Andrew Klavan - Empire of Lies

There was a news program on. One of those Sunday talk shows where a moderator sits at a table and interviews a newsmaker or a pundit face to face. As a lead-in, they were showing video of the wars in the Middle East, quick cuts of American soldiers braving bullets flying out of gutted houses; car-bomb blasts and the bleeding injured wandering dazed among the ruins; an Arab woman fallen to her knees before the corpse of her child, her hands uplifted to the sky as she keened for the dead.

When the video ended, the show returned to the moderator and his guest at the table. The moderator was a rather dapper middle-aged man, and his guest was a solemn but still-dynamic fellow of sixty or so with silver hair atop a pug-nosed and rather mischievous face. He had been a senator once, but had been thrown out in the last election. Ever since then, he'd been making the rounds of talk shows, having a good old time saying whatever came into his head.

"These wars in the Middle East-they're like treating a disease with too short a dose of antibiotics," he was saying now. "The disease comes back stronger and adapts to the medicine. You have to snuff it out completely before you're cured."

"Which means…?" said the moderator.

"Well, it means in this case," said the former senator, "that we have to conquer these people, literally take over their countries and run them until they can run them themselves, if ever. Look, the attack on the New Coliseum-an attack in which no one was killed only through the sheerest, blindest good luck-that attack should stand as a warning that they're going to strike at us again and again and again until we stop them or they destroy us."

The dapper moderator sat back in his chair and smiled mildly with lofty patrician disbelief. "But aren't you getting dangerously close to talking about a kind of… imperialism?"

"I am talking about imperialism," said the former senator with the cavalier self-assurance of a man who has no job left to lose. "Empire is a phase in the life of great nations. It's like adulthood. You can either embrace it or die. The question is whether this particular generation, that hasn't even been able to grow up on an individual level, is going to accept the responsibility of growing up on a national level."

The commercials came on. In the middle of an ad for tomato soup, I narrowed my eyes. Wait a minute, I thought. Had I actually just heard that? Empire is a phase in the life of great nations. Wasn't that one of the things my mother had scrawled in one of her Spiral Notebooks? I was no longer sure. I could no longer remember. Maybe I had it wrong, or maybe I had just fallen asleep in my chair and dreamed the man on TV had said it. I couldn't tell.

After a time-a long time-I became aware that the rest of the house had awakened around me. The boys were on the floor in their pajamas, playing with a computer game of some kind. Cathy was in the kitchen, banging the coffeepot around.

Now my daughter Terry climbed into the armchair beside me. She worked her way under my arm to snuggle warmly against me.

"Daddy," she said, "can we watch cartoons?"

I hugged her to me and pressed the buttons of the remote control. I found a lot of cartoon ponies with feathery wings. Terry seemed to like that.

I sat with her there and stared at the television set, lost within myself. When I finally heard Nathan speaking to me, I had the feeling he'd been trying to get my attention for some time.

"Dad? Dad?"

I shuddered out of my reverie and turned to him. He was on his feet now, looking out the big window at the backyard. In a voice hushed with mysterium, he said, "There's somebody on our swing set."

"Who?" cried my daughter. Affronted that any stranger might be on a swing set that was largely hers, she wriggled out from under my arm, and jumped off the armchair to have a look for herself.

I rose heavily from the chair and joined the children at the window. The morning light was spreading over a sweet blue spring day. Small white clouds were sailing past the sun and over the pale green of the budding treetops and over low bushes white with flowers. I could see their reflections moving stately across the lake beyond.

Through the last faint trailing remnants of mist off the water, I saw Serena. She was down there at the bottom of the grassy slope. She was sitting on one of our swings, one hand slack in her lap, the other loosely holding the chain. Small and forlorn, her eyes turned down to the ground, she rocked herself gently back and forth, pushing off the sand with the tips of her tennis shoes. There was a canvas bag on the lawn by the side of the swing set.

"Who is it, Daddy?" Terry asked me.

"Cathy!" I called. "Could you come here a second, please?"

My wife came in from the kitchen, looking fresh and cheerful in her opalescent quilted bathrobe. She saw us all standing there-because Chad, curious, had come up off the floor to get a look out the window as well.

"Oh, boy, what are we watching?" she laughed. She moved to stand with us, looking out over Terry's head.

"Serena," I told her.

She took a long breath. "Did you know she was getting out?"

I shook my head. "She didn't say so in her last letter. She never does say much."

"How on earth did she get here?" my wife wondered.

One corner of my mouth lifted. I gazed out the window at the girl on the gently moving swing. "She walked," I said quietly, after a while. "She's a good walker."

There was silence between us another second or two. Then, "The poor thing," Cathy said. "She must be hungry. Go bring her in. I'll start breakfast."

I nodded as she headed back for the kitchen. I stood another long while at the window, watching Serena rock herself. Finally I let out a sigh between pursed lips.

Nathan caught that. He caught my mood as a ten-year-old will. He imitated my quirked mouth, my expression of knowing cynicism.

"Well," he said up at me, "this can only mean trouble."

I laughed. "All my children are trouble," I said. "Go turn off the TV and get ready for church."

I pushed out the back door and walked down the hill toward her. What a beautiful morning it was, I remember. The mist kept the air cool, but there was a sweet scent of blossoms and the breeze off the lake smelled of trees thick and green with full summer foliage. I breathed in deeply as I crossed the grass.

Serena didn't see me. At least, she didn't look up as I approached. She just went on swinging gently back and forth, studying the tips of her pink sneakers as they pushed off the sand. She had a cheap blue windbreaker on, but it was unzipped. I could see the dull gray sweatshirt underneath it and the brand-new jeans. Her hair was a little longer than it had been the last time I saw her, pulled back and tied up in a ponytail. Even from a distance, her face seemed very pale, very thin. I don't think she was wearing any makeup.

Finally, when I was standing directly in front of her, she lifted her eyes to me. It hurt me to see how gaunt her face was. Her skin had gotten bad, too. Her cheeks were patched with acne. Her eyes seemed dull as if a film lay over them. Her mouth was set in a tense, grim line. She gave off a sickbed air. Prison had done this to her. Prison had worn her down.

I didn't say anything but I smiled at her. She got up out of the swing. We stood facing each other. I reached out and put my hand tenderly on her shoulder.

At that, Serena's chin bunched, her lips trembled, and she dissolved into tears. I pulled her to me and held her. Her crying grew more violent. She pressed her face into my shoulder and her whole body bucked and shivered as she sobbed. The sobs were very loud, raw, and hoarse. I kept my arms around her and rubbed her back and kissed her hair.

I looked out over her head to the sky and the water. Strangely, after my long, miserable night, I had a sense for the first time then-just an intimation really-that it was going to be all right. You know? That I was going to be all right, that I was not going to shoot myself with any damned gun, that I was going to damn well live-I was going to live a good long time and meet my grandchildren. I had a faint but sure and certain sense that this sadness was going to lift finally and that there was a kind of peace waiting for me beyond it, not as far off as all that, a bearable distance, a journey I had the strength to make.