Andrew Klavan: Empire of Lies

So she died alone. The maid came in one morning and found her. I wondered-I still wonder-if her whisper had faded to nothing or if she stopped suddenly in the middle of a word. I wondered if she felt relief as the last hoarded breath rattled out of her-relief that it was finally over, that her guardianship of the secret patterns of history was finally done. Or did she die grieving that there was no one there to hear her, no one else to understand and to take up the sacred burden when she was gone?

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up into the shadows for a long time. Then I looked away. Confronting the past was all well and good, but there was no chance I was going up there tonight, not with the babbling ghost of her lying there in the darkness. Tonight, I decided, I would sleep in the television room.

The television room was a strange feature of the place. It was not connected to any other room in the house. You had to get to it by going through the garage. I reached the garage through the door in the kitchen, then edged my way between my mother's old Volvo and the gardening tools hanging on pegboards along the walls. The door to the television room was at the back beside stacked boxes of moldering books. I went through. Turned the light on. Tossed my suitcase onto the floor.

The room was a long and narrow rectangle. Call it ten feet by twenty. The walls were painted a deep, rich blue. There was a couch on one end, to my right. And to my left, all the way on the other end, taking up almost the entire wall, there was what to these rapidly aging eyes seemed the largest flat-screen rear-projection television set that could ever be conceived by the mind of man. Really, it was a monster, just huge. Seventy inches, if I remember my brother's boast right. Alan had treated himself to the machine about two years earlier, when some of my mother's CDs had rolled over.

Everything else here-everything else besides the couch and the TV-was incidental. Windows covered with wooden shutters. An ancient shag rug on the floor. Shelves and drawers against the longer walls to hold Alan's collections of old movies, television shows, and video games. A long coffee table in front of the couch, pinewood with ring stains and coffee stains on it. An Xbox on the table. And, of course, an amazingly complex super-duper remote control that for all I knew could make the sun rise in the morning and part the waters from the dry land.

I'd always liked this room. I'd always found it peaceful and comforting. All the high-tech stuff was new, of course, but there had always been a TV out here. Nothing as big as this cyclopean beast but some kind of TV or other. When we were kids, Alan and I would carry our cereal bowls through the garage of a Saturday morning, set them on the shag rug-the same shag rug, in fact-and lie belly down, eating our Cheerios and watching the cartoons. I remember it as the only time he and I could be alone together without him punching or kicking me or throwing me to the floor or stealing or breaking my toys or calling me names in a wild, high voice like a demon's. The TV seemed to hypnotize and pacify him and he would just lie on the rug beside me, munching his Cheerios, staring at the screen. As far as I could make out, that was pretty much all he'd been doing ever since.

My long trip over, I plumped down onto the sofa with a sigh. I picked up the remote gizmo. Studied it for a few seconds and pressed the buttons. The big TV made a sizzling sound. A red light flickered at the bottom of it, then went green. The set came on. Pictures. Voices. Drowning out the babbling ghost inside the house. What a relief.

A woman appeared on the screen, a perky little blonde thing, glossed and powdered to a fare-thee-well. Sally Sterling, she was-so said the caption across her breasts. Her gigantic face took up the entire far wall, her features so huge they fairly forced themselves on my consciousness. Ultra-kissable bee-stung lips. Glistening blue eyes that managed to be ambitious and imbecilic at once. She struck me as the kind of girl who in a bygone age would have set her sights on an aging millionaire. Now here she was, blown up to the size of a bus, bothering all the rest of us. She was holding a penis-shaped microphone in front of her mouth- well, I couldn't help but perceive it that way with it jumping out at me as large as that. Her great white smile flashed. She looked as if she could barely contain her glee.

"Is this the end of civilization as we know it?" she drawled ironically, a laugh stuck in her throat. "Three major Hollywood studios certainly hope so as they get ready for the premiere of the first film ever using Real 3-D Technology at the New Coliseum Theater just off Times Square-"

I pressed the remote, hunting through the channels. An ad for car insurance went by, then an ad for soda, then a game show with lightbulbs flashing around a babe in a short skirt. I settled on the news. Enormous images tumbled past of American soldiers curling around the doorways of bomb-gutted houses, young men charging into bullet-riddled darkness with brave and fearful eyes. There were bodies in an Arab marketplace around an exploded car. There was an old woman in a black burqa weeping on her knees. In St. Petersburg, some Islamo-fascists had set off a bomb near the Church of Saints Peter and Anne. In Paris, a lone jihadi had gone apeshit at the Louvre, stabbing two tourists before he slashed a priceless painting, Ingres's Odalisque.

I stared at the images, but again, my mind drifted back to Lauren, wondering what she wanted, why she had called me. And suddenly, thinking of her, watching the images on the screen, a realization came to me. With all this business about confronting the past and so on, I realized I'd been imagining Lauren as if she would be the same, as if she would look the same as I remembered her. When she'd spoken to me on the phone, her voice was unchanged. It was still a low, throaty drawl, sardonic, mocking, secretly vulnerable. The image of her that came into my mind as I listened was the image of her as she once was: young, narrow, wired, with that braced, expectant air some women have as if they're waiting to be taken by storm. I remembered her mostly as I saw her last, turning away from me, walking away, disappearing into the crowds by the harbor, Liberty in the distance to the left of her, the Twin Towers looming against the sky to her right.

But she will have changed, I reminded myself, as if talking to a simpleton. Of course she will have changed. I'd changed. Everyone had. The whole city was different, diminished, those towers themselves blown to rubble, the thousands in them dead. The whole world-that stunned, victorious West we lived in-our dumb, hilarious, in-the-money America with the slave colonies of the evil empire clacketing down like dominoes around our big clown feet: Seventeen years and it was all different, all gone. Look. Look at the TV: There was war after war in the Middle East now, war after war radiating like shock waves from the wound in the island where the towers had stood. Crazy jihadists taking over the failed kingdoms of Islam, fanatic hordes of fundamentalist warriors who seemed to have burst alive out of a mural of the Dark Ages, burst, complete with beards and turbans, frothing horses, scimitars upraised, to go galloping nutso through real life. They would brook no god but their god, their ferocious god, no law but their sharia law. They would kill anyone who might oppose or offend them, any Muslim who imagined a new future, any woman who wanted to be equal or free. And they dreamed of conquering all the infidel West, subjugating the whole mess of the modern world. They were murderers in Holland. Rioters in France. Bombers in England, Russia, Pakistan, and so on. They were armies fighting for entire nations in Africa. Here in America too, after the World Trade Center, they continued to pull off attacks now and then. Sometimes it was a terrorist cell, sometimes just a lone mad-for-Allah boy opening fire in a shopping mall or running down some nonbelievers with his SUV. But there were always bigger doings in the works, foiled plots and whispered conspiracies: to bring down more buildings, to bring down anything that stands-hell, to bring down the whole third dimension and make the world flat again.