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  “We aren’t looking at any therapy, Mr. Sperry. At best, we’ll relieve your son’s pain until he dies.”

  “Toby’s only seven,” I said, as if I were a lawyer asking a governor to reprieve an underage client. “He’s only seven years old.”

  “I think I’ll sue that damn camp,” Helen grunted.

  “You’d lose,” said Prendergorst, handing her a stark pamphlet, white letters on black paper: Xavier’s Plague and Xavier’s-Related Syndrome—The News Is All Bad. “I wish I could remember what those toads are called.”

  Had my brainburn not purged me of sentimentality and schmaltz, had it not, as it were, atrophied my tear ducts, I think I would have wept right then. Instead I did something almost as unorthodox. “Dr. Prendergorst,” I began, my hands trembling in my lap like two chilly tarantulas, “I realize that, from your perspective, our son’s chances are nil.”

  “Quite so.”

  I deposited the computer printout on Prendergorst’s desk. “Look here, over twenty articles from The Holistic Health Bulletin, plus the entire Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference on Psychoneuroimmunology and The Collected Minutes of the Fifth International Mind-Body Symposium. Story after story of people thinking their way past heart disease, zapping malignant cells with mental bullets—you name it. Surely you’ve heard of such cases.”

  “Indeed,” said Prendergorst icily.

  “Jack…please,” groaned Helen, wincing with embarrassment. My wife, the Sweet Reason reporter.

  “Miracles happen,” I persisted. “Not commonly, not reliably, but they happen.”

  “Miracles happened,” said Prendergorst, casting a cold eye on the printout. “These incidents all come from the Nightmare Era—they’re all from the Age of Lies. We’re adults now.”

  “It’s basically a matter of giving the patient a positive outlook,” I explained.

  “Please,” hissed Helen.

  “People can cure themselves,” I asserted.

  “I believe it’s time we returned to the real world, Mr. Sperry.” Prendergorst shoved the printout away as if it were contaminated with Xavier’s. “Your wife obviously agrees with me.”

  “Maybe we should bring Toby home next week,” Helen suggested, fanning herself with the pamphlet. “The sooner he knows,” she sighed, “the better.”

  Prendergorst slid a pack of Canceroulette from the breast pocket of his lab coat. “When’s your son scheduled to leave?”

  “On the twenty-seventh,” said Helen.

  “The symptoms won’t start before then. I’d keep him where he is. Why spoil his summer?”

  “But he’ll be living a lie. He’ll go around thinking he’s not dying.”

  “We all go around thinking we’re not dying,” said the doctor with a quick little smile. He removed a cigarette, set the pack on the edge of the desk. WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL’S CRUSADE AGAINST THIS PRODUCT MAY DISTRACT YOU FROM THE MYRIAD WAYS YOUR GOVERNMENT FAILS TO PROTECT YOUR HEALTH. “God, what a depraved species we are. I’m telling you that Toby is mortally ill, and all the while I’m thinking, ‘Hey, my life is really pretty good, isn’t it? No son of mine is dying. Fact is, I take a certain pleasure in these people’s suffering.’”

  “And when the symptoms do start?” Helen folded the pamphlet into queer, tortured origami shapes. “What then?”

  “Nothing dramatic at first. Headaches, joint pains, some hair loss. His skin may acquire a bluish tint.”

  Helen said, “And then?”

  “His lymph nodes will become painful and swollen. His lungs will probably fill with Pneumocystis carinii. His temperature—”

  “Don’t go on,” I said.

  The doctor ignited his cigarette. “Each case is different. Some Xaviers linger for a year, some go in less than a month. In the meantime, we’ll do everything we can, which isn’t much. Demerol, IV nourishment, antibiotics for the secondary infections.”

  “We’ve heard enough,” I said.

  “The worse of it is probably the chills.” Prendergorst took a drag on his cigarette. “Xaviers, they just can’t seem to get warm. We wrap them in electric blankets, and it doesn’t make any—”

  “Please stop,” I pleaded.

  “I’m merely telling the truth,” said the doctor, exhaling a jagged smoke ring.

  All the way home, Helen and I said nothing to each other. Nothing about Toby, nothing about Xavier’s, nothing about miracles—nothing.

  Weirdly, cruelly, my thoughts centered on rabbits. How I would no longer be able to abide their presence in my life. How I would tremble with rage whenever my career required me to criticize a copy of Peter Rabbit or an Easter card bearing some grinning bunny. I might even start seeking the animals out, leaving a trail of mysterious, mutilated corpses in my wake, whiskers plucked, ears torn off, tails severed from their rumps and stuffed down their throats.

  Total silence. Not one word.

  We entered the elevator, pushed 30. The car made a sudden, rapid ascent, like a pearl diver clambering toward the air: second floor, seventh, twelfth…

  “How are you feeling?” I said at last.

  “Not good,” Helen replied.

  “‘Not good’—is that all? ‘Not good’? I feel horrible.”

  “In my case, ‘horrible’ would not be a truthful word.”

  “I feel all knotted and twisted. Like I’m a glove, and somebody’s pulled me inside out”—a bell rang, the numeral 30 flashed above our heads—“and all my vital parts, my heart and lungs, they’re naked and—”

  “You’ve been reading too many of the poems you deconstruct.”

  “I hate your coldness, Helen.”

  “You hate my candor.”

  I left the car, started down the hall. Imagined exchanges haunted me—spectral words, ghostiy vocables, scenes from an intolerable future.

  Dad, what are these lumps under my arms?

  Swollen lymph nodes, Toby.

  Am I sick, Dad?

  Sicker than you can imagine. You have Xavier’s Plague.

  Will I get better?

  No.

  Will I get warm?

  No.

  Will I die?

  Yes.

  What happens when you die, Dad? Do you wake up somewhere else?

  There’s no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the human brain.

  The apartment had turned against me. Echoes of Toby were everywhere, infecting the living room like the virus now replicating in his cells—a child-sized boot, a dozen stray checkers, the miniature Crusaders’ castle he’d built out of balsa wood the day before he went to camp. “How do you like it, Dad?” he’d asked as he set the last turret in place. “It’s somewhat ugly,” I’d replied, flinching at the truth. “It’s pretty lopsided,” I’d added, sadly noting the tears welling up in my son’s eyes.

  On the far wall, the picture window beckoned. I crossed our rugless floor, pressed my palms against the glass. A mile away, a neon sign blazed atop the cathedral in Galileo Square. ASSUMING GOD EXISTS, JESUS MAY HAVE BEEN HIS SON.

  Helen went to the bar and made herself a dry martini, flavoring it with four olives skewered on a toothpick like kabobs. “I wish our son weren’t dying,” she said. “I truly wish it.”

  An odd, impossible sentence formed on my tongue. “Whatever happens, Toby won’t learn the truth.”

  “Huh?”

  “You heard Prendergorst—in the Nightmare Era, terminal patients sometimes tapped their bodies’ natural powers of regeneration. It’s all a matter of attitude. If Toby believes there’s hope, he might have a remission.”

  “But there isn’t any hope.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “I’ll go to him and I’ll say, ‘Buddy, soon the doctors will…the doctors, any day now, they’ll…they’ll c-c…’”

  Cure you—but instead my conditioning kicked in,
a hammerblow in my skull, a hot spasm in my chest.

  “I know the word, Jack. Stop kidding yourself. It’s uncivilized to carry on like this.” Helen sipped her martini. “Want one?”

  “No.”

  I fixed on the metropolis, its bright towers and spangled skyscrapers rising into a misty, starless night. Within my numb and disordered brain, a plan was taking shape, as palpable as any sculpture I’d ever deconstructed at the Wittgenstein.

  “They’re out there,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “They can lie. Maybe they can teach me to lie.”

  “You’re talking irrationally, Jack. I wish you wouldn’t talk irrationally.”

  It was all clear now. “Helen, I’m going to become one of them—I’m going to become a dissembler.” I pulled my hand away, leaving my palm imprinted on the glass like a fortune-teller’s logo. “And then I’m going to convince Toby he has a chance.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

  “Somehow they’ve gotten around the burn. And if they can, I can.”

  Helen lifted the toothpick from her martini glass and sucked the olives into her mouth. “Toby’s hair will start shedding in two weeks. He’s certain to ask what that means.”

  Two weeks. Was that all I had? “I’ll say it means n-n-nothing.” A common illness, I’d tell him. A disease easily licked.

  “Jack—don’t.”

  A mere two weeks. A feeble fourteen days.

  I ran to the kitchen, snatched up the phone. I need to see you, I’d tell her. This isn’t about sex, Martina.

  610-400.

  It rang three times, then came a distant click, ominous and hollow. “The number you have reached,” ran the recorded operator in a harsh, gravelly voice, “is out of service.” My bowels became as hard and cold as a glacier. “Probably an unpaid bill,” the taped message continued. “We’re pretty quick to disconnect in such cases.”

  “Out of service,” I told Helen.

  “Good,” she said.

  7 Lackluster Lane, Descartes Borough.

  Helen polished off her martini. “Now let’s forget this ridiculous notion,” she said. “Let’s face the future with honesty, clearheadedness, and…”

  But already I was out the door.

  Girding the gray and oily Pathogen River, Lackluster Lane was alive with smells: scum, guano, sulfur, methane, decaying eels—a cacophany of stench blaring through the shell of my Adequate. “And, of course, at the center of my opposition to abortion,” said the somber priest on my car radio, “is my belief that sexual intercourse is a fundamentally disgusting practice to begin with.” This was the city’s frankest district, a mass of defunct fishmarkets and abandoned warehouses piled together like dead cells waiting to be sloughed off. “You might even say that, like many of my ilk, I have an instinctive horror of the human body.”

  And suddenly there it was, Number 7, a corrugated tin shanty sitting on a cluster of pylons rising from the Pathogen like mortally ill trees. Gulls swung through the summer air, dropping their guileless excrement on the dock; water lapped against the moored hull of a houseboat, the Average Josephine—a harsh, sucking sound, as if a pride of invisible lions were drinking here. I pulled over.

  A series of narrow, jackknifing gangplanks rose from the nearest pier like a sliding board out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—one of my most memorable forays into film criticism—eventually reaching the landing outside Martina’s door. I climbed. I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again, harder. The door drifted open.

  I called, “Martina?”

  The place had been stripped, emptied out like the Hob’s hare whose photo I’d seen that morning in Prendergorst’s office. The front parlor contained a crumpled beer can, a mousetrap baited with calcified cheddar, some cigarette butts—and nothing else. I went to the kitchen. The sink held a malodorous broth of water, soap, grease, and cornflakes. The shelves were empty.

  “Martina? Martina?”

  In the back room, a naked set of rusting bedsprings sat on a pinewood frame so crooked it might have come from Toby’s workshop.

  I returned to the hot, sour daylight, paused Martina’s landing. A wave of nausea rolled through me, straight to my putative soul.

  Out on the river, a Brutality Squad cutter bore down on an outboard motorboat carrying two men in green panchos. Evidently they were attempting to escape—every paradise will have its dissidents, every utopias its defectors—an ambition abruptly thwarted as a round of machine-gun fire burst from the cutter, killing both fugitives instantly. Their corpses fell into the Pathogen, reddening it like dye markers. I felt a quick rush of qualified sympathy. Such fools. Didn’t they know that for most intents and a majority of purposes Veritas was as good as it gets?

  “Some people…”

  I looked toward the dock. A tall, fortyish, excruciatingly thin man in hip boots and a tattered white sweatshirt stood on the foredeck of Average Josephine.

  “…are so naive,” he continued. “Imagine, trying to run the channel in broad daylight.” He reached through a hole in his shirt and scratched his hairy chest. “Your girlfriend’s gone.”

  “Are you referring to Martina Coventry?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “The little synecdochic cunt owes me two hundred dollars in rent.”

  I descended through the maze of gangplanks. “You’re her landlord?”

  “Mister, in my wretched life I’ve acquired three things of value—this houseboat, that shanty, and my good name.” Martina’s landlord stomped his boot on the deck. He had an extraordinarily chaotic and unseemly beard, like a bird’s nest constructed under a bid system. “You know how much a corporation vice president typically pulls down in a month? Twelve thousand. I’m lucky to see that in a year. Clamming’s a pathetic career.”

  “Clamming?”

  “Well, you can’t make a living renting a damn shanty, that’s for sure,” said the landlord. “Of course, you can’t make one clamming either. You from the Squad? Is Coventry wanted by the law?”

  “I’m not from the Squad.”

  “Good.”

  “But I have to find her. It’s vital.” I approached within five feet of the landlord. He smelled like turtle food. “Can you give me any leads?”

  “Not really. Want some clam chowder? I raked ’em up myself.”

  “You seem like a highly unsanitary person. How do I know your chowder won’t make me ill?”

  He smiled, revealing a severe shortage of teeth. “You’ll have to take your chances.”

  And that’s how I ended up in the snug galley of Average Josephine, savoring the best clam chowder I’d ever eaten.

  His name was Boris—Boris the Clamdigger—and he knew almost as little about Martina as I did. They’d had sex once, in lieu of the rent. Afterwards, he’d read some of her doggerel, and thought it barely suitable for equipping an outhouse. Evidently she’d been promised a job writing greeting-card verses for Cloying and Coy: they’d reneged; she’d run out of cash; she’d panicked and fled.

  “‘Vital,’” Boris muttered. “You said ‘vital,’ and I can tell from your sad eyes, which are a trifle beady, a minor flaw in your moderately handsome face—I can tell ‘vital’ was exactly what you meant. It’s a heavy burden you’re carrying around, something you’d rather not discuss. Don’t worry, Jack, I won’t pry. You see, I rather like you, even though you probably make a lot of money. How much do you make?”

  I stared at my chowder, lumpy with robust clams and bulbous potatoes. “Two thousand a month.”

  “I knew it,” said Boris. “Of course, that’s nothing next to what a real estate agent or a borough rep pulls down. What field?”

  “Art criticism.”

  “I’ve got to get out of clams. I’ve got to get out of Veritas, actually—a dream I don’t mind sharing with somebody who’s not a Squad officer. It’s a big planet, Jack. One day I’ll just pull up anchor and whoosh—I’m g
one.”

  The shock and indignation I should have felt at such perverse musings would not come. “Boris, do you believe in miracles?” I asked.

  “There are times when I don’t believe in anything else. How’s the chowder?”

  “Terrific.”

  “I know.”

  “May I have some more?”

  “No—I want to save the rest for myself.”

  “I don’t see how you’d ever escape,” I said. “The Squad would shoot you down.”

  “Probably.” My host swallowed a large spoonful of his exquisite chowder. “At least I’d be getting out of clams.”

  Four

  Monday: back to work, my flesh like lead, my blood like liquid mercury. I’d spent the previous week locked in the Wittgenstein’s tiny screening room, scrutinizing the fruit of Hollywood’s halcyon days and confirming the archeologists’ suspicions that none of these narratives contained not one frame of truth, and now it was time to deconstruct them, Singin’ in the Rain, Doctor Zhivago, Rocky, the whole deceiving lot. Hour followed hour, day melded into day, but my routine never varied: filling the bathtubs, dumping in the 35mm negatives, watching the triumph of Clorox over illusion. Like souls leaving bodies, the Technicolor emulsions floated free of their bases, disintegrating in the potent, purifying bleach.

  My heart wasn’t in it. Cohn, Warner, Mayer, Thalberg, Selznick—these men were not my enemies. Au contraire, I wanted to be like them; I wanted to be them. Whatever one might say against Hollywood’s moguls, they could all have blessed their ailing children with curative encouragement and therapeutic falsehoods.

  Stanley Marcus stayed away until Thursday, when he suddenly appeared in my coffee cubicle as I was dispiritedly consuming a tuna-fish sandwich and attempting, without success, to drown my sorrows in caffeine. Saying nothing, he took up his broom and sweept the floor with slow, morose strokes.

  “That recommendation letter was pretty nasty,” he said at last, sweating in the July heat. “I wish you hadn’t called me a toady.”

  “I had a choice?”

  “I didn’t get the promotion.”

  “It’s not easy for me to pity you,” I said through a mouthful of tuna, mayo, and Respectable Rye. “I have a sick son. Only lies can cure him.”