Empire of Lies

Cathy on the Phone

I turned the TV off after that. No Patrick Piersall tonight. I'd had enough of him that morning in the Ale House. And then, too, it was all Patrick Piersall somehow. On every show on every channel, he was the presiding spirit: The Wonderful Wizard of Me.

I phoned my wife.

"Hey you," she said. "When are you coming home? It's lonely in my bed at night."

"Tomorrow. The house is all cleaned out. Mitzi can stage it and put it on the market without me."

"Excellent. I can't wait to have you back."

"I have to tell you something," I said. "It's kind of nasty."

"All right." The warm, cheerful voice changed tone. It became flat and cautious. "What's the matter?"

"I went to see an old girlfriend the other day…"

I heard her breathing stop hundreds of miles away. Then, with false and pitiable lightheartedness she said, "And did you set your marriage vows at naught and destroy my happiness, your children's, and your own?"

I laughed. "No. I'm crazy, but I'm not stupid." She breathed again and I loved her. It was the first time it occurred to me to feel glad that I hadn't gone through with my visit to Anne that day. "I should've told you before I went. I'm sorry."

"Never mind. What happened?" It was typical Cathy. Not a word of anger out of her. Just another shift in tone. Now she sounded a little less like the wife and mother she was and more like the lawyer she used to be, ready to figure it all out, whatever it was.

I sighed. I pinched my eyes closed, holding the phone to my ear. "She has a kid. A daughter. She claims she's mine from the old days."

I heard her give a little grunt, as if I'd struck her. "Oh, no, Jason. Oh, no," she said. "Do you think it's true?"

"I can't be sure. I don't think she's even sure. She married another guy and told him the kid was his, too."

"All right. All right." Now I could practically hear her gathering herself, gathering her resources to confront the thing. "So she's not really someone we can trust, in other words."

"No."

"And the girl. Have you seen her? Does she look like you?"

"I don't know. A little, I guess. Everybody looks pretty much like everybody when you come right down to it."

"All right," she said again. "All right. Well, we'll have to get a DNA test. What does the woman want from you? The mother? Does she want money?"

"I don't think so. She just…"

"Wants you back."

"Wants to draw me back into her life, yeah. Show me her life. Make me feel bad about it."

"Misery loves company."

"Pretty much, yeah. The thing is: It kind of worked. I mean, the kid's a mess."

"Well, I'm not surprised," said Cathy primly.

"Yeah, but I mean she's really gotten herself into a situation. She says-the girl-Serena-she says she witnessed a murder."

I told her about Casey Diggs, if it was Casey Diggs. I told her what I knew about the Great Swamp and Diggs's conspiracy theories and so on. When I was done, there was another pause: Cathy considering, gathering her resources again. I sat in the silent television room, listening to her breathe.

"Are you asking for wifely counsel," she asked me then, "or are you just keeping me informed while you handle this on your own?"

"Wifely counsel."

"Go tell the police what you just told me, then come home."

I nodded as if she were there. "Yeah, that's pretty much what I figured. That's pretty much my plan. I'm gonna go to the cops first thing in the morning."

"Good. Then get out of there. Whatever we have to do for this girl, whatever's the right thing, we can figure it out together at home. You have no reason to stay there anymore. That's not your life anymore. Your life is here."

I gave a bitter laugh. "But that's the whole point, isn't it? You can never get away from any of it. Anything you've done. Anything that's ever happened. It all just keeps being about that, again and again."

"No," she said. "No. You wanted wifely counsel, right?"

"Yes."

"Well, then: No. That's not the whole point. In fact, that's not the point at all. 'Forget the former things and do not dwell on the past.' Right? 'Behold, I make all things new.'"

"Well, you do make all things new, Cathy…"

"Not me. I'm quoting God, stupid."

"Oh. I knew that."

"'I make all things new.' That includes you, Jason."

I couldn't answer her for a moment. I sat there with the phone in one hand, pinching my eyes shut with the other. "Right," I finally whispered hoarsely. "Right. It includes me. I forgot."

"I know. That's okay. You forgot because you're there and you had to clean out your mom's room and everything, and it sent you back. But it's all right. You did all right. You didn't do anything horrible, and I'm still here and everything's fine. So now it's time to remember that you've been made new, and forget the past and come home."

I was quiet again. I went on pinching my eyes shut. I thought of her sitting there in our house on the other end of the line, listening to my story and telling me to come home and leave the former things behind because God had made me new. I thought about that, and then I thought about how I'd thought the past was swallowing me and how I'd wanted it to swallow me and had gone to see Anne. And I thought: What are you, Jason, some kind of fucking idiot?

"God, I'm an idiot," I said.

"You're not an idiot. You're the king of my life and I love you," she said.

I nodded a long time. Finally I managed to say, "Thank you. Thank you. I'll see you tomorrow."

And if I had-if I had gone home and seen her tomorrow-then everything would've been easier-easier for me, at least. I would've confronted the past and returned triumphant and never have done the things I did or faced the parts of myself I finally had to face.

But, of course, it didn't work out that way.

After I closed the phone, I sat for a while, staring into space. I prayed. It wasn't like before, in the church, when I felt nothing, when I felt alone. The lines of communication were up again somehow. I felt better-steadier, surer-when I was done.

I opened my laptop on the coffee table. I went online and picked up my e-mail. There were only a few notes, a few from my office, one each from my kids. I answered the ones that needed answering. Then I fell into another staring spell, my eyes on the computer screen.

The next time I became aware, the image on the monitor had changed. The e-mail file was gone and the screen saver had kicked in. The screen saver drew colorful fractals on the dark background: snowflakes and jellyfish and patterns like galaxies and patterns like DNA. My ten-year-old son Chad had installed the thing for me. Chad had explained fractals to me, too. Apparently, mathematicians had discovered that seemingly random forms in the universe could be reproduced by charting a few simple equations again and again. We couldn't know that in the old days because you needed a computer to chart them so many times, but now we saw that things that we thought were jumbly bits of chance-weather and bird migration and the tumbling of a woman's hair when it's undone-were actually elaborate designs based on mathematical instructions played out almost endlessly. The instructions, the equations, were like thoughts in the mind of God, pure ideas capable of taking physical shape. What made the resulting patterns unpredictable was that the repetitions of the underlying equations magnified the effects of small distorting events. That was what they called the Butterfly Effect, where something as small as a butterfly's fluttering wings changed the pattern of the wind, say, until it became a hurricane.

I gazed at the pictures and designs unfolding on the laptop screen. They were very beautiful and hypnotic. I wondered how many things in the world were like them, how many things that seemed arbitrary actually made a sense beyond our ability to know: evolution, maybe, with its seemingly random selection and love and the creation of worlds. Maybe even the stories people tell were all designs thrown up by the few simple equations of the human heart repeated and repeated. Maybe even history itself is a design like that, too large for us to comprehend.

The thought made me smile fondly to myself. I was thinking of my mother, of course, wondering if maybe her illness had opened up her mind somehow and allowed her to catch sight of some gigantic historical fractal beyond the vision of the rest of us.

And I was sitting like that, staring like that, smiling, thinking like that, when I slowly became aware of a noise that had been going on for some time, perhaps more than a minute. It was a clicking sound. At first I took it for the working of a mechanism: a clock or the cooling TV or some glitch in the computer. But as it drew me out of my fugue state, I realized that, no, it was coming from the window. It was the sound of something hard hitting tick-tick-tick against the glass. A tree blown by the wind, I thought, or an animal scratching.

I didn't have to get off the sofa to look. I simply leaned over and reached to the shutters. I pulled the bar to open the louvers.

I started back and a small noise of surprise escaped me: The face was there in front of me so suddenly, so close to the glass. I couldn't take it in right away. It was just eyes staring in at me, a hand reaching out at me. Then I saw the finger rapping a ring against the pane. Then the face came into focus and I recognized it.

It was Serena.