“The reconstruction,” I said.
“There’s a lot of guesswork,” he agreed, nodding. “Evans—the excavator—gets a lot of flak for it, but the guy basically found the oldest city in Europe, the center of an entire culture quite different from Mycenaean Greece, and with its own distinct writing systems. I say we cut him some slack.”
“The reconstructed bits are pretty impressive,” I said, urging him on. “I mean, to people like me who don’t know anything.”
“You know some,” he said. “And you care about it.”
Unlike others, he didn’t actually say, though his eyes flashed to where Gretchen and the guys were laughing loudly.
“What are those animals?” I said, nodding at the wall paintings, creatures that were half bird, half lion.
“Griffins,” he said. “It’s not clear if the room was actually a throne room for the king or queen or if it was a religious space, though the bathing bowl suggests some kind of ceremonial or ritual function. What did you tell Gretchen about your sister?”
He said it just like that, with no segue, no pause, just moving from the tour-guide stuff to the question that had been on his mind for at least two hours.
“She was anxious about the dive,” I said, my voice unsteady, the explanation stupid and implausible even in my own ears. “I was just trying to make her feel better. She latched onto something I said and it just happened.”
He gave me a level look, unmoved.
“It just happened?” he echoed.
“Yes.”
“What did you tell her?”
I hesitated, then swallowed.
“I made something up,” I said. “Said she lived in Portland and worked in CGI. There was an article about the industry in the in-flight magazine . . .”
“Jesus, Jan,” said Marcus.
“I know! I just . . .”
For a long moment, Marcus said nothing and went back to staring fixedly at the high-backed stone throne. At last he shook his head.
“Ever heard of Epimenides?” he said.
“No,” I whispered.
“A philosopher, lived right here around 600 BC,” said Marcus conversationally, though I suspected this had been circling in his head for a while and the speech was at least partly prepared. “You should know him. He’s famous for one thing, the Epimenides paradox. It’s very simple. He said, ‘All Cretans are liars.’”
I swallowed and looked away.
“Marcus—” I began.
“No, listen,” he cut in. “You’ll like this. All Cretans are liars, right? But he was a Cretan. So the paradox is that since he was a Cretan, what he says must be a lie, but since he said that all Cretans are liars, it’s actually true, a truth that confirms a lie and vice versa. It’s like a M?bius strip, you know, turning back on itself: lies, truth, lies, truth, lies—”
“I see.”
“Lies, truth. Lies, truth. Like every conversation you ever have, Jan. I’m sorry,” he said, taking in my gasp of shock, “but that’s right, isn’t it? I thought you were over it. I thought you were better. But you’re not, and it means I can’t trust you. No one can. And what’s crazy is that you know I’m right. You know that this is why you are so stuck, personally and professionally, why you can’t move forward in any part of your life because people don’t trust you.”
“That’s a bit unfair . . .”
“Is it? When we were coming back on the boat from the dive, and everyone was talking about the fish they’d seen and you said you’d seen a squid or a cuttlefish or some damn thing, and I thought, yeah, but did you really?”
“I did!” I said. “I mean, it was at a distance and it might not have been, and I was thinking about one of the pictures Archimedes had in that book of things we might see . . .”
“So you made the leap. You decided it was possible and it would be cool to see it, so you said you had. You see, Jan? People learn the hard way that you’re not reliable, that everything you say is . . . unstable. It might be true, and it might not. People can’t live like that! You can’t be around someone who you never know for sure is telling the truth. I can’t, anyway.”
“I know,” I said, a pleading note creeping into my voice, as I reached for his hand. “Marcus—”
“Don’t,” he said, snatching his hand away. “Just . . . don’t.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“No. You never do,” he said, and if there had been frustration and hurt and anger in his voice only a moment before, it was all gone now. Now he was hard, implacable as the stones all around us. “It’s like the Wilmington thing all over again.”
“Marcus, I said sorry for that so many times—”
“I know. And I’m not looking for another. I’m just saying . . .”
“That you don’t trust me. Yeah, I heard.”
“Don’t do that,” he said. “The woe-is-me face, like you’re the victim. Like I’m being unreasonable.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
He looked away again and took a deep breath, as if he were about to dive into a pool and swim the entire length underwater, then he turned back to me.
“The thing about Epimenides, Jan—your great Cretan ancestor—is that the only thing we can deduce with any certainty from his statement is that he’s a liar. Right? Because either not all Cretans are liars, in which case, what he’s saying isn’t true, or they are, therefore so is he.”
“OK,” I said. “I get it.”
“Do you?” he said, giving me a quick, hard look. “I mean you say that, but how would I know?” He hesitated, then took an abrupt step away. “I’m going to go get back in the car.”
I turned to go after him, but he stopped me with a gesture.
“Just . . . ,” he said. “Give me a little while, OK?”
And he walked away.
PART 2
THE CAVE
Furious, Rhea resolved to save her newborn son, Zeus, by replacing the infant with a large stone which Cronus swallowed whole. She then took the baby, bathed him in the river Neda, and took him to a certain cave on Mount Ida in Crete. She then had her other children sing and clash their spears against their shields at the cave mouth so that Cronus would not hear the crying of the newborn within.
—Preston Oldcorn
Chapter Fifteen
“What was the first lie you ever remember telling?” asked Chad.
Sorry. Mr. Hoskins. My occasional therapist.
“I was eleven,” I said. “I told the girls at school that my baby sister was training to be an Olympic gymnast.”
“Which she wasn’t.”
“I didn’t have a sister,” I said.
Chad smiled in spite of himself.
I don’t know what makes me think of that now as I work my wrist around in the manacle, trying to feel if any part of the iron feels weak or thinned by rust. I hold it carefully with my free hand, turning my left slowly inside the cuff, concentrating like some TV safecracker.
You told Gretchen you had a sister who worked in film effects, said a voice in my head. CGI or something. Marcus heard . . .
And wouldn’t speak to me.
I stop what I’d been doing with the manacle, momentarily elated by the memory coming back to me, as if I have found a button and the chain has snapped away. The relief lasts less than a second before the implication of Marcus’s angry disappointment settles on me, and I remember that I am chained in the dark, at the mercy of some nameless, bull-headed monster . . .
No. That’s absurd. He’s a man. Possibly, I suppose, a woman, and my strange sense that his head was too large was just my terrified imagination. He’s a man, just a man.
And he will come back. He will ask the questions I can’t answer, and then . . . I don’t know, but it won’t be good. Anxiety and dread build in my chest. I have to do something. If I sit here in the dark waiting for him to come back, I’ll go insane.
I turn the manacle to the left and then—when my arm won’t go any farther—to the right. It feels solid, uneven and certainly chewed by rust, but not so that it feels likely to crumble. Despair is stealing in on me and I have to push past it. I think of Marcus and try to recall his anger at the lie I told, and I find myself thinking back to when we were here before and the tense return to our shared apartment in Charlotte five years ago. We were tired and stressed with travel and each other, and Marcus went straight to bed before I noticed the light blinking on the answering machine. I remember playing the message and then sitting there, staring at nothing.
Marcus had applied for a place on an intensive teacher-training course in Wilmington: the last month of the summer before classes restarted. It was a government-sponsored program working through the UNC system, and if he committed to doing three of them, along with supplemental online assignments and the construction of a writing portfolio, it would earn him a master’s degree. This was in the days when that meant an automatic pay raise in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district.