“I caught it on the scanner,” Captain Tester tells me. “I live near here, you know? On Talmadge.” I’m watching her face. I don’t know what I look like to her, I don’t know if she can tell what I’m thinking, but she keeps talking. “Sometimes I like to stop by a scene. Sometimes these…” Another half second pause. “Anyway. As long as I was in the area, I thought I’d babysit the homeowner while the scene officers did their thing. Take something off their plate. You know the figure?”
“Of course.”
“Just procedure,” she says with a final nod, and I’m wondering at her words, wondering at myself for wondering. Is Captain Tester reminding me of the division between our respective domains, between the world of police business and that of speculative affairs? Is she brushing me back? Does she know she’s doing it? The wind teases at the tops of the fat-trunked aspens and the skinny palms that shade the yard. The lenses of the captures hum unseen in the greenery.
“Anyway.” Captain Tester smiles, gives me a reassuring pat on the shoulder, colleague to colleague, and heads back to her car.
Officer Paige is over on the far side of the lawn. She has finished with the workmen and she’s watching me—she has been watching the whole time; I can tell from here that she has never lost track of me for a second. Ardent young seeker, wanting so badly to enter this beguiling and suspicious world I inhabit.
All right, then.
“Hey,” I say. “Paige.” I crook a finger and she comes springing across the lawn like a deer.
“Yes, sir. What is it?”
I refocus my attention on Tester, who’s climbing into her unmarked car. She raises a hand to me, and I raise one back. A captain of the regular police.
“Do we know whose house this is?”
5.
People see us—people like Renner, I mean, and even people like Elena Tester, people who ought to know better—and get weird. Wary. They talk slow or fast, fidget from side to side or stand statue still, arms crossed, protecting the midsection as if from a blow. Afraid of lying, but also afraid of being thought to be lying, afraid of the rules we enforce and the punishments we are empowered to dole out.
But what you should be afraid of, and what I think most people really are afraid of, deep underneath—buried truth, truth of the soul—is what would happen if we were gone.
What they ought to be afraid of is the truth of the world beyond the Golden State, the truth of the wilderness, which is no truth at all.
I’m talking about what happened to the rest of it, to the world beyond our world of bright blue skies and ocean breezes and crystalline epistemology.
We are the world that is left, and the future of the Golden State depends on the fierce defense of what is Objectively So. It depends on the transcriptionists and archivists and librarians of the Permanent Record and the collectors and checkers and double-checkers of the Trusted Authority; it depends on the Acknowledged Experts, up on Melrose Avenue, scurrying from committee room to committee room; and it depends somehow on us, on me, me in my rumpled suit, clinging to the steering wheel like a ship’s captain, looking longingly at the House of Pies as it sails by on Vermont Avenue. Aysa Paige riding shotgun upright and at attention, her intensity dimmed not a bit by her first foray into the field.
It’s already eleven. I know that to be a true fact because the bells are ringing from the high tower of the old movie palace at Vermont and El Segundo, and strangers are stopping on the street to tell each other it’s eleven, agreeing that it’s true, shaking hands and reinforcing what is Objectively So.
I wonder fleetingly what Silvie is doing right at this exact minute; this is something I used to do all the time, before we went our separate ways. I would pause somewhere in the middle of my day and wonder what she was doing, right at this exact minute. It would be the thought of her, out there in the city, maybe filing forms in her orderly sub-basement office, maybe meeting her friend Lily for silken tofu soup on Beverly Boulevard, just Silvie out there doing her thing—the thought of her out enjoying the universe would reliably buoy my own thick, dull spirits. That’s love, as best as I can figure it: love isn’t how you feel when you’re together, it’s how you feel, how often you feel it, when you’re apart.
“All right, so look,” I say abruptly. “I gotta say something.” And Ms. Paige immediately says “Yes, sir,” and I immediately stop.
“Yes? Mr. Ratesic?”
I sigh. I hate this conversation. I hate conversations, just in general. I wish I was alone. I wish I could stop, alone, at Donut Sam’s or one of the other greasy anonymous places with the laminated posters in the windows, with the cheap tin napkin dispensers on the grimy plastic tables, with the rows of colorful fluorescent doughnuts under glass like costume jewelry.
“So,” I say to Paige. “You were right.”
“Yes, sir.”
“About this event. This incident.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop calling me ‘sir.’ We are both officers of the same service, Ms. Paige.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay. So—but—” She clears her throat. She looks at me. “Do we do it now?”
“No.” I sigh, shake my head. “And don’t ask again because I will fucking tell you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I will tell you when it’s time to speculate.”
We’ve come all the way downtown on Vermont Avenue by now. We’re passing the blocks of factories, long, low smokestack buildings pumping out textiles and tin cans and small electronics, we’re passing the wheat fields and cotton fields and dope fields, all the architecture of our self-sufficiency. Through downtown and out again into University City.
“First we need a few more facts.”
“You people friends
