1 #3
When I wore my glasses, I couldn’t enter the local public pool where I’d been swimming for years, but I could enter the private botanical garden up in the hills.
Before my glasses broke, I’d only been in there once, years earlier, for a birthday party.
Now I visited every few days, for the pleasure of wandering through a green oasis in this desert state.
I graded papers and prepared for my classes at a little table by the waterfall in the garden, green fronds all around.
When I wasn’t there, I missed the waterfall’s rushing white noise.
I thought, I want to dive into freezing water.
A strange idea that came out of nowhere, and where on the Southern California coast could one even find an ice-water pool with a diving board?
I wasn’t sure that such a thing existed.
But the idea stayed with me. One evening I lost track of time and remained later than usual, until an employee came to me and said they were closing.
I rose to leave, and then it occurred to me: I could probably come here at night.
No, coming here at night wouldn’t work, because of surveillance cameras.
What I could do, though, is steal an employee uniform—easy enough with my magic glasses, my unrecognizable face—and then anyone watching the surveillance would think I was a security guard.
Only then did it hit me that I was considering committing a crime.
“Ma’am,” the employee said.
“I’m going.” On my way out, I passed a white bus coming in.
It was filled with children, a line of unsmiling faces pressed to the windows.
There was something off about them, but it didn’t register until I was standing a few minutes later on the Botanical Garden Station platform, waiting for the trolley that would carry me downtown.
All of the children’s heads had been shaved. What I’d seen was an orphanage outing.
From here, on the platform up in the chaparral hills, the business district was lit up like a distant stage set below me.
What I’d discovered in myself was a faint shadow of corruption.
I could become a criminal, I realized, and there was freedom in that.
With the glasses, I’d already in a small way stopped following certain rules.
But this thought was followed by terror, because people who broke the rules disappeared, everyone knew that.
Their children filled the State orphanages.
In distant childhood memory, a girl whose name I couldn’t remember waved at me from across the street and disappeared into the back of a State car with her parents.
The trolley was gliding toward me. I took off my glasses before I stepped aboard.
Without them, the world was softer and a little dreamlike, the lights on the ceiling possessed of a gentle aura, and I couldn’t read the propaganda screens inside the train.
The problem was that the broken glasses had exposed some underlying flaw in the world, and I couldn’t unsee it.
I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t there.
If I were to avoid becoming a criminal, I thought, then perhaps my safest option would be to move deeper into the police.
I applied for a competitive promotion to the rank of detective.
Some weeks passed while I waited for a response, and in those weeks Fillmore took on an almost supernatural beauty.
I knew that I would get the promotion, in the way that sometimes all through my life I’ve just known things, and the nearness of my departure made everything vivid.
This is one of the last times I’ll walk up this street, I thought, on the walk from the college to my house at dusk in the evenings, and the double row of palms was otherworldly in its symmetry.
This is one of the last mornings I’ll wake up here, I thought, when my alarm went off in the mornings, and I admired the patch of sunlight that came through leaves to land in a gilt square on my bedroom floor.
After about three weeks, a man I’d never seen before knocked on my office door at the college.
“Good morning, Ibari,” he said, when I looked up. “David Grissom.” He closed the door behind him and sat on the other side of my desk. “I’m here from Service.”
Grissom was aggressively ordinary, that was my first impression.
He was dressed like every professor on campus, like every dad in the park near my house, in jeans and a short-sleeve button-down.
He was dressed to disappear into a local crowd.
If I’d needed confirmation that I’d been surrounded all my life by other Service agents, Grissom was the proof.
“Good morning,” I said. I touched the confirmation button on my watch, and he did the same.
“Three cities later you look up from the table,” he said.
“You look up, startled from something foreign and incomprehensible,” I said, “and you are surprised by the question.” I hadn’t done this in a while, and the exercise felt a little silly.
My watch buzzed once, registering the first round of the confirmation phrases, then the screen display read NEXT PHRASE: GO.
“On the ferry at night there is no sky and no sea, the horizon marked only by scattered lights.”
“Scattered lights in darkness,” Grissom said. He spoke very seriously. “Starless, no moon, cold wind, cold night, lights in the distance.”
“Lights in the distance. Always coming home.”
My watch vibrated once more on my wrist and displayed a green check mark.
“Okay,” he said, and smiled at me. “Your Service record is impeccable. You’ve been in this posting for a while now, haven’t you?”
“Two decades, give or take.”
“What is the attribute that distinguishes you from your colleagues in Service?”
A vulnerability to corruption and a chronic case of low-level dread. “I’d say intelligence,” I said, “but everyone at the academy was intelligent. So I think I’d have to say intuition. Premonition. I realize that sounds strange.”
“As it happens,” he said, “notes from your supervisors back you up on that, so you don’t need to worry about sounding like a lunatic. How would you describe your premonitions?”
I’d spent a lifetime brushing it off—Oh, it’s nothing, I just sometimes have a sense of something that’s going to happen—but I wanted the promotion, I sensed Grissom’s willingness to take me seriously, and I decided to take the risk.
“It’s a kind of deep listening,” I said.
“If you’ll permit me an analogy, you can walk into a café and register that there’s a song playing on the sound system, or you can really deeply listen to the song, and in so doing you can predict when the beat will drop, or when the chorus will come in. ”
He nodded, and made a note. “Something to do with listening and pattern recognition.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s fair.” Pattern recognition wasn’t quite it, but some things are difficult to articulate.
“You have a nice life here,” he said, “by all appearances. Fillmore is a highly coveted post.”
“Absolutely. I’m grateful for it.”
“In the detective position,” he said, “there is no more cover life. You would be a full-time detective, and your cover would just be a story you told people.”
“I understand.”
“Why do you want to give up your current life?”
“I want to do something more.”
“The position you’re applying for involves a higher level of trust,” he said, “and that means, if we can speak frankly here, a higher possibility of encountering cases that you might find personally distressing. It is necessary work, but there’s a darkness in it, there is personal sacrifice in performing this service, and there’s a price we pay to maintain a harmonious society.
I’m speaking candidly and off the record. ”
“I appreciate that.”
“There are people who ascend the ranks because they want power, Ibari, and people who ascend because they wish to be of greater utility to the State, and people with different motives altogether. I’m going to ask you again, and I need you to be absolutely honest with me.
Why do you want to give up this seemingly very pleasant life as a midlevel agent, in order to take on a high-stress detective position in Los Angeles? Why do you wish to ascend in Service?”
A series of barely plausible lies flitted through my head—I just want to give back, I believe in the Promise of the State, the relentless propaganda just really resonates for me—but my basic understanding of Service was that Service knew everything, so I went with something closer to the truth.
I want to dive into freezing water. “Lately,” I said, “let’s say over the past year or so, I’ve felt restless.
I’ve been living this life for a while, and I’ve enjoyed it, but I’d like to be a more active person.
I mean someone who’s more actively engaged in the world. ”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I think I’ve too often been an observer,” I said. “In my life, but also in the world. I don’t want that anymore. I’d like to be someone who does things. I guess I like the idea of being closer to the centre of things. Just, doing more. Going further.”
He nodded. “I understand. Would you be alone in Los Angeles? Do you know anyone there?”
This felt like a trap—didn’t Service know everything?—but I answered anyway. “I have a good friend there,” I said.
“Nico Li?”
It’s only unsettling if you choose to be unsettled, that’s what I remembered my father saying about Service when I was young. You can choose to accept surveillance as an inevitability, like taxes or the weather, and there’s peace in that. “Yes, Nico Li. We went to grad school together.”