“You are very much entitled to that opinion,” is my answer. “That is an expression of opinion, and opinions are subjective, and as long as your expressed opinion reflects your honest interior position…” I trail off. I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a prick, so I just go ahead and sound like a prick. “Then it doesn’t matter what you think. Your son lied. He broke the law. And he has to face punishment, and the punishment is prescribed by the State. You should understand that the punishment could be worse.”
“He’s right, ma’am. He knows.”
Aysa speaks gently, all the “Yes, sir,” “No, sir” sharpness replaced by a gentle reassurance. Ms. Tarjin turns her pained eyes toward her. “What do you mean?”
“Well—it just—” Aysa clears her throat. “It could really have been a lot worse.” She’s too kind to make it explicit, what she knows, what we all know: liars are subject to exile. Had Todd Tarjin’s misrepresentations been judged inflammatory, or intended to disrupt the business of the State, or in any way outrageous to the common good, he could have been sent away entirely. Forget about Folsom, San Quentin, or Pelican Bay, forget about ten years. There is a version of this story that ends with Todd in the desert—beyond the desert. Beyond whatever is beyond that.
It happens. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
Eddie, meanwhile, stands diffident, trying to figure out how to feel. This is all because of him, and he is bearing the weight of that knowledge while still glad not to be facing the terror of prison. Guilt, relief, and anger—a welter of emotion moves crosswise on his face.
“Okay, but—I mean.” Ms. Tarjin crouches before me, her voice ragged with need. “There has to be something you can do. Anything.”
She is looking at me with tearful eyes, sadness and need coming off her in waves, her hands pushing into her hair. Eddie is behind her, twisting a torn tissue, miserable with helplessness. Aysa is watching too, and old Arlo, and Charlie from the wall, from behind the shield of his crossed arms, from the distant past.
“Ms. Tarjin, the rules are very clear, and as it happens, they are quite specific. Punishment for falsehood is a bulwark. It’s—”
She snorts at the word “bulwark,” as if I were speaking a curse, an insult. Invoking some demon, instead of the whole system of good works that protect the Objectively So.
“It’s part of what keeps us safe, ma’am.”
“It’s not keeping Todd safe. It’s not keeping my family safe.”
“Respectfully, Ms. Tarjin, your son chose to tell a lie.”
“He was desperate! He was trying to help his brother. He—”
“I am aware of the context. I understand the nuances. I was there, remember? But I’m telling you: strip away the context and the foundational truth is that he lied. In a public place, purposefully and specifically, he told a purposeful and specific untruth.”
I get up, and she can’t help but recoil, step back from my height, my weight, just the breadth of me. “Imagine if everyone did it. Imagine if each person was allowed the luxury of claiming their own truth, building a reality of their own in which they can live. Imagine the danger that would pose, how quickly those lies would metastasize, and the extraordinary threat that would pose to the world. To our world. To the good, golden, safe world we have built and in which we all live together.”
I am conscious as I make this statement that it is true and it is also simultaneously a kind of performance of truth. I am performing for Arlo, my mentor and friend; I am performing for Aysa Paige, who stands deferentially listening, absorbing. I am performing for Charlie, hung up there on the wall. But even as I deliver my pronouncement, chapter and verse of the Basic Law, and of the reasons behind the law, I am confronted with the fact that this is not a case study, this is not a training module for the edification of Ms. Aysa Paige, this is a real human person whose life is in the balance, whose heart right now is a bubble I hold in my hand. Ms. Tarjin with her gray-streaked hair and determined chin is a professional problem, and she is an unanswerable conundrum and she is at the same time a person. A person clutching the arm of her unstrung son, her dark eyes alive with emotion, a person in low heels and a green blouse, frantic, desperate, trying to exist in the world, trying, like we all are, all the time, to bend the world into a shape in which we can fit.
Ms. Paige stands patiently, her hands behind her back, looking down at the floor. She is too respectful a junior partner to let me see how she feels about the matter, but she’s also too decent a person for me not to be able to tell.
“Okay, well, then,” says Ms. Tarjin with soft bitterness. “I guess I’ve wasted my time.”
“No. You’ve registered your opinion on the matter,” I say quietly. “You have told your truth, and that cannot be counted as wasted time.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”
There is a crimp in the air, a mild bend, as my own half-truth, cynical and self-protecting, rolls through. Ms. Tarjin nods tightly, a single tear running down her cheek, and then Eddie breaks his silence, speaking suddenly in a rapid burst. “Yeah but what if—what if, you know—what if we change places?”
I look at him. “What?”
Arlo looks up from his desk, shakes his head, looks down again.
“Is there some sort of—I don’t know. Is there, like, a mechanism, or… I don’t know.” He looks at me, then over at Aysa, perhaps having sensed that she’s the one with a foot in the world as it exists thirty floors down from here, outside the Service, out in the world.
Eddie must know on some level
