Truth be Told

Come in, come in, there’s a sandstorm kicking up outside. You can take off your mask, the air is better in here. I can’t say about the fallout, but at least we can breathe. For the time being anyway.

Would you like a Sprite? I found a few in the remnant of that Walmart on the highway. Watch your fingers, they were in a pile of broken glass when I found them. They’re warm I’m afraid, but it’s something. You look old enough to remember when we had refrigeration. You don’t appreciate that until it’s gone, like nap time in elementary school. Go ahead, stamp the red dust off your boots, take a load off. You’re here for the story, yes? Of how it happened.

Don’t look so surprised, no one has secrets from me. I have you warn you, you won’t believe me. No one does. But I still tell the ones who want to know, it seems only fair. Sit, I’ll tell you everything.

There are so many things I wish I didn’t know, and one thing I wish I had.

I wish I didn’t know that my forty-five-year-old former neighbor still slept in a dinosaur onesie, or that my old elementary school teacher fantasized about running away with Clark Gable while her students were taking spelling tests, or that my sister hacked into my Amazon account every year to pick out my birthday gifts. I wish I didn’t know that my mother regretted having a second child, or that my niece strangled her family’s pet ferret several summers ago and they all pretended it was an accident, or that my brother-in-law embezzled a hundred thousand dollars from the cancer charity he worked for. I wish I didn’t know that my best friend’s husband regretted their marriage since the day after the wedding, or that the police officer whose car I used to pass on the way to work helped convict an innocent man of murder because the man saw his partner shoot a civilian.

I know all these things, but if I had known what that locket was made of, I wouldn’t have opened the damn thing and I wouldn’t know any of this.

When you were a kid, did you study Greek mythology in school? I did. We had to write a report about a mythological character of some kind. I chose the Hippocampus because I wanted to be different. If you’ve never seen a picture of one, it’s like a mermaid horse. The smartest girl in the class chose Pandora. She’s the genius who opened the forbidden box and released all the various evils and suffering into the world. Oh, and hope too. At least that’s something.

Sitting in class, listening to my classmate talk about her, I remember thinking it would be really rough to do one stupid thing and have the responsibility for all the world’s problems laid at your feet. She might have been an idiot, but also I felt kind of bad for her, I’m not going to lie. These days, I feel pretty much the same way about myself.

The little heart-shaped locket was a family heirloom, passed down for so long no one could remember where it originally came from. My great-grandmother used to tell stories about how that locket had traveled with our ancestors through nameless mountain trails, around the Mediterranean seas, across the Atlantic ocean, all the way through history from the fall of the Roman Empire through the turnstiles of Ellis Island, until it found its way into my hands on my twenty-fifth birthday, as was tradition. It came with one sternly delivered admonition, Don’t. Open. It.

What’s the point of a locket if you don’t open it? I wondered. The whole point is to keep something important inside. For months that locket burned a hole in the back of my brain. What was inside it? Some terrible family secret? An ancient picture of the original owner? The key to some fabulous family fortune? In the years since I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether any of the locket’s previous owners experienced the same temptation, and how they were able to resist. Maybe no one else wore it around. Maybe they just stuffed it in a bin in the attic with their old Christmas sweaters and forgot about it. Come to think of it, it was pretty hard to pry open when I finally did so, maybe they thought it couldn’t open at all. Maybe every other time the locket was passed down, they told the receiver to open it as much as she wanted, so the prospect held no appeal and she never got around to trying.

I guess all my foremothers were miraculously born with either no curiosity or a superhuman level of self-discipline, but whatever it was that quality must have skipped me, because I opened it.

It was a Tuesday night and the timer was about to go off on the lasagna I had in the oven. The clasp was tarnished shut and I had to fish a tiny screwdriver out of our toolbox to pry the two halves apart. After some fiddling, it clicked open and lay flat on the kitchen counter. There was a tiny word etched inside that I couldn’t make out. No photo, no fortune, no world-changing tide of innumerable miseries. Truth be told, it was a little anticlimactic. The oven timer went off and I walked away to finish making the salad.

When I went into the bedroom to tell my husband dinner was ready, he gave me the oddest look. I was about to ask if I had something on my face when he blurted out that he wasn’t really held late at the office last week, he had gone out drinking with a coworker and didn’t want me to feel like he hadn’t wanted to come home. I was about to tell him he could have just said that and I wouldn’t have been mad when he added that he’s always hated the paint color I chose for our bedroom, but didn’t want to hurt my feelings. I started wondering if he’d read one of those “radical honesty” self-help books that tells you to track down the gift store you stole a snow globe from when you were ten and pay the owner for it so you can right every wrong you’ve ever committed or something.

Before I could answer him, my phone was buzzing. A flood of text messages were coming in, so fast I could barely read more than a few words at a time from each. My boss admitting that she passed me over for promotion next year because she felt like she had to hire the CEO’s nephew, my dad telling me he always let me beat him at chess as a teenager to boost my self-esteem. Then came the social media rush. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter notifications coming so fast my screen was a flurry of banner alerts, hardly appearing before the next one would push it down. I could hear the same cacophony of beeps and chirps coming from my husband’s phone. People were posting selfies of their face scrubbed clean of makeup, tweeting that they never tip waiters even though they know that they don’t get paid if you don’t, posting on Facebook that they lied about who they voted for or that they sell their mom’s prescription pills out of their garage.

Thinking that this had to be a mistake somehow, a prank, a broken cell tower, I went into the living room and turned on the news. Every talking head on every news station was blurting out that they exaggerated this story to get views or buried that one because the network didn’t like it. I kept flicking through channels and came across a breaking news update from the lawn of the White House. The President, looked rumpled and dazed, was gripping the sides of a podium and shouting state secrets motor-mouthed into the microphone. He took campaign money from the NRA despite claiming to be anti-gun ownership, there are no aliens at Area 51, but there is a lot of experimental military technology, the U.S. government never had any intention of reforming education like they said they would. He also admitted that he’s just a person doing his best like everyone else, and it’s exhausting to pretend to have all of the answers all the time. That one tugged at my heartstrings a little, I’m not going to lie.

Dazed and wondering why everyone except me seemed to have suddenly lost their minds, I drifted back into the kitchen. It had just occurred to that maybe I was the one who had lost my mind and I was hallucinating all of this when the kitchen light glinted off the locket, still lying open on the counter. I brought it up close to my face and squinted at the word engraved on the inside. Veritas. Truth.

You know that feeling when your brain makes a connection, but it’s too crazy to comprehend so you just kind of stand there shell-shocked, repeating something to yourself and hoping it will make sense this time? That locket, the one I had been so strictly told not to open, was made of a piece of that long-ago artifact that belong to my generations-ago grandmother, the one who unleashed all the evil into the world. And by opening it, I had doomed us again, but this time with the most dangerous virtue of all, honesty.

I staggered back into the living room just in time to see the President still talking. It seemed like he’d barely taken a breath since he’d begun, and his latest confession was that the U.S. had been stockpiling nuclear weapons for the last ten years. I didn’t know it at the time, but around the world similar televised confessions were taking place in different languages. All I could do was sit on the couch, hands clasped together, the locket dancing on the end of its chain as my hands shook around it.

I don’t remember much of the next several weeks, to be honest. I don’t know when the first bomb got dropped, or who dropped it. The news stations showed image after image of mushroom clouds and apocalyptic flashes of light, cities leveled in minutes, state buildings blown apart one after another. They kept it up until the news stations themselves starting disappearing, until one by one the channels turned to static. Even if you could find a TV still attached to a power source, all it would display was grey snow.

While this was happening, like everyone else I was herded into bunkers, fallout shelters, backup plans we hadn’t known existed. When we emerged the fires and explosions had ceased, and the ones who had dropped the bombs were gone, but all we could see around us were the remnants of things. Pieces of buildings, clouds of dust that might have once been trees, libraries, or people. Everyone seemed to feel the same way I did right after I opened that locket. They drifted around the wreckage in a daze, waiting for things to start to make sense. I guess we’re still waiting.

I wish there was a different ending, but I’m afraid that’s about it. I told you no one believes me, but you know, I think just maybe you do. I see your eyes keep straying to the chain around my neck. For millennia it was closed, and now it’s open I can’t close it again. While I was in that bunker I went crazy trying, but it’s too late now. Now, just like me, you know everything. Perhaps, like me, you wish you didn’t. Maybe you pity me, maybe you judge me, maybe some of both. But tell me this. If that locket had been hanging around your neck, can you honestly say that you wouldn’t have opened it?