This Story Is a Lie

by Tom Pollock

  Rita comes to stand by Ingrid’s side.

  “Peter,” she says, “tell us where Anabel is. Where would she go if she got scared?”

  Bel. They want Bel. In my mind I see red bricks and red leaves. I hear my sister’s voice: I was scared sick something had happened to you.

  “Yes!” Ingrid starts forward. “Yes! There, where’s that, Peter? Where is that place you meet her?”

  Shit! Frantically I shove the thoughts out of my mind. I think of elephants and hula hoops and the taste of salt and vinegar and clods of earth and . . . I need a distraction . . .

  Get counting.

  1, 1.414214, 1.732050, 2, 2.236068 . . . There’s an acid taste in my mouth. Even as I start, I know I can’t count forever. I can feel the knowledge of our secret place battering at the walls of my mind as hard as the panic ever did. 2.449 . . .

  “I had something for a second,” Ingrid’s telling Rita. “But I didn’t catch it. Now he’s doing square roots.”

  Rita’s silence indicates she doesn’t follow.

  “Of the integers,” Ingrid goes on, “to six decimal places.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Rita mutters. She walks behind me again, raising her voice, as if she’s speaking for a recording. “I’m going to dose him again.”

  “Peter, stop,” Ingrid begs me. “Stop this. You can’t keep it up.”

  2.828427, 3 . . .

  “Please”—and there are tears in her eyes—“if you don’t stop, we’ll have to shock you again, and again until you can’t resist anymore. Until you can’t even count anymore.”

  3.162278. I’m snarling, even in my head. I won’t give Bel up to her. 3.3166 . . .

  “Petey,” Ingrid whispers.

  “Dose four.”

  From behind me, Rita’s voice is like a morgue drawer slamming shut.

  The world goes white. I clench my teeth so hard I hear them cracking, feel them splintering. The numbers in my head flake into ash. I can’t see or hear. I spit and gibber and try to scream but manage only a low moan. I dig my fingers hard into the trolley below the bed frame, and a paper-thin curl of plywood comes away in my palm. For a single, blissful second, my mind goes blank, but then red blots into it like blood into a bandage. I try to push it back, but I can’t. I’m exhausted. Red. Red leaves. Red bricks. I grasp after numbers to banish the image, but I can’t think of any. The woods behind the northwest corner of school. My school. The place where Bel and I meet when things get bad.

  And as I think it, I know Ingrid’s seeing it. I listen, waiting for her to tell Rita.

  I wait.

  I wait some more.

  I open my eyes. Ingrid’s gripping her arms, her knuckles white. She’s shivering. Her mascara’s running in little black rivers down her face. Rita seems unperturbed by her distress.

  You feel it, I feel it. Her words rise like smoke from my burned brain. You’re my best friend.

  What if that wasn’t a lie?

  Her hands inch towards the backs of her gloves. Her eyes flicker across my face. She looks panicky; she could be faking it, but I don’t think so. I can feel her, poised, uncertain, guiltily looking over my shoulder at Rita, and then at me and back up again. She goes to speak, hesitates, and swallows.

  I grit my teeth. My eyes seek hers, and she can’t tear them away. ARIA, I think. A proof of who we are. I think of battered maths textbooks and page number codes. This is a ten on the Ballsuck, I think, but we can get through it. She shakes her head minutely, pleading with me to stop, but I don’t. I think of interrobangs. I think of the feel of her hand in mine and the warmth of her body lying next to mine on my Nightcrawler duvet. I think of kissing her. I think of a bloodied scrubbing brush bouncing into the sink. I think of how much I love her.

  If you can’t trust yourself, trust me, I think.

  Beads of sweat have appeared on her forehead. They crawl down her face like condensation on cold glass. Rita doesn’t speak, but I can feel her behind me, watching, expecting.

  Ingrid, I think.

  “Ana,” she whispers, her lips barely moving. “My name is Ana, Ana Black.”

  Ingrid.

  She looks at Rita, opens her mouth, hesitates. I can see her wavering.

  “B-boyfrien . . .” I blurt out, just as her lips start to move. My voice is slurred, but, minus a few consonants, I manage to shape the words. Ingrid looks at me in astonishment.

  “What?” Rita demands.

  “Bel’sss with her boyfrien . . .”

  Rita comes into view behind Ingrid’s shoulder. She looks up at a camera in the corner and then back at me.

  “We don’t have any record of a boyfriend. Louise—”

  “Mum doesn’t know,” I interrupt. “Bel never tol’ her, ’caus’ he’s so much older . . .” Feeling is beginning to return to my jaw. I look straight at Ingrid. She stares back at me.

  “He’s twenty-three,” I said. “And she’s only seventeen. They’ve been together eleven months.”

  23-17-11 . . .

  “Where does he live?” Rita presses me.

  I let my head sag, shake it slowly, as if I’m trying to clear the fog.

  “I only remember a house number,” I mumble. Ingrid’s looking at me stricken, but I don’t look away. “Fifty-four.”

  Rita stands patiently, waiting for Ingrid’s verdict. Ingrid swallows hard, and when she speaks, her voice is tear-hoarse but calm.

  “He’s telling the truth.”

  Rita leans in, peels back one of my eyelids, and holds my gaze for a moment while she considers it.

  “We’ll check it out.”

  Recursion: 2 Years,

  9 months Ago

  “I’m telling the truth,” Dr. Arthurson insisted.

  I stared at the equations on the screen until my eyes watered and all the X, ∫, and ∑ symbols curved and ran together like ripples in a pond.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s right.”

  “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, Dr. A. I’m not calling you a liar. I’m just saying I don’t understand why.”

  Dr. Arthurson’s eyebrows knitted as he frowned. He had truly monumental eyebrows, grey, bushy, caterpillaresque. At that moment those brows were unified into a single hairy stripe.

  “You remind me of bloody Gödel,” he muttered. “Scrawny, twitchy, prodigious. They called him Mr. Why when he was a kid, and look what happened to him.” He waggled his eyebrows ominously.

  “What did happen to him?” I asked.

  The eyebrows rose in astonishment.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “I barely know anything about him.”

  “You never studied Gödel? What happened to your nerdish compulsion to cram the Wikipedia entry of every famous mathematician in history into your head?”

  The brows continued their dizzying ascent of Mount Arthurson. When they reached his hairline, it was like two lost mountain sheep finally reuniting with their flock.

  “I haven’t got to him yet,” I protested. “There’s more than twenty-five hundred years of mathematical history and less than sixteen years of me. Somebody had to lose out to eating and sleeping.”

  “Well, you should look Gödel up. It’s a good story,” Dr. A muttered. “And by good, I mean horrifying.” He gestured to the screen that was only a hazy rectangle of brightness to his failing eyes. “Is the why of this really so important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  Dr. A nodded glumly and glanced at the clock. Ten to six. He’d offered to take me through a few more advanced theorems on Wednesdays after school. Rain crackled against the window from an ink-swilled sky. It was getting dark, but I hadn’t bothered to switch on the lights. I’d pulled my chair up next to his, and we huddled around the glow of his laptop like it was a fire in the wilderness.<
br />
  “I blew off an evening with Dean for this,” he grumbled. “He was going to cook. He always does three courses, and he makes these little chocolate truffle things to have with coffee afterwards.”

  “Fancy,” I said.

  Dr. A smirked. “It’s still early days; he likes to show off for me.”

  “Give it six months and it’ll be all takeaway fried chicken and loud farts on the sofa, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t turn my nose up at fried chicken right now.”

  This was punctuated by a sound that I took for thunder, but that turned out to be Dr. A’s cavernous stomach rumbling. It was time to go.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s call it a night. You and Chef can still get most of an evening together.”

  “You sure?” he asked, teasing the bud from his ear. “We can look at this again tomorrow. Don’t worry, I’ll get you there.”

  “I know you will. You’re the best maths teacher in the country.”

  He beamed at me, but it couldn’t be far short of the truth. There were fewer than a hundred blind teachers in the UK. One hundred out of more than six hundred thousand. To make head of maths at a fancy school like mine, Dr. A had to be hot shit.

  I stood and slipped my notebook into my bag, took his arm, and guided him towards the door. Not that he needed help; he taught in this classroom nearly every day, but I liked doing it and he let me.

  “So you broke up with George, huh?”

  “Rather the other way round.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Dr. A. What happened?”

  The atmosphere went chilly and straightaway I felt I’d stepped on a conversational land mine. I did this sometimes, deprived of practice, when I tried to make friends. I pushed them too far in my eagerness to be liked, interrogating them in an attempt to show interest, turning over earth they wanted left undisturbed.

  We walked together towards the exit, the only sound the tapping of Dr. A’s cane on the lino.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket.

  Going to be late. Something’s come up at office. The rats are turning somersaults. Explain later. Be there by 6.30. Mum X

  I sighed.

  “What is it?” Dr. A asked.

  “Mum’s going to be late. And Bel’s still suspended . . .”

  I left it hanging, but he understood: I was going nowhere. I’d never discussed my embarrassing dependency on my sister to Dr. A, and he never questioned it. He was good like that.

  “I—” He hesitated. “Look, I completely understand if you don’t want to talk about it, but how’s it going, being here without her?”

  “Fine,” I lied.

  “Given what you’ve told me,” he went on, “I imagine things must be a little tense at home right now, with Bel and your mother, I mean.”

  I didn’t reply.

  He looked awkward. “Listen, Peter.” He reached into his jacket and held out a piece of folded paper. “I want you to take this.”

  I unfolded the A4 page. In huge, bold black marker letters was written 419 GABRIEL STREET SW19 7HE.

  “Just in case,” he mumbled. “In case you ever need somewhere to go. Aboveboard, of course. Make sure your mother’s okay with it. But if things ever get too . . . well. Just in case.”

  “I . . .” But I couldn’t finish the sentence. I hurriedly folded the note and put it in my pocket. I felt it there, a promise of refuge, fragile and precious.

  “Thank you,” I managed finally.

  “I keep a spare key under the fourth brick from the front of the flower bed. If I’m not there, just let yourself in.”

  “Thank you,” I said again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Thank you.”

  We waited and chatted at reception until Dean arrived to collect him. He was friendly and handsome in a “just walked out of a moisturizer advert” kind of way. I was happy to see the little dusting of cocoa powder on his sleeve.

  “Mum late again?” Sal, the receptionist, enquired sympathetically.

  “Acrobatic rats,” I explained. She nodded sagely.

  “Want me to phone the library and let Julie know you’re coming?”

  “Ta.”

  With Dr. A’s offer in my hoodie pocket, I all but bounced into the library and high-fived Julie, the librarian. Julie was awesome. Auburn-haired and hyper, she was roughly the shape of an old-fashioned egg timer and buzzed at pretty much the same frequency when she was in a good mood, which she always seemed to be.

  “Hey, Petey,” she said. “What’ll it be tonight? Meteorology? Phenomenology? Herpetology? I’ve just got a book in on the chemical make-ups of the deadliest venoms in the animal kingdom. I know how you like a grisly demise on a Wednesday.”

  A grisly demise. You remind me of bloody Gödel, and look what happened to him.

  “How about a biography?” I said.

  I slouched down into a ketchup-red bean bag and cracked open the hardback Julie had handed me, promisingly entitled, Unprovable: The Madness and Mastery of Kurt Gödel. There was a black-and-white picture on the inside cover: a stick-insect of a man in a jacket and tie, dark eyes staring out from behind bottle-top spectacles.

  I sat there for a long time. That gaze held me like a tractor beam. The eyes were deeply shadowed but more than that: his stare made me feel I was complicit in some terrible secret.

  Scrawny, twitchy, prodigious, I heard Dr. A saying. You remind me of Gödel.

  “Yeah,” I muttered under my breath. “Me too.”

  Normally, when I read up on a mathematician, I like to take my time. I imagine myself in the warm sun of ancient Greece, or under the smog of industrial revolution Hamburg. I savour the sting of their early setbacks, the out-of-touch old men who laughed at their theories, relishing their coming triumph. And when it comes to their big moment, I read and reread the relevant passage, committing it to memory, then close my eyes and live it; that incandescent moment when they scratch out the final line in their proof and realise they’ve done it. They’ve proven that there are multiple infinities, or that space and time were one.

  Not today.

  Anxiety crabbing at my belly, I flicked through the pages until I landed on the one word I was looking for: death.

  Gödel died in January 1978 at the age of seventy-one. It wasn’t a sickness of the body that killed him, rather a sickness of the mind. He suffered from paranoid delusions and was convinced that someone was trying to poison him. He trusted only his wife, Adele, to prepare his food, and when she was herself hospitalised in late 1977, he starved himself to death.

  “Holy shit,” I murmured under my breath.

  A doctor who attended him in his final weeks said later in an interview: “We tried to persuade him to eat, but he refused. We told him—no one’s trying to poison you, but he wouldn’t believe us. He kept saying over and over that there was no way to be sure.”

  When Gödel died, he weighed just sixty-five pounds.

  He trusted only his wife . . . I thought, closing the book, aware of the sweat cooling between my shoulders. She was his axiom. And when he lost her, all his proofs and theorems, his understanding, the life he’d built on her came crashing down, demolishing him on the way.

  Something else on that page snared my attention: He suffered from paranoid delusions . . .

  You remind me of Gödel.

  That’s what Dr. A had told me.

  A chill crept from the base of my neck up to my hairline like spider’s feet. I flicked back to Gödel’s photograph. He looked haunted, as if he harboured a dreadful secret. But what was it? What was so shattering that it drove him to starve himself?

  I tried to imagine how it must have felt; the hunger pangs, the dizziness, his hand at a standstill halfway from plate to mouth, his jaw locked tetanus-tight in refusal. What could have brought him to that?

  I flicked to the inde
x. The largest number of page references appeared under the heading of something called Incompleteness Theorems, pp. 8, 36, 141–146, 210. I skipped to page 141. In bold black letters it said:

  THIS STATEMENT IS A LIE.

  “Huh,” I muttered. “The liar’s paradox.” It can’t be true without being false, and it can’t be false without being true. Pretty much the most decrepit cliché in all of philosophy. It had always struck me as a pointless linguistic trap. Besides, the “truth” is a woolly concept at the best of times.

  On the page below it was another, similar sentence.

  THIS STATEMENT IS UNPROVABLE.

  I felt a queasy rumble in my belly. I saw the point, of course. That second sentence really was unprovable, because proving it true would prove it false and that’s a one-way express ticket back to paradox land.

  It’s just a word game, I told myself. Just a clever trap based on the fuzzy language we use to talk about coffee and kittens and nuclear wars. You’d never get away with anything that imprecise in maths.

  But Gödel was a mathematician, and I had a horrible feeling I knew where this was going.

  After all, if you could find an equation that declared itself unprovable, I thought, then you really would be in trouble; basically you’d have broken maths.

  I remembered the haunted look in Gödel’s eyes and my fingers trembled as I turned the page.

  Shit.

  Equations sprawled down the page. All this time, I’ve been at this school and this book’s been sitting here in the library, waiting to shatter my universe.

  I read it five, six, seven times, hoping against hope to find some mistake, some error that could have been missed by the hundreds of readers whose greasy thumbs had stained these yellow pages before mine.

  There wasn’t one.

  I reached the last line of the chapter and there it was, the coup de grace.

  F ⊢ GF ↔ ¬ProvF(⌈GF⌉)

  The unprovable theorem.

  That was it. Maths wasn’t complete. It couldn’t justify itself, and there was nothing outside of it more fundamental or certain that could do the job.