Free City of Truth by James Morrow Page B

blisters, rashes, and second-degree burns as we carried heap after heap of steaming precipitate to the Jordan and dropped them over the banks. Lucky mopped our brows with towels dipped in ice water, slacked our thirst with lemonade, soothed our wounded skin with eucalyptus oil — but he kept us on the job all day. Wednesday: a tedious morning of shoeing six-legged horses, a wearying afternoon of decorating Satirev's innumerable rock gardens. My companions and I felt that, for stones, these creatures were extraordinarily loquacious and singularly self-pitying. The stones lamented their lack of mobility and prestige. They said it was hell being a stone. Cut them, they claimed, and they would bleed. Further lies, Thursday's lies — our task master loaded his truck with cans of spray paint and shunted us across Satirev, stopping at every public park along the way and ordering us to turn the grass purple, the roses blue, and the violets red, an ordeal that left my co-apprentices and I so speckled we looked like amalgams of all the Jackson Pollocks I'd ever criticized. That night, as I lay on my cot in the Paradise, my stunned brain swirled with deceptions — with lavender cabbages and crimson potatoes, with indigo jungles and chartreuse icebergs, with square baseballs, skinny whales, tall dwarves, and snakes with long, pale, supple legs. More lies — lies, lies, lies. On Friday, Lucky gave us .22 caliber hunting rifles, instructed us in their use, and, exploiting the handicap of our Veritasian upbringings, made us swear we wouldn't use them to escape. "Before the day is out, you must each bring down a flying pig. Don't let the low comedy of their anatomy fool you —
    they're smarter than they look." Thus did I find myself crouched behind a forest of cat-o'-nine-tails on the banks of the Jordan, my .22 poised on my knees, my mind turning over the manifest rationale behind my deconditioning. A black, bulbous shape glided across the river, like the shadow that might be cast by a gigantic horsefly, and I recalled the perusal I'd made of Alice's Adventures Underground before criticizing it. "The time has come," the Walrus said, "to talk of many things." I grabbed the rifle, took aim; the shape flew along the equator of my telescopic sights, eastward to the axis. "Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax — of cabbages and kings." I fired. "And why the sea is boiling hot." The bewildered and wounded animal fell squealing. "And whether pigs have wings." My bleeding prey hit the water.
    When your every muscle aches with the effects of a currency harvest, you do not doubt that money grows on trees. When your entire epidermis is branded with the aftermath of 200-degree snowflakes, you cannot but accept their reality. When every particle of your concentration is fixed upon blasting a winged pig out of the sky, you do not question its species's ontological status.
    * * *
    The Hotel Paradise had but one eatery, an immaculate malt shop called the Russian Tea Room, and on Friday night Lucky took us there for dinner. Brilliant white tiles covered the walls. The stools — red vinyl cushions poised atop glistening steel stalks — resembled Art Decco mushrooms. The menu bulged with carnivoral delights — with cheese steaks, hot dogs, hamburgers, beef tacos. Lucky told us to order whatever we liked.
    "I've been driving you all pretty hard," he confessed after our food arrived.
    "An understatement," I replied.
    Lucky twisted the cap off a bottle of Semitomato Ketchup from Veritas. "Tell me, men, do you feel any different?"
    "Different?" said Ira Temple, voraciously consuming a beef taco. "Not really." William Bell bit into his cheeseburger. "I'm the same man I always was."
    "Saturday's schedule is pretty intense," said Lucky, shaking blobs of ketchup onto his French fries. "You'll be digging sugar out of the salt mines, attending a linguistics seminar with some golden retrievers, carrying steer haunches over to the Pope for him to bless. In