To Name the Bigger Lie by Sarah Viren

Author:Sarah Viren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

16

What is true? And how do you know? Those were the questions Dr. Whiles asked us to ask ourselves my freshman year, the kind of questions that many teenagers ask themselves anyway. It is the most bewildering time: coming-of-age, we call it in novels. That spring, at forty, I felt like I had been wrested back into that world. It is easier to slip out of logic and into delusion than a lot of us want to believe. All you need is for one person to start lying, and a system—a high school, an investigation, a government—to legitimize that fiction. All you need is for that to go on for a little longer than you could have predicted. For you to get tired enough to doubt yourself, or others. Then suddenly you’re a teenager again, writing frantically in her journal late at night: “I’m so confused. Is everyone?”

That doubt—of myself, and Marta, and our reality—only quieted when I focused on Jay: as a person, or a character. I imagined him some days in the conservative city where he lived, in an apartment alone with his dog, a pit bull mix whom he adored. I’d picture him after a department meeting or teaching, giving his dog a pet, hanging up his coat or putting away his books, and then opening his laptop at the kitchen table and pulling up the email account for Jessica. I wondered if he got drunk before sending each new email. I wondered if he told anyone what he was doing. I wondered how he’d thought to do it in the first place. Had he done this to someone else before?

I had obsessed in a similar way over Dr. Whiles—before Jay interrupted the story I once thought I was telling. I’d searched for him online. I’d scrutinized his reviews on Amazon, his photos of blue herons and Texas flowers, his scant Facebook posts and short friends list, just as I would later pore over Jay’s social media posts—looking for clues. I’d imagined him going about his life, just as I would later imagine Jay doing the same. Dr. Whiles would live alone, I decided, in a tidy condo in the small Texas town where he had retired. I saw him tromping through mangroves, a camera in hand, or in his living room, reading, maybe from a text he had once taught us—Dante’s Inferno or Brave New World. Whenever I pictured him like that, I rendered him tinged by remorse—for what he had taught us, the way he had led some of us astray. I had no idea if that was even close to true. Maybe Dr. Whiles never thought about us at all. Maybe he was at peace with his acts and his beliefs. Maybe Jay was, too.

“Make your characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water,” Kurt Vonnegut famously advised. “Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.” He was talking about motivation, what some creative writing teachers refer to as “the stakes” of a story.

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