Empire of Lies (41 page)

Now, as if gushing from a culvert, we broke out of the narrow alley and spread out into the street. We were broadsided, jostled, and then joined by the greater crowd swarming out of the front doors. As if we were one enormous force, we carried the barricades away, knocked them down and trampled them. We caught up the thousands of spectators waiting outside and engulfed them and bore them on. Finally we began to spread out over the streets and the sidewalks, flowing in both directions toward the avenues, away from the theater. With every step, the mob's first explosive energy diminished. It began to flow and eddy. I gained my feet again in the midst of it. I began to move by my own will. I began to think again. I felt the rhythms of my body beginning to slow and calm.

By the time Serena and I reached Broadway, I was able to stop, to turn and look back at the New Coliseum. Its gorgeous white facade stood imperturbable and grand. The spiraling sweep of arched, column-framed windows were bathed in the spotlights and the kliegs sweeping back and forth majestically in front of it. The last of the people inside were just now spilling out of the various doors, the flow of black tuxes and brightly colored gowns filling the street and spreading toward the avenues. As the people began to disperse and calm, their rush of movement slowed. Like the surf breaking into pools on the shore, the mob broke into groups and couples and individuals again. Some continued running toward the avenues in their anxiety, but most were content to
slow down and walk away or stop at the corner or even just outside the theater's doors. People began to look at the theater over their shoulders or to turn around and watch it expectantly.

Nothing happened. The movement of the crowd slowed even more. More and more people came to a standstill. Some began to curse. Some began to shake their heads and laugh.

I was at the corner of Broadway. The lights of Times Square soared into the night behind me. The spotlit grandeur of the New Coliseum rose above the milling people on the street before. After the thundering panic, the honking horns of the jammed traffic and the shouts and talk and footsteps and music of New York everywhere seemed almost harmonious and sweet.

I set Serena down on the ground, holding her up on her bound feet with my arm around her shoulders. With my free hand, I worked the duct tape off her wrists. Then I held her under the arm while she bent over and worked the tape off her ankles. I looked out, meanwhile, at the gowns and tuxes pooling in the street. I heard more laughter—cursing, too. My eyes passed over smiling faces and puzzled faces and angry faces. I saw people who had fallen or simply collapsed in the gutter and were lying there with others kneeling beside them. Finally my gaze came to rest on one man standing in the street about twenty yards from me—twenty yards, I mean, closer to the theater. It was Patrick Piersall. He was panting, out of breath as I was, exhausted. He looked old, deteriorated, squat and paunchy in his black sweatpants and orange pullover. He was still gripping his gun, holding it down by his side now. He was staring up at the swirling rise of the theater facade with a sort of dazed, stupid fascination.

Serena straightened beside me, unbound. She looked at the theater, too. We all looked at it, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

"What the hell was
that
all about?" I heard someone say.

I wondered myself. I felt a fresh anxiety slowly growing up inside me. In my spent, empty mind, bits of information were beginning to assemble themselves like pieces of matter coming together in space. An entire alternative story told itself to me in an instant. In this story, I had inherited my mother's disease, had begun to see connections and patterns and logical progressions that had no bearing on reality. I had found a teenaged girl in a bad situation and connected it to a professor whose philosophy I didn't like. In my madness, I had tortured the poor professor into inventing some sort of conspiracy against American culture, an attack on the New Coliseum. Maybe I was even suffering hallucinations, and my life had become like one of those French theories in which reality could not be distinguished from the images thrown up by society...

"My God—" I began to whisper.

Then the New Coliseum exploded.

I could not take in the vastness of the catastrophe. I could only stand and stare.

There was a hugely loud yet strangely echoless thump. There was a great heaving movement in the street. There was a punching blast of air and heat that knocked me back on my heels. I felt a jolt of terror and a kind of awe as every one of the big arched windows that spiraled up the front and side of the building flashed with fire then went suddenly black. Glass flew—enormous slanting shards and little confetti fragments of it flew out everywhere—fanned out into the night with what almost seemed an air of frantic gaiety. The glass caught the white of the spotlights. It caught the colored lights of Broadway. It glittered and sparkled gaily, shattering and tinkling and raining down over the ducked heads and raised arms of the crowd in the street. The whole theater seemed to expand for a moment and then, remarkably, settle back into itself as if it were unharmed.

After that, there was a second of uncanny stillness.

After that, the theater crumbled.

Before our eyes, the fabulous structure turned to jagged stones and dust and, with a long, dying roar, spilled down out of itself and over the pavement. Once again, the people began screaming. They ran and stumbled over each other, trying to get away from the white onslaught of debris and the thick spindrift of dust. I saw people caught by the tide of stone and knocked over. Some were buried under it. Some were carried away.

The rubble that had been the theater rolled clear across the street. It splashed and crashed against the walls of the brick buildings opposite. More windows shattered. Blood splattered against the stone. The debris seemed to rise up high into the night and hurl itself down again, leaving a thick mist of motes choking the air. At some point, the spotlights were knocked over. There was a brittle crash of glass and metal and that beautiful silver light around the red carpets was snuffed out. The kliegs fell, their beams toppling out of the night sky like towers. Where the bright theater stood, there was all at once a black hole, a ruin of girders and cement caught in places by sweeping brightness and then released again into shadow as a single klieg—swept off its truck bed but still somehow standing on the street—swung back and forth, its shaft crossing back and forth beneath the bellies of the roiling clouds above.

The panicking people poured past me, jostling me where I stood. Covered with dust and glass, catching, like the glass, the Broadway lights, they looked like strange rhinestone ghosts with dark O's where their mouths should have been. I kept my left arm around Serena's shoulders and pulled her to me to hold her upright, to keep her from being swept off as the people knocked into us and flowed past on either side.

I sought out Patrick Piersall again and found him. He was not
far from where he'd been before. It was as if the collapsing theater had simply passed over him, as if the running, panicked crowd had passed over him, and all of it left him untouched. He was dusty—his pullover white, his face gray and white—but otherwise unmoved and unharmed.

And he was still just standing there, just staring up at the theater—or at the ruin that had been the theater, the emptiness of slanting girder and jagged stone. Then, the next moment, he was laughing—laughing hard, with his debauched wreck of a face thrown back and his shoulders going up and down and his round belly quivering. His laugh broke high once, then settled into a long baritone guffaw. I could hear him clearly over the shouts and screams and honking horns and traffic.

He began to look around, as if searching for someone he could share the joke with. He found me. Our eyes met.

Through the floating mist of ruin, as the people ran screaming for their lives, Patrick Piersall sent me a flamboyant salute. Laughing like a madman, he braced the tips of all five fingers of his left hand against his forehead and then flung the hand toward me, opening it in my direction. It was a grandiose, flyaway gesture, a gesture of pure, alcoholic derangement, both exalted and absurd. I returned it in a more restrained fashion, a finger to my eyebrow, then pointed at him. Piersall went on laughing. Even I couldn't help but smile.

Because the fact was—when the dust and insanity settled—the fact was we had saved them. Oh, there were terrible tragedies that night, terrible injuries that would never be healed. Children lost limbs. Women's faces were slashed and ravaged. A couple of men were paralyzed. A couple had heart attacks. A few were buried under the rubble for hours. There were hundreds hurt, some in ways almost unimaginable, ways too disturbing to describe. Still...

Still in all, not one person died as a result of the terrorist blast in the New Coliseum Theater. Todd, Juliette, Angelica, the secretary of state, all the others in the audience and all the people who'd been standing and watching on the street outside—miraculously, every single one of them—every single one of them survived.

So Patrick Piersall laughed and I managed a small smile and we saluted each other, standing on the corner of Times Square. Because we saved them, he and I—and Casey Diggs, too. We saved them—that was the truth of it. A paranoid wannabe journalist barred from his profession for telling the truth. A drunken has-been Hollywood actor who once pretended to be the admiral of a spaceship. And me. Not much in the way of heroes, I know, but all the heroes we could muster in a desperate hour.

And it was enough. Just barely enough.

Because we saved them all.

On a clear fall afternoon not long after the explosion, I came home to the Hill. As I stepped out of my car into the driveway, my wife and children rushed the door of the house so fast they got jammed up in it together. Then they broke out one at a time and came hurtling toward me. Chad and Nathan were racing in the lead with little Terry running behind. As I stepped out of the driveway onto the front walk, they flung themselves at me. In a moment, I had a boy in each arm and the girl wrapped around my leg, and Cathy, smiling and crying at once, moving in among them with a kiss.

I wanted to weep when I saw them. I wanted to fall to my knees and press my forehead to the flagstone and sob enormous racking sobs until I heaved up some portion of the thick, strangling mass of my self-revulsion. I wanted to slobber over the goodness of those children's heads and wallow in the sweetness of my wife's bosom and grovel on the earth in front of them. I wanted to rip open my shirt and bare the ugliness of myself to heaven and beg their forgiveness for what I was inside.

But no. I was Cathy's husband, the children's father, and they were all of them in my care. If I wept, they would weep. If I showed them my misery, they would be miserable, too. I had no business bringing my moral nausea to their happy occasion. I settled instead for many misty-eyed kisses and embraces all around. Then, with what I hoped was insouciant Dad gallantry, I said, "So—
what's for dinner?" They all laughed and we headed together into the house.

It was the beginning of a very hard winter. A black depression soon settled over me. My old joy of life seemed to seep through my fingers as I desperately tried to hold it fast. At last, it bled out of my life entirely. I walked through the days hollow-hearted and soul-dead. Day by day, hour by hour, I used all the strength of will I had to hide my emptiness from the children. I went through the motions of driving them to school and playing with them in the snow and taking them to movies, but that's what it was: just going through the motions. Joking with them, wrestling with them, setting rules for them, hearing them out. None of it seemed real to me. My life did not seem real.

I told my wife how I felt, but I tried not to show it to her too much. I tried to describe it to her without complaining or moping or carrying on. One night, I confessed to her what I did to Arthur Rashid, forcing myself to remain dry-eyed as I described pulverizing his kneecaps with the hammer. Cathy reached across the table and took my hand.

"That's awful. What an awful experience," she said.

But I could see the doubt and horror in her eyes. I could see her hold back the question: "Wasn't there anything else you could have done?"

I couldn't bring myself to tell her the rest, to describe the pulsing excitement that went through me as I brought the hammer down, or about how I hid in the theater closet, ready to lay hands on Maryanne.

I tried to pray about these things, but I couldn't somehow. I tried to ask God to forgive me for what I'd done and what I'd felt, but I couldn't. The truth was: I was too angry at him to pray. I felt he had asked too much of me. It wasn't that he had asked me to sacrifice my decency or my complacency or even my joy of living.
Those were his to give and his to take away; I understood that. But before he would allow me to save those thousands and thousands of innocent lives—his damn lives, his creations—God had demanded that I know myself, and for that I could not forgive him. I could not forgive him and so I could not ask him to forgive me.

So what else was there? I tried going to a psychiatrist. He listened to me talk for fifteen minutes, then wrote me a prescription for pills—some of those anti-depression pills I'd seen advertised on TV. I was so dejected at that point I actually filled the prescription. But I never took them. Listen, to each his own. For all I know, you could pop a couple of those suckers and spend the rest of your days dancing in the sun. But the way I saw it, my problem wasn't chemical, it was spiritual. The spirit has to have its journey, has to go through its stations, you know; that's how it's shaped finally into a soul. I took the pills down to the lake and hurled them in.

Now I guess you may say to me: Well, that's all very well and good, but what if you can't make it through the stations of the spirit, what if the journey's too much for you? What if you get so depressed you go out and buy a rope and hang yourself? And I guess I would answer you: Them's the breaks, pal. There's no freedom without the possibility of failure. And I'm not afraid to die.