are you a good lier? are you good enough to lie to two women?

I know that I shouldn´t be in love with two magical beings specially two magical beings from other land. But everytime I remember and think about my lovely and sweet fairy, Brenda and my sensual and always nuturishing my mind and desires, my lovely mermaid I just can´t stop thinking about them. That morning I arrived early to job, inhat the laboratory of robots where my boss and other doctors use to work always there is so many strange nose, specially from the monitor that is always registingthe beat hearts from every human who is translated to No Man´s Land.
I was doing some testing in human those lately days, and today finally I will start working with the lie detector machine.
At first he believed it was the clock ordering him to rise, but then he
awakened completely and remembered his profession.
The voice he heard was rusty, as if disguised. He could not
distinguish what altered it: alcohol, drugs, anxiety or fear.
It was a woman’s voice; but it could have been an adolescent
imitating a woman, or a woman imitating an adolescent.
“What is it?” he asked. “Hello. Hello. Hello.”
“I had to talk to someone; I can’t sleep. I had to call someone.”
“You have something to confess…”
“To confess?” echoed the voice incredulously; this time, the
ascending tonalities unmistakably feminine.
“Don’t you know who I am?”
“No, I just dialed blindly. I’ve done this before. It is good to hear a
voice in the middle of the night, that’s all.”
“Why a stranger? You could call a friend.”
“A stranger doesn’t ask questions.”
“But it’s my profession to ask questions.”
“Who are you?”
“A lie detector.”
There was a long silence after his words. The lie detector expectedher to hang up. But he heard hercough through thetelephone.
“Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“I thought youwould hang up.”
There was laughter through the telephone, a lax, spangled, spiralinglaughter. “But you don’t practice your profession over the
telephone!”
“It’s true. Yet you wouldn’t have called me if you were innocent.
Guilt is the one burden human beingscan’t bearalone.As soon asa
crime is committed, there is a telephone call, or a confession tostrangers.”
“There was no crime.”
“There is only one relief: to confess, to be caught, tried, punished.
That’s the ideal ofevery criminal. But it’s not quite so simple. Onlyhalf of the self wants to atone, to be freed of the torments of guilt.
The other half of man wants to continue to be free. So only half ofthe self surrenders, calling out ‘catch me,’ while the other half
creates obstacles, difficulties; seeks to escape. It’s a flirtation withjustice. If justice is nimble, it will follow the clue with the criminal’s
help. If not, thecriminalwilltakecare of his own atonement.”
“Is that worse?”
“I think so. I think we are more severe judges of our own acts than
professional judges. We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret
curses, our secret hates, not only ouracts.”
She hung up.
The lie detectorcalled up the operator, gave orders to have the call
traced. Itcamefroma bar. Halfan hour later, he was sitting there.
He did not allow his eyes to roamor examine. He wanted his ears
aloneto beattentive, that he might recognizethe voice.
When she ordered a drink, helifted hiseyes fromhis newspaper.
Dressed in red and silver, she evoked the sounds and imagery of
fire engines as they tore through the streets of NewYork, alarming
the heart with the violent gong ofcatastrophe;all dressed in red andsilver, the tearing red and silver cutting a pathway through the flesh.
Thefirst time helooked at her hefelt:everything will burn!
Out of the red and silver and the long cry ofalarmto the poet whosurvives in all human beings, as thechild survives in him; to this poet
she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city andordained,“Climb!”
As she appeared, the orderly alignment of the city gave way beforethis ladder one was invited to climb, standing straight in space liketheladder ofBaronMunchhausenwhich led to thesky.
Only her ladder led to fire.
Helooked at heragainwith a professionalfrown.
She could not sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with afeverish breathlessness like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she
could not bear to sit for long; and, when she rose to buy cigarettes,
she was equally eager to return to her seat. Impatient, alert,
watchful, as if in dread of being attacked, restless and keen, shedrank hurriedly; she smiled so swiftly that he was noteven certain it
had been a smile; she listened only partially to what was being saidto her;and, evenwhen someonein the bar leaned overand shouteda namein her direction, she did not respond at first, as ifit were not
her own.
“Sabina!” shouted the man from the bar, leaning towards her
perilously but not losing his grip on the back of his chair for fear oftoppling.
Someone nearer to her gallantly repeated the name for her, whichshe finally acknowledged as her own. At this moment, the lie
detector threw off the iridescence which the night, the voice, thedrug ofsleep and her presence had created in him, and determinedthat she behaved like someone who had all the symptoms of guilt:
her way oflooking at the door ofthe bar, as ifexpecting the proper
moment to make her escape; her unpremeditated talk, without
continuity; hererraticand sudden gestures, unrelated to her talk; thechaos of her phrases; her sudden, sulky silences.
As friends drifted towards her, sat with her, and then drifted awayto other tables, she was forced to raise her voice, usually low, to be
heard abovethecajoling blues.
She was talking abouta party at which indistinct incidents had takenplace, hazy scenes fromwhich the lie detector could not distinguishthe heroine or the victim; talking a broken dream, with spaces,
reversals, retractions, and galloping fantasies. She was now in
Morocco visiting the baths with the native women, sharing their
pumice stone, and learning from the prostitutes how to paint her
eyes with kohlfromthe market place. “It’scoal dust, and you place
it right inside the eyes. It smarts at first, and you want to cry; but
that spreads it out on theeyelids, and that is howthey get that shiny,
coal black rimaround theeyes.”
“Didn’t you getan infection?”asked someoneat her right whomthelie detector could not see clearly, an indistinct personage she
disregarded even as sheanswered,“Oh, no, the prostitutes havethekohl blessed at the mosque.”And then, when everyone laughed at
this which she did not consider humorous, she laughed with them;
and now it was as if all she had said had been written on a hugeblackboard, and she took a sponge and effaced it all by a phrasewhich left in suspense who had been at the baths; or, perhaps, this
was a story she had read, or heard at a bar; and, as soon as it was
erased in the mind of her listeners, she began another…
The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only halfdrawn; and, when the lie detector had just begun to perceive them,
another face and figure were interposed as in a dream. And whenhe believed she had been talking abouta woman, it turned out that it
was nota woman, buta man;and when theimage ofthe man beganto form, it turned out the lie detector had not heard aright:ies. Shewas a young man who resembled a woman who had once takencare of Sabina; and this young man was instantly metamorphosedinto a group of people who had humiliated her one night.
He could not retain a sequence of the people she had loved, hated,
escaped from, anymore than he could keep track ofthe changes in
her personal appearance by phrases such as “at that time my hair
was blond,”“at that time I was married,”and who it was that hadbeen forgotten or betrayed;and when in desperation heclung to therecurrences of certain words, they formed no design by their
repetition, but rather an absolute contradiction. The word “actress”recurred most persistently; and yet the lie detector could not, after
hours of detection, tellwhether she wasan actress, or wanted to beone, or was pretending.
She was compelled by a confessional fever which forced her intolifting a corner of the veil, and then frightened when anyone listenedtoo attentively. She repeatedly took a giant sponge and erased all
she had said by absolute denial, as if this confusion were in itselfamantle of protection.
At first she beckoned and lured oneinto her world; then she blurredthe passageways,confused alltheimages,as ifto elude detection.
The dawn appearing at the door silenced her. She tightened her
cape around her shoulders as if it were the final threat, the greatest
enemy of all. To the dawn she would not even address a feverishspeech. Shestared at itangrily,and left the bar.
Thelie detector followed her.