�Would you like to put any of the bills in your name? I was thinking that you could open up the Keyspan account under your name, so that we kinda split things. You know?�

The pretense is that I�m being involved in the apartment by taking responsibility for one of the bills, but the obvious yet unstated fact is that she is hiding something.

Pathological liars are prisoners of their own deception. Every statement they make must be carefully chosen to support earlier falsehoods, thus fostering a cancerous fiction that eventually consumes their personality. The lies breed like gerbils, demanding larger and larger portions of consciousness until the mind becomes nothing more then a host in support of a parasitic fantasy.

My roommate was Barron Munchousen, minus any quality of whimsy or charm.

People who habitually lie rarely ever say anything out of the blue. Few words ever exit their lips without prior consideration and examination. Often times the level of consideration extends to the point where a person will have entire conversations in their head, exploring every possible path of interaction, just to have the bases covered and the lies supported. In essence, pathological liars are not spontaneous, so it was obvious to me that the Ruemate was playing an angle when she mentioned the Keyspan account.

Playing the game, I brushed it off ambiguously, imparting interest without any sense of action. As expected, she pretended to forget about the issue for an appropriate amount of time before casually introducing another angle.

�Yeah, it�s going to be getting cold soon. You know, we should probably set up an account with the gas soon because they have to come out and turn on the line. It might be hard getting a service call soon.�

�I could put it in my name, I just thought that maybe you�d want to have one of the bills in your name. You know, to like, share responsibility.�

At this point in our history, the relationship was largely unestablished. In hindsight I can honestly say that her attempted lies and manipulations were painfully transparent, but while her general dishonesty was always clear, her intentions towards me were not. Although it was obvious that she was lying to me regularly, I felt that her intentions deserved the benefit of doubt until she could prove my good faith to be foolish.

Foolish indeed.

What was even more baffling about her behavior was how she handled other embarrassing events in her life.

In the weeks following the construction of my loft, the Ruemate began spending an unusual amount of time at home. She would be in her bed when I left for work in the morning, and by the time I returned home a staggering migration took her twelve feet towards the television. While it was possible that someone had assigned her to permanent pajama detail, it was far more likely that she�d been fired from both her jobs.

A person could probably invent any number of reasons as to why you would leave a job ranging from the mundane to the fantastic, but rather then concoct any sort of plausible explanation for her sudden homebody status, she simply pretended that nothing had ever changed. I�d taken the apartment under the pretense that she would be away most of the time, but the statement of �3 to 4 days alone each week� had been quietly squashed beneath a 156-pound couch potato.

In contrast of such blatant omissions, other embarrassing details were passed almost as if by accident in an absent moment of candor.

While performing manual labor around the apartment one day, she advised me not to freak out if I found any fingernails lying around, motioning to the thick red chicklets that tipped her fingers. She then added �they fall off sometimes�.

The thought process that follows that statement goes something like this:

What? Her fingernails fall off sometimes? Is she some kind of leper? Wait, no. They�re press-ons. Oh, okay. Why does she wear press-ons that short? Oh, because she has no fingernails. Wait, what? She doesn�t have fingernails?

In a fit of real or feigned absent-mindedness she called attention to her fingernails or absence thereof, thus invariably leading me to the discovery that she compulsively bites her fingernails off.

...and I don�t mean that she nibbles the ends of her nails the way normal neurotic people do. She chews her fingernails down to their nailbeds, unearthing the tenderly frayed white skin underneath.

She has no fingernails on her hands because she gnaws them off completely.

You armchair psychiatrists can draw your own conclusions, mine were mounting by the ton. As I�d never encountered a person as genuinely unstable and challenged as the Ruemate was, I really had no idea how to handle her.

Any relationship with a roommate is one of delicate balance, and now I found myself sharing an unwalled apartment with a closet schizophrenic. How does one balance that?

My tactic was to play the games she presented and see where they took me, and so I accepted her Keyspan challenge. It was a bit of a gamble, given her obvious games regarding the matter, but I decided that there could be little harm in controlling one of our utilities.

We decided to drive over to Brooklyn Heights and open the account on my next day off. A couple of quick forms, and we�d have scorching gas heat to warm the cockles of our hearts through winter.

But, as with everything in this apartment, things did not prove to be this simple...