"Empire of Lies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Klavan Andrew)

SUNDAY
Another Life

The jet dropped out of low clouds and there was Manhattan, the dense skyline thrusting toward the mist. I gazed out the porthole, watching the spires sail past. I thought of Lauren down there somewhere. What could she want? I wondered-wondered for the umpteenth time. What could she want and why call me about it? She wouldn't tell me over the phone, and I couldn't stop trying to figure it out. Was it money? That was the only thing I could think of, the only thing that made sense. She must need money. She must've heard I'd done well and figured I could help her. It had to be that-or why call me?

After all these years, why call me?

My gaze focused on the Empire State Building-and then went beyond it over the undulating fall of stone to the island's southern tip, to the place where I had seen her last. My mind went back to that day and to all the days before it until, as the plane descended, I was lost in another life-a life that used to be my life.

I said I would tell you everything, so here it is:

When I was twenty-eight, I went a little mad. There were good enough reasons for it, I guess. My mother's illness, my father's suicide, my own guilt about both because of my discovery of the Spiral Notebooks. My brother's cruelty had twisted me. The company I kept had led me astray. There were plenty of reasons.

Still, in the end, it was me, my thoughts, my actions, my choices that sent me down the road into darkness until I became sick-morally sick; lost and mad and desperately unhappy.

It was seventeen years before all this began, before that autumn afternoon on the patio and the End of Civilization as We Know It. Picture me handsome, edgy, dripping with urban sophistication. I smoked in a curt, defiant way. I was quick-witted and funny. I had a good line in irony and sneering left-wing cant.

All in all, I would say I was deceptively presentable back then, considering what a mess I was inwardly. I dressed conservatively, in a pressed, preppy style. I thought it made a piquant contrast with my opinions and my job. I was an investigative reporter for the Soho Star, a radical weekly with an office on lower Broadway. I spent my working hours hunting down obnoxious landlords, highlighting cultural offenses against blacks and homosexuals, and seeking out corruption in any official who did not believe in the state as a sort of Nanny Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to fund its infantilizing care for the poor. I liked to claim that my creased khakis and my button-down shirt, my navy blue jacket and school tie were a sort of clever disguise to help me mingle with the ruling class and get the goods on them. But I'm afraid the ugly truth was: I liked the way I looked in that outfit. And the upshot was I appeared in those days as every inch the solid pillar of society I would one day come to be.

But oh, my soul.

I was miserable. I was miserable and I was proud of it, the way intelligent young people often are. I wore my inner pain like a badge of honor. It showed I was too sensitive for the harsh world, too honest for its corruption, too independent for its iron chains of conformity. Oh, I had all sorts of ego-polishing notions about my unhappy self. And I had theories, too. What, after all, is a depressed intellectual without his theories? I can't reconstruct the details of them now. It would be too boring to try. But there was a lot of Nietzsche involved and Freud, too-oh, and Marx. That was it, my trinity: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx. Which is to say I believed that power, sex, and money explained all human interactions, all history, and all the world. To pretend anything else, I thought, was rank hypocrisy, the worst of intellectual sins. Faith was a scam, Hope was a lie, Love was an illusion. Power, sex, and money-these three-were the real, the only stuff of life.

And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.

I don't remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity-power and money-were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society's evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.

Sex, though-sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing-nothing consensual-that could repel or alienate such enlightened folk as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite-for food, say, or alcohol or material goods-our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man-so my theories went-threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.

My depths, unfortunately, had been forged in the fire of a very unhappy youth. Rage at my mother's fate, confusion at my father's, a wellspring of pent violence opened by my brother's bullying brutality all played a part. And when I really delved into the nature of my desires-and how, given my theories, could I do otherwise?-I discovered I had a simmering penchant for cruelty. This had to be developed-so I decreed in the name of liberation and integrity-not to mention the fact that it turned me on.

Which brings me to Lauren Goldberg.

Lauren was the child of a teacher-slash-filmmaker and the paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist whom he divorced. The years of their marriage, of course, were Lauren's golden era. Till the age of eight, she could trust and believe in family and love and the gentle guidance of the teachers at her private school. After that, her world was all recriminations and disillusionment and shifting sand-plus the cold chaos of public education when the parental breakup sent the family budget to hell. The contrast between these two periods was the source of-or at least the excuse for-all Lauren's bitterness and all her yearning.

She had long black hair, a small, thin, nicely proportioned body, a harshly attractive face with her father's aquiline Jewish features and her mother's white German-Irish skin. She was young, like me. Smoked, like me. Saw sneeringly, like me, into the grimy heart of the pseudo-immaculate American dream or whatever it was we were sneeringly seeing into the heart of. She worked as a photographer's assistant. Her ambition was to become a photographer herself.

We met at a poetry reading held in a church. We drank wine out of plastic cups and talked, standing close to each other in the corner under a station of the cross. She agreed with me-or at least nodded eagerly-when I expounded on what a con job, what a lie it all was. Society, I mean, Western culture: all just a disguise for the will to power and money and sex. She nodded and said in a scintillating tone of admiration, "That is incredibly true."

And so to bed.

Now, the media have portrayed me as such a withered puritanical moralist that I suppose I ought to say right up front: I have no qualms whatsoever about the games lovers play, and may God bless you all in your variety. But this is my story, so I can only tell you about the things I did and how they affected me.

Anyway, Lauren and I didn't get up to anything too grotesque or dangerous, not at first. We just tied each other up with belts and bathrobe ties and slapped each other's butts and pretended to choke each other, snarling nasty words and so on. All in good fun, you know. And I mean, I liked Lauren well enough. I liked the fragility and the longing I sensed under her sullen, cynical hide. We had, I guess, a relationship of sorts. Pasta and philosophy in the wine cellars of Alphabet City. Wrist-bound, red-bottomed nights in her apartment-because her apartment was nicer than mine, a sparkly brick-walled wood-floored studio in Chelsea her father helped her rent.

Then, of course, after a while, I grew bored with her. Nothing surprising there. The urge to sexual variety in men is just as strong as the urge to bear young in women. And since our relationship was based mostly on sex, I saw no reason to draw things out. No hypocrisy, remember. I simply broke the news to her: I wanted to see other people. To my surprise, she eagerly agreed: Yes, yes, we should. In fact, through her photography contacts, she knew some other couples who were into what she called The Scene. Maybe we should get together with them. Well, yeah! I said.

I didn't understand, you see, that Lauren likely would've done anything to stop me from going, to win my love, to be the girl she thought I wanted her to be. To my idiot mind, we were just a couple of free spirits exploring the dangerous boundaries of our desires. It never occurred to me until it was too late that I was the natural leader of us, that I was in charge of her and therefore responsible for her welfare.

So we entered The Scene, becoming part of a loose company of people who enjoyed rough sex and other shenanigans. We would get together, two or sometimes three couples at a time, play out roles and scenarios, expose our most secret, most violent hungers and proceed to satisfy them on each other.

If you are wondering what that feels like-what it feels like to hurt other people for your sexual pleasure-I mean, to really bind them hard and hurt them cruelly-I will tell you: It feels good. At least it did to me. There was a dull-minded, feverish heat to having sex that way. No, it was not like lovemaking exactly. There were no deep draughts of pleasure from someone else's pleasure, no long, slow immersion in another's face, another's body, beautiful because they were her face and body, exciting because they were hers. Acting out the universal male fantasies of rape and conquest and domination had instead a childishly gluttonous quality. It was like sitting cross-legged on the floor and stuffing chocolate cake into your mouth until the whole cake was gone. It was just like that, in fact: delicious-then compulsive-and finally sickening.

Sickening, yes. Because when it was over-never mind the morning after, I mean the second it was over-I felt my spirit-that spirit I did not believe existed-flooded with moral revulsion as if a bubbling tarlike substance was rising into my throat and choking me. But here was the funny thing-the strange thing. I somehow managed to hide this feeling from myself. It's odd, I know. I meant to be so honest about everything, to expose my deepest nature, to act upon my most primal instincts without restraint-no hypocrisy. And yet about this-this most basic fact of the experience-I lied shamelessly. I told myself I felt deliciously wicked. I told myself I felt a free man who had broken the bonds of moral conformity. Oh God-my God, my God-the things I told myself. Anything to hide the truth of my moral revulsion.

Finally, when the lies were not enough, I used drugs. Well, we all used drugs, all of us in The Scene. They were to heighten the sensation, we said-without considering that the sensation needed heightening only so that the urges of our desire would continue to outstrip the commandments of our self-disgust. We started with cocaine and later added Ecstasy, which was just beginning to make the rounds in a big way. Before long, I was using something almost daily.

And yet I still had my theories-and according to my theories, everything was going great! I had the joys of honest sensuality to set against the lies that mask society's emptiness and corruption. I had the bulwark of philosophical truth to protect me against the oppressive meaninglessness of existence. I had the satisfaction of answering ever-present Death with Physical Pleasure, the only thing that was both good and real.

That was how it was, according to my theories.

In practice, my personality was disintegrating and I was plunging into a dull fog of depression, illuminated by sharp flashes of suicidal despair. Go figure.

It happened slowly at first, then it happened fast, like a child going down a playground slide, push, push, then picking up speed, then falling finally plump into the sandpit below. That was how I fell-plump-into That Night in Bedford.

That's what we always called it, Lauren and I: That Night in Bedford. As in "I can't stop thinking about That Night in Bedford." Or: "After That Night in Bedford, nothing was the same."

That Night in Bedford, we rented a car and drove up to Westchester to meet a new couple involved in The Scene. He was some kind of Wall Street guy, maybe forty, hopped-up, snappy. She was his wife, a Realtor, a little younger but not much. She was brimming with forced sophistication, broad, limp-wristed gestures, loud laughter. She actually said, That's just delightful, darling. She said it several times, in fact, during the course of the evening.

They had a spectacular sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane. She called it that when she gave us the directions: "It's a sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane." They invited Lauren and me to stay with them for the weekend.

I won't pretend I don't remember what happened. That would be nice, but I remember only too well, in spite of the chemical fog that was curling through the twisted byways of my brain at the time. The blow-by-blow of it doesn't matter much anymore. The point is: It ended with the woman sobbing. The wife, the Realtor. All her pretense at sophistication gone. Curled naked on the floor in a corner of the master bedroom, weirdly small-looking under the ceiling's enormous, exposed wooden beams. Her hand was wedged between her legs, and she was sobbing so convulsively, I thought she might rupture something. Lauren was in the master bathroom puking up pills. And me, I was holding my head in one hand and trying to find my clothes with the other.

The husband, the Wall Street guy-he was worse even than the rest of us. If there were some sort of award for this kind of thing he would've won it: Most Disgraceful Behavior in a Disgraceful Situation or something like that. The clown was actually screaming at his wife. Standing over her in his ridiculous bikini briefs, his bland face scarlet, his pearly hands flying every which way. Screaming at her: "You always do this! You always goddamn find a way to pull this fucking shit on me!" With the poor woman curled up at his feet, convulsing, sobbing so that a stone would've pitied her: "I didn't want to. I told you I didn't want to."

After that, after That Night in Bedford-that's when I cracked. It was the disgust, you know, the moral disgust. And yet, I had worked so hard at hiding it from myself that it could only reveal itself to me in other forms and symptoms.

So I would wake up in the predawn dark or just go still, staring at my desk in daylight. My skin would suddenly turn clammy, my heart suddenly flutter and race. I would think about the sobbing Bedford woman. And outlandish fears would swim into my mind: What if she accuses me of rape? Or: What if she dies of internal injuries and I'm arrested for murder? I laughed these worries off at first. They were nonsense. She'd agreed to everything and I knew she hadn't been hurt in any serious way. And yet the fears kept coming back. And then other fears came, too, small emberlike worries that had been smoldering in me a long time but now suddenly burst into larger flame. What if I got sick? Having sex with so many strangers, careless because of the drugs. What if I had syphilis and didn't know it? What if I had AIDS? What if I got cancer of some kind? Cancer of the penis? Cancer of the balls?

I grew sick with fear. I grew small and hunched and sallow, worrying. There were days when I thought about it every hour, hours when I thought about it every minute. What if she accuses me of rape? What if she dies? What if I get a venereal disease? What if I get cancer? I went to the library and pored over legal books. I pored over medical articles, looking for symptoms. I checked my body constantly and panicked at every pimple and rash. I turned my face away whenever police cars went by. I was in an agony of terror: the symptom of my buried revulsion.

Lauren tried to help, but she only made things worse. She would lay her fingertips gently on my chest in the darkness and whisper to me with impatient tenderness: "Look, you didn't mean it. She said she wanted to. She did."

She didn't understand. How could she? She was part of my guilt. I saw that finally. I could tell myself that she had brought me into The Scene, that she'd suggested it and made the introductions. But I knew the truth. She had followed my lead. She had admired me, had wanted to please and impress me. She had shaped herself to my desires.

And now here she lay, whispering comforts into my sleepless ear, while another voice-my own voice-was whispering: "Look at you! Sniveling, fearful, sweating in the dark. Where're your theories now, Philosophy Boy? Where's the great enlightenment, the freedom and liberation you promised? You scuzzy shithead. Look at what you are."

So much for sex as a path to the good life. So much for power, too, when you came to think of it. So much for Freud and Nietzsche as guides to happiness. And as for Marx? Well, Marx, it turned out, was done for, too. It was not so very long before that I had watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, watched that signature monstrosity of a monstrous century die its miniature death on the piece-of-papersized TV on Lauren's kitchenette counter. I had seen Marx's children come blinking out of the pit of tyranny into the bright, gaudy light of the big, beautiful market-driven world, seen them lift their grateful hands to that glad radiance where it reflected blindingly off the teeth of movie stars and the fenders of Corvettes and the bare skin of Western women, hot and spoiled and blessedly free. The hard-hearted, war-mongering, greed-is-good troglodytes of conservatism had prophesied it would be so, those suit-and-tie defenders of old truths and old religions and the silly, old, outmoded American way. They had predicted it would be like this and we-we the fine, sophisticated, enlightened, chattering self-certain of the left-we had called them every name we could think of, anything we could think of that might intimidate them into silence. And now look. Look. It was no good denying it, though all my radical friends made haste to: They had been right, those conservatives-they had been right and we had been wrong. The truths we'd held to be self-evident were nothing more than a comfortable climate of opinion, self-congratulatory certainties that made us feel righteous and progressive and bold and yet had nothing to do with facts. This, too, I understood now. We had been wrong. I had been wrong.

I had been wrong about everything.

What an awful thing to discover. My whole sense of myself was shattered. I felt as if I were falling apart. I had to do something.

I don't know why I went to the Church of the Incarnation. I had been raised without religion, mostly. I had certainly never been baptized or anything like that. My father, the child of a sometimes-radical academic, always swatted away my metaphysical questions as if they were mosquitoes. My mother, who'd been brought up Catholic, retained some vague notion of a gentle infant deity as long as her mind held out, but for the most part the Christ she knew was a figment of her later madness. For myself, I was an atheist, tolerant of faith only in the form of that vague Western version of Eastern mysticism so popular among my colleagues and friends.

Still, one afternoon, I was walking along Madison Avenue, and there was the church and I stopped in front of it. It was a beautiful old place, an old Gothic Revival brownstone sitting on the banks of the avenue almost defiantly serene as the flood of nervy pedestrians and deafening traffic went rushing past. Dwarfed by the towering modern apartment buildings all around it, it seemed to me a thing of more human dimensions than they somehow, aspiring skyward in this sort of small, hopeful way, peak to peak, pediment to gable to steepled tower, each crowned with a finial cross. I seized on it as if it were a piece of driftwood in the boiling sea. I went inside.

The traffic noise died away as the big wooden door swung shut behind me. I stepped across the tiled vestibule to the head of the nave. The light in here seemed white and golden, the effect of its play on the marble altar and its gilded cross. Lancets and quatrefoils of vivid stained glass ran along the walls to either side of me. Christ enthroned, Lazarus risen, Virgin with child all flamed into relief or drew back into shadow as the sun shone through them or moved past.

There was no service going on, but a few people were bowed prayerfully in the pews here and there. I didn't want them to see me, so I retreated into the vestibule and stepped into an empty side chapel.

I took a seat at the front before a small altar, also of marble. There was a wooden crucifix on it, framed against a multicolored triptych on the wall behind. Jesus hung wracked and mournful on the cross, his dying eyes turned up to heaven, the thorns carved into his head, the blood carved onto his brow.

I didn't know what I was supposed to say to him. "Hi," I said finally, in a barely audible whisper. "I hate to bother you, but I'm really feeling like shit here." Embarrassed, I screwed my palms together in my lap. "Frankly," I added with a laugh, "you're not looking so good yourself." Then I buried my face in my hands and started weeping. I said to him: "Help me! Forgive me! Forgive me, help me, help me!"

The storm passed. I waited there, just like that. I'm not sure what for, exactly. Maybe I thought I would peek through my fingers and see the celestial cavalry charging over the altar to my rescue. More likely, I was hoping for an enlightening interior blast of some kind. Some hallelujah conversion maybe. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. I stayed a while longer, trying to force it, trying to get a little uplift and inspiration going by sheer willpower. But no. Nothing.

Well, what did I expect? This whole God thing was bullshit. Everyone knew that. Everyone I knew knew that anyway. I got up and got the hell out of that place in a hurry. If you're going to get past things like this, I told myself bitterly, you have to get past them on your own. I was a man, wasn't I? Well, I was going to act like one. To hell with my damn theories. I knew what was right. I just had to do it, that's all-and I would. I was going to call up the Bedford woman and apologize for being a brute and a blind fool. I was going to dump the ugly sex that made me feel good in the moment and lousy ever afterward. I was going to stop using these awful drugs and clear my head and try to be kinder to people, try to be more honest about what I thought and felt and saw, more honest and forthright and kind all around. I was going to change everything, damn it. I was going to start everything over from scratch.

And I did. With God's help, I did. Because, of course, over time I realized what should've been obvious to me right away: that my prayer in the chapel that afternoon had been answered, after all. The celestial cavalry had, in fact, charged over the hill at the first sound of my cry for help. I didn't see it at first because there was no magic to it. It was just real-as real as real. My prayer had been answered almost in the saying of it.

So I quit The Scene. I quit the drugs. I quit the Soho Star. I sent out resumes and got offered a new job at a small paper in the Midwest.

Which left me with only one other thing I had to do.

"I'm going away," I told Lauren. We were walking by the harbor path in Battery Park on a winter Sunday. She had her arm in mine. I was looking away over the unbroken line of benches, squinting through the brittle sunlight to watch the tiered ferries sputter through the water toward the Statue of Liberty. I heard Lauren beside me release a trembling sigh. "I've been offered a job in another city, and I'm going to take it."

She slipped her arm out of mine. She slipped her hands into the pockets of her dark woolen overcoat. "I'm assuming this isn't an invitation," she said.

I took a slow scan of the water back to the tip of the island, up to the twin towers of the World Trade Center standing massive against the afternoon sky. I was going to miss this city, I thought. "Lauren, look," I said. "I never lied to you about the way I felt."

"No. No, you didn't. God knows I tried to get you to, but you never did."

"I've just… changed too much. I can't make any more small adjustments. I'm going to be thirty soon. I need to start again somewhere else."

She stopped on the path and I stopped, and we faced each other. I don't know why it surprised me to see her wiping her nose with the woolen gloves on her hands. We'd been so glib and cynical and crazy with each other, it was hard for me to realize how much I meant to her.

"Well, listen," she said with a miserable laugh. "Fuck you and all that. If you don't mind, I'm not gonna go through the whole routine. Crying gives me a headache, and I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Anyway, it won't change anything. Have a nice life, Jason, okay?"

She walked off quickly, looking small and sad in the long coat and the watch cap pulled down over her hair, the knit scarf trailing behind her. A hunched, unhappy figure against the sparkling harbor. I wanted to call her back but what for? I knew I'd only browbeat her into forgiving me so I'd feel better. I watched her go, watched her blend with the crowds around the ferry stand, meld with the scenery-people, plane trees, and those two stalwart towers.

Then I turned away and walked off in the opposite direction.

Now, Manhattan's skyline sank out of sight as the plane settled down toward the runway. I came out of myself and turned away from the porthole. I had an odd, heavy sensation inside me-an intimation of danger-a feeling that I was coming here for deeper and more perilous reasons than I knew. Because it was strange, wasn't it? That call from Lauren just as I had to decide what to do with my mother's house. The timing was strange, the coincidence of it. It gave me the feeling that I was returning not just to the East Coast but to the past itself, returning to confront the past itself, to face it as a new man and prove to its ghosts and shadows that I was a wholly different man than I had been.

The plane touched down with a jolt. I shook myself, trying to throw that feeling off, that odd, heavy intimation of danger.

It wouldn't go away.