Lies That Bind Us

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 contradiction 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.