More info at: https://law-theorem.com/ This work reveals a fundamental tradeoff between consistency, asynchrony, and performance of crash-tolerant protocols by introducing the L2AW impossibility. The L2AW asserts that in any linearizable asynchronous read/write register implementation that tolerates a single crash, no reads are local. We prove this impossibility in the absence of Byzantine faults, message losses, and network partitions. Guided by this result, we introduce the idea of "almost-local reads" (ALRs), which can be implemented in a crash-tolerant and linearizable manner under asynchrony. ALRs inevitably have higher latency than local (single-node) reads, but they are very lightweight, with computation and network costs close to local reads.