“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.
“Idiot,” I call myself, and “asshole,” as I prowl around to the rear of the house, to where the pool stretches out in a perfect pristine rectangle, its even blue surface shimmering with the shadow of the house itself. I’ve come around to the back to make sure there aren’t any contraindicating facts, but really, just to have a second alone, alone with my lumbering thoughts, with my anger and self-recrimination—and with the capture op, lone representative of the Record. He has trailed me and stands now at a respectful ten-foot distance, his handheld trained on me, standing heavily on the lawn. Reality in progress.
I think I’ve seen this op before—a shaggy-headed dude named Morgan or Marcus, something like that. Convention dictates that you ignore the Record’s representatives, but a lot of people will say hello, give a nod or a smile. Not me. I keep my hands deep in my pockets, stare by turns at the roof, the lawn, the pool.
The sun scatters its golden light across the moment, glittering on the rooftop, glinting on the blue of the pool, dappling the deep green of the lawn. The damn roofer should have had the good sense to fall off this side of the house. He might have saved himself a broken neck. Might have drowned instead.
There’s a back door, coming off the pool patio, a pair of elegant French doors that allow no clear view of whatever choices are made inside the house. I look up at that house, debating whether to take the extra five minutes to haul myself up there, push a ladder against the stuccoed white walls, and have a closer look at the spot where the roofing tiles gave way. Make sure. Make double and triple sure.
But I’d only be doing it by way of apology to Ms. Paige, a half-assed dumb show of contrition: Look, maybe you were right. Maybe there’s one more flat fact to be found, another tile for us to lay into the mosaic. Only I know there’s not. What happened is what happened. It was a tragedy, maybe, but there is no anomaly, no lie hidden, obscured, and in wait beneath the surface, like a snake under the soil. All the facts are flat and simple. All the lines between them are clean and direct.
I am not the monster that I sometimes appear to be. Not at the core, not down at the bone. I understand young Paige’s eagerness, her fervency, the fundamental truth of her, coming off the kid in waves. She wants to speculate because that’s what Speculators do. We are the ones with the power, and the license, to truck with lies—we can sense them, we can handle them, and we are empowered to emit them our own damn selves. To construct different versions of the truth so each can be tested, so all might fall away until only the real one remains.
Ms. Paige just wants to do the damn work.
And here I come to explode at her for committing the crime of caring too much? Of hoping to find something lurking beneath the surface?
The question is, what kind of fundamental truth is coming off me?
Back in front of the house, the ambulance has maneuvered onto the lawn and parked among the other emergency vehicles under the meager shade of the very tall palms, and now I shade my eyes and watch the men with their stretchers trot across the lawn to bear away
