Empire of Lies (21 page)

Ah, never be afraid to ask. That was the underlying theme of the movie. Never, never, never be afraid to ask. Because now see: The wife was taking her clothes off, too. She was kneeling naked on the bed while the husband and his girlfriend climbed up her flanks like ivy. What relief. What joy. What tits.

Oh God, oh God, how I wanted Anne just then, how I wanted her naked in my arms!

I snagged my glass of wine off the table. I knocked back another swallow. Husband and girlfriend now had the wife on her back, the girlfriend's mouth on her breasts, the husband's face buried between her legs.

And shouldn't life be like that? I asked the empty room silently. Instead of all this fuss about adultery and morality and whatnot. Shouldn't life be just like that?

Take my father, for instance. My father could serve as an object lesson here. My father killed himself while I was away at college. He sat in his Lexus in the garage just outside this television room, just on the other side of the door. He turned on the engine and let it run. My brother Alan had already graduated by then and had more or less moved back home to begin his career as a leech and wastrel. He was the one who found Dad's body slumped behind the wheel.

And why? Why did the old man do it? Well, there was no suicide note—Dad died as he lived, in pale and thin-lipped silence—
but let's face facts: It was because of Margaret—of course it was—little mousy Margaret who adored him and whom he loved.

She was a client of his, bankrupt after her husband left her. My father restructured her finances, helped her get a bookkeeping job. She relied on him and came to look up to him and finally idolized him in her careful, mousy way. I saw them together once, in his office. Quite a comical pair, really, the two of them. He dry as a stick and colorless as a tax code, and she with her limp brown hair and the face of a painfully serious squirrel, sniffing and nibbling around his every word as if it were the meat she lived on.

I only learned the whole story later, from her, from Margaret herself. She came to Dad's funeral. I was sitting in the front pew of the mortuary, sitting with my arm around my mother. Poor Mom barely understood what had happened. She was looking at the floor, shaking her head, whispering to herself, trying to fit Dad's suicide into the grand historical scheme of things. At some point, I glanced over my shoulder and spotted Margaret sitting modestly in the back, alone, a stranger to everyone else, unobtrusive but clearly grief-stricken. I remembered seeing her in Dad's office that one time and somehow now, I guessed the truth. As the service ended, I saw her slip out the back door quietly. On instinct, I went after her, caught her elbow as she crossed the parking lot to her car. I thanked her for coming. She seemed grateful that anyone spoke to her at all. We arranged to have coffee together in the city.

What a funny little creature she was. Small and slump-shouldered and flat-chested and with that plain, humorless, squirrelly face: You never would've thought there could be so much passion in her. We met at a Starbucks near NYU, a big glass box of a café filled with round wooden tables and straight-backed wooden chairs. She sat in her colorless skirt and jacket suit, nearly quivering with formality amidst the crowd of students
slouched all around her in hoodies and jeans. She spoke carefully, primly, with the superserious air of a little girl laying out a tea set, trying to get everything exactly right. I listened, in my own student hoodie and jeans, slouched across the table from her. This is what she told me:

My father's life with my mother could hardly be called a marriage, not for the last few years, anyway. Mom had finally gone too crazy to relate or even speak sense to him. Sometimes she even seemed to believe he was an impostor, a stranger only pretending to be her husband. At times like that, she refused to have sex with him. Even in her clearer moments, she'd submit to it only as a wifely duty. She obviously found it an irritating distraction from the realizations and inspirations constantly flashing in her brain. At best, Dad felt he was an annoyance to her. At worst, he felt like a rapist. Finally he gave up. They continued living in the same house—even sleeping in the same bed—but each was living alone.

Now Dad and Margaret, meanwhile—they were a different story. A veritable riptide of erotic longing was dragging their scrawny bodies and their bloodless lips together. They fought it with all their honor, all their might, trying like mad to do what they thought was the right thing. But once Mom and Dad stopped having sex altogether—well, then, Dad and Margaret, pursuant to what I imagine was a rather dry, legalistic discussion of the finer moral points, decided they were justified in giving in to the flow. Occasionally, furtively, they began meeting at her apartment where, not to put too fine a point on it, they went about the serious business of fucking each other like a pair of rabid wildcats.

Of course, it only made matters worse. The sex was like sea-water, quenching their thirst only to leave them thirstier still. Once they had a taste of each other, they wanted to be with each other every night. They wanted to sleep with each other and wake
in each other's arms. Their conversations returned to the problem again and again until they rarely talked of anything else. Their joy in being together from time to time quickly soured into painful longing to have each other always.

But my father wouldn't leave my mother. He and Margaret both agreed it wouldn't be right. She was his wife of twenty-five years. They had loved each other when she was well. She had cheerfully kept his home, cooked his meals, raised his children. Now she was ill beyond recovery. What was he going to do? Put her in an institution somewhere? Abandon her to sit gaping beneath the television set in some sterile dayroom, drugged and drooling, confused and alone? Oh, you could rationalize it all you wanted, but abandonment was what it would be.

There were days when Dad weakened, when he wondered aloud if maybe professionals might take care of her better than he could, when he wondered whether he and Margaret didn't deserve a little happiness for themselves. But Margaret stayed strong. You don't walk away from your obligations for mere happiness, she said. She loved him because he was a better man, a more honorable man, than that.

Then one day—Margaret told me in Starbucks—one day, my father said a terrible thing. He was sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed to go home. He was staring at his shoes, thinking. She was lying naked under a single sheet, looking up at his profile.

And he murmured, "It would be better for everyone if she were dead."

It wasn't just the words, Margaret told me. They'd both said almost as much any number of times. But the tone of his voice, the awful, serious tone, and the awful, serious look he turned on her—she could tell he was saying one thing but that he meant something else, something much worse.

Their eyes met and they understood each other. For a long moment, they were together in that strange world of emotional logic where to escape the horrible prospect of wronging someone, you contemplate the thought of murdering her instead.

The moment passed—of course it did; they weren't monsters, obviously. But they couldn't deny it had happened and that it might happen again—and again, until the idea began to seem almost reasonable to them.

They held another of their precise, judicious discussions of the moral issues. They both agreed: They had to end their affair. It was making them miserable as things stood, and the only way to change the situation was to act cruelly or do what was wrong. They wouldn't. They would act kindly. They would do what was right. They would separate from one another forever.

So they did. They did the moral thing. The responsible thing. The honorable thing. They parted. And the meaning went out of my father's life, and he went into the garage and sat in the Lexus and gassed himself to death.

It's an object lesson, you see? Because it raises the question: What's the point of it all? All this morality, all this restraint. Doing right and depriving yourself of so many vital delights. We're here only a day or so—alive, I mean, a dawn, a hurried day, a remorseful twilight before the impenetrable dark. How can we deny ourselves even a single moment of passion or joy or pleasure? Why should we transform ourselves into dismal church ladies when look what we could be doing with each other, just look, right there, on the TV! The wife with her ass in the air now and her face between the girlfriend's legs and hubby going at her from behind and everyone's happy. I mean, if the hole is sweet, dude, stick the peg in, yes? Why all this fuss and feeling about it, all these rules and regulations? A peg in a hole. A life and a death. What difference does any of it make in the long run?

"Anne," I groaned quietly.

Then out of some combination of—I don't know—call it lethargy and self-disgust, I took another swig of wine and changed the channel...

To
The Justice Room
—where MacNamara was prosecuting a Christian minister who'd murdered a man to keep him from euthanizing his brain-dead wife.

Anne ... I went on thinking about Anne. But without the porn to distract me, my thoughts slowly returned to what she'd said to me on campus. What if it was the truth? I wondered. What if Serena went into The Den that night looking for Casey Diggs?

I changed the channel...

To
Undercover
—where—
kerpow!
—petite, sexy Jillian Blaine punches the traitor Robert right in the kisser, knocking him ass over teakettle, yeah!

What if Serena had actually
delivered
Casey to Jamal and his friends? What if she had brought him to them so they could take him out to the Great Swamp and murder him?

I changed the channel...

To the news—where some Middle Eastern rabble-rouser with a name like Kaka al-Iraqi was screaming to a cheering crowd, "This is Holy War! We will not rest until we bring the foul disease of freedom and rationalism to an end!"

And what if Diggs was murdered because he was right? Because he knew Rashid was at the center of a planned terrorist attack on the city?

I changed the channel...

To
Missing:
"You see a Saudi national who might be a terrorist," spat the heroic Agent Magruder. "I just see another overambitious FBI agent profiling a man because of his race and religion."

If no one believed Diggs, why would anyone believe
me?
I wasn't even sure
I
believed me. I had no proof of anything.

I changed the channel...

To
The Inner Circle
—news commentary—where a pink, bald newspaper columnist who looked like a cartoon pig was saying: "I think Mr. Kaka is simply trying to communicate his frustration with American foreign policy..."

Lies, lies, lies,
I thought.
It's all lies. It's all about what they don't say.

My thoughts returned to Rashid pacing the platform in that lecture hall. I recalled my moment of fear and certainty.
Of course he's a terrorist. Of course he is.

Who could I go to? What would I tell them? How could I stop this thing before people died?

I changed the channel...

And there—there, so help me, God—was Patrick Piersall!

"You gotta be kidding me!" I said aloud.

It was a local news program out of New York. The scene was somewhere near City Hall Park. There was a wild, pudgy figure on screen, stumbling around the middle of the street. It was a fuzzy amateur video, taken from some distance. You couldn't really make out the guy's face, but there was a helpful caption on the bottom of the screen:
UNIVERSAL STAR PATRICK PIERSALL ARRESTED FOR DUI AND WEAPONS POSSESSION.

I watched, dumbstruck.

The pudgy little figure went on raving, leaping here and there beside a silver BMW he'd apparently run halfway up onto the sidewalk. He waved his hands insanely in the air. He threw back his head and howled at the sky.

Then four cops swarmed over him and wrestled him to the ground.

I went on staring openmouthed at the television as they showed the video again and again. And again. Not to mention again. As if urging us to drain the drama of the moment down to its dregs, a magic elixir of vicarious life to warm us in our lassitude. Even when the newswoman came back on, they split the screen and kept running and rerunning the video to the right of her. The newswoman—a smart-eyed street reporter with brown hair and white-coffee skin—talked for a few moments into her hand mike on one side of the screen while Piersall confronted the cops again and again on the other. Then the newswoman was replaced by a head shot of Piersall in his prime. It was a nice effect. There he was to the left as we knew him best, chisel-featured and coiffed, with the silver shoulders and sparkly collar of his space admiral's unitard just visible at the bottom of the picture. Meanwhile, on the right, where the video kept replaying, there he was as a fat crazy man screaming in the middle of the street until the four officers tackled him, shoved his face into the pavement, wrenched his arms behind his back, and slapped the cuffs on. The two sides of the screen formed a sort of living mug shot, only instead of showing the suspect full-face and profile, they showed him past and present. Handsome TV star here, drunken has-been nutcase under arrest over there. A nice effect, as I say. It's a very pleasant sensation to watch a successful person fall from grace.

Anyway, here's what had happened to the poor bastard—here's
what the newswoman told us, I mean, while, oh look! they ran the video of Piersall's violent arrest three more times.

The day after having his
True Crime America
show canceled during its first broadcast, Piersall, according to police and eyewitnesses, stormed into the cable network's Manhattan headquarters just north of Times Square. Witnesses described him as "drunk and irate." Barging into the office of network president Cole Hondler, he brandished a .38 caliber revolver.

"There were women screaming, people diving under desks. It was terrifying," said one young doofus whose clueless face was captioned cable network office worker.