“I know, Laszlo, that you do not relish the company. But there is no one else who can offer this young lady what you can. Do you know what that is?”
“No,” I say.
“Ballast.”
And then he just smiles, the wide and watery smile. And I know exactly what he means. I can picture Aysa Paige, dying to get to the crime scene, dying to ask a thousand questions, dying to speculate, leaping ahead. Bounding, heedless, reckless. Where my qualities tend in the other direction. I am the earthbound man, heavy and stolid. Ballast. That’s me.
Charlie was eager too. Not with Aysa’s wide-eyed acolyte eagerness, but with the swaggering keenness of a big-game hunter, the man who catches a scent and cannot and will not stop, never mind the dangers. Fuck the dangers of exposure, the dangers of living in proximity to dissonance, the dangers of speculation. Sometimes Charlie almost—not quite, but almost—refused to believe there even was any danger.
And Arlo knows as well as I do what happened to Charlie.
I stood beside Arlo at the funeral while the bells were ringing, one ring for each year of his life.
Mr. Vasouvian and Mr. Ratesic, the younger Mr. Ratesic, on the outskirts of the thronging crowd, watching Charlie’s coffin be delivered to the earth, committed to the ground for all time, like a sealed box of files being added to the Permanent Record.
Arlo with his hand on my elbow, holding me gently back from whatever drastic action he was afraid I’d take. As if there was any danger of that: of Laszlo Ratesic flying off the handle, gnashing his teeth, enacting violent revenge. That’s never been my style. I just stood there, hands in pockets, head lowered, listening in silence while my brother’s wild courage was eulogized.
I’d never before seen my father in public without his pinhole on. Never in all of my life.
I’m thinking about him, like I’m always thinking about him, and now I’m thinking about Aysa too, young Ms. Aysa Paige of the Speculative Service, with her whole golden life ahead of her.
“And you didn’t think it was better to simply discourage her from entering the Service entirely? You didn’t think that would be the better course for her?”
“Perhaps.” Arlo turns then, at last, and looks me full in the eye. “But not the better course for the Service.”
Modest as he is, Arlo will not apologize for choosing the integrity of the truth, and the safety and welfare of the State, ahead of the safety and welfare of any single individual. And I’m too sour and inward to express what I am already feeling, which is that I am grateful to Arlo for the opportunity to work with Aysa Paige. To take her under wing, lead her into greatness.
I scan the edges of the Plaza, but lunchtime is over, and the food trucks are going or gone. I see the Dirty Dog, a black truck with pink piping, a hot dog truck I’ve been wanting to try for years, but it’s just now driving away, turning down Alameda Street in a cloud of exhaust. In the wake of this disappointment I register another truth about Aysa Paige, the other way I am feeling and have felt since Crane’s apartment, which is a burning envy—I could die of jealousy, I swear to it, that is big true, I could die of jealousy, but because I love the State, I love the work, I will raise her up. Show her the works. Take her along.
“So we are set then?” Arlo says quietly, reading my mind. “I can entrust young Ms. Paige with confidence to your care?”
“Requires subjectivity to answer,” I say. In the pond, the ducks execute a U-turn, still in their flotilla. “Requires an assessment of future events.”
“But you’ll try.”
“I’m trying already.”
“Well, then keep it up.”
The man in the wheelchair has gone, and for once the wall is deserted, this stretch closest to us, and I almost stand up and go over there myself. I’ve never gone in for it myself, the displays of faith. I’d be embarrassed to do it, to put my private devotion on public display, but right now I want to put both of my hands against the Record, press my forehead against the stones of its wall, and whisper, “Thank you. Thank you… for the world we have built, in which everything is known and can be known, in which everything that is so is known to be so, and has been known and will be known tomorrow.” Because just imagine—just imagine the alternative, the world in which a man encounters some scrap of information, about the murder rate in his neighborhood, or about the presence of troops on the northern border, or what time the bus is supposed to come—any of the small and large pieces of information a person encounters in the course of a day or a lifetime, personal or political, substantive or trivial—and then the next hour or the next day he hears something different, and it is impossible, literally impossible, to know which version is the real one.
Madness creeps in very quickly at the edges of such speculation. Not just madness but a kind of horror, a flickering red field closing in. Just the thought of it.
The bell begins to ring from the Grand Hall of the Record, and everybody on the Plaza stops moving and turns to a nearby stranger. “It’s one o’clock,” say a dozen different voices, loud and confident, affirming general truth.
“It’s just turning one.”
“In one hour exactly it will be two.”
I never did pick up the book. It is lying still where Arlo left it, and now he picks it up again, holds it in his lap while he
