Ben Winters - Golden State

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 out here that I can barely see. I squint up at the brutal desert sky. The sky is 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 I suffer a quick vision of that spray aerosol coming out, the lighter, and I’m already so hot— No fire, no —but it’s a knife he takes out this time, 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 as I try to follow them back on, 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 the 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 bus, driving back to the good and golden world, leaving me here in the sand.

This is what it’s like outside the Golden State.

Now I know. A new piece of truth to add to my personal store, to carry along with me for however long it is before I collapse out here and die.

The fate of the exiled is unknown and unknowable, until you are added to their number. Until you get put on a truck and kicked off the truck in the hot, empty air of the world outside the world. The fate of the exiled is unknown until the knowledge is all around you like a carpet of heat, shifting under your footsteps like burning sand, stinging your eyes like windblown grit.

I gotta get up. That’s the first thing. Get up. Rise, you dumb brute, rise.

So I do, I struggle up, arrange my feet underneath me, shake off the pulse of pain in my kidneys and in my shoulder and my head, and start to walk. The air is fiery yellow, it’s ash-streaked gray, it’s billows of angry red at the horizon’s furthest edge.

I walk along the road that is just a strip of asphalt through an endless landscape of hardscrabble dirt and desert sand.

Every direction I look the air is warped and shimmering with heat.

This is what it’s like. This is what we have protected ourselves from, in there, at home, but now I’m out here. I’m gone from home and I have to get back.

So I go. I walk. One step and then another one and then one more. It hurts but I go. Back toward home.

Because I fucked up. I fucked it all up and now I have to get home and put it right. Save the State.

Past brown desert plants, dead or dying. Through low drifts of sand that come across the road in dry rivulets. Clutching my side, wincing, breathing hard. Past stands of bent cactus and clusters of rocks in tottering piles, crusted with old dirt.

I’m walking, I am, but it’s not easy. Staying upright, staying ambulatory. The basic mechanics of forward motion. Not easy at all.

I am following the road. I was trying to pay attention, the whole ride out here, trying to stay in tune with the motion of the truck, so I could retrace my steps. So I could get back.

The sky is a constant yellow glare that makes it hard to hold up my head, so I don’t, I stare at my feet while I walk, keep my head hung, my chin pressed into my clavicle. I clear my throat and spit on the ground, or actually what happens is I try to spit and manage only a thin clot of dried-out mucus, which dribbles from my lower lip into my beard. There is a steady pulse of pain from my wounded shoulder, and I keep falling into the pulses’ cadence, walking to the miserable rhythm, one footfall for every angry throb. My kidneys hurt bad, from where the men’s boots slammed into me, so I clutch my side and walk stooped, bent, one step after the other, feeling individual drops of blood form and fall from my nose.

I think one of my eyes has come loose. That’s what it feels like, like it’s loose or swollen somehow. I can feel it getting bigger inside the socket, threatening to burst.

About a half mile from where I got tossed off the truck the road is blocked by an old highway sign, green with white detailing, fallen from its mooring and covering the road, bent up at a sharp angle and shimmering with heat lines from the unceasing sun.

I try to step over the broken sign and misjudge it severely, because I can’t see because of my fucking eye, and I scrape my shin on the sign’s edge as I pitch forward onto its face, sliding forward like an awkward kid on a playground slide, down the blistering hot surface of the sign until I land in a heap at the bottom.

I get up. I keep going.

I’ve gotta get home, that’s all. Get back.

Although first what I’d really love is a drink of water. My tongue is fat inside my mouth, and my throat is burning, bristly, thick with sand and dirt.

I keep thinking I hear laughing voices, or cars coming, or my radio singing out, but I’m always wrong. I carry no radio. I have no identifications.

I stop walking and stand still in the heat. Shakily I raise a hand to my brow, try to block the sun from scouring my eyeballs. I wipe blood and phlegm out of my beard. I just gotta stop a second, that’s all. Try to get my bearings. Make sure I’m walking in the right direction.

I’m not. I’m walking in the wrong direction. Fuck.