Empire of Lies (19 page)

Then there he was.

In memory, I can make him out clearly, but at the time, he was so far away, his face was something of a blur. I think my mind may have supplied the details from the pictures I'd seen on television the night before: the pleasing combination of dark, Middle Eastern skin on the handsome, chiseled features of an English gentleman. In any case, even at that distance, he was a powerful presence.

He was an impressive performer, too. He had a dynamic stride that carried him swiftly to the lectern. He had a bright smile that flashed out and beamed to a startling distance like the beacon of a lighthouse. Also, he had a great suit. I remember thinking that:
Great suit!
It was formal, tailored, gray black, set off by a port red tie that projected power and confidence, yea, like his smile, even unto the back rows.

He brought no notes with him, no books. He stood at the lectern only long enough to fasten a microphone to his lapel. "Good morning," he murmured meanwhile in a personable tone, glancing down sweetly at the students in the front row right beneath him. Then he was off, strolling about the stage, down to one end, back to the other, ambling around the center, gesturing to us in a friendly, informal manner all the while. He spoke in the quiet, confidential tone of a gentleman sharing insights, wing chair to wing chair at his private club. His accent was like his face: elegant, English, and precise with only enough hint of the Levantine in it to lend it an exotic charm.

I sat back and listened to him—and what followed was one of the strangest experiences of my life.

It's difficult to describe what happened or why. Something about the man or the setting or the lecture itself must've set it off,
but I'm not sure what. It was a charged atmosphere, certainly. The charismatic professor reeling off his ideas. The hundreds of rapt young faces either turned up to him with openmouthed wonder or pressed down close to their notebooks while they scribbled feverishly as if to transcribe every word. It was an atmosphere almost of reverence, almost of awe. And yet, I don't think that's what caused my bizarre reaction. I still can't entirely explain it.

The lecture was about the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.

"These two so-beautiful jewels in the crown of the English language," Rashid called them. "Not one of us here can think a thought or form a phrase or have an impression of each other or ourselves without their having been shaped in some way by the concepts, by the vision, and by the language of these magnificent works of art."

The guy was riveting, I have to say. Incredibly eloquent, incredibly learned. There seemed to be no facet of the subject he hadn't mastered. Without notes, seemingly without even a plan, he took us on a leisurely, discursive survey of the world that had created Shakespeare and the King James, facts and ideas leaping each to each with a speed and natural ease that was captivating. I can't reconstruct it all. I wouldn't think to try. His thoughts were much too brilliant, too complex and erudite for me. I just want to try to tell enough of what I remember to describe the strange thing that happened to me.

He began with England's break from the Catholic Church and the sometimes-violent suppression of English Catholicism, including, perhaps, the Catholicism of Shakespeare's own family. Then he talked about Luther's declaration that all religious authority came from the Bible rather than the Church.

"Thus, translating the biblical text into English became an act of enormous political significance," he said. "Whoever controlled
the language controlled the ruling religion itself. An observer as keen as Shakespeare had to ask himself: If power corrupts, can translations made under such conditions be trusted? It's no wonder that when Hamlet looked into books, he saw nothing more than 'words, words, words' devoid of any inherent truth value."

Now up to this point, I remember, I was enjoying myself. I was always a lover of both Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and Rashid made it very clear he loved them, too. It was exciting just to watch him think about the subject. I was swept up in it, as if I could see the lines of inspiration connecting thought to thought like lines on a planetarium ceiling linking seemingly random stars into a constellation.

"Perhaps Shakespeare, forced to abandon the Catholicism of his father, felt some strange mixture of identification with and repulsion from the native peoples now being estranged from their own traditions by European imperialism and the 'words, words, words' of its religious missionaries. The moor Othello, for instance, lives as a Christian and only identifies with his Muslim origins when he kills himself. Perhaps this is a reflection of Shakespeare's own—and thus England's own—religious displacement and internal division."

As he went on like this, my reaction began to change. My eyes wandered away from him. His genteel figure continued pacing and turning and gesturing onstage, but I looked instead at the students. I panned my gaze over their upturned faces and the faces pressed down into notebooks. They were young people, I saw, of many colors, white and yellow and brown, girls and boys from all over the country, I would've guessed, and from other countries, too. I found myself wondering: How many of them had actually read Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, for that matter? Myself, as I say, I had always loved them both. I could remember suffering over Othello's mistake, wanting to reach out and stop Desdemona's
murder with my own hand. I could remember suddenly seeing the Bible as a single chain of thought, a single idea developed in the collective mind of a people over centuries, from their earliest understanding of creation to the discovery of Christ's empty tomb. I suspected many of these students would never experience any of that, would never know more about Shakespeare or the Bible than they learned at this lecture today.

"When Othello says he 'threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe,' by murdering his white Christian wife Desdemona," Rashid was saying now, "how can we not think of Jesus' admonition to not 'cast your pearls before swine'—that is, don't bother sharing Jewish truth with the piglike gentiles? Christianity has been wasted on Othello, you see. In the end, he has resorted to the kind of vicious, murderous behavior the worst enemies of Islam would have predicted of him. Savages may be brought to Christ by English missionaries, but they can't be trusted. They will return to their savage nature, in the end."

This is when it began. It was subtle at first. My heart fluttered, making me breathless. A cold clammy feeling ran down the back of my neck. I felt light-headed. I thought:
Maybe I'm coming down with something.

"This English terror of the stranger, the other, exemplified by Shakespeare and arising from a fear of their own suppressed Catholicism, can't help but find its way into the King James translation," Rashid went on. "Thus these masterpieces of European literature, these cornerstones of our attitudes and our feelings and our thoughts, are also the vehicles for a fearful, urgent, kill-or-be-killed approach to different cultures. They carry within them the seed and the rationalization for colonization, conversion, and imperialism."

Then it came over me—this bizarre moment I'm talking about. Suddenly, violently, it was there: a red upsurge of revulsion, a
strangling sense of horror as if something gory and terrible were happening right in front of my face. Sitting there, in that civilized hall, that Roman temple beneath the plane trees and maples, I felt the helpless, wild, careening panic of a witness to disaster. My mouth opened and closed. My hand clutched at my chest. All around me, the students continued taking notes, the professor continued ambling and chatting easily. Nothing was going on but a morning class at an excellent urban university—and yet I had the almost-overwhelming urge to cry out, to cover my eyes, to run to someone's aid amidst the smoke and rubble and blood—smoke and rubble and blood that simply weren't there, weren't there at all. How can I describe this? What can I compare it to? It wasn't a hallucination or a delusion or a fantasy, or anything like that. It was just an emotional response completely at odds with the facts of the experience. I was attending a lecture, and yet my feelings were those of a man watching the slaughtering clash of armies, a field of smoking corpses amidst smoldering ruins. It was as if one thing transformed itself into another inside me, as if I saw one thing and my heart translated it into something else.

And then—as I sat there breathless and sweaty—then the thought came to me—as clear as if it were spoken aloud—spoken with absolute certainty, absolute conviction:

Of course he's a terrorist. Of course he is.

That suddenly, that completely, I was convinced—utterly convinced—that Casey Diggs was right: Arthur Rashid was engineering a murderous attack on the city of New York.

The very next moment, the irrational wave of feeling began to ebb. The terror subsided and with it, the clarity and the certainty faded away as well. I dropped back in my chair, trying to catch my breath. I was nauseous. A clammy line of sweat was running down the back of my neck. Blinking hard, I thought,
My God, my God—
this is what must've happened to my mother. This is exactly what must've happened in the mind of my mother when she went insane.

My gaze was shooting around in an abrupt, disjointed way now, from the professor to the walls of the room and back over the faces of the students in their seats. And as I began to recover from that bizarre moment of panic and conviction, my attention lit on one girl sitting five or six rows in front of me. She was off to my left, in the last seat on the left near the wall. She was writing intently in her notebook, her head down, her lush black hair spilling forward. But just as my eyes fell on her, she looked up. She brushed her hair off her face with a graceful sweeping gesture of one hand. She turned to look at the professor and so presented her profile to me.

Startled, I recognized her at once. The sight of her knocked every other crazy thought right out of me. I was so surprised to find her there—so mystified by the coincidence—and so glad, too—so glad and excited to see her again.

It was Anne Smith. Remember her? The beautiful bartender from The Den.

I wanted to ask her something. It was important. That's why I waited for her after class. Really—that's why. All the same, I admit it: I felt like a schoolboy with a crush, standing at the bottom of the hall's stone steps, my hands in my pockets, my casual posture as studied as the schoolboy's, my heart just as secret and eager.

"Anne!" I called when I saw her step out through the glass doors. She didn't hear. She started down the stairs amid the crowd, her head down, her black hair pouring forward. "Anne!"

I didn't think she'd remember me. How could she? So many people must come and go in that nightclub every night. But, in fact, she lifted her broad, oval face, spotted me with those big doe-eyes, and broke into a radiant smile. She freed one hand from the books she was holding against herself, waved it at me with that quick metronomic wave girls have when they're shy and happy to see you.

"Hi!" she said with outsized delight. She joined me in the dappled shadows under the plane trees. She shone on me like the warmth of morning. "What are you doing here?"

She was wearing jeans and a maroon jacket over an openthroated shirt, nothing half so revealing as the shoulderless outfit she'd had on in the club. Dressed like that and in the light of day, she looked more composed and womanly somehow and even more appealing. Faced with all the freshness and the warmth and the ripeness of her and the youth, I found myself feeling ridiculously
self-conscious in front of her, ridiculously aware of my appearance and how I spoke and the impression I might be making on her.

"I didn't think you'd remember me," I said.

"Jason Harrow," she answered as if she were showing off her powers of recall. "The guy who's not as ugly as his driver's license."

"My claim to fame."

She was as I remembered her: as friendly, as straightforward as she'd been at The Den, and with that touch of insecurity so appealing in such a pretty girl. Her raspy voice was full of humor. "Which brings me back to my original question," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"I've heard about this guy Rashid. I wanted to hear his lecture."

She did that thing teenaged girls do when they're talking about some movie actor or rock star they love: Her hips went slack, her mouth went open, her eyes rolled heavenward. "Is that guy a super-genius or what? He must need, like, two heads to keep his brains in or something."

I felt a pang at that. Maybe I was still in the grips of that weird horror I'd experienced in the lecture hall. Or maybe I was just jealous and didn't want her to admire another man.

"I thought you told me you've never read Shakespeare," I said.

"No. I know. I really want to now. Rashid makes it sound so interesting."

"Mm. Yeah."

"Listen, I gotta get to my next class. You want to walk me?"

"Sure."

"There's only, like, twelve people, so I can't sneak in, and if you're late, Mr. Roth gives you, like, seven kinds of shit."

I managed only a faint smile. I've never gotten used to women cursing. The young ones almost all do it now, even the sweet country things like Anne. It's all fair and equal and so on, but
I don't like it. Still, a man will tolerate just about anything in a pretty girl, especially one he is trying to sleep with.

Which was the odd thing about Anne, by the way—the odd thing for me about walking beside her like that. It was a strangely doubled experience, as if I had two selves, one overlapping the other like images superimposed in a photograph. In one of those selves, I had no intention of trying to sleep with her—none. She was young enough to be my daughter. I felt toward her as a responsible middle-aged man feels toward any young adult: interested, solicitous, ready to be charmed. In this first self, I was there to ask her a question, and that was all. But in my other self, everything was seduction. Every move I made, every word I spoke, every smile and gesture was designed to win her over. It was as if there were some sort of filter system in my brain. Before I did or said anything, it asked automatically:
Will this make her like you enough to have sex with you? Will this?