“Don’t shoot me,” I say to whoever it is. Wherever they are. “I don’t want to die.”
I do, though. A little bit, I do. It hurts to speak. My feet are burning and bleeding. My face is peeling, flakes of hot skin coming off my cheeks above my beard.
“You can’t be out here,” says the voice.
I spin around. I don’t know where the voice is coming from. “Okay,” I say.
Then I see them. Two of them, coming across the road toward me, with guns aimed at my head. They are Speculators, is what they are—black suits, black shoes, black hats—and I am about to call out in happy greeting, ask them their unit, tell them who I am, but then I see that they’re also wearing thick aprons that cover the whole midsection and helmets, black helmets with tinted visors that cover the whole face.
The words come to me again, and the truth of the words: I don’t know where I am.
They are approaching me swiftly, like shadows, like creatures risen from some impossible deep to come and claim me and drag me away. There is a crispness in their movements, a panther-like military integrity that reminds me with a burst of sad longing that I used to be like them. It reminds me that I’m standing here barefoot, broken, bleeding from my head.
“Please don’t shoot me,” I say. “Please.”
They stop, guns still drawn and aimed, and the shorter of the two raises the faceplate and holds up a stubby bullhorn. It’s a woman, pale-faced, staring at me impassively.
“We will not shoot you unless given cause to do so.”
“Okay,” I say. And then, ridiculously: “That’s great.”
“Please provide your identification.”
“I don’t have any.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I don’t have any.”
“None?”
I shake my head.
She is stymied. Irritated, even. Leaving her faceplate up, she turns to her partner to confer. He is shorter than her, broad around the middle, and when he flips up his own faceplate I see a round, pocked face. They press their foreheads together and talk so I can’t hear them. I see figures moving about on the catwalks, clustering together. People. Dozens of people. Staring at me. I turn to one of the glass buildings, on one side of the street, and I see that I am being watched from there, too. And from the building on the opposite side. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, thousand, maybe, are watching.
I know at last where I am. A skyline that is not a skyline but a cluster of overlapping skylines. I know it from The Prisoner, from when, toward the end, Dave Keener arrives in that glittering and hopeful city in search of the wrecked alcoholic doctor who may or may not hold the secret that can save Dave’s son. When he arrives, it’s late at night, and he drives his car down a broad avenue—this same broad avenue—into a throbbing crowd of partygoers and happy revelers, and his own grief and panic are drawn in sharp contrast to the footloose alcoholic joy of those he is forced to pass through en route to his salvation and that of his family.
The whole world of the book returns to me in a flash, a world layered over this one, Dave Keener unable to deal with the traffic, throngs of cars going on either side, so he pulls over and gets out on the side of the road and climbs up on top of his car, scanning in both directions, while the exhaust of a hundred cars blows up into his eyes and coats his throat.
I am in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, as it turns out, is a real place.
The two officers have come to some sort of disagreement, presumably about my fate. The short fat one raises his gun and points it at me, and the other one, the one who spoke to me, pushes it down. I step off my traffic island and head toward the two officers—or soldiers, or whatever they are—hoping to engage them, but they ignore me, continue their squabbling. Their voices float over to me in patches, ribbons of conversation.
“…I don’t know what you want me to do—”
“You know what you have to do. Directorate just issued new instructions on this.”
“What directorate are you fucking talking about?”
“Main Directorate.”
“Main Directorate of Identification, or Main Directorate of Border Security?”
“I don’t know!”
“You just said you did know!”
“Can we just call it in? Let’s call it in.”
“Fine. Fine, Rick.”
Rick holsters his gun and digs under his heavy apron and comes out with a radio, a small black box of a make I’ve never seen before. He murmurs into it while his partner watches, and then the three of us stand baking in the sun.
“Hey,” I say, realizing suddenly how brutally thirsty I am. “Can I—”
“Remain where you are.”
“Remain where you are.”
“Do not move.”
“Do not move.”
“Stay.”
So I wait, unmoving, under the watchful eyes of the two officers in their thick lead aprons and black face masks, and under the eyes of everybody in those hotels that line the street, because that’s what they are. Hotels. I know them from The Prisoner, I have been given a map in advance: a guide book. That’s Luxor, Caesars Palace, New York–New York. Purpose-built simulacra of real places, once built for pleasure. Inside them now, I think, I presume, are people—the people who live in Las Vegas now, who live here now in the present like there are people who live in the Golden State. These people, the Las Vegas people, were never real to me before this instant—but neither were they were unreal. I had no reason to conceive of their existence, nor reason to doubt it. They were unknown and unknowable.
But now they are real, and I can feel their eyes staring from the glass windows above and around me.
Sweat is
