Ben Winters - Golden State

“But what if I failed the test? You would have died.”

“I was very confident in my analysis.”

“Come on. Come on . Can’t you talk straight for one second?”

“Oh, you mean like they talk straight in there? Twelve and twelve is twenty-four, and north is the opposite of south, and all of that? All of that ‘truth’?”

I’m ready to say yes, exactly, all of that truth, but she isn’t stopping.

“There is truth in scripture,” Ms. Wells tells me. “There is truth in the Brothers Grimm. There is truth in any old map you find. Any old mooted map, with a skull for a compass rose, ‘Beyond here there be dragons’ and all of that. You got truth in that too.”

She’s up now, animated, pacing back and forth. Behind us is the wreck of the Flying J, which has more or less finished burning down and stands as a desiccated hulk, a black and irradiated heap adding new lines of heat to the wavering world around it. I trot clumsily in the wake of Ms. Wells, staggering to keep up with her, my feet burning on the sand. Now we’ve arrived at a small car, bright green, reflecting viciously bright beams of sunlight from all its chromed edges. The car says “VW” above the rear license plate, and it is painted with flowers and speckled with rust.

“Is this your car?” I say, and she doesn’t answer. “Can I take this car?”

“Oh yes,” she says. “You’re going to take it. You have to.” She opens the trunk and pulls out a bottle of water. “Here. Drink.”

I don’t realize how thirsty I am until I am guzzling the bottle. I finish it in a swallow and she hands me another one, and I drink that too.

“Okay,” she says. “Listen. Do you want the good and golden world?”

“Yes.”

She points. “It’s that way.” She fishes in one of the pockets of one of her shirts and holds up a single silver key. “Go and get it.”

“Are you serious?”

She puts the key in my hand. “It’s all yours.”

“Is there enough gas? To get me home?”

“Home? Is that where you’re going?”

“Wait—what does that mean?”

But she’s already gone. I get in the small car. I crane my neck out the open window.

“Hey,” I call. “Are you coming?”

“Coming?” She is already twenty steps away, striding with purpose. “I’m a sweeper, boy child. I gotta keep sweeping.”

And she’s gone.

The city, my city, when at last it appears, is a dim gleam on the horizon: a collection of fairy lights in the desert, yellow on yellow, showing itself through the heat and haze as I crest yet another low rise.

And then I see a cluster of buildings, the tops of buildings, just barely visible above the rolling dunes, just their tips peeking up, and I follow a long bend in the road, until all at once it is unveiled: the Golden State, bright late-day sun glinting off the glass surfaces of the world, returned to me. I grin, jubilant, my dry lips cracking from the effort, and I yelp and smack the center of the steering wheel, a grateful holler to ricochet back across the silent desert to mad Ms. Wells.

I smash down on the gas pedal, and my heart kicks into double time.

I did not believe you, Ms. Wells, I did not know what you were, but I should not have doubted your fluttery and sporting mind. Because there it is, here it is, the Golden State getting taller and clearer as I close out the miles, and just in time, because the gas needle is inching perilously close to empty.

I’m home. I’m back. Oh, Ms. Wells, I’ll never doubt you again.

I come into the city on a broad avenue I don’t yet recognize, three wide and empty lanes in either direction, running between towering buildings, and I am trying to figure out what district I’m in, what section, and I’ve just about decided I’m downtown, it has to be downtown—but what part of downtown?—when one of the car’s front tires explodes and the steering wheel jumps out of my hand.

“Shit,” I say as the car skids and flies, bounces with a rattling bang off a streetlamp and careens in a new direction, totally out of my control. I struggle to get the wheel steady in my hands but it shivers and rolls, flying through my fingers. The car caroms to the other side of the road and my head cracks against the driver’s side window, sending a flash of pain across my skull.

“Fuck,” I say, rolling back from the blow. “Fuck.”

The car sputters and stops, perpendicular to the roadway, steam hissing out from under the hood. The air-conditioning dies along with the engine, and in an instant the car becomes a furnace. I take deep breaths, fighting to steady my shaking hands. The sun is blinding, burning, magnified by the glass of the windshield. There is an ominous hiss coming from somewhere in the mechanics of the car. Blood is trickling into my right eye. I must have cut my head when it hit the window.

“Get out of the vehicle.”

The voice is mechanized. Loud. Coming through a bullhorn or a speaker, some kind of amplification system. I squint through the cracked windshield, rubbing blood out of my eye with my knuckles, trying to see who’s addressing me. My head is a thick knot of pain.

“Get out of the vehicle.”

I grasp the door handle, take a breath, and step out into the blasting heat.

An even, flat expanse of asphalt spreads in either direction. A long street, dotted with street lamps, lined with buildings. I still don’t know where I am, exactly, just that I’m home. I peer up at the street lamps, looking for captures. I had forgotten that I’m barefoot. It was okay driving but now the heat of the pavement sears the soles of my feet.

“Hello?” I call feebly, hands in the air, turning in a slow circle. I don’t see anyone. If somebody shot out my tire, I don’t see them now. Enormous buildings, majestic constructions of concrete and glass, rise on either side of me, up and down the street, each of them with its own giant-scale architectural style. There’s a building that is itself an entire skyline, each of its towers fashioned to look like the top of a downtown skyscraper. To one side of me is a pyramid, its front-facing sides made of sheer black glass, rising many stories into the air.

Whoever told me to get out of the car I don’t see anywhere, but it feels like I should have my hands in the air, so I keep my hands in the air. I walk gingerly from where my car stopped to the traffic island at the center of the lanes.

There are no buildings like this downtown. Maybe I’m not downtown. Maybe I’m up in Pasadena or Glendale, down in the beach cities. Some reach of the State my travels rarely took me.

“Stay exactly where you are. Keep your hands visible.”

The voice again, from nowhere and everywhere.

“Okay,” I say. Now, squinting upward into the haze, I can make out a kind of catwalk, an elevated hallway with a glass bottom, suspended across the road and spanning it, connecting one of the insane buildings on one side to one on the other. I squint up at the catwalk, in search of the source of the voice. I think I can spot figures shifting about up there, dark shadows floating above the roadway, but I can’t be sure.

“Don’t shoot me,” I say to whoever it is. Wherever they are. “I don’t want to die.”

I do, though. A little bit, I do. It hurts to speak. My feet are burning and bleeding. My face is peeling, flakes of hot skin coming off my cheeks above my beard.

“You can’t be out here,” says the voice.

I spin around. I don’t know where the voice is coming from. “Okay,” I say.

Then I see them. Two of them, coming across the road toward me, with guns aimed at my head. They are Speculators, is what they are—black suits, black shoes, black hats—and I am about to call out in happy greeting, ask them their unit, tell them who I am, but then I see that they’re also wearing thick aprons that cover the whole midsection and helmets, black helmets with tinted visors that cover the whole face.