My head is shaking. I am shaking my head. “No. No, that’s not right. I didn’t do that. Why would I?”

Arlo turns the page over, and on the back side is a series of photographic stills, taken from the hospital room captures. There I am in the pictures. I am standing at Charlie’s bedside. I am crouching at his bedside. I am examining the machines. I am turning the dials.

“I suppose you didn’t know that I knew,” says Arlo. “What you did, I mean. But I have always known, Laszlo. I have always known what you did.”

“But it’s not—” I find my voice. I say it loud. “That never happened.” Louder. “It’s not So.”

“Come now, Laszlo. It’s on the Record. We’re looking at it.” He puts his fingertips firmly on the photograph. It is black-and-white. My face is distinct. “Look!”

“Why?” I look at Arlo, my face hot with grief. “Why did I do that?”

“You were jealous of Charlie. You had always been jealous, and now—well, now, the man had become a genuine hero. The greatest hero the State has ever produced. You couldn’t bear it, Laszlo. I am absolutely sympathetic, I have always been so. Which is why I have kept my silence for all these years.”

“Oh.” I say it again very softly: “Oh.”

And I turn the page over and over again, the words on the front and the pictures on the back, turn them over and over, as if I can shake the letters and the images right off the paper, make it all go away, but it won’t go away, because it is true. I remember it now. I spent these years unremembering it but now it is coming back, rushing back, grabbing at me, clutching at my heels like speculation: the bitter sting of envy I felt in Charlie’s presence, the hatred for him that has always seethed below the surface of my adoration. How easy it suddenly seemed to be done with those feelings. Done with him, done with him forever. I remember the smell of the room, the beep of those machines, how easy it would be, how easy it was.

“Oh fuck, Arlo. Oh no.” I tilt back from the table and turn my face away from him in the dim light of the Record and weep at what I did, at what I am. “Oh no.”

“It will be all right.” Arlo rises, comes over to my side of the review desk, and lays a hand down on top of mine while with the other hand he gently strokes my woolly head. “It will be okay. Look, Laszlo. Look.”

There is another CSE on the table, beside the first one. I lean forward, baffled, pushing tears out of my eyes with my thick fingers. It is the same file, the same blue, the same label. Exactly the same. “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

“What?” I say. “What is this?”

“This is the file that lives here, on the Record. It is a forgery, Laszlo.”

“Forgery”: old word, dead word. The word itself an artifact.

“The file that you just read—that one”—he points at the first file, the one in which Laszlo Ratesic betrays his beloved brother—“this file has lived for all these years at my home, Laszlo. I could not bring myself to destroy a piece of the Record, but it does not live here. I replaced it with this one.”

He lifts this second file and places it precisely on top of the first one, hiding the first from view. We sit in the silence of the enormity of this crime of forgery, of purposefully removing truth from the Record and replacing it with false. Rewriting the Record. A grave assault upon the Objectively So. And for what? For me. I flip open this second file. It tells the story that I knew and have known for the last decade, the story I have long taken for truth. It shows how Charlie was injured in the raid, how he struggled to survive for days and then weeks, how the doctors were able to stabilize but never reverse the course of the opportunistic infections that ultimately claimed his life. There is no murder in this file. No envious Laszlo, stopping to tamper with the dials. The man was wounded, and then he died from his wounds. A martyr.

“I replaced this file”—Arlo lifts a corner of the new file, gives a quick furtive glimpse of the old one before covering it again—“with this. Because I believed that we would be better off with you in the world than not in it. To defend our world and protect it. Especially with Charlie gone. I made that call. I made that decision.”

“Oh, Arlo. Thank you.” I reach out across the table, new tears on my cheeks, and I grab his shoulders, push my forehead against his. “Thank you.”

He pulls from my grasp. He stares at me. His eyes behind his glasses are dark with sadness.

“I cannot believe it.” His voice is a weary rasp. “Every time I see it I still cannot believe it.”

“Believe—” I peer at him. “Believe what?”

“You saw it, didn’t you? In your mind. You saw yourself murdering your brother. It was true inside your heart, that you killed the one person you love more than anyone in the world. Oh, Laszlo. I have spent a melancholy lifetime contemplating the impermanence of reality, and yet I am constantly stunned anew.”

With small, deliberate movements, Arlo lifts first the forged file and then the real one—and yet another file is revealed. And this new file is the same again, the same CSE a third time through: “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”

I look at Arlo. I look at the file. I open it.

Murder again. The text and the pictures together tell the story: Charlie, incapacitated and vulnerable, is defenseless against the stealthy approach of the monster…except the monster is Arlo. It is Arlo Vasouvian who lurks at the bedside, Arlo Vasouvian who crouches, and then Arlo Vasouvian with the dials in his hands.

Memories drop out of my head. The truth reverses itself, scrambles and re-forms. I pick up my gun again. Arlo leans back and stares at me, not like a friend now. Like a scientist, examining, considering. I raise the gun and he does not flinch. Around us hangs the solemn stillness of the Record.

“That file is the real one,” I say.

“Yes.”

“You killed Charlie.”

“I did.” Arlo, blood-splattered, gentle-eyed, stares back at me evenly. “That is accurate. To the extent that that word owns a definition.” The three blue files are still on the desk, and now, as he talks, Arlo shifts them around, places a palm down on one and moves it in an idle circle, then does the same with the others, rearranging and rearranging their places, shuffling and reshuffling their order. “He was good at his job. Very good. I never thought—” He shakes his head in wonderment. “Never for a moment did I think that his undercover operation would be a success, but as you know, it was. With long effort and clever skill he destroyed nearly all we had built, and he had found nearly every member of our Golden State. As it was constituted, I should say, at that time. I could not let him find me too. He was, of course, a very talented man.”

“Arlo Vasouvian,” I say, summoning the voice I need, “you are under arrest.”

“No,” he says, “I’m not.”

“You just confessed. It’s all—” I look around the room, gesturing up at the captures. “It’s all on the Record.”

“Oh, right. The Record. Inviolable. Impregnable.” He sighs. “You’re not listening, Mr. Ratesic. Or you’re listening but wishing not to hear.” His hands pause in their card-trick motions. He picks the file that ended up on top, flips it open. It’s me, in the photograph, me crouched to the dials.

“But that’s not—”

“Real!” He stands abruptly and snarls, contorted with contempt. “Would you stop it? Would you stop? With ‘real’ and ‘not real,’ ‘fake’ and ‘not fake,’ ‘true’ and ‘not true.’ Stop!” He sweeps all three files from the desk and rushes out of the room, and I go after him.

He is moving quicker than I’ve ever seen him, flying from narrow hallway to narrow hallway in the weak light. I follow his footfalls, follow his thin shadow. At the stairway shaft he turns and snarls, holding all the files up, clutching them to his chest like a shield.

“Do you know why they built the Record underground?”

There is a true answer to that question, as true as two and two, and I give it automatically: “Because it provides infinite room for expansion.”

“No. Bullshit! It’s a metaphor. Everything is a fucking metaphor.” He holds the files out, over the side of the railing. A couple of pages slide out, flap and flutter down into the empty air of the stairwell. “They built it belowground so everyone could walk around feeling like the truth was beneath their feet. You see? We—we here, I mean—we in this dumb and blinded land, we live our lives believing that beneath us there is foundation. That there is something there. Permanence. A record. ‘The Record.’” He puts the phrase in sneering quotes. “But it’s not so!” He flings one of the files downward, one of the three official versions of “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.” I watch it as it flies and then falls, spilling end over end into the descending darkness of the empty stairwell.

“Under us is nothing, Laszlo. Nothing.”

“And so what—what—” Fury of my own is rising. My body is trembling. My face bends into a snarl. “You want what? Nothing? You think it would be better to have no truth at all?”

“No. No, poor Laszlo. Dear Laz. Laszlo, my love.” He lets go another of the files and it flaps open, empties as it falls, its two wings bending upward like a bird’s. “Letting go of the fantasy of objective and provable truth would not be better or worse. It would be accepting reality and figuring out what to do next.”

There is only one of the three files left now. He holds it up. “Shall we open it, Laszlo? See what the truth ended up being?”

I don’t take the bait. I have taken too much bait, been too easily led. “You are under arrest, Arlo Vasouvian.”

“You’re not going to arrest me,” he says. “I already told you that. You will let me go, or you will shoot me dead.”

“How do you know?”

He smiles sadly, looks across the darkness. “I am only speculating.”

I’m not going to shoot him. I won’t do that. I can’t. But I step toward him with the gun still raised, reaching for the cuffs on my belt. I am going to do this correctly. I will take him in. He will confess. The truth will be rebuilt. There must be a mechanism to do that. There must be a form that can be filled out, a process that can be initiated, to reconstitute that file, reinstitute the events, remake reality as it was. There will be a way.

“It was her idea, you know,” says Arlo, as if something has just occurred to him. “To use you in this way. Once we had concluded that starting again with Off Record houses was too simple, too literal, too small. Once we had decided we needed to achieve something larger—to send a shiver through the bulwarks, as they say. It was her idea. This piece of it. This marvel of string pulling that brought you along.”

I stop. “Her”: Silvie? “Her”: Tester? Her—

He is watching me. Narrow-eyed, examining. Watching my face as this miserable new truth breaks through. “Ms. Paige.”

“Yes, Laszlo. Aysa is ours. She was always ours. Her parents were ours and so was she.”

I close my eyes. No more. I can’t take any more.

“I had told her all about you,” he says, “during her training. I told her all about brave Charlie’s poor kid brother who never measured up. This sad unfortunate younger man, who doted upon and resented heroic Charlie in equal parts. And Aysa thought—it’s really quite remarkable—Aysa thought, well goodness. Perhaps this younger brother will be eager to finish what his brother began. How hungry he must be for his own moment in the sun. In the good and golden sun.”

I am shaking my head. I am back at the house on Mulholland, beside the pool with my junior partner, the two of us in silent wonder at the lies to which we were bearing witness, and not just witnessing but feeling, and not just feeling but seeing.

“But she saw them just like I did,” I tell Arlo. “She saw Petras’s lies and denials. The same as I did, she saw them.”

“You saw her say she felt Petras lying. You saw her say she saw it.”

I blink, trying to grab hold of my own memories, corner my own mind. I am not the hero, confronting the villain. I am a lost and tiny man, diminished and confused and uncertain. I am nothing.

“So she was, what, an actor? She was acting?”

“Actor.” “Acting.” Old words from an old world, concepts with dim ancient references, half hidden by time. The old world, not to be known.

“Yes. Just so,” says Arlo. “An actor. Like Crane, the roofer, whose name was really Ortega, by the way, except it’s not, not really. It’s Ortega, it’s Crane, sometimes it’s Mortenson. Once, for a week, we called him Joe Dill, just to see how that felt. He practiced so often how to throw himself off a roof and make it look like he fell. See? See, Laszlo? Can you imagine doing that? Just that moment of letting go, letting your body slide? To him it was worth it. Aysa allowed herself to be sacrificed, just like quote-unquote Crane, who taught himself to fall off a roof. And both of them knew what I know, which is that it was worth it. Worth it.”

“No. It can’t—none of this can be true.”

“Yes!” He laughs, a short burst of happy laughter, and brings his hands together. “Now you see it. That’s the whole point, Laszlo: that’s the whole point.” He rushes forward and grabs my arm, smiling, eyes wide with delight. “Laszlo—I’m not even standing here right now.”

“What—what are you talking about?”

“The figure you are talking to is a projection. I am hidden somewhere else in this building, preparing to make my escape.” He says it in a melodramatic voice, making a face, playing a game. “Unwilling to risk capture at this late moment in my long-planned scheme.”

“That’s impossible. That’s insane. Something out of a—”

“Out of a what, Laszlo?” He steps closer. “A novel? Why can’t it be true, Laszlo, if all the rest of it is true? I have power over stretches, I have power over people. Why not power over the air itself?”

“It’s a lie, Arlo.”

“Okay, then. If it’s a lie, can you see it?”

“See…”

“Can you see the lie?”

I look wildly around the room. I step backward from Arlo and I look at the air around us and I don’t feel it and I don’t see it. No crackle in the atmosphere, no bending at the edges. Nothing.

“I’ll say it again, dear Laszlo. A firm declaration, posited as fact.” He makes his hands into a bullhorn, trumpets it: “I’m not really standing here. I’m a hologram. Well? Now? Are you discerning anything now?”

He says it with plain contempt, mocking the idea on which I have based my life.

“If I’m lying, you’d be feeling it, right? Right?”

He’s right. I would see it. Wavelets of telltale in the atmosphere, ripples in the very air—I would be feeling it, just as he says, and now I do not, now the air is crystalline and calm, just Arlo walking toward me saying he is not, after all, Arlo, proving his bastard point, showing me that I cannot trust in what I know. I am discerning nothing. I hold the gun steady, hold it up straight.

Now, very slowly, he pulls out his own gun and aims it at me, as I am aiming mine at him.

The cold air of the basement is perfectly still.

“I doctored all of those stretches,” says Arlo. “I put a forgery on the Record. I convinced two people, two that you know of, to sacrifice their lives, knowing that it was worth it. What makes you think I couldn’t create a hologram of myself, and it’s the hologram you are talking to now?”

“No,” I tell him. “Yes. I don’t—I don’t know.”

“So if I’m telling the truth, then you can shoot me.”

“What?”

“I’m not here.” He takes a step closer. His gun is pointed at my face. “It’s not me. So shoot. Go on. Shoot—”

I pull the trigger and I feel the kick of discharge, and Arlo’s chest explodes in a red blur and he flies backward and slams into the stair rail. I run to him, and I don’t know if I’m crying because he is my friend, my oldest friend, and I love him and he is dying in my arms, or because of what has happened. He is cradled in my arms, his real body, no hologram, the real Arlo, his real flesh body. Then I hear footsteps crashing down toward us, the whole staircase is shuddering with the force, and now it all makes itself clear to me in retrospect, every inch of this nightmare playing itself out in reverse and filling in its details, right up to this moment—this moment right now! He never stopped playing mastermind, arranging details, right up until this moment, with the regular police pouring off the stairs and him bleeding in my arms—

“Freeze,” they are shouting. “Do not move!”

Captain Elena Tester and six other officers, a small army of regular police filling up the narrow space around the stairs, surrounding us with guns drawn.

“Wait,” I say, turning, body hot with confusion and fear. “Wait.”

Tester and her officers crowd around me, closing in. She is staring, astonished; Arlo is collapsed in my arms, sprawled across my lap.

“Laszlo,” she says. “What have you done?”

“Nothing. I haven’t done anything. It was…He…”

They step closer, one step at a time, guns raised. Arlo, in my arms, bends his body upward slowly. Brings his lips up to my ear and says, “Worth it.”

Tester circles me warily, keeping the gun leveled at my face, and the other officers fan out behind her. Arlo is cradled in my lap, his blood on my pants, his blood on my arms and on my face, his blood all over my black coat. What am I going to say? He tricked me. He said he wasn’t real. He said that shooting him wasn’t shooting a real person.

I feel that there is nothing I can do but explain myself, and that I would be a fool at the very least not to try. So I tell Captain Tester she’s making a mistake.

I tell her that Arlo Vasouvian rigged the whole thing, that he is trying to frame the Speculative Service, that he is purposefully attempting to erode trust in our Basic Laws. I tell her he is at the head of an elaborate plot to kick away the pillars that support society, to smash in the walls that have kept us safe inside the Objectively So. While Arlo’s body lies in my arms and Tester’s officers keep their guns trained on my face, I say, “You have to believe me, you have to believe me”—I say all the things that are the only things I can say, and she reacts exactly as I would have predicted.

“You know, Laszlo,” she says flatly, “that sounds like the wildest bunch of lies that I have ever heard. But you tell me.” She crouches beside me, pulls out her handcuffs. “You’re the expert.”