Hey! I think. As loud as a thought can get, which after all is not all that fucking loud. I’m in here. Hey! I can’t see out the windows of the truck because the windows are blacked out, tinted over, so I do what I can do, which is stare into them and beam my thoughts out uselessly into the passing world as the truck rumbles along: Help.
I’m in here.
Help!
No one can hear. No one can help.
The people out there are dim shapes on the street corners. Faceless creatures behind the wheels of their vehicles, glancing with disinterest at the truck and then away.
I am strapped to my seat. A metal pole runs from floor to ceiling in front of me, and I am shackled to it at wrist and ankle.
The truck has been stripped of the artifacts of its old design. All that’s telling me where I am is the old stink of cooking water and the shape of the vehicle, tubular, low and long. I am inside a truck that is shaped like a hot dog, and I am both inside this machine, shackled to a plastic bench by my wrists and ankles, and outside it, looking longingly at it as it cruises past. I could not have known, the many times I looked with keen interest at the Dirty Dog cruising the city, that it is out of service. It has been decommissioned and repurposed as a mobile prison, delivering the exiled to their exile.
No wonder, I think stupidly. No wonder it never stops.
Even in the state of dull bafflement with which I have suffered the last two weeks, of trial and sentence, of confusion and fear, of public approbation and private pain, even in my raw confused condition, I can pick up the old scents of boiled meat, of relish and mustard and pickle. I take some very small comfort in the pleasant ancient smells of condiments and meat. And I take comfort, too, in the thought of all the people out there, my good and golden fellow citizens, watching the black truck with the pink piping as it sharks past, wondering idly as I have for years, How come it never stops?
I can see where the refrigerator once was, up there behind the captain’s-chair-style driver’s seat. I can see where they had a row of compact metal containers for the various condiments, and probably a steam tray for the hot dogs themselves. But now all of these culinary accessories have been replaced by monitor screens, a bank of dials, a map of the city covered in beeping lights and lines.
One of these dots, it is easy to understand, is us. This vehicle I’m captive inside of. That is easy to figure. Requires zero speculation. We are moving fast now, and the dot is moving fast.
It’s just me in the truck—me and the driver and the man seated across from me, a narrow ugly man in a tan coat and sunglasses, with a gun in his lap. The gun and the ugly man are both staring at my face.
“Excuse me?” I say to the man, but he doesn’t answer. He looks like a Librarian, except for the sunglasses. He has the same set expression in his bearing, in his posture. Passive, still, exuding his grim authority.
I’m in a hunched position, because of how I’ve been bound, tied to the pole with a set of sleek plastic tethers. I have not been put into any sort of jumpsuit, nor even stripped of my Speculator blacks. Only my pinhole has been taken from me. Otherwise I am still me. There is heat on the back of my neck.
I feel miserable, a result of how much I now understand that I never did before, how much I’ve learned in these last days and how much dissonance I’m suffering now; or it might just be because the air inside the decommissioned hot dog truck is stale and close and pungent. It’s hot, and where I’m going it’s only getting hotter.
“You can lower your weapon,” I tell the man across from me. I don’t know if he’s really a Librarian, but he has become one in my mind. “I’m not going to do anything.” I tug at my restraints, demonstrating how tightly my hands are lashed to the pole. “I can’t.”
He doesn’t answer. The gun does not move. The driver, absurdly, begins to whistle. The back of his neck is closely shaved, bristling with small dark hairs.
The truck banks into a turn, and I am shifted to the right, and then the truck speeds up, and I feel it rising, moving uphill, and then it turns again. I don’t know if we’re close or if we’re almost there. I don’t know where there is or how far away it is, or what is going to happen to me, or how I will die.
Help, I think again, radiate my desperate fear out through the sides of the truck toward whoever might be out there, but this is useless—it’s ridiculous. I am living in a pretend world where empathy has secret supernatural power, where it can fly on wings and burrow into the secret hearts of strangers. And even if my message could sing out through these blackened windows, the truth is, I’m not the good guy. I am not the hero of this novel. I have not been kidnapped by nefarious crooks or dirty liars. I am the crook and I am the dirty liar. I have been tried and convicted for my assault against reality. I have left a trail of blood behind me, and my exile, now underway, is necessary to the ongoing security of the State.
It has all happened. However I remember it, whatever my own personal truth, it all happened. What is So is So forever. It’s all on the Record.
The truck’s engine makes its steady rumble. Time passes. Minutes of it, and then hours; there is no clock on the truck. Miserable and terrified as I am, in time my eyes get heavy and the hot dog truck becomes the big blue bus my brother and I used to take down to the beach on Saturday afternoons, when we were children still, still in that young and dreaming part of life. We were just teens, experimenting with what kind of adults we were going to be. Shirtless and self-conscious, already thick around the middle, I am clutching my surfboard at the bus stop before sunup. Charlie, bouncing from foot to foot, T-shirt wrapped around his forehead like a privateer, is whistling cheerfully at the sunrise.
I blink. Shift in my seat. I am on this hot dog truck driving farther from the city, deeper into the wild, with my hands and feet shackled, and I am also an awkward teenager on the bus to the beach. I exist in two places at once, listening to the rumble of the truck and listening to Charlie, whistling through his teeth.
No, though—no. It’s the driver, still whistling. I jerk awake. The driver’s head bobbles slightly as he whistles. My body aches from the shape it has been forced into, for however long it’s been.
I think we’re going downhill now. I can feel the truck’s pneumatics shifting underneath me. The Librarian seated across from me rises, walks the two paces across the truck, and sits beside me, his right leg pressed against my left.
“Where are your identifications?”
“In my pocket,” I say. “Right side.”
He reaches across my lap, unconcerned with the intimacy, and wriggles his hand into my pocket. It all comes out: birth cert, five-years card, adulthood card, work card, home address attestation. A parade of Laszlo faces, one after the other. Growing older, uglier, fleshier; a flip-book of my dissolution.
The driver keeps on whistling.
“Is that everything?” says the man, and he sniffs. He’s not a Librarian—no. Some special branch of service?
I nod. “Yeah.”
“All right.”
He gets up again. He’s got a little screwdriver in one of his pockets, and he uses it to open a panel on the metal wall behind him. Behind the panel is a shallow drawer.
“What—” He slides my documents into the drawer. “What are you doing?”
He doesn’t answer. Maybe he is a Librarian: he’s got a wand. He puts the screwdriver back in his pocket and takes out the slim metal tube, black metal with silver caps on either end, and I feel an instinctual revulsion. What is going on? I draw back, pull as far away as I can from the pole to which I’m tethered, but he’s not aiming the wand at me. He places my documents in the flat drawer and slowly passes the wand over them, front to back, a slow steady movement, like he’s wanding someone’s forehead, and there is a hissing noise from inside the drawer, and smoke rises from it in a disappearing puff.
“Hey,” I say. “Hey.”
But it’s already done. He tilts the drawer forward so I can see the ashes inside, and then he tilts it further, so they scatter on the floor of the hot dog truck.
“Okay,” he says, and the driver stops whistling long enough to say it too: “Okay.”
“Now. What’s your name?”
“Laszlo Ratesic.”
The truck jerks to a stop, as if we’ve hit something, and I fly forward off the bench and slam face-first into the pole. And the man who is not a policeman, not a Librarian, who must be some sort of special officer, an officer of some kind of border service known only to those in its employment, he’s up and out of his seat, and so is the driver, and the two men begin to kick me, one and then the other.
“Liar!” shouts the borderman, kicking me in the center of my stomach.
“Liar!” shouts the driver, kicking me in the neck.
“What is your name?”
“What’s your fucking name?”
“I don’t—” I’m no dummy. “None! I have no name.”
The kicking stops. The driver winks and walks back to his captain’s chair. “Now you’re getting it.”
The other man, though, the borderman in his tan suit, still stands over me, looking down. The truck starts up again. I feel the muscle of its engine thrum along the length of my body.
“What year were you born?” says the borderman.
“I—I—” I hesitate. I swallow. It hurts. A bruise is developing on my throat—inside or outside it, or both. My wounded shoulder has burst back into hot pain from the kicks.
“What year,” he says again, staring directly into my face, “were you born?”
“I was never born.”
I wince, but that’s it. That was the right answer. The borderman braces himself and lifts me by the armpits and heaves me back to my feet, shoves me back in my seat. The truck keeps rolling, rolling downhill now, gaining speed, slowing only for the occasional sharp turns that tell me we are switchbacking down the far side of the mountain. Some mountain.
I slump and the tethers bite into my wrists.
My gut hurts. My throat, my head, my shoulder.
For all of my life, exile was just a word, an idea rather than a process, a wall erected around certain behaviors, not an actual thing that happens, not a series of actual physical events. These are those events. This is how it happens.
If I ever thought of it, I guess I thought of checkpoints. Some kind of physical barrier between this world and the next one—a wall or a partition. Men with long guns up high on parapets, angling their rifle noses down toward attempted incursion.
But there is no barrier. The truck never stops; the driver never rolls down his window to exchange words or money or documents with some guard at some fence.
No physical barrier separates our world from the outside. We simply rise up into the Hills and then down again, a winding path that I have given up on trying to memorize.
My eyes fall closed and Charlie is calling my name as he bounds off the old bus, telling me I’d better hurry the fuck up and grab my board and get off, and in the memory I can’t recall what the actual name is. “Hey—” says Charlie, and there is a mute moment, like glitches in audio dropping out of a stretch. “Come on.” My own name has elided from my head. A welt is rising on the side of my forehead from where I got kicked. This is how fast the truth can change—one hard kick from a heavy boot and everything is erased.
The brakes hiss and the body of the truck shudders as it stops. A dragon sighing as it settles.
The two men rise, the borderman from his seat and the driver from his, and they huddle at the side door of the truck. They ignore me, push their foreheads together, and murmur to each other.
“Two and two is four.”
“The word ‘serrated’ means ‘lined with jagged teeth.’”
“A hummingbird is of the family Trochilidae.”
They speak very quietly, hushed as if fearful, hushed as if in prayer, preparing for battle. Murmuring true statements into each other’s hearing. They are doing exactly what Aysa and I did during our approach to Mulholland Drive, chanting facts, girding ourselves with small pieces of reality like strung beads. Every “is” and “are,” every flat declaration of a true fact, is like a piece of armor, and they are assembling it around themselves.
I start to do the same, catching up, following their lead.
“Bricks are heavy,” I say. “Twelve inches to a foot,” I say, and the driver grabs me by the back of the neck, opening the door with his other hand, and I say “Limestone is a sedimentary rock,” and he pushes me, hard, down the short exit staircase, off the truck and down onto the road.
“Night adders are venomous,” I say, and gasp because the air is thin and it is so bright that I can barely see. I squint up at the brutal desert sky: endless, baked blue, the sun a merciless glare above it.
The borderman and the driver rush down off the truck after me. They move quickly. The borderman squats at the roadside, digs into his pocket and comes out with a knife, a short effective blade that slashes the binds on my hands and on my feet.
He nods at the driver and the driver nods at him. Done. Mission accomplished.
I rise to a feeble seated position, blink helplessly in the brightness. “Wait,” I say. “Don’t. Listen. This is a mistake.”
“Liar,” says the borderman.
“I’m not a liar,” I say.
“Liar,” says the driver, and he kicks me away from the truck and I tumble backward, land on my ass. The concrete is hotter than the sand.
“There’s a plot,” I say, and turn up my palms, for mercy. “A plot to destroy the Golden State.”
“Yours,” says the borderman, and catches me under the chin. “Your plot.”
He kicks again, and my face flies backward, and I’m on the ground again, blood pouring from my nose. “We’re in danger,” I say, and he kicks me again, a hard one, again in the center of my stomach, and I moan “Danger,” and he says “Liar,” and then the driver catches me in the small of the back—“Liar!”—and the other one does, and then both of them together, over and over, and the individual words begin to blur and rise together, into the single word, loud as anything, true as doors on houses, louder and stronger: “Liar! Liar! Liar!”
And then they move swiftly back up the steps onto the truck to escape from the air, which is already baking me inside my suit.
A blur of sounds—“Liarliarliarliar”—a whirl of inward-collapsing sound, which rings in my ears and hangs in the air and mingles with the retreating hum of the truck, driving back to the good and golden world, leaving me here in the sand.