Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “Regular as clockwork,” I said. “Couldn’t get through the week without her. And you?” I said, turnabout being fair play. “You still going to Oriental Elegance?”

  He almost laughed but managed to nod seriously.

  “It’s handy,” he said, “being right over by Thai Palace. I can get a massage and then go downstairs for some Prik King.”

  My turn to look down, hiding my grin.

  “Oriental Elegance?” said Simon. “Full service, huh? Sounds like you’re the Prick King!”

  Brad laughed loudly, but Melissa rolled her eyes.

  “So juvenile,” she said, smiling. “What are you, thirteen?”

  “I thought you loved my boyish charm?” he said.

  “Oh, I do,” said Melissa, grinning at him. I caught Marcus’s eye, and we exchanged a private smile. I’d only had one glass of wine, but I felt myself flushing happily. I looked away bashfully.

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Gretchen remarked, “but I’d go diving again tomorrow if I had the chance.”

  “We have the gear all week,” said Simon, tearing his gaze from Melissa and Brad. “Totally could. At the other end of the island, there’s a submerged city. Ruins of temples and stuff. Roman or whatever. Greek, I guess. We’d need to get started pretty early but . . .”

  “Let’s play it by ear,” said Melissa. “Gotta get some shopping in, right, ladies?”

  Kristen said, “Oh, I think so,” and reached over the table for a high five. Gretchen hastily added an “Absolutely!” and half reached for the high five, but slid her hand under the table when she realized she had been a moment too late. Again I looked quickly away.

  “Maybe another day,” said Marcus, whose curiosity was obviously piqued.

  “Yeah,” said Simon. “I thought you’d like that, professor.”

  “Not a professor,” said Marcus, smiling, humble. “Just a lowly high school history teacher.”

  “Public school too,” said Brad. “How’s that for dedication?”

  I saw Marcus’s eyes harden a little, but he made the best of it.

  “Lots of great kids,” he said. “Smart. Capable. Just because they can’t afford—”

  “You have, like, metal detectors and stuff?” said Brad. “Keep the gangs under control.”

  “No,” said Marcus.

  “Maybe they build them in shop class,” said Simon, grinning. “They still have shop? Woodworking? Car mechanics? Cooking classes?”

  “Bojangles has to get its staff somewhere, right?” said Brad.

  “I teach history,” said Marcus, his jaw tight. “AP and IB courses. We get some of the best college placement in the state . . .”

  “Oh, no doubt,” said Melissa. “They didn’t mean anything by it, did you Simon? Brad?”

  “Just kidding around, man,” said Simon.

  “Yeah,” said Brad. “Don’t tell me you grew out of your sense of humor, professor.”

  “My sense of humor is well intact,” said Marcus, putting his knife and fork down and meeting Brad’s skeletal grin with something like defiance.

  “That’s so cool,” said Gretchen, apparently missing the shift in the tone of the conversation. “You guys have such cool jobs.”

  I tore my eyes from Marcus, who was still staring Brad down, and tried to use what she had said to redirect the group, but it wasn’t easy. My job was far from cool.

  “Not really,” I said. “I mean, they have cool jobs,” I added, nodding expansively to the others, including Marcus. “I’m one notch up from your basic salesclerk.”

  “That’s not true,” said Marcus loyally. “You’re a team manager for a major retail chain.”

  Just not an executive team leader . . .

  “See?” said Gretchen guilelessly. “That is cool. Might not be doing CGI trolls or dinosaurs or whatever, but it’s still better than answering phones for lawyers.”

  I felt my heart leap into my throat and forced myself to look at my plate, where the remains of fish skin and bones were congealing in a little stream of olive oil.

  “I’m sure there’s more to being a legal secretary than just answering phones,” said Marcus, smiling. The kindness of his tone struck me as familiar, and I couldn’t help but look up just as Kristen said,

  “Who does CGI dinosaurs?”

  “Jan’s sister,” said Gretchen. “Right, Jan?”

  Marcus didn’t look at me but he went very still, his blank gaze locked onto the table, fork suspended in the air, as if he’d forgotten about it.

  “Oh, right,” I said quickly. “Yes. So what are you guys hoping to shop for?”

  I kept my eyes fixed on Melissa as she started to talk, but I didn’t hear a word of it. All I could hear was the blood singing in my ears. All I could feel was the force of Marcus not looking at me.

  We got to Knossos late. The upside of that was we had the place largely to ourselves, the tour buses at the entrance loading up and pulling out as we were buying our entry tickets. The downside, of course, was that we only had forty-five minutes to do the entire site.

  “I’m just going to sit here,” said Melissa.

  “Really?” said Marcus. “It’s an amazing site. There’s so much to see.”

  She shrugged and flipped her shades down over her eyes.

  “I can see it from here,” she said. “I don’t need to really look. I’ll just . . . absorb it from where I am. If you see anything really cool, take pictures. You guys can tell me about it later.”

  Marcus gave her a look of true perplexity, then shrugged and smiled. He hadn’t spoken to me since our late lunch, and I felt his silence like a cloud. I had gotten into the car, deliberately leaving a seat open for him, but he went to the bathroom as we were leaving the restaurant, so Gretchen got in next to me. I tried to pretend he hadn’t done it on purpose, but the way he stared quietly out of his side window, never engaging the rest of the group or turning in my direction, suggested otherwise.

  The archaeological site of Knossos was a baffling mixture of fragmented walls and exposed foundations made from pale sand-colored stone on the one hand and, on the other, monumental reconstructions complete with bright-red painted columns. There were information boards displaying two-headed axes and bulls engaged in some kind of sport in which people ran from or vaulted over the massive horned animals—practices supposedly connected to the legend of the Minotaur which had, in myth, roamed the labyrinth below the palace itself on this very spot. This was the monster killed by Theseus, who then found his way out of the labyrinth using the thread given to him by . . . Arachne? No, that’s the spider lady who challenged Athena to a weaving contest or something. Ariadne? Maybe. Anyway, Theseus slew the Minotaur, then retraced his steps by following the thread he had spooled out when he first went in. The information boards had precious little to say about the mythology connected to the site, however, as if the place’s more fanciful associations were a bit of an embarrassment, despite their domination of the souvenir shops. In other circumstances I would have been disappointed.

  But I had other things on my mind.

  I kept a watchful eye on Marcus, but he did not look at me, so I drifted around the ruins, not sure what I was looking at, further disappointed when I saw that the spectacular frescoes of dolphins and women with distinctively braided ringlets were all reproductions, the originals having been moved for safety to a museum in Heraklion. The sign said so. I wouldn’t have known otherwise, and I found myself resenting the little information I was being given for somehow deflating my sense of the place.

  Gretchen, looking prematurely drunk, wandered equally aimlessly, while Brad, Simon, and Kristen stayed together in a group, chatting about work and food and exercise and cars, as they always seemed to. They could have been anywhere. I felt uninformed and ashamed to be so. They didn’t seem to feel anything at all, and within minutes I could hear Gretchen complaining that her feet ached and there was nothing to see, as if it was the place’s fault that they were bored.
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  Only Marcus treated the site with the kind of scrutiny it deserved, but he kept his distance from me, and after a while I started wishing I was more like the others for whom the place and its ancient historical significance was, at best, irrelevant to them, their lives, and the things they valued. The idea depressed me and made me seek out Marcus, whether he wanted to talk to me or not.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” I said.

  He gave me a sidelong glance, then returned to what he was looking at—a stone-flagged chamber labeled as the Throne Room, with red painted walls, stone benches, and an impressive chair facing a pale basin, both carved from single pieces of rock.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Too bad we’ve been given, like, ten minutes to go through one of the most important sites in the ancient world.”

  “It’s pretty confusing,” I said, trying to give him an opening. Marcus loved to explain things. He was a natural teacher.

  “It’s a controversial site,” he said, not looking at me.

  “The reconstruction,” I said.

  “There’s a lot of guesswork,” he agreed, nodding. “Evans—the excavator—gets a lot of flak for it, but the guy basically found the oldest city in Europe, the center of an entire culture quite different from Mycenaean Greece, and with its own distinct writing systems. I say we cut him some slack.”

  “The reconstructed bits are pretty impressive,” I said, urging him on. “I mean, to people like me who don’t know anything.”

  “You know some,” he said. “And you care about it.”

  Unlike others, he didn’t actually say, though his eyes flashed to where Gretchen and the guys were laughing loudly.

  “What are those animals?” I said, nodding at the wall paintings, creatures that were half bird, half lion.

  “Griffins,” he said. “It’s not clear if the room was actually a throne room for the king or queen or if it was a religious space, though the bathing bowl suggests some kind of ceremonial or ritual function. What did you tell Gretchen about your sister?”

  He said it just like that, with no segue, no pause, just moving from the tour-guide stuff to the question that had been on his mind for at least two hours.

  “She was anxious about the dive,” I said, my voice unsteady, the explanation stupid and implausible even in my own ears. “I was just trying to make her feel better. She latched onto something I said and it just happened.”

  He gave me a level look, unmoved.

  “It just happened?” he echoed.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  I hesitated, then swallowed.

  “I made something up,” I said. “Said she lived in Portland and worked in CGI. There was an article about the industry in the in-flight magazine . . .”

  “Jesus, Jan,” said Marcus.

  “I know! I just . . .”

  For a long moment, Marcus said nothing and went back to staring fixedly at the high-backed stone throne. At last he shook his head.

  “Ever heard of Epimenides?” he said.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “A philosopher, lived right here around 600 BC,” said Marcus conversationally, though I suspected this had been circling in his head for a while and the speech was at least partly prepared. “You should know him. He’s famous for one thing, the Epimenides paradox. It’s very simple. He said, ‘All Cretans are liars.’”

  I swallowed and looked away.

  “Marcus—” I began.

  “No, listen,” he cut in. “You’ll like this. All Cretans are liars, right? But he was a Cretan. So the paradox is that since he was a Cretan, what he says must be a lie, but since he said that all Cretans are liars, it’s actually true, a truth that confirms a lie and vice versa. It’s like a Möbius strip, you know, turning back on itself: lies, truth, lies, truth, lies—”

  “I see.”

  “Lies, truth. Lies, truth. Like every conversation you ever have, Jan. I’m sorry,” he said, taking in my gasp of shock, “but that’s right, isn’t it? I thought you were over it. I thought you were better. But you’re not, and it means I can’t trust you. No one can. And what’s crazy is that you know I’m right. You know that this is why you are so stuck, personally and professionally, why you can’t move forward in any part of your life because people don’t trust you.”

  “That’s a bit unfair . . .”

  “Is it? When we were coming back on the boat from the dive, and everyone was talking about the fish they’d seen and you said you’d seen a squid or a cuttlefish or some damn thing, and I thought, yeah, but did you really?”

  “I did!” I said. “I mean, it was at a distance and it might not have been, and I was thinking about one of the pictures Archimedes had in that book of things we might see . . .”

  “So you made the leap. You decided it was possible and it would be cool to see it, so you said you had. You see, Jan? People learn the hard way that you’re not reliable, that everything you say is . . . unstable. It might be true, and it might not. People can’t live like that! You can’t be around someone who you never know for sure is telling the truth. I can’t, anyway.”

  “I know,” I said, a pleading note creeping into my voice, as I reached for his hand. “Marcus—”

  “Don’t,” he said, snatching his hand away. “Just . . . don’t.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “No. You never do,” he said, and if there had been frustration and hurt and anger in his voice only a moment before, it was all gone now. Now he was hard, implacable as the stones all around us. “It’s like the Wilmington thing all over again.”

  “Marcus, I said sorry for that so many times—”

  “I know. And I’m not looking for another. I’m just saying . . .”

  “That you don’t trust me. Yeah, I heard.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “The woe-is-me face, like you’re the victim. Like I’m being unreasonable.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  He looked away again and took a deep breath, as if he were about to dive into a pool and swim the entire length underwater, then he turned back to me.

  “The thing about Epimenides, Jan—your great Cretan ancestor—is that the only thing we can deduce with any certainty from his statement is that he’s a liar. Right? Because either not all Cretans are liars, in which case, what he’s saying isn’t true, or they are, therefore so is he.”

  “OK,” I said. “I get it.”

  “Do you?” he said, giving me a quick, hard look. “I mean you say that, but how would I know?” He hesitated, then took an abrupt step away. “I’m going to go get back in the car.”

  I turned to go after him, but he stopped me with a gesture.

  “Just . . . ,” he said. “Give me a little while, OK?”

  And he walked away.

  PART 2

  THE CAVE

  Furious, Rhea resolved to save her newborn son, Zeus, by replacing the infant with a large stone which Cronus swallowed whole. She then took the baby, bathed him in the river Neda, and took him to a certain cave on Mount Ida in Crete. She then had her other children sing and clash their spears against their shields at the cave mouth so that Cronus would not hear the crying of the newborn within.

  —Preston Oldcorn

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What was the first lie you ever remember telling?” asked Chad.

  Sorry. Mr. Hoskins. My occasional therapist.

  “I was eleven,” I said. “I told the girls at school that my baby sister was training to be an Olympic gymnast.”

  “Which she wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t have a sister,” I said.

  Chad smiled in spite of himself.

  I don’t know what makes me think of that now as I work my wrist around in the manacle, trying to feel if any part of the iron feels weak or thinned by rust. I hold it carefully with my free hand, turning my left slowly inside the cuff, concentrating like some TV safecracker.

  You told Gre
tchen you had a sister who worked in film effects, said a voice in my head. CGI or something. Marcus heard . . .

  And wouldn’t speak to me.

  I stop what I’d been doing with the manacle, momentarily elated by the memory coming back to me, as if I have found a button and the chain has snapped away. The relief lasts less than a second before the implication of Marcus’s angry disappointment settles on me, and I remember that I am chained in the dark, at the mercy of some nameless, bull-headed monster . . .

  No. That’s absurd. He’s a man. Possibly, I suppose, a woman, and my strange sense that his head was too large was just my terrified imagination. He’s a man, just a man.

  And he will come back. He will ask the questions I can’t answer, and then . . . I don’t know, but it won’t be good. Anxiety and dread build in my chest. I have to do something. If I sit here in the dark waiting for him to come back, I’ll go insane.

  I turn the manacle to the left and then—when my arm won’t go any farther—to the right. It feels solid, uneven and certainly chewed by rust, but not so that it feels likely to crumble. Despair is stealing in on me and I have to push past it. I think of Marcus and try to recall his anger at the lie I told, and I find myself thinking back to when we were here before and the tense return to our shared apartment in Charlotte five years ago. We were tired and stressed with travel and each other, and Marcus went straight to bed before I noticed the light blinking on the answering machine. I remember playing the message and then sitting there, staring at nothing.

  Marcus had applied for a place on an intensive teacher-training course in Wilmington: the last month of the summer before classes restarted. It was a government-sponsored program working through the UNC system, and if he committed to doing three of them, along with supplemental online assignments and the construction of a writing portfolio, it would earn him a master’s degree. This was in the days when that meant an automatic pay raise in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district.