I am contemplating a thousand things I thought I knew and never did know.
I am watching him pitch around in circles, blood from his mouth like a sudden exclamation. In my head, his hands are on Silvie’s waist, just barely, the first time. Just the backs of his hands.
My personal and professional existence is built on the idea that everything can be known, that everything must be known, and now here I am, on a bench outside judge’s chambers, and I’m on a green glider in Mar Vista pierced by understanding that nothing can be known at all. Something has opened up inside me that never can be closed.
Aysa beside me lifts the judge’s Night Book. The cover is misted with blood, the pages are gummed together. Carefully she begins to unstick them, page by page.
In spite of myself, I am curious. I am interested.
“Is the rest of the Night Book like the part he read?”
She nods. “Yeah. Pretty much it is.”
She scans sections, murmurs a line or two aloud to me. It’s all lust. It’s all sex and the desire for sex, the delicate small observations and sudden fierce movements that are prelude, the altered locutions and idiosyncratic motions that define the event itself. There are Night Books that overflow with sedition, with epistemological heresy or criminal confession, but this, it seems, was the only form of proscribed detail the judge thought worthy of preserving; he took pride in the full truth of his ability as a seducer, and he felt that the Record, the complete archive of the truth of the world, would be incomplete if it did not include them. His personal history of conquest and debauch, organized by name. “Stole away with J after court.” “Brought L back to chambers for a frank discussion, which led down the hoped-for path.”
Aysa carefully peels the blood-gummed pages from each other, until she finds it—
“Here,” she says. She holds it up. “E. E for Elena?”
I shrug. I nod. “E for Elena.”
“Whoa.”
“What?”
She holds out the open book to me. My body is moving on its own, hand opening on its own. She puts the Night Book in my flat palms and I stare at the words, looking through eyes rimmed with blood. “Again I find myself with E,” it says at the top of the page, in the judge’s precise cursive—followed by nothing. Or, rather, followed by nothing that once was something.
After “Again I find myself with E,” there is inky blackness, lines and lines of it. Sentences that have been crossed out, blacked over, comprehensively redacted.
Aysa leans in eagerly, her knees jiggling with excitement, as I turn over pages. Two pages, three pages, four. Whatever happened between the judge and this Ms. E, it has been neatly and comprehensive excised from his Night Book.
What has the man made hidden, even in his book of hidden truths? Too secret to be told, even to himself?
Aysa, meanwhile, has returned to her own Day Book, and she is tapping it, nodding, glancing back and forth between the judge’s book and her own.
“It’s the same days,” she announces.
“What?” I close Sampson’s book, lift my fingers from its tacky hide.
“The date range, sir. Laszlo, the dates are the same.”
She holds up her Day Book, hands it to me so I can read the notes she made in Dolly Aster’s basement, and I two-step verify them in my own. The entry that begins “Again I find myself with E” falls exactly among Mose Crane’s missing days.
I breathe in and then out again. It’s like my blood froze when Sampson did what he did and now it is flowing again—not flowing but racing, rushing.
“Ms. Paige. Do you have your radio?”
“Of course.”
“Do me a favor, will you? Can you raise Alvaro?”
“Why?”
“Just raise him for me. Raise him.”
We’d driven in angry silence all the way to Silver Lake. That night. Silvie and me.
Forty minutes of cold silence because of some offhand idiot remark I’d made in our driveway, on the way to the car.
I’ve made my way outside now and I’m standing on the courthouse steps, blinking in the sunlight like a bear emerged from his cavern. I’m waiting for Aysa to raise Alvaro so our next step can be ratified. Meanwhile I’m smoking a cigarette and staring at the dirty steps and trying to move forward, to beat back the past. Gather my spirit and forge it into something strong.
Silvie was beautiful that night: a gold dress with small pearl buttons; earrings and heels; a ceramic butterfly clip lifting her hair into a crown. Silvie was in an expansive mood. She stopped me in the driveway, seized me by the elbow, and pointed at the sky.
The stars were just coming out, and she told me that they were diamonds.
“And you see those three—those ones there?” She was holding a bottle of red wine by its slender neck. I had the keys. “That’s a necklace. A pretty diamond necklace like the one you’ve never bought me.”
She laughed, making sure I knew she was joking, but I couldn’t even muster a smile.
“The stars are like diamonds,” I said.
Obviously she wasn’t lying; obviously she wasn’t purposefully misrepresenting the nature of the stars. She was enjoying the feeling of the twilight sky, the sturdy feeling of her hand on my arm. She was feeling good, feeling gentle, sharing a plain metaphor with her man. But something in me wasn’t in the mood. I had had a hard day at work, trudging through a world thrumming with lies. I was feeling small, miserable, literal.
“The stars. They’re not diamonds, Sil. They’re masses of hydrogen and helium, millions of miles wide and millions of miles away.”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “I know.”
She took her hand off my arm. We drove across town in
