The whole building was dead to the eyes of the world so that lies could be told within its walls with impunity. This Golden State, Charlie told us, was meeting off the Record, disconnected from ongoing reality.
“But… why?” asked Carson, her face reflecting the fascinated horror that we were all feeling.
“To lie. Just to lie.”
We could not conceive of it, the willful depravity of this place that Charlie had been inside of: good and golden citizens parading about in full and luxuriant disregard for the truth, announcing themselves to have new names, telling each other that they were pirates, or millionaires, war heroes, thieves. Relating stories from their personal histories, reveling in changing the details every time they told them, making themselves funnier or braver or better looking in retrospect. Making up stories about their friends, about history, about public figures and private friends.
They were spewing out so many and such extravagant lies that every time Charlie approached this warehouse, willing himself back into character as one of the conspirators, he could practically see the effusions of their dishonesty billowing out from behind the doors.
“It’s fucked up,” he told us. “These people are seriously fucked up.”
“So what are we waiting for?” said Alvaro. “Let’s bust in there and shut the place down.”
“No!” shouted Charlie loudly, wheeling on poor Alvaro, who backed away, putting his hands in the air. Charlie’s eyes were wild, red-rimmed. His hair was a mess, sticking out in all directions. “We can’t.”
“But Charlie,” I said softly, trying to calm him. “Why not?”
The answer was simple, at least as he saw it: Charlie didn’t want us to end the conspiracy because he had convinced himself that there was someone else involved he had not yet managed to identify. “Give me more time. A little more time. I have to find the monster.”
We all looked at each other. Laszlo, over by the elevator, stood up straight.
“The monster?”
“That’s right.”
It was increasingly clear, the longer the great Charlie Ratesic stood there, staring at us, staring out the window, that something was wrong with him. Something was very wrong indeed. His lips were flecked with spittle. His eyes were wild.
“They say—” He ground out his cigarette, lit a new one. “These fuckers say that the Golden State—the real one, our one—is all bullshit. They say that the real golden state—like, ‘state’ like ‘state of being,’ ‘state of understanding’—the real golden state is accepting that there is no such thing as truth. They think we’re fooling ourselves to think we can be protected from lies. They say that all of it—the Record, the captures, the Service…” Ratesic was staring out the window again, out at the glittering majesty of the dark city. “They think it’s some kind of fallacy, that we’re, like—what do they say?—playing make-believe.”
We were all looking at each other, looking at Charlie, trying to take the measure of what was happening inside his mind by the wildness in his eyes.
“They’re writing a book,” he said. Lighting a new cigarette with trembling hands. “A Night Book, they call it, because it’s a book of real truth, truth underneath the truth. Just like a real Night Book, but… but it’s a joke. It’s a sick joke.” Charlie took a deep drag of the new cigarette and launched again, a single long sentence curling out with the smoke. “They say the real truth is that there is no such thing as truth at all, there’s only perception, okay, because everything you think is true can only be proved by pointing to some other truth, but that truth rests on another one, too, and so on forever, and they say that what this means is that there is no permanent actual reality, there is no Objectively So, and all that we have built, the good and golden truth that surrounds us, is nothing.” He stopped finally, then, and stood trembling with tears in his eyes. “Not truth but it’s opposite. It’s absence.”
“Okay, Charlie,” I said softly. “Okay.”
“Don’t do that, Vasouvian.” He sprang back to life, snarling, and grabbed my collar. “Don’t condescend to me. These assholes want to take the whole State off the Record. They say that whatever happened”—he let go of me and gestured wildly, gesturing to the ancient inscrutable past, the unknowable calamity that happened to the rest of the world—“that we oughta let it happen here. We oughta make it happen here.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“It’s not. It’s not! There’s a monster. There’s a monster and the monster is going to make it happen. Unless we stop it.”
“A monster?”
“What?” said Ratesic. “You think I’m lying?”
It was, I realized, time to talk to Charlie alone. I took him aside. We sat down at my desk and I poured us both coffee. The man had been undercover for six months, and I told him that in my expert opinion it was time for him to come in from the field. Monster or no monster.
“No,” he said. He did not drink the coffee. “No, Arlo.”
“What I’m afraid of, dear Charlie, is that the work—being so exposed, for so long—that it is affecting you.”
“What? No. The work doesn’t affect me. You know that. I don’t get symptoms. I don’t—”
“On the inside, Charlie. I’m afraid that it is affecting you inside.” I didn’t use the phrase that had occurred to me, as I looked with horror at the sallowness in his cheeks, the wildness in his eyes when he raved about his monster. I was afraid he had begun to rot from the inside out.
“I am worried, Charlie, that there is an alternate reality that has its hooks in you. As your superior—as your friend—”
“Enough,” He slammed down his coffee cup. He grabbed his jacket. “I’m going back in there. I’m going to find the monster.”
He stormed toward the elevator, wrestling himself back into his coat.
“Hey. Charlie?”
Laszlo Ratesic stopped his brother by the elevator door. He was bigger than Charlie by half a head, maybe, but you never really noticed him when Charlie was around. Charlie smiled to see him, though. He had his jacket on now. He was ready to go. “Yeah, buddy?”
“I just wanted to say be careful out there.” He knew his brother too well to try to stop him. “Okay?”
Charlie nodded. “You got it.” He patted his brother on the cheek, and stepped into the elevator. We watched the door close.
The next time we saw him he was in his hospital bed.
19.
“Is that all true?” says Paige.
“Everything is true,” I tell her.
I’ve told her the whole story,
The only part I left out was the distressing exultant feeling I got while I was listening to him that day, raving to old Arlo about this terrifying conspiracy he penetrated, this Golden State that was not the real Golden State, that wanted to make of us our inverse, build a world of pure thin truthlessness with no Record, no captures, everybody walking around with no burden of truth upon them, no prison of truth around them, and how what I felt on hearing all this was a kind of inchoate sideways longing.
Wouldn’t that be fucking great? is what I thought, watching the elevator door close behind Charlie. That’s what I thought, a longing shadowed by the shame of that longing. Shame and fascination and fear.
Wouldn’t that be something…
Same way I felt three hours ago, reading The Prisoner, immersing myself in alternate realities, soaking in them, all the things that could be but aren’t…