This Is All a Lie

  This is All a Lie

  a novel

  Thomas Trofimuk

  Copyright © 2017 Thomas Trofimuk

  Enfield & Wizenty

  (an imprint of Great Plains Publications)

  233 Garfield Street

  Winnipeg, MB R3G 2M1

  www.greatplains.mb.ca

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program; and the Manitoba Arts Council.

  Design & Typography by Relish New Brand Experience

  Printed in Canada by Friesens

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Trofimuk, Thomas, 1958-, author

  This is all a lie / Thomas Trofimuk.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927855-77-5 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-927855-78-2 (EPUB).--

  ISBN 978-1-927855-79-9 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8589.R644T45 2017 C813’.54 C2017-902012-9

  C2017-902013-7

  ½

  Perhaps you begin to read this book in a bath. The temperature is perfectly Goldilocks – not too hot, nowhere near tepid, just right. You are more buoyant because you have added mineral salts to the water but you do not notice this buoyancy. The water feels silky – heavier, slower through your fingers. Candles stand guard along the ledge and throw dancing shadows against the tile. You probably used one of the utility lighters you bought last week to light the candles. Of course, there were five of these long-necked lighters in the package, because people always need five lighters all at once. You had to use industrial scissors to open the package. Maybe you have wooden matches and these are what you used to light the candles, so you do not think about the excessive packaging.

  It’s possible your kids are in bed, asleep, and your husband is watching the hockey game in the basement. Or, perhaps your wife is out with her girlfriends and you read five stories to the kids before they fell asleep, and now this bath is waiting. Maybe your partner is at a yoga class and you’ve opted out – Yin yoga is too intense for you. Instead, you’ve carved out this time to be alone. You found this book on your to-read shelf and decided to dive in. You poured yourself a generous glass of wine because you do not want to have to get out of the bath and go downstairs for more, and you do not want to haul the entire bottle upstairs because it will just get warm. You like your white wine so cold it’s almost frozen.

  Last week, you poured yourself a hefty portion of scotch, crawled into the tub, drank half the whisky and promptly fell asleep. You hope the wine will not have the same effect. You like reading in the bath.

  Snow is falling past the window above the bathtub. It has been snowing since 2 p.m. You slide the window open, just a bit, and listen. Silence. You can’t even hear the traffic from 97th Street. Your tulips are completely covered by the snow. You hope they will still bloom despite this setback. You dry your hands and light the last two candles. You open the book and flip through the first few pages. You might notice the Note on the Font and the Acknowledgements are at the beginning. While you’ve never really thought about fonts, you expect there are hundreds, if not thousands of them in the world. You’ve never paid attention to them. Not really. You do not have a favourite font, nor do you know which ones are easier to read, and more importantly, you don’t care.

  The first pages in this book bother you. You have questions. Does the author actually want you to read the Note on the Font and the Acknowledgements? What about the Epilogue? Because it’s there too. These sections are normally at the back of a book and because of this, they are easy to ignore. Well, you always read epilogues, and prologues for that matter. The prologue is the set-up; the epilogue is the denouement – the exhalation at the end of things. Regardless of your normal reading habits, you know you won’t be able to flip past the Note on the Font and the Acknowledgements. You’ll read them. You’ll read them because they’re out of place. You might peek at the first chapter, which is Chapter 24. This might make you feel even more unsettled. Perhaps the whole book is backwards. It seems everything is flipped around. You might take a big breath and tell yourself – it’s okay, it’s fine. This is the writer trusting the reader to do the right thing.

  You look out the window at the falling snow. Except it’s not falling anymore – it’s rising. The snow is lifting from the ground and drifting silently into the sky. You take a sip of your wine but it’s not wine anymore – it’s the good scotch your father-in-law gave you for your birthday. And the bathwater is cold. How long have you been in here? You reach with your left foot and nudge the hot water tap, and hot water spreads into the tub. Somewhere down the hall, a baby is crying. Music is playing and you recognize it as Elgar’s 2nd Movement, from his Serenade for Strings. You do not remember knowing anything about classical music – you’ve always preferred jazz. This music is so sad. What the hell is going on?

  In the beginning movement of the book, you can see there is a chunk of writing – marked with the symbol for ‘half’ and an ellipsis. It is stranded just before the Note on the Font and it’s about you. In this section of writing, you’re in a bathtub with the water at the perfect temperature and you are starting to read a book in which everything is backwards and nothing is true.

  Everything is backwards and nothing is true. Is that right? Is truth the opposite of a lie? Is the world pure black and white with no degrees of grey when it comes to truth? Either you tell the truth, or you lie? You’re old enough to recognize this is bullshit. Life is all middle ground. Black is an idea. White is a pretty idea.

  You start to take a sip of your drink and you’re not sure what to expect. Will it be wine, or whisky – or something else? You might find you are still drinking wine.

  Maybe a lie can be a stepping-stone to the truth. Or, is a lie just the red clown nose on the face of truth? Perhaps truth is the adjective, and lying is the verb, and they both modify the colour grey. This book says it is all a lie, but is this title a lie too? Which would mean nothing in the book is a lie? Your head hurts – like when you were in university, in Philosophy 365, studying the relationship between reality and consciousness. You remember late nights in the campus pub talking about Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche with anyone who would engage. You were mesmerized by these ideas. You were just barely smart enough to recognize that while this conversation was not new, it was important. You were trying on new ideas and some of them would stick with you. You probably didn’t get laid a lot.

  You do not know what’s in your glass anymore and you no longer care. Elgar’s Serenade for Strings seems to have stopped. It’s so quiet. You want to check on the snow. You want to see if it’s still rising into the sky. Maybe your tulips are uncovered. But no, you place these things aside. You open the book and start to read.

  * * *

  Imagine a woman with luxurious brown hair sitting at a desk, marking her students’ papers. She has pulled her hair into a sloppy ponytail so it is not in her face and she can focus on her work. The phone might ring and she looks up
from her marking and sighs. She will pick it up and say nothing. The woman on the other end hesitates before saying anything, so the brown-haired woman thinks it’s a machine trying to sell her something, but then a human voice. The teacher places her red pen aside, and she listens.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  The woman on the phone tells her, again, and still the teacher is uncertain.

  “Okay, look, whatever your fucking name is, you should know, I am too old for jealousy. I’ve been there and I’m not interested anymore. What do you want?”

  “Did you actually hear me? I’m sleeping with your husband.”

  The teacher swallows. She wills her voice to be unwavering. “So?” she says. “Good for you. I do not own him. He is not my property. If he wants to spend his sex on some twit, I don’t care.”

  “You’re not angry? Because I would be beyond pissed off. I would want to rip your fucking head off if you did this to me.”

  The teacher is beyond angry; she’s seething. Just on principle, she’s angry, but there’s no way she is going to show this woman her anger. Also, this is a surprise and its immediacy stings. She’s going to hold it together. “He sleeps with me, honey. He wakes up with me. He has a life with me.” The teacher pauses. She holds her breath. She says a little prayer – please, please, please, don’t say you’re pregnant. That, I couldn’t take. Dear God, she thinks. Don’t let this woman tell me she’s pregnant. Please, God. Please.

  “But you’re married to him.”

  “And?” the teacher says. She exhales.

  “And when you’re married…” But she doesn’t finish. Either this woman is truly unaffected by this or she’s pretending – and she’s an amazing liar. There are rules in marriages, for God’s sake. “You’re the good wife, aren’t you?”

  “Well it’s better than being an amusement ride, honey. Because that’s all you are.”

  The woman on the phone is silent. The teacher does not feel good about calling this woman an amusement ride. She knows it is hurtful but she is shocked and wounded and off balance. The words just tumbled out. But she is protective now, of her husband. This other woman is trying to hurt him, she’s betraying his trust in her, and this pisses her off. She places her anger and hurt aside. She is not surprised her husband had it in him to fool around on her. But the jolt of hearing this woman’s voice takes her breath away. The realization that he actually did fool around on her shakes her to the core. But there is also a quiet voice reminding her she is not innocent. A voice that assures her that jealousy would be a meaningless waste. That she has already forgiven her husband for this, because she has no choice but forgiveness. She has no choice.

  “Okay,” the teacher says. “Are we done here?”

  “Don’t you want to know how long it’s been going on?”

  “No…” Hang up, she tells herself. Hang the phone up now. “If my husband wants to relieve himself with some bimbo, I could care less.”

  “Are you really that much of a heartless bitch?”

  “Look, you don’t sleep with him. He fucks you – that’s all. I know this because I’m the one he sleeps with, wakes up with and has a life with. You’re nothing but a fuck. Why don’t you go try and ruin someone else’s life?”

  The teacher puts the phone down. She’s done. She does not want to hear any more.

  A Note on the Font

  Well, this isn’t right – the note on the font is normally at the back of the book, after the acknowledgements. You may wonder what it’s doing up here at the beginning, instead of the end. Is the font important? Maybe the font is a key part of the story. You’re right to question the placement of this note, but regardless, here it is.

  This particular font is Garamond, which comes from the punch-cutter Claude Garamond (Latinised as garamondus). Garamond lived, historians believe, from 1480 to 1561. Many Garamond fonts resemble the work of punch-cutter Jean Jannon, or integrate the italic designs from Robert Granjon. However, among present-day typefaces, the Roman versions of Adobe Garamond, Granjon, Sabon, and Stempel Garamond are directly based on Garamond’s work.

  Garamond’s letterforms suggest a sense of grace and constancy. Some unique characteristics in his letters include the small bowl of the “a,” the slender eye of the “e,” and the soaring upper-case “W,” which resembles two superimposed Vs. The lowercase italics z is particularly appealing, with its swooping extender, as in – zinc, zephyr, and azure. Garamond’s long extenders and top serifs have a delightful downward slope. Like all old-style designs, the variation in stroke width is presented in a way that resembles handwriting, creating a design that seems both organic and, for the most part, unembellished. Of course, Garamond’s lowercase italics z is the lovely exception.

  Garamond is considered one of the most legible and readable serif typefaces when printed on paper. This sounds like one of those “true” things you read on the internet – something like ‘eating quinoa every day will add ten years to your life.’ Which is an unsubstantiated declaration someone posted years ago and it was re-posted, liked and shared millions of times, until it arrived in your social media feed and it’s almost true because it’s ubiquitous. Except, it’s complete bullshit. Or, that mantra from your mother – every time you talk with her it’s “Are you drinking eight cups of water a day, dear?” More bullshit. There is no science to back it up. It’s an urban myth. You probably need around six to eight cups per day but this is usually achieved through food, caffeinated beverages and even alcohol. And water, of course. Yup, wine and coffee do not dehydrate you. So you can stop carrying around that water bottle. Just listen to your body, not your mother. Drink water when you’re thirsty.

  Here’s the thing: Garamond actually is a readable font. Test it for yourself. You’ll see.

  Acknowledgements

  The author would first like to acknowledge Claude Garamond, the masterful father of the Garamond font, who is most definitely not a character in this book. Good old Claude Garamond is not here – not really. The font you’re reading is Garamond, so his work is here, but the guy died in the middle of the sixteenth century. Writing about him would nudge this story toward the genre of historical fiction, and that’s not going to happen here. A writer would have to deal with the Protestant Reformation and the corruption of the Catholic Church, the death of Christopher Columbus in 1506 and the ramifications of his explorations – syphilis for one, the explorer Jacques Cartier claiming Quebec for France in 1534, and Copernicus publishing his ridiculous theory that the Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun in 1543. Three years after old Claude Garamond shuffled off his mortal coil in 1561, William Shakespeare was born. Seriously, this is not historical fiction. You should forget about Claude Garamond now. Bit of a red herring. Sorry about that.

  Also, as an equally absurd historical note on this text, there will be no Vikings in this book – not one. You’re probably wondering why there would be reference here, in the opening frames of this book, about the absence of Vikings – unless the author is sneakily giving himself permission to write about Vikings at some point in the coming pages. The answer is no. Unequivocally, unquestionably, emphatically no. There will be no Vikings in this book.

  Anyway, now that the problems of Claude Garamond and the Vikings are cleared up, you’re about to start reading a new book described as ‘a novel.’ It’s right there on the cover. However, you should know this before you begin reading – this probably isn’t a novel. Perhaps, if you pick up a book called This is All a Lie – a novel, you should not expect it to be a novel, or at least, acknowledge the possibility it might not be a novel at all. The author might say this is a story, and it is populated by deeply flawed characters. Of course, the reviewers will want to call it a novel, because they need categories, and subcategories, genres and – things have to fit somewhere. And what if this writer has a history of writing things called novels. You can easily imagine
the author, a strikingly handsome man, a witty man, a charming and sensitive man, muttering – in private, and after a couple glasses of wine – “If you’re looking for Dickens, or Virginia Woolf, or Brontë, well, read goddamned Dickens, Woolf, or Brontë.”

  Look, at some point in the next few pages you’re probably going to meet a woman named Nancy Petya. Her real name is Nensi Katarina Petya. When she came to North America she changed her name because she grew tired of spelling it for people. She was born in Kursk, in Russia, and in the opening movements of this book, she will be caught inside a terrible moment and it will change everything. She will teeter on the brink and for a while, she won’t care which way it goes – she’ll be completely free. She will be beyond caring.

  Nancy’s father was killed in 1989, at the end of the Soviet-Afghan War. He was killed when he stepped on a landmine. There are still over ten million unexploded landmines in Afghanistan. That’s what the Kapitán told them when he delivered the news that what remained of her father was in the desert outside Kandahar. Her mother called it the godforsaken desert. Nancy is not fond of the country of Afghanistan, nor Afghans, nor anyone who looks like they may be Afghan. She would not like to think she hates anyone, but Afghans, in general, come close. She recognizes the irrational nature of this almost-hatred aimed at a country and its people – the vast majority of whom she has not met. She knows it’s absurd, but it’s also powerful – sometimes overwhelming. Afghanistan killed her father and therefore she hated Afghanistan. She was eight years old when the news of her father’s death marched up to their door. Nancy and her mother were alone in the flat. They were making soup when the door shook. Nancy’s siblings were not in the house. Her older brother was fishing, and the twins were playing in the park. “Your father is a hero,” the Kapitán said. He did not say ‘your father was a hero,’ as if he were avoiding past tense and purposely keeping his comrade in the present – for the family. “He saved a family caught in a cross-fire. He saved four children and then…” The Kapitán did not finish his sentence. Nancy remembers the Kapitán smelled strongly of cigarettes – he smelled acrid and stale, and his shoes were shined like mirrors. Her mother was struggling to understand – her face contorted in pain. “He was trying to save an Afghan family? I thought we were fighting Afghans.”