City of Truth (8 page)

"To begin with, he's a year-rounder. Lives here all the time." For most dissemblers, Martina elaborated, Satirev was a pied-a-terre, locus of the periodic pilgrimages through which one renewed one's talent for mendacity, whereas Pope Manny never left. "It's made him a little nuts," she explained.

"I'm not surprised," I said as an aquatic ferret leaped out of the Jordan and snatched an unsuspecting polka-dotted frog from the shore.

"Play up your devotion to your kid," Martina advised. "How you'd move heaven and earth to cure him."

"And don't look the old man in the eye," said Franz. "He hates directness." My guardian landed us at a trim, sturdy, immaculately whitewashed dock, its pilings decorated with ceramic replicas of pelicans and sea gulls. An equally clean and appealing structure rose from the shore — a bait shack or possibly a fisherman's hut. A German shepherd lay on the welcome mat, head bobbing in languid circles as he tracked a dragonfly.

"The Holy See," said Martina, pointing.

"It's a bait shack," I corrected her.

"It's the Holy See," said Franz as he lashed his gondola to the dock.

"Maybe we don't have the budget we'd like around here," said the dog, "but it's still the Holy See."

I didn't bat an eye. I was getting used to this sort of thing. The door swished open on well-oiled hinges and a short, nervous, walleyed man in his seventies ambled onto the dock wearing a brilliant white polyester suit and a yarmulke. He told Martina and Franz to come back for me in an hour.

"Care for a cup of fresh-perked coffee?" asked Manny Ginsburg as he led me into his one-room riverfront abode. The German shepherd followed, claws clicking on the wooden floor. "It's quite tasty."

"Sure," I said, glancing around. Manny's shack was as spotless within as without.

"Pull up a chair."

There were no chairs. I sat on the rug.

"I'm Zeke, by the way," said the dog, offering me his paw.

"Jack Sperry," I said, shaking limb extremities with Zeke. "You talk," I observed.

"A bioelectronic implant, modifying my larynx."

Manny sidled into the kitchenette. Lifting a copper kettle from his kerosene stove, he filled a pair of earthenware mugs with boiling water then added heaping spoonfuls of Fran's Fairish Coffee Crystals.

"You said fresh," I noted with Veritasian candor.

"It's fresh to
us
," said the Pope.

"Want to hear a talking dog joke?" Zeke inquired.

"No," I replied, truthfully.

"Oh," said the dog, evidently wounded by my frankness. Manny returned from the kitchenette with a Coca-Cola tray bearing the coffee mugs plus a cream pitcher and a canister marked
Salt
.

"It's a sterile world up there. Sterile, stifling, spiritually depleting." Manny set the tray beside me and rolled his eyes heavenward. "And before long it will all be ours. You doubt me? Listen — already we've placed twenty dissemblers in the legislature. A person with our talents has no trouble getting elected."

"You mean — you're going to conquer Veritas?" I asked, making a point of not looking Manny in the eye.

The Pope slammed his palms against his ears. "
Please
."

"Don't say 'conquer,'" admonished the dog.

"We're going to
reform
Veritas," said Manny. I fixed on the rug. "Truth is beauty, your holiness." Splaying my fingers, I ticked off a familiar litany. "In the Age of Lies, politicians misled, advertisers overstated, clerics exaggerated—"

"Satirev's founders had nothing against telling the truth." Manny tapped his yarmulke. "But they hated their inability to do otherwise. Honesty without choice, they said, is slavery with a smile." He pointed toward the ceiling with his coffee mug. "Truth above..." He set his mug on the floor. "Dignity below." He chuckled softly. "In Satirev, we opt for the latter. Do you like it sweet?"

"Dignity?"

"Coffee."

"I
would
like some sugar, matter of fact."

The Pope handed me the salt canister. I shook some grains into my palm and licked. It was sugar.

"My heart is broken," said Manny, laying a hand on his chest. "I feel absolutely devastated about your Toby."

"You do?"

"I'm crushed."

"You don't even know him."

"What you're doing is so
noble
."

"I think so too," said Zeke. "And I'm only a dog." Manny shook Satirevian salt into his coffee. "I have just one question. Listen carefully. Do you love your son?"

"That would depend on—"

"I don't mean love him, I mean
love
him. Crazy, unconditional, non-Veritasian love."

Surprisingly — to myself if not the Pope — I didn't have to think about my answer. "I love him," I asserted. "Crazy, unconditional, non-Veritasian love."

"Then you're in," said Manny.

"Congratulations," said the dog.

"I must warn you — the treatment doesn't take in all cases." Manny sipped his Fran's Fairish. "I advise you to throw everything you've got into it, your very soul, even if you're convinced you don't have one. Please don't look me in the eye." I turned away, uncertain whether to rejoice at being admitted or to brood over the possibility of failure. "What are my chances, would you say?"

"First rate," said Manny.

"Truly excellent," Zeke agreed.

"I'd bet money on it," the Pope elaborated.

"Of course," said the dog, "we're probably lying."

* * *

On Sunday morning Martina and I hiked through the flurry of five-leaf clovers outside the Center for Creative Wellness and, reaching the top of the hill, placed a call to Arnold Cook at his home in Locke Borough. After claiming to be my wife, Martina told him I'd been diagnosed with double pneumonia and wouldn't be coming to work for at least a week. Her fabulation gave me a terrible headache and also, truth to tell, a kind of sexual thrill.

The chief curator offered his qualified sympathy, and that was that. What a marvelous tool, lying, so practical and uncomplicated. I was beginning to understand its pervasive popularity in days gone by.

Together Martina and I strolled through the park, Franz hovering in the background like an unwanted thought. She grasped my right hand; my fingers became five erogenous zones. Today she would return to Veritas, she explained, where she'd finally lined up a job writing campaign speeches for Doreen Hutter, a Descartes Borough representative.

"I'll miss you," I said.

"I'll be back," she said, massaging her baroque braid with her free hand. "Like all dissemblers, I'm obliged to live here ninety days a year, soaking up the atmosphere. I'll be spending next Friday on the Jordan, fishing for ferrets."

"Will you visit me?" I asked this zaftig and exotic woman. She stared into the sky and nodded. "With luck you'll be a liar by then," she said, tracking a pig with her decorous eyes. "If you have anything honest to say to me, you'd better do so now."

"As you might imagine, I'm completely focused on psychoneuroimmunology right now. However, beyond that, I'd have to say..." The truth dawned on me even as I spoke it. "I'd have to say I'm a little bit in love with you, Martina."

"Only a little bit?" she asked, leading me to the riverbank, Franz at our heels.

"These things are hard to quantify." Two gondolas were lashed to the dock, riding the wake of a passing outboard motorboat. "May I ask how you feel about me?"

"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 3000-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 Hawaiian shirt so loud it invited legislation. 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, rivet-studded door that seemed more likely to lead to a bank vault than 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 with wildly diverse bodies rested on adjacent cots, smoking cigarettes. "Your roommates," said the bellhop as he and Franz exited. The door thudded shut, followed by the muffled clicks of the tumblers being randomized.

"I'm William," said my tall roommate. He could have played point guard for 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 Angelica, the one person in the world 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 Angelica'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 around. "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," said Lucky brightly. "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 immersion 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 the day sweating under a mercury-vapor sun, 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 blisters, rashes, and second-degree burns as we carried heap after heap 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 wounded 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 decorating Satirev's innumerable rock gardens. 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 I 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 Underground
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 and wounded animal fell squealing. "And whether pigs have wings." My bleeding prey hit the water.