Two cars pull up at the same moment, from opposite directions, one on either side of the traffic island where I’m standing. The cars are yellow, each with the word “TAXI” stenciled on its side. Nobody gets out of the cars. One of the officers, the woman, remains with her gun pointed at me, while the other hustles over to the window of one of the taxis.
For a long moment he talks to whoever is in there, and then he trots back over to his partner as the door opens and a new officer comes out—a tall, thin woman, no apron, no mask, dressed all in blue.
She has a bullhorn, and she lifts it to her lips.
“Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
She doesn’t repeat herself. She just waits, watching. My fingers are clumsy, swollen, wrestling with the buttons of my shirt. While I struggle out of my clothes, an officer emerges from the second taxi and methodically puts four traffic cones in a square around me. There is another cop inside his car, I see her waiting, watching him tensely from behind the steering wheel. My pants are burned onto my skin, and I have to fight them off, wrestle them down, unpeel myself from myself. When the new officer, who is older, black, with a thin gray mustache, is done with the traffic cones, he strings yellow caution tape from cone to cone, cordoning me off.
At last I stand in my underpants, the sun flaying my broad red back.
I am becoming aware of life in the corners of this picture. A man and a woman sit on a decorative concrete wall in front of one of the hotels, dangling their feet. A little boy is on a bicycle, swooping in curious circles closer and closer to the conversation. Half a block up there’s a statue of a towering figure in a draped toga or cape, lording proudly above the intersection.
The first officer keeps her gun on me while Rick waits beside her along with the perimeter. He takes off his hat and wipes sweat from his brow while the tall woman, the one with no mask and no apron, lifts her bullhorn again.
“We’re going to need to know your name.”
I start to answer, but then I don’t want to. I can’t. I remember the thud of the boots in my side in the hot dog truck. Not falling for that again. “I don’t have a name.”
“Look,” she says. “If we don’t know who you are, you’re dangerous. If you’re dangerous, we have to handle you as we handle any threat.”
As if to underscore the tall woman’s point, the woman with the gun raises it a little higher. Rick brushes his fingertips along the holster of his own weapon but doesn’t draw. The last of the officers, the perimeter man with the thin gray mustache, has his hands in his pockets, but he’s looking at me closely.
I am going to die here, I think. Wherever this is—one way or another—I’m going to die. I might as well go out with my name on.
“My name is Laszlo Ratesic,” I say.
“You’re Golden State?”
“Yes.”
She says it like that, not “Are you from the Golden State?” but “You’re Golden State?” and I wonder what that means.
“You’re a refugee?”
“I—I’m sorry. I—”
“Exile.” She interrupts, impatient. “You’re an exile.”
I squint. I can’t hear her clearly. Maybe she said “in.” You’re “in exile” or you’re “an exile.”
“Yes,” I say, the answer is the same either way, and feel the pain of longing for my homeland, which strangely enough appears to me as the pleading, earnest face of Kelly Tarjin, whom I only met three days ago. I think of her in the doorway of her small home in Faircrest Heights, her face worn with care. I recall telling her there was a version of the world in which I would come back to her, buy her a hamburger, tell her funny stories. I imagine her now with a stab of regret, imagine her waiting, imagine arrogantly that she cares, that she’s standing in her doorway in fruitless anticipation of my return. The weakest form of speculation: fantasy.
I miss her. I never really met her. “Home” is a word with no definitive meaning.
Meanwhile, the mustache guy trots over to the captain and mutters in her ear. She looks baffled, but then she shrugs and hands him the bullhorn. He starts to talk, it doesn’t work, he puzzles at the mechanism and starts again.
“Hey, would you say the name again?”
“Laszlo,” I say.
“The whole name.”
The captain is watching him. He’s watching me.
“Laszlo Ratesic.”
He confers with the captain, and then with the other two cops, who lift their visors to join the conversation, until he speaks again into the bullhorn. “All right, then. We will not be killing you for the time being.”
The dark-skinned cop with the gray mustache has a partner, too, a young woman with a black ponytail. She’s driving and he’s in the shotgun seat, and I’m in the back, and they don’t talk while they take me where we’re going, a short ride down the avenue—the Strip, is what it’s called. That’s what Wish calls it in The Prisoner; I remember it now. But in their easy comfort with each other, in the clear mutual respect I sense between the two, I am reminded helplessly of Aysa Paige, my old friend, my first and last and only partner.
My thick head lolls back and I think maybe I sleep a little, in the air-conditioned back seat of this taxicab that is a police car, in this city that did not exist until half an hour ago, heading to who knows where. I drift off to sleep deciding that the best thing to do is remember Aysa forever as the Aysa I knew first, the one who never betrayed me and never intended to.
