Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

Now, as if gushing from a culvert, we broke out of the narrow alley and spread out into the street. We were broadsided, jostled, and then joined by the greater crowd swarming out of the front doors. As if we were one enormous force, we carried the barricades away, knocked them down and trampled them. We caught up the thousands of spectators waiting outside and engulfed them and bore them on. Finally we began to spread out over the streets and the sidewalks, flowing in both directions toward the avenues, away from the theater. With every step, the mob's first explosive energy diminished. It began to flow and eddy. I gained my feet again in the midst of it. I began to move by my own will. I began to think again. I felt the rhythms of my body beginning to slow and calm.

By the time Serena and I reached Broadway, I was able to stop, to turn and look back at the New Coliseum. Its gorgeous white facade stood imperturbable and grand. The spiraling sweep of arched, column-framed windows were bathed in the spotlights and the kliegs sweeping back and forth majestically in front of it. The last of the people inside were just now spilling out of the various doors, the flow of black tuxes and brightly colored gowns filling the street and spreading toward the avenues. As the people began to disperse and calm, their rush of movement slowed. Like the surf breaking into pools on the shore, the mob broke into groups and couples and individuals again. Some continued running toward the avenues in their anxiety, but most were content to slow down and walk away or stop at the corner or even just outside the theater's doors. People began to look at the theater over their shoulders or to turn around and watch it expectantly.

Nothing happened. The movement of the crowd slowed even more. More and more people came to a standstill. Some began to curse. Some began to shake their heads and laugh.

I was at the corner of Broadway. The lights of Times Square soared into the night behind me. The spotlit grandeur of the New Coliseum rose above the milling people on the street before. After the thundering panic, the honking horns of the jammed traffic and the shouts and talk and footsteps and music of New York everywhere seemed almost harmonious and sweet.

I set Serena down on the ground, holding her up on her bound feet with my arm around her shoulders. With my free hand, I worked the duct tape off her wrists. Then I held her under the arm while she bent over and worked the tape off her ankles. I looked out, meanwhile, at the gowns and tuxes pooling in the street. I heard more laughter-cursing, too. My eyes passed over smiling faces and puzzled faces and angry faces. I saw people who had fallen or simply collapsed in the gutter and were lying there with others kneeling beside them. Finally my gaze came to rest on one man standing in the street about twenty yards from me-twenty yards, I mean, closer to the theater. It was Patrick Piersall. He was panting, out of breath as I was, exhausted. He looked old, deteriorated, squat and paunchy in his black sweatpants and orange pullover. He was still gripping his gun, holding it down by his side now. He was staring up at the swirling rise of the theater facade with a sort of dazed, stupid fascination.

Serena straightened beside me, unbound. She looked at the theater, too. We all looked at it, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

"What the hell was that all about?" I heard someone say.

I wondered myself. I felt a fresh anxiety slowly growing up inside me. In my spent, empty mind, bits of information were beginning to assemble themselves like pieces of matter coming together in space. An entire alternative story told itself to me in an instant. In this story, I had inherited my mother's disease, had begun to see connections and patterns and logical progressions that had no bearing on reality. I had found a teenaged girl in a bad situation and connected it to a professor whose philosophy I didn't like. In my madness, I had tortured the poor professor into inventing some sort of conspiracy against American culture, an attack on the New Coliseum. Maybe I was even suffering hallucinations, and my life had become like one of those French theories in which reality could not be distinguished from the images thrown up by society…

"My God-" I began to whisper.

Then the New Coliseum exploded.

I could not take in the vastness of the catastrophe. I could only stand and stare.

There was a hugely loud yet strangely echoless thump. There was a great heaving movement in the street. There was a punching blast of air and heat that knocked me back on my heels. I felt a jolt of terror and a kind of awe as every one of the big arched windows that spiraled up the front and side of the building flashed with fire then went suddenly black. Glass flew-enormous slanting shards and little confetti fragments of it flew out everywhere-fanned out into the night with what almost seemed an air of frantic gaiety. The glass caught the white of the spotlights. It caught the colored lights of Broadway. It glittered and sparkled gaily, shattering and tinkling and raining down over the ducked heads and raised arms of the crowd in the street. The whole theater seemed to expand for a moment and then, remarkably, settle back into itself as if it were unharmed.

After that, there was a second of uncanny stillness.

After that, the theater crumbled.

Before our eyes, the fabulous structure turned to jagged stones and dust and, with a long, dying roar, spilled down out of itself and over the pavement. Once again, the people began screaming. They ran and stumbled over each other, trying to get away from the white onslaught of debris and the thick spindrift of dust. I saw people caught by the tide of stone and knocked over. Some were buried under it. Some were carried away.

The rubble that had been the theater rolled clear across the street. It splashed and crashed against the walls of the brick buildings opposite. More windows shattered. Blood splattered against the stone. The debris seemed to rise up high into the night and hurl itself down again, leaving a thick mist of motes choking the air. At some point, the spotlights were knocked over. There was a brittle crash of glass and metal and that beautiful silver light around the red carpets was snuffed out. The kliegs fell, their beams toppling out of the night sky like towers. Where the bright theater stood, there was all at once a black hole, a ruin of girders and cement caught in places by sweeping brightness and then released again into shadow as a single klieg-swept off its truck bed but still somehow standing on the street-swung back and forth, its shaft crossing back and forth beneath the bellies of the roiling clouds above.

The panicking people poured past me, jostling me where I stood. Covered with dust and glass, catching, like the glass, the Broadway lights, they looked like strange rhinestone ghosts with dark O's where their mouths should have been. I kept my left arm around Serena's shoulders and pulled her to me to hold her upright, to keep her from being swept off as the people knocked into us and flowed past on either side.

I sought out Patrick Piersall again and found him. He was not far from where he'd been before. It was as if the collapsing theater had simply passed over him, as if the running, panicked crowd had passed over him, and all of it left him untouched. He was dusty-his pullover white, his face gray and white-but otherwise unmoved and unharmed.

And he was still just standing there, just staring up at the theater-or at the ruin that had been the theater, the emptiness of slanting girder and jagged stone. Then, the next moment, he was laughing-laughing hard, with his debauched wreck of a face thrown back and his shoulders going up and down and his round belly quivering. His laugh broke high once, then settled into a long baritone guffaw. I could hear him clearly over the shouts and screams and honking horns and traffic.