Empire of Lies (4 page)

I didn't know what I was supposed to say to him. "Hi," I said finally, in a barely audible whisper. "I hate to bother you, but I'm really feeling like shit here." Embarrassed, I screwed my palms together in my lap. "Frankly," I added with a laugh, "you're not looking so good yourself." Then I buried my face in my hands and started weeping. I said to him: "Help me! Forgive me! Forgive me, help me, help me!"

The storm passed. I waited there, just like that. I'm not sure what for, exactly. Maybe I thought I would peek through my fingers and see the celestial cavalry charging over the altar to my rescue. More likely, I was hoping for an enlightening interior blast of some kind. Some hallelujah conversion maybe. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. I stayed a while longer, trying to force it, trying to get a little uplift and inspiration going by sheer willpower. But no. Nothing.

Well, what did I expect? This whole God thing was bullshit. Everyone knew that. Everyone I knew knew that anyway. I got up and got the hell out of that place in a hurry. If you're going to get past things like this, I told myself bitterly, you have to get past them on your own. I was a man, wasn't I? Well, I was going to act like one. To hell with my damn theories. I knew what was right. I just had to do it, that's all—and I would. I was going to call up the Bedford woman and apologize for being a brute and
a blind fool. I was going to dump the ugly sex that made me feel good in the moment and lousy ever afterward. I was going to stop using these awful drugs and clear my head and try to be kinder to people, try to be more honest about what I thought and felt and saw, more honest and forthright and kind all around. I was going to change everything, damn it. I was going to start everything over from scratch.

And I did. With God's help, I did. Because, of course, over time I realized what should've been obvious to me right away: that my prayer in the chapel that afternoon had been answered, after all. The celestial cavalry had, in fact, charged over the hill at the first sound of my cry for help. I didn't see it at first because there was no magic to it. It was just real—as real as real. My prayer had been answered almost in the saying of it.

So I quit The Scene. I quit the drugs. I quit the
Soho Star.
I sent out résumés and got offered a new job at a small paper in the Midwest.

Which left me with only one other thing I had to do.

"I'm going away," I told Lauren. We were walking by the harbor path in Battery Park on a winter Sunday. She had her arm in mine. I was looking away over the unbroken line of benches, squinting through the brittle sunlight to watch the tiered ferries sputter through the water toward the Statue of Liberty. I heard Lauren beside me release a trembling sigh. "I've been offered a job in another city, and I'm going to take it."

She slipped her arm out of mine. She slipped her hands into the pockets of her dark woolen overcoat. "I'm assuming this isn't an invitation," she said.

I took a slow scan of the water back to the tip of the island, up to the twin towers of the World Trade Center standing massive against the afternoon sky. I was going to miss this city, I thought. "Lauren, look," I said. "I never lied to you about the way I felt."

"No. No, you didn't. God knows I tried to get you to, but you never did."

"I've just ... changed too much. I can't make any more small adjustments. I'm going to be thirty soon. I need to start again somewhere else."

She stopped on the path and I stopped, and we faced each other. I don't know why it surprised me to see her wiping her nose with the woolen gloves on her hands. We'd been so glib and cynical and crazy with each other, it was hard for me to realize how much I meant to her.

"Well, listen," she said with a miserable laugh. "Fuck you and all that. If you don't mind, I'm not gonna go through the whole routine. Crying gives me a headache, and I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Anyway, it won't change anything. Have a nice life, Jason, okay?"

She walked off quickly, looking small and sad in the long coat and the watch cap pulled down over her hair, the knit scarf trailing behind her. A hunched, unhappy figure against the sparkling harbor. I wanted to call her back but what for? I knew I'd only browbeat her into forgiving me so I'd feel better. I watched her go, watched her blend with the crowds around the ferry stand, meld with the scenery—people, plane trees, and those two stalwart towers.

Then I turned away and walked off in the opposite direction.

Now, Manhattan's skyline sank out of sight as the plane settled down toward the runway. I came out of myself and turned away from the porthole. I had an odd, heavy sensation inside me—an intimation of danger—a feeling that I was coming here for deeper and more perilous reasons than I knew. Because it was strange, wasn't it? That call from Lauren just as I had to decide what to do with my mother's house. The timing was strange, the coincidence
of it. It gave me the feeling that I was returning not just to the East Coast but to the past itself, returning to confront the past itself, to face it as a new man and prove to its ghosts and shadows that I was a wholly different man than I had been.

The plane touched down with a jolt. I shook myself, trying to throw that feeling off, that odd, heavy intimation of danger.

It wouldn't go away.

Night had long fallen by the time I left the airport to drive out to the island. There were spots of rain on the windshield of my rental car. It was a sleek, jolly little red Mustang, low to the ground. It dodged and wove sweetly through the expressway traffic.

I talked to Cathy most of the way out. Her voice was thin and tinny and faraway in my cell-phone earpiece. She told me about the kids, their day at school: a good grade on a spelling test, a part in a school play. It was still daylight where they were, she said. The sky, she said, was clear.

Man oh man, I wished I hadn't lied to her about Lauren. I wished I had told her I was going to see her while I was here. She wouldn't have minded. She would've trusted me. I wasn't sure why I had kept it to myself. Just an impulse really, a momentary whim. It wasn't that I was planning to sleep with Lauren again, or anything. I wasn't an idiot, after all. I think it's just that sometimes—sometimes when you live a good life, a stable life—you want to leave room for the possibility of something else, for the excitement of the possibility. It was like letting Tanya touch my arm ... just for a moment sometimes, you feel compelled to leave life open to the thrill of disaster.

Anyway, I hadn't told Cathy the truth, and I found I couldn't tell her now. Feeling uncomfortable and guilty, I asked her to put the children on. They said hi to me one by one. I asked them how
they were. Fine, they said. When they were done, I switched off the phone and kept driving.

I slid from the highway into my hometown. I came along the broad road past the car dealerships and gas stations at the town limits. Then it was up the hill into the residential areas, where streetlights shone down on the canopies of maples and elms above me. Yellow and red and green leaves glistened, slick with the light rain. Behind the trees, entry lights gleamed white by the doorways of tranquil clapboard-and-shingle houses. Inside, behind the curtains, room lights burned yellow and warm.

It was just another Long Island suburban town, but it was my town. I'd been back here often over the years, of course, to visit Mom and my brother. Every time, it struck me with an almost-mystical familiarity. I felt I could walk its streets blindfolded, and if its streets were gone, I could walk blindfolded on the paths where they had been. I felt as if the map of the place were branded on the longest-living part of me, as if I could die and trace its outline on the after-darkness.

The house where I grew up and where my mother went mad and died was on the corner at the bottom of a hill. It was a substantial two-story colonial with white clapboards and dark green shutters. It was set back on a broad, flat lawn and shaded by oaks and a tall cherry tree. I'd been paying a caretaker to keep the grounds neat and a housekeeper to dust and air out the rooms, but when I pulled into the driveway, I thought the place had a forlorn, abandoned look to it all the same.

Inside, when the door had shut behind me, it seemed very still. I don't suppose that houses get any quieter when people die in them. I don't suppose it was any quieter than if my mother had gone out for a while on one of the rambling walks she sometimes took before her heart got too bad. But she hadn't gone out for a
walk, and when I turned on the foyer light, the rest of the house spread dark around me and, as I say, it seemed almost preternaturally still.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my suitcase in my hand. I looked up into the shadows of the second-floor landing. Her bedroom was up there, haunted by my imagination of her last hour. I imagined her lying in bed alone, feverishly explaining the signs, the omens and connections that were so obvious to her, but that no one else could see. The fall of the Republic. The Second Coming of Christ. The coming of savagery again to the scattered nations. Explaining and explaining to no one in a whisper. Reaching out in the dark as if to take hold of my wrist—me, because I was the only one who had the patience to listen to her...

But I wasn't there. No one was. I had begged Mom for years to come live with me. Cathy and I had both begged her. But I think she liked taking care of my brother. Paying his keep, making his bed, his lunch, doing his laundry. I think it gave her a sense of purpose. Of course, he was no good to her when the crisis came. Alan—that's my brother's name—Alan—had been living with her for over a decade by then. A ruined, useless man. A great pontificator on What's Wrong with the World, but incapable of holding down a job or starting a family or putting bread in his own mouth. When he sensed that the end was near, he decided it was time to take what he called a "vacation." He withdrew about forty thousand dollars from Mom's various accounts and went off to Bermuda. As far as I knew, he was still there.

So she died alone. The maid came in one morning and found her. I wondered—I still wonder—if her whisper had faded to nothing or if she stopped suddenly in the middle of a word. I wondered if she felt relief as the last hoarded breath rattled out of her—relief that it was finally over, that her guardianship of the secret patterns of history was finally done. Or did she die grieving that
there was no one there to hear her, no one else to understand and to take up the sacred burden when she was gone?

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up into the shadows for a long time. Then I looked away. Confronting the past was all well and good, but there was no chance I was going up there tonight, not with the babbling ghost of her lying there in the darkness. Tonight, I decided, I would sleep in the television room.

The television room was a strange feature of the place. It was not connected to any other room in the house. You had to get to it by going through the garage. I reached the garage through the door in the kitchen, then edged my way between my mother's old Volvo and the gardening tools hanging on pegboards along the walls. The door to the television room was at the back beside stacked boxes of moldering books. I went through. Turned the light on. Tossed my suitcase onto the floor.

The room was a long and narrow rectangle. Call it ten feet by twenty. The walls were painted a deep, rich blue. There was a couch on one end, to my right. And to my left, all the way on the other end, taking up almost the entire wall, there was what to these rapidly aging eyes seemed the largest flat-screen rear-projection television set that could ever be conceived by the mind of man. Really, it was a monster, just huge. Seventy inches, if I remember my brother's boast right. Alan had treated himself to the machine about two years earlier, when some of my mother's CDs had rolled over.

Everything else here—everything else besides the couch and the TV—was incidental. Windows covered with wooden shutters. An ancient shag rug on the floor. Shelves and drawers against the longer walls to hold Alan's collections of old movies, television shows, and video games. A long coffee table in front of the couch, pinewood with ring stains and coffee stains on it. An Xbox on the table. And, of course, an amazingly complex super-duper remote
control that for all I knew could make the sun rise in the morning and part the waters from the dry land.

I'd always liked this room. I'd always found it peaceful and comforting. All the high-tech stuff was new, of course, but there had always been a TV out here. Nothing as big as this cyclopean beast but some kind of TV or other. When we were kids, Alan and I would carry our cereal bowls through the garage of a Saturday morning, set them on the shag rug—the same shag rug, in fact—and lie belly down, eating our Cheerios and watching the cartoons. I remember it as the only time he and I could be alone together without him punching or kicking me or throwing me to the floor or stealing or breaking my toys or calling me names in a wild, high voice like a demon's. The TV seemed to hypnotize and pacify him and he would just lie on the rug beside me, munching his Cheerios, staring at the screen. As far as I could make out, that was pretty much all he'd been doing ever since.

My long trip over, I plumped down onto the sofa with a sigh. I picked up the remote gizmo. Studied it for a few seconds and pressed the buttons. The big TV made a sizzling sound. A red light flickered at the bottom of it, then went green. The set came on. Pictures. Voices. Drowning out the babbling ghost inside the house. What a relief.

A woman appeared on the screen, a perky little blonde thing, glossed and powdered to a fare-thee-well. Sally Sterling, she was—so said the caption across her breasts. Her gigantic face took up the entire far wall, her features so huge they fairly forced themselves on my consciousness. Ultra-kissable bee-stung lips. Glistening blue eyes that managed to be ambitious and imbecilic at once. She struck me as the kind of girl who in a bygone age would have set her sights on an aging millionaire. Now here she was, blown up to the size of a bus, bothering all the rest of us. She was holding a penis-shaped microphone in front of her mouth—
well, I couldn't help but perceive it that way with it jumping out at me as large as that. Her great white smile flashed. She looked as if she could barely contain her glee.