Ben Winters - Golden State

I am going to die here, I think. Wherever this is—one way or another—I’m going to die . I might as well go out with my name on.

“My name is Laszlo Ratesic,” I say.

“You’re Golden State?”

“Yes.”

She says it like that, not “Are you from the Golden State?” but “ You’re Golden State ?” and I wonder what that means.

“You’re a refugee?”

“I—I’m sorry. I—”

“Exile.” She interrupts, impatient. “You’re an exile.”

I squint. I can’t hear her clearly. Maybe she said “in.” You’re “in exile” or you’re “an exile.”

“Yes,” I say, the answer is the same either way, and feel the pain of longing for my homeland, which strangely enough appears to me as the pleading, earnest face of Kelly Tarjin, whom I only met three days ago. I think of her in the doorway of her small home in Faircrest Heights, her face worn with care. I recall telling her there was a version of the world in which I would come back to her, buy her a hamburger, tell her funny stories. I imagine her now with a stab of regret, imagine her waiting, imagine arrogantly that she cares, that she’s standing in her doorway in fruitless anticipation of my return. The weakest form of speculation: fantasy.

I miss her. I never really met her. “Home” is a word with no definitive meaning.

Meanwhile, the mustache guy trots over to the captain and mutters in her ear. She looks baffled, but then she shrugs and hands him the bullhorn. He starts to talk, it doesn’t work, he puzzles at the mechanism and starts again.

“Hey, would you say the name again?”

“Laszlo,” I say.

“The whole name.”

The captain is watching him. He’s watching me.

“Laszlo Ratesic.”

He confers with the captain, and then with the other two cops, who lift their visors to join the conversation, until he speaks again into the bullhorn. “All right, then. We will not be killing you for the time being.”

The dark-skinned cop with the gray mustache has a partner, too, a young woman with a black ponytail. She’s driving and he’s in the shotgun seat, and I’m in the back, and they don’t talk while they take me where we’re going, a short ride down the avenue—the Strip, is what it’s called. That’s what Wish calls it in The Prisoner ; I remember it now. But in their easy comfort with each other, in the clear mutual respect I sense between the two, I am reminded helplessly of Aysa Paige, my old friend, my first and last and only partner.

My thick head lolls back and I think maybe I sleep a little, in the air-conditioned back seat of this taxicab that is a police car, in this city that did not exist until half an hour ago, heading to who knows where. I drift off to sleep deciding that the best thing to do is remember Aysa forever as the Aysa I knew first, the one who never betrayed me and never intended to. Let that truth be the one that lasts, let that be the real bone truth of her and me.

When the cops open the back door and tell me to wake up, we’re at a hotel called the Mirage. It’s a simpler, shabbier building than some of the others—a pair of identical buildings, each a massive rectangular slab of concrete, striped with glass, angled backward toward a tower in the center that connects them. It looks like a book open to the street.

In the parking lot, as we get closer to the rear door, there is what looks very much like a giant pile of rotting pumpkins, hundreds of pumpkins smashed to pieces in a shifting pile, covered in flies.

I don’t ask. I am done, for now, with questions. I follow my escorts inside, and I am overwhelmed by noise: a vigorous open-air bazaar is in full swing in the lobby of the Mirage, with market stalls set up and lines of customers haggling over clothing and food and small housewares.

“Six bucks? Fuck you,” says a beefy guy, shaking his head at a small woman with wiry hair and a handkerchief over the lower half of her face.

“No,” she says, tugging down the kerchief so she can enunciate better, “fuck you. ”

The beefy guy steps up to the lady, making fists of both hands. The cop with the mustache steps toward the confrontation, but his partner, the young woman, stops him. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I got it.”

She strides over, hand on her gun, as I dodge a wheelbarrow laden with what looks like toasters and pencil sharpeners. Mustache takes my arm.

“You doing okay?”

“No,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “I bet you’re not. C’mon.”

He leads us through the lobby, past the elevator bank, into a quiet dark room, and the feeling of the place is immediate and unmistakable: across all space and time, in whatever universe I may stumble into, the smell and feel of being in a bar remains the same. People are scattered at small tables throughout the room, nursing small glasses, and there’s a bored-looking bartender, a guy in round sunglasses with spiky hair, reading a book with the paper cover folded back. Before him, across the bar, is a man in a gigantic motorized wheelchair, nursing a glass of his own.

“Hey,” says the cop, and everybody looks up. But he’s talking to the guy in the wheelchair. “Hey Charlie. I believe this man belongs to you.”

The man in the wheelchair moves his right hand, just his right hand, to work a device on his armrest. Slowly the machine turns, and I can see his face.

“Charlie,” I say. “Oh, Charlie.”

The chair moves slowly toward me, and I walk toward him, almost as slowly as he comes toward me, so baffled am I, so weighted with astonishment. My feet plant and lift themselves one heavy step at a time as he rolls across the tile floor of the bar, the mechanics of his chair whirring as he comes. The cop steps back and crosses his arms, watching our reunion, and the bartender goes back to his book. Halfway across the bar, the front wheel of Charlie’s chair catches on a lip of tile, and the whole thing nearly totters over backward. He stops, fusses with his buttons, and navigates the obstacle.

“Lashed to the mast”. The phrase appears in my head. My long-lost brother, living still, is lashed to the mast.

We meet in the center of the room, and I crouch before him and put my hands on his narrow shoulders.

He cannot move his neck.

He says something, but I can’t hear him. His mouth barely moves and the words are faint and garbled. I bend closer.

“Heya, dickhead,” he whispers.

I follow him as he moves across the hotel, through the crush of people in the market. Old decommissioned casino games are shoved against the walls, unplugged. Felt tables have been made into market tables laden with goods. Way up above me are hotel rooms, doors hung with wreaths. Clotheslines are drawn between the mezzanine railings.

I stand beside Charlie in the elevator, shaking my head. His whole physical self is gone, his broad swaggering body is blasted and burned and shriveled, but I would know him anywhere. I would know him a thousand times.

“Welcome to”

Charlie writes those two words and I take the paper and wait while he writes more.

“my swinging”

I am smiling already, but I wait for it, for the third scrap of paper. He holds the nub of a pencil in his hand, between middle and pointer finger, clutching it fiercely between two knuckles, and it trembles wildly as he writes.

“bachelor pad”

I laugh. His face does not move. He is frozen. His face is a mess of old scars and burn marks, pocked and pitted and locked in place. His mouth is a sideways oval, a bent O angled toward his right cheek.

Charlie can’t talk. Not really. Each word he utters is a triumph of sustained effort and still comes out as a strangled, unearthly whisper.