“Stop,” I say, and lunge for her, and she raises one hand, and I jerk back, spin halfway around, and my first thought is that she can control reality itself, of course she can, and she has caused the searing pain in my shoulder with a sharp movement of her hand, but then there is a another explosive sound from the house’s second story and I understand that someone is shooting at us, she has signaled someone on the upper floor who has opened fire. Is it Doonan? I wonder, standing there like an idiot peering up, until Aysa grabs at me, pulls me down as she kicks over the glass-topped table to form a shield.
Petras is bolting back toward the house. A third bullet smashes into the tabletop, shattering it, glass exploding everywhere. The dog is barking wherever it is.
I shout after Petras, over the lip of the inverted table: “Stop! Stop!”
Paige shoots up at the window and misses.
Petras is running, and it occurs to me that I could shoot her. I think madly, I could shoot her, right in the back, shoot her and shoot the man upstairs, shoot the dog, burn the whole house down, and none of it would ever be known. This is the madness of living unrecorded, untethered to time. You can do anything and say it never happened. Anything.
Paige takes a second shot, clear through the window, and I see the shooter go down, spin backward as blood mists from the hole in his head.
“Stop!” I yell, and Petras stops. Paige rises unsteadily from behind the table.
“Turn around,” I say, and Petras obeys. She has the knife that was on the breakfast board that was on the table: a knife, a long serrated blade, the handle clutched in her fist, the blade trembling frantically in the air before her.
She raises the knife’s brutal edge to her throat. Tears form and fall from her eyes.
“I swear in the name of the State and my high position that I have committed no crime. Whatever kind of trick you are playing here, I will not have my life destroyed for it.”
“Drop that knife, please,” I say. The dog has stopped its barking. The sun has risen high enough that I can feel its heat. “Please drop it, Ms. Petras.”
Her right eye flickers and jumps.
“No.”
Aysa has her gun on Petras. I have my gun on her too. This is madness. But the problem is, it’s not madness, because I have given this lady no choice and no chance. I have nothing to use as leverage, no power of mercy. The crimes with which I have just accused her, the crimes I know her to be guilty of, carry the maximum penalty, and she knows it the same as I do. The Golden State does not practice capital punishment, but everybody knows what it does, everybody knows what will happen.
She will be sent into the wilderness, of course. The charges I am leveling carry that penalty. She will not only be toppled from her high position, she will be sent out into the wilderness and die there. So why would she cooperate?
“Drop the knife!” I shout again, but why would she drop the knife?
“Ms. Petras,” says Paige, and she steps forward, and Petras steps forward too, and then jumps, and I shout “No!” but it’s too late, Petras is jumping with the knife. I don’t know what her plan is but she only gets as far as screaming and lunging, and Paige is firing her weapon and so am I, and she misses because Petras has slammed into her, buried the knife in her stomach. Paige misses but I don’t. I catch Petras in her side just at the moment the knife slides in, and now both of them are bleeding—Petras gushing from her side, slumped forward, driving the blade deeper and deeper into Aysa, who is screaming, pushing at the other woman as she sinks down beneath her, the white stone disappearing under an opening curtain of blood.
“No,” I say. I’m running across the slick pavement, slipping on the mingling blood. “No.”
I am down on one knee, scrambling for Paige’s wound, pressing the heels of my palms into it, holding her closed with my hands.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her, “it’s going to be okay.” I scramble for my radio, smash the buttons, raise the alarm, telling her, “It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay,” and now it’s my own lie that is rolling in the air, because I have no information to support my asseveration. Aysa’s eyes are clouding. Her cheeks are losing their color. There is blood on my arms where I am holding her, a slick of blood expanding on the stone beneath us, dripping over the edge and expanding out onto the surface of the water, and it is not going to be okay.
“No.” Too little, too late. “No.”
Not good enough. Deep truth—bone true—true as daylight, true as doors on houses. Never good enough.
Part Two
Our desire to know the whole truth is what makes us human. Our understanding that it can’t be known is what keeps us alive.
20.
Death is the truest thing. Binary and unambiguous, permanent and forever.
The bells are ringing for Aysa Paige, one for each of her years, and I’m standing with my head ducked as rain sneaks into the collar of my coat. A miserable rain that drips over the brim of my pinhole, soaks into my beard, inches its way along the line of my neck up the sleeves of my black coat.
The others in the crowd are holding umbrellas, most of them, but I’m not part of the crowd. Not really. They’re over there, standing around the hole in the ground, the hole they’re going to lower Aysa into. I stand with my head bent, far enough away to be at a distance. Forest Lawn. Charlie is here. He’s right over there. I don’t come and visit because there’s no reason to. I won’t come and visit Aysa Paige either.
The bells ring for the twenty-fourth time and then give way to silence. The rain hisses on the leaves of the trees.
Today I am being hailed for my courage and dedication, for my valor and service to the State. It’s heavily featured in the Trusted Authority, in both the print and radio editions, early reports of the extraordinary valor of two Speculators, one of whom was injured, the other injured in the line of duty. More details to emerge in time. There will be a novel. I will be one of its heroes.
That word is wrong. It feels wrong. Hero.
Charlie carried himself like a hero long before he was one. When we were kids I would call him a hero, and he would tell me I was right. When in due time he became a hero for real, when they put the mantle on him, it fit perfectly and he wore it with ease, like his favorite jacket or his beat-up boots.
Me, though? The word hero sits heavily in my gut. It mewls and rolls. It disputes itself.
I spent the morning alone, staring out the window of my small house, trying to ignore the sour rolling in my stomach, the dark sense that any version of reality in which Laszlo Ratesic has become a hero, as a matter of Record, is a reality in which something is deeply fucked up.
My gut tried to convince me not to go to the funeral at all, to stay home and make myself frozen waffles and curl up in a corner and read the novel again: The Prisoner by Benjamin Wish.
But I had to come. I needed to, so I ignored my gut. I did make waffles, and I drowned them in syrup and ate them over the sink while I burned the novel in the toaster oven, and then I put on my black clothes. And now here I am, with rain dribbling into my beard, inside one of those moments when one’s inmost truth sits in uneasy disagreement with the acknowledged truth of the world.