Lies that Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

But then that’s how you get by sometimes, isn’t it? By deploying those little half-truths that keep the world rosy enough to live in.

I loved story, the shape of it, the inventive audacity of stringing together characters, places, and events to make up something that felt absolutely real but existed only in the head of the writer or their readers.

I have left behind my job, I thought, my ordinary, humdrum life in an American city, and I have become Medea, a woman of magic and mystery

“We are so white!” Gretchen exclaimed to Marcus. “Aren’t we just so white?” Marcus’s eyes widened slightly and he smiled that puzzled, disbelieving smile I knew so well. “Pretty white,” he agreed, indulgently. “Right?” said Gretchen. She shrieked with laughter at her own outrageousness. “You are so random,” said Simon consideringly. He was smiling, but it wasn’t quite a compliment. “I know, right?” said Gretchen, delighted. “Seriously random.”

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.

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.

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.

Gretchen laughed, a high, unsteady laugh, too loud and long, until Melissa gave her an arch look and said, “No more voddy for you, little Gretchen.” “I’m fine!” she sang back. “Totally down, right Marcus?” “I’m sorry?” said Marcus. “I’m down. You know. Down.” “I don’t know what you . . .” “You know,” she said, her eyes unfocused. “It’s a street thing, dog. ‘I’m down with OPP, yeah, you know me . . . ,’” she sang, flashing ludicrous gang signs. “Oh boy,” said Marcus. “You need to go to bed.” “Just tryin’ to keep it real, homes.” “OK,” said Marcus.

“Icarus is . . . I don’t know: aspiration and daring but also arrogance and hubris. It’s a cool story, the boy who flew too close to the sun so that the wax holding the feathers in his wings melted, but it’s also a great tragic metaphor for overreach, not knowing your limitations.”

We don’t need to look to mythological creatures to find terror and brutality. People can do that all by themselves.

Plato thought life was like that. That all we saw were shadows, but that the real things—the ideal forms of them—existed somewhere else.”

“Jan . . . ,” he begins. “Don’t speak,” I say. My fingers have pressed the nail tip as far as it will go before drawing blood. If I slam the heel of my hand hard against the nailhead, it will go straight through the eardrum and the temporal bone of the skull into the brain. He may not know that, but his body senses it. Death is two inches away. His eyes are wide under the diving mask. He does not move. All my fear and horror have become his. His life is in my hands. I am Theseus, come to purge the labyrinth.

“Marcus?” I say. “Are you OK to drive?”

Whatever the world is, I still have to live in it. We all do. Maybe that’s the truth at the heart of the labyrinth myth—that we’re wandering, lost, always trying to stay one step ahead of our personal monsters, always ready, sword in hand, spooling out Ariadne’s thread in the hope that one day we will make it out in one piece.