"James Morrow - City of Truth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrow James)

Copyright © 1990 by James Morrow,All rights reservedcopynotes . Published by arrangement with St.
Martin's Press. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology in the
United States of America only.



CITY OF TRUTH


by James Morrow




ONE



I no longer live in the City of Truth. I have exiled myself from Veritas, from all cities — from the world.
The room in which I'm writing is cramped as a county jail and moist as the inside of a lung, but I'm
learning to call it home. My only light is a candle, a fat, butter-colored stalk from which nets of melted
wax hang like cobwebs. I wonder what it would be like to live in that candle — in the translucent
crannies that surround the flame: a fine abode, warm, safe, and snug. I imagine spending my days
wandering waxen passages and sitting in paraffin parlors, my nights lying in bed listening to the steady
drip-drip-drip of my home consuming itself.

My name is Jack Sperry, and I am thirty-six years old. I was born in truth's own city, Veritas, on the last
day of its bicentennial year. Like many boys of my generation, I dreamed of becoming an art critic one
day: the pure primal thrill of attacking a painting, the sheer visceral kick of savaging a movie or a poem.
In my case, however, the dream turned into a reality, for by my twenty-second year I was employed as a
deconstructionist down at the Wittgenstein Museum in Plato Borough, giving illusion its due.

Other dreams — wife, children, happy home — came harder. From the very first Helen and I wrestled
with the thorny Veritasian question of whetherlove was a truthful term for how we felt about each other
— such a misused notion,love , a kind of one-word lie — a problem we began ignoring once a more
concrete crisis had taken its place.

His sperm are lazy, she thought. Her eggs are duds, I decided. But at last we found the right doctor, the
proper pill, and suddenly there was Toby, flourishing inside Helen's redeemed womb: Toby the embryo;
Toby the baby; Toby the toddler; Toby the preschool carpenter, forever churning out crooked
birdhouses, bent napkin holders, and asymmetrical bookends; Toby the boy naturalist, befriending every
slithery, slimy, misbegotten creatures ever to wriggle across the face of the Earth. This was a child with a
maggot farm. A roach ranch. A pet slug. I think I love him, I told Helen one day. Let's not get carried
away, she replied.


The morning I met Martina Coventry, Toby was away at Camp Ditch-the-Kids in the untamed outskirts
of Kant Borough. He sent us a picture postcard every day, a routine that, I realize in retrospect, was a
kind of smuggling operation; once Toby got home, the postcards would all bethere , waiting to join to his
vast collection.