Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (518 page)

Martina?”

In the back room, a naked set of rusting bedsprings sat on a pinewood frame so crooked it might have come from Toby’s workshop.

I returned to the hot, sour daylight, paused on Martina’s landing. A wave of nausea rolled through me, straight to my putative soul.

Out on the river, a Brutality Squad cutter bore down on an outboard motorboat carrying two men in green ponchos. Evidently they were attempting to escape—every paradise will have its dissidents, every Utopia its defectors—an ambition abruptly thwarted as a round of machine-gun fire burst from the cutter, killing both fugitives instantly. Their corpses fell into the Pathogen, reddening it like dye markers. I felt a quick rush of qualified sympathy. Such fools. Didn’t they know that for most intents and a majority of purposes Veritas was as good as it gets?

“Some people…”

I looked toward the dock. A tall, fortyish, excruciatingly thin man in hip boots and a tattered white sweatshirt stood on the foredeck
of Average Josephine.

“…are so naive,” he continued. “Imagine, trying to run the channel in broad daylight.” He reached through a hole in his shirt and scratched his hairy chest. “Your girlfriend’s gone.”

“Are you referring to Martina Coventry?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“The little synecdochic cunt owes me two hundred dollars in rent.”

I descended through the maze of gangplanks. “You’re her landlord?”

“Mister, in my wretched life I’ve acquired three things of value—this houseboat, that shanty, and my good name.” Martina’s landlord stomped his boot on the deck. He had an extraordinarily chaotic and unseemly beard, like a bird’s nest constructed under a bid system. “You know how much a corporation vice president typically pulls down in a month? Twelve thousand. I’m lucky to see that in a
year.
Clamming’s a pathetic career.”

“Clamming?”

“Well, you can’t make a living renting out a damn shanty, that’s for sure,” said Martina’s landlord. “Of course, you can’t make one clamming either. You from the Squad? Is Coventry wanted by the law?”

“I’m not from the Squad.”

“Good.”

“But I have to find her. It’s vital.” I approached within five feet of the landlord. He smelled like turtle food. “Can you give me any leads?”

“Not really. Want some clam chowder? I raked ’em up myself.”

“You seem like a highly unsanitary person. How do I know your chowder won’t make me ill?”

He smiled, revealing a severe shortage of teeth. “You’ll have to take your chances.”

And that’s how I ended up in the snug galley of
Average Josephine,
savoring the best clam chowder I’d ever eaten.

His name was Boris—Boris the Clamdigger—and he knew almost as little about Martina as I did. They’d had sex once, in lieu of the rent. Afterwards, he’d read some of her doggerel, and thought it barely suitable for equipping an outhouse. Evidently she’d been promised a job writing greeting-card verses for Cloying and Coy: they’d reneged; she’d run out of cash; she’d panicked and fled.

“‘Vital,’” Boris muttered. “You said ‘vital,’ and I can tell from your sad eyes, which are a trifle beady, a minor flaw in your moderately handsome face—I can tell ‘vital’ was exactly what you meant. It’s a heavy burden you’re carrying around, something you’d rather not discuss. Don’t worry, Jack, I won’t pry. You see, I rather like you, even though you probably make a lot of money. How much do you make?”

I stared at my chowder, lumpy with robust clams and bulbous potatoes. “Two thousand a month.”

“I
knew
it,” said Boris. “Of course, that’s
nothing
next to what a real estate agent or a borough rep pulls down. What field?”

“Art criticism.”

“I’ve got to get out of clams. I’ve got to get out of
Veritas,
actually—a dream I don’t mind sharing with somebody who’s not a Squad officer. It’s a big planet, Jack. One day I’ll just pull up anchor and whoosh—I’m gone.”

The shock and indignation I should have felt at such perverse musings would not come. “Boris, do you believe in miracles?” I asked.

“There are times when I don’t believe in anything else. How’s the chowder?”

“Terrific.”

“I know.”

“May I have some more?”

“No—I want to save the rest for myself.”

“I don’t see how you’d ever escape,” I said. “The Squad would shoot you down.”

“Probably.” My host swallowed a large spoonful of his exquisite chowder. “At least I’d be getting out of clams.”

Four

Monday: back to work, my flesh like lead, my blood like liquid mercury. I’d spent the previous week locked in the Wittgenstein’s tiny screening room, scrutinizing the fruit of Hollywood’s halcyon days and confirming the archaeologists’ suspicions that these narratives contained not one frame of truth, and now it was time to deconstruct them,
Singin’ in the Rain, Doctor Zhivago, Rocky,
the whole deceiving lot. Hour followed hour, day melded into day, but my routine never varied: filling the bathtubs, dumping in the 35mm negatives, watching the triumph of Clorox over illusion. Like souls leaving bodies, the Technicolor emulsions floated free of their bases, disintegrating in the potent, purifying bleach.

My heart wasn’t in it. Cohn, Warner, Mayer, Thalberg, Selznick—these men were not my enemies.
Au contraire,
I wanted to be like them; I wanted to
be
them. Whatever one might say against Hollywood’s moguls, they could all have blessed their ailing children with curative encouragement and therapeutic falsehoods.

Stanley Marcus stayed away until Thursday, when he suddenly appeared in my coffee cubicle as I was dispiritedly consuming a tuna-fish sandwich and attempting, without success, to drown my sorrows in caffeine. Saying nothing, he took up his broom and swept the floor with slow, morose strokes.

“That recommendation letter was pretty nasty,” he said at last, sweating in the July heat. “I wish you hadn’t called me a toady.”

“I had a choice?”

“I didn’t get the promotion.”

“It’s not easy for me to pity you,” I said through a mouthful of tuna, mayo, and Respectable Rye. “I have a sick son. Only lies can cure him.”

Stanley rammed his broom into the floor. “Look, I’m a ridiculous person, we all know that. Women want nothing to do with me. I’m a loner. Don’t talk to me about your home life, Mr. Sperry. Don’t talk about your lousy son.”

I blanched and trembled. “Fuck you figuratively, Stanley Marcus!”

“Fuck
you
figuratively, Jack Sperry!” He clutched the broom against his bosom, pivoted on his heel, and fled.

I finished my coffee and decided to make some more, using a double helping of crystals from my Donaldson’s Drinkable jar.

Back in the shop, yet another stack of 35mm reels awaited my review, a celluloid tower stretching clear to the ceiling. As Donaldson’s Drinkable cavorted, so to speak, through my neurons, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. I dissolved
The Wizard of Oz
and
Gone With the Wind,
stripped
Citizen Kane
and
King Kong
down to the acetate, rid the world of
Top Hat, A Night at the Opera,
and—how blatant can a prevaricator get?—
It’s a Wonderful Life.

The end-of-day whistle blew, a half-dozen steamy squeals echoing throughout the Wittgenstein. As the sixth cry faded away, a seventh arose, human, female—familiar.

“Way to go, critic!”

I glanced up from my tub of Clorox, where
Casablanca,
was currently burbling toward oblivion. The doorway framed her.

“Martina?
Martina?”

“Hello, Jack.” Her silver lamé dress hugged her every contour like some elaborate skin graft. A matching handbag swung from her shoulder. I’d never seen a Veritasian outfitted so dishonestly before—but then, of course, Martina was evidently much more than a Veritasian.

‘The guard let you through?” I asked, astonished.

“After I agreed to copulate with him tomorrow, yes.”

The truth? A half-truth? There was no way, I realized with a sudden pang of anxiety, to gauge this woman’s sincerity. “I’m extraordinarily happy to see you,” I said. “I went to that address you gave me, but—”

“Just
once
I’d like to meet a man whose genitalia didn’t rule his life.”

“I wanted to talk with you, that’s all. A
talk.
I ran into Boris the Clamdigger.”

Opening her silver handbag, Martina retrieved a one-liter bottle of Charlie’s Cheapdrunk and a pair of Styrofoam cups. “Did he mention anything about two hundred bucks?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s not going to get it.” She set the cups on my workbench and filled them with mud-colored wine. “I suppose he told you we had sex?”

“Yes.”

“Hell, Jack, you know more about my private life than
I
do.” She seized her cup of Charlie’s and sashayed around the shop, breasts rolling like channel buoys on Becket Bay, hips swaying like mounds of dough being hefted by a pizza chef.

It was all lost on me, every bounce and bob. My urges had died when Prendergorst said
fatal
; I’d been gelded by an adjective.

Grabbing my wine, I swilled it down in one gulp.

“So this is where it all happens.” Martina stopped before my tool rack, massaging my axes, fondling my tin snips, running her fingers over my saws, pliers, and drills. “Impressive…”

“Where are you living now?” I asked, refilling my cup.

“With my girlfriend. I can’t afford anything better— Cloying and Coy turned down my Mother’s Day series.” She finished off her Charlie’s. “Which reminds me—you know that page of doggerel I gave you?”

Like a chipmunk loading up on acorns, I inflated my cheeks with wine. I swallowed. “Those verses have never left my mind. As it were.”

Martina frowned severely, apparently puzzled by the notion that her doggerel was in any way memorable. “I want them back. You never liked them in the first place.”

The wine was everywhere now, warming my hands and feet, massaging my brain. “They’re somewhat appealing, in their own vapid way.”

Hips in high gear, she moved past the seething remains of
Casablanca,
reached the door, and snapped the deadbolt into place. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I let them go. I always save my original manuscripts. I’ll gladly give you a copy.”

So there it was, the final proof of Martina’s true colors. The cunning little liar had deduced the poems were dangerous—in her justified paranoia, she’d imagined me spotting the flagrant falsehoods embedded in the page.

Buzzing with Cheapdrunk, I didn’t resist when Martina ushered me across the shop to my assignment for the upcoming week—a mountainous pile of Cassini gowns, Saint Laurent shirts, and Calvin Klein jeans.

“So anyway,” she said as we eased into the fraudulent fabrics, “if you could give me those verses…”

Her full wet lips came toward me, her eager puppyish tongue emerged. She kissed me all over; it was like being molested by a marshmallow. We hugged and fondled, clutched and tussled, poked and probed.

My genitalia, to use Martina’s word, might as well have been on the moon, for all they cared. I said, “Martina, I know why you want that doggerel.”

“Oh?”

Icy vibrations passed through her, the tremors of her guilt. “You want it because the paper’s riddled with lies,” I said. The skin tightened on her bones. “You’re a dissembler.”

“No,” she insisted, extricating herself from our embrace.

“How do you counteract the conditioning?” I persisted.

She stood up. “I’m
not
one.”

“You wrote about having wings. You wrote about a
soul.”
Scrambling to my feet, I squeezed her large, Rubensian hand. “My son means a great deal to me. Love, even. He’s just a boy. Ever hear of Xavier’s Plague? He mustn’t learn the truth. If he doesn’t realize it’s fatal, he might go into remission or even—”

She ran to the door as if fleeing some act of the alleged God, a forest fire, tidal wave, cyclone. “You’ve got the wrong woman!” she shouted, throwing back the bolt.

“I won’t go to the Squad—I promise. Please, Martina, teach me how you do it!”

She tore open the door, started into the hot dusk. “I tell only the truth!”

“Liar!”

Sweating and shaking, she fumbled into her shiny Toyota Functional and backed out of the parking lot. Her rubbery face was bloodless. Her eyes flashed with fear. Martina Coventry: dissembler. Oh, yes, truer words had never been spoken.

She will not escape,
I silently vowed, clasping my hands together in that most dangerous of postures and disingenuous of gestures.
With God as my witness,
I added with a nod to the late, great
Gone With the Wind.

Heaven answered me with a traffic jam, the full glory of the Veritasian rush hour. I ran into its dense screeching depths, weaving around pedestrians like a skier following a slalom course, never letting Martina’s Functional out of my sight. She crawled down Voltaire Avenue, turned east onto River Lane. By the time she reached the bridge, the traffic had halted completely, like a wave of molten lava solidifying on the slope of a volcano.

She pulled into a parking space, started the meter, and ducked into a seedy-looking bar-and-grill called Dolly’s Digestibles.

A pay telephone stood at the Schopenhauer Avenue intersection. The thing worked perfectly. In the Age of Lies, I’d heard, public phones were commonly the targets of criminal behavior.