Paulie

The quarry held himself straight and dignified, making authoritative hand gestures, in a suit that a test group found handsome but not ostentatious, and a tie that was subconsciously aggressive. His movement was slow and deliberate, rehearsed to look spontaneous but confident, while he explained how his agenda was at long last a solution to the problems his opponents were happy to ignore. He looked hatefully out into the crowd at Paulie, whose cycloptic eye of gleaming onyx snick snick snicked the politicians every move.

Paulie understood that it was impossible to lie, the unconscious part of you wouldn't allow it. The rational part of a person could misdirect or conceal the truth, but no one could suppress all of the innate and microscopic glimpses of himself. Paulie's specialty was capturing these moments with his camera. He expanded the slivers of time the deceitful tried to close, opening them to a vast expanse that everyone could wander through and make their own slow impressions. Paulie believed in discriminating patience. Someone might wait with their camera, like setting a trap, a bow drawn taught, to release it at exactly the right moment. Paulie took the opposite tact, shooting indiscriminately, and stalking his moment afterward. He felt the shiver building in his spine, like resonant glass, as he saw the seeds of a scowl or grimace in the mouth of a subject. When it grew to a crescendo he froze the moment, and admired the jewel he mined from the mire.

As Paulie became sure there was no such thing as a lie for the grains of truth revealed in context, he wondered if there was any such thing as truth for the lies that diluted it. Surely as we are involuntarily honest we must be compulsively deceitful, coloring our actions with our bias, misconception and fantasy. Paulie decided there could be no singularity in truth or lies in a multitude of time. He looked warily at his camera, his tool for finding isolated moments in people, and wondered how he could start snapping off pictures of everyone he talked to.