After they’d left, Peter sat down and stared across the room at nothing in particular.
His eyes settled on a picture of Vic, which sat in the place where he once had a picture of Katie. Next to it sat a picture of his father.
He and Vic still hadn’t talked, only messaged briefly, though he had left voice mails. He told himself he didn’t want to intrude, that she needed space and time. In truth, he didn’t know what she wanted to happen next. He also still didn’t know what to say or how to adequately apologize. Was the fight last week in Colorado going to get them through the inertia and bring them closer? Or was it a shove that would begin an unreconcilable drift apart? He needed a signal from her.
He was uncertain of so many things. He glanced at his laptop on his desk, which was now open to the podcast about him. There had been a couple of stories written about his becoming a target online. “Former aide to President Nash and VP Upton slammed in cyberattacks.” The stories hadn’t dug into the substance of the false allegations, but they had repeated them. Randi had denied any of it was true. The Pentagon had no comment on the allegations. President Nash’s spokesperson had dismissed the rumors as nonsense. But a couple stories had quoted people he knew from the military, former friends who were unwilling to defend him because they were frightened. More than a few people apparently believed that if something had gotten this big on the web, there must be something to it.
He couldn’t articulate yet what he was feeling. It was too large, and he couldn’t make out the boundaries of it. But he sensed that what was happening in the world revealed something deeper—a crack in the foundation that could not be repaired. Rena had seen the walls of civilization collapse before—seen men in war, consumed by fear, succumb to their most savage impulses. He’d seen soldiers engage in acts so terrible they would never forget them, never mention them, and never forgive themselves. He had seen countries fall into madness and collapse in a matter of weeks. But when the righteous wars ended and the soldiers returned home, even those who had committed awful acts usually sought to leave them behind—or went insane.
He was trying to connect that—his reference for when people abandoned their moral and civil norms—to what seemed to be happening nearly every day online, including what was happening to him. He knew talk on the Internet was different from people going off in wartime. These were just words, not acts. He was not dead, just defamed. But the impulses behind them felt familiar. He had seen them before. They both reflected hate born out of fear. Once the world had become connected and everyone could speak to everyone else online, why had people begun to treat each other so badly? What dark truth about the human psyche lingered in the hate-filled conspiracy-heated, misogynist, racist rants that filled the web? Even if that hate were manufactured—the product of Russian, Chinese, or Iranian state agents—governments only launched those operations because they worked; because the words touched something in people’s souls.
The web was only a generation old. But in that tiny flicker of time, the delicate virtues of human interaction that took centuries to nurture seemed to have been overrun. Once we were all connected, the gossamer wings that held aloft the better angels of our nature apparently were no match for the private human weakness that connection unleashed. Rena tried to banish these thoughts from his mind. They sounded like self-pity. But they would only stay away for a while before wandering back.
He looked at the picture of his father, who had emigrated to America from Italy with Rena when Peter was a baby. Peter was told later that his mother had died when he was one. It was now just the two them. Even as a fairly young child in America, Peter had functioned as a kind of cultural interpreter for his father, and that role gave him the courage to sort matters out for himself when his father didn’t understand their new country’s customs. It was a strange way to grow up—maybe an immigrant’s way—but most Italians had come so many generations earlier there wasn’t much of a community for people like them. And in his mind, in the life story he told himself, he was most proud that, as a boy, he had developed a code for himself about what mattered. And he had tried to live by that code as an adult, when life was more complicated and always challenged by compromise. At the heart of Rena’s private code was the idea that you told the truth. If you stuck to that, you also could learn what the truth was.
He could recall the day this code had begun to form as the germ of an idea in his mind. He was fourteen. It was the day he discovered that most of what his father and his grandmother had told him about his life up to that point was a lie.
In his memory of that afternoon, he is cooking supper, fresh tomatoes from the yard, sautéed in garlic. He would add the fresh basil at the last minute. The pasta is boiling. He remembers hearing the door and looking up to see his father. “Hello, Pietro.” The old man’s pants are covered in white dust from whatever stone he had chiseled that day working on the big American cathedral across the river in the city. Rena watches his father head to the bathroom to wash off the dust, to scrub it from his eyebrows, and mustache, and from inside his ears. Remembering it now, twenty-nine years later, Peter imagined his father was already beginning to look bent over, the first signs of the illness that would sweep him away. But mostly Peter remembers feeling resentment, even in the way his father said hello. There is too much affection in it, too much need.
Rena had been waiting to confront him. For that was the day he had puzzled out the secret he suspected Papa was keeping from him. Why had they moved to America from Italy alone when Rena was only eighteen months old? Why had Papa taken Peter away from grandma Nona and his cousins? Why had they come to this world his father didn’t understand?
Standing at the stove, he can barely contain himself. His hands feel numb, and his veins tingle. But he is patient. He will wait until they are at the dinner table so his father can’t bow his head in that stubborn way he had and walk away.
Why, Papa, did you lie? They had come to America in 1980, Peter had always been told, so his father could help finish building the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The big church on Massachusetts Avenue was the only true European-style cathedral in the United States, his father explained, and the only people who knew how to build such buildings were Europeans. His father was a stone artisan, and he was needed for the work high above, for the spires and the high windows and the gargoyles lurking on the roof.
It was during the summers he spent with his grandmother in Tuscany that he had first sensed something was wrong. People whispered about the boy from America who was Italian but not quite. He thought at first they were whispering because he was different. Eventually he realized they were sharing secrets about him. He was accustomed to being alone and was good at puzzling things out for himself. In soccer, where he was beginning to excel, he had taught himself to watch an opposing player and sense the other boy’s weaknesses; how to mislead opponents by making deliberate mistakes that would cover up his real weaknesses. By the time he was twelve, he had learned how to interrogate his aunts without their realizing it, to wrap his real questions inside innocent ones. He was beginning to recognize when people lied to him. By fourteen, he had collected enough clues, heard enough whispers, asked enough questions, detected enough lies, and gone through enough of his father’s things, to puzzle out the most important mystery of all.
Rena’s mother was not dead. She had run off with another man when he was a baby. She had abandoned her husband and her child and fled to Rome. And Rena’s father had gathered up Peter and come to America in shame. They had not moved because his father’s skills were so necessary and rare. They had come so his father could flee.
“You lied about everything,” Peter shouted at his father. “Your whole life is a lie. And you made mine one, too, Papa.” He was young enough that his outrage was pure and quick. “But I am not ashamed. I am only ashamed of you!”
His father did not bow his head or walk away from the table. He said to Peter, “It was a secret I wanted to protect you from.” Peter remembered his father mumbling the words.
“No, they were just lies!” In his memory, Peter is screaming. “You’re a liar! Even to yourself. You can’t tell the difference anymore!” And in his memory of it, it is Peter who gets up from the table and walks away.
Two days pass before they speak another word. Peter is in the garden working the tomatoes. His father comes outside. As Peter remembered it now, his father says, “You were so small, Peter. I meant to tell you someday. I didn’t mean to lie, only to keep something a secret until you were old enough.”
In his memory, Peter stands up—they were almost the same height now—and looks his father in the eye. “They are the same thing, Papa. As soon as you try to hide them, secrets become lies. And all lies become conspiracies.” Maybe he hadn’t used those words. Maybe through recollection he had made himself more articulate. But after that day Peter saw his father differently, not as someone wise and exotic, but as a man outmatched by life and a country he didn’t understand. A construction worker with a few skills, not an artisan. Most of all, Peter saw a man ashamed. Hiding. Of course, these things he thought were not the whole truth. They were lies of their own. But that’s how Peter would see his father for a long time.
It would get better between them eventually, but not until after West Point, after he married Kate, after a lot of things. By then Peter was an adult and his father was sick.
That would all come later. That day, in the garden, Rena began to form a theory about how he wanted to live his life, in ways that would be different from how his father had lived. He was fueled by the absolute conviction that all secrets become lies and all lies were evil, and that if you made them part of your life, they would poison you. He was determined to live without lies. He knew, of course, that everyone told lies—and that everyone told themselves they wanted to live an honest life, too, as if those things went together. But he would be serious about it. Lies were like shadows, and he wanted to live in the light. He didn’t know if he could do it or what it would be like. He didn’t really know anyone who lived like that. But he was fourteen, and he thought everything was possible.
He liked organizations that had rules. He became the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of Virginia. After that, the army seemed like a good place to live the kind of life about which he dreamed. It had rules and codes of honor. It had historians who wrote the stories of battles to study what went right and what went wrong, searchers of truth in a world where facts saved lives and where too much faith in credo could get you killed.
He had believed it all. Even after the army broke his heart and banished him. He had believed it all.
Now, sitting in his living room, peering into the semi-dark web, he was beginning to doubt, to wonder whether maybe he had been wrong about almost everything he had believed and fought for. Lies and innuendo were being told about him by people he didn’t know. A lot of these people were military—or they claimed to be. Maybe some really knew him. A version of his past was being written that was unrecognizable. And though they were lies, people believed them. And didn’t that, in some way, make the lies real?
Maybe he had built his life around an adolescent grudge? Were lies of self-delusion the most damaging of all because you told them to yourself?
Then he brought his computer to life and began to listen to the interview of David Highsmith, the self-described private investigator into the New World Order.