The Folded Lie

By Mary Graf

Media literacy educator Jillian Dawson thinks the mind-numbing influence that mass media spreads through our culture, along with the motives and methods behind it, makes us all marks in the biggest and most multi-faceted con game the planet can possibly experience. But as she tries to create a curriculum guide that will keep students from falling prey to the dangers of the electronic jungle, her husband is targeted by another kind of scam that floats into his inbox and threatens to drain their retirement savings. Can she keep him, and by extension herself, from becoming losers in a game that’s been devised by a tech-savvy person who at a younger age might have been one of her favorite students? Can the beliefs on which she’s built her life survive the emotional maelstrom she experiences? The answers to these questions come in the telling of a story that Jillian hopes will be appealing enough to be heard above the cacophony of voices that are trying to anaesthetize our critical judgment by amusing us to death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385015511

Mary Graf

With an educational background in English Literature, Rhetoric, and Media Literacy Education, along with experience teaching these subjects in the high-school and college classroom, Mary Graf has informed insights about the role emotional appeal plays in our modern, media-saturated world. She believes that our best hope for staying in charge of our minds and our bank accounts in a time when deception is so easy and widespread is the adoption of critical thinking skills that help us see through surface appeals to the truth that lies beneath. Along with these insights and her advocacy of Media Literacy Education in our schools, her background has also inspired an appreciation for writers who reflect and respond to the culture of their times in thought-provoking ways. The Folded Lie is her attempt to do the same.

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Copyright © 2024 Mary Graf.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

844-714-3454

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1549-8 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1550-4 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1551-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023924404

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/07/2024

For my first family tribe,

and the one that came after.

All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.

—W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

CONTENTS

The Players

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

The Setup

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Game’s On

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Brain Burner

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Endgame

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Postgame

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Afterword

Discussion Questions

About the Author

Acknowledgments

THE PLAYERS

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April–September 2013

Life is a puzzle, a riddle, a test, a mystery, a game

—whatever challenge you wish to compare it to.

Just remember,

you’re not the only participant;

no one person holds all the answers,

the pieces, or the cards.

—Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway

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CHAPTER 1

Media Literacy is a 21st century approach to education. It provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with messages in a variety of forms—from print to video to the Internet.

—Center for Media Literacy

It had been a dim and drizzly day, perfect for staying home and making progress on the curriculum guide I was writing. Earlier in the afternoon I’d moved my laptop from my desk in another room to the kitchen table so I could rest my eyes by looking out through the row of elongated windows that flanked that part of the house. With all the spring rain, our fescue yard was its most vibrant green. The stone and brick patio just outside the windows and the steppingstone walkway that led off to the side were glistening with wetness, the azaleas and dianthus were in full bloom, and I could see that the shoots and buds in my cutting garden were eager to add their own unique attributes to the smile that nature was beginning to spread over the landscape.

But I was now noticing that the dog was sitting by the back door, and that almost certainly was a sign my husband was in the neighborhood and would soon be expecting dinner. So, in spite of the fact that thoughts were still bubbling up in my mind and I wanted to explore each one before it burst and became part of the shapeless atmosphere of daily life, I lowered the top of my computer and moved it to an out-of-the-way place.

Then, trying to switch my thinking over to the task before me, I went to the refrigerator and started to pull out ingredients for our meal. A moment later, as I was still placing items on the kitchen island, Dean came limping through the back door. He’d been reminding me lately of a hobbled racehorse. The neuropathy and knee pain that had plagued his existence over the last several years kept his desire to charge ahead in check and filled his days with challenge.

Dean gave me a hug before moving on to the sitting area next to the table. He looked exhausted. Fatigue was his constant companion these days—the result not only of dealing with his health issues but also of taking a cocktail of lethargy-inducing drugs to help with them.

In spite of being tired, however, I could tell my husband was happy to be home and have a ball of orange fluff jump into his lap and wriggle with excitement over his return to her little pack.

Have you missed me, Foxy? Maybe you should come to work with me one of these days. You could get lots of treats, greet everyone who comes through the door, maybe chase after the groundhogs that live in the front yard. Wouldn’t all that freedom be fun? Dean, knowing how protective I’d always been of our pets, looked at me for a reaction and laughed at the eye darts I flashed his way.

Only kidding, Jill.

The Pomeranian we’d named Foxy because of her resemblance to a baby fox had been taken from a hoarding situation a few months ago. In spite of Google searches that showed backgrounds like hers could lead to behavior problems, I took the chance and was rewarded by having the most affectionate and outgoing little creature I could imagine as part of our family. It was as though she couldn’t do enough to show us and everyone else how grateful she was for her new life.

With Foxy still on his lap, Dean raised his feet onto the ottoman. I saw him wince as he settled them on the surface. The knees could be fixed, and I needed to pressure him to see his orthopedic doctor about that. The neuropathy that had taken over his feet and was progressing up his legs, however, couldn’t be helped. And it was a sad reality for me that there was nothing we could do to change that.

Been a tough day? I asked.

Oh, not so much. Dean inhaled and slowly released his breath through pursed lips. I’m just tired for some reason.

It was the stoic response I expected. Dean had never been one to complain about working too hard or for too many hours, and from the very beginning of our life together, he’d had a rule about not bringing the office home with him. That had probably been a positive thing for the family, but lately I’d been feeling uneasy about what was going unspoken about the end-game strategy. No one can keep working forever, and from what I’d been hearing about the poor performance of the stock market and how the value of investment property had dropped, I wasn’t quite sure where things stood for us.

As usual, dinner was simple. I tried to follow the advice of our doctor and the knowledge I’d gained from paying attention to all the health talk circulating on the airwaves: fish or chicken, minimal carbs (none from refined sugar), low levels of unhealthy fats, lots of colorful veggies and dark leafy greens. It seemed that most of what I could do to help my husband these days was in the kitchen, and I put a lot of thought into planning the meals we ate together in the evening.

Our conversation was about national news that Dean had tapped into during the day and news about family that came from my phone conversations with the girls. Our daughters were thirty-nine and forty-one, but like a lot of people our age, we still thought of them as young adults who’d grown up with us and then ventured off into a world where only parents get older.

I tried to share thoughts about media literacy—the subject of my writing project—and he tried to listen. But it was obvious this wasn’t a place where Dean’s mind went easily. He watched the news, news commentary, and sports on TV; he went to movies I convinced him were too special to miss; he read the newspaper but spent little time reading books. Those he did read were always nonfiction, and we no longer had teenagers to bring pop culture into the house. The internet, as far as he was concerned, was only there to facilitate business and exchange emails with friends and family.

The amazing thing to me was that in spite of his lack of understanding of what I was doing and why I was doing it, my husband never questioned the importance of my efforts. He just didn’t see what any of it had to do with him. And, with no easily available person I could have in-depth conversation about my work with, a familiar wave of self-doubt swept across my mind. Would I really be able to make other people care about these things I considered so important to the future of our country and the world?

I suppressed that thought as I sent my husband into the family room to relax while I cleaned up the kitchen and turned once again to look at the scene outside the windows. The rain was lighter now, but daylight was fading and a heavy gloom had taken over the landscape. The row of tea olives at the back of the yard seemed like a shadowy legion of soldiers standing guard over our property. The coziness of being inside looking out in this kind of weather settled over me. I felt safe. I felt secure. And I knew that being kept inside by springtime rain was a small price to pay for the beauty that would soon be on full display.

I didn’t realize as I celebrated the magic and promise of Mother Nature’s efforts that there would soon be another kind of growth germinating in a distant part of the country that would creep across the miles, wrap around the framework of our lives, and choke out everything that wasn’t itself. I didn’t know that if I could have seen this ordinary day, and others that followed, in the context of what I’d know later, my concern wouldn’t have been about what I would or wouldn’t be able to do with my work. It would have been about what someone else would soon be doing to us.

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CHAPTER 2

If good looks and charm could ensure success all by themselves, Garrison Richards wouldn’t have been so desperately searching for a short path to prosperity. As it was, however, at age thirty-two he was living with his girlfriend in a six-hundred-square-foot apartment—rent paid by her—in Yonkers, New York. And while she trudged off every day to perform her job as an IT professional who specialized in undoing the damage that people she called tech toddlers inflicted on their office computers, he sat around at home, or in a close-by coffeehouse, researching the possibilities for his next effort to support himself.

Who wouldn’t need Google breaks in such a situation? But at some point, those breaks had gotten longer than time spent looking for employment. And linking back to a conversation he’d recently had with his semiconductor-scientist brother, Josh, the main focus of his searches had become the materials Josh worked with.

Garrison had started his internet exploration with only limited knowledge of semiconductors. He knew they conducted electric current in devices like computers and cell phones. He knew tech companies in California made a lot of money by using them in the production of computer components. He knew silicon was the primary semiconductor used and the source of the name given to the hub of innovation called Silicon Valley. He knew this California location was the center of an economic bubble that had burst with the decline of the stock market at the beginning of the current century and that fiasco had been dubbed the dot-com crash. He also knew that a semiconductor, as the name indicated, conducted current only in a limited way and that the degree of its conductivity varied somewhere between that of a material like copper, which has nearly full conductivity, and an insulator like rubber, which has almost none.

Most people’s knowledge of the subject ended with those facts, and Garrison would have been happy to stop there too if he’d been more motivated to spend his time looking for employment. Instead, however, his brother’s excitement about his professional activities lingered in his mind and took him to the World Wide Web to figure out how a person could feel that way about a job.

There he saw the periodic table of chemical elements and recognized silicon, germanium, and a few others his sibling had said could be combined to create the new compound semiconductors he was working with. He also found images of the basic ball-shaped atom all individual elements have in common. He took note of the terms shell and valence shell—shells being the layers of negatively charged electrons traveling in orbit around the positively charged nucleus and valence shell being the outermost layer of those electrons. It was incredible to realize that these invisible atoms were the structures Josh manipulated in his field of nanoelectronics.

When Garrison looked back at his early life with Josh, he often remembered how completely on board his sibling had been with their Marine father’s favorite saying, which in Garrison’s mind had run like barbed wire through their childhood: If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. That memory would lead him to others about how Josh had applied this maxim to his academic pursuits and how that would annoy and embarrass him as he followed two years behind.

Recently, however, Garrison’s new insights into his brother’s job and the memory of his over-the-top work ethic had given rise to a new thought: perhaps people like Josh had an important role they weren’t aware of. Perhaps their work created launching pads for the financial success of others.

As he sat at Ira’s Bean and Brew that morning, he remembered something he’d read about Steve Wozniak. As a young man, the Woz was just a nerdy guy with no apparent plan for achieving great wealth. Yet his transformation of a basic hobbyist’s computer became the ancestor of later versions that millions of people couldn’t imagine themselves without. Unfortunately, this achievement made a lot more money for Steve Jobs than it did for him. Garrison closed his eyes and smiled. Too bad Wozniak hadn’t been smart enough to keep from being duped by his friend.

This judgment then led to one more: being smart in one way doesn’t always mean being smart in another. According to Josh, the new compound semiconductors would someday replace silicon as the demand for smaller, faster, more efficient devices with longer battery lives increased; and, therefore, they would change the future of technology. This, Garrison concluded, meant they were going to make some people very rich. He knew his brother was probably, like Wozniak, less interested in achieving great wealth than he was in making a contribution to his field. Well, how noble … How selfless … How absurd. There was a big financial opportunity somewhere in his brainy brother’s accomplishments, and he wanted to find it.

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Garrison’s mind eventually turned to physical reality, and he became aware of a conversation going on elsewhere in the room. It was that flashy guy who sometimes positioned himself with his laptop in the back corner of Ira’s. He was saying to Jimmy, one of the workers, Actually, I prefer games that let you play the part of the antihero. It gets boring always being the superior person who has to rescue the weaklings of the world who can’t take care of themselves.

With the ingratiating smile of a good waiter, Jimmy responded, Does that mean you like that evil little thief Conker?

Flashy guy smiled back. Ahh, thanks, nice animation, but I’m not into squirrels. I’ll leave that kind of thing for you. After a pause during which his mirthful expression faded away, he continued. "Seriously, I mean someone like Snake in Metal Gear Saga. The line between right and wrong is blurred in that one. It lets you act out however you want without having to stop and think about it."

"Right, Metal Gear’s rad. Me and my friends sometimes binge it."

Garrison’s interest was aroused. Like most of the people he’d gone to school with, he’d played a lot of video games. In college he’d actually spent hours working his way through early installments of Metal Gear Saga when the results of the next day’s classwork said he should have been studying.

Suddenly feeling the need for a break and deciding it was time to meet this person who had prosperity written all over him, Garrison stood and sauntered toward the men’s room, which was in the general direction of where the conversation was taking place.

As he got closer, he heard Jimmy say, It kind of messes with your mind.

Well, that’s good. That’s the kind of story I like to go with.

The speaker glanced down at his computer screen as though he was ready to get back to work and then looked up again as Garrison approached.

"If this is a gathering of Metal Gear fans, I’m in. I haven’t had much time for that sort of thing lately, but I played a lot in college."

Garrison said this in the open and agreeable way that always helped him make friends quickly. Then, having caught the statement about liking to go with certain kinds of stories and noticing the T-shirt with the words Fantasy Pro written in quirky font in the middle of a burst of neon-colored lightning bolts, he made a wild guess about the guy’s occupation. Are you in the video game business?

Fantasy Pro guy threw back his shoulders and smiled in a way that hinted at smugness. Nope. Not me. I thought I wanted to do that when I was in school, but I found out that doing it right takes a whole development team, and I’m never going to share my creative process with a group of people who take my money to change my vision.

He nodded his head in what seemed a gesture of self-validation and then raised his eyes to meet Garrison’s. "What I’m working on is a tabletop strategy game—something like Dungeons and Dragons—that I have complete control over. It’s a spin-off of a comic book series I’ve been publishing online for the last couple years. The whole thing’s mostly for fun, but I’ve got a nice little following, and I’m pretty sure I can come up with something they’ll like … if I decide to share it."

Fantasy Pro looked at his computer screen again—this time running his fingers up and down its edges as though he were caressing something very dear to him. I’ve just got to expand the individual stories a little more to make them fit in with the larger narrative I have in mind.

Garrison remembered his brother playing Dungeons and Dragons with his nerdy high school friends—some of whom, he thought, were also into comic books. But he himself had preferred hanging out with a livelier crowd and didn’t know much about what that other world did for fun. Tying these last statements in with the discussion of Metal Gear, however, he came up with a response intended to show how in sync he was.

And you’re using unconventional characters and plots. Then for good measure he threw in the word awesome—this said in a way that placed a big exclamation point at the end.

Fantasy Pro smiled and pointed to the words on his T-shirt. That’s right. I’m a specialist in thinking outside the box.

Garrison dialed up the charm another notch. I’m with you on that. A history of his own outside-the-box manipulation of jobs and the negative consequences that had put him in his current situation flashed through his mind as he said this, but he pushed it aside.

Fantasy guy straightened in his chair. So, what’s your gig? I see you here almost every time I come in. I guess you work online?

Feeling the warmth of a blush rise up his neck, Garrison looked away briefly and then fell back on his recent internet quest for an answer. I’m researching some new compound semiconductors that are going to have big investment potential in the near future. The confidence in his voice went way beyond the reality he felt, but he had to come up with something.

Fantasy Pro’s eyes opened wide. Really? That sounds like something I might be interested in. I’ve helped set up a few investment groups that’ve been pretty rewarding. We should talk sometime.

Garrison’s heart beat faster as he translated these words to mean golden opportunity. Obviously, this guy was more than a game and comic book creator—he’d said those things were just for fun. Judging by his appearance and the shiny red Ferrari he’d parked in front of Ira’s one day, Garrison guessed he was probably also a highly creative businessman who had come up with some innovative way of making money.

Sure, anytime. I have access to insider information about the development and use of these materials, but I’ve still got more research to do before deciding what the possibilities are. My name’s Garrison Richards, by the way. He leaned across the table and offered his hand.

Fantasy Pro half stood, extended his arm over his computer, and transformed the intended shake into a fist bump. Aristotle De Silva. Nice to meet a fellow fan of the Snake.

Same here. And yes, we’ll have to talk.

Having established a connection and not being prepared to take the semiconductor conversation any further, Garrison broadened his smile, nodded to seal the deal, and turned to leave. Forgetting that he’d wanted Fantasy guy to think he was only passing by on his way to the restroom, he returned to his table near the front window and, discovering his slip-up too late to correct it, sat down to continue his efforts at understanding the basics of semiconductor science and hope that his mistake hadn’t been noticed.

Garrison’s focus lasted several hours. Aristotle left, Jimmy and the other workers left, new workers and customers came in. The sunlight dimmed and the streetlights came on. His cell phone rang, and it was the person who paid the rent calling.

Where are you? What are you doing? It was Carla’s irritated voice. She was always irritated about