My neighbor Gideon woke up one Tuesday morning and discovered he could only tell the truth. Not the polite kind or a partial version. No, this was truth stripped of all padding, the sort that makes people flinch.
“Your breath smells like a dying cow,” he told his wife over breakfast. She slapped him and left for her mother’s. By lunchtime he’d been fired for telling his boss that his management style resembled “a constipated orangutan trying to solve a Rubik’s cube.” By dinner his best friend had blocked his number after Gideon admitted he’d always found the guy’s poetry “less inspiring than the instructions on a shampoo bottle.”
The following day Gideon could lie again. He spent Wednesday through Monday patching up relationships, spinning tales about food poisoning and temporary insanity. People forgave him. People always forgive what they want to believe.
Next Tuesday, it happened again. And the Tuesday after that. Gideon tried everything. Duct-taping his mouth, calling in sick to life, even attempting to sleep through the entire day. Nothing worked.
Eventually he found a workaround. Every Tuesday he volunteered at the hospital, sitting with terminal patients who had no family. They didn’t want soft consolations; they wanted someone to witness their reality.
“You’re dying,” he would say, holding their hands. “But right now you’re still here, and I see you. ”
Sometimes he’d tell them about his curse. They laughed, real belly laughs.
“What a superpower,” said an old woman with pancreatic cancer. “To be forced to say what everyone else is thinking.”
“It isn’t a superpower,” Gideon insisted. “It’s a punishment.”
“Same thing,” she whispered, clasping his fingers with an unexpectedly firm grip. “Trust me, I’m dying. I know these things.”
The hospital staff thought he was a saint. His family assumed he was atoning. But only the dying understood: Gideon wasn’t there for them; they were there for him.
On his own deathbed, many years later, it was a Tuesday. The nurse asked if he needed anything.
“Just one thing,” Gideon said. “ Tell me a beautiful lie. ”