I blink, trying to grab hold of my own memories, corner my own mind. I am not the hero, confronting the villain. I am a lost and tiny man, diminished and confused and uncertain. I am nothing.
“So she was, what, an actor? She was acting?”
“Actor.” “Acting.” Old words from an old world, concepts with dim ancient references, half hidden by time. The old world, not to be known.
“Yes. Just so,” says Arlo. “An actor. Like Crane, the roofer, whose name was really Ortega, by the way, except it’s not, not really. It’s Ortega, it’s Crane, sometimes it’s Mortenson. Once, for a week, we called him Joe Dill, just to see how that felt. He practiced so often how to throw himself off a roof and make it look like he fell. See? See, Laszlo? Can you imagine doing that? Just that moment of letting go, letting your body slide? To him it was worth it. Aysa allowed herself to be sacrificed, just like Crane, who taught himself to fall off a roof. And both of them knew what I know, which is that it was worth it. Worth it.”
“No. It can’t—none of this can be true.”
“Yes!” He laughs, a short burst of happy laughter, and brings his hands together. “Now you see it. That’s the whole point, Laszlo: that’s the whole point. Laszlo—Laszlo—” He rushes forward and grabs my arm, smiling, eyes wide with delight. “Laszlo—I’m not even standing here right now.”
“What—what are you talking about?”
“The figure you are talking to is a projection. I am hidden somewhere else in this building, preparing to make my escape.” He says it in a melodramatic voice, making a face, playing a game. “Unwilling to risk capture at this late moment in my long-planned scheme.”
“That’s impossible. That’s insane. Something out of a—”
“Out of a what, Laszlo?” He steps closer. “A novel? Why can’t it be true, Laszlo, if all the rest of it is true? I have power over stretches, I have power over people. Why not power over the air itself?”
“It’s a lie, Arlo.”
“Okay, then. So, can you see it?”
“See…”
“If it’s a lie, can you see the lie?”
I look wildly around the room. I step backward from Arlo and I look at the air around us and I don’t feel it and I don’t see it. No crackle in the atmosphere, no bending at the edges. Nothing.
“I’ll say it again, dear Laszlo. A firm declaration, posited as fact, that you say is not So.” He makes his hands into a bullhorn, trumpets it: “I’m not really standing here. I’m a hologram. Well? Now? Are you discerning anything now?”
He says it with scorn, contempt, mocking the idea on which I have based my life.
“If I’m lying, you’d be feeling it, right? Right?”
He’s right. I would see it in the air. Wavelets of telltale in the atmosphere, ripples in the very air—I would be feeling it, just as he says, and now I do not, now the air is crystalline and calm, just Arlo walking toward me saying he is not, after all, Arlo, proving his bastard point, showing me that I cannot trust in what I know. I am discerning nothing. I hold the gun steady, hold it up and straight.
Now, very slowly, he pulls out his own gun and aims it at me, as I am aiming mine at him.
The cold air of the basement is perfectly still.
“I doctored all of those stretches,” says Arlo. “I put a forgery on the Record. I convinced two people, two that you know of, to sacrifice their lives, knowing that it was worth it. What makes you think I couldn’t create a hologram of myself, and it’s the hologram you are talking to now?”
“No,” I tell him. “Yes. I don’t—I don’t know.”
“So if I’m telling the truth, then you can shoot me.”
“What?”
“I’m not here.” He takes a step closer. His gun is pointed at my face. “It’s not me. So shoot. Go on. Shoot—”
I pull the trigger and I feel the kick of discharge, and Arlo’s chest explodes in a red blur and he flies backward and slams into the stair rail. I run to him, and I don’t know if I’m crying because he is my friend, my oldest friend and I love him and he is dying in my arms, or because of what has happened. He is cradled in my arms, his real body, no hologram, the real Arlo, his real flesh body. Then I hear footsteps crashing down toward us, the whole staircase is shuddering with the force, and now it all makes itself clear to me in retrospect, every inch of this nightmare playing itself out in reverse and filling in its details, right up to this moment—this moment right now! He never stopped playing mastermind, arranging details, right up until this moment, with the regular police pouring off the stairs and him bleeding in my arms—
“Freeze,” they are shouting. “Do not move!”
Captain Elena Tester and six other officers, a small army of regular police filling up the narrow space around the stairs, surrounding us with guns drawn.
“Wait,” I say, turning, body hot with confusion and fear. “Wait.”
Tester and her officers crowd around me, closing in. She is staring, astonished; Arlo is collapsed in my arms, sprawled across my lap.
“Laszlo,” she says. “What have you done?”
“Nothing. I haven’t done anything. It was… He…”
They step closer, one step at a time, guns raised. Arlo, in my arms, bends his body upward slowly. Cranes his lips up to my ear and says, “Worth it.”
Tester circles me warily, keeping the gun leveled at my face, and the other officers fan out behind her. Arlo is cradled in my lap, his blood on my pants, his blood on my arms and on my face, his blood is smeared all over my black coat. What am I going to say? He tricked me. He said he wasn’t real. He said that shooting him wasn’t shooting a real person.
I feel that there is nothing I can do but explain myself, and that I would be a fool at the very least not to try. So I tell Captain Tester she’s making a mistake.
I tell her that Arlo Vasouvian rigged the whole thing, that he is trying to frame the Speculative Service, that he is purposefully attempting to erode the trust in our Basic Laws, to bring the State crashing in, that he has cooked up an elaborate scheme to kick away the pillars that have supported society, to smash in the walls that have kept us safe inside the Objectively So. While Arlo’s body lies in my arms and Tester’s officers keep their guns trained on my face, I say, “You have to believe me, you have to believe me”—I say all the things that are the only things I can say, and she reacts exactly as I would have predicted.
“You know, Laszlo,” she says flatly, “that sounds like the wildest bunch of lies that I have ever heard. But you tell me.” She crouches beside me, pulls out her handcuffs. “You’re the expert.”
Part Three
“Look. Look!” Shenk had him by the arm at this point, had him in his clutches, and he wasn’t letting go. “If this kid thinks that he’s an alien from outer space, and he does things based on this belief? That he’s an alien? Then, I mean, on a certain level, guess what? The kid’s a fucking alien.”
24.
Hey! I think. As loud as a thought can get, which after all is not all that fucking loud. I’m in here. Hey! I can’t see out the windows of the truck because the windows are blacked out, tinted over, so I do what I can do, which is stare into them and beam my thoughts out uselessly into the passing world as the truck rumbles along: Help.