Every Mouth a Wound

ONE. THE WARD

On the ninth day of the clarity, Ruth Adeyemi could no longer tell a dying man that it would not hurt, and so she stood at the foot of his bed with her mouth open like a hooked fish, saying nothing, while he watched her not say it. He understood. He was old and he was not stupid and he had been reading nurses' faces for eleven months. That was the moment Ruth learned what the truth actually costs.

It does not cost the liar. It has never, in the whole squalid history of the species, cost the liar one thin dime. It costs the person who needed the lie.

His name was Absalom Kite. There was a thing in his pancreas the size of a plum and it had sent its children out to colonize the rest of him, and by the standards of the ward he was doing well, which meant he had perhaps four days. He asked her, because everyone asked, because it is the only question: Is it going to hurt?

Nine days earlier she would have said no. She would have said, "We'll keep you comfortable, Mr. Kite," and she would have meant I will do everything I can and it will not be enough and I am sorry, and he would have heard the first thing and not the second, and he would have slept. That is what the lie was for. The lie was a blanket. Somebody, somewhere, decided that blankets were a form of theft.

What came out of Ruth's mouth instead was this: "Yes. Toward the end the liver goes and the drugs stop reaching where they need to reach and you will be awake for some of it and I will be in the room and there will be nothing I can do."

She heard herself say it. She could not stop. That was the part nobody understood at first, in the early days, when the news called it a candour epidemic and the afternoon programmes made it a joke and a senator wept live on air for forty minutes. The clarity did not simply prevent falsehood. It prevented omission. It opened you like a valve and everything you knew about a question came out of you in order, all of it, the qualifications, the small print, the cruelty at the bottom of the drawer.

Absalom Kite listened to all of it. Then he turned his face to the window and said, quite kindly, "You should go, love. You look like you need to sit down."

And she went, and she sat in the linen closet among the folded blankets, and she cried for eleven minutes, and when she came out she was one of the first people on Earth to understand that a world of perfect honesty is a world in which the dying comfort the living.

TWO. THE HOUSE ON MERIDIAN STREET

Teodor Vance had been married to Ilse for twenty-two years, and on the eleventh day, over eggs, she asked him whether he had ever loved her.

Understand: she did not ask it to wound him. She asked because the clarity had got into her too, and a question you have carried for two decades is a kind of pressure, and the valve works both ways. She asked it the way you press a bruise. She expected — I think she expected — one word. Yes. She had budgeted for one word.

What she got took nineteen minutes.

He told her yes, and that was true, and if the world had been merciful the sentence would have ended there. But the world had traded its mercy for accuracy at an exchange rate nobody had been consulted about, so it went on. He told her yes, and he told her when. He told her the yes had been enormous in 2044 and thinner by 2051 and that in the winter of 2058 it had become a decision he re-made every morning the way you make a bed. He told her about Marisol from the accounting floor, whom he had never touched, and about the forty-one evenings he had thought about touching her, and he could give the number because the clarity gives you the number. He told her he had stayed partly out of love and partly out of arithmetic, because leaving costs money and he is a coward about money. He told her that when her mother died he had felt, underneath the grief, a small clean flare of relief, and that he had spent six years pretending he had not felt it, and that he had almost succeeded.

Ilse did not move through any of it. She held her fork. The eggs went cold and formed a skin.

Here is the thing I want you to sit with, because Teodor sat with it for the rest of his short life: every single word he said was true, and the sum of them was a lie. Twenty-two years does not fit inside nineteen minutes. It came out of him shaped like an indictment because an indictment is the only shape that fits through that particular door. The clarity did not make him honest. It made him itemized.

She left on the twelfth day. She was not angry. That was the unbearable part. She said, "Teodor, I believe every word," and she carried her suitcase down the front steps, and the truth stood in the doorway behind her wearing his face.

THREE. THE BACK ROOM OF THE PHARMACY ON COYLE STREET

The queue starts before dawn now and goes around the block and nobody in it talks, because talking is how you lose everything, and they have all learned that in under a month.

They come with money and with jewellery and once with a dog, and they are not buying medicine. There is no medicine. They are buying one sentence.

Marguerite Sze charges what the market bears. She is fifty-six, she has a chemist's hands and an accountant's face, and she is the only human being on the planet who can still say a thing that is not so. The virologists would like very much to know why. They have taken her blood eleven times. They will not find it in her blood.

She knows why. She has always known why.

You do not build a thing like the clarity in a rented lab on a grant from a foundation that believed, in the honest and stupid way of foundations, that the world's sickness was deception, and that a species which could not lie would have to become good. You do not build it, and test it on yourself, and carry it in a cold flask through an airport, unless you have first told yourself the largest lie ever assembled by one person: this will help. She had made herself immune the day she started, and the antibody was not in her blood, it was the thing she had done to her own mind in order to keep going. The clarity cannot touch her because there is nothing inside her for it to open that she did not seal shut herself, from the inside, with her own hands.

So she sells lies. She is very good at it. A man came in on Tuesday and asked her to say his son had not suffered, and she said it, and he wept, and she kept his watch. A woman asked her to say she was forgiven, and she said you are forgiven, and the woman went out into the street straight-backed for the first time in nine years.

This is not absolution and Marguerite does not pretend that it is. She is aware of the arithmetic. She broke the world and she is charging it rent.

Tonight, at the end of the queue, there is a girl of about seven with a coin she has clearly been given by someone who could not answer her.

"Is my mum coming back?"

And here is the whole ruin of it: Marguerite has to decide. Every liar decides. That is what the clarity took away, and it is the only thing that was ever worth anything — not honesty, which is weather, which happens to you, but the terrible free choice to open your mouth and put something into the world that the world did not contain.

She kneels down. She takes the coin, because it matters that it costs something.

"Yes," she says. "She's coming."

It is the most beautiful sentence spoken on Earth in three weeks. The girl carries it out into the street with both hands, like a lit candle in a wind.

Marguerite closes the door. She sits down in the dark among the empty shelves.

And because there is no one left alive who can hear it, she tells herself the truth.