by James Morrow
Stanley rammed his broom into the floor. “Look, I’m a ridiculous person, we all know that. Women want nothing to do with me. I’m a loner. Don’t talk to me about your home life, Mr. Sperry. Don’t talk about your lousy son.”
I blanched and trembled. “Fuck you figuratively, Stanley Marcus!”
“Fuck you figuratively, Jack Sperry!” He clutched the broom against his bosom, pivoted on his heel, and fled.
I finished my coffee and decided to make some more, using a double helping of crystals from my Donaldson’s Drinkable jar.
Back in the shop, yet another stack of 35mm reels awaited my review, a celluoid tower stretching clear to the ceiling. As Donaldson’s Drinkable cavorted, so to speak, through my neurons, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I dissolved The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, stripped Citizen Kane and King Kong down to the acetate, rid the world of Top Hat, A Night at the Opera, and—how blatant can a prevaricator get?—It’s a Wonderful Life.
The end-of-day whistle blew, a half-dozen steamy squeals echoing throughout the Wittgenstein. As the sixth cry faded away, a seventh one arose, human, female—familiar.
“Way to go, critic!”
I glanced up from a tub of Clorox, where Casablanca was currently burbling toward oblivion. The doorway framed her.
“Martina? Martina?”
“Hello, Jack.” Her silver lamé dress hugged her every contour like some elaborate skin graft. A matching handbag swung from her shoulder. I’d never seen a Veritasian outfitted so dishonestly before—but then, of course, Martina was evidently more than a Veritasian.
“The guard let you through?” I asked, astonished.
“After I agreed to copulate with him tomorrow, yes.”
The truth? A half-truth? There was no way, I realized with a sudden pang of anxiety, to gauge this woman’s sincerity. “I’m extraordinarily happy to see you,” I said. “I went to that address you gave me, but—”
“Just once I’d like to meet a man whose genitalia didn’t rule his life.”
“I wanted to talk with you, that’s all. A talk. I ran into Boris the Clamdigger.”
Opening her silver handbag, Martina retrieved a one-liter bottle of Charlie’s Cheapdrunk and a pair of Styrofoam cups. “Did he mention anything about two hundred bucks?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s not going to get it.” She set the cups on my workbench, filled them with mud-colored wine. “I suppose he told you we had sex?”
“Yes.”
“Hell, Jack, you know more about my private life than I do.” She seized her cup of Charlie’s and sashayed around the shop, breasts rolling like channel buoys on Becket Bay, hips swaying like mounds of dough being hefted by a pizza chef.
It was all lost on me, every bounce and bob. My urges had died when Prendergorst said fatal; I’d been gelded by an adjective.
Grabbing my wine, I swilled it down in one gulp.
“So this is where it all happens.” Martina stopped before my tool rack, massaging my axes, fondling my tin snips, running her fingers over my saws, pliers, and drills. “Impressive…”
“Where are you living now?” I asked, refilling my cup.
“With my girlfriend. I can’t afford anything better—Cloying and Coy turned down my Mother’s Day series.” She finished off her Charlie’s. “Which reminds me—you know that page of doggerel I gave you?”
Like a chipmunk loading up on acorns, I inflated my cheeks with wine. I swallowed. “Those verses have never left my mind. As it were.”
Martina frowned severely, apparently puzzled by the notion that her doggerel was in any way memorable. “I want them back. You never liked them in the first place.”
The wine was everywhere now, warming my hands and feet, massaging my brain. “They’re somewhat appealing, in their own vapid way.”
Hips in high gear, she moved past the seething remains of Casablanca, reached the door, and snapped the deadbolt into place. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I let them go. I always save my original manuscripts. I’ll gladly give you a copy.”
So there it was, the final proof of Martina’s true colors. The cunning little liar had deduced the poems were dangerous—in her justified paranoia, she’d imagined me spotting the flagrant falsehoods embedded in the page.
Buzzing with Cheapdrunk, I didn’t resist when Martina ushered me across the shop to my assignment for the upcoming week—a mountainous pile of Cassini gowns, Saint Laurent shirts, and Calvin Klein jeans.
“So anyway,” she said as we eased into the fraudulent fabrics, “if you could give me those verses…”
Her full wet lips came toward me, her eager puppyish tongue emerged. She kissed me all over; it was like being molested by a marshmallow. We hugged and fondled, clutched and tussled, poked and probed.
My genitalia, to use Martina’s word, might as well have been on the moon, for all they cared. I said, “Martina, I know why you want that doggerel.”
“Oh?”
Icy vibrations passed through her, the tremors of her guilt. “You want it because the paper’s riddled with lies,” I said. The skin tightened on her bones. “You’re a dissembler.”
“No,” she insisted, extricating herself from our embrace.
“How do you counteract the conditioning?” I persisted.
She stood up. “I’m not one.”
“You wrote about having wings. You wrote about a soul.” Scrambling to my feet, I squeezed her large, Rubensian hand. “My son means a great deal to me. Love, even. He’s just a boy. Ever heard of Xavier’s Plague? He mustn’t learn the truth. If he doesn’t realize it’s fatal, he might go into remission or even—”
She ran to the door as if fleeing some act of the alleged God, a forest fire, tidal wave, cyclone. “You’ve got the wrong woman!” she shouted, throwing back the bolt.
“I won’t go to the Squad—I promise. Please, Martina, teach me how you do it!”
She tore open the door, started into the hot dusk. “I tell only the truth!”
“Liar!”
Sweating and shaking, she fumbled into her shiny Toyota Functional and backed out of the parking lot. Her rubbery face was bloodless. Her eyes flashed with fear. Martina Coventry: dissembler. Oh, yes, truer words had never been spoken.
She will not escape, I silendy vowed, clasping my hands together in that most dangerous of postures and disingenuous of gestures. With God as my witness, I added with a nod to the late, great Gone With the Wind.
Heaven answered me with a traffic jam, the full glory of the Veritasian rush hour. I ran into its dense screeching depths, weaving around pedestrians like a skier following a slalom course, never letting Martina’s Functional out of my sight. She crawled down Voltaire Avenue, turned east onto River Lane. By the time she reached the bridge, the traffic had halted completely, like a wave of molten lava solidifying on the slope of a volcano.
She pulled into a parking space, started the meter, and ducked into a seedy-looking bar-and-grill called Dolly’s Digestibles.
A pay telephone stood at the Schopenhauer Avenue intersection. The thing worked perfectly. In the Age of Lies, I’d heard, public phones were commonly the targets of criminal behavior.
I told Helen I wouldn’t be home for supper. “I’m tracking a dissembler,” I explained.
“The Coventry woman?”
“Yes.” I peered through the bar’s grubby window. Martina sat in the back, sipping a Olga’s OK Orangeade and eating a murdered cow.
Helen said, “Did you have sex with her?”
“No.” A mild but undeniable pain arose in my temples. “We kissed.”
“On the lips?”
“Yes. We also hugged.”
“Come home, Jack.”
“Not before I’m one of them.”
“Jack!”
Click. I stood in the silvery, sulfurous rain and waited.
Within the hour Martina left Dolly’s Digestibles and set out on foot, striding eastward into the twili
t depths of Nietzsche Borough. Once the lynchpin of the Veritas Trolley Company, an enterprise that in its heyday shuttled both freight and humans around the metropolis, Nietzsche had of late fallen victim to the revolution in private transportation, becoming underpopulated and inert, an urban moonscape. I followed Martina to a depot, its tracks now deserted but for the occasional rusting Pullman or decaying boxcar. How stealthy I was, how furtive—how like a dissembler already.
A roundhouse loomed up, its turntable lying before the switchyard like an enormous lazy Susan, its barns sealed with slabs of corrugated steel. A diesel switch engine sat on the nearest siding, hulking into the wet summer air like the fossilized remains of some postindustrial dinosaur.
Martina drummed on the door—a swift, snappy paradiddle—and a tall, devil-bearded man answered, his gaunt features softened by the dusk. “I’m Spartacus, come to free the slaves,” she told him—a code phrase, evidently. I flinched at the falsehood.
“Right this way, brave Thracian,” he replied, stepping aside to let her pass.
Sneaking around back, I groped along the sooty, rust-stained walls. A high, open window beckoned. I was all instinct now, piling the handiest junk together (pickle barrel, apple crate, fifty-five-gallon drum), scrambling upward like the swashbuckling hero of some Cinemascope illusion. I reached the sill and peered in.
Liars—everywhere, liars. There were over four hundred of them, chattering among themselves as they gripped kerosene lanterns and drifted amid the empty rails, gradually converging upon a makeshift wooden podium suspended several feet above the ground on stilts. The women were dressed outrageously, in low-cut sequined blouses and spangled stretch pants, like chorus girls out of a Fred Astaire movie; Martina fit right in. The men’s attire was equally antisocial. They wore tuxedos with white gloves; riding cloaks and jodhpurs; lavender jackets that might have been stolen from pimps.
A burly man in a zoot suit mounted the steps of the podium, carrying a battery-powered bullhorn. “Settle down, everybody!” came his electrified bellow.
The mob grew quiet. “Take it away, Sebastian!” somebody called from the floor.
The liars’ leader—Sebastian—strutted back and forth on the podium, flashing a jack-o’-lantern grin. “What is snow?” he shouted.
I fixed on Martina. “Snow is hot!” she screamed along with her peers.
A dull ache wove through my belly. I closed my eyes and jumped into the thick, creosote-clogged air.
“What chases cats?” asked Sebastian.
“Rats chase cats!” the liars responded in a single voice—a mighty shout drowning out the thud of my boots striking the roundhouse floor. Rats chase cats: God. My discomfort increased, nausea pounding deep within me. I backed against a rivet-studded girder, my body camouflaged by shadows, my footfalls masked by the rumble of the crowd.
“Now,” said Sebastian, “down to business…”
Gradually the sickness passed, and I was able to monitor the schemes now unfolding before me.
The dissemblers—I quickly learned—were planning yet another attack on Veritas’s domestic tranquility. For one astonishingly disruptive afternoon, they would revive what Sebastian called “that vanished and mythic festival known as Christmas.” Anything to demoralize the city, evidently, anything to rot it from within. At 2 P.M. on December 25, when Circumspect Park was packed with families out for a jolly afternoon of skating on the duck pond and drinking hot chocolate by bonfires, the liars would strike. Costumed as angels, elves, gnomes, and sugarplum fairies, they would swoop into the park and cordon it off with snow fences, discreetly taking a dozen hostages to discourage police intervention. Sebastian’s forces would next erect a so-called Christmas tree on the north shore of the pond—a Scotch pine as big as a windmill—immediately inviting Veritas’s presumably awestruck children to decorate it with colored glass balls and tinsel. Then, as evening drew near, the dissemblers would perform a three-act adaptation of a Charles Dickens story called A Christmas Carol. I knew all about that story, and not just because I’d read a copy of the first edition prior to burning it. A Christmas Carol had entered history as one the falsest fables of all time, a glib embodiment of the lie that the wicked can be made to see the errors of their ways.
Finally: the climax. A loading gantry would appear on the scene and suddenly—look—here comes old Santa Claus himself, descending from the sky in a shiny red sleigh harnessed to eight audio-animatronics reindeer and jammed with gifts wrapped in glittery gold paper. As the children gathered around—their hearts pounding with delight, their faces aglow with glee, their poor defenseless minds dizzy with delusion—the elves would shower them with the stuff of their dreams, with scooters and ten-speeds, doll houses and electric trains, teddy bears and toy soldiers.
Sebastian held up the red suit, pillow, and fake beard he intended to wear as Santa Claus, and the roundhouse broke into instant, thunderous applause.
I studied the crowd, shuddering each time I came upon a familiar face. Good heavens: Jimmy Breeze, the bartender from Booze Before Breakfast. Who would have picked him for a liar? Or my plumber, Paul Irving? Or my barber, Bill Mumford?
Sebastian divided his legions into the necessary task forces. Jimmy Breeze ended up on the Ornaments Committee; my plumber was cast as Ebenezer Scrooge; my barber volunteered to be an elf; Martina agreed to write Santa’s opening oration.
The closing litany caught me by surprise.
“What can dogs do?” Sebastian shouted abruptly.
“They can talk!” answered the mob.
My skull began to throb.
“What color is grass?”
“Purple!”
The pounding in my skull intensified.
“Stones are…”
“Alive!”
“Stop!” I cried, squeezing my head between my palms. “Stop! Please stop!”
Four hundred faces turned toward me. Eight hundred eyes flashed with anger and indignation.
“Who’s that?” someone asked.
“Spy!” a voice called.
Another: “Brutality Squad!”
Another: “Get him!”
I raised my open palms. “Listen! I want to join you!” The liars rushed toward me like the hordes in the most impressive Renaissance oil I’d deconstructed during my apprenticeship, Altdorfer’s Battle of Issus. “I want to become a dissembler!”
A leathery hand curled around my mouth. I bit into it, tasting the liar’s salty blood. A boot jabbed my side, snapping a middle rib like a dry twig. Groaning, reeling with fear, I dropped to my knees. I’d never before felt so much of that ultimate truth, that quintessential fact, pain.
The last thing I saw before losing consciousness was my tax advisor’s fist moving swiftly toward my jaw.
I woke up alive. Alive—and no better. My lips felt like two fat snails grafted onto my face. My torso, it seemed, had recently been employed as the ball in some particularly violent contact sport. Pain chewed at my side.
Gradually the gooey film slid from my eyes. I took stock. Foam mattress, eiderdown pillow, the adamant odor of rubbing alcohol. Adhesive tape encircled my chest, as if it were the handle of a tennis racket.
A middle-aged doctor in a white lab coat fidgeted beside me, stethoscope dangling from her neck. “Good morning,” she said, apparently meaning it. A thin, vivid face: beaky nose, sharp chin, high cheeks—a face that, while not beautiful, would probably always retain a certain fascination for anybody obliged to behold it regularly.
“Morning? Is it Friday already?”
“Very good,” the doctor answered merrily. Her smile was as crisp and bright as a gibbous moon. “I’m Felicia Krakower, and I truly, sincerely hope you’re feeling better.”
Across the room, an old man with skin the color of oolong tea sat upright on his mattress, his head wrapped in a turban of brilliant white bandages.
“My rib hurts,” I said.
“I’m terribly sorry to hear that,” said Dr. Krakower. “Don’t fret. You’re
in Satirev now.”
“Satirev?”
“Off the map.” Dr. Krakower waved a thermometer around as if conducting an orchestra.
“Spell it backwards,” my roommate suggested. “I’m Louie, by the way. Brain cancer. No big deal. It just grows and grows up there, like moss, and then one day—pfttt—I’m gone. Death is an extraordinary adventure.”
I slid the thermometer between my lips. Satirev…Veritas…Satirev…Veritas…
My accomodations were coated with lurid yellow paint and equally lurid lies—a poster-sized edition of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a print of Salvador Dali’s notorious landscape of trees fruited with pocket watches. I glanced through a rose-tinted window. Outside, a rank of Corinthian columns supported a carved lintel reading CENTER FOR CREATIVE WELLNESS.
As Krakower removed the thermometer, I pressed my staved-in side and said, “Doctor, you’ve heard of psychoneuroimmunology, haven’t you?”
“The mind-body connection?”
“Right. The patient adopts such a cheerful outlook that his sickness never takes hold. Does that ever happen?”
“Of course it happens,” the doctor replied, sliding her index finger along the bright yellow tubing of her stethoscope. “Miracles happen every day—the sun comes up, a baby gets born—and don’t you ever forget it, Jack Sperry.”
How marvelous to be among people who weren’t afraid of hope. “Bless you, doctor—am I running a fever?”
“Maybe a tiny one. Not to worry. In Satirev, one never stays ill for long.”
“I should call my wife.”
Against all odds, the doctor’s smile grew even larger. “You have a wife? Wonderful. Lovely. I’ll relay your request to Internal Security immediately. Open your mouth, would you?”
“Why?”
“Something for your own good.”
I moved my wounded lips apart. The doctor deposited a sugary, kidney-shaped capsule on my tongue, handed me a glass of water. “How do I know it’s for my own good?”
“Trust me,” said Dr. Krakower.
“In Satirev people trust each other,” said Louie.