This Story Is a Lie

by Tom Pollock

  Shit.

  Shit shit shit shit shit.

  Suddenly I could feel the congealed mess of my lunch high in my chest. I wanted to vomit. I gripped the book so hard I could hear my knuckles crack.

  I stared at it.

  An unprovable theorem. An unanswerable question. A problem that I and a thousand others like me and a billion, billion supercomputers could work at until the sun burned out and never get close to solving.

  And if there’s one, a nasty voice asked from the back of my brain, how can you be sure there aren’t more?

  I sagged into the beanbag.

  ARIA was dead.

  The whole project had depended on two basic assumptions: first, that my panic attacks were, at root, a mathematical problem, and second—an assumption so basic I hadn’t even known I’d made it (and aren’t those always the ones to fuck you up?)—that any mathematical problem could actually be solved with maths.

  Gödel had blown a hole in the second assumption big enough to steam an aircraft carrier through. Any equation could be a hideous, insoluble, life-swallowing trap in disguise.

  All the screwed-down hope, the plans I’d shared with Ingrid, echoed hollowly through the corridors of my mind:

  “There’s an equation that’s me. I’m going to find it. And I’m going to prove it.”

  I’d dreamed I would define, perfectly, the theorem of my fear. And then I’d know, I’d know if it was ever going to stop.

  The book fell from nerveless fingers and I didn’t hear it hit the floor.

  But ARIA might not be like that, a voice inside me protested. There might still be an answer. There might still be a proof. But the voice was weak. My dream was fracturing and however I tried to cup my hands, I couldn’t catch the pieces. I pictured myself, hunched over my desk, gnawed on by age and doubt, calculating for year after year, never knowing if I was getting closer to an answer.

  I looked down at the floor. The book had fallen open again and the starved eyes of Gödel stared up at me.

  . . . there was no way to be sure.

  THIS STATEMENT IS A LIE.

  A lie that demolished certainty in everything.

  I fled the library, Julie’s face and voice blurred by tears as she called after me. I ran down the hallways randomly, purely for somewhere to run. The rain besieged the windows, hundreds of drops per second, too many to count.

  The hall clock bit off seconds: 6:47 p.m. and still no sign of Mum. I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialled Bel, but she didn’t answer. I tried to call Ingrid, but I couldn’t make myself press the button. I remembered her eyes when I’d explained ARIA to her, the hope that had lit up in them, and I couldn’t, I just couldn’t kill it.

  I slumped against the lockers and slid to the floor, tears pouring hot down my cheeks. I felt utterly alone.

  But I wasn’t.

  It took me a long time to register the footsteps. “What the fuck,” said Ben Rigby, rain dripping from his hair as he unslung his football bag from his shoulder and stepped forward from his gaggle of friends, “are you still doing here?”

  NOW

  “One . . . One . . .”

  Test one. The memory of the electricity coursing through my temples shatters my concentration. My eyes water, their lids heavy. Sleep. I need to sleep. Tendrils of exhaustion wrap around my limbs, pulling me down into the dark.

  I reach inside my ruined shirt. My fingers find the scaly mess of a burn, still sticky with electrode glue. I grab the edge of a bit of skin and pull.

  The pain dispels the fog, and I inhale sharply through my teeth. I blink my eyes clear and go back to staring at the door.

  “One . . . t-t-t . . . One.”

  I sigh. I’ve been staring at this door for what feels like forever and I’ve got to know it pretty well. It’s made of metal, covered in flaking blue paint, and draped in twisted ropes of shadow from the cobwebs covering the one bare lightbulb. It doesn’t seem to have a lock, but sadly it doesn’t have a handle on this side, either. It does, however, boast a ring of neat little rivets running around the edge. I’m hungry, exhausted, confused, and frightened, but it would all be a little bit better if I could only count those rivets.

  “One, one . . . one . . . Shit.”

  It’s not going well. Also, I don’t seem to be able to stop drooling, and my right hand is currently wedged between my arse and the paint can I’m now sitting on because it was shaking so hard it was distracting. (There are tins of government-issue magnolia eggshell everywhere. I guess they don’t have any actual prison cells here in spy HQ and they’ve thrown me into the maintenance cupboard.)

  Worst of all, I can’t count past one. I can’t even rebuild myself beyond that, before the panic knocks the bricks over.

  Ingrid’s warning echoes in my head: We’ll shock you until you can’t resist any more, until you can’t even count anymore.

  But I keep trying because, if I can count the rivets, then I can estimate the size of the door. If I can estimate the size of the door, I can guess the volume of this closet. If I can estimate the volume, then I could convince myself there’s more air in this crushingly tiny space than there is in your average mass-produced coffin. And if I can do that, then maybe I could stifle the urge to vomit up scream after hysterical scream currently caged behind my teeth and do something useful.

  Like plan.

  I peel more skin off my burn, wince, wipe what I really hope isn’t the pus of incipient infection off my hand, drool some more, and stare at the door.

  “One,” I say firmly.

  Along with the paint cans, my cell does have one amenity that most coffins don’t: a vent in the wall high above me, covered by a metal grille. Agent Blankman (bitten by a radioactive plot device as a child) might have climbed up there, levered it out with his . . . teeth or something, and gambled on the ten thousand to one chance it led to freedom and not the furnace of a central heating plant.

  He probably would have made it too; that kind of shit happens in spy stories.

  But Agent Blankman’s gone. It’s just me now, and the only way I’m getting out of here is with help. I just have to be ready for it when it comes.

  I stare at the door. The door stares back.

  “One . . . one . . .”

  As I seem to have some time on my hands, I compose a eulogy.

  Agent P. W. Blankman spent years under astonishingly convincing cover as a snivelling coward, but was in truth the bravest officer in the unit. He met his final fate today, bleeding out on the floor of a dingy interrogation chamber, the backbone he so skillfully pretended not to have impaled on the blade of a treacherous double agent—

  The latch clunks. The hinges creak. The door opens, and there she stands in silhouette, her blonde hair like embers and shadow. I take a deep breath.

  “Agent Blonde Calculating Machine”—and for a second Agent Blankman’s ghost animates my lips—“what a pleasant surprise.”

  She crosses the space to me in two short steps (hey, two, there you go!) and unseen hands close the door behind her. She takes me by the chin with one hand. Her gloves are damp, as if she’s pulled them on over wet skin. The tang of iodine stabs into my nostrils.

  Her familiar brown eyes flicker across my face.

  “You aren’t surprised to see me, Peter.”

  “Aren’t I? Well, I guess you’d know.”

  “Age”—her voice is flat with accusation—“House number, duration of relationship. It’s not much of a description, but sooner or later . . .” She tails off, apparently too angry to carry on, so I pick it up for her.

  “Sooner or later,” I say, “the people you work for will realise that no boy who matches that description has ever been near my sister’s pants, and then they’ll know.”

  “Yes.”

  “That you lied—to them, for me.”

  �
�So what was this, a fucking trap?” She hisses, her eyes wide and so close I can almost count the tiny capillaries.

  I hold her gaze.

  You lied to them, for me. It’s been the other way around ever since I met you, Ana, and indignation’s not going to get you where you want to go. Feel free to read that out of my fucking mind if you want.

  “This is my family, Peter.” She’s almost pleading. “He’s my dad.”

  For a moment I don’t follow, and then—

  My dad, I’m afraid of my dad. They were among the first words she ever said to me.

  Ana, she called herself, Ana Black. And from earlier in this endless day, Rita in the car on the phone to her boss, a man called Henry Black, saying, “If this was your daughter, would you want me to leave her out in the cold?”

  “You’re the boss’s daughter?”

  A tight nod.

  “So why did you cover for me? You knew what I was hiding. Why not tell them?”

  She glares at me fiercely, but whatever she’s looking for she doesn’t find it, because now she’s looking at the paint, at the cobwebs, anywhere but at my face. Her hands move towards the hems of her gloves. When she finally speaks, it’s not an answer.

  “They’re already getting suspicious. The search parameters are too vague to be a total bust, but none of the matches look promising.” She flaps a hardback notebook at me.

  “LeClare sent me down to see if you’d be any more forthcoming when we’d fed you.”

  She nods over her shoulder to a store-bought ham-and-cheese sandwich and a bottle of water on a tray by the door; they must have shoved that in behind her when she came in. My stomach yawns ravenously—it’s been a long time since breakfast, which I threw up anyway—and I lunge for them.

  “LeClare?” I mumble around a mouthful of plasticky bread.

  “Carolyn LeClare, the deputy director. She would have told you an outdoor name.” She waves a hand vaguely. “Sandra, Pamela, Jessica . . .”

  “Rita?” I spray crumbs incredulously. “Rita’s the fucking deputy director?”

  “She’s Daddy’s right-hand gal,” she says, her voice taut, “and by the look she gave me when she told to me to grill you ‘about this mysterious boyfriend’ . . . I don’t think she believes a word of it.”

  “So why not read her mind?” I ask. I can’t believe I just said that so matter-of-factly, but I’m so punch-drunk from the rest of the day’s surprises I no longer feel shock. “That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t read minds, Peter.” She eyes me sullenly. “I can only read yours.”

  For a moment, the only sound is the dripping pipe.

  “I’m a mirror, but only a cloudy one. I feel people’s desires, passions, emotions. But I have to know a subject incredibly well for those feelings to coalesce into thoughts. You—”

  She hesitates, bites a phrase back, literally, her teeth are so deep in her lip I’m surprised there’s no blood. Then she adds:

  “You don’t know how lucky you are. To have someone who knows you that well.”

  “I thought I knew you pretty well.”

  Her face is cobwebbed in shadow, but I see tears glimmering in the corners of her eyes.

  “I wish.”

  In rooms above us fingers are hammering keys, and computer power on a scale I can’t even imagine is churning and chuntering and eroding the little time we have. I have to get out of this plywood-shelved tomb. I have to find Bel. I have to do it now . . .

  And yet.

  There are forty-three muscles involved in human facial expression and every one of hers is telling me to take this slowly.

  My heart thuds in the base of my throat.

  “Then tell me,” I say.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Everything: what happened to you, how you got here.”

  She stares at me.

  “You want me to know the real you?” I push. “Then tell me about her. Start at the beginning.”

  She looks at me warily, but I’ve seen that expression once before: it’s mixed with hope. This was how she looked when I told her about ARIA.

  “I don’t know the beginning,” she says slowly, reluctantly, but at least she’s talking. “The beginning was before I was born. But as far as I can piece together, an all-staff email went out saying ‘Volunteers needed, expecting children.’ The sales pitch? A chance to dramatically increase the emotional intelligence of a child, to the point of creating a fully functional empath.”

  She drops an ironic half curtsy.

  “Let me guess,” I say. “That wasn’t an opportunity the head of an intelligence agency could afford to pass up?”

  “Correlation versus causation, Peter,” she tuts. “I’m surprised at you. You think I’m the way I am because Daddy’s the boss? Daddy’s the boss, because of me. This is a spy house. Its world is stitched from double crosses. It exists to find the pressure points it can use to bend and break people. And it’s all so uncertain, so riddled with doubt and second-guessing: ‘Do they know we know they know?’ and all that dreary, anxious bullshit. And then along comes little Ana, able to spot a lie at a hundred paces, able to feel the dearest, darkest, most deeply buried desire of your target, simply by being in the same room . . .”

  She tails off, stares past my shoulder. I don’t think she even sees me anymore, just her memories, reshaping her mind as they recur.

  “I am this company’s greatest asset, and pretty much from the day I could first talk, Daddy worked me.”

  She starts chewing her cheek, fit to put a hole in it, the same remorseless rhythm with which she washes her hands.

  “It is impossible to explain what that was like.”

  “Try me.”

  She stiffens, braces her feet like she’s waiting to get punched.

  “I spent two days,” she snaps, “watching terrorists in Seoul, and I became so obsessed with a reunified Korea I was willing to firebomb an elementary school for it. Then they flew me out to Venezuela, and for a week I was sick with lust for a Caracas rent-boy—oh, and I was twelve . . .” Her gaze rakes over me and my skin crawls. “Then they nailed that guy too and the love vanished, just like that. Only to be replaced by a long weekend on another target in Poland, feeling only his burning, insane hatred for Jews, because it turns out that when you work as an empath for a spy agency, the people they want you to empathise with aren’t very nice.”

  Her voice stays low, to keep it from the guard outside. She sounds murderous.

  “I felt like a matchstick in a hurricane. Their need and rage and hate filled me up, shoving me in a million different directions. I begged my dad for a break, for some time alone, and finally he relented, but it was too late. When I got back to my room and closed the door, I felt . . . nothing. The mirror was empty.

  “I tried to reach, to gather up some sense of who I was, of what I wanted when I was just me, but it was like grasping at fog.”

  Her breath patters quickly against my eyelids and I can feel her fear.

  “And then they put me on you. For three years, they put me onto you. And you burned so bright, brighter than anyone I’d ever seen. You were a lighthouse in the fog. I got home at night, and your panic and your love for your family, your passion for numbers were still there, in me, and, all right, most of it was fear, but at least it was something and it was like . . .” She tails off, then shrugs.

  “And then when I saw you splayed out like that, in front of me downstairs, I just . . . I couldn’t, I couldn’t undo you like that. It would have been like undoing myself.”

  “So you lied.”

  “So I lied.”

  “23-17-11-54.”

  She tucks her chin into her chest, her gaze on the floor, and laughs silently, the tears running down her cheeks.

  “The whole thing was a fucking botch anyway,�
�� she sniffs. “I should have had days to prep, to work you over, but the top floor’s just so freaked out right now—I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, I’d never met your mum before they put me onto you, but I’d heard of her. She’s a big deal in-house, and you’d expect a shit storm when any one of us are targeted, but even so . . . to have less than an hour to crack you . . . and you were panicking, so I was panicking too and . . . fuck,” she breathes. “What am I going to do?”

  Daddy worked me. I think quickly while her eyes are fixed at the floor. Don’t make her feel cornered. If she feels cornered, she’ll play safe, go back to what she knows, i.e. her family. It’s what I’d do.

  You have to give her a choice.

  “Way I see it,” I say carefully, “you have three options.”

  “One.” I uncurl an index finger. “You go to Rita—LeClare, whatever her name is—right now and you tell her you made a mistake. You read me wrong. I conned you. You tell her what she needs to know. That’s your way back in.”

  Please don’t want back in.

  She stands there, head bowed, and says nothing.

  “Two.” Another finger. “Tell them the truth. You wobbled a little, but you’re back inside now.”

  Except you aren’t, are you?

  Still no response.

  “Three.” My third finger uncurls. “You and I leave, right now.”

  Still no response . . .

  . . . and then:

  “How?” It’s barely audible, but relief floods through me.

  “What?”

  “How do we leave? Jack’s standing right outside the door.”

  “Well then, you leave now, take him with you, lose him, double back, and—are there loos on this floor?”

  “Right down the hall.”

  “Good, meet me in the loos. Knock five times on the first stall.”

  She looks at me like I’m an idiot.

  “But how will you get out of this closet?”

  I tear a side from the cardboard pack the sandwich came in. I fold it in half, then in half again, and again. With every fold, the pressure pushing back on my fingers squares. Exponential origami.