Empire of Lies (7 page)

She had planned to have an abortion, she said, but the affair with Carl started up so soon after our breakup and he was so enthusiastic about the idea of being a father that she didn't see anything wrong with telling him the baby was his.

It's not like I'm asking you for child support,
she said to me.
Shit, Jason, I'm not asking you for anything. I just need you to go talk to her, that's all, before something bad happens. Come on, man. Please. There's no one else I can turn to.

I didn't know whether to believe any of this or not. I didn't know whether the sick swirling certainty in my gut was an intuition that she was telling the truth or just guilt and fear. Because,
I mean, what if it was true? What if Serena was my daughter? How was I going to break it to Cathy?

And what was I going to do now?

I thought about it, sitting on the couch with the TV going. And then I stopped thinking about it. I stopped thinking about anything, stopped seeing anything. I stared into space as evening came on outside the shuttered windows.

Now, it always kind of worried me when I did that: zoned out and stared into space like that. My mother used to do the same thing. It was the first sign of her madness.

When I was small, she would sit with me in the grass in our backyard. She would hold me on her lap and we would look at things together. She had light red hair that fell around her face and teased her mouth when the wind pushed at it. Her skin was pale and freckled. She had clear green eyes. I don't remember thinking she was beautiful, though I know she was. What I do remember is feeling that she was part of the landscape: the grass, the dandelions, the whispering leaves, my mother. Anyway, we would look at things and she would talk about them in her low voice, in her gentle, wondering way. How do the ants know to run for their lives when you come near them? How do the bees tell each other when to swarm and when to fly off? How did anyone ever imagine they could make flour out of wheat or bread out of flour? Then sometimes, in the middle of all this wondering, she would drift away, drift like a leaf on the surface of a slow stream into a silent, distant dream state, gazing. I would climb up over the front of her and touch her cheeks and put my fingers to her lips and press my face up close to hers, but she'd be gone.

As it turned out, those little dazes of hers—they were a kind of seizure, a sort of low-grade epileptic fit. Every time she had one, they did damage to her brain, to a part of her brain called the amygdala. The way I understand it, the amygdala makes emotional
connections for you. You see an angry face, and your amygdala tells you to be afraid. You see a chocolate bar, and it tells you to be happy. When your amygdala goes wonky, like my mother's did, you start making all kinds of connections you shouldn't. You start to see a lot of coincidences everywhere, and every coincidence seems amazing and meaningful. It's like one long "Aha!" A cartoon lightbulb over your head that can't be turned off.

The doctors said the condition wasn't usually genetic, but they couldn't be sure in her case. Usually, they said, it was brought on by a trauma of some kind, a concussion, a fever, something like that. But with my mother, no one could figure out where it had come from. So it might've been inherited and it might've been passed on, in turn, to my brother and me. The doctors just didn't know.

So I worried. Whenever I found myself gazing into space that way, the way I was doing that evening in the television room, I'd come back to myself and get worried that what happened to my mother was happening to me. Sometimes when I'd notice a coincidence, or when I'd feel a fact or an event was particularly significant or important, I wouldn't trust myself. I'd think: Is this the start of it? Is it happening to me, too?

I came out of it now. Sitting there on the couch, I blinked and looked around. I thought of my mother, and a small clutch of anxiety tightened my chest.

I forced myself to focus on the TV.

There was a beautiful woman on the screen now. The sight of her reached through my troubled thoughts and touched off a small soothing cloud of desire in my loins. It was a soft-focus montage of a movie actress I recognized: Juliette Lovesey. There was Juliette stepping out of a car, Juliette walking down a red carpet, Juliette adjusting her bathing suit at the beach, all in slow motion. She was small and slender but shapely with a wonderful cleavage she
kept on display. She had a face of fabulous fragility and yearning framed in achingly limp brown hair.

Now there were images of another actress, Angelica Eden. I felt the stirring of lust again and again it comforted me. Angelica was gorgeous, too, but in a different way. She had sensuous, dark, animalistic features, night black hair, and blood red lips. She had breasts you could drown in, aggressive, engulfing. She was walking along a sidewalk somewhere next to the actor Todd Bingham, a skinny, pretty boy with a wispy little beard.

"As these three mega-stars prepare for the opening of their new film—the first ever in holographic Real 3-D—the question is being asked all over Hollywood: Is this the end of civilization as we know it for Juliette and Todd?" So said the narrator, a perky female—maybe that same Sally Sterling girl, I don't know. "Rumors of an on-set romance between Todd and Angelica have sparked speculation that Todd's fairy-tale engagement to Juliette may be over."

She droned on. The same old thing. The usual celebrity game of pegs and holes. Todd, Juliette, Angelica. A peg with a pretty-boy head attached, and two holes with pretty-girl heads and breasts. The peg slotted into one hole, then later slotted into another, and it was all supposed to matter in some way because the heads were so pretty. But they were still just pegs and holes; it was still just a game.

"To add to the feverish gossip," the perky female narrator went on feverishly, "some sources close to the actress are saying that Juliette may be carrying Todd's child!"

That shook me. Whatever calm my lust had given me was gone on the instant. Talk of love triangles and pregnancy and desertion brought my own situation flooding back in on me: Lauren, Carl, Serena. I seized hold of the remote. I snapped off the TV. I leaned
forward on the sofa in the gathering dark, my elbows propped on my thighs, my hands clasping and twisting against my lips. I prayed silently.
What am I going to do, Lord? What should I do now?

Then I sat in the silent television room, staring into space.

Then, when deep night came, I went out to look for the girl.

The Den-the club where Lauren said Serena hung out—was in the old meatpacking district on Manhattan's Lower West Side. I was surprised to see how crowded the neighborhood was in the middle of the week like this. All the old butcher shops were dance clubs now. There were partygoers on every sidewalk, passing in the dark under the long awnings, in the lee of the grimy brick walls, or spilling over into the broad, cobbled streets. They moved in packs and pairs through the night from club to club, entryway to entry-way, cordon to cordon, line to line. The guys all looked alike to me: gawky dopes with spiky hair and untucked shirts, the long tails dangling over slacks or jeans. Each girl, on the other hand, was a sight to behold: young, some of them teens, some wearing small, sleek dresses and some in frilly taffeta, some wobbling on high heels they hadn't mastered yet, all of them poignant and pretty to my middle-aged eyes.

I found The Den near the corner of Twelfth Avenue. The line there was maybe twenty couples long. I moved beside it to the entrance, catching the smell of perfume as I passed. The perfume smelled like candy or fruit, something little girls would wear playing dress-up. In front, the club was like the other clubs I'd seen, all but unmarked, a discreet sign on the brick wall, a cordon in front of a pair of massive doors.

The guy guarding the approach was a masterpiece of cliché-without-irony. Muscle-bound, block-headed. Wearing a tight black
T-shirt even in the brittle autumn night. I flashed him a hundred-dollar bill and told him I was doing a review of New York clubs for a magazine in the Midwest. He muttered darkly into a walkie-talkie, then thumbed me in, playing it a little extra cool, I thought, now that he figured someone might describe him in the press.

Inside, the place was done up to look like a cave, with lights flickering in alcoves like fire, throwing the shadows of the dancers up on the fake rock walls. The dancers packed the place; the floor was dense with them. They thrashed and coiled like snakes touched by a live wire. The girls' bare shoulders and bare legs caught the colored lights and gleamed. The boys with their untucked shirts were sunk in glimmering nothingness. All of them, judging by flashes of their sweat-shiny faces, seemed to be in a kind of narcissistic trance, eyes closed, lips parted, their attention wholly inward. The music hammered at them. It hammered at me. Ephemeral bursts of electronic Morse code in a spastic melody. A jungle sideman amped up under it with a migraine beat. And out of the midst of all that noise, a woman's voice, thin as a drifting specter and full of a specter's longing. She was singing about sex, but she made it sound like love.

I moved along the outskirts of the dance floor, pushing through clusters of young, light, almost insubstantial flesh. The smell—I remembered that smell—not the patches of perfume and cologne here and there, but the pervasive smell beneath that: cold, processed air and fresh, hot skin together, an atmosphere like a zombie's eyes, torpid yet weirdly alive, full of aching and emptiness. It did that thing to me, that thing smells do, wafting through my limbic system like a smoky key, unlocking images and memories. Suddenly in my mind, I saw a girl I'd known when I was very young, a girl I'd danced with at a club like this one. She was in my mind with startling clarity and my heart ached to have her, just as it had ached back then.

I shouldered my way through the crowd to the bar, a bar of silver metal and glass. It was sunk into an alcove of its own with the fake rock jutting out on either side of it. The close space deadened the thumping, jittery music, brought down the volume a little. Which was a relief to my relatively ancient ears.

One of the two lady bartenders emptied some kind of soapy goop out of a cocktail shaker into a glass and pushed the concoction toward a girl too young to drink it. Then she stepped over and asked me, "What can I get you, partner?"

Anne. That was her name. That was the first time I saw her—saw her and heard her voice and caught a whiff of the scent she wore, which was flowery and sweet and made me think of that girl again, that girl I'd danced with and longed for. Anne was almost as young as I had been back then, in her early twenties at most. Tall with broad shoulders, but not strong-looking or mannish, soft and ungainly in an endearing way. She had the awkward, slightly goofy air of a girl who didn't realize how beautiful, how sensual she was. Her skin was olive, her face oval and big-eyed and innocent, her hair black and lavish, tumbling to those broad shoulders, which were bare in her black tube top. Maybe it was because I'd been thinking about that girl I'd danced with, or maybe it was just Anne, but I suddenly wished with a wish like fire that I had my youth to do over again.

I ordered a bottle of Dos Equis. She clunked it in front of me with a bright, sweet smile. Her eyes—her doe brown eyes—lingered on me frankly, looked me over up and down as I laid my money on the glass in front of her. The frankness of her appraisal was exciting. I couldn't tell if she was being flirtatious or just friendly and curious, but I felt so old in that place—I was probably twice her age at least—that it was exciting to have her look at me at all.

I wondered if Dos Equis was still a cool beer to drink. I hoped so. It used to be, back in the day.

"What're you looking at?" I said with a smile.

"I don't know," she said with an adorably silly tilt of her head. "What am I?"

"You're not gonna card me, are you?"

Likewise adorably, she put one hand on her hip and dropped the other in front of me, demanding my ID. I still had my wallet out, so I slapped it into her palm. Still adorably, she examined my license.

"Jason Harrow. I guessed you were from out of town. You're much better looking than your picture," she said as she returned the wallet to me.

"Thank you. You're much better looking than my picture, too."

She laughed and tossed her hair back. She had a ladybug tattoo on her left shoulder. She had a warm, open laugh like a girl from the country and a sort of raspy voice with a lot of humor in it. I wished the music would pipe down so I could hear her better. Also, I wished I were younger and still single.

As if she heard the thought, I saw her glance down at my left hand, at the gold band on my finger. Then she raised her eyes and saw that I'd seen her glance down. She smiled mischievously and jogged her eyebrows. Adorably. I laughed.

"Now, don't be bad," she said.

She was called away to make a drink for another guy. I shook my head into my beer. I told myself to stop flirting with her. Then she came back and I went on flirting with her. It was as if I was being carried along on a current. Telling myself to stop didn't matter. It was beside the point. The current carried me along.

"I'm Anne," she said, drying her hand on a towel. "Anne Smith." She stuck the hand out and I shook it. Her palm was cool from handling the glasses, but I could feel the heat of her underneath.

"Good name," I said. Even here I had to raise my voice to be heard above the music. "Anne Smith. No-nonsense."

She wrinkled her nose. "I hate it. It's too plain. I gotta marry a guy named Zucabatoni or something."

"I like your ladybug."

"Oh, thanks. It speaks highly of you, too."

She hit me with another of those smiles. I had to force myself to change the direction of the conversation.

"Listen," I said. I leaned toward her so I wouldn't have to speak so loudly. "I'm looking for someone. The daughter of an old friend. She left home, and her mother's worried about her. Her mother says she comes in here a lot."

I had a photo Lauren had given me, a snapshot of three friends she had taken from Serena's room. I laid it on the bar.