Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (514 page)

The dissemblers. Even now, after all I’ve been through, the word sends a cold wind through my bones. The dissemblers: Veritas’s own enemy within, defacing its walls with their oil paintings, befouling its air with their songs, and, most daringly, turning its pristine streets into forums for Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw, each production a ragged, jerry-built affair frantically staged before the Brutality Squad could arrive and chase the outlaw actors into their holes and hideouts. Only once had a dissembler been caught, and then the Squad had bungled it, clubbing the woman to death before they could ask the crucial question.

How do you tell lies without going mad?

How?

What I loved about this job was the way it got my head and my hands working together. True, the raw existential act of deconstruction was rather crude, but before that moment you had to use your mind; you had to decide that the piece in question, whether original or forgery, was indeed inimical to the public good.

I turned toward a piece of classical mendacity labeled
Nike of Samothrace.
A lie? Yes, manifestly: those wings. Merely to behold such a creature nauseated me. No wonder Plato had banned artists and playwrights from his hypothetical Utopia. “Three removes from nature,” he’d called them, three removes from factuality. art is a lie, the electric posters in Circumspect Park reminded us. Truth might be beauty, but it simply didn’t work the other way around.

Like an agoraphobic preparing for an indoor picnic, I spread my canvas dropcloth on the concrete floor. I took down a No. 7 sledgehammer. The
Nike
had arrived headless, and now, as I wielded my critical apparatus against her, she became wingless as well—now breastless, now hipless. Amorphous chunks of marble littered the dropcloth. My overalls stank of sweat, my tongue felt like a dried fig wedged into my mouth. An exhausting enterprise, criticism; grueling work, analysis. I deserved a break.

A note lay on the desk in my coffee cubicle. “Dear Mr. Sperry: Last Friday, you might recall, you offered to write a letter on my behalf,” I read as the water boiled. “I hope Mr. Cook might receive it by the end of the week. Fairly sincere regards,
Stanley Marcus.”

I took down my mug, dumped in a heaping teaspoonful of semi-instant crystals—Donaldson’s Drinkable Coffee, my favorite brand—added hot water from my kettle, and began mentally composing a recommendation for Stanley. He’d been assisting in my sector for over a year now, servicing a dozen of us critics—sharpening our axes, fueling our blowtorches, faithfully sweeping up our workshops and cubicles—and now he was looking to get promoted. “In all honesty, I believe Stanley would prove reasonably competent at running the main incinerator. Of course, he is something of a drudge and a toady, but those qualities may actually serve him well. One thing you’ll notice about Stanley is that he farts a great deal, but here again we’re not talking about a characteristic that would hinder…”

I glanced at my
Beatoff Magazine
calendar—and a good thing, or I might have forgotten about meeting my wife for lunch. “Helen,” said the July 9th square, “1
p.m.,
No Great Shakes.” No Great Shakes on Twenty-ninth Street had marvelous submarine sandwiches and terrific Waldorf salads. Its shakes were not so great.

Miss July—Wendy Warren, according to the accompanying profile—leered at me from the glossy paper. “Being an intellectual,” ran her capsule biography, “Wendy proved most articulate on the subject of posing for us. ‘It’s at once tawdry and exhilarating, humiliating and energizing,’ she said. ‘If not for the quick five thousand, I never would’ve considered it.’ When we learned how smart she was—that Interborough Chess Championship and everything—we almost disqualified her. However, we knew that many of you would enjoy masturbating to…”

Good old Wendy. My hypothetical id was ticking. And suddenly I realized there’d be a minor but irrefutable thrill in simply looking at Martina Coventry’s handwriting, as if its twists and turns were the lines of her Rubensian flesh. I took a long sip of Donaldson’s Drinkable and, pulling Martina’s doggerel from my pocket, flattened the crumpled sheet on the desk.

The verses were as terrible as ever, but the signature indeed held a certain eroticism. I even got a mild charge from the contours of the subsequent information. “7 Lackluster Lane, Descartes Borough,” she’d written. “Phone 610-400.”

Something caught my eye, a web of thin shallow grooves in the paper, occupying the space between the Valentine message and the birthday greeting, and I realized that the object in my possession had backstopped one of Martina’s earlier creative convulsions. Curious, I seized the nearest pencil and began rubbing graphite across the page, causing the older verses to materialize like a photographic image appearing in a tray of developer. Within seconds the entire composition lay before me, and my nervous system vibrated with intermingled disbelief, horror, and fascination.

Lies.

Gruesome and poetic lies.

In Martina Coventry’s own hand.

I hide my wings inside my soul,

Their feathers soft and dry,

And when the world’s not looking,

I take them out and fly.

Sweat erupted in my palms and along my brow.
Wings.
Martina didn’t have wings. No one did. Who did she think she was, the Nike of Samothrace? One might as well assert the reality of Santa Glaus or Lewis Carroll’s Alice. As for the
soul,
that soggy construct…

Perhaps my eyes were deceiving me. I resolved to read the poem aloud—hearing is believing; to sense these astonishing words resounding in my head would be to know they in fact existed. “I hide my wings,” I said in a hoarse whisper, but I couldn’t go on. A primordial terror surged up, bringing a migraine so severe I almost fainted.

My critical instincts took hold. I seized Martina’s poem, dashed out of the museum and ran across the courtyard to the main incinerator. Skull throbbing, I thrust the page toward the same seething pit where the day before I had deconstructed a dozen books on reincarnation and the last two hundred issues of
The Journal of Psychic Healing.

I stopped.

Was I in fact ready to cast Martina Coventry out of my life? Was I truly willing to consign her identity to the flames? No. I wasn’t. I fixed on her address, massaging it into my memory.

How did she tell lies without going mad?

How?

Phone 610-400. No problem. For his
sixth
birthday we’d given Toby a
ten-speed
bike, but
four
months went by before I put it together, and he hardly ever rode it, so the whole experience was rather null, a zero—two, in fact. 6…1…0…4…0…0.

My fingers parted, and the poems floated toward their fate, joining the Homer epics, the Racine plays, the Dickens novels, and the mushy, gushy, pseudoscientific rantmgs of
The Journal of Psychic Healing.

* * * *

“It’s absolutely incredible,” I told Helen as we sat in No Great Shakes burrowing into the day’s special:
murdered cow sandwich, wilted hearts of lettuce, high-cholesterol fries—a quite reasonable $5.99
. “Four hours ago I was having breakfast with a dissembler. I could’ve reached out and touched her.”

“But you didn’t,” said Helen in a tone more apprehensive than assured. She slid her sunglasses upward into her frothy, graying hair, the better to scrutinize my face.

“I didn’t.”

“She’s definitely one of them?”

“I’m positive. More or less.”

My wife looked straight at me, a shred of lettuce drooping over her lips like a green tongue. “Let’s not get carried away,” she said.

Let’s not get carried away.
That was Helen’s motto; it belonged on her tombstone. She was a woman who’d devoted her life to not getting carried away—in her career, in our bed, anywhere. It was her job, I believe, that made her so sedate. As a stringer for the celebrated supermarket tabloid,
Sweet Reason,
Helen moved among the skeptics and logicians of the world, collecting scoops:
controlled study negates new arthritis cure, slain bigfoot revealed as schizophrenic in suit, top psychics’ predictions fall flat.
Ten years of writing such stories, and you acquire a bit of a chill.

I said, “You have a better interpretation, ostensible darling?”

“Maybe she found the paper on the street, supposed sweetheart,” Helen replied. A beautiful woman, I’d always thought: large pleading eyes, soft round cheeks you wanted to rub against your hands like balm. “Maybe somebody
else
composed the poem.”

“It was in Martina’s handwriting.”

Helen bit into her murdered cow. “Let me guess. She gave you her name and address, right?”

“Yes. She wrote them on the page.”

“Did she say she wanted to have sex with you?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Did you say you wanted to have sex with her?”

“Yes.”

“You think you will?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so, I hope not—you know how it is.” I licked the grease from a French fry. “I’d hate to hurt you,” I added.

Helen’s eyes became as dark and narrow as slots in a gun turret. “I probably feel as conflicted as you. Part of me wants you to turn this Martina over to the Brutality Squad, the better to get her out of our lives forever. The other part, the woman who feels a certain undeniable affection for you, knows that would be a stupid thing to do, because if the lady senses the police are on her trail, well, she might also sense how they got there, right? These dissemblers, I’ve heard, are no nonliteral pussycats. They’ve got assassins in their ranks.”

“Assassins,” I concurred. “Assassins, terrorists, lunatics. You want me to burn the paper?”

“Burn it, critic.”

“I did.”

My wife smiled. In Veritas, one never asked,
Really? Are you kidding? Do you mean that?
She finished her cow and said, “You’re a somewhat better man than I thought.”

We filled the rest of the hour with the usual marital battles—such ironically allied words,
marital, martial.
Helen and I loved to fight. My erections were becoming increasingly less substantive, she asserted, truthfully. The noises she made when chewing her food were disgusting, I reported, honestly. She told me she had no intention of procuring the obligatory gift for my niece’s brainburn party on Saturday—Connie wasn’t
her
niece. I didn’t
want
her to get the gift, I retorted, because she’d buy something cheap, obvious, and otherwise emblematic of the contempt in which she held my sister. And so we continued, straight through coffee and dessert, nibbling at each other like mice, picking each other off like snipers. Such fun, such pathological fun.

Helen reached into her handbag and pulled out a crisp sheet of computer paper speckled with dot-matrix characters. “This came this morning,” she explained. “A rabbit bit Toby,” she announced evenly.

“A what? Rabbit? What are you talking about?”

“He’s probably forgotten the whole thing by now.”

“It
bit
him?”

Ralph Kitto

Executive Director

Camp Ditch-the-Kids

Box 145

Kant Borough

Mr. and Mrs. Sperry:

As you may know, your son makes it his annoying mission to release all the animals caught in our rat trap. Yesterday, in performing one such act of ambiguous compassion, he was attacked by a rare species called Hob’s hare. We dressed his wound immediately and, checking his medical records, confirmed that his tetanus immunizations are up to date.

As a safety precaution, we retained the rabbit and placed it under quarantine. I am moderately sorry to report that today the animal died. We forthwith froze the corpse then shipped it to the Kraft Epidemiological Institute. The Kraft doctors will contact you if there’s anything to worry about, though I suspect you’ve started worrying already.

Yours up to a point,

Ralph Kitto

“Why didn’t you show me this right away?”

Helen shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.”

Smooth, nervy Helen. There were times when I wondered whether she liked Toby. “Aren’t you bothered that the rabbit died?”

“Maybe it was old.”

My teeth came together in a tight, dense grid. The thought of Toby’s pain troubled rne. Not his physical pain—it might have even done him some good, toughening him up for his brainburn. What distressed me was the sense of betrayal he must have felt; my son had always negotiated with the world in good faith, and now the world had bitten him. “There’s something I should tell you,” I admitted to my wife. “Before burning Martina’s doggerel, I memorized her address and phone number.”