Everything is on the Record, just waiting to be discovered: the whispered confession, the stolen kiss. This is not the goal of our good and golden systems; the goal is simply the maintenance of reality as it occurs, so that all can live together within the same sheltering truth, safe within the strong high walls of the Objectively So. We may keep secrets from one another, but not from the Record, and if life is therefore made more difficult for the adulterer or the petty-cash-box pilferer, for the student with his eye on his deskmate’s paper or the worker who clocks in late, well surely that’s a price worth paying—or even, looked at differently, not a price at all, but a benefice. A gift we are given by the ever-presence of truth.
Captain Elena Tester, right about now, isn’t quite seeing it that way. Her face has colored. She stares at me, eyes lit with anger, as I press on.
“How long have you had a relationship with Mr. Sampson?”
“Judge,” she says.
“What?”
“Judge Sampson.”
He is a judge in the Court of Aberrant Natural Phenomena. His courtroom is on Grand Street, in one of the old slate-gray justice buildings. Those who come before the ANP are most often referred from the Social Services divisions, but it certainly would not be unusual for the regular police, including officers under Tester’s jurisdiction, to be called to offer testimony before him. These facts paint a certain picture, and I record its outline in my Day Book, keeping my face neutral. Not just an intimate problem but a professional problem, a conflict of interest problem. A conflagration of problems for Elena Tester. I have walked in here today and lit a fire on her desk.
“And now here is my question for you, Mr. Speculator.”
Elena stands up, places her palms flat on the desk. Whatever this question is, I am supposed to answer it and then go. Our interview is over. “Are you quite comfortable, destroying my life offhandedly? Destroying Barney’s life? Because a man happened to fall off of his roof? Is that a decision that you feel happy about?”
“No,” I say. “Not happy.”
“But content.”
I think that over for a moment, judging the true, full meaning of the word “content.”
“My professional responsibility is to follow this incident until its truth is full and final,” I say quietly. “My personal hope is that it causes you no unnecessary grief.”
“Oh,” she says. “Great. My personal hope is that you can go fuck yourself. Do you have any more questions for me, Mr. Ratesic?”
“No, ma’am,” I say. “Not at this time.”
She glares at me, the rims of her eyes gone red, as I rise to go. I’m at the door with all my papers gathered up, and when I look back, Tester stares at me coldly, with hatred but as if from a great distance.
“You weren’t good enough for her, Laszlo.”
“I know.”
Truth, a sliver of weaponized truth.
“That’s what happened to you and Silvie. In case you didn’t know. You were never, ever good enough.”
I stop at the charmingly gritty Asian market just down the road from my house, near where Bundy turns into Centinela. Tucked inside is a brightly lit food court where you can get seven different kinds of ramen, including the kind I love, miso broth swimming with thick-cut slabs of pork and sprinkled with sliced green onions. In line for the soup, I’m thinking never good enough. Digging out a handful of crumpled bills, muttering “Thanks,” driving home with the bag balanced precariously on the shotgun seat, and I’m thinking Never, ever good enough.
I get home from the market and there’s no chance she’ll be waiting for me on the porch as I would have found her six months ago, sipping wine on the green glider we bought together at a Palms yard sale, awaiting me in the waxy moonlight, raising her glass in an ironic toast as I trudge toward her up our steps.
And yet my heart fills with dumb hope as I shut the car door. The Moon is in fact waxy in the sky, and the green glider is on the porch, and the breeze is easing it gently back and forth, but Silvie isn’t on it.
I put my dinner down in the living room and tell the wall-mounted to turn on. The wall-mounted is just like the screen at work, except it’s bigger and flatter and you don’t control it—it’s more like you’re at its mercy. In the office you can requisition reality in the official capacity, get the stretches you want and slide them into your screen and say “Go.” But with the wall-mounted, you just pick from among whatever happens to be on. It’s all slices of life, culled from captures all over the city, arranged by the entertainment professionals into themed streams: “Arguments in Restaurants,” “Surprise Proposals,” “Searching for Small Lost Things.”
I flip around for a while in search of something suitably nontaxing, maybe one of the unpopulated streams, “Traffic Lights Cycling” or something like that. I settle for “Mildly Comical Misunderstandings.” I unpack my soup and eat it slowly, trying not to get too much on my coat because I know I’ll be wearing it tomorrow. I say “Play” to the wall-mounted and watch some poor asshole waiting at the Superior Java on Finley Avenue, checking his watch, while his date on split screen waits at the Echo Park location, checking her’s.
When I’m done I turn off the screen, chuck the empty containers in the trash, and head downstairs to do my archiving.
My own Provisional Record is in a crawl space underneath the house, dimly lit, thick with dust and spiderwebs no matter how often I clean it out, which is not nearly often enough. I tear from my Day Book the
