On The Subject Of Liars

So I've been lying a lot lately. Not small, horrible lies, not the sort with malice or a need to deceive inherent in the lie itself; no, I've been making up mad tales and doing my best to make the people around me believe them. For instance, certain regular customers of mine have been asking me lately where I've been; my schedule is such that it makes tracking me down a somewhat arduous process, and my absence is apparently noticeable. It has become my habit to claim, and when questioned insist, that I have been in diplomatic custody after trying and failing to take over a small South American country via military coup.

This tendency of mine is by no means an unusual or unexpected thing. When I sprained-nigh-broke my ankle, anyone who asked me what happened was treated to a sweeping epic concerning a battalion of velociraptor-riding ninjas doing their best to defend a small beachhead under attack by cyborg-Vikings.  The only thing that makes the talespinning of recent history remarkable is that, lately, I have found myself in the unique position of actually being believed.

The uncertainty in their eyes is palpable when I inform them in all seriousness that no, the diplomatic wing of the United States government wasn't particularly pleased at the concessions it had to give in order to secure my release, but in the end it was decided I was so excellent, so brilliant a mind, as to be worth the time and effort and trade agreements. My customers are relatively certain that I'm lying, but there is enough conviction in my tone to cause them to doubt themselves and everything they know about the world. Sooner or later, of course, they work out that I'm kidding, that I must be kidding, mustn't I? Because I have only been below their personal radar for a month or so, which is certainly not enough time to actually stage a military coup.

Yes, one of the customers I was talking to was unsure enough that he actually worked out the last time he'd seen me, just to give himself mental comfort.

The thing is, I don't think this is an example of how good a liar I am. I'm a crap liar, and everyone who is even vaguely familiar with my ways and means knows it. I can't actually lie convincingly about anything, which is why I resort to wild, sweeping dramas that could not possibly be true. So why, then, am I even slightly believed?

To attempt to answer the question, I'm going to tell you about a man I've met who goes to my school. I will not be giving his name here, as doing so could buy me all manner of trouble...suffice it to say, I call him The Liar, and he is quite possibly my very favorite person in this school to watch.

The Liar established his credentials the very first time I met him, loudly and repeatedly. He informed me within approximately forty-five seconds of my having encountered him that he did not belong here, that community college was beneath him, that he couldn't believe how stupid the people here were when compared to his own gleaming intellect and knifelike insight. He complained of being smarter than the teachers, smarter than the administration, smarter than every single person he had met up until that point, and the implication was heavy that he automatically considered himself smarter than me, by dint of my very presence in this school.

This was enough to make my inner trickster-ears perk. I have taken to liking superiority complexes, considering that I harbor a rather healthy and cheerfully-defended one within my own heart. Anyone who insists upon his so vociferously and so immediately is worth listening to, if only because people who do that are usually trying desperately to prove something.

"I don't need to be here, you know," he informed me, after complaining about the pricing of the courses. "My stupid fucking job is making me go back to school."
Oh?
"Yeah. I'm going to be promoted and in order to get the position I have to have a fucking degree."
Faaascinating. What job is this?
"Oh. I'm head of the international department of Vogue Magazine."

...............

Really?

He went on to talk about how he got paid more money than God, hung out with Lady Gaga the night before ("Her name is Stephanie, you know, I knew her before she was big"), got his job because Oprah really liked him, was in control of the jobs of eleventy thousand assistants who all feared his wrath and did whatever he wanted, had every single celebrity ever ohmygod on his speed-dial, and other claims that only served to make my straight face increasingly difficult to maintain.

After he got up and walked away, I turned to the girl next to me and said solemnly, "Do you know, I don't think a word that man just said is true."
And she goggled at me, and said in tones of scandalized horror usually reserved for tabloid fodder, "Really?!"  Her friends turned to stare, too, as if to say to themselves, who is this outsider among our number and how may we best rip out her eyeballs? "What made you think that?!"

She wasn't being sarcastic. This made me wonder if perhaps I was the crazy one, if someone who was complaining about the prices of community college one minute and claiming to be a millionaire the next was actually a perfectly forthright individual and I was full of insidious and unwarranted suspicions.

Have you ever had a multiple-choice test before you, and you shade in B, then think better of it, erase B and fill in D instead, only to discover when the tests are handed back that your original thought was correct and it had been B all along? Are you the sort of person to get really annoyed by this? 

I am. And I have spent all too large a percentage of my time metaphorically erasing the correct answer at the behest of other people and my own self-doubt. Thus and so, irate at the whispers of "D, Truth!" coming from the sidelines and the vague feeling that reality as I knew it was no longer mine to claim, I glanced at the time, saw that I still had a half-hour before class started, and pattered off to the library to research the cast and crew of Vogue Magazine.

Stupid, stupid Liar. You should never, ever give your full name to someone whose head cocks inquisitively when you tell her stories. Because she might do something obsessive and insane like Google you, then Google the magazine you say you work for, search through their listings of employees, eventually call up the office of the magazine you say you work for and pretend to be your sister looking for your work number and talk to multiple receptionists trying to locate your office, then, to put the cherry on top of the whipped cream, check the entertainment news to find out if Lady Gaga has even been on the same coast as you in the last month.

She hasn't, by the way.

And nobody at Vogue has ever even heard of you.

This discovery filled me with far more glee than it ought to have. I called up multiple friends and did little verbal dances into their ears, telling them about this guy I met and how I thought maybe he was full of shit and had then proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was completely full of shit, and for the most part the reactions I got were along the lines of this:

"...wait, you actually called the home office of Vogue? What the hell is the matter with you?! Who does that?!"

((((I do that, friends-of-Susie. Obviously. It is part of the reason why you are friends with me.))))

At first, I couldn't wait to run into the Liar again, so triumphant was I, so hells-bent at showing him that there was at least one person in this school whose eyes were dyed-wool-free. Vogue, I was going to say? Really? Are you sure about that? REALLY REALLY SURE? And then, I was going to throw all I had discovered into his face, and quite possibly do a little touchdown-dance in conclusion.

But then, one day I did run into him, charging down the hall, the girls I had mentioned my suspicions to trailing in his wake like so many ducklings. They all stopped, they all glared, and the Liar...

...I kid you not...

...commenced to strut. And he continues to strut, to this day. Every time he sees me in the hallway, his voice gets louder and his assertions get more strident and his chest thrusts out and his steps turn mincing, and I don't even think he realizes he's doing it. Because that time we met and he was in front of his friends, I saw something they didn't; a flash of uncertainty.

Because I know, and he knows I know, and there's nothing else he can do except pull his pride in on itself and carry on living fiction with his head held high.

And I find myself kind of liking him for it. We scrabble together what we can in this world, you see, we take our shit situations and we do the best we can with them and sometimes, you discover something that makes it all a bit more tolerable: that if you walk like you know where you're going, the rest of the world hardly has a choice but to follow along.

That's not why I started lying, of course. I just started it up because I realized that this school is full of gullible fools who might actually swallow the huge piles of crow I am handing them, and a girl's gotta do something to keep herself entertained.

And in a world where everything has a shot at being believed, why shouldn't I have a velociraptor army or three?