People approach the Record’s walls, as they are constantly approaching the Record’s walls, to perform the small ecstatic ritual for which it is famous. One guy comes up quickly now, a shaggy Caucasian in sandals and aviator glasses, who, as I watch, hunches over and scribbles madly in his Day Book, scribbling some intimate truth; then he tears off whatever he’s been writing, folds the scrap up small and then smaller, and jams it into a crack in the wall of the Record before he steps back, satisfied, and eruns two fingers along the wall, tracing a slow reverential path across its pitted surface.
Others come and go, they are always, always, coming and going, up and down the stone steps, each to perform his or her own version of the old ritual: a lady in a sundress, striding purposefully, grinning ear to ear; a man with his son up on his shoulders; a girl of fifteen, sixteen, maybe, with a skateboard she tucks under her arm while digging out her Day Book. They’re tearing small pieces from their interior lives, ripping pieces from their Day Books and jamming them like sealant into the cracks in the walls of the Record, good and golden citizens adding their private truths to the greater store, a literal enactment of our figurative truth: everybody builds reality together.
There is one truth, and here it is. One truth, and I too am a part of it.
I watch the kid with the skateboard as she presses her palm against the wall, trots back down the steps, and hops back on her board. It’s funny, how much I dislike people in general but then I see one particular person, one good citizen doing her thing, or his thing, and I feel love like a concavity in my chest—the fearsome love that drove me to join the Service in the first place. The need to protect everybody I see.
“So are we talking about the case, Laz? This business up on Vermont Avenue.”
“Yes,” I say. “In a way.”
“Oh?” Arlo untucks his napkin, crumples it into a ball that then expands out into a nest. “And what way is that?”
His voice, as ever and as always, has a calming effect on me. I find that despite the unease of what I have found, I am able in Arlo’s steady presence, warm and worn, to speak clearly. I give the old man a rapid brief on the morning’s adventures, on the dead roofer, how we had enough anomalies to justify going down to his place of residence, and how, once there, we found—
“This.”
I hold it up. “It’s a novel. A work of fiction.”
“Pardon me,” he says, and frowns. “But a novel is not a work of fiction.”
“I know that, sir. I know what a novel is supposed to be.”
“A novel is a true story about an event or events from the distant or recent history of our State—”
“Arlo, I know.”
That’s the point. That’s why I’ve sought him out. But Vasouvian can’t stop now that he’s started. The old man has got few faults, but among them is a love of reciting, of casually demonstrating how comprehensive is his knowledge of the Basic Law, every bulwark and provision. What I am now witnessing may indeed be Arlo’s favorite state: eyelids drifted down to half shut, head tilted slightly back, glasses perched on the tip of his nose, precisely unspooling a line of text.
“A true story, that is, organized into chapters or incidents, featuring a historical character or characters, building to a conclusion, suggesting or implying an inspirational message about the nature of the Golden State.”
“Thank you. Yes. I know all that.”
“It’s true, it’s true,” he says, singsong, with a pleased sigh. “It’s all true.”
“Right, but that’s the point, Arlo.” I hold up the book again, with its plain yellow cover, oversized red letters. “But this thing is not that. It says ‘novel’ on the cover, under the title, but it’s something different.”
“You’ve… read it?” he asks, giving me a look I’ve never seen from him before.
“No, sir.” I shake my head. “I haven’t read it.”
There’s an accusation in his question, a rising sharpness at the end of it that I don’t like. As if I decided to stumble into an alternate reality, to discover a work of make-believe and carry it around. “I only opened it, sir. I looked inside.”
Arlo contemplates me for a moment; another. Behind us, a woman stands very close to the wall, her head bent forward and pressed against the concrete of the building, her hands pressed flat against it. A load-bearing citizen, using the strength of her body to hold up the State.
“And if you only opened it, how do you know that, though it says ‘novel,’ it is not a novel?”
“Well, here.”
I flip it open to the passage on which my eyes landed, I open this fat fraudulent document right there on the steps of the Plaza, right out in the shadow of the Record itself, and I show to Arlo the sentences that scythed into me, the business about the injured boy and the dizzying whirl of activity around his hospital bed, the intimation of some alien intelligence. Clear fabrication, unsupported and unsupportable by any provable fact or facts.
“It’s fiction,” I say flatly, and Arlo murmurs, “So it is,” and closes it, softly but firmly, like a man putting the top back on a box. He thinks and I watch him think,
