Itinerantdaughter's Blog

“How does somebody with your kind of Panglossian constitution determine whether you’re ever being lied to, I sometimes wonder, Booboo. Like what criteria brought to bear. Intuition, induction, reductio, what?”
“You always get hard to understand when you’re up on your side on your elbow like this.”
“Maybe it just doesn’t occur to you. Even the possibility. Maybe it’s never once struck you that something’s being fabricated, misrepresented, skewed. Hidden.

“Hey Hal?”

“And maybe that’s the key. Maybe then whatever’s said to you is so completely believed by you that, what, it becomes sort of true in transit. Flies through the air toward you and reverses its spin and hits you true, however mendaciously it comes off the other person’s stick.”

“…”

“You know for me, boo, people seem to lie in different but definite ways, I’ve found. Maybe I can’t change the spin the way you can, and this is all I’ve been able to do, is assemble a kind of field guide to the different kinds of ways.”

“…”

“Some people, from what I’ve seen, Boo, when they lie, they become very still and centered and their gaze very concentrated and intense. They try to dominate the person they lie to. The person to whom they’re lying. Another type becomes fluttery and insubstantial and punctuates his lie with little self-deprecating motions and sounds, as if credulity were the same as pity. Some bury the lie in so many digressions and asides that they like try to slip the lie in there through all the extraneous data like a tiny bug through a windowscreen.”

“Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn’t think he was.”

“Would that that were a trait family-wide, Boo.”

“Maybe if we call him he’ll come to the WhataBurger. You can see him in you want to if you ask, maybe.”

“Then there are what I might call your Kamikaze-style liars. These’ll tell you a surreal and fundamentally incredible lie, and then pretend a crisis of conscience and retract the original lie, and then offer you the lie they really want you to buy instead, so the real lie’ll appear as some kind of concession, a settlement with truth. That type’s mercifully easy to see through.”

“The merciful type of lie.”

“Or then the type who sort of overelaborates on the lie, buttresses it with rococo formations of detail and amendment, and that’s how you can always tell. Pemulis was like that, I always thought, til his performance over the urinal.”

“Rococo‘s a pretty word.”

“So now I’ve established a subtype of the over-elaborator type. This is the liar who used to be an overelaborator and but has somehow snapped to the fact that rococo elaborations give him away every time, so he changes and now lies tersely, sparely, seeming somehow bored, like what he’s saying is too obviously true to waste time on.”

“…”

“I’ve established that as a sort of subtype.”

“You sound like you can always tell.”

“Pemulis could have sold that urologist land in there, Boo. It was an incredibly high-pressure moment. I never thought he had it in him. He was nerveless and stomachless. He projected a kind of weary pragmatism the urologist found impossible to discount. His face was a brass mask. It was almost frightening. I told him I never would have believed he had that kind of performance in him.”

“Psychosis live on radio used to read an Eve Arden beauty brochure all the time where Eve Arden says: ‘The importance of a mask is to increase your circulation,” quote.”

“The truth is nobody can always tell, Boo. Some types are just too good, too complex and idiosyncratic; their lies are too close to the truth’s heart for you to tell.”

“I can’t ever tell. You wanted to know. You’re right. It never crosses my mind.”

“…”

“I’m the type that’d buy land, I think.”

“You remember my hideous phobic thing about monsters, as a kid?”

“Boy do I ever.”

“Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now i believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.”

“But then how do you know they’re monsters, then?”

“That’s monstrosity right there, Boo, I’m starting to think.”

“Golly Ned.”

“That they walk among us. Teach our children. Inscrutable. Brass-faced.”

I’m doing this experiment this morning…I tend to not be able to sleep for more than 3-4 hours at a time, and when I wake up, I eat a snack, watch something (this morning it was the end of Stepbrothers…there’s nearly two hours I can’t get back), read, maybe, and eventually go back to sleep. This perversion of the circadian rhythm hasn’t been working out too well for me, so I’ve decided, today, to try to stay awake. All I have to do is entertain myself for an hour, then it will be breakfast and hopefully I’ll be sufficiently distracted and, then, caffeinated.

Naturally I don’t have a whole lot of brainpower (give me a break, it’s six o’clock in the FUCKING morning…I firmly believe no person should be awake before nine) so I’m not doing any intellectual lifting; rather, I’m reading Missed Connections to keep myself awake. I’ve only been doing this for five minutes or so, and I’ve already found TWO that are based on the female’s ownership of Infinite Jest.

I don’t know whether to be mightily encouraged or pissed off!