Ben Winters - Golden State

“Charlie,” I keep saying, tears rushing down my cheeks, a hot rush. I feel like a dummy.

He has a sheaf of loose papers balanced in his lap. He writes, holds up papers for me, one at a time.

“Knock it off”

And then:

“you baby”

I would knock it off if I could. Instead I crouch down before him and hug his withered legs. His body is a coil of wire, bent up into a seated shape. He is impossibly thin, and immobile, slumped into the movable chair, head fixed in a half tilt, the muscles of his face unmoving.

I have presumed my brother dead for so long, though, and here he is, alive. There is terrified joyful movement inside my chest, small birds opening their wings.

The balcony of Charlie’s room’s has a view of the central courtyard of the hotel. From Charlie’s room you can look across at other rooms just like it, look up and down at other floors just like this one. The bazaar I walked through on my way in continues down below: as we talk, the sounds of haggling, contentious commerce waft up in a continuous stream.

The room is full of paper. There are the loose pages scattered on Charlie’s lap for these small conversational notes, but that’s just the beginning of it. His coat is overflowing with paper, his jacket pockets stuffed with paper. The room is full of filing cabinets, shelves, boxes, and I am certain that they’re stuffed with paper.

“You OK?”

I shake my head. “Not really. I went to your funeral, Charlie.”

He writes. The pencil jiggles between his knuckles.

“Me too”

I laugh. Good old Charlie. He’s still writing, writing two words at a time, writing—

“Arlo: smart”

I read it and his fingers are curling for me to give the note back. I do, and he scribbles, crosses out and amends, and hands it back.

“Me: smarter”

I don’t have to ask him about what happened next, once he disappeared from the Golden State. I spent twenty-four hours, give or take, in exile, in the desert between the Golden State and this place, whatever this place is. I know how I feel now, burned and blasted, twisted and wracked. My throat still feels dry and full of sand. So here’s my Charlie, after my day in the desert, plus months. Plus years. However long until he made it here.

He’s looking at me while I look at him, and then he does his effortful writing again, creating just one word:

“Beard?”

“Oh. Yeah,” I say. I put my hands up to my face self-consciously. “I started it after you were gone. I dunno why. Just—I dunno.”

His eyes don’t move. They are settled on my face. His chin ducks down then, very slightly, which seems to be the extent of movement he’s got, as far as moving his head. I crouch down before him, put my ear to his thin lips.

“It looks like shit.”

I laugh. He is not laughing but I know that he is.

“Fuck, Charlie,” I tell him. “You cheated death.”

His pencil moves across the paper. I wait for it.

“No. The”

I wait. Listen to the noise of the bazaar. Look around the cluttered, paper-ridden room.

“other way around”

It takes a long time for Charlie to explain everything that he wants me to understand. And it is a mark of how much Charlie remains Charlie—world-beating, stubborn, domineering Charlie—that he does not give a shit how long it takes.

Whatever he has to say, it is worth waiting for, because it is Charlie who is saying it.

Charlie was in the desert for a long time. He doesn’t know how long. He does not know how close he came to dying, but he knows it was damn close.

And then at last he made it here. It took him a lot longer than it took me, because there was no Ms. Wells then, no outrider from Vegas making sorties into the State, finding exiles and pointing them in the right direction.

“What is this place? Why is everything indoors?”

Charlie writes.

“Under my ass.”

“What?”

He points to the paper again. “Under my ass.”

I crouch before him to perform the peculiar intimate act of reaching under the fragile structure of his body, leveraging him up slightly with one hand while I feel around with the other under his bony rear end until I find the wiry spirals of a notebook. More paper. Paper everywhere.

The cover of the notebook is blank.

The notebook is only a few pages long. Still squatting, I flip it open and read it.

It is the provisional understanding of the people of Las Vegas that at some (currently) indeterminate time in the past, an enemy (???) of what was then known as “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (with “enemy” to be [provisionally] defined as EITHER an external adversary OR an internal adversary OR some combination of the two) did inflict (EITHER over time OR “at a strike”) irrevocable damage upon “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”.

The text in the notebook is hard to read. There are many strikeouts and erasures, with some passages in pen and others in in pencil, and with much of it written in, over, and around earlier text. There are arrows at the ends of lines, directing the reader to skip a paragraph or turn the page over to find the continued thought on the back. Each notebook page is a patchwork of smaller pages, smaller pieces of paper, taped and stapled on.

This (postulated) irrevocable damage done to “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” was realized by taking advantage of the nation’s highly interconnected energy infrastructure, coupled with the (near-??) total reliance of that “grid” (term?) on computerized control mechanisms which were highly vulnerable to interference (“sabotage”). The postulated “enemy” (internal OR external OR combined, as noted above) was thus able to take advantage of

A) “systemic flaws” in this “grid” AND/OR

B) “systemic flaws” in the general population’s ATTITUDE TOWARD authority, i.e. DISTRUST for any statement issued by the “government” (including, FOR EXAMPLE, an announcement relating to an attack on the “grid”) AND/OR

C) “systemic flaws” in the population’s ATTITUDE TOWARD the “media” (term?), such that—

I close the notebook for a second and take a look at Charlie. It’s hard to tell but he might be sleeping. His mighty presence has momentarily departed the room. I try to find my place in the book but it’s hard, among the wandering lines of texts, the arrows and cross-outs and redirects. So I just pick a page, a few pages on from where I was.

—a BLAST RADIUS measuring dozens (hundreds? +++?) of miles in diameter. The effects of this accident (term?) were COMPOUNDED by the inability/ unwillingness of survivors to communicate [i.e., severe distrust toward fellow survivors, refusal to accept or solicit assistance, presumption of “enemy intent”]. Lacking the tools to measure, we can feel uncertain—

Someone had written “we can feel certain,” and someone else, or maybe the some person having second thoughts, had gone back and made the certain into uncertain.

—that despite the intervening passage of [???] years, the environmental hazard that was the result of the explosion(s) still pervades the atmosphere in (some but not all) of “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

That’s the last word on that page, “America,” and then it skips down a few lines and someone else in different handwriting has written, in parentheses and in very small letters, (“term?”).

It goes on. I can’t read anymore. I laugh at myself, shaking my head. I sit with the book in my lap, looking out the window of Charlie’s little room. The sky isn’t poisoned with lies, you idiot. It’s poisoned with poison.

“Hey,” says Charlie, working hard to get the word out. “Hey.”