City of Truth

by James Morrow

  We’ve been sailing the broad and stormy Caribbean for nearly four years now, visiting the same landfalls Columbus once touched—Trinidad, Tobago, Barbados—filling up on fruit and fresh water, course uncharted, future unmapped, destination unsettled. We have no wish to root ourselves. At the moment Average Josephine is home enough.

  My syndrome, I’m told, is normal. The nightmares, the sudden rages, the out-of-context screams, the time I smashed the ship-to-shore radio—all these behaviors, I’ve heard, are to be expected.

  You see, I want him back.

  It’s getting dark. I’m composing by candlelight, in our gloomy galley, my pen nib scuttling across the page like a cockroach scavenging a greasy fragment of tinfoil. My wife and the clamdigger come in. Boris asks me if I want coffee. I tell him no.

  “Hi, Daddy.” Little Andrea sits on Helen’s shoulders like a yoke.

  “Hi, darling,” I say. “Will you sing me a song?” I ask my daughter.

  Before I destroyed the radio, a startling bit of news came through. I’m still trying to deal with it. Last October, some bright young research chemist at Voltaire University discovered a cure for Xavier’s Plague.

  Andrea climbs down. “I’d be deee-lighted to sing you a song.” She’s only two and a half, but she talks as well as any four-year-old.

  Boris makes himself a cup of Donaldson’s Drinkable Coffee.

  Out of the blue, Helen asks, “Did you copulate with that woman?”

  “With what woman?”

  “Martina Covington. Did you?”

  I can answer however I wish. “Why are you asking now?”

  “Because I want to know now. Did you ever—?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Once. Are you upset?”

  “I’m upset,” says Helen. “But I’d be more upset if you’d lied.”

  Andrea scrambles into my lap. Her face, I note with great pleasure, is a perfect conjunction of Helen’s features and my own. “‘I hide my wings inside my soul,’” she sings, lyrics by Martina Coventry, music by Andrea Sperry.

  “‘Their feathers soft and dry,’” my daughter and I sing together. Her melody is part lament, part hymn.

  Now Helen and Boris join in, as if my Satirevian training has somehow rubbed off on them. The lies cause them no apparent pain.

  “‘And when the world’s not looking…’”

  We’re in perfect harmony, the four of us. I don’t love the lies, I realize as we trill the final line—our cloying denial of gravity—but I don’t hate them either.

  “‘We take them out and fly,’” we all sing, and even though I’m wingless as a Veritasian pig, I feel as if I’m finally getting somewhere.