Empire of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

self-evident were nothing more than a comfortable climate of opinion, self-congratulatory certainties that made us feel righteous and progressive and bold and yet had nothing to do with facts. This, too, I understood now. We had been wrong. I had been wrong.
    I had been wrong about everything.
    What an awful thing to discover. My whole sense of myself was shattered. I felt as if I were falling apart. I had to do something.
    I don't know why I went to the Church of the Incarnation. I had been raised without religion, mostly. I had certainly never been baptized or anything like that. My father, the child of a sometimes-radical academic, always swatted away my metaphysical questions as if they were mosquitoes. My mother, who'd been brought up Catholic, retained some vague notion of a gentle infant deity as long as her mind held out, but for the most part the Christ she knew was a figment of her later madness. For myself, I was an atheist, tolerant of faith only in the form of that vague Western version of Eastern mysticism so popular among my colleagues and friends.
    Still, one afternoon, I was walking along Madison Avenue, and there was the church and I stopped in front of it. It was a beautiful old place, an old Gothic Revival brownstone sitting on the banks of the avenue almost defiantly serene as the flood of nervy pedestrians and deafening traffic went rushing past. Dwarfed by the towering modern apartment buildings all around it, it seemed to me a thing of more human dimensions than they somehow, aspiring skyward in this sort of small, hopeful way, peak to peak, pediment to gable to steepled tower, each crowned with a finial cross. I seized on it as if it were a piece of driftwood in the boiling sea. I went inside.
    The traffic noise died away as the big wooden door swung shut behind me. I stepped across the tiled vestibule to the head of the nave. The light in here seemed white and golden, the effect of its play on the marble altar and its gilded cross. Lancets and quatrefoils of vivid stained glass ran along the walls to either side of me. Christ enthroned, Lazarus risen, Virgin with child all flamed into relief or drew back into shadow as the sun shone through them or moved past.
    There was no service going on, but a few people were bowed prayerfully in the pews here and there. I didn't want them to see me, so I retreated into the vestibule and stepped into an empty side chapel.
    I took a seat at the front before a small altar, also of marble. There was a wooden crucifix on it, framed against a multicolored triptych on the wall behind. Jesus hung wracked and mournful on the cross, his dying eyes turned up to heaven, the thorns carved into his head, the blood carved onto his brow.
    I didn't know what I was supposed to say to him. "Hi," I said finally, in a barely audible whisper. "I hate to bother you, but I'm really feeling like shit here." Embarrassed, I screwed my palms together in my lap. "Frankly," I added with a laugh, "you're not looking so good yourself." Then I buried my face in my hands and started weeping. I said to him: "Help me! Forgive me! Forgive me, help me, help me!"
    The storm passed. I waited there, just like that. I'm not sure what for, exactly. Maybe I thought I would peek through my fingers and see the celestial cavalry charging over the altar to my rescue. More likely, I was hoping for an enlightening interior blast of some kind. Some hallelujah conversion maybe. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. I stayed a while longer, trying to force it, trying to get a little uplift and inspiration going by sheer willpower. But no. Nothing.
    Well, what did I expect? This whole God thing was bullshit. Everyone knew that. Everyone I knew knew that anyway. I got up and got the hell out of that place in a hurry. If you're going to get past things like this, I told myself bitterly, you have to get past them on your own. I was a man, wasn't I? Well, I was going to act like one. To hell with my damn theories. I