Free City of Truth by James Morrow

only a dog." Manny shook Satirevian salt into his coffee. "I have just one question. Listen carefully. Do you love your son?"
    "That would depend on—"
    "I don't mean love him, I mean love him. Crazy, unconditional, non-Veritasian love."
    Surprisingly — to myself if not the Pope — I didn't have to think about my answer. "I love him," I asserted. "Crazy, unconditional, non-Veritasian love."
    "Then you're in," said Manny.
    "Congratulations," said the dog.
    "I must warn you — the treatment doesn't take in all cases." Manny sipped his Fran's Fairish. "I advise you to throw everything you've got into it, your very soul, even if you're convinced you don't have one. Please don't look me in the eye." I turned away, uncertain whether to rejoice at being admitted or to brood over the possibility of failure. "What are my chances, would you say?"
    "First rate," said Manny.
    "Truly excellent," Zeke agreed.
    "I'd bet money on it," the Pope elaborated.
    "Of course," said the dog, "we're probably lying."
    * * *
    On Sunday morning Martina and I hiked through the flurry of five-leaf clovers outside the Center for Creative Wellness and, reaching the top of the hill, placed a call to Arnold Cook at his home in Locke Borough. After claiming to be my wife, Martina told him I'd been diagnosed with double pneumonia and wouldn't be coming to work for at least a week. Her fabulation gave me a terrible headache and also, truth to tell, a kind of sexual thrill.
    The chief curator offered his qualified sympathy, and that was that. What a marvelous tool, lying, so practical and uncomplicated. I was beginning to understand its pervasive popularity in days gone by.
    Together Martina and I strolled through the park, Franz hovering in the background like an unwanted thought. She grasped my right hand; my fingers became five erogenous zones. Today she would return to Veritas, she explained, where she'd finally lined up a job writing campaign speeches for Doreen Hutter, a Descartes Borough representative.
    "I'll miss you," I said.
    "I'll be back," she said, massaging her baroque braid with her free hand. "Like all dissemblers, I'm obliged to live here ninety days a year, soaking up the atmosphere. I'll be spending next Friday on the Jordan, fishing for ferrets."
    "Will you visit me?" I asked this zaftig and exotic woman. She stared into the sky and nodded. "With luck you'll be a liar by then," she said, tracking a pig with her decorous eyes. "If you have anything honest to say to me, you'd better do so now."
    "As you might imagine, I'm completely focused on psychoneuroimmunology right now. However, beyond that, I'd have to say..." The truth dawned on me even as I spoke it. "I'd have to say I'm a little bit in love with you, Martina."
    "Only a little bit?" she asked, leading me to the riverbank, Franz at our heels.
    "These things are hard to quantify." Two gondolas were lashed to the dock, riding the wake of a passing outboard motorboat. "May I ask how you feel about me?"
    "I'd prefer not to say." Martina splayed her fingers, working free of my grasp.
    "Ultimately there'd be nothing in it for either of us, nothing but grief." She climbed into her gondola and, assuming the pilot's position in the stern, lowered her oar.
    "I'm certain you'll become a Satirevian," she said, casting off. "I have great faith in you, Jack," she called as she vanished into the 3000-watt sunrise.
    * * *
    The current carried Franz and me south, past a succession of riverfront cottages encrusted with casuistry: welcome mats, flower boxes, plaster lawn ornaments in the forms of Cupids and little Dutch girls. My guardian landed the gondola before a two-story clapboard building painted a bright pink and surmounted by the words HOTEL PARADISE in flashing neon. A stone wall hemmed the grounds, broken by a massive gateway in which was suspended an iron portcullis, also painted pink. Bars of pink iron crisscrossed the hotel windows like strokes of a censor's pen. A sudden skreee : the