Deceit

EIGHT

I lie, therefore I am.

I’d discovered those words carved into my desk with a Swiss army penknife one day back in New York.

I assumed a Swiss army penknife had done the damage, because one of my fellow reporters had once shown it to me. It was his lucky talisman, he told me. It had gotten him through two wars and a near kidnapping in Tikrit.

Lately, he’d begun reading my copy with avid interest. He asked me for drinks one night and marveled at my sources. At my knack for being at the center of things. At my nose for the story.

He asked me fawning questions about my obvious alacrity at ferreting out the truth.

It was only later that I realized that he might’ve bought more drinks than I could count, but they were all my drinks. His vodka-Grey Goose, straight up-had sat untouched exactly where he’d placed it.

One of us did have a real alacrity for ferreting out the truth, but it wasn’t me.

I lie, therefore I am.

Guilty as charged.

After I reread my notes, wishing for once I’d developed an affinity for tape recorders, I drove to Muhammed Alley. I ordered a margarita-no salt-from BJ’s cousin, who tended bar on nights BJ stayed home and played dad. BJ apparently had four children from three different women, none of whom he’d ever married.

It was a little like the old days, I thought.

If you went back. Way back, to the old, old days.

When I’d first fallen in love. When I’d first bowed to the deities of Woodward and Bernstein. When I’d offered them up daily sacrifices, including my every waking hour, forswearing anything resembling a social life. When I’d pounded the pavement like I pounded the keys on my Mac-with a desperation born of true-blue obsession.

Those days.

When I believed I did have a nose for the story-I might’ve been the only one who did-that I could sniff them out like a customs dog. Someone would say something offhand-a state congressman, a mayor’s aide, a police official-and alarms would go off. Only I could hear them; they were at a pitch unknown to ordinary working hacks. I’d feverishly start digging, looking for something hidden and odious, never meant to see the light of day.

Most of the time, all you found was mud. Murky and insubstantial. You couldn’t sling it without two-sourced and verifiable proof.

There were exceptions, of course. Occasional investigations that actually uncovered something half-interesting. Nothing major, nothing incendiary enough to burn a hole into the public consciousness, but worthy enough to land me somewhere north of page 10.

On those mornings, when I perused my byline with awe and gratitude and even humility, I thought it was just possible I was on the side of the angels.

I was hearing alarms again.

Someone had tripped the wire, set off the circuitry, and jarring bells were going off in my head.

Seth stopped by.

“What’s shaking?” he said, hopping up on the next stool.

Me, I wanted to say. I’m shaking, rattling, and rolling.

“Working on a story,” I said.

“That’s funny. It looks like you’re working on a margarita. Heh-heh.”

I kind of liked Seth, in the way one fuckup feels genuine empathy for another, but tonight I felt this, well… distance between us. Wasn’t I back in the saddle, and wasn’t he still stuck in the mud?

“I need ten,” I said to him.

“Barking up the wrong tree, amigo,” he said. “I’m tapped out. Honest.”

“Ten minutes.”

“Oh.” He looked embarrassed, momentarily he did, and I suddenly felt kind of rotten for relegating a bowling team member to the ranks of the annoying and superfluous-even one with a noticeable mullet.

“Okay,” he said, sliding off the stool with feigned indifference. “That’s cool.”

“Buy you a drink when I finish,” I said.

“No problem.”

The question was, finish what?

I asked BJ’s cousin for a pen. I used my napkin to jot things down-basically everything I knew.

I was in the Acropolis Diner playing connect-the-dots again.

What has no testicles, no skid marks, and two races?

Got me.

I even threw in the assault in the basement for good measure-scribbled it there at the bottom of the napkin as a kind of addendum.

Still no clue.

Or many clues, but no answers.

Or simply random incidences.

Which would make them coincidences.

I doodled in the margins. I drew lines from one thing to another. I Etch A Sketched.

I drew two cars and blackened one till it disappeared.

I wrote down their names. Ed Crannell and Dennis Flaherty-who might or might not have been a black man.

I’d start with him, I decided.

The dead man.

When Seth came back and asked for his drink-7 and 7, a leftover from high school days, I imagined, when Seth was still hot shit and maybe the future even looked promising-I stared at him with what must’ve been a curiously blank expression.

“My drink, man. Did you or did you not offer me a cocktail?”

“Oh, sure. Just order it. I gotta run.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Writing an obituary,” I said.

That’s how I began.

Stuffed in a cluttered cubicle preparing obits for still-living, breathing people-mostly famous ones, of course-chiseling their headstones for that time when they’d be needed. The hardest part was remembering the right tense, to relegate legions of the still upright to the recent past.

Is into was. Doing into did. Living into lived.

My first professional lies.