Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. Single moms. Divorcé dads. They always think the kids are doing great. Cathy and I hear it all the time, in church, in our children's schools. How're the kids doing? They're doing great! They're always doing great. Until they're not doing great, until suddenly they're in rehab or on medication or off at some special camp for suicidal teens or whatever. Divorce fucks kids up.

  "What happened?" I asked her.

  She laid the photo down again. "She's gone."

  "Serena is gone? You mean she ran away?"

  She waved the cigarette in circles. "Moved out."

  "Moved out? She's a sophomore, you said. She's—what?—sixteen? Call the cops; make her come back."

  "I did that. She just leaves again. What am I gonna do? Chain her to the radiator? After a while, you know, you keep calling the cops, they set Child Protective Services on you. I'm not gonna let them put her in some foster home..."

  I sighed, rubbed the back of my neck. "Well, where is she?"

  "I don't know. She stays with friends, one friend, then another. I don't even know most of them."

  "Friends like other kids? Kids with parents? Is she staying with other families?"

  "Sometimes. I don't know. No. No, I don't think so." She averted her eyes the way people do when you press them for details and they don't want to talk about the details because then they'll have to face them straight on themselves. Holding her cigarette between two fingers, she massaged her forehead with her pinkie and thumb. "She gets involved with these characters. They get their claws into her..."

  Oh, wonderful, I thought. These characters ... with their claws in her... I had to fight down a flash of irritation. People make such messes for themselves—for themselves and for their children, too. And yes, I knew I shouldn't've passed judgment on her. And yes, I did feel bad for her, too. Poor woman, the way she looked, her face all swollen and pocked as if every day since I'd seen her last had been a punch in the jaw. For all her smart mouth and her bravado, Lauren had always needed someone to take charge of her, someone to lead her to a better place. Guys took advantage of that—guys like Carl—guys like me, like I was back then. She wanted leading? We led her, all right. We led her where we wanted to go, and then dumped her when we wanted to go somewhere else. Him off in Arizona, me on the Hill. And her left behind, looking like this. So, aside from all the petty stuff—you know, my smugness at having a good life, my satisfaction at doing better than an old girlfriend—I really did feel bad for her and guilty, to some degree. All the same, she'd sure made a mess of things, a mess for herself and a mess for her daughter. And it irritated me, I have to confess.

  "Have you told her father about this?" I asked her. "Have you told Carl?"

  She answered with an exasperated Pah!

  "Well, what do you want me to do?"

  "Talk to her," she said. "Just go talk to her. Get her to come home."

  "That's ridiculous, Lauren, I don't even know her."

  "I know but ... she needs someone like you, Jason. She needs a man, a father figure, someone who's not an asshole. That's always been the big thing about you. I always remembered that. I mean, with all the fucked-up stuff we did and everything, you were never an asshole, not like Carl. I mean, this Jesus shit you're into—I don't know what all that's about. I guess everyone has their drug of choice, so fine, whatever, but ... You're the only guy I know who hasn't turned out to be a piece of shit. Serena's gonna hurt herself or get hurt or get pregnant or I don't know what and ... I can't be Daddy for her. I can't reach her. Please. Go and talk to her. She might listen to you."

  I had no idea what to say to that. Baffled, I shook my head. My eyes were turned down to Serena's photograph. That child-woman face, the pouting Little Girl Lost, was gazing up at me. It seemed to me now that she did have her mother's eyes, after all, those same hurt, defiant eyes, begging for someone to take charge of her.

  "Look," I said. "I'm sorry. I mean, I want to help you, Lauren. I do. I'd like to help Serena, too, but ... This doesn't make any sense to me. I don't even know what I'm doing here. You and me—it's a long time ago now. You don't just call a guy up after all these years. Not for something like this. She must have a teacher or guidance counselor or something..."

  She made that exasperated noise again, the same noise: Pah!

  "What would I even say to her? How would I even find her?"

  "I don't know ... They go to this club all the time, her friends and her. The Den..." Her cigarette had burned to the nub. She let it burn, holding it up beside her head. With her other hand, she pinched the bridge of her nose. She shut her eyes. A crystal tear shone on her lashes.

  "Lauren..." I said. "Really..."

  "Shit. Just do this, will you, Jason. For old times' sake. I'm scared, okay? Every day, I'm so scared ... I can't sleep at night ... Will you just do this? Please."

  I'm not sure what I was about to tell her. Something, some excuse, to get me out of there. It all just seemed wrong to me somehow. Wrong, suspect, illogical, bizarre, maybe even dangerous. I was an idiot to have come. I had let myself be tempted by—whatever had tempted me—the promise of schadenfreude or the sexual charge of an old flame or the vague, imaginary prospect of an emotional adventure. And I was tempted now, too—by her ridiculous faith in me and by the chance to play her knight in shining armor and the chance to play Big Daddy to some pretty teenaged girl.

  But no. I was finished here. I was sorry I'd come. I was sorry I'd left my sweet house on the Hill for this shabby rental with its secondhand couch and its furniture that came in boxes. I wanted to get out of here and get the hell home as fast as I could.

  I started to push back from the table. I started to say, "I'm sorry, Lauren—"

  But she dropped her hand—the hand that was pinching the bridge of her nose. She dropped it to the photograph lying between us. She lifted the photograph by its frame. She waggled it in front of me, grimacing in her anger.

  "Shit, Jason," she said. "Look at her, would you? You have to do this. I mean, come on. Look at her! Why do you think I called you? She's not Carl's kid. She's yours."

  Waiting for Dark

  I waited for dark in the television room. I was supposed to be upstairs. I was supposed to be cleaning out my mother's room so the Realtor could stage the house for potential buyers. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. I waited in the television room instead.

  There was a talk show on the massive screen. Some hip young host, a fidgety young guy, was sitting behind a desk against a backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. He was interviewing a pudgy, dissolute older actor and frantically working his hands and flashing glances at the audience as if he feared they might be as bored as he was.

  I didn't recognize the guest at first. Then—wait a minute—yes, I did. Just as I was about to change the channel, I thought: Son of a gun, that's Patrick Piersall.

  So it was. God, look at him, I thought. Of course, I had no idea just then the part he would ultimately play in all this, but still, I was riveted. When I was a miserable twelve-year-old, he was the admiral of The Universal on the TV series of the same name. Augustus Kane, the wise, battle-hardened leader of an international crew of humans and androids sent into space to find a new home for the denizens of a dying Earth. He was sleek and muscular then in his skintight spaceship unitard. He had coiffed, wavy red-brown hair. Smooth, classic matinee-idol features highlighted by a hot, steady gaze. Oh, and the famous, mellifluous voice, its signature syncopated rhythm. Ram. The force field. Full speed! If those Borgons escape. The galaxy. Is done for!

  No wonder I hadn't recognized him at first. What a roly-poly little wreck of a man he'd become. The dark jacket he'd closed artfully over an orange V-necked pullover couldn't hide his bowling-ball belly. And the once-dashing features were puffy and distorted, with a complexion like veiny yogurt, the sign of a lifelong drinker. His toupee was awful and sat like a hat over his grizzled sideburns.

  Only the voice was the same, the liquid tone and the clipped, charge
d phrasing. And the dramatic gestures of his hands, too, as they chopped the air.

  "Television. I think. Is such a wonderful vehicle for. Reality," he said as the host sat quietly climbing out of his skin with boredom. "And that's what my new show is about. Real crimes. Real mysteries. Murders. Disappearances. In which the investigation is still open, and the guilty party has not. Yet. Been found."

  In other words, I'm a fat, has-been boozehound who couldn't get arrested in show business, and one of these True Crime show rip-offs was the only job I could find.

  I changed the channel. There was a building blowing up: an ad for a movie. I gazed at it, but I didn't watch it. I just stared, thinking about Lauren, about Serena.

  Look at her, Jason. Look at her. Lauren had kept saying the same thing to me, kept waving the framed photograph of her daughter in front of my face. Anyone can see she's yours. Look at her.

  Oh, come on, Lauren. I was so upset, I almost shouted at her. I pushed back from the table, stood up from my chair. Don't pull that crap on me. Come on! How stupid do you think I am?

  But she kept holding out the photograph, kept saying, Look at her.

  And I did look at her. And my breath caught and my stomach felt as if it were circling the drain.

  Her story was plausible. It was very plausible, knowing Lauren, knowing me. She said she had sensed, those many years ago, that I was going to break up with her. It was plain enough to see with all the changes I was going through. So she stopped taking her birth-control pills. She wanted to get pregnant before I had the chance to tell her I was leaving. That way, it would seem like an accident; it wouldn't seem as if she had done it on purpose to hold us together. She wanted to fool herself in this as much as me.

  But she waited too long to speak up. Even though her period was already one week late, even though the test she'd gotten at the drugstore was positive, she wanted to be completely certain before breaking the news. Then came that day out by the harbor when I told her it was over. That changed the whole scenario. Now, she couldn't tell me about the baby. Now it would be obvious even to herself what a desperate ploy it was. She was too proud for that—too proud to go through with it once she could no longer lie to herself about her own motives. So she walked away grandly without saying a word, taking her fetus with her.

  She had planned to have an abortion, she said, but the affair with Carl started up so soon after our breakup and he was so enthusiastic about the idea of being a father that she didn't see anything wrong with telling him the baby was his.

  It's not like I'm asking you for child support, she said to me. Shit, Jason, I'm not asking you for anything. I just need you to go talk to her, that's all, before something bad happens. Come on, man. Please. There's no one else I can turn to.

  I didn't know whether to believe any of this or not. I didn't know whether the sick swirling certainty in my gut was an intuition that she was telling the truth or just guilt and fear. Because, I mean, what if it was true? What if Serena was my daughter? How was I going to break it to Cathy?

  And what was I going to do now?

  I thought about it, sitting on the couch with the TV going. And then I stopped thinking about it. I stopped thinking about anything, stopped seeing anything. I stared into space as evening came on outside the shuttered windows.

  Now, it always kind of worried me when I did that: zoned out and stared into space like that. My mother used to do the same thing. It was the first sign of her madness.

  When I was small, she would sit with me in the grass in our backyard. She would hold me on her lap and we would look at things together. She had light red hair that fell around her face and teased her mouth when the wind pushed at it. Her skin was pale and freckled. She had clear green eyes. I don't remember thinking she was beautiful, though I know she was. What I do remember is feeling that she was part of the landscape: the grass, the dandelions, the whispering leaves, my mother. Anyway, we would look at things and she would talk about them in her low voice, in her gentle, wondering way. How do the ants know to run for their lives when you come near them? How do the bees tell each other when to swarm and when to fly off? How did anyone ever imagine they could make flour out of wheat or bread out of flour? Then sometimes, in the middle of all this wondering, she would drift away, drift like a leaf on the surface of a slow stream into a silent, distant dream state, gazing. I would climb up over the front of her and touch her cheeks and put my fingers to her lips and press my face up close to hers, but she'd be gone.

  As it turned out, those little dazes of hers—they were a kind of seizure, a sort of low-grade epileptic fit. Every time she had one, they did damage to her brain, to a part of her brain called the amygdala. The way I understand it, the amygdala makes emotional connections for you. You see an angry face, and your amygdala tells you to be afraid. You see a chocolate bar, and it tells you to be happy. When your amygdala goes wonky, like my mother's did, you start making all kinds of connections you shouldn't. You start to see a lot of coincidences everywhere, and every coincidence seems amazing and meaningful. It's like one long "Aha!" A cartoon lightbulb over your head that can't be turned off.

  The doctors said the condition wasn't usually genetic, but they couldn't be sure in her case. Usually, they said, it was brought on by a trauma of some kind, a concussion, a fever, something like that. But with my mother, no one could figure out where it had come from. So it might've been inherited and it might've been passed on, in turn, to my brother and me. The doctors just didn't know.

  So I worried. Whenever I found myself gazing into space that way, the way I was doing that evening in the television room, I'd come back to myself and get worried that what happened to my mother was happening to me. Sometimes when I'd notice a coincidence, or when I'd feel a fact or an event was particularly significant or important, I wouldn't trust myself. I'd think: Is this the start of it? Is it happening to me, too?

  I came out of it now. Sitting there on the couch, I blinked and looked around. I thought of my mother, and a small clutch of anxiety tightened my chest.

  I forced myself to focus on the TV.

  There was a beautiful woman on the screen now. The sight of her reached through my troubled thoughts and touched off a small soothing cloud of desire in my loins. It was a soft-focus montage of a movie actress I recognized: Juliette Lovesey. There was Juliette stepping out of a car, Juliette walking down a red carpet, Juliette adjusting her bathing suit at the beach, all in slow motion. She was small and slender but shapely with a wonderful cleavage she kept on display. She had a face of fabulous fragility and yearning framed in achingly limp brown hair.

  Now there were images of another actress, Angelica Eden. I felt the stirring of lust again and again it comforted me. Angelica was gorgeous, too, but in a different way. She had sensuous, dark, animalistic features, night black hair, and blood red lips. She had breasts you could drown in, aggressive, engulfing. She was walking along a sidewalk somewhere next to the actor Todd Bingham, a skinny, pretty boy with a wispy little beard.

  "As these three mega-stars prepare for the opening of their new film—the first ever in holographic Real 3-D—the question is being asked all over Hollywood: Is this the end of civilization as we know it for Juliette and Todd?" So said the narrator, a perky female—maybe that same Sally Sterling girl, I don't know. "Rumors of an on-set romance between Todd and Angelica have sparked speculation that Todd's fairy-tale engagement to Juliette may be over."

  She droned on. The same old thing. The usual celebrity game of pegs and holes. Todd, Juliette, Angelica. A peg with a pretty-boy head attached, and two holes with pretty-girl heads and breasts. The peg slotted into one hole, then later slotted into another, and it was all supposed to matter in some way because the heads were so pretty. But they were still just pegs and holes; it was still just a game.

  "To add to the feverish gossip," the perky female narrator went on feverishly, "some sources close to the actress are saying that Juliette may be carrying Todd's child!"

>   That shook me. Whatever calm my lust had given me was gone on the instant. Talk of love triangles and pregnancy and desertion brought my own situation flooding back in on me: Lauren, Carl, Serena. I seized hold of the remote. I snapped off the TV. I leaned forward on the sofa in the gathering dark, my elbows propped on my thighs, my hands clasping and twisting against my lips. I prayed silently. What am I going to do, Lord? What should I do now?

  Then I sat in the silent television room, staring into space.

  Then, when deep night came, I went out to look for the girl.

  The Den

  The Den-the club where Lauren said Serena hung out—was in the old meatpacking district on Manhattan's Lower West Side. I was surprised to see how crowded the neighborhood was in the middle of the week like this. All the old butcher shops were dance clubs now. There were partygoers on every sidewalk, passing in the dark under the long awnings, in the lee of the grimy brick walls, or spilling over into the broad, cobbled streets. They moved in packs and pairs through the night from club to club, entryway to entry-way, cordon to cordon, line to line. The guys all looked alike to me: gawky dopes with spiky hair and untucked shirts, the long tails dangling over slacks or jeans. Each girl, on the other hand, was a sight to behold: young, some of them teens, some wearing small, sleek dresses and some in frilly taffeta, some wobbling on high heels they hadn't mastered yet, all of them poignant and pretty to my middle-aged eyes.

  I found The Den near the corner of Twelfth Avenue. The line there was maybe twenty couples long. I moved beside it to the entrance, catching the smell of perfume as I passed. The perfume smelled like candy or fruit, something little girls would wear playing dress-up. In front, the club was like the other clubs I'd seen, all but unmarked, a discreet sign on the brick wall, a cordon in front of a pair of massive doors.