Antiphony Read Free Page A

in the middle of a meeting in a conference room, with a sudden and undeniable need to go.
    Now that he is situated on the hard narrow seat, he takes a look at his surroundings. This is the kind of tight, confining space he never feels he will make it out of alive; the sharp smell of urine and trace of blue sanitized water from the toilet cause his nostrils to pinch. He has to shift his knees at an awkward angle so that his legs will fit between the jutting stainless steel paper dispenser and the opposite wall of the stall.
    Theodore often finds himself in situations such as this, in the wrong place at the wrong time, slightly out of phase with the world around him. He should be at the ballroom where his esteemed colleagues are gathering to hear him speak. But insteadhe is here, contemplating his hairy kneecaps and wondering where in the world his notes might be.
    Ilene said she saw them in the room—they must be there. Everything is okay, he will finish here and calmly go upstairs and find them. He envisions them lying on the bedside table next to the clock radio, or perhaps on the desk next to the room service menu and the cunning futuristic lamp. He sees the sheets of paper engulfed in a kind of glow that makes them stand out against the objects around them. They are there, they must be. They contain, in a mere pair of handwritten pages, the accumulated wisdom of the past seven years of his life’s work, the most comprehensive and elegant summary of Perturbation Theory imaginable.
    A surprisingly rich scent of coffee emanates from the bolus of digested food he has released into the ceramic basin beneath him. Against his doctor’s orders, he has once again taken up drinking coffee for breakfast, and he has begun to notice that his excrement somehow retains the smell of it, overpowering all the other ingredients that go into producing this concentrated distillate of his self. This is finished. He wipes himself, stands and pulls up his pants. These furtive movements initiate a startling sudden whoosh behind him. He turns to watch the waste recede into the plumbing on a cascade of fresh blue water and as he does, a series of words that has been etched into the stall catches his eye.
    T HE W ORD I S A L IE
    Or, maybe it is T HE W ORLD I S A L IE , it is hard to tell—there may be an “l” there, squeezed between the “r” and the “d.” The graffiti has been casually sketched onto the metal wallwith a pen or a knife—or both. There is clearly blue ink in the outlines of the letters, but there is an indistinct mark between the “r” and “d” that makes the message ambiguous.
    T HE W ORD I S A L IE . What does that mean? He looks in the mirror as he washes his hands and considers the face that stares back at him. Dark hair and blue eyes that pale into gray when the weather turns grim. Narrow cheekbones that frame his nose and mouth, and a goatee speckled with blond that Ilene has never really liked, his attempt to look professorial. He would never lie—has never lied. It is outside the realm of possibility for him. His entire life has been dedicated to finding truth, to peeling back layers upon layers of obfuscation and going directly to the most basic reality of human existence. Perhaps he has been set upon this course, this life of fitful lurching in the direction of truth, by an incident that occurred when he was only six years old. He was in first grade, and they had seen fit in his primary school to organize the desks of the students in clusters of four, so that instead of having ranks of students facing straight ahead towards the teacher dispensing her wisdom at the front of the class, the students paid attention mostly to each other. An educator somewhere must have thought this arrangement would lead to a more democratic form of scholarship, students learning from each other, through teamwork and collaboration, but, as Theodore has discovered through his