Liar

by Rob Roberge

  Until later when Sasha is going down on you. After you come—in what, you now can’t help thinking of as a loud, goofy, and pathetically grateful orgasm—Sasha sits up and makes a disgusted face like she’s just eaten a handful of rancid pistachios. Not her usual reaction. She looks left, then right and you can tell something is terribly wrong. She gags and coughs onto the floor—also the opposite of her usual reaction. She wipes the back of her hand on her lips and sniffs her wrist and forearm, wincing again.

  “You are taking vitamins?” she says.

  “Not anymore, I’m not.”

  Later, you tell Concetta what happened. Between peals of laughter, she gives you some of the best advice you will ever get. “Listen. You are not healthy anyway, no matter how well you think that shit made you feel. The odds of you finding something other than vitamins that are good for you are pretty good. The odds of finding a woman who makes you sound the way you sound when you come with her are not very good at all.”

  She opens two beers and gives you one. “I’d say lose the fucking vitamins. Or give me her number.”

  You never take a vitamin again.

  —

  APRIL 15, 1912: Among the more than one thousand people who die in the sinking of the Titanic is Thomas Andrews, the marine architect who designed the ship, who becomes one of the few people in history killed by something they conceived and created.

  —

  1983: You have scars you lie about and scars you tell the truth about.

  The summer you’re seventeen, you tell people, you get chased by several cops for more than half an hour through the woods of your hometown. The same woods—though you don’t think about this until later—that Nicole was killed in when you were eleven. You don’t even remember why they were chasing you. You do remember being drunk. You remember the woods being dark and your body flooded with adrenaline and fear and sprinting over wet mossy stones and through the giant knuckled limbs of the trees. You hear them running behind you and you see the blur of their flashlights jumping up and down as they chase you.

  You turn to look back and see if they’re getting closer and you get clotheslined by a thick broken tree limb. Your head and chest stop. Your legs fly out in front of you and you’re instantly on your back and your head hits the ground hard. You have trouble breathing, but know you have to get moving. You run for another five or ten minutes and end up hiding in tall grass on the dammed-up side of the lake. You stay there with just your head above the water. You listen for a while until, finally, the cops give up and you hear their footsteps grow more and more distant. Soon you can only hear the crickets in the woods and the fish gently surfacing and feeding on bugs and you hear and feel your heart beating and your breathing, hard at first and then more calmly.

  You walk about a mile to a friend’s house and see in her bathroom mirror that you’ve opened a slice across your collarbone so deep you can see the milky gray-white of your bone, so wide you can fit your index finger into the cut and feel your bone through the split skin and severed muscle. Touching the bone makes you queasier than looking at it does. Your shirt is soaked with blood and lake water. Your friend gives you a washcloth and you press it to the cut. When you take it away and look in the mirror, you see the clean cut and the gray-white bone and then the blood pools again and all you see is red. And you press the washcloth against it for a while.

  This story is true.

  —

  1987: You have a round scar about the size of a quarter between the thumb and forefinger of your left hand—white around the circumference and a deep red in the middle. People ask about it and you tell them some guy was pissed at you and had a friend hold you down while he burned you with a cigar. You will tell this same story for years. People seem to believe it. You’re a fuckup. You’ve pissed off some angry people in the past.

  This is a lie.

  You give yourself the scar, burning your hand in the same spot repeatedly with the car cigarette lighter. You sit in your car and see your breath collect in puffs in the cold. You’ve got the key turned so that the electric is on but the engine is off. The car is dark. The streetlights glow a faded overexposed sepia on the rounded hills of snow that people have shoveled from their driveways and sidewalks. The Green Line train clatters on its tracks a couple of blocks away. You push the seat back and recline so much that you’re almost lying down. You’ve learned already that you have to be comfortable if pain is going to feel good.

  You pull the cigarette lighter out and it glows orange. You put your left hand on your thigh because you worry you’ll jerk away from the lighter if you don’t brace it against something, but your hand never moves as you press the lighter into that web of skin. It makes the same sound as Hawaiian lava when it joins the surf. The first time, you are surprised that it smells sweet and pleasant. You thought burning skin smelled horrible, but you were wrong—it’s body hair that makes burns smell so bad. You are reminded of this years later when you get your first brand and Gayle holds your hand and kisses you and you are not at all alone and you smell your burning skin again and you think of being in that car by yourself.

  The pain flashes and at first a chill shoots through your whole body, and then it’s as if the lighter is a drug being injected at the burn and you feel an incredibly calm, beautiful peace radiate from your hand into every cell of your body. Pain hurts when you don’t expect it, when you resist it. When you know it’s coming and you relax into it, you and the pain move together and it’s like you and the lighter make a complete electrical circuit that allows a current to flow through. Let it happen, you learn, and it feels good everywhere. Every jumpy, fractured nerve is smoothed by the pain. And all the hurt evaporates for a little while.

  When the lighter loses its heat, you take it away from your skin and reset it. The windows are fogged up and the streetlights are an expressionist blur now. When the lighter clicks to let you know it’s ready to go again, you light a cigarette and crack the window and feel the cold air, and you smoke and let your head fall, heavy and spent, against the headrest. There is no tension left in your body. You breathe the smoke in deeply.

  It’s years before you tell anyone how you really get that scar. Now it seems ridiculous that you wouldn’t have told someone what you did to yourself, but you are not the same person you used to be. Except, of course, when you are.

  —

  2010: You’re on your way home from an AA meeting in Palm Springs (your home group, which you attend every week) and you hit a traffic jam. Two lanes are down to one and there are cop lights ahead. You think you can go into the left lane and cut across through the grocery-store parking lot, but after you have swerved out of your lane and passed several cars, you realize it’s not possible. You try to get back into the single-lane flow of traffic. A cop comes over and beats on your door.

  “What? You think you’re some asshole who the rules don’t apply to?” he screams at you.

  You try to explain yourself. That you weren’t trying to cut ahead of the other cars but trying to get into the parking lot.

  “How much have you been drinking tonight?”

  You laugh.

  “What the fuck is so funny?” His anger reminds you of every small-time jerk with authority who has ever yelled at you.

  “I’ve been at an AA meeting,” you say.

  “AA meeting? That’s a great one. Yeah. I’ve never heard that.”

  You look up at him. His gray-white skin flashes shades of blue and red from the cruiser lights.

  He says, “Get out of the car.”

  “What?”

  “Get out of your fucking car!”

  Before you know what’s happening, he has you facedown on your hood and he’s going through your wallet. He tells you not to move while he calls you in. You’re shaking. There’s really nothing to be afraid of. There’s no information he can “call in” on you. Nobody wants you for anything. No matter how long the odds may have once been, you’re a respectable citizen. Still, you’re
afraid. You know that cops don’t need any real cause to bring you in for anything, and this guy seems to have it in for you. You find yourself thinking, Fucking low-rent loser. Get a fucking life. Go arrest someone who’s done something, for Christ’s sake. But you are in a familiar position of powerlessness with a man who seems irate at you for reasons you can’t fathom. You feel the heat from your engine warming your cheek on the hood. Your legs are spread uncomfortably, but you are afraid to move.

  He comes back and pulls you roughly upright. He gives you back your wallet.

  “Stop driving like a fucking asshole,” he says.

  You stand there. Not knowing what you are allowed to say to this man.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he says.

  You get in your car, your legs still shaking.

  —

  1972: Your grandfather on your father’s side is from Halifax. On April 16, 1912, the day after the Titanic sinks, the White Star Line sends the Mackay-Bennett—known as “the undertaker ship”—from Halifax to the last known coordinates of the Titanic. It’s tasked with claiming the bodies floating in the twenty-eight-degree water, loading them onto the ship stocked with as many pine caskets as it can carry—though still not enough for the bodies there—and, ultimately, bringing them back to Halifax for burial. A family friend of your grandfather’s is eighteen years old and on his first White Star Line job. He tells your grandfather about the debris fields—two large ones, which have given some credence to the much-debated eyewitness accounts that the ship did in fact split in two prior to sinking—littered with tables and deck chairs and wooden luggage crates and the swollen bodies of the dead. His job is to judge what class the victims sailed based on the quality of their clothing. First-class victims are given priority and immediately taken aboard. Second-class victims are taken on a case-by-case basis as a result of the Mackay-Bennett’s dwindling number of caskets. Steerage passengers are loaded down with weights and sunk.

  Your grandfather’s family friend was prepared for the bodies. It was the job he signed up for, after all. The bodies of the passengers aren’t what disturbed him. What he never forgets, though, is the dull clunk against the side of the ship, fishing a stiff corpse from the water. It is not human. It’s a frozen Labrador retriever. Many first-class passengers were traveling with pets. He brings it halfway up the ship’s side, sees what he has taken from the water, and places it gently, gently for reasons he’s never sure of, back in the freezing water. He watches it until it is a dot on the horizon as the ship moves to the perimeter of the debris field, looking for more bodies. The image of the frozen dog is the one that stays with him.

  —

  1977: Three Girl Scouts are murdered June 12 in Oklahoma. You learn about their deaths when you are researching Nicole’s case. These murders happen ten days before Nicole is killed. The cases are unrelated, of course, but share the fact that they are both unsolved. The Girl Scouts are between the ages of eight and ten. They are raped and murdered and left near their camp tent. Gene Leroy Hart, a violent ex-con and escapee, is tried for the crime and acquitted. Thirty years later DNA samples are tested but are too degraded and the results prove inconclusive.

  —

  1986: You are working at the Marlboro Market and your boss sends you out for the weekend’s change. There aren’t many bank machines. Besides, you need enough quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies to make change for Saturday and Sunday. He sends you to the bank. On the way back, you are walking down Massachusetts Avenue with more than a thousand dollars in bills and coins and an enormous man is walking toward you. You realize too late that he isn’t just some guy who doesn’t see you—he’s coming at you with purpose. He looks like Chief from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and he must have a hundred pounds on you and he towers over you by nearly a foot. Before you realize what’s happening, he punches you in the chest. The sack of money goes flying, but doesn’t break or open. At first, you think he must have seen you come from the bank and that he’s robbing you. But then he just stands over you, staring down into your eyes. He doesn’t take the money.

  “What are you going to do about it?” he says.

  He’s waiting for an answer. You think of all the men who have scared the shit out of you in your life. You say, “Nothing.”

  —

  1990: You are living in Sarasota, Florida. In the last year, you have lived in Amherst, Massachusetts (where you were in and dropped out of an MFA program), Marathon in the Florida Keys, and now Sarasota. Months from now you will be living in your car, parking as often as you can in beach parking lots on the Gulf of Mexico, and then in a freezing house filled with tweakers you don’t know in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. For now, though, you haven’t totally worn out your welcome in Sarasota. Your relationship with Mary is ending, but you are still together. You and Mary have been together, on and off, for years. You’ve moved to Florida to be with her, where she’s studying at some design school. You have no reason to be in Florida at all except to be with Mary, and this is taxing your relationship, along with the fact that you are falling deeper into your addictions. You’re barely having sex anymore, though you fall asleep, drunk, holding each other often, still. She’s recently shaved her head and you find yourself gently kissing the mitten-shaped scar on her head while she sleeps.

  Your life hasn’t totally fallen apart yet. You are starting to realize it’s going to, though. You are beginning to feel helpless. For years, you have romanticized being a fuckup, but now you’re starting to see there’s a real cost. You could lose Mary. And not much else matters to you at this point. But you can’t stop yourself.

  —

  1991: Your friend Sharon throws a party. She’s a veterinary assistant and she’s swiped a bunch of liquid ketamine and you are filled with ketamine and beer and you couldn’t get off the couch if you wanted to. Sharon asks you to pass her the TV remote. You realize you can’t move. You wonder if your involuntary muscles will stop working, too. You think you might die. You could stop breathing. You could stop swallowing.

  “Dude, what’s your fucking problem?” Sharon says. “Give me the clicky.”

  You think you are dying. Even if you aren’t dying on your own, you know that Sharon owns a python named Axel that she lets roam free in the house. You hate snakes. You fear snakes that kill people by constricting their ability to breathe far more than you fear poisonous snakes, though to be fair you are afraid of all snakes. But pythons are the worst. You fear losing your breath, you fear drowning. You fear emphysema, though that doesn’t stop you from smoking, since you don’t plan on living to thirty anyway.

  Sharon say, “You are deep in a K-hole, dude.”

  All you can move are your eyes. You are alive. You are breathing if you can still hear Sharon. You wonder where Axel is. You can’t talk. That snake could be anywhere. It could wrap itself around you and you’d be dead.

  You may not plan on seeing thirty, but you’re only twenty-five. You are going to pick the way you go. You’ll OD or drive your car off a cliff into the ocean. That, you have already decided.

  —

  1903: Ed Delahanty, a professional baseball player, is drunk when he drowns in Niagara Falls. There is some debate over whether he jumped or was pushed. He was often referred to as unstable and thought to have suffered from some form of mental illness.

  —

  1986: You play once—maybe twice—with one of the guys from the Boston band Dumptruck. They have recently broken up. You loved them. One of your favorite records is D Is for Dumptruck. They were too good to be just a local band. They should have made it.

  Here’s how it happens: After Dumptruck splits, a friend introduces you to one of the guitar players. She says to you both at a bar you’re all drinking at that you guys will really click, musically and personally.

  You end up scheduling a time to play with him and a couple of other guys. When you play together you are nervous—this guy was in Dumptruck! But you play well. He has some really complime
ntary things to say, says he loved how it sounded and that you should play together more. But you don’t.

  Over the years, you will say that you almost played in Dumptruck. Sometimes the lie will grow and you will say that you played in the band the guy did after Dumptruck. Once, you will tell someone that you were in Dumptruck, but there’s no recorded evidence because they were involved in some legal issues with the record company after they released D Is for Dumptruck and they could only play live gigs. This last lie is—legally, at any rate—totally believable. Another time, you tell the same lie about being in Dumptruck when they were being sued, and add that you, as a member of the band, are part of the suit, even though you weren’t in the band when the legal trouble started.

  You played maybe a couple of times with a guy who was in a pretty obscure Boston band in the mid-1980s. It’s 1991, in Sarasota, Florida. No one knows who the hell Dumptruck was or is. The guy you are lying to—a waiter in the restaurant where you cook—would probably believe you if you told him you were the whole genius behind Dumptruck. But you keep your lies pretty small.

  You were in the guitar player from Dumptruck’s later band. Or, you were briefly in Dumptruck, but there are no recordings, which is a real tragedy, because you were a great live band.

  You never lie about being in the band during their heyday. You never say you were in any bands bigger than Dumptruck, which was not very big even at its peak. Even your lies, elaborate as they may get, are not full of ambition.

  —

  2011: You decide that, with or without the help of the Monroe cops, you must find out more about Nicole’s murder. You’ve been waking up, shaking, seeing images of her dead body. Images, of course, that you never saw in real life. Your birthday’s coming up, which is also the anniversary of her murder, and it always gets you down. You wake up on your birthday and remember Nicole’s murder and it clouds the day.

  What you think you remember:

  You think Nicole had a younger brother and her mother became enormously protective of him after Nicole’s murder. You think you remember that the mother made him take self-defense classes from a very young age. This may or may not be true. It makes sense. You think you remember hearing it. It sounds true, whether or not it happened.