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Overview
By turns comic, suspenseful, bitingly satirical, and emotionally potent, A Big Enough Lie pits personal mistruths against national ones of life-and-death consequence. Tracking a writer from the wilds of Florida to New York cubicles to Midwestern workshops to the mindscapes of Baghdad—and from love to heartbreak to solitary celebrity—Bennett’s novel probes our endlessly frustrated desire to grab hold of something (or somebody) true.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810131217 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2015 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Big Enough Lie
A Novel
By Eric Bennett
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2015 Eric BennettAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3121-7
CHAPTER 1
For two years after college, muddling through in America, far from the army, I tried to write books, fictional ones, wrote pages and pages about cities in little danger of getting blown up and about people the furthest thing from soldiers. I polished those pages and sent them to agents, and nobody would listen, because who was I but some white guy with a pretentious vocabulary and a typical childhood in Massachusetts, somebody neither obnoxiously rich nor heartbreakingly poor, somebody with no boon nor boom nor bane nor bust worth writing about, just tricks with words, like that one. I went to Boston University, did classical studies there, thinking the old myths would give me a good grounding in storytelling, a stupid idea. I graduated in 2000, and after graduation kept the accounts for my dad's construction business based out of Waltham. He was more contemptuous than grateful, because why wasn't I hanging Sheetrock?
I wasn't hanging Sheetrock because I was bookish, a milquetoast in his eyes, not that he ever used that word — "pussy" would have been more in his register — and, in this upside-down world, I joined the army and became a second lieutenant and went to war because I was deficient in this way. War seemed like a cool solution, or at least the obvious one. Henry Fleming, yours truly, was just too cautious and normal otherwise to mess his life up in a newsworthy way. Any writer worth his salt has got to draw close to the flame of chaos, and if he can't do it through his personality, he can do it through the Department of Defense. You'll notice Ernest Hemingway didn't spend his late adolescence hanging out in Kansas.
My enlistment was a strange thing insofar as it looked like bravery. I never demonstrated anything resembling bravery in my day-to-day life. On streets and sidewalks I made way for hotheads, apologized randomly to rude strangers in a hurry, and let myself be honked at. At home I allowed my father's low-grade bullying to soak in like harmless drizzle, unless it secretly got to me on some level, which it probably did. I was brave almost only in the realm of ideas, but there at least I was Genghis Khan.
The attacks of 9/11 made enlisting easier, not because I shared the spirit of all the delusional mavericks vowing revenge, nor because it gave new significance and respectability to serving one's country, but because it crystallized the image I had in my head of coming to matter to history. Go figure. If my father was not won over by the gesture, he at least understood it or thought he did. I have no doubt it baffled him, coming from his milquetoast pussy of a son. Soon enough it would baffle me, too, or really just make me miserable — once the sleep deprivation and push-ups and spittle-flinging screams at Fort Benning began. But in the privacy of my vast imagination, ahead of time in Massachusetts, the solution, as I say, looked cool, or right, or OK.
So that's one version: I enlist because my life is boring, I want to write books, and I have no subject matter. Another version: I enlist because of unresolved issues with my dad. Or I enlist to defy my undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or because the girl I'm sleeping with fills me with such potent, electric, erotic misery that I want to kill myself.
That last one is probably the best. But I don't actually want to kill myself, I just want to do something as drastic as killing myself that I nevertheless get to stick around and watch the consequences of. I enlist because I'm too in lust to be in love, and will die without controlling the love I want to be in. I enlist because Hillary Dollenmaier drives me crazy.
Hillary Dollenmaier was the girl in the back row on the first day of Introduction to Sociology my freshman year at BU, and her eyes never landed on a boy in the classroom. She fixed her gaze on the blackboard with an unflinching gorgeous haughtiness as if she were trying to seduce those statistics in chalk. She did not look otherwise seductive, dressing in opposition to her looks, not outrageously, but taunting them indifferently with blue jeans and a polo shirt. She smoked on the way out of class, admitting a cigarette to her lips as if nothing else could touch them. She was the girl whose hair you noticed first, its auburn fullness — strawberry blondeness, in September — its curls and luster. Once I got to know her she confessed she believed it always looked messed up from sex, which, in the time since then, I've come to learn is a kind of trope among women, but which, at the time, I'd never heard before, so, in my mind, it still belongs to her. She was the girl people took a long time to talk about or dare to approach, so sufficient was the radius of disdain that she radiantly enforced.
My attraction grew from the sense that she knew, despite this radius, that I was there. Somehow I wasn't surprised when two weeks into college an acquaintance, a friend of hers, came up to me and said, "You should talk to Hillary."
I talked to her, and she made clear that she wanted to go on a date. I proposed a date. She accepted. I have a vivid memory of picking out something to wear that night. My favorite shirt, the only one in which I reliably felt comfortable and confident, I had been wearing when I asked her out. Everything else in my closet touched me with disgust. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. My face seemed too round, and my hair too lank. I was sure that odors beyond my perception drifted from me. With great reluctance I pulled on jeans and a polo shirt.
On our first date we talked about de Sade, whom I pretended I'd read. On our second date we walked by the neighborhood porn shop, and she asked me sweetly whether I ever went in there. I did, and told her so with burning cheeks. She told me she was a poet and loved the poetry of Neil Dubuque and would never in her life read enough true crime to satisfy her so help her God. On our third date she told me that she could tell from the beginning that I was the kind of boy who liked to do bad things. Was I the kind of boy who liked to do bad things? I had never done a bad thing in my life. I said I was.
Hillary was wild in her way, but it was a cautious kind of wild that could not come into being without the presence of a countervailing mildness, and that's what I provided. We were opposites who attracted. Her impulses concealed themselves behind her radius of disdain and depended for their existence on the presumption of their nonexistence. If I had gone looking for them they would not have been there to find. She was never wild with wild boys, felt a deep antipathy toward perfumed jerks preying on freshman girls, hated players, and had decided on me as suitably awestruck, awkward, and humble.
She introduced me to marijuana and taboo acts. She got me to smoke cigarettes and drink more. She enticed me into learning to override my aversion to chaos, which I longed to do. Under her influence I leavened the classics I studied with the culture of the populace — with pop culture. We got on mostly alone: left the college parties early, lounged in our dorm rooms and later our apartments, explored Boston as a pair, had a daily ménage à trois with the glow of the television and a biweekly one with the equally anesthetizing glow of substances.
I knew throughout college that I loved her too much. I feared that her wildness would expand beyond me, and this fear guaranteed a kind of amorous intensity that I could neither give up nor really enjoy. It was not, exactly, that I did not trust her. But she maintained, even in the depths of our intimacy, the illusion — or the truth — that her inner life involved more than I would ever know. She was remote, even in her closeness. She radiated secrecy, secrecy that I always partly but never completely got to share. The remainder, the secrecy that hovered darkly at the edges of our confidence, almost made me lash out. My jealousy sustained the passion it corrupted. But I am not a violent person and was not ever violent.
Version four, of the story of my enlistment, leads back to version three, the obsessive-compulsive one. My jealousy was profoundly related to impulses that long preceded it. From the dawn of memory I harbored a crippling aversion to uncontrolled and imperfect states. In another family I would have been sent in and diagnosed for it, but my father lent credence to gushing blood and scorching thermometers and practically no other index of unwellness. So I was fine. OK. I was fine. But I was only as fine as a little kid who cries when the neighbor makes footprints in the fresh snow in the backyard. My mattress had to be centered on my box springs before I could even entertain the idea of sleep. I had sought out and found every last asymmetry in my body — lymph nodes, testicles, teeth — and regarded each, in panicked succession, as proof of leukemia or scrofula or perdition. Patterns and rituals inoculated life against fatal diseases, uncertainty, and flux — I hoped. I hoped, and hoped, and cried when it snowed. I was nutty.
What in elementary school was meteorological or mechanical or hypochondriacal became in high school social. Virginity, meaning its absence, tormented me worse than the worst skewed mattress or crooked uvula. Later, forcing myself into a kind of feminism, wanting to force myself into it, I would be tormented by the lingering fact that virginity tormented me. At the time, in high school, the torment was unselfconscious and all consuming. When my girlfriend, Daphne Fritz, told me she'd had sex with her first boyfriend, I felt like I'd found a third tonsil on the bottom of my tongue. It had less to do with sexism than with a kind of megalomania so intense that I feared it would kill me. The world should star Henry Fleming and Henry Fleming only. So I dated Hillary Dollenmaier to defy myself, to let go of the mattresses and sidewalk rituals and snow fantasies and to know a woman with a past.
In college it worked, and I thought I was cured, or at least not sick enough to call myself sick any longer. I had outgrown my obsessions and compulsions, broken their fussiness with the hammer of my girlfriend, let loose. But during those four years I underestimated, I now see, the soothing power of the implicit structures: semesters, classes, dorm rooms, class years. The safety of college, its artificiality, freed me up to experiment, to abide disorder. After we graduated, things did not revert immediately, but slowly gave way. By September I was feeling the turbulent pull of the forces that caused my earlier self to cry at trampled snow. It was as though an agoraphobic person had suddenly noticed the walls were gone.
My breakdown took the form of jealousy — the old jealousy amplified into a power that distorted not only my perceptions of the world but the world's perception of me. "You're being ridiculous," Hillary said, at first with laughter, then, after my outbursts had lasted too long, with strained, loving patience, then with intense irritation. "I'm not interested in him," she said of whomever it was that week. "I don't know why he texted me," she said. "Fine," she finally said. "I met him for a drink, but only because you're acting like a psycho."
In January of 2002 I signed my name on the dotted line and headed off to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and fourteen weeks later emerged as a second lieutenant in an armored division of the U.S. Army. The gesture dispelled my jealousy like a fever breaking. Suddenly I was free again from clinging with creepy vigilance to the minutest changes in Hillary's movements and inflections. In the short time before I left, our sex felt like it used to, and she couldn't find it in herself to say "no" when I asked her if she wanted to get engaged. Once I was gone she missed me terribly, I truly believe she did, and it felt wonderful. The orderliness of the army felt OK too. It was college in spades. The mattresses were square, the boots shined, the steps regular. If ever order fortified itself against chaos, it was here.
Afghanistan was already up and running that winter, so I thought I knew what I was in for, but of course a year later the drums were booming on the path to Iraq, so Iraq's where I found myself in the spring of 2003.
Until now, the public hasn't known any of this. My name is a household name shrouded in fog. Until now, people have known only where things ended: I went to war and died as the most shadowy member of the Babylon Seven. The tape of my murder was missing, and my body was missing. In this way I differed from J'Million, Duckworth, Schwartz, Eccles, and Frank, all of whom appeared in skittering footage that filled computer screens in American suburbs for countless hours in early summer 2004. I differed, too, from the one soldier everybody knew survived, Antoine Greep.
Beginning in June 2004, after my supposed death, the talking heads talked far and away more about Greep than the rest of us. What they had to say about me was what you have to say about any enigma. He's enigmatic. My mother was long gone, and my siblings nonexistent. My father, dead himself by then — of cardiac arrest at an ice cream stand in the autumn of 2003 — could provide nothing. Nobody at Waltham High School or Boston University remembered much about me. "He was quiet," teachers said on news shows; true enough. "He did his work on time, and did it well"; thanks for that. At Fort Benning I had stayed low on everybody's radar: competent, never obtrusive, obedient, sufficient for leadership, bland. Only Hillary Dollenmaier might have filled in the blanks. She was out there and aware, through my letters, of everything except the final moments of my "life." She must have known the truth about Greep. But Hillary let the talking heads talk.
Even the millions of Americans who ignore all but the most explosive headlines will know the name of Antoine Greep, son of the famous American League pitcher Bobby Greep. As the presumed sole survivor of the Babylon Seven, he nodded and smiled and cried throughout the interviews of 2004, putting a face to an ordeal beyond imagining. Through soft words on flashing screens he transformed unwitnessed crimes into a Medal of Honor.
I had enlisted to gather textures for fiction — to place myself in situations where my life took on interest. I had enlisted to come to terms with my father. I had enlisted to rein in disorder. I had enlisted to kill myself without dying, to commit a nonfatal suicide, inspired by the black flood of lust and love and jealous rage. Whichever version you believe, you should know that I had no intention of emerging from the dead to write something like the following. If war teaches you anything, though, it's that fate isn't great at honoring intentions.
For a year in Baghdad we were what we were. Then things started to change in April, and shortly before the transfer Breitbart called me into the FOB, I remember it distinctly, to ride his twin moral hobby horses, Antoine Greep and hardcore porn. Greep and porn formed a package tied with the bow of my failures as an officer, and Breitbart loved ripping the wrapping off. That afternoon he was waiting at the TOC with his hands on his hips, and I had trouble not feeling embarrassed for him. He was my commanding officer, the captain of the company, and an outcast and a freak. War movies echoed in his skull and blasted out his mouth. "WHAT IS THIS?" He clenched pages of magazines and shook them at me. "WHAT IN DOG'S NAME?"
"It's the graphic depiction of sex acts, sir."
"YOU BEING SMART?"
"No, sir."
"YOU A PATENT NITWIT?"
"No sir."
"YOU EVER HEARD OF GENERAL ORDER 1A?"
Every last E1 had heard of General Order 1A, the street urchins of Tikrit had, the washwomen of Fallujah had. It prohibited booze, porn, pets, and looting. But that was officially, because practically speaking it prohibited only booze. Asking an army to kill without jacking off was like asking Catholics to confer without drinking. But Breitbart had a thing about porn that derived from his thing about Jesus. He was a Christian whose contempt for sex surpassed his fear of roadside bombs.
I told him I had heard of General Order 1A. "YOU REMEMBER WHAT I SAID ABOUT IT?"
"You said no exceptions, sir."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Big Enough Lie by Eric Bennett. Copyright © 2015 Eric Bennett. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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