Read Online City of Truth by James Morrow - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: James Morrow
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Sci-Fi Short, Honesty - Fiction, Honesty, Truthfulness and Falsehood, Truthfulness and Falsehood - Fiction
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Martina and Franz stood beside me, well within earshot.
"Do you understand how you must conduct yourself?" my guardian asked.
"I think so."
"Drop the slightest hint and, bang, you're back in Veritas, awash in scopolamine
— you'll never remember you've been here, not one detail. That would be most unfortunate, wouldn't it?"
The phone was a deceitful affair, secretly wired into the Veritas system, blatantly looting its services. I extended my index finger, pressed the appropriate buttons. Helen didn't answer till the seventh ring. Obviously I'd awakened her. "Hello?" she said groggily.
"Did I wake you?"
"Of course you woke me," she mumbled, "whoever you are."
"Listen," I told her abuptly. "Don't ask me anything."
" Jack ? Is that you ?"
"It's me. Don't ask me where I am, Helen. Everything depends on it." My wife exhaled in frustration. "I ... er, it's good to hear your voice, Jack."
"I'm among them. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"I think so."
"They're considering my case, Helen. They might let me in. I hope you're not still against me on this."
"I'm against you," she grunted.
I looped the phone cord around my arm, forcing it tight against my skin like a phylactery strap. "Have you heard anything from Toby?"
"Postcard came today."
"Did he mention his health — headaches or anything?"
"He said he was in a canoe race. I'm supposed to pick him up at the bus station on the twenty-seventh. I wish he weren't sick."
I kissed the plastic mouthpiece. "I'll call you back as soon as I can. Good-bye, Helen. I'm terribly fond of you."
"I'm terribly fond of you too, Jack — but please get out of there. Please ." I hung up and turned toward Martina and Franz. Behind them, a shaggy black rat pinned a Siamese cat to the ground and began tearing out its throat.
"You did fine," said my guardian.
FIVE
The weather engineers had just turned up their rheostats, flooding the Saturday morning sky with a dazzling emerald sunrise, when Martina came bouncing into my hospital room. She opened the drawer of my nightstand and removed her ludicrous metaphysical horseshoe. "It worked," she insisted, holding out the shoe as if it were a wishbone we'd agreed to split.
"Oh?" I said sneeringly, skeptically: I refused to descend into mysticism —
psychoneuroimmunology was for real.
She dropped the horseshoe into her handbag. I was lucky, she told me. The typical supplicant was commonly sequestered for a full month in the Hotel Paradise while the government decided his fate. Instead, assuming Dr. Krakower agreed to release me, I would meet that very afternoon with Manny Ginsburg himself.
"Imagine, Jack — you've been granted an audience with the Pope!" Twenty minutes later Krakower appeared, accompanied by the eternally unctuous Franz. As Martina looked on with seemingly genuine concern, Franz with a kind of smarmy pity, the doctor inspected my infirmities. She removed the bandage from my head wound, palpated my broken rib through the adhesive tape —
"This might hurt a bit," she warned before sending me into paroxysms of pain —
and cheerily pronounced me fit to travel, though she wanted me back by sundown for another checkup.
I got into the denim overalls I'd worn to work on Thursday: how far away that Thursday seemed, how remote and unreal. Martina and Franz guided me through the hospital lobby and across the park to the banks of a wide canal labeled Jordan River , its waters clean, clear, and redolent of some happy mixture of root beer and maple syrup. Golden trout flashed beneath the surface like reflected moonbeams. Sparkling with fresh paint, a red gondola lay moored to the wharf. We got on board. As my guardian poled us forward, pushing his oar into the sweet waters, Martina briefed me on the intricacies of dealing with Manny Ginsburg.
"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
"Do you understand how you must conduct yourself?" my guardian asked.
"I think so."
"Drop the slightest hint and, bang, you're back in Veritas, awash in scopolamine
— you'll never remember you've been here, not one detail. That would be most unfortunate, wouldn't it?"
The phone was a deceitful affair, secretly wired into the Veritas system, blatantly looting its services. I extended my index finger, pressed the appropriate buttons. Helen didn't answer till the seventh ring. Obviously I'd awakened her. "Hello?" she said groggily.
"Did I wake you?"
"Of course you woke me," she mumbled, "whoever you are."
"Listen," I told her abuptly. "Don't ask me anything."
" Jack ? Is that you ?"
"It's me. Don't ask me where I am, Helen. Everything depends on it." My wife exhaled in frustration. "I ... er, it's good to hear your voice, Jack."
"I'm among them. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"I think so."
"They're considering my case, Helen. They might let me in. I hope you're not still against me on this."
"I'm against you," she grunted.
I looped the phone cord around my arm, forcing it tight against my skin like a phylactery strap. "Have you heard anything from Toby?"
"Postcard came today."
"Did he mention his health — headaches or anything?"
"He said he was in a canoe race. I'm supposed to pick him up at the bus station on the twenty-seventh. I wish he weren't sick."
I kissed the plastic mouthpiece. "I'll call you back as soon as I can. Good-bye, Helen. I'm terribly fond of you."
"I'm terribly fond of you too, Jack — but please get out of there. Please ." I hung up and turned toward Martina and Franz. Behind them, a shaggy black rat pinned a Siamese cat to the ground and began tearing out its throat.
"You did fine," said my guardian.
FIVE
The weather engineers had just turned up their rheostats, flooding the Saturday morning sky with a dazzling emerald sunrise, when Martina came bouncing into my hospital room. She opened the drawer of my nightstand and removed her ludicrous metaphysical horseshoe. "It worked," she insisted, holding out the shoe as if it were a wishbone we'd agreed to split.
"Oh?" I said sneeringly, skeptically: I refused to descend into mysticism —
psychoneuroimmunology was for real.
She dropped the horseshoe into her handbag. I was lucky, she told me. The typical supplicant was commonly sequestered for a full month in the Hotel Paradise while the government decided his fate. Instead, assuming Dr. Krakower agreed to release me, I would meet that very afternoon with Manny Ginsburg himself.
"Imagine, Jack — you've been granted an audience with the Pope!" Twenty minutes later Krakower appeared, accompanied by the eternally unctuous Franz. As Martina looked on with seemingly genuine concern, Franz with a kind of smarmy pity, the doctor inspected my infirmities. She removed the bandage from my head wound, palpated my broken rib through the adhesive tape —
"This might hurt a bit," she warned before sending me into paroxysms of pain —
and cheerily pronounced me fit to travel, though she wanted me back by sundown for another checkup.
I got into the denim overalls I'd worn to work on Thursday: how far away that Thursday seemed, how remote and unreal. Martina and Franz guided me through the hospital lobby and across the park to the banks of a wide canal labeled Jordan River , its waters clean, clear, and redolent of some happy mixture of root beer and maple syrup. Golden trout flashed beneath the surface like reflected moonbeams. Sparkling with fresh paint, a red gondola lay moored to the wharf. We got on board. As my guardian poled us forward, pushing his oar into the sweet waters, Martina briefed me on the intricacies of dealing with Manny Ginsburg.
"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
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