Empire of Lies Read Free Page A

have to come back east, Jason. You have to help me. Please. Come back. I need you."
    I had been honest with my wife about Lauren. I hadn't told her all the details, but I'd told her as much as she wanted to hear. She knew about The Scene and That Night in Bedford. Sometimes in church she saw me make a fist, and she knew I was holding fast to Christ's hand, and she knew why. I had been honest with her about all that.
    I didn't really start lying to her until after I'd hung up the phone, until I'd settled back into the patio chair beside her.
    And she said, "Who was it?"
    And I said, "Just someone from the office with a question."
    "You'd think they could give you your weekend, at least."
    "It was nothing. What were we talking about?"
    "About your mother's house..."
    "About the house—right," I said. I gazed down the slope of grass to the children playing around the swings. They were laughing loudly, chasing each other around in circles. The Frisbee was lying in the grass, and as far as I could tell, the elaborate structure of their game had already collapsed into hilarious confusion.
    I sat and gazed at them as if I were considering my answer, but my mind was blank.
    And then I said, "I think I'll go back east. I might as well. I might as well just go and get the whole thing over with."

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