Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  It took a moment for this to register, for the implications to register. "I'm sorry. Say that again."

  "She came in one night.... She came up to me at the bar. You know, just like you did. She was, like, 'You know Casey Diggs, right?' And I was, like, 'Yeah, sure.' And she was, like, 'When he comes in, point him out to me.' Just like you did with her."

  "She was looking for him," I said, my voice dull and soft suddenly, a distant monotone. "She knew his name."

  "Yeah. She'd been wanting to meet him."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I have this friend—Jamal. He told me she'd be coming in. He told me she wanted to meet Casey Diggs, and I should watch out for him for her."

  "You know Jamal?"

  "Yeah, we had, like, a one-night thing once, but we're still friends. He's the one who got me to take this class. Look, I really gotta go."

  "Wait. Did you tell any of this to the police?"

  Anne gave a kind of comical start of surprise. "That some girl was looking for some guy in The Den?"

  "They never asked you about it?"

  "It's not exactly a big whoop, Jason. She just went up to him when I pointed him out and, you know, they danced. It was, like: whatever."

  "Did they leave together?"

  "Beats me. I didn't notice."

  I was quiet, lost in the thought of it, the idea of it, what it meant.

  "I really gotta..." She pointed a thumb at the building again.

  Then, completely unexpectedly, she darted forward and kissed me gently. It was startling—startling and intense. A moment with her soft lips on mine, her black hair tickling my skin, and that sweet, flower perfume she wore, like a teenage girl's.

  "I like you," she whispered, her breath warm on my mouth. "Call me."

  As she drew back, I caught a flash of something—something glittering in the opening at the neck of her blouse. A chain with a familiar sterling silver ring at the end of it about a quarter of an inch thick.

  Then, dazed and stupid, I stood watching her as she walked away. My eyes were on her retreating figure, the seat of her jeans, the toss of her hair. My mind was racing, trying to sort out too many different things at once.

  Anne joined the other students going through the door of the stately building, and she was gone. But I kept standing there, full of her. Thinking about that flashing ring on her necklace. About her whisper: I like you. Call me. About the touch of her lips.

  Finally I turned away. I had to force myself to do it, pivoting around quickly. The movement must've taken the man across the lawn by surprise because I caught him there, watching me. He was young, dark-skinned. He had hooded eyes and a mouth that turned down on one side. He was staring at me balefully from the shadows of a broad oak tree on the grass about twenty yards away.

  I barely had time to notice him before he wasn't there anymore. He was hurrying down a path—slipping between two buildings—out of sight—gone.

  Lies, Lies, Lies

  It was night, I don't know how late. I'd been in the television room for hours. I'd been through one bottle of wine already and was halfway through another. I slumped nearly horizontal on the sofa, the remote control held loosely in my hand. I was somewhere into the deep cable numbers. There was a soft-core porno movie playing on the immense screen across the room. It told the stirring story of a woman who took her clothes off and straddled a naked man while moaning loudly. You just can't delve more deeply into the human condition than that.

  I watched the action through half-lidded eyes. The naked woman bounced up and down on the naked man. Her head was thrown back. Her mouth was open. A sheen of sweat glowed on her face. "Oh, oh, oh, oh!" she said, her fine breasts jiggling.

  I had paused here while channel surfing. I thought it would help me stop thinking, stop worrying about what I should do next. At first, it delivered a tranquilizing thrill. Now boredom, like an anesthetic, stunned me. My mind drifted. I thought about Serena again. About Casey Diggs. Rashid. Words, words, words, I thought, drunkenly. Lies, lies, lies.

  What was I supposed to believe? Was anything Serena told me true? Had she known Casey Diggs? Had she gone into The Den looking for him that night? Was she working with the people who'd killed him? But if she was, why would she confess to me like that? Or if she was some unwilling dupe, why run away with them in their green Cadillac? Should I call the police? Would that get Serena killed? Or was her whole story about the murder another lie? Or maybe it was Anne who lied. Maybe it was Anne...

  Oh, wait, look now. There was a new wrinkle to the plot of the movie. The woman had climbed down off the man and was positioning herself on the bed on all fours. The man knelt behind her and began pumping his hips while she cried out, throwing her head around so that her hair whipped about her face. Stirring stuff. I straightened a little on the couch. When the man ran his hands along her flanks to cup her breasts, I could almost feel the yielding flesh against my own palms. I could almost feel what Anne's flesh would be like.

  Anne, I thought, yearningly. Anne...

  I kept thinking about her. I kept thinking about that ring she wore around her neck. I knew that sort of ring. It was called an O-ring, after The Story of O. At least, that's what I'd always heard it called. Back when I was with Lauren. Back when we were in The Scene. A ring like that around a woman's neck—or on her wrist, or dangling from her ear—was meant to signal that she enjoyed being submissive during rough sex. It meant she liked to be dominated. She liked to be hurt.

  How do they know? I almost whispered aloud. How do they pick you out like that? How do they always know?

  Uh-oh, hold on, what was this? The bedroom door had come open—in the movie, I mean; on the television. The wife, the man's wife, barged into the room and caught her husband doing the naked bang-bang with this other woman. Now here was drama for you. Look how shocked and hurt she was. Well, sure. The faithful love that had sustained her life, repaired the injuries of her childhood, become the medium of her joy and self-esteem was now revealed to be a lie—a lie, I tell you! How could she ever trust the naked man again? How could she ever trust anyone or anything? And the children—what of the children? Their parents' marriage was their universe. Divorce would bring the very stars down around their heads!

  Quickly, the husband unplugged himself from the naked woman's backside. As well he should! He went to his wife. He stroked her shoulders in a conciliatory fashion.

  "We wanted you to join us, but we were afraid to ask," he said.

  Ah, never be afraid to ask. That was the underlying theme of the movie. Never, never, never be afraid to ask. Because now see: The wife was taking her clothes off, too. She was kneeling naked on the bed while the husband and his girlfriend climbed up her flanks like ivy. What relief. What joy. What tits.

  Oh God, oh God, how I wanted Anne just then, how I wanted her naked in my arms!

  I snagged my glass of wine off the table. I knocked back another swallow. Husband and girlfriend now had the wife on her back, the girlfriend's mouth on her breasts, the husband's face buried between her legs.

  And shouldn't life be like that? I asked the empty room silently. Instead of all this fuss about adultery and morality and whatnot. Shouldn't life be just like that?

  Take my father, for instance. My father could serve as an object lesson here. My father killed himself while I was away at college. He sat in his Lexus in the garage just outside this television room, just on the other side of the door. He turned on the engine and let it run. My brother Alan had already graduated by then and had more or less moved back home to begin his career as a leech and wastrel. He was the one who found Dad's body slumped behind the wheel.

  And why? Why did the old man do it? Well, there was no suicide note—Dad died as he lived, in pale and thin-lipped silence— but let's face facts: It was because of Margaret—of course it was—little mousy Margaret who adored him and whom he loved.

  She was a client of his, bankrupt after her husband left her. My father restructured her fi
nances, helped her get a bookkeeping job. She relied on him and came to look up to him and finally idolized him in her careful, mousy way. I saw them together once, in his office. Quite a comical pair, really, the two of them. He dry as a stick and colorless as a tax code, and she with her limp brown hair and the face of a painfully serious squirrel, sniffing and nibbling around his every word as if it were the meat she lived on.

  I only learned the whole story later, from her, from Margaret herself. She came to Dad's funeral. I was sitting in the front pew of the mortuary, sitting with my arm around my mother. Poor Mom barely understood what had happened. She was looking at the floor, shaking her head, whispering to herself, trying to fit Dad's suicide into the grand historical scheme of things. At some point, I glanced over my shoulder and spotted Margaret sitting modestly in the back, alone, a stranger to everyone else, unobtrusive but clearly grief-stricken. I remembered seeing her in Dad's office that one time and somehow now, I guessed the truth. As the service ended, I saw her slip out the back door quietly. On instinct, I went after her, caught her elbow as she crossed the parking lot to her car. I thanked her for coming. She seemed grateful that anyone spoke to her at all. We arranged to have coffee together in the city.

  What a funny little creature she was. Small and slump-shouldered and flat-chested and with that plain, humorless, squirrelly face: You never would've thought there could be so much passion in her. We met at a Starbucks near NYU, a big glass box of a café filled with round wooden tables and straight-backed wooden chairs. She sat in her colorless skirt and jacket suit, nearly quivering with formality amidst the crowd of students slouched all around her in hoodies and jeans. She spoke carefully, primly, with the superserious air of a little girl laying out a tea set, trying to get everything exactly right. I listened, in my own student hoodie and jeans, slouched across the table from her. This is what she told me:

  My father's life with my mother could hardly be called a marriage, not for the last few years, anyway. Mom had finally gone too crazy to relate or even speak sense to him. Sometimes she even seemed to believe he was an impostor, a stranger only pretending to be her husband. At times like that, she refused to have sex with him. Even in her clearer moments, she'd submit to it only as a wifely duty. She obviously found it an irritating distraction from the realizations and inspirations constantly flashing in her brain. At best, Dad felt he was an annoyance to her. At worst, he felt like a rapist. Finally he gave up. They continued living in the same house—even sleeping in the same bed—but each was living alone.

  Now Dad and Margaret, meanwhile—they were a different story. A veritable riptide of erotic longing was dragging their scrawny bodies and their bloodless lips together. They fought it with all their honor, all their might, trying like mad to do what they thought was the right thing. But once Mom and Dad stopped having sex altogether—well, then, Dad and Margaret, pursuant to what I imagine was a rather dry, legalistic discussion of the finer moral points, decided they were justified in giving in to the flow. Occasionally, furtively, they began meeting at her apartment where, not to put too fine a point on it, they went about the serious business of fucking each other like a pair of rabid wildcats.

  Of course, it only made matters worse. The sex was like sea-water, quenching their thirst only to leave them thirstier still. Once they had a taste of each other, they wanted to be with each other every night. They wanted to sleep with each other and wake in each other's arms. Their conversations returned to the problem again and again until they rarely talked of anything else. Their joy in being together from time to time quickly soured into painful longing to have each other always.

  But my father wouldn't leave my mother. He and Margaret both agreed it wouldn't be right. She was his wife of twenty-five years. They had loved each other when she was well. She had cheerfully kept his home, cooked his meals, raised his children. Now she was ill beyond recovery. What was he going to do? Put her in an institution somewhere? Abandon her to sit gaping beneath the television set in some sterile dayroom, drugged and drooling, confused and alone? Oh, you could rationalize it all you wanted, but abandonment was what it would be.

  There were days when Dad weakened, when he wondered aloud if maybe professionals might take care of her better than he could, when he wondered whether he and Margaret didn't deserve a little happiness for themselves. But Margaret stayed strong. You don't walk away from your obligations for mere happiness, she said. She loved him because he was a better man, a more honorable man, than that.

  Then one day—Margaret told me in Starbucks—one day, my father said a terrible thing. He was sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed to go home. He was staring at his shoes, thinking. She was lying naked under a single sheet, looking up at his profile.

  And he murmured, "It would be better for everyone if she were dead."

  It wasn't just the words, Margaret told me. They'd both said almost as much any number of times. But the tone of his voice, the awful, serious tone, and the awful, serious look he turned on her—she could tell he was saying one thing but that he meant something else, something much worse.

  Their eyes met and they understood each other. For a long moment, they were together in that strange world of emotional logic where to escape the horrible prospect of wronging someone, you contemplate the thought of murdering her instead.

  The moment passed—of course it did; they weren't monsters, obviously. But they couldn't deny it had happened and that it might happen again—and again, until the idea began to seem almost reasonable to them.

  They held another of their precise, judicious discussions of the moral issues. They both agreed: They had to end their affair. It was making them miserable as things stood, and the only way to change the situation was to act cruelly or do what was wrong. They wouldn't. They would act kindly. They would do what was right. They would separate from one another forever.

  So they did. They did the moral thing. The responsible thing. The honorable thing. They parted. And the meaning went out of my father's life, and he went into the garage and sat in the Lexus and gassed himself to death.

  It's an object lesson, you see? Because it raises the question: What's the point of it all? All this morality, all this restraint. Doing right and depriving yourself of so many vital delights. We're here only a day or so—alive, I mean, a dawn, a hurried day, a remorseful twilight before the impenetrable dark. How can we deny ourselves even a single moment of passion or joy or pleasure? Why should we transform ourselves into dismal church ladies when look what we could be doing with each other, just look, right there, on the TV! The wife with her ass in the air now and her face between the girlfriend's legs and hubby going at her from behind and everyone's happy. I mean, if the hole is sweet, dude, stick the peg in, yes? Why all this fuss and feeling about it, all these rules and regulations? A peg in a hole. A life and a death. What difference does any of it make in the long run?

  "Anne," I groaned quietly.

  Then out of some combination of—I don't know—call it lethargy and self-disgust, I took another swig of wine and changed the channel...

  To The Justice Room—where MacNamara was prosecuting a Christian minister who'd murdered a man to keep him from euthanizing his brain-dead wife.

  Anne ... I went on thinking about Anne. But without the porn to distract me, my thoughts slowly returned to what she'd said to me on campus. What if it was the truth? I wondered. What if Serena went into The Den that night looking for Casey Diggs?

  I changed the channel...

  To Undercover—where—kerpow!—petite, sexy Jillian Blaine punches the traitor Robert right in the kisser, knocking him ass over teakettle, yeah!

  What if Serena had actually delivered Casey to Jamal and his friends? What if she had brought him to them so they could take him out to the Great Swamp and murder him?

  I changed the channel...

  To the news—where some Middle Eastern rabble-rouser with a name like Kaka al-Iraqi was screaming to a cheering crowd, "This is Holy W
ar! We will not rest until we bring the foul disease of freedom and rationalism to an end!"

  And what if Diggs was murdered because he was right? Because he knew Rashid was at the center of a planned terrorist attack on the city?

  I changed the channel...

  To Missing: "You see a Saudi national who might be a terrorist," spat the heroic Agent Magruder. "I just see another overambitious FBI agent profiling a man because of his race and religion."

  If no one believed Diggs, why would anyone believe me? I wasn't even sure I believed me. I had no proof of anything.

  I changed the channel...

  To The Inner Circle—news commentary—where a pink, bald newspaper columnist who looked like a cartoon pig was saying: "I think Mr. Kaka is simply trying to communicate his frustration with American foreign policy..."

  Lies, lies, lies, I thought. It's all lies. It's all about what they don't say.

  My thoughts returned to Rashid pacing the platform in that lecture hall. I recalled my moment of fear and certainty. Of course he's a terrorist. Of course he is.

  Who could I go to? What would I tell them? How could I stop this thing before people died?

  I changed the channel...

  And there—there, so help me, God—was Patrick Piersall!

  "You gotta be kidding me!" I said aloud.

  It was a local news program out of New York. The scene was somewhere near City Hall Park. There was a wild, pudgy figure on screen, stumbling around the middle of the street. It was a fuzzy amateur video, taken from some distance. You couldn't really make out the guy's face, but there was a helpful caption on the bottom of the screen: UNIVERSAL STAR PATRICK PIERSALL ARRESTED FOR DUI AND WEAPONS POSSESSION.

  I watched, dumbstruck.

  The pudgy little figure went on raving, leaping here and there beside a silver BMW he'd apparently run halfway up onto the sidewalk. He waved his hands insanely in the air. He threw back his head and howled at the sky.