The Truth of the Matter

by Andrew Klavan

  Soon the laptop was fully working, its screen bright in the dark room. I moved back to the desk by its light, gripping the furniture for support while I went. Sport followed along beside me. I plunked down into the desk chair again. Sport sat down next to me and watched.

  I brought up the browser and used it to find the phone program. There was no camera in the laptop so Beth wouldn’t be able to see me, but I’d still be able to see her. I brought up Beth’s number and called it. I sent up a little prayer that she’d be home.

  The ring tone sounded so loudly in the quiet house, I looked over my shoulder at the window to make sure there was still no one coming. The tone sounded again.

  Then it stopped. I heard Beth’s voice, charged, excited.

  “Charlie?”

  A swirling image appeared on the laptop. A caption said, “Video starting.”

  “Beth, it’s me.”

  “I can’t see you.”

  “There’s no camera in my computer. Is your camera on?”

  “Yes, you should see me in a minute. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. How about you?”

  “I’m fine. I’ve been so worried about you. Did you find the man you were looking for?”

  “I found him, Beth but . . .”

  I was about to tell her what happened when the video came on. There she was, her living image on the screen right in front of me. Seeing her again . . . it’s hard to describe what it was like. Even feeling as bad as I did, the sight of her was like a sort of flash of light going off inside me. I reached out for the screen and touched the image, feeling only the monitor’s cool, featureless surface against my fingertips.

  “Beth,” I said softly.

  She smiled. I moved my fingers down over the side of her face, trying to imagine I was really touching her.

  “Beth,” I said. I could barely get the words out. “Beth, I remember.”

  Her lips parted in surprise. “What . . . ?”

  “I remember. I remember everything. I remember us.”

  “Oh, Charlie,” she said, her voice breaking.

  “I remember all about us, all of it.”

  Beth covered her mouth with both her hands. I heard her sob and say: “Thank God, thank God.”

  “Everything’s starting to come back to me now, soon I’ll have the whole story but . . .”

  Just then, Sport let out a bark. I turned and saw headlights flash on the front windows.

  “Charlie?” said Beth. “What was that noise?”

  The headlights outside grew brighter. A car was approaching up the dirt drive.

  Beth said, “Is something wrong?”

  I turned back to look at her. I would’ve given anything not to have to say good-bye, but I had no choice.

  “I have to go,” I told her.

  “Go,” she answered at once. “Don’t worry. I’ll be here. Just go. Stay safe.”

  Quickly, I turned off the computer. I had to close the lid to shut out its light. That wasn’t the way it was when I found it, but I hoped I’d be gone before anyone noticed the difference.

  I stood up—and the minute I did, I knew I was in trouble.

  My head swam. My legs felt as if they were made of rubber. I looked back at the window. The headlights glared in at me as the car grew near. I stood there unsteadily, staring at the lights and, as I did, they grew huge and out of focus and then dwindled to a small point in the darkness so that I thought I was going to faint.

  It was the fever. It was getting worse, much worse. I wasn’t sure I could even walk—but I had to try. I had to get out of here.

  There was no chance of running away. I just didn’t have the strength. But I thought if I could get out of the house, maybe I could make it to that shed next door. I could hide out in there until I felt better.

  The headlights were right outside now, right in front of the porch. No way to escape through the front door. I had to find another exit.

  As the car came to a stop outside the house, the headlights shone in on me through the front window. I could make out the room in the glow. I threaded my way between the chairs and end tables and moved toward an archway on the back wall. I passed through it into another room. It was darker in here, but I could just make out a dining table, some chairs, a sideboard. Another door on the far wall. I took a step toward it . . .

  Then the room tilted sickeningly. It felt as if it were going to turn completely upside down and dump me off the floor onto the ceiling. My stomach pitched. I grabbed hold of . . . something, I don’t know what. The back of a chair, I guess. My feet felt as if they were anvils. I couldn’t lift them. I couldn’t move . . .

  Now I heard the front door opening. Sport was barking happily to welcome his people home. The light in the living room went on.

  I heard a little boy’s high, piping voice: “And then Dan said they’d let me play tomorrow, only they couldn’t today because the game was too important . . .”

  A woman’s lower, quieter voice answered wearily, “Well, that’s good. Quiet, Sport.”

  “Hi, Sport!” said the boy.

  The dog’s barking stopped and was replaced by happy panting.

  I had to go, had to get out of here. I took a heavy step toward the door. There had to be a back way.

  I took another step—but I hadn’t let go of the chair. I didn’t have the strength to let go of it. As I moved, the chair tilted over and fell to the floor with a crash. I lost my footing and stumbled to the side until my back thudded into the wall.

  Sport let out another bark in the living room.

  “What was that, Mommy?”

  I heard the woman answer, her voice tense: “I don’t know.”

  “Is someone here?”

  “Ssh, Larry. I don’t know.”

  I tried to move to the door, to get out, but I felt if I let go of the wall I would topple over. The shadows whirled around me. My thoughts were muddy and confused. Red and blue lights seemed to flash in the darkness as if police cars were closing in on me. Somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard my mother sobbing.

  “Is someone in there?”

  That was the woman, calling from the living room. Her voice was soft, tentative, afraid. Sport came into the archway, wagging his tail. He let out another happy bark, this one at me. I stared at him dumbly, my mouth hanging open.

  “Is someone in there?” the woman called again from the living room. “I’m calling the police right now!”

  Then the dining room light snapped on.

  I saw the woman—the woman from the photographs in the kitchen. She was staring at me from the archway. Her expression was both frightened and stern. She had the little boy clutched against her leg. He stared at me too, his eyes wide and worried. Sport stood beside them, barking and wagging his tail.

  “Who are you?” she said. “What are you doing in my house? What do you want?” But her eyes softened as she looked at me. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “My God, look at you. Are you ill?”

  I couldn’t answer her. I could only gape at her, dazed. I didn’t quite know where I was anymore. I couldn’t quite figure out what was happening. There was so much confusion. The lights flashing. The dog barking. My mother crying.

  “Mom?” I said then. “Mom . . . I’m so sorry.”

  And I slid down the wall to the floor.

  PART IV

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Fever

  This time the past came back to me in fragments and in dreams.

  I was in a courtroom—but the courtroom was bizarre. The angles of the walls slanted in and out as the place got larger and smaller. The judge’s bench was huge. It towered above me, seeming to soar up toward a ceiling as high as the sky. The judge was an older man with a lot of silver hair. He glared down at me from his great height where I sat at the defense table far, far below. The defense table seemed to sit in a pool of glaring light with the rest of the court in shadows around me. In that glaring light, I felt exposed
and vulnerable, put on display like a butterfly pinned to a board.

  I was on trial for the murder of my friend Alex Hauser. Alice Boudreaux, the county prosecutor, a squat woman with frosted blond hair, was marching back and forth in front of me. She was talking to the jury, wagging her finger in my direction. The jury box was sunk in deep shadow. All I could see of the jurors were a dozen pairs of eyes, gleaming in the darkness, staring at me where I sat in the glaring light.

  “The defense will tell you that Mr. West passed a lie detector test—and that’s true,” Boudreaux said as she marched back and forth, “but when you consider the other evidence, the overwhelming evidence against him, passing that test only proves what an accomplished liar he truly is. Consider this: By his own admission, he’s almost certainly the last person to have seen the victim alive. He and the victim argued violently before the victim went into the park. Traces of the victim’s blood were found on the defendant’s clothing. The murder weapon had his fingerprints on it and his DN A.” She stopped in her pacing and leveled a finger directly at me. “This is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the only possible verdict is guilty.”

  Her words sent a cold jolt up my spine. I knew, of course, that it was Waterman who had put the traces of Alex’s blood on my clothes. It was the Homelanders themselves, as I found out later, who had planted the murder weapon with my DN A. The whole thing was a frame-up from start to finish. And yet as I listened to the prosecutor tick off the evidence against me, I was sickened by the idea that people all around me were believing her.

  I turned to look at them—at the other people in that distorted dream courtroom. I saw dozens of people sitting in the weird, shifting shadows behind me. Even in the dark that came and went as the walls moved in and out, I recognized some of them. People from school, teachers, students. People I’d grown up with. Relatives. Some of their faces were illuminated for moments at a time by spotlights that seemed to shine out of nowhere and pick them out of the dark. I saw my friends—Josh and Rick and Miler—leaning forward intently, listening intently to every word the prosecutor said. I saw Beth, casting me quiet looks and gestures of encouragement whenever I turned to her. I saw my father, frowning angrily at the prosecutor as he watched her moving back and forth across the courtroom.

  And I saw my mother. She was sitting beside my father and he had his arm around her. She wasn’t crying now, but I could see by her pallor and her unnaturally bright eyes that she was devastated; terrified by what was happening to her son. I felt the terrible weight of her grief and fear. And I felt the terrible weight of my own guilt for having chosen the path that made her feel this way.

  Then I spotted Mr. Sherman. He was sitting near one shifting wall. He saw me look at him. He smiled at me and nodded, as if some secret communication were passing between us.

  The sight of him made me nauseous. I felt the movement of the shifting, shadowy room inside me as if I were standing on a ship in a raging sea. Some lines from the Bible went through my mind, a passage about sailors in a storm:

  They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble . . .

  I wanted to cry out to the Lord too, but what could I cry? He knew what none of my friends or family knew: that I wanted to be found guilty—that I had to be found guilty for the plan to work. All I could ask was that he would comfort the people who loved me, that he would comfort my mom especially . . .

  I turned away from Sherman to face the front of the room again. There was the prosecutor, her face pressed terrifyingly close, her features all distorted as she shrieked at me:

  “Guilty!”

  Startled, I snapped out of the fever dream—but not out of the fever. For a moment, I was awake in a haze of heat and sickness. Where was I? What was happening to me? The room I was in was a foggy, shifting blur.

  “Mom . . . ,” I heard myself groan.

  And I heard her answer, “Ssh. It’s all right now.”

  I turned eagerly to the voice, lifting my hand. I felt a cool hand take mine. I searched for my mother’s face. And there she was . . . But wait, no, it wasn’t my mother. It was another woman. Blond, weary. Did I know her? Yes . . . at least I’d seen her before . . . But I couldn’t quite remember who she was. Still, her voice was gentle and comforting.

  “Just lie quietly.”

  She put a washcloth on my forehead. It was cool and damp, and the feel of it against my burning skin was incredibly soothing.

  “Guilty . . . ,” I said.

  “No, no, no,” she murmured. “It’s going to be all right.”

  I shook my head at her. It would never be all right. “Guilty . . . guilty . . . ,” I tried to explain.

  From far away, I heard another voice: “Is the man dying, Mommy?”

  “No, sweetheart,” she said. “He’s just sick and tired, that’s all.”

  I held on to her hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “I know. Just rest.”

  I felt myself sinking again, falling down and down and down into the foggy world of the past . . .

  “Look I’m just asking you to think logically here. I just want you to ask yourself some simple, logical questions about the things you’ve been taught to believe. That’s not evil, is it, Charlie? Asking questions is just what a teacher is supposed to do. Isn’t it?”

  The voice was murmuring low—practically whispering— in my ear. There was nothing else. Just darkness. Just that voice. I knew the voice, but I couldn’t place it right away, couldn’t figure out whose voice it was.

  “I mean, when you get a different set of facts, you have to reconsider the situation. Right? You might think the sky is always blue or the grass is always green, but if you wake up one morning and the grass is red, well, you have to reformulate your opinions around those observations. Different information requires a different worldview.”

  Slowly, as if lights were coming up on a stage in a theater, the scene became visible around me. I was in a restaurant. It was in my hometown, but it was not a restaurant I knew. It was a sort of cocktail lounge in a mall. It was dark with black walls, low lights, small tables, far apart from each other. There was a bar where men sat slumped over their drinks while a basketball game played soundlessly on the TV on the wall.

  This was not the kind of place I would normally go to. It was sleazy. People sitting around drinking in the middle of the afternoon. But that’s exactly why we were here. It was the kind of place where no one we knew would see us.

  I turned to look at the man who was speaking to me. It was Mr. Sherman, my old history teacher. Again, the sight of him made me feel kind of ill, as if the room were going up and down on a stormy sea. He was close to me now, sitting right next to me in a booth seat at a small table. He was leaning toward me over our lunch plates. I could feel his breath as he spoke.

  “Look, no one likes to abandon cherished beliefs,” he went on in that insinuating murmur. “I mean, we all find these old superstitions comforting and reassuring—I know that. No one likes to find out that something he was taught as a child by his parents or teachers might be wrong. But you have to be realistic. You have to consider the facts.”

  I looked at him. I forced myself to nod, as if I were considering his words, as if he were making headway in convincing me. To be honest, I didn’t much like pretending in that way, but that was what I was supposed to do. That was the job Waterman had given me. I was supposed to make Sherman think he was changing my mind, convincing me to join the Homelanders.

  But all the while, I could see right through him. I mean, I had taken history from him two years in a row. I knew exactly the way he argued. He would begin by making these broad generalizations that had an element of truth to them. He would say: You have to use your reason. Or: When the facts change, you have to change your opinion. Which, of course, are true statements as far as they go. But
it’s easy to twist even the truth and use it for false purposes.

  Now Sherman went on, murmuring in my ear: “As long as you were living your safe, middle-class life, you thought everything in America was perfect. You were all full of big words like ‘liberty and justice for all,’ and you thought that was the situation you were in. But now things have changed. Now you’re being falsely accused, aren’t you? You’re being railroaded into prison for a murder you didn’t commit. And all of that is being done by the very American system you respected and trusted.”

  This was such typical Sherman, it almost made me laugh. You thought everything in America was perfect. That was just dumb! I wasn’t some kind of slaphappy idiot or blind patriot. I knew there were problems and evils here just like there are problems and evils everywhere there are human beings. But over time, no other country has been more free or caused more freedom to spread around the world or protected freedom more around the world. And if people aren’t free, what are they? If you don’t start with that, what have you got?

  That’s what I was thinking, but that’s not what I said. What I said was, “Yeah . . . yeah, I guess I see what you mean. But what about these people you’re with—these Islamo-fascists seem like pretty nasty types to me.”

  Sherman made a motion with his hand, brushing this objection aside as if it were nothing. “Look, you know me, Charlie. I don’t believe in any God or religion. That’s just old-fashioned superstitious stuff from another age. But these people are committed to bringing this unfair system down, and that’s what I’m committed to also. When the smoke clears, that’s when we’ll make our real move, that’s when we’ll turn this country into a place where there’s no unfairness at all, where everyone has the same amount of money and property, and where no one says anything hateful, or treats anyone unfairly.”

  “Because you’ll be telling them not to,” I couldn’t help saying. “You’ll be deciding for them what’s right and what’s wrong and making them do it.”