At the present moment, though, I just need a dictionary. Along the inner wall of our office is The Full Dictionary of the Golden State, all seventeen volumes, with the bold main entries and the word histories in tiny type, with all the illustrations and charts and diagrams, the latest updates in a series of stapled inserts in the back of each volume.
I’ve got The Speculator’s Field Dictionary, leather-bound and portable; I’ve got The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary.
And then, of course, closest to hand, I have Mose Crane’s copy of that same Everyday Citizen’s, the universally issued handheld lexicon.
I like a man who likes his dictionary. I open it up, about a third of the way in, where the Gs or Hs would be, and I feel all of my blood freeze and stop, and I snap it closed again.
It’s not a dictionary.
There has been, since we left Dolly Aster’s building, a quiet burble of speculation chugging along in the back of my brain, a faint gurgling ever-presence like a creek on the far side of a campground, and now, all of a sudden, it becomes a rush, a crashing wall of water that staggers me up and out of my chair. I push the book off the desk and it slams on the floor and I stare at it lying there, like a feral animal, motionless but radiating menace. Cullers looks up at the sound and then down again, shifts his position, and lets himself drift back to sleep.
I bend warily to pick it up, slide it back on my desk, keeping my face a good foot from the object itself.
The cover looks like the cover of the dictionary, there’s no question about it. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary, the font and typesetting so familiar I could have drawn it myself. Beneath it, in smaller type: A Product of the Golden State Publishing Arm.
But only the paper jacket is real; the cover has been removed from a real dictionary and wrapped around this book instead, and carefully trimmed, I now realize, cut at top and bottom to fit precisely. Beneath the paper cover of the dictionary, the book has a real cover, pale yellow with stark red letters: “The Prisoner.” And then, underneath it, in smaller type, “A Novel,” and then, in smaller letters still, “By Benjamin Wish.”
A stolen cover or a counterfeited cover hiding a real one. Like snakeskin, like a skein, a shadow truth drawn across the object’s reality like a curtain. A big lie, a forgery, an act of material pretense. I wrap my fingers around the edges of my desk. By instinct, just to feel something real, to grip on to it. With both hands I clutch the desk’s edge like a window ledge and hold on tight.
And then—a deep breath—I open the book again, look down and then up again, just long enough to read a sentence, grab the words without feeling them:
—and what of the boy himself? What was transpiring meanwhile within the fragility of his body, within his mind’s blank interior, while outside him all of this whirl of activity: his doctor’s interventions, his parents’ desperate pleading? His body lay still and seemingly at rest but inside there was life, after all, but life of a kind—
I close the book.
Close it and press my hands down on top, one hand flat and then the other hand flat on top of the first, press both hands down as if on the lid of a chest to keep it from springing open again.
It’s fiction. For fuck’s sake. It’s fiction.
“Hey. Cullers. Hey.”
“Yup?” He says it with forcefulness, the feigned alert tone people use when they’ve just been woken up.
“Do you know where Mr. Vasouvian is?”
“What?”
“Arlo? Where is he? Where is Arlo?”
8.
I find him in the first place I look, in his favorite place, just across the Plaza, on the broad majestic steps of the Permanent Record, working his way with stoic determination through a very large sandwich. He’s got his tie tucked punctiliously between the buttons of his shirt, and a paper napkin tucked into his collar, and even in my agitated state of mind I spare a moment to love Arlo Vasouvian, my mentor and my oldest friend in the Service. Probably my oldest friend alive, if you don’t count Silvie, and I can’t count Silvie anymore.
“Ah,” says Arlo, looking up. “Laszlo. Six sixes is thirty-six.”
“And always will be,” I say. I’m holding the book close to my chest, tight at my heart like a breastplate.
“You all right there, Mr. Ratesic?” Arlo lowers his sandwich to his lap, dabs at his lips with the napkin. A wilt of thin white hair falls across his forehead. “You will forgive, I hope, an old man’s lapse into cliché, but you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
That’s it exactly, of course. The thing in my hand, the dictionary that is not a dictionary, novel that is not a novel, is a ghost: phantasmagoric, alarming, inexplicable. I drop down onto the bench beside Arlo, still catching my breath.
“Take time,” says Arlo, and he smiles his faraway smile. “Take time. Gather your thoughts.”
The Plaza is a wide parallelogram of cement and fountains, of tall palms and statuary, of meandering paths and kiosks whose cheerful merchants hawk gum and marijuana cigarettes and the day’s Trusted Authority. The broad and sun-drenched Plaza is the heart of the State, and at the heart of the Plaza is the pond, a narrow, kidney-shaped duck pool surrounded by benches. Food trucks shark around the outskirts of the Plaza at all hours, a constantly rotating array of food trucks representing all the dizzying variety of cuisines that flavor the State: sumptuous pork dumplings and crisp savory crepes and spicy beef empanadas, tacos and tortas and tostadas, fish sandwiches and pâté sandwiches and overstuffed chicken salad sandwiches like the one Arlo is now enjoying. Ringing the Plaza are
