Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

Then I hit the doors with my back. I carried Serena through, into The End of Civilization as We Know It.

The music surrounded us, brash and loud. We were bathed in strobic light and shadows. I charged through the flicker, up an inclined aisle, gathering my breath, gathering my courage.

I started shouting even before I reached the auditorium, my voice nearly drowned by the music.

"Bomb! There's a bomb in the building! Get out! There's a bomb!"

I plunged into the center of the movie.

It felt like that. It felt as if I'd crashed through the surface of the show and become a part of it. I had broken out of the aisle onto the stage of a vast amphitheater. Tiers and tiers of seats rose into the glimmering darkness all around me. Eyes gleamed up there, gazing down at me. Hundreds of faces came halfway into view then vanished as the shifting light from the scene below played over them and passed by.

I was in that scene. I was lost in that light: light and color and shapes and figures ringed round by the tiers of gazing eyes. There were the pyramids of Giza rising toward the sky; and there the sphinx of living rock standing its ancient guard. Trucks were rumbling past in the distance. Men in khaki uniforms ran here and there. Other men in flowing white Arab robes strode past. On every side of me the lone and level sands stretched far away.

Apparently, the way the new 3-D technology worked, no matter where you were in the seats above, the images seemed clear and life-sized and bizarrely real. But down where I was, the picture was distorted. The buildings were slanted, some huge, some too small. The people were stretched and blurred and of different sizes. Vehicles and running men became elongated as they went past, then suddenly vanished. Images became more and more transparent the closer they came. The effect was swirling, dazzling, phantasmagorical-yet even for me, at moments, it was completely three-dimensional, thoroughly alive.

I was dazzled by it all. Confused. I had stepped in an instant from present-day New York into ruins and sand. The scene surrounding me was at once utterly unreal and utterly present. The scene above me was all faces-faces rising into infinity-flickering in the flickering light-climbing tiers of eyes staring down at me. It was more than I could take in. It stopped my thinking cold, shut down my mind. All I could manage to do was turn from place to place, holding Serena in my arms, and shouting wildly:

"Bomb! Bomb! There's a bomb in the theater!"

A man stepped right up to me. Startled and afraid, I spun to him. I recognized him at once: It was the actor, Todd Bingham. For a second, he seemed enormous and elongated like pulled taffy. The next second, he snapped into his proper shape but became transparent. It was the phantom of Todd, his character in the movie.

"I've had enough of being afraid," he said to me.

Other people were shouting around me, running past me, soldiers and natives and sheikhs.

"There's a bomb!" I screamed at Todd.

A woman behind me spoke, her voice very loud. I swung around to her, Serena's tear-streaked features going bright and dim as they slashed through the center of a nomad's skirt. There was Angelica Eden on the other side of me, solid and vital. She looked cool and witty in khaki slacks and a purple blouse open on her famous cleavage. She laughed around her cigarette. She said, "You can never have enough fear, Jason. Fear is how America rules the world. If we can make them fear these Muslims, all their oil will be ours!"

I blinked, confused. She'd used my name. Was she real? Was she speaking to me? No, dimly, even in my confusion, I realized she was part of the scene. I realized, too, that the scene-its music, its dialogue, the rumble of its stretching, moving, vanishing trucks-was swallowing my shouts, was encompassing my presence altogether.

This, I later learned, was the part of the film in which Todd, playing a hard-boiled CIA agent, first begins to realize that the terrorist explosions bringing chaos to the Middle East are in fact being engineered by American political and business interests who are then putting the blame on innocent Muslims in order to start a war and take over their oil fields.

"There's a bomb in the theater!" I screamed, my voice cracking.

"Wait! Jason, wait!"

Again, disoriented by the sound of my own name, I turned to see a woman striding toward me-striding toward me and shrinking from a monstrous taffy string into the transparent image of Juliette Lovesey. She looked strong now, clear-eyed, dynamic; not the fragile creature I'd seen on the red carpet outside. "Before you make up your mind, there's someone I think you need to talk to."

Suddenly another man was standing beside me. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He was an Arab man about sixty years old with a black beard and a black turban. His face was lined but kindly. His eyes twinkled with wisdom.

"This is Muammar al-Qadi," said Juliette.

"Of Hezbollah?" Todd said in terse surprise.

"Listen to me!" I shouted up at the flickering faces in the surrounding dark.

"You must listen to him," said Juliette.

"They don't know we're real!" Serena cried to me.

"I should've killed you when I had the chance," said the evil Angelica to the Arab man. Her father, it would turn out, owned a controlling interest in an oil company.

Now, yet another man rushed beneath the base of the gazing sphinx and stumbled toward Todd with flying footsteps. He was all in black, black jeans and a black hoodie. The outfit seemed almost to make a human-shaped hole in the surrounding scene. His face, though-his face was preternaturally bright. It was like a sunburst, burning with prophecy, ecstatic, insane.

Dazed and squinting through the dazzling light, I didn't recognize him at first. Then Serena let out a short, sharp scream and I realized it was Jamal.

"Sometimes," said the old, kindly Arab man, his wise eyes twinkling, "sometimes we must turn to the beautiful wisdom and imagery of the Koran for guidance."

"Allahu akbar! God is great!" Jamal shouted.

Now the music swelled romantically to underscore Muammar al-Qadi's wisdom. The bearded old man lifted his hand. There was a venerable leather-bound book in it. Jamal lifted his hand almost simultaneously. There was a detonator in it. I could see the red button under his thumb.

"Allahu akbar!" Jamal shrieked.

I had one last moment to look around me, to turn and cast my gaze over the shifting phantoms on the dazzling stage. There was Todd with the tough-guy stubble on his chin and Juliette looking bold and adventurous and Angelica looking wicked but strong. I saw the kindly old Arab with his turban and black beard and Patrick Piersall in sweatpants and an orange pullover of some kind…

And the last thing I remember thinking before the blast was: Patrick Piersall? Is he in this, too?

Apparently he was. He had entered from the direction of a passing truck. He was standing in the yellow sand right there beside me. Even here in the movie, he appeared pudgy and yellow-eyed and dissolute. Yet in this role at least, he managed to put on a heroic demeanor. He was planted firmly with his legs apart and wore a look on his face so stalwart and grim, he might still have been piloting his spaceship through the galaxy as in days of yore. I saw Todd stride manfully past him to Juliette. He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her to him and said, "Where the hell have you been?"

"God is great!" shouted Jamal, holding up the detonator.

"Eat shit and die!" said Patrick Piersall.

He lifted his hand, too. He was holding a gun in it. It was that 9mm automatic he had shown me in the Ale House.

The music was blossoming around us like a sudden garden with a scent redolent of courage and romance. Then came the blast-a shocking blast. It wasn't loud-not as loud as the explosions in the movie-but it was real and vibrant, sucking the air into itself and blowing it out again so that I felt it like a punch to the cheek.