Chapter 1 - City of Truth

I no longer live in the City of Truth. I have exiled myself from Veritas, from all cities — from the world.

The room in which I'm writing is cramped as a county jail and moist as the inside of a lung, but I'm learning to call it home. My only light is a candle, a fat, butter-colored stalk from which nets of melted wax hang like cobwebs. I wonder what it would be like to live in that candle — in the translucent crannies that surround the flame: a fine abode, warm, safe, and snug. I imagine spending my days wandering waxen passages and sitting in paraffin parlors, my nights lying in bed listening to the steady drip-drip-drip of my home consuming itself.

My name is Jack Sperry, and I am thirty-six years old. I was born in truth's own city, Veritas, on the last day of its bicentennial year. Like many boys of my generation, I dreamed of becoming an art critic one day: the pure primal thrill of attacking a painting, the sheer visceral kick of savaging a movie or a poem.

In my case, however, the dream turned into a reality, for by my twenty-second year I was employed as a deconstructionist down at the Wittgenstein Museum in Plato Borough, giving illusion its due.

Other dreams — wife, children, happy home — came harder. From the very first Helen and I wrestled with the thorny Veritasian question of whether love was a truthful term for how we felt about each other

— such a misused notion, love

, a kind of one-word lie — a problem we began ignoring once a more concrete crisis had taken its place.

His sperm are lazy, she thought. Her eggs are duds, I decided. But at last we found the right doctor, the proper pill, and suddenly there was Toby, flourishing inside Helen's redeemed womb: Toby the embryo;

Toby the baby; Toby the toddler; Toby the preschool carpenter, forever churning out crooked birdhouses, bent napkin holders, and asymmetrical bookends; Toby the boy naturalist, befriending every slithery, slimy, misbegotten creatures ever to wriggle across the face of the Earth. This was a child with a maggot farm. A roach ranch. A pet slug. I think I love him, I told Helen one day. Let's not get carried away, she replied.

The morning I met Martina Coventry, Toby was away at Camp Ditch-the-Kids in the untamed outskirts

of Kant Borough. He sent us a picture postcard every day, a routine that, I realize in retrospect, was a kind of smuggling operation; once Toby got home, the postcards would all be there

, waiting to join to his vast collection.

To wit:

Dear Mom and Dad: Today we learned how to survive in case we're ever stranded in the woods

—

what kind of bark to eat and stuff. Counselor Rick says he never heard of anyone actually using these skills. Your son, Toby.

And also:

Dear Mom and Dad: There's a big rat trap in the pantry here, and guess who always sneaks in at night and finds out what animal got caught and then sets it free? Me! Counselor Rick says we're boring.

Whoops, out of space. Your son, Toby.

It was early, barely 7 A.M., but already Booze Before Breakfast was jammed to its crumbling brick walls. I made my way through a conglomeration of cigarette smoke and beer fumes, through frank sweat and honest halitosis. A juke box thumped out Probity singing Copingly Ever After. The saloon keeper, Jimmy Breeze, brought me the usual — a raspberry Danish and a Bloody Mary — setting them atop the splintery cedar bar. I told him I had no cash but would pay him tomorrow. This was Veritas. I would.

I spotted only one free chair — at a tiny, circular table across from a young woman whose wide face and plump contours boasted, to this beholder's eye, the premier sensuality of a Rubens model. Peter Paul

Rubens was much on my mind just then, for I'd recently criticized not only The Garden of Love but also

The Raising of the Cross

.

Come here often? she asked as I approached, my plastic-wrapped Danish poised precariously atop my drink. Her abundant terra-cotta hair was compacted into a modest bun. Her ankle-length green dress was made of guileless cambric.

I sat down. Uh-huh, I mumbled, pushing aside the sugar bowl, the napkin dispenser, and the woman's orange peels to make room for my Bloody and Danish. I always stop in on my way to the Wittgenstein.

You're a critic? Even in the endemic gloom of Booze Before Breakfast, her smooth, unpainted skin glowed.

I nodded. Jack Sperry.

Can't say I'm impressed. It doesn't take much intellectual prowess, does it?

She could be as honest as she liked, provided I could watch her voluptuous lips move. What line are you in? I asked.

I'm a writer. Her eyes expanded: limpid, generous eyes, the cobalt blue of Salome's So-So Contraceptive Cream. It has its dangers, of course. There's always that risk of falling into ...

what's it called?

Metaphor?

Metaphor.

There were no metaphors in Veritas. Metaphors were lies. Flesh could be like grass, but it never was grass. Use a metaphor in Veritas, and your conditioning instantly possessed you, hammering your skull, searing your heart, dropping you straight to hell in a bucket of pain. So to speak.

What do you write? I asked.

Doggerel. Greeting card messages, advertising jingles, inspirational verses like you see in—

Sell much?

A grimace distorted her luminous face. I should say I'm an aspiring writer.

I'd like to read some of your doggerel, I said. And I'd like to have sex with you, I added, wincing at my candor. It wasn't easy being a citizen.

Her grimace intensified.

Sorry if I'm being offensive, I said. Am I being offensive?

You're being offensive.

Offensive only in the abstract, or offensive to you personally?

Both. She slid a wedge of orange into her wondrous mouth. Are you married?

Yes.

A good marriage?

Pretty good.

To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to the degree that these mischievous and sentimental abstractions have any meaning

: Helen and I had opted for a traditional ceremony. Our son is terrific. I think I love him.

If we had an affair — a furtive smile — wouldn't you feel guilty?

I've never cheated. An affair, I mused. Scary stuff. Guilt? Yes, of course. I sipped my Bloody Mary. I

believe I could tolerate it.

Well, you can drop the whole fantasy, Mr. Sperry, said the stranger, a declaration that filled me with an odd mixture of relief and disappointment. You can put the entire thought out of your—

Call me Jack. I unpackaged my Danish; the wrapper dragged away clots of vanilla icing like a band-aid pulling off a scab. And you're—?

Martina Coventry, and at the moment I feel only a mild, easily controlled desire to copulate with you.

'At the moment,' I repeated, marveling at how much ambiguity could be packed into a prepositional phrase. In a fashionably gauche move I licked the icing off the Danish wrapper (

The Mendacity of

Manners had recently hit the top slot on the

Times bestseller list). Will you show me your doggerel? I asked.

It's bad doggerel.

Doggerel is by definition bad.

Mine's worse.

Please.

Martina's pliant features contracted into a bemused frown. There's a great deal of sexual tension occurring between us now, wouldn't you say?

Correct.

She reached into her purse and pulled out a folded sheet of crisp white typing paper, pressing it into my palm with a sheepish wink.

First came a Valentine's Day message.

I find you somewhat interesting, You're not too short or tall, And if you'd be my Valentine, I wouldn't mind at all.

A birthday greeting followed.

Roses drop dead, Violets do too, With each day life gets shorter, Happy birthday to you.

I have no illusions about earning a living from my doggerel, said Martina, understating the case radically.

What I'd really like is a career writing political speeches. My borough rep almost hired me to run his re-election campaign. 'Cold in person, but highly efficient' — that was the slogan I worked out. In the end, his girlfriend got the job. Do you like my verses, Jack?

They're awful.

I'm going to burn them. Martina kissed an orange slice, sucked out the juice.

No. Don't. I'd like to have them.

You would? Why?

Because I'm anticipating you'll write something else on the page. From my shirt pocket I produced a ballpoint pen (

Paradox Pen Company — Random Leaks Common — Sorry

). Like, say, the information I'll need to find you again.

So we can have an affair?

The thought terrifies me.

You are fairly attractive, Martina observed, taking the pen. Indeed. It's the eyebrows that do it, great bushy extrusions suggesting a predatory mammal of unusual prowess — wolf, bear, leopard — though they draw plenty of support from my straight nose and square jaw. Only when you get to my chin, a pointy, pimply knoll forever covered with stubble, does the illusion of perfection dissolve. I'm warning you, Jack, I have my own Smith and Wesson Liberalstopper.

She signed her name in bold curlicues across the bottom of the page, added her address and phone number. If you try to force yourself on me, I'll give you fair warning and shoot.

I lifted the doggerel from the table, flicking a Danish crumb from the word Valentine

. Funny — you've almost told a lie here. Roses don't drop dead, they—

They wither.

If I were you, Martina, I wouldn't take such chances with my sanity.

If you were me, she replied, you would take such chances with your sanity, because otherwise you'd be someone else.

True enough, I said, pocketing Martina Coventry's stultifying verses.

* * *

Thomas More Square was clogged with traffic, a dense metallic knot betokening a delay of at least twenty minutes. I flipped on my Plymouth Adequate's AM radio and began waiting it out.

Eighteenth

Street, Nineteenth Street, Twentieth...

...fact that I accepted a fifty thousand dollar kickback during the Avelthorpe Tariff Scandal should not, I

feel, detract from my record on education, the environment, and medical...

Twenty-fifth Street, Twenty-sixth Street, Twenty-seventh...

...for while we do indeed divert an enormous amount of protein that might be employed in relieving world hunger, the psychological benefits of dogs and cats have been proved almost beyond the shadow of a...

Thirtieth Street, Thirty-first...

...displeased with the unconscionable quantities of sugar we were putting in children's cereals, and so

we're happy to announce a new policy of...

At last: the Wittgenstein Museum, a one-story brick building sprawling amid a vast concrete courtyard, flanked by a Brutality Squad station on the north side and a cafe called the Dirty Dog on the south. The guard, a toothy, clean-cut young man with a Remington Second Amendment belted to his waist, waved me through the iron gates. I headed for the parking lot. Derrick Popkes of the Egyptian Relics Division had beaten me to my usual space, usurping it with his Ford Sufficient, so I had to drive all the way to the main incinerator and park by the coal bin.

Channel your violent impulses in a salutary direction — become a Marine. Purge your natural tendency toward— I snapped off the radio, killed the engine.

What had life been like during the Age of Lies? How had the human mind endured a world where politicians misled, advertisers overstated, clerics exaggerated, women wore makeup, and people professed love at the drop of a tropological hat? How had humanity survived the epoch we'd all read about in the history books, those nightmare centuries of casuistic customs and fraudulent rites? The idea confounded me. It rattled me to the core. The Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Frosty the

Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: staggering.

You're late, observed the chief curator, bald and portly Arnold Cook, as I strolled into the front office.

Heavy traffic?

Yes. I jammed my card into the time clock, felt the jolt of its mechanism imprinting my tardiness.

Bumper to bumper. Every so often, you'd experience an urge to stop short of total candor, an impulse to omit some self-damning piece of the truth. But then suddenly it would come: a dull neurological throb that, if you didn't tell all, would quickly bloom into a psychosomatic explosion in your skull. I also wasted a lot of time getting a young woman's address.

Do you expect to copulate with her? Mr. Cook asked, following me to the changing room. Early morning, yet already he was coated with characteristic sweat, droplets that, as I once told him in a particularly painful exercise of civic duty, put me in mind of cat urine.

Denim overalls drooped from the lockers. I selected a pair that looked to be my size. Adultery is deceitful, I reminded the curator.

So is fidelity, he replied. In its own way.

In its own way, I agreed, donning my overalls.

I followed a nonliteral rat-maze of dark, dusty corridors to my workshop. It was packed. As usual, the items I was supposed to analyze that day divided equally into the authentic objets d'artifice unearthed by the archeologists and the ersatz output of the city's furtive malcontents —

its dissemblers. For every statue from ancient Greece, there was a clumsy forgery. For every Cezanne, a feeble imitation. For every

18th-century novel, the effluvium of a vanity press.

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, Racine, 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 my job was the way it got my head and 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 inimicable 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 sledge hammer and set about deconstructing the Nike of Samothrace. The lady 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 had earned 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 that Mr. Cook might receive it by the end of the week. Best regards, Stanley Marcus.

I dumped a spoonful of Fran's Fairish Coffee Crystals into my mug, 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 sincerity, 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 of the first things 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've 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 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, embarrassing and thrilling,' she said. 'If not for the quick five thousand, I never would've considered it.' When we learned how smart she is — 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 subtle but undeniable charge 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 Fran's Fairish 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 lift 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, lying in 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 in a tray of developer. Within seconds the entire composition lay before me, and I realized to my intermingled disbelief, horror, and fascination what I was looking at.

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 indeed. Martina didn't have wings. No

one did.

One might as well assert the reality of Santa Claus 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. An antique terror surged up, bringing a headache 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 pit of seething flames where the day before I had deconstructed a dozen books on reincarnation and eight thousand issues of

The Journal of Psychic Healing

.

I stopped. I wasn't ready to cast Martina Coventry out of my life. I simply couldn't do it. I fixed on her address, massaging it into my long-term 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 Shakespeare plays, the Dickens novels, and the mushy, gushy, pseudoscientific rantings 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 certain. 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: a kitten's pleading eyes, soft round cheeks you wanted to rub against your hands like balm. 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. I would.

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. In other words, burn the paper?

Burn it, critic.

I already did.

My wife smiled. In Veritas, one never asked, Really?

One never asked, 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 typing paper speckled with dot-matrix characters. This came this morning, she explained. A rabbit attacked Toby, she announced evenly.

A what? Rabbit? What are you talking about?

He's probably forgotten the whole thing by now.

It attacked him?

Ralph Kitto

Executive Director

Camp Ditch-the-Kids

RR #1, Box 145

Kant Borough

Dear 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 bitten 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 Center. The Kraft doctors will contact you if there's anything to worry about, though I

suspect you've started worrying already.

Figuratively yours, Ralph Kitto

Why didn't you show me this earlier? I demanded.

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 me. 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 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.

Helen appeared to be experiencing a bad odor. How readily you exhibit the same disgusting qualities one associates with anuses. Honestly, Jack, sometimes I wonder why we got married.

I sometimes wonder the same thing. I wish that rabbit hadn't died.

Forget the rabbit. We're talking about why I married you.

You married me, I said, telling the truth, because you thought I was your last chance.