I feel miserable, a result of how much I now understand that I never did before, how much I’ve learned in these last days and how much dissonance I’m suffering now; or it might just be because the air inside the decommissioned hot dog truck is stale and close and pungent. It’s hot, and where I’m going it’s only getting hotter.
“You can lower your weapon,” I tell the man across from me. I don’t know if he’s really a Librarian, but he has become one in my mind. “I’m not going to do anything.” I tug at my restraints, demonstrating how tightly my hands are lashed to the pole. “I can’t.”
He doesn’t answer. The gun does not move. The driver, absurdly, begins to whistle. The back of his neck is closely shaved, bristling with small dark hairs.
The truck banks into a turn, and I am shifted to the right, and then the truck speeds up, and I feel it rising, moving uphill, and then it turns again. I don’t know if we’re close or if we’re almost there. I don’t know where there is or how far away it is, or what is going to happen to me, or how I will die.
Help, I think again, radiate my desperate fear out through the sides of the truck toward whoever might be out there, but this is useless—it’s ridiculous. I am living in a pretend world where empathy has secret supernatural power, where it can fly on wings and burrow into the secret hearts of strangers. And even if my message could sing out through these blackened windows, the truth is, I’m not the good guy. I am not the hero of this novel. I have not been kidnapped by nefarious crooks or dirty liars. I am the crook and I am the dirty liar. I have been tried and convicted for my assault against reality. I have left a trail of blood behind me, and my rendition is a necessary service to the State.
It has all happened. However I remember it, whatever my own personal truth, it all happened. What happened is what happened and what is So is So forever. It’s all on the Record.
Time passes. Minutes of it, and then hours; there is no clock on the truck. Miserable as I am, and as terrified, my eyes begin to blink open and then closed, and the hot dog truck becomes the big blue bus my brother and I used to take down to the beach on Saturday afternoons, when we were children still, still in that young and dreaming part of life. We were just teens, experimenting with what kind of adults we were going to be. Shirtless and self-conscious, already thick around the middle, I was awkwardly clutching my surfboard at the bus stop before sunup. Charlie, bouncing from foot to foot, T-shirt wrapped around his forehead like a privateer, was whistling at the sunrise.
I am on this hot dog truck driving further from the city, deeper into the wild, with my hands bound and my feet shackled with tight straps to the pole, and I am also an awkward teenager on the bus to the beach. I exist in two places at once, listening to the rumble of the truck and listening to Charlie, whistling through his teeth.
No, though—no. It’s the driver, still whistling. I jerk awake. The driver’s head bobbles slightly as he whistles. My body aches from the shape it has been forced into, for however long it’s been.
I think we’re going downhill now. I can feel the truck’s pneumatics shifting and purring underneath me. The Librarian seated across from me rises, walks the two paces across the truck, and sits beside me, his right leg pressed against my left.
“Identifications,” he says. “Where are your identifications?”
“In my pocket,” I say. “Right side.”
The Librarian reaches across my lap, unconcerned with the intimacy, and wriggles his hand inside my pocket. It all comes out: birth cert, five-years card, adulthood card, work card, home address attestation. A parade of Laszlo faces, one after the other. Growing older, growing uglier, a flip-book of dissolution.
The driver keeps on whistling.
“Is that everything?” says the man, and he sniffs. He’s not a Librarian—no. Some special branch of service?
I nod. “Yeah.”
“All right.”
He gets up again. He’s got a little screwdriver in one of his pockets, and he uses it to open a panel on the metal wall behind him. Behind the panel is a shallow drawer, which he pulls out.
“What—” I say, as he slides my documents into the drawer. “What are you doing?”
He doesn’t answer. Maybe he is a Librarian: he’s got a wand. He puts the screwdriver back in his pocket and takes out the slim metal tube, black metal with silver caps on either end, and I feel an instinctual revulsion. What—what is going on? I draw back, pull as far away as I can from the pole to which I’m attached, but he’s not aiming the wand at me. He places my documents in the flat drawer he’s removed from the wall and slowly moves the wand across them, front to back, a slow steady movement, like he’s wanding someone’s forehead, and there is a hissing noise from inside the drawer, and smoke rises from it in a disappearing puff.
“Hey,” I say. “Hey.”
But it’s already done. He tilts the drawer forward so I can see the ashes inside of it, and then he turns it over so they scatter on the floor of the hot dog truck.
“Okay,” he says, and the driver stops whistling long enough to say it too: “Okay.”
“Now. What’s your name?”
“Laszlo Ratesic.”
The truck jerks to
