Community of Liars
by G David Schwartz

About the author

David Schwartz is the former president of Seedhouse, an online interfaith committee. Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue. He coauthored Parables In  Black and White with Jacqueline Winston. Currently he is a volunteer at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati. Midrash and Working Out Of The Book are now in stores.

P and Q are divorced. She wanted him to learn to engage in small talk,not consistently be swallowed up in philosophy.  He was a fanatic aboutphilosophy. He wanted to name their first child Socrates, handling theprotest by saying it was, “NO is a good Greek name.”

“But we are not Greek,” his wife said to him with a face that wanted to break out in a grin.

He was thinking whether he was Greek or not and when he had to deduce that he was not, he insisted they name their first child Socrates.

“Don’t you think Amanda will get upset?”

“Who is Amanda?”

“Your first child,” she said with a quizzical spectacle above her lips.

“Ahhh.  For sure.” He tried to give a pleasant answer. “Then we should name our first child Sonya,” he growled with a nod to Amanda.

That was days ago, and if you read this story in a week or so, it will be even more days ago, P (a letter to stand for the name of the woman Patricia Vicuña, a person who is not in this story, but I didn’t want to ignore her) moved to city B. (either Boston, or Bolivia, or maybe even Broadway where she falls in love but looking back as we are now, she fell in love, past tense, with C, (either Crandall or Cary or Kevin) and R (certainly Ronda). He is infatuated with their lives.

P finds out that C and R are liars. They were graduates in the art of Liarodiuin, which is a thing liars use to believe in artists who say whatever pops into their head. They have a surrealistic maxim which says that whatever pops in your head must pop out of your mouth. Then they do what they have to do to purify it.

P is morally outraged. He plots revenge. He lies to them. Them who? Them ALL.  They had begun to appreciate him more.

A voice is heard. I am not sure who said it so I will not put it in paradigms. I didn’t say everyone had to be interested in philosophy. All I ask is for some sense of intelligent creativity, some creative spark, some shard of new actionability, some non-deviant yet creative spark, something like the spark of life.

It is busy so there are many other voices, such as “Repairman are just like everybody else.  You’ve got to watch them like a hawk. I had that job for many years but I never knew how a hawk watched other than using his eyes to look at things and see things.”

Then a thought flew out of the air and into the place was it could be

read. Once read it said, “Why Vince won’t fill out the organ donor 

half of his D.L.”

“I have this fear. Suppose I get to heaven and they say, “Oh, no. You

can’t get in here because you gave your heart away.”

Then there is this little truth:

P lights a cigarette. Q shoots him a dirty look. In the look some words form and fall into the air making a sound, which sounds amazingly like: “Do you have to do that so soon after Dad’s death?”

“I…I have children…I do it for them!”

“For THEM?”

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