I’m in here.
Help!
No one can hear. No one can help. The people out there are dim shapes on the street corners. Faceless creatures behind the wheels of their vehicles, glancing with disinterest at the truck and then away.
I am strapped to my seat. A metal pole runs from floor to ceiling in front of me, and I am shackled to it at wrist and ankle.
The truck has been stripped of the artifacts of its old design. All that’s telling me where I am is the old stink of cooking water and the shape of the vehicle, tubular, low and long. I am inside a truck that is shaped like a hot dog, and I am both inside this machine, shackled to a plastic bench by my wrists and ankles, and outside it, looking longingly at it as it cruises past. I could not have known, the many times I looked with longing at the Dirty Dog cruising the city, that it is out of service. It has been decommissioned and repurposed as a mobile prison, delivering the exiled to their exile.
No wonder, I think stupidly. No wonder it never stops.
Even in the state of dull bafflement with which I have suffered the last two weeks, of trial and sentence, of confusion and fear, of public approbation and private pain, even in my raw confused condition, I can pick up the old scents of boiled meat, of relish and mustard and pickle. I take some very small comfort in the pleasant ancient smells of condiments and meat. And I take comfort, too, in the thought of all the people out there, my good and golden fellow citizens, watching the black truck with the pink piping as it sharks past, wondering idly as I have for years, How come it never stops?
I can see where the refrigerator once was, up there behind the captain’s-chair-style driver’s seat. I can see where they had a row of compact metal containers for the various condiments, and probably a steam tray for the hot dogs themselves. But now all of these culinary accessories have been replaced by monitor screens, a bank of dials, a map of the city covered in beeping lights and lines.
One of these dots, it is easy to understand, is us. This vehicle I’m captive inside of. That is easy to figure. Requires zero speculation. We are moving fast now, and the dot is moving fast.
It’s just me in the truck—me and the driver, me and the driver and the man seated across from me, a narrow man in a tan coat and sunglasses, with a gun in his lap. The gun and the man are both staring at my face.
Help, I think, sending out my invisible distress call to the people we’re driving past, the other cars and pedestrians we’re presumably passing. Help!
“Excuse me?” I say to the man, but he doesn’t answer. He looks like a Librarian, except for the sunglasses. He has the same set expression in his bearing, in his posture. Passive, still, radiant with authority.
I am forced into a hunched position by the way I’ve been bound, tied to the pole with a set of sleek plastic tethers. I have not been changed into any sort of jumpsuit, nor even stripped of my Speculator blacks. Only my pinhole has been taken from me. Otherwise I am still me. There is heat on the back of my neck.
I feel miserable, a result of how much I now understand that I never did before, how much I’ve learned in these last days and how much dissonance I’m suffering now; or it might just be because the air inside the decommissioned hot dog truck is stale and close and pungent. It’s hot, and where I’m going it’s only getting hotter.
“You can lower your weapon,” I tell the man across from me. I don’t know if he’s really a Librarian, but he has become one in my mind. “I’m not going to do anything.” I tug at my restraints, demonstrating how tightly my hands are lashed to the pole. “I can’t.”
He doesn’t answer. The gun does not move. The driver, absurdly, begins to whistle. The back of his neck is closely shaved, bristling with small dark hairs.
The truck banks into a turn, and I am shifted to the right, and then the truck speeds up, and I feel it rising, moving uphill, and then it turns again. I don’t know if we’re close or if we’re almost there. I don’t know where there is or how far away it is, or what is going to happen to me, or how I will die.
Help, I think again, radiate my desperate fear out through the sides of the truck toward whoever might be out there, but this is useless—it’s ridiculous. I am living in a pretend world where empathy has secret supernatural power, where it can fly on wings and burrow into the secret hearts of strangers. And even if my message could sing out through these blackened windows, the truth is, I’m not the good guy. I am not the hero of this novel. I have not been kidnapped by nefarious crooks or dirty liars. I am the crook and I am the dirty liar. I have been tried and convicted for my assault against reality. I have left a trail of blood behind me, and my rendition is a necessary service to the State.
It has all happened. However I remember it, whatever my own personal truth, it all happened. What happened is what happened and what is So is So forever. It’s all on the Record.
Time passes. Minutes of it, and then hours; there is no clock on the truck. Miserable as I am, and as terrified, my eyes begin to blink open and then closed, and the hot dog truck becomes the big blue bus my brother and I used to take down to the beach on Saturday afternoons, when we were children still, still in that young and dreaming part of life. We were just teens, experimenting with what kind of adults we were going to be. Shirtless and self-conscious, already thick around the middle, I was awkwardly clutching my surfboard at the bus stop before sunup. Charlie, bouncing from foot to foot, T-shirt wrapped around his forehead like a privateer, was whistling at the sunrise.
I am on this hot dog truck driving further from the city, deeper into the wild, with my hands bound and my feet shackled with tight straps to the pole, and I am also an awkward teenager on the bus to the beach. I exist in two places at once, listening to the rumble of the truck and listening to Charlie, whistling through his teeth.
No, though—no. It’s the driver, still whistling. I jerk awake. The driver’s head bobbles slightly as he whistles. My body aches from the shape it has been forced into, for however long it’s been.
I think we’re going downhill now. I can feel the truck’s pneumatics shifting and purring underneath me. The Librarian seated across from me rises, walks the two paces across the truck, and sits beside me, his right leg pressed against my left.
“Identifications,” he says. “Where are your identifications?”
“In my pocket,” I say. “Right side.”
The Librarian reaches across my lap, unconcerned with the intimacy, and wriggles his hand inside my pocket. It all comes out: birth cert, five-years card, adulthood card, work card, home address attestation. A parade of Laszlo faces, one after the other. Growing older, growing uglier, a flip-book of dissolution.
The driver keeps on whistling.
“Is that everything?” says the man, and he sniffs. He’s not a Librarian—no. Some special branch of service?
I nod. “Yeah.”
“All right.”
He gets up again. He’s got a little screwdriver in one of his pockets, and he uses it to open a panel on the metal wall behind him. Behind the panel is a shallow drawer, which he pulls out.
“What—” I say, as he slides my documents into the drawer. “What are you doing?”
He doesn’t answer. Maybe he is a Librarian: he’s got a wand. He puts the screwdriver back in his pocket and takes out the slim metal tube, black metal with silver caps on either end, and I feel an instinctual revulsion. What—what is going on? I draw back, pull as far away as I can from the pole to which I’m attached, but he’s not aiming the wand at me. He places my documents in the flat drawer he’s removed from the wall and slowly moves the wand across them, front to back, a slow steady movement, like he’s wanding someone’s forehead, and there is a hissing noise from inside the drawer, and smoke rises from it in a disappearing puff.