City of Truth

Copyright © 1990 by James Morrow, All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with St. Martin's Press. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology in the United States of America only.

CITY OF TRUTH

by James Morrow

ONE

I no longer live in the City of Truth. I have exiled myself from Veritas, from all cities — from the world. The room in which I'm writing is cramped as a county jail and moist as the inside of a lung, but I'm learning to call it home. My only light is a candle, a fat, butter-colored stalk from which nets of melted wax hang like cobwebs. I wonder what it would be like to live in that candle — in the translucent crannies that surround the flame: a fine abode, warm, safe, and snug. I imagine spending my days wandering waxen passages and sitting in paraffin parlors, my nights lying in bed listening to the steady drip-drip-drip of my home consuming itself. My name is Jack Sperry, and I am thirty-six years old. I was born in truth's own city, Veritas, on the last day of its bicentennial year. Like many boys of my generation, I dreamed of becoming an art critic one day: the pure primal thrill of attacking a painting, the sheer visceral kick of savaging a movie or a poem. In my case, however, the dream turned into a reality, for by my twenty-second year I was employed as a deconstructionist down at the Wittgenstein Museum in Plato Borough, giving illusion its due.

Other dreams — wife, children, happy home — came harder. From the very first Helen and I wrestled with the thorny Veritasian question of whether
love
was a truthful term for how we felt about each other — such a misused notion,
love
, a kind of one-word lie — a problem we began ignoring once a more concrete crisis had taken its place.

His sperm are lazy, she thought. Her eggs are duds, I decided. But at last we found the right doctor, the proper pill, and suddenly there was Toby, flourishing inside Helen's redeemed womb: Toby the embryo; Toby the baby; Toby the toddler; Toby the preschool carpenter, forever churning out crooked birdhouses, bent napkin holders, and asymmetrical bookends; Toby the boy naturalist, befriending every slithery, slimy, misbegotten creatures ever to wriggle across the face of the Earth. This was a child with a maggot farm. A roach ranch. A pet slug. "I think I love him," I told Helen one day. "Let's not get carried away," she replied. The morning I met Martina Coventry, Toby was away at Camp Ditch-the-Kids in the untamed outskirts of Kant Borough. He sent us a picture postcard every day, a routine that, I realize in retrospect, was a kind of smuggling operation; once Toby got home, the postcards would all be
there
, waiting to join to his vast collection. To wit:

"Dear Mom and Dad: Today we learned how to survive in case we're ever stranded in the woods — what kind of bark to eat and stuff. Counselor Rick says he never heard of anyone actually using these skills. Your son, Toby." And also:

"Dear Mom and Dad: There's a big rat trap in the pantry here, and guess who always sneaks in at night and finds out what animal got caught and then sets it free?

Me! Counselor Rick says we're boring. Whoops, out of space. Your son, Toby." It was early, barely 7 A.M., but already Booze Before Breakfast was jammed to its crumbling brick walls. I made my way through a conglomeration of cigarette smoke and beer fumes, through frank sweat and honest halitosis. A juke box thumped out Probity singing "Copingly Ever After." The saloon keeper, Jimmy Breeze, brought me the usual — a raspberry Danish and a Bloody Mary — setting them atop the splintery cedar bar. I told him I had no cash but would pay him tomorrow. This was Veritas. I would.

I spotted only one free chair — at a tiny, circular table across from a young woman whose wide face and plump contours boasted, to this beholder's eye, the premier sensuality of a Rubens model. Peter Paul Rubens was much on my mind just then, for I'd recently criticized not only
The Garden of Love
but also
The
Raising of the Cross
.

"Come here often?" she asked as I approached, my plastic-wrapped Danish poised precariously atop my drink. Her abundant terra-cotta hair was compacted into a modest bun. Her ankle-length green dress was made of guileless cambric. I sat down. "Uh-huh," I mumbled, pushing aside the sugar bowl, the napkin dispenser, and the woman's orange peels to make room for my Bloody and Danish.

"I always stop in on my way to the Wittgenstein."

"You're a critic?" Even in the endemic gloom of Booze Before Breakfast, her smooth, unpainted skin glowed.

I nodded. "Jack Sperry."

"Can't say I'm impressed. It doesn't take much intellectual prowess, does it?" She could be as honest as she liked, provided I could watch her voluptuous lips move. "What line are
you
in?" I asked.

"I'm a writer." Her eyes expanded: limpid, generous eyes, the cobalt blue of Salome's So-So Contraceptive Cream. "It has its dangers, of course. There's always that risk of falling into ... what's it called?"

"Metaphor?"

"Metaphor."

There were no metaphors in Veritas. Metaphors were lies. Flesh could be like grass, but it never
was
grass. Use a metaphor in Veritas, and your conditioning instantly possessed you, hammering your skull, searing your heart, dropping you straight to hell in a bucket of pain. So to speak.

"What do you write?" I asked.

"Doggerel. Greeting card messages, advertising jingles, inspirational verses like you see in—"

"Sell much?"

A grimace distorted her luminous face. "I should say I'm an
aspiring
writer."

"I'd like to read some of your doggerel," I said. "And I'd like to have sex with you," I added, wincing at my candor. It wasn't easy being a citizen. Her grimace intensified.

"Sorry if I'm being offensive," I said. "Am I being offensive?"

"You're being offensive."

"Offensive only in the abstract, or offensive to you personally?"

"Both." She slid a wedge of orange into her wondrous mouth. "Are you married?"

"Yes."

"A good marriage?"

"Pretty good."
To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to the degree that
these mischievous and sentimental abstractions have any meaning
: Helen and I had opted for a traditional ceremony. "Our son is terrific. I think I love him."

"If we had an affair" — a furtive smile — "wouldn't you feel guilty?"

"I've never cheated." An affair, I mused. Scary stuff. "Guilt? Yes, of course." I sipped my Bloody Mary. "I believe I could tolerate it."

"Well, you can drop the whole fantasy, Mr. Sperry," said the stranger, a declaration that filled me with an odd mixture of relief and disappointment. "You can put the entire thought out of your—"

"Call me Jack." I unpackaged my Danish; the wrapper dragged away clots of vanilla icing like a band-aid pulling off a scab. "And you're—?"

"Martina Coventry, and at the moment I feel only a mild, easily controlled desire to copulate with you."

"'At the moment,'" I repeated, marveling at how much ambiguity could be packed into a prepositional phrase. In a fashionably gauche move I licked the icing off the Danish wrapper (
The Mendacity of Manners
had recently hit the top slot on the
Times
bestseller list). "Will you show me your doggerel?" I asked.

"It's bad doggerel."

"Doggerel is by definition bad."

"Mine's worse."

"Please."

Martina's pliant features contracted into a bemused frown. "There's a great deal of sexual tension occurring between us now, wouldn't you say?"

"Correct."

She reached into her purse and pulled out a folded sheet of crisp white typing paper, pressing it into my palm with a sheepish wink.

First came a Valentine's Day message.

I find you somewhat interesting,

You're not too short or tall,

And if you'd be my Valentine,

I wouldn't mind at all.

A birthday greeting followed.

Roses drop dead,

Violets do too,

With each day life gets shorter,

Happy birthday to you.

"I have no illusions about earning a living from my doggerel," said Martina, understating the case radically. "What I'd really like is a career writing political speeches. My borough rep almost hired me to run his re-election campaign. 'Cold in person, but highly efficient' — that was the slogan I worked out. In the end, his girlfriend got the job. Do you like my verses, Jack?"

"They're awful."

"I'm going to burn them." Martina kissed an orange slice, sucked out the juice.

"No. Don't. I'd like to have them."

"You would? Why?"

"Because I'm anticipating you'll write something else on the page." From my shirt pocket I produced a ballpoint pen (
Paradox Pen Company — Random Leaks
Common — Sorry
). "Like, say, the information I'll need to find you again."

"So we can have an affair?"

"The thought terrifies me."

"You
are
fairly attractive," Martina observed, taking the pen. Indeed. It's the eyebrows that do it, great bushy extrusions suggesting a predatory mammal of unusual prowess — wolf, bear, leopard — though they draw plenty of support from my straight nose and square jaw. Only when you get to my chin, a pointy, pimply knoll forever covered with stubble, does the illusion of perfection dissolve. "I'm warning you, Jack, I have my own Smith and Wesson Liberalstopper." She signed her name in bold curlicues across the bottom of the page, added her address and phone number. "If you try to force yourself on me, I'll give you fair warning and shoot."

I lifted the doggerel from the table, flicking a Danish crumb from the word
Valentine
. "Funny — you've
almost
told a lie here. Roses don't drop dead, they—

"

"They wither."

"If I were you, Martina, I wouldn't take such chances with my sanity."

"If you were me," she replied, "you
would
take such chances with your sanity, because otherwise you'd be someone else."

"True enough," I said, pocketing Martina Coventry's stultifying verses.

* * *

Thomas More Square was clogged with traffic, a dense metallic knot betokening a delay of at least twenty minutes. I flipped on my Plymouth Adequate's AM radio and began waiting it out. Eighteenth Street, Nineteenth Street, Twentieth...

"...fact that I accepted a fifty thousand dollar kickback during the Avelthorpe Tariff Scandal should not, I feel, detract from my record on education, the environment, and medical..."

Twenty-fifth Street, Twenty-sixth Street, Twenty-seventh...

"...for while we do indeed divert an enormous amount of protein that might be employed in relieving world hunger, the psychological benefits of dogs and cats have been proved almost beyond the shadow of a..."

Thirtieth Street, Thirty-first...

"...displeased with the unconscionable quantities of sugar we were putting in children's cereals, and so we're happy to announce a new policy of..." At last: the Wittgenstein Museum, a one-story brick building sprawling amid a vast concrete courtyard, flanked by a Brutality Squad station on the north side and a cafe called the Dirty Dog on the south. The guard, a toothy, clean-cut young man with a Remington Second Amendment belted to his waist, waved me through the iron gates. I headed for the parking lot. Derrick Popkes of the Egyptian Relics Division had beaten me to my usual space, usurping it with his Ford Sufficient, so I had to drive all the way to the main incinerator and park by the coal bin.

"Channel your violent impulses in a salutary direction — become a Marine. Purge your natural tendency toward—" I snapped off the radio, killed the engine. What had life been like during the Age of Lies? How had the human mind endured a world where politicians misled, advertisers overstated, clerics exaggerated, women wore makeup, and people professed love at the drop of a tropological hat?

How had humanity survived the epoch we'd all read about in the history books, those nightmare centuries of casuistic customs and fraudulent rites? The idea confounded me. It rattled me to the core. The Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: staggering.

"You're late," observed the chief curator, bald and portly Arnold Cook, as I strolled into the front office. "Heavy traffic?"

"Yes." I jammed my card into the time clock, felt the jolt of its mechanism imprinting my tardiness. "Bumper to bumper." Every so often, you'd experience an urge to stop short of total candor, an impulse to omit some self-damning piece of the truth. But then suddenly it would come: a dull neurological throb that, if you didn't tell all, would quickly bloom into a psychosomatic explosion in your skull. "I also wasted a lot of time getting a young woman's address."

"Do you expect to copulate with her?" Mr. Cook asked, following me to the changing room. Early morning, yet already he was coated with characteristic sweat, droplets that, as I once told him in a particularly painful exercise of civic duty, put me in mind of cat urine.