Bullshitter

In the town of Marrow Glen, truth arrived quietly and left without applause.

Lies, on the other hand, came with fireworks.

His name was Gideon Vale, though most people called him Gid, and eventually—behind cupped hands and glowing screens—they called him the Jester. Not because he was funny. Because he performed.

Gid wore spectacle like a tailored coat. He could not enter a room without rearranging its gravity. If someone mentioned the weather, he would tilt his head and murmur, “You still believe in weather?” If someone spoke of elections, he would sigh like a widower and whisper, “You think votes are counted?” If a child released a balloon into the sky, Gid would crouch beside them and say gently, “It won’t come down. They don’t let things come down anymore.”

Who they were shifted as needed.

Gid did not begin as a liar. He began as lonely.

Marrow Glen had once applauded him for smaller tricks—coin-behind-the-ear magic, harmless exaggerations about catching fish “this big.” But attention is a currency that inflates quickly. Soon, his old tricks bought him nothing.

So he raised the stakes.

He claimed the cell towers hummed in coded language. He insisted the moon had been replaced in 1999 by a government replica slightly off-center if you looked long enough. He swore that every third obituary was fabricated to hide disappearances.

At first, people laughed. That was oxygen. Laughter meant they were listening.

Then some stopped laughing.

A woman at the bakery leaned in closer when he spoke. A mechanic nodded slowly. A group of teenagers began filming him, uploading his monologues with dramatic music. His words, once tossed like pebbles, became stones skipping across thousands of screens.

The comments fed him.

“Finally someone brave enough to say it.”

“I’ve always suspected this.”

“You’re awake. The rest are sheep.”

Sheep. That word thrilled him. It meant he was not one of them.

Gid began to study himself as if he were scripture. He replayed his own videos at night, analyzing cadence, refining pauses. He discovered that doubt delivered softly was more powerful than certainty shouted. He practiced looking wounded when challenged.

“Why are you so angry?” he would ask calmly, when cornered. “I’m just asking questions.”

Questions were blades disguised as feathers.

The first time someone fact-checked him publicly, Gid felt a tremor—not of fear, but of opportunity. He smiled with almost tender disappointment.

“You’d trust a website over your own instincts?” he asked the crowd.

It was intoxicating, watching faces turn.

The truth has no stage presence. It does not juggle. It does not wink.

Gid did.

He began to believe himself in increments. Not all at once—no sane person leaps fully into madness. He stepped carefully, like crossing a river on stones he himself had placed.

If the moon hadn’t been replaced, why did it sometimes look different in photographs?

If obituaries weren’t fabricated, why did grief feel so orchestrated?

If cell towers weren’t whispering, why did he feel watched?

The brain, once tasked with defending a lie, will furnish it like a palace.

Gid stopped saying “I think” and began saying “I know.”

The town shifted around him. Marrow Glen’s annual fair used to host pie contests and fiddlers. Now it hosted a “Truth Tent” where Gid stood beneath striped canvas, spinning invisible threads between unrelated events until they resembled tapestry.

A drought became “water rationing rehearsal.”

A new library became “data harvesting hub.”

A school lockdown drill became “conditioning.”

The teenagers who once filmed him now wore shirts with his catchphrase: Look Again.

He was no longer lonely.

He was necessary.

But belief is a hungry animal. It does not remain satisfied with performance. It demands sacrifice.

Gid’s sister, Clara, confronted him one evening in his kitchen, the room lit only by the blue pulse of his laptop.

“You know this isn’t real,” she said softly. “You’re scaring people.”

He closed the screen slowly. “Real is what enough people see.”

“That’s not how reality works.”

“Isn’t it?” His smile was patient now, almost pitying. “History is just agreed-upon lies.”

Clara searched his face for the brother who used to fake ghost stories at sleepovers and then confess before anyone cried.

“I miss when you knew you were joking,” she said.

He felt, briefly, the old tremor. The stone beneath his foot wobbled.

Then he thought of the comments. The applause. The faces leaning in.

“If I were wrong,” he asked gently, “why would it all fit together?”

It was the most dangerous sentence he had ever spoken.

Because it did fit together.

He had made sure of it.

He curated his information like a gardener removing weeds. Anything that contradicted his narrative was “planted.” Any expert was “compromised.” Any evidence was “manufactured.”

The world became malleable clay in his hands.

And slowly—so slowly he did not notice—he stopped shaping it for others and began shaping it for himself.

He stopped sleeping well. He covered his windows. He unplugged appliances at night in case they listened. He avoided the new library. He stared at the moon too long.

When a transformer blew near the outskirts of town, plunging several streets into darkness, Gid did not see aging infrastructure.

He saw confirmation.

“They’re testing response times,” he told his followers in a trembling livestream.

His fear made him radiant. Authenticity, even counterfeit authenticity, is contagious.

The next week, a group of his most devoted believers refused to send their children to school. They claimed the lockdown drills were preludes to something unspeakable. One man confronted a city council member at a grocery store. Another vandalized a cell tower.

Gid watched the footage in silence.

This was not part of the performance.

Or was it the ultimate act?

He told himself he was not responsible. He never gave instructions. He only asked questions.

But questions are doors. And not everyone closes them gently.

The night the fire started, it began in the empty lot behind the library—the supposed “data hub.” Someone had tried to smoke out invisible servers. Flames climbed greedily, bright and indifferent to ideology.

Gid stood at the edge of the crowd as sirens wailed. The heat kissed his face.

“They wanted this,” someone beside him muttered. “Now they can rebuild it stronger.”

The sentence slid into Gid’s mind like a key.

He could use this.

He felt it—the instinct to weave, to spin the blaze into proof.

Then he saw Clara across the street, ash in her hair, fury in her eyes.

“Look at what you’ve done,” she shouted.

The word you struck harder than the sirens.

Gid opened his mouth.

For a moment—just a moment—he did not know what he believed.

Was the fire orchestrated? Was it rebellion? Was it coincidence?

Or was it consequence?

The trouble with lying so long is that truth becomes indistinguishable from invention. You lose the ability to tell whether you’re leading the parade or being dragged behind it.

The crowd turned to him instinctively.

They waited.

The Jester had to speak.

He could calm them. He could escalate. He could redirect blame toward a faceless they and walk home adored.

Or he could say the one sentence he had trained himself never to say.

“I don’t know.”

The words hovered at the back of his throat like a foreign language.

He imagined posting a video that night: We were wrong. He imagined the comments curdling. The applause fading. The loneliness returning.

He imagined silence.

Gid lifted his phone.

The red recording light blinked on.

And he smiled.

Because even now—even with smoke in the air and sirens splitting the sky—he could feel the story forming, neat and powerful, snapping into place.

“They don’t burn their own buildings,” he began, voice steady, wounded, certain. “Unless they need an excuse.”

The crowd leaned closer.

And somewhere beneath the roar of flame and faith, Gideon Vale believed every word.