Since when do things have to be true to be useful?
Take God, for instance. Maybe there is no such thing. But I still see the merit in believing in the decrees of some cosmic force, bestowed upon our bearded ancestors, wearing sandals on a mountaintop. Let’s face it: It’s useful to honor our parents. Sometimes they know something, and we rely upon them more than we admit. Better not to bite the hand. And it’s practical not to kill, even if some Almighty isn’t keeping tabs. Try to survive a line at the DMV without suppressing a murderous impulse here and there. We’d be forever clearing our paths of the bodies felled in our temporary fugues. Not sustainable. And surely it’s pragmatic not to covet the spouse next door, else we’d be driving our cars off the road, distracted by libidinous daydreams.
“Burr’s Sore,” a story by Albert Howard Carter III (Spring 2013 Intima), lays out the dissonance between truth and utility. Married with kids, Burr Stearns gets liquored up at a convention, goes up to another woman’s hotel room, loses himself in a dance of slow kisses (he strokes her back, her breasts, her backside!), and when the tryst concludes before consummation (because she hurls her booze into the toilet) he somehow believes he’s remained faithful. Self-deceiving lie, or cleverly adaptive truth? In my view, it’s both: If Burr can conjure fidelity out of fortuity—out of a timely barf stuffing his wandering hands back into their pockets—and thereby avoids the intruding guilt that would’ve kept him up at night; silences the relentless urge to confess; side-steps the catastrophe of a marriage shattered in the name of honesty . . . Well, I’m not sure my truth would’ve been all that useful here. Better to go with Burr’s.
Then there’s me (“Never Tell A Truth,” Fall 2020 Intima). In the most neurotic days of the pandemic, I return home from my contaminated workplace, and sincerely offer my wife solace . . . in the form of a big fat lie. On another day, I confide in her the loss of a colleague . . . and wound her with the facts. But Burr isn’t perfect, either: sometimes he tells the truth. Like when he awaits the biopsy report of his suspicious skin lesion, torturing himself with the fantasized prospect of cancer. His concern is justified, of course, based in truth . . .
But it’s just not useful.
Douglas Krohn, MD is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College in Valhalla and a member of the Department of Pediatrics in CareMount Medical Group, a clinical affiliate of The Massachusetts General Hospital headquartered in Chappaqua, NY. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Westchester Literary Review, The Einstein Quarterly Journal of Biology and Medicine, Travel + Leisure Family and the Scarsdale Inquirer. His non-fiction essay “Never Tell a Truth” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.