Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

"Get your hands off me or I'll kill you," he said.

I got past him, tumbling deeper into the mass.

Then-the next moment-I was jostled hard from the right. I stumbled. The plasma of the media creature began closing over me. I felt the bodies of men pressing in on me as I nearly lost my footing, felt the comfortless closeness of women as the hurly-burly nearly bore me down. I smelled their aftershave and their perfume. I saw their twisted features above me, their bared teeth, their eyes both bright and dead. Jutted microphones shot past my cheek like bullets. Elbows knocked and clocked me from every side.

Falling, panicking, I thought, What am I doing here? What am I doing? I no longer cared about Patrick Piersall or Casey Diggs or plots and conspiracies and shadowy threats of danger. I just wanted to get out. I just wanted to go home, away from the sight of these slavering, crazy-faced men, from the sound of these women buzzing like locusts, screaming like harpies. Only a rage for survival, a terror of being trampled into the pavement and smothered down there, made me corkscrew viciously, gripping and tearing at the bodies around me in order to stay on my feet. Only that rage made me battle forward with all the strength I had. Somehow I got my balance back. I rammed myself headlong through the congealed human mass, looking for a clearing, for open air.

And then there I was. I was at the police line. I was at the edge of the corridor. I had broken through the mob and was standing between two NYPD patrolmen, at the point where their hands met to form their barricade against the press. There was no one else in front of me. I could see right into the corridor itself.

There was Piersall and his entourage of lawyers and lawmen-and they had already passed me by. I'd missed them by a few steps. The trailing pair of COs was a pace to my right, then the attorneys, then Piersall and the officers who held him, then the COs in the lead-who were nearly at the building's stairs, nearly at the door.

The pressure of the amoeba behind me drove me hard against the cops' arms. The creature's voices were shouting loudly on every side of me. I stuck my hand into the pocket of my windbreaker. I felt it close on the note I had folded there. I brought the note out, crumpled in my fist. But there was no way to get it to the lawyers or to Piersall. I had missed my chance.

But wait. The next moment, just before he reached the steps, Piersall stopped. He turned-swung around so hard that he brought the two startled corrections officers at his elbows swinging around with him. The actor was glowering with rage. His cheeks were red. His eyes were white and rolling. He was like a chained beast goaded into a fury by captivity and the mob and the questions hurled at him like stones.

He shouted. His voice was a ragged growl. He sounded just as I remembered him, as we all remembered him, from those moments of highest melodrama on the besieged deck of the spaceship Universal.

"This!" he bellowed at us. "This is not the news!"

He tried to charge at us like a bull. The force of it pulled his corrections officers after him a step before they could restrain him. The lawyers-the tidy men in suits-stumbled back several paces, jumbling together with the COs in the rear, who fell back too. One of the lawyers stuck his hand out to recover his balance.

On the instant, I saw my chance. I lunged forward, reaching out between the policemen. I grabbed the lawyer's hand and forced my note into it.

My name is Jason Harrow, it said. I have information about the disappearance of Casey Diggs. I will only speak to Patrick Piersall. Call this number.

Afterward, I felt awful: stupid, ashamed. I had bruises on my arms, one on my side. I thought I had one on my forehead, too-it felt bruised though I couldn't see it. My jaw hurt, my ribs ached. And for what? Piersall's lawyers would simply throw my note away. Of course they would. What had I accomplished? Nothing.

Wearily, I limped back to the parking lot, to my Mustang. I settled stiffly behind the wheel. I sat there, staring through the windshield at the Mercedes parked across from me. I felt far away from the living surface of the world. Dazed, dissociated, dead to feeling, confused about what was real and what wasn't. Why the hell had I come here? What was I thinking? I remembered, as if it were long ago, feeling some sense of threat, of danger. A sense I had to do something, do something fast. But why? What was it all about? A story told to me by a lying teenager? The wild accusations of a crazy college dropout? A lecture on Shakespeare by a college professor? The maunderings of a drunken, washed-up actor trying to jump-start his career with sensationalistic self-destruction? Nothing. It was all about nothing. Lies, rumor, suspicion hyped to an intensity of desperation by those days in my mother's house, those nights, those drunken nights, in the craziness of the television room. It really was true: I'd fallen through the screen and landed here, a drowning fall into other people's delusions.

I drove out of the lot and began wending the complicated way toward the East Side and the FDR Drive. The traffic was thick and I kept finding my path frustrated by one-way streets and security barricades. It took me the better part of an hour to reach the highway. There, the traffic grew lighter. I went quickly up along the East River, glancing out the window at the water running turbulent and dull beneath a sky darkening with running clouds. I was heading for the Midtown Tunnel, for the Island and my mother's house.

But I went another way. I don't know why. Maybe it was just my reluctance to return to that house, that room-I'm not sure. But when I got off at the 34th Street exit, I turned away from the tunnel without thinking. I headed west instead, across the city.

At first, I wasn't sure where I was going-then I was: the Church of the Incarnation, the brownstone church on Madison Avenue I had come to in the depths of my craziness so many years ago.

I remembered that day as I stepped through the church doors, that day I had prayed in the side chapel: Forgive me, help me. I thought of that now as the great axial moment of my life, the moment around which my soul had swung like a compass needle from misery to happiness. I yearned to feel the intensity of that day again, even the intensity of its despair, anything rather than this zombie malaise that had come over me. I tried to milk the stately place for some celestial emotions. I grasped at the sweetness of the quiet as I stepped from the vestibule into the nave. I savored the door swinging shut behind me, muffling the hectic street sounds that had followed me in. I drank in the otherworldly light that fell in beams through the stained-glass windows, crimson and indigo and gold. I tried to lift myself from this daze of unreality into the crystal solidity of the high, imagined spheres. But my mind remained muddy and faraway.

I slipped into a pew near the middle of the church. There were only two other people there with me: an old woman sitting on the far right side, and an even older woman sitting on the left. In my sullen distraction, they looked to me like refugees from the battle for the world, survivors who had stumbled into this ruin to die. All that was left of the broken body of Christ.

I sat and clasped my hands in my lap. I bowed my head and closed my eyes and tried to pray. But a moment later, I looked up again. I looked around. My eyes came to rest on the reredos up behind the altar. Herald angels flanking a trio of cherubs who were unrolling a scroll. and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, the scroll read. What the hell was that supposed to mean? I wondered. I mean, now that you have your spaceships and quantum physics and computers and television sets? The Word was made flesh. What the hell was that?