Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

Now, though I felt my throat tighten, though I felt pity rising in me like floodwater-pity for her and for myself and for my father caught in his trap of passion and decency-I forced the feelings aside. I went about the business of cleaning the place out.

It didn't take long. I brought the pictures down the ladder, then the rug and the curtains, finally the writing table and chair. When the room was empty of everything else, I went at the notebooks. I gathered them in armloads and dropped them-whap and splatter-through the open trapdoor into the closet below.

At last, I climbed down the ladder myself. I pushed the trapdoor shut. Armload after armload, I carried the notebooks downstairs to the living room, to the fireplace. It was a gas fire, very steady. Still, there were so many pages covered in that precise and tidy schoolgirl script.

It took hours to burn them all.

What happened that night in the television room almost beggars belief, but I have to tell it because it's true.

When I finished cleaning out my mother's room, I was exhausted. Even my anger at Lauren was spent. Hollow-eyed, I watched the news on TV, sitting in the dark room, chomping my way through a tasteless store-bought turkey sandwich and polishing off another half bottle of white wine. After a while, I pressed the mute button on the remote. I picked my phone up off the coffee table and called my wife.

"I cleaned out my mother's attic," I told her.

"Good," she said. "I'm glad that's done." She was getting ready for bed. Her voice sounded sleepy and soft; warm, deep, cheerful, and content. I could almost taste her good-night kiss. I could almost feel her fingertips on my shoulder blades.

On the big TV screen across the room, the wars went on silently: smoking desert cities; women wailing on their knees; soldiers patrolling the burned-out shells of houses; tangled bodies of men; the body of a child.

I watched them. I chewed my lip. I wanted to tell Cathy what was happening here, about Lauren and Serena and everything. I was trying to find the right words to start with.

"Those notebooks-my mother's notebooks," I said. "The way she saw patterns in everything, everything falling into place, everything making sense. It makes you doubt yourself, makes you doubt your own perceptions. I mean, how do you know what's logical, what fits together? It's all just a bell ringing in your brain, isn't it? If the bell gets broken, if it won't stop ringing-how do you know?"

"I guess it's all a kind of faith in the end," Cathy said sleepily. "I guess God planned it that way."

"That God. He gets up to some shenanigans, doesn't he?"

"I know I love you though," she said. "I love you more than anything, I know that."

The dark room flickered with the images on the screen: a fireball blowing out the windows of a grand hotel; a general giving a press conference; a mob in Paris burning cars.

"I love you too," I said. "Sleep well."

I laid down the phone. I picked up the remote. I turned the TV's audio on again.

I remember well the first thing I saw then. Well, sure I do. It's what got me into so much trouble later on. There was some imam on the news show now, some chubby-cheeked, baby-faced brown guy in a funny black hat, patiently explaining things to some commentator or other.

"When atheist Communism threatened to take over the world, we stood beside Christian America to defeat the atheists. Those atheists have been swallowed up by hell as they deserved." He said all this in a pleasant tone of voice, the voice of a cherubic man of wisdom making all things clear. "Now that atheism is no more, we must have a Holy War to decide the question: Which God will rule? The West's God of materialism and selfishness and licentiousness-or the true God, Allah, His name be praised?"

At the time, I just snorted and started changing channels apathetically. Buy this car. Eat this burger. Take this pill to give you an erection. Call your doctor if your erection lasts more than four hours. Blah, blah, blah.

I did pause a moment when I saw Angelica Eden. The actress, remember. The raven-haired siren who seemed to have stolen wispy Todd Bingham away from sweet-faced, and possibly pregnant, Juliette Lovesey. All of which seemed to be their way of publicizing their new movie, The End of Civilization as We Know It. The first film ever in holographic Real 3-D.

"I mean, look, I believe in love, you know," she was saying. "But not this idea that you're with one person till you die. I think anyone should be able to be with anyone they want to. It's really no one's business, after all."

She was wearing a black dress with a hemline that rose to the top of her thighs and a neckline that plunged nearly to the hem. She was sitting in a director's chair, smiling over at the smiling bee-stung lips of our old friend Sally Sterling. When she crossed her creamy white legs, I felt it flow through me like liquid electricity.

"Tell us about the new movie," Sally said.

"It's called The End of Civilization as We Know It," said Angelica large-breastedly. "Because the filmmakers really believe that it's civilization as we know it that's causing all these wars all over the place. And since we're the most so-called 'civilized' country in the world, obviously we're really the ones who are most to blame."

Man, I thought, look at the tits on this woman! And have I mentioned her lips? Wonderful lips, lush, scarlet. Never mind calling your doctor. Those lips looked like they could make a four-hour erection last about thirty seconds.

I drank more wine. I changed the channel and then changed the channel again, then again. Tipsy, lonely, horny, I caught myself searching for one of those late-night porno movies so I could really make a night of it.

As it turned out, I couldn't find anything quite that exciting. In fact, on all those millions of channels, I couldn't find anything worth watching at all. So I switched to the TiVo screen, to its list of prerecorded programs. And whoa!, for a second there, I felt a little amygdaloid jolt of coincidence and meaning-did I ever! Because what name was up there on the screen? That's right. Patrick Piersall! Then, oh yeah, I remembered-I'd programmed him into the machine myself.

I pressed the button to open his file. The TiVo had recorded another episode of The Universal and-oh, look!-there was that new reality crime show he'd been touting on the talk circuit the other evening. Patrick Piersalls True Crime America! I started it playing.

At first, there was just a lot of noise and graphics. Police sirens screaming, thumping music. Cop cars and grocery holdups and murder victims on stretchers flashing by in a strobic montage. Then, like a prison door slamming shut, the title card whomped down over the screen: Patrick Piersall's True Crime America! And then there was Piersall in the flesh-in a lot of flesh. The lithe unitarded Augustus Kane we remembered from last night was gone-way gone. In his place once again stood today's pudgy, haggard little man, his red-veined, swollen-nosed alcoholic's face capped with a toupee that made him look as if a flying squirrel had been shot out of the sky and landed dead on his scalp.

He came walking toward us portentously down a residential street in Your Town, My Town, Anytown USA. He looked at us straight in the kisser and quirked an Augustus Kane eyebrow at us. It was sad: an ironic gesture without the old irony, a meaningless habit now. Meaningless, too, was that old hesitant, syncopated speaking rhythm of his. It still made him sound as if he were plucking each word from the Tree of Wisdom, but he couldn't have been, because this is what he said:

"A quiet street. A row of houses on well-tended lawns. Happy families leading respectable lives. This is the America we like to believe in. But for the police-and for the victims of crime-the reality is very different."