Lying (16 page)

I started to send my work out to literary magazines, half because I wanted to get published but half, or three quarters, because I wanted an acceptance or two when I saw him again. I sent work that was both all mine and somewhat mine to small prestigious journals, the kind Christopher often appeared in, high-minded magazines with reproduction Vermeers and Cézannes on their covers. My rejection notes, like Christopher’s letters, were full of double meanings. “Excellent,” wrote Hilda Raz from
Prairie Schooner
about a story that really was an LJS original. “This story is exceptional, truly beyond the pale. We can’t take it, but please try us again.”

In February he invited me to meet him in New Hampshire, where he would read with Bernard Malamud. “Bernard Malamud,” he said. “Lauren Jean, Bernard Malamud has asked to read with me.”

I left on a Saturday, the air woolly with fast-falling snow. The roads disappeared beneath blankets of white. Cars crawled slowly, and spun sideways into ditches, where their hazard lights blinked beacons in the thick storm. I had come to the point where I’d risk my life for him, and I saw how stupid, stupid I was. I wanted to tell the bus driver to turn around. I wanted my own bed back, that narrow dorm bed becoming mine if I would only let it.

Hours later I entered the Holiday Inn. This is comic. I was spinning in through the revolving door and she was spinning out, the she being Liz, the Bread Loaf horse, her sturdy body bending into the blizzard wind, her footprints fat as Clydesdales’ in the snow. I recognized her immediately, and once inside I stood by the plate-glass window and watched her recede into winter’s lint.

“Liz was here,” I said to him. I tossed my small suitcase onto the bed.

“How are you, Lauren Jean?” he said.

“What was she doing here?” I said.

“I’ve been here since Thursday,” he said. “She asked if she could visit, and I said yes.”

I punched him then. I had come through snow and sleet, wind and weather. I punched him hard on his shoulder and I heard the gunshot crack of a bone.

“Jesus,” he said, grabbing my wrists, you guessed it. We wrestled, fucked, and then I punched him again.

It was over.

“I told you,” he said, pressing ice cubes to his clavicle, “I told you I’m compulsive in this area.”

“But not Liz,” I said. I was shaking. “What is it about Liz?” he said.

I knew. I felt utterly defeated. She was not a woman so much as she was a writer. My thinking went as follows: If he loved me for my words then he probably loved her for her words, which meant my words were not the only words or even the top words, they were just words, words among many. And then I felt my words drop into the chasm, I could almost hear them hitting the rocky bottom of my brain like Coke cans tossed into a gorge.

What, I wondered, would fill the silence, the space in me? What would make me real? I had tried stealing, sickness, the lovely links of language, none of it had worked. I needed something more direct, like life support. Hook me up, please. Put me on a breathing machine, pump me full of fresh oxygen, fresh bags of blood, dialysis, cardiac cuffs, my heart has stopped, I need resuscitation.

The blue line on the blank screen, flat, and then a tiny, struggling spike.

Revitalize me.

Raise me from the things that die.

Christopher was staring at me, staring and staring, his eyes sharp green, his lashes thick and black.

I had spent more than half my life now seizing at this, seizing at that, my body clenched around air. In the old days, when witches boiled herbs and princes stood in towers, people said epilepsy was a sign of the devil, the soul and skin possessed by evil, thrashing spirits. But no. Epilepsy does not mean to be possessed, passively; it means to need to possess,
actively. You are born with a hole in you, genetic or otherwise, and so you seize at this, you seize at that, your mouth so hungry you’ll take your own tongue if you have to.

I sat in the motel room with a man who did not love me and I heard the sound of Coke cans thrown into the gorge. And I was seventeen. And outside the snow was coming down like angels shaking dust from their voluminous robes, a sight beautiful and beyond my reach. And I had the feeling, then, I had the knowledge. I was seventeen and no longer a concrete thinker. I saw I was spiritually bankrupt, a liar, a thief, a plagiarist. I saw my illness as more than a physical thing; it was also a metaphor, and that helped me make some sense. Seizure. Seizure.

“What is it?” Christopher said. He whispered.

And then I had a real seizure, my first big one in many months. When I woke up, I was on the floor, and there was some blood.

“What the hell,” Christopher said, and then he shouted,
“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I have epilepsy,” I said. I said it flatly, without drama or flourish or mystery. We had come to the end, I knew, a place beyond manipulation, beyond what I could handle.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said. “This is too much.”

“Yes it is,” I said.

The rest I don’t remember. Somehow I got back to the bus, and we said good-bye I knew for good, and I got home and I could not stop crying. My soldier roommate made me tea and, to distract me, told me things about the Israeli secret service that few people know. She showed me how to fire a
gun, cocking broomsticks on our shoulders and pressing phantom triggers,
kaboom
. I got to like her a little, and when I felt lonely I decided I should love her like a sister, but love never came. What did come, however, weeks after the affair had ended, was a letter in the mail, a special letter about a memoir I had done that was not plagiarized but that my mother had told me was not accurate. “Dear Ms. Slater,” the editor wrote, “I am pleased to inform you that the nonfiction work entitled ‘The Cherry Tree’ has been accepted …”

In my backyard, in the house where I grew up, I think I remember that there once was a cherry tree. Every spring it bore tiny green leaves, and in the summer red fruit that gave way to rot very slowly. In the morning I could smell the sweetness of the tree, and in the evening I could hear the bees, hundreds of them, nosing at the sun-spoiled pulp and turning it all to honey. One day I climbed this cherry tree, and when the wind blew I fell from it, diving with what must have been God’s grace toward the ground. This is my tale, and I have written it over and over again, and, depending on my mood or my auras, the story always seems to change, and yet it always seems true. Perhaps that means it is all false, except that, every time, the words bear witness, and every time I feel love, and then, with a simple snap of an eye, the click of a closing shutter, the tree is gone, the love is gone, the man is gone, the words are gone, Christopher is gone, and I am standing in space, my brain split, my hands held out. If only I could learn to live here, in the chasm he cut, in the void out of which our world was born, if only I could.

I can.

1. This is a difficult book, I know. There was or was not a cherry tree. The seizures are real or something else. I am an epileptic or I have Munchausen’s. For marketing purposes, we have to decide. We have to call it fiction or we have to call it fact, because there’s no bookstore term for something in between, gray matter. If you called it faction you would confuse the bookstore people, they wouldn’t know where to put
the product, and it would wind up in the back alley or a tin trash can with ants and other vermin.

You would lose a lot of money.

2. So, I suppose you want to know how much is true, how much untrue, and then we can do some sort of statistical analysis and come up with a precise percentage and figure out where the weight is. That, however, would go against my purpose, which is, among a lot of other things, to ponder the blurry line between novels and memoirs. Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it’s obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what’s what, and does it even matter? That’s question number one.

3. Question number two: Is it possible to narrate an honest nonfiction story if you are a slippery sort? I, for one, am a slippery sort, but I believe I’m also an honest sort because I admit my slipperiness. And, therefore, to come clean in this memoir would be dishonest; it would be to go against my nature, which would be just the sort of inauthenticity any good nonfiction memoirist, whose purpose is to capture the
essence
of the narrator, could not accommodate. I truly believe that if I came completely clean I would be telling the biggest lie of all, and at heart I am not a liar, I am passionately dedicated to the truth, which, by the way, is not necessarily the same thing as fact, so loosen up! Something can be both true and untrue—it’s a paradox—the same way Jesus Christ can be
both man and god, and when you try to sell this little book I suggest you pitch it to the public as such, jacket copy to read, perhaps,
a book that takes up residence in the murky gap between genres and, by its stubborn self-position there, forces us to consider important things
.

4. Even, however, if I choose not to tease apart the fabrications from the facts, I’d like to, at the very least, lay out the possibilities. They are as follows: A) I have epilepsy as I’ve described. Ninety-nine percent of what I’ve told you is accurate, with a few glitches, due mostly to the memory lapses and altered consciousness that accompany the split-brain patient. B) I have epilepsy, but due to the very nature of the epileptic personality, the need to exaggerate and all that, you should believe only selectively what I have recorded here. C) I don’t have epilepsy at all, not a shred, not a sliver, but I do have Munchausen’s, and what you have here before you is a true portrait of a fabulist, a sick mind under siege, the webs we weave, the glistening tales, all matter turned to myth, yes. D) I have neither Munchausen’s nor epilepsy nor a TLE personality style, but I did grow up with a mother so wedded to denial, so inclined to twist and even outright lie, that I became confused about reality and also fell in love with tall tales.

5. Before I submitted the manuscript for your approval, I gave it to four friends, five acquaintances, and six strangers. All the strangers, who know nothing about my slipperiness, took it all quite literally, like it was just one more true account
of yet another disease. Well, it’s not. If you read it that way, I will feel I have failed.

6. My good friend and novelist believes a book can qualify as nonfiction only if the literal facts are for the most part accurate. Therefore she thinks I should call this book fiction, but I disagree. After all, a lot, or at least some, or at least a few, of the literal facts are accurate. Second of all, even those things that are not literally true about me are metaphorically true about me, and that’s an important point.

7. Sometimes I look at my foot and I can’t believe it belongs to me.
That’s my foot, my foot, my foot
, I repeat, but it doesn’t seem attached to me, and if you asked me who I was at that moment, I would tell you many things, including the fact that I am footless. Why is what we feel less true than what is? Supposing I simply feel like an epileptic, a spastic person, one with a shivering brain; supposing I have chosen epilepsy because it is the most accurate conduit to convey my psyche to you? Would this not still be a memoir,
my memoir
? After all, if I were making the whole thing up—and I’m not saying I’m making the whole thing up—but if I were, I would be doing it not to create a character as a novelist does, but, instead, to create a metaphor that conveys the real person I am.

8. Sometimes, my confusions tire and depress me so much, I want to sleep forever.

9. Nevertheless, confusions and all, Kate, I think I am a nonfiction writer, and I would like to be known as such. I record
my life
, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely. Come with me, Kate. Come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, “The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are at our most honest when we are lost.” Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.

10. Together we will journey. We are disoriented, and all we ever really want is a hand to hold.

11. I am so happy you are holding me in your hands. I am sitting far away from you, but when you turn the pages, I feel a flutter in me, and wings rise up.

12. Dr. Neu once told me a fascinating fact.

13. This is true.

14. The neural mechanism that undergirds the lie is the same neural mechanism that helps us make narrative. Thus, all stories, even those journalists swear up and down are “true,” are at least physiologically linked to deception.

15. When I was a child, in the fifth grade, I realized I was telling a lot of lies, and so I made a lie chart, a notebook in which I recorded, at the end of the day, every lie I told. My goal was to get to the point where I had nothing to record, and so absolve myself of sin. The first week I recorded ten pages of lies, and the lies so interested me that I illustrated them; and then the second week nine pages, the third week four pages, until, months later, I got to the end of the week and had nothing to record. I stared at the blank page, and maybe it was at that moment I became a writer. My heart quickened in my chest, and I felt fear. I was falling into whiteness. A terrible silence surrounded me. I wanted to mark the page, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say, or who I was, or even how to spell my name, now that my stories were gone.