The Truth of the Matter (21 page)

I turned to look at them—at the other people in that distorted dream courtroom. I saw dozens of people sitting in the weird, shifting shadows behind me. Even in the dark that came and went as the walls moved in and out, I recognized some of them. People from school, teachers, students. People I’d grown up with. Relatives. Some of their faces were illuminated for moments at a time by spotlights that seemed to shine out of nowhere and pick them out of the dark. I saw my friends—Josh and Rick and Miler—leaning forward intently, listening intently to every word the prosecutor said. I saw Beth, casting me quiet looks and gestures of encouragement whenever I turned to her. I saw my father, frowning angrily at the prosecutor as he watched her moving back and forth across the courtroom.

And I saw my mother. She was sitting beside my father and he had his arm around her. She wasn’t crying now, but I could see by her pallor and her unnaturally bright eyes that she was devastated; terrified by what was happening to her son. I felt the terrible weight of her grief and fear. And I felt the terrible weight of my own guilt for having chosen the path that made her feel this way.

Then I spotted Mr. Sherman. He was sitting near one shifting wall. He saw me look at him. He smiled at me and nodded, as if some secret communication were passing between us.

The sight of him made me nauseous. I felt the movement of the shifting, shadowy room inside me as if I were standing on a ship in a raging sea. Some lines from the Bible went through my mind, a passage about sailors in a storm:

They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to
the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel
to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their
wits’ end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble .
. .

I wanted to cry out to the Lord too, but what could I cry? He knew what none of my friends or family knew: that I
wanted
to be found guilty—that I
had
to be found guilty for the plan to work. All I could ask was that he would comfort the people who loved me, that he would comfort my mom especially . . .

I turned away from Sherman to face the front of the room again. There was the prosecutor, her face pressed terrifyingly close, her features all distorted as she shrieked at me:

“Guilty!”

Startled, I snapped out of the fever dream—but not out of the fever. For a moment, I was awake in a haze of heat and sickness. Where was I? What was happening to me? The room I was in was a foggy, shifting blur.

“Mom . . . ,” I heard myself groan.

And I heard her answer, “Ssh. It’s all right now.”

I turned eagerly to the voice, lifting my hand. I felt a cool hand take mine. I searched for my mother’s face. And there she was . . . But wait, no, it wasn’t my mother. It was another woman. Blond, weary. Did I know her? Yes . . . at least I’d seen her before . . . But I couldn’t quite remember who she was. Still, her voice was gentle and comforting.

“Just lie quietly.”

She put a washcloth on my forehead. It was cool and damp, and the feel of it against my burning skin was incredibly soothing.

“Guilty . . . ,” I said.

“No, no, no,” she murmured. “It’s going to be all right.”

I shook my head at her. It would never be all right. “Guilty . . . guilty . . . ,” I tried to explain.

From far away, I heard another voice: “Is the man dying, Mommy?”

“No, sweetheart,” she said. “He’s just sick and tired, that’s all.”

I held on to her hand. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I know. Just rest.”

I felt myself sinking again, falling down and down and down into the foggy world of the past . . .

“Look I’m just asking you to think logically here. I just want you to ask yourself some simple, logical questions about the things you’ve been taught to believe. That’s not evil, is it, Charlie? Asking questions is just what a teacher is supposed to do. Isn’t it?”

The voice was murmuring low—practically whispering— in my ear. There was nothing else. Just darkness. Just that voice. I knew the voice, but I couldn’t place it right away, couldn’t figure out whose voice it was.

“I mean, when you get a different set of facts, you have to reconsider the situation. Right? You might think the sky is always blue or the grass is always green, but if you wake up one morning and the grass is red, well, you have to reformulate your opinions around those observations. Different information requires a different worldview.”

Slowly, as if lights were coming up on a stage in a theater, the scene became visible around me. I was in a restaurant. It was in my hometown, but it was not a restaurant I knew. It was a sort of cocktail lounge in a mall. It was dark with black walls, low lights, small tables, far apart from each other. There was a bar where men sat slumped over their drinks while a basketball game played soundlessly on the TV on the wall.

This was not the kind of place I would normally go to. It was sleazy. People sitting around drinking in the middle of the afternoon. But that’s exactly why we were here. It was the kind of place where no one we knew would see us.

I turned to look at the man who was speaking to me. It was Mr. Sherman, my old history teacher. Again, the sight of him made me feel kind of ill, as if the room were going up and down on a stormy sea. He was close to me now, sitting right next to me in a booth seat at a small table. He was leaning toward me over our lunch plates. I could feel his breath as he spoke.

“Look, no one likes to abandon cherished beliefs,” he went on in that insinuating murmur. “I mean, we all find these old superstitions comforting and reassuring—I know that. No one likes to find out that something he was taught as a child by his parents or teachers might be wrong. But you have to be realistic. You have to consider the facts.”

I looked at him. I forced myself to nod, as if I were considering his words, as if he were making headway in convincing me. To be honest, I didn’t much like pretending in that way, but that was what I was supposed to do. That was the job Waterman had given me. I was supposed to make Sherman think he was changing my mind, convincing me to join the Homelanders.

But all the while, I could see right through him. I mean, I had taken history from him two years in a row. I knew exactly the way he argued. He would begin by making these broad generalizations that had an element of truth to them. He would say: You have to use your reason. Or: When the facts change, you have to change your opinion. Which, of course, are true statements as far as they go. But it’s easy to twist even the truth and use it for false purposes.

Now Sherman went on, murmuring in my ear: “As long as you were living your safe, middle-class life, you thought everything in America was perfect. You were all full of big words like ‘liberty and justice for all,’ and you thought that was the situation you were in. But now things have changed. Now you’re being falsely accused, aren’t you? You’re being railroaded into prison for a murder you didn’t commit. And all of that is being done by the very American system you respected and trusted.”

This was such typical Sherman, it almost made me laugh.
You thought everything in America was perfect
. That was just dumb! I wasn’t some kind of slaphappy idiot or blind patriot. I knew there were problems and evils here just like there are problems and evils everywhere there are human beings. But over time, no other country has been more free or caused more freedom to spread around the world or protected freedom more around the world. And if people aren’t free, what are they? If you don’t start with that, what have you got?

That’s what I was thinking, but that’s not what I said. What I said was, “Yeah . . . yeah, I guess I see what you mean. But what about these people you’re with—these Islamo-fascists seem like pretty nasty types to me.”

Sherman made a motion with his hand, brushing this objection aside as if it were nothing. “Look, you know me, Charlie. I don’t believe in any God or religion. That’s just old-fashioned superstitious stuff from another age. But these people are committed to bringing this unfair system down, and that’s what I’m committed to also. When the smoke clears, that’s when we’ll make our real move, that’s when we’ll turn this country into a place where there’s no unfairness at all, where everyone has the same amount of money and property, and where no one says anything hateful, or treats anyone unfairly.”

“Because you’ll be telling them not to,” I couldn’t help saying. “You’ll be deciding for them what’s right and what’s wrong and making them do it.”

“Oh, hey, Charlie. Don’t give me this ‘We, the People’ stuff, all right? Look around you. Most people are idiots. They can barely put two thoughts together in a row. You want
them
deciding what’s right for the country?”

Well, again, I wasn’t there to argue with him. I was there to pretend to be convinced by him. So I said, “Okay. So you’re saying democracy isn’t always such a good thing . . .”

“It’s not, Charlie, believe me. It’s the wrong way to go. People need to be forced to do what’s right.”

“But what if they don’t agree. You’re talking about killing people then, aren’t you?”

“No, no, no,” said Mr. Sherman—but always keeping his voice low, always keeping his face close to mine so no one else could hear what he was saying. “I’m talking about
saving
people, Charlie. Saving all the people who die because of America’s evil.”

I would have paid cash money to tell him what I thought of him just then. But I did my job. I said, “Uh-huh.”

“Listen, Charlie, here’s the thing,” Sherman went on softly. “Let’s say you get convicted of Alex’s murder.”

“Well, I hope I won’t . . .”

“I know, I know,” he said, cutting me off. “But let’s just say you get unfairly convicted and sent to prison. You could be forty or fifty before they set you free again. That’s your whole life gone, Charlie. For what? For a lie. For nothing. Just because they needed a scapegoat.”

I swallowed hard, as if I were considering his words. “Yeah? So?”

“So these Islamic guys you hate so much?”

“I don’t hate them. I just disagree with them.”

“Whatever. The thing is: they have deep contacts in our prisons, a lot of powerful contacts. If you joined with us, I could arrange for you to break free of any prison they try to put you in. Instead of rotting away behind bars until you’re an old man, you could be living free, fighting to make this a better country.”

I leaned toward him and was about to answer, but as I did, I felt that nausea again. The way the dark room shifted back and forth and the way Mr. Sherman pressed his face close to me and the way he kept whispering in that soft, intense, insinuating way—it was all sickening.

I shook my head a little, trying to clear it. It seemed to be getting darker around me. It was harder and harder to see the restaurant.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “Okay. Just for the sake of argument, if I joined up with you, what would I have to do?”

The light got dimmer and dimmer. The walls of the restaurant disappeared in the encroaching darkness. The darkness spread toward us like a stain, the other tables disappearing first, then our own table getting dimmer. Soon, I could barely make out Sherman himself, even though he was right next to me.

Finally, blackness.

I reached out blindly. A gentle hand took hold of mine. A woman’s kindly face hovered over me.

“Ma . . . ?” I moaned softly through my fever.

“It’s all right, sweetheart.”

“Didn’t want to hurt you . . .”

“I know. It’s all right.”

“So sorry . . .”

“No, you did the right thing.”

“Made you cry . . .”

“It’s a sad world sometimes. Sometimes people have to cry, that’s all.”

“Never wanted . . .”

“I know. It’s all right.”

I clung to her cool hand for comfort. Her face swam in and out of focus. Sometimes I thought it was my mom and sometimes I wasn’t sure. I wanted to see my mom so much. I wanted to be home again so much. I was tired of being on the run, tired of being alone.

“Ma . . . ,” I whispered.

“Ssh,” the woman whispered back. “Just rest.”

I sank back into dreams and memory.