Empire of Lies

A Prayerful Interlude

Afterward, I felt awful: stupid, ashamed. I had bruises on my arms, one on my side. I thought I had one on my forehead, too-it felt bruised though I couldn't see it. My jaw hurt, my ribs ached. And for what? Piersall's lawyers would simply throw my note away. Of course they would. What had I accomplished? Nothing.

Wearily, I limped back to the parking lot, to my Mustang. I settled stiffly behind the wheel. I sat there, staring through the windshield at the Mercedes parked across from me. I felt far away from the living surface of the world. Dazed, dissociated, dead to feeling, confused about what was real and what wasn't. Why the hell had I come here? What was I thinking? I remembered, as if it were long ago, feeling some sense of threat, of danger. A sense I had to do something, do something fast. But why? What was it all about? A story told to me by a lying teenager? The wild accusations of a crazy college dropout? A lecture on Shakespeare by a college professor? The maunderings of a drunken, washed-up actor trying to jump-start his career with sensationalistic self-destruction? Nothing. It was all about nothing. Lies, rumor, suspicion hyped to an intensity of desperation by those days in my mother's house, those nights, those drunken nights, in the craziness of the television room. It really was true: I'd fallen through the screen and landed here, a drowning fall into other people's delusions.

I drove out of the lot and began wending the complicated way toward the East Side and the FDR Drive. The traffic was thick and I kept finding my path frustrated by one-way streets and security barricades. It took me the better part of an hour to reach the highway. There, the traffic grew lighter. I went quickly up along the East River, glancing out the window at the water running turbulent and dull beneath a sky darkening with running clouds. I was heading for the Midtown Tunnel, for the Island and my mother's house.

But I went another way. I don't know why. Maybe it was just my reluctance to return to that house, that room-I'm not sure. But when I got off at the 34th Street exit, I turned away from the tunnel without thinking. I headed west instead, across the city.

At first, I wasn't sure where I was going-then I was: the Church of the Incarnation, the brownstone church on Madison Avenue I had come to in the depths of my craziness so many years ago.

I remembered that day as I stepped through the church doors, that day I had prayed in the side chapel: Forgive me, help me. I thought of that now as the great axial moment of my life, the moment around which my soul had swung like a compass needle from misery to happiness. I yearned to feel the intensity of that day again, even the intensity of its despair, anything rather than this zombie malaise that had come over me. I tried to milk the stately place for some celestial emotions. I grasped at the sweetness of the quiet as I stepped from the vestibule into the nave. I savored the door swinging shut behind me, muffling the hectic street sounds that had followed me in. I drank in the otherworldly light that fell in beams through the stained-glass windows, crimson and indigo and gold. I tried to lift myself from this daze of unreality into the crystal solidity of the high, imagined spheres. But my mind remained muddy and faraway.

I slipped into a pew near the middle of the church. There were only two other people there with me: an old woman sitting on the far right side, and an even older woman sitting on the left. In my sullen distraction, they looked to me like refugees from the battle for the world, survivors who had stumbled into this ruin to die. All that was left of the broken body of Christ.

I sat and clasped my hands in my lap. I bowed my head and closed my eyes and tried to pray. But a moment later, I looked up again. I looked around. My eyes came to rest on the reredos up behind the altar. Herald angels flanking a trio of cherubs who were unrolling a scroll. and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, the scroll read. What the hell was that supposed to mean? I wondered. I mean, now that you have your spaceships and quantum physics and computers and television sets? The Word was made flesh. What the hell was that?

I shook my head, looking over the apse and the empty pews. This place-this place that had been so important to me once. Now it just seemed like a hiding place for frightened old women, somewhere restful they could go to die, away from the crap and holler of life.

I closed my eyes again. I closed my hand into a fist, hoping to feel Christ's hand in mine. I felt nothing. I forced out a prayer.

Show me the way, Lord. Something terrible is happening-or is going to happen-I don't know which-something terrible is happening to my brain or is going to happen to this city-I don't know, I don't know which-maybe there's some kind of attack in the works-or maybe it's all me, maybe what happened to my mother is happening to me now, maybe even you are just some flash in my brain, some electrochemical kind of

… Ach! Show me the way. Show me the way.

He answered by cell phone. Hey, it's the modern world, what can I tell you? I'd forgotten to turn the phone off and just at that moment, it sang out with a sort of shrill, gleeful rudeness, the way a mischievous demon might fart in a place like this. The two old ladies swung around at me, their faces wrinkled and wrathful and dark. I made an apologetic smile and unwound from my pew. I hurried up the aisle and pushed out the doors, back into the city.

I answered the phone as I stepped onto the sidewalk. I could barely hear the voice on the other end above the grind and rumble of a bus passing on its way uptown. I stuck a finger in my free ear.

I said, "I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you. What'd you say?"

The voice was a man's voice. It was featureless, nondescript: "Mr. Piersall will meet you in an hour," it said, "in the Ale House downtown."