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.

but 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 didn’t want him to know just how excited I really was, how delighted that I had managed to hold on to my slender connection to them. I felt the way people may once have felt in the presence of royalty, except this was better because they were my friends. I knew that was lamer still, and I privately mocked myself for being so much the devoted hanger-on. It was tiredness, I told myself, the kind of exhaustion that makes you weak and emotional.

I stop breathing. I feel my heart tighten in my chest, as if, for a second, every cell in my body just ceases whatever it usually does. I am lifeless. Iron, like the ring in the wall against which my wrist chafes, or ice. I am fear, and no other thought, feeling, or sensation registers. I had thought that not being sure was the worst thing I could feel here in the dark, but someone is there, and knowing that is far, far worse.

And there you have it. Me. Jan the liar. Voted—in a dazzling bit of mean-spirited group creativity—most likely of her graduating high school class to have flammable pants. So yes, I’m used to not being believed. I’m used to feeling stupid and humiliated, caught in the web of my own fantasies, mocked, passed over, and rejected, usually for reasons entirely in my own control. Except that—painfully, inexplicably—they’re not. I lie. I can’t help it. I don’t mean to. Not usually. I just prefer the version of my life that I make up, but then I say it, not out of malice or the desire to trick or mislead others, but to get that nicer, happier version of the world out there where I can see it, where I can believe in it . . . but then that’s not true either, is it? Of course I mean to mislead others. Or myself. It’s pathetic. And it’s why Marcus left me.

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.

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.

“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.”

The manacle is everything in your life that is broken, I think. It’s your job and your loneliness and your stupid impulse to lie, to wreck whatever you have that is good . . .

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

She drifted, smiling through life, did her job, took her classes, took her tests, and moved up in the world. I sat on the sidelines, wallowing in my own fantasies, my own lies, the very things that constantly and irreparably fucked me over time and time again . . .

“I don’t mean I dislike them or anything—though, I’ll tell you that Brad is getting on my last nerve—but I’m not sure we have anything in common except a kind of historical accident, you know? We met, and now we’re friends. Kind of. I don’t know how they vote or what they believe in. I don’t know if they have interests, hobbies. Not really. But then, maybe friendship is always like that: coincidence that becomes history. You’re friends because you’re friends.” “I’m almost scared to ask,” he said, “how they vote, what they believe. When they reveal anything at all that isn’t about their jobs or their damn health clubs, I kind of want to run or cover my ears like a kid, you know?” “La-la-la, I can’t hear you?” “Exactly,” said Marcus. “I feel like I’m tiptoeing around, always one false step away from the kind of fight you don’t recover from. I don’t really know why. And we should be able to talk, shouldn’t we? These are smart, successful people. So why do they seem so deliberately, willfully ignorant? I mean, we’re in Crete, for Christ’s sake. The place is stuffed with art and history from every period, philosophy, religion, mythology . . . and no one cares.”

“What was Plato’s myth of the cave?” I said. “Not really a myth, more a metaphor,” said Marcus. “The people who live in the cave and have never been outside see shadows on the walls cast by the sun. Animals and stuff. Because they’ve never been outside they think the shadows are the real thing rather than just, you know, shadows. 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.”

You’d think that tales about boys crying wolf would make me immune to this sort of thing, but it didn’t. It was an obvious downside of being a known embroiderer of the truth, a distorter, a misleader, that even when you were being absolutely honest, the best you could hope for was a kind of wary détente, a truce between battles while everyone waited for independent confirmation that you weren’t, in fact, lying your ass off.

“I am the great artificer, Jan, the Cretan liar. I am Daedalus. This is my labyrinth, and I will find the way out.”

You remember your firsts, especially where romance is concerned. First love. First kiss. First true sexual encounter. You remember them usually because you didn’t really know what they were till they happened. They open up a rush of new thoughts and sensations, like you’ve stumbled on a world you hadn’t believed in till you found yourself in it. The feelings that come with that new world may be the beginning of a long sequence that eventually becomes familiar and staid, but they begin as surprise. It makes sense then that I could think of nothing else to say. Marcus had never lied to me before.

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.

Nothing binds people together, I guess, like shared experience, even if that experience is full of fear and sadness.

Simon had turned out to be shallow, selfish, and ruthless in a bland, predictable, and petty sort of way, but it didn’t shock me—maybe because he was a man. I’m used to the way men, suitably draped with respectability, with money and status, are absolved and dressed with things that, if squinted at without your glasses, look like virtues: strength, confidence, and ambition. Melissa was more of an enigma, her sense of sneering superiority to all around her—including, I would say, Simon—less easy to explain and harder to swallow. A double standard, perhaps.