I am approaching the end of the book, and the father and the doctor and the lawyer are converging in a different city, a vacation city, an impossible city, in hopes of finding a cure. This city, Las Vegas, is described as a place where, as the lawyer keeps saying, “Gambles sometimes pay off.” And as I read, as I travel along with the people who love the boy, Wesley Keener, on their wild-eyed mission, barreling in an old car through the heat of what feels like an endless desert in search of this mirage of hope in this place Las Vegas, which cannot be real, I am as close as I have ever been to understanding what happened—what really happened—what laid us low—what cut the Golden State adrift and cloistered in its own truth at the edge of the world, as close as I have ever been to the old world that left us or we left, and it is like I am driving in a car through the desert toward the inscrutable past—
Toward the truth—
I read to the end, faster and faster, I can’t stop, I keep reading, pushing forward through this dream of something that is Not So and never has been, and by the time I reach the final pages, however many hours later, I am curled up beside my bed as if in hiding from the world outside, hiding from the Moon, my back against the wall and my knees curled up against my chest. I am reading the end pages and not wanting it to end, I am shaking, my body in full revolt against all my manly efforts to hold it still.
Later on—much later, I don’t know how much later—there’s a noise.
I roll over and raise my head, confused and weary. Baffled. I am, it appears, on the ground. I am on the floor, with the book beside me. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how much later it is.
But then the noise, again. Something crashing against something else. It has a texture to it, a wooden thump.
I moan. I’m in a hospital bed.
I am an unconscious child.
I’m on the floor and the book is nearby, closed and angled away, its spine turned away from mine, like we are lovers who’ve quarreled in the night. False reality is clinging to me like the dust of an old world, gritty at the corners of my mind.
My family is clustered around my bed, consumed with worry.
I shake it away. I stand, slowly, and brush myself off, wiping bits of falsehood off my chest and my arms.
It’s knocking, that’s all. Someone is knocking at the door.
The Moon hangs like a lamp outside the window, giving a grudging half-yellow light. I don’t like the sound of the knocking. I find my gun and chamber a round. I get up, slow and deliberate, and, holding the gun in front of me, I walk to the door.
The pounding continues.
The doctor is at the door, here to lay scorn on my desperation to find a cure for my son, my sad need to pick and choose my own truth.
The boy himself is at the door, Wesley Keener, up and about at last, back from the dead.
Come on, Laszlo. Come on. Get it the fuck together.
“Who is it?” I stand away from the door, gun drawn but not aimed, just like I learned in the academy.
“It’s me. Mr. Ratesic? Laszlo. It’s me.”
I keep my weapon out, but I look through the peephole and there’s my trainee, out of her blacks, in jeans and a T-shirt, no pinhole, hair pulled back and tied, looking up into the door’s eye with raw urgency on her young face.
I glance back into my bedroom, the sliver visible through the door. The novel just out of sight. And I think, what have I done?
18.
“Okay,” says Aysa, breathing heavily, nodding her head, gathering her thoughts. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. So. I went back to the office to finish reviewing it.”
“Reviewing what?”
“The stretches. Can I come in?”
“What stretches, Aysa, did you go back to finish review?”
“On Crane’s apartment. The stakeout stretches from Mose Crane’s apartment.”
She holds up her hand and a shiver cuts through me. She’s got one tight in her fist, a slim rectangle of silver plastic. She’s been back to the office, and not only did she review the stretch, she made an echo of it: she burned it and stuck it in her pocket and brought it here.
“You weren’t supposed to do that,” I say, glancing up at the doorway capture, and I’m trying to be stern but I fear I sound like a child, like a small, scared child. “You can’t have done that.”
Of course I could be talking to myself. The Prisoner is in the bedroom, still quietly singing. Its alternate truth is still glimmering in here, glossing the furniture, fogging my vision. If she’s broken the rules, then I certainly have too. When these stretches are played, when this reality is requisitioned, when this whole story enters the Record, it will be both of us who are found to have strayed.
“We were pulled from that case,” I tell Aysa. “That is not a case.”
“No, I know. Can I just come in? There’s something you need to see.”
“The State has determined this matter unknown and unknowable. We can’t look, Paige. There’s nothing there.”
“Well, Petras said so. But just because she says there’s no anomaly, that doesn’t mean there’s no anomaly.”
I’m stunned. I laugh. “Yes,” I tell Paige. “That’s exactly what it means. That’s literally what it means. Petras was speaking for the State.” The thing is determined. It is done. “We fucked it up.” Catch it. Correct it. “I did. I fucked it up. Investigation complete.”
She is shaking her head, gritting her teeth. She won’t accept it—she can’t. I wonder with a sudden horror whether
