The Truth

John drank his coffee and looked out at his perfectly manicured lawn. It was so well-tended, so green and uniform in its evenness, that it could have been astroturf. Maybe it was astroturf, he thought. Maybe that would explain things – how everything seemed wrong one day. It was like someone had moved the world off-kilter, but only by an inch and a half. He knew something was different, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe it was a carbon monoxide leak – something undiscernible, that made him inexplicably tired and ill at ease.

He sipped his coffee – It was awful, Folger’s bullshit, you could taste the stale coffee grounds. He never really learned how to make the good stuff. Sara wouldn’t stand for this crap – she woke up early, did her pilates, and always came home with a giant iced coffee from Starbucks. There were little wet rings on all the surfaces in the house from her giant coffees. Why hadn’t his wife ever learned how to use a fucking coaster? In the end, he supposed it didn’t matter – they had enough money to replace all the surfaces she destroyed with her negligence. And really, she was perfect in basically every other way – flagrantly self-obsessed, maybe, but who wasn’t these days? She kept a trim figure, kept the kids in check, and slept with John at least two times a week, so he couldn’t really complain. It was always Mondays and Fridays – he imagined she kept “sleep with John” as an item in her planner for those two days. She would wear her nicest underwear, and right before they went to sleep she’d rest a dainty hand on his chest and raise her eyebrows at him. Then it was go time.

This was his precious time alone, the sacred hour before work when he could drink his shitty coffee, watch the news, maybe jerk off if there was time. He glanced over at the kitchen TV – a slightly less fancy version of the monstrosity in the living room, but nonetheless top-of-the-line. One of those vacuous morning show programs was on, the hosts two grinning idiots with shiny orange limbs. They were recapping last night’s episode of Midnight Market, the latest hit competition show. Contestants prostrated themselves before a live audience and slimy judges so they could have their student loans forgiven, get a kidney transplant, pay for a decent nursing home for their infirm grandparents. Apparently the audience wasn’t impressed with a contestant’s dancing performance, but one of the judges offered to pay their hospital bills if she was willing to get her right index finger chopped off – but here’s the rub! – she had to smile the entire time they did it, or she wouldn’t get a red cent.

Disgusting, thought John. But he still wished he had seen it.

John drove to work in his luxury sedan, listening to smooth jazz the entire way. He only liked background music – nothing that would require his full attention. It was easy to drive through his suburb and get lost, with all the winding roads and uniform houses. One time he had driven around for fifteen minutes in the neighborhood, trying to get into several houses that weren’t his. So he put up an American flag by the front door, thinking that would help. Once the fourth of July came around, though, everyone had an American flag by their door, and several of his neighbors didn’t bother to put them down. He had considered painting the front door a bold color – dark red or bright blue, maybe – but Sara had vetoed the suggestion. She was terrified of the Home Owners Association and didn’t like rattling cages.

Something struck him in that moment about that term – “rattling cages” – something on the tip of his tongue, in a dark corner of his mind. What was it? A loud horn blared at him as he drove through a stop sign. John shrugged his shoulders at the angry car, a gesture of “whoops, sorry!” that he hoped didn’t make him look like too much of an asshole.

He parked in his spot and walked into the building. The secretary at the front desk greeted him, and he nodded curtly to her before jogging into the elevator as if he was in a hurry to do some important work.

In reality, John wasn’t exactly sure what his job was. He knew it was important, because he had a secretary all his own – a nice older lady named Polly who took messages for him and asked how his day was going, who screened people before letting them into his office. Occasionally he would go to a meeting and sit to the right of the President of the company, and he would nod, smile, and agree to whatever the President said. There were a couple sycophants who he guessed were his underlings, two guys named Bob and Fred and who always smiled wide at him and asked about the Big Game and would earnestly ask how he thought of their performance. To this, John would knit his brow as if he was thinking some deep thought, really ruminating on the work of Bob or Fred, and then say he was showing a lot of promise. That would usually get them off his back for awhile.

But what did he do? And what did the company do, for that matter? Something to do with marketing, he thought. There was a lot of talk of synergy, whatever that was. Some days John would sit at his desk in his office, open his email, and type random letters over and over again as if he was writing something important. Occasionally, he considered firing somebody, just to make things interesting.

Mostly, John just fucked around on the internet. One day he found the profile of a girl he recognized from the last family trip to Applebee’s. It was the waitress with the stringy blonde hair and thick, dark eyeliner, the one who barely spoke and grunted her replies at the family. Sara had been appalled at her behavior. “I hope you don’t tip her,” she’d said as John signed the bill for another bland family dinner. “If you tip her, she’ll never learn.” John tipped the girl twenty-five percent. Later that night, during his regimented Friday night fuck with Sara, he imagined he was pumping into that waitress, as she yawned and rolled her eyes at him.

The girl’s name was Macy Holloway. He messaged her immediately: “How’s Applebee’s?”

She responded in a little over two minutes. “They fired me, Big Tipper.”

It was the beginning of a love affair that made him feel slightly less numb. Macy was everything that Sara was not – she hated competition, she had no interest in comparing herself with other women, she was messy and smoked weed so often that her lips were stained with the taste of it. Macy lived in a tiny apartment with two roommates, none of whom did the dishes, so they piled up in the sinks and on the kitchen counters, attracting flies and cockroaches. Instead of cleaning up, they used paper plates.

It was Macy who showed him The Video. The Video put everything into place – the vague feeling of dread, the notion that something was wrong with the world. The man in the video was strung-out, with wild eyes, dark shadows underneath them like he hadn’t slept in days. When he spoke to the camera, it was like he was speaking directly to John. “They will make you think that you are the one who is wrong, but it is the world that’s wrong,” he said. “This isn’t Earth – it is an approximation of Earth, a simulacrum. The lizard people took us, they transplanted us here, and they are watching and listening always. We are just an experiment to them. But there is a way out, folks.”

He never fully explains this way out, but John thinks he understands. He knew one day, somehow, that Sara was different, that his life was different. How long had she been a lizard person in disguise? How long had the charade been going on?

After the first time he watched The Video, Macy smiled, handing her joint over to him. “Congratulations,” she said. “Now you know the truth.”

The idea of the lizard people began to consume him. When, exactly, had he been taken away from the real world and put into this biosphere? He tried to think of the last time that life had felt real to him. Maybe it was back in college, when he was still dating Sara. Maybe it was after the birth of Chelsea – this he remembered vividly, the fear in his gut, the sweat on Sara’s distorted, anguished face while she pushed their firstborn out. But it felt almost like someone else’s memory. Chelsea was twelve years old now – an awkward, gangly thing that resented him and spent most of her time texting her friends and scowling. For all he knew, his real daughter was back on Earth, wondering whatever became of him.

“It’s more likely that they replaced you with a double,” said Macy. They were lying post-coitus on her bare mattress, a sweaty mess of tangled limbs. “Just like we are living in a world of doubles, they had to replace you with one of their own topside.” She shrugged. “Or – and this is a really fucked up theory – your daughter and everyone you know is long dead. We’re thousands of years in the future, on their planet. Interstellar travel takes a long time, and I bet they kept us on ice until we could get here.”

It stuck with him – this idea that every other connection he had had in the world was gone, long dead. Macy was one of the few real people left. He held her close.

“How do we get out?” he asked. The Video had hinted at a way, but it was all hidden in code.

“There’s been some talk on the boards,” said Macy. She was referring to the message boards, where people who had seen The Video – survivors, real humans – spoke to one another. “Some people think we have to defy expectations. Do crazy shit, basically.”

“Crazy like what?” he asked.

Macy just winked.

When John came home, Sara had dinner set up. No one was sitting at their designer table – Sara was taking pictures of the food with her phone, trying different light setups, making Chelsea and Ben move things around on the slate surface until she got her perfect shot.

“Dinner’s gonna get cooold,” Ben whined. He was eight years old and as profoundly annoying as he was cute.

No one ate dinner until Sara got her perfect shot. They ate mostly in silence. The food tasted much worse than it looked.

That night, John lay in bed, pretending to read while Sara went through her evening retinue of cold creams. He squinted at the ceiling fan. Was there a camera hidden inside? He knew the lizard people liked to watch in any way they could – they were perverse in this way – and that cameras and listening devices were installed in every house, every workplace, even the trees outside. Were they even real trees, anyway? Maybe they were manufactured, like set pieces for a play.

Sara got into bed beside him and rested her hand on his chest. So this must be a Monday or a Friday, he thought. But he was really not in the mood for sex, not after he’d already seen Macy earlier that day.

“Not tonight, honey,” he said to Sara, taking her hand in his and pushing it away, then turning to face the wall. He thought he could see a tiny speck there – a hidden microphone perhaps?

Sara got out of the bed and started pacing, her footsteps muffled by the soft beige carpeting. “I knew it,” she said, “I knew it, I knew it..”

John was annoyed to have his attention pulled away from the speck in the wall. He sighed. “You knew what, exactly?”

She whirled at him, pointing her perfectly manicured finger in his face. “You’re having an affair!”

John laughed. He did not feel guilty in the slightest – after all, this wasn’t his real wife, and he had much more important business on his mind. “Preposterous. Now come back to bed, sweetie.”

Tears spilled down her tanned face. “You’ve been acting strange for a long time. And never once have you turned down sex before – why now, John? Who is she?” She grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and dabbed at her eyes.

“You have nothing to worry about, honey,” he said. “Please, come back to bed.”

She shook her head. “I know something’s going on,” she insisted.

Cheap theatrics, he thought. This must be part of some script. Of course, the lizard people must know that he’s been seeing Macy, and they want to create some sort of drama for entertainment. Or maybe it’s a warning from them – a warning to stay away, to stop asking questions?

“Is this what you want?!” he yelled at the speck on the wall. He punched the wall, grabbing for whatever was concealed there, but found nothing but drywall. Some sort of alien trick? Of course their technology had to be advanced – the microphone was probably too small for him to see, but he knew it was there.

Sara shrieked and pulled at his waist. “Why did you do that?”

“You know why I did that!” he snapped. He stepped onto the bed and pulled the ceiling fan down with all the weight of his body. A pile of rubble collapsed from the ceiling onto the bed. He choked on the dust. Sara sat in a corner of the room, her legs pulled into her chest, eyes wide in fear. She begged him to stop.

“Is this entertaining enough for you?” he screamed at the hole in the ceiling. There was a buzzing in his ears, drowning away Sara’s muffled sobs, drowning away the voices of his children, asking questions, woken from their slumber, confused. It was a sharp hum, like feedback from a microphone. This is the moment he understands – they must have slipped something into his skin, right above his ear, in his right temple. Why would they bug the ceiling fan when they could just as easily bug him?

It was an overcast day, the kind of day when the sun tries to shine through the thick layers of smog over the city in vain, the kind of day that gives everyone a migraine and sets even the most even-tempered people on edge. John sat in his office. He was bored – he was often bored, often sitting there staring at the blank screen of his computer, waiting for something to happen, anything. It was at this moment that he thought of firing Bob. Why not? From where he sat in his ergonomic, leather-backed chair – one that set the company back 5,000 dollars and which John asked for just to see if he could get away with it, and lo and behold, he could – he could see Bob drinking water from a Dixie cup. Somehow Bob had managed to spill water on his bland, colorless tie. John stared at the tie with a curled lip, disgusted at the lack of style.

When he called for Bob to join him in his office, the employee looked honored at first – his face slightly flushed, a stupid smile plastered on his blank, nondescript face. John thought about Bob’s blankness – he was like a canvass, unaltered – no, that wasn’t quite it – he was more like a colorless void. It almost pained him to look at a face so devoid of character.

“You’re fired, Bob,” he said. He offered no explanation, just sat back in his chair – a chair well worth more than a month of Bob’s work at the company, worth more than roughly 160 hours of Bob’s life, and watched for a reaction. It seemed that Bob thought it was a joke at first. He laughed uneasily, but John coached his own face into solemnity, and as Bob stared at him, his eyes darting around his face like a crazed animal backed into a corner, he started to stammer on about his situation at home. This kind of talk bored John even more. Bob was crying now, talking about his wife who had cancer and how they couldn’t afford the chemotherapy treatments.

“Maybe you should go on Midnight Market then,” suggested John with a cruel detachment.

“I have no talents,” stammered Bob, “they’ll humiliate me.”

John thought about the recent losers on that show, people with nothing to offer the world, begging for money, begging for their lives. There was a man who agreed to have his face tattooed with corporate logos. There was a woman who agreed to finish every sentence with “put that on a Lowman’s burger!” an insipid catch-phrase for a fast food chain. If she forgot to say it, there was a chip implanted in her wrist that would send an electric shock through her body, sometimes causing her to piss herself in public.

John recognized that he was luckier than those poor morons debasing themselves on television, or Bob, this shell of a man in front of him. Even before the lizard people abducted him, he knew he lived a privileged life. But he hated the idea that he should prostrate himself before the unwashed masses, the poor people who disgusted him by their very presence, who allowed themselves to be vulnerable in such an uncouth manner. And here Bob was, blubbering to himself, begging for his job. Did he have no shame?

It occurred to John at this moment that he had an opportunity. He had pulled the blinds closed after asking Bob to join him in his office. It was just the two of them now – well, the two of them and whoever was watching him from the microchip implanted in his brain. He thought about some of the theories he had been discussing with Macy – he had to do what was not expected of him. It was the only way to free himself from this prison.

And besides, what John really wanted to do was kill Bob. Bob was uncouth. He was small and insignificant, and he sniveled like a child. Moreover, Bob wasn’t even a human being – he was a lizard person, and so if John got rid of one, that was a win for humanity.

It was surprisingly easy. John took his pen knife and jabbed it into the side of Bob’s throat. He half expected to see green goo coming out of the wound, but it was rather convincing looking blood. Interesting, he thought. So the lizard people have similar blood to ours. Or at least they could pretend to – at least they have some sort of smoke screen, some way of making themselves look like dead humans.

Bob let out a squeal that devolved into a gargle. The blood was getting everywhere, and John took a few steps back. He did not want his shoes to be stained – a silly vanity, perhaps, considering the circumstances. He looked at Bob’s convulsing body, his bulging eyes fixed helplessly up at John and then down at the knife stuck in his throat. John tried to summon up some sort of feeling besides a general disgust at the way Bob slowly died in front of him.

Well, there it was. If the lizard people wanted a show, they sure got one. John looked around the office, half expecting one of them to leap out from behind his desk and shout “surprise!” What had his plan been, anyway? Did he really think killing a low-level grunt at his job would impress them?

No, no, that simply wouldn’t do. The lizard people wanted a show. They wanted carnage, the kind of sick, unpredictable thing that only a person who knew the truth would do – and he would do it because he was in on the joke, he knew this was not the real world. He was in a doll house, a simulation, the matrix, whatever you wanted to call it…

Sure, but for now he would have to leave the office and get on with his day. He stuffed Bob into a small closet in his office. There was the matter of the blood on the carpet, of course, but he would get back to that later. Or maybe he’d leave it, see if the night janitor would take care of it. It occurred to him then that the janitor would probably take care of the body for him, too. People like that always bended over backwards to curry favor with him, in the hopes of getting some sort of pittance.

John fixed his tie – silk and expensive, one of the many gifts from the President of the company – and whistled out of the office. He told Polly he was taking the rest of the day off. She nodded and smiled, no questions asked.

Macy opened the door to her apartment, her thin eyebrows raised, her arms crossed. “What is it?” she sighed. “I’m busy.”

“I did it,” he said. “Finally gave ‘em a show.”

She knew what he meant, and it was only moments later that he was pounding into her on her bare mattress. This time she seemed to be enjoying herself more than humoring him.

Afterward, she lit up a joint. “Can’t believe you finally axed your wife,” she said. “Good riddance.”

It occurred to John that there had been a fundamental misunderstanding. “I, uh – no, I killed one of my employees,” he told her sheepishly. “I figure, start small, right?”

Macy stared at him, her eyes red and glassy. She let the ash from the joint fall on the dirty hardwood floor. “Some low-level employee?” she said. “What’s the point of that?” She shook her head, as if she was regarding a dog that just couldn’t figure out how to sit for a treat. “That won’t get their attention. Why would they care about Fred?”

“It was Bob, actually,” he said, but even at that moment he was starting to have doubts. Was it Fred? Now he was starting to understand the bigger picture – Bob, Fred, and all the other low-level morons were basically computer code, automatons, getting rid of one of them would not raise any flags. The lizard people had bigger fish to fry. He suddenly felt like the world’s biggest dunce.

“I bet you Sara is one of the high-ranking lizard people,” said Macy. “That’s why they stuck her as your wife. It makes total sense. Get rid of her, and we might be able to finally find some answers. We can escape the simulation.”

Escape the simulation. It was all he could think about as he drove through the winding roads of his subdivision. The words repeated over and over in his mind, like a mantra, or one of those god-forsaken jingles from the radio when you were a kid that wheedle into your mind and come back to haunt you when your mind rests idle twenty years later. When you’re on your waaaay, the convenient stoooores of – Speedway!

If he could only find his house – he weaved through, looking at all the matching houses, squinting in a vain attempt to read the numbers on the mailboxes. If only he had been able to paint the damn door. When he finally reached his lovely abode, he felt light on his feet. His fingers tingled with excitement.

All that he could think about was the gun in the safe, in his study. Sara had insisted on buying it after seeing the riots on TV. She had nightmares of the dirty unemployed hordes taking over. She had read some article about a suburb in Los Angeles that was taken over by anarchists – the invasion of Skid Row, the papers had called it – a terrifying week when the derelict had given the mansions to the homeless before the National Guard had been called in, saving the day. The anarchists were shot. The homeless went back on the street, where they belonged. But the property damage had been astounding. Sara asked for John to buy the gun then, to protect them and their precious house.

And now he was going to use it on her. What an exciting turn of events. He almost got hard at the thought. He called out her name, expecting her to come running. But the house was dark, empty. She wasn’t cooking dinner or setting the table. There was no sullen preteen, no apple-cheeked little boy coming to greet him. All that he found was a note on the dinner table, telling him that she’d taken the kids to her parents’ house and not to bother to call. She needed space. What a joke. What a crock of shit.

John sighed. What, exactly, was he supposed to do now? He was about to turn on the TV when there was a firm knocking on the door. He saw the lights then – blue and red. He heard a siren. There was another knock now, even louder than the one before. My God, he thought. The janitor didn’t clean up my mess after all.

He sprinted for the study, hurriedly punched in the code to the safe, and grabbed the gun along with an envelope stashed with $50,000. He would sneak out the back. Maybe he could make it to Sara’s parent’s house. With a gun on her, she would have to spill the beans. She could tell him the whole dastardly plot, the reason why the lizard people chose him, just what exactly they hoped to gain from all of this.

He hunched over and quietly stalked to the back door. Just as he was about to open it, he saw a shadow outside – my god, they had him surrounded. His mouth went dry. So this is how it ends, he thought. They were already starting to kick down the front door. There wasn’t much time left – if they got him into custody, who knows what they would do to him? Maybe they would wipe his memory, and he would just go back to his old life, totally unaware of their plot. Would it be better that way – not knowing, blindly ignorant of the truth?

No, he thought. If it ends, it is going to end on my terms. He ran up the stairs, past the bedroom – the remnants of the ceiling fan still on the expensive king-sized bed. He locked himself into the bathroom. This is where he would do it.

He raised the barrel of the gun to his temple, right where he knew the microchip had been implanted. It all made sense now – this was the way out. Destroy the chip, wake up, and go back to real life. He knew the truth. He squeezed the trigger.

Polly sat at her desk. She hovered her mouse over the “buy” button. She knew it was wrong to shop online when she should be working, but she was the only one in the office now. The police had come and gone last night. Her boss had taken the coward’s way out, was the gossip around the water cooler this morning. She had tried not to be emotional. John had been good to her, and she still had a hard time believing he was capable of what everyone was saying about him. But you never did know about people, did you?

She had spent the better part of an hour looking at sales items online. She didn’t really need a new microwave, but when an expensive one was marked down significantly, it was almost like losing money not to buy it. At least that’s what she figured. So she spent money she did not have, and nothing could beat that rush when she pressed the “buy” button and knew she’d just taken advantage of an incredible deal.

This reminded her – it was getting late, and she was going to miss the new episode of Midnight Market. She stood up from her desk, stretching her aching limbs. She glanced over at the door to John’s office. Not his office anymore, of course – soon he would be replaced by another young go-getter. Such was the way of the world.

She opened the door to the office, ducking under the police tape. John’s computer was still on his desk, somehow still turned on, the blue light from the screen illuminating the room. She sat gingerly at his desk. There was a document on the bottom right corner of the desktop, simply titled “The Truth.” Her mouth went dry. Something had seemed off about the whole thing, she thought. Something off about John, something off about the world…

She took a deep breath and opened the document.

Gaby Harnish has a BFA in Screenwriting from EICAR: The International Film School of Paris. She currently resides in Sacramento with her fiancé and her cute-but-troubled dog, Britta. This is her first published work.