Lying (21 page)

I poured myself a glass of red wine. In the clear goblet, the drink blazed like a tulip.

I drank the wine, and then I had more, and then more still, but I could not, would not, get drunk. My aim was to get drunk so I could make my tale true retrospectively at least. However, I stayed stubbornly sober. My body seemed to be
telling me
Here, here is the truth, truth begins in the body, and the body is made by God
.

I looked at my hand. Sometimes, one of the symptoms of epilepsy is the sense that a piece of your body does not belong to you. I held up my hand, though, and saw for sure it was mine.

“This is my hand,” I said.

I once read that fact is the basis of all morality. Part of me had always pooh-poohed that, because anyone with depth knows the emotional truth means so much more.

And yet, sitting there, I felt a fact in me. For the first time, maybe ever in my life, I felt I had a definite fact, and the fact was in my stomach, solid and soft both, a stone with a shape I could see; I could see! I can see! And this is what I saw:

I decided to proceed as follows. I felt a firm orientation, knowing what I was not. I blinked and looked around. It was June, then, and the early roses were fluffing out, and clouds with clear outlines sailed across the sky.

Each slat in each picket fence seemed so separate, so freshly white.

Our AA group had planned a weekend retreat to a monastery
in New Hampshire, a Franciscan monastery where hooded brothers would lead us in prayer and contemplation. There would be services in a country church, small stone rooms with narrow beds, no excess anywhere, a world of pure
is
.

I would tell on that weekend retreat. My diseased brain is a series of crisscrossed nerves and mismatched signals, of auras that perpetually blend. And my personality, for reasons physical and other, makes that blending even worse by the need to boast and fib till the cows come home. Well here, at this country monastery, the cows were coming home. Since my drunk-a-logue, for the first time in my life I felt clear, like God had washed my eyes with Windex, I saw what I was not, and I saw that the self is forever surrounded by the loneliest smoke unless it can tell its true tale. I saw I loved Elaine, and Amy, and God himself, and that every intimacy is eroded by any deceit.

I lived alone in a studio apartment. I missed the world.

I packed a weekend bag.

We drove up there in a van. Elaine sat on one side of me, Amy on the other, and we ate popcorn. We went over a bridge and deep beneath us a river swept over rocks, sent spray into the air. I leaned my head out the window and felt each distinct drop hit my face, moisten my lips, touch my tongue: tell.

That night, over dinner, Brother Joseph read us a story. Afterward, we went into the den for our AA group. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” Elaine said. “You look upset.”

My palms felt clammy. How do you say to an AA group
that you’ve been, well, that you don’t have the very disease you’ve led them to believe you have? How do you say that after they’ve told you what an inspiration you are, how totally honest you are; I wanted them to love me.

I wanted them to say,
Okay
.

Inside of me, I felt my fact. I felt the smooth stone washed by the river of God, bright blue in my stomach.

It grew dark. We lit a fire, sat in the den. Instead of using a podium format, we went around in a circle. People spoke about gratefulness and relapse and fearless and searching moral inventories. When it was Elaine’s turn she said, “I did my fifth step a few weeks ago with Lauren. Lauren is special. There is something in the way she listens. You feel she is taking you in. You feel cleansed.”

Everyone looked at me. I shrugged.

“Since Lauren’s drunk-a-logue,” Brad said, “I have felt newly sober. I have been reminded of my priorities, which have to do with articulating experience.”

It was my turn then. I was so scared I lost my whole body. I could feel only my mouth, my tongue, huge and glowing in the darkened room.

“Look,” I said, and I pictured my tongue flickering, fat. “I want to thank everyone in this group for their support. I want to thank everyone in this group for being so accepting. I am hoping that after I tell you what I have to tell you tonight, you will accept me still.”

It was so quiet then, I could hear only the fire crackling in the fireplace, each flame forked.

“I don’t,” I said, “I don’t really have a drinking problem.
I don’t think I am really an alcoholic, I don’t have that disease, I’m sorry, I’ve been confused, but I’m sure, I’m sure, I’m really not an alcoholic my life has been difficult in so many ways except I really
really
don’t drink in a problematic way I don’t and I’ve been needing to say this out—”

“Shhh,” Brad said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

Elaine came over and knelt by me. “We see this all the time,” she said.

“It was too soon,” Amy said. “We shouldn’t have pushed you to do that drunk-a-logue. You’re too early in recovery. Too much truth can overwhelm a person.”

“I’m not overwhelmed,” I said. “I’m just not an alcoholic.”

“Denial,” Elaine said, squeezing next to me on the sofa. “Denial always kicks in when we get too close to the truth.”

“No,” I said.

“Shhh,” she said.

“Shhh, shhh, shhh,” everyone was saying, everyone leaning in toward me, their faces stained and dripping with firelight, their shushing sounds soft and comforting, blurry and rocking. I leaned back into them. I leaned on someone’s shoulder. Silk. The stone in my stomach turned to silk, and then melted away. I thought,
Well, maybe I am an alcoholic, after all the AAers say my mother is and Amy said it’s a question of genes, the other night I did drink too much, didn’t I, haven’t I, I could be
, I got confused, and my fact blew away, and I found myself back in the world I knew best, the strange warped world, a world of so many stories—I am an alcoholic
I am not an alcoholic; I am an epileptic I am not an epileptic—a world peopled with princes, with color, with cities of salt and perpetual, perpetual possibilities, plots unfolding one into the other,
I could be I might be, and there are so many ways to tell a tale;
oh, said Shakespeare, oh what webs we weave.

And I leaned into the web, which the spider of my soul made for me. Spiders are ugly, lonely creatures. They make webs and live in that lace like spinsters, live in that lace lonely. “Shhh,” everyone was saying, “you’re in denial,” everyone was saying, and I felt grateful that nothing would change, and then I felt furious, I mean
furious
that nothing would ever, ever change for me, that I would never land on the literal, that I would never maintain to them, “I am not an alcoholic,” or to you, “I am not an epileptic, I am
really really
not an epileptic, I’ve had many problems in my life, but epilepsy has not been one of them.” Even if I wanted to tell you this (and I do not want to tell you this; fall with me, please), I could not maintain my claim to you, because you would probably question me and say, “You mean after all this you’ve
never
had a seizure?” and then I would lose my ground and say, “Well, my whole life has been a seizure, I have a fitful, restless brain, I feel I have several selves, I have had many serious psychiatric and neurological problems, and even if there was no Kansas, and even if there were no nuns, there were many nurses—women in white, women in white—tall tales, the truest way I know, and Sartre, who says the metaphorical world and the material world blend
and blur, become each other; believe me, I have suffered seizures.”

And I looked at the AAers whom I had tried to tell, because the burden of living in limbo, of never coming down, clean and hard like a hammer on the nail of absolute knowing, was at once just too heavy and just too tempting. And so I looked at those AAers who would not hear me. They would not hear me! There they were with their solid, sure faces, everyone dripping like demons with firelight, they were so damn cocky, they with their solid little steps, their maps and rules, a fucking cult they were. “Shhh,” they said. “You’re in denial,” they said.

Somewhere, a door slammed shut in me. A child screamed, temper tantrum. “Look,” I said, but their empathy drowned me out. “I have to go,” I said, and I stood. I don’t remember what happened next. I felt hate. Is that a fact? I felt hate. I ran out of the room.

•  •  •

In the fourteenth century the fact was that the world was flat; we now know for a fact it’s round. We once knew for a fact that the sun and the stars and all the other planets orbited the earth, which was a pearl, a throne in the center of the entire sky. Aristotle announced that if a couple copulated facing north or south, a boy would be born; east or west for a girl. Now we know that’s not true, but for a fact, sex prior to ovulation makes a female, during makes a male; we can control. Take salts and your skin diseases will go away; a pink bath helps you breathe. Epilepsy today is definitely a physical
thing, but two hundred years ago it was definitely a demon. You can be cured, today, with drugs, but long ago the same cure came through stork’s dung, the liver of a she-goat, an amulet of stones taken from the stomach of a swallow at the waxing moon.

•  •  •

I went outside. I walked far, far into a field. I had anger in me. I had no facts, only fictions. When I turned, the lit windows of the monastery were tiny as the tips of stars.

In Boolean math, 1 plus 1 does not equal 2. It equals 10. In Riemann geometrics, the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line.

When I die, and am judged, either by myself or by the spirit that seeps through the universe, what will be said? Will I be considered brave for the fog I’ve tolerated, or too cowardly to face the bright light of truth, or, simply, too crippled, my brain too broken? It’s not my fault, I say.

If it is not my fault, if I cannot even claim my own faults, the splits in the center of my skull, then I really have given myself away.

It is my fault. This is something I can claim. My fault. My split. My guilt. Here. Here is where I am.

Thus, myself. My memoir, please. Nonfiction, please.

I laughed out loud, then. An owl answered me.

I was alone, in a far, far field, and then I walked farther, and the monastery disappeared.

It started snowing, even though the season was summer,
and all the flowers were in bloom. Snow fell on the flowers—the wild roses, the dark berry bushes, the purple peonies, the Queen Anne’s lace, snowdrops and lemon drops, and then the universe turned over twice. A great hole opened up in the ground, a hole that Lewis Carroll himself had dug. He was an epileptic, and when he wrote about Alice dropping down the hole, we know he was really writing his own memoir, the disease sucking all solidity away. You could just cry over that. You could just cry and seize at whatever solid shreds there are, but isn’t that the biggest lie of all? The world is flat. The world is round. East, west, north, south, it’s always changing; clutch at what? You tell me.

Like this. You throw your legs out at the hip and give in. You say “snow,” and turn into snow. You give up the ground, which you never really had to begin with, and something else takes over, and that something, with or without a face, beyond proof or even theory, that’s the one fact I will ever and only have. I have the fact of falling, this is a story, finally, of falling, thank you Sister Julia, thank you Sister Patricia, I can stop seizing now; so can you. Open your fists. Go girl. Cheer for me madly. I will not win. If I am on a horse, we will both fall into the hole. If I am a gymnast, I will miss my mark, and fall, in my pale blue leotard, straight into the hole. Alice is there. The queen is there. My mother is there. Oh, Mom, I miss you. Give me a kiss good-bye. Cheer for me madly. Out in that field, I heard it happening. The trees cheered, the stars cheered, the monks and nuns and friends and family cheered as I went down, legs hurled
out at the hip, I fell, and gave up the ground, and for that split second, spinning in utter space, I was nowhere, I was nothing, my mouth open round, like a zero, like 0, out of which the baby is born, the words spill, the planet pops, the trees grow, everything rising; real.

In
Lying
I have written a book in which in some cases I cannot and in other cases I will not say the facts. I am, after all, the grandchild of Kant, of Heisenberg, someone who came of age just as the postmodernists were in their full flower. Postmodernism may have many problems, but it also has at least one point, a point that has been driven into my heart and the hearts of many of my contemporaries, and the point is this: What matters in knowing and telling yourself is not the historical truth, which fades as our neurons decay and stutter, but the narrative truth, which is delightfully bendable and politically powerful.

Lying
is a book of narrative truth, a book in which I am more interested in using invention to get to the heart of things than I am in documenting actual life occurrences. This means that the text I’ve created uses, in some instances, metaphors, most significantly the metaphor of epilepsy, to express subtleties and horrors and gaps in my past for which I have never been able to find the words. Metaphor is the greatest gift of language, for through it we can propel what are otherwise wordless experiences into shapes and sounds. And even if the sounds are not altogether accurate,
they do resonate in a heartfelt place we cannot dismiss. That is why it is in this book, although it is not always factually correct, that I feel I have finally, finally been able to tell a tale eluding me for years, a tale I have tried over and over again to utter, the story of my past, of my mother and me, the story of the strange and fitful illnesses claiming most of my moments, the humiliating birth of sexuality, my love of myths and proclivities toward deceit. I have told it all and it is a relief. A relief to put it to rest.