“Shit,” I say as the car skids and flies, bounces with a rattling bang off a streetlamp and careens in a new direction, totally out of my control. I struggle to get the wheel steady in my hands but it shivers and rolls, flying through my fingers. The car caroms to the other side of the road and my head cracks against the driver’s side window, sending a flash of pain across my skull.
“Fuck,” I say, rolling back from the blow. “Fuck.”
The car sputters and stops, perpendicular to the roadway, steam hissing out from under the hood. The air-conditioning dies along with the engine, and in an instant the car becomes a furnace. I take deep breaths, fighting to steady my shaking hands. The sun is blinding, burning, magnified by the glass of the windshield. There is an ominous hiss coming from somewhere in the mechanics of the car. Blood is trickling into my right eye. I must have cut my head when it hit the window.
“Get out of the vehicle.”
The voice is mechanized. Loud. Coming through a bullhorn or a speaker, some kind of amplification system. I squint through the cracked windshield, rubbing blood out of my eye with my knuckles, trying to see who’s addressing me. My head is a thick knot of pain.
“Get out of the vehicle.”
I grasp the door handle, take a breath, and step out into the blasting heat.
An even, flat expanse of asphalt spreads in either direction. A long street, dotted with street lamps, lined with buildings. I still don’t know where I am, exactly, just that I’m home. I peer up at the street lamps, looking for captures. I had forgotten that I’m barefoot. It was okay driving but now the heat of the pavement sears the soles of my feet.
“Hello?” I call feebly, hands in the air, turning in a slow circle. I don’t see anyone. If somebody shot out my tire, I don’t see them now. Enormous buildings, majestic constructions of concrete and glass, rise on either side of me, up and down the street, each of them with its own giant-scale architectural style. There’s a building that is itself an entire skyline, each of its towers fashioned to look like the top of a downtown skyscraper. To one side of me is a pyramid, its front-facing sides made of sheer black glass, rising many stories into the air.
Whoever told me to get out of the car I don’t see anywhere, but it feels like I should have my hands in the air, so I keep my hands in the air. I walk gingerly from where my car stopped to the traffic island at the center of the lanes.
There are no buildings like this downtown. Maybe I’m not downtown. Maybe I’m up in Pasadena or Glendale, down in the beach cities. Some reach of the State my travels rarely took me.
“Stay exactly where you are. Keep your hands visible.”
The voice again, from nowhere and everywhere.
“Okay,” I say. Now, squinting upward into the haze, I can make out a kind of catwalk, an elevated hallway with a glass bottom, suspended across the road and spanning it, connecting one of the insane buildings on one side to one on the other. I squint up at the catwalk, in search of the source of the voice. I think I can spot figures shifting about up there, dark shadows floating above the roadway, but I can’t be sure.
“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!”