Ben Winters - Golden State

He is holding out his working hand for the notebook, and I hand it to him. He flips back to the first page, takes his pencil and presses down hard, underlining a single word, the fourth word in the paragraph: “provisional.”

The roof of the Mirage is all farmland.

I followed Charlie up here in the elevator, and now I lope behind him through yet another alternate universe, a landscape of self-sufficiency rolled out high above the street.

The rooftop has been covered in soil, built over with greenhouses and silos. I follow in Charlie’s wake as he maneuvers past patches of unsown field, cornstalks growing in bent rows. He ably navigates the bulk of his chair between piles of mulch and a clatter of unused shovels and rakes. Dark soil is laid out right to the lip of the roof, with roots twisting into it deep, with the bulging, uneven bulbs of pumpkins twisting up out of the dirt.

Charlie writes.

“Mine all mine,” his note says.

He owns the pumpkin patch. He has papers for it. Other pieces of this common garden are owned by other people, all of it pipelined to the bazaar down below. The people of Las Vegas determined, one way or another, to create a civilization, dragging themselves along as they go.

Charlie angles his chair very close to the edge of the building to show me what he wants me to see: a wooden machine that he built, or maybe had built, right up at the lip of the roof. It’s a very simple structure, just a plank of wood balanced on a triangle, like a teeter-totter, suspended in place with a thick elastic band. And there’s a pumpkin placed, delicately, at the near end of the plank. It’s a catapult, and it’s loaded. Waiting to fire.

We regard this primitive invention for a moment in silence. I feel the heat of the day finally starting to dissipate as it gets closer to nighttime.

Charlie writes one of his notes, and I bend over him to read it:

“What happens?”

“What do you mean?”

But he doesn’t write anymore. He holds up the same paper again. “What happens?”

Meaning, I gather at last, dense Laszlo, what happens when you fire it? When you let loose the pumpkin? What happens?

“It’ll—it’ll go down. Fly over the side.” He waits. I look at his rickety machine, and then back at Charlie, still holding his paper, the scrap of interlocution, patient, insistent. “It’ll fly down and then smash on the ground below.”

I peek over the edge of the hotel, shade my eyes. I think I can see, just barely, the parking lot, littered with the smashed carcasses of pumpkins.

I step up to the machine. I haven’t seen him do it before, and I would have said it was impossible, but Charlie arches his eyebrows: mischievous. Daring.

So I fire the pumpkin. Release the band, step back, and watch the pumpkin fly off the board and disappear over the edge. Together we watch it go: hurtling down and down, arcing outward, tracing a long wobbling parabola until it makes its satisfying smack, loud on the pavement, and bursts into its gore atop and around the existing pile.

I look at Charlie. I’m grinning, weirdly exuberant. He’s already writing.

“Again”

“Again?”

“Again”

We fire the gun over and over. Six pumpkins, ten. The orange corpses pile up far below us.

I’m trying to figure out what the point of this is, what Charlie wants me to see by showing me his jury-rigged pumpkin-firing machine. But after the third or fourth pumpkin I’m mainly lost in the spectacle, holding my breath each time we launch a new projectile and it flips and spins in its ballistic descent toward the climax, the explosive moment of contact with the hard, flat parking lot, the bursting into chunks and lumps of stringy goo. And I laugh with delight and turn to Charlie and he’s waiting, head angled toward the pile, waiting for me to load the next one. This is not just fun, this is a demonstration of some kind, I’m sure, some lesson to be learned about the Golden State, about how we have huddled fearfully away from the edge of the world, burrowing molelike inside our small store of truth, blinding ourselves to the possibility of more. Or maybe the idea here is something even more elemental, more base—Charlie sphinxlike in his wheelchair, watching me work the machine, waiting for me to get it—maybe the message is that Arlo and his revolutionaries, with their contempt for the very idea of truth, that they are wrong, too, and that they are even wronger. Maybe what Charlie wants me to get is just that when you shoot a fucking pumpkin off a roof the same thing happens every time. Every single time.

But then when we’re done, when we’ve depleted our whole pile of pumpkins, before we go back to the elevator, my brother struggles his one working hand off the armrest, lifts one finger to jab me in the center of the chest. He pushes at my sternum, above my heart, with a push that is surprisingly firm. Then he takes the same finger and slowly pushes it into his own chest. Drawing an invisible line between his heart and my own.

This is a novel.

Some of the words in it are true and a lot of them are not and a lot of them are of that indeterminate third category for which there is no good name. But you can say that it is an amalgam of true and false events, true and false impressions, a series of imagined and actual experiences that have been strung together in a particular order to provide access to a kind of truth that might otherwise be unavailable. And more precious for it.

Blindly, blindly, we are feeling our way toward something.

Okay?

My name is Laszlo Ratesic and I am fifty-four years old, formerly of the Speculative Service, formerly a citizen of the Golden State.

I am writing these words in a notebook my brother, Charlie, gave me. The first of nineteen empty notebooks I found inside this yellow taxicab he requisitioned for my journey.

I am at a roadside hamburger restaurant off Highway 8, en route to a town that is called Vancouver, or that was once called Vancouver. There are inquirers in Las Vegas, my adopted hometown, who believe, provisionally, that there are people living in Vancouver who are relatively healthy and stable, who have built a new world, and with whom a profitable exchange of ideas and/or commerce might be arranged.

Or there might not be. We will find out.

The roadside hamburger restaurant, as I sadly concluded when I saw it, is nonoperational, and probably has been that way for many generations. I only know it was a hamburger restaurant because it is shaped like an actual hamburger. This is a metaphor.

Once, many many years ago, a man named Arnold Ramirez ordered something called the Dinosaur Burger and ate the whole thing, an achievement that entitled him to get the meal for free, and to have his picture hung in a frame on the wall of the restaurant. After some internal debate, during which I contemplated the photograph of Mr. Ramirez and his clean plate, I took the picture down, carefully opened the frame and slipped it from the glass, and taped it inside the notebook you are now reading.

Charlie is not able to come to Vancouver, so I am going for him.

He has filled up the car with paper. He has instructed me to fill the paper with truth and bring it back to him.

Some of it will be right and some of it will be wrong.

I will do as my brother has instructed me, and open up the covers of my books like the lids of jars, fill them up with truth and bring them home.

Right now I’m smoking in the night, looking up at a sky full of glimmering pinpricks of light, and I know them to be stars and also diamonds.

I am very grateful to Joshua Kendall at Mulholland Books, and also to my literary agent, Joelle Delbourgo. Both were so smart, and so patient, as I wound my way through many alternate universes until I found this novel.