“What I’m afraid of, dear Charlie, is that the work—being so exposed, for so long—that it is affecting you.”
“What? No. The work doesn’t affect me. You know that. I don’t get symptoms. I don’t—”
“On the inside, Charlie. I’m afraid that it is affecting you inside.” I didn’t use the phrase that had occurred to me, as I looked with horror at the sallowness in his cheeks, the wildness in his eyes when he raved about his monster. I was afraid he had begun to rot from the inside out.
“I am worried, Charlie, that there is an alternate reality that has its hooks in you. As your superior—as your friend—”
“Enough,” He slammed down his coffee cup. He grabbed his jacket. “I’m going back in there. I’m going to find the monster.”
He stormed toward the elevator, wrestling himself back into his coat.
“Hey. Charlie?”
Laszlo Ratesic stopped his brother by the elevator door. He was bigger than Charlie by half a head, maybe, but you never really noticed him when Charlie was around. Charlie smiled to see him, though. He had his jacket on now. He was ready to go. “Yeah, buddy?”
“I just wanted to say be careful out there.” He knew his brother too well to try to stop him. “Okay?”
Charlie nodded. “You got it.” He patted his brother on the cheek, and stepped into the elevator. We watched the door close.
The next time we saw him he was in his hospital bed.
19.
“Is that all true?” says Paige.
“Everything is true,” I tell her.
I’ve told her the whole story,
The only part I left out was the distressing exultant feeling I got while I was listening to him that day, raving to old Arlo about this terrifying conspiracy he penetrated, this Golden State that was not the real Golden State, that wanted to make of us our inverse, build a world of pure thin truthlessness with no Record, no captures, everybody walking around with no burden of truth upon them, no prison of truth around them, and how what I felt on hearing all this was a kind of inchoate sideways longing.
Wouldn’t that be fucking great? is what I thought, watching the elevator door close behind Charlie. That’s what I thought, a longing shadowed by the shame of that longing. Shame and fascination and fear.
Wouldn’t that be something…
Same way I felt three hours ago, reading The Prisoner, immersing myself in alternate realities, soaking in them, all the things that could be but aren’t…
Come on, Laz. Come on. Get it together.
You can’t see much of Petras’s house from here. It is a modern structure, a single slab of deep gray, its frontage mostly hidden by hedgerow, its full shape obscured by moonlight. A thing of stone and glass, arrogantly defiant of gravity, built back from the road and cantilevered out over the valley below.
The house radiates. The house holds the monster. The house is a monster, looming, reaching into the darkness.
Paige has questions. One or two more questions formulating in that nonstop mind of hers, I see them bubbling in her, but more than that I can see the energy itself—she has questions but they’re all incidental. Fuel for the fire. She is ready to roll. She is itching to go. This is something, man—that’s what Ms. Paige is thinking.
I remember her on the bench outside the judge’s chambers, my young partner, trying to puzzle out the judge’s act of self-slaughter, her lip curling at the idea of such a radical reaction to something so small.
Whatever else she knows, she knows that this—the story I’ve told her, the story of Charlie, the story we’re part of now—this is not small.
“Your brother went back into that house?”
“He did. There was no way to stop him. He thought—the way he put it—he thought he had to catch a monster.” I look at her. She is looking through the windshield at Petras’s house in the darkness. “He thought there was a monster.”
“Not literally?”
“You know, I don’t know. I was never really sure.”
Using the information Charlie provided, Mr. Vasouvian along with Mr. Alvaro and the rest of us on the thirtieth floor planned a raid on the warehouse in Glendale. We waited for a week, two weeks; waited and hoped that my brother would come to his senses and get out of there. But an Off Record house could not be countenanced, and soon enough, with or without Charlie, it was time to act.
Three units of the Service went in together, along with half a battalion of regular police. We made nine arrests, all of whom were subsequently charged with grave assault on the Objectively So and exiled for their crimes.
“And what about your brother?”
I just shake my head. I’ve reached the end of the story. I can’t tell any more.
I don’t know if he thought there was a literal monster or not, but here we are. Staring at Petras’s house.
You were right, Charlie. You were always right.
For once I have a gut feeling, the kind Charlie got every day his whole life. There are only a handful of people in the State who could arrange the kind of careful unseen sabotage of the Record that Charlie was convinced happened, but Laura Petras is surely one of them. She did it before, and she escaped apprehension, and now she’s doing it again.
Bringing another house off the Record. Her own house.
Mose Crane, itinerant construction man, freelance contractor, must have been among those who worked on the project. Maybe he knew and maybe he didn’t know the nature of the alterations he had been asked to undertake on this property. Maybe he only later realized.
But he did figure it out, I know he did, because six months later he decides to turn his knowledge into easy money, to use this piece of discovered truth like a crowbar, like a lockpick. To blackmail the judge and the Acknowledged Expert with what he knew. And that’s what he’s
