These are the custodians of the Record itself. They are Librarians, and they do not fuck around.
“If you could bear your head for a moment.”
I grimace. This is the part I fucking hate. But I take off the pinhole and bow my head, submissive, silent. Push back my hair.
“Thank you, sir,” murmurs the Librarian and she takes out her wand.
It’s weird because the damn thing is nothing. It’s just a stick, really, a slim metal tube, 14.5 inches long, black metal with a silver cap at either end. And all she does, quiet unsmiling efficient Librarian, is bring it very close to my head, as close as she can without touching, and then move it slowly across my forehead. Not looking at me, not looking at the wand, holding her eyes half shut in concentration, feeling for the minute reverberations in her palm she’ll get or not get as she hovers the wand slowly, very slowly, along the curve of my skull.
I do, though, I fucking hate it, and I know I’m not alone: everybody hates it. Cullers won’t even go to the Record anymore. He flat out refuses, and just because of the wanding. You can’t even feel it; nothing happens. It’s just so unsettling—no other word for it—the creeping movement of that thing from one side of your head to the other. The abstract sense of invasion, of the mind being opened like a cabinet.
“Okay, sir.” She puts the wand away. “Enjoy your visit.”
From the outside, the Record is a two-story building, just the Grand Entrance Hall on the first floor and the modest museum, free to the public, upstairs. It’s only when you begin your descent, down in one of the majestic elevator cars or down the spiral staircase at the precise center of the Hall, that you can begin to understand the size of the place, its dimension, its astonishing shape. Substory after substory, basement upon basement, stacked one beneath the other like the drawers in a dresser, cataloged and cross-cataloged, an ever-expanding library and permanent archive of all that is part of what is So. Rooms full of tapes in rolling bins, cataloged by date and cross-cataloged by event; rooms full of manila file folders hung in narrow metal cabinets, cataloged and cross-cataloged, by person, by location, referenced and cross-referenced into Significant Individuals, Significant Places, Collated Significant Events.
Each floor is dotted with organizational kiosks, octagonal stations with keyboards and screens on each of their sides, from which the Librarians can perform system scours of the complete collection, summoning forth individual stretches or files or notebooks or boxes for review. Each basement is built on a hub-and-spoke design, a spiderweb of hallways radiating out from the central pole of the staircase, and each could theoretically be expanded out forever.
And eventually, of course, it will, the Record will be expanded out forever. Because new material is always being added, new reality is always happening, new truth is entering the world every moment, and so new hallways will have to be dug, further excavations undertaken, the bedrock forged of our past to undergird our future.
I skip the elevator today. I’m not going that far. My boot heels clang melodically on every step as I descend, around and around the spiral, deeper into the sacred heart of the Objectively So, with the metal staircase shivering slightly under my weight.
Man oh man, whenever I come down here, I get weird. The stairwell is encased in heavy glass, and through each door off each landing I glimpse the dim corridors that bend off into darkness. It is intense and disquieting to be surrounded by so much information, so much truth, everything we know, all of it gathered together. It is oppressive, actually, in a way. In a way, it is terrifying. Down here in the heart of the State, the deep hidden heart of the world.
Silvie is on Basement Four. I pass the department doors, one after another, along the corridor: the Office of the Permanent Census, the Office of Weights and Measures, the offices of Data Sets and of Facial Recognition and of Element Stability Across Time. And here—the Department of Contingent Reality Reassembly. She’s in there. She’s working.
You have to press a small glowing button to ring the bell, and it takes me a second to get my shit together enough to ring, and whether that’s because I’m nervous about seeing Silvie or I’m just a little worked up like I always get a little worked up down here in the solemn silence of the Record, I don’t know. But at last I press the stupid buzzer, and a moment later Mr. Willis opens it, scowling.
“You have no appointment,” he says.
“Yeah, I know.”
Mr. Willis hates me. Silvie isn’t going to be happy to see me either. What the fuck am I doing?
Contingent Reassembly is a humble and underdecorated office, ugly gray carpeting and dull yellow lights. It has never been good enough for Silvie, but then again neither was I.
The furniture is shabby and chipped and dented, and the walls are lined with framed black-and-white nature prints from around the State: rushing waterfalls and towering redwoods, windmills and freight trains, coffee plantations in Santa Barbara and marijuana fields in Sacramento, the majestic smelters that ring the banks of the Salton Sea. But the pictures are washed out, laid indifferently in chintzy frames. All subjects made much less beautiful than they are in reality.
Willis instructs me curtly to wait. He is the CRR’s pale and tiny office manager, who, with the divorce, has at last been given license to bring his distaste for me out into the open. So I sit in the waiting room, half reading this morning’s Trusted Authority, leafing through the latest economic indicators, the comprehensive lists of the dead and the born. There’s the latest photograph of the committee of experts, and my eyes as they always do scan the plain, unsmiling faces until I find the one I’ve met in person: Laura Petras, Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws. A plain woman, barely smiling, in a gray suit and tan shoes, surrounded by her similarly dressed staff. Professional and dull and inoffensive. I’m—
“What are you doing here, Laszlo?”
My heart delivers a single smacking thump, a big mule kick, just at the sight of her: Silvie, my Silvie, mine no more, hands on hips, ruddy and skeptical. My former wife is not as tall as me, but she’s damn tall. The average woman is five foot five and a half, and Silvie is six foot one, buxom and broad-chested, blonde-headed and red-cheeked. I want to gather her up, press her to my body, which is most of what I ever wanted to do for the last ten years: hold her and tell her about all the shit the world was doing to drive me crazy, and listen to her laugh and remind me how lucky I was to be alive in the first place—how lucky we all are to be alive, to be in the Golden State, the two of us especially because we get to serve it.
For ten years that was all I wanted, until we split up six months ago because I’m a moron.
“What do you want, Laz?”
“That’s how we’re going to start? We can’t start nice?”
“Laszlo. Come on. What is it?”
Mr. Willis scrutinizes this exchange from his small desk, his allegiance clear. I edge closer to Silvie, trying to screen Willis out of the conversation, and Silvie draws back, as if I’m a predator, a snake in the forest coming in to strike. Her instinctive withdrawal stabs me in the heart. Silvie in her gold earrings, with her masses of thick hair piled up and curled, always almost but not quite corralled, some of it always drifting down to tease her neck. She purses her lips and crosses her arms.
“The last time we talked you said we weren’t going to talk for a while.”
“I know. But it’s not a law. It’s not a bulwark. We’re not exiled from each other.”