Ben Winters - Golden State

I got fooled. I got turned around. When I fell across the downed sign, or maybe earlier, maybe all along. There’s just no way to tell anything. The sky is all one sky, all one ugly swirling pale gray, a color that is no color. The air is tremulous, coruscated at its edges. It’s like—it’s like all the lies I have ever seen, all the times I’ve watched the air bend and ripple, all the dissonance of the atmosphere, it’s all gathered around me now, thick and getting thicker.

I don’t know which way to walk. The road is lined with Joshua trees, speckled with their small hearty blooms, bristling with prickles, standing with their hands in the air. The sun is hidden, or the sky is all sun; it’s all heat, a wall of glass heat, and such a sky cannot guide my way. There is horizon in all directions.

I go back the way I came. Retrace my stumbling steps. My feet are burning, swollen and itching with heat inside the leather of my shoes. Intolerable. I stop and my whole body nearly pitches forward with the teetering momentum, and I sit down to wrestle off the shoes. I get the left shoe off okay but there is a knot in the lace of the right one, a miserable tight little bastard that my thick fingers cannot possibly undo, and the sweat makes it impossible to even see, so I end up tearing the damn thing off entirely, wrestling the whole shoe off in one furious gesture, like tearing the skin off an animal, and then I fall backward, staring up, my head in the impossible heat of the sand, and start screaming at the sky.

In the silence, when my voice runs out, I again hear sounds in the distance—not even sounds but the echoes of sounds, toy sounds. A truck’s horn blowing. The jingle of small music.

My mind drifts upward, feeling around in the absence of breathable air. Maybe it is the lies themselves that affect the atmosphere out here, out past the reach of the State. Absent the bulwarks, without the bedrock of the Record beneath it and the sheltering fortress of full and permanent truth above, maybe this is what happens to the world, it gets to be so shot through with lies that it traps in heat and multiplies it, sears the ground and poisons the air.

Maybe this, after all, is the history of the world.

Exactly as feared. Exactly as we have been warned. An unlivable world, outside our boundaries, east of the mountains—this is what the world has become. Has become and remains. A sky alive with lies, constantly rolling and billowing, boiling in on itself. Here is a sky that is no sky. Here is a world that is a vacuum of itself. The sun is a fiery liar, burning into me, burning me down.

I hear a voice and it’s Arlo’s voice, whispering cruelly as he did in the bowels of the Record, telling me how it’s all a metaphor, lies like heat and untruth bending the sky, it’s all a system of metaphor we have talked ourselves into believing, except now look! Look, you old asshole. You traitor! Look at it out here! The sun is burning my skin, the sky will bake me alive, so fuck you with your metaphors.

I get back up. I keep going. There is no reason to keep walking except that I cannot bear the idea of stopping: of just lying down and letting sand rise up slowly and cover me over.

So I keep walking, barefoot now, starting to pick up some speed again, moving in what I am now just fucking hoping is the right direction, bearing my melting bulk back toward the Golden State. Because Arlo arranged my exile for a reason. Our defenses are weakened. Public trust in the Service has been grievously assaulted, and now he’s going to…

…fuck, though. I can’t remember.

I can’t remember what he’s going to do next. But I have to get back. I have to stop him.

Shit.

Wait. Shit.

I don’t know which way to walk. I turn around, a half-turn, scratch my head. Sand drifts out of my hair. I start walking the opposite way, because, yes, this is the right way, this way is south. I think. I press forward, one step after the last, moving automatically.

After a while I take off my coat, walk with it folded over my arm for a few paces, like I’m going to find a chairback out here somewhere to sling it over. Then I fling it into the desert, watch it unfold like a winged beast and fall dead to the ground, and I laugh, the sound of my own laughter a haunted croak. I think maybe I was walking south before, and now I fucked it up. I’m just not sure.

I stop. This is how it ends: you just stop. You keep walking until you see a sign by the side of the road, a tall pole listing aimlessly to the left, an oval pitched on top of it with words in it—a word and a letter. It says “FLYING J.” That doesn’t mean anything. The sun has baked sense out of my mind.

I pitch forward off the road, toward the sign, and as I reach for the metal pole I imagine somehow that it is going to be cold to the touch, but it burns me when I grab it. My fingers start to cook and I shout and let go, draw back, totter, and fall.

I wake up only because I have no choice.

“Hey,” I say.

Someone is peeling my eyes open. I mean literally digging their fingers into my eyes and peeling back the lids.

“Hey,” I say again, or maybe I just try to say it—my throat is clogged with dust and heat. My lips don’t work. I say a noise that sounds like “Hey” while this lady digs my eyes open with her nails. She is squatting over my chest, straddling me with her heels dug into the sand, peeling at my eyelids with all ten fingers, hissing, trying to get my eyes open.

“Hey,” I say, really say this time, getting the word out with an effortful croak. I try to rock myself up, but I can’t move. I’m big but weak. I’m a downed bear in the dirt with this lady on top of me, laughing at me, her face matted with grit.

I can feel her weight on top of me and feel her fingers in my eyes, but I don’t trust that she is real. Maybe it’s a vision, or a dream. Maybe this is the way it works out here, outside the State, in the thin air of the truthless world: you wake with a demon squatting on your chest and she scrapes away your skin until your flesh is raw to the world.

“Smoke smoke smoke,” says the woman, and her voice is familiar in its tone and its rhythm. “You smoke, yeah? A smoker and a joker, that’s my boy. You got any?”

Her breath is outrageously bad, a stale reek blowing right into my nose and mouth. I bat her away with the back of my hand and she grabs on to my wrist, slaps me in the face with my own hand and giggles, witchy.

“Stop hitting yourself,” she says. “Stop hitting yourself.”

The light slashes into my brain and all I can see is her face, leering with want, her tongue clucking. I have seen this face before. A round face, high cheeks, a laughing mouth. Now that my eyes are open she has switched to my cheek, dragging her ragged nails through my beard, digging hard. I feel cuts opening, feel blood blossoming and draining out into my beard.

“Come on,” I say. “Stop it.”

“Where you keeping ’em?”

She is real and I do know her.

“Hey,” I say one more time, and manage to angle my torso up and thrust my elbows beneath me. The lady tumbles off into the sand, and both of us struggle to our feet and stare at each other.

“I was just asking for a cigarette,” she says.

“Lemme see.”

I abandoned my coat miles ago, but I’ve got a pack in my right front pocket, with three cigarettes still inside. I shake one out and hand it over. She pokes it into the corner of her mouth and it dangles there. She doesn’t ask for a light, just stands with the cigarette at a raked angle in the corner of her pursed lips. As hot as I feel, she looks hotter, wearing three or four layers of skirts, wearing a jumble of overlapping t-shirts and vests, like she was wearing when I saw her in Judge Sampson’s courtroom.