Empire of Lies

The End of Civilization as We Know It

The music surrounded us, brash and loud. We were bathed in strobic light and shadows. I charged through the flicker, up an inclined aisle, gathering my breath, gathering my courage.

I started shouting even before I reached the auditorium, my voice nearly drowned by the music.

"Bomb! There's a bomb in the building! Get out! There's a bomb!"

I plunged into the center of the movie.

It felt like that. It felt as if I'd crashed through the surface of the show and become a part of it. I had broken out of the aisle onto the stage of a vast amphitheater. Tiers and tiers of seats rose into the glimmering darkness all around me. Eyes gleamed up there, gazing down at me. Hundreds of faces came halfway into view then vanished as the shifting light from the scene below played over them and passed by.

I was in that scene. I was lost in that light: light and color and shapes and figures ringed round by the tiers of gazing eyes. There were the pyramids of Giza rising toward the sky; and there the sphinx of living rock standing its ancient guard. Trucks were rumbling past in the distance. Men in khaki uniforms ran here and there. Other men in flowing white Arab robes strode past. On every side of me the lone and level sands stretched far away.

Apparently, the way the new 3-D technology worked, no matter where you were in the seats above, the images seemed clear and life-sized and bizarrely real. But down where I was, the picture was distorted. The buildings were slanted, some huge, some too small. The people were stretched and blurred and of different sizes. Vehicles and running men became elongated as they went past, then suddenly vanished. Images became more and more transparent the closer they came. The effect was swirling, dazzling, phantasmagorical-yet even for me, at moments, it was completely three-dimensional, thoroughly alive.

I was dazzled by it all. Confused. I had stepped in an instant from present-day New York into ruins and sand. The scene surrounding me was at once utterly unreal and utterly present. The scene above me was all faces-faces rising into infinity-flickering in the flickering light-climbing tiers of eyes staring down at me. It was more than I could take in. It stopped my thinking cold, shut down my mind. All I could manage to do was turn from place to place, holding Serena in my arms, and shouting wildly:

"Bomb! Bomb! There's a bomb in the theater!"

A man stepped right up to me. Startled and afraid, I spun to him. I recognized him at once: It was the actor, Todd Bingham. For a second, he seemed enormous and elongated like pulled taffy. The next second, he snapped into his proper shape but became transparent. It was the phantom of Todd, his character in the movie.

"I've had enough of being afraid," he said to me.

Other people were shouting around me, running past me, soldiers and natives and sheikhs.

"There's a bomb!" I screamed at Todd.

A woman behind me spoke, her voice very loud. I swung around to her, Serena's tear-streaked features going bright and dim as they slashed through the center of a nomad's skirt. There was Angelica Eden on the other side of me, solid and vital. She looked cool and witty in khaki slacks and a purple blouse open on her famous cleavage. She laughed around her cigarette. She said, "You can never have enough fear, Jason. Fear is how America rules the world. If we can make them fear these Muslims, all their oil will be ours!"

I blinked, confused. She'd used my name. Was she real? Was she speaking to me? No, dimly, even in my confusion, I realized she was part of the scene. I realized, too, that the scene-its music, its dialogue, the rumble of its stretching, moving, vanishing trucks-was swallowing my shouts, was encompassing my presence altogether.

This, I later learned, was the part of the film in which Todd, playing a hard-boiled CIA agent, first begins to realize that the terrorist explosions bringing chaos to the Middle East are in fact being engineered by American political and business interests who are then putting the blame on innocent Muslims in order to start a war and take over their oil fields.

"There's a bomb in the theater!" I screamed, my voice cracking.

"Wait! Jason, wait!"

Again, disoriented by the sound of my own name, I turned to see a woman striding toward me-striding toward me and shrinking from a monstrous taffy string into the transparent image of Juliette Lovesey. She looked strong now, clear-eyed, dynamic; not the fragile creature I'd seen on the red carpet outside. "Before you make up your mind, there's someone I think you need to talk to."

Suddenly another man was standing beside me. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He was an Arab man about sixty years old with a black beard and a black turban. His face was lined but kindly. His eyes twinkled with wisdom.

"This is Muammar al-Qadi," said Juliette.

"Of Hezbollah?" Todd said in terse surprise.

"Listen to me!" I shouted up at the flickering faces in the surrounding dark.

"You must listen to him," said Juliette.

"They don't know we're real!" Serena cried to me.

"I should've killed you when I had the chance," said the evil Angelica to the Arab man. Her father, it would turn out, owned a controlling interest in an oil company.

Now, yet another man rushed beneath the base of the gazing sphinx and stumbled toward Todd with flying footsteps. He was all in black, black jeans and a black hoodie. The outfit seemed almost to make a human-shaped hole in the surrounding scene. His face, though-his face was preternaturally bright. It was like a sunburst, burning with prophecy, ecstatic, insane.

Dazed and squinting through the dazzling light, I didn't recognize him at first. Then Serena let out a short, sharp scream and I realized it was Jamal.

"Sometimes," said the old, kindly Arab man, his wise eyes twinkling, "sometimes we must turn to the beautiful wisdom and imagery of the Koran for guidance."

"Allahu akbar! God is great!" Jamal shouted.

Now the music swelled romantically to underscore Muammar al-Qadi's wisdom. The bearded old man lifted his hand. There was a venerable leather-bound book in it. Jamal lifted his hand almost simultaneously. There was a detonator in it. I could see the red button under his thumb.

"Allahu akbar!" Jamal shrieked.

I had one last moment to look around me, to turn and cast my gaze over the shifting phantoms on the dazzling stage. There was Todd with the tough-guy stubble on his chin and Juliette looking bold and adventurous and Angelica looking wicked but strong. I saw the kindly old Arab with his turban and black beard and Patrick Piersall in sweatpants and an orange pullover of some kind…

And the last thing I remember thinking before the blast was: Patrick Piersall? Is he in this, too?

Apparently he was. He had entered from the direction of a passing truck. He was standing in the yellow sand right there beside me. Even here in the movie, he appeared pudgy and yellow-eyed and dissolute. Yet in this role at least, he managed to put on a heroic demeanor. He was planted firmly with his legs apart and wore a look on his face so stalwart and grim, he might still have been piloting his spaceship through the galaxy as in days of yore. I saw Todd stride manfully past him to Juliette. He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her to him and said, "Where the hell have you been?"

"God is great!" shouted Jamal, holding up the detonator.

"Eat shit and die!" said Patrick Piersall.

He lifted his hand, too. He was holding a gun in it. It was that 9mm automatic he had shown me in the Ale House.

The music was blossoming around us like a sudden garden with a scent redolent of courage and romance. Then came the blast-a shocking blast. It wasn't loud-not as loud as the explosions in the movie-but it was real and vibrant, sucking the air into itself and blowing it out again so that I felt it like a punch to the cheek.

Piersall had pulled the trigger of his weapon. And now he pulled it again and again. There was another blast and another. And another as he pulled the trigger again.

I turned and turned in confusion and terror, Serena screaming in my arms. I saw Todd drawing Juliette to him. I saw Juliette lifting her lips for a kiss. I saw Angelica looking on in fury and frustration and the old Arab man looking wise and kind.

And I saw Jamal. His eyes were wide. His arms were flung out on either side of him. The front of his shirt was being torn to bloody shreds in front of my eyes as Piersall's bullets pounded into his chest. The detonator fell from his hands as he reeled backward a step, his arms pinwheeling. He tumbled right through Todd and Juliette and dropped down into a pool of light that swirled over the stage floor like sand.

A girl shrieked. I looked toward the sound. No, it wasn't a girl. It was a skinny little man jumping to his feet in the first ring of seats above me, his hands clutching the sides of his head. It was Todd-the real Todd, up in his seat, watching the movie. His face was quivering with realization and fear. His hands flew from his head to grip the tier rail in front of him. He let out another high-pitched shriek.

"That's not in the movie!" he screamed. "That scene's not in the movie. Those people are real!"

"There's still a timer," Serena said to me. "It'll still explode!"

"There's a bomb!" I shouted. "It is real! There's a bomb in the theater!"

For one more moment-one more and then one more-all those faces flickering in the seats rising higher and higher around me remained as they were. Coiffed and bejeweled and beautiful and distracted. It struck me as an almost wistful tableau, like a daguerreotype of a vanished and well-loved past. For one more moment, all those rich, lovely, comfortable cosmopolitans gazed down at the movie, their minds trying to convince themselves that whatever was not the movie must just be some kind of joke or mistake.

Then at last-at last-the truth dawned on them: They were under attack.

As if on cue, there were more explosions. It nearly stopped my heart as a medallion of fire and debris leapt out of the air at my feet. A moment later, I realized this, too, was only part of the movie, another scene in the movie in which bombs went off. But even as I realized that, I became aware of another noise, a deeper noise: a low rumble as of a great beast stirring. I listened to it through the blasts and the music. On every side of me, there were murmurs-murmurs becoming voices, voices spiraling up into cries-a rising grumble of movement as people stood up out of their seats, a growing thunder rolling down from tier to tier and over the stage to tremble above me, beneath me, around me.

An explosion went off beneath the sphinx, hurling bodies and flame and sand: still the movie. I lifted my eyes in the blazing, flickering light and saw the faces above me starting to flow and migrate into the aisles. I heard more voices, more screams.

"It is real! There's a bomb!"

"Someone's been shot!"

"Oh my God! Oh my God!"

I saw a man in a tuxedo tumble frantically over a low railing to get down to the stage. Another followed. Then more men and women started to spill over and others above them were pushing out of their rows of seats, fighting their ways to the aisles. Every moment, there were more of them moving, a thick flow of them moving faster and faster.

"It's real! It's real!"

"Is there a bomb?"

"Someone said there's a bomb in the theater!"

"There's a bomb, a bomb!"

Suddenly I saw Todd racing toward me-wispy little Todd in his tuxedo-racing across the bright stage with his arms and legs churning, running for his life with all the intensity and dedication of a cartoon mouse. I stood and watched fascinated as he rushed right into the gruff three-dimensional image of himself-Todd with a day's growth of beard and a gun in his hand. For an instant, they seemed to be a double image of one man. And then the real Todd burst out of the phantom Todd and dashed up an aisle and vanished into the shadows.

I turned-turned with Serena in my arms-turned past the phantom of Angelica Eden as she laughed wickedly at the destruction around her. I turned to Patrick Piersall. He stood where he was, staring down at the sprawled, bloody body of Jamal on the floor. Piersall's arm was still extended in front of him, the gun still in his hand.

As I watched him, he seemed hardly to notice the commotion growing around him. He lifted his eyes slowly. Vaguely, he looked up at the tiers of seats. He seemed barely to know where he was.

The music thrummed dangerously now. Phantoms fired phantom rifles in our direction. Phantom explosions went off at our feet and in the sand and around the pyramids.

"Piersall!" I shouted.

The old actor blinked. He looked at me vaguely.

"It's done," I said to him. "Let's get the hell out of here."

There were others running across the stage now-real people, I mean-more and more of them. Men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns legging it through the desert sands beneath the sphinx's impassive gaze. The rumble above me was growing louder, stronger as more and more people began to panic and flee. The atmosphere quivered with their movement. The shouts and the footsteps were merging into a single quaking thunder.

"Let's go!" I shouted.

I broke for the aisle behind me. Carrying Serena in my arms, plunging through the phantasmagoria, out of the light, back into the flickering shadows of the aisle. I raced down the short slope, charging at the swinging doors.

I made it out into the corridor, headed down the corridor toward the red exit light, part of a swiftly moving stream of black dinner jackets and glittering gowns. The whole building seemed to be shaking now with footsteps and motion. The walls seemed almost to be rocking. The ceiling seemed to jump as if the roof would fly off. My stream of people crashed into another coming from the opposite direction. We converged and meshed and became one greater stream under the red light.

The door under the light was open by the time I reached it. Serena and I went through it with the rapid wash of rhinestones and bow ties flashing past on either side of us. I stepped out into the cold, damp air and took a great, welcome breath of it. But there was no time to feel relief. I was in an alleyway-a different one from before. I had to keep running or be knocked over. We all kept running, trying to reach the alley exit, trying to reach the street and put some distance between us and the doomed theater. Even here-even outdoors like this-we could hear the thunder in the theater continue to grow. It sounded as if some enormous tsunami were ripping itself out of the ocean bed and hoisting itself up to the surface of the sea.

I was halfway down the alley when the tidal wave caught up with us. Every theater door flew open. The people burst from them in the full flight of panic and swept over me in a flood. I clutched Serena to my chest with all the strength I had. I heard her scream, then heard her screams lost in the thousands of screams all around me. Wild faces were everywhere and the solid softness of bodies engulfed us. The tide pushed us and stopped and spurted forward suddenly in a broken rhythm impossible to outguess. I fought frantically to stay on my feet, clutching Serena, shoving to left and right to make a way for us. I felt myself lifted up and carried and hurled down to the pavement so hard I thought I would fall. But the crush lifted me up and bore me on, my toes scraping over the alley floor. I had lost all control. I was being carried along at the mercy of the billowing surge of the mob. I was conscious of my racing heart and a flow of some chemical energy through me that I suppose might have been called fear. But I was detached from it. It was something happening inside my body, not to me. In me, there was only an intensity of experience and force all funneled into my effort to keep my feet, to hold on to Serena, to go on, and to survive.

Now, as if gushing from a culvert, we broke out of the narrow alley and spread out into the street. We were broadsided, jostled, and then joined by the greater crowd swarming out of the front doors. As if we were one enormous force, we carried the barricades away, knocked them down and trampled them. We caught up the thousands of spectators waiting outside and engulfed them and bore them on. Finally we began to spread out over the streets and the sidewalks, flowing in both directions toward the avenues, away from the theater. With every step, the mob's first explosive energy diminished. It began to flow and eddy. I gained my feet again in the midst of it. I began to move by my own will. I began to think again. I felt the rhythms of my body beginning to slow and calm.

By the time Serena and I reached Broadway, I was able to stop, to turn and look back at the New Coliseum. Its gorgeous white facade stood imperturbable and grand. The spiraling sweep of arched, column-framed windows were bathed in the spotlights and the kliegs sweeping back and forth majestically in front of it. The last of the people inside were just now spilling out of the various doors, the flow of black tuxes and brightly colored gowns filling the street and spreading toward the avenues. As the people began to disperse and calm, their rush of movement slowed. Like the surf breaking into pools on the shore, the mob broke into groups and couples and individuals again. Some continued running toward the avenues in their anxiety, but most were content to slow down and walk away or stop at the corner or even just outside the theater's doors. People began to look at the theater over their shoulders or to turn around and watch it expectantly.

Nothing happened. The movement of the crowd slowed even more. More and more people came to a standstill. Some began to curse. Some began to shake their heads and laugh.

I was at the corner of Broadway. The lights of Times Square soared into the night behind me. The spotlit grandeur of the New Coliseum rose above the milling people on the street before. After the thundering panic, the honking horns of the jammed traffic and the shouts and talk and footsteps and music of New York everywhere seemed almost harmonious and sweet.

I set Serena down on the ground, holding her up on her bound feet with my arm around her shoulders. With my free hand, I worked the duct tape off her wrists. Then I held her under the arm while she bent over and worked the tape off her ankles. I looked out, meanwhile, at the gowns and tuxes pooling in the street. I heard more laughter-cursing, too. My eyes passed over smiling faces and puzzled faces and angry faces. I saw people who had fallen or simply collapsed in the gutter and were lying there with others kneeling beside them. Finally my gaze came to rest on one man standing in the street about twenty yards from me-twenty yards, I mean, closer to the theater. It was Patrick Piersall. He was panting, out of breath as I was, exhausted. He looked old, deteriorated, squat and paunchy in his black sweatpants and orange pullover. He was still gripping his gun, holding it down by his side now. He was staring up at the swirling rise of the theater facade with a sort of dazed, stupid fascination.

Serena straightened beside me, unbound. She looked at the theater, too. We all looked at it, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.

"What the hell was that all about?" I heard someone say.

I wondered myself. I felt a fresh anxiety slowly growing up inside me. In my spent, empty mind, bits of information were beginning to assemble themselves like pieces of matter coming together in space. An entire alternative story told itself to me in an instant. In this story, I had inherited my mother's disease, had begun to see connections and patterns and logical progressions that had no bearing on reality. I had found a teenaged girl in a bad situation and connected it to a professor whose philosophy I didn't like. In my madness, I had tortured the poor professor into inventing some sort of conspiracy against American culture, an attack on the New Coliseum. Maybe I was even suffering hallucinations, and my life had become like one of those French theories in which reality could not be distinguished from the images thrown up by society…

"My God-" I began to whisper.

Then the New Coliseum exploded.

I could not take in the vastness of the catastrophe. I could only stand and stare.

There was a hugely loud yet strangely echoless thump. There was a great heaving movement in the street. There was a punching blast of air and heat that knocked me back on my heels. I felt a jolt of terror and a kind of awe as every one of the big arched windows that spiraled up the front and side of the building flashed with fire then went suddenly black. Glass flew-enormous slanting shards and little confetti fragments of it flew out everywhere-fanned out into the night with what almost seemed an air of frantic gaiety. The glass caught the white of the spotlights. It caught the colored lights of Broadway. It glittered and sparkled gaily, shattering and tinkling and raining down over the ducked heads and raised arms of the crowd in the street. The whole theater seemed to expand for a moment and then, remarkably, settle back into itself as if it were unharmed.

After that, there was a second of uncanny stillness.

After that, the theater crumbled.

Before our eyes, the fabulous structure turned to jagged stones and dust and, with a long, dying roar, spilled down out of itself and over the pavement. Once again, the people began screaming. They ran and stumbled over each other, trying to get away from the white onslaught of debris and the thick spindrift of dust. I saw people caught by the tide of stone and knocked over. Some were buried under it. Some were carried away.

The rubble that had been the theater rolled clear across the street. It splashed and crashed against the walls of the brick buildings opposite. More windows shattered. Blood splattered against the stone. The debris seemed to rise up high into the night and hurl itself down again, leaving a thick mist of motes choking the air. At some point, the spotlights were knocked over. There was a brittle crash of glass and metal and that beautiful silver light around the red carpets was snuffed out. The kliegs fell, their beams toppling out of the night sky like towers. Where the bright theater stood, there was all at once a black hole, a ruin of girders and cement caught in places by sweeping brightness and then released again into shadow as a single klieg-swept off its truck bed but still somehow standing on the street-swung back and forth, its shaft crossing back and forth beneath the bellies of the roiling clouds above.

The panicking people poured past me, jostling me where I stood. Covered with dust and glass, catching, like the glass, the Broadway lights, they looked like strange rhinestone ghosts with dark O's where their mouths should have been. I kept my left arm around Serena's shoulders and pulled her to me to hold her upright, to keep her from being swept off as the people knocked into us and flowed past on either side.

I sought out Patrick Piersall again and found him. He was not far from where he'd been before. It was as if the collapsing theater had simply passed over him, as if the running, panicked crowd had passed over him, and all of it left him untouched. He was dusty-his pullover white, his face gray and white-but otherwise unmoved and unharmed.

And he was still just standing there, just staring up at the theater-or at the ruin that had been the theater, the emptiness of slanting girder and jagged stone. Then, the next moment, he was laughing-laughing hard, with his debauched wreck of a face thrown back and his shoulders going up and down and his round belly quivering. His laugh broke high once, then settled into a long baritone guffaw. I could hear him clearly over the shouts and screams and honking horns and traffic.

He began to look around, as if searching for someone he could share the joke with. He found me. Our eyes met.

Through the floating mist of ruin, as the people ran screaming for their lives, Patrick Piersall sent me a flamboyant salute. Laughing like a madman, he braced the tips of all five fingers of his left hand against his forehead and then flung the hand toward me, opening it in my direction. It was a grandiose, flyaway gesture, a gesture of pure, alcoholic derangement, both exalted and absurd. I returned it in a more restrained fashion, a finger to my eyebrow, then pointed at him. Piersall went on laughing. Even I couldn't help but smile.

Because the fact was-when the dust and insanity settled-the fact was we had saved them. Oh, there were terrible tragedies that night, terrible injuries that would never be healed. Children lost limbs. Women's faces were slashed and ravaged. A couple of men were paralyzed. A couple had heart attacks. A few were buried under the rubble for hours. There were hundreds hurt, some in ways almost unimaginable, ways too disturbing to describe. Still…

Still in all, not one person died as a result of the terrorist blast in the New Coliseum Theater. Todd, Juliette, Angelica, the secretary of state, all the others in the audience and all the people who'd been standing and watching on the street outside-miraculously, every single one of them-every single one of them survived.

So Patrick Piersall laughed and I managed a small smile and we saluted each other, standing on the corner of Times Square. Because we saved them, he and I-and Casey Diggs, too. We saved them-that was the truth of it. A paranoid wannabe journalist barred from his profession for telling the truth. A drunken has-been Hollywood actor who once pretended to be the admiral of a spaceship. And me. Not much in the way of heroes, I know, but all the heroes we could muster in a desperate hour.

And it was enough. Just barely enough.

Because we saved them all.