A few weeks before the release of my first book, a memoir about my mother’s murder, I had to take a polygraph exam. The two things were not in fact related, but that was easy to forget once I found myself strapped in a chair in a windowless room on the fourth floor of a federal building in El Paso, with some polygrapher I’d just met sitting behind me, asking questions. 

I’d met my examiner, whom I’ll call Kevin, that morning. The federal scheduler had insisted on a 9:00 am appointment even though I lived four hours away, which meant I’d spent the previous night alone in a Motel 6 by the highway in El Paso, eating Del Taco and reflecting on the decisions that had led me to spending the night alone in a Motel 6 by the highway in El Paso, eating Del Taco. Technically, I was there because I’d applied for a job with Customs and Border Protection. But the truth seemed much more complicated than that.

I didn’t get much sleep, and showed up at the federal building early, dressed in what I imagined the government meant by comfortable clothing: black dress pants, plain white oxford, no tie. I looked like a banquet waiter. One other guy was in the waiting room when I walked in. As we sat there past the scheduled time of our appointments, we struck up a desultory conversation. Like me, he’d been in the hiring process for years, had driven down from Albuquerque the night before, and seemed nervous. He asked if I’d done any research on the polygraph. I said no, and asked him the same question. He said no. We were getting our first lies out of the way. 

The government’s guidelines had repeatedly stressed that we should not do any research before our polygraph. Their insistence struck me as odd: if the machine detects lies, why would it matter? I’d spent much of the previous week Googling polygraphs. I was in the middle of denying it to my new friend when the door opened and Kevin appeared. 

He was around sixty, short, portly, bald, with a silly goatee and wire-rimmed glasses, wearing a baggy gray suit and a shirt in one of those colors I never can keep straight, puce or mauve or periwinkle, a little too festive for the occasion. Kevin was squinty and smug, with an air of hollow authority that reminded me of my middle-school principal. He didn’t even step into the waiting room, just swung the door open and shouted my full name. I stood and shook the hand he extended. He squeezed too hard and said I could call him by his first name, as if he were doing me some great favor.

Kevin led me down a drab hallway to a door on the left that led to my first disappointment. I’d been expecting the sort of tableau you see in cop movies, some dank cellar with a dangling bulb and a two-way mirror on the wall for me to stare defiantly into. Instead we entered a bare, sterile room with office chairs on either side of a desk. Wires ran from the computer on the desk across the room to a hardbacked chair festooned with cuffs and straps and sensors. 

We sat in the normal chairs. Kevin leaned back in his, twirled a pencil, and said, “Let’s get started.” I knew this bit, the casual tone and performative warmth. I was a college professor, sort of, and I did this same bit on the first day of classes, trying to make my students trust me. In that first fluorescent moment, staring into Kevin’s beady eyes, I had a premonition: I was going to fail my polygraph exam.

—

Joan Didion once wrote that it’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. That has not been my experience. Ends are obvious: divorce, death, getting fired. Beginnings, on the other hand, seem subjective. If ends are facts, beginnings are truth: relative, random, subject to belief.

The story of my exam, for example, could begin two years before I met Kevin, when President Obama signed an act requiring polygraph screening for applicants to certain federal agencies. Or two years before that, when I started writing a memoir and began to understand what it means to tell the truth. Or it could begin with the polygraph itself, the kind of story America likes best: a simple one that isn’t all that true. The polygraph’s most commonly credited inventor is John Larson, an employee of the Berkeley Police Department, who developed a new device for interrogations in 1921. Larson was twenty-nine at the time, and, like me, a strange candidate for law enforcement: he might have been America’s first cop with a PhD. 

His degree was in physiology, the science of the body’s systems. The then-prevailing scientific belief saw crime as biological, either hereditary or the result of a physical defect. Larson explored both possibilities. His undergraduate work tried to find familial patterns in fingerprints that predicted criminality. In grad school, Larson shifted his focus to thyroid deficiencies. The results were disappointing, so he turned to machines. Larson read an article about using blood pressure to detect deception, and decided to improve on its author’s technique by designing a machine that could do so more objectively. The polygraph was born. 

The truer story is, as usual, more complicated. Larson’s machine was not so much an invention as it was an amalgam of existing devices. He didn’t believe it detected lies and didn’t call it a polygraph: Larson referred to his machine as an “emotion recorder.” His protégé and rival, Leonarde Keeler, would later come up with the term polygraph to help commercialize the device.

Polygraph organizations like to say the word means “many writings,” which is halfway true. It’s a neologist portmanteau of the Greek terms meaning exactly that, and the machine does indeed create many writings. But to claim the word means only and exactly one thing is to make the same mistake with language polygraphers habitually make with facts: believing that they’re static and absolute. Language, like truth, is neither. Words evolve and change over time and mean different things in different contexts. Polygraph has six different definitions, according to the Oxford English Dictionary—three of which predate the machine—and they range from a letter grouping in cryptography to a person imitating another to a writer of various works. (Which I guess makes this an essay about a polygraph taking a polygraph.) 

More to the point, polygraph does not mean “lie detector.” Larson himself repudiated that term for the rest of his life. But that fact didn’t get in the way of a good story. Once the polygraph was adopted by police across America and heralded in the popular media, it took on a mythical new name: the lie detector. And as soon as the lie detector became famous, a bunch of men fought with each other for decades—mostly in their memoirs—over who was its true inventor. In his book The Truth Machine: A Social History of the Lie Detector, Geoffrey C. Bunn devotes an entire chapter to the question of who invented the device and offers enough credible candidates to field a baseball team: everyone from Carl Jung, who helped pioneer the field of psychology, to Étienne-Jules Marey, who did the same for cinematography. As Bunn puts it, with magisterial restraint, it was a “curious and notable fact that the lie detector’s principal actors mistrusted each other intensely.” Maybe they should have taken a polygraph to resolve the question . . .

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