“Is this the first pallet?” I ask her.
“First and last.”
I look at her in the dim light, and then back at the pallet. A single pallet. Six boxes.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely sure?”
“What am I going to do?” she says. “Lie?”
The room feels colder than it was. Colder and darker. I glance at Ms. Paige, and she looks uneasy, standing behind me with her hands on her hips.
“Ms. Aster.” My voice is in neutral. My mind is going ten different ways at once. “How old was this man again? If that’s a fact you’re—”
“Fifty-four,” says Aster, busybody, knowledge collector. She knows.
I grunt. I crouch to the pallet. Fifty-four years. Same as me. I shift my weight to talk over my shoulder to Paige.
“Hey. What’s your gut?”
“What?”
She looks caught out, confused. But this is how it works: you are confronted with something and you make a decision. Anomaly, whispers of anomaly. What do you do?
“Come on, Ms. Paige. Come on. Your gut.”
“Dig,” she says quietly. “My gut is we dig.”
“Okay.” I shrug. “So? Dig.”
She crouches down beside me and we open our satchels. I keep all the special small tools for this kind of investigation in a zippered inner pocket: the slicing tool for clean-cutting dailies, the highly specialized adhesive tape for officially and properly sealing them back up and stamping them opened/examined next to today’s date. We pry off the lid of the first box and start digging.
Crane has got everything in order, just like he’s supposed to, just like everybody: each day’s pocket flotsam is gathered together in its own Mylar bag, each week of days is gathered together in a durable hard-paper sack and sealed. We paw through Mose Crane’s days, and we are both thinking the same thing: they are thin. Some days only have one or two pieces of paper in them, one or two conversations, or just a couple of receipts, or none. Aster watches Paige and me, unsealing thin bag after thin bag—days without incident, nothing worth recording, no transactions, no conversations at all. There’s one Saturday, three weeks old, with a parking ticket, an unlucky lotto ticket, and a note to himself, torn from the corner of his Day Book, scrawled in pencil, indecipherable.
But most days are even thinner. Employer-stamp slips and nothing else: Crane worked and went home, worked and went home. The combined Record of his life adds up to just six boxes, and six boxes is nothing. I’ve got nineteen boxes, personally. Same number of years, thirteen more boxes of days. Receipts for beers with friends from work, carbons of wedding invitations, of my wedding invitation, pictures and postcards and memories.
And listen, I’m fucking nobody. I’m no social butterfly. I don’t like people, I don’t talk to strangers, I don’t have hobbies. Fifty-four years wandering around our good and golden land, some people have got dozens of boxes, hundreds.
But our man Crane is sitting on six. Six.
And listen, there’s a part of me processing this as a trained Speculator, a law enforcement official with a wealth of institutional experience on which to draw. Six boxes isn’t much, but it’s not off the charts. Some people are just lonely, that’s all. Some people don’t get out. It’s just more evidence of the kind of life that Crane led, like the dumpy apartment, like the single ratty pair of shoes: introverted, dull, absent of incident. A bachelor, a day worker, working and eating and sleeping.
“You doing all right, Ms. Paige?” I am bending to the second to last of the boxes.
“No,” she says, a strangled single syllable, and I turn. I didn’t notice, but Paige at some point has stopped digging. She’s come up out of her crouch halfway and is frozen like that, legs bent, one hand over her mouth. Aster has lapsed into expectant, curious silence, her lips pursed and her eyes caught and held.
“Paige?”
Nothing. Here we go again. “Ms. Paige?”
“There’s—” She shuts her eyes, longer than a blink, tries again. “There’s—”
“Ms. Paige?”
“There’s—look—” She swallows hard, and I swear I can feel it, the pulse of pain that jams her up a second, before she manages to explain, sticking her hand into the one box I haven’t gotten to yet, the most recent one. “Look.”
“What am I looking at?”
“There are two weeks missing.”
-
Commencement:And so the novel begins!
After several episodes of raw investigation, in which our curiosity is piqued and our appetite whetted, our attention now returns to the majestic glass-walled downtown office complex that houses the Speculative Service, in company with our hero, the most remarkable representative of that selfsame agency!
Our readers will not need to be reminded of the various mechanisms, extraordinary and subtle, that work together to protect the Golden State from the ever-present danger of falsehood in its variegated forms. These mechanisms include, for example, the Trusted Authority, daily beacon of new and accurate information; the Gazetteer and Book of What Is So and all the other volumes of reference, regularly issued and updated by the Publishing Arm to disseminate good and golden facts so that we all may operate, in all places and at all times, with the benefit of common understanding; and the “comprehensive capture mechanisms,” or simply “captures,” those ubiquitous small recording devices, some carefully hidden and some purposefully visible, capturing what happens, at all times and in all places, so that reality can be preserved for later reference. So there may be one reality, true and permanent and universal.
And of course the Record itself, where the events which occur are forever housed, so that no one may say one thing and subsequently claim not to have said it; so that no controversy may go unresolved; so that no disruption of fact can long go uncorrected.
Preeminent among the variety of truth-defending mechanisms, though, is the Speculative Service, that elite corps of law enforcement officials who are solely empowered, and uniquely qualified, to detect and destroy the stuff
