Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  I shouted, "Serena!"

  She didn't stop. She just kept running down the middle of the street, her pink dress sparkling, then growing dim as she passed through patches of sun and patches of shadow.

  I was about to go after her. But just at that moment, the green Coupe de Ville came tearing around the corner.

  I heard a screech of tires, and there it was. It came from the right as if it had continued on the highway to the next exit, then doubled back. It came at speed, swerving into the glare of sunlight and bursting ahead on a straight course at the running Serena.

  I shouted again. "Watch out!" But there was no time to move, no time to think. I just stood there as Serena ran flailing toward the gleaming teeth of the monster's grille, as the grille plowed at her with a grinding roar. I just stood and watched and waited for the moment of impact.

  There was no impact. Suddenly the car stopped with a jolt. Serena never slowed. She kept on running, ran right around the big tank's headlight. The Cadillac's passenger door flew open. Serena clambered into the wide front seat. The car started moving again, was moving even as she pulled the door shut behind her.

  It was a rendezvous. She had known they would come for her. She had been waiting for them to rescue her from me.

  Now, already, as the car started toward me again, my astonishment and fear were beginning to morph into something else. I felt a poisoned emptiness inside me. I realized I had been betrayed. I realized I had been lied to. It was humiliating. Even as I stood there gaping, I wondered: Was anything she'd told me true? Had I been fooled completely?

  In the next second, the big green car rushed past me. I saw Serena inside as it went by. Her face was pressed to the window, twisted in a vulgar sneer. Her hand was held up beside her cheek. Her middle finger was stuck up in the air, stuck up at me.

  Then the car streaked away under the yellowing plane trees, through the slanting beams of sunlight and past the faded houses and their scraggly lawns. With another scream of rubber and road, its great, sleek body careened around the corner, blasting across the path of the shapeless old lady in her shapeless blue dress.

  And she—she just kept shuffling forward along the sidewalk, slowly, slowly approaching the whirlwind of dust and yellow leaves that lingered in the autumn air after the Cadillac was gone.

  The Real World

  "So where is she?" said Lauren.

  I was standing on the stoop of her row house. She was in the doorway, peering around me, looking for Serena.

  "She ran away," I said, and brusquely stepped past her into the house.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the mantelpiece in the living room. I looked angry. I was. At this point, it felt good to be angry. It felt better, anyway, than my other feeling—my feeling that Serena had made a jackass out of me.

  I sat on the sofa. I told Lauren what had happened. She sat in a wooden chair beside the fireplace, smoking one Kent after another from the box on the lamp stand while she listened. A couple of times as I talked, she laughed out of the side of her mouth or shook her head. A couple of times, she made that exasperated, disdainful sound of hers—Pah!—with the smoke blowing out on the breath of it.

  She was wearing the same kind of get-up as before, the sweater and skirt that made her look fleshy and ungainly. Her coarsened, bloated face and those damp, fierce, cynical eyes—so different from the way she looked when I first knew her—still came as a shock to me every time I looked at her.

  "I guess she must've called these punks while she was in the bathroom," I said. "She must've gotten the address off the realty flyer and told them where we were. She was just waiting for me to pull over and stop somewhere, so she could jump out and run off with them. I probably should've just stuck to the expressway and called the cops from the car."

  Lauren snorted, her elbow on the chair arm, the cigarette held straight up beside her ear. "That's my baby girl."

  "Do you think it was bullshit top to bottom?" I asked her. "The whole story? The murder in the swamp, and so on. You figure it was all lies?"

  Pah! "A true word out of that kid's mouth would die of loneliness. She's a born liar. I was there. I know." When I shrugged glumly, she gave me a shrewd once-over. "She really got you, didn't she?"

  I hesitated. My instinct was to stop talking. There were all these doubts and suspicions still swirling around in my brain, but my instinct was: Leave them alone. See, to be honest, as humiliated as I felt, this wasn't really a bad situation for me. The way things were, I could just tell myself that Serena's story was a pack of lies, and I'd be finished here. No cops, no courts, no killers. Nothing more for me to do. Just head back to Long Island, put my mother's house on the market, then fly home to hearth and family and never see these people ever again.

  But somehow that didn't work for me. Somehow I felt compelled to go on.

  "It just bothers me," I said. "Her story was so detailed, there were so many specifics. The way it looked, the way it sounded. Not the kind of things a girl like Serena could just make up. It's hard for me to believe it was all just an out-and-out lie."

  "Yeah, I know, she's good at that." Lauren waved the whole incident away with a casual gesture of her cigarette—a gesture so blithe and self-assured and unconcerned it made me want to knock her out of her chair ass over teakettle. "Kids. They're always fucking with your head one way or another. What can you do?"

  I could hear my voice begin to take that ultracalm patriarchal tone it gets when I begin to become enraged. "Maybe you're right. But, just as a suggestion, it might not be a bad idea to look into it a little further, make sure she's not in any real danger."

  "What do you want me to do, Jason? Call the FBI?"

  "No, but ... Does she have a computer? Does she go on any of those friend sites? MySpace or something?"

  "I don't know. How the hell would I know? God, I hope not. I hear all kinds of shit goes down on those things."

  "Well, you might want to check, Lauren. Find out if this guy Jamal is on her friends list—find out who she's hanging out with in general, you know."

  Pah! "Are you kidding? Go into her computer? Come on, Jason. She's sixteen years old. That's practically a grown woman. I hate to even think about the kind of shit I was into when I was sixteen. I'm not gonna go snooping around in her computer. It's like reading her diary or something."

  "Okay," I said—and my voice grew even more calm, even more patriarchal as I grew more enraged. "If that's the way you feel. But when you called me originally, you sounded kind of concerned about her."

  "I am concerned about her."

  "You told me you were so scared for her, you couldn't sleep."

  She made that blithe gesture with her cigarette again, that gesture that made me want to knock her down. "Sure, 'cause at that point, I thought she could be dead or something. I mean, she just vanished on me. She could've been in the hospital for all I knew. I mean, look, I'm sorry she took you on this whole wild-goose chase and everything, hurt your pride or whatever, but at least now I know she's safe. You did a good thing. I appreciate it, Jason, really."

  I had to draw a deep breath to keep that voice going, that calm fatherly voice that disguised my fury. "You feel pretty sure she's safe, then."

  "Oh, yeah," said Lauren. "Yeah, look—she's with a guy. She found some guy she wants to be with, and she's having that experience. That's all. I did the same thing when I was her age. He'll tell her she's special while he bangs her for a while, then, about three months or whatever, it'll suddenly occur to him that other girls have exactly the same thing between their legs that she's got between hers, and she'll be all, 'I thought I was special,' and he'll be all, 'Yeah, no, what I meant was you were a convenient warm, fuzzy hole for me to stick my dick in,' and she'll be all, like, 'Boo hoo hoo,' and she'll come home and sleep with her teddy bear in her own little bed and everything'll be back to normal."

  The gospels tell us to withhold judgment on other people's sins. I believe in that. But I'm not very good a
t doing it. I am pretty good at pretending to do it, though, so I sat there listening to this irresponsible horseshit Lauren was spewing with what I hoped was a more-or-less uncritical expression pasted on my face. Here, meanwhile, is the speech I was not making, the speech that I was making in my head and that I would go on making, revising and refining furiously for an hour or so after I left her:

  Listen, you bitch, you coarse, ugly, reckless excuse for a bitch, I don't know whose husband you were out fucking last night while I was watching your daughter vomit pills and liquor into my toilet bowl, but maybe you ought to start paying attention to her because, one way or another, this child is in trouble, and it's your fault—yours. She needed a father and she needed a family and she needed a mother with half a mustard seed of moral sense and you gave her none of those things and now she's miserable and lost and poisoning herself and dressing and acting like a common whore and maybe she's even in danger and it's not just 'kids today' and it's not just 'boys and girls together' and it's not just the way things are—it's you, your fault, your responsibility, you bitch, bitch, ugly, vulgar, irresponsible bitch.

  "All right," I said quietly in that ultracalm voice of mine, that voice of the All-Father of the Fallen World. I stood up. "All right, then I guess there's nothing else for me to do."

  Lauren threw herself back against her chair and laughed.

  "Oh ho ho! Oh! Jason! Jason! I mean, fuh-uk you!"

  She had heard the whole thing, of course: the speech I hadn't made, the thoughts I hadn't spoken; she had heard all of it.

  "Why don't you just hit me?" she said, laughing. "Huh? Go on, sweetheart, you want to, don't you? Go ahead. Like you used to. I dug it. Give me a good one, right here."

  She pointed her cigarette hand to a spot on her jaw. I won't say I wasn't tempted.

  "I'll see you around, Lauren," the calm All-Father said. "Have a nice life."

  "Oh, you fucking hypocrite." She jabbed her cigarette into the ashtray, one time. It lay there bent and smoking. She stood up, walking ahead of me, blocking my path to the door, not laughing now. "Don't give me that You're-a-Bad-Girl face, that judgmental shit. Mr. Big Daddy. 'Ooh, where were you last night? Ooh, you were out having sex! You're a sinner, you'll burn in hell.' Don't give me that shit, all right? Because I've seen you bare-assed doing shit you could get arrested for. So don't give me that."

  I didn't answer. I had no answer. I settled for an imperturbable All-Fatherly stare.

  "You think this is all my fault?" Lauren went on—went on as if I had answered, as if I didn't need to answer, as if she could read my mind. "You're the one who left me with her, Jason, remember? She's your daughter, too."

  "Is she? She said you weren't sure."

  "Yeah, because she lies, dickhead, as we learned in our last episode. Anyway, you know she's yours, you bastard. You're off in happy land with your nice home and your money and your family, and what do you give a shit? It's all my fault? Well, this is what you left behind, Jason. This is what life is like for the rest of us."

  That neutral, cool, Good Father voice kept coming out of me: "That's why you really called me, isn't it?"

  "Yes!"

  "So I could see what's happened to you?"

  "Damn right!"

  "So you could blame me for it and drag me into it."

  She pointed a long, witchy finger at me. "You know what you are, Jason? You're a coward. You live in some make-believe place where nothing bad ever happens and everyone's rich and married and happy like you so you can pretend that God's in Heaven watching over everyone. And anyone who's in trouble, well, it must be their own fault, right? 'Because look at me,' you think, 'I have so much money and I'm so happy, why aren't they?' You're a coward. You're just running away from reality. This is reality, Jason. This is the way things are. People get divorced and their children have problems, and you can't just go dancing around singing hymns of praise because you're so fucking rich that you don't have to deal with how fucked up everything is."

  The gospels further tell us that we are liable for our hearts, not just for our actions but for the anger and lust and dishonesty hidden in our hearts. I don't think that's supposed to be some kind of moral equation or anything, as if being annoyed with someone were the same as killing him. No. I think it's an insight instead into the nature of our imaginations, into the connection between what we imagine and what we end up doing, the way our ideas and our imagination become the matrix of who we are.

  Right then, for instance, for a second, for a flash, I was so furious, I imagined grabbing Lauren by the neck, forcing her over the back of her chair and sodomizing her with violent force while simultaneously whipping my open hand back and forth across the back of her head. Go ahead. Like you used to. I dug it. That was what was in my imagination, and it made my chest feel tight with excitement.

  "Well, gee, thanks for those insights, Lauren," said the ultra-calm All-Father of the Fallen World, standing there face to face with her, my expression lofty while I imagined raping her, my gaze detached and calm. "But you know what? This"—and I gestured at her, at her apartment, at her life. "This isn't just 'the way things are.' This is the way you made them. This is the result of your choices, your actions. Yours. You don't live in 'the real world,' Lauren. You live in the world you made for yourself. I made different choices, so I live in a different world—that's all—but it's just as real. Instead of worrying about me and screaming at me and blaming me for everything and trying to bring me down to your level, it might be a good idea if you took care of yourself and your daughter. She needs you. She needs something, anyway and, the sad truth is, you're all she's got."

  She tried to stand in front of me but I shouldered past her and she staggered back. She screamed at me—really screamed at the top of her lungs as I headed for the door: "She's your daughter, too! You coward! Hypocrite! She's your daughter, too, Jason! Fuck you! Go back to your wife! Maybe get her to get your freak on for a change, stop you from being such a tight-assed asshole! You shit!"

  This—and more like it—was still going on when I left the house and shut the door behind me.

  The Spiral Notebooks

  So. We find me next in the driveway of my mother's house. Yes, that's me there in the red Mustang, my forehead pressed against the steering wheel. I was still going over that speech in my mind. You bitch, bitch, ugly, vulgar, irresponsible bitch and so on. Fine-tuning it, adding a few choice sentiments here and there, polishing its style—and using it to feed my rage, to nurse my self-righteousness and my rage which, like drugs to an addict, no longer felt even good but merely desperately necessary. Without them, without my anger at Lauren, my feeling of moral superiority to her, what was there? There was just the girl, just Serena, lost out in the world. Okay, maybe there hadn't been any execution-style murder in the swamp. Maybe all that was lies—probably it was. Probably she got the whole story off some TV show or something. Still, the simple truth was bad enough without that. A sixteen-year-old child, a fatherless child with a feckless mother, was in the process of poisoning herself with drugs and booze and sex as if her body and soul were two different things. And she was my daughter—my daughter, whom I'd left behind and whom—let's face it—I was going to leave behind now again when I went home to the Hill. You bitch, bitch, ugly, vulgar, irresponsible bitch.

  I got out of the car. I slammed the door. I walked up the path to the house, shaking my head, muttering under my breath.

  Inside, I went to the kitchen. The phone was there, and an answering machine. There was a message on the machine from the Realtor, a woman named Mitzi. She wanted to know if the house had been cleaned out yet, if she could have the stagers come over to get it ready for showing. While the message played, I stood at the kitchen window. I looked through the glass at the bright day nearing noon. I breathed the fresh autumn air with the smell of leaves in it. That ache of nostalgia came back to me and so did the image of my mother as she once had been: sitting in the backyard, gently wondering at things; sitting cross-
legged in the grass with me climbing over her as if she were a feature of the landscape...

  Oh, stop, I thought. The self-pity and the rage. As if I were a child again. As if the act of coming home had turned me back into a child.

  I needed to get out of here—that's what. I needed to finish my business and go back to my wife and kids. I would tell Cathy what had happened, and she would help me figure out what to do next. Maybe we could send Serena some money or start a college fund for her or something. In the meantime, I had my own family to care for and my own life to think about. I needed to finish up my business here and go.

  I returned to the front hall. I looked up the stairs. The stairs rose into the haunted shadows on the second floor. I climbed the stairs into the shadows.

  My mother's bedroom had been dusted and aired by my cleaning lady once a week every week of the eight months since Mom had died. At this point, the scent of her, the scent of my mother, could have been nothing but a visceral memory. Still, there it was as I stepped into the unlit room. There it was—and it made me half afraid that I would see her in the half dark, see the shape of her on the bed before I turned the lights on. I turned the lights on quickly, my fingers fumbling at the double switch.

  The room was large and simple, sparsely furnished. The carpet was an indistinct tan and the walls a muted yellow with white trim around the windows and wainscoting. My mother's bed—my parents' double bed with its elegantly curving headboard—was against the wall to my left. On the wall across from it, there was a dresser with a mirror. The windows were on the wall opposite me. They looked out on the backyard, but all I could see through them from where I stood were tangles of gray branches and a few yellow leaves shuddering in the wind.

  That scent of her, the smell of the room, the smell, I mean, that I must've remembered, was the smell of her sickness and her later age. Closed up, dried up; the musty aroma of slack flesh without the juice of life in it, plus a faint trace of perfume, a faint, poignant dab of it. Lost and baffled in her loony inner world, she clung desperately to what habits of womanhood she could.