“Kelly.”
“Your full name, ma’am.”
“Kelly Tarjin. Elizabeth. My middle name is Elizabeth.”
“So Kelly Elizabeth Tarjin?”
“Yeah. Right. Do you want to see my identifications?”
“No, Ms. Tarjin. That’s not necessary.”
I don’t need to see her identifications. Even in the general discomfort I’m feeling over here by the liar’s table, her asseveration of her name doesn’t add to the discordance. Maybe she was lying to the others just now, but she’s not lying to me right now. I can tell. When it’s bad, it gets bad. Two days ago I had a guy on a false claim, a guy begging at 4th and Alameda with a hungry and homeless sign, though he was neither, a guy who then clung to his demonstrable untruths even when contrary evidence was presented, stood there proclaiming and reproclaiming his lies, swearing to them until the air was so thick I felt it way down in my throat, like a clot in a drain.
“These are your sons, Ms. Tarjin?”
“Yes. Todd and Eddie. Edward.”
“Hey,” says one of them. Todd. They’re both looking at me, both of them wary, both of them uncertain. I cough once, into my fist.
“And what are you folks discussing this morning?”
The boys glance at each other. Ms. Tarjin taps one hand on the table, next to her plate.
“Well,” she says finally, and then one of the sons interrupts: “It’s personal.”
I smile. “I’m afraid it’s not anymore.”
I want to keep everybody cool for as long as possible. Keep the situation in neutral. I have other voices I use in other situations.
“Yes, sir. Of course.” That’s Mom, that’s Ms. Tarjin, who is afraid. You can tell she’s afraid. I don’t want her to be afraid, I don’t want anyone to be afraid of me, I’m like anyone else, even though it’s not me she’s afraid of, it’s the clothes and the position, it’s the black pinhole with the felt brim, it’s the boots, the outfit metonymic for the whole system of which I am a representative. Still, nobody likes to make other people fearful.
But the atmosphere continues in its roil. It’s here. It’s close. I cough again.
“We were talking about some… some uh…” The woman, the mom, she’s choosing her words carefully. That’s what folks do, with me standing here, all the weight of what I am, me looming like a dark planet. It’s okay. I’m patient. “We were just having a conversation about some medication of mine.”
“Medication.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What kind of medication is that?”
“Dreams—that’s all. For dreams.” She has lowered her voice, as if it were possible for us to speak confidentially. As if everybody in the room weren’t listening by now, customers and waiters gawking, fascinated; as if the place wasn’t bristling, too, with captures—captures in the ceiling fans, captures on the kitchen’s large appliances, the pinhole that constantly captures my own personal POV. The whole world under constant surveillance, everything on the Record, reality in progress. “I take Clarify, that’s all.”
“Oh. Well, that’s all right.”
While I write it in my Day Book, Ms. Tarjin swallows, swallows again. “Dream control, you know. Prescribed. To reduce or—how does it go?—to reduce or eliminate the confusing effects of dreams in my waking life. I have the prescription. Do you—” She glances at her purse, and I shake my head, raise a hand—That’s not necessary. I don’t think she’s lying about being prescribed the dream dampener. The boys, meanwhile, are stock-still, frozen by some combination of protective impulse and fear for their own safety. In another moment, no doubt, I’m gonna know which guy has more of which. Like I said: either someone confesses or someone does something dumb. That’s how it always ends.
“And your supply of Clarify,” I venture, “has it perhaps been coming up a little short?”
“Yes.” She swallows. “That’s right.”
I write in my Day Book.
“And so the conversation you’re having here, that’s you asking the boys if they happen to know where your surplus dream meds might have gotten to?”
She lowers her head.
“Mom, you don’t have to answer all these questions.” That’s Eddie, the smaller of the brothers, giving his voice some spine.
“Well, she does, actually. She does.” He glares at me, his face tight with anger, and I gaze back at him impassively.
It’s dead quiet in here now. No waitresses are taking orders. No one is chitchatting in their own booth. Somebody has killed the jazz radio in the kitchen. Everybody is staring at us, at the big man in his blacks, towering over the three-top by the front window. And, you know, this is my nineteenth year doing this job and there’s something I’ve learned, which is that you can talk however calmly and reassuringly you want to, but people are gonna hear your words colored by their own feelings, by their own anxiety or fear or impatience.
“Tell me the rest,” I say to Ms. Tarjin.
“Mom—”
“No, Eddie,” I say. “You keep quiet, son. I’m gonna talk to your mom a minute. Don’t obfuscate.” I shift on my feet, turn out, so I’m talking as much to Ms. Tarjin as to the boys. “A lie hidden in a shell of truth is a lie just the same, and I will know it.”
“I was afraid that my son Eddie was stealing my pills.”
“Mom!”
“But—but—” She looks at the boys, and Eddie is looking at me, coldly furious, and Todd is inspecting the backs of his hands. “But Todd says it wasn’t Eddie. Todd says it was him.”
“It was, Mom. It was me.” Todd looks up, presses a hand to his chest. “It was, okay?”
She gives him a look I can only half see because the air is bending, the air is bent, and she says, “I thought it was Eddie because Eddie had been at the house but Todd told me that I had it wrong. So we’re getting it straightened out. That’s all. It’s not a matter for, for”—she meets my eye, very briefly—“for your department.”
“Oh,” I say, “I see,” and I look at the family looking back and I am feeling it now, and I
