Foul Speech

The fate of humanity relies on me telling the truth. What a sorry fate for humanity, when I am a pathological liar. Lying is how I got my wife to marry me, how I lied about cheating on her, how I got my masters degree in engineering, and how I have so many friends. Simply put, lying is fun. 

I met my wife five years ago in college. She was in my art class. She was a shy sort, adorable as a button and easy to fool. She was wearing an oversized dress, no makeup, and heavy glasses. Few guys would have seen the beauty of her, but few guys could see through deception like I could. I didn’t like being deceived by other people—I only liked doing the deceiving. Things like self-confidence and makeup were big deceptions. 

Every time class ended, she immediately packed up her things and practically ran out of the class to avoid talking to anyone. I gathered data on her, asked around about her, but no one knew anything. How interesting.

I stopped her when she was leaving class once. I made myself up to be as handsome and to her taste as possible. I saw her reading high fantasy books around campus–you know, the nerdy Lord of the Rings stuff–and so I grew my hair out a bit. Luckily, I already looked a bit like an elf or a hobbit, so I had that covered. I made up my wardrobe to be a bit more appealing to her, and voila.

I asked her, “Do you have a study partner?”

She shook her head. 

“Good. I hear you get good grades in this class.” I didn’t just hear it. I peeked at her grades and saw she always got As and Bs. I didn’t actually need her help, of course. I got As in everything. “Perhaps we can study together?”

“Sure, I guess…” her voice was barely audible in the crowd of people. “What’s your name?”

“Anders.” I answered. “And yours?”

“Morgan.” 

Her name was like music to my ears. I knew I wanted to make her my wife. It only got better when I saw her praying before our study sessions. I knew little about Christianity, but I knew divorce was a last ditch solution for them.

During our first study session was where the fun truly began. 

“So, what are you having trouble with?” Morgan asked.

“Just the memorization of what artist did what piece of art.” A lie.

“Have you ever tried a mnemonic device?” She asked.

“What’s that?” Another lie. 

She smiled. She was loving this. I could tell she adored teaching others. “It’s basically using acronyms to remember complex topics. Let me break it down for you.”

She broke it down, and I continued to plead ignorance. After studying for a time, I saw a way to get to know her better. I knew what questions to ask through practice. 

“Me and Monet have the same last name. Isn’t that funny?” she laughed.

“Maybe. Except you look beautiful up close, and from far away, whereas his paintings are only beautiful from afar.” I appraised her reaction, seeing if she liked outright flirtations. Her cheeks were beet red. Bingo. She liked it very much. 

“You’re silly…” she murmured. 

“So your family came from France originally?” Since she liked words and languages, I knew she would like that I knew it was a French name.

She nodded excitedly. “Yeah, they did. We’ve been in America a long time now, though. I miss my family… It's sort of scary moving out and being on your own. What about you? You miss yours?”

“I do. Me and my dad were really close. We went to the movies all the time, and now I barely ever see him. It’s pretty lonely.” I forced an awkward laugh. Another brilliant lie. After all, what girl likes to hear about a father who put cigarettes out on you and punched you so hard you had to be hospitalized?

But the story I told her was incredibly relatable, and her eyes lit up. “Well. I feel a bit less lonely now that I’ve gotten to know you. I don’t make friends easily, you know?”

“Why not? Are you a little shy? I can relate.” Obviously another lie. And a clumsy lie at that, I felt like cutting out my tongue. If I were shy, I wouldn’t have accosted her as boldly as I did when we met.

Her face was suspicious for a moment, but since all my other lies lined up, she let it slide. She looked down at her lovely, slender fingers. “I don’t know if it’s that… I just like being alone sometimes. It’s selfish, but if I get to know others, I will need to share my time with them. And time is precious to me.”

She revealed to me nearly her entire soul in that one night, making it easy for me to hack her brain. Such a sweet, trusting fool. I saw her often across six months, and married her in nine. Children served no interest for me, but they did for her, so I gave her five in five years. 

But she began wising up to me over the years. She trusted me for four entire years that I wasn’t cheating or watching porn (and to her porn was the same as cheating), but then she began to suspect.

And from there, she did some snooping and figured out I had been lying about cheating. She managed to forgive me, so long as I stopped all extracurricular marital behaviors. Regardless, she no longer trusted me, and knew to assume that if my lips were moving, I was lying. 

But now, it was an amusing challenge to me. I wondered if I could gain back her trust through more lies, and had begun to do so. 

One night, I went out of our house while she was asleep to smoke (another thing I told her I never did), and that’s when I discovered the fate of humanity was on my shoulders. 

A big lie by omission I had been telling others my whole life was that I could see how long they could live by numbers displayed over their heads. I had seen my own number first, written brightly and glowing above my head when I turned eight-years-old. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but, knowing no one would believe me, I stayed quiet about it. I looked at the numbers above other heads and saw a boy my age at school who had a ‘one’ above his head. A day later, the boy was found dead. He had drowned in a river. 

I thought it was an odd coincidence, and I tracked another adult man with a three above his head. My parents didn’t keep track of me, so I was able to follow him around until he got shot. Then, I saw a thirty above my dad’s head, and he died of consumption thirty days later. 

The number above my own head was satisfactory. I would die in my late thirties. Short and sweet. I wanted to burn brightly and burst like a star. 

The only person I had ever told about the numbers was a therapist. He wanted to slap another label on top of me of schizophrenia on top of all the other disorders he had diagnosed me with, and I was sick of it. I was hoping he would believe me, but alas, when I already had the pathological liar diagnosis, there was no way he would. 

Regardless, the night I popped out of my house to smoke a cigarette, everything changed. I had driven deep into the desert because I wanted to look at the stars. And up above, I saw one of the stars, bright against the desert sky, blink brightly. A beam of light shone down upon me from it, and I hastily jumped back in surprise. From above, I saw a spiral of bright lights traveling down from the beam. I watched curiously, nearly paralyzed with shock at what I was seeing. Then, the sparkles glowed brightly, practically blinding me. It became what I thought was a human being.

It was so blindingly white I could barely see its features. I took a step back in shock. “Who—what are you?” I spluttered.

The creature was silent. The light it was emitting pulsed brightly, then died down enough for me to see blindingly white skin and hundreds of eyes.

“You have perverted your language, distorted it, spoken untruths. If your tongue is so vicious and deceitful, you shouldn’t use it at all. Speak truth if you want humanity to continue.” 

There was flat silence filled in by chirping crickets as I marveled at what I was seeing. It was like I was seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing, and it sent waves of absolute terror rippling through me. 

The creature walked close to me, and I backed away, tripping over a rock and then falling down. The creature opened its yawning mouth and I saw eternity in it. The hair rose on my arms as a chiming sounded at the edge of my hearing. The creature pulsed brightly again, then disappeared in a flash of light.

When he left, every person I encountered had a seven over his head.

I didn’t feel much at all about it at first. Still don’t. Everyone and everything dies. What matters if it’s in seven days or seven million years. I went home that night and peeked in on each of my five children. I could try to tell my wife, but I was untrustworthy in her eyes already. I sat at the end of my oldest son’s bed, drumming my fingers on the edge of it. He would die, too, if I did nothing. The creature from the sky indicated that if I didn’t speak the truth, everyone would die. 

I shrugged. If that creature wanted humanity to live, he should have entrusted it to someone else. Though, I was probably just imagining things. Perhaps the doc was right about that schizophrenia diagnosis… Whenever the number above someone’s head reached zero, I did always see them getting dragged down to what appeared to be hell by a demon, and the doc did say that schizophrenics were prone to seeing things like demons.

I crawled back into bed next to my wife and draped an arm around her. She would die, too, though, and I would have no one left to lie to.

I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t sleep. When I woke up, I felt drained. 

My wife was exhausted, too, as she made us coffee. She asked, “Where were you last night?”

She was fully expecting me to lie. I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I told her, “Another slipup.”

She sighed heavily, her eyes full of tears. “Thank you for telling the truth. If you love her, you can go.”

I bit back laughter, finding the irony of the truth being so much worse than an already terrible lie to be amusing. “I want to work on us.” I kept my voice sincere, honest. 

“Apparently, you don’t. If you did, you would stop doing what you’re doing. Please, no more torturing me. Go if you want her.” she wept bitterly.

I listened to her ugly sobs, wondering why it hurt her so badly. I wouldn’t care if she did the same thing to me. Ultimately, humans take what they want when they want it. In the end, it was a biological urge for men to take their pleasures where they might–though she insisted God put us on this earth to rise above our carnal natures.

I leaned against the counter in the kitchen. The number above her head showed an infinity sign. I wonder what made her so different. All of our children’s heads had an infinity as well. I wanted to see what her reaction to me telling the truth was, so I tried to tell her. “Actually, that was a lie. The truth is, I ran into our pastor.”

Oops. Another lie. Silly tongue, I was trying to tell the truth.

My wife’s face wrinkled in confusion. “Are you lying? Why?”

“No, I’m telling the truth. I met him at a bar and he told me I needed to straighten up.” The lie kept unraveling. It was clever though, I had to hand it to myself. It was just strange enough to be the truth.

My wife stared. “And? Are you going to change your ways?”

“I’ll try. I never thought you would actually leave me. I thought marriage was for life.” Before I met her, I didn’t know anything about Christianity. But I made sure to remember the parts about marriage so I could use it to keep her. 

“I didn’t say I wanted to divorce. I said you may as well be with her. I will continue to love and pray for you.” she said.

I frowned. She was making it a bit too easy. What a foolish, foolish, sweet girl, to hold such a harmful belief so deeply in her innocent heart. I looked down at my feet. “Well, I’m not seeing her anymore.” A half-lie. I saw her rarely, but was kind of bored of cheating. 

She looked deep into my eyes unblinkingly. The stare was so intense I had to look away. She sighed. “I just can’t tell when you’re lying…”

“I’m telling the truth.” I just couldn’t stop myself.

Her eyes were full of tears that wouldn’t stop coming. I didn’t know what came over me, but suddenly, I didn’t want to lose her. Companionship is nice, I suppose.

“Then tell me the truth. All of it. Or I never want to see you in my house again until you do.” she said. “Start at the beginning. You told me your parents are lawyers and you like them, but you never want to visit them. You always have an excuse. Let’s start there.”

I was surprised. How long ago had she figured that out? And yet she never brought it up? I was about to spin a fun tale about how they were good parents, and I was nearly done with the tale when I stopped myself. 

She was on her knees, bawling her eyes out, praying with all her might for me to change. To tell her the truth. 

My mouth moved. I could feel another compulsory lie starting. I stopped myself. I found myself mentally praying to something I didn’t believe in, too. It was embarrassing to see her so destroyed. I knelt by her and hoisted her up without even thinking after that fraction of a prayer. 

We locked eyes.

I took a deep breath, and my tongue felt a bit looser. I said quietly, “My father put out cigarettes on me. Those scars on my chest and back? All him. I’m really no better. In fact, if you had a brain in your head you would have left me long ago. I lied to my dad constantly. That’s why he beat me.”

Her eyes were wide. She swallowed, grabbing one of my hands shakily. “You don’t really like high fantasy? You don’t believe in God?”

I shook my head slowly. I held her chin in my hands. I could appreciate her from an aesthetic view and from a moral point of view. She was a work of art, loveliness itself, but I could never be in love with her or anyone else.

Her lip trembled, tears streamed continuously down her cheeks, and I felt disgusted at having vandalized such a work of art. “Everyone is going to die in seven days.” I said honestly.

She snorted. “Why would you lie after finally telling the truth! You truly must get some sort of perverse satisfaction from it.” 

“Let me show you.” I said suddenly. 

We went to church, and I pointed out a man who would die in two days, another who would die in six, and one had an infinity above his head. We waited, and when the prediction came true, she believed me. The man with the infinity seemed to go to heaven, and the other two dragged to hell.

She was stunned. “So… you’ve told the truth. Will everyone live now?”

I shrugged. “The sevens are gone. I’m seeing normal numbers now.”

She sighed in relief. “Good. But… you’ve known this whole time when people were going to die and you said nothing. Just who did I marry?”

The lie was on the tip of my tongue. It was amusing, but convincing enough for a silly girl like her to believe. I wanted to tell her, ‘a misguided soul’. But I thought of her, absolutely broken on her knees and praying for my hideous soul, and I managed the truth. The dull, nihilistic truth. “You married an absolute monster.”

I was expecting her to weep, but she embraced me. My ugly, cold heart was warmed as I embraced her back. She was just happy I had told her the truth. There was some change in my ugly heart from there on out. I couldn’t put my finger on it. The feelings of others still didn’t matter to me–I barely understood them–but I trained myself to understand the pain and joy that was correlated with those emotions, and tempered my actions and my lying tongue to fit the situations. 

I was used to lying to others. So used to it that the biggest lie I told myself was right under my nose–that heaven and hell didn’t exist. The good news was that if demons existed, angels did, too. And my wife was mine.

But she wasn’t the one who had saved me in the end.