"So you haven't told them—the court or the press—you haven't told them any more about Casey Diggs."
"You don't understand. You don't—understand. The story ... Oh, thank you, thank you, my friend," he said with a gracious, actorly smile as Charlie set another round in front of him. The wrinkly barkeep exchanged a glance with me, that expressionless yet somehow sardonic glance that sober men exchange over a drunk. Then he was gone again. "This is what you don't understand. The story boxes you in. Trust me. I've been in this business a long, long time. That's how it works." Piersall lifted his shot glass but set it down without drinking. "The story—their story, their prewritten script—ties you up in its own logic. It refuses to tell anything but itself. 'Disgruntled has-been actor arrested for DUI after holding a gun on the executive who canceled his show.' That's the story. That's the plot people are following. And if you—if you say, 'Listen. You dumb shits. That's not the story. The story is that just because a couple of—camel-jockey—rag-headed—dune-coon pressure groups—who probably have fucking terrorist connections of their own—turned the screws on the cable station, we are being silenced. Silenced! We are failing to investigate a possible terrorist plot against the city of New York.' If you try to tell that story, see, if you break in on their script with the truth, it's too sudden, too unexpected for people. It's as if a love scene were interrupted by a helicopter crash. The audience says, 'What? No. No. That—doesn't make sense. That—doesn't fit. That's not what we expected. It's not the story.'"
There was no helicopter crash, and Piersall continued in his staccato way, with many a graceful gesture, many a knowing smile.
"So the truth is swallowed by the story line. The media, the audience—they incorporate the interruption into the plot and it disappears without a trace. 'Drunken has-been actor who waved disgruntled gun at canceled show exec goes on foulmouthed rant, calls Muslims dune coons.' And while you—because you're so furious—because no one will listen—while you rant like a lunatic trying to get someone to hear the truth, they air an interview with the elegant, articulate Ahmed Muhammed Ahmed, you know, of the Camel Jockey Ragheads for Media Fairness Association." Here he slipped into what I'll politely call an outrageous Middle Eastern accent. "'It is quite unfor-choo-nate dat Meester Pierce-all would stoop to cheap racial stereotyping...' Blah-de-blah-de-blah ... You see? So the story continues on its way: 'Angry Actor Goes Nuts.' The story's like—like a road—a road that carries you where it wants you to go, even if the truth lies in the opposite direction."
"Well, all right," I said, trying hard not to sound impatient with him. "I'm listening. What is the truth? What is this possible terrorist plot? What exactly did Casey Diggs think was going to happen?"
"You see," Piersall mused, suddenly changing his tone to that of a Man Who Looks Back Wisely on a Much-lived Life. "America is an imaginary country." This, as everything, in that patented rhythm. America. Is an. Imaginary country. "Other countries have bloodlines. History. The ancient earth. Bloodlines that run through history into the ancient earth."
Oh, for Christ's sweet sake! I was thinking.
"Americans," he went on. "All we have is"—he tapped the side of his head with his forefinger—"up here. Ideas. Images. Who we are. What we're like. What we believe. Stories. Movies. The Bible. The Constitution. TV. Characters. In our mind. Jesus Christ. Thomas Jefferson. Augustus Kane. Patrick Piersall..."
His voice meandered off like a river winding away into the distance. He made another gesture with his hand and bowed his head, as much as to say: I could go on, my friend, but these deep things are understood between us.
Which they weren't, of course. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I sat there, bewildered, looking at the top of his head. If you're interested, I can tell you that his hair was dyed to its old reddish hue with a distinguished touch of silver left showing at the edges. I had thought it was a toupee on TV but, from that angle, I could see the line of scars where the Hair Club boys had put the plugs in. Not entirely without some Christian pity, I found myself thinking: This poor bastard. What a loser. What a clown.
"Just getting back to the terrorist plot for a minute," I said. "What was Casey Diggs's theory, exactly? I mean, he thought Professor Rashid was up to something, right? What exactly did he think he was going to do?"
"Ah!" he said—and he looked up—and he knocked down another shot, guzzled some more beer by way of an exclamation point. He leaned toward me, a Man Imparting the Secret History of the World. Also a Man Breathing Whiskey All Over My Face. "He. Diggs: He. Understood. America. The Country of the Imagination. He—saw: that—that would be Rashid's target. Not some ... towers." He waved off the three thousand people who had died in the Islamo-fascists' destruction of the World Trade Center—waved them away as if they were nothing. Only in Hollywood, I thought. "That's just money. That's just the economy," he said. "The Pentagon, too. What's that? The military." Another wave-off. "The Capitol? The White House? The government? No. No. None of those is what really matters. Casey—he understood. The Country of the Imagination. That—is what Rashid has spent a—a lifetime attacking, undermining. With his—theories—ideas—propaganda. Not the economy, the military, the government, but..." And here, unbelievably, Piersall lifted his two hands and tapped his fingertips against himself three times, each hand against one breast, rat-tat-tat. "The American Imagination. The Bible. The Constitution. Jesus Christ. Thomas Jefferson. Movies. TV. Augustus Kane. Patrick Piersall. That's what he's out to destroy."
I hid a smile behind my hand. I couldn't suppress it. I suppose I was smiling at myself as much as him. I mean, what an idiot I'd been to come here, right? To think that this goofus might have some information that could help me decide what was true and what wasn't. Hell, look at him.
I looked at him. He was an ego acting the part of a human being. He wasn't obsessed with Casey Diggs's theories because they were true. How could they be true? The police and the FBI had already investigated them, already dismissed them. But that didn't matter to Patrick Piersall. To his pickled mind, Diggs's theories were valid because they recentered the news of the world around the only thing that really mattered to him, the only thing that even existed to him: himself.
Once again, I felt as if I had stepped from reality into Television Land. Only now, I had followed the land's Yellow Brick Road to its conclusion and stood before the Great Citizen of its Emerald City: the Wonderful Wizard of Me. Pay no attention to that narcissist behind the curtain. Just talk to the Giant Transparent Head.
Which is what I did. "Did Casey have anything more specific to go on? I mean, other than the idea that Rashid was organizing an attack on"—I gestured at Piersall himself. I couldn't resist the comedy of it—"the American Imagination. Had he uncovered some specific plan?"
"Oh, yes! Oh-ho, yes," said the onetime admiral of the spaceship Universal. Then he barked in those very tones of command that once struck fear into Borgons throughout the galaxy, "Charlie! Another!"
Then he explained it all.
I won't go over the whole thing here. Diggs's obsessive, paranoid writings are public record now. You can look them up online and read them yourself and good luck to you. You'll find detailed glosses on all of Arthur Rashid's writings, translations of interviews Rashid gave to the Arab press, interviews with sources Diggs had uncovered on his own, not to mention a complex mathematical and what I guess you'd call symbological calculation based on religious prophecies and—so help me—the phases of the moon. It was Casey Diggs's version of my mother's Spiral Notebooks.
And what it all came down to was this: Rashid, according to Diggs, believed that Americans had become so rich through their financial institutions, so powerful through their military, and so free through their system of government that they had forgotten that the financial institutions, the military, and the government were merely the visible structures that had been built on the foundation of an ancient culture and its ideas. Rashid, Diggs said, loved this culture intellectually for
its genius, but hated it in his heart because it made him feel inferior on his father's side, made him feel his British mother was humiliating his Egyptian father every day the West thrived. He wanted to destroy America, said Diggs, and he believed the country could be decoyed into pouring all its resources into protecting the visible structures of its success while it left the cultural foundations open to a devastating attack. This attack—and here's where all the mathematical and symbological hoo-ha came in—this attack, Diggs believed, was to take place on the highly symbolic eve of both Ramadan and Yom Kippur, which arrived this year on the same day: Saturday.
"So Diggs thought Rashid was planning an attack for Friday, then?" I asked Piersall.
"Friday," the actor muttered. His words were becoming slurred now.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow ... yeah."
"You're not talking about an intellectual attack here, right? A diatribe or—I don't know—a really sharp editorial or something? You mean an actual bombing or assassination?"
Piersall nodded heavily, as if all that alcohol had gone to his head now and made it weigh twice as much as normal. His torso had begun to tilt forward in his chair with the weight so that he was hovering horizontally over the table, staring down at his hands where they sat wrapped around his latest beer glass. All of which is to say: The guy was so shit-faced, he looked like he was about to sink right into the table. A drop of drool fell from his open mouth and ran down the liver-spotted back of one hand.
I sat and studied him a long, quiet moment. I thought of him as I'd seen him on TV. Augustus Kane delivering the camp sci-fi histrionics that had somehow intersected with a momentary zeitgeist. The man who had watched that zeitgeist slip away like a balloon through a child's fingers, his career earthbound while the culture vanished into the blue.
Now here he was before me in the flesh, an old drunk raving about the fate of the world. Like Casey Diggs raved after he got booted off the school newspaper. Or like I had been raving these last two nights, after I'd forced myself to clean out my mother's attic and burn the Spiral Notebooks. The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.
Well, I guess I was a little better off now than when I'd walked into the bar anyway. Now, at least, I was certain that the Diggs Conspiracy Theory was a lot of crazy nonsense. You only had to listen to Piersall explain it to understand why the authorities had brushed it aside.
But I still wasn't sure what to do. Even if it had nothing to do with Rashid, Diggs could still have been murdered. Serena's story about the Great Swamp might still be true. And while I hated to set the police on the girl, I didn't see how I was going to avoid it, especially now that Anne had confirmed seeing her and Diggs together about the time he disappeared and had linked Jamal to their meeting.
But there was one thing I knew I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to tell any of this to Patrick Piersall. Really, he was nearly unconscious now. What would be the point?
"Well..." I said aloud. I stood up out of my chair.
The movement seemed to reach Piersall even in his stupor. He roused himself a little. With what seemed a great effort, he lifted his head. He reached out a hand spasmodically and seized my wrist.
"They killed him, you know," he said—and I couldn't tell anymore whether he was a drunk speaking his deepest truth or a drunk playing the part of a Drunk Speaking His Deepest Truth. He blinked slowly, trying to focus on me. "Diggs. They killed him."
"Did they?"
He gave a short laugh, as much as to say: Of course, you fool. Then a sly smile came over his face, that famous, englamoured, once-handsome face. He let go of me. He raised his chin in a gesture meant to bid me stay and watch him. Then he tried to reach inside his natty corduroy sports coat. It took several attempts for his unsteady hand to find the coat's opening. Finally, the hand slipped in under his arm. When it came out again—just halfway out, just peeking out—I could see he was holding a gun. I don't know what kind of gun it was. I could just see the grip. It was something blocky, powerful, and deadly, by the look of it.
"Oh, fuck!" I believe I remarked.
"They won't get me, though," Piersall said.
"Would you put that away, please?"
The gun vanished inside his coat again. "There's more where that came from," he murmured darkly.
I sighed. I nodded. Again, not entirely without pity, I laid a hand on his shoulder by way of farewell.
"Oh," he said, with a final glimmering of that actorly graciousness he'd shown before, "on your way out, would you ask Charlie if he could possibly bring me another?"
An Unscheduled Detour
I left the bar. A faint rain had begun to fall, a drizzling autumn mist. People hurried past on the sidewalks, their shoulders hunched, their heads ducked down, their hands shoved in their pockets. The cabs and cars and buses on the street had their headlights on against the gloom, their windshield wipers working wearily away at the weather. I had the impression that the day had ended early somehow, that the day had been called off midway and the night had come down at noon.
I had no hat. I wore only a light windbreaker over my sweatshirt. I felt the cold damp in my hair and on my scalp. The chilly air came through my clothes and made me shiver. Still, it was good to be outdoors, good to be away from the smell of morning beer, away from Piersall's whiskeyed breath and from the claustrophobic closeness of his outsized ego.
I joined the pedestrians hurrying past, shoulders hunched and head ducked down and hands shoved into my pockets like them. As I walked back to the parking lot where I'd left my car, the heaviness of the abrupt darkness seemed to settle inside me. So did the dead day's graveyard chill.
I felt—what's the word for it?—bereft, I guess. Bereft. Depressed. Adrift. Deprived of—what?—purpose. The purpose of my coming here today. The—how can I say it?—justification—yes—for my meeting with Piersall. I was appalled—appalled at myself for having daydreamed my way into the heart of a global conspiracy that I now saw was nothing but the fantasies of a troubled boy and the narcissistic melodrama of a washed-up actor. This was what I had convinced myself to worry about rather than—what?—rather than confront my own—what is the word? What is the word I want?—grief. Yes, that's it. My own grief. For my mother. My poor father. My angry, brutal, waste of a brother. Myself. My crappy past. My damaged heart.
That's all this was about. This urgency I'd been feeling, this sense of fear. It was really all about the past, wasn't it? I'd come back here to confront the past, and instead I'd been swallowed up in it. In my mother's madness and my father's death, in my brother's cruelty, and in the consequences of my own mistakes. You tried to break free of these things. You lived on your hill in a studied, earnest happiness, clinging to your wife, your kids, your faith, telling yourself you had won through to a better life. But it was always there, the past, within you and without you, governing your mind, your vision, your little unconsidered choices, creating a destiny out of its own broken logic, waiting for you to return to it, for its time to rise again. It was there in the surge of lust I felt when I saw the ring around Anne's neck. It was there in Lauren and her hold over me, the way she played my emotions and roped me in. It was there in Serena—in Serena most of all. She was the problem I'd been avoiding. She was the living token of the fact that nothing ever goes away—not one act, not one error. The world is a machine for turning sin into history and history back into sin. It's a closed system, and there's no way out of it.
I reached the lot. A baleful-eyed Balkan sat hunched in his little booth, glowering out through the rain-streaked glass. I pushed money in at him through a slot in the window. He pushed my car keys back out at me.
It's all about the past. I was still repeating the phrase in my head as I lowered myself behind the wheel of my car; still repeating it as I drove out into the city, and the Mustang became just on
e more of the cars with their headlights on and their wipers working wearily back and forth. The traffic had congealed, as it always does in New York when it rains. I drove uptown on Park Avenue South in a slow, sludgy line of cars and cabs and groaning buses. For interminable minutes, we got nowhere. Lights turned red, then green. Horns bleated uselessly in frustration. Finally, for no apparent reason, we moved on again, trudging like bent-backed slaves. The eccentric towers lining the boulevard—the columned porticoes, the mansard roofs, the arched windows framed with brick or stone—were all broken and prismatic images through the raindrops that flecked the windows. The facade of the terminal ahead—winged Mercury surmounting the clock above the entrance—seemed blurred and far away, nearly lost in the foggy distance.
I sat and drove and sat, lost in my thoughts. After a while, the traffic quickened a little. I came back to myself. I noticed Grand Central was growing nearer, Mercury growing clearer behind the moving wipers. As if someone else were driving, I suddenly realized the car had not turned off toward the tunnel, that I was not heading back to the Island and my mother's house at all. I was still traveling uptown.
That was the first time I understood that I was going to see Anne.
Shall I say that I wanted to ask her more questions? To clear up this matter of Serena and Diggs at The Den so I knew what to tell the police? Shall I say it was all part of my heroic efforts to get at the truth? To find out what else she knew about Jamal? What else he had told her? I would like to say those things. I would like to answer the insinuations of the left-wing media, of the Times and the New Yorker and that loudmouth on CNN and all the conspiracy theorists online and all the rest of them. I would like to make myself out to be a better man than I am. But that's the whole point. I'm not a better man than I am. I'm just a better man than they are. Because unlike the Times and the New Yorker and the CNN loudmouth, at least I'm trying to tell the truth.