After all, they’ll tell you, everything that happens belongs to the State, and a thought is just an event that happens in your head.
And unlike a Day Book, a Night Book only reaches the Record when its author is dead and it passes into the Permanent Record with all the rest of life’s artifacts. Or, let’s say, when a pair of Speculators barge into your office, chasing an anomalous death that happens to intersect with your existence, and they sense the presence of your Night Book and reach for it and pull it out like a loose tooth.
The judge’s Book is indeed right here in the office with him, hidden in a wall safe behind his official portrait, and before we can object, he has it open on his desk: a slim volume, handsomely appointed. He pulls out reading glasses and adjusts them on his nose and sets in.
“Sir,” I say, one last time. “We will take the book away with us.”
“Oh, I know,” he says, flipping the book open. “But first I’m going to read.” And his finger falls on a particular page, and he begins.
“‘It was the sort of party one is dying to leave until a moment arrives and one never wants to go home.’” Sampson pauses and looks up. “Oh, that’s rather nice. I had forgotten I wrote that. Very nice, indeed.”
That’s the other thing a Night Book does, of course: it gives a vain person like the judge ample opportunity to indulge that vanity, all under the guise of supreme service to the State.
Judge Sampson licks his lips and finds his place. “‘We had been introduced at the very threshold of the evening, one among the usual roundelay of how-do-you-dos. If I suspected in that moment that she would be added to my collection, I suspected it without suspecting that I suspected it. I suspected it in my heart alone, or in some other, lower precinct.’”
He pauses again, looks up over the rim of his glasses at Paige. “‘Collection’ is rather crass. I apologize.”
Paige is looking at me. She mouths “Tester?” And I do not answer. Knowledge is alive in me; moving; welling up. Sampson with his crocodile mouth carries on: “‘I had promised myself therefore not to leave before she did, and my patience was at last rewarded.’” He pauses, looks up, and sees that he has our attention. I cannot move. I am not moving. “‘We two indeed were among the last to leave, lingering in the doorway between parlor and kitchen, engaged in a very long conversation about nothing at all. Her husband, it seems, had lost patience and retreated, alone.’”
“Husband?” says Ms. Paige. “Hold on. Captain Tester is a widow. Is this—”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” says the judge, looking up, finding my eyes. Looking not at Aysa, who interrupted him, but at me. “Is this not relevant to your ongoing investigation?”
He’s holding the book open with his palm, still looking at me. “Tell you what. I’ll skip ahead.”
“‘S. displayed her body in the doorway as if for my personal delectation, belied any dictums about the highest beauty being the product of the greatest delicacy. Her charm, the charm of S., was in her substance, her attractiveness a matter of superabundance and profusion. Tumbling yellow locks and a full flushed face, full lips parted around a red tongue, an admirable plumpness of breasts and of rear. Her body an inviting expanse, demanding circumnavigation.’”
“That’s enough,” Ms. Paige says, though it cannot be because she has realized what I have realized, that this is Silvie being conjured, Silvie that the judge is recalling with such rich pleasure. S. for Silvie. Silvie laughing at a suggestive joke, Silvie drifting as if by accident into his arms. The description is specific and precise, incontrovertible, slivers of weaponized truth. A husband, too, can be tragic.
“That’s enough,” says my partner again, but the judge does not stop, he reads on, sentences like wires that fall around Silvie and draw her into an empty bedroom. Lascivious, circling sentences that trace the lines of her body like fingertips.
I remember that damn party, somewhere in Silver Lake. Forty minutes in traffic to get there, the two of us sitting in stony silence all the way. I knew no one, wanted to meet no one. I left early, leaving Silvie to find a taxi home.
The judge remembers it too, he has it all written down, and he reads on, word after word: words that carefully unbutton the dress, words that reveal the pale wide flesh of belly and thighs, words that trace the silhouette shape of her waist, words that describe her hips and then clasp at the small of her back, traveling with the gauzy fuzz that climbs upward along her spine as it arches in abandonment.
I try to say something—I try to say “Stop,” I may even manage to say “Stop,” but he does not stop, he will not, his sentences gather steam and rhythm as he approaches the predictable climax of the paragraph, and then he is through, and he has made his monstrous point about the rings of truth, about context and omission: he has illustrated that no matter how much we know, there are parts of the story that are missing.
There are elements unknown and unknowable, whether we know it or not.
“Shall I go on?” he says, softly, daringly, wondering if I will take some dramatic action, smash into him with my fists, crash the crooked smile off his face.
“As I said earlier”—my voice is a coiled wire, my hands clutched into fists at my side—“we will take the book away and return it when we are through.”
“Very good.” He places the book on the desk, slides it toward me. “Enjoy.”
Paige reaches for the book as Judge Sampson drinks at last from the tumbler, grins sheepishly, opens his mouth, and vomits a long stream of blood, staggering forward and collapsing across the desk.
“What…” says Aysa,
