Empire of Lies Read Online Free PDF

knew what was right. I just had to do it, that's all—and I would. I was going to call up the Bedford woman and apologize for being a brute and
a blind fool. I was going to dump the ugly sex that made me feel good in the moment and lousy ever afterward. I was going to stop using these awful drugs and clear my head and try to be kinder to people, try to be more honest about what I thought and felt and saw, more honest and forthright and kind all around. I was going to change everything, damn it. I was going to start everything over from scratch.
    And I did. With God's help, I did. Because, of course, over time I realized what should've been obvious to me right away: that my prayer in the chapel that afternoon had been answered, after all. The celestial cavalry had, in fact, charged over the hill at the first sound of my cry for help. I didn't see it at first because there was no magic to it. It was just real—as real as real. My prayer had been answered almost in the saying of it.
    So I quit The Scene. I quit the drugs. I quit the
Soho Star.
I sent out résumés and got offered a new job at a small paper in the Midwest.
    Which left me with only one other thing I had to do.
    "I'm going away," I told Lauren. We were walking by the harbor path in Battery Park on a winter Sunday. She had her arm in mine. I was looking away over the unbroken line of benches, squinting through the brittle sunlight to watch the tiered ferries sputter through the water toward the Statue of Liberty. I heard Lauren beside me release a trembling sigh. "I've been offered a job in another city, and I'm going to take it."
    She slipped her arm out of mine. She slipped her hands into the pockets of her dark woolen overcoat. "I'm assuming this isn't an invitation," she said.
    I took a slow scan of the water back to the tip of the island, up to the twin towers of the World Trade Center standing massive against the afternoon sky. I was going to miss this city, I thought. "Lauren, look," I said. "I never lied to you about the way I felt."
    "No. No, you didn't. God knows I tried to get you to, but you never did."
    "I've just ... changed too much. I can't make any more small adjustments. I'm going to be thirty soon. I need to start again somewhere else."
    She stopped on the path and I stopped, and we faced each other. I don't know why it surprised me to see her wiping her nose with the woolen gloves on her hands. We'd been so glib and cynical and crazy with each other, it was hard for me to realize how much I meant to her.
    "Well, listen," she said with a miserable laugh. "Fuck you and all that. If you don't mind, I'm not gonna go through the whole routine. Crying gives me a headache, and I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. Anyway, it won't change anything. Have a nice life, Jason, okay?"
    She walked off quickly, looking small and sad in the long coat and the watch cap pulled down over her hair, the knit scarf trailing behind her. A hunched, unhappy figure against the sparkling harbor. I wanted to call her back but what for? I knew I'd only browbeat her into forgiving me so I'd feel better. I watched her go, watched her blend with the crowds around the ferry stand, meld with the scenery—people, plane trees, and those two stalwart towers.
    Then I turned away and walked off in the opposite direction.

    Now, Manhattan's skyline sank out of sight as the plane settled down toward the runway. I came out of myself and turned away from the porthole. I had an odd, heavy sensation inside me—an intimation of danger—a feeling that I was coming here for deeper and more perilous reasons than I knew. Because it was strange, wasn't it? That call from Lauren just as I had to decide what to do with my mother's house. The timing was strange, the coincidence
of it. It gave me the feeling that I was returning not just to the East Coast but to the past itself, returning to confront the past itself, to face it as a new man and prove to its ghosts and shadows that I was a wholly