Ben Winters - Golden State

The words come to me again, and the truth of the words: I don’t know where I am.

They are approaching me swiftly, like shadows, like creatures risen from some impossible deep to come and claim me and drag me away. There is a crispness in their movements, a panther-like military integrity that reminds me with a burst of sad longing that I used to be like them. It reminds me that I’m standing here barefoot, broken, bleeding from my head.

“Please don’t shoot me,” I say. “Please.”

They stop, guns still drawn and aimed, and the shorter of the two raises the faceplate and holds up a stubby bullhorn. It’s a woman, pale-faced, staring at me impassively.

“We will not shoot you unless given cause to do so.”

“Okay,” I say. And then, ridiculously: “That’s great.”

“Please provide your identification.”

“I don’t have any.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t have any.”

“None?”

I shake my head.

She is stymied. Irritated, even. Leaving her faceplate up, she turns to her partner to confer. He is shorter than her, broad around the middle, and when he flips up his own faceplate I see a round, pocked face. They press their foreheads together and talk so I can’t hear them. I see figures moving about on the catwalks, clustering together. People. Dozens of people. Staring at me. I turn to one of the glass buildings, on one side of the street, and I see that I am being watched from there, too. And from the building on the opposite side. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, thousand, maybe, are watching.

I know at last where I am. A skyline that is not a skyline but a cluster of overlapping skylines. I know it from The Prisoner, from when, toward the end, Dave Keener arrives in that glittering and hopeful city in search of the wrecked alcoholic doctor who may or may not hold the secret that can save Dave’s son. When he arrives, it’s late at night, and he drives his car down a broad avenue—this same broad avenue—into a throbbing crowd of partygoers and happy revelers, and his own grief and panic are drawn in sharp contrast to the footloose alcoholic joy of those he is forced to pass through en route to his salvation and that of his family.

The whole world of the book returns to me in a flash, a world layered over this one, Dave Keener unable to deal with the traffic, throngs of cars going on either side, so he pulls over and gets out on the side of the road and climbs up on top of his car, scanning in both directions, while the exhaust of a hundred cars blows up into his eyes and coats his throat.

I am in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, as it turns out, is a real place.

The two officers have come to some sort of disagreement, presumably about my fate. The short fat one raises his gun and points it at me, and the other one, the one who spoke to me, pushes it down. I step off my traffic island and head toward the two officers—or soldiers, or whatever they are—hoping to engage them, but they ignore me, continue their squabbling. Their voices float over to me in patches, ribbons of conversation.

“…I don’t know what you want me to do—”

“You know what you have to do. Directorate just issued new instructions on this.”

“What directorate are you fucking talking about?”

“ Main Directorate.”

“Main Directorate of Identification, or Main Directorate of Border Security? ”

“I don’t know!”

“You just said you did know!”

“Can we just call it in? Let’s call it in.”

“Fine. Fine, Rick.”

Rick holsters his gun and digs under his heavy apron and comes out with a radio, a small black box of a make I’ve never seen before. He murmurs into it while his partner watches, and then the three of us stand baking in the sun.

“Hey,” I say, realizing suddenly how brutally thirsty I am. “Can I—”

“Remain where you are.”

“Remain where you are. ”

“Do not move.”

“Do not move.”

“Stay.”

So I wait, unmoving, under the watchful eyes of the two officers in their thick lead aprons and black face masks, and under the eyes of everybody in those hotels that line the street, because that’s what they are. Hotels. I know them from The Prisoner, I have been given a map in advance: a guide book. That’s Luxor, Caesars Palace, New York–New York. Purpose-built simulacra of real places, once built for pleasure. Inside them now, I think, I presume, are people—the people who live in Las Vegas now, who live here now in the present like there are people who live in the Golden State. These people, the Las Vegas people, were never real to me before this instant—but neither were they were unreal. I had no reason to conceive of their existence, nor reason to doubt it. They were unknown and unknowable.

But now they are real, and I can feel their eyes staring from the glass windows above and around me.

Sweat is running in streams from my brow down into my beard. Blood has caked in the corner of my eye, and it bubbles at the cracked blisters on my lips.

Two cars pull up at the same moment, from opposite directions, one on either side of the traffic island where I’m standing. The cars are yellow, each with the word “TAXI” stenciled on its side. Nobody gets out of the cars. One of the officers, the woman, remains with her gun pointed at me, while the other hustles over to the window of one of the taxis.

For a long moment he talks to whoever is in there, and then he trots back over to his partner as the door opens and a new officer comes out—a tall, thin woman, no apron, no mask, dressed all in blue.

She has a bullhorn, and she lifts it to her lips.

“Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

She doesn’t repeat herself. She just waits, watching. My fingers are clumsy, swollen, wrestling with the buttons of my shirt. While I struggle out of my clothes, an officer emerges from the second taxi and methodically puts four traffic cones in a square around me. There is another cop inside his car, I see her waiting, watching him tensely from behind the steering wheel. My pants are burned onto my skin, and I have to fight them off, wrestle them down, unpeel myself from myself. When the new officer, who is older, black, with a thin gray mustache, is done with the traffic cones, he strings yellow caution tape from cone to cone, cordoning me off.

At last I stand in my underpants, the sun flaying my broad red back.

I am becoming aware of life in the corners of this picture. A man and a woman sit on a decorative concrete wall in front of one of the hotels, dangling their feet. A little boy is on a bicycle, swooping in curious circles closer and closer to the conversation. Half a block up there’s a statue of a towering figure in a draped toga or cape, lording proudly above the intersection.

The first officer keeps her gun on me while Rick waits beside her along with the perimeter. He takes off his hat and wipes sweat from his brow while the tall woman, the one with no mask and no apron, lifts her bullhorn again.

“We’re going to need to know your name.”

I start to answer, but then I don’t want to. I can’t. I remember the thud of the boots in my side in the hot dog truck. Not falling for that again. “I don’t have a name.”

“Look,” she says. “If we don’t know who you are, you’re dangerous. If you’re dangerous, we have to handle you as we handle any threat.”

As if to underscore the tall woman’s point, the woman with the gun raises it a little higher. Rick brushes his fingertips along the holster of his own weapon but doesn’t draw. The last of the officers, the perimeter man with the thin gray mustache, has his hands in his pockets, but he’s looking at me closely.