THOUSANDS OF LIES MANUEL MARRERO A Novel EXPAT PRESS NEW YORK PART ONE I. INTRO UTERINE CATASTROPHE 9 9 9 9 © 2015 by Manuel Marrero II. BEFORE YOU GOT SCARED OF ME 16 16 16 16 16 16 All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America III. BLOWS 27 27272727272727272727276 IV. HOW MAL CHANGED HER IDENTITY 41 41 No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information V. LOST IN THE FUCKHOUSE OR SOULSICK FAT GIRL storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. TORNADO 51 51 51 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product VI. THE HISTORY OF SEIZURES 6060606060606060606060 of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. VII. LUTZ/HEMPEL 1108081108081108110808180 Thanks Susanna, Tony, Wylie, Thomas, Mallory and Alanah. Book Design and Artwork by Arturo Herman Medrano. PART TWO VIII. PHONE HOME 119 119 119 119 119 IX. THOUSANDS OF LIES 181 X. MILES OF HURT ()*228228228228228228228228228228 XI. LAST REFUGE OF THE SPEED EATERS AND SNIZZ HEADS 236 236 236 XII. SEVEN LONG AVENUES OF LOVE 272 272 XIII. CATHEXIS 300 For so and so . PART ONE “L’homme est cible sur terre pour des tireurs secrets.” -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Terre des Hommes, 1939. “Misery is wasted on the miserable.” -- Louie 9 I. INTRO UTERINE CATASTROPHE . Agent Rx -- musician, outlaw, and fugitive at large -- speaks . When I say I’m crazy, don’t look for comfort in mutual. An admission without consequence, to cast aspersions on the nature of my soul for your sweethearted amusement. Madness is an immutable fact -- spineless and remote to casual adjustment. If you’ll forgive my tics, let’s talk about women. The ones who wear long, flow- ing threads to conceal their ample rears, miniskirts to accent their golden hips + hostile limbs astride, the ones who wish they had more girth in the money, the ones who demand, the ones who don’t think twice. Rita is tying her shoelaces for her usual 5am run. Nothing in particular crosses her mind. This is the appeal of physical tests. Out there, her thoughts are alien and it stands to reason she’s devoid of deep associations. She needs her space and it drives me up a stomach-churning suction tunnel of immaturity. Her sweat-stained musk carries a stench of career remoteness I’ll never know. She has hobbies which suggest a rich inner life -- tennis, yoga, hiking -- artless distractions. If she neglects them she gets angry and prone to hurl frames and kitchenware. Her shit is caked on the side of the porcelain bowl. Romance is fickle economy stipulated on infinite growth, cascading diminish- ing returns. Dating is like settling into a cozy New York apartment: you win some, lose some, get lucky, find a few bills on the floor, drink, and the exchange is fluid and non-ascending. She was transient for many months and ended up in New York for several years, where her vagrancy paused, her apartment by the time I find it 10 11 home to portable cues -- dual stacks of trash-or-treasure paperbacks, a collection . tampers with lids, runs afoul of lenses, and intimately acquaints himself from which a casual observer might infer eclectic taste in canon: Vonnegut, Kafka, with the contents of Jordan Lupe Strong’s cinematographic subject, one Jane Gogol -- an existential monster’s cache of pop philosophy that moved unaug- Bale of northwestern Massachusetts . mented from apartment to apartment like a set of worn props. She never talked about them. When prompted, she’d feed back with questions cadenced to segue Crackle and burn. She monitors her cervix regularly to chart for fertility. into me, savoring my take as a springboard on which she invariably bounced. It Speculum in hand, she gauges cervical mucus by touch. Keep Life Simple: the was hard to find her personality imbued anywhere. The living room was a model Mirena’s thoughtful watchwords. If fluids are thick, it’s working. No ovulation home shopping catalog, lacking in a single discrete element or fixture. The rela- cycle, no regular periods, and possibly infertility affects sex drive. She bought her tionship was defined by relentless perversity. first vibrator when she turned eighteen, in advance of drugs and alcohol. She is There are a few ways to relate this. Unicursally would ask beyond a reason- remarkably attuned to her body’s cycles, severe anxiety accompanying the trifle able effort, so settle for incoherence cruising on deft exposition. Her bed is an of self-abuse one night of binge drinking and comfort food may assure. She has impossibly shrunken twin that induces my worst nightmares. She is religious uncommon reactions to marijuana (producing in her a kind of psychic fugue), about contact, and I respond appropriately, shirking the dereliction of self-control uppers and downers (no foreigner to bugs), but a veteran of the psychic wars; flirt- people tend to demonstrate while they’re sleeping. But while she’s awake I don’t ings with ayahuasca overwhelmingly positive and profound: truthfully, the only resist. The electrolysis rash on her thigh sends me to a high heaven. thing in her life she’d describe as blissful, and psilocybin mushrooms an unlikely We meet every couple of days after work under a flag pole, which in fiction dependable euphoric agent. Her IUD works three ways. She wrestled first with could be symbolic of some over-arching theme. Really, it’s just where our paths casual bulemia, then full-on anorexia nervosa in her teens (owing to the corporeal crossed on the walk home. dissonance). She has made a total of three suicide attempts. You live in your own world of insulin and exercise. Everything is athletic when (1. At age six she ran home sobbing after her boy crush, in the spirit of adoles- you’re skirting your death 24/7. Dangling from a digital interface wakes me -- cent feints, hoodwinked her tiny heart and dropped her skirt in class, pricking PUMP -- in the middle of the night. No escape, even in sleep. the very nerve that would grow like a tumor in successive years and then atrophy, Sometimes people don’t even know what to say to me. bound by a recidivism of anxiety that would trail her into her late twenties. She Log of things I learned (in order) ran home as her parents were working their 9-5s, swallowed a handful of what 1. She’s type 1 diabetic. This one’s not inherently problematic ‘til we start she believed were sleeping pills [actually her mother’s cleverly stashed, off-label pounding down cheap whiskey. Imbibed, she suffers from strabismic spells and Xanax] and proceeded to lie in the bathtub, where she anticipated she would blindness episodes. drown. A call from the school saw that she failed. 2. She’s a cutter. X-acto. 2. This time at seventeen, she takes an inordinate dose of sleeping pills and 3. She hasn’t had her period in five years and hasn’t bothered to get checked out freaks out and calls her mother who frantically rushes to the hospital to learn on dread of portent. A quick, unguided research shows potential. Uterine cancer. that they’re pumping her stomach and she’ll be okay, though she may experience I give her my first ultimatum. She agrees. crippling lethargy and short-term memory deficiencies for as long as a week, give 4. She’s afraid of everything. I’m adamant about this. or take. 5. She’s a compulsive, possibly pathological liar. 3. This is where she would have succeeded, had her mother not walked in at In my dreams they were interchangeable. Sometimes it was she, going into the right moment and found her in a petrified state of aphasic dismay, packing her shock, and often enough it was Jane, pecking at whole-wheat kernels. They were to the hospital where they gave her MAOIs, anxiolytic tranquilizers, prescribed always tickling the spoke reflex, tripping over minor sentiments and details I neuroleptics aka antipsychotics and scheduled an appointment with a nutritionist found unbearable to aesthetic foundation, in crackling celluloid pitch. and therapist for eating disorder and self-image anxiety, respectively + inclusively, 12 13 rescuing her from a highly probable death at twenty-two. The plan was to check accomplish. I did it in two days. I followed the air through nasal cavity into chest into a hotel and obfuscate her absence and lie in the bathtub and slit her wrists cavity and breathed in my black lungs. Then in full lotus I vanished into darkness vertically [she was mislead that bleeding to death was painless, which is true, while the light outside myself waited to blind me, reminiscent of the postscriptual except that bleeding would hold no bearing over the natural reflex to a sliced photophobic effects induced by deliriants (datura, ayahuasca, salvia divinorum, artery -- uncontrollable and agonizing claw-clenching, carpal neuralgia, and Dust-Off, and to a milder yet no less profound extent, DMT). I was too deep to tremors that would reduce a high thresholder of pain to a trickling whimper]). penetrate the silence. And the light, when it seeped through in harmony with She has had a total of fifty-one sexual partners as of her twenty-seventh birth- return of my awareness, was a thin beam warming a single point of my nasal day (twenty-nine she would describe as the casual, no-strings-attached type, ten membrane.