City of Truth (9 page)

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 200-degree snowflakes, you cannot but accept their reality. When every particle of your concentration is fixed upon blasting a winged pig out of the sky, you do not question its species's 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 atop glistening steel stalks — resembled Art Decco mushrooms. The menu bulged with carnivoral delights — with 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 food arrived.

"An understatement," I replied.

Lucky twisted the cap off a bottle of Semitomato 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 cheeseburger. He pondered the question for nearly a minute. At last he raised his head, closed his eyes tightly, and issued the sort of delighted yelp an Age-of-Lies child might have voiced on Christmas morning.

"Pigs have wings!"

"What did you say?"

"W-w-wings!" William leaped from his chair and began dancing 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, grinning spectacularly.

"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. "Tell me about snow, Jack," he commanded. "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.

"Snow is 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 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 pumped full of either lies or scopolamine, illusion or amnesia; there was no third path.

"Treatment isn't taking, huh?" said Franz as he approached.

"I'm beaten," I groaned.

Franz removed his Panama, placing it over his heart — a gesture of grief, I decided, anticipatory mourning for Toby Sperry.

"You have a visitor," he said.

"Huh?"

"Visitor."

"Who?"

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 Avingnon
.

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?" Martina came toward me, her extended hand fluttering like a wondrous bird. "You look unhappy, dear."

"I'm no Satirevian." I reached out and captured her plump fingers. "I never shall 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, stretched out. She looked like a relief map of some particularly 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 Plymouth 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, hut after hut, 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 Ditch-the-Kids T-shirts marched by clutching fishing rods. Their counselor explained 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 paper 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, frozen in astonishment at hearing my praise.

"Dad, what are
you
doing here?"

I hadn't seen him in a month. He seemed taller, leaner, darker — older —

standing there in his grimy Ditch-the-Kids T-shirt and the bluejeans 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 salubrious 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 at the station."

"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. 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 Bruno 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, crooked little 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 exclaimed, hopping up and down, his skin aglow. "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. The Paradise guards immediately learned our faces, letting us come and go as we pleased. As 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.