City of Truth Read Free

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