“As you may be aware, Mr. Speculator,” Petras begins, “we on the committee have certain prerogatives regarding matters of epistemological certainty.”
“What?”
This is off topic. I don’t know what this is, but I don’t like it.
“That is, the State has vested in me the power to determine, under certain circumstances, when matters can be deemed inscrutable. Impossible to be weighed as true or not true, and therefore dangerous.”
She gives me her bland smile. I know what she means, the ultimate power of the State, the authority to designate things as unknown and unknowable, beyond the reach of speculation. But I don’t see what that has to do with this—until I do.
“Wait.”
“Mr. Doonan would be happy to provide you with documentation of the statutory authority to which I refer.”
I see it now—the danger that has entered the room in the slipstream of her murmuring tone.
“Ms. Petras, hold on.”
“Upon review of the case currently under discussion—”
“You haven’t reviewed it. You—”
“—my office is taking the official step of declaring the matter of the death of Mose Crane—”
She is just reeling it off, chapter and verse, reciting it like Arlo would, except not to flaunt her knowledge of the Basic Law but to build it as a wall.
“Hold on.”
The trap was not clear until it was too late—the ground did not shift until I stepped onto it. Oh. Oh shit.
“—as unknown and unknowable.”
“Laszlo?” says Aysa, confused, uncertain. Mr. Doonan is still writing. There are three notebooks on his desk now, just the three. Outside the window of the bungalow, carts putter past, important people going from one important place to another, clutching folders bulging with important papers.
I have been carrying around the small light of my investigation, like a man cupping a candle under his palms, hoping for it to stay lit, and instead I’ve brought it to the one person with the power to snuff it out between two fingers. I don’t even look at Ms. Paige right now. I can’t. I can’t bear to watch her realize what I’ve done. What an idiot I am.
“I declare the truth of the death of Mose Crane, and all matters flowing therefrom, to be unknowable.” She nods at Doonan, who nods back at her. He is writing in his Day Book, a big silver number with silver-edged pages. The captures are rolling. It’s all being lost, before my eyes. “All relevant truth that can be collected has been collected,” she says.
“No,” I say. “It hasn’t.”
“Well.” She stands, and holds out her hand. “It has been, though. And let me add, finally, also, on behalf of the Golden State: thank you for your efforts in this matter.”
It is the end of the conversation. She holds out her pad for me to stamp, and I stamp it, and Paige stamps it too. Too late I have figured it out, too late to draw the line that I should have drawn already.
E is not for Elena at all. E is for Expert.
“Okay,” says Petras brightly, as if we’ve just come in. “Was there anything else I can help you folks with today?”
17.
Everybody keeps everything. Archiving is a bulwark. You do it. I do it. We have to do it.
I do it now, down in the crawl space beneath my small house, I unpack all of the flat facts I’ve collected, my whole paper trail of the day that was, a day’s worth of living. Conversation stamps and stamps of presence, the receipt from passing through the gate arm at the administrative campus, the receipt for every cup of coffee and donut consumed, the record of my interrogation by the regular police in the hallway outside Judge Sampson’s chambers. The slip of stamped paper I was handed on the seventh floor of the Service building, when we turned over Sampson’s Night Book to evidence processing.
I tear today’s pages of notes clean from my Day Book, one at a time, careful to leave the carbons in place.
My motions are deliberate, slow, careful. I have performed this ritual many times. Once for every day of my adulthood. Those notes relating to the death I was investigating and am not investigating any longer I fold in half, and then fold in half again, make of them a small hard square, a stiff packet with four sharp corners, and this I slide last into the bag and seal it. Mose Crane is dead, but his death is not an event for me. It is gone from my mind.
When I’m done, I don’t get up. I stare at my boxes, tempted to start opening things up. I could just sit here for a while, rummaging through years gone by, digging up scraps of the past for consideration. People do it. I have done it. Sort through the past, seek out certain incidents, key days, fragments of memory, spread them out on the ground and then sweep them all together and put them all back, stamp the bags “Unsealed and resealed,” waste hours in reflection, self-abasement, and recrimination. There are people who fall down that rabbit hole and never come up.
Not me. Not tonight.
I rise stiffly, keeping my body very still, wriggle back out of the crawl space, and walk slowly back up the stairs.
“Fuck.”
I find my face in the mirror, in the darkness of my empty house. Silvie took a lot of the furniture when she left, but this standing mirror is still here, by the front door, leaning against the wall. “It might be fun to look at yourself in the morning sometimes,” she used to say. “Before you leave the house.”
There is blood still on my forehead, up by my hairline, at the level of the roots. Blood
