Charlie could have done it. Charlie would have outsmarted them before he could be outsmarted, Charlie would have sensed the maneuverings of the gray man in the corner, seen the wall the Expert was building and tunneled under it, flown over it. Charlie would have come back laughing with the whole truth and nothing but, dangling from his clenched fist like a monster’s severed head.
Every time I close my eyes my body hums for solace, and every time I open them I see the novel lying on the bed.
I put down my weapon. I pick up the book. I need it.
I start at page one.
“Listen, lady,” said Shenk very slowly, shaking his head. “You’re in the wrong place. Okay? You need to find yourself a lawyer.”
“You are a lawyer.”
“Yes. I’m a lawyer.” Shenk smiled. He felt weary. He was tired of smiling. “But what you need is, you need a lawyer lawyer. A real lawyer. You understand?”
That’s how it starts, page one, the page after the title page. A lawyer in his office, morose and deflated, visited by a needful stranger, and already I can feel its claws in me, the claws of its questions: Who is the lawyer and who is the woman, what is their past and future—
I put the fucking thing down. I put it down on the edge of the bed and then I pick it up again and throw it against the wall.
I stand up and grit my teeth and stare out the window at the sleeping city. The tops of palm trees, the distant movement of brake lights. Reality all around me.
I know what is going to happen already, I can feel it happening. I have been warned of this my whole life. We all have—I have and you have. I have spent my whole life protecting against alternate realities, and now this one is like an injection, it is like pushing poison directly into my veins, and I can’t stand it, I can’t allow this to happen, but then I yell “Fuck!” and I storm across the room and grab the book with greedy fingers and find the page I was on and start to read again.
The Prisoner is the story of a boy who becomes gravely ill after a botched surgery, and it’s about his family, which is desperate for his recovery, desperate and scared and sad, and it’s about the lawyer that they hire—that’s the lawyer from the opening passage—his name is Shenk, and he is a sad and furious man when we meet him but then we understand in time that he wasn’t always that way, it was this case, this broken boy who made him so, and it’s about the boy himself, who lies for most of the story in silence, in a vegetative state on a hospital bed with some sort of mysterious alien life moving inside him—that’s the part I saw yesterday, the section I already read, the part I glanced at grudgingly in my office yesterday, the part the book was opened to. I charge on, I read and read. It’s all happening in a city called Los Angeles, within a state called California, which is related somehow to the Golden State, bearing some similarities in the detailing, in weather and geography and here and there in street names, landmarks—which is disquieting and yet mesmerizing and the thing about the book is that none of it is true, nothing is confirmed or certain. The book speaks in the voice of various of its characters, and each of them—the lawyer, the boy’s father and his mother, the doctor—has an opinion about what must have happened, each of them marching around shaking their own version like a fist, and so it is a riot of subjectivities, a violence of truths, and the fuck of it is—is that as I read I am beginning to cry, tears rolling hot down my heavy cheeks and disappearing into my beard because I do not understand this—
And then I feel like I do understand it, what it means, of course I do, but I can’t think about it, it doesn’t bear consideration, it—
The world as I have understood it is slipping out from under me and I ought to stop but I can’t. I can’t stop. I keep reading and as I read the book settles down over me, it becomes reality as I read it, the air becomes fuzzed, to the point that when I look up it is like the reality of my room is less real than the reality inside the book.
I read it for hours, curled forward over the small artifact of the book, sitting on the wood floor of my house, feeling the real world under my ass, leaning against the wall and feeling the real world of drywall and plaster against my back, and this extraordinary struggle plays out inside the boy, but really the novel revolves around the people outside him, who have no idea what’s going on, just as I, reading it, have no idea really what is going on, and I want to know what is real even though I know that none of it is real, that a novel is just a book of lies, a bundle of falsehoods like sticks lashed together with sentences for wires, the boy invaded by alien intelligence and the doctor drinking himself sick over his failure and the father seeking his own truths in this maddening truth-diffusing system of systems called the Internet, and I can feel all of this non-sense, all of this not-true, it’s
