The Truth Commission - Hardcover

AUTHOR’S NOTE

First let me say that this will not be an easy tale to tell, so I’ll warm up with an author’s note. That’s one of the great things about creative nonfiction. You can write forewords and author’s notes, prologues and prefaces before you start the actual story. They are the writing equivalent of jumping jacks and shadow boxing. Fiction writers are supposed to get right to it. Visual artists have it even worse. Most assume no one will read their artist statements before looking at their art. Michelangelo didn’t write a preface about where he got the stone for David or an author’s note about why he decided to make David’s hands so big and his . . . well, never mind.

But authors expect responsible nonfiction readers to read every word. They get to tell the reader what she’s going to read, as well as why and how it was written. So here goes:

This is my Spring Special Project for the second term of grade eleven.

The story that follows covers the period from September until November of last term. I can’t believe all this happened so recently. It feels like a thousand years have passed.

Here’s how this project is supposed to work: Each week I will write and submit chapters of my story to my excellent creative writing teacher.1 She will give me feedback on those chapters the following week. I will write as if I do not know what will happen next—as if I’m a reporter, which is a device used in classic works of creative nonfiction.2 When the whole manuscript is done, my teacher will share it with the project’s second reader, Mr. Wells, Prince Among English Teachers. When those two arbiters of taste, style, and content sign off on what I’ve written, I will have my mark for the Spring Special Project. Et voilą! as we’ve been taught to say in French class.

What else do I need to say in order to begin? This might be the time to bring up my use of footnotes.3 I know not everyone loves them. When we read that heavily footnoted David Foster Wallace essay about going on a cruise,4 students were divided. Some of us loved the footnotes because they were funny and informative and demonstrated DFW’s virtuosic vocabulary. Some of us thought they distracted from the main text and were annoying. Still others of us never do the class readings and so really shouldn’t get to have an opinion.5 I don’t want to test the reader’s patience too much, so here’s what I propose.

I will use footnotes to address my editor. I may also use them to include things that a) are interesting, and b) don’t really fit in the main text, but nevertheless seem important. I may decide to stop using them partway through the story. Who knows what will happen? My random approach to footnotes might help build tension, which is a very big deal in fiction and in nonfiction. I might also decide to add illustrations and doodles in or near the footnotes. (Readers who are not giving feedback and assigning marks to this project can skip the footnotes, but those readers will be missing interestingness, diversity, and art, and those are things no one should ever miss.)

Finally, and even though this is an author’s note and not acknowledgments,6 I would like to take this opportunity to thank the powers that be at Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design for allowing me to write a nonfiction manuscript for my Spring Special Project. I know other students here at Green Pastures are doing things like creating life-sized replicas of NASA’s Opportunity rover out of circuit boards, old washing-machine parts, and antique fish tanks, and weaving huge wall hangings featuring images of our prime minister clinging to Parliament’s Peace Tower like King Kong in a sweater vest, so a regular old written story, especially a true one, seems a little prosaic and uninspired.

My best friend Dusk is doing a tabletop installation featuring a taxidermied shrew in a shrew-sized mobile home. My other best friend, Neil, is doing uncanny paintings of beautiful women. Just when you think you understand how attractiveness works, Neil’s oil paintings will make you reconsider.

Their work is so physical and concrete. So art-y. It makes me doubt myself as I sit here at a computer, typing out words onto an electronic page. Sure, I do fine art or I wouldn’t have been admitted into this school, no matter who my sister is.7 I draw, I make stuff, and I’m a stitching fanatic (current obsession—embroideries that look like paintings), but I believe that writing is as much an art as any other. Some might fight me on this point, and they would probably win, because I’m not very tough—physically I could stand to work out more—still, I remain sort of convinced.

This story, which my creative writing teacher tells me falls into the “much maligned category of creative nonfiction,”8 is complicated but it wants to come out. It needs to come out.

Warning: Sometimes when I write, I find myself lapsing into what Mr. Wells calls “high turgid English.” That happens when I’m not quite warmed up enough. My hope is, the further I get into this story, the more I’ll move into “plain English” or, as Mr. W. styles it, “effective writing.” I’m extremely nervous about telling all this stuff. That’s the plain truth. Maybe I should write a preface or some other front matter next.9

In the beginning, I had a mother, a father, a sister, and two real friends. My friends’ names were Neil and Dusk. (Her real name is actually Dawn, but she prefers Dusk for reasons having to do with her essential nature and temperament, which is less morning, more evening.) Together, my friends and I formed the Truth Commission. We went on a search for truth and, to our surprise and my chagrin, we found it.

When all this started, the three of us had modest ambitions. We didn’t set out to change lives. You will have noticed that there is no “reconciliation” in our title, as with other, more famous and important, truth commissions.12 By the time you finish this story, you will agree that adding a bit of reconciliation to truth-seeking endeavors is a smart move. Neglecting it was an oversight on our part. A bad one.

As you know, there are several classes of truth. There are the truths that pour out on confessional blogs and YouTube channels. There are the supposed truths exposed in gossip magazines and on reality television, which everyone knows are just lies in truth clothing. Then there are the truths that show themselves only under ideal circumstances: like when you are talking deep into the night with a friend and you tell each other things you would never say if your defenses weren’t broken down by salty snacks, sugary beverages, darkness, and a flood of words. There are the truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it’s like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart. Truths like those are rare and getting rarer. But there are other truths lying around, half exposed in the street, like drunken cheerleaders trying to speak. For some reason, hardly anyone leans down to listen to them. Well, Neil, Dusk, and I did. And it turns out those drunken cheerleaders had some shocking things to say.

This is a story about easy truths, hard truths, and those things best left unsaid.

Tuesday, September 4

On the first day of grade eleven, Neil, Dusk, and I were sitting on the benches outside our fair institution of moderate learning, the Green Pastures Academy of Art and Applied Design13 pretending to smoke candy cigarettes and comparing our running shoes. We have this hobby where we try to see how long our shoes can hold out. In a culture that places undue emphasis on new footwear, we are passive resistors. Dusk has been wearing the hell out of her grandfather’s New Balance (size 9, extra wide) for two years. They are disgusting, and Neil and I are envious and wish our grandfathers were still alive so they could give us some old man shoes.

Neil whispered, “Sweet Mother Mary.”

“I know. I wore them all summer. I even swam in them. I think they actually rotted onto my feet. Practically had to have surgery to get them off,” said Dusk, proudly lifting a wretched shoe the shade and texture of a badly used oyster. Dusk is one of the few people on the planet who can get away with disgusting shoes, because she’s chronically attractive. When she has a blemish and hasn’t brushed her hair or teeth, she’s a fifteen out of ten. On a good day, she’s up in the twenties, looks-wise.

“Shhh,” said Neil. “Look.” He sounded like a bird-watcher who’d just spotted a blue-gray gnatcatcher. Gorgeous women are Neil’s subjects, which makes him sound pervy. He’s not. He’s just very interested. In his drawings and paintings, he seems to be trying to get to the heart of what draws everyone’s eye to one woman and not to another. Most of his paintings show a lone beautiful female avoiding the gaze of a crowd. Sometimes she’s slipping off the edge of the canvas. Sometimes she’s staring, exasperated, into the middle distance, as everything else in the picture seems to lean in toward her. Last summer Neil started a series of paintings of Dusk. He took Polaroids of her in various situations and then created his peculiar, uncomfortable scenarios around her. Dusk is perfect for Neil’s paintings because few people can muster such sour facial expressions while remaining devastatingly attractive. Dusk is Neil’s muse. Our instructors all think Neil has an extremely mature perspective and an “uncommonly sympathetic eye.”14

Here’s something else I can tell you about Neil: he has an adorably seedy vibe, thanks to his habit of dressing like characters from some of the grittier movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and thanks to his father, who leads a life of near-total leisure. For our first day of school Neil had on a too-large, formerly white, large-collared dress shirt over a V-necked T-shirt and brown polyester dress pants. This outfit was an homage to Al Pacino’s character in Dog Day Afternoon, which, according to Neil, is about an incompetent bank robber with a lot of secrets. Of course, no one picks up on the reference. They just think Neil is a super-bad dresser. Which is great.

Dusk and I followed his gaze past our candy cigarettes and spotted Aimee Danes, who’d just gotten out of her claret-colored BMW.

As we watched, Aimee stretched her nose up to catch passing scents and held out her arms to draw the sun’s rays to her chest. But what a nose! And what a chest!

Aimee had had some renovations done over the summer.

At the close of grade ten, just three months before, Aimee Danes had an insistent nose. Long and gracefully curved, it was a nose that was sure of itself and its opinions. It was a bit Meryl Streep-ish, and I was a great admirer of its confidence. Her chest never registered with me, which means that it probably wasn’t as impressive as her nose, but neither was it nonexistent, because I probably would have noticed that because I am relatively observant. Dusk, for example, is not well endowed. Neil says Dusk has a “runway bust.” She replies that it better run on back before she reports it to the authorities. Anyway, back to Aimee and the alterations. Here it was, the first day of grade eleven, and she showed up sporting a shrunken nose and a rampart of a bosom tucked into a white leather vest. You think I kid about the vest. I do not. It appeared soft and made of the rarest hide. Baby unicorn, maybe.

The vest contrasted strangely with the new nose, which appeared to be huddling on Aimee’s face, hoping not to be noticed. It was not a nose that would put up its hand and venture a guess. It was not a nose that belonged anywhere near a unicorn-hide vest.

You have to understand that G. P. Academy is not the sort of school where one expects to see plastic surgery. Maybe some of the students who are into the new primitivism have had radical and wince-inducing body modifications like forehead studs or whatever. But no one gets cosmetic procedures. We’re about self-expression here, but not that kind of self-expression.

“Last year all she got was that car,” said Dusk as we watched Aimee continue to sniff the air with her tiny nose and expose the Mariana Trench of her cleavage to the warming rays.

“Is all that new?” I whispered, making a windshield wiper gesture with my hand and wondering, as always, if I was seeing the situation clearly.

“Nose or chest?” asked Neil.

“Both, I guess. I mean, I can tell the nose is new. That’s too bad. I loved her old nose.”

“The girls,” said Neil, making a vague double-handful gesture, “are definitely new.”

“Maybe they just look really big because the nose is so small,” I suggested. “And because that vest is so . . . white.”

“So you’re saying it could be a vest-induced optical illusion?” asked Dusk.

“Maybe. We shouldn’t assume.”

“I’m pretty sure those kinds of changes are meant to be noticed,” said Neil. “They are part of Aimee’s self-presentation. My guess is that she’d be devastated if no one noticed. It’s like if you spent two days Photoshopping your Facebook profile picture and no liked it or commented on how good you look.”

“So we’re supposed to notice but not ask?” said Dusk.

By this time Aimee had begun a series of attention-getting stretches. She looked as though she’d been gardening or bricklaying for eight hard hours and had a crick in her spine.

A lot of her posturing seemed directed at us. Which made sense, because we were the only people around. We had arrived thirty minutes early because we came in my truck, which has a tendency to flood and stall, so we build extra time into every trip.

“We should say something,” Dusk whispered.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Tell her she looks nice. She’s probably nervous. She’s made all these changes and we’re the first ones on-site for inspection.”

“It’s not an inspection,” I said. “It’s school.”

“Same thing,” said Dusk.

“We need to be more specific,” said Neil, ignoring me. “We should tell her we think the work is excellent. Top-notch and first-rate. Madonna-caliber work.”

“People don’t want their fakery exposed,” I said.

“I think a lot of the time, they do,” said Neil.

“We live in an age of unparalleled falseness,” said Dusk. Her voice had taken on that rebar quality it gets when she’s about to take a stand on some issue. “And I for one have had enough. I’m going to say something.” She stood, and her rotted shoes made a squelching sound.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said.

Dusk repositioned the candy cigarette in the corner of her mouth.

“Dusk, you’re the wrong person for the job,” I whispered. “You’re too perfect.” My gaze slid over to Neil.

“Are you suggesting that I’m less than a total Adonis?” said Neil. Then he laughed softly to himself. Neil has longish hair that he slicks back with just a hint too much product. He’d unbuttoned his dress shirt, and the T-shirt was cut low so it showed just a touch too much chest. There are days when Neil wears a silk scarf. Neil kills me, but in a good way. He acts like he has Teflon self-esteem, even though he’s one of the most sensitiv...