Free City of Truth by James Morrow Page A

portcullis, ascending with the grinding gracelessness of an automated garage door. Franz led me beneath the archway, up a pink cement path, and through the central portal to the front desk. He gave my name to the clerk —
    Leopold , according to his badge — a horse-faced, overweight, fortyish man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt so loud it invited legislation. After confirming that they were indeed expecting a Jack Sperry from Plato Borough, Leopold issued me a pink tunic with NOVITIATE stamped on the chest. It was as baggy as a gown from the Center for Creative Wellness, and I had no trouble slipping it on over my street clothes.
    "You look real spiffy in that," said Leopold.
    "You're one of the homeliest people I've ever seen," I felt bound to inform him. The chief bellhop, a spidery old man whose skin resembled a cantaloupe rind, guided me down a long hallway decorated with Giotto and Rembrandt reproductions, Franz following as always, my eternal shadow. We paused before a pink, rivet-studded door that seemed more likely to lead to a bank vault than a hotel room — it even had a combination lock. "Your suite," the bellhop said as the three of us stepped inside.
    Suite. Sure. It was smaller than the Holy See, and sparser: no rugs, no chairs, no windows. The walls were clean and predictably pink. Two male novitiates with wildly diverse bodies rested on adjacent cots, smoking cigarettes. "Your roommates," said the bellhop as he and Franz exited. The door thudded shut, followed by the muffled clicks of the tumblers being randomized.
    "I'm William," said my tall roommate. He could have played point guard for the Plato Borough Competents. "William Bell."
    "Ira Temple," said his scrawny companion.
    "Jack Sperry," I said.
    We spent the next hour swapping life stories.
    Ira, I learned, was a typical dissembler-in-training. He hated Veritas. He had to get out. Anything, he argued, even dishonesty, was superior to what he called his native city's confusion of the empirical with the true.
    William's story was closer to my own. His older sister Angelica, the one person in the world who mattered to him, had recently landed on Amaranth, a planet that existed only in her mind. By learning to lie, William reasoned, he might travel to Angelica's mythic world and either release her from its mad gravity or take up residence there himself.
    The door swung open and in came a small, dusky, stoop-shouldered man with a bald head and a style of walking that put me in mind of a duck with osteoporosis.
    "During the upcoming week, you're all going to fall in love with me," he said abrupty, waving his clipboard around. "I'm going to treat you so well, you'll think you've died and gone to heaven." He issued a wicked little wink. "That's a lie. I'm Gregory Harness, Manny Ginsburg's liaison. You may call me Lucky," he said with an insistent, rapid-fire bonhomie. "The Pope deeply regrets not being here to orient you personally, but his busy schedule did not permit ... anyhow, you get the drift of his bullshit," said Lucky brightly. "Which one of you's Sperry?" I raised my hand.
    "I heard about your sick child," said Lucky. "Heart-rending. Tragic. Believe me, Sperry, I'll be rooting for you all the way."
    * * *
    And so it was upon us, our immersion in lies, our descent into deception, our headlong, brainfirst plunge into Satirevian reality.
    At the crack of dawn Lucky herded us into his pickup truck and took us to a place where money grew on trees, a pecuniary orchard so vast it could have paid the interest on Veritas's national debt. We spent the day sweating under a mercury-vapor sun, harvesting basket after basket of five-dollar bills. On Tuesday morning the weather engineers contrived a fearsome blizzard, squall upon squall of molten snow bringing Satirev to a total standstill and inspiring Lucky to issue us broad-scooped shovels. "Clean it up," he demanded, "every highway, street, alley, path, sidewalk, and wharf." And so we did, our skin erupting in