by Jim Stark
In response to her insistent questioning about the explosion at the lodge, Randall had told her, in strictest confidence, the secret of who had invented the LieDeck. She'd been astonished to learn that the man she knew as a mild-mannered taxi driver had invented the device that had brought an end to her marriage ... not that it wasn't doomed anyway. When she told that personal story to Randall, he suggested that perhaps she would like to participate in the evening sessions of the focus group studying the impact of the device. She had accepted—not just for the evening sessions, but for all the sessions, explaining that she had six weeks of accumulated vacation leave at her government job, and would be happy to use some of it for this purpose. She was determined to put the collapse of her marriage behind her, and she was happy to see another woman, albeit a rather young one, join the group. As in much of life, the fairer sex was in a distinct minority position in the L.A.P.
After Michael and Becky were introduced to the group, Steve took them to the table at the front of the room and showed off the LieDeck. “Well,” he said, “this is it. This is what all the fuss is about."
"Doesn't look very scary, does it?” said Nancy.
Michael had seen it before, of course, but this was new for Becky. It didn't look very impressive—a black plastic Dictaphone case, a few colored buttons with makeshift labels glued beneath them. “That's it?” she asked.
"Go ahead,” said Steve. “Tell it a lie."
"I wish I didn't have to be here,” said Becky.
"Beep,” went the LieDeck as she hit the last word of her sentence.
"We're glad you're with us,” said Steve. “And you see? I must have really meant it, because there was no beep."
"I have to be home by midnight,” said Becky, expectantly.
"Beep,” said the LieDeck.
"I think my mom and dad are overly protective of me,” she added. To her enormous astonishment, the LieDeck beeped her. “I ... don't understand. How come I got beeped?"
"Gotcha,” laughed Nancy. “This thing is amazing. I've only been using it for a couple of hours, and I just can't get over it. It can tell you things about yourself that you really didn't know, things that your subconscious knows, but your conscious mind doesn't."
"The subconscious mind knows stuff the conscious mind doesn't?” asked Becky. “Like, I know things about myself that I don't even know that I know?"
"Oh yeah!” said Nancy. “That's why shrinks use hypnosis to find that stuff out. Turns out the LieDeck is actually easier, and much more reliable. For instance, try saying that you ... resent your parents’ protectiveness, but you don't really think they're overdoing it."
"I ... resent my parents’ protectiveness,” said Becky. Nothing. No signal. “But I don't think they're overdoing it,” she tried. Again there was silence. “Well I'll be darned,” she exclaimed. “This is ... ummmm ... more than I bargained for!"
"Whoa,” said Michael. “I didn't know about that part. This could be dangerous."
"Well, that's part of what we're here to determine, or at least to explore,” said Steve. “Now, if you'll take your seats—there's two at the back there if you like—we have to get on with our work. I believe we left off with you, Nancy. You mentioned something about how the divorce rate is probably going to triple or quadruple."
Nancy returned to her front-row seat and shuffled her notes. She seemed to be looking for something, but in reality her mind was flooded with images of Tom Ferguson, her cheating husband, her very-soon-to-be-ex-husband. She remembered her humiliation at Ray's Restaurant, when she learned from her answering machine that her life was not as she had imagined, and she quivered at the recollection of the big arm of that waitress, a total stranger, who had showed her kindness at a time when the person closest to her had showed nothing but deceit, and contempt. She had always been a church-going woman, and at this exact moment she was glad there was a hell—for Tom.
"I—uh—I don't have much to add to what I said before,” she began. “It seems that with the ‘Helliwell-effect’ in the mix, the institution of marriage is in serious trouble. I mean, it already was in trouble, but now it's ... well, maybe it's a goner. Something has to change—either our attitudes about sex and fidelity or our expectations about family life. In the short run, as Chairman Steve put it earlier, there's going to be an epidemic of divorces, starting ... well, right now, I guess, but not necessarily based on husbands and wives fooling around on each other, sexually. With the LieDeck, we get to know pretty much whatever we want to know about our spouses, lovers, kids, parents, bosses, and our employees, including everybody's ... shall we say their ‘dark side,’ their inner thoughts, fantasies, illicit desires, all that stuff we used to be able to bury or just keep quiet, and of course that's a two-way street, so they get to know all about us in the same—"
"We don't have to answer when people ask us about stuff that we don't want to talk about,” came a male voice from the back. Nancy turned her head slightly and looked at the rumpled middle-aged bus driver who had seemed intent on making a contact sport of interrupting her ever since she'd joined the group a few hours ago. His name was Mickey Gendron—Marc Gendron, actually, though he had used “Mickey” since he was a kid.
"Marc,” she said, deliberately using the name he had asked the group members not to use, “we went through that earlier. People communicate as much by what they don't say as by what they do say, and—"
"Horseshit,” scoffed Mickey.
"Really?” said Nancy as she turned around more completely, with her eyebrows at full mast and her gaze dead into his black pupils. “Do you have any idea why you like to challenge me all the time? You want my attention! I have to accept that you don't agree with what I said, because you didn't get beeped. But this isn't about the details of how people communicate. The reason you jump in on me like that all the time is because you want to have sex with me! Right? You don't even care that I find you annoying. In fact, you couldn't care less what I think of you, or what I think about anything at all. Who I am is of no interest to you! You just want to screw me, for your own recreation.
"Well, Mr. Gendron? Lost your tongue, Mr. Gendron? No denial, Mr. Gendron? You don't have the courage to open your mouth, Mr. Gendron? Scared of getting beeped, Mr. Gendron?
"You haven't got the guts to cope with the reality of who you are, but the fact is, you don't have to respond out loud. Everybody in this room knows the answer already. Now maybe you can see what we mean about finding out stuff even when a person doesn't say a word, Mr. Gendron?"
"I ... think you've made your point,” said Steve gently, trying to get Mickey off the hook.
All eyes in the room were welded onto Mickey's face. His hard eyes had locked onto Nancy's, and narrowed to slits, concealing ... well, concealing nothing, as it turned out.
"So now you want to slap me or hit me with your fist, is that it?” Nancy asked. “Well, thanks ever so much. I find that very sexy, a real turn-on."
Two electronic beeps identified that reverse meaning of her put-downs, the sarcastic intent—not that anyone needed confirmation. She turned her face back to the front of the room and signaled Steve that she was done, that he could continue, hopefully on some other subject, so she could cool down and cope with the presence of a man who wanted to rape her, a man who would settle for a good beating or a black eye, maybe even a broken bone—in the worst case, for ... what? Murder?
Michael and Becky were sitting very near Mickey Gendron, and they were stunned, shaken. The other participants were silent, frozen into their own imaginings of what this incident represented, and what it could lead to, not only for Mickey and Nancy, but for themselves, and for humanity in general. The LieDeck, apparently, did a lot more than detect lies and go “beep."
Steve hadn't asked for the role of facilitator. When he had been nominated, a couple of days earlier, he had tried to duck out of it, had even begged not to be chosen, but the group had insisted. Now he was stuck with a duty to sort this thing out, to either chan
ge the subject or see the confrontation through to some kind of resolution, perhaps to expel the hormone-driven Mickey Gendron, or to rescue his sanity, or stave off an emotional collapse ... or an assault.
I know, he thought. I'll bare my own ... He was about to think the word “soul,” but that word had gone the way of “goblin” and “angel.” His vocabulary had yet to adjust to what the focus group was calling the “truth imperative,” and he couldn't immediately locate an unbeepable surrogate.
Mickey felt like a bleeding ulcer. His mind was ping-ponging back and forth from a consideration of his own embarrassing nature to the options available for the laying on of hurt, physical hurt. He was still staring at the back of Nancy's head, three rows in front, wanting to love her ... or injure her. All the other eyes in the room were executing quick triangular road races among Nancy, Mickey and Steve.
"Look, Mickey,” tried Steve, “there isn't a person in this room or anywhere who doesn't have parts of his or her character that are not in keeping with the—uh—that are out of whack with that person's finer qualities, that are, well, sometimes offensive, to others, even to ourselves. The LieDeck Revolution is putting us all through an extremely difficult process of identifying who we really are, even including the bad stuff, and it's ... well, like I said ... it's not easy. If you'd like to take a short—"
"What about you?” shouted Mickey at the chairman. “You're pretty damned clever, the way you keep the light from shining on your bad stuff."
It was a fair call—rude, bumptious, but fair. Its appeal to Mickey was in the diversion of attention away from himself, in the possibility it held for him to save a little face, if only in relative terms. And besides, I was going to do that anyway, without any prompting from Mr. Hormones-for-brains, thought Steve. He smiled inwardly at that pejorative; he would never have used it, even in the privacy of his brain, back when he was a priest. Or am I still a ... He came out of the reverie as abruptly and inexplicably as he had entered it. “Yeah ... me too,” he said, failing to specify, and feeling somewhat faint.
"So ... spill it,” said Mickey, sensing that he had touched a nerve.
The former bishop was snookered, and he knew it. His mind flashed back to a day more than thirty years ago, when he was in grade ten. A friend of his had taken him aside and given him proper shit for being such a social klutz. “Your problem is you don't know how to act,” his buddy had said to him earnestly. Steve remembered thinking, but not saying, a snappy comeback: “Your problem is that you do know how to act,” he'd wanted so much to say. How odd, he thought now. When I finally learned to act, it backfired. I acted like a believer, and they made me a priest. I acted like a priest, and they made me a bishop. Then I acted like Jesus, and they dumped me.
"I ... was ... sort of a blackmailer ... in a way,” he shrugged. “I was—uh—you could say I was something of ... of an emotional terrorist."
"Oh for Christ's sake,” said Nancy, unaware of the full irony of her choice of words. “What the hell are you talking about, Steve?"
Steve had been standing at the front of the room. Now, he sat on the desk, folded his hands on his lap, and slowly raised his eyes to meet Mickey's. He didn't have to do this, and he certainly didn't want to, but he would.
"All my life,” he said plainly, “I went to confession, and told, honestly, of the sins I had committed. But there was always a part of me, a part I denied and ... that I couldn't cope with—"
"Beep."
"—wouldn't cope with,” he continued without skipping a beat, “a part of me that I blamed on the Devil, or on some outside force, a part of me that I kept private. It had to do with my doubts about my faith. I always settled for having doubts about my doubts, but ... well, as I told you before, I've never believed in God ... ever ... although I only fully realized that a week ago, less than a week, last Friday, the day I met Mr. Helliwell, the day I finally had my agnosticism LieDeck-verified and—"
"Beep."
"Sorry,” said Steve as he wiped his damp face with a damp hand. “I should have said the day I had my atheism LieDeck-verified. Not that there's a great deal of difference. But the question remains: what was I doing all those years that I was a priest? Was I in deep psychological denial? Was I insane? Was I playing a game? Or was I responding to some primitive urge to boost myself up by laying a power trip on others? And if that's what I was doing, how on Earth did I avoid realizing it? What need was being served by such a tawdry self-deception? As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time in the last few days trying to figure—"
"So you're human,” blurted Nancy. “So what's all this crap about blackmail and terrorism?"
Steve then realized he was still hoping to slide by the crux of the matter. He'd gotten Mickey out of the frying pan, but he had landed himself in the fire. Fine, he thought. I will say what I have to say, and I will not get emotional about it.
"Let me put it this way,” he said evenly, staring at his hands and wishing this cup could be taken from his lips. “Santa Claus—the myth of old St. Nick—he's supposed to know all, and he goes around with his list and checks it twice, making notes on who's naughty and nice, and the nice kids get presents and the naughty ones don't. Even that myth has an intrinsic lie. Santa leaves presents for all the kids, the naughty ones and the nice ones and the half-and-half ones, which is most of us, I suppose. But the blackmail works, doesn't it? Hundreds of millions of children try like crazy to be extra-nice in the couple of weeks leading up to Christmas.
"God, on the other hand—let's say the myth of God—well, he's not nearly as nice as old Santa. He's supposed to know everything too, so much so that he doesn't even have to keep a list, let alone check it twice. However, it's essentially the same as the Santa scam. If you're nice, you get to live forever in this perfect place called heaven after you die. But if you're naughty, he doesn't just withhold a few goodies and presents; you get to spend eternity in this house of pain called hell. God's got a much bigger carrot than Santa, and a much bigger stick.
"And who do you think gets to wave the stick at those who don't do what God says? Who gets to say exactly what God wants? The priests! We're God's enforcers, dispensing reality and passing the collection plate. We tell people what's right, what's wrong, how to behave, how not to behave, and if people defy us, or if we don't believe that a confession is sincere, that they're really really sorry, or if they refuse to confess to us, we don't bust a kneecap, but we do withhold ... absolution! We deny them God's forgiveness, and by so doing, we deny them entry into heaven, and we assure their deliverance into hell.
"Worst of all, we don't even take responsibility for this blackmail, this ... terrorism. We say, ‘Hey, I was just following orders,’ like the Germans did at Nüremberg. We make the rules, then we claim that God made the rules and that we just teach them, apply them, like a good parent ... like a good cop ... like a good Nazi ... and—"
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Steve,” said Nancy, “get a grip! You've gone too far, way too far. You quit trusting your mind several decades, ago, so figure it out, eh? We're talking major rust effect here. So what if you used to wallow in power, now you're wallowing in guilt. Put it behind you, for heaven's sake! You too, Mickey. You're both acting like ... jerks. Yes, the LieDeck is making us face up to the fact that we're flawed, maybe even deeply flawed, but what's important is whether we continue to act like assholes, now that we have to acknowledge the truth about ourselves.
"So, as I was saying, about marriage and divorce..."
Michael reached over and took Becky's hand. Becky squeezed back.
Chapter 37
WHISPER CAMPAIGN
"Victor,” said Randall boisterously. “Great to see you again."
"How are you, Randall?” said Victor, without emotion. “And the family?"
It was 9:50 p.m., and “the truth squad” had gathered in the boardroom of Whiteside Technologies to view the evening news and to discuss how they should respond to the day's developments, if at all. They knew the moniker
“the truth squad” wouldn't stick and mightn't even be deserved, and they hadn't actually voted on it themselves, but they were gelling into a family of sorts, and yet they were seriously confused about exactly who they were, and why they were together, doing this thing.
One thing, however, was crystal clear. Victor knew that his taxi-driving days, his days of anonymity, were over. Randall explained to Victor that after Jean Proulx had made his appearance earlier in the day on LieDeck Live, an enterprising Alpha reporter had been able to confirm his identity as the inventor of the LieDeck from a second reliable source, by tricking a staff member from the lodge.
"I hope it wasn't Winnie,” said Victor.
"I'm afraid it was,” said Cam. “I told all staff that while the lodge was being rebuilt they would get their full pay, and I told them to watch out for reporters or anybody else who might try to get them to talk about you, or about the attack. But you shouldn't blame her. A reporter found her at her apartment in Quyon, and he had a LieDeck. She denied everything, but she might as well have told the truth. It seems that a ‘no’ plus a ‘beep’ are equal to a ‘yes’ now—although the reporter used the pin signaling mode, of course."
"I don't blame Winnie,” said Victor ruefully. “I just got hoisted by my own petard, so to speak."
Cam smiled—something he tried to avoid, normally. This “petard” business was the first sign of sophistication or class he'd ever seen in the taxi driver, and he was impressed ... modestly.
"Annette's really pissed off at you for not visiting,” said Helen.
"Oh, she'll forgive me,” said Victor.
"You could have called,” said Steve, with an edge to his voice.
"I could've not told anybody about the LieDeck,” said Victor, in a tone that dared anyone to scold him again. “I just lost my freedom, Steve, forever, and I'm not thrilled about it. I thought I'd have a month or more. Instead I got two and a half frigging days. I couldn't go see her, and even if I'd called, I might have ended up with even less than two and a half days if the call had been intercepted. You know perfectly well that ever since about 2005, in response to nine-eleven, more and more national governments spy on private emails and phone calls and ordinary mail and any communications they feel like spying on, and they do it legally, because people don't get it. God knows what the RCMP is up to, or capable of. You seem to have forgotten that the assassination attempt was aimed at me. I needed some time to myself. I'm glad she's okay."
