Empire of Lies

He began with England's break from the Catholic Church and the sometimes-violent suppression of English Catholicism, including, perhaps, the Catholicism of Shakespeare's own family. Then he talked about Luther's declaration that all religious authority came from the Bible rather than the Church.

  "Thus, translating the biblical text into English became an act of enormous political significance," he said. "Whoever controlled the language controlled the ruling religion itself. An observer as keen as Shakespeare had to ask himself: If power corrupts, can translations made under such conditions be trusted? It's no wonder that when Hamlet looked into books, he saw nothing more than 'words, words, words' devoid of any inherent truth value."

  Now up to this point, I remember, I was enjoying myself. I was always a lover of both Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and Rashid made it very clear he loved them, too. It was exciting just to watch him think about the subject. I was swept up in it, as if I could see the lines of inspiration connecting thought to thought like lines on a planetarium ceiling linking seemingly random stars into a constellation.

  "Perhaps Shakespeare, forced to abandon the Catholicism of his father, felt some strange mixture of identification with and repulsion from the native peoples now being estranged from their own traditions by European imperialism and the 'words, words, words' of its religious missionaries. The moor Othello, for instance, lives as a Christian and only identifies with his Muslim origins when he kills himself. Perhaps this is a reflection of Shakespeare's own—and thus England's own—religious displacement and internal division."

  As he went on like this, my reaction began to change. My eyes wandered away from him. His genteel figure continued pacing and turning and gesturing onstage, but I looked instead at the students. I panned my gaze over their upturned faces and the faces pressed down into notebooks. They were young people, I saw, of many colors, white and yellow and brown, girls and boys from all over the country, I would've guessed, and from other countries, too. I found myself wondering: How many of them had actually read Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, for that matter? Myself, as I say, I had always loved them both. I could remember suffering over Othello's mistake, wanting to reach out and stop Desdemona's murder with my own hand. I could remember suddenly seeing the Bible as a single chain of thought, a single idea developed in the collective mind of a people over centuries, from their earliest understanding of creation to the discovery of Christ's empty tomb. I suspected many of these students would never experience any of that, would never know more about Shakespeare or the Bible than they learned at this lecture today.

  "When Othello says he 'threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe,' by murdering his white Christian wife Desdemona," Rashid was saying now, "how can we not think of Jesus' admonition to not 'cast your pearls before swine'—that is, don't bother sharing Jewish truth with the piglike gentiles? Christianity has been wasted on Othello, you see. In the end, he has resorted to the kind of vicious, murderous behavior the worst enemies of Islam would have predicted of him. Savages may be brought to Christ by English missionaries, but they can't be trusted. They will return to their savage nature, in the end."

  This is when it began. It was subtle at first. My heart fluttered, making me breathless. A cold clammy feeling ran down the back of my neck. I felt light-headed. I thought: Maybe I'm coming down with something.

  "This English terror of the stranger, the other, exemplified by Shakespeare and arising from a fear of their own suppressed Catholicism, can't help but find its way into the King James translation," Rashid went on. "Thus these masterpieces of European literature, these cornerstones of our attitudes and our feelings and our thoughts, are also the vehicles for a fearful, urgent, kill-or-be-killed approach to different cultures. They carry within them the seed and the rationalization for colonization, conversion, and imperialism."

  Then it came over me—this bizarre moment I'm talking about. Suddenly, violently, it was there: a red upsurge of revulsion, a strangling sense of horror as if something gory and terrible were happening right in front of my face. Sitting there, in that civilized hall, that Roman temple beneath the plane trees and maples, I felt the helpless, wild, careening panic of a witness to disaster. My mouth opened and closed. My hand clutched at my chest. All around me, the students continued taking notes, the professor continued ambling and chatting easily. Nothing was going on but a morning class at an excellent urban university—and yet I had the almost-overwhelming urge to cry out, to cover my eyes, to run to someone's aid amidst the smoke and rubble and blood—smoke and rubble and blood that simply weren't there, weren't there at all. How can I describe this? What can I compare it to? It wasn't a hallucination or a delusion or a fantasy, or anything like that. It was just an emotional response completely at odds with the facts of the experience. I was attending a lecture, and yet my feelings were those of a man watching the slaughtering clash of armies, a field of smoking corpses amidst smoldering ruins. It was as if one thing transformed itself into another inside me, as if I saw one thing and my heart translated it into something else.

  And then—as I sat there breathless and sweaty—then the thought came to me—as clear as if it were spoken aloud—spoken with absolute certainty, absolute conviction:

  Of course he's a terrorist. Of course he is.

  That suddenly, that completely, I was convinced—utterly convinced—that Casey Diggs was right: Arthur Rashid was engineering a murderous attack on the city of New York.

  The very next moment, the irrational wave of feeling began to ebb. The terror subsided and with it, the clarity and the certainty faded away as well. I dropped back in my chair, trying to catch my breath. I was nauseous. A clammy line of sweat was running down the back of my neck. Blinking hard, I thought, My God, my God— this is what must've happened to my mother. This is exactly what must've happened in the mind of my mother when she went insane.

  My gaze was shooting around in an abrupt, disjointed way now, from the professor to the walls of the room and back over the faces of the students in their seats. And as I began to recover from that bizarre moment of panic and conviction, my attention lit on one girl sitting five or six rows in front of me. She was off to my left, in the last seat on the left near the wall. She was writing intently in her notebook, her head down, her lush black hair spilling forward. But just as my eyes fell on her, she looked up. She brushed her hair off her face with a graceful sweeping gesture of one hand. She turned to look at the professor and so presented her profile to me.

  Startled, I recognized her at once. The sight of her knocked every other crazy thought right out of me. I was so surprised to find her there—so mystified by the coincidence—and so glad, too—so glad and excited to see her again.

  It was Anne Smith. Remember her? The beautiful bartender from The Den.

  Anne

  I wanted to ask her something. It was important. That's why I waited for her after class. Really—that's why. All the same, I admit it: I felt like a schoolboy with a crush, standing at the bottom of the hall's stone steps, my hands in my pockets, my casual posture as studied as the schoolboy's, my heart just as secret and eager.

  "Anne!" I called when I saw her step out through the glass doors. She didn't hear. She started down the stairs amid the crowd, her head down, her black hair pouring forward. "Anne!"

  I didn't think she'd remember me. How could she? So many people must come and go in that nightclub every night. But, in fact, she lifted her broad, oval face, spotted me with those big doe-eyes, and broke into a radiant smile. She freed one hand from the books she was holding against herself, waved it at me with that quick metronomic wave girls have when they're shy and happy to see you.

  "Hi!" she said with outsized delight. She joined me in the dappled shadows under the plane trees. She shone on me like the warmth of morning. "What are you doing here?"

  She was wearing jeans and a maroon jacket over an openthroated shirt, nothing half so revealing as the shoulderless outfit she'd had on in the club. Dressed like
that and in the light of day, she looked more composed and womanly somehow and even more appealing. Faced with all the freshness and the warmth and the ripeness of her and the youth, I found myself feeling ridiculously self-conscious in front of her, ridiculously aware of my appearance and how I spoke and the impression I might be making on her.

  "I didn't think you'd remember me," I said.

  "Jason Harrow," she answered as if she were showing off her powers of recall. "The guy who's not as ugly as his driver's license."

  "My claim to fame."

  She was as I remembered her: as friendly, as straightforward as she'd been at The Den, and with that touch of insecurity so appealing in such a pretty girl. Her raspy voice was full of humor. "Which brings me back to my original question," she said. "What are you doing here?"

  "I've heard about this guy Rashid. I wanted to hear his lecture."

  She did that thing teenaged girls do when they're talking about some movie actor or rock star they love: Her hips went slack, her mouth went open, her eyes rolled heavenward. "Is that guy a super-genius or what? He must need, like, two heads to keep his brains in or something."

  I felt a pang at that. Maybe I was still in the grips of that weird horror I'd experienced in the lecture hall. Or maybe I was just jealous and didn't want her to admire another man.

  "I thought you told me you've never read Shakespeare," I said.

  "No. I know. I really want to now. Rashid makes it sound so interesting."

  "Mm. Yeah."

  "Listen, I gotta get to my next class. You want to walk me?"

  "Sure."

  "There's only, like, twelve people, so I can't sneak in, and if you're late, Mr. Roth gives you, like, seven kinds of shit."

  I managed only a faint smile. I've never gotten used to women cursing. The young ones almost all do it now, even the sweet country things like Anne. It's all fair and equal and so on, but I don't like it. Still, a man will tolerate just about anything in a pretty girl, especially one he is trying to sleep with.

  Which was the odd thing about Anne, by the way—the odd thing for me about walking beside her like that. It was a strangely doubled experience, as if I had two selves, one overlapping the other like images superimposed in a photograph. In one of those selves, I had no intention of trying to sleep with her—none. She was young enough to be my daughter. I felt toward her as a responsible middle-aged man feels toward any young adult: interested, solicitous, ready to be charmed. In this first self, I was there to ask her a question, and that was all. But in my other self, everything was seduction. Every move I made, every word I spoke, every smile and gesture was designed to win her over. It was as if there were some sort of filter system in my brain. Before I did or said anything, it asked automatically: Will this make her like you enough to have sex with you? Will this?

  And because I was two selves at once, I saw two images of her as well. On the one hand, she simply seemed amiable to me. Open, sweet, maybe a little flirtatious but only in an innocent, teasing kind of way. A college girl talking to an older man. And at the same time—I wasn't sure. Maybe she wasn't innocent. Maybe her flirtation was dead serious.

  And to make matters even more confusing, I was also aware of an intense and sentimental autumn yearning. I had been so unhappy when I was young, so insane that I had missed the whole college thing irretrievably, wandered through it in a depressive daze. And now here I was—with young people in their packs and pairs moving along the campus paths, over the grass and under the trees together—here I was with her, with Anne, as other boys were with their girls. Chatting with her, turning to smile at her, turning to catch the vital, smiling spark in her eyes. It made me ache, I must confess, and the ache seemed everywhere, not just in me. It seemed to breathe out of the beams of sunlight falling through the dying leaves. It seemed the secret substance of the chill New York weather.

  I glanced at the books she held propped against her middle: two large textbooks and a binder.

  "Those look heavy," I said. "You want some help?"

  She laughed at me. "You're offering to carry my books to school? Are we twelve?"

  My face went hot. She was right, of course. Not only was I acting like a twelve-year-old, I was acting like someone who was twelve more than thirty years ago.

  "I guess I'm old-fashioned," I said, my cheeks burning.

  "I guess so! I kind of like it, though. Sure—you wanna carry them?"

  She gave the books to me. My God, they were as heavy as anvils! I pretended to fall over from the weight. "Holy smokes! Now you'll have to carry me."

  She laughed that big laugh that seemed to belong out in an open field somewhere. She tossed her hair behind her.

  "What do you, lift weights or something?" I asked.

  She growled and flexed her arm, as if to show me her muscle. We walked along in smiling silence a few paces, me with her books under my arm and my heart aching.

  "Listen," I said then, "I have to ask you something."

  "Okay."

  "Did you ever know a guy named Casey Diggs?"

  Anne seemed surprised. "The guy from the posters?"

  "What posters?"

  She started to gesture at the path around us, the trees, the lampposts—but she let the gesture die. "Oh, I guess they took them down."

  My gaze followed the incomplete motion of her hand. It was the first time it occurred to me to wonder: Why were there no posters? There should've been. Have you seen this man? Missing. If you have information, call... But there were none.

  "They were all over for a couple of weeks," Anne said. "Here, this is me." We stopped in front of one of several stately brick buildings, three stories tall with stone pilasters running up from the base to beneath the eaves of a bronze roof, patina-green. Scruffy students were filing in at the glass doors. Soon Anne would be joining them. I wished I would be joining Anne, going to class with her and young.

  Anne went on: "Anyway, yeah, sure, I knew him. Why? I mean, I didn't know him well or anything. I just talked to him a couple of times. He talked to everyone. All the people who took classes from Rashid. He used to wait outside and ask us questions: What did he say? What was he talking about? I heard he was crazy, you know? Making all these accusations against Rashid, like he was a terrorist or something. I guess they finally expelled him and he just disappeared somewhere. I heard they even did a TV show about him. I didn't see it, though." Her eyes, which had shifted away as she remembered Casey, shifted back to me. "Is that really why you waited for me? To ask me that?"

  It was. Anne knew Serena, Serena may have known Casey, Casey attacked Rashid, Rashid lectured to Anne. When I saw Anne there in the hall, I thought it might've been just a coincidence—or there might've been more of a link between them.

  "Yeah," I said. "Why?"

  "And you really did come here to hear Rashid lecture."

  "Yeah. Like I said."

  She made a sweet little pouting frown. "I'm disappointed. I thought you were stalking me."

  I laughed, looked away, bashful with her. "You know, you oughta stop saying things like that, Anne."

  "Why?"

  "Because I might take them seriously."

  "And that's bad because...?"

  I rolled my eyes. "Never mind. Here, take these back before I get a hernia." I piled her books back into her arms. "Thank God. That's the last time I offer to do that. I must've been out of my mind."

  She smiled at my kidding, but she was thinking about something else—I could see it going on behind her eyes. Then she said, "Well, here, anyway." She wrestled her binder to the top of the book pile. Opened it. Took a girly purple pen out of an opaque plastic case inside. She scribbled something on a notebook page quickly, tore out the corner, and handed it to me. "Take this."

  I took it. "What is it?"

  "Duh, stupid. It's my phone number. And my address."

  I laughed once, excited, unnerved. "Anne..."

  "And, y'know, you're making me work much too hard at this, Mr. Jason-
man. Most guys have to ask for those."

  "I'm sure they do." I held up the wedge of paper as if to give it back to her. "And believe me, I would've. But what am I gonna do with it?"

  She made a face at me, openmouthed, a mocking show of dumb surprise. I waggled my left hand, my ring finger in answer.

  "Married. Remember?"

  "Oh, right, I forgot," she said—and she wrinkled her nose, as if I'd reminded her of some mild impediment between us, like a cold I didn't want her to catch. "But I mean, you can't be faithful all the time, right?"

  She said this with a little smile and a naughty jog of her eyebrows, so cute and fun about the whole thing. I felt like the oldest of old fuddy-duddies for even entertaining the hoary notion that the ideas offaithful and all the time might somehow go together. It was like talking to a creature from another planet—the planet Youth. Everything about her made me feel like my own grandfather.

  I gave her a look—disapproving, ironic, complicit ... Oh, I don't know what kind of look it was. I let the subject drop. And I let the hand holding the piece of paper drop. And the other hand, too, the one with the wedding band on it.

  "Listen, goofy girl, let me ask you one more thing."

  "Okay"—pointing her thumb over her shoulder at the building behind her—"then I really gotta go."

  "Did Casey ever come to The Den?"

  "Yeah, sure. Everybody goes to The Den. It's kind of like the unofficial school hangout."

  "Right. And you remember the girl I came in there to find the other night?"

  "Sure. Oh—is that what this is about?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, it is. Did you ever see that girl—Serena—did you ever see her and Casey together?"

  "Ummmmm," she said, screwing her lips up, squinting up into the trees. Then she remembered: "Oh, yeah. One night. I remember. They danced together."

  "How long ago?"

  "A month. Six weeks. I don't know."

  "About the time he disappeared?"

  "Maybe. I can't remember. Like I said, I didn't know him all that well. I just remember she came in looking for him. She asked me to point him out to her, and then she went up to him and they started dancing."