by James Morrow
“The plan’s been changed. She had to go out of town—there’s a big UFO story breaking in the Hegelian Desert.” I experienced a small but irrefutable pleasure, the sweet taste of truth bending in my mouth. “We’d better get your stuff packed. Where’s your cabin?”
Toby unnocked the arrow and used it to indicate a cluster of yurts about twenty yards from the targets.
The archery instructor approached, a woodsy, weathered fellow with a mild limp. Toby introduced me as the best father a boy’d ever had. He said he loved me. So strange, I thought, the spontaneous little notions that run through the heads of pre-burn children.
My son turned in his bow, and we started toward his cupcake-shaped cabin.
“You’ve got a nice tan, Toby. You look real healthy. Gosh, it’s good to see you.”
“Dad, you’re talking so funny.”
“I’ll bet you feel healthy too.”
“Lately I’ve been getting headaches.”
I gritted my teeth. “I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about.”
“Wish I wasn’t leaving so soon,” he said as we climbed the crooked wooden steps to his room. “Barry Maxwell and I were supposed to hunt snakes tomorrow.”
“Listen, Toby, this is a better deal than you think. You’re going to get an entire second vacation.” The space was only slightly more chaotic than I’d anticipated—clothes in ragged heaps, Encyclopedia Britannica comics in amorphous piles. “We’re going to live in a magic kingdom under the ground. Just you and me.”
“What sort of magic kingdom?” he asked skeptically.
“Oh, you’ll love it, Toby. We’ll go fishing and eat ice cream.”
Toby smiled hugely, brightly—a Satirevian smile. “That sounds neat.” He opened his footlocker and started cramming it full: crafts projects, T-shirts, dungarees, poncho, comics, flashlight, canteen, mess kit. “Will Mom be coming?”
“No.”
“She’ll miss all the fun.”
“She’ll miss all the fun,” I agreed.
My son held up a hideous and lopsided battleship, proudly announcing that he’d made it in woodworking class.
“How do you like it, Dad?”
“Why, Toby,” I told him, “it’s absolutely beautiful.”
Six
Twelve gates lead to the City of Lies. Every year, as his commitment to mendacity becomes increasingly clear, his dishonesty more manifestly reliable, the Satirevian convert is told the secret location of yet another entrance. Mere notiviates like myself knew only one: the storm drainage tunnel near the corner of Third and Hume in Nietzsche Borough.
So many ways to descend, I thought as Toby and I negotiated the dank, mossy labyrinth beneath Veritas. Ladders, sloping sewer pipes, narrow stone stairways—we used them all, our flashlights cutting through the darkness like machetes clearing away underbrush. My son loved every minute of it. “Wow!” he exclaimed whenever some disgusting wonder appeared—a slug the size of a banana, a subterranean lake filled with frogs, a spider’s web as large and sturdy as a trampoline. “Neat!”
Reaching our destination, we settled into the Hotel Paradise. Unlike my previous accommodations, our assigned suite was sunny and spacious, with glass doors opening onto a wrought-iron balcony from which one could readily glimpse the local fauna. “Dad, the horses around here have six legs!” Toby hopped up and down with excitement.“The rats chase the cats! The pigs have wings! This really is a magic kingdom!”
It soon became obvious that the whole of Satirev had been anticipating our arrival. We were the men of the hour. The Paradise guards immediately learned our faces, letting us come and go as we pleased. Franz and Lucky gushed over Toby as if he were a long-lost brother. Whenever we strolled around the community, total strangers would come up to us and, confirming our identities, give Satirev’s tragic child a candy bar or a small toy, his father a hug of encouragement and affirmation.
Even Felicia Krakower was prepared. After drawing a sample of Toby’s blood—we told him the kingdom had to make certain the tourists weren’t carrying germs—she retired to her office and came back holding a stuffed animal, an astonishingly comical baboon with acrobatic eyes and a squarish, doglike snout.
“This is for you, Rainbow Boy,” she said.
Toby’s face grew knotted and tense; he gulped audibly. He was not too old for stuffed animals, merely too old to enjoy them without shame.
“He needs a name, don’t you think?” said Dr. Krakower. “Not a silly name, I’d say. Something dignified.”
I performed my survey, the one I took every hour. The facts were becoming irrefutable—the bluish cast of his skin, the thinness of his hair.
Toby relaxed, smiled. “Dignified,” he said. “Not silly. Oh, yes.” Clearly, he’d sensed the truth of his new home: in Satirev everything was permitted; in Satirev no boy grew up before his time. “His name is Barnaby. Barnaby Baboon.” Frowning, Toby rammed the tip of his tongue into the corner of his mouth. “I think he might be carrying some germs.”
“Rainbow Boy, you’re absolutely right,” Dr. Krakower pried a wad of cotton batting out of Barnaby’s arm with her syringe. “We’d better take a stuffing sample.”
That night, the minute my son fell asleep, I ran to the phone booth outside the Paradise and called the Center for Creative Wellness. Krakower told me exactly what I expected to hear: the Xavier’s test was positive.
“There’s still plenty of hope,” she insisted.
“I know what you mean,” I said, shivering in the hot summer darkness. Positive. Positive. “If we give Toby the right outlook, his immune system will kick in and bang—remisssion.”
“Exactly.”
“How many years might a remission last?”
“You can’t tell about remissions, Jack. Some of them last a long, long time.”
I placed a call to Veritas.
“Hi, Helen.”
“Jack? Now you call? Now, after ten whole days?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Your curator sent a get-well card. Are you sick?”
“I’m feeling better.”
“This is a bad time to talk,” said Helen. “I’m due at the bus station.”
“No, you’re not. I picked up Toby on Sunday.”
“You what?”
“He’s got to be with me now. I can give him the right outlook.”
“You mean—you’re one of them?”
“Dogs can talk, Helen.”
I pictured her turning white, cringing. “Shut up!” she screamed. “I want my son back! Bring me my son, you tropological shithead!”
“I love him.”
“Bring him back!”
“I can cure him.”
“Jack!”
As the hot, soggy July melded into a hotter, soggier August, my son and I spent long hours in the outdoors—or, rather, in those open spaces that in Satirev functioned as the outdoors. Together we explored the community’s swampy frontiers, collecting bugs and amphibians for Toby’s scale-model zoo. The money orchards, meanwhile, proved excellent for archery—we would nock our arrows and aim at the five-dollar bills—while the broiling snowfields soon became littered with the results of our sculpting efforts: snowmen, snowdogs, snowcows, snowbaboons. It was all a matter of having a good pair of insulated gloves.
Finally there was the Jordan, perfect for swimming and, when we could borrow a gondola, fishing. “Do you like this place?” I asked Toby as I threaded my line with a double-barbed hook.
“It’s pretty weird.” Furiously he worked his reel, hauling an aquatic armadillo on board.
“You’re having a terrific time, though, aren’t you, buddy? You’re feeling cheerful.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said evenly.
“What do you like? Do you like making snowmen?”
“The snowmen are great.”
“And the fishing?”
“I like the fishing.” Placing his boot on the armadillo’s left gill, Toby yanked the hook out of its mouth.
“And you like our archery tournaments too, don’t you?” I marveled at the armadillo’s design—its lozenge-shaped body, sleek scales, dynamic fins. “And the swimming?”
“Uh-huh. I wish Mom were here.”
I baited my own hook with a Satirevian snail. “So do I. What else do you like?”
“I don’t know.” In a spasmatic act of mercy, he tossed the armadillo overboard. “I like the way strangers give me candy.”
“And you like the fishing too, right?”
“I already said that,” Toby replied patiently. “Dad, why does my hair keep falling out?”
“W-what?”
“My hair. And my skin looks funny too.”
I shuddered, pricking my thumb with the fishhook. “Buddy, there’s something we should talk about. Remember that blood sample Dr. Krakower took? It seems you’ve got a few germs in you. Nothing serious—Xavier’s Plague, it’s called.”
“Whose plague?”
“Xavier’s.”
“Then how come I got it instead of Mr. Xavier?”
“Lots of people get it.”
Toby impaled a snail on his fishhook. “Is that why my hair…?”
“Probably. They might have to give you some medicine. You’re not really sick.” God, how I loved being able to say that. Such power. “The thing is to stay cheerful. Just say to yourself, ‘Those bad old Xavier’s germs can’t hurt me. My immune system’s too strong.’”
“My what?”
“Immune system. Say it, Toby. Say, ‘Those bad old Xavier’s germs can’t hurt me.’ Go ahead.”
“‘Those bad old Xavier’s germs can’t hurt me,’” he repeated haltingly. “Is that true, Dad?”
“You bet. You aren’t worried, are you?”
Toby rubbed his blue forehead. “I guess not.”
“That’s my buddy.”
If my son wasn’t too old for stuffed animals, then he wasn’t too old for bedtime stories. We read together every night, snuggling amid the Paradise’s soft buttery sheets and smooth cotton blankets, working our way through a stack of volumes that had somehow escaped the Wittgenstein’s predations—Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Corbeau the Pirate, and, best of all, a leatherbound, gilt-edged collection of fairy tales. Perusing the Brothers Grimm, I trembled not only with the thrill of forbidden fruit—how daring I felt, acting out material I’d normally be reading only in prelude to burning it—but with the odd amoralities and psychosexual insights of the stories themselves. Toby’s favorite was “Rumpelstiltskin,” with its unexpected theme of an old man’s hunger for a baby. My own preference was “Sleeping Beauty.” I roundly identified with the father—with his mad, Herodlike campaign to circumvent his daugher’s destiny by destroying every spinning wheel in the kingdom. I thought he was heroic.
“Why did Rumpelstiltskin want a baby?” Toby asked.
“A baby is the best thing there is,” I replied. I felt I was telling the truth. “Rumpelstiltskin was a man who knew what he wanted.”
Whenever Martina was in Satirev, she joined our expeditions—hiking, swimming, fishing, bug collecting—and I couldn’t quite decide what Toby made of her. They got along famously, even to the point of scatalogical private jokes involving Barnaby Baboon, but occasionally I caught a glimmer of unease in my son’s eyes. Were he a post-burn kid, of course, he would’ve been frank. Dad, is Martina your mistress? Dad, do you and Martina have sex?
To which the truthful answer would have been: no. Since Toby’s arrival, I had lost my urge for erotic adventures. Martina did not protest; like me, she rather regretted our romp on the billiard table: adultery was wrong, after all—even a dissembler knew that. Thus had Martina and I entered that vast population of men and women whose friendship has crossed the copulation barrier but once, followed by retrenchment and retreat, an entire affair compacted into one memorable screw.
Most nights the three of us went to dinner in the Russian Tea Room. The staff doted on Toby; he got all the hamburgers he could eat, all the hot dogs, all the French fries, all the milkshakes. Nobody could say the Tea Room wasn’t doing its part to keep Toby cheerful, nobody could say it wasn’t putting him in a salubrious mood. The manager was a thin, wiry, exuberant man in his early fifties named Norbert Vore (evidently he did not partake of his own fattening and enervating menu), and upon sensing that from the boy’s viewpoint the restaurant was deficient in desserts, he immediately read up on the matter, soon learning how to prepare transcendent strawberry shortcake and ambrosial lemon-meringue pie. Norbert’s baked Alaska, fudge brownies, and Bing-cherry tarts kept Toby grinning ear to ear. His chocolate parfaits were so lush and uplifting they seemed in themselves a cure.
It was in the Russian Tea Room that Toby and I first noted a curious fashion among Satirevians. About a quarter of them wore sweatshirts emblazoned with a Valentine-style heart poised above the initials H.E.A.R.T. “HEART, what’s that?” my son asked Martina one evening as we were plowing through a particularly outrageous ice-cream treat—a concoction Norbert had dubbed “A Month of Sundaes.”
“It’s a kind of club—the members get together and talk about philosophy,” Martina replied. “You know what philosophy is, Toby?”
“No.”
“The H stands for Happiness, the E for Equals.”
“And the A, R, and T?” asked Toby.
“Art, Reason, and Truth,”
H.E.A.R.T. It was, Martina explained after Toby was went to bed, an organization the year-rounders had formed for the sake of, as she put it, “thinking good thoughts about your son and thereby hastening his cure.” HEART, the Healing and Ecstasy Association for the Recovery of Toby. They met every Tuesday evening. They were planning to start a newsletter.
I had never been so profoudly moved, so totally touched, in my life. My soul sang, my throat got hard as a crab apple. “Martina, that’s terrific. Why didn’t you tell me about HEART?”
“Because it gives me the creeps, that’s why.”
“Huh?”
“Your son is sick, Jack. Sick. He’s going to need more than HEART. He’s going to need…well, a miracle.”
“HEART is a miracle, Martina. Don’t you get it? It is a miracle.”
There is nothing quite so exhilarating as spending large amounts of time with your child, and nothing quite so tedious. I’ll be honest: when Martina offered to relieve me of Toby for an hour or two—she wanted to help him find specimens for his miniature zoo—I told her to take all day. Even Sleeping Beauty’s father, I’m sure, got tired of her on occasion.
It was an hour past his bedtime when Toby returned to the Paradise, laden with the day’s haul—a dozen bottles and cages filled with rubbery newts, glutinous salamanders, spiky centipedes, and disgruntled tree frogs whose cries sounded like bicycle bells.
He could not enjoy them.
“Dad, I don’t feel so good,” he said, setting the various terrariums on the coffee table.
“Oh?” So here it comes, I thought. Now it begins. “What do you mean?”
“My head hurts.” Toby clutched his belly. “And my stomach. Is it those germs, Dad?”
“Just remember, in the long run they can’t hurt you.”
“’Cause of my immune system?”
“Smart boy.”
Toby woke up repeatedly that night, his temperature lurching toward 103, flesh trembling, bones rattling, teeth chattering. He sweated like a bill-picker laboring in the money orchards. I had to change the sheets four times. They stank of brine.
“I think we’d better drop by the hospital tomorrow,” I told him.
“Hospital? I thought I wasn’t really sick.”
“You aren’t really sick.” Oh, the power, the power. “Dr. Krakower wants to give you some medicine, that’s all.”
“I don’t think I can sleep, Dad. Will you read to me about Rumpelstilkskin or pirates or something?”
“Of course. Sure. Just stay happy, and you’ll be fine.”
The next morning, I took Toby to the Ce
nter for Creative Wellness, where he was assigned a place in the children’s ward, a large private room that despite its spaciousness quickly seemed to fill with my son’s disease, a sickly, sallow aura radiating from the bedframe, covering the nightstand, smothering the swaybacked parent’s cot in the far corner. His skin got bluer; his temperature climbed: 103, 104, 104.5, 105, 105.5. By nightfall the lymph nodes under his arm had come to resemble clusters of ossified grapes.
“We can get the fever down with acetaminophen and alcohol baths,” said Dr. Krakower as she guided me into her office. “And I think we should put him on pentamidine. It’s been known to work wonders against Pneumocystis carnii.”
“Genuine wonders?”
“Oh, yes. We’d better set him up for intravenous feeding. I want to try pure oxygen too, maybe an inhalator. It’ll keep his mind clear.”
“Doctor, if there’s no remission…”
“We shouldn’t talk like that.”
“If there’s no remission, how long will he live?”
“Don’t know.”
“Two weeks?”
“Oh, yes, two weeks for sure, Jack. I can practically promise you two weeks.”
Although Martina’s speech-writing job for Borough Representative Doreen Hutter consumed all her mornings, she arranged to spend each afternoon at Toby’s bedside, infusing him with happy thoughts. She invited him to imagine he was gradually entering a state of suspended animation, so that he could become the first boy ever sent beyond our solar system in a spaceship: hence the inhalator squeezing and expanding his chest, conditioning his lungs for interstellar travel; hence the plastic tube flowing into his left arm, giving him enough food for a year in hibernation; hence the plastic mask—the “rocket jockey’s oxygen supply”—strapped over his mouth and nose.
“When you wake up, Toby, you’ll be on another planet—the magical world of Lulaloon!”
“Lulaloon?” The oxygen mask made him sound distant, as if he were already in space. “Is it as good as Satirev?”
“Better.”
“As good as camp Ditch-the-Kids?”
“Twice as good.”
Toby stretched out, putting a crimp in his glucose tube, stopping the flow of what Martina had told him were liquid French fries. “I like your games,” he said.