Empire of Lies (15 page)

This—and more like it—was still going on when I left the house and shut the door behind me.

So. We find me next in the driveway of my mother's house. Yes, that's me there in the red Mustang, my forehead pressed against the steering wheel. I was still going over that speech in my mind.
You bitch, bitch, ugly, vulgar, irresponsible bitch
and so on. Fine-tuning it, adding a few choice sentiments here and there, polishing its style—and using it to feed my rage, to nurse my self-righteousness and my rage which, like drugs to an addict, no longer felt even good but merely desperately necessary. Without them, without my anger at Lauren, my feeling of moral superiority to her, what was there? There was just the girl, just Serena, lost out in the world. Okay, maybe there hadn't been any execution-style murder in the swamp. Maybe all that was lies—probably it was. Probably she got the whole story off some TV show or something. Still, the simple truth was bad enough without that. A sixteen-year-old child, a fatherless child with a feckless mother, was in the process of poisoning herself with drugs and booze and sex as if her body and soul were two different things. And she was my daughter—my daughter, whom I'd left behind and whom—let's face it—I was going to leave behind now again when I went home to the Hill.
You bitch, bitch, ugly, vulgar, irresponsible bitch.

I got out of the car. I slammed the door. I walked up the path to the house, shaking my head, muttering under my breath.

Inside, I went to the kitchen. The phone was there, and an answering machine. There was a message on the machine from the
Realtor, a woman named Mitzi. She wanted to know if the house had been cleaned out yet, if she could have the stagers come over to get it ready for showing. While the message played, I stood at the kitchen window. I looked through the glass at the bright day nearing noon. I breathed the fresh autumn air with the smell of leaves in it. That ache of nostalgia came back to me and so did the image of my mother as she once had been: sitting in the backyard, gently wondering at things; sitting cross-legged in the grass with me climbing over her as if she were a feature of the landscape...

Oh, stop,
I thought. The self-pity and the rage. As if I were a child again. As if the act of coming home had turned me back into a child.

I needed to get out of here—that's what. I needed to finish my business and go back to my wife and kids. I would tell Cathy what had happened, and she would help me figure out what to do next. Maybe we could send Serena some money or start a college fund for her or something. In the meantime, I had my own family to care for and my own life to think about. I needed to finish up my business here and go.

I returned to the front hall. I looked up the stairs. The stairs rose into the haunted shadows on the second floor. I climbed the stairs into the shadows.

My mother's bedroom had been dusted and aired by my cleaning lady once a week every week of the eight months since Mom had died. At this point, the scent of her, the scent of my mother, could have been nothing but a visceral memory. Still, there it was as I stepped into the unlit room. There it was—and it made me half afraid that I would see her in the half dark, see the shape of her on the bed before I turned the lights on. I turned the lights on quickly, my fingers fumbling at the double switch.

The room was large and simple, sparsely furnished. The carpet was an indistinct tan and the walls a muted yellow with white
trim around the windows and wainscoting. My mother's bed—my parents' double bed with its elegantly curving headboard—was against the wall to my left. On the wall across from it, there was a dresser with a mirror. The windows were on the wall opposite me. They looked out on the backyard, but all I could see through them from where I stood were tangles of gray branches and a few yellow leaves shuddering in the wind.

That scent of her, the smell of the room, the smell, I mean, that I must've remembered, was the smell of her sickness and her later age. Closed up, dried up; the musty aroma of slack flesh without the juice of life in it, plus a faint trace of perfume, a faint, poignant dab of it. Lost and baffled in her loony inner world, she clung desperately to what habits of womanhood she could.

I smelled all that, or thought I did. And even with the lights on, I could almost see her lying there. I could almost feel her dry fingers urgent on my wrist and hear her urgent whisper.
Soon. You have to be ready. You have to see and prepare the way. Language ... that hides it, hides the spiral, the spiraling cycle. Do you see? Watch the Jews. They have the book. The faces of God in the spiral, in the rise and fall. It's always the Jews; that's where God comes into history, where he'll come again. To relive the pattern. You see? To take the spiral into himself. We'll have to protect the Jews. Watch for that. Prepare the way.

The breeze went through the branches at the window. The branches chattered against the glass. I could almost swear I heard her trying, trying, trying to explain.

The trapdoor was in the clothes closet. It was a long closet with several sets of folding doors that nearly took up the length of one wall. For the longest time, I never even knew the trapdoor was there. Then one day, when I was in fifth grade, I think, I came home from school excited. I'd gotten a good grade on a story I'd written. I wanted to tell my mother. I went through the house calling her. Finally I ran upstairs. I found the bedroom empty and was turning around to go, when I heard a noise—the clack of the folding door. I turned back and suddenly she was there—standing there, paper pale, with her eyes liquid and dazy, but still very tender to me, very beautiful to me in her tenderness. She was closing the door with one white hand, so I deduced she'd come from inside the closet. When I asked her about it, she murmured something vague and changed the subject. I became curious.

One day, not long after, while my father was at work and Mom was in the basement doing laundry, I snuck back into the bedroom. I went into the closet and pushed Mom's dresses aside, thinking—I don't know what—that I would find some secret stash of something hidden behind them or some secret passage, maybe. There was nothing—just shelves of shoes and sweaters—nothing special. I was about to give up and leave. Then my fingertips brushed a muslin blouse hanging from the clothes rod. Such intimate contact with so feminine a thing sent a zippy little frisson through my little-boy brain. My eyes rose up to look at it—and I spied the outline of the trapdoor in the ceiling above.

But it was another long time—months—before I went up into the attic. Partly this was because I hadn't found the pole yet and had no idea how I would get the damn trapdoor open. But partly, too, I was already beginning to suspect what I'd find, something anyway of what I'd find, and I didn't want to find it.

Now, today, the closet was empty. My wife had packed up my mother's clothes shortly after the funeral and sent them to Goodwill. There were just the naked yellow walls in there and the pole leaning in one corner. I hoisted the pole to the trapdoor, fitted its hook to the small eyebolt barely visible in the ceiling. I drew the door down. A metal ladder came rattling down with it. I set the pole aside, scooped up my bags, and, clutching them in one fist, climbed up into my mother's writing room.

More than thirty years had passed since the first time I saw it, but it was much the same. A room as delicate and gentle as my mother's features, with her same gliding elegance, the gliding silent elegance of a swan. Lace curtains framed the single window. A floral rug softened the wooden floor. Pastel prints of ballerinas and meditative ladies hung on the wall beside framed photographs of my brother and me when we were little boys. The pitch of the roof brought the ceiling low, which made the space and everything in it seem somehow miniature, as if it were a room in a dollhouse. Of nothing was this more true than the writing desk that stood against one wall: a little Regency-style thing that I've learned is called a
bonheur du jour.
It had slender legs and a small surface with a raised cabinet in back, all of it dark, shiny rosewood with brass inlays. Here my mother sat in a flower-backed chair and wrote with a fountain pen, filling notebook after notebook with her ladylike hand. Even now, it was easy to place her there in my imagination. The room, as I say, was so much like her. With her gone, it was like a symbol of her, or maybe her monument. The space and the décor represented the woman I saw for so long. The notebooks—the notebooks piled up high against every wall—stood for her mad, frantic, secretly failing mind.

I picked up one of the notebooks from the top of a stack as high as my knee. There were stacks like that all around me, just as high, against every wall. I laid the book on the writing table. I opened the cardboard cover and turned the pages, glancing over them. This was one of the later books, I guess. You couldn't tell by the look of it. They all looked just the same, the neat schoolgirl hand, the delicate sketches. But her thoughts became more fragmentary over time and the first great shocks of recognition, recorded in the beginning with hurried wonder as if she was in a rush to pin them to the page before they flew away, were now repeated wearily and
almost hopelessly, the prophecies of a seer grown tired and hoarse with the effort to make someone, anyone, listen.

It's all true, it's all real, it's all happening ... The Great Culture is passing ... The marching armies have come to spread the remnants ... Now the eastern rival has fallen, just as I predicted ... Just as I predicted, the barbarians are on the move ... The wars will make strong men great ... The need for global governance will bring down the republic ... Empire is a phase in the life of great nations ... the pattern that spreads the revelation of the pattern ... When it takes the Jews under its protection—that's when He will come again ... The man in the spiral, the spiral in the man ... I have to make them ready. I have to prepare the way.

All this, you have to understand, was squeezed into the narrow spaces between complex charts and graphs and elaborate illustrations: Plutarchian comparisons of American personalities with personalities from Greece and Rome, Spenglerian diagrams of imperial rises and falls, biblical predictions connected by arrows to recent headlines, and delicately executed drawings of anthills and beehives and the migration patterns of birds.

Nowadays they say it's all right for men to cry, but they're liars. The world is a better place when men behave like men. All the same, if you can get through life without shedding a couple of tears here and there, you're probably not paying attention. I cried that first time I came up here certainly, the first time I read these books and understood what she'd become. I plunked myself down on the floor cross-legged and put my chin on my chest and shuddered and cried for nearly half an hour.

But I was only a boy then, barely twelve years old. I was a child and she was my mother and I'd always loved her very much.

Now, though I felt my throat tighten, though I felt pity rising in me like floodwater—pity for her and for myself and for my father
caught in his trap of passion and decency—I forced the feelings aside. I went about the business of cleaning the place out.

It didn't take long. I brought the pictures down the ladder, then the rug and the curtains, finally the writing table and chair. When the room was empty of everything else, I went at the notebooks. I gathered them in armloads and dropped them—whap and splatter—through the open trapdoor into the closet below.

At last, I climbed down the ladder myself. I pushed the trapdoor shut. Armload after armload, I carried the notebooks downstairs to the living room, to the fireplace. It was a gas fire, very steady. Still, there were so many pages covered in that precise and tidy schoolgirl script.

It took hours to burn them all.

What happened that night in the television room almost beggars belief, but I have to tell it because it's true.

When I finished cleaning out my mother's room, I was exhausted. Even my anger at Lauren was spent. Hollow-eyed, I watched the news on TV, sitting in the dark room, chomping my way through a tasteless store-bought turkey sandwich and polishing off another half bottle of white wine. After a while, I pressed the mute button on the remote. I picked my phone up off the coffee table and called my wife.

"I cleaned out my mother's attic," I told her.

"Good," she said. "I'm glad that's done." She was getting ready for bed. Her voice sounded sleepy and soft; warm, deep, cheerful, and content. I could almost taste her good-night kiss. I could almost feel her fingertips on my shoulder blades.

On the big TV screen across the room, the wars went on silently: smoking desert cities; women wailing on their knees; soldiers patrolling the burned-out shells of houses; tangled bodies of men; the body of a child.

I watched them. I chewed my lip. I wanted to tell Cathy what was happening here, about Lauren and Serena and everything. I was trying to find the right words to start with.

"Those notebooks—my mother's notebooks," I said. "The way she saw patterns in everything, everything falling into place, everything making sense. It makes you doubt yourself, makes you
doubt your own perceptions. I mean, how do you know what's logical, what fits together? It's all just a bell ringing in your brain, isn't it? If the bell gets broken, if it won't stop ringing—how do you know?"

"I guess it's all a kind of faith in the end," Cathy said sleepily. "I guess God planned it that way."

"That God. He gets up to some shenanigans, doesn't he?"

"I know I love you though," she said. "I love you more than anything, I know that."

The dark room flickered with the images on the screen: a fireball blowing out the windows of a grand hotel; a general giving a press conference; a mob in Paris burning cars.

"I love you too," I said. "Sleep well."

I laid down the phone. I picked up the remote. I turned the TV's audio on again.

I remember well the first thing I saw then. Well, sure I do. It's what got me into so much trouble later on. There was some imam on the news show now, some chubby-cheeked, baby-faced brown guy in a funny black hat, patiently explaining things to some commentator or other.