Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  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.

  The Reality Show

  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 sof
t; 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.

  "When atheist Communism threatened to take over the world, we stood beside Christian America to defeat the atheists. Those atheists have been swallowed up by hell as they deserved." He said all this in a pleasant tone of voice, the voice of a cherubic man of wisdom making all things clear. "Now that atheism is no more, we must have a Holy War to decide the question: Which God will rule? The West's God of materialism and selfishness and licentiousness—or the true God, Allah, His name be praised?"

  At the time, I just snorted and started changing channels apathetically. Buy this car. Eat this burger. Take this pill to give you an erection. Call your doctor if your erection lasts more than four hours. Blah, blah, blah.

  I did pause a moment when I saw Angelica Eden. The actress, remember. The raven-haired siren who seemed to have stolen wispy Todd Bingham away from sweet-faced, and possibly pregnant, Juliette Lovesey. All of which seemed to be their way of publicizing their new movie, The End of Civilization as We Know It. The first film ever in holographic Real 3-D.

  "I mean, look, I believe in love, you know," she was saying. "But not this idea that you're with one person till you die. I think anyone should be able to be with anyone they want to. It's really no one's business, after all."

  She was wearing a black dress with a hemline that rose to the top of her thighs and a neckline that plunged nearly to the hem. She was sitting in a director's chair, smiling over at the smiling bee-stung lips of our old friend Sally Sterling. When she crossed her creamy white legs, I felt it flow through me like liquid electricity.

  "Tell us about the new movie," Sally said.

  "It's called The End of Civilization as We Know It," said Angelica large-breastedly. "Because the filmmakers really believe that it's civilization as we know it that's causing all these wars all over the place. And since we're the most so-called 'civilized' country in the world, obviously we're really the ones who are most to blame."

  Man, I thought, look at the tits on this woman! And have I mentioned her lips? Wonderful lips, lush, scarlet. Never mind calling your doctor. Those lips looked like they could make a four-hour erection last about thirty seconds.

  I drank more wine. I changed the channel and then changed the channel again, then again. Tipsy, lonely, horny, I caught myself searching for one of those late-night porno movies so I could really make a night of it.

  As it turned out, I couldn't find anything quite that exciting. In fact, on all those millions of channels, I couldn't find anything worth watching at all. So I switched to the TiVo screen, to its list of prerecorded programs. And whoa!, for a second there, I felt a little amygdaloid jolt of coincidence and meaning—did I ever! Because what name was up there on the screen? That's right. Patrick Piersall! Then, oh yeah, I remembered—I'd programmed him into the machine myself.

  I pressed the button to open his file. The TiVo had recorded another episode of The Universal and—oh, look!—there was that new reality crime show he'd been touting on the talk circuit the other evening. Patrick Piersalls True Crime America! I started it playing.

  At first, there was just a lot of noise and graphics. Police sirens screaming, thumping music. Cop cars and grocery holdups and murder victims on stretchers flashing by in a strobic montage. Then, like a prison door slamming shut, the title card whomped down over the screen: Patrick Piersall's True Crime America! And then there was Piersall in the flesh—in a lot of flesh. The lithe unitarded Augustus Kane we remembered from last night was gone—way gone. In his place once again stood today's pudgy, haggard little man, his red-veined, swollen-nosed alcoholic's face capped with a toupee that made him look as if a flying squirrel had been shot out of the sky and landed dead on his scalp.

  He came walking toward us portentously down a residential street in Your Town, My Town, Anytown USA. He looked at us straight in the kisser and quirked an Augustus Kane eyebrow at us. It was sad: an ironic gesture without the old irony, a meaningless habit now. Meaningless, too, was that old hesitant, syncopated speaking rhythm of his. It still made him sound as if he were plucking each word from the Tree of Wisdom, but he couldn't have been, because this is what he said:

  "A quiet street. A row of houses on well-tended lawns. Happy families leading respectable lives. This is the America we like to believe in. But for the police—and for the victims of crime—the reality is very different."

  "Blaaa-laaaa-laaaa-laaaaggh," I said, holding my wineglass upside down over my head and shaking it to make the last drop fall onto my tongue.

  "Welcome to Patrick Piersall's True Crime America..." said Patrick Piersall.

  " 'The only job I could get,'" I muttered back.

  "...where we're going to explore the sudden violence, the agony, and the mystery that lurk behind these seemingly respectable facades. Tonight," he went on—and now a fresh batch of crime-related images flashed in epilepsy-inducing fashion across the huge screen—"we're going to delve into the heart of an unsolved mystery, as we examine ... the disappearance of university student Casey Diggs."

  Then—like the rolling pictures on a slot machine finally ringing up a jackpot—the flashing graphics ended with a photograph of Casey Diggs.

  And I whispered, "Wha-a-at?"

  My hand—the hand holding the wineglass—dropped limply into my lap. My mouth hung open in drunken surprise. Sitting slightly tilted over, I blinked one long time, then stretched my eyes wide to get a better look at the young man on the gigantic screen in front of me.

  It was a family snapshot, probably. A color snapshot taken in the woods, most likely at his parents' cabin or on vacation somewhere. It showed this Casey Diggs from the hips up, standing next to the trunk of an old car. Smiling at the camera. Lifting a soda can in salute. Enlarged to that size, it was a bit unfocused, but just a bit. You could make out the details well enough.

  He was tall. He had narrow shoulders, but a bit of flab pushing against his T-shirt at the beltline. He had short blond hair and hazel eyes behind rimless glasses. He had a pale, round, almost-featureless face. I mean, talk about a white man! He could've been the product of a night of love between a loaf of Wonder Bread and a bowl of Cream of Wheat. And there on his shirt—hanging around his neck and lying on his port-colored T-shirt above the raised crest of Sacred Heart High School—was a leather lanyard with one of those i
ron nails dangling from it, those passion nails that Christians took to wearing after they saw the film The Passion of the Christ.

  "That's him!" I murmured.

  And I admit now, I was a little drunk. Sitting slouched and woozy on the couch, my head in a fog. Still—still—it was—I was sure of it—it was him.

  It was the boy Serena saw knifed to death in the Great Swamp.

  He was exactly as she described him. It was as if I'd seen him myself, as if I'd been there in The Den the night that he and Serena met. It was like a bell of recognition ringing in my brain.

  "Casey Diggs vanished from his apartment six weeks ago," said Patrick Piersall. "Was he a troubled youth who ran away to find himself? Or was he the victim of a terrorist conspiracy ... and murder?"

  "Good God," I whispered.

  And the words of my mother's notebook came back to me and I thought: It's all true. It's all real. It all happened.

  What Happened to Casey Diggs

  Danger music. Images flashed on the screen again like memories of a lifetime in the mind of a dying man. Faces screaming in protest, a domed building on a university campus, a seedy railroad flat with a soiled futon open on the floor. Then the music faded to the volume of footsteps creeping up behind you. And there—once more—was Patrick Piersall. Well, it was his True Crime America, after all.

  "Casey Diggs came to Manhattan full of hope and promise, eager to begin his university career. With a 4.1 high-school GPA, he already seemed well on his way to realizing his dream of becoming a journalist."

  Then there was a lot of ya-ya-ya about his childhood. Son of two Philadelphia lawyers. Educated at fine private schools. Spent a couple of summers building classrooms and houses with church groups in Kenya and Louisiana. Became a committed Christian and even wrestled with the idea of becoming a minister. In the end, he decided journalism was his vocation. He was delighted when he was accepted into a university known for one of the finest journalism departments in the country.