Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

He began to look around, as if searching for someone he could share the joke with. He found me. Our eyes met.

Through the floating mist of ruin, as the people ran screaming for their lives, Patrick Piersall sent me a flamboyant salute. Laughing like a madman, he braced the tips of all five fingers of his left hand against his forehead and then flung the hand toward me, opening it in my direction. It was a grandiose, flyaway gesture, a gesture of pure, alcoholic derangement, both exalted and absurd. I returned it in a more restrained fashion, a finger to my eyebrow, then pointed at him. Piersall went on laughing. Even I couldn't help but smile.

Because the fact was-when the dust and insanity settled-the fact was we had saved them. Oh, there were terrible tragedies that night, terrible injuries that would never be healed. Children lost limbs. Women's faces were slashed and ravaged. A couple of men were paralyzed. A couple had heart attacks. A few were buried under the rubble for hours. There were hundreds hurt, some in ways almost unimaginable, ways too disturbing to describe. Still…

Still in all, not one person died as a result of the terrorist blast in the New Coliseum Theater. Todd, Juliette, Angelica, the secretary of state, all the others in the audience and all the people who'd been standing and watching on the street outside-miraculously, every single one of them-every single one of them survived.

So Patrick Piersall laughed and I managed a small smile and we saluted each other, standing on the corner of Times Square. Because we saved them, he and I-and Casey Diggs, too. We saved them-that was the truth of it. A paranoid wannabe journalist barred from his profession for telling the truth. A drunken has-been Hollywood actor who once pretended to be the admiral of a spaceship. And me. Not much in the way of heroes, I know, but all the heroes we could muster in a desperate hour.

And it was enough. Just barely enough.

Because we saved them all.

On a clear fall afternoon not long after the explosion, I came home to the Hill. As I stepped out of my car into the driveway, my wife and children rushed the door of the house so fast they got jammed up in it together. Then they broke out one at a time and came hurtling toward me. Chad and Nathan were racing in the lead with little Terry running behind. As I stepped out of the driveway onto the front walk, they flung themselves at me. In a moment, I had a boy in each arm and the girl wrapped around my leg, and Cathy, smiling and crying at once, moving in among them with a kiss.

I wanted to weep when I saw them. I wanted to fall to my knees and press my forehead to the flagstone and sob enormous racking sobs until I heaved up some portion of the thick, strangling mass of my self-revulsion. I wanted to slobber over the goodness of those children's heads and wallow in the sweetness of my wife's bosom and grovel on the earth in front of them. I wanted to rip open my shirt and bare the ugliness of myself to heaven and beg their forgiveness for what I was inside.

But no. I was Cathy's husband, the children's father, and they were all of them in my care. If I wept, they would weep. If I showed them my misery, they would be miserable, too. I had no business bringing my moral nausea to their happy occasion. I settled instead for many misty-eyed kisses and embraces all around. Then, with what I hoped was insouciant Dad gallantry, I said, "So- what's for dinner?" They all laughed and we headed together into the house.

It was the beginning of a very hard winter. A black depression soon settled over me. My old joy of life seemed to seep through my fingers as I desperately tried to hold it fast. At last, it bled out of my life entirely. I walked through the days hollow-hearted and soul-dead. Day by day, hour by hour, I used all the strength of will I had to hide my emptiness from the children. I went through the motions of driving them to school and playing with them in the snow and taking them to movies, but that's what it was: just going through the motions. Joking with them, wrestling with them, setting rules for them, hearing them out. None of it seemed real to me. My life did not seem real.

I told my wife how I felt, but I tried not to show it to her too much. I tried to describe it to her without complaining or moping or carrying on. One night, I confessed to her what I did to Arthur Rashid, forcing myself to remain dry-eyed as I described pulverizing his kneecaps with the hammer. Cathy reached across the table and took my hand.

"That's awful. What an awful experience," she said.

But I could see the doubt and horror in her eyes. I could see her hold back the question: "Wasn't there anything else you could have done?"

I couldn't bring myself to tell her the rest, to describe the pulsing excitement that went through me as I brought the hammer down, or about how I hid in the theater closet, ready to lay hands on Maryanne.

I tried to pray about these things, but I couldn't somehow. I tried to ask God to forgive me for what I'd done and what I'd felt, but I couldn't. The truth was: I was too angry at him to pray. I felt he had asked too much of me. It wasn't that he had asked me to sacrifice my decency or my complacency or even my joy of living. Those were his to give and his to take away; I understood that. But before he would allow me to save those thousands and thousands of innocent lives-his damn lives, his creations-God had demanded that I know myself, and for that I could not forgive him. I could not forgive him and so I could not ask him to forgive me.

So what else was there? I tried going to a psychiatrist. He listened to me talk for fifteen minutes, then wrote me a prescription for pills-some of those anti-depression pills I'd seen advertised on TV. I was so dejected at that point I actually filled the prescription. But I never took them. Listen, to each his own. For all I know, you could pop a couple of those suckers and spend the rest of your days dancing in the sun. But the way I saw it, my problem wasn't chemical, it was spiritual. The spirit has to have its journey, has to go through its stations, you know; that's how it's shaped finally into a soul. I took the pills down to the lake and hurled them in.

Now I guess you may say to me: Well, that's all very well and good, but what if you can't make it through the stations of the spirit, what if the journey's too much for you? What if you get so depressed you go out and buy a rope and hang yourself? And I guess I would answer you: Them's the breaks, pal. There's no freedom without the possibility of failure. And I'm not afraid to die.

I thought about it a lot, in fact: killing myself, I mean. I took long drives to deserted country lanes, parked in the grass by the roadside, and thought about ways to do it. After months of considering various methods, I settled on a gun as the surest and quickest. I even began shopping around for a gun and had my eye on an elegant little Beretta 9mm. With that, I figured, if I decided to live, I would still have something for home protection.

So it went, through Christmas, into January, February, March. And all in spite of the fact that most of my worst fears of what would happen in the aftermath of The End of Civilization never actually materialized. For instance, I had worried quite a lot early on that I might have to go to jail for what I did to Rashid or at least stand trial for it. I had worried that I might even still be a suspect in Anne Smith's death. For weeks I had bouts of paranoia during which I imagined that all the details of my sordid earlier life would somehow become news and so become known to my children and my neighbors on the Hill. Even the idea that my children and neighbors would hear about Rashid-how I had taped him up and gagged him and shattered his knees with a hammer to make him talk-haunted and sickened me and kept me awake at night.