A 15-year-old narrator with autism sets out to investigate who killed a neighbor's dog with a garden fork, keeping a detective notebook. His inquiry leads him to discover his father killed the dog and had lied that his mother was dead when she had actually left with the neighbor, so the investigation into one event exposes a hidden structure of lies.
A narrator who cannot read facial expressions, metaphor, or white lies renders ordinary adult life strange by taking everything at face value. Through this lens, social conventions, euphemisms, and 'harmless' lies become visible as arbitrary and often deceptive constructions rather than neutral background.
The narrator manages overwhelming sensory and emotional input through rigid rules, counting systems, and ranking days good or bad by seeing colored cars in sequence. Imposed order is not irrationality but a functional coping mechanism: predictability substitutes for the intuitive filtering others do automatically.
The narrator reasons that he cannot tell lies because a lie requires imagining all the other things that did not happen, which is endless, whereas the truth is only one thing. This frames honesty as cognitively simpler than deception and deception as an open-ended generative burden.