“They call themselves… the Golden State,” he said.
We looked at each other in bafflement. Most of the unit was there, gathered around to listen: Carson and Burlington, Cullers, Alvaro. Laszlo, our hero’s younger brother, was leaning by the elevator wall, hands buried deep in his pockets.
“The Golden State?” I said slowly. “I had understood from your earlier reports, Mr. Ratesic, that this was a conspiracy against our good and golden State.”
“Yeah.” He pulled out another cigarette. Cigarette after cigarette. “See, the fuckers—they think it’s funny, okay? To call themselves that.” He sneered. “They think everything is funny.”
He told us what he had learned, and we listened in horror. This criminal conspiracy, this self-styled Golden State, met nearly every night at the warehouse in Glendale, where they had removed all the captures and replaced them with duplicates. “Dummies” was the word Charlie used. Dummies. Machines cleverly styled to look like the recording devices that forge our reality, but are not connected to anything.
The whole building was dead to the eyes of the world so that lies could be told within its walls with impunity. This Golden State, Charlie told us, was meeting off the Record, disconnected from ongoing reality.
“But… why?” asked Carson, her face reflecting the fascinated horror that we were all feeling.
“To lie. Just to lie.”
We could not conceive of it, the willful depravity of this place that Charlie had been inside of: good and golden citizens parading about in full and luxuriant disregard for the truth, announcing themselves to have new names, telling each other that they were pirates, or millionaires, war heroes, thieves. Relating stories from their personal histories, reveling in changing the details every time they told them, making themselves funnier or braver or better looking in retrospect. Making up stories about their friends, about history, about public figures and private friends.
They were spewing out so many and such extravagant lies that every time Charlie approached this warehouse, willing himself back into character as one of the conspirators, he could practically see the effusions of their dishonesty billowing out from behind the doors.
“It’s fucked up,” he told us. “These people are seriously fucked up.”
“So what are we waiting for?” said Alvaro. “Let’s bust in there and shut the place down.”
“No!” shouted Charlie loudly, wheeling on poor Alvaro, who backed away, putting his hands in the air. Charlie’s eyes were wild, red-rimmed. His hair was a mess, sticking out in all directions. “We can’t.”
“But Charlie,” I said softly, trying to calm him. “Why not?”
The answer was simple, at least as he saw it: Charlie didn’t want us to end the conspiracy because he had convinced himself that there was someone else involved he had not yet managed to identify. “Give me more time. A little more time. I have to find the monster.”
We all looked at each other. Laszlo, over by the elevator, stood up straight.
“The monster?”
“That’s right.”
It was increasingly clear, the longer the great Charlie Ratesic stood there, staring at us, staring out the window, that something was wrong with him. Something was very wrong indeed. His lips were flecked with spittle. His eyes were wild.
“They say—” He ground out his cigarette, lit a new one. “These fuckers say that the Golden State—the real one, our one—is all bullshit. They say that the real golden state—like, ‘state’ like ‘state of being,’ ‘state of understanding’—the real golden state is accepting that there is no such thing as truth. They think we’re fooling ourselves to think we can be protected from lies. They say that all of it—the Record, the captures, the Service…” Ratesic was staring out the window again, out at the glittering majesty of the dark city. “They think it’s some kind of fallacy, that we’re, like—what do they say?—playing make-believe.”
We were all looking at each other, looking at Charlie, trying to take the measure of what was happening inside his mind by the wildness in his eyes.
“They’re writing a book,” he said. Lighting a new cigarette with trembling hands. “A Night Book, they call it, because it’s a book of real truth, truth underneath the truth. Just like a real Night Book, but… but it’s a joke. It’s a sick joke.” Charlie took a deep drag of the new cigarette and launched again, a single long sentence curling out with the smoke. “They say the real truth is that there is no such thing as truth at all, there’s only perception, okay, because everything you think is true can only be proved by pointing to some other truth, but that truth rests on another one, too, and so on forever, and they say that what this means is that there is no permanent actual reality, there is no Objectively So, and all that we have built, the good and golden truth that surrounds us, is nothing.” He stopped finally, then, and stood trembling with tears in his eyes. “Not truth but it’s opposite. It’s absence.”
“Okay, Charlie,” I said softly. “Okay.”
“Don’t do that, Vasouvian.” He sprang back to life, snarling, and grabbed my collar. “Don’t condescend to me. These assholes want to take the whole State off the Record. They say that whatever happened”—he let go of me and gestured wildly, gesturing to the ancient inscrutable past, the unknowable calamity that happened to the rest of the world—“that we oughta let it happen here. We oughta make it happen here.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“It’s not. It’s not! There’s a monster. There’s a monster and the monster is going to make it happen. Unless we stop it.”
“A monster?”
“What?” said Ratesic. “You think I’m lying?”
It was, I realized, time to talk to Charlie alone. I took him aside. We sat down at my desk and I poured us both coffee. The man had been undercover for six months, and I told him that in my expert opinion it was time for him to come in from the field. Monster or no monster.
“No,”
