City of Truth by James Morrow

Author:James Morrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

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 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 superstition—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—but not I. 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 Dr. Krakower appeared, accompanied by the eternally unctuous Franz Beauchamp. 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-à-terre, locus of the periodic pilgrimages through which one renewed one’s talent for mendacity, whereas Manny Ginsburg never left. “It’s made him a little nuts,” she explained.

“I’m not surprised,” I said as an aquatic ferret leaped out of the Jordan and snatched an unsuspecting polka-dotted frog from the shore.

“Play up your devotion to your kid,” Martina advised. “How you’d move heaven and earth to cure him. The man’s a sucker for sentiment.”

“And don’t look the old man in the eye,” said Franz. “He hates directness.”

My guardian landed us at a trim, sturdy, immaculately whitewashed dock, its pilings decorated with ceramic replicas of pelicans and sea gulls. An equally clean and appealing structure rose from the shore—a bait shack or possibly a fisherman’s hut. A German shepherd sprawled on the welcome mat, head bobbing in languid circles as he tracked a dragonfly.

“The Holy See,” said Martina, pointing.

“It’s a bait shack,” I corrected her.

“It’s the Holy See,” said Franz as he lashed his gondola to the dock.

“Maybe we don’t have the budget we’d like around here,” said the dog, “but it’s still the Holy See.

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