The Perfect Liar

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  Max smiled. “Okay.”

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept in a real bed. It highlighted to him how much his whole body ached from years of sleeping outside. He sank into the soft mattress and in moments he was out.

  When he woke, the sun was high in the sky and beaming in, the room stifling and smelling like old people. His room had its own bathroom—all the bedrooms did—and he stumbled in there and turned on the shower and kept the water cold and got under there and it felt like being reborn, all that water just pouring on him and wiping away whatever he had done the night before, whatever he had done for years now.

  When Max went downstairs, Max W had made coffee and was about to cook omelets for the two of them, as if they were a regular old couple all of a sudden.

  They spent the rest of that day fucking around. They climbed a little bit in the woods to see this view, the whole mountain range and, in the distance, Lake Champlain and on the other side Vermont. They nibbled on all kinds of food they found in the house, a bag of spicy venison jerky, and some chips that were sort of stale but still okay. They started drinking early because when it’s just two guys alone on a mountain and they don’t want to go anywhere, what else do they do?

  Max W made a case to go into town, maybe go to the one bar down there, but Max discouraged him. Max had decided he didn’t want anyone seeing both of them together.

  “Man, why?” he said. “We got everything we need up here.”

  So instead they made gin and tonics and sat on that giant porch and watched the sun slowly fall behind the hills. For dinner they grilled a saddle of lamb, something Max had never heard of but it was a huge hunk of meat, and they ate that with frozen peas they cooked in butter and some potatoes they threw in a hobo pack on the grill, which was Max’s contribution. A little road knowledge, he said.

  Max W opened a dusty old bottle of red wine, which was kind of sour and colored brown, and later Max wished he had paid more attention to what it was, for while he certainly couldn’t appreciate it then, it was probably some rare French vintage that he could have been conversant in, could reference at an opening or a cocktail party.

  The meal was memorable. Max could still remember the taste of that tender lamb when it was pulled away from the bone, the smell of the fat. After eating, they sat happy and full and watched the dark gather.

  They were next to each other in Adirondack chairs that were painted a deep dark green. The wine gave way to bourbon and Max W was getting drunk, and when he got drunk, his Southern accent went through the roof and he started to pontificate, picking up on the conversation they had had earlier about the whole art-world thing, and none of it made sense to Max and he wished Max W would quit it and let Max stare out into the dark and taste the smooth whiskey.

  Later, he would also remember the glass in his hand, a big old-fashioned tumbler, leaded glass, heavy. He would remember the fractured sky, the place between day and night, the buzzing in his head from the whiskey. He saw the way Max W looked at him in the half dark from a foot away, how his face floated there in the air, big and fat like a peach.

  What Max would never remember, though, was the whip slap of his arm, fast fast fast, or why he did it when he did, it was one of those things that just happened, instinct, id and fury taking over.

  In front of him, Max W’s face exploded as the glass hit it full on. It contorted sideways, mashing into itself and then releasing back to its full size. A half second later the blood was everywhere. The noise that came out of his mouth was terrifying. Max knew he had no choice but to finish what he had started then, which he did on that porch, and it didn’t matter that Max W screamed for there was no one for miles to hear him. Then he was silent, for every act of violence eventually leads to silence.

  Max was spent. He stumbled back into the big house and up those winding stairs and found his room from the night before and went into it and took off his stained clothes and collapsed onto the big canopied bed.

  THE NEXT MORNING THE SKY was gray out the windows and Max’s head ached from the booze, but he knew he had to reckon with a world of responsibility in that house. Max took the tablecloth off the huge dining-room table and he brought it out to the porch and he wrapped the body in it, which is how he thought of Max W now. He didn’t want to have to look at him. So he dragged him to the edge of the porch and left him there while he cleaned.

  He used towels on the big stuff and these he threw into the tablecloth with Max W. Then he used a spray bottle he found under the sink and paper towels and did his best to get everything up. He went around to every place in the house he could remember touching and he sprayed it down and wiped and scrubbed.

  Max decided to hike down and away from the house, where the land was steep and harder to access. It would be easier to move the body downhill, and since it was so pitched, someone walking was less likely to come upon him.

  He took a shovel he found in the garage and he needed to get as far away from the house as possible, but he also knew that when he returned to the site he would be dragging 150 pounds of dead weight awkwardly behind him.

  He picked a spot on the side of that mountain overgrown with moss between two spruce trees, and the forest floor was wet and the earth moved easily with each dig of the shovel. The mosquitoes were everywhere, though, in his hair, on his neck, and he felt them biting and huge, and while he swiped at them when he could, mostly he just worked through it, like some kind of penance. Soon he had a hole about three feet deep, and six feet long. He returned up the hill to the house.

  It took over two hours to get the bundle containing Max W down to the hole he had dug. He was too heavy to carry, so he dragged him like Santa Claus with a sack of toys as in some cartoon Max had seen when he was a kid.

  He dragged him through heavy brush and then downhill through trees and over stumps and by the time he got him down there it felt as if his arms were about to fall off. Max stood breathing heavy and looking at this pile that barely fit into the ground. It occurred to him that he should put all of Max W’s other stuff in there, too, his bag and his clothes and everything he had brought to the house with him. So before he filled in around Max W, he once again returned to the house.

  Max W’s backpack was in the kitchen where he’d left it. In there, in addition to his clothes, was a passport and a Dopp kit, which contained a barber’s clippers, the secret to how he kept his head so closely shaved.

  Mac took this out and went and looked at himself in the mirror. His hair, though already thinning in the front, was long and ragged and in places had rope-thick dreadlocks that hung down the sides of his head. He turned the clippers on to see if the batteries were charged and it came to life. He smiled into the mirror, though he couldn’t do this here. He couldn’t leave the hair with the DNA it would provide, and he couldn’t leave it anywhere near the house.

  In one of the bedrooms Max found a small antique round mirror on a stand and he took it and the clippers and went outside. This time, instead of hiking down the hill toward the new grave, he went up this scraggly hillside where the mountain continued. It was full of brush and slow going, but soon he found himself deep in the forest with the house far below.

  Max stopped in front of a rocky outcropping and balanced the mirror on top of it and looked at himself. He turned on the clippers and went to work.

  On the forest floor below, three years of his hair, three years of living on streets up and down the East Coast, fell onto old leaves and blended in.

  In the mirror, Max barely recognized the man staring back at him, his whole life cut away in seconds, and here he was, brand-new.

  He came back down the hill toward the house. As he was about to walk the final fifteen feet to the front porch, he heard the car before he saw it, parked in front with the engine running. Max was about to dive back into the woods but it was too late.

  The car, red and white with a light rack on top and the word SHERIFF emblazoned on the side, was facing where he stood some twenty yards
away, and anyone inside could easily have seen him.

  Max dropped the mirror and the clippers on the ground and took the last step out of the break of trees onto the scraggly lawn that led to the house. He looked at the car and wondered how this might go down. He wondered if he might have the opportunity to fight or to flee, or if he would get shot.

  The car door opened and a uniformed older man with a mustache got out and stood with the door cracked and gave him a wave that seemed entirely friendly.

  “Hey, Max,” he called.

  Max realized that with his newly shaved head and from a distance he looked like Max W. People see what they expect to see, and given the context, of course the sheriff thought he was Max W.

  “Hey,” he shouted back, trying to sound like Max W, faking a Southern lilt, but didn’t move any closer.

  “Heard there was someone up here, just wanted to make sure it was one of you all.”

  “Thanks.” Max waved again, as if to say Dismissed.

  “Were you hiking?”

  Max realized that fresh haircut aside, he must look rough and dirty, and he had to have blood on his clothes. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Well, all right then, be well.”

  Max waved as the sheriff backed his cruiser out and turned it around and went back down the narrow drive.

  Max went to work fast. He was hungry as hell but food could wait. He had been hungrier. He took all of Max W’s clothes and his bag and brought them down to the hole where he lay. Max shoveled in the hole and pressed the moss-covered earth down on top of it. He walked back five feet and examined his work. Other than for a few edges where he could see fresh dirt, it was as if nothing had happened there at all.

  Back at the house he continued cleaning until he was satisfied it looked as if they had never been there. Next, he took a hot shower and changed his clothes, and a half hour later Max was driving down the driveway in the Jeep, a new wallet and passport with him, and almost four hundred dollars that he had found in the wallet, which, by the scale he was accustomed to, practically made him rich.

  On the highway, Max stopped at a Burger King and ate until he felt sick. Then he drove straight to New York City, and a couple of blocks from Max W’s apartment on Fourteenth Street, he found a parking garage and here he left the Jeep, wiping it down, the steering wheel and the dash and anything else he might have touched.

  Max thought about going to Max W’s apartment and seeing what he could find there, but it was too risky. For one, he’d forgotten to ask if Max W lived alone. He dropped the keys into a sewer.

  That night he went to a dive bar in the Meatpacking District and there he met a pretty girl with brown eyes, and when she asked his name, he said out loud for the first time, “Max W.”

  “What’s the W stand for?”

  “Well, that I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.”

  She took him home, which was the whole goal, and he told her after they fucked and he lay there feeling all verbal, the words just spilling out of him as they did sometimes after he came, that he was an artist and was going to be famous someday. She said she believed him. She said it sincerely. She said that she would believe anything he said.

  When she left for her job as a bank teller in the morning, Max asked her if she minded if he slept in. She trusted him, because people always did.

  He used her computer and googled Max Westmoreland, and Maxwell Westmoreland and even Max W, but nothing was out there saying he was missing, or anything else, and it would be a month or so before Max would find an article saying Max W was gone and friends and family were concerned.

  But as far as Max knew, no one ever tied him to that great camp in the Adirondacks on that day in June. And it was as if Max W had just vanished.

  That was how Max became him, or not him, for his plan was never to be fully Max W but his own Max W. There was one notable exception, and this was why he decided to adopt the name.

  A few months later he wrote a letter to the California Institute of the Arts and gave Max’s name and Social Security number and his own new address in New York and asked for copies of transcripts for both his BFA and MFA in painting.

  When he created a résumé, it said he was a graduate with both degrees, and before long this child of the streets was hanging art in some of Manhattan’s most prestigious galleries. He would shape and sculpt this narrative for years. He would borrow from his life and the one he took when it made sense to him. He was not Max W from Charleston, South Carolina, with the trust fund and the historic family camp in the mountains of New York. He was Max W from West Bumblefuck, New York, who lived homeless on the streets before becoming an artist.

  One day Max was walking down a Chelsea street when he saw a bunch of kids sitting on the ledge of a building with their bags and their sign and their one scraggly dog. They were a group of crusty punks he used to run with. Max stopped in front of them and dropped a five into their bucket.

  “Thanks, brother,” this kid named Savage whom Max once hitchhiked with for days on end said to him. For a moment Max thought he saw a glimmer of recognition in Savage’s eyes but couldn’t be sure. Max kept walking and Savage didn’t say a thing. Max’s transformation was complete.

  Now, many years later, the plane circled above Burlington, Vermont. The rain had stopped, and below, Max could see the broad expanse of Lake Champlain, the small city below, and the craggy mountains on the other side of it. Somewhere beneath him were his house and his wife and his stepson. Max had no idea what he was coming home to. Down there was also someone who had figured out who he was, and now he needed to know not only who, but how much the person knew.

  FOR SUSANNAH, EVERYTHING WAS NORMAL about that day except for the note on the door. After she hung up with Max she placed the note in the cabinet where she kept her cigarettes—the cabinet of illicit things she tried to forget until she wanted them.

  She went about the business of her day, working on her breathing, the way to take her back down. She was always trying to remember how to breathe again. She took a hot shower and then cobbled together for lunch what she called a refrigerator salad, a bit of this, a bit of that. She drank some wine. But the note was still there and it was almost as if she could hear it, those words speaking to her from behind the wood. It was kind of like a loud clock that just kept ticking in a silent house, the sound of it always the same, but the mind making it seem to grow louder and louder.

  Susannah used to obsess about this sometimes. Not only how she could hear that ticking over and over but also this idea that the seconds themselves would never come back, as if they were things that appeared in the world and then vanished for eternity. And what did you do with your life, Susannah?

  Now there was a note and she wondered what those words meant. Why did they scare her so much? After all, Max was probably right. It was nothing. Maybe it was someone’s idea of a joke. Maybe the person even got the wrong house.

  That afternoon, though, Susannah jumped when the doorbell rang. She went to the door and in her hand was her phone, ready for calling 911. But when she looked out through the glass, there was Freddy, her son, coming home from school. What could be more normal?

  Susannah opened the door and he stood there looking exasperated. “Why’s the door locked?”

  “Oh,” she said, as if surprised. “I must have done it by accident when I came back from my run.”

  Freddy didn’t respond and went right to the kitchen, where he dumped his backpack and his skateboard on the counter and made himself a sandwich, a new thing for him, making sandwiches, ham and cheese on bread, drowning it with Russian dressing. He ate it with his earbuds in as if she weren’t even there.

  But today Susannah was grateful for this simple, predictable thing, and she knew as soon as he was done, he would disappear upstairs into his room and fall into his video-game world, which drove her crazy, but Max less so, Max saying the games are not as bad as they look. There were even some benefits, he said, but all Susannah saw was killing.


  Though it was one of the things she loved about Max, how he related to Freddy. Max had proposed to Susannah six months after they met, in the exact same spot where she had first seen him come off the elevator. Lydia had summoned her to her apartment and Susannah was anticipating some small crisis, which was often the case when Lydia summoned her. Once she went all the way uptown because Lydia couldn’t open a jar and was throwing a fit because she couldn’t reach Tam, her housekeeper, who had the afternoon off.

  But this time when the elevator opened into Lydia’s apartment, Max was standing there with a big shit-eating grin on his face. Behind him was Lydia, as if she was orchestrating everything, which in some way she was.

  “What is this?”

  Max dropped to one knee.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Baby, I fell in love with you in this very spot, the moment I first saw you. I wasn’t looking for love. I wasn’t looking for anything, other than to meet Lydia. But there you were with those amazing eyes that I just fell into. I want you to be my wife. Will you marry me?”

  Susannah put her hands over her face and cried. “You ready to be a dad? You always said you couldn’t imagine it. Are you?”

  “I love Freddy.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  Behind Max, Lydia clasped her hands together and swept at her hair and Susannah went to Max and he slipped that antique ring that he found somehow on her finger. When he rose, they kissed and hugged while Lydia watched over them, the same way she watched over Max’s career now.

  Not that they had tons of money, but Susannah wanted a wedding. Max wanted to go down to City Hall and just knock it out. She had already done that once with Joseph and she didn’t want that to be their story, too. Susannah had this idea of Freddy giving her away, the only family she had anymore, and this was Max’s point as well, that he didn’t have any family either, so why go through the motions of something?

  She told him that he was thinking small for once. “We have all kinds of family, just not the conventional kind. Look at all these people we know.”