City of Truth Read online

  “I’d prefer not to say.” Martina splayed her fingers, working free of my grasp. “Ultimately there’d be nothing in it for either of us, nothing but grief.” She climbed into her gondola and, assuming the pilot’s position in the stern, lowered her oar. “I’m certain you’ll become a Satirevian,” she said, casting off. “I have great faith in you, Jack,” she called as she vanished into the three-thousand-watt sunrise.

  The current carried Franz and me south, past a succession of riverfront cottages encrusted with casuistry: welcome mats, flower boxes, plaster lawn ornaments in the forms of Cupids and little Dutch girls. My guardian landed the gondola before a two-story clapboard building painted a bright pink and surmounted by the words HOTEL PARADISE in flashing neon. A stone wall hemmed the grounds, broken by a massive gateway in which was suspended an iron portcullis, also painted pink. Bars of pink iron crisscrossed the hotel windows like strokes of a censor’s pen.

  A sudden skreee: the portcullis, ascending with the grinding gracelessness of an automated garage door. Franz led me beneath the archway, up a pink cement path, and through the central portal to the front desk. He gave my name to the clerk—Leopold, according to his badge—a horse-faced, overweight, fortyish man dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt. After confirming that they were indeed expecting a Jack Sperry from Plato Borough, Leopold issued me a pink tunic with NOVITIATE stamped on the chest. It was as baggy as a gown from the Center for Creative Wellness, and I had no trouble slipping it on over my street clothes.

  “You look real spiffy in that,” said Leopold.

  “You’re one of the homeliest people I’ve ever seen,” I felt bound to inform him.

  The chief bellhop, a spidery old man whose skin resembled a cantaloupe rind, guided me down a long hallway decorated with Giotto and Rembrandt reproductions, Franz following as always, my eternal shadow. We paused before a pink, riveted door that seemed more likely to lead to a bank vault than to a hotel room—it even had a combination lock. “Your suite,” the bellhop said as the three of us stepped inside.

  Suite. Sure. It was smaller than the Holy See, and sparser: no rugs, no chairs, no windows. The walls were clean and predictably pink. Two male novitiates, one tall, one short, rested on adjacent cots, smoking cigarettes. “Your roommates,” said the bellhop as he and Franz exited. The door thudded shut, then came the muffled clicks of the tumblers being randomized.

  “I’m William,” said my tall roommate; he could have been a power forward with the Plato Borough Competents. “William Bell.”

  “Ira Temple,” said his scrawny companion.

  “Jack Sperry,” I said.

  We spent the next hour swapping life stories.

  Ira, I learned, was a typical dissembler-in-training. He hated Veritas. He had to get out. Anything, he argued, even dishonesty, was superior to what he called his native city’s confusion of the empirical with the true.

  William’s story was closer to my own. His older sister, Charlotte, the one person on Earth who mattered to him, had recently landed on Amaranth, a planet that existed only in her mind. By learning to lie, William reasoned, he might travel to Charlotte’s mythic world and either release her from its mad gravity or take up residence there himself.

  The door swung open and in came a small, dusky, stoop-shouldered man with a bald head and a style of walking that put me in mind of a duck with osteoporosis. “During the upcoming week, you’re all going to fall in love with me,” he said abrupty, waving his clipboard. “I’m going to treat you so well, you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.” He issued a wicked little wink. “That’s a lie. I’m Gregory Harness, Manny Ginsburg’s liaison. You may call me Lucky,” he said with an insistent, rapid-fire bonhomie. “The Pope deeply regrets not being here to orient you personally, but his busy schedule did not permit…anyhow, you get the drift of his bullshit. Which one of you’s Sperry?”

  I raised my hand.

  “I heard about your sick child,” said Lucky. “Heart-rending. Tragic. Believe me, Sperry, I’ll be rooting for you all the way.”

  And so it was upon us, our absorption in lies, our descent into deception, our headlong, brainfirst plunge into Satirevian reality.

  At the crack of dawn Lucky herded us into his pickup truck and took us to a place where money grew on trees, a pecuniary orchard so vast it could have paid the interest on Veritas’s national debt. We spent a sweaty, grueling day under the celestial lamps, harvesting basket after basket of five-dollar bills.

  On Tuesday morning the weather engineers contrived a fearsome blizzard, squall upon squall of molten snow bringing Satirev to a total standstill and inspiring Lucky to issue us broad-scooped shovels. “Clean it up,” he demanded, “every highway, street, alley, path, sidewalk, and wharf.” And so we did, our skin erupting in second-degree burns as we carried great heaps of steaming precipitate to the Jordan and dropped them over the banks. Lucky mopped our brows with towels dipped in ice water, slacked our thirst with lemonade, soothed our blistered skin with eucalyptus oil—but he kept us on the job all day.

  Wednesday: a tedious morning of shoeing six-legged horses, a wearying afternoon of arranging and rearranging the contents of a Satirevian rock garden. My companions and I felt that, for stones, these creatures were extraordinarily loquacious and singularly self-pitying. The stones lamented their lack of mobility and prestige. They said it was hell being a stone. Cut them, they claimed, and they would bleed.

  Further lies, Thursday’s lies—our task master loaded his truck with cans of spray paint and shunted us across Satirev, stopping at every public park along the way and ordering us to turn the grass purple, the roses blue, and the violets red, an ordeal that left my co-apprentices and me so speckled we looked like amalgams of all the Jackson Pollocks I’d ever criticized. That night, as I lay on my cot in the Paradise, my stunned brain swirled with deceptions—with lavender cabbages and crimson potatoes, with indigo jungles and chartreuse icebergs, with square baseballs, skinny whales, tall dwarves, and snakes with long, pale, supple legs.

  More lies—lies, lies, lies. On Friday, Lucky gave us .22-caliber hunting rifles, instructed us in their use and, exploiting the handicap of our Veritasian upbringings, made us swear we wouldn’t use them to escape. “Before the day is out, you must each bring down a flying pig. Don’t let the low comedy of their anatomy fool you—they’re smarter than they look.” Thus did I find myself crouched behind a forest of cat-o’-nine-tails on the banks of the Jordan, my .22 poised on my knees, my mind turning over the manifest rationale behind my deconditioning. A black, bulbous shape glided across the river, like the shadow that might be cast by a gigantic horsefly, and I recalled the perusal I’d made of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland before criticizing it. “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things.” I grabbed the rifle, took aim; the shape flew along the equator of my telescopic sights, eastward to the axis. “Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—of cabbages and kings.” I fired. “And why the sea is boiling hot.” The bewildered animal fell squealing. “And whether pigs have wings.” My bleeding prey hit the water.

  When your every muscle aches with the effects of a currency harvest, you do not doubt that money grows on trees. When your entire epidermis is branded with the aftermath of two-hundred-degree snowflakes, you cannot but accept their reality. When every ounce of your concentration is fixed upon blasting a winged pig out of the sky, you do not question its species’ ontological status.

  The Hotel Paradise had but one eatery, an immaculate malt shop called the Russian Tea Room, and on Friday night Lucky took us there for dinner. Brilliant white tiles covered the walls. The stools—red vinyl cushions poised on glistening steel stalks—resembled Art Decco mushrooms. The menu featured murdered cows, euphemistically named “cheese steaks,” “hot dogs,” “hamburgers,” “beef tacos.” Lucky told us to order whatever we liked.

  “I’ve been driving you all pretty hard,” he confessed after our meals arrived.

  “An underst
atement,” I replied.

  Lucky twisted the cap off a bottle of Quasitomato Ketchup from Veritas. “Tell me, men, do you feel any different?”

  “Different?” said Ira Temple, voraciously consuming a “beef taco.” “Not really.”

  William Bell bit into his “cheeseburger.” “I’m the same man I always was.”

  “Saturday’s schedule is pretty intense,” said Lucky, shaking blobs of ketchup onto his French fries. “You’ll be digging sugar out of the salt mines, attending a linguistics seminar with some golden retrievers, carrying steer haunches over to the Pope for him to bless. In my experience, though, if you’re not a liar by now, you never will be.” With a directness rarely found in Satirev, Lucky looked William in the eye. “What do pigs have, son?”

  “Huh?”

  “Pigs. What do they have? You’ve been dealing with pigs lately—you know about them.”

  William stared at his half-eaten cow. He pondered the question for nearly a minute. At last he raised his head, closed his eyes tightly, and let out the sort of delighted yelp an Age-of-Lies child might have issued on Christmas morning. “Pigs have w-wings!”

  “What did you say?”

  “W-w-wings!” William leaped from his chair and danced around the table. “Wings!” he sang. “Wings! Pigs have wings!”

  “Good job, William!” Ira shouted, his face betraying a mixture of envy and anxiety.

  Lucky smiled, ate a fry, and thrust his fork toward Ira. “Now—you. Tell me about money, Ira. Where does money grow?”

  Ira took a deep breath. “Well, that’s not an easy question. Some people would say it doesn’t grow at all. Others might argue…”

  “Money, son. Where does money grow?”

  “On trees!” Ira suddenly screamed.

  “On what?”

  “Money grows on trees!”

  “And I’m the Queen of Sheba!” said William.

  “I’m the King of France!” said Ira.

  “I can fly!” said William.

  “I can walk on water!” said Ira.

  “God protects the innocent!”

  “The guilty never go free!”

  “Love is eternal!”

  “Life is too!”

  Lucky laid his knobby hand on my shoulder. “What’s the deal with snow, Jack,” he asked. “What is snow like?”

  The appropriate word formed in my brain. I could sense it riding the tip of my tongue like a grain of sand. “It’s…it’s…”

  “Is it hot, for example?” asked Lucky.

  “Snow is h-h-h—”

  “Hot?”

  “Cold!” I shrieked. “Snow is cold,” I moaned.

  William shot me an agonized glance. “Jack, you’ve got it all wrong.”

  “Don’t you remember that blizzard?” asked Ira.

  I quivered with nausea, reeled with defeat. Damn. Shit. “The stuff they make here is a fraud.” Jack Sperry versus Xavier’s Plague—and now the disease would win. “It’s not snow at all.”

  “Snow is hot,” said Ira.

  “It’s cold!” Rising from my chair, I stumbled blindly around the Russian Tea Room. “Pigs don’t fly! Dogs don’t talk! Truth is beauty!”

  I left.

  The hotel lobby was dark and pungent, suffused with the Jordan’s sugary aroma. The night clerk slept at his post. Franz Beauchamp sat in a wicker chair beside a potted palm, his long face shadowed by a Panama hat.

  I staggered to the front door. It was locked. But of course: one left Satirev filled with either lies or scopolamine, illusion or amnesia; there was no third path.

  “Treatment isn’t taking, huh?” said Franz as he approached. “Don’t be discouraged.”

  “I’m beaten,” I groaned.

  “Now, now—you still have tomorrow.” Franz removed his Panama, placing it over his heart—a gesture of grief, I decided, anticipatory mourning for Toby Sperry. “Someone wants to see you,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “You have a visitor.”

  “Who?”

  “This way.”

  He led me past the sleeping clerk and down the east corridor to a steel door uncharacteristically free of catches, bolts, and locks. The sign said, VIDEO GAMES. Franz turned the handle.

  There were no video games in the Video Games Room.

  There was a blood-red billiard table.

  A print of Picasso’s The Young Women of Avignon.

  Martina Coventry.

  “Hi, critic. We had a date, remember?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’d forgotten.”

  “‘To tell you the truth’? What kind of talk is that for a Satirevian?” Martina came toward me, her extended hand fluttering like a hummingbird. “You look unhappy, dear.”

  “I’m no Satirevian.” I reached out and captured her plump fingers. “Never will be.”

  Martina tapped the brim of Franz’s Panama. “Mr. Sperry and I require privacy,” she told him. “Don’t worry, we’re not going to have sex or anything.”

  Though convulsed with misery and self-loathing, I nevertheless noticed how Martina was dressed. If employed as a lampshade, her miniskirt wouldn’t have reached the socket. The strap of her madras bag lay along her cleavage, pulling her LIFE IS A BANQUET T-shirt tight against her body and making her breasts seem like two adjacent spinnakers puffed full of wind.

  Franz tipped his hat and ducked out of the room.

  “Let’s get your mind off your deconditioning.” Martina hopped onto the table and stretched out. She looked like a relief map of some particularly lewd and mountainous nation. “Lie down next to me.”

  “Not a good idea,” I said. True: a roll on the felt wasn’t going to solve my problems. I should be pumping Martina’s mind and no other part of her; I should be trying to learn how she herself had managed the crucial transition from Veritasian to liar.

  She said, “You don’t want to?”

  I gulped loudly. “No, I don’t.” My blood lurched toward the temperature of Sartirevian snow.

  “No?”

  “I’m married, remember? I don’t want to have sex with you.”

  I did, of course. In my heart of hearts, I did—and now came the correlative of my desire, drawing both Martina’s attention and my own.

  I don’t want to have sex with you, I’d said.

  Yet here was the resolute little hero, shaping the crotch of my overalls into a denim sculpture.

  So I’d lied! For the first time since my brainburn, I’d lied!

  I pulled off my tunic, slipped out of my overalls. “‘I hide my wings inside my soul,’” I quoted, climbing atop Martina.

  Deftly she removed my undershorts; my erection broke free, a priapic jailbreak. I’d done it, by damn. I might have a Veritasian penis, but I’d finally acquired a Satirevian tongue.

  “‘Their feathers soft and dry’!” I cried, shucking off Martina’s skirt.

  “‘And when the world’s not looking’!” she whooped.

  “‘I take them out and fly’!”

  I had to apply the brakes on my Adequate almost a dozen times as I descended the southern face of Mount Prosaic and headed into the lush green valley below. Cabin after cabin, tent after tent, Camp Ditch-the-Kids was strung along a strip of pine barren midway between the swiftly flowing Wishywashy and a placid oxbow lake. For the first time, it occurred to me that Toby might not like the idea of leaving two days early. With its fearsome dedication to frivolity, its endless amusements and diversions, Ditch-the-Kids was the sort of place a seven-year-old could easily imagine living in forever.

  As I pulled up behind the administration building, a gang of preadolescent children in yellow Ditch-the-Kids T-shirts marched by, clutching fishing rods. I studied their faces. No Toby. Snatches of the counselor’s pep talk drifted toward me, something to the effect that acid rain was sterilizing Lake Commonplace so it really didn’t matter how much they caught, the fish were all doomed anyway.

  I entered the building, a slapdash pile of tar pap
er and cedar shingles. A grizzled man with a three-day beard sat behind the desk, reading the August issue of Beatoff.

  “I’m Toby Sperry’s father,” I said. “Are you’re…?”

  “Ralph Kitto.” The camp director eyed me suspiciously. “Look, Mr. Sperry, there’s no question we were pretty irresponsible, leaving that rat trap out in the open as we did, but I doubt you have a criminal case against us.”

  “It’s not my intention to sue you,” I told him, savoring the spectacle of joy and relief blossoming on his face. Little did he know I could’ve been lying.

  “Will Toby be okay? I’ve been feeling a certain amount of guilt about this matter. Nothing I can’t handle, but—”

  “I’m here to bring him home,” I said. “He’s going into the hospital tomorrow.”

  “Life is a tough business, isn’t it?” Ralph Kitto fanned himself with Beatoff. “Take me, for example. Sure wish I could find a better line of work.”

  “I imagine these kids drive you crazy—figuratively crazy.”

  “Vodka helps. I get drunk frequently.”

  Kitto consulted his master schedule and told me Toby was probably still on the archery field, a half mile south down the Wishywashy. I paid the balance due on my son’s tuition, thanked the director for his willingness to take on such an unrewarding job, and set out along the river.

  When I arrived, my son had just missed the bull’s-eye by less than an inch.

  “Nice shooting, Toby, old buddy!”

  He maintained his bowman’s stance, transfixed not only by the fact of my arrival but also, no doubt, by the content of my greeting. “Dad, what are you doing here?”

  I hadn’t seen him in a month. He seemed taller, leaner, swarthier—older—standing there in his grimy yellow T-shirt and the blue jeans he’d shredded into shorts last spring.

  “I’ve come for you,” I told him, moving as close as I could without making it obvious I was scanning him for symptoms. His hair was as thick, dark, and healthy-looking as ever. His eyes sparkled, his frame looked firm, his tanned skin held no trace of blue.

  “No, I’m taking the bus Sunday.” He nocked an arrow. “Mom’s picking me up.”