How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  “Aristotle was wrong a lot. I mean, he just made stuff up. How is that scientific?”

  “He relied on other people. It was harder to get around back then, and there were nowhere near as many books. If someone wrote something about a place far away, people just accepted it. Hence all that medieval crap about griffins and winged elephants and dragons.”

  “He was wrong about stuff that was right next to him. There’s no dogfish that carries a baby attached to the outside of its body. I checked.”

  “Science is about facts, but it takes imagination, too, doesn’t it? Maybe they hadn’t worked out the balance yet.”

  He laughed and touched my shoulder so I’d move out of his way. So he could get in his car and drive to wherever he was going. So I could walk home alone with myself and the whole story could repeat itself over and over in my head. Having emotions is like living in a clothes dryer.

  “Maybe we can talk when all this is over, okay?” He looked up at me with his door open. Pretending like he was asking and it was my decision.

  For a minute I tried to make excuses, for him and me. Tried to explain it to myself. I wasn’t grasping at straws. It wasn’t like water slipping through my fingers. It just was. When he pulled away, I sat down on his front step and looked up through the telephone lines at the place where the moon was last time. It was empty. I found my cigarettes right in my top pocket and lit one while I stared at the negative space between the wires.

  I was too full of information to even think. Too tired to walk. I was sick of every fact in the world.

  But there were more facts coming. It was like someone had pulled away our shells and left our nerves bare. We were so exposed by then that everything seemed to travel right into us.

  We were at Nervous Records the day we heard about Ray Velker’s body.

  I woke up that Saturday and the tide was so high I could see the water without even getting out of bed. I knew it was really spring then. When I was littler, I used to pretend we lived in a floating house on days like that. I’d sit in bed and imagine that the water came all the way up to the walls of the house, that we got everywhere by boat like people in Venice or the Everglades.

  That day I made some coffee and opened my window. I leaned into the trees and breathed smoke out toward Carter’s Bay. The air smelled like rot and metal.

  It was eight o’clock. I was the only teenager in the universe who voluntarily woke up early on Saturdays. You’d have thought everybody would pat me on the back and tell me what an industrious, responsible kid I was. That never happened, so I stopped using Saturday mornings to do my chores and starting using them for time to be alone.

  I still had my mother’s notebook in my backpack, and I knew Daisy would be asleep until at least eleven. I put on Andre’s duffle coat and my sneakers and climbed the hill. The McNamaras actually kept a spare key under the doormat by the back door. You had to wonder why evolution hadn’t taken care of them about three generations back. I opened the back door and made another coffee before I went up to the attic.

  When I looked out the attic window the world was full of cross-hatched lines, telephone wires and branches and vapor trails and my mother’s geometry notebook. I was full of caffeine, and the whole world was still asleep. I sat there with the notebook open on my lap, reading about Deborah and trying to connect her to that woman who wanders around on our mud. My mother’s life was like Of Mice and Men, a load of extra drama, bent broken people and people who didn’t survive.

  At eleven o’clock I went down, got in bed with Daisy, and poked him. He didn’t even jump. He just put his head under the blanket and mumbled my name. Then he breathed out a little satisfied sigh, like a baby. I kicked him, but not too hard.

  After a while he said, “I need another dry cell.”

  “Wake up, Daisy. I don’t have any kind of batteries.”

  “I’m awake.” He was still under the covers. Well, his head was under but his feet were sticking out. He wore his socks to bed. “I already sold the stereo.”

  “I figured. Your room stinks. Let’s go to Hatchet Mary’s and see if the carp woke up.”

  “No!”

  “Why not? If we can catch it, I can take its temperature.”

  “Because Hatchet Mary’s is full of lurking creeps with angel dust, remember? And every time we go there, we fight.” He tented the blanket up with his arm but stayed under it. “I’m never going there again.”

  “We fought one time. And you could just not smoke the angel dust. You can’t not go to Hatchet Mary’s. That’ll ruin at least twenty-eight percent of our entertainment.”

  “I have a plan. I need a dry cell and maybe some old vacuum tubes. Can we go to Nervous Records and ask Andre’s boss?”

  “Your room smells like you keep jocks in the closet. I think your main plan for today should involve laundry.”

  We took the bus to Huntington and got some cannoli first. Ferravante’s in the parking lot behind Main Street has the kind without citron. The entrance to Nervous Records was in an alley off Main Street that had probably been made for people to put garbage in. They had a neon sign that flickered like it was crapped out, but on purpose. Nervous. Get it?

  There were bins full of records and cassettes hanging on pegs from the wall, wrapped in enough hard plastic so kids couldn’t shove them in their jackets without hurting themselves. The floor was black-and-white tiles, and someone had stenciled a giant solarized picture of Sid Vicious on one wall. When Sid Sings came out and Andre put on his version of “My Way,” my dad told him he was ridiculous. Even Gramps shook his head and looked out the window so he wouldn’t have to deal.

  The owner of Nervous Records was white and messy and maybe thirty years old. He thought he was special for being the first one to figure out that everything cool came from England again. He was always calling Andre brother. When we came in that Saturday, there was a kid with a suspiciously large Navy coat on and a guy in the jazz section who looked like maybe he hung out with Mr. Tomaszewski in his spare time. Andre was handing Jimmy, the owner, a brand-new copy of The Specials. We waved and went straight over to the tapes on the wall so Andre wouldn’t get in trouble for socializing at work. I tried to look like I really wanted to buy the cassette of Survival even though Arthur already had it.

  Then “A Message to You, Rudy” came through the speakers. It was a nothing moment, but in it something ended for us. Something started, too, I guess, but I still don’t know what. I mean, yeah, the music was new last year, but I don’t care about that. Andre, in his turtleneck and his black 501 button-flies, I guess maybe he was part of what changed. I realized that day that he was going to be different than the rest of us. He was riding something we couldn’t feel yet. Well, maybe my mother could. Maybe that’s why she likes him better than me.

  Daisy picked up a Joni Mitchell album and waved it at Andre to get him to come over.

  “Does your boss sell stereo equipment?”

  Andre swept his hand in a circle around the room and looked at Daisy. “No.”

  “I need to sell some parts and maybe buy some other ones. Do you know where I can?”

  I don’t know what Daisy really wanted. He’d been to Nervous Records before, and he knew Andre didn’t give a shit about his weird electronics. It was all an excuse, but I still don’t know for what.

  Anyway, freeze that moment. Look at it. It was right before the final thing fell down into our lives. The one we never asked for and couldn’t contain.

  “You guys are from over in Highbone, aren’t you?” Jimmy shouted over the music.

  Andre said yeah and something like, “This is my sister, Joan.” Jimmy gave me a look that was a little less creepy than a lot of the looks I get lately. But it wasn’t exactly neutral, either.

  “What’s up with this?” Jimmy held out the Saturday Newsday. “Missing Teenager’s Body Found in Highbone,” the front page said.

  Even Andre forgot about work. We all stood around the paper spread out by the cash
register. The Specials went on singing, and we read about how Ray Velker had been lying in the woods at Hatchet Mary’s for months. People had been going up there to see Ray all winter, getting stoned and staring at him while he disintegrated into the mulch. And it was months before one of them thought maybe they should say something. Finally, a kid tipped off the cops.

  I thought about the inside of Ray Velker, open in the woods like some kind of carnival sideshow from a nightmare. I didn’t want to picture any of it, the bones or the organs or the way it all worked and fell apart. I didn’t want to know.

  Jimmy turned the volume down on “Do the Dog” and Andre’s face closed over. I knew right then, he was leaving as soon as he could save up enough money or find a free way out. He wouldn’t wait for September. We all stood there trying to comprehend people gawking at Ray’s dead body like he was a shark strung up at the docks, but Andre just said no. No, I don’t have space in my head for that. No, thanks. Daisy and me stood there in Nervous Records, looking at the paper and wishing we could muster up that kind of denial. Well, maybe we already had. Maybe we already weren’t telling each other just as much as every other kid in Highbone.

  We went back to Ferravante’s for coffees and another two cannoli. I climbed up onto one of the high stools and watched the sugar dust fall from Daisy’s lips. The world seemed muffled and I couldn’t taste anything.

  “I love you,” Daisy said. “You know, like a friend. I love you.”

  “I love you too, man.” Then I felt bad for being sarcastic. “No, I do.”

  “I don’t want anything to ever happen to you. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. I can’t breathe because I dreamed you were dead.”

  “We’re all gonna die, Daisy. But let’s hang out until then.”

  I was thinking it had been a cold winter. Ray had basically been on ice for almost three months, but still. He must have been pretty far gone by the time they found him. I was picturing his bones with nothing but tatters of sinew clinging to them, his eyes looking at never and nothing and then melting away.

  That was before all the details came out. Before we found out what really happened to Ray Velker’s eyes.

  We went to Radio Shack so Daisy could poke around. The long-haired guy behind the counter looked at us like we were there to steal his dry cell batteries. Did he know? Had he read the paper that day? Did Ray matter in Huntington, or would it just be another gruesome story? How much distance do you need before a dead body doesn’t mean anything? I looked out the plate-glass window at the world where Ray Velker’s body had lain for months alone in the snow.

  Daisy pointed to some vacuum tubes and said, “Inside those it’s like outer space. No atmosphere, no air, nothing could live inside here.”

  “First of all, outer space is way colder. Insanely cold, like your blood would freeze right inside you.”

  Then I thought of Ray again, with the blood leaking out of him and drying in the freezing air. I didn’t think about Robbie. Even after what I’d seen, I still believed he was out there somewhere twitching and messing things up as usual. Except he wasn’t, and Daisy knew it. So what was Daisy thinking right then?

  “I’m just saying, inside these tubes you might as well not even be on this planet.”

  “Tetanus could maybe live in there. Tetanus is anaerobic.”

  “Seriously, Joan. Sometimes you could go with a feeling instead of a fact.”

  “You know what? I hate Radio Shack. Nothing’s alive in here.”

  I went out front and got out my mom’s notebook. I leaned against the plate-glass window and stared at her handwriting, looking for evidence. You don’t find the facts in people’s words. People use words as camouflage. Ink, though—ink never lies. It tells years later whether your hand shook and where your tears fell and smudged it into puddles. In a way, part of my mother was in that book. Not the words, the tears and the sweat and the skin cells. The breath that dried into the ink. Someday, that notebook will disintegrate too. The paper will crumble and the ink will fade. By that time no one who knows enough to care will still be alive anyway.

  Andre came home from work later that night with a copy of The Specials, a thin tie, and a long coat from the antique store. Dad gave him a pair of his museum shoes, and he spent the whole night reading the classifieds in a copy of the Voice.

  Daisy

  ALL SPRING, WE kept trying. We didn’t know what else to do. I sat alone in my mother’s room, looking at the picture of her and Robbie on the wall. I had shoved the bed over to the wall and moved most of her stuff into the basement, but I left that picture hanging there. It was taken some dry fall day when everybody was young. The whole thing is blurry and full of sunlight. Behind them there’s some scrub pine and a brown mess of dead stuff. The lawn is turning brown, too. I think that picture is in the backyard here, at Aunt Regina’s in Rockaway.

  My mother is wearing a loose black dress with a cloth rose pinned to it. Her hair is set and she’s smiling like a frightened child with one arm around Robbie and the other looking skinny in her lap. When I was little she never went anywhere without her checkered sunglasses hiding her eyes. She made the world talk to her lipstick. I remember the way words came low and breathy out of those red lips. How anyone who talked to her had to rely on that whisper because there was no way into her eyes. In that picture, though, her eyes are naked. Scared, if you look close enough.

  One night last spring I looked at that picture and saw how young she was, how she was sitting in the middle of a sudden, terrifying world with babies and sex in it, trying to look happy because that’s what you do in pictures. She is showing a row of strong teeth, but the picture is so blurred with light I can never tell about the lipstick. Robbie is wearing a shirt the same red as Mom’s cloth rose, and he’s moving. He’s maybe a year old, doesn’t even look like he could walk yet. He’s blurred himself into a ghostly smudge, like he’s about to fade back to heaven and leave her there.

  At least one of the people in the picture was dead, maybe both. I said goodbye to them and went upstairs to the attic. I looked out at Arthur’s shadow moving past his window. I watched Mr. Harris park his car and carry his tall, steady presence into the warm house. Looking at their roof, I wished I had one of those infrared cameras that show all the warmth leaking out of doors and roofs and windows. I wished I could lie on the Harrises’ roof like a cold-blooded animal, soaking in all the escaping heat.

  Instead I went back downstairs and slept under my mother’s picture.

  In my dreams I saw Robbie in his Charger. I was around him or inside of him, looking out at the sea grass in the Jamaica marshes from behind his shoulder. The sun bleached everything until it was pale and dry and tossing in the breezes. I could feel Robbie all around me. Then there was a bang and all the car windows filled up with a flash of light.

  I woke up because Joan was shouting my name. She sounded panicked, and I wondered whether someone else was dead.

  “I’m in here!” It came out croaky and I had to shout again. I pushed my grandmother’s afghan off me and looked down to see what I was wearing.

  Joan threw the door open and hit the light switch.

  “Hello, Daisy. Come on in. Relax.”

  “Jesus fuck!”

  “I should really give that thing pathways. It should have called you Joan.”

  “What were you doing in here? I couldn’t find you. This is not the time to go AWOL, McNamara.”

  “It seemed safer not to sleep in a bedroom.”

  “This is a bedroom, Daisy!” She looked around at the wires and the blinking lights. Then she seemed to give in. She sat down and lit up a Player’s Navy Cut. I wondered where she got it.

  “Ashtray?”

  I handed her a cream soda can. “This is a cool problem. How could we make the light switch recognize the difference between you and me?”

  “I know a cool problem. You’re sixteen and no one lives here with you. Your mother fucked off somewhere and
you’re sleeping on the floor in a nest of live wires. What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m fine, Joan. I like living here.”

  I was so happy that she was yelling at me. It was so much better than when she didn’t talk to me at all. Joan is one of those people who gets mad when she really cares.

  “Arthur said he already talked to you about your family. What’s with that, Daisy?”

  “He was helping me. I’m trying to find out what . . . where Robbie is.”

  “Helping you how?”

  “You know, just asking around.”

  “Asking around who?”

  “Just guys in the park. Patrick and people. It’s no big deal.”

  “You idiot, Daisy.”

  “We talked about it and he said not to tell you.”

  “Hello, remember me? Joan, your best friend. Perfectly capable person who’s been getting you out of trouble with a smile since 1972.”

  “We don’t want you to get hurt or get in trouble. Arthur said if I got killed it would ruin your life. If you get killed, I’m going with you.”

  She fell over backward and said, “You really don’t get it, do you?”

  “Watch out for that casing. There are live wires in there.”

  She cursed and sat up again.

  “How long before you burn this place down, Daisy? I’m tired of being your responsible adult.”

  “See, you care! It’s all fused anyway. Don’t worry so much.”

  Joan looked up at the picture of Mom and Robbie, then over at my map. It was blinking now that she’d turned the lights on. Then the next thing I knew she put her hands on my shoulders and started shouting.

  “You don’t get it! You’ve been my best friend my whole life and you still don’t get it!”

  “Jeez. Calm down. I can show you the safety.”

  “Whatever! I don’t even care if you burn your house down. Answer me this: you piss off some cops or some dealers, Arthur pisses off some cops or some dealers. What’s the difference?”

  “I’m underage?”

  “Wake up and smell the fucking coffee, McNamara! You’re white and your dad’s friends own the cops. If a dealer kills you, they might actually get in trouble for it.”