Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  In the light of day, it seemed far more likely that Serena was a liar, that the FBI was on the job protecting America from its enemies, thank you very much, and that Casey Diggs was some bitter schizo who had nothing to do with anything and would eventually turn up drunk in a motel somewhere ranting about the end of the world. The best thing for me to do was forget about all of them and go home to my wife and children, where I belonged.

  Which is exactly what I wanted to do. But I couldn't. Not until I was sure.

  So, just after sunrise, I drove the red Mustang back into the city. I headed up to the Heights, to the university. It was another bright morning with the air cold and sad. The sun was falling in moted beams on the brownstones and the shop awnings. I had the radio playing light rock as I cruised the avenue and side streets around the campus looking for a parking space. I finally found a metered spot about three blocks from the school. I pulled up alongside it, my turn signal clicking.

  Just then, the music on the radio ended and an announcer said: "And now, an entertainment minute with Sally Sterling."

  I laughed out loud as I put the car into reverse. America must be starved for what this broad was feeding them because she seemed to be everywhere.

  "Will baby make four?" she wondered aloud. I hadn't noticed it before, but she had a richly feminine voice, low and hoarse and with the consistency of syrup. "That's the question on the minds of Hollywood star-watchers as rumors fly over whether the alleged Juliette-Todd-Angelica triangle is, in fact, becoming ... well, a rectangle. Is Juliette pregnant? And if so, will that bring Todd rushing back to her from Angelica's arms?"

  I made a wry, rueful grimace as I backed the Mustang into the spot. These people—these Hollywood stars—the way they behaved—what were they but trailer trash with pretty faces? Or maybe that wasn't being fair to trailer trash.

  "All three stars are heading to New York for the premiere of the first three-dimensional movie ever: The End of Civilization as We Know It."

  Glamorizing their fucked-up relationships at a theater near you.

  The 'Stang slid into the parking place easily. I straightened it out. Slapped it into parking gear. I was reaching for the keys to turn off the ignition when Sally Sterling went on, a suppressed laugh turning her voice more viscous still:

  "And on the lighter side ... this has to be some kind of record: Patrick Piersall's attempt to jump-start his flagging career with a return to TV ended last night before ... well, before it even ended."

  My hand hovered where it was, my fingers surrounding the car keys without touching them.

  "Patrick Piersall's True Crime America! was canceled by cable-network executives while the final credits were still rolling," Sally continued. "The network was apparently flooded with complaints that the Most Wanted style crime show was racist and offensive to Arab-Americans. Phone lines set up to receive crime-solving tips were shut down while calls were still coming in. The network says episodes already taped and in production will not be shown. I guess Patrick should've never left the deck of The Universal. And that's your entertainment minute. I'm—"

  I turned the car off, killing the radio. I sat there behind the wheel, my hand still holding the keys, the keys still in the ignition. Boop boop boop, I thought. So much for Patrick Piersall's True Crime America! What did it all mean? I asked myself. And I answered myself: Nothing, probably. Just some TV executives' typical cave-in under political pressure.

  I pulled the keys free. I pushed out of the car. I went to see Brent Withers.

  Casey Diggs's former roommate lived in a dormitory off Broadway. It was a red brick high-rise with a white concrete entryway, the sort of functional monstrosity they used to slap up a lot in the fifties. It rose above the older, more stately buildings around it, a sliver of dingy red towering over the campus's noble white arches and columns and domes.

  I hadn't told the kid I was coming. It was a trick I used to use back when I was a journalist. I found if I showed up early in the morning, I could usually catch the people I was looking for, and that I got more out of them when I took them by surprise like that and they didn't have time to prepare. I had the guard buzz him from the phone at the security desk in the lobby. Then I took the phone and spoke to him myself. The same adenoidal voice I'd heard on TV last night came over the line. I heard him hesitate when I said I was here to talk about Casey Diggs. He told me to hand the phone back to the security guard. The guard listened for a second, then nodded me through.

  Withers was waiting for me on the third floor, peeking out the doorway of his dorm room. He lifted a chin by way of greeting as I stepped off the elevator. I came down an empty hall of closed doors and blank walls. I wasn't sure, but I thought the kid actually looked right and left as I stepped into his room—checked, I mean, to see if anyone was there to witness my arrival.

  If anything, Withers looked more like a stick insect in real life than he had on TV. He had the long thin body and the weirdly long thin head and his arms, which were mostly elbows, kind of waved around a lot like a bug's antennae. He was still in the room he'd shared with Casey, I guess, because there were two beds and two desks; only one bed was stripped to the mattress and one desk was empty.

  He sat on his bed, the one with the tangle of covers. I sat on the chair by his desk, the only chair there was. The room was oppressively small and cramped the way dorm rooms are, a jumble of laptop, stereo, books, unwashed shirts and slacks and underpants, plus a million photographs, the whole stick-insect family one by one and two by two and all together, plus a torn poster on the wall right behind him: three black gangsta rappas snarling as they showed off their leather and muscles and chains.

  The poster made a strange contrast to the woefully pallid student on the bed. He had a solemn, almost funereal face, a lot of black hair piled on top. He waved his antenna arms around as he spoke, and blinked in slow motion as if he were fighting to stay awake till the end of the sentence. "So what's this about?" he asked me.

  I told him I'd seen him on the Patrick Piersall show and wanted to ask him some questions.

  "What's this for?" he asked. "Is this for a newspaper story or TV or...?" He spoke as slowly as he blinked. He seemed to be pondering every word, turning it this way and that in the light before he laid it down in front of you.

  "It's purely personal," I told him. "If there's any truth to what Diggs believed, I have a friend who might be in danger. You were the one guy who seemed to think Diggs might be on to something, that maybe his conspiracy theories weren't as crazy as they sounded."

  "I didn't say that."

  "No, I guess you didn't. But I got the feeling there was a lot you weren't saying."

  "Well, that's the whole point around this place, actually," said Brent Withers. "It's all about what you don't say."

  "What is?"

  "Everything. School. Business. Life."

  "You mean, you're afraid you'll be punished if you speak the truth?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "You have any reason to think you would be?"

  His hand sort of wafted over toward the empty desk behind him. "That's Casey's desk over there. Do you notice Casey sitting at it?"

  "No."

  "Notice his computer? His Pacers jacket? His cheesecake picture of Angelica Eden?"

  "Okay. He's gone."

  "Yes, he is. He got expelled. I can't afford to get expelled. My parents aren't rich. They run a couple of franchise stores in St. Louis. They made a lot of sacrifices so I could come here and I still have to get my MBA after this. You need a good MBA to get a start in business without connections. For me, a happy and successful life depends on what I don't say, so I don't say it."

  "Don't say what?"

  "A lot of things."

  "Like what?"

  "You want a for-instance?"

  "Yeah. For instance, what don't you say?"

  "Well, I don't say, 'Women aren't as good at math and science as men are.'"

  "You don't say that?"

&nb
sp; "I never say it."

  "But you're thinking it, you mean."

  "I didn't say that."

  "So there's another thing you don't say."

  "That's right."

  "What else?"

  "I don't know. How about 'African art and literature are simplistic and primitive compared to European art and literature.'"

  "Uh-huh. It's a long list, I gather."

  "I need that MBA."

  "All right, I get you," I said. "It's a university campus, all political correctness, no free speech, pretty typical. But look: Casey Diggs didn't get expelled for saying petty stuff like that. The guy accused a famous professor of planning a terrorist attack. That's a very serious thing to do."

  "Well, it is. But that's not the way things work. Not exactly." The kid paused before going on in his slow-blinking, hand-waving way. Considering every word. Planning every sentence. It was sort of hypnotic to watch. "Plenty of people at this university—not just students but professors, too—have made accusations just as serious as Casey's. They accused the United States government of destroying the World Trade Center and shuffling the blame onto innocent Islamics. They accused the president of ordering the flooding of New Orleans in order to kill black people. There are students who gathered outside the classroom of Professor Leonard Stein—a seventy-year-old man—and shouted accusations that he was complicit in the murder of Palestinians until Stein was forced to retire. None of those people has been expelled like Casey was. None of them has been penalized in any way."

  "Okay. So what are you saying?"

  "I'm not saying anything," said Brent Withers. "That's what I'm trying to tell you."

  I massaged my forehead with one hand. "Let me start again. Why was Casey Diggs expelled, do you think?"

  "Boy, that's a good question. It's kind of hard to explain, isn't it? Seeing those other people weren't expelled or fired. Why was he?"

  I laughed. He didn't. Now I found myself doing what he did—not the blinking and insectile arm-waving stuff, but raising my eyes to the ceiling and carefully constructing a sentence before I spoke. "Okay," I said finally. "Explain to me how someone like Casey might possibly get expelled from a university like this one."

  "Theoretically? Well," said Withers very slowly. "Theoretically, let's stipulate, for argument's sake, that there are a lot of powerful people at a university like this who believe things that aren't, strictly speaking, true."

  "Leftists, you mean."

  "Let's just call them people. Powerful people."

  "All right."

  "These powerful people believe things like: One culture is as good as another. Or, there's no such thing as good and evil. Therefore, if America is at odds or at war with someone, it must be America's fault. You only have to think about those statements for two minutes to see that they can't possibly be true. But these people think they should be true and they think they'll seem to be true if no one is allowed to say that they're not true. So they attack anyone who says that they're not true. They call him names. Racist, sexist, phobic, offensive, whatever. They demand apologies from him. They make his life a misery, so no one wants to speak up."

  "So it's like the emperor's new clothes."

  "Right. Except instead of clothes, it's all the emperor's lies. And in an Empire of Lies, only a crazy man would speak the truth."

  "Okay."

  "And crazy people do crazy things, right? They do stupid things and wrong things. We all do, but crazy people do especially."

  "I think I see what you're saying."

  "I'm not saying anything."

  "Well, I see what you're not saying, then. I know what you mean. You mean they don't destroy someone for saying that their false ideas are false—"

  "Right. They destroy him for doing something crazy. But you have to be crazy to tell them their ideas are false, because if you do, they'll find a way to destroy you."

  "And you're saying that's what happened to Casey Diggs."

  "No."

  "You're not."

  "No."

  "But you mean Casey Diggs ... Wait a minute. I'm really confused."

  Withers sat on the edge of the unmade bed with his long arms still now, his big hands clasped between his legs. He blinked and swayed like a drunken man, but thinking, considering. Then he said, "What happened to Casey is that, purely by accident at first, he made it seem as if anti-American, relativisitic, multiculturalists like Arthur Rashid are not only wrong, but have also created a breeding ground on campus for hate-filled, violent, terrorist-sympathizing, anti-Semitic Islamic radicals. Casey was warned not to do that anymore, but he was crazy enough to keep doing it. And when finally he got so crazy he took his accusations too far, he was expelled."

  "Ah, yes, but that's my question right there: Did he take his accusations too far? Were his accusations untrue?"

  This time, the shrug, the blink—they seemed to last for half an hour. "The police obviously think so. I mean, the FBI says Casey is wrong. The FBI wouldn't cover up a terrorist plot, would they?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Right."

  "So what are you saying?"

  "I'm not saying anything."

  The conversation was beginning to make my head hurt. "Kid. Listen. I can't read minds. Give me something here."

  He thought about it. He blinked slowly. He waved one arm. "Why don't you go see for yourself? Arthur Rashid lectures twice a week. He lectures today. Eleven a.m. Godwin Hall."

  Auditing Rashid

  Godwin Hall was an elegant old theater, a Roman temple of a place. Under yellowing plane trees and scarlet maples, its stone stairs rose majestically to four fluted columns before a solemn brick facade. The columns shouldered a pediment and the pediment sheltered a carved relief rising and falling in its triangular frieze: Art and Philosophy Bearing Fruit to the Spirit of Freedom. All right, I'm guessing, but it was some sort of allegory like that. I squinted up at it through the late-morning sunshine as I approached. Then I lowered my eyes to the scene below: masses and masses of shaggy-haired students in torn jeans and sweatshirts pressing up the stairs under the weight of their backpacks, shuffling out of the sunlight, into the shadows of the colonnade. Ignorance Bearing Credulity to Nonsense. All right, I'm guessing.

  I jostled into the throng, and was soon being carried along in the sludgy tide, up the stairs and under the columns and through a pair of anachronistic glass doors. We moved on in a crush across a small foyer, through another set of doors. Then we were in the hall itself.

  The size of it startled me. It was a semicircular vastness, rows on rows on rows of seats descending toward a stage far below. I'm not much good at estimating these things, but there must've been close to three hundred students already there when I arrived. Maybe a hundred and fifty more were still pouring in.

  I grabbed a spot near the back and watched as the rest of the seats filled up quickly. A shuffling silence followed: the snap of binders, muted conversation, sudden bursts of laughter.

  Then there he was.

  In memory, I can make him out clearly, but at the time, he was so far away, his face was something of a blur. I think my mind may have supplied the details from the pictures I'd seen on television the night before: the pleasing combination of dark, Middle Eastern skin on the handsome, chiseled features of an English gentleman. In any case, even at that distance, he was a powerful presence.

  He was an impressive performer, too. He had a dynamic stride that carried him swiftly to the lectern. He had a bright smile that flashed out and beamed to a startling distance like the beacon of a lighthouse. Also, he had a great suit. I remember thinking that: Great suit! It was formal, tailored, gray black, set off by a port red tie that projected power and confidence, yea, like his smile, even unto the back rows.

  He brought no notes with him, no books. He stood at the lectern only long enough to fasten a microphone to his lapel. "Good morning," he murmured meanwhile in a personable tone, glancing down sweetly at the students in the front row r
ight beneath him. Then he was off, strolling about the stage, down to one end, back to the other, ambling around the center, gesturing to us in a friendly, informal manner all the while. He spoke in the quiet, confidential tone of a gentleman sharing insights, wing chair to wing chair at his private club. His accent was like his face: elegant, English, and precise with only enough hint of the Levantine in it to lend it an exotic charm.

  I sat back and listened to him—and what followed was one of the strangest experiences of my life.

  It's difficult to describe what happened or why. Something about the man or the setting or the lecture itself must've set it off, but I'm not sure what. It was a charged atmosphere, certainly. The charismatic professor reeling off his ideas. The hundreds of rapt young faces either turned up to him with openmouthed wonder or pressed down close to their notebooks while they scribbled feverishly as if to transcribe every word. It was an atmosphere almost of reverence, almost of awe. And yet, I don't think that's what caused my bizarre reaction. I still can't entirely explain it.

  The lecture was about the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.

  "These two so-beautiful jewels in the crown of the English language," Rashid called them. "Not one of us here can think a thought or form a phrase or have an impression of each other or ourselves without their having been shaped in some way by the concepts, by the vision, and by the language of these magnificent works of art."

  The guy was riveting, I have to say. Incredibly eloquent, incredibly learned. There seemed to be no facet of the subject he hadn't mastered. Without notes, seemingly without even a plan, he took us on a leisurely, discursive survey of the world that had created Shakespeare and the King James, facts and ideas leaping each to each with a speed and natural ease that was captivating. I can't reconstruct it all. I wouldn't think to try. His thoughts were much too brilliant, too complex and erudite for me. I just want to try to tell enough of what I remember to describe the strange thing that happened to me.