“Hey,” I say. “Hey.”
But it’s already done. He tilts the drawer forward so I can see the ashes inside of it, and then he turns it over so they scatter on the floor of the hot dog truck.
“Okay,” he says, and the driver stops whistling long enough to say it too: “Okay.”
“Now. What’s your name?”
“Laszlo Ratesic.”
The truck jerks to a stop, as if we’ve hit something, and I am flung forward from the bench and slam face-first into the pole I am connected to. And the man who is not a policeman, not a Librarian, who I realize now must be some sort of special officer, an officer of some kind of border service known only to those in its employment, he’s up and out of his seat, and so is the driver, and the two men begin to kick me, one and then the other.
“Liar!” shouts the borderman, kicking me in the center of my stomach.
“Liar!” shouts the driver, kicking me in the neck.
“What is your name?”
“What’s your fucking name?”
I’m no dummy. “I have no name.”
The kicking stops. The driver walks back to the driver’s seat, settling back into his captain’s chair. “Now you’re getting it.”
The other man, though, the borderman in his tan suit, still stands over me, looking down. The truck starts up again. I feel the muscle of its engine purring under the length of my body.
“What year were you born?” says the borderman.
“I—I—” I hesitate. I swallow. It hurts badly, and I realize a bruise is developing on my throat—inside or outside it, or both. My wounded shoulder has burst back into hot pain from the kicks.
“What year,” he says again, staring directly into my face, “were you born?”
“I was never born.”
I wince, but that’s it. That was the right answer. The borderman braces himself and lifts me by the armpits and heaves me back to my feet, pushes me back down in my seat. The truck keeps rolling, rolling downhill now, gaining speed, slowing only for the occasional sharp turns that tell me we are switchbacking down the far side of the mountain. Some mountain.
I am back in my hunched posture, hands again bound before me.
My gut hurts. My throat, my head, my shoulder.
For all of my life, exile was just a word, an idea rather than a process, a wall erected around certain behaviors, not an actual thing that happens, not a series of actual physical events. These are those events. This is how it happens.
If I ever thought of it, I guess I thought of checkpoints. Some kind of physical barrier between this world and the next one—a wall, a partition. Men with long guns up high on parapets, angling their rifle noses down toward attempted incursion.
But there is no barrier. The truck never stops; the driver never rolls down his window to exchange words or money or documents with some guard at some fence.
No physical wall separates this world from the next. We simply rise up into the Hills and trace a winding path, which I have by now given up on trying to memorize.
My eyes flicker closed again and here is Charlie calling my name as he bounds off the old bus, telling me I’d better hurry the fuck up and grab my board and get off the bus, and in the memory I can’t recall what the actual name is. “Hey—” says Charlie, and there is a mute moment, like glitches in audio dropping out of a stretch. “Come on.” My own name has dropped out of my head. A welt is rising on the side of my forehead from where I got kicked. This is how fast the truth can change—one swift kick from a heavy boot and everything is erased.
The brakes hiss and the body of the truck shudders as it stops. A dragon sighing as it settles.
The two men rise, the borderman from his seat and the driver from his, and they huddle at the side door of the truck. They ignore me, push their foreheads together and murmur to each other.
“Two and two is four.”
“The word ‘serrated’ means ‘lined with jagged teeth.’”
“A hummingbird is of the family Trochilidae.”
They speak very quietly, hushed as if fearful, hushed as if in prayer, preparing for battle. Murmuring true statements into each other’s hearing. They are doing exactly what Aysa and I did during our approach to Mulholland Drive, chanting facts, girding ourselves with small pieces of reality like strung beads. Every “is” and “are,” every flat declaration of a true fact, is like a piece of armor, and they are assembling it around themselves.
I start to do the same, catching up, following their lead.
“Bricks are heavy,” I say. “Twelve inches to a foot,” I say, and the driver grabs me by the back of the neck, opening the door with his other hand, and I say “Limestone is a sedimentary rock,” and he pushes me, hard, down the short exit staircase, off the truck and down onto the road.
“Night adders are venomous,” I say, and gasp because the air is thin and it is so bright out here that I can barely see. I squint up at the brutal desert sky. The sky is endless, baked blue, the sun a merciless glare above it.
The borderman and the driver rush down off the truck after me. They move quickly. The borderman squats at the roadside, digs into his pocket, and I suffer a quick vision of that spray aerosol coming out, the lighter, and I’m already so hot—No fire, no—but it’s a knife he takes out this time, a short effective blade that slashes the binds on my hands and on my feet.
He nods at the driver and the driver nods at him. Done. Mission accomplished.
I rise to a feeble seated position, blink helplessly in the brightness. “Wait,” I say. “Don’t. Listen. This is a mistake.”
“Liar,” says the borderman.
“I’m not a liar,” I say.
“Liar,” says the driver, and he kicks me away from the truck as I try to follow them back on, and I tumble backward, land on my ass. The concrete is hotter than the sand.
“There’s a plot,” I say, and turn up my palms, for mercy. “A plot to destroy the Golden State.”
“Yours,” says the borderman, and catches me under the chin. “Your plot.”
He kicks again, and my face flies backward, and I’m on the ground again, blood pouring from my nose. “We’re in danger,” I say, and he kicks me again, a hard one, again in the center of my stomach, and I moan “Danger,” and he says “Liar,” and then the driver catches me in the small of the back—“Liar!”—and the other one does, and then both of them together, over and over, and the individual words begin to blur and rise together, into the single word, loud as anything, true as doors on houses, louder and stronger: “Liar! Liar! Liar!”
And then they move swiftly back up the steps onto the truck to escape from the air, which is already baking me inside the suit.
A blur of sounds—“Liarliarliarliar”—a whirl of inward-collapsing sound, which rings in my ears and hangs in the air and mingles with the retreating hum of the bus, driving back to the good and golden world, leaving me here in the sand.
25.
This is what it’s like outside the Golden State.
Now I know. A new piece of truth to add to my personal store, to carry along with me for however long it is before I collapse out here and die.
The fate of the exiled is unknown and unknowable, until you are added to their number. Until you get put on a truck and kicked off the truck in the hot, empty air of the world outside the world. The fate of the exiled is unknown until the knowledge is all around you like a carpet of heat, shifting under your footsteps like burning sand, stinging your eyes like windblown grit.