“Stipulated.”
“Do you think we can talk in your office?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Sil.”
“Is this a personal matter or a professional matter?”
“Professional, Silvie. Okay? I need your help with a case.” I hold up my hands, like a man surrendering, like a magician proving there’s nothing up his sleeve. “Okay?”
“All right,” says Silvie after an extended pause. “Come on back.”
“Are you quite sure?” Mr. Willis puts in, and I can tell Silvie isn’t sure. She’s too smart not to know that me saying I’m here on business is at best the top layer in a complicated multilayered truth. But there is no question that she blames herself for what’s become of us, and she knows that I, grudging child in my heart, I blame her also, and she feels she owes me and she feels she always will.
It’s what I’m counting on, big clever monster that I am.
“Five minutes,” says Silvie at last. “I’m not busy, but I don’t like seeing you. It makes me sad.”
“Okay,” I say, and follow her through the inner doors and down the hall. “Stipulated.”
Silvie gestures to the chair on the other side of her desk, takes her own seat. Her inner office is a lot more pleasant than the rest of the floor: minimalist and cream-colored, gently lit and full of small cactuses in tidy beige planters. It’s got the cool, understated aesthetic she tried to get going in our home in Mar Vista, an effort forever foiled by my total indifference to my surroundings. There is a small coffee table, with exactly one book on it: Past Is Prologue, of course, the novel of the founding of the Golden State. I kiss my forefinger and brush it across the cover of the book, while Silvie waits, not softening, her eyes watchful and withholding. Clearly determined to play the surface truth of the situation: two professionals settling in to discuss a professional matter.
“So what is it?” Silvie says warily. “It’s a case?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of case?”
I smile, lay my heavy arms down on the desk, and swallow the wild urge to confess that I set up the whole thing—I broke into a man’s house and burned two weeks of his days, I clambered up behind him on a roof and pushed him to his death, all to contrive a reason to be here now, sitting across from you, Silvie, with our arms almost touching on your desk.
Come on, Laszlo. Get it together. Take a fucking breath.
“I have two weeks of missing days that I need reconstructed.”
“Whose days?”
“A man named Mose Crane. A roofer. Construction guy. Recently deceased.”
Silvie twists her lips to one side, the kind of small unconscious gesture that I watched her make a thousand times, and which I now force myself to ignore. When you have been in love with someone in the past, there are a million small trapdoors you can fall through that would take you right back.
“Mose Crane. A bad guy?”
“No. Well, I don’t know what kind of guy he is yet. That’s why I need the days built.”
“And you said two weeks? Two weeks in aggregate?”
“No. A two-week period.”
“Empty bags or no bags?”
“No bags. Clean.”
“No kidding.” Silvie shakes her head at me and puckers her lips. Silvie, with her plain, cheerful face, is an expert at the art of smiling disapproval. “Rather an extensive project you’re dumping in my lap, wouldn’t you say?”
I shift in my chair. “Is it?”
“Question with a question is pretty weak, Mr. Ratesic,” she says. “Even for you.”
But Silvie is interested. Her curiosity adds an intensity to the light in her eyes. She is biting at her lower lip, leaning forward. This is part of what I was counting on, coming to her directly like this: that despite it all she’s intrigued—as curious as I am about how a day laborer, about how anyone, would come to have a precise two-week bite taken out of his Provisional Record. There are many things we never had in common—almost everything—but Silvie, bless her, was ever as interested as her man in the byzantine business of reality maintenance.
“What happened to those weeks?” she wants to know.
“That’s part of what I’m trying to find out.”
“How long ago are they?”
“Not long. Six months back.”
“The subject is dead, though, you said?”
“Dead.”
“Well, that does make it easier.” Silvie leans back a bit, takes a look at her watch. She told me I had five minutes, and five minutes I shall get. “Talk to Mr. Willis,” she says, “and he’ll take the information, fill out a ninety-four B.”
“Silvie. I could have done a ninety-four from my desk.”
“Perhaps you should have.”
“Silvie.”
“Laszlo.” A smile flickers at her lips at this old game, batting back and forth, but she stops it up, remembers to glare at me. “When days are lost, there is a process, and the Office of Contingent Reality Reassembly is happy to execute our duties. Fill out the form and we will get to work on it.”
“I don’t want help from the office in general,” I tell her. “I want help from you.”
“And you didn’t think it would be uncomfortable, to come to me of all the people in this Department?”
“I knew it would be uncomfortable,” I say. “But you’re the best.”
“You are trying to flatter me.”
“Well, yeah.” I smile, trying to smile with my whole face, put the smile into my eyes, my fat cheeks. “But also, it’s true.”
Silvie rolls her eyes, but I’ve got her, just a little bit I’ve got her. There’s small measure of happiness blooming on her face. The bells are ringing—coming from somewhere, from below and around us—and we are at Forest Lawn, turning to notice each other, standing with no umbrellas while the bells ring for Charlie. She is saying “Oh, wow” when I tell her who I am. Who I’m related to. Every time she smiles I am thrown back to the beginning.
Now a moment has passed into a different moment, we have reverted to an old way of being, and it’s almost worse. It is: it’s worse. We were in love for a long time, or whatever it was we were in, and for a second, another second, it feels like it would be the easiest thing in the world to pick up right where we left off.
Except all the rest of it would pick up too: the shadows that never left us alone for long, the pressure of the past on all our present moments. The ghost of a question that was in the room with us every time we were alone.
The ghost of my dead fucking brother, whose heavy bootsteps I can hear even now—even now—descending the spiral staircase, as he comes and finds us, who even now I can see slipping into Silvie’s neat clean office and making himself at home. In his blacks, grinning on Silvie’s clean white sofa, his confident feet kicked up on her coffee table, to remind me why it would never work. Why it never worked and could never work in the future.
The same miserable trick he pulled the whole time we were together.
Silvie writes in her Day Book as I tell her what I have. Mose Crane. The address on Ellendale. The most recent employer and the place and manner of death. This is a big project I’m dumping in her lap, and we both know it. She’s going to have to seek out people who crossed paths with him and take doubles off their pads, find the roads he drove and the paths he walked and dub off the stretches, find the stores where he shopped and pull receipt copies. Build a picture from scratch, off whatever scraps of starting and ending evidence I can give her.
“I’ll need to know what proportion of his totals the missing days represent,” she says.