Lying

by Lauren Slater

  I went to an AA meeting that afternoon, but I couldn’t connect. Depression came back. I filled my mouth with butter cookies.

  I was so easily derailed in those days, just like an alcoholic, newly sobered, can sink straight into a drink.

  I had tastes in my mouth, tastes like vodka and gin. My stomach felt sick. At the meeting they lit incense and the incense smelled of piss.

  I pulled a prayer book out from the wooden pocket of the pew. I opened it and closed my right eye. With my left eye, I watched the meaningless march of words, surgically shattered.

  “Newcomers speak,” someone said.

  I looked up. I opened both eyes and looked up.

  “It’s newcomers’ night,” Helen said. “We dedicate this microphone to the stories of those new to sobriety or new to the program itself.”

  I was sitting next to Brad. “Go on,” he said. He elbowed me. “Why don’t you speak? You’re new to the program and so far you haven’t done a drunk-a-logue.”

  Drunk-a-logue was the word AAers used to describe what they did up there, in the microphone. They told the woeful tales of their drinking days; they repented in front of everyone.

  “No,” I said. “Not now.”

  “Go on,” Brad said. He was speaking loudly. He even gave me a little shove, the jerk.

  Amy turned from the front pew. “Lauren,” she said, “I think it’s your time. I think it’s time.”

  And before I knew it everyone was saying, “Go on, Lauren, tell us your tale, Lauren, the story saves, Lauren,” and the incense smelled like piss, my mouth pinging with phantom spirits, I felt bad, because of Dr. Neu, or maybe just a seizure, a physical thing, and Jesus flying far above me, as small as a mosquito in the sky, I could not connect.

  And I was wafted up there, a breeze blew me up there, the voices a kind of aura carrying me, running before, standing before, them. Them. And the microphone, it looked like, like a microphone, a device to deepen my voice.

  This, I thought, was my chance to tell the truth. They wanted my story, I would tell them my story. I was not an alcoholic, I suffered from a different disease. I had told them I was an alcoholic because in some deep sense it seemed true. Alcoholism can stand in for epilepsy, the same way epilepsy can stand in for depression, for disintegration, for self-hatred, for the unspeakable dirt between a mother and a daughter; sometimes you just don’t know how to say the pain directly—I do not know how to say the pain directly, I never have—and I often tell myself it really doesn’t matter, because either way, any way, the brain shivers and craves, cracked open.

  And yet there is always the desire to find the words that refer directly to reality, fact and truth together. I wanted to try. Try. My heart pounded. I can come up with no better phrase. My heart was a huge hammer pounding, pounding on nothing but my blood. My blood splashed around. I thought I would faint. “Tell your tale, Lauren,” and I saw my tale, and God, I wanted to tell it as it really was and have them love me, have them listen to me still. That is all we ever want, the one risk we’re too afraid to take.

  A fly landed on the rim of the microphone, black with sheer wings. I watched it crawl over the pores and the sound of its tiny tread filled the room, crackle.

  I couldn’t. I felt lost. I felt frightened. It’s hard to break old habits. I relapsed, just like an alcoholic. I said:

  “My name is Lauren.”

  “Hello, Lauren,” everyone answered.

  “And I am an alcoholic,” I said. I started to cry.

  “You’re brave,” someone said. “Admitting the truth is the bravest, most healing thing.”

  “I have never been able to admit or even know the truth,” I continued. I took a deep breath. “It’s part of my disease. I had my first drink, what I mean by that is my disease began, when I was ten years old. We were in Barbados, and my mother, she was an alcoholic, and she was drinking a lot. It was night, New Year’s Eve, and I remember all the lights and the sound of the ocean crashing. And my mother got very drunk, insulting people and showing off at the piano. And a great sadness but also a great pride filled me, and somehow, I link my disease to these two emotions: sadness and pride. And my mother.”

  I paused. My tears dried. My voice got smooth and confident. I felt the story take shape, and it really was true; it flew from me.

  “After that first episode,” I said, “my disease got worse. I started, you know, doing it at home, in school, all the time, just stumbling around and making a real fool of myself. When I think back on my behavior now, I am humiliated. Just humiliated. But I couldn’t control myself then, and I can’t even really control myself now; all I remember is stumbling, and tripping, and the stink. I remember the stink.”

  I lowered my gaze. I looked back up.

  “The stink,” I said, “of my sickness.

  “My parents were beside themselves, even though, well, my mother was just as sick, you know? But they focused on me. That’s what happens in dysfunctional families, one person gets focused on and absorbs all the craziness. I was that person. They sent me away. I went to a hospital-like place in Kansas, where nurses and nuns tried to help me out. Nuns taught me how to cope with life, how to be strong and practical, by scrubbing floors, by washing windows and baking bread; it was therapy. And it helped. I loved those nuns. I first felt God in their presence.”

  “Amen,” someone said.

  My voice rose, a choir of confidence.

  “And you know what? When I got home from this school I was better for a while, but then, the disease … It’s a disease of—”

  I stopped. Everyone was looking at me. I had them in my hands. I felt this was the best drunk-a-logue anyone had ever done. It wasn’t what I was saying, but how I was saying it, my voice so genuine, so painful, so utterly, absolutely authentic, and it was! It was!

  It wasn’t!

  “It’s a disease of what?” I shouted. I felt the fire in me.

  “It’s cunning and baffling,” someone said.

  “What else?” I shouted, my mouth right up against the microphone.

  “Of physical and spiritual anguish,” someone else shouted out.

  “People,” I said. I lowered my voice and the audience lowered with me. We all went down, tight together, woven in the strands of my story.

  “People, it’s a disease of relapse. Relapse!” I said, “And that’s what happened to me after I came back from the convent. I relapsed, I became an adolescent, and my disease progressed. I started stealing. I walked right into my neighbors’ houses and stole, and let me tell you this. It is worse, spiritually speaking, to steal from a neighbor than to steal from a store, even if you take your neighbor’s toilet paper. Because the Bible says to love your neighbor, but it doesn’t say to love your stores.”

  I paused and looked around me again. Someone tittered. The stained glass windows seemed to be glowing with a preternatural brightness; red, rose, lime. I lifted.

  “I stole from my neighbors and then, later on, I stole from books, lifted words and phrases. And I was such a lonely, needy kid that instead of hiding my disease like a lot of alcoholics do, I showed it off. You people,” I said. “You people talk about hiding your whiskey bottles, your martini glasses, your slurring words; well, I didn’t. I made sure everyone saw, and even when I wasn’t having an episode I pretended I was. I know that sounds weird, to exaggerate your disease, to entirely create your disease, but that’s what happened. Even when I was sober, I stumbled and slurred and went into emergency rooms, and in this way I learned how to talk to the world and to hide from it, both at the same time. Showing off,” I said, “is itself a kind of hiding.”

  I paused to let my words sink in.

  “The clown is the loneliest person,” I said.

  “The brighter the clothes,” I said, “the more somber the soul.

  “I hid,” I said, “through lies, but at the same time, every tale I told expressed a truth. It has been very confusing for me.”

  I stopped.

  The
room was dead quiet. “What is sobriety?” I said. “It’s not limited to alcohol, it’s a whole life concept that can apply to everyone. Therefore, I can be in AA whether I drink or don’t because AA is about the sober soul. This,” I said, “this is what you people have helped me with. You have given me a way to tell my tale, but at the same time you have shown me how to sit with emptiness, and it’s been very very difficult for me.

  “You don’t need the details,” I said. “You don’t need all the little niggling facts. You don’t need to know that I drank this on one night, that on another, because those facts are irrelevant. The only thing that’s relevant is that I have a disease—no, that I have the disease, and I am here to be healed.

  “Help me.”

  Everyone clapped like crazy and cried, even the men. “Oh my God,” they said, “that was so honest.”

  Inside of me, my heart crashed off a cliff again and again; girl gone, Gomorrah.

  • • •

  I went home and poured myself some wine. I told myself I’d spoken 99.9 percent correctly, except that I was describing another disease, so I shouldn’t feel bad, but I felt very bad. I told myself that the figurative truth means more than the literal truth, but I still felt bad. I felt like a liar. I loved Elaine. I loved Amy. I loved Brad and Sue and Anne and Mike. My friends. And yet I was surrounded by smoke.

  I poured myself a glass of red wine. In the clear goblet, the drink blazed like a tulip.

  I drank the wine, and then I had more, and then more still, but I could not, would not, get drunk. My aim was to get drunk so I could make my tale true retrospectively at least. However, I stayed stubbornly sober. My body seemed to be telling me Here, here is the truth, truth begins in the body, and the body is made by God.

  I looked at my hand. Sometimes, one of the symptoms of epilepsy is the sense that a piece of your body does not belong to you. I held up my hand, though, and saw for sure it was mine.

  “This is my hand,” I said.

  I once read that fact is the basis of all morality. Part of me had always pooh-poohed that, because anyone with depth knows the emotional truth means so much more.

  And yet, sitting there, I felt a fact in me. For the first time, maybe ever in my life, I felt I had a definite fact, and the fact was in my stomach, solid and soft both, a stone with a shape I could see; I could see! I can see! And this is what I saw:

  A half-empty wine bottle.

  A goblet bright as a tulip.

  She is not an alcoholic.

  I am not an alcoholic.

  Now tell.

  I decided to proceed as follows. I felt a firm orientation, knowing what I was not. I blinked and looked around. It was June, then, and the early roses were fluffing out, and clouds with clear outlines sailed across the sky.

  Each slat in each picket fence seemed so separate, so freshly white.

  Our AA group had planned a weekend retreat to a monastery in New Hampshire, a Franciscan monastery where hooded brothers would lead us in prayer and contemplation. There would be services in a country church, small stone rooms with narrow beds, no excess anywhere, a world of pure is.

  I would tell on that weekend retreat. My diseased brain is a series of crisscrossed nerves and mismatched signals, of auras that perpetually blend. And my personality, for reasons physical and other, makes that blending even worse by the need to boast and fib till the cows come home. Well here, at this country monastery, the cows were coming home. Since my drunk-a-logue, for the first time in my life I felt clear, like God had washed my eyes with Windex, I saw what I was not, and I saw that the self is forever surrounded by the loneliest smoke unless it can tell its true tale. I saw I loved Elaine, and Amy, and God himself, and that every intimacy is eroded by any deceit.

  I lived alone in a studio apartment. I missed the world.

  I packed a weekend bag.

  We drove up there in a van. Elaine sat on one side of me, Amy on the other, and we ate popcorn. We went over a bridge and deep beneath us a river swept over rocks, sent spray into the air. I leaned my head out the window and felt each distinct drop hit my face, moisten my lips, touch my tongue: tell.

  That night, over dinner, Brother Joseph read us a story. Afterward, we went into the den for our AA group. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” Elaine said. “You look upset.”

  My palms felt clammy. How do you say to an AA group that you’ve been, well, that you don’t have the very disease you’ve led them to believe you have? How do you say that after they’ve told you what an inspiration you are, how totally honest you are; I wanted them to love me.

  I wanted them to say, Okay.

  Inside of me, I felt my fact. I felt the smooth stone washed by the river of God, bright blue in my stomach.

  It grew dark. We lit a fire, sat in the den. Instead of using a podium format, we went around in a circle. People spoke about gratefulness and relapse and fearless and searching moral inventories. When it was Elaine’s turn she said, “I did my fifth step a few weeks ago with Lauren. Lauren is special. There is something in the way she listens. You feel she is taking you in. You feel cleansed.”

  Everyone looked at me. I shrugged.

  “Since Lauren’s drunk-a-logue,” Brad said, “I have felt newly sober. I have been reminded of my priorities, which have to do with articulating experience.”

  It was my turn then. I was so scared I lost my whole body. I could feel only my mouth, my tongue, huge and glowing in the darkened room.

  “Look,” I said, and I pictured my tongue flickering, fat. “I want to thank everyone in this group for their support. I want to thank everyone in this group for being so accepting. I am hoping that after I tell you what I have to tell you tonight, you will accept me still.”

  It was so quiet then, I could hear only the fire crackling in the fireplace, each flame forked.

  “I don’t,” I said, “I don’t really have a drinking problem. I don’t think I am really an alcoholic, I don’t have that disease, I’m sorry, I’ve been confused, but I’m sure, I’m sure, I’m really not an alcoholic my life has been difficult in so many ways except I really really don’t drink in a problematic way I don’t and I’ve been needing to say this out—”

  “Shhh,” Brad said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  Elaine came over and knelt by me. “We see this all the time,” she said.

  “It was too soon,” Amy said. “We shouldn’t have pushed you to do that drunk-a-logue. You’re too early in recovery. Too much truth can overwhelm a person.”

  “I’m not overwhelmed,” I said. “I’m just not an alcoholic.”

  “Denial,” Elaine said, squeezing next to me on the sofa. “Denial always kicks in when we get too close to the truth.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Shhh,” she said.

  “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” everyone was saying, everyone leaning in toward me, their faces stained and dripping with firelight, their shushing sounds soft and comforting, blurry and rocking. I leaned back into them. I leaned on someone’s shoulder. Silk. The stone in my stomach turned to silk, and then melted away. I thought, Well, maybe I am an alcoholic, after all the AAers say my mother is and Amy said it’s a question of genes, the other night I did drink too much, didn’t I, haven’t I, I could be, I got confused, and my fact blew away, and I found myself back in the world I knew best, the strange warped world, a world of so many stories—I am an alcoholic I am not an alcoholic; I am an epileptic I am not an epileptic—a world peopled with princes, with color, with cities of salt and perpetual, perpetual possibilities, plots unfolding one into the other, I could be I might be, and there are so many ways to tell a tale; oh, said Shakespeare, oh what webs we weave.

  And I leaned into the web, which the spider of my soul made for me. Spiders are ugly, lonely creatures. They make webs and live in that lace like spinsters, live in that lace lonely. “Shhh,” everyone was saying, “you’re in denial,” everyone was saying, and I felt grateful that nothing would change, and then I felt furio
us, I mean furious that nothing would ever, ever change for me, that I would never land on the literal, that I would never maintain to them, “I am not an alcoholic,” or to you, “I am not an epileptic, I am really really not an epileptic, I’ve had many problems in my life, but epilepsy has not been one of them.” Even if I wanted to tell you this (and I do not want to tell you this; fall with me, please), I could not maintain my claim to you, because you would probably question me and say, “You mean after all this you’ve never had a seizure?” and then I would lose my ground and say, “Well, my whole life has been a seizure, I have a fitful, restless brain, I feel I have several selves, I have had many serious psychiatric and neurological problems, and even if there was no Kansas, and even if there were no nuns, there were many nurses—women in white, women in white—tall tales, the truest way I know, and Sartre, who says the metaphorical world and the material world blend and blur, become each other; believe me, I have suffered seizures.”

  And I looked at the AAers whom I had tried to tell, because the burden of living in limbo, of never coming down, clean and hard like a hammer on the nail of absolute knowing, was at once just too heavy and just too tempting. And so I looked at those AAers who would not hear me. They would not hear me! There they were with their solid, sure faces, everyone dripping like demons with firelight, they were so damn cocky, they with their solid little steps, their maps and rules, a fucking cult they were. “Shhh,” they said. “You’re in denial,” they said.

  Somewhere, a door slammed shut in me. A child screamed, temper tantrum. “Look,” I said, but their empathy drowned me out. “I have to go,” I said, and I stood. I don’t remember what happened next. I felt hate. Is that a fact? I felt hate. I ran out of the room.

  • • •

  In the fourteenth century the fact was that the world was flat; we now know for a fact it’s round. We once knew for a fact that the sun and the stars and all the other planets orbited the earth, which was a pearl, a throne in the center of the entire sky. Aristotle announced that if a couple copulated facing north or south, a boy would be born; east or west for a girl. Now we know that’s not true, but for a fact, sex prior to ovulation makes a female, during makes a male; we can control. Take salts and your skin diseases will go away; a pink bath helps you breathe. Epilepsy today is definitely a physical thing, but two hundred years ago it was definitely a demon. You can be cured, today, with drugs, but long ago the same cure came through stork’s dung, the liver of a she-goat, an amulet of stones taken from the stomach of a swallow at the waxing moon.