Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

Now, I was about to go on to say that, with atheism a discredited force in the world, there were basically two different ways in which you could believe in God. You could believe in a God who had spoken one time and then demanded submission ever after to his Word. Or you could believe in a God who was still speaking, still unfolding his creation to us in the strange equation of every soul and in the unfathomable design thrown up by all our souls together. That God-that second God-requires not submission but liberty, so that every soul can speak, even the errant and foolish ones. Ultimately, I was going to say, one of those two versions of God has to triumph over the other. They obviously can't live side by side.

But before I could go on, before I could say any of that, the perky female interviewer interrupted me. Her startlingly present features were suddenly far less perky, far more dark and fierce.

"So what are you saying? Are you saying this is something like Smackdown: Jehovah Versus Allah? Either believe in our Judeo-Christian God or we kill you?"

"Oh, no," I said, horrified. "No, not at all, what I meant-"

"You believe this is some kind of New Crusade-because many in the Muslim world are afraid of exactly that."

"No, that's not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is-"

"Are you a Christian?" she asked me accusingly.

"Well, yes-yes I am, but-"

"So you believe your religion is the right one and other religions are false?"

"Well, yes, I suppose in some sense I do, but-"

Too late. The perky female interviewer rested her case. She swiveled her crossed knees away from me decisively and re-pointed them at Patrick Piersall, where he sat fat and kingly in the chair beside me.

"Patrick, do you agree with that?" she said-and I thought there was a clear tone of warning in her voice.

But Piersall knew the ropes of these things far better than I. "No, no, no, no, no," he said in deep, mellow, almost Santa Clausian tones. I noticed he had carefully tucked the tail of his sports jacket under his buttocks so it wouldn't ride up to his shoulders when he leaned forward. And I noticed he leaned forward whenever he talked. This, I learned later, gave him a more animated, active appearance onscreen. He leaned forward and began to cut the air with his hands in that Patrick Piersall way of his, speaking in those patented Patrick Piersall syncopations. "With respect to my friend-if anything-I think what happened this past week shows"-and his expression here became almost mystic, his hand trembling like a trapped bird in the air in front of him-"It shows the-the need for greater-sensitivity-understanding-among peoples of the world. Because war-war is-not the answer."

The perky female interviewer turned from him to look directly into the camera. "We'll be right back," she said.

The bright lights dimmed and we sank into a duller shade of existence.

Patrick Piersall turned his bloated face toward me and winked broadly. "Kid," he said. "I don't think you're quite ready for TV."

Well, that didn't say the half of it. After that interview-that's when the attacks started. The endless op-eds and editorials in the Times. The subtle but unmistakable shift in the tone of coverage on the networks. The honk of that jerk on cable news, the one with a voice like a traffic jam, going on and on about me. Before the interview with the perky female, I was a "hero," a "heartland entrepreneur," an "unprepossessing everyman." Now I was suddenly a "racist," a "rabid right-winger," a "fundamentalist theocrat, as bad as the terrorists themselves." And those were only the opinions. In the news reports, I went from being "handsome with an ironic smile" to "short" and "bland" with "a receding hairline." I went from having no political or religious affiliation to speak of to where journalists seemed unable to mention my name without pointing out that I was a conservative or a Republican or a Christian. Juliette Lovesey, Todd Bingham, and Angelica Eden all condemned me publicly. "It was exactly to change bigoted attitudes like Mr. Harrow's that we made our movie," Juliette said, her eyes growing damp. "This makes me feel the entire project was in vain." For a while, a group called Arab-American Rights got big headlines by demanding an apology from me, and calling for anti-hate-speech legislation to prevent "such dangerous incidents from occurring in the future." Fortunately, the group's leader was soon after indicted for having ties to Palestinian terrorists-whereupon the story vanished from the news altogether.

Conversely, the "true hero of the New Coliseum" (Times), "beloved TV star Patrick Piersall" (CBS Evening News), was soon signed to "light up the airwaves once again" (CNN) with a featured role as "a former sixties revolutionary now turned heroic defense attorney on the surefire hit False Convictions " (Sally Sterling). Hey, I was happy for him. He had not spent half a lifetime trying to claw his way back into the limelight for nothing.

The media attacks went on forever, but I hardly minded. My attention was taken up by my other nagging anxiety, which was, of course, Serena. I did not see how she could avoid going to prison. I was fearful that her role in the murder of Casey Diggs would get her a long sentence, possibly even life. She was in custody much of the winter as her case dragged on. When I wasn't lying awake at night thinking about suicide, I was lying awake at night worrying about her. I had a half-acknowledged sense that prison was what she deserved, but I was certain it would be the ruin of her.

In the end, again, the outcome was nowhere near as bad as I feared. I helped Lauren pay for a good lawyer, and I spoke to anyone and everyone I could on her behalf. Serena's youth, her role in alerting me to the plot at the theater and a convincing argument that she had been used by Jamal and never fully understood his plans won her some sympathy from both the authorities and the media. She had valuable testimony to trade, too, and some good intelligence she had overheard while in Jamal's company. The feds wound up giving her a suspended sentence on a conspiracy charge and the state finally made a deal that got her one and a half to three years in a juvenile facility in Dutchess County, with time served and a strong possibility of parole after only six months. It was a hell of a break for her, far better than I'd dared to hope for.

And, in the end, as it was Serena who had gotten me into all this in the first place, so it was Serena who began to bring me out.

It happened early in May, early on a Sunday morning after a particularly bad night. With the coming of better weather back east, my mother's house had finally sold the day before for a decent price. I had approved the deal in the afternoon and barely thought about it for the rest of the evening. Then, shortly after midnight, I awakened with a crushing sense of grief and loss. I felt as if that week I had spent in my mother's house had been the last real thing that had happened to me. Here in my own house, I felt I was living in a kind of delirium, a kind of running fever dream. With my mother's house gone, I could never escape from here, never go back to that reality again. It felt like a great weight was sitting on top of me. I felt very sad, very heavy, very terrible.

Somewhere around 3:00 A.M., in this agony of sadness, I reached a decision that, yes, I would buy the gun I had chosen. The decision gave me a sense of certainty and direction and it offered the promise of an end to this depression that had drained the joy out of me since my return. I felt energized and excited by the finality of it and I couldn't get back to sleep.

Finally, as dawn began to lighten the windows, I slipped out of bed. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and went downstairs. As an act of-I don't know-nostalgia, maybe, I turned on the television in the living room. I sat slumped in an armchair with the remote control held slack in my hand, my chin on my chest, my eyes peering up at the screen from under my eyebrows.