Golden State

They are Librarians, and they do not fuck around.

...you can talk however calmly and reassuringly you want to, but people are gonna hear your words colored by their own feelings, by their own anxiety or fear or impatience.

This is how it ends: you just stop.

When you have been in love with someone in the past, there are a million small trapdoors you can fall through that would take you right back.

A question is a cup you hold out to be filled, and there are those who will always fill it to the brim, pour in all the truth they can think of, until it overflows and spills out and spreads across the table. That's not me. Me, I'll give you what's precisely true and no more; I'll answer your question and shut up.

Imagine if everyone did it. Imagine if each person was allowed the luxury of claiming their own truth, building a reality of their own in which they can live. Imagine the danger that would pose, how quickly those lies would metastasize, and the extraordinary threat that would pose to the world.

That’s love, as best as I can figure it: love isn’t how you feel when you’re together, it’s how you feel, how often you feel it, when you’re apart.

After all, they'll tell you, everything that happens belongs to the State, and a thought is just an event that happens in your head.

Because just imagine--just imaging the alternative, the world in which a man encounters some scrap of information, about the murder rate in his neighborhood, or about the presence of troops on the northern border, or what time the bus is supposed to come--any of the small and large pieces of information a person encounters in the course of a day or a lifetime, personal or political, substantive or trivial--and then the next hour or the next day he hears something different, and it is impossible, literally impossible, to know which version is the real one.

Madness creeps in very quickly at the edges of such speculation. Not just madness, but a kind of horror, a flickering red field closing in. Just the thought of it.

How can we know what we don't know?

This is a novel. Some of the words in it are true and a lot of them are not and a lot of them are of that indeterminate third category for which there is no good name. But you can say that it is an amalgam of true and false events, true and false impressions, a series of imagined and actual experiences that have been strung together in a particular order to provide access to a kind of truth that might otherwise be unavailable. And more precious for it.

People are going to lie: they want to—they need to. Lying is born into the species. You know this is true as well as I do. There is something perfect in a lie, something seductive, addictive; telling a lie is like licking sugar off a spoon.

Pardon me,” he says, and frowns. “But a novel is not a work of fiction.

when the conversation is over Renner stamps my pad and I stamp his, and he stamps Paige’s pad and she stamps his too, and all of us have officially had this conversation and this conversation will always have occurred. It is on the Record.

What is the rate of decay of old truths? When do they dissolve and disappear forever?

I know,” I say, but the problem is, yes, somebody would do that, and now I’ve come down hard on a bone truth, on the brutal bone truth that if there is ever anything that somebody could do—something violent, something perverse, something cruel and unconscionable—if there is ever anything that somebody could do, somebody is going to do it, somebody has already done it.

These fuckers say that the Golden State—the real one, our one—is all bullshit. They say that the real golden state—‘state’ like ‘state of being,’ ‘state of understanding’—the real golden state is accepting that there is no such thing as truth. They think we’re fooling ourselves to think we can be protected from lies. They say that all of it—the Record, the captures, the Service…” Ratesic was staring out the window again, out at the glittering majesty of the dark city. “They think it’s some kind of fallacy, that we’re, like—what do they say?—playing make-believe.

The world as I have understood it is slipping out from under me and I ought to stop but I can’t. I can’t stop. I keep reading and as I read the book settles down over me, it becomes reality as I read it, the air becomes fuzzed, to the point that when I look up it is like the reality of my room is less real than the reality inside the book. I

My personal and professional existence is built on the idea that everything can be known, that everything must be known, and now here I am, on a bench outside judge’s chambers, and I’m on a green glider in Mar Vista pierced by understanding that nothing can be known at all.

Everything is on the Record, just waiting to be discovered: the whispered confession, the stolen kiss. This is not the goal of our good and golden systems; the goal is simply the maintenance of reality as it occurs, so that all can live together within the same sheltering truth, safe within the strong high walls of the Objectively So. We may keep secrets from one another, but not from the Record, and if life is therefore made more difficult for the adulterer or the petty-cash-box pilferer, for the student with his eye on his deskmate’s paper or the worker who clocks in late, surely that’s a price worth paying—or even, looked at differently, not a price at all, but a benefice. A gift we are given by the ever-presence of truth.

The preservation of reality’s integrity is the paramount duty of the citizenry and of the government alike. What kind of mad society would be organized otherwise?

Stubble and sallow cheeks, a life lived indoors, staring at screens.

What we know of the past is enough to be afraid, enough to build this world, our good and golden world, around preventing a repeat of the mistakes that destroyed the world before.