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

The Television Room

Night had long fallen by the time I left the airport to drive out to the island. There were spots of rain on the windshield of my rental car. It was a sleek, jolly little red Mustang, low to the ground. It dodged and wove sweetly through the expressway traffic.

I talked to Cathy most of the way out. Her voice was thin and tinny and faraway in my cell-phone earpiece. She told me about the kids, their day at school: a good grade on a spelling test, a part in a school play. It was still daylight where they were, she said. The sky, she said, was clear.

Man oh man, I wished I hadn't lied to her about Lauren. I wished I had told her I was going to see her while I was here. She wouldn't have minded. She would've trusted me. I wasn't sure why I had kept it to myself. Just an impulse really, a momentary whim. It wasn't that I was planning to sleep with Lauren again, or anything. I wasn't an idiot, after all. I think it's just that sometimes-sometimes when you live a good life, a stable life-you want to leave room for the possibility of something else, for the excitement of the possibility. It was like letting Tanya touch my arm… just for a moment sometimes, you feel compelled to leave life open to the thrill of disaster.

Anyway, I hadn't told Cathy the truth, and I found I couldn't tell her now. Feeling uncomfortable and guilty, I asked her to put the children on. They said hi to me one by one. I asked them how they were. Fine, they said. When they were done, I switched off the phone and kept driving.

I slid from the highway into my hometown. I came along the broad road past the car dealerships and gas stations at the town limits. Then it was up the hill into the residential areas, where streetlights shone down on the canopies of maples and elms above me. Yellow and red and green leaves glistened, slick with the light rain. Behind the trees, entry lights gleamed white by the doorways of tranquil clapboard-and-shingle houses. Inside, behind the curtains, room lights burned yellow and warm.

It was just another Long Island suburban town, but it was my town. I'd been back here often over the years, of course, to visit Mom and my brother. Every time, it struck me with an almost-mystical familiarity. I felt I could walk its streets blindfolded, and if its streets were gone, I could walk blindfolded on the paths where they had been. I felt as if the map of the place were branded on the longest-living part of me, as if I could die and trace its outline on the after-darkness.

The house where I grew up and where my mother went mad and died was on the corner at the bottom of a hill. It was a substantial two-story colonial with white clapboards and dark green shutters. It was set back on a broad, flat lawn and shaded by oaks and a tall cherry tree. I'd been paying a caretaker to keep the grounds neat and a housekeeper to dust and air out the rooms, but when I pulled into the driveway, I thought the place had a forlorn, abandoned look to it all the same.

Inside, when the door had shut behind me, it seemed very still. I don't suppose that houses get any quieter when people die in them. I don't suppose it was any quieter than if my mother had gone out for a while on one of the rambling walks she sometimes took before her heart got too bad. But she hadn't gone out for a walk, and when I turned on the foyer light, the rest of the house spread dark around me and, as I say, it seemed almost preternaturally still.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my suitcase in my hand. I looked up into the shadows of the second-floor landing. Her bedroom was up there, haunted by my imagination of her last hour. I imagined her lying in bed alone, feverishly explaining the signs, the omens and connections that were so obvious to her, but that no one else could see. The fall of the Republic. The Second Coming of Christ. The coming of savagery again to the scattered nations. Explaining and explaining to no one in a whisper. Reaching out in the dark as if to take hold of my wrist-me, because I was the only one who had the patience to listen to her…

But I wasn't there. No one was. I had begged Mom for years to come live with me. Cathy and I had both begged her. But I think she liked taking care of my brother. Paying his keep, making his bed, his lunch, doing his laundry. I think it gave her a sense of purpose. Of course, he was no good to her when the crisis came. Alan-that's my brother's name-Alan-had been living with her for over a decade by then. A ruined, useless man. A great pontificator on What's Wrong with the World, but incapable of holding down a job or starting a family or putting bread in his own mouth. When he sensed that the end was near, he decided it was time to take what he called a "vacation." He withdrew about forty thousand dollars from Mom's various accounts and went off to Bermuda. As far as I knew, he was still there.

So she died alone. The maid came in one morning and found her. I wondered-I still wonder-if her whisper had faded to nothing or if she stopped suddenly in the middle of a word. I wondered if she felt relief as the last hoarded breath rattled out of her-relief that it was finally over, that her guardianship of the secret patterns of history was finally done. Or did she die grieving that there was no one there to hear her, no one else to understand and to take up the sacred burden when she was gone?

I stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up into the shadows for a long time. Then I looked away. Confronting the past was all well and good, but there was no chance I was going up there tonight, not with the babbling ghost of her lying there in the darkness. Tonight, I decided, I would sleep in the television room.

The television room was a strange feature of the place. It was not connected to any other room in the house. You had to get to it by going through the garage. I reached the garage through the door in the kitchen, then edged my way between my mother's old Volvo and the gardening tools hanging on pegboards along the walls. The door to the television room was at the back beside stacked boxes of moldering books. I went through. Turned the light on. Tossed my suitcase onto the floor.

The room was a long and narrow rectangle. Call it ten feet by twenty. The walls were painted a deep, rich blue. There was a couch on one end, to my right. And to my left, all the way on the other end, taking up almost the entire wall, there was what to these rapidly aging eyes seemed the largest flat-screen rear-projection television set that could ever be conceived by the mind of man. Really, it was a monster, just huge. Seventy inches, if I remember my brother's boast right. Alan had treated himself to the machine about two years earlier, when some of my mother's CDs had rolled over.

Everything else here-everything else besides the couch and the TV-was incidental. Windows covered with wooden shutters. An ancient shag rug on the floor. Shelves and drawers against the longer walls to hold Alan's collections of old movies, television shows, and video games. A long coffee table in front of the couch, pinewood with ring stains and coffee stains on it. An Xbox on the table. And, of course, an amazingly complex super-duper remote control that for all I knew could make the sun rise in the morning and part the waters from the dry land.

I'd always liked this room. I'd always found it peaceful and comforting. All the high-tech stuff was new, of course, but there had always been a TV out here. Nothing as big as this cyclopean beast but some kind of TV or other. When we were kids, Alan and I would carry our cereal bowls through the garage of a Saturday morning, set them on the shag rug-the same shag rug, in fact-and lie belly down, eating our Cheerios and watching the cartoons. I remember it as the only time he and I could be alone together without him punching or kicking me or throwing me to the floor or stealing or breaking my toys or calling me names in a wild, high voice like a demon's. The TV seemed to hypnotize and pacify him and he would just lie on the rug beside me, munching his Cheerios, staring at the screen. As far as I could make out, that was pretty much all he'd been doing ever since.

My long trip over, I plumped down onto the sofa with a sigh. I picked up the remote gizmo. Studied it for a few seconds and pressed the buttons. The big TV made a sizzling sound. A red light flickered at the bottom of it, then went green. The set came on. Pictures. Voices. Drowning out the babbling ghost inside the house. What a relief.

A woman appeared on the screen, a perky little blonde thing, glossed and powdered to a fare-thee-well. Sally Sterling, she was-so said the caption across her breasts. Her gigantic face took up the entire far wall, her features so huge they fairly forced themselves on my consciousness. Ultra-kissable bee-stung lips. Glistening blue eyes that managed to be ambitious and imbecilic at once. She struck me as the kind of girl who in a bygone age would have set her sights on an aging millionaire. Now here she was, blown up to the size of a bus, bothering all the rest of us. She was holding a penis-shaped microphone in front of her mouth- well, I couldn't help but perceive it that way with it jumping out at me as large as that. Her great white smile flashed. She looked as if she could barely contain her glee.

"Is this the end of civilization as we know it?" she drawled ironically, a laugh stuck in her throat. "Three major Hollywood studios certainly hope so as they get ready for the premiere of the first film ever using Real 3-D Technology at the New Coliseum Theater just off Times Square-"

I pressed the remote, hunting through the channels. An ad for car insurance went by, then an ad for soda, then a game show with lightbulbs flashing around a babe in a short skirt. I settled on the news. Enormous images tumbled past of American soldiers curling around the doorways of bomb-gutted houses, young men charging into bullet-riddled darkness with brave and fearful eyes. There were bodies in an Arab marketplace around an exploded car. There was an old woman in a black burqa weeping on her knees. In St. Petersburg, some Islamo-fascists had set off a bomb near the Church of Saints Peter and Anne. In Paris, a lone jihadi had gone apeshit at the Louvre, stabbing two tourists before he slashed a priceless painting, Ingres's Odalisque.

I stared at the images, but again, my mind drifted back to Lauren, wondering what she wanted, why she had called me. And suddenly, thinking of her, watching the images on the screen, a realization came to me. With all this business about confronting the past and so on, I realized I'd been imagining Lauren as if she would be the same, as if she would look the same as I remembered her. When she'd spoken to me on the phone, her voice was unchanged. It was still a low, throaty drawl, sardonic, mocking, secretly vulnerable. The image of her that came into my mind as I listened was the image of her as she once was: young, narrow, wired, with that braced, expectant air some women have as if they're waiting to be taken by storm. I remembered her mostly as I saw her last, turning away from me, walking away, disappearing into the crowds by the harbor, Liberty in the distance to the left of her, the Twin Towers looming against the sky to her right.

But she will have changed, I reminded myself, as if talking to a simpleton. Of course she will have changed. I'd changed. Everyone had. The whole city was different, diminished, those towers themselves blown to rubble, the thousands in them dead. The whole world-that stunned, victorious West we lived in-our dumb, hilarious, in-the-money America with the slave colonies of the evil empire clacketing down like dominoes around our big clown feet: Seventeen years and it was all different, all gone. Look. Look at the TV: There was war after war in the Middle East now, war after war radiating like shock waves from the wound in the island where the towers had stood. Crazy jihadists taking over the failed kingdoms of Islam, fanatic hordes of fundamentalist warriors who seemed to have burst alive out of a mural of the Dark Ages, burst, complete with beards and turbans, frothing horses, scimitars upraised, to go galloping nutso through real life. They would brook no god but their god, their ferocious god, no law but their sharia law. They would kill anyone who might oppose or offend them, any Muslim who imagined a new future, any woman who wanted to be equal or free. And they dreamed of conquering all the infidel West, subjugating the whole mess of the modern world. They were murderers in Holland. Rioters in France. Bombers in England, Russia, Pakistan, and so on. They were armies fighting for entire nations in Africa. Here in America too, after the World Trade Center, they continued to pull off attacks now and then. Sometimes it was a terrorist cell, sometimes just a lone mad-for-Allah boy opening fire in a shopping mall or running down some nonbelievers with his SUV. But there were always bigger doings in the works, foiled plots and whispered conspiracies: to bring down more buildings, to bring down anything that stands-hell, to bring down the whole third dimension and make the world flat again.

Look at the TV, I told myself. Look at the news. The past wasn't there to be confronted anymore. This was the state of things now, the state of things since Lauren walked away from me with the Twin Towers looming over her.

No, I thought. It was unlikely she would look the same.