Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

"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.

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.