1 #13
We’d finished what I had decided would absolutely be my last drink of the evening. The singer was gone. How late was it? Very, but it didn’t actually matter that much, because tomorrow was my day off and I didn’t have to get up in the morning.
“I was never that interested,” I said. “Where are your kids?”
“Sleeping.”
“They’ve been alone all this time?”
“They’re fine. Don’t worry about them. Look, I’ve got this app.” Fayed fumbled on his phone, swiping here and there, and then showed me a screen that I was certain he hadn’t looked at all evening.
“Is that your living room?” I was looking at a video image of two small children curled up together on what looked like a pullout couch.
“The kids like sleeping in the living room. It’s like camping.”
“I hated camping,” I said dreamily. Hazy memories of some god-awful span of time next to a lake when I was a kid, rain leaking through the tent into my sleeping bag, cold food, mosquitoes, smoke.
“We both know there’s no crime anymore,” Fayed said. “That’s the Promise of the State, right?”
“To the State,” I said, and raised my glass. “But you’re not worried they’ll wake up and be scared?”
“Oh.” He looked startled. “I guess that never occurred to me.”
“Fayed,” I said.
“I hate that you call me that.”
“I don’t care at all. Do you have any new theories? About what happened?”
He put down his phone, flipped it screen-down on the table, and sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. Not so much a theory. More a half-baked idea.”
“Tell me.”
“I came across this paper recently,” he said. “Published years ago in a physics journal. Do you have a pen?”
I gave him a pen, and he reached for a cocktail napkin. “This guy proposed a three-dimensional model of time,” he said. “It has to do with Planck-scale quantum phenomena, cosmological evolution, and—”
“Do me a favour,” I said. “Pretend I’m drunk and also not a fucking physicist.”
“Okay, sorry. Look.” He drew a straight line on the napkin, with some effort. “The first dimension, here, that’s time as we experience it. We’re moving along this line here. Let’s say this line is today.”
“By ‘today,’ you mean . . .”
“The day you just had,” he said. “You woke up in your bed, you went to work, you came to this bar.”
“Okay.”
“But there’s a second dimension, crossing with the first.” He drew a second line, at a slight angle, so that it crossed the first line at the midpoint. “That line was supposed to be straighter,” he said.
“It would’ve been straight two drinks ago.”
“Anyway. The point is, you’re travelling along the first axis, and then you get to this intersection. If you were to step off the first line, onto the second, you might be in a slightly different version of today.”
“Or a slightly different version of the world?”
“Maybe? That’s the first thing I thought when I read it.” He peered into his glass, then gestured to the bartender.
“Is there a third dimension?”
He leaned back on the bench, gazing at me in a blurry, drunken way, and his right hand moved involuntarily to his left. He’d taken off his wedding ring, I saw now, but he was touching a phantom ring. “The third dimension involves moving between the first two,” he said.
“So the third dimension’s the cocktail napkin?”
Fayed wasn’t really listening to me. He was staring at the napkin.
“Maybe there was something wrong in one of our equations.” He leaned forward again, touched the point of the pen to the first line.
“We always started here,” he said, “and sometimes ended here too, but maybe sometimes our end point was on the second axis.”
“This has to be my last drink,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Fayed said. “Absolutely.” We were out on the street now. The sequence of events between paying for the drinks and leaving the bar was unclear. Why was I outside with a bar glass?
“Did I just steal this glass?” I asked. “I think I just stole this glass.”
“Stay at my place. It’s right there.”
“I didn’t realize how close we were,” I said. We were somehow already walking toward his and Nico’s place, toward the gate that opened with a code into her garden.
“I sometimes wonder if they’d be better off with the State,” Fayed said. We were walking through the overgrown garden, past a birdbath that shone pale in the darkness. Towers rose on either side of the garden and behind the house.
“In an orphanage? What are you talking about?”
“I can’t parent anymore,” Fayed said. “I can’t do it.”
“Okay, but they’re your kids.”
“I don’t want this.” Fayed was waving his hand around drunkenly, in a gesture that encompassed the garden, the house, somehow also his entire life. “Any of this.”
“Your home, your garden, it’s beautiful,” I said.
“It’s haunted. It’s Nico. Everywhere I look in this garden, I see her. You see the jasmine vines?”
I looked.
“She planted those,” Fayed said, “right before she disappeared. She built the garden. She’s all around us. My kids don’t love me.”
“I’m sure they—”
“No, kids know when you don’t want them,” Fayed said. “They can tell.” He was fumbling with his keys.
“Stop,” I said. “We’re not going in.”
“Why not?”
“Hold on a moment.” I sat on the step to search my handbag for the little white pills I always carried, Service-issued pills that erased drunkenness.
“Here,” I said, and gave him one. I let mine dissolve in my mouth, and a moment later I felt a sharpening, the alcohol haze dissipating like mist in sunlight.
“Jesus Christ, Ibari, this is the exact opposite of what I’d hoped for when you handed me a pill,” Fayed said. “I liked being drunk. I was enjoying it.” He sat beside me on the step. “You always such a goddamn buzzkill?”
“Occupational hazard.” I took off my watch and threw it into the lawn, and then threw my phone after it. They caught the light in the grass, dark jewels.
“Why are you—”
I touched my finger to my lips. Shhh. I pointed to his phone, in his jacket pocket. He handed it to me, confused, and I threw it across the length of the garden.
“Ibari,” he said, “what the actual . . .”
I shielded my mouth with my hand, and leaned close to his ear.
“I didn’t want to go into your house,” I whispered, very softly, “because your entire house is wired for sound.”
When I pulled back, his face was dim in the half-light, his eyes shining.
“And my phone is listening to me?” he whispered.
“I’d assume so,” I whispered back. “I know you lied to me in the interrogation.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Nico told me everything,” I whispered. “I know your intentions with the experiment. I’m only here because of her.”
He was staring at me. I could see him running the probabilities. It was possible I knew that he’d been working on an experiment meant to subvert the State, but equally possible that I was bluffing.
“Even if you weren’t lying,” he said, “even if this outlandish idea you’re putting forward were true, why would she tell you anything?”
“Because,” I said, “your wife was Service.”
9
A few days later, I returned to the hair salon in Culver City. I knew Latika would be working that afternoon. We’d been talking for a long time by then, and she looked less terrified now when I came in. Impossible not to feel guilt at this. I wished I could tell her: I’m worse than you thought.
“Latika,” I said, in the back room, “please give me your phone. This is just a precaution.”
She handed it to me, with a show of making no hesitation. I dropped it into a Faraday bag, and put the bag on the table.
“Is everything all right?” she asked. Still breezy.
“The case is proceeding very well,” I said. “We’re working on establishing the supply chain for the materials used in the forgery, the specialized paper and such.”
Latika nodded. Her gaze darted to her phone.
“I think there must have been help on the inside,” I said.
She frowned. “The inside of what?”
“Inside the apparatus of the State.”
Her pleasant expression faltered. There was a question in her eyes when she looked at me. I nodded, very slowly and deliberately.
“Yes,” Latika said.
Without sound, I mouthed one word to her: Service. She looked away. In the silence I heard the muffled sounds of the salon outside, voices and music.
“Service,” she said woodenly. “There was someone in Service.” Latika met my eyes, and I saw pure pain. None of us want this, I wished I could say to her, but of course that wasn’t something that could be said.
I wrote a name on a piece of paper, and slid it across the table. “I’m going to need a name,” I said. “I know you’ve been protecting someone. Think of your children. Your business. Your future as a citizen of this State.”
Latika looked at the paper. Her gaze softened then, and settled on some distant point, beyond the room. She was dissociating, leaving the scene without rising from her chair. She was somewhere else. I’d seen it in a thousand interrogations.
“David Grissom,” she said.
“Thank you. We’ll speak again soon.” I returned her phone, took the Faraday bag and the slip of paper with David’s name on it, and walked out of the salon. Trying to ignore the glances of customers in the mirrors as I passed. I couldn’t look at myself.
I didn’t return immediately to the office. Instead I boarded an eastbound train, and set out for a desert station.
10
Thirty years later, I sat alone in my office in the dark, waiting for my friend Kareem to die. It was the middle of the night, two or three in the morning. I’d been transferring files from the network onto my phone, which I knew would raise no alarms for several hours.
My phone buzzed softly in my hand. A text from Samir Li: Who is the other Kareem Fayed? I stared at the message for only a heartbeat before I replied: A ghost.
He slipped away quietly a few hours later, with his daughter by his side.
Kareem, Kareem, my best and only friend.
I sat very still in my office for a while when the message came in from his doctor, staring out the window, before I did what needed to be done.
A half-hour later, in the first light of morning, I walked out of Service headquarters for the last time.