Empire of Lies

  I told her about Casey Diggs, if it was Casey Diggs. I told her what I knew about the Great Swamp and Diggs's conspiracy theories and so on. When I was done, there was another pause: Cathy considering, gathering her resources again. I sat in the silent television room, listening to her breathe.

  "Are you asking for wifely counsel," she asked me then, "or are you just keeping me informed while you handle this on your own?"

  "Wifely counsel."

  "Go tell the police what you just told me, then come home."

  I nodded as if she were there. "Yeah, that's pretty much what I figured. That's pretty much my plan. I'm gonna go to the cops first thing in the morning."

  "Good. Then get out of there. Whatever we have to do for this girl, whatever's the right thing, we can figure it out together at home. You have no reason to stay there anymore. That's not your life anymore. Your life is here."

  I gave a bitter laugh. "But that's the whole point, isn't it? You can never get away from any of it. Anything you've done. Anything that's ever happened. It all just keeps being about that, again and again."

  "No," she said. "No. You wanted wifely counsel, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, then: No. That's not the whole point. In fact, that's not the point at all. 'Forget the former things and do not dwell on the past.' Right? 'Behold, I make all things new.'"

  "Well, you do make all things new, Cathy..."

  "Not me. I'm quoting God, stupid."

  "Oh. I knew that."

  "'I make all things new.' That includes you, Jason."

  I couldn't answer her for a moment. I sat there with the phone in one hand, pinching my eyes shut with the other. "Right," I finally whispered hoarsely. "Right. It includes me. I forgot."

  "I know. That's okay. You forgot because you're there and you had to clean out your mom's room and everything, and it sent you back. But it's all right. You did all right. You didn't do anything horrible, and I'm still here and everything's fine. So now it's time to remember that you've been made new, and forget the past and come home."

  I was quiet again. I went on pinching my eyes shut. I thought of her sitting there in our house on the other end of the line, listening to my story and telling me to come home and leave the former things behind because God had made me new. I thought about that, and then I thought about how I'd thought the past was swallowing me and how I'd wanted it to swallow me and had gone to see Anne. And I thought: What are you, Jason, some kind of fucking idiot?

  "God, I'm an idiot," I said.

  "You're not an idiot. You're the king of my life and I love you," she said.

  I nodded a long time. Finally I managed to say, "Thank you. Thank you. I'll see you tomorrow."

  And if I had—if I had gone home and seen her tomorrow—then everything would've been easier—easier for me, at least. I would've confronted the past and returned triumphant and never have done the things I did or faced the parts of myself I finally had to face.

  But, of course, it didn't work out that way.

  After I closed the phone, I sat for a while, staring into space. I prayed. It wasn't like before, in the church, when I felt nothing, when I felt alone. The lines of communication were up again somehow. I felt better—steadier, surer—when I was done.

  I opened my laptop on the coffee table. I went online and picked up my e-mail. There were only a few notes, a few from my office, one each from my kids. I answered the ones that needed answering. Then I fell into another staring spell, my eyes on the computer screen.

  The next time I became aware, the image on the monitor had changed. The e-mail file was gone and the screen saver had kicked in. The screen saver drew colorful fractals on the dark background: snowflakes and jellyfish and patterns like galaxies and patterns like DNA. My ten-year-old son Chad had installed the thing for me. Chad had explained fractals to me, too. Apparently, mathematicians had discovered that seemingly random forms in the universe could be reproduced by charting a few simple equations again and again. We couldn't know that in the old days because you needed a computer to chart them so many times, but now we saw that things that we thought were jumbly bits of chance—weather and bird migration and the tumbling of a woman's hair when it's undone—were actually elaborate designs based on mathematical instructions played out almost endlessly. The instructions, the equations, were like thoughts in the mind of God, pure ideas capable of taking physical shape. What made the resulting patterns unpredictable was that the repetitions of the underlying equations magnified the effects of small distorting events. That was what they called the Butterfly Effect, where something as small as a butterfly's fluttering wings changed the pattern of the wind, say, until it became a hurricane.

  I gazed at the pictures and designs unfolding on the laptop screen. They were very beautiful and hypnotic. I wondered how many things in the world were like them, how many things that seemed arbitrary actually made a sense beyond our ability to know: evolution, maybe, with its seemingly random selection and love and the creation of worlds. Maybe even the stories people tell were all designs thrown up by the few simple equations of the human heart repeated and repeated. Maybe even history itself is a design like that, too large for us to comprehend.

  The thought made me smile fondly to myself. I was thinking of my mother, of course, wondering if maybe her illness had opened up her mind somehow and allowed her to catch sight of some gigantic historical fractal beyond the vision of the rest of us.

  And I was sitting like that, staring like that, smiling, thinking like that, when I slowly became aware of a noise that had been going on for some time, perhaps more than a minute. It was a clicking sound. At first I took it for the working of a mechanism: a clock or the cooling TV or some glitch in the computer. But as it drew me out of my fugue state, I realized that, no, it was coming from the window. It was the sound of something hard hitting tick-tick-tick against the glass. A tree blown by the wind, I thought, or an animal scratching.

  I didn't have to get off the sofa to look. I simply leaned over and reached to the shutters. I pulled the bar to open the louvers.

  I started back and a small noise of surprise escaped me: The face was there in front of me so suddenly, so close to the glass. I couldn't take it in right away. It was just eyes staring in at me, a hand reaching out at me. Then I saw the finger rapping a ring against the pane. Then the face came into focus and I recognized it.

  It was Serena.

  Serena for Dinner

  The alarm went off when I let her in. I was so shaken by the sight of her I had forgotten to disarm it before I opened the door. It gave a high-pitched warning whistle, a noise like a teakettle programmed to sound for sixty seconds before the system let fly with the real clanging blast. Even as Serena stepped into the foyer, I hurried away from her, back into the kitchen to key in the code to turn it off.

  When I was done, I returned to the hall. There she was, standing at the other end of it. She was wearing cargo pants and a T-shirt and a hoodie sweatshirt. She had her hands stuffed in the sweatshirt pockets. She looked slumped and withdrawn and small. I couldn't really make out her face in the dim foyer light. It was only when I approached her that I got the full picture.

  She had a black eye. She'd tried to cover it with makeup, but it was unmistakable. And she had scratches on one cheek and a red mark on her neck, too. Plus her lower lip was swollen.

  One sympathetic glance from me and the tears came to her eyes. I took her chin in my fingers and gently turned her face so I could get a better look at the damage.

  "I'm not going to the fucking police," she said.

  "Ssh," I said, looking her over.

  "All right?" she said.

  "Just take it easy. You want something to eat?"

  She shrugged sullenly.

  I locked up the house again. Brought her into the kitchen. Turned the alarm back on. I sat her down in the breakfast nook, at the same table where we'd eaten before. Luckily, the refrigerator was still pretty well stocked.

>   "How about a turkey sandwich?"

  "I'm a vegetarian."

  I laughed. "No kidding? Is Ecstasy a vegetable?"

  "Ha ha."

  I slapped a few slices of cheese onto some rye bread. I poured her a 7UP on ice. She ate like what she was: a ravenous teenager. She ripped great chunks out of the sandwich and swallowed them in great gulps. I sat at the table across from her. Watched her till she was nearly done.

  After a while, gaining strength, she glared at me, her cheeks bulging with food. "I only came here because I don't have anywhere else to go," she said. The words were muffled in her mouthful.

  I didn't argue with her. I knew why she'd come. A good father is hard to find. "How'd you get here?" I asked.

  "Took the train, then walked."

  "All the way from the station?"

  She shrugged. She picked slyly at the crust of her bread. "I'm a good walker," she said.

  For some reason, this more than anything—more than the shiner, more than the fat lip—hurt my heart and made me feel for her. She wanted me to be proud of her, see. She wanted me to think well of her, and that was all she had, all she could think of to brag about: I'm a good walker.

  "You must be. That's quite a way," I said.

  "I walked all the way into Manhattan once."

  "Wow."

  "It's, like, five miles or something." She stuffed the rest of her sandwich into her mouth. Chomped on it like a cow on grass. "Can I ask you something?" she said, offering me an excellent view of the chewed food. "You can ask."

  "Did you really do all that sick shit my mom said?"

  I smiled. We were back to the teenager games. "That's not really any of your business, Serena," I said. "Now tell me about your black eye."

  She got that look on her face that people get when they want you to take charge of them, but they don't want to admit it: that smile at the corner of the mouth they try to pretend is ironic but isn't. She buried herself in her 7UP glass to hide it. When she came up for air again, the smile was nearly gone.

  "You'll just try to make me go to the police again. I'm not going. I mean it."

  "Did your boyfriend do it? Jamal?"

  Her mouth turned down in a frown and the tears welled in her eyes again. "He's such an asshole."

  "Did it have to do with what happened to Casey Diggs in the swamp?" I asked her. "Did it have to do with what you told me about last time?"

  She looked away. "No. No, that was just ... Forget about that. All right? That was just me being stupid. Anyway, I don't want to talk about it anymore."

  I felt something—a slight drop inside me—like a pebble falling into a pond. It was a hint, an intimation of what was coming. All afternoon, ever since I'd talked to Patrick Piersall in the Ale House, I'd been telling myself that Casey Diggs was crazy, that Piersall was a useless drunk, that their conspiracy theories were nonsense. There was no urgency to the situation, even if tomorrow was Friday, the day Casey said Rashid would attack. There wasn't going to be any attack. That's what I'd been telling myself.

  But when I mentioned Casey Diggs's name to Serena, she didn't say Casey who? She knew exactly who I was talking about. She didn't even try to convince me the story about the Great Swamp was a lie. I felt that little pebble drop inside me and the ripples spread out from it like echoing whispers: It's all true, it's all real, it's all happening...

  Serena must've sensed what I was thinking. She stole a glance at me and I saw an expression on her face, a look composed of guilt and fear, desperate appeal and naked longing. I knew that look. Every father does. She was hoping that just coming to me would make it all better somehow, that I would uncreate the disaster.

  "I can't help you if you don't tell me the truth," I said.

  "Can't we just go away somewhere?" Serena said. All at once, she was pleading with me, her voice trembling. "Mom says you're rich. Can't you just take me somewhere? They'll kill me if I tell."

  "Jamal sent you into the club that night, didn't he?" I asked her.

  She began to cry. "He got me so fucked up."

  "He gave you drugs?"

  She nodded, wiping her nose with her hands. "E. And all these White Russians."

  "Then he sent you inside to get Casey."

  "He said he just wanted to talk to him."

  "You went in and asked Anne, the girl behind the bar, to point him out."

  "He told me to. He said she was waiting for me, she was his friend. I just did what he said. I was so fucked up. I didn't know what they were gonna do to him. That's true. I swear. That's true."

  "And the rest of the story you told me? Out at the swamp. That's how it happened."

  She dug the heel of her palm in one eye then the other, trying to stanch the tears. The tears kept coming. "They just killed him. They just fucking, like, cut his throat. It was so horrible."

  "But not you."

  "What?"

  "They didn't kill you."

  "Jamal wouldn't let them."

  "Because he thought you were sleeping..."

  "Because he loves me. He says he loves me, anyway."

  Right, right. Love. There's a word for you. It's the only action people think they can take without actually doing anything. All right, so he loved her—or wanted her, or whatever it was. And he figured he could control her, that she would keep quiet, do whatever he said. Which she did for the most part. But after she witnessed what happened to Casey, the guilt ate at her. She thought if she kept drinking, kept partying, she could make it stop. Then, when I took her out of The Den that night, when I took her home and she spent that morning with me, the truth came out of her—a version of the truth, anyway. She told it to Daddy to get it off her chest. But when I threatened to take her to the cops, she got scared, she bolted. She went back to her man.

  "What happened tonight?" I asked her. "You got in an argument with him?"

  "Yeah. I mean, he treats me like shit sometimes." She said this as if she were trying to explain herself, justify herself, as if I were going to blame her for getting beaten up. "And he's just always with his friends. Like they're this secret club. Whispering. Their big plans. Always closing the door on me. He doesn't tell me anything. And he sends me out of the room like I'm a child or something. It's, like, he snaps his fingers and I'm supposed to do whatever he says."

  "But you knew they were planning something."

  She went on rubbing at her eyes. I gently pulled her hands away from them. The sockets were starting to look as red as raw meat. "Big criminal masterminds," she said bitterly. "His friends are such assholes."

  "So is that why he hit you tonight? Did you try to get him to tell you what they were going to do?"

  "No-o," she whined, again as if I'd accused her—as if I might take Jamal's side. "I don't give a shit about their big ... fucking thing, whatever it is. Their big ideas. Like they're some important ... y'know, big thing. I just wanted him to spend some time with me, that's all. He can't just treat me like 'Do this, do that.' I'm a person, too. I fucking told him that, too." She drank her 7UP defiantly. "I did."

  I bowed my head against my hand, rubbed my forehead. "Oh, Lord, Serena," I murmured.

  "What?" she said.

  Those whispers in me were spreading, echoing, louder now. I felt the urgency rising out of my belly into my throat. I had to call the cops—not tomorrow—tonight, now. But again—again—I hesitated. I felt a sickening certainty they wouldn't believe me. They hadn't believed Casey. They hadn't believed Piersall. I needed more information to bring to them. I needed to hear everything Serena had to say, everything I could get out of her.

  "Serena," I said slowly, lowering my hand, pressing my two hands together in front of me. "Serena, you must know something, you must've heard something. About what they're planning. When they sent you out of the room, you must've been curious—angry—you must've tried to listen in sometimes."

  She made a sad little gesture: a wave, a shrug. "I just know it was supposed to be some big deal. Some 'major victory'
or something. Like it was so important."

  "But you don't know what or where?"

  She sniffled, shook her head. She'd managed to stop crying now. "I think it's tomorrow, though." I forced down a curse. "What else?"

  "Nothing."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes!"

  "All right," I said. I tried to bring her back to her story. "So tonight. You told him you wanted him to pay attention to you—"

  "I just want him to be nice to me sometimes."

  "And that made him angry. He yelled at you."

  She made a childishly mocking face, a childishly taunting voice, imitating Jamal. "'You don't understand. You're just a stupid girl. It's so important! It's so important!' Blah-de-blah. I was, like: 'Fuck you, y'know? I don't care how important you are. I'm important, too.' And he was, like—" that taunting voice again—" 'You're nothing. You're just a stupid female. I'm the master of the universe.' And I'm, like: 'Whatever.' I'm, like: 'You dumb fucking Arabs treat girls like shit, y'know that?' And so then he, like, just hits me, like, with his fist." She moved her fist as if it were a hammer. "I mean, he's such a little wimp, it's not like he's strong or anything. And I'm, like, 'Yeah, well, you and your big plans are all bullshit anyway because I told Jason and he's investigating everything now and he's gonna tell the whole story to the police.'"

  It was a second before I registered what she was telling me, before I could bridge the gap between her childlike tone, her childlike inner world, and the terrible meaning of what she said.

  "You told him about me? You told him you were coming here?"

  She gave me a sort of sidelong glance, a sort of conspiratorial smirk. She was trying to please me, flatter me, enlist me to her side of the fight against her boyfriend. "I told him you were my real father. I said, like, you were this rich, important guy from, like, the Midwest or something, and you were, like, totally in with the police and you were really pissed off that he was bossing me around and giving me shit all the time. I was, like: 'I told Jason all about what happened in the swamp and now he has the police investigating the whole thing and if I get hurt he's gonna find out about it and come after you.' I was, like: 'You're not so important after all, are you?'"