Once we’d exhausted our memories and first observations, we got down to research proper, looking for written evidence of the claims she had made. If she hadn’t made these claims around others, then any that we made about this would look unhinged.
Kasia quickly found elementary grammatical-case errors in the footnotes of her scholarly work when citing Polish sources (the essay was deleted from its shared folder shortly after). Great—though one could argue Katie simply didn’t proofread her footnotes. Early graduate work could be sloppy, that wasn’t uncommon.
Then, checking WhatsApp, Kasia found numerous messages in group chats of Katie claiming to be Polish and able to speak the language. At first glance, then, these messages appeared to have caught her publicly in the lie. But upon reexamination, each message always had a slight ambiguity, enough wiggle room for her to never quite “technically” commit to any lie. Although she once compared a colleague’s bragging to being “like” her making a claim that living in Poland until the age of eight made her an expert—this was not quite the same as saying she actually did live in Poland until the age of eight.
Or, for example, a message saying that she blurted out “cseść” [sic] to a border guard when she last travelled to Austria. Probably calculated to give the impression that she got muddled between languages when switching (just like Kasia). But Katie could also argue that the comment was only intended to show her poor German. She never directly asserted that she was Polish, never incriminated herself fully. Other people in these message threads did reply like they were under the impression that she was Polish—but if push came to shove, it wasn’t obvious how to prove this wasn’t just a mass misunderstanding.
I began to focus on a certain question: how could someone maintain that level of plausible deniability over the long term?
There is an unusual flexibility of meaning in her writing. Digging into the syntax of a typical sentence reveals some fascinating effects: take the following anecdote, in which Katie states she slipped over on some ice and dislocated her knee while on a day trip with a friend. The facts of the incident may well be true (the message was posted in a group chat that her accompanying friend was not in)—although it’s hard to determine exactly what the facts are:
[The friend] called the paramedics and two giant burly Slavic-American guys carried me to the car
If you start asking questions (and in the moment, you never do), then it’s hard to stop: Surely that must have cost a bomb? Was “the car” her car? Why would paramedics carry her to her car, and not to an ambulance? Or was she calling the ambulance “the car”? Did they go on to the hospital, or not? Or did two bystanders carry her to the car? If bystanders, what happened to the paramedics—did they not come at all? Why specify that they were Slavic-American? And who calls “the paramedics” in a crisis—wouldn’t you “call an ambulance”?
The original messages are funny, but they also feel frantic, like the humor is more a function of panic, a coping mechanism. The incident sounds too shocking to appropriately joke back. It’s worth noting that dramatic tales of personal injury are a common pattern described in the literature on pathological liars. (My favorite of the genre came from when Kasia told Katie she’d seen the Hamilton cast in London. Katie matched her and raised her: she’d seen the original cast of Hamilton in New York in 2015. Only, on the way home her family were T-boned in a crash, and Katie broke her back, spending three months in hospital. And more importantly, she had blacked out during the crash, which, oddly, left her with no recollection of the performance whatsoever. Yes—at the time we believed this entirely.)
The collocation of words and ideas in the quoted sentence above is subtly but consistently disordered. This leads to a form of speech that’s rather inaccurate: the meaning is scattered, and it’s hard to grasp. The only way to understand it is to guess at the gist of what she means. Context is required to finalize the meaning: the reader or listener fills in the gaps themselves.
And this is essential. Reexamine the sentence quoted above: because the paramedics and the “Slavic-American guys” belong to clauses in the same sentence linked by “and,” it makes the most sense to presume they’re the same men. But if this interpretation were to become too uncomfortable, the sentence’s disorder would allow Katie to insert multiple possible convenient clarifications wherever necessary. For example:
[The Friend] called the paramedics and [then the phone call ended without them arriving. Instead,] two giant burly Slavic-American guys [who were around in the vicinity] carried me to the car
Only if you read the first sentence back again, it would be bizarre not to assume that, the friend having called the paramedics, two didn’t turn up and carry her away to the hospital in an ambulance. This is the simplest, most obvious interpretation, and the impression she allows to form. Moreover: if you actually concluded from the original example that she’d meant the paramedics never came and bystanders helped her instead, you would either be a poor reader or something of a prophet. (“How could you reach that conclusion from that sentence?” would be the reply to you; “Surely they were paramedics that carried her to the car!”) This demonstrates the ghastly effect of this syntax: probable assumptions are made to look hysterical, and vice versa.
This lack of commitment to an unambiguous meaning can result in some quite humorously garbled word mush in texts where Katie’s back is against the wall. When Kasia recommended that Katie sit down for a simple ten-minute French translation in front of a professor to pass her PhD’s foreign language requirement, rather than embark on a six-week-long French course over the summer (remember: Katie’s mother was French, and she claimed to speak it fluently)—she replied, “it’s very tempting, honestly, and would probably be a good idea.”
The paramedic anecdote may not be a lie—though in my opinion, it would be better if it actually were. Because if it is true she seems unable to directly say it. Even if she isn’t lying continuously, her lies have affected the way she speaks the truth. Remembering conversations with her, we realized that she had never actually committed to saying anything. The effect of this has been utterly corrosive, because the long-term impression of her personality now wriggles like a mirage. We admitted—we were forced to admit, as it’s the kind of thought you hide even from yourself when you’re lonely—that despite all the time we’d spent with her, there had always been a wall, and Kasia never did feel like she’d found a best friend in her. Recalling these conversations, there is in fact never anything to remember past the impression of facts one has created oneself: she never asserted any vivid image or detail long enough for it to truly stick. She became a person that started endlessly falling apart, again and again, with every message we checked, every conversation we recalled. Katie is only a “pole” insofar as she’s an empty field.
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