Study in Perfect by Sarah Gorham Read Free Book Online Page B

bear’s heart. Plants too: The mountain laurel’s pollen-coated, spring-loaded stamens are painted a bright, alluring pink. From scent and color, the lady-slipper creates a tantalizing canoe-shaped trap for bees and spiders.
    Rocks and cement do not lie. The very idea is absurd. It appears the lie is a characteristic of living things, an extension ofDarwinian notions of natural selection. The liar, whether plant or animal, casts a spell for a handful of reasons: to jump-start the reproductive process, protect its young, defend its territory, escape predation, scare or intimidate rivals, or otherwise appear more fit in the world’s eye.
    The most enchanting things in nature
and art are based on deception
.
— VLADIMIR NABOKOV

    Here is a poem that describes a deception gone wild, from Jeffrey Harrison’s collection
Feeding the Fire
:
    OUR OTHER SISTER
    The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn’t shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second
    before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who’d gone away.
What my motives were I can’t recall: a whim,
    or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a string of DNA
    that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel
    and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.
    Before I knew it, she’d moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she’d stopped calling.
    I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember
    how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I’d just made up
had that kind of power, and I can just feel
    the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister
    had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.
    The first false sentence the speaker recalls in this poem—the pronouncement and vague shape of another sister—is the easiest. But a lie is seldom solitary; it begs another and another, until an imaginary skeleton is built, bone by bone, muscle and flesh, a sister-hologram with hobbies, home, hair. The greater the detail, the less likely she will crumble. The longer her history, the greater the strain, until he can’t even make the truth believable and must suffer “the blowdart of remorse.”
    Initially, the speaker lies to get what he wants. Perhaps it began with a whim. Or big-brother meanness, like the homemade blowdart. Perhaps indeed the speaker was “toying with loss,” or probing “the ache of imaginary wounds.” Whatever the motivation, the lie flatters the liar. Like Joni Mitchell’s makeup denial or the frigate bird’s magnificent feathers, the lie allows him “that kind of power.”

    True consciousness, the recognition of self, separated from world, occurs at around age seven, the age at which a child also begins to lie. Teenagers are notorious liars. They lie about their whereabouts, drugs and alcohol, school attendance, grades, boyfriends, sex, mostly to avoid punishment from various authority figures. But they lie to their friends as well, boosting their intelligence, sexual experience, cool quotient. The high social pressure of adolescence makes them desperate for any and every kind of “spell.” It is often a way of
being
. Bonnie once told her teacher she had been abused and now her parents were divorcing. She noticed how victims were getting all the attention, their status clearly elevated to the point of celebrity. Again, we were pulled into the Sister’s office as the first step in a kind of