Ariel shuts her eyes tight.
“Locating the phone wasn’t the end of it. We’re investigating a lot of angles.”
“Like?”
“Hey, it’s really late. Why don’t we go over this in the morning?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Why did you run? From a driver who was called, for your safety, by the US embassy?”
What can she say? I’m running because I’m terrified that the driver might actually be a contract killer hired to assassinate me, to finally eliminate the long-dormant threat of me, a threat that has been resurrected by this kidnapping of my husband.
“Let’s get you back to your hotel,” he says. “Come on.”
She can see that his face is swollen where she hit him; he should’ve spent the last few hours applying ice, but instead he seems to have been chasing her around Lisbon. To keep her safe? Or to keep her contained?
“My car is just up the street.”
He’s right. She has to give up for the night, go back to the hotel, lie down, get some sleep. This was one of the hard lessons she learned while solo-parenting an infant: Sleep deprivation is very real, it doesn’t take long to set in, and its effects are brutal. Physical, psychological, emotional, everything all at once. Tomorrow she’ll need her wits, that’s for damn sure.
“Come on,” he repeats.
Ariel begins to cry, again. He notices her tears, and he’s trying to decide how to respond, whether to embrace her, or take her hand, or her elbow, or put his arm around her shoulder, but he’s probably afraid that she doesn’t want to be touched, certainly not by a strange man in an alley in the middle of the night, and he’s absolutely right. Instead he offers another empty “It’s gonna be okay.”
He can’t possibly know that anything is going to be okay. But that’s what we do sometimes, we lie to each other, even when everyone knows that lying is what’s going on. Sometimes we call this politeness, sometimes we call it optimism, sometimes we call it support, sometimes we call it politics or business or negotiation or public relations or marketing, sometimes we call it just doing our jobs. Sometimes we compound the lies we tell each other with lies we tell ourselves, denying that what we’re doing is lying, or denying that lying is bad, or denying that lying has consequences. Denying that facts are facts. Denying that truth has meaning.
It’s no surprise that this man is lying to Ariel, and that she’s lying by letting him, and that they both know the other is lying, both pretending they don’t.
*
You want to believe that there’s only one reality, that we all share it. This is what Ariel used to be certain of: Facts are facts, truth is truth.
But then.
Here’s what can happen: You lose faith in yourself, in your capacity to see the world clearly, to understand it correctly. You begin to think that you’re somehow broken, that there’s some deficit in your intellect that prevents you from being competent in a way that everyone else is competent, some short circuit that renders your brain unable to process facts and emotions, to make appropriate responses.
At first you might be positive—one hundred percent, no doubt—that you understand the events, the physical environment, what time it was, how much alcohol you’d consumed, all these facts seem so clear, so unassailable, indisputable.
But then you’re told something different. Told that you don’t understand what really happened: No, it wasn’t like that, not at all. It’s your interpretation that’s faulty; you misunderstood. You asked for it—not just figuratively but literally, you actually said this aloud: “I want it.”
You know with absolute certainty that this is not true, that you said no such thing. But you are told, with one hundred percent certainty, that you did.
So then what? So then despite yourself, despite your confidence—despite your certainty—doubt begins to creep in. Doubt about things that are obviously open to interpretation, subjective matters of opinion. But eventually also doubt about things that aren’t. Doubt about facts.
No: It was midnight, not ten.
You’d had six drinks, not two; you were the drunk one, I was sober.
You were asking for it, so I gave it to you.
That’s how you lose faith in objectivity, in reality, in yourself.
That’s how gaslighting works.
CHAPTER 22
DAY 2. 9:17 A.M.
Ariel awakens alone, again. Within seconds her mind is already hyperactive, that peculiar buzzing that comes with stress, too many ideas colliding, haphazard thoughts shooting off in multiple directions with little chance of arriving at logical destinations. This is a disorganized mind, unproductive fretting, and Ariel feels the suffocating clutch of frustration tightening her chest, a panic attack rising in response to this unsustainable situation, and her inability to deal—
Stop.
She shuts her eyes. Deep breath. Think of nothing except exhaling …
And again …
And then she opens her eyes, and feels a bit better. Not a lot, but enough.
She looks around the room, cleaner and neater than it had been the last time she awoke here, with no last-night remnants of John, of sex. Has it been only one day?
Yesterday was definitely bad, but today is probably going to be worse. At least yesterday Ariel had some control, she was the one making fundamental choices—to go to the police, to the embassy, various calls to America, gathering the disparate threads into one ball, giving it a push over the crest of the hill.
Now it’s up to other people, and she can’t completely rely on any of them. Which is why she needs so many.
*
Ariel gets dressed in her usual outfit of jeans and a T-shirt. She towel-dries her hair, pulls on her running shoes, swipes a lipstick across her mouth, done.
When she was young, Ariel made so many of her choices—personal, professional, romantic and platonic and sartorial—premised on herself as the center of the universe, the way she looked, the clothes she wore, the places she was seen and with whom, her perceived levels of attractiveness, of status, building blocks of a persona that yearned to be public, to be a person who was envied by strangers.
She’d taken herself pretty damn seriously. But that’s youth, isn’t it? Young people come from all over the world to New York to take themselves seriously, to clamor for attention, to be known, to be admired, to be envied, to be desired. Ariel attained all of that, only to discover that she didn’t want it, and to realize that these traits that we admire and envy—youth and beauty and privilege—these are not accomplishments.