Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  Mercifully, she passed out then, her head falling limp, her mouth hanging open. She started snoring. I drove crosstown toward the expressway.

  I took her out to Astoria first, to Lauren's place. But the brick row-house was dark. Lauren wasn't home. Of course. I sat out front in the car and dialed her number again. The phone rang and rang, and then the machine picked up. I gave a curse and broke the connection. Damn her.

  I glanced at the girl in the seat beside me. She sat slumped and limp and snoring, dead to life. From where I sat, I could still catch traces of her perfume. She probably had a house key in that pink purse of hers. But what then? I couldn't just leave her inside alone. And the thought of waiting around for Lauren to turn up—if she ever did—was more than I could stomach.

  I took off again. Got the car back on the expressway and headed toward my mother's house. The pitted expressway pavement thumped and rattled under my tires. The late traffic streaked by on either side of me, red taillights pulling away up ahead, white headlights coming toward me in the oncoming lanes. The billboards, the grimy factories, and the bright main streets of Queens gave way to malls and gas stations and twinkling houses out amid the rolling shadow-shapes of trees on midnight lanes.

  I cursed Lauren the whole way. What had she gotten me into? Something was up with this kid; something was wrong. She was scared—scared of the cops—scared of something, that was for sure. Her muttered words came back to me. Can't. Back there. Mom's. They'll find me. She didn't want to go home because if she went home, someone would find her. Maybe the cops, maybe someone else. Someone.

  She was still out cold when I pulled into the driveway of my mother's house. I sighed again as I killed the engine. It was going to be hell getting her inside.

  Out here, away from the city, the bracing night was full of the tang of autumn leaves. I went around to the car's passenger side and pulled the door open. I ducked inside and reached over her to release the seat belt. As I took it off her, Serena fell forward. I caught hold of her. She began muttering.

  "Come on," I said.

  "Why do I...?"

  She protested dully as I turned her around and worked her body to the edge of the seat. Her eyelids fluttered a little and she made a confused gesture with her hand as I got hold of her. One of her shoes had already fallen off in the car. I took off the other one and tossed it in with the first. Then I got one arm under her knees and the other under her arms, hoisted her into the air, and kicked the door shut. Her head fell against my shoulder. I turned with her in my arms to survey the houses around me, dark, most of them, hunkered under their oaks and maples. I hoped that meant the neighbors were asleep. God knew what they would think if they saw me carrying this drunken teenaged girl into the house.

  I carried Serena up the front steps. I had to set her on her feet there so I could unlock the door. She swayed and took hold of me. She began trying to open her eyes, trying to figure out what was happening. Her head fell forward.

  "Sick," she said.

  "All right. Hold on."

  I managed to get her inside and hurried her down the hall to the bathroom. I got the lights on and threw the toilet seat up just in time. She fell on the bowl as if it were water in the desert. I could hear her retching violently as I went back to shut the front door.

  When I returned to the bathroom, she was sprawled on her ass, her legs spread, her dress up, her pink underpants showing. She was gripping the toilet rim to keep from falling onto her back. She stared up at me with her mouth open, mascara raccooning her eyes. Then she hauled herself up to the bowl again and vomited some more. The noise was loud and unpleasantly liquid. The smell of the vomit filled the room. When she was done, she clung to the toilet with her face over the bowl, grunting. After a while, she started to cry.

  The housekeeper I'd hired kept the place in good shape. There were washcloths on the wall rack and everything. I grabbed a cloth and ran some cold water on it.

  Serena sat there, holding to the toilet rim. She cried like a baby—exactly the way a baby cries, with that same crumpled look of grieved incomprehension, the same wild appeal to the Great Powers: How can this be? How can this be? I got down on one knee beside her.

  "All right, all right," I said.

  I wiped the flecks of vomit from her lips and cheeks. There were lumps of it on the front of her sparkly pink dress, too. I scraped the washcloth over the thin fabric, feeling the motion of her little breasts underneath.

  She sobbed and gasped.

  "All right," I said. "Take it easy."

  "I didn't..." she said and her face crumpled like a baby's face again. "I didn't know..."

  "Take it easy, Serena. Shush."

  When I was finished cleaning her, I tossed the washcloth up into the sink above me. I pushed her short hair back behind one ear. "Are you done?"

  She shook her head. She cried. "I didn't, I swear—" Then she turned and put her head in the bowl and retched some more. It was just convulsions now. There wasn't anything left in her. I fetched the washcloth and wet it and wiped her face again. Her skin looked rougher than before and more flushed. Maybe I'd wiped off her makeup. I couldn't be sure. I don't know very much about makeup. All I know is that now she looked like a child who'd hurt herself while playing dress-up and was lying on the floor and bawling in her grown-up clothes.

  "I need to pee," she said miserably.

  I left her there, shutting the door behind me. I went to the front stairs and jogged up. It was the first time I'd been upstairs since I'd come back to the house. The linen closet was on the second-floor landing. I got a spare blanket and a pillow and a couple of towels out of it. As I was piling them up in my arms, I could feel the presence of my mother's room down at the end of the hall. I didn't look that way for fear I would see my mother's ghost, standing in the shadows down there, watching me.

  I went downstairs again, back to the bathroom. Just as I arrived, the door opened. Serena stepped out weakly, holding on to the edge of the door for support. She looked at the blankets and the pillow under my arm.

  "I really feel sick," she said pitifully.

  "I know you do, sweetheart. It'll be all right."

  "I mean, I can't ... I don't think I can do anything tonight. Anyway, I don't have any condoms or anything, y'know?"

  It took a second before I understood her. Then I laughed. "You don't need condoms, you screwball. You're going to bed."

  She massaged her forehead with one hand, confused. "I don't ... I'm sorry. Who are you?"

  "I'm a friend of your mother's, remember? Come on. Let's find you a place to sleep."

  She sniffled once, then started to cry again.

  I put my arm around her, guided her through the kitchen and out into the garage. I let her walk ahead of me along the narrow corridor between the wall and my mother's Volvo. She was crying and sniffling the whole way. I got her into the television room. I figured that was the best place for her. I'd be able to look after her in there.

  I put the pillow on the end of the long sofa. Tossed the blanket on the coffee table. Laid the towels on the floor in case she needed to puke again. Serena stood, meanwhile, swaying, nodding, her eyes falling shut and starting open and drifting shut again. She'd lapsed now into little moans and half-formed phrases. The vomiting had sobered her up for a while, but the drunk was coming back. I could see she was close to passing out again.

  "I didn't ... didn't know ... I swear..."

  I sat her down on the sofa. She gaped and gulped and whimpered in a small, self-pitying sort of way. I tipped her gently over until she lay with her head on the pillow. I covered her with the blanket. As I tucked the blanket under her chin, she worked her hand free and took hold of my hand.

  "I swear..." she murmured. She licked her lips, fighting to keep her eyes open.

  I perched on the edge of the couch and sat there, holding her hand. She brought my hand close to her face and nuzzled it like a child with a teddy bear or a security blanket. I looked down at her, studied he
r features carefully. In all truth, I couldn't tell whether she resembled me or not.

  She was on the brink of unconsciousness now. She shuddered with crying.

  "I didn't know, I didn't ... swear..." she whimpered.

  "Quiet now, Serena," I said. "Just lie quiet. It'll be all right."

  "I didn't know they were going to kill him," she said.

  Then she was asleep.

  The Universal

  When I was sure Serena was unconscious, I left her there and went back through the garage into the kitchen. Now I needed a drink myself. I'd bought some groceries that afternoon, including a couple of bottles of chardonnay. I poured myself a glass of wine and downed a good-sized portion of it in a single swig. I came gasping out of it and set the glass on the counter, holding on to the base as if it would keep me steady.

  I didn't know they were going to kill him.

  I was going to have a long night, wondering what the hell she meant by that. In my heart, I was afraid I already knew. The terror in Serena's eyes when I first approached her. Her fear of the police. Her reluctance to go home where "they" might find her. It all made sense if she had witnessed a murder. If she had witnessed someone being killed or knew about it somehow. If she was running from someone or if, more likely, in her clumsy, drunken, stupid, teenaged way, she was wandering around the city waiting for whatever catastrophic thing was going to happen next, hiding sometimes and sometimes haunting the very places where the axe might fall, because she couldn't stand the waiting, the suspense.

  Well, the suspense was mine now, too. Until morning, at least, when I could talk to her again and find out more. There was no point even thinking about it until then. Good luck trying not to.

  I let the wineglass go and walked over to the security keypad by the door to the garage. I pressed in the code to arm the house alarm and watched the light over the pad go from green to red. That made me feel a little safer. It was all I could do for now.

  I went back to the counter. I took another long gulp of the wine, then refilled the glass. I looked at the window, at my reflection there on the surface of the night. I could feel the dark house hunkering silently around me. I could feel my mother's ghost moving in the upstairs hall. I could hear her whispering up there, pathetic, lost: What happened to me? Where did I go? I could feel the graveyard chill of her breath on the back of my neck. Where did I go?

  Her disease had progressed through stages so subtle no one knew. So many of the things I loved about her stayed the same. Her slow, soft, gentle manner, her wistful wondering at things, her seemingly bottomless fascination with my own childish concerns—these all remained as her amygdala began to misfire more and more often, as it began to sing its mad song of coincidence and meaning, continually unearthing some new connection between one idea and another, one event or fact and another, until she'd filled the Spiral Notebooks, working out her whole grand historical scheme.

  How much of this deterioration was apparent to my father earlier on, I just don't know. He was always distant, internal, burdened, impossible to read. Even when the great tragic love of his life was playing itself out behind the scenes—a story, really, so swept by tidal emotions it could've been an opera—he went about the business of a suburban bankruptcy attorney with impenetrable blandness. The line of his thin lips never altered; the eyes behind his square glasses never betrayed more than an empty blink or stare. He comes back to me in his white shirt always, with his tie always knotted, his long face pasty, never a slick black hair out of place.

  So I don't really know what he knew. But for the longest time, I know I knew nothing. In fact, I always sort of liked those dreamy little trances of hers, her secret seizures. They seemed so typical of her somehow, so much of a piece with her sweet, wondering nature. If I had known, if anyone had known, what they really were, she could've gotten medicine for them. The damage to her brain could've been slowed, even stopped.

  I refilled my glass, standing there, listening to my mother's ghost pottering around upstairs, her little sighing plaints: What happened to me? I had a life, a husband, my children. How I loved my children. Where did I go? I went into a reverie and when I came back, I was gone.

  I knocked down another shot of wine, feeling the heat of it spreading through me now like a stain marking the paths and byways of my bloodstream.

  I didn't know, I told her. I was just a kid. I didn't know.

  I didn't know they were going to kill him.

  I collared the wine bottle and lifted my glass and carried them both out to the television room.

  She was just a little slip of a being, Serena was. Curled up under her blanket like that, she still left room for me to sit at the end of the sofa. I pushed at her feet and wedged myself between them and the sofa arm. I picked up the remote and turned on the enormous TV. I cranked the sound way down low, but there wasn't a chance in hell it would wake her.

  "After my husband died, I was listless," said a cherubic old woman, blown up to the size of a Volkswagen on the wall-sized screen. "I couldn't eat. I'd lie awake worrying all night long. Finally, my best friend said to me, 'This just isn't like you. Why don't you talk to your doctor about Cruxor?'"

  And I'll be damned if that woman wasn't transformed right before my wondering eyes into her old happy, gregarious self.

  "Man, I gotta get me some of that shit," I said, knocking back another slug of wine.

  I settled in, bouncing from channel to channel.

  A schoolful of Buddhist teachers murdered by "rebels" in Thailand, facedown in the yellow dust, the backs of their white shirts savaged with red.

  A Christian village in Nigeria destroyed by "militia," clay huts gutted, orange flames snickering against the pale blue sky.

  Jews blown up by "Palestinians," in Israel. Muslims castrated and beheaded by "insurgents" in Iraq.

  I snorted to myself. Who did they think they were fooling? I wondered ... a little drunkenly now, I must confess. These highborn Lords of the News, spoon-feeding us their carefully selected diet of euphemisms. Rebels, militia, Palestinians, insurgents, French youths. Did they think we were sitting here, thinking, Hm, I guess those dark-skinned, angry-looking killers named Muhammed all over the world aren't radical Muslims after all. Now I will not be prejudiced against their religion. Didn't they understand that we were bouncing on the sofa, screaming all the louder for our frustration, Hey, News-clowns! Tell the truth for once in your useless lives! Say the word! Say some word. Islamo-fascists! Jihadis! Something. Ya dumb fucks. Ya dumb, useless, lying, elitist fucks.

  Ah, well. I suppose that's neither here nor there. I mean, it just makes me angry now, you know, because maybe it would've been a little easier for me to figure out what the truth was if the people who were supposed to be bringing me information hadn't felt duty-bound to guide me instead into right-thinking with their lies, lies, lies. But really—really—it's neither here nor there. The important thing—the jarring, weird, and, yes, ultimately relevant thing—was what happened next.

  I changed the channel. And "Hey!" I murmured aloud in my surprise.

  Because—what do you think?—there he was again! Patrick Piersall. Weird, no? Well, it seemed weird to me. I mean, I hadn't thought of the guy more than five times since I was twelve years old, and here he was suddenly appearing on my TV twice in one day.

  It was a rerun of The Universal. Now he was Augustus Kane in his prime, standing sleek in his silvery unitard in front of one of those papier-mâché boulders they seemed to have on other planets back then. Beside him was his archenemy, Smoldar of the Borgons, aka some poor bastard who dreamed of being Brando and wound up wearing a grotesque full-face mask with stringy black hair sprouting all over it.

  "You Mindlings command us to. Live in Peace lest we destroy ourselves," said the admiral with his signature delivery, looking up at the painted sky in which his invisible captors hid. "But we would rather be free—free to choose our paths without the interference of a controlling hand no matter how benevolent. For wi
thout freedom—without choice—there can be no virtue—even in doing good. Without freedom—without a chance to choose virtue for ourselves—we can never find our destiny."

  Now here's the thing. There was some channel—the Sci-Fi Channel—that played these reruns every night. So stumbling on Piersall again like this wasn't really that much of a coincidence at all. But I didn't know that. To me, the synchronicity seemed startling. More than that, it seemed downright scary. It made me start to worry again about the whole family-madness idea, the old amygdala going haywire. That was the last thing I needed on my mind right now.

  So I had this brainstorm: I called up the TiVo, the digital-recording system. I programmed it to record anything that Piersall was in. That way, there would be no more coincidences, you see? The next time Patrick Piersall showed up on my television, it would be because I had chosen to record him, not because I was turning into my mother, seeing some secret network of connections governing the unseen world.

  What can I say? I'd had too much to drink, all right? It made sense to me at the time.

  And, of course, in the end, it made all the difference in the world.

  TUESDAY

  Breakfast with Serena

  I was in the kitchen making coffee when Serena stumbled in. Gray, small, and uncertain, she stood wavering in the doorway to the garage. Her narrow shoulders were hunched. Her face was screwed up painfully against the morning light. Her party dress hung on her like a wrinkled pink rag.

  "You remember where the bathroom is?" I asked her.

  She nodded weakly and shuffled across the room and off down the hall.

  I set the coffeemaker going. Got some eggs and bread, butter and milk out of the refrigerator. Set them on the counter by the sink. I could see the backyard out of the window as I worked. It was a beautiful blue autumn day, the oaks red, the elm trees yellow, the rolling grass pale green. I had the window cracked open a little, and the cool air came to me. The smell of the dying leaves made my heart ache for the past. I used to play tag with my friends on that stretch of grass beneath the trees. My mother would stand right where I was now, making lunch, washing dishes, watching me.