Golden State

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.

Acknowledgments

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.

Thanks to Nell Beram, who copyedited the hell out of the final manuscript, and to Ben Allen for shepherding its production. Thanks to Amanda Brower for a crucial early read. Thanks to Jenny Meyer for carrying my banner overseas. Thanks to Joel Begleiter for being charmingly, relentlessly Joel Begleiter.

Thank you to the law professor Larry Sager at the University of Texas, and the political scientist Adam Berinsky at MIT, for elucidating conversations about law and truth.

Thank you to everyone at Mulholland and the wider world of Little, Brown, especially Sabrina Callahan, Pamela Brown, Alyssa Persons, and Reagan Arthur.

Thanks most of all and forever to Diana Winters, Rosalie Winters, Ike Winters, and Milly Winters. I love you guys so much, and that’s the truest thing I know.

About the Author

Ben H. Winters is the New York Times best-selling author of Underground Airlines and the Last Policeman trilogy. He is a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award and the Edgar Award, and he has been nominated for an ITW Thriller of the Year Award. Winters lives with his family in Los Angeles.

Also by Ben H. Winters

Underground Airlines

The Last Policeman Trilogy

The Last Policeman

Countdown City

World of Trouble

Bedbugs

Android Karenina

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

Copyright

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2018 by Ben H. Winters

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First Edition: January 2019

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ISBN 978-0-316-50541-3

LCCN 2018941036