Ben Winters - Golden State

You’re not alone, out here in exile. That’s not how it works. Not with so many having been exiled before you. A whole universe of wanderers out here, further and further from home.

“How did you—” I realize halfway through my question that it makes no sense, but I finish it anyway. “How did you find me?”

“Wasn’t looking. Just good luck. What about you?”

“What?”

“How did you find me? ”

She laughs, crazily, but I am gathering the distinct impression that she is not crazy, or not as crazy as she was. It’s also possible that I can’t tell anymore, because I’m crazy myself. The heat is a monster hunched above us, the heat that is bloated, greasy with untruth, the heat that has us both baked inside it.

“You have to help me, I tell her.”

“Oh yeah?”

“We have to get back,” I say. “We have to…”

She’s waiting. Gaping at me, her mouth curved up, ready to laugh, and I know why. What am I about to say? We have to foil the plot! We have to defeat the Golden State and save the Golden State! Lunatic slogans. Idiot ravings. Nothing is real.

“Where are we?” I ask her instead. “What is this place?”

“‘This place,’ ‘this place,’” she says, parroting my voice, but mildly, friendly. Then she holds up both hands, like a Joshua tree, and turns in a rapid circle, like I saw her doing in the courtroom. “America. Just America.” Then she points one hand toward the sprawling, low-ceilinged building behind us. “ This place is Flying J. Okay? A truck stop! Magazines, prostitutes, and cigarettes. Fried eggs and waffles, playing cards and gum.” Her voice has rolled over into a giggling singsong, and she is dancing from one foot to the other, and now she starts singing outright in a low croon: “‘And I think to myself… what a wonderful world…’”

Ms. Wells is tapping at her hips and then her chest, frisking herself for something, which she then finds, deep within some pocket: a small plastic cigarette lighter.

“Oh,” she says, holding up the lighter. “Here we go.”

She lights her cigarette, and I’m thinking how awful it looks to be smoking in this terrible heat, surrounded as we already are by the choking misery of a thousand lies, when Ms. Wells abruptly spins around and trots toward the building.

“Hey,” I say. “Wait.”

I lumber after her, but it’s too late, she’s already slipped inside the building, and I can see her through the glass—the whole front of the building is glass, the doors are glass—doing her mad dance through the empty aisles, puffing on her cigarette, hopping from foot to foot.

I try the door. She locked it. I bang on the glass.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey!”

She stops dancing. The shelves are almost entirely empty, an empty shop in the emptied-out world, but there are a couple of things in there. Ms. Wells has got a red plastic can. A gas can. She slowly unscrews the stopper and begins to empty it out, swinging her arm to splatter and splash the liquid all over the filthy tile floors of the Flying J.

I watch her, astonished, as she starts to move through the store, rushing up and down the aisles while gas streams out of the can and splatters on the floor, until finally she turns the can upside down and taps out the last drops and dribbles. She tosses the can itself at the front of the store and it bangs off the glass and back toward her.

She looks at me and does not look crazy. Her pale eyes are lucid.

“What the fuck?” I shout, trying to make myself loud enough to be heard, as if she can’t see me clearly enough. “What the fuck are you doing?”

She drops the cigarette. It spins end over end from her two fingers to the floor and by some miracle doesn’t land in the gas, but bounces and continues to burn, harmless, on the floor.

So Ms. Wells crouches, squints at the butt like she is inspecting a small insect, and then gives it a small push with one finger, and in an instant the convenience store turns red with living fire, flames bursting up in the center of the store and rushing out in all directions. I scream. The fire spreads with astonishing force, racing along the floors and up the walls, consuming the cheap plastic shelves in an instant. I see Ms. Wells with her arms up, wincing, shaking her head from side to side and dancing at the center of the fire, see her disappearing inside it like curtains are closing around her. What is she— what the fuck?

I run up to the building and then back away, shielding my eyes, turning my face away from the inferno. When I’m able to look again I can still see her, just barely, standing perfectly still in the center of the fire as it engulfs her, and it is her own deliberate doing, I watched her do it, but I can’t just turn away. She is a person born of flesh, as am I. I left my identifications on the hot dog truck but I’m still a person, and so I start to cast about, spin around in a desperate circle. I see a pile of buckets beside the row of gas pumps, buckets full of squeegees for windshields, a thousand years old.

I grab the topmost bucket and dump the squeegees out onto the ground. I jam the bucket onto my head and I choke at the miniature rain shower of dust that sprinkles into my eyes and mouth even as I bear down and run toward the building, head bent forward, hurling myself like a truck, like a missile, like a bear with his head inside a bucket, and slam into the glass.

I am flown backward by the impact, and I land, grunting, on the ground. I sit up, groaning, lift the bucket off my head, and Ms. Wells is not on fire but she is about to be, so I put the bucket back on and I start from further back. I give out a wild animal yell, making of myself a battering ram, hurtling toward the glass, and this time it smashes open. I hurl the bucket off my head, kicking through the broken glass while the fire is billowing out, gathering force as it feeds on the rush of oxygen from out here in the rest of the universe, and I find the lady, Ms. Wells, just as the fire reaches her, and I grab her and I carry her, unprotesting, from the fire and out into the slightly lesser heat of the rest of the world.

Then, for a long time, we are on the ground, lying beside each other and breathing, still as lizards. Baking in the heat.

Ms. Wells sprawls beside me, I don’t know how she is still living. She should have died in the fire, but then again, so should have I.

“Are you a hologram?” I ask her.

“No.”

“I had a friend,” I tell her, “who said he was a hologram.

“Oh, yeah?”

“I killed him.”

“Whoa,” she says. Her eyes are closed. My eyes are also closed. “That’s crazy.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Come on,” I say. I open one eye to look at her and find that she has also opened one eye to look at me. “Why did you almost kill yourself? Set yourself on fire. Were you—what, were you testing me?”

“Do you think I was?”

“Yes. Did I pass?”

“Well. Let’s see.” She tugs on her hair, and then nods, satisfied. “I’m alive. Look. It was important to see if you were still human. I don’t mean, are you a hologram? Or a robot, or—anything like that. I mean, ‘Is he still human?’ Like, possessed of a good and golden heart. I thought you were, we thought you were, but—” She sighs. “I had to see.”

The word “we” catches me. I open my other eye. She is still talking, on and on, with no trace left of madness in her voice or mien. “A lot of people, you know, they lose their identity, they are decoupled from the truth, and something happens to them. Everything gets—burned away. You, on the other hand, you appeared to me as remaining still essentially… present. Still human.”