This Is All a Lie Read online

  “Yes, innocents. He saved innocents. He is a hero…” The Kapitán stopped. He took a deep breath. It was as if he realized, finally, his positioning this man as a hero changed nothing for his family. The father, the husband, the soldier and the man were all dead in a pointless war and now the family would have to find a way to survive. This family would have to go on without him. The Kapitán fidgeted with his wristwatch and finally managed to remove it. He bent down with his sad, moustached face and gave the watch to Nensi. “This is for you,” he said. Nancy remembers he patted her head, stood up and looked at her mother. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said, saluting and turning to leave in one smooth motion.

  The Kapitán, whose name was Anatoly Ilia Taras, was well on his way to drinking himself to death. He delivered the news of casualties of war to mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, and to children – and for three-and-a-half years, he held himself together with moderate amounts of vodka. He opened himself to the sadness of what he was doing. He tried to bring a sense of honour and dignity to the reality of so much death. In the third year, with each delivery, he began to drink a little more. When he knocked on Nensi’s family’s door, his liver was failing and he knew it would be his last assignment. He was at the end of such deliveries. Someone else would have to continue and he knew someone else would always continue.

  Anatoly Ilia Taras goes AWOL with a couple crates of vodka. He retreats to a friend’s cousin’s dacha, a little cottage in a forest near Saint Petersburg. The dacha is not winterized but with the woodstove going almost constantly, the Kapitán makes it work. In almost four years he’d knocked on 512 doors and it was, finally, too much darkness for him. It was as if life and death both dissolved into something awful. Each knock on a door took something essential away from the Kapitán and it was never replaced.

  Nensi came to North America wearing Anatoly’s wristwatch. She was nineteen years old, and in love with a National Hockey League prospect named Dmitri, who was signed by the Montréal Canadiens. She managed to stay in the West after he grew tired of her. Honestly, it was Nensi who had grown tired of him. His whining was never-ending. It was always the coach’s fault. It was the coach’s prejudice against Russian players in Montréal, and in Detroit an assistant coach who believed he was too soft in the corners. Everything was the coach’s fault. Nensi believed she understood the game better than he ever would. He was a six-foot-four, 220 pound baby. Dmitri plays for one of the New York teams now, she can’t remember which one. He’s a third-liner and makes good money. He married a woman with jet-black hair. Nensi’s hair is beach blonde, at least that’s what the woman who colours it calls it. She says it is sun-streaked, as if it were blown wild by salty ocean breezes. Nensi suspected this woman read this description on a box of hair dye.

  On the night they met, Dmitri told Nensi her eyes were ferocious, the colour of blue glass that has fallen on the floor and shattered.

  “What does that mean?” she said. “Is there something wrong with my eyes?”

  “It means they are intense and beautiful.”

  “Well, I worked very hard to get them to be that way.”

  He looked at her and did not understand. He was asking himself if it was possible to work on your own eyes. Was she making fun of him? He knew he was missing something but he didn’t know what. He thought he was paying her a compliment. “Are you angry, Nensi? Are you pissed off at me?”

  “I will never be pissed off at you, Dmitri,” she said, her first lie to him coming so easily.

  Nensi was pretty sure she frightened Dmitri most of the time.

  A year later, she changed her name to Nancy and took a job working in an art gallery on South Firth Street. This was when she met and married an investment banker who was addicted to working out and to sex. He spent every spare moment working on his body, and he insisted on sex, every day, sometimes more than once – as if he were trying to prove something. Nancy divorced the investment banker three years later after an incident during which he tossed her onto a table at a Thai restaurant and choked her until a group of customers pulled him away. She’s not sure if her husband was trying to kill her, or if he just wanted to scare her by choking her. Regardless, she was unconscious when he stopped. The restaurant was packed with witnesses and two people even recorded it on their phones. Nancy refused to press charges, and instead, negotiated a generous divorce settlement that included a condominium, a car, and hefty monthly payments.

  Listen, all you need to remember about Nancy, for now, is her father was killed in a war in Afghanistan when she was eight – he marched away and never came home. She has never stopped wearing the gift from the Kapitán – the inelegant Vostok military watch with its fading green face. On the back of the watch there is an inscription that reads – for Anatoly, love papa. Nancy likes to think the Kapitán’s name was Anatoly. It makes her happy to believe this. Also, Nancy has a tattoo of the Russian word for grace on her left forearm. She does not believe she has grace. Rather, it is a steady reminder of her intention. She got the tattoo because the investment banker forbade her to get it.

  * * *

  So, here’s the thing. If you asked a thousand people to define what a novel is, you would likely get two thousand different answers, three thousand different examples, and a lot of flailing and ‘um-ing’ and ‘ah-ing.’ Perhaps the author of This is All a Lie – a novel would say this is nothing more than a story comprised of moments and characters, and a bit of a case study of how these characters misbehave inside these moments. He might lean back in his chair, cross his left leg over his right, and look at you as if he’s waiting for you to say something more.

  Of course, this is a book of lies. Lying is something young writers are told to practise – you lie to get at the truth. The facts are irrelevant – you manipulate the facts to find the truth. It sounds psychotic, but in writing, a blatant fabrication can be completely true.

  For instance, there could also be a woman named Tulah Roberts in this book and there might be something essential you ought to understand about her – something like the fact she loves snow. It’s an irrational love. A kind of ridiculously obsessive love. In fact, if snow were a man, it would have dumped Tulah long ago because she was too in love. Snow would probably have felt overwhelmed by Tulah’s love.

  When she was fifteen, she started a snow journal in which she decided to record snowstorms, snowfalls, and flurries. When it snows, she goes out into it, lets it touches her, and she touches it. Breathing becomes sanctified because she is aware of each inhalation, each exhalation, the pause at the top, and the pause at the bottom. She is not precious about it. She would not call her ritual holy. For Tulah, it was a simple thing. With snow falling all around, she stops and listens, and watches. She breathes it and each time out she finds the beat of the snow – a sort of silent measure that is about the snow’s veracity, and its velocity, and its texture.

  When Tulah was twenty, and staying in a cabin on the side of a mountain near Nelson, British Columbia, she went outside and stood naked in a snow storm. She stood on the veranda surrounded by pines and ghost peaks as the snow came down. The man she was dating was in bed, asleep and she’d had enough wine to think being naked in the falling snow was a fabulous idea. She’d stoked the fire in the living room for her return, slipped out of her clothes, and stepped barefoot onto the veranda. She stood still and felt everything. She saw only shades of white shifting through white. The air was cool and clean and she could smell strands of wood smoke. She heard an owl somewhere near the cabin – and then the muffled, folding silence. Even though she was sure she loved the man asleep in the bed under the thick down quilt, and he had spoken his love to her, Tulah felt a deep loneliness. She did not wake him. Something in her wanted to keep this for herself. She didn’t want to risk anyone telling her this was silly, or stupid, or ridiculous. She did not know what the sleeping man would have said to her about this naked snow shower she was taking. She wa
s cold, but it was not bitterly cold out. She would have liked to walk into the woods like this – to move under the tall pines away from the cabin as the snow twisted through boughs but there were no stairs to the forest. It was just an inexplicable yearning to move through the forest – to become even more vulnerable – to let the snow swallow her.

  There are 487 entries in her snow journal. She knows this because she numbered them. Some were long reflections on the particular snow, and some had a brief description of the snow and a long reflection on her life. This one was number seventy-nine and it was dated November 3, 1995, two days after her twentieth birthday.

  * * *

  You might know people who would be bothered by the placement of the acknowledgements at the beginning of this book. You might be the kind of person who likes the acknowledgements at the back of the book where they belong – right beside the note of the font and a picture of the author. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.

  Here is another possible lie: you will be introduced to a character in the chapter immediately following these acknowledgements. His name is Raymond Daniels but nobody calls him Raymond except for an aunt in Billings, Montana, who owns seventeen cats and, as Ray’s mom used to say, really enjoys the wine. Ray works as an arborist with the city, and sometimes he talks to trees. He will be up in a bucket, suspended within the high branches of a poplar, or an elm, or a conifer and he will have an impulse to talk with the tree. Sometimes, Ray Daniels surrenders to the impulse.

  It’s tempting to show Ray having a conversation with a tree here, but to really understand him there is a moment three months after his mom dies that is perhaps more illuminating. His mom’s house has been sold, and the new owners will take possession in a couple weeks. For the previous three weekends, he and Tulah and the girls have been clearing out the contents of his mom’s life. For the girls, it was fun for the first hour, then just hard work and boring. After two hours, Tulah drove the girls to her mom’s house.

  This weekend, Ray has been working alone, going through the boxes of her life, and boxes of his life. It is an overwhelming exercise. It’s all minutiae and sorting and deciding about importance. There are hundreds of pictures in boxes – pictures of people he does not know, and whom he doubts his mother knew, pictures of him as a child that he’d not seen before, and pictures of a person he thinks might be his biological dad. He keeps six pictures – three of his mother, two of himself, and one, a black-and-white photo of a woman feeding a bear cub in the mountains. This idiot woman is not his mother. She is a stranger, a mystery woman who thinks it’s perfectly fine to feed bears in national parks. There is something wide-eyed and innocent about this woman. Ray decides to keep this image of her – to move her forward in time.

  On this particular Sunday night, when the final dumpster has been hauled away, and the three boxes he could not look at yet had been loaded into his trunk, he pauses at the back entrance.

  It’s all done. The house has been cleaned. It’s ready for its new owners. It smells faintly of cleaning product. He’d walked through the hollowed out rooms and hallways one last time.

  He is tired and numbed by the previous weeks of clearing. He is no longer sentimental about the house. He’s worn down by it. After the first weekend, he came home stunned by grief and shocked by the realization that an entire life came down to a bunch of stuff that could be thrown away so easily. His mother had jewelry, and a new television, which Ray had bought for her. Everything else was going to Good Will, or into a dumpster. It made him look around at his own stuff. His stuff was newer, but it was equally dismissible.

  A week before, sitting on the front porch with his wife, Ray looked at her and sighed. “All the things we think are important – all the things we cling to, all the shit we carry around – it’s all just meaningless stuff,” he said. “So, what remains of us? What do we leave behind of value? What’s the point of all this running around to get money to acquire more stuff?”

  “Yup,” his wife said. “What’s important? What has value? And why? And to whom?”

  The problem for Ray was, he wasn’t sure. It was as if someone came in the middle of the night and poured grease on all the floors. His world was slippery and uncertain.

  Ray is standing at the back door, ready to leave. He is halfway out the door, ready to pull it shut but he can’t. He can’t shut the door yet. In the kitchen, he sits on the grey tiled floor, his back against the wall, and remembers his mother sitting at the kitchen table on a Christmas Eve, drinking coffee. He is lying on his stomach in his bedroom, down the hall, his head sticking out just enough to see. She is playing one side of an album that has the song Silent Night on it, and she is playing it over and over. It’s Bing Crosby. The record starts with Silent Night and ends with I’ll be Home for Christmas.

  She will get up and walk into the living room and play the same side over and over. Ray thinks perhaps she was not drinking coffee – that there was something stronger in her mug. He wonders about who she is remembering, or if she is remembering anyone. But she is definitely filled with sadness about something. He remembers his mother’s sadness and also feeling helpless to do anything about it. He could not offer comfort because he did not fully understand what he was seeing.

  Bugger. Bugger. Maybe showing Ray up in the branches having a conversation with a tree is a better way to get to know him. There are elms all over this city, thousands of them, and Ray is particularly fond of elms. Perhaps when he talks with trees it is a way for him to sort things out. He is not a crazy person standing and having heated arguments with inanimate objects. His conversations are quiet and private, more a muttering than anything.

  “Well, tree,” he will say to an elm on Savoy Avenue. “I’m worried about this branch. It’s not as strong as it should be.”

  Ray will imagine his voice vibrating through the leaves and into the trunk and down into the roots. He imagines the tree hears him.

  “You see where it forks, there is weakness. I’m not going to try and correct this problem but I want you to know I’ll be watching it.” He will make a note in his log, and sometimes draw a little picture. Every boulevard tree and every tree in a public space is identified and logged on an interactive website. There’s a public page and then there’s the page Ray uses, which has room for his sketches. He has an assistant named Clara who thinks his sketches are “little works of art” and uploads them to the site as if she’s performing a sacred ritual.

  Ray will find a damaged branch and wonder if trees have memories.

  “Something must have happened,” he will say. “Maybe you remember? An infestation? A drought? A severe windstorm? Yes? Do you remember a spring snow storm with the weight of the snow breaking branches?”

  Ray wonders if it is the wind, or if the tree is answering yes to his question. Because the tree will seem to be nodding.

  He spies a branch that has been rubbing against another, lower branch, and he smiles. “This, I can fix for you, and it will feel better, tree.” He removes the upper branch, which had been threatening to rub a wound into the lower one – a wound through which insects and disease could enter. He uses his Japanese pruning saw, which is perfect for tight spaces and small cuts like this one.

  There are days when Ray doesn’t want to come down – days in which he would rather be in the high branches of a tree than anywhere else. Even though the trees never say anything, he feels they listen, and that his words are safe. He feels safe when he is with his trees.

  * * *

  Normally, authors thank a group of people in their lives in the acknowledgements – the people who helped them endure, or abide the long, disappeared days of writing. First, if you want to do this right, you might thank your publisher, who forked over a hefty sum of money for this book and as a result, felt emboldened and cocky enough to try and change the title. And secondly, an editor or two who had their hands on your baby, and then you should thank all the people in your life who
helped you be a writer – which is just about everyone you’ve ever met – and a much shorter list of all the people who protected you while you wrote, who tolerated your sometimes whimsical, flighty nature. And to your charming agent, and to your wife, and to that woman at Bistro Four who over-pours your wine – you know the one, the brunette with the tortoise-shell glasses and the colourful bras under her white blouses. And you should give a nod to your hard-edged, demanding fantasy – the woman who lives at the periphery of what you can barely admit to yourself. Can you see her? She’s full-figured – which is a nice way of saying she has terrific breasts and curves, and her eyes are green and needy. She will do the unimaginable things with you – the things that sit uneasily at the periphery of decency.

  Finally, acknowledgements sometimes have something eccentric, or heartfelt, or kind. You’ll probably do none of the above, and instead, you’ll write out some Buddhist blessing because of that yoga teacher at the 97th Street studio who has the most exhilarating body odour – the one with the tattoo of a Fibonacci curve on her forearm. She teaches hot yin and about halfway through her class, when she comes to you, to make an adjustment, you shiver inside her scent, an elemental smell that cuts through any walls, or barriers. You want her to stay near you. She offers a blessing at the end of her class: “May you be filled with loving kindness. May you be well. May you be peaceful and at ease. May you be happy.” Of course, she finishes this off with a deep bow and a beautiful Namaste. You believe she is sincere beyond sincere and you love her a bit in that moment. Her voice is deeper than you expected – it’s almost husky. Truthfully, she could have said ‘go screw yourself,’ and you would still be a little in love with her.