You Will Always Write Lies

T h e l a s t . . .

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Even now, as I slowly print these words on paper with my mechanical pencil, I am afraid.

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That last sentence took me eight hours to write. I kept stopping. My nails are now gnawed down to the quick, my hair is messy, and my forehead is oily with sweat. I stopped for lunch and three snacks. I watched T.V. I read the paper (gas prices are expected to hit four dollars a gallon this summer, by the way). I took my cat to the groomer’s. I painted the red maple tree that stands outside my living room window, the tree that I’ve painted exactly twenty-three and a half times now.

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[Next day]:

That was enough writing for one day. Now, I shall begin my story. The sun has not yet risen, and I know this will take a long time to write.

The last time I wrote was thirteen years, six months, and twenty-one days ago.

It all started fourteen years, six months, and twenty-one days ago, and I remember it perfectly.

I was walking my dog, Aristotle, in the park--back then, I had a dog--because I’d decided that I should perhaps take an interest in my health, now that I was no longer a kid or even a teenager, but an adult of twenty-six. It was fall, the one week where the colors of the leaves were at their peaks for the season. There was a breeze, cool yet pleasant, that ruffled the leaves from their old stems and flung them around the world. It was my favorite time of year.

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I’m sorry, I just can’t do this. I can’t…I can’t…

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[Next day]:

So I sat down on a wood bench, tugging at Aristotle’s leash. I surveyed the area, looking for inspiration. As I already said, I was a young man, and I was passionate about everything in life. I was a struggling writer--to be a successful author was my dream, and I dedicated my life to it, against other more practical professions. Being a writer was a whole other lifestyle--I had few deadlines and absolute freedom. I could eat what I wanted (my band count permitting), when I wanted. I could sleep all day and be awake all night. I rented movies, all kinds of movies, and read books of many genres. But what I wrote was speculative fiction--that is, fantasy and science fiction. I wrote about space colonies and virtual worlds and magic and even dragons and elves--I was partial to elves especially, despite the fact that elves are perhaps the most cliché of all races in fantasies. It was my mission to reshape and redefine the true “elf” into something more unique.

So anyway, I gazed out at the falling leaves and felt the warm, almost magical breeze strike my skin. Aristotle finally settled down and laid down by my feet, and it was then that I knew I had to write. I pulled out a small pocket notebook and a pencil and held the pencil poised above the paper, thinking and looking around. In a flash, a sudden idea came to me. I toyed with it, mentally turned it around and looked at it from all angles, adding to it and inventing. Then my pencil dropped and I began writing furiously. Five minutes later I slowed, paused, wrote some more, paused. I clucked my tongue thoughtfully, delight racing through me like adrenaline.

Aristotle’s ID tag jingled as he suddenly perked up to watch a squirrel. I looked up at the squirrel chittering away and scampering down a tree and across the yard toward the next, and I said vaguely, “No, Aristotle” and looked back to my notebook. The next thing I knew, Aristotle had leapt up and yanked me off the bench. My notebook fell to the ground. Still clutching my pencil, I grabbed the leash with two hands and braced myself against Aristotle’s pulling, but he was a big dog and I wasn’t exactly the most fit for my age--so he took off.

“Aristotle, no!” I screamed. “Aristotle, STOP!” I freed my right hand from the leash, but I had wound the leash around my left wrist. I ran full-tilt after Aristotle and the squirrel, desperate to free myself before he could pull me faster than my legs could go and I fell. Finally, I managed to slip myself loose and let go of the leash, and I watched as Aristotle forced the squirrel to change direction and run across the park. The squirrel finally chose a tree and ran up it, leaving Aristotle to claw at the tree and bark his head off while I ran to catch up.

When I caught up with him, I grabbed the leash and I released a string of curses (after having checked that no little kids were in the area) at the stupid mutt. I yanked on his leash, nearly choking him, before e gave up on the squirrel and reluctantly followed. Then I remembered that I’d left my notebook by the bench. I started jogging, but when I got there, it was gone.

“Nooooo….” I wailed. I kicked around the leaves by the bench, but still didn’t find it. by then I was frantic, shaking--one of my worst fears is plagiarism, that someone will steal my idea or steal my original draft and publish it, lying that it’s theirs while leaving me helpless to prove it otherwise. I started biting my lip and massaging my temples, at a loss for what to do. What do I have in that notebook, anyway? My new idea; the character description of the elf king; notes on time-space travel; and the most recent chapter if my novel, the chapter about the faked suicide of the witch’s family and their subsequent escape from the city. As I started to recall the priceless bits of ideas that I had recorded in my notebook, the more distressed I became. Could I remember it all to rewrite it?

“Come on, Aristotle,” I growled, yanking him to his feet. I was now anxious to get home to some paper before all of my newly-recollected ideas leaked back out of my brain. I turned down the paved path back toward my home.

“Hey--you!” a voice called. I turned. A woman in a light fur coat was hurrying toward--ME. Yes, toward ME. I didn’t know who the woman was at all, so I was even more shocked by her addressing me. I rarely talked to women--and I’m not gay or anything--because I’m just not really ever around any women, one of the downsides of my profession, I suppose. I didn’t go out to bars and such either, because I never believed in dating that way, and besides, the kind of women who went to bars were NOT my kind of women. I tried going to the typical “romantic and contemporary” meeting spots of coffee houses in hopes of maybe meeting a poetess or a woman like myself--but few people there looked open to chats with strangers, and most of the women there were businesswomen. I despise businesswomen and other women who have the arrogance to put themselves above men by calling themselves feminists (as if they’re pathetic victims of some horrible sort of discrimination, and thus should be honored for their noble sense of righteousness, all the while trying to make men feel bad for it!) and then taking the jobs that men should do, and could do a lot better.

But anyway, I digress! This woman was hurrying toward me, and as she came closer I realized that she was a very pretty woman. She looked to be in her young twenties, and she wore pink lipstick and some blush. Her hair was short, but not like a dyke’s, more like just above her shoulders, and it was dyed a reddish brown color. I usually never pay attention to eyes at all, but hers were large and brown. She had on some light pink and subtle light brown eye shadow which brought her eyes to life and made you not want to look away.

“Sorry about that,” she puffed. She made a fist and coughed once into a leopard-printed glove. “Excuse me,” she said, and straightened up.

“Oh no, that’s okay,” I replied, more confused than ever. “Uhm, do I know you?”

“No.” She laughed. “Sorry, you must be confused. I think this is your notebook.” She withdrew my notebook from one of her coat pockets.

“Thank you!” I cried, lighting up and taking it. What a relief! I must’ve looked silly being so happy, because she laughed.

“I saw you drop it when your dog ran away from you, so I picked it up and started walking that way” --she pointed-- “hoping that I’d cut you off over there. But then I didn’t see you, so I came back.”

“Ahh.” I laughed.

Before I could say anything else, she said, “ ‘Kisses are admitting fairies exist,’ huh?” She grinned.

My heart almost stopped. SHIT! That poem was probably one of the worst things she could’ve read in there. And what business did she have to go reading it anyway, or even admitting to me that she’d read it? “Yeah, I’m a writer.” I smiled and shrugged.

“Really? You’re a poet? How romantic!”

My face might have reddened a bit. “Er--no, I’m actually a spec fic writer--I write speculative fiction, you know, like fantasy and science fiction and stuff,” I added, seeing her confusion. “But I do poems sometimes, too.” I smiled brightly.

“You’re an author? So you have books published?” she asked incredulously.

“Uhm, yeah. Just a few books though, nothing big yet,” I said modestly.

“Wow…That’s really cool,” she mused. “Could I, you know, maybe get your autograph?” She giggled.

I chuckled. “Sure, if you’ll come have lunch at the coffee house with me.” That was a bold move right there. I was proud of myself for the ease with which I said it.

Her eyes lit up. Apparently I was talking her kind of language finally. “Oh, that would be great! The one just over here on 34th Street? I love it there; I go there all the time.” I’d never seen her there before, and that was the one that I went to almost every day. Sometimes I even went up there three times a day.

Thus began my relationship with Caroline. She was the best thing to happen to me in my adult life so far. Because of this, I decided to venture into a genre of writing that I’d never done before: nonfiction. I began to keep a personal diary.

Caroline, I learned, was a hairdresser at one of the city’s best salons. She had gone to college, but had dropped out after only one year (me, I had done four years to major in creative writing and English literature). She had two older sisters, her mother had died when she was eleven, and her dad held a high-paying job as an executive for some insurance company. One sister was an actress and another was a nurse. I was glad that Caroline wasn’t a nurse--it was such a lowly job, and besides, Caroline would make a horrible nurse, the silly dear. I had been interested in meeting the actress sister (after all, being an actress is another one of those romantic, free-spirited professions like mine) until I found out that she was a lesbian. After that, I quickly fell in love with Caroline’s carefree spirit and pleasing innocence. We shared stories about our lives or people we knew or our thoughts and our fears (well, Caroline talked about that more than I did. She hardly needed any coaxing before she was spilling her most embarrassing secrets and fears all over me. But of course, I let her do that, because I’m kind like that and besides, all females need to do that emotional bonding/sharing kinda thing.)

Caroline was eager to have me meet her father, so she talked him into flying out here to meet me. When we were eating dinner in Caroline’s apartment and Caroline had left the room, her father clapped his hand on my shoulder and promptly told me that I was a “fine gentleman, never mind the rather meager-incomed and idealistc job choice” I had. He then went on to say, in the same sentence, that he approved of me and said I could marry Caroline if I liked, but to please schedule the wedding on a date when he wasn’t going to be on a big work trip. It was rather early on in our relationship, so I stuttered my thanks but quickly told him that we wouldn’t marry THAT soon, if we do even decide to marry.

So anyway, I recorded all if the things we said and did in my journal. I wrote in it on most days.

After a while, I started to notice that Caroline would forget things. I finally had her go to the doctor’s and they had her CAT-scanned and gave her an MRI (neither of us had insurance, so it took a while to pay the bills back, but I didn’t care because I loved her to much), but they could find nothing wrong with her. She didn’t have early Alzheimer’s, nor any brain trauma, nor any physical signs of amnesia. They couldn’t figure it out, and neither could I. The weird thing was, was that Caroline never forgot where she put her keys or things like that--she only forgot things about us, like things we’d done together. But she was convinced that she forgot nothing, and that the things I told her that we’d done had never happened. It had become a source of argument, her forgetfulness. Neither of us would give in. I couldn’t believe how adamant she was on the subject, but eventually I stopped bringing to up to her, for fear of it ruining our relationship. I loved her far too much to lose her.

Then one day she suggested that I meet her father. He was coming into town to visit her. I didn’t tell her that we’d already met, but instead told her that I’d be there. I’d prove once and for all that I was right and that there WAS something wrong with her memory when her father would shake my hand and say how nice it was to see me again.

It didn’t happen that way.

When I “met” him, I immediately went up to him and shook his hand, saying, “How are you, Mr. Freedman?” He gripped my hand quite firmly and replied, “Good, and you are Mr…?”

“Stanley,” Caroline supplied. “Peter Stanley.”

“Oh, I’ve heard many things about you, Peter…”

Her father didn’t remember me either.

After that, I began to believe that it was I, instead, who was forgetful. Or, not quite forgetful, but maybe even something worse, like multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia or something. So I began to write in my journal even more feverishly--every single day. At one point, I was writing in it three times a day, and had to start a new journal. I reread the past week every single evening to see if anything had changed from what I remembered. It hadn’t. But in everyone else’s memories, it had.

I almost became OCD about writing in my journal, putting in such details as the number of deer we’d counted in the state park--23--and the color of the stray cat Caroline and I had started feeding--orange. When asked, Caroline said we’d seen 87 deer. The stray cat, she said, was “blue. Well, no, not blue, don’t be silly, but its fur was so black and shiny that it LOOKED almost blue.” One night, Caroline and I had some big fight over some stupid little trivial thing, the biggest fight we’d ever had. I was afraid that she’s break up with me after that. I wrote all about it in my journal. The next day, she came over with a wrapped box of expensive chocolates saying how wonderful our date last night had been. When I wrote about a wonderful day we had doing something, the next day she’d meet me with terse words ad sullen looks.

One day, I got food poisoning. I slept all day and didn’t write in my journal. Caroline took care of me. The next day, she remembered it.

It was the journal.

After that, I started to write things in the journal that HADN’T happened. Caroline was allergic to cats and so she could never ever have one (she’d told me this herself). I wrote that she took the stray cat to the pound. The next day, Caroline greeted me with a kiss and excitedly told me the impossible--that she’d finally given in to the cat’s pathetic mewing and had decided to take it in, despite her allergies. One day we’d had a wonderful day eating ice cream and going to a local art exhibit. I wrote that we’d had a fight. The next day, Caroline jabbered on about how wonderful the day before had been and how we should do things like that more often.

Whatever I wrote in the journal, the opposite would happen.

One day I decided to write about how Caroline had freckles. The next time I saw her, they were gone. She had no makeup covering them, either. For the rest of the day I felt nauseous and kept glancing at her freckle-less nose and cheeks. I could CONTROL her--and not just events, but FACTS about her, things that she had no way of changing. It scared me. I stopped writing for a while after that.

We’d been getting to the point in our relationship when I was considering proposing to her--but after I stopped writing, it all started to go downhill. I became frantic then and started writing as obsessively as ever, making up dreadful, exaggerated details of our fights and even inventing some--and then we were back to being the happiest couple that could be.

From then on, I wrote how horrible our days were. I wrote how much I hated her and how much she despised me. Life was perfect.

Then one night, we finally had sex for the first time.

We were both a good bit drunk, Caroline more so than I, I think. When I woke up from passing out on the floor of my living room, feeling like a ball of shit from a hangover, I rolled over and pulled out my journal and wrote about how I’d raped her and how it had been the worst sex in my life. I finished up just as Caroline was stirring on the couch. She yawned and stretched and finally opened her eyes. Her eyes settled on watching me, who was putting my jeans--I’d been naked. She herself was topless, merely having her shirt pulled over herself but not on, but she didn’t seem to notice or mind.

“How are you, pumpkin?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer at first, just groaned a little. “Good, I think. But I have a bad hangover…”

“Want me to make some eggs? It might help,” I offered.

“Sure.” I left her on the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. “How was last night?” I called from the kitchen.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “What happened?” When I didn’t answer her, she asked, “Was it good?”

I returned to the living room, poking my head in so that I could see her face, and said, “Yeah. It was.” I couldn’t help but grin.

She smiled. “I wish I remembered.”

I went back to the eggs.

Three days later, I was arrested on charges of third degree criminal sexual conduct--of forcibly raping Caroline while she was also drunk and therefore unable to give her consent.

Eventually I learned that Caroline had become curious about how our night had been exactly. She knew I kept a journal, so she found it and read it. She then went straight to a shelter to get some DNA samples as further proof that I’d “raped” her. She also had her blood tested for its alcohol content. The journal was used as proof that it had been rape and not consensual.

I tried to explain to her, to tell her that I loved her. I tried to get her to bring me the journal so I could point to the different entries and explain them to her--and so I could write in it and fix everything. I tried to reason with her--if all the other entries were “lies” (or, in her memory, they were), how could she be sure that the entry about “that night” was true?

She only shook her head. “I can’t believe I thought I loved you. I can’t believe how I trusted you, how I didn’t see how you truly saw me,” she said.

“But I love you!” I cried. “None of my feelings in there…the ones at the end, I mean--they’re not true! The ones at the beginning are, before I realized that the journal made it opposite--”

She shook her head even more, and I could tell that she was holding back tears in her eyes. “No. No. You may have loved me at first, before you obviously got bored with me. I should have seen it earlier. You’re INSANE. You will always write lies. You will always tell lies.”

I looked at her incredulously. “But if all the stuff in my journal is lies, as you say--and the last half really is, but I had to--then how is it that I’m locked in here for rape? How could that be true??” I could prove it! Come on, she couldn’t ignore logic!

She opened her eyes, and I saw tears around the edges. “That was the only time you told the truth.” She walked away.

I was tried for rape and convicted. I served the time--twelve years--and I’m out now and on probation for a couple years. I’m living off welfare now, and my new house is being repossessed because I haven’t been working at all to make enough money to even keep this tiny house. I tried to come up with some new ideas for a new fantasy story, but my mind is rebelling against any sort of inspiration and I’m too afraid to write anything down. How ironic--a writer afraid to write, afraid to be what he is. But by writing my story down, I’m starting to come back to my old self. I think I can start up again. Perhaps I could even publish my journal or even this piece so I can share with the world my story. Perhaps the world could then understand who Peter Stanley really is.

“You will always write lies,” she said.

This story is a lie.

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The above sentence is a part of the story.