Something new in the eyes of the world.
But Silvie’s attitude is relentlessly normal, almost maniacally upbeat. She is holding my arm but it feels like it is she who is holding me up.
“You want to eat something?” she asks. “Should we find a food truck?”
“No.”
“I think I saw that hot dog truck a bit ago.”
“The Dirty Dog.”
“Yes. Should we—”
“No.”
I say “No,” and also I think, I should have kept loving you. I should have loved you forever. What happened?
And then I remember. Judge Sampson comes crashing in. Sampson beaming, leering, opening his Night Book and laying down his finger on just the right page. I stop walking. I put my hand up over my eyes.
“Silvie,” I say. “Silvie—”
She looks up at me and smiles, innocent.
“Yes?”
“I—”
But I can’t do it. I won’t. Here she is, after all, having come for me in my darkest moment, rousted me, come to give me comfort in my darkest hour.
“Forget it.”
“Forgotten.”
We stop at an empty bench and she tells me to sit.
“Now. Laszlo.” She reaches into her bag. “I wanted to let you know the disposition of the matter you asked me to look into.”
“The—what?”
“The what, he says. Come on, Laz. Scour your memory.”
“Oh right. That.”
“Yes. That. Mr. Mose Crane. A small apartment in University City. Worked as a roofer, odd jobs before that. Currently dead. All ringing a bell now?”
Her tone is absolutely normal, for her, for us: teasing, cutting, kind. My Silvie’s voice, comfortingly familiar to me as the voice I have known in thousands of conversations. And yet—it isn’t. Her voice is different. How is it different?
“Listen,” I tell her. “It doesn’t matter. It’s inscrutable. That whole case.” I make a noise in my throat, some sort of laugh. Aysa is in the ground. I fucked it up. Somehow, I did. “Unknown and unknowable. That case is over.”
“Yes, so I understand,” says Silvie with exaggerated sweetness. “Because, you know, I worked my ass off digging facts up for you. And then, just as I was building the reconstructed days, I received a communiqué from the Office of Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws.”
“Yeah, no. I know.”
“Turns out the circumstances of the man’s death were abruptly declared unknowable, and any investigative actions relating thereto were to be ceased immediately.”
“Yeah, that’s—that’s my fault.”
“Seems like everything is these days.”
“Seems like it is.” She’s laughing, but there is some different truth active in her eyes. “But you know, Laszlo…”
I lean in closer. If you asked me last week, I would have said I knew all the sounds of Silvie’s voice, but there is something new in it now, something I have never heard before. Light is reaching me as if from a distant star. We are sitting near the dead center of the Plaza, in the midday shadow of the Record itself, the Service behind us, Trusted Authority to the east.
“I’m sorry not to have more for you.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry it was a… like you said. A waste of your time.”
“Oh, Laz,” she says. “Not like it was the first time.”
We are speaking in a secret language. I don’t know how else to explain it. You live with someone long enough, you have enough conversations with them, just the two of you, and a language builds itself underneath the actual words. But something—something is going on here. Silvie is not here on a mission of sweet mercy, to drag me out of the far recesses of my depression: she is here to tell me something serious. She looks at me, and I look back at her.
“Silvie?”
“Yeah?”
“I appreciate it. I do in all seriousness appreciate it.”
“Yeah,” she says. She takes off my pinhole, touches my forehead with tenderness, tries to smooth my sweaty mass of hair down onto my scalp. “You know what I was thinking? We should do the wall.”
“What?”
She hops up, adjusts her skirt. Behind her, at the wall, the fervent and the zealous are doing their thing, tearing strips from their Day Books and inserting their small truths into the wall’s cracks and crevices.
“Come on, Laz. It’ll be fun.”
She turns, takes the few steps to the wall, and gets out her Day Book. I watch her, astonished. Papering truth into the wall is for day-trippers, fanatics. If Silvie and I ever discussed it, it was to roll our eyes at the very idea. But now I get up, move close to where she’s standing by the wall, and watch her write, dashing words with her small pen onto one small corner of a fresh page. A scrap of truth, some small detail of her private heart. I wonder what it is, as I wondered the whole time we were together what was happening in those parts of her truth that were forever inaccessible to me and my grasping interest.
She tears out the page, one small corner, folds it up tight, and jams it into a crack in the wall.
And maybe it is because of the context, or maybe because I don’t know where else my life is supposed to go, but in that moment, standing close to my ex-wife, I want her back. Fuck the judge. Fuck him. Fuck the past. Surely the truth of right now weighs more than the truth of six months ago or a year ago. What is the rate of decay of old truths? When do they dissolve and disappear forever? Surrounded by strangers, hot and uncomfortable in the sunlight, I stand inside a powerful rush of longing for Silvie Ratesic. Watching her perform this
