The Perfect Liar

by Thomas Christopher Greene

  She cleaned the kitchen, finished off the bottle of wine she had started, and though she knew she was definitely going to pay for it tomorrow, she liked the way it made her feel. She suddenly wanted to dance and had this pang of memory of being younger and going out to clubs in New York. When she was with her girlfriends and a favorite song would come on. How they all recognized it from the opening beat and rose up as one to go to the dance floor.

  She remembered what it was like to live like that—how carefree she once was with her body, how it felt to move without thinking, the time before she became aware of every tiny sensation and thought it meant certain death. Sometimes it was hard to remember that there was a time before when she lived in fear of losing her mind.

  When the kitchen was clean, she drifted upstairs. She stopped outside Freddy’s closed door for a moment and listened. She knocked softly. He didn’t answer, so she tried the door and it opened.

  To her surprise, he was asleep on his bed and fully clothed, his comforter to the side of his curled-up body. She walked over to him, pushed his hair to the side, and kissed him gently on the forehead. He stirred for a moment but did not wake. She pulled the comforter over him and left the room.

  She went to the bedroom she shared with Max. He was asleep, too, under the covers, his mouth slightly open, and all the lights were on. Susannah considered climbing into bed with him but she wasn’t tired.

  What was wrong with these two? She was up before both of them and maybe it was just the wine, but the night felt young to her.

  She thought brightly about smoking a cigarette. She was pleasantly drunk now. She returned downstairs, and in the kitchen she fetched her pack of American Spirits from above the refrigerator and went out to her spot, through the back door and under the eaves.

  The rain had stopped and the night air was sweet like flowers. To her left, the moon, a day away from being full, had just cleared the evergreen trees in the neighbor’s yard. The moon was hazy with clouds. She lit her cigarette and inhaled deeply. God, she loved smoking. She knew it was the worst thing in the world for her, but she loved the feel of the slender cigarette in her fingers, the lit tip, the taking of the cloud of smoke into her mouth and down her throat.

  “Mostly,” Joseph used to say to her in session, “you like it for the control: the taming of fire in your hand. It’s an ancient impulse. It’s also the world’s most perfect antidepressant. So it’s no surprise you enjoy it, Susannah. Even though it is the poor man’s suicide.”

  She hated sometimes how Joseph came to her uninvited, his words like talismans, so that every action she committed there he was, long dead, having something to say. Sometimes she wished he would stop narrating her life, trying to define her from the grave.

  She smoked greedily and looked at the moon. The moon was fat and hazy as she began to walk. The grass was wet under her sneakers and all around her the air was warm and moist. Winter took forever here to lift, but spring came on like thunder.

  Susannah walked through the cut in the hedges and then around the front of the house to the street. The neighborhood was whisper quiet, though in the distance she heard the crawl of cars going down Main Street. The only lights were from the streetlamps, which glowed yellowish in the hazy night, and the grand old Victorian houses were hulking and dark. The rain that had fallen earlier was puddled in places on the asphalt.

  She didn’t have a plan. She just walked down the sleeping street, deeper into the neighborhood and away from town. She walked past house after house, in the most exclusive neighborhood in Burlington. She didn’t know who lived in them, with a few exceptions, but she knew they were university people—professors or administrators—and some executives from places such as IBM, which had a corporate campus nearby.

  The moon was her guide and she walked toward it, taking a left at the end of the block and climbing up the small hilly street, marveling at that grayish-white orb above the trees in the starless sky.

  She found the fox on the side of the road. She almost didn’t see it. She almost walked right past it. But out of the corner of her eye she saw this shadowy form lying on the ground, and when she went to it, she saw that it was a small red fox that must have been hit by a car.

  Susannah bent down and took out her phone and scrolled up to the flashlight and turned it on.

  He was on his back, his head lolled to one side, dead. He was lean and beautiful with long threads for whiskers and brown marble eyes and his fur was the deepest red except for his belly, which was the color of straw. If he were not lying on the side of the road, she would not have surmised that a car had killed him. He looked unmarked. She reached down and touched him, first his shoulder, then his spindly legs, and his belly. To her surprise, he was not cold, and when she petted his belly, it was slightly warm to the touch.

  Susannah turned off the light on her phone and slid the phone into her back pocket. She put her hand under the fox’s head and her other hand under his back and picked him up like a baby. She stood slowly and brought him to her chest, and through her shirt she could feel the sharp click of his dead claws.

  WALKING BACK HOME, SHE HELD him to her chest like a stray kitten she had found. One car rolled down the street and past and the headlights lit her up for a moment before going beyond and taking a right and heading down the hill.

  In the kitchen, Susannah laid the fox on the big round cutting board. She laid him on his back and he slumped slightly to the side and now in the light she saw how beautiful he truly was, the long whiskers and the thick red fur and those soft, sentient brown eyes.

  He must not have been dead long, for he was warm and limber in her hands. When she was a child, Susannah’s father would sometimes go upstate where a friend of his from Spain had decamped from Queens when he retired. Her father and his friend would spend the weekend trapping rabbits, as they had done in the old country. When her father returned home with two or three rabbits, he would present them to her mother as if they were necklaces, holding them up by the legs so she could see how they hung fat and long.

  Susannah’s mother’s eyes would light up with this gift, as they did at Christmas when every year he bought her a new Lanz nightgown.

  Her mother would take the rabbits into the kitchen and open them up below the neck, deftly disemboweling them with her strong hands, removing the organs and cleaning the insides under cold water. She did the same with fish he caught at this point on the East River.

  Now, holding a sharp slender knife, Susannah almost instinctively crossed herself. She wasn’t religious anymore, but in moments like this, she still believed in being present with the sacred.

  She opened the fox from stem to stern. She reached in and took all his warmth into her fingers. This was an act of love, she thought, a bringing back of life.

  She cleaned him and washed him carefully in the sink, bathing him like a newborn.

  In a few days, Susannah would take him in a shoe box to a place in the northeast kingdom of Vermont, where a taxidermist would finish him, stuff him like a toy, and return him to her, and she would keep him in a box in her closet, under a pile of sweaters, hidden like a secret.

  TO MAX, SATURDAY SEEMED BOTH far away and ridiculously close. That week went by like a blur, classes and office hours, a lecture he gave at a nearby half-ass college barely even registering as something to remember, his voice in a big room echoing out like some lounge singer doing it by rote and no one giving a shit because they recognize the song. They all rose to their feet when he finished. Afterward, a line of students and faculty waited to talk to him when he came down the stairs from the stage.

  It was all so fucking easy sometimes, Max thought.

  At home Susannah seemed strong to him, the latest darkness having lifted. That Thursday, he decided to take her out, a last-minute date night. It was another beautiful and warm late-spring evening. They ate at Leunig’s, a busy bistro down on Church Street, and they sat outside and drank a bottle of red wine and slurped oysters and ate steak frites an
d watched the people walk by and listened to a young couple busking.

  He was on the fiddle and she sang and at their feet was a mangy pit bull. Behind them were their oversize backpacks, everything they owned. Their clothes were tattered and their hair long and scraggly and dreadlocked. They were crusty punks, as Max once was. Max looked at the boy’s pants, cut off at the knees, his beard that didn’t grow full, the dirt caked onto his calves, and Max tried to remember himself back then, before he shed that life like a snake sheds its skin.

  But he couldn’t. Over the years the layers had grown too thick.

  When they were leaving, Max and Susannah stopped in front of the buskers, and they were quite good. The boy’s playing was strong and her voice, though high and reedy, had this great Southern inflection that made the hairs stand up on the back of Max’s neck. From his wallet Max peeled out two twenty-dollar bills and held them in the air so the boy’s eyes, small and brown, could see them before Max theatrically dropped them into the fiddle case. The boy gave Max a huge tobacco-stained grin.

  “That’s generous,” Susannah said.

  “I don’t mind paying for art.”

  MAX SAW DAVID HAMMER ONLY once that week—in the hallway outside their offices. David’s was about three doors down from Max’s on the third floor of that old brick building. Max was going out as David was coming in, and right when they ran into each other, Max’s phone began to buzz and he looked down to see a Manhattan number he did not recognize. Manhattan, the Western center of the art world, was usually good news and Max wanted to answer it, but there was David, wearing his usual button-down and jeans and Chuck Taylor sneakers with no laces.

  Max looked again at his phone.

  “Hey, Max. Up for more punishment Saturday?”

  “You bet.… Sorry, I need to take this.”

  “Pick you up at nine,” David said, brushing past Max and into his office with its wide view of the quad, whereas Max, being the new guy, despite his appointment, stared out at the parking lot.

  “See you then.” Max then walked, answering the phone.

  “Max W?”

  “This is him.”

  The voice on the other end was calling from Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street giant. Would Max be willing to come give his “You Are the Art” talk to their employees at the annual meeting this June? He had come to their attention, the man said, when his TED Talk of the same name went viral a few years before. Goldman was interested in having its traders think about their work as art, as much as science.

  The enemy, Max thought, and this was precisely the type of thing that would barbecue one in the art world. “I’m rather busy.”

  “We’ll pay you fifty thousand dollars.”

  “You got my attention. Why me?”

  “Good. We’ve been impressed with what we are hearing about you. And we usually bring in someone out of the box, not what you might expect Wall Street types to listen to at an annual meeting.”

  “That’s by design. I don’t allow videotaping or the use of phones, though. It’s meant to be a live experience.”

  “Understood. By the way, Bon Jovi has the same condition.”

  “Bon Jovi?”

  “Yes, the band. They are going on after you.”

  “Amazing.” Max couldn’t help but laugh. From homeless to opening up for Bon Jovi, hair rockers who do stadium shows, and on Wall Street, of all places.

  America can be a bright, beautiful place some days.

  IT WAS WARM AND THE sunlight dappled through the trees and onto the trail as they finished stretching and set off on the same run they had done the week before. David led and Max followed and the deer run they were on was bone-dry now, hardened dirt, and David went fast moving up the steep hill.

  They did not run together—Max could tell David Hammer enjoyed this part, the competitiveness of it, as if he were putting Max in his place somehow, proving that David was the fitter of the two of them, as if that mattered a whit to Max.

  When they reached the top of the hill, Max’s chest was on fire, the breaths coming in pants, and this was the spot where they had stopped last week, but this time David did not so much as pause and instead plunged down the trail and Max followed. His knees burned with the downhill. The air was thick and still and the blackflies were out again and he smacked at them as he ran.

  Once again, David broke away from Max, the white of his baseball hat moving between trees far below. Max ran as hard as he could, aware of the pounding of his legs on the hard dirt, stepping over fallen logs, swiping at the cloud of tiny flies around his head.

  Max came out of the tree line and onto the rocky floor of the gorge. David stood near the edge of the pool, his hands on his hips. Max stopped running. Now that the pounding in his ears slowed, he could hear the raging water to his left where it fell ten feet in a torrent over the rocks.

  David turned his head to watch Max walk toward him.

  “You all right, old man?”

  Max shook his head. “Barely.”

  Max walked until they stood side by side. David Hammer was looking down into the water. Under his tight T-shirt Max could see the rise and fall of David’s breath, the intake in, the shape of his ribs, and then the long exhale out.

  They watched the rock-lined deep pool and the falls and the water that swirled violently in circles.

  David half turned his face to take in Max’s. “You never went to CalArts, did you?”

  Once, while on the road, Max watched a small guy beat the shit out of a bigger guy outside the bus station in Philadelphia because the bigger guy had tried to sell the small guy a dime bag of oregano. It didn’t seem as if he should have been able to take the bigger guy, and Max knew both of them vaguely from traveling, so another night he asked the small guy how he did it. Always hit first, he said. And don’t stop.

  David turned his head away from Max then, toward the falls. He was waiting for Max to answer. Max smashed into him like a linebacker, his shoulder low and aiming for his ribs.

  “What the fuck?” David Hammer said as he fell into the water.

  His head poked above the churning foam. Max watched as the current moved him swiftly away from Max in an arc and toward the falls. Only a hell of a strong current could move a man as if he weighed nothing. As David started to swim against it, Max jumped in after him.

  The water was freezing cold. It took Max like an undertow but on the surface. He spun almost halfway around, heading toward the center of the pool before moving almost into David Hammer’s arms. It was like water ballet, the two of them, a delicate and serious dance.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  But Max only smiled at David, Max’s biggest smile, the one he reserved for the end of a talk, when the crowd rose like a single organism, one loud thundering clap that filled the room, applause that he lived for, the moment when it engulfed him like an avalanche.

  The current brought them together as if in an embrace. It’s stunning, Max thought, when a man is going to die and has no idea. David Hammer’s eyes widened, his arms came up, and on his face was a look of complete puzzlement as Max rose up in the water and wrapped his arm around David’s head and locked him tightly to him and took him under the water.

  David knew the score now. He thrashed like a fish and was strong. His fingers were in Max’s face, his nails scratched furiously at him, but Max pushed down as hard as he could until he felt David go limp, then let go.

  Max bobbed and gasped for breath as he watched David Hammer surface and float away from him and under the falls where the water pounded his flaccid body.

  MAX WAS RUNNING ON ADRENALINE. Near the falls the currents were even stronger and he sensed the tumble of it everywhere, wanting to take his body and pull him down to the depths the way he had pulled David Hammer down, until Max was spinning as if he were in a washing machine and couldn’t get out.

  David was floating on his stomach as Max drifted toward him. Max watched David’s legs swish back and forth, as if he
was alive and building momentum to hurl his body toward the rocky face under the waterfall.

  Max kicked his legs to close in and suddenly it was like turbulence in an airplane when your stomach drops from the urgent loss of altitude. Max was under, under David, on his back, fighting to climb back up, but it was as if he were hooked to a rope at the bottom of the pool. He kicked as hard as he could.

  He came up spitting water, shaking the water from his head at the moment David barreled into him, solid as concrete, and then it was as if the entire weight of the waterfall, a winter’s worth of snowmelt, were pounding on his head and shoulders. The sound was deafening. Max shot under again, and he thought, This is the manner of my death. It ends here.

  His head smashed into rock. That was the last thing he remembered.

  THE FIRST THING MAX HEARD WAS the sound of water, lapping against him. He was beached like a canoe, half on a flat sliver of rock, half in six inches of stream. He blinked and opened his eyes. A searing pain was on the left side of his head. When he put his hand up there and brought it back down, Max saw the crimson red of his own blood sliding down his fingers.

  He pulled himself out of the water and sat up. Now he remembered getting sucked under, hitting his head. Looking up, he saw the falls straight ahead and off in the distance from where he sat.

  Somehow, unconscious, he had floated out of the pool and then down the slope of shallow stream to here, maybe fifteen feet from the mouth of the stone pool. How was he even alive?

  The flies were all over him like a piece of carrion. A dark swarm of them, tiny, were landing on his face, especially on where he was cut. He tried not to think about this.

  Max managed to get to his feet, swatting at the blackflies with one hand, while holding his aching head with the other. He had a moment of vertigo and thought he might go down, but somehow he willed himself to stay upright.