Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  While I’m making my confession, I should also say that Chad Hoskins wasn’t my boyfriend and we hadn’t had dinner together the night before I left Charlotte. He was my occasional therapist, the closest thing to a psychiatrist my health insurance would cover, and though I fantasized about him occasionally, we had no relationship outside of his dingy office.

  And there you have it. Me. Jan the liar.

  Voted—in a dazzling bit of mean-spirited group creativity—most likely of her graduating high school class to have flammable pants.

  So yes, I’m used to not being believed. I’m used to feeling stupid and humiliated, caught in the web of my own fantasies, mocked, passed over, and rejected, usually for reasons entirely in my own control.

  Except that—painfully, inexplicably—they’re not.

  I lie. I can’t help it. I don’t mean to. Not usually. I just prefer the version of my life that I make up, but then I say it, not out of malice or the desire to trick or mislead others, but to get that nicer, happier version of the world out there where I can see it, where I can believe in it . . . but then that’s not true either, is it? Of course I mean to mislead others. Or myself.

  It’s pathetic. And it’s why Marcus left me.

  Chapter Nine

  He sits there in the dark. He? I have no idea, but I’m chained up, imprisoned, and someone is there, someone I assume is responsible for my situation, so yes, decades of books and movies and damsel-in-distress crime TV says he.

  Unless . . .

  “Are you stuck here too?” I say to the darkness, somehow steadying the quaver in my voice till I can barely hear it. “Are you tied up? Manacled? Can you hear me?”

  Nothing.

  I strain to see, leaning closer so that the chain around my wrist clanks and I feel its weight shift, but the movement doesn’t make my eyes any better, and I can’t make out anything in the darkness beyond that lumpen shape. Maybe he is asleep, drugged like I was, dragged in and left to wake in his own time. The sigh could have been a snore.

  But he hasn’t moved, and what little I can see suggests he is sitting.

  People sleep sitting up.

  But the breath . . . if it was a snore, surely there would have been more than one? I stare harder into the blackness, not wanting it to be true, wishing I were anywhere other than here. I want to roll onto my side with my face to the wall, to pretend none of it is real, but I daren’t turn away. I can see almost nothing, but I can’t take my eyes off the shape, a huddled, oversize crow perched there in the corner.

  “Can you hear me?” I try again. “Can you? Speak to me. I just want . . . I need to know what is happening to me. What is . . . going on. What . . .” And suddenly something inside breaks, and my voice, which had been low and raspy, is a ragged, full-throated scream that bounces off the walls like gunfire.

  “What do you want?” I shout. “What have I done to you, you sick bastard? What do you want?”

  And then there are almost no words. Just my screaming, crying despair, raw as the howl of a wounded dog. It gets me off the bed and a step toward the corner, to the full limit of the chain around my wrist, and my fury yanks at it, though I barely feel the pain, a squall of bellowing and cursing that takes the air from my lungs. It rings in the silence as I collapse back onto the mattress, trembling all over, unable to stand, sprawled on my side, my left arm keening from the edge of the manacle, my anger and fear folding around me. I have never done anything so clearly futile in my life. I’m weak from the exertion, cowed by my own powerlessness and terror.

  For several minutes, everything is quiet. Then . . .

  I barely notice at first, but it comes again—the faintest creak—and I see that the shape in the corner is different, taller, as if he has sat up straight. There’s a long, empty silence, and then a prick of light comes on at what I take to be waist height. It’s red, but it turns green almost immediately, and now the breathing sound is louder and different, sibilant somehow, like wind in dry grass or breakers coursing over shingle.

  I go very still, not daring to swallow or breathe, too terrified to speak or move a single muscle. I am tense with the strangeness of what is happening, eyes and ears straining for something, anything that will make sense of the sound, the tiny green light. A moment passes, and then a strange inhuman voice uncurls from the corner of the room. It’s slow and deep, distorted so that it drags and rolls like a steel barrel on a hard floor. It is neither male nor female, and it says only one thing:

  “Jan.”

  Chapter Ten

  Lying is creation ex nihilo. It’s parthenogenesis, the goddess Athena born fully armed from the head—the mind—of her father, Zeus. Lying is making things up out of thin air. Except that the air is toxic, corrupting everyone who hears the lie, and the liar most of all.

  I want to believe that it’s harmless, a coping mechanism that makes a pretty shitty reality seem bearable, but it always catches up with me, a black cloud that engulfs me with a sense of failure, of stupidity and worthlessness. In college I lied about why I hadn’t done assignments as a way of buying myself time and sympathy—a grandmother’s funeral here, a self-harming roommate there—and initially it had been fine. I even made the dean’s list in my first year, and I never pushed beyond simple lying into other moral or criminal areas, like plagiarism, which—though related—felt like theft. But getting away with a lie brings its own particular euphoria, a secret pleasure like an adrenaline high, and if you’re not careful it can become an end in itself. I said that my excuses, the assorted variations on the dog ate my homework, bought me time, but midway through my second year, it became clear I wasn’t actually using that time to finish the work I had dodged. I was using it to build more lies, more escape hatches. In my third year I took two incompletes that I never finished; and in my fourth, I ran headlong into Dr. James Bancroft and his developmental biology course. The class wasn’t especially hard, but I didn’t like it, didn’t like his pedantic, robotic teaching, and I resolved to find a way to skate through it with the minimum amount of actual work.

  From time to time I ran into people who saw through me. Not completely, and usually not right away, but they were hardwired to sniff out bullshit and—and this was worse—to call you on it. Most people are too polite to see a lie for what it is. They sense something is off, but you seem so nice—or so upset, whatever—and they just assume they’ve miscalculated somehow. After all, they say, why would she lie?

  Why indeed?

  Anyway, Bancroft was one of the few who were just primed for untruth. I’m not sure why, though I suspected afterward that he knew me like an alcoholic recognizes other alcoholics, picking up the little tells in the way your eyes go to the bottle just before you sit as far away from it as possible. Or maybe he had seen the behavior in someone close to him and was just alert to it. In any case, my little elaborations, what I used to call my fibbing, didn’t wash with him. I tried to avoid a paper on morphogenesis not once, not twice, but three times, spending more labor on inventing reasons why I couldn’t do it than I would have done on the actual paper. The first time Bancroft shut me down so completely that I should have known I was on a losing tear, but some stupid part of me treated it as a challenge. The second time I was actually affronted by how unmoved he was by my tales of hardship, as if my inventiveness had actually deserved the pass.

  I failed the class, a shock so unsettling that I lost control of my grades in every other course that semester, failing to show up for finals in two of them, including one in my beloved mythology class. By the time I graduated, the 4.0 I had maintained through my first year had dropped to a 2.7, and my future was in burnout. I applied for lab positions and internships, never lying in my applications but always in interviews, upping the ante as jobs came and went, and I was still getting up at three in the morning to oversee the stocking of shelves at Great Deal. The more desperate I became, the more reckless was the lying, so that I was soon telling stories of my past employment that were in direct contradict
ion to my own résumé. I got used to the ripple of confusion on the faces of my interviewers, the way their gaze would go back to the papers in front of them while I backpedaled and unraveled.

  I told myself it was fine. I was moving on up. It would all be fine. I was fine. And I continued to do that, right up to this day at the beach in Crete.

  They were all still in the sea, but I had splashed a little distance away to be alone with my humiliation. The lie I had told Marcus about the promotion not being right for me was nothing like as great as the one I had been telling myself: that I’d gotten it, been welcomed to the upper echelon of the company with open arms, that I could afford a solo apartment or, for that matter, this vacation. That was the greater lie, the one that said life was good. That I didn’t mind my spreading body, the increasing gap between me and the friends I had made on this beach five years ago, the longing for the rum I had missed while taking the nap I had pretended was from tiredness rather than retreat, rather than panic, dread, and rushing inadequacy. They were all paddling back to their deck chairs now, and there would be more rum, or whatever newfangled cocktails Melissa had discovered in the trendy London bars I would never visit. I wanted one of those drinks more than anything. No, I wanted six. But I couldn’t face the way Marcus would avoid my gaze, as you might avoid looking directly at a beggar.

  I was an embarrassment.

  So I swam farther out as the others went in.

  I swim like I do everything else—badly, with neither grace nor power—but I felt my feet leave the bottom and labored on out to sea. The horizon sparkled through my speckled glasses and I fixed my eyes on it, pushing through my clumsy and inefficient breaststroke, glad I couldn’t see the others settling happily on the beach talking about . . . what? Old times? Recent triumphs? A new kitchen, even a new house? I doubted Simon could afford a private jet, but a boat was surely within his means. Maybe he already had one. Maybe Marcus was telling them all about the excavations at the palace of King Minos. Or Midas, who turned everything to gold just by touching it. Or maybe he was telling them about Jan and her lies, her dire financial straits and professional failures, Queen Jan whose touch turned everything to shit.

  I kept swimming. Someone went buzzing round the headland on a Jet Ski. We’d used a Jet Ski or two when we were here last. I remember seeing Simon on a big blue one, looking like a latter-day Poseidon shooting across the waves, his face dark with focus, his chest and arms braced. He had been—as always—confident, impressive, even when he ran it aground on the pebbly shore on our last day and had to pay for the damage.

  “Why you drive so fast, man?” the rental guy had yelled. “Why you not just shut it off? And why you come from over there? I told you, you only go round the rocks that way!”

  It should have been funny, but I guess we were tired and stressed about leaving.

  The jet skier wasn’t Simon this time, though. Not one of my group, I thought, marveling at the ironic inaccuracy of that my. I had thought Gretchen was the interloper, the hanger-on, but suddenly it seemed more likely that that was how they saw me. Jan the Pathetic, the charity case who had to have her way paid for her.

  A horrible thought struck me, and my stroke faltered. What if I was the only one who wasn’t chipping in for the cost of the villa? What if the others had gotten together to help out poor Jan and they were all covering my expenses? What if Gretchen was auditioning to be the group’s new Jan, a better prospect for Marcus: cuter, less of a downer, someone who could be counted on not to lie about what fucking day it was . . .

  The Jet Ski whipped past, a good twenty yards in front of me, but the wave from his wake caught me by surprise. It slapped me hard in the face before I could float over it. I came up sputtering and realized immediately that what had been crisp and clear was blurry, a smudge of light and color.

  My glasses.

  I had lost my glasses. I flailed in the water wildly, but I was out of my depth and couldn’t fix my position as the sea moved round me. I thrust my splayed fingers through the water, hoping to catch the drifting frames, staring down, my face almost under the surface, but I touched nothing, saw nothing.

  “No,” I said aloud, hands raking the water desperately. “No!”

  It was futile. And stupid. I had lost them. My only pair—of course they were—and I had lost them. I was more than angry. I was humiliated, ashamed even, because this was just so me.

  I continued to tread water a little longer where I was, sobbing quietly, my piggy snuffling loud in my ears as the infuriating fucking jet skier zoomed away so that I had the Aegean to myself. At last I began my pathetic splashing back to the shore.

  I remembered coming out of the optician’s shop when I was twelve in my first pair of glasses, astonished by the clarity of the bricks in the wall across the street.

  People can see like this? I had wondered, amazed to the point of disbelief. It had always seemed to me quite logical that things got harder to see the farther away they were, and I had breezed through the first decade of my life sure in my own mind that there was nothing wrong with my eyes. No one else had figured it out either because I developed ways of hiding the truth, even from myself. I sat at the front of class; I kept clear of sport, professing that I would rather read books; and when other people pointed things out that I couldn’t see, I pretended I could.

  More coping strategies. More lies.

  But my eyes were terrible. So bad, in fact, that it was only because the beach was largely deserted that I was able to find the others as I splashed my way out of the water. If it had been crowded, my humiliation would have been increased by having to wander from group to group, peering . . .

  But I found my chair without a word and braced myself for the questions about what I had done with my specs. But the questions didn’t come. No one noticed. Not even Marcus, and while it was a relief not to have to explain my idiocy aloud, this too felt like a kind of defeat.

  I lay in my recliner, eyes shut, angry at myself and at the others for not realizing I was upset. I stayed like that for ten whole minutes, so locked in my own head that it took me a while to note the edge in Simon’s voice.

  “I thought the whole point was that we would come to the beach on our way to get them from the airport?”

  “But we’re hot and sweaty and covered in salt and lotion,” Melissa wheedled. “It’s over an hour in each direction to the airport, and we’ll just take up space in the car.”

  “Kristen and Brad are expecting to see you there,” said Simon. “I’m not the fucking chauffeur, Mel.”

  “Come on, Si,” said Melissa. “It’s such a waste of the afternoon . . .”

  “For you,” Simon shot back. They were keeping their voices low but everyone could hear. “I have to drive there and back regardless.”

  “And I appreciate it,” said Melissa.

  “So you say,” Simon snapped. “But you’d rather lie in the sun.”

  “Of course I would! Who wouldn’t? Right, Gretchen?”

  “Well, sure,” said Gretchen, guardedly.

  I kept my eyes shut, determined not to be drawn in.

  “Maybe we could call a cab to get them,” Simon mused. “Bring them here, then we all go up to the villa . . .”

  “They’re expecting you,” said Melissa.

  “They’re expecting us,” Simon returned.

  “Come on, sweetie,” said Melissa. “Don’t make us all go.”

  “Fine,” said Simon, standing abruptly and snatching up his towel so fast that I felt a faint shower of sand on my legs.

  “Simon!” Melissa exclaimed. “Careful!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” Simon replied with mock politeness. “Did I disrupt your busy day of sitting?”

  “Don’t start, Simon,” said Melissa. “I’ve done as much as you to make everything nice.”

  “I’m the one ferrying everyone back and forth from the airport! By myself.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  It was Marcus. I turned in surpri
se and opened my eyes, dismayed to find how indistinct everyone looked.

  My glasses.

  But I didn’t need perfect vision to see that Simon was glaring at Melissa.

  “That’s OK, Marcus,” he said. “This isn’t your fight.”

  “It’s OK,” Marcus answered, sitting up. “I could use a break from the sun, anyway.”

  Simon turned to look at him, and everything about him softened a little, the tension draining from his face and shoulders.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Sure,” said Marcus. “Gives us the chance to do some manly bonding. You know . . . talk football. Boobs.”

  “Deal,” said Simon. “I have things to say on both.”

  “As do I, brother man, as do I. See you all later.”

  I nearly offered to join them, but I couldn’t, and not just because it would feel disloyal to Melissa. Simon walked away without another word.

  “Big baby,” said Melissa, pushing her sunglasses back into place and sitting back in her lounger. “I’m ready for another drink.”

  I had seen Brad and Kristen less than the others, only once, in fact, since our first visit to Crete, and even then they had been more peripheral to the group, though I suppose that was true of everyone but Melissa. She was the sun at the heart of our little solar system, the gravity that drew us in and held us together. Simon was next, of course, a giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn, though with the looks of Apollo, as I’ve suggested, and the personality of Mars. I said this once to Marcus and he had agreed, though he’d suggested that since we were in Greece, we’d be better off thinking of Simon as Ares rather than Mars. He had said it half to himself, as if he was making a point, but when I asked him why he had corrected me when he knew it had just been a mental slip on my part, he replied, “Oh, you know me. Always the teacher.” He had said it miserably, with a kind of low-grade contempt for himself that bothered me.

  But a certain amount of self-loathing was inevitable around our newfound friends. They all had a glow about them, the halo of beauty and prosperity. If Melissa and Simon were the heart of our solar system, Brad was its Mercury—sorry, Marcus, Hermes—shimmering and changeable but fascinating and, in its way, beautiful. My first thought was that Kristen was our Venus—Aphrodite—but with hindsight, she was more a comet: mystifying, spectacular, and rare.