“Oh. Right. No. Not forgive. Absolve.” I’m such an idiot. “Ms. Tarjin. It’s okay.”
“It is?”
“It is.” My fears drove me here. I didn’t stop to think of how it would make her feel, this poor lady, to find me washed up on her shore. “I contacted the PA’s office, and formally absolved Todd of the false representation he made to me. Just like I said I would. Okay? Like I said.”
She exhales, her hand trembling. “Oh—Okay. Okay.” Then she steps back and tilts her head. “Then what… what are you doing here?”
“Well.” I take off my pinhole, push a hand through my hair. “I need to ask you a question.”
A few moments later, and we are arranged in her small dining area.
I ground myself in the reality of the small house. A handsome wood dining table ringed by mismatched chairs, a low-hanging light fixture with six bulbs. Steam rising from teacups, the smell of baking bread. The wall-mounted plays on in the kitchen behind us, turned to a stream called “Eating Lunch Outside.” I’m across from Ms. Tarjin, who leans forward on her elbows, looks at me carefully. There are freckles across the bridge of her nose.
Eddie, the other son, is home. He emerged from the back of the house while Ms. Tarjin fixed tea, and now he’s looking at me with plain distaste, arms crossed. He watches us sit, half hidden behind a room divider, anxiety and dislike plain in his eyes.
“What does he want?” he asks, and then, to me directly: “What do you want?”
“Help,” I say. Call out over his mother’s shoulders. I need your help.” And turn to Ms. Tarjin, who is trying to puzzle me out from across her table. “You and your mom.”
Eddie doesn’t come over. He stays where he is. “What kind of help?”
“Okay, so, the other morning,” I say. “The other morning at the diner. At Terry’s diner. I heard you. I heard you talking, and I—I stood up and I came over. And we talked for… for three minutes? Four minutes?”
“Yeah,” says Eddie warily. Trying to figure this out. While we’re talking the wall-mounted is cycling through short stretches: a picnic in Griffith Park, a barbeque at one of the crowded State beaches.
“Yeah. And—look, there is a radio on my belt. A radio.” I am talking too fast. Tripping over myself, talking sideways. “Do you remember?”
“Yes,” says Ms. Tarjin.
The first anomaly—what was the first of the anomalies?
“When I approached you, in the restaurant—”
The first of the anomalies. Not on the lawn—
Tarjins, mother and son, exchange glances, trying to figure out what’s going on here. Ms. Tarjin leans forward, reaches past the cup of tea she has poured for me, and places a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Breathe. Hey. Mr. Speculator? You gotta breathe, okay?”
She is empathetic. Kind. I follow her instructions. I breathe; take a sip of the tea.
“What do you need to ask us?”
“When I was in the act of arresting your family, did my radio go off? The radio I wear on my hip—this.” I point to it, the black box, black dials, red lights, shift my body weight awkwardly forward to angle my hip toward them. “Did it make any noise? Was there a call that I ignored?” They look at each other again. “Please try to remember.”
Ms. Tarjin puckers her lips. Unsure, unwilling to lie.
But Eddie is shaking his head. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. You were—you didn’t move. There was no radio call. I’d remember it. I remember thinking, Well, that thing is cool.”
“The radio?”
“Yeah. Even though I was scared, I was thinking, That thing is cool. I wanted to see it work.”
“And if it had gone off, you would have noticed.”
“I would have noticed. Yeah.”
“Are you sure?” I say again.
He nods. Of course he’s sure. I’m sure too. I can see the truth that I feared rising up slowly from below.
Ms. Tarjin stops me on the way out, calls my name at the green door.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” I tell her. “I’m not.”
“Are you in danger?”
“I—” It sounds so stupid. But it’s the truth. “I am. And—we all are. I think the whole—” I shake my head at the enormity of it. The ridiculousness. “I think we may all be in danger.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure yet. I don’t know. But I’m going to try to stop it.”
This is a strange thing to say, and surely it is a strange thing to hear said. But Ms. Tarjin just nods, looks at me, at the life of the State proceeding behind me. The coffee shop next door, the brightly painted small houses. One of those palms that stands taller than all the ones surrounding it, extending itself far above the world, as if straining with curiosity.
“Okay. Well.” Ms. Tarjin smiles and places her hand on the side of my face. “Come back. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, and I linger just a moment more, just a half a moment, before I get back in my car.
Maybe there will be a world where that happens. Maybe the world will unfold in such a way that I do return, find my way back to the green door in the red frame. It’s the smallest moment that I’ve experienced in a long time, small and immediate, shared between two humans, but it’ll keep me going awhile. I know it will. I will live in a world for the next little while in which everything works out, and I come back like she said, and then who knows what happens after that?
For now I point the car back downtown, and back toward the Plaza.
The anomalies did not start on the lawn in Los Feliz, they did not start in the apartment on Ellendale. The first of the anomalies was in my own fucking office.
The upstream untruth, from which all the others flowed, was Arlo Vasouvian saying that he radioed about a car crash outside Grand Central. A case that, had I been dispatched to handle it, as I should have been, would have
