City of Truth (5 page)

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

"Nothing dramatic at first. Headaches, leg cramps, 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 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. Words haunted me, little ghostly vocables, scenes from an unwanted future.

— Dad, what are these lumps under my arms?

— Swollen lymph nodes.

— 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. Bits 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 twelfth-century 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 crooked," I'd added, sadly noting the tears welling up in his 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 Thomas More Square. ASSUMING GOD EXISTS, it said, 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."

"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 criticized at the Wittgenstein.

"They're out there," I said.

"What?"

"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."

"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.

And I thought: 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 FM radio, "is my belief that sex 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 perched atop 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 nearby houseboat, the
Average Josephine
— a harsh, sucking sound, as if a pride of invisible lions were drinking here. I pulled over.

A conjunction of narrow, jackknifing gangplanks brought me to the landing outside Martina's door. I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again. The door drifted open under the force of my knuckles.

I called, "Martina?"

The place had been stripped, emptied out like the Hob's hare whose photo I'd seen 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 cabinets were all empty.

"Martina? Martina?"

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

I returned to the hot, sour daylight, paused on the 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, all utopias their 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. A qualified sympathy poured out of me. Such fools. Didn't they know that for most intents and the majority of purposes Veritas was as good as it gets?

A male voice said, "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
.

"Some people 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 little 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 Brutality 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 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 a privy. Evidently she'd been promised a job writing verses for the Cloying and Coy Greeting Card Company: they'd reneged; she'd run out of cash; she'd fled in a panic.

"'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. You can still find some surprises out there. One day I'll just pull up anchor and
whoosh
— I'm gone."

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. Want some more?"

"Sure."

"I don't see how you'd ever escape," I told Boris. "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 leaden, 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 a single frame of truth, and now it was time to deconstruct them. 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. Whatever one might say against Hollywood's moguls, they could all have blessed their ailing children with 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 began sweeping the floor with slow, morose strokes.