Prague (3 page)

Mark: 'As my dad always said, one's pain should always be held in perspective. There is always someone worse off than yourself. That's a perennial comfort."

Emily: "The world contains more nice people than mean people. I really believe that." John could see she plainly did believe that, and he knew that this basic faith, rare and extraordinary, was precisely what he lacked and needed in order to live a full and important life. He also loved that the duress of telling two lies right off the bat had been too much for Emily, and now she faced the daunting prospect of producing two in a row to finish.

Scott, not really up for the game at its highest levels, turned to bland possibilities: "I like Pest better than Buda." He lived and worked in the Buda hills, across the Danube from Pest's flat urban rings and grids.

n I n u n

"Boring," muttered Gabor. "Beneath the dignity of the game. You suck."

"Fuck you, fucker," riposted the English teacher.

John (whose rum-and-cola had since arrived, placed for no good reason in front of Mark by a similarly sullen but altogether different waitress): "Fifteen years from now people will talk about all the amazing American artists and thinkers who lived in Prague in the 1990s. That's where real life is going on right now, not here." He reached across the table to gather his drink but knocked Gabor's liqueur onto Scott's lap. Scott jumped, accepted Emily's speedy offer of a napkin, and applied fizzing, high-sodium Carpathian water to the brown herbal goop spreading over the crotch of his running shorts.

"Blot, don't rub," advised Emily with real concern.

ROUND THREE

"I
  
HAVE TO
 
ADMIT,"
 
GABOR
 
SAID
 
SLOWLY WHEN
 
SCOTT WAS
 
SEATED
 
AGAIN,

"I was briefly jealous just there when Emily took such an interest in you, Scott." Charles raised his eyes to her, then looked away, letting his breath stream out in a flutter of the lips before adding, "And the matter of blotting your shorts," as if the smutty coda to his comment might disguise its embarrassing inner truth.

John stopped breathing, stunned at the sudden barriers to the life plan he had been formulating for the last half an hour. Forced to admit that there was personal history at the table of which he was unaware, he finally consoled himself with the likelihood (75 percent) that Charles had been lying. On the other hand, he recalled that while explaining the rules, Charles had cited "one of the game's most beautiful aspects: Players sometimes don't know themselves precisely how much truth they're telling."

"You're a bad person, aren't you, Charlie?" Emily wagged a finger.

Charles looked away, hoping to disguise something he had revealed, or to reveal something he only wanted to appear to disguise, and so he tricked another waitress into coming to the table, and before she was able to realize the trap, she found herself taking orders for replacement drinks and food. "Poor woman," he said as she wound her sour way back into the cafe. "She'll never survive the new economy. This whole country needs its ass kicked."

"You can't take two turns, Charles."

"No, I know. That was just my opinion."

Mark was nodding. "I guarantee there was never sullen service in this cafe when it was founded. You're up, Em."

"Oh, jeez. Do we have to go on with this? This isn't the way normal people should spend their time. Okay, okay, gimme a sec.... I think I could live in Hungary forever. I don't ever want to move back to the States."

John smiled at the idea of this most American of girls slowing and settling into a Central European permanence, raising her Hungarian children to be the first trusting and cheerful nonsmokers in the nation's history.

Scott's third-round offering: "English is harder than Hungarian."

And John's: "Scott is our parents' favorite."

One could always feel the same sense of malaise creep over games of Sincerity near round four, a peculiar discomfort just out of range of consciousness, a wave of sleepiness or spaciness. Nongame conversation would proliferate, but also grow testy, as players were commonly exerting a great deal of energy trying to remember what they had already said and what of that had been ostensibly true. That evening in May, it looked as if only Charles Gabor and, perhaps, Emily had not lost their sparkle. As it edged toward six o'clock, everyone but Scott, an avid nutritionist, had consumed too much sugar, caffeine, or alcohol. Scott was leaning back in his wrought-iron chair to stare at the softening sky filtered through overhanging branches. John was feeling that dull disappointment and heaviness in the legs of stepping up onto an immobile escalator. Mark had gotten drunk off Unicum, the rough herbal liqueur beloved of the Hungarian nation, and, as he tended to grow maudlin under the influence, was massaging a tendril of red hair and gazing at the dusty airline office with a wistful pucker of the lips and a sorrowful tilt of his brow.

ROUND FOUR

CHARLES
  
SWIRLED
  
AN
  
ESPRESSO
  
BETWEEN
 
THUMB
  
AND
  
MIDDLE
  
FINGER,

peered for inspiration at the brown arcs he made on the white cup's inside surface. "I think raising children is probably the single highest-return investment on offer, to reap the profit of self-awareness and self-expression, that would be the essence of existence."

"I suppose it's not entirely out of the question there are MBAs who believe that," Mark said. Wasting a turn but enjoying himself greatly, he added, "Financial jobs are profoundly creative and are vitally important to the well-being of culture and human happiness. Particularly venture capital."

Emily: "Dishonesty comes so easily to me that it sometimes worries me."

Scott Price: "I was adopted. Or John was."

"That's better, Scottie," Charles said. "Though technically a verifiable statement of fact. We'll let it stand for amusement's sake."

John offered, "I can certainly see why everyone here are such good friends."

"Is such good friends," corrected the English teacher, leaning back with closed eyes, his two swaying chair legs a tempting target.

Over a round of Unicums, the players revealed their truths and tallied the score. Charles Gabor scored a very solid seven out of eight, though he was visibly disgusted at his poor showing. Each of his first three statements was picked as true by a competitor: Emily believed he envied Mark's research, Mark believed he envied Emily's attentions to Scott, and John believed (and not without an edge to his voice) his endorsement of a refreshed fascist Hungary. But it was his fourth statement—the glories of child rearing couched in financial terminology—that he declared to be sincere. Scott, having suspected that Charles would at least claim its sincerity, scored a hit.

Charles also received four points for correctly identifying truth in each of the others. Mark was certain that moody service was an invention of the late twentieth century. Emily did indeed believe that the world's nice people outnumbered its nasty ones. Charles knew that Scott, despite not yet having learned Hungarian, did not believe it to be as difficult as his native tongue. And John, in his two days in Budapest, had already pegged the city as being less epochally and culturally promising than Prague, where he had spent sixteen formative hours on his way into town.

Scott pulled off a six. He received Emily's vote that he must be happy to have John in Budapest, a vote which so tickled John that he did not brood for long over the implications of the original lie. Scott also won two votes in favor of his provocative adoption play. Yes, two: Even John thought it fit too many observable facts not to be true, and would perhaps explain his inability to jump-start a permanent adult relationship with his elder brother. Scott also easily identified John's Prague envy and Emily's chipper worldview but stumbled with Mark, believing his drivel about keeping one's pain in perspective.

Mark placed third, with a very respectable four: He called Emily's truth and culled three points for his boot-strappy theory of pain. "My dad is just the same," Emily had consoled him. 'Actually, no," Mark admitted. "My dad began complaining about his life back in about 1973 and hasn't yet stopped." However, Mark voted for John's anti-Semitic waitress ploy and Scott's adoption.

John, therefore, scored a three. Emily, telling him not to feel bad about it, said that it's hard to be the favorite child, too, sometimes even harder. ("To be honest," John replied, "ours is a scientifically unique family in that neither child is the favorite.") He in turn spotted Emily's faith in mankind, not without a quiet intake of breath and happy recognition of fate's turning wheels.

Special Assistant Emily Oliver, displaying a congenital inability to lie or sense dishonesty, therefore scored zero. She sipped her second Unicum, unconsciously grimacing after every taste. Her cheeks began to flush in the cool evening air and from the hot tickle of the herbal liqueur. "This game is sick, Charlie."

Of course, the game is fundamentally flawed. One never actually knows if players tell the truth at the end, or if they even know the truth ("one of the game's most beautiful aspects").

JOHN
  
PRICE'S
  
DECISION
  
TO
  
EMIGRATE
  
FROM
  
LOS
  
ANGELES
  
TO
  
HUNGARY

had required eight minutes. He reread his big brother's postcard and sensed their time had finally come. He recalled a newspaper article praising Hungary's nascent "potential." He savored his approaching resignation from the Committee to Bring the 2008 Olympics to L.A., for which he had been mistyping press releases and making Xerox copies of his butt.

He admitted that Scott would be of two minds, at most, about their reunion. He had tracked Scott down before to solder an essential brotherly bond, appearing hopeful and eager at his college dorms twice. And at Scott's first tiny apartment in San Francisco. On the fishing boat just before Scott set off for Alaska. Again in Portland. And Seattle. And each time, Scott ironically, even amusingly, rebuffed him, deflated him (even as Scott had begun his own steady physical deflation).

Scott had persistently believed, to John's repeated amazement, that their tritely unpleasant childhood had mattered, that it somehow mattered still, and, most of all—never spoken but quite clear—that John himself was not a victim of their family (as Scott was) but one of the oppressive ruling junta itself, a belief John could neither dislodge nor comprehend. After each defeated, angry return to L.A., some months were necessary before John would convince himself again that this time would be different, that enough healing had occurred for a fraternal future to begin.

And now Budapest. After so many false starts, the two brothers would shed everything old and ugly and shine upon each other. In that unimaginable city, far from everything familiar, they would dig past the past, burst through to the essential something that would render John whole and strong, untouchable and wise. Old barriers would crumble to reveal manicured gardens.

Wanting to give some—but not too much—warning of his arrival, John planned to appear in Budapest about a week after an eloquent and nuanced explanatory letter. He had, however, overestimated post-Communist postal commitment. One Wednesday night, displaying the brittle optimism of the frequently disappointed, he had knocked on Scott's door in Buda and confronted surprise and rage, uneasily battling for dominance. "Huh," Scott managed to say, looking at the matching suitcase and hanging bag floating in the May moonlight. "So where are you staying?" Conversation that night fractured and seeped, no one being in the mood to produce the necessary caulking jokes. Scott made John repeat the story of how he had found his address.

And now, eight days later, left to his own devices for yet another afternoon, John stood on top of his brother's hill and watched the haze distort Pest, then returned to lie on the floor of yet another of Scott's nondescript, barely furnished apartments. He considered retreating home to beg for his old job; still eighteen years until those Olympics. But he also thought of Emily Oliver's laugh, and though he knew he hardly knew her, he admired how (unlike his dismal brother) she hid nothing, faced everything, and approached the world as a place roiling with possibility, as he himself did. She was reason enough to be here. And then Scott's mail slithered through the door and slapped onto the floor. John opened his own letter from L.A., read his good intentions and embarrassing, delicately couched hopes. He stuffed it in his luggage.