Alternative Truths

by Bob Brown

  Trump beat me to it, neatly blocking my reaching arm with his massive body. With a single flick of his thumbs, he raised the hinged lid of the box. No shiny colored jewels met our gazes. Not even winking diamonds. Instead a dazzle of gold nearly blinded me, flashing brighter than the glaring light in the Oval Office.

  “It’s a fountain pen,” Trump gasped in awe as he grabbed the etched masterpiece of writing implements. He held it up to the light and squinted, trying to decipher the whirls and flourishes that scrolled down and around the pen from capped nib to barrel and back again. Anxiously he pulled the cover free to reveal a sharp nib with a single drop of black ink dangling from the tip, ready to drop the moment it was set to paper. Or parchment. Or . . . or . . .

  The room darkened as the lights winked out.

  “If you can hear my voice, you have uncovered the instrument of ultimate salvation,” a disembodied voice came from behind us. Basso tones that oozed authority.

  Something my cultured tenor could never do.

  Both Trump and I whirled to face a ghostly glowing form. It might have been human, once. It hovered in the air several inches above the floor. Lean with incredibly long, thin arms and fingers with an extra joint, it towered over Trump, considered a tall man—especially with those shoes. Only the figure’s eyes seemed solid. Deep dark orbs that when I looked deeply into them drew me in, erased my sense of self from all my incarnations. I saw stars and galaxies, new worlds, and old. An infinity of space and hope.

  Both Trump and I remained transfixed, unable to move, only to stare into those beneficent eyes that promised everything.

  We offer you the gift of ruling. Your world faces chaos. Soon it will crumble. The pen offers you an escape. It offers you power. It offers you Truth.

  What you decree with the power of this pen will be, within your borders. Write it with this tool and it will be so. But use it carefully. Make what you would have be, one step at a time. One stroke of the pen. Your words will become truth. Your dreams for your people a reality. Use it for your people. It is not for your personal salvation. Use it carefully. Once you have altered a truth only an altered truth can negate it.

  The glowing image stretched upward, taller and taller, until it touched the high ceiling and dissipated into wisps that faded as it drifted away.

  “By the moon and stars, what was that?” I croaked through a mostly paralyzed throat—like trying to speak aloud to negate a nightmare before fully awake. Moving still seemed a great effort, beyond my simple brain’s ability to function.

  “Aliens?” Trump gasped. He seemed to have recovered more quickly. Perhaps because he held the pen.

  Or the combined ghosts of our ancestors?

  “Can we trust it, Roger?” Trump spun around and fixed me with his stare.

  I shook myself with great effort to free the last of the enthrallment.

  “I don’t know. I should have that pen checked out.”

  Trump shook his head and put the pen back into its special box. He looked at me in a way he hadn’t since before the election. There was new energy in those squinting eyes that looked out of the bloated features.

  ~o0o~

  Donald Trump walked up to the nests of microphones arrayed before his podium. His skin no longer sagged. He wore a hopeful smile. The entire setting an illusion of old tech intimacy, as if he addressed a crowd of reporters and a mass of people beyond. A sham. The only media feed he actually spoke to was a tiny lapel microphone on his oldest and most care-worn suit that strained across his chest and at the shoulder seams, trying to mimic the same hard times as the entire population of rest of the country. That suit would look splendid and new on anyone else.

  I, too, had donned one of my older off-the-rack ensembles, the first one I’d purchased. I loved this suit and didn’t mind that it didn’t have a coordinating vest. It had been the first symbol of my status as an adult male joining an exclusively male club of politicians, never to be discarded because it was the first outward symbol of my transformation into a gentleman.

  “People of the press corps!” Trump exclaimed. “Today I have signed a new trade bill that will ensure grain and fruit imports—tariff free—to fill the bellies of all our children and ourselves.” He held up the gold pen as a symbol of his greatest achievement.

  The air shimmered and tilted so that right seemed to be left and left down. Faint vibrations rippled from the speaker’s platform. I whipped my head around to seek the source. An earthquake?

  No one else—meaning the office staff since no one else was physically there—seemed to have noticed the shift.

  Then all of a sudden the world seemed a less dreary and used-up place.

  No one among the press corps shouted questions because they weren’t there. I expected my computer inbox to be flooded with inquiries about today’s announcement.

  Trump waved brightly to the single camera recording this “conference” and stepped down from the podium. Carefully he capped the pen and tucked it into the breast pocket of his suit.

  The next week, Trump repeated the performance. “Gentlemen of the press.” All men, no women, or generalized people in his address. “Today I have signed my acknowledgement that my scientists confirmed an average reduction of global temperatures by 1.94 degrees Celsius, returning us to the normal temperature proving that no climate change descended upon us, merely a random fluctuation.”

  Week after week, Trump signed a new proclamation bent on restoring the life America had voted to restore. Was it just four years ago?

  Trump proclaimed that every signature accomplished miracles. The people said it was so. No one was hungry, but malnutrition continued to be diagnosed. The temperatures were confirmed to have restored themselves, yet the glaciers still melted, the ice shelves shrank.

  With one swish of a pen, gays, transgendered, and bi-sexuals ceased to exist. No one could see them, or know them, but no one went away. The words, the labels seemed to have lost their meaning?

  Another signature and starving refugees no longer sought American shores.

  On and on it went. Murder was banished. But death still came and the people saw it caused by other things. And when a magic signature banned theft? Things were still taken, but it wasn’t theft. Theft could not be seen. Treasured artifacts disappeared from the Trump Palace on a daily basis. I saw them tucked into pockets or under coats. Trump noticed nothing.

  I was among the first to take note. But I was not alone. More and more people noticed they could see things they knew couldn’t exist and they whispered their confusion to each other, never to an official or the press.

  And each time Trump signed a new truth, the light shifted, and the earth rippled and I saw the falseness of the truth. I went to the streets where the bodies lay, I went to the drowning homes as the seas rose. I took pictures.

  “Sir, you should see these.” I said as I poured Trump’s morning tea.

  “What?” Trump looked at the pictures. “No. They are all lies manufactured by anarchists who want to go back to the horrible days before my reign.” He no longer mentioned an election. Then he picked up his golden fountain pen that never ran out of ink and scrawled across the pictures, “This never happened.”

  As I watched, the heart breaking photos faded to empty paper. No new truth replaced them. But I knew.

  Trump tossed the pages into the recycling basket—his one concession to the truth of a lack of resources.

  That evening, I donned my oldest jeans and polo shirt, amazed that they still fit. Then I rummaged around in my personal effects and found a bag of makeup left over from a previous theatrical career. If no one looked too closely I appeared to be just as pale and hollow-cheeked as the average person wandering the streets in search of answers to the confusion of life.

  I didn’t have to wander far away from the palace to find a bar tucked into a back alley. Dim lights shone around the edges of shutters. The dangling sign of Mike’s Place dangled off center from rusted and creaking chains. Just that sho
rt walk had me dripping with sweat, in late October. The temperatures had not dropped at all. I wondered if they had in fact soared despite the Truth the President had declared with the swipe of his pen.

  Inside, a single fluorescent bulb shone over the tap handles. There was no other light. And no AC as there was in the Palace. Electricity had become too precious to waste on comfort.

  I felt as if I’d stepped back in time.

  For the next four hours I nursed a pint of stout while hunched over the bar, perched on a high stool. I allowed the barkeep to refill my jar only once, not wishing to let the brew befuddle my brains. I’d become too used to fine wines smuggled in from the south of France. The crude, unfiltered liquid bread reminded me of my youth and gay evenings out with other students and later theatrical people. I melted back into that old life, all the while listening to the populace. Strange that they were all men, mostly out of work. Women didn’t come out to this pub. As a shiver of fear ran down my spine, I wondered if females avoided all the other pubs too.

  But then the President didn’t like seeing women in public. They belonged behind closed doors, ready to serve their husbands, or fathers, or brothers. So he had decreed that pubs were suitable only for male clientele. And so it was.

  “I don’t understand. I really don’t. I know that what the government says is truth. I know it deep in my heart. But then the light shifts and I see something else.”

  “Yeah. And every time I feel like something’s not right I see the sky reflect a different color and I’m satisfied again, knowing that the government is working for me, not some idle career politician or power hungry industrialist. They are all working for me!”

  Over and over, I heard the same litany of complaint and confusion. I left the bar at closing, as bewildered as my drinking companions.

  Early the next morning, before the President could process to his office after a grand promenade through the Grand Palace, I slipped into the secret office.

  I walked directly up to the gold desk. It looked dusty now, no otherworldly gleam; no enticing beauty of form. Just another piece of junk. Had it always been thus? I opened the lid and then the little drawer, yanking it fiercely when it stuck.

  Empty.

  Whatever had triggered the illusion of the misty angel or meddling alien, or whatever it was, no longer responded.

  Nearly despondent and as confused as the populace, I turned to retrace my steps and stopped short.

  A column of white mist stood before me. My heart thundered in my chest. The figure coalesced as I watched, taking on the tall, rough shape of a human with impossibly long fingers and burning black eyes. But something was different about this one. The eyes that reflected the cosmos seemed shuttered and blank. I saw only myself. As I truly had been. Then I slowly grew into the image I saw in my mirror every morning.

  The time is coming when you will have no choice. Only an altered truth can counter the ink’s alterations. The enemies of humanity eagerly await the moment of ultimate confusion before they invade and effortlessly take over. You see what few others can. You must decide. Remain a patriot and become a slave. Become a traitor and humanity will survive.

  “Why? Why are you telling me this?”

  Because I, like you, can see the truth. I do not believe my people can survive when they exist only to conquer. I, like you, am an altered truth. Unrecognized and not listened to.

  The entity vanished as before.

  I shook my head to clear my jumbled thoughts.

  Only one altered truth can counter the new truth.

  Or did the thing mean someone altered to the truth?

  ~o0o~

  “Oh, there you are, Roger. Where’s my tea? Look at this. Mixed races do not exist. Our race will become pure again.” He raised the golden pen to make it so.

  “I don’t think so, sir.” I, Roger Middleton, grabbed Trump’s hand where it coiled around the pen and tore it from his grasp.

  “What? How? Unhand me! Give me my pen”

  “No.”

  “But I’ve saved our country.”

  “No, sir, you are damning it.” I held up the pen. “This is not a gift, it is a curse. The aliens you think want to help us are using this to remove the wall between reality and your illusions. When the time comes they will hand you the decree that says they are the government. You will sign it. And it will be.”

  “Nonsense. They gave me the power to save humanity.”

  “Save it? Or lay it out as a sacrifice to their greed?”

  Trump gulped. A glaze of confusion crossed his face. Then his eyes cleared and he again reached for the pen.

  “What about someone who was altered to their true nature before you found the pen?”

  Trump’s eyes bulged and his hand slipped away from the barrel of the pen.

  “That’s right, Donald Trump. Before I joined your political movement as a man among men, I was a woman portraying both male and female characters in one of the finest theatrical troupes in the land. Before I became Roger Middleton, I was Oprah Roosevelt-Kennedy, the culmination of the Kennedy and Roosevelt line. I hereby take back this pen, this nation, and my birthright. I now control the truth and you have no part of it.”

  With a vigorous stroke of the pen I crossed out and obliterated the name and signature of Donald J. Trump from the latest decree. The light shifted, thunder clapped, the floor rippled and walls shook.

  I stood alone in the office that had once belonged to presidents of noble blood and intentions, and did so once more.

  END

  GOOD CITIZENS

  Paula Hammond

  No Mulattos. No Jews. No Gays. Dose are da rules. I don’t make ’em. If you don’t like ’em, don’t ride.

  What’s that? Yeah. Well. Figured you’d say dat. Where to? Right. Meter’s runnin’. Jump in.

  Yeah. That’s right. Joe Mingo, VB. That’s me. Just like da license says.

  Volunteer Brigade. May as well just sew one of those yellow stars on my jacket and get it done with. Still, with a VeeB tag I’m lucky to get any job. Funny, ain’t it? You spend 20 years saluting the flag. Swearing to defend democracy and freedom. And when you do just dat, you end up flushin’ your whole life down the can. You get da label. You get da tag. You a VeeB for life.

  Huh. Well, that’s what a lot of people said. Why fight back? It don’t mean nuthin’. Just an election, they said. We still gots our rights. We still gots the constitution. We gots our TVs and our Happy Meals. All they’re gonna do is yack and yack like governments always do. And four years from now things will go right back to where they was. Why worry?

  But then there was all those ‘nice’ white folks who felt that Herr Hitler had da right idea ’bout blacks and Jews and all dat. All I can say is dat guys from my neighborhood felt different. Never made no difference to me. I mean, what’s skin color when you’re fighting jest to put the food on your table?

  Yeah, well, a job’s a job ain’t it? Lot of us VeeBs ended up on the cabs. No minimum wage, see? No health and safety. No unions. No nuthin’. Used to be the ragheads did all the crappy work. But since Big A cleared em all out it’s left to VeeBs like me.

  Hell, no. We didn’t see it comin’. Who did? I mean, it started with a bit of paper. Jest a dummy bit of paper. Citizen Registration. Sounds patriotic, don’t it?

  Nah, this was way before they dropped the bomb. Before they had the whole world saying ‘Yes Sir, no Sir’. Before everyone was rushin’ to bend a knee to the crazy Old Man in the White House.

  Only problem was we ‘Americans’ wuz from all over. Africans, Arabs, Jews, mixed. Gays? I couldn’t say. Didn’t care. No-one cared much about that sorta thing back den. We muddled along: neighbors, family, friends. Then suddenly it ain’t enough to be American. They wanna know where you’re from. Where your parents from. Where your grandparents from. What percentage white you are? American. What does that even mean? Unless you wuz one of dose guys standing on the freakin’ sand watching the pilgrims roll in, I reckon you
ain’t got no cause to be precious about it.

  White? Yeah. Sure. I’m white. White enough to pass. Dat’s what day say, ain’t it? White enough to pass. Funny. When Granpap left N’Orleans, he figured we could pass. Not have the stain of black on our papers. Give his daughters the chance to marry well. What a joke! If you ain’t black, you’re Jewish, or Latino, or queer. There’s always a new enemy. That’s why we all looked out for each other. We knew it was jest a matter of time before we was next. Can you believe that they got names for exactly how much black you got in you? How much you’re ‘tainted’. Quadroons, octoroons. I ain’t joking. It’s crazy. I mean, here I am breaking the rules in my own freakin’ cab.

  I guess you’re too young to remember, huh? No, there weren’t much fuss to start with. Most people decided it didn’t matter. It was just a bit of paper. Sign a bit of paper. Admit what you wuz and they let you get back to your shitty life. “You gotta look out for your own. Don’t rock the boat.” That’s what they said. “It’s not like we’re Nazi Germany. We just need to know who’s who.” But there wuz those who wouldn’t. Right from the get go.

  Why? Hell, we all had our reasons. The older ones had maybe lived long enough to have seen it before. Came from families who’d been slaves way back. Had brothers who fell for girls the wrong color and got lynched for it. Maybe they’d been beaten, passed over, lost out coz they wuz a bit darker than the next guy. Others could just see how it was going down. So we formed the VeeBs, so we could lend a hand where it was needed. A march here, a blockade there. We brought New York to its knees jest by lyin’ in the streets. We had guys in the electric companies who blacked out Wall Street. We had truckers who spilt their loads. Blocked the highways. Man, for a time, it was glorious. Fan freakin’ glorious.

  Ha! You heard ’bout that? Yeah, the artists, the writers, the actors. They came onboard pretty quick. They couldn’t do much but, yeah. Even now, when I see pictures of that giant naked statue they put out in front of the White House, I gotta crack a smile. There it was, with its big, bloated head and its tiny whatsit slap bang in the middle of the pool. Still don’t know how they did it. Thing gotta have weighed a coupla tons.