Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “And what are we?” Marcus had said, indulging me. This was after the only other time we had seen them, at a holiday party in Brad and Kristen’s colossal Buckhead home.

  “Minor moons,” I said.

  “Or Pluto,” he added, cracking himself up. We were both pretty drunk.

  “Discredited,” I agreed.

  “Invisible to the naked eye,” he said.

  “And named after a cartoon dog,” I added.

  “Well, not exactly named after . . . ,” he began, catching himself and rolling his eyes. “God, I’m boring.”

  “No, you aren’t,” I said. We were still together then. Just.

  “Well, we can’t both be Pluto,” he pronounced. “I called it. You have to be something else. What do you think? Which of the Greek gods was the biggest underachiever?”

  He grinned as he said it. He’d had at least three beers and a couple of large shots of whiskey. He didn’t even see my reaction, an involuntary wince like a muscle spasm. But I played along.

  “Maybe I’m not a planet at all,” I said. “I think I’m more . . . a black hole.”

  “Ooh,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. Sucking everything around you into your own darkness. That’s perfect.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Perfect.”

  Anyway, Ares and the comet—they sounded like a band, or the hosts of a New Age radio talk show—arrived on schedule and met Simon and Marcus at the airport. I could picture exactly what that moment was like, Brad and Kristen drawing every eye, movie stars in their shades and casual couture. And I guess they were, one of them at least. Kristen had joined the cast of End Times, the Atlanta-based sci-fi show, in its second season but had quickly moved from being an occasional guest star to being a core character. She played an alien who had survived the apocalyptic war with humanity that had left the world in ruins. I didn’t know why the alien had a British accent, but people loved her. They were on season four now, and she had become the face of the show, so while I’d seen her only once since we met on Crete, she now eyed me from billboards and the sides of buses almost constantly. It was a bit unnerving. The accent was real. She was born and raised in and around London to a white mother and an Asian father and had done some theater and TV there as a child before maturing into the bombshell she was today—light-tan skin and black hair complemented uncannily by ice-blue eyes and the kind of elegant calm that made her ethereal, angelic. Not angelic in the sense of prim or sexless—her TV roles had often been pretty spicy, so watching her as someone I knew, albeit slightly, made me feel like a voyeur—but with that chill, otherworldly strength you sometimes see in medieval paintings. Michael. Gabriel. Angels with flaming swords and eyes to match. She was perfectly cast in End Times: beautiful, sexy in ways that felt deliberately manipulative, and ultimately unreadable. It was no surprise that Hollywood had come calling.

  Brad, as I think I said, was in commercial real estate. He found and brokered land for powerhouse companies to open new branches and franchises. That was about all I knew of it. It was very lucrative and meant that he traveled a lot, but it had none of the glamour of his wife’s profession. They had met in London while he was negotiating a deal for an Atlanta-based company, and she had looked him up when she first went to the States. He was, apparently, the only person she knew in the city who wasn’t working on the show. They had only just become a couple when we met them, and her first End Times episode hadn’t yet aired. They married a year later, just as her star—her comet, I should say—was really taking off.

  “Good timing,” Marcus had remarked cryptically.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “But I mean, he’s a regular guy, right? Smart, good-looking, and rich, but still a regular guy. He buys and sells land for Wendy’s and Wal-Mart.”

  “So?”

  “So she’s a star, and she mixes with stars. Gets a lot of attention.”

  “You think that he married her because he wouldn’t be able to compete with the Hollywood A-listers who were starting to pay attention to her? That’s pretty cynical.”

  “Just honest,” said Marcus, who always was. “I mean, if I were with someone like that, I’d be worried, what with all the fame, the glamour, the celebrities, and fancy parties, you know. That I couldn’t keep her.”

  As I said, we were only just still together. I opened my mouth to say something, but I wasn’t sure what it was that I wanted to know or whether I really wanted to know it, so I left it at that.

  Simon’s earlier irritability had utterly vanished as the four of them met us at the Minos, and he made a point of tacitly going straight to Melissa and kissing her on the cheek. They muttered privately to each other and hugged, their differences forgotten, and I felt a twinge of envy. Brad hugged me warmly, like he was genuinely pleased to see me, and his smile was wide as a child’s, a happiness at seeing us all that seemed so deep and genuine that I was momentarily thrown. Brad was the driest of the group, the most implacable, and his wit had a fine, cutting edge. Kristen hugged me too, but she said “hiya” first, a word that sounded so comically, stereotypically English and unselfconscious, that for a moment I couldn’t connect her to the ice queen I saw on television. I wondered briefly if I’d had it wrong all this time and this wasn’t actually the same woman at all. Her manner was—I have to say it—nice. Ordinary. Less the comet of my imagined recollection and more a person I had once met. She was still exotically beautiful, still English, as her husband was still rich and handsome, but they were also just people, less glamorous in some ways than Melissa and Simon, younger and less polished. That all made Kristen a better actress than I had thought her, and that slightly mean-spirited compliment made me like her more and myself less.

  So, nothing new there . . .

  Brad looked older than he had. His auburn hair was cropped very close at the sides, and his forehead was higher than I remembered, but he looked more buff than he had been too, his arms long and muscular. He had blue eyes so bright, I had always assumed he wore colored contacts, though he claimed not to, and they flashed when he cracked wise, which was most of the time. There was something slightly skeletal about his face, like the skin had been pulled tight at the back of his head, so that when he smiled he got a manic look, eyes wide, teeth exposed like little chisels. Kristen’s hair was also short—amazingly so—cut to within a couple of inches all over. It should have made her boyish, but it only showed off those knife-sharp cheekbones, so she looked like the magical princess from some strange Japanese anime. She didn’t pulse like Melissa did, didn’t glow, and you might not notice it at first, but she really was exquisite.

  “Oh my God!” said Melissa. “Your hair!”

  “I know, right?” she said, ruffling it self-consciously. “Too butch?”

  “No!” said Melissa. “It’s fantastic. Very chic.”

  “Makes it easier to deal with wigs. And I get recognized less off set.”

  “That must get to be a drag,” I said, not really believing it.

  “It’s mostly OK,” said Kristen. “But it’s nice not to feel like public property all the time.”

  We had left the beach when Simon phoned from the road and waited for them in the hotel’s airy lobby. Our reconnections done, Brad made a pit stop to the men’s room, and we then climbed back into the Mercedes: Melissa in the front; me, Marcus, and Gretchen in the back; Brad and Kristen in the middle. It was tight, but the AC was cranked up and as soon as we were pulling away, Simon had “1999” blaring away on the stereo again, and everyone was whooping and singing, reveling in being there again.

  “Can’t believe he died,” said Kristen, as the song finished. “I was sad about Bowie, but Prince? I couldn’t believe it.”

  Marcus nodded. “A piece of my past,” he said. “I remember my mom dancing around to ‘Little Red Corvette,’ and I used to crank Sign o’ the Times all through college, remember?”

  “Yeah,” I said, suddenly wistful.

  The mood in th
e car had inverted in seconds, as if Prince’s death had cost us something we hadn’t noticed before.

  “We need a new anthem,” said Melissa, scanning the iPhone’s playlist with determined focus. “You guys know any other good millennium songs?”

  No one did.

  I kept my eyes on the passing scenery to stave off motion sickness. Not that I could see much beyond the blur of color and shape.

  “So, Jan,” said Brad, turning right on cue. “Contact lenses, huh? Looking eagle eyed. Nice.”

  I colored. Beside me, Marcus frowned with bewilderment. He knew how bad my eyes were, but he also knew that I had an aversion to anyone—myself included—touching my eyes. I had tried contact lenses one time, and it had taken me twenty hellish minutes to get one of them in. I never got the other in and fled from the optician’s, weeping, the moment I had managed to get the first one out. Neither Marcus nor any of the others had noted my missing glasses.

  “Just trying something new,” I said.

  A stupid, unsustainable lie, but sitting there with them all, the Pluto, the black hole of the group, I just couldn’t say “No, I lost my glasses in the sea because I’m a pathetic, clueless, moron.” Marcus’s eyes narrowed doubtfully, but it was too late. I just couldn’t bear the idea that I’d tell them the truth and they’d laugh at me. Or that they’d stifle that honest impulse out of pity. That would almost be worse.

  “Good for you!” Brad said.

  “Thanks!” I replied.

  The trees sped past: blobs of dull green and pale, sandy ground, illegible road signs like teasing question marks all pointing at me, Lying Jan . . .

  How was I going to get through a week like this? I couldn’t see shit beyond about three feet. There was no way I would be able to sustain the pretense that I could function normally. I was used to covering my ass like that, keeping track of my various exaggerations, elaborations, and flat-out untruths so that I didn’t catch myself out, and generally I got away with it. And usually I was also careful about the initial lie, floating it only in situations where I knew nobody or was about to leave so that the chance of being exposed was minimal. This was different. A week in close quarters with people I knew pretending I could see? I could barely tell them apart!

  I bit my lip hard, punishing myself till I felt the blood run.

  Idiot. Pathetic, lying, idiot.

  Chapter Eleven

  My name. The voice in the dark—strange, sexless, sepulchral—says it and I clench every muscle. I can hear the tremble of my limbs in the miniscule shaking of the chain around my wrist, drawing myself together like some shell-less turtle.

  “Jan.”

  “Who are you?” I manage. “What do you want?”

  The silence that follows lasts an age. All I can hear is the thin hiss from the corner that sounds dimly like radio static, and the stuttering quaver of my own breathing. The pinprick of green light doesn’t reveal anything more in the blackness, but then, I remember with a start, that might not just be the lightlessness of the room.

  I lost my glasses.

  In the sea. I lost my glasses in the sea. I remember now. My mind tries to hold on to that thought, to anchor the person I am now, chained in the blackness with this . . . this thing that is talking to me, as if having a past will somehow explain the present, make it manageable. But I can’t remember anything else; the attempt is drowned out by the dread of whatever is sharing the cell with me. It speaks.

  “Tell me about before.”

  I stare blindly into the dark, my eyes fixing pointlessly on the green-glowworm brightness.

  “W-what?” I stammer. “Before what?”

  Another long silence like a chasm, and I feel like I’m on the lip of a pit peering down, terrified of the black depth, and even more terrified of what might come out of it.

  “Last time,” says the voice.

  “What?” I say again, confusion and panic making me stupid. What does he want me to say? What will he do if I get it wrong? “I don’t understand. Last time when?”

  “You came to Crete five years ago,” the rolling, droning voice intones, each syllable dragging like snagged audiotape.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Tell me about it.”

  The panic rises again, kicking mulishly inside my head. I don’t understand and I’m going to get it wrong. I’ll die because he—or she or whatever the fuck it is—has me confused with someone else and I don’t know what he wants to know, and he’ll reach out with a blade I won’t see coming and I’ll bleed out here in the dark . . .

  “Five years ago,” says the voice. “When you were here. Tell me what you did.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “So, Brad,” said Simon, “how’s life in commercial real estate?”

  “Awesome,” said Brad. “Just reeled in a deal for sixteen new Value Auto Parts stores across the southeast. A little economic downturn, and suddenly everyone wants to work on their own cars!”

  “Gotta love that,” said Simon, laughing.

  “No kids to put through college, so I guess we’ll get that boat!” Brad cooed, reaching for the high five. Simon responded on cue, as if the whole thing had been carefully choreographed, and their two palms rang out crisply. It looked like a scene from a movie, the two of them, with their easy GQ elegance and professional good looks, like brothers, in sync, comfortable and on top of the world. “Or a zeppelin,” he added musingly. “Always wanted one.”

  He gave me his trademark skull grin, and his blue eyes flashed.

  We were sitting in the villa’s glorious glassed-in lounge, its rustic stone floor and great fireplace flanked by immense windows looking down over the patio to the rugged coast and the sea. The golden light of the late afternoon had reddened into sunset as vast purple clouds rolled in, crisp-edged and solid as heaped boulders. It was extraordinary.

  “I’m looking at getting into a little real estate dealing in London,” said Simon. “Might want your input. Residential rather than commercial, but still. Man, the appreciation there is through the roof. It takes a little capital down, but if you have it, there’s serious money to be made. If you’re in the right spot, you can charge what you like. Fifty million dollars for an apartment. More. I shit you not.”

  “Yeah?” said Brad. “Some people have a lot more cash than brain cells.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. Some of these Saudi businessmen, man. You wouldn’t believe what they walk around with in their pockets. But if it’s a swank London apartment they want, overlooking Hyde Park or whatever, and they can afford it . . .”

  “Oh hell yeah, I’ll sell it to them,” Brad said with a laugh. “Their ill-gotten oil money will do a lot more good in my wallet. Sure, send me what you have and we’ll talk.”

  “You should come over soon. These post-Brexit prices won’t last forever. I’ll walk you through some options. Might be something you want to get into. I gotta show you the new Panamera. The Turbo S, baby, it’s a sight to see!”

  “Absolutely,” said Brad, nodding. “And we can talk about that wine dealership idea too.”

  “Yeah,” said Simon, making a face. “Not so sure about that. Looks to me like most guys who get into that do it so they can score some deals on a few crates. I doubt they’re making much more than pocket change. I mean, could be a tax write-off, but it’s more of a hobby than a real business enterprise.”

  “Maybe,” said Brad, “but if you can get your foot in the door with the big distributors . . . Total Wine, the supermarket chains . . . you put enough investment in . . .”

  I caught Marcus’s eye, and a private smile rippled the corner of his mouth. It had been like this last time, the two business guys trading tales of profit and loss, stock market tips and portfolio recommendations in a language where every fifth word sounded coined by some MBA textbook, and me and Marcus looking at each other, feeling both out of it and on the edge of giggling. Of course, the first time, we had then taken solace in each other, celebrating our difference from them w
ith little looks and grins that would, later, become whispers, kisses, other things . . .

  Now, with the weight of my professional failure hanging around me like a wet coat—the heavy woolen kind that holds rain like a camel’s hump—the humor of being so obviously excluded was harder to find. Even Marcus’s wry amusement looked weary, as if he had dug out some old TV comedy that had once seemed so hilarious and found it dulled by repetition and familiarity. We were sitting across the room from each other. Gretchen was one seat over from him on the couch, but she was too entranced by Melissa’s iPad pictures of the house she was redesigning for some newspaper magnate, and when Marcus’s eyes wandered toward her she didn’t react, so he got up and went to the bar by himself. I considered going after him but didn’t know what I would say and, without my glasses, couldn’t read his face well enough at this distance to see if I was welcome.

  Brad was still pitching his wine-supplier idea.

  “I don’t know,” said Simon. “Risky commodity. Too fragile, too niche . . .”

  “But with the right capital outlay and people on the inside who really know the product . . . ,” Brad persisted.

  “Yeah, but the hardcore enthusiasts aren’t your market, are they?” Simon quipped. “Or if they are, your market is too small and you’ll never earn out. And if they’re not your market, if your target consumers are people more like . . . well, us, who frankly don’t know that much about wine . . .”

  “Hey,” said Melissa. “I know wine.”

  “You know what you like, honey,” said Simon, indulgently.

  “Same thing,” said Melissa, kissing the top of his head and taking his empty glass to refill it.