A Vital Public Service

I am a professional liar.

That statement is true, but it doesn’t sound right, does it? Who would aspire, or even admit, to something like that? The very idea you would pay good money to be lied to seems preposterous, doesn’t it?

While there are many professions based on some form of lying—con artist, lawyer, advertising copywriter, lobbyist, and politician, to name a few—only novelists will tell you we’re lying right up front. If a politician prefaced a speech by saying, “I’m only saying this to get elected,” not many x’s would show up beside her name in the ballot boxes. If a lawyer came right out and said, “My client is guilty as hell, but here’s why he’s innocent,” the conviction rate would sky-rocket. Yet novelists routinely get away with those “any resemblance to persons living or dead” disclaimers in the front of the book. How do we do this? Here’s my theory:

In many ways, novelists are more honest than other professional liars, because most forms of lying are unavailable to us. A novel is, first and foremost, a logical construct. Within it, everything must make perfect sense to be believable.

We can’t lie by omission. The arthritic, octogenarian, cat-lady character must never take out the assassin-for-hire character by suddenly turning into Yoda on page 245. She has to be Yoda, right from the start.

We can’t bluff. Unless we give you a compelling reason for why the laws of gravity have been suspended, the suicidal stockbroker character who leaps off the roof of the Empire State building, damn well better make a convincing splat when he hits 5^th Avenue.

We can only exaggerate under specific conditions, such as simile, metaphor, or hyperbole. The head of any character whose eyes actually did widen to the dimensions of saucers would explode.

These limitations give fiction a Newtonian kind of hyper-reality. Actions generate reactions. Causes always lead to effects. Every character has understandable motivations. Such conditions do not apply in the real world, where our lives are dominated by spastic, seemingly random co-incidence, and people do the most bizarre things for no apparent reason at all.

The only form of lie available to novelists is the bald/bare-faced lie. (So named, if the etymology is correct, because a man who displays his face seems more trustworthy than a man who hides behind a beard, therefore men who shave get away with telling bigger lies. By extension, bearded men, even though they don’t look trustworthy, would actually be more trustworthy. Something to think about, ladies, next time you’re sussing out the talent on datesRus.com.) By making no attempt to disguise what we write as truth, novelists free readers from distracting suspicions about our motives. You know our motives. We want your money. We’re lying to get it.

When you plunk down $15.99 for the latest pack of lies by Famous Author, what you are really doing is holding out your leg to be pulled. You want to sink into a soothing, make-believe world, where everything is more exciting and believable than real life. You want us to help you escape reality. You want to be lied to.

In this sense, novelists perform a vital public service of which we can be justifiably proud. Without us, you’d be trapped in a world of incomprehensible truth, which, as you know, is far stranger than fiction.

A Short Vacation from Reality

The toe of my winter boot snags on a ridge of ice as I step up on the sidewalk. I stumble and sprawl forward onto the cement, managing to pull my hands out of my coat pockets just in time to prevent breaking the resulting fall with my face.

After a fall, there’s always a blank moment, while the brain ignores external input to assess damage and gear up for pain. Hip: groan. Good knee: yeouch. Palms: double yeouch. Bad knee: Holey Moley! Crank up the endorphins!

When vision returns, I find myself staring at a cough drop that flew out as I jerked my hands from my pockets. Printed on the wrapper, in tiny letters, like sympathetic encouragement from a miniscule god, are the words: You’ve survived worse!

I’m seriously disturbed by this message. Sane people never receive personal consolation from a deity (of any size) and the cough drop delivery method freaks me right out. Has the fictional universe I inhabit while writing spilled over into reality? Have I fallen through an inter-dimensional portal where cough drops are not only sentient, but compassionate? Or maybe it’s only the cherry-flavored ones that are compassionate. Maybe the licorice ones are cranky and the extra strength ones are disciplinary.

Above me, a gruff, kindly voice asks, “Are you hurt, ma’am?”

“I don’t think so,” I reply as I roll over and find myself looking into the concerned blue eyes of a bald man. His face is half-hidden by an explosion of curly white beard, and he’s wearing a bright orange jump suit.

For a split second, I wonder if I hit my head after all, suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, and am looking into the face of the God I don’t believe exists. Then sanity prevails. Any omnipotent deity with a modicum of self-respect would never represent himself as a pink bowling ball nestling in a mound of angel hair pasta. Also, an omniscient deity wouldn’t have to ask me if I was hurt. As final proof, dead people’s knees don’t feel like there’s a spike driven into the patella.

“Here,” the non-deity grabs my wrist and elbow, “let me help you up.”  He hauls me to my feet with surprising strength for a man of his apparent age.

From a vertical perspective, I can see he is a member of the work crew setting up orange cones around a utility truck parked by the curb. I thank him for his help, retrieve my compassionate cough drop from the sidewalk, and limp half a block to the nearest coffee emporium. I order a cappuccino and find an out-of-the way seat at the back of the room to minimize the number of people who witness my next act, which is to read the wrappers on the rest of the cough drops in my pocket. If I’m going to receive any more miraculous messages, the fewer people who witness it the better.

Here are all the messages I receive from my cough drops:

You’ve survived worse!

Let’s hear your battle cry!

Impress yourself today!

Don’t waste a precious minute!

Go for it!

Don’t give up on you!

Get back in there, chump!

Keep your chin up!

Start today!

Obviously, one of the designers at the cough drop wrapper production facility is a frustrated motivational speaker, and it just happened that the first message I noticed applied to my situation at the time.

With reality restored, I finish my latte and toss the cough drops into the garbage. Crossing the street to the variety store, I buy a bag of scotch mints wrapped in transparent, blank cellophane and the rest of my day proceeds in the dull, boring fashion of a typical winter Wednesday. Which is fine by me. I suddenly have a much a deeper appreciation of mundane reality.  

Afraid of the Dark

I woke up late yesterday. In my scramble to get to the bus stop on time, I forgot to put the book I’m currently reading into my tote bag and wound up at the downtown diner with nothing to occupy my eyeballs while I ate breakfast. A previous customer had abandoned a newspaper on the table beside mine. I picked it up and remembered why I never read newspapers. They’re just so depressing.

For example, yesterday’s paper contained three fatal shootings, a landslide that killed seventeen people, an update on the trial of a young man who murdered his mother, two alcohol-related car crashes for a total of eight dead, an exposé on nursing home abuse, the kidnapping of a red cross worker in Pakistan, a report on drug addiction among the homeless, a celebrity break up, and a political bun fight over parking fees. And that was just the front page.

It put me right off my food. I abandoned my chicken salad and lettuce on a toasted sesame bagel and walked over to the bank to replenish my pocket change.

What disturbed me most about the news—except for the landslide, a natural disaster and therefore unavoidable—was that it all revolved around the dark side of humanity, the angry, the venial, the rebellious, the downright stupid. I’ve gone to considerable effort to eradicate these elements from my life and felt quite annoyed with myself for allowing them back in via the newspaper.

Let’s start with guns. I don’t own a gun. I don’t hang out with anyone who owns a gun. I don’t want to hang out with anyone who owns a gun, so if you know me, and I find out you own a gun, prepare to be shunned. There are no good uses for guns in a civilized world. Guns (and bombs, and any other form of long range killing) are all about intimidation and domination from a safe distance; the tools of cowards. I think I might enjoy reading about a war fought with fists instead of guns, although I imagine fewer people would want to fight them. If I found genie in a lamp, my first wish would be that guns no longer existed.

For my second wish, I’d make all addictive substances instantly fatal. This may sound harsh, but it’s actually a kindness in disguise. There would be no homeless drug addicts wandering the streets and far fewer botched convenience store robberies. Alcohol-related traffic deaths would drop to zero. Taxes would plummet as governments saved billions (and billions and billions) of dollars by not having to fight the war on drugs. There would be no babies born addicted to heroin, or with fetal alcohol syndrome. Best of all, I could afford a humungous flat screen HD TV and state of the art blue ray player with all the money I’d save if I could kick my nicotine addiction.

I arrived at the bank and entered the vestibule where the ATM machines are. As I punched in my secret pin number, a man entered the vestibule. He wasn’t a terribly savory-looking character. In fact, he was downright seedy. His clothing was stained, his hair was matted, and even from ten feet away, I could detect the unmistakable odor of a person who’d tied one on the night before. Instead of going to an ATM, the only reason I could think of for entering the vestibule, he stood just inside the door, searching for something in the bulging pockets of his duffel coat.

Hyper-sensitized to the prevalence of crime in our society by my run in with the newspaper, I tried to decide whether I should continue my transaction and run the risk of being robbed, or whether it would be better to abort the transaction and come back later when the bank was open. When I’m afraid, I get angry and defiant. I turned around and stared at him. He moved to the ATM furthest from mine and kept looking through his pockets until he found his debit card.

My third wish would be to live in a world not dominated by fear. Because honestly, I can’t imagine how people who read newspapers can even step outside their front doors.