pathological liar disease — 1 investigation

dave is on speaker, narrating a wire transfer that has not, technically, happened. mom is on the other line, softer, walking around the kitchen, telling me her test results came back fine and that she is, in any case, fine. the landlord’s note, taped to my door this morning, used the phrase pathological liar disease as if it were a medical bulletin and not, what it clearly was, an insult dressed up in a lab coat.

so here we are. one airpod in. the other one is, as always, somewhere in this apartment, possibly under the couch, possibly inside the third yoga mat, definitely not in this ear. the microwave is humming behind me. the seventh microwave, since you asked, and that fact is going to matter in about six paragraphs.

i’m at the desk. carla is in a quarterly review on the third floor that started, by my watch, at 2:41pm, and won’t release her until lunch. that gives me roughly two hours to take the landlord’s accidental diagnosis and turn it into a small working theory of who, on the rung-chart of liars, i actually am. the answer, broadly, is: not pathological. close in places. but not.

at the desk. quarterly review on the third floor. carla took her good pen, which is, in this office, a confidence signal i tend to over-read.

pathological liar disease, the desk version

let me, before anyone gets excited, separate the phrase from the panic. pathological liar disease is not, in any strict sense, a disease. it is a sentence the public uses to describe a person who lies habitually, elaborately, and with no clear external benefit. specialists use shorter, drier words for it. the public, including my landlord, prefers the dramatic three-word version, because the word “disease” makes the whole conversation sound less like an argument and more like a diagnosis.

that is the trick of the phrase. it removes the argument. once you call something a disease, you have, rhetorically, taken yourself off the hook for having a small disagreement about a sink, or a rent payment, or whether the kitchen window has, in fact, been broken since march. the disease did it. you were busy.

i’m on, by my own count, my third reading of the note. it is two paragraphs long. the first paragraph is about the rent. the second paragraph contains the phrase. the phrase is underlined. underlined by a man who lives in the building and presumably does not own a label maker, but does, evidently, own a ruler.

DISEASE. IS. NOT. A. WORD. YOU. UNDERLINE. CASUALLY.

dave laughed for nine straight minutes, mom asked questions

i read the note out loud, this morning, to the only two people i had on the line at the time, which was, by accident, both of them. dave was on speaker, mid-explanation about a wire transfer he says is processing, which is dave’s word for imaginary. mom was on the other line, on her sunday call early — she has been calling earlier on weekdays since the test results — asking what i’d had for breakfast.

i held the note up. i read the underlined part. dave laughed for nine straight minutes. i timed it on the kitchen clock. mom did not laugh. mom asked, calmly, three questions in a row: do you owe him money, are you eating, and is the lock on the door still the one that sticks. all three are, by the way, sound questions. i answered two of them honestly.

this is the texture of my house at 11:02am on a thursday. one phone with dave, one phone with mom, one airpod in, one underlined note, one kitchen sink that has been making a noise i have decided is a feature. the microwave, in the corner, is reheating a coffee. the microwave plate doesn’t need to spin, by the way — and i’d like that in honesty — and yet it spins anyway, because the seventh microwave is, like the previous six, a unit of equipment built to a specification i never asked for.

the landlord’s note that used the word ‘sick’

the actual word, in the second paragraph, was “sick”. i lied a sentence ago. the word “disease” is mine, retroactively, because pathological liar disease is what the underline reads as. the actual sentence, in his hand, was: “you are, frankly, a sick man about the rent.” that is the line. that is what i have been turning over since 8:47am.

now. is the landlord wrong. let me show my work. the rent is, technically, late. it has been late, on my count, for fifteen days. i have, in those fifteen days, sent two messages. message one, on day three, said “transferring this morning”. the transfer did not happen that morning. message two, on day eleven, said “sorted by friday”. friday came and went, and the rent did not, in any traceable banking sense, move from my account into his.

are those lies. on a strict reading, yes. on a financial reading, also yes. on a friday reading, they are postponements with cover, which is the kind of phrase a man uses when he is trying to sound less guilty than he is. i wrote both of those messages from this desk. i am now writing this post from the same desk. the symmetry is not lost on me.

but — and here is where i would like to plant a flag — those are strategic lies. they have a reason. the reason is: i did not, in either of those weeks, have the rent in cleared funds. the lie is about timing. the lie is for cover while the timing reorganises itself. that is, on the rung-chart, the second rung. it is not the fifth. it is not pathological. it is, broadly, what most working adults do on at least one thursday a year.

the airpod, still alone, still functioning

the airpod, in this ear, has been alone since approximately may 2023. the other one is, as far as i can tell, somewhere structural in this apartment. binaural sound, at this point, is a luxury i no longer afford. it is also, in a quiet way, a small daily lie i tell myself: i tell myself i will, this week, find the other one. i will not. the other one has been absorbed into the building.

this is, on the chart, a habit-lie. it costs nobody anything. it does not affect the rent. it does not affect the kitchen sink. it does not affect mom, who would, if she knew, send the kind of look down the phone that travels through fibre optic cable and lands, somehow, in your kitchen.

but it is, technically, a lie. and a man with a habit of small private lies should, at the very least, know which ones he tells. i tell three. one to the airpod about finding it. one to the rent about clearing it. one to the unopened mail pile about handling it. all three are postponements. none of them are inventions. that is, in my own accounting, the line that separates me from the rung the landlord underlined.

for cinematic context — and i’m reaching here for the public’s shorthand, not for the literature — the rung at the very top of the chart is the one that the 1999 film about a young man who borrows a richer man’s name and a richer man’s life and slowly cannot tell the difference made famous. that is the cinematic version of pathological. that is a person who eventually loses custody of which version of themselves is the real one. i still know which microwave is the real one. it’s the one in the corner. the seventh.

why ‘disease’ makes the avoidance sound dramatic

the reason the landlord chose the word “sick”, and the reason the public reaches for “disease” in this context, is that the medical frame removes the friction of accountability without removing the right to be annoyed. you can be annoyed at a sick man. you cannot send a sick man a strongly worded eviction notice without looking, in the building, like a man with no soul. the diagnosis softens his hand and stiffens his case at the same time. it is, in its way, a small piece of rhetorical jiu-jitsu.

i admire it, briefly. then i remember it is about me. then the admiration recedes.

here is the thing the medical frame gets wrong, however. a man who is fifteen days late on rent because his cashflow is, this month, an interpretive dance, is not sick. he is broke and slightly dishonest about the timeline. those are different categories. for further reading on what the phrase actually means in the real, non-landlord-rhetorical sense, see my longer explainer on the meaning of a pathological liar and how the rung actually behaves. it is not, you will be relieved to know, a description of late rent.

the second test, of course, is mom. mom is, on these matters, an unbiased panel of one. mom asked, on the call, whether i thought the landlord was wrong. i said, after a pause, “broadly, no, but inaccurately, yes”. she said: “that is the most you sentence you have given me all week.” she did not mean it as a compliment. but she did not mean it as an indictment either. that’s the sunday call. that’s the most a man can hope for at 2:23pm.

verdict, my disease is a habit that learned to read

so here is the verdict, drawn at the desk, with the note still on the table and the seventh microwave humming through it. pathological liar disease, as a phrase, is a piece of public shorthand for the heaviest rung of the lying chart — sustained, elaborate, often unprovoked, sometimes believed by the liar. it is not a real disease. it is a description. and it is a description that, applied to me, by a man with a ruler and a grievance, does not fit. i am late. i am evasive. i am, on three small daily fronts, dishonest. but the dishonesty has reasons. the reasons are nameable. the inventions, in my case, are postponements. that is the second rung, not the fifth.

my actual disease, if we are insisting on medical language, is a habit that has, over fifteen years of working life, learned to read. it reads the room. it reads the rent. it reads the test results mom is currently telling me about for the second time, more slowly, because she suspects, correctly, that i did not catch all of them the first time. that is not a disease. that is a man at a desk on a tuesday, with one airpod, one note, two phones, and one microwave, doing his best with the rungs he has.

quarterly review let out. carla walked past the desk with the good pen still in her hand and a small, tactical smile. i interpret this as a sign she got at least one bullet point out of the meeting that wasn’t hers. i don’t ask. she doesn’t volunteer.