Evil Tongues
A thief steals your possessions
A murderer steals your life
A liar steals your reality.
I’ve contemplated this truism for years; ever since I experienced lies that called into question my perception of reality. Lies so good and stated so matter-of-factly even when confronted with solid proof that it was a lie, I still found myself questioning what I knew to be the truth. If you’ve lived with an addict, you might be familiar with this steady warping of reality.
When you’re writing a mystery, you have to develop a character that is really comfortable with deceiving everyone around them. So comfortable, in fact, that their lies are sometimes easier to believe than truth. In her tenure as my favorite amateur sleuth, Q Toledano has encountered some amazing liars. So, it’s ironic that in her next two misadventures, she’s the one that must do the deceiving. She has no choice.
Until the Devil Weeps ends with a doozy of a lie to poor Sanger and this lie now must live in the core of almost every relationship she has in Devil in Exile (in final editing) and Gods and Devils (in revision). And it’s enough to drive poor Sanger to the edge of madness because it so completely warps his perception of reality. Mostly because the person he’d thought he could rely on most in the world is the one doing the warping.
Why is it so so easy for a simple lie to make you feel like you’re going crazy? Well, that is harder to explain. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr dives deep into the fundamental elements of neuroscience and psychology that make us so susceptible to loving a good story. Coincidentally, it is these same aspects of our brain that make us feel so insane when someone is lying to us. Even if we know they’re lying. Even if we have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, it still calls our very existence into question.
How so?
Because our perception of reality is essentially a hallucination. Our eyes are not as good as we think they are. We do not see or hear as much as we think we do. Our brain is constantly running complex algorithms from information it received seconds or minutes before to fill in the blanks. Ever look for your phone all morning and find it right where you looked like ten times?? Well, that’s why. You literally weren’t seeing your phone because in those moments, it happened to fall inside a blind spot of your vision and your brain filled in the blanks with an empty table it saw before you put the phone there. Hence the now you don’t see it, no you do switcheroo. Wild, I know.
And maybe that’s why lies are so cruel. They call into question the very shaky framework we build our life around. What’s reality? The lie someone is telling you? Or that hallucination our flawed neural algorithm has generated? It’s enough to cook your noodle but good. And if you’re a naturally honest and trusting person, well, believe me when I tell you it’s enough to drive you a little mad. And so it is with poor Sanger. He knows he’s being lied to. He just doesn’t know why he’s being lied to and that’s the part that gets under his skin. Because if the lie is actually the truth, then his entire world has just come crashing down. If it’s a lie, then his world has just been blown up in a metaphoric apocalypse. The man just can’t win for losing.
For Sanger, what’s worse than the lie itself is the liar. It doesn’t matter to him that Q has a very good reason for deceiving him. Because Sanger is creature for whom trust and honesty go literally hand in hand. There cannot be one without the other.
At the same time Sanger is getting lied to by Q, he’s also getting lied to about Q. Cunning little lies designed to pull him away from her. A little innuendo here. A little hint of uncertainty there. Add a dash of caring protectiveness… the diabolical “I’m only telling you this because it’s in your best interest”. And Sanger is getting fed a heady brew of poison that slowly twists him into someone we barely recognize by the time we see him again in Gods and Devils.
In Judaism, spreading lies about another person is called Lashon hara. Literally, “evil tongue.” And Lashon hara is way up on there on the “to not to” list of commandments. Like right up there with murder and adultery. Why? Because these lies are designed to damage. These lies are designed to destroy. These are consciously formed to be cruel. And even when you know they’re not true. Even when you see what’s happening. Well, it’s hard to turn off that algorithm that’s trying to fill in the blanks and tell a new story from which to build the hallucination we call reality.
The words from that evil tongue slip into your ear and whisper all kinds of things that twist you up inside. It’s no wonder you walk away from situations like these feeling concussed. It’s no wonder you wake up at three in the morning with your stomach coiled in knots, thinking “What if I’m wrong and they are telling the truth?”
In that concussed state, you really only have one choice, to trust your own instincts and your own evidence and rely on what you know to be true. Because when you love someone and know them so well, it’s just about impossible to believe a lie about them unless they’re, say, a thousand miles away on a twenty-mile-long dot of sand in the Caribbean and you’re stubbornly refusing to talk to them. Luckily for Sanger, Q returns to New Orleans in Gods and Devils and confronts him with the truth of their friendship. Sanger might know Q is lying to him about something, but it certainly isn’t the something he’s been told all those months she was away in Devil in Exile.
That, my friends, is the cruel and insidious nature of lies. They take away your safety even when you see right through them. Because if you’re a naturally honest person, you can’t imagine saying something so needlessly hurtful and so very, very, untrue. And it’s really difficult to acknowledge that there are people who are damaged enough to do just that.
But Detective Aaron Sanger is my righteous truth-seeker and his instincts are usually on point. And when they’re not? His best friend always guides him in the right direction. There is a reason that Derek Sharp nicknamed Sanger “Spot;” because Sanger is as determined to dig up the truth as a dog with a bone. And thank goodness for him.