Empire of Lies (23 page)

I was deep in the gelatinous flow, struggling against it even as I helped create it. Between heads and over shoulders, I caught tidal glimpses of the action at the front. Two COs helped Patrick Piersall down from the back of the van. His hands were cuffed behind him. His suntanned face, suddenly so shockingly present in the flesh, was set in that wry insouciant smile people wear when they're trying to rise above their shame. Two tidy men in suits, both carrying briefcases—his lawyers—stepped down gingerly after him. These five—Piersall, the COs at his elbows, the lawyers at his back—formed the core of the parade. Two more COs strode ahead of them, two fell in behind. They marched into the corridor between the cops, between the crush of journalists, and headed swiftly for the courthouse doors.

The mindless mind of the amoebic press had a mindless voice now too, a choral cry of male and female tones, of high and low. It shouted what were phrased as questions but uttered as commands, without that uptick at the end that questions have, with only the coughing bark of the imperative.

"Why was your show canceled."
Tell me.

"What did you say to Cole Hondler."
Tell me now.

"What are you going to plead."
Say something.

"Do you think your TV career is over."
Fill my airtime. Fill my computer screen. Feed my gobby substance with your shame!

The shouts were coming from all around me, mingled with grunts and curses in the swirling turmoil. Up front, the parade with Piersall at its center was passing swiftly up the corridor. A few seconds more and they would be at the courthouse, inside it, out of reach. Desperate to get to them before they were gone, I struggled toward the police line with fresh force. I set my hands against another man's shoulder. I shoved at him, trying to compress him into a smaller space so I could squeeze past. The man rounded on me with the face of a devil, contorted with anger, eyes afire.

"Get your hands off me or I'll kill you," he said.

I got past him, tumbling deeper into the mass.

Then—the next moment—I was jostled hard from the right. I stumbled. The plasma of the media creature began closing over me. I felt the bodies of men pressing in on me as I nearly lost my footing, felt the comfortless closeness of women as the hurly-burly nearly bore me down. I smelled their aftershave and their perfume. I saw their twisted features above me, their bared teeth, their eyes both bright and dead. Jutted microphones shot past my cheek like bullets. Elbows knocked and clocked me from every side.

Falling, panicking, I thought,
What am I doing here? What am I doing?
I no longer cared about Patrick Piersall or Casey Diggs or plots and conspiracies and shadowy threats of danger. I just wanted to get out. I just wanted to go home, away from the sight of these slavering, crazy-faced men, from the sound of these women buzzing like locusts, screaming like harpies. Only a rage for survival, a terror of being trampled into the pavement and smothered down there, made me corkscrew viciously, gripping and tearing at the bodies around me in order to stay on my feet. Only that rage made me battle forward with all the strength I had. Somehow I got my balance back. I rammed myself headlong through the congealed human mass, looking for a clearing, for open air.

And then there I was. I was at the police line. I was at the edge of the corridor. I had broken through the mob and was standing between two NYPD patrolmen, at the point where their hands met to form their barricade against the press. There was no one else in front of me. I could see right into the corridor itself.

There was Piersall and his entourage of lawyers and lawmen—and they had already passed me by. I'd missed them by a few steps. The trailing pair of COs was a pace to my right, then the attorneys, then Piersall and the officers who held him, then the COs in the lead—who were nearly at the building's stairs, nearly at the door.

The pressure of the amoeba behind me drove me hard against the cops' arms. The creature's voices were shouting loudly on every side of me. I stuck my hand into the pocket of my windbreaker. I felt it close on the note I had folded there. I brought the note out, crumpled in my fist. But there was no way to get it to the lawyers or to Piersall. I had missed my chance.

But wait. The next moment, just before he reached the steps, Piersall stopped. He turned—swung around so hard that he brought the two startled corrections officers at his elbows swinging around with him. The actor was glowering with rage. His cheeks were red. His eyes were white and rolling. He was like a chained beast goaded into a fury by captivity and the mob and the questions hurled at him like stones.

He shouted. His voice was a ragged growl. He sounded just as I remembered him, as we all remembered him, from those moments of highest melodrama on the besieged deck of the spaceship
Universal.

"This!" he bellowed at us. "This is not the news!"

He tried to charge at us like a bull. The force of it pulled his corrections officers after him a step before they could restrain him. The lawyers—the tidy men in suits—stumbled back several paces,
jumbling together with the COs in the rear, who fell back too. One of the lawyers stuck his hand out to recover his balance.

On the instant, I saw my chance. I lunged forward, reaching out between the policemen. I grabbed the lawyer's hand and forced my note into it.

My name is Jason Harrow,
it said.
I have information about the disappearance of Casey Diggs. I will only speak to Patrick Piersall. Call this number.

Afterward, I felt awful: stupid, ashamed. I had bruises on my arms, one on my side. I thought I had one on my forehead, too—it felt bruised though I couldn't see it. My jaw hurt, my ribs ached. And for what? Piersall's lawyers would simply throw my note away. Of course they would. What had I accomplished? Nothing.

Wearily, I limped back to the parking lot, to my Mustang. I settled stiffly behind the wheel. I sat there, staring through the windshield at the Mercedes parked across from me. I felt far away from the living surface of the world. Dazed, dissociated, dead to feeling, confused about what was real and what wasn't. Why the hell had I come here? What was I thinking? I remembered, as if it were long ago, feeling some sense of threat, of danger. A sense I had to do something, do something fast. But why? What was it all about? A story told to me by a lying teenager? The wild accusations of a crazy college dropout? A lecture on Shakespeare by a college professor? The maunderings of a drunken, washed-up actor trying to jump-start his career with sensationalistic self-destruction? Nothing. It was all about nothing. Lies, rumor, suspicion hyped to an intensity of desperation by those days in my mother's house, those nights, those drunken nights, in the craziness of the television room. It really was true: I'd fallen through the screen and landed here, a drowning fall into other people's delusions.

I drove out of the lot and began wending the complicated way toward the East Side and the FDR Drive. The traffic was thick and
I kept finding my path frustrated by one-way streets and security barricades. It took me the better part of an hour to reach the highway. There, the traffic grew lighter. I went quickly up along the East River, glancing out the window at the water running turbulent and dull beneath a sky darkening with running clouds. I was heading for the Midtown Tunnel, for the Island and my mother's house.

But I went another way. I don't know why. Maybe it was just my reluctance to return to that house, that room—I'm not sure. But when I got off at the 34th Street exit, I turned away from the tunnel without thinking. I headed west instead, across the city.

At first, I wasn't sure where I was going—then I was: the Church of the Incarnation, the brownstone church on Madison Avenue I had come to in the depths of my craziness so many years ago.

I remembered that day as I stepped through the church doors, that day I had prayed in the side chapel:
Forgive me, help me.
I thought of that now as the great axial moment of my life, the moment around which my soul had swung like a compass needle from misery to happiness. I yearned to feel the intensity of that day again, even the intensity of its despair, anything rather than this zombie malaise that had come over me. I tried to milk the stately place for some celestial emotions. I grasped at the sweetness of the quiet as I stepped from the vestibule into the nave. I savored the door swinging shut behind me, muffling the hectic street sounds that had followed me in. I drank in the otherworldly light that fell in beams through the stained-glass windows, crimson and indigo and gold. I tried to lift myself from this daze of unreality into the crystal solidity of the high, imagined spheres. But my mind remained muddy and faraway.

I slipped into a pew near the middle of the church. There were only two other people there with me: an old woman sitting on the far right side, and an even older woman sitting on the left. In my
sullen distraction, they looked to me like refugees from the battle for the world, survivors who had stumbled into this ruin to die. All that was left of the broken body of Christ.

I sat and clasped my hands in my lap. I bowed my head and closed my eyes and tried to pray. But a moment later, I looked up again. I looked around. My eyes came to rest on the reredos up behind the altar. Herald angels flanking a trio of cherubs who were unrolling a scroll. and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, the scroll read.
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
I wondered. I mean, now that you have your spaceships and quantum physics and computers and television sets? The Word was made flesh. What the hell was that?

I shook my head, looking over the apse and the empty pews. This place—this place that had been so important to me once. Now it just seemed like a hiding place for frightened old women, somewhere restful they could go to die, away from the crap and holler of life.

I closed my eyes again. I closed my hand into a fist, hoping to feel Christ's hand in mine. I felt nothing. I forced out a prayer.

Show me the way, Lord. Something terrible is happening—or is going to happen—I don't know which—something terrible is happening to my brain or is going to happen to this city—I don't know, I don't know which—maybe there's some kind of attack in the works—or maybe it's all me, maybe what happened to my mother is happening to me now, maybe even you are just some flash in my brain, some electrochemical kind of ... Ach! Show me the way. Show me the way.

He answered by cell phone. Hey, it's the modern world, what can I tell you? I'd forgotten to turn the phone off and just at that moment, it sang out with a sort of shrill, gleeful rudeness, the way a mischievous demon might fart in a place like this. The two old ladies swung around at me, their faces wrinkled and wrathful and
dark. I made an apologetic smile and unwound from my pew. I hurried up the aisle and pushed out the doors, back into the city.

I answered the phone as I stepped onto the sidewalk. I could barely hear the voice on the other end above the grind and rumble of a bus passing on its way uptown. I stuck a finger in my free ear.

I said, "I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you. What'd you say?"

The voice was a man's voice. It was featureless, nondescript: "Mr. Piersall will meet you in an hour," it said, "in the Ale House downtown."

The Ale House was one of the oldest pubs in the city. Sawdustt covered the floor. Old newspapers and photos of dead Irishmen covered the walls. Left of the door as you came in, there was a brass-and-mahogany bar that probably predated the Draft Riots. Dusty bottles crowded the ancient shelves behind it. Above the bottles, there were more photos and more headlines, plus a mounted fish that looked like it might've been caught by James, son of Zebedee. Come to think of it, the bartender—with a face that had collapsed into a mass of frowning wrinkles—looked like he might've been there with James at the time. He was swiping down the top of the bar with a rag. There was an old pile of clothes in front of him that turned out to be a man drinking beer.

When I walked in, the barkeep took one look at me and tilted his head toward an archway. I went through the archway into the tavern's main room.

There were no windows here. The ceiling lights were dim as candles and had the same yellowish glow. The wooden tables were crowded against the walls left and right. Between them was the open floor with the sawdust on it streaked by passing footsteps. The place could've looked the same a hundred years ago. Only the paper napkins and glass bottles of ketchup on every table served as a jarring reminder of the modern world.

It was still early—before lunchtime. At first glance, the room seemed empty. Then I looked again at a potbellied woodstove
whispering and snickering in one far corner. A lone drinker sat hunched at the table just beyond the stove, his back to me. He seemed, in that setting, like a figure in an old painting or photograph, a thing of more meaning than substance, a representative, say, of the Urban Man who carries the nation's lonely vastness inside himself, a symbol of that peculiar American solitude one finds in midnight diners and daylight bars.

I walked across the sawdust until I was standing over him. He raised his face to me. It was Piersall.

I'd seen him in the hectic crush that morning, of course, but it was different now, quiet and close like this. He had the glamour of TV on him, that camera magic that made him seem embossed on the flat facade of life, raised up from it, more real than real. His face was like a living billboard of itself—and not just his face, but the face beneath his face, the dashing features of Admiral Augustus Kane, distorted by bloat and hidden under wrinkles, but still glowing within somehow, still there.

He had his hand wrapped around a mug of beer. There was a shot of whiskey by it. They weren't his first of the morning, I could tell. His fat cheeks were flushed, his blue eyes hectic. A blood vessel throbbed on his mottled nose. Not quite noon, and he was already half in the tank.