Ben Winters - Golden State

I get it all down, organizing the flats in neat columns on the pages of my Day Book, and then—I don’t know why exactly, but I do—I stay in my investigative crouch, a bear down low to the ground, paws planted to keep myself from toppling, roving my careful eyes over the man’s dead face. His skull has split and spilled but the weathered face is intact, unharmed. The eyes above the black mustache are open wide, very wide, and he’s got this expression—and this is a subjective determination, this is hard to measure on the scale of what is and what is not so—but he looks terrified .

“Mr. Ratesic?” Paige is trying again, eager to learn, her own Day Book out and open. “What are you seeing?”

“Nothing,” I say, and stand up, heaving my body straight. “Not a thing.” I take one more look up at the house, shake my head. “You wanna tell me what we’re doing here?”

“What?”

“What was the impetus for the presence of the Service? Why were we called?”

“Oh. Um—should we ask?”

She gestures to the knot of regular police who are hanging around close to the house, pretending to do things, stealing glances at the two of us over here by the body. So, too, are the dead man’s coworkers, all in the same green shirts he’s wearing, all milling uncertainly in the shadow of the house, murmuring together, looking warily at their fallen comrade.

And then there’s a team from the Record, circling Paige and me, capturing reality as it unfolds. The capture operator and his backup. The microphone operator, hovering at the prescribed distance, professional headphones bulky over her ears. The archivist and the archivist’s assistant.

“No,” I tell Paige. “I don’t want to ask them. I’m asking you. You looked at the call report, right? From Alvaro?”

“Yes. It just said they called it in. It said the Service was requested to discover the full and final truth. He said they said—”

“Who said?”

“The regular police.”

“What did they say?”

“They said there was something anomalous in it.”

“Anomalous?”

“Yes, that’s—” She takes a step back from me. I’ve got my hands jammed in my pockets. I am scowling, bent forward. “That’s what they said.”

“Meaning what?”

“What?”

“What does that word mean?”

“Meaning… you mean what does ‘anomalous’ mean?”

“Yes, Ms. Paige. Shared understanding is a bulwark. Clear and agreed upon definitions of common terms are defenses against infelicity. Words mean what they mean. So, what is the meaning of the word ‘anomalous’?”

My tone is not pleasant, I recognize that. If Arlo wants me to train this girl, well, then I’m going to train her. It is miserably hot out here—deadly hot. The sun is carving a rash into the skin above my collar.

“‘Anomalous’ means”—Paige takes a breath and stands erect, spits it out, word for word from the Basic Law—“a mismatch of facts possibly indicative of the presence of a falsehood or falsehoods obscuring the full and final truth of a given situation. Sir.”

“Okay.” I nod, maybe a little disappointed to be deprived of the opportunity to further chastise. “Good.” Paige’s nervous face shows a quick shimmering smile.

“So what do you think? Where’s the anomaly?”

“I—” She looks at me, uncertain. Then she looks back up at the house, back at the guy. “I don’t see it. I think he fell off the roof.”

“Yes,” I say. “Me too.”

“So maybe if we just—” She angles her head over to the crowd of officers again. “Maybe we ask?”

“Nope.”

“But—”

“If we can’t spot it ourselves, we don’t keep digging. They put the body in the ambulance and they drive him away. The regular police do their thing, and our part is over. We get back in our car.”

“But—wait.”

I’ve started walking away, and Ms. Paige puts a hand on my shoulder, and then shrinks back when I stop and turn to glare at her. A pause. A mourning dove makes its low coo from somewhere in the high trees. Along the lawn are the embedded captures, forever adding to the documented bulk of reality.

“Why would they call it in if there isn’t anything?”

“For the free show.” I gesture over at them, the workaday police in their blue hats and khaki pants, proving my point, the whole herd of them staring back at us gape-mouthed. “Because being an ordinary precinct policeman is boring, Ms. Paige, and rubbing up against the great and mysterious Speculative Service is not. So they call us and they don’t lie, careful not to lie, but they say, ‘Oh, well, we wonder if there is something weird going on here, we just really want you guys to put eyes on it,’ but really it’s them wanting to put eyes on us. There’s not much we can do about it, it’s the way of the world, but we don’t have to indulge it by turning every tragic accident into the lie of the century.”

“I see,” she says. “Sure. I get it. But maybe…”

“What? Maybe what? ” I feel anger boiling up in me, I hear my voice rising, but I can’t stop. I didn’t want to have a partner anyway. Hadn’t I told Arlo that? Didn’t I say so? “Do you have something to add, Ms. Paige?”

“No, just—” She looks longingly at the dead man. “Maybe if we just speculated—”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say it loud. I practically shout it. Somewhere, a rough cut officer is turning down the monitor at a transcription station, grimacing at the burst of distorted output.

“No, sir. I just thought—”

“I already said there’s no reason. You said it too, didn’t you? No cause for spec. You fucking said it!”

I step closer to her, bellowing now, and she’s smart enough to keep her mouth shut.

“There’s a corpse on the lawn, a broken roof. It’s a clear story, told by the flat facts. So you want to, what, start speculating, conjuring possibilities, right here at the scene? Maybe a low-flying plane knocked him off the roof. Maybe he was pushed by his evil twin!”

The boom mic dangles her pole as close as she dares; the capture op inches in.

“Listen to me, Paige: We start conjuring up alternate versions of realities, just for fun? Just so you can practice? Then guess what? We’re committing our own assault on the Objectively So. Then we have become the liars.”

Paige’s chin has stiffened; she has crossed her arms. “I wasn’t proposing that we lie, sir.”

“Unwarranted speculation is no better than lying, Ms. Paige. It is worse. You want to see how it’s done, here’s how it’s done: it’s better when it’s not done at all. Our job is to reinforce the Objectively So. Not stand around conjuring realities, alternate realities, every one of which might extend, evolve, metastasize.” I am barking now, hollering, furious at the idea that she might not hear and understand what I’m telling her. “And none of those realities can be collected back once released. Our job is to find the facts and travel between them, to walk carefully along lines of what’s true. And when we do speculate? When we do hypothesize? We do it carefully, conscientiously, in a controlled environment, and we don’t do it at all unless and until the facts support it. The Speculative Service is a bulwark. What is the Speculative Service?”

“It’s a bulwark.”

“Fucking right it is.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now just—” I take a deep breath. Plant my hands on my hips, feel my feet beneath me. Try to get steady again. “Would you give me a second to do the stupid job?”

I regret my outburst right away, of course.

That’s me all over. Big and brave Mr. Laszlo Ratesic of the Service, dedicated officer of what is true, and a petty and short-tempered and thickheaded brute. Fully conscious of all his faults, wholly unable to correct them.