City of Truth

by James Morrow

  “Sleeping pill?” I asked, swallowing.

  “Could be,” said the doctor.

  Sleeping pill…

  When I returned to awareness, Martina Coventry was leaning over me, still packaged in her lascivious silver dress. Beside her stood a tall, lanky, coarse-skinned man in a green dinner jacket fitted over a sweatshirt that said, WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, MAKE LEMONADE. He looked like a cactus.

  “Martina!”

  She laid a plump hand on my forehead. “Say hello to Franz Beauchamp.”

  “Hello,” I said to the cactoid man.

  “I’m in charge of making sure you don’t wander off,” Franz explained in a voice that seemed to enter the room after first traveling through a vat of honey. “It’s no big deal. Just give me your Veritasian word you won’t wander off.”

  “I won’t wander off.”

  “Good for you.” My guardian’s grin was as spectacular as Felicia Krakower’s; I’d fallen in with a community of smilers. “I have a feeling we’re going to be great friends,” he said.

  Martina was gaudier than ever. She’d worked her long terra-cotta hair into a sculpted object, a thick braid that lay on her shoulder like a loaf of challah. Her eyes had become cartoons of themselves, boldly outlined and richly shaded. “Even though this is Satirev,” she said, “I am Veritasian enough to speak frankly. I saved your ass, Jack. You’re alive because good old Martina Coventry argued your case back at the roundhouse.”

  “I’m grateful,” I said.

  “You should be.”

  “You told them about Toby?”

  She nodded. “Yes, and I must say, the story was an instant hit. A Xavier’s child with a shot at remission—you have no idea what appeal that sort of situation holds down here.”

  “It’s all so amazingly touching,” said Franz. “A father fighting for his son’s life—my goodness, that’s touching.”

  “Can you teach me to lie?” I asked.

  “It depends,” said Martina.

  “On what?”

  “On whether you’re accepted into the program—on whether the treatment takes. Not everyone has the stuff to become a dissembler.”

  “If it were up to me, I’d let you in”—Franz snapped his fingers—“like that.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not up to us,” said Martina. “You’re going to need some luck.” She reached into her madras bag and took out, of all things, a horseshoe. Opening the drawer in my nightstand, she dropped in the shoe, thud. “Horses have six legs,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  I gritted my teeth. “Good-luck charms are lies,” I countered.

  “Perhaps,” said Martina.

  “I understand you wish to make a phone call,” said Franz brightly. “Speaking on behalf of Internal Security, I must tell you we’re delighted to grant that particular request.”

  Franz and Martina helped me to my feet, inch by painful inch. I’d never realized I owned so many vulnerable muscles, so many assaultable bones. At last I stood, the cold floor nipping at my bare feet, my baggy and absurdly short hospital gown brushing my rump.

  The Center for Creative Wellness was a modest affair. A dozen paces down a hall hung with photographs of ecstatic children, a dozen more across a lobby loaded with Monet’s paintings of water lillies, and suddenly we were moving through the main entrance and into a small private park. Graffiti coated the smooth brick walls: JESUS LOVES YOU…EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL IN ITS OWN WAY…TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. I looked up. No sun, no clouds—no sky. The whole park was covered by a concrete arch suggesting the vaulted dome of a cathedral; three mercury-vapor searchlights lay suspended from the roof, technological suns.

  “We’re under the ground,” Martina explained, noting the confusion on my face. “We’re under Veritas,” she said, launching her index finger upward; her nails were painted a fluorescent green. “So far we’ve colonized only a hundred acres, but we’re expanding all the time.”

  Compact, enclosed—and yet the park was not claustrophobic. Indeed, I had never before stood in such a soothing and airy space. It smelled of pine sap. The omnipresent birdsong boasted the exhilarating intricacy of a fugue. Butterflies representing a dozen species, each more colorful than the next, fluttered about like patches attempting to fuse themselves into a crazy quilt. A flagstone footpath meandered amid neat little gardens planted with zinnias, gladioli, tulips, and peonies.

  Martina said, “We’ll never grow as big as Veritas, of course. But that’s not the point.”

  I studied the ceiling, its curving face crisscrossed with Veritas’s innards—her concrete intestines, gushing lead veins, buzzing nerves of steel and gutta-percha. Something peculiar glided over my head.

  “The point is that Satirev is here,” Martina continued, “and that it works.”

  A pig. A pig? Yes, there it was, sailing through the air like a miniature dirigible, flapping its little cherub-wings. A machine of some kind, a child’s bizarre toy? No, its squeal was disconcertingly organic.

  “Pigs have wings,” said Franz. His lie sent a chill through my flesh.

  A scrawny yellow cat sidled out from behind a forsythia bush, its hairs erect with feline anxiety. It molded itself into an oblong of fur and shot toward the Center for Creative Wellness. An instant later, its pursuer appeared. A dog, I assumed at first. But no. Wrong shape. And that tail, long and ropelike.

  The shudder began in my lower spine and expanded. A rat. A rat the size of a pregnant badger.

  Chasing a cat.

  “This is a very strange place,” I said, staring into Martina’s exotically adorned eyes. “Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Strangeness is relative,” she replied.

  “I’m bewildered,” I said.

  “It’s not hard to make a lie, Jack. Avant-garde microbiology will give you a flying pig, an outsized rat—anything you want.”

  “I’m still bewildered.”

  “Satirev takes some getting used to,” said Franz, smiling prolifically. “I’m sure you’ll be able to master it. You look like a champ to me, Jack.”

  The telephone booth sat on a knoll smothered in purple grass and five-leaf clovers. Slowly I limped through the odd flora—my body felt like a single gigantic bruise—and pushed the sliding door against the jamb. Martina and Franz stood beside me, well within earshot.

  “Do you understand how you must conduct yourself?” my guardian asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Drop the slightest hint and, bang, you’re back in Veritas, awash in scopolamine—you’ll never remember you’ve been here, not one detail. That would be most unfortunate, wouldn’t it?”

  The phone was a deceitful affair, secretly wired into the Veritas system, blatantly looting its services. I extended my index finger, pressed the appropriate buttons.

  Helen didn’t answer till the seventh ring. Obviously I’d awakened her. “Hello?” she said groggily.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Of course you woke me,” she mumbled, “whoever you are.”

  “Listen,” I told her abuptly. “Don’t ask me anything.”

  “Jack? Is that you?”

  “It’s me. Don’t ask me where I am, Helen. Everything depends on it.”

  My wife exhaled in frustration. “I…er, it’s good to hear your voice, Jack.”

  “I’m among them. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “I think so.”

  “They’re considering my case, Helen. They might let me in. I hope you’re not still against me on this.”

  “I’m against you,” she grunted.

  I looped the phone cord around my arm, forcing it tight against my skin like a phylactery strap. “Have you heard anything from Toby?”

  “Postcard came today.”

  “Did he mention his health—headaches or anything?”

  “He simply said he was in a canoe race. I’m supposed to pick him up at the bus station on the twenty-seventh.”

  “Nothing about h
eadaches?”

  “No.”

  I kissed the plastic mouthpiece. “I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Good-bye, Helen. I’m terribly fond of you.”

  “I’m terribly fond of you too, Jack—but please get out of there. Please.”

  I hung up and turned toward Martina and Franz. Behind them, a shaggy black rat pinned a Siamese cat to the ground and began tearing out its throat.

  “You did fine,” said my guardian.

  Five

  The weather engineers had just turned up their rheostats, flooding the Saturday morning sky with a dazzling emerald sunrise, when Martina came bouncing into my hospital room. She opened the drawer of my nightstand and removed her ludicrous horseshoe. “It worked,” she insisted, holding out the shoe as if it were a wishbone we’d agreed to split.

  “Oh?” I said sneeringly, skeptically: I refused to descend into superstition—psychoneuroimmunology was for real.

  She dropped the horseshoe into her handbag. I was lucky, she told me. The typical supplicant was commonly sequestered for a full month in the Hotel Paradise while the government decided his fate—but not I. Instead, assuming Dr. Krakower agreed to release me, I would meet that very afternoon with Manny Ginsburg himself.

  “Imagine, Jack—you’ve been granted an audience with the Pope!”

  Twenty minutes later Dr. Krakower appeared, accompanied by the eternally unctuous Franz Beauchamp. As Martina looked on with seemingly genuine concern, Franz with a kind of smarmy pity, the doctor inspected my infirmities. She removed the bandage from my head wound, palpated my broken rib through the adhesive tape—“This might hurt a bit,” she warned before sending me into paroxysms of pain—and cheerily pronounced me fit to travel, though she wanted me back by sundown for another checkup.

  I got into the denim overalls I’d worn to work on Thursday: how far away that Thursday seemed, how remote and unreal. Martina and Franz guided me through the hospital lobby and across the park to the banks of a wide canal labeled Jordan River, its waters clean, clear, and redolent of some happy mixture of root beer and maple syrup. Golden trout flashed beneath the surface like reflected moonbeams.

  Sparkling with fresh paint, a red gondola lay moored to the wharf. We got on board. As my guardian poled us forward, pushing his oar into the sweet waters, Martina briefed me on the intricacies of dealing with Manny Ginsburg.

  “To begin with, he’s a year-rounder. Lives here all the time.” For most dissemblers, Martina elaborated, Satirev was a pied-à-terre, locus of the periodic pilgrimages through which one renewed one’s talent for mendacity, whereas Manny Ginsburg never left. “It’s made him a little nuts,” she explained.

  “I’m not surprised,” I said as an aquatic ferret leaped out of the Jordan and snatched an unsuspecting polka-dotted frog from the shore.

  “Play up your devotion to your kid,” Martina advised. “How you’d move heaven and earth to cure him. The man’s a sucker for sentiment.”

  “And don’t look the old man in the eye,” said Franz. “He hates directness.”

  My guardian landed us at a trim, sturdy, immaculately whitewashed dock, its pilings decorated with ceramic replicas of pelicans and sea gulls. An equally clean and appealing structure rose from the shore—a bait shack or possibly a fisherman’s hut. A German shepherd sprawled on the welcome mat, head bobbing in languid circles as he tracked a dragonfly.

  “The Holy See,” said Martina, pointing.

  “It’s a bait shack,” I corrected her.

  “It’s the Holy See,” said Franz as he lashed his gondola to the dock.

  “Maybe we don’t have the budget we’d like around here,” said the dog, “but it’s still the Holy See.”

  I didn’t bat an eye. I was getting used to this sort of thing.

  The door swished open on well-oiled hinges and a short, nervous, wall-eyed man in his sixties stepped onto the dock wearing a brilliant white polyester suit and a yarmulke. He told Martina and Franz to come back for me in an hour.

  “Care for a cup of fresh-perked coffee?” asked Manny Ginsburg as he led me into his one-room riverfront abode. The German shepherd followed, claws clicking on the wooden floor. “It’s quite tasty.”

  “Sure,” I said, glancing around. Manny’s shack was as spotless within as without.

  “Pull up a chair.”

  There were no chairs. I sat on the rug.

  “I’m Ernst, by the way,” said the dog, offering me his paw.

  “Jack Sperry,” I said, shaking limb extremities with Ernst. “You talk,” I observed.

  “A bioelectronic implant, modifying my larynx.”

  Manny sidled into the kitchenette. Lifting a copper kettle from his kerosene stove, he filled a pair of earthenware mugs with boiling water then added heaping spoonfuls of Donaldson’s Drinkable Coffee crystals.

  “You said fresh,” I noted with Veritasian candor.

  “It’s fresh to us,” said the Pope.

  “Want to hear a talking dog joke?” Ernst inquired.

  “No,” I replied, truthfully.

  “Oh,” said the dog, evidently wounded by my frankness.

  Manny returned from the kitchenette with a Coca-Cola tray bearing the coffee mugs plus a cream pitcher and a canister marked Salt.

  “It’s a sterile world up there. Sterile, stifling, spiritually depleting.” Manny set the tray beside me and rolled his eyes heavenward. “And before long it will all be ours. You doubt me? Listen—already we’ve placed twenty dissemblers in the legislature. A person with our talents has no trouble getting elected.”

  “You mean—you’re going to conquer Veritas?” I asked, making a point of not looking Manny in the eye.

  The Pope slammed his palms against his ears. “Please.”

  “Don’t say ‘conquer,’” admonished the dog.

  “We’re going to reform Veritas,” said Manny.

  I fixed on the rug. “Truth is beauty, your holiness.” Splaying my fingers, I ticked off a familiar litany. “In the Age of Lies, politicians misled, advertisers overstated, clerics exaggerated—”

  “Satirev’s founders had nothing against telling the truth.” Manny tapped his yarmulke. “But they hated their inability to do otherwise. Honesty without choice, they said, is slavery with a smile.” He pointed toward the ceiling with his coffee mug. “Truth above…” He set his mug on the floor. “Dignity below.” He chuckled softly. “In Satirev, we opt for the latter. Do you like it sweet?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your coffee. Sweet?”

  “I would like some sugar, matter of fact.”

  The Pope handed me the salt canister. I shook some grains into my palm and licked. It was sugar.

  “My heart is broken,” said Manny, laying a hand on his chest. “I feel absolutely devastated about your Toby.”

  “You do?” I asked, adding Satirevian salt to my coffee.

  “I’m crushed.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “What you’re doing is so noble.”

  “I think so too,” said Ernst. “And I’m only a dog.”

  “I have just one question,” said Manny. Listen carefully. Do you love your son?”

  “That would depend on—”

  “I don’t mean love him, I mean love him. Crazy, unconditional, non-Veritasian love.”

  Surprisingly—to myself if not the Pope—I didn’t have to think about my answer. “I love him,” I asserted. “Crazy, unconditional, non-Veritasian…”

  “Then you’re in,” said Manny.

  “Congratulations,” said the dog.

  “I must warn you—the treatment doesn’t take in all cases.” Manny sipped his Donaldson’s. “I advise you to throw everything you’ve got into it, your very soul, even if you’re convinced you don’t have one. Please don’t look me in the eye.”

  I turned away, uncertain whether to rejoice at being admitted or to brood over the possibility of failure. “What are my chances, would you say?”

  “First
rate,” said Manny.

  “Truly excellent,” Ernst agreed.

  “I’d bet money on it,” the Pope elaborated.

  “Of course,” said the dog, “we could be lying.”

  On Sunday morning Martina and I hiked through the flurry of five-leaf clovers outside the Center for Creative Wellness and, reaching the top of the hill, placed a call to Arnold Cook at his home in Locke Borough. After claiming to be my wife, Martina told him I’d been diagnosed with double pneumonia and wouldn’t be coming to work for at least a week. Her fabulation gave me a terrible headache and also, truth to tell, a kind of sexual thrill.

  The chief curator offered his qualified sympathy, and that was that. What a marvelous tool, lying, I thought: so practical and uncomplicated. I was beginning to understand its pervasive popularity in eras gone by.

  Together Martina and I strolled through the park, Franz Beauchamp hovering blatantly in the background. She grasped my right hand; my fingers became five erogenous zones. Today she would return to Veritas, she explained, where she’d finally lined up a job writing campaign speeches for Doreen Hutter, a Descartes Borough representative.

  “I’ll miss you,” I said.

  “I’ll be back,” she said, massaging her baroque braid with her free hand. “Like all dissemblers, I’m obliged to immerse myself in Satirev ninety days a year. I’ll be spending next Friday on the Jordan, fishing for ferrets.”

  “Will you visit me?” I asked this zaftig and exotic woman.

  She stared into the sky and nodded. “With luck you’ll be a liar by then,” she said, tracking a pig with her decorous eyes. “If you have any words of truth for me, you’d better spill them now.”

  “Truth?”

  “We dissemblers can handle it, every now and then.”

  “Well, I suppose I’d have to say…” The reality of my condition dawned on me even as I spoke it. “I’d have to say I’m a little bit in love with you, Martina.”

  “Only a little bit?” she asked, leading me to the riverbank, Franz at our heels.

  “These things are hard to quantify.” Two gondolas were lashed to the dock, riding the wake of a passing outboard motorboat. “May I ask how you feel about me?”