City of Truth (13 page)

Stunned and gutted, the five of us wandered into the living room, a space now jammed with terrible particulars, the Power Pony, the plush giraffe, all of it. Helen offered us a lunch of sliced Up-to-Snuff Cheddar on Respectable Rye. No one was hungry. Collecting by the picture window, we looked down at the City of Truth. Veritas, the vera-city; curiously, the pun had never occurred to me before. I followed William and Ira to the elevator, mumbling my incoherent gratitude. Unlike the HEART members, they sympathized tastefully; their melancholy was measured, their tears small and rationed. Only as the elevator door slammed shut did I hear William cry out, "It isn't
fair
!" Indeed.

I returned to the living room. Martina was still near the picture window, rooted like a moneytree. "Stay," I told her. "That's all right, isn't it, Helen? Martina is Toby's friend. She can stay, right?"

Instead of answering, Helen simply stared at Martina and said, "You're exactly as I imagined you'd be. I guess you can't help looking like a slut."

"Helen, we're all very upset," I said, "but that sort of talk isn't necessary." My wife lit a cigarette, the first time I'd seen her smoke in years, and sank into the couch, drained, defeated. "I'm upset," she agreed, blowing out smoke.

"Toby was so happy to see you," Martina told her. "I'll bet he'll start doing a lot better now that you're with him."

"Don't lie to me, Miss Coventry. I'm sorry I was rude — but don't lie." Martina was lying, and yet as evening drew near Toby indeed seemed to rally. His fever dropped to 101. He began making demands of us — Helen must bring his Power Pony into the room, Martina must tell him the story of Rumpelstiltskin. I suspected that the infusion of familiarity — these precious glimpses of his wallpaper, closet door, postcard collection, and benighted carpentry projects — was having a placebo effect.

Placebos were lies.

While Martina entertained Toby with a facetious retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, a version in which the miller's daughter had to spin bellybutton lint into peanut butter sandwiches, Helen and I made coffee in the kitchen.

"Do you love her?" she asked.

"Martina? No." I didn't. Not any longer.

"How can I know if you're telling the truth?"

"You'll have to trust me."

We agreed to keep the marriage going. We sensed we would need each other in the near future: the machinery of grief was new to us, our tears were still foreign and scary.

At five o'clock the next morning, Toby died. During his final hour, Helen and I positioned him on Chocolate and let him pretend to ride. We rocked him back and forth, telling him we loved him. He said it was a great Power Pony. He died in the saddle, like a cowboy. The final cause was asphyxiation, I suppose; his lungs belonged to
Pneumocystis carnii
and not to Veritas's soiled and damaged air. His penultimate word, coughed into the cavity of his mask, was "cold." His last word was "Rumpelstiltskin."

We set him back in bed and tucked Barnaby Baboon under his arm. Guiding Martina into the hallway, I gave her a good-bye hug. No doubt our paths would cross again, I told her. Perhaps I'd see her at the upcoming Christmas assault on Circumspect Park.

"Your wife loved him," Martina said, pushing the elevator's
Down
button.

"More than she knew."
Bong
, the car arrived. "I made him happy for awhile, didn't I? For a few weeks, he was happy."

Behind Martina, the elevator door opened. "You made him happy," she said, stepping out of my life.

I shambled into the kitchen and telephoned my sister.

"I wish my nephew hadn't died," she reported. "Though I will say this — I'm counting my blessings right now: Connie, my good health, my job. Yes, sir, something like this, it really makes you count your blessings."

"Meet us in an hour. 7 Lackluster Lane. Descartes Borough." Helen and I wrapped Toby's tiny corpse in polyurethene bags. Barnaby Baboon was part of him now, fastened by rigor mortis. We hauled him onto the elevator, brought him down to street level, and loaded him into the back of my Adequate. As we drove across town, political campaign ads leaped from the radio, including one for Doreen Hutter, the borough rep for whom Martina had been writing. "While
one
of my teenage boys is undeniably a drug addict and a car thief," she said, "the
other
spends his after-school hours reading to the blind and..." I pictured Martina writing those lines, scribbling them down in the margins of her doggerel.

Reaching the waterfront district, I pulled up beside the wharf where
Average
Josephine
was moored. Boris sat on the foredeck, wrapping duck tape around the fractured handle of a clamming rake, chatting with Gloria and Connie. I fixed on my sister's eyes — dry, obscenely dry — shifted to my niece's — dry. Thank the alleged God: Boris grasped the situation at once. So Toby wanted to be buried at sea? All right, no problem — the canvas sack would work fine: a few bricks, a few rocks...

He brought
Average Josephine
into the channel at full speed, dropping anchor near the north shore, below a sheer cliff pocked with tern rookeries. Wheeling across the water, the birds scolded us fiercely, defending their airy turf like angry, outsized bees.

Boris dragged Santa Claus's sack to the stern and set it on the grubby, algae-coated deck. "I hear you were quite a lad, little Toby," he said, cinching the sack closed with a length of waterproof hemp. "I'm sorry I never knew you."

"Even though you can't hear me, I am at this moment moved to bid you good-bye," said Gloria. "I feel rather guilty about not paying more attention to you."

"The fact of the matter is that I'm bored," said Connie. "Not that I didn't
like
Toby. Indeed, I'm somewhat sorry we hardly ever played together." Boris lifted the Santa sack, balancing it on the transom with his hairy, weatherworn hand.

"I miss you, son," I said. "I miss you so much." Boris raised his palm, and the sack lurched toward the water like the aquatic armadillo Toby had caught and freed on the Jordan. As it hit the channel, Helen said, simply: "I love you, Toby." She said it over and over, long after the sack had sunk from view.

"It'll be dark in an hour," Boris told me. "How about we just keep on going?"

"Huh?"

"You know — keep on going. Get out of this crazy city."

"Leave?"

"Think it over."

I didn't need to.

* * *

I'm a liar now. I could easily fill these final passages with a disingenuous account of what befell us after we set Gloria and Connie back on shore and returned to the river: our breathless shootout with the Brutality Squad, our narrow escape up the inlet, our daring flight to the sea. But the simple fact is that no such melodrama occurred. Through some bright existential miracle we cruised free of Veritas that night without encountering a single police cutter, shore battery, or floating mine. We've been sailing the broad and stormy Caribbean for nearly three years now, visiting the same landfalls Columbus once touched — Trinidad, Tobago, Barbados

— filling up on fruit and fresh water, course uncharted, future unmapped, destination unsettled. We have no wish to root ourselves. At the moment
Average Josephine
is home enough.

My syndrome, I'm told, is normal. The nightmares, the sudden rages, the out-of-context screams, the time I smashed the ship-to-shore radio — all these behaviors, I've heard, are to be expected.

You see, I want him back.

It's getting dark. I'm composing by candlelight, in our gloomy galley, my pen nib scuttling across the page like a cockroach scavenging a greasy fragment of tin foil. My wife and the clamdigger come in. Boris asks me if I want coffee. I tell him no.

"Hi, Daddy." Little Andrea sits on Helen's shoulders like a yoke.

"Hi, darling," I say. "Will you sing me a song?" I ask my daughter. Before I destroyed the radio, a startling bit of news came through. I'm still trying to deal with it. Last October, some bright young research chemist at Voltaire University discovered a cure for Xavier's Plague.

Andrea climbs down. "I'd be
deee-lighted
to sing you a song." She's only two and a half, but she talks as well as any four-year-old.

Boris makes himself a cup of Fran's Fairish.

Out of the blue, Helen asks, "Did you have sex with that woman?"

"With what woman?"

"Martina Covington. Did you?"

I can answer however I wish. "Why are you asking
now
?"

"Because I want to know now. Did you ever—?"

"Yes," I say. "Once. Are you upset?"

"I'm upset," says Helen. "But I'd be more upset if you'd lied." Andrea scrambles into my lap. Her face, I note with great pleasure, is a perfect melding of Helen's features and my own. "I hide my wings inside my soul," she sings, lyrics by Martina Coventry, music by Andrea Sperry.

"Their feathers soft and dry," my daughter and I sing together. Her melody is part lament, part hymn.

Now Helen and Boris join in, as if my Satirevian training has somehow rubbed off on them. The lies cause them no apparent pain.

"And when the world's not looking..."

We're in perfect harmony, the four of us. I don't hate the lies, I realize as we trill the final line — our cloying little denial of gravity — but I don't love them either.

"We take them out and fly," we all sing, and even though I'm wingless as a Veritasian pig, I feel as if I'm finally getting somewhere.

The End