Veracity Diner
I’ve seen some shit. I’ve covered wars, interviewed undiscovered peoples, even infiltrated incestuous religious cults, but the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, I saw on vacation.
My job was like a river—at least that’s what I told my kids—with currents that swept me away from my family. It dunked me, raked me against submerged rocks, and dumped me out, sodden and disoriented, miles from where I began. Even when I made it home, still dripping with the consequences of my occupation, they could smell it on me. I was immersed.
These days it’s fine. They’re older and they don’t want anything to do with me anyway. But when they were young it was hard on them, and, as you might imagine, hard on my marriage. So, in order to avoid separating property and battling custody, I took my family on vacation once a year.
This strategy didn’t end up working, by the way, but it did leave us with some memories. We went to Hawaii first, the Grand Canyon next, San Francisco after that, and so on. The American classics. But once, when the kids were ten and twelve, we decided to break our routine and visit someplace unaccustomed to tourists. We ditched traditional location-finding methods (Google) and bought a physical map of the United States. My wife hung it up on the bedroom wall, handed me three throwing darts, and blind-folded me. The first dart bounced off the wall and stuck upright into the hardwood. The second landed in the Atlantic Ocean. I should have recognized these ill omens—I would have preferred the Atlantic Ocean to our eventual destination—but my fact-based, news-fed brain ignored ancient wisdom and forced my arm to throw the third and final dart. It pierced the center of Wyoming’s “O,” destroying, had the dart been a missile and the map our country, a tiny and sparsely populated town called Veracity.
Veracity, Wyoming, “Go Wolverines!” is home to 718 decent, hardworking Americans and one preposterously single-minded scum-sucking bastard named Don.
Veracity hasn’t changed since its heyday in the late fifties. On its lonely Main Street a single-screen movie theater, a two-story hotel, a poorly stocked bar, and a glossy diner have been standing at attention since the cold war. All the kids have moved away, so the town is crawling with agrarian geriatrics, or as I like to call them, stoics. It’s charming enough at first, and it’s remote which appealed to my wife. After all the whole point was to get me away from work so that I’d spend more time with our kids. How better to accomplish this than to drag me to the most boring town in the United States?
We got in late. The owners of the hotel had already gone to bed, electing to leave our room key on the front desk inside an envelope displaying a misspelled version of our last name, rather than to stay up to greet us. We settled in, checked the three local channels—two were sermons and the third a high school football rerun—showered, and then put the kids to bed. I went downstairs for a drink but, predictably, the bar was closed. Annoyed, I walked into the deserted street and inspected the moonlit town from the culturally enlightened perspective of privileged superiority. With only one street light muddying the night sky, stars splattered the rural darkness like white paint on a Pollock. I was gazing upward, wondering if it would be possible to fuck my wife without waking my children, when a man’s voice sounded from across the street.
“You must be the feller stayin’ at Abernathy’s hotel,” said the voice, “I’m Don.” A big man in overalls and a cotton long-sleeved shirt sauntered over to me and held out his hand. He had a strong grip, and held on to my hand longer than I felt was appropriate, but he wasn’t outwardly aggressive. “I run the Diner ‘cross the street,” he said, “Veracity Diner. Y’all should mosey over in the mornin’. Best eats in town, if I do say so myself.” And he smiled without taking his eyes off me. He looked swollen, glandular, and clearly had no reservations about staring. I glanced up Main Street and couldn’t help noticing that Don’s, in fact, provided the only eats in town. He was still staring at me when I looked back, but I chalked-up his odd mannerisms to country hospitality or some such, and put them out of my mind. After a minute or two I became unable to manufacture any more reasons to be away from my family, so I told Don that we’d see him in the morning—again, there was nowhere else to go—and walked back to the hotel room to avoid contact with my wife and keep my eyes closed until the morning.
We forgot to pull the curtains closed, so the next morning we awoke violently with the sunrise. When the light was still just a warm pink glow on the inside of my eyelids and a pale blue watercolor on the vast horizon, my dick was full of blood and my ears were full of my children’s senseless complaints. Needless to say, nothing was where I wanted it to be. We got up, dressed, felt obliged to comment briefly upon the natural beauty waving at us through the window, and crossed the street to Veracity Diner for breakfast.
Everything was coated with a thin glimmering sheen of grease, including Don himself who pointed emphatically toward a vacant table as we entered his establishment. The entire town was in attendance; every table in the restaurant clinked with antique delight as we took the seats he’d assigned us. Cream colored tile lined the walls and pleasant mellow greens and oranges curved around the ceiling molding like racetracks. A career waitress filled coffee mugs for me and my wife, and handed my son a stack of laminated menus to distribute. She came back five minutes later and took our orders. I ordered chicken fried steak, my wife asked for eggs benedict, and both my son and my daughter wanted pancakes. I noticed a scraggly grey cat staring at me from the street. Its eyes were huge and wide, which in wartime usually denotes a state of panic, but this feline was clearly calm, even purposeful. This made me uneasy.
A plastic plate clattered heavily onto our Formica table, jolting my attention away from the cat and onto my meat. But where flaky fried steak should have swam in a pool of warm gravy, six pieces of French toast squatted in a stagnant puddle of maple syrup. Confusion dazed me, and when I finally looked up the career waitress had already gone—damn she was quick. But before she had, she’d left identical plates of French toast bulging in front of each of my family members. Increasingly bamboozled, I raised my hand like a schoolboy with a full bladder, only just managing to restrain myself from calling out, “Mrs. Matthews!” in a pathetic reversion to my childhood.
My erect arm earned no attention from the career waitress, so I stood to hail Don with both hands like a man stranded on an island trying to flag down a passing cruise liner. But as I did I noticed—to my horror—that identical plates of French toast squatted in front of each and every patron of Veracity Diner. Without exception. “What French hell is this?” I whispered to myself, chuckling slightly in spite of the situation, just as Don apprehended my concern. Being the prudent business man he was, Don bustled over to investigate this social crime committed on behalf of his establishment.
“Mornin’ neighbors!” he bellowed, his tone evoking Thanksgiving commercials and home décor catalogues, “Now, how can I serve you?” He rubbed his hands together and assumed an eager, charitable countenance. He looked like a friar at confessional, ready to absolve me of my sins and guarantee my place among the deservedly well-fed.
“I take it the French toast is pretty good here, Don?” I asked him rhetorically, trying to lighten the mood, “But the thing is—”
“Actually, son,” said Don, cutting me off, “we call it Freedom Toast here. We changed the name once those frogs abandoned us in our time of great need. And after we saved their asses in The Great War…” He shook his head as if to say it was a shame.
“That was World War Two,” I said.
“What?”
“We saved French assess in World War Two,” I reiterated.
The room grew quiet. The scrape and clatter of heavy metal utensils on brittle plastic plates ceased. Don looked at me without expression. He seemed stuck; it was like pausing a homemade VHS and watching a funny uncle glitch awkwardly between frames. Then suddenly, as if someone had pressed play, he looked me in the eyes, smiling, and said, “That’s not what I heard—now what can I do ya for?”
At first I was so alarmed that I didn’t respond. What the fuck did that mean? I looked around to see if anyone else thought Don’s response was strange, but they all just stared in silence. The most socially comfortable thing for me to do was to laugh, so I laughed. “Ha ha ha. Good one, Don,” I said, and patted his shoulder in recognition of his fine joke, “But seriously,” I continued, “I think there’s been some sort of mistake. None of us ordered ‘Freedom Toast.’”
Don laughed too. Returning my physical affection with a shoulder shrug, he said, “Well, I’m glad to see that you’re having a good time here, fella, but I’m quite certain these are your orders. Now, if you’ll just excuse me, I’ve got a business to run.”
I stared at him like an illiterate might stare at a book. “Come now, Don,” I implored, “There must be some kind of mistake here. I’m telling you these aren’t our orders.”
“Oh no, friend,” he said, using a tone that under ordinary circumstances might have reassured me, “there’s been no mistake. See, we only serve Freedom Toast here at Veracity Diner. Now, I hope you enjoy them!”
Feeling somewhat afraid, like maybe I was in some freaky nightmare and lacked the lucidity recognize it, but also feeling more than a little bit indignant, I turned to address the room. “And is the irony of this situation lost upon you good people?” I asked, but no one answered. “Ah,” I said, “I see. Well, thanks, Don, but I think my family and I will be taking our money elsewhere. C’mon honey, I’m sure there’s a place with some variety down the road. Thanks for the hospitality, Don.”
At this my wife pushed back from the table, but froze as Don’s hearty laugh filled the room. Feeling eyes on me I began to sweat. “Well,” Don said gregariously, putting a little base into his voice, “I think you’ll find that Freedom Toast is the only food we eat here in Veracity County. 1,095 meals a year. It’s the most nutritious meal there is and the people just love it. Now, why don’t y’all just sit down and enjoy yourselves.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back down into my seat. I was so bewildered by this last revelation that I just let it happen.
I looked around at my hungry, hungry family. My daughter was hyperventilating and my son was staring at his Freedom Toast like maybe he really did order it, maybe this was what he wanted. My wife didn’t look at me at all, but she touched my leg underneath the table communicating to me that I maintained the moral high-ground but that maybe I should just let it slide. I felt as if I had entered an unfamiliar reality where my desires were retroactively fitted to my remunerations, and I couldn’t orient myself in a way that allowed me to form a solid dissenting argument. So I just gaped, staring stupidly at my family without eating and without leaving.
A short aside: I used to be funny, I used to make jokes. But cynicism is so high these days that jokes aren’t jokes anymore, and nothing’s funny. Advertisements aren’t just transparent, they’re self-aware. Like ha-ha we know we suck but na-na you can’t live without us. It’s so disrespectful. Throwing our vulnerabilities in our faces over and over again until we capitulate and find ourselves wondering if we might really be happier with Exalta, despite the 45 potentially life-threatening side-effects. It gets rid of your neck-fat! Never mind that it’ll fuck up your nerves and give you a twitchy crack-head smile, just imagine how many more times your dick would’ve been sucked had your neck stored less fat!
Insurance companies don’t care about people, anything with the word, “natural” in it is anything but, and if it’s called “The Fun Zone” it’s probably where Chechen nationals harvest your organs. You always hear that phrase, “take things at face value,” you know, try to believe things are what they claim to be. But that shit’ll get you killed. Because everyone is lying to you all of the time and if you don’t strap your bullshit-goggles on tight you’ll end up selling your eyes. And the terrible thing about today’s lies is that they’re built on top of yesterday’s, and yesterday’s, and yesterday’s. So that in order to expose one, you’ve got to expose a whole family tree of lies, and explain their genealogy. And nobody’s got time for that.
This, however, presents a wonderful opportunity to the unscrupulous. The powerful systematically take advantage of the vulnerable, lie to them about it, and then punish them when they realize what’s happening. They’re shitting in our hands, telling us it’s gold, and then calling us smelly when we go wash up.
Anyway, I ate my fucking Freedom Toast. It tasted like what I imagine Soylent Green must’ve tasted like: shameless profit mixed with moral outrage and fake sugar. The knock-off maple syrup had congealed over the wonder-bread sponges, making the entire experience feel swampy and chemical, like eating one of those oil-drenched birds you see on BP spill-damage advertisements. Still, I made it through the meal. And somehow I managed to avoid my family’s peering eyes, content simply to let their resentment wash over me like a congressman reading letters from his constituents. We all finished quickly and pushed our plates toward the middle of the circular table. Seeing this, the career waitress ambled over with the check, placing it (presumptuously) in front of me. I slapped my plastic credit-card onto the table like a gambler flaunting a royal flush, but it turned out that Don’s was one of those places where you pay at the counter, so I was forced to retrieve it.
Sheepishly I pushed back from the table, but before I was allowed to rise I was stricken with an acute stomach pain that folded me faster than Chamberlain folded to German threat of force. For the second time during this breakfast I felt transported into the mind of my childhood self; I felt afraid for large imposing reasons that skirted the horizon of my consciousness, just out of reach, reminding me of the time I did ‘shrooms in college and tried to remember how to play guitar but wound-up just holding one for several hours without plucking a string.
Seeing my agony from across the room, Don bustled over to our table again. “You alright, neighbor?” he asked, his voice dripping with honeyed concern, “You’re lookin’ a little green around the gills.” I shook my head distractedly. “I’m fine!” I growled, looking into my wife’s eyes as I struggled to my feet. Don was hovering over me like a mosquito, and I could feel little air-bubbles moving in and out of my stomach as I slouched over to the paying counter.
While I waited for the career waitress to punch in my credit-card number manually, I took out my phone and, like any sane, red-blooded American, googled my symptoms. I typed, “Acute stomach pain,” into the browser and braced myself for the wave of negative information that would inevitably reassure me that—as I’ve always known—I was fucked. But relief never came. The city of Veracity, and I should have guessed this, exists outside of cellular range.
At this point I must have looked pretty bad, because both my wife and Don rushed over to stabilize me at the paying counter. “Friend,” said Don meaningfully, “I recommend you go see the doctor, because it looks like a stiff breeze’d knock you over.” My wife agreed. With petulant resignation, leaning the weight of my entire body onto my wife as she gathered directions from Don, I let the powers that be decide my fate.
The office of Doctor Tryme, a gastroenterologist by trade and also the town’s only doctor, was overrun by acute angles groaning with discomfort. The line into his office was so long that it spilled from the waiting room and out onto the street. My wife and I shared a concerned look, but lined up anyway, at a loss for what else to do. We left our kids in the car with the windows open. They were fine.
When we finally got inside we realized that nobody was there to see the doctor, but rather to pick up prescriptions. Men and women who seemed to have submitted meekly to their hunched forms shuffled to a counter where a bored-looking woman doled out heavy-looking white bags filled, I presumed, with some-kind of medicine. Thirty minutes later I reached the counter. And the woman behind it, looking down at a copy of Veracity Weekly on which, for a befuddling second, I seemed to glance a picture of Don, thrust a white paper bag into my face.
“Excuse me,” I groaned, but the woman only shook the bag impatiently. “No,” I stammered, “You misunderstand, I.. I’d like to make an appointment with Dr. Tryme.”
She looked up at me, shocked. “An appointment?” she asked, “I’ve never seen you before in my life!”
“I don’t really see how that’s relevant,” I replied, “But I’m sick, as you can see, and Don told me to come down here and see Dr. Tryme, so now I’m here.”
Evidently this cleared things up for her because she picked up a receiver and dialed the doctor. “Doctor Tryme,” she said, once he’d picked up, “I’ve got a guy out here says he wants an appointment. Mm hm. Okay I’ll send him back.” And with a single motion she returned the receiver and pressed a button that caused a hidden door beside her to unlatch and fall inward.
With mounting trepidation I hugged my wife and crossed that uncanny boundary, leaving her in a room made cacophonous with groaning citizens. I followed signs down an empty hallway that would have looked more appropriate in a mansion than in a doctor’s office, until I found a great iron door that stood at least ten feet tall and had a gargoyle-faced knocker sticking out at head-level. I used it.
“Come in,” said a familiar voice, and as I swung the door open with my left hand, I noticed that behind a huge mahogany desk and a golden nameplate that read “Dr Tryme,” stood Don.
“Howdy neighbor,” he boomed, “Now, how can I serve you?”
Shock quaked through my body. “YOU?!” I bellowed, “You’re Dr. Tryme? Dr. Don Tryme?”
“That’s right,” said Don, “And don’t you forget it!” He laughed congenially. “The Diner’s a relatively new venture of mine,” he said, “I like to think that it integrates vertically with my other interests. Now come, friend, tell me what ails you.”
I slid over to his desk as if it were an alien ship and I were stuck in its tractor beam. I don’t know what it was, but there was something in Don’s big arrogant masculinity that made me want to obey him. Maybe it was his cleft chin, perhaps his steely gaze, or I suppose it could even have been the system of power and reliance he’d built around him. It was hard to say. But in any case I described my symptoms to him, mumbling, “Acute stomach pain.”
He looked me over for a few seconds, told me to open my mouth and say, ‘awe,’ felt the tissue around my neck and jaw, and then wrote something in a black leather book he kept open on his desk. “Well,” he said, “I can’t tell for sure, but I’m guessing you’ve picked up whatever everyone else’s got. It’s really quite something: you see, at any given time approximately one-third of Veracity County experiences gastric distress. It’s really quite perplexing. Anyhow, I’ve concocted a remedy, of my own design, mind you, that seems to relieve this distress. For a time. I recommend you ingest this remedy thrice daily or until relieved.” He reached for a prescription pad and scribbled something that looked like “FT,” onto it. Then, he ripped the prescription from its pad and stuffed it into my breast pocket. “Now off you are,” he said, “Give that ‘scrip to Penelope on your way out and she’ll fix ya right up.”
Several minutes later I found myself standing at the end of that long line once again. It was now so long that it wove through the parking lot and I happened to stand right next to the car, where my family huddled in a malaise brought on by boredom and confusion. When I told my wife, through the cracked car window, that doctor Tryme was actually Don from the Diner, and that he’d written me a prescription, she was irate. She spoke of collusion and conspiracy, and people in the line around me were beginning to get nervous; she was spooking the herd. I tried to placate her, to tell her that Don was just an opportunistic business man who saw a way through the system and that he was someone to be admired, but all that came out was a blithering, “Bu-ba-b-b-b…” that sounded horribly like the bleating of a sheep.
She considered me with a cross-armed look of fascinated disgust, but allowed me to shuffle on. After several minutes, during which I had only gained six full steps toward the door, I looked around at my family and saw my wife sitting backwards in the front seat speaking animatedly to our children, punctuating her words with periodic points in my direction. I turned quickly back to the line, my face growing hot; the next time I chanced a look in their direction I saw that all three of them were scowling at me. I knew Don wasn’t to be trusted, but I wanted to be proven wrong. To wake up tomorrow morning and find myself once again in that semi-comfortable hotel bed where I was still the master of my fate, the father of my children, and the mediocre husband to my tolerant wife. And it looked easier to go along with the line and hope for a return than to embrace the fact that to return is impossible. There is no path back.
After about an hour I made it back to the front of the line. I handed the receptionist my prescription. I assumed she must have been Penelope; wordlessly she held out a white paper bag that hung taught with the weight it held. She looked like Lady Justice, with her left arm outstretched toward me and her chin jutting righteously into the air, but instead of scales she clutched an unmarked bag, and instead of a blindfold she wore shades, tinted just enough so that her eyes weren’t visible. If this symbol had been crafted with even an iota of subtlety I may have paid it heed, but it seemed too blatant to hold any significance, like a poison that shouts, “I’m poison!” right before you drink it, and so I shook it from my mind and grabbed my bag of remedies.
I made it back to the car breathlessly. I jumped in the passenger seat, peered out the window at the line, and said, “Okay, I got the remedies, now let’s get the fuck back to the hotel.”
I could feel my wife’s eyes prodding me. “Open it,” she said.
“What?” I replied stupidly, unnerved by the realization that I’d never seen anyone besides myself exit the office of Doctor Tryme, and that the building seemed to consume its patrons like a fat man slurping spaghetti.
“Open it,” she demanded, “Open your bag of remedies.”
Suddenly I was afraid. I didn’t want to open my bag of remedies. “I’m actually feeling much better,” I said, burping loudly as my stomach roiled in protest, “So, I probably won’t even need these remedies after all. Let’s just go back to the ho—“
But the three members of my family interjected all at once with a ferocious chorus of, “OPEN IT!” And so, ashamed, holding it like I would hold an eel, I produced the white paper bag of remedies, reached inside, and retrieved a brown cardboard to-go box and a plastic fork.
No, I thought, it can’t be; but when I unfastened the box’s clasps and bent back its tabs, there, like a mountain range or a stegosaurus’s back, stood six triangular pieces of Freedom Toast. My wife sighed in disgust and my children gasped in horror, but I just laughed. They looked at me like I was crazy, but they didn’t understand: this was the first genuinely funny thing that had happened to me in years. It was a joke! It was all a big joke and none of it mattered! I looked down at the box, shrugged, said, “Fuck it,” and began severing one of the soggy triangles with the edge of the plastic fork I’d been given.
My wife wrestled it away from me, calling it evidence. She tried to explain to me that Don was a criminal, and I knew that, but for some reason I just didn’t care. She said we had to take the to-go box to the police, and I giggled. As we drove to city hall my wife pointed out all the horrible things about Veracity. “Look around you,” she said, “There’s only one place to eat, the town doctor prescribes breakfast food, and the only people who live here are sick old white people!” She was right, Veracity was horrible, but for some reason I found this information hilarious, and by the time we parked in front of city hall I was cackling like mad scientist.
Obviously, I was in no shape to speak to the authorities, so we waited in the car until I calmed down. After about 30 minutes, my post-Freedom-Toast euphoria began to wane and the mischievously nihilistic perspective that it had built inside of me began to crumble. I felt hollow without this built-in ethos, and grasping for my own made me feel clumsy. I saw myself stuck to the wall of a spaceship, an alien was thrusting its way out of my chest; but when it burst through my body, it wasn’t an alien at all, but a miniature version of myself that flipped me off and then left me for dead.
As this tiny reborn version of myself, I clasped my wife’s hand and marched with her into city hall like only the privileged can. We left the kids in the car again; the window was cracked, they were fine—and anyway, justice is bigger than a couple o’ kids getting left in a car. A pleasant docent informed us that Veracity police headquarters occupied the third floor of city hall, so we stormed up two flights of stone steps, opened the heavy oaken doors with the word, “Police” stamped into them, and slammed the box of Freedom Toast onto the receptionist’s desk.
The receptionist, who looked alarmingly like Penelope from doctor Tryme’s office, seemed unsurprised by our abrupt entrance, and therefore immediately gained the upper hand. “We’d like to report a crime,” my wife said, pushing through her uncertainty, “A man is turning Veracity into a business.”
“A crime!” shouted the Penelope look-alike, “Why, we haven’t had a crime in Veracity in years. The Chief’ll want to hear this.” She pushed a red button on her desk and said aloud, “Chief, some outta-towners here are lookin’ to report a crime.”
A hidden door beside her unlatched and fell inward. We knew what we’d find on the other side of that door, but we ignored ourselves and entered in order to preserve our reality for as long as possible. Our reality being the one in which crime is punished and virtue is rewarded, and not the reality in which success is the only reward and to be poor is to be punished.
We followed gilded signs down gilded hallways until we found ourselves in front of a huge iron door, standing at least ten feet tall and presenting a gargoyle-faced knocker at about head-level. I used it. And from inside came a familiar voice that said, “Come on in, neighbors.”
You guessed it. Behind that iron door, another mahogany desk, and a golden nameplate that read, “Chief Tryme,” stood Don, a look of pure good-humored malevolence stretched upon his greasy face. He looked like a caricature; but if I’ve learned anything from Veracity (and I’m defining my terms here) it’s that while things may not be what they claim to be, or even what they appear to be, they’re almost always what they seem to be. Does the quiet but kinda hot boy in Civics class seem a little creepy? He is! Does the Nigerian prince emailing you about investing into his diamond mine seem unreliable? He is! Does it seem like the words coming from our leader’s mouths are false? They are! In this moment I finally realized that Don was no caricature. He was as real as any lie, so far above the truth that he could watch it as it worked and laugh at the labor of logic, which is a chain made of unique pieces that fit together only one way. He, instead, prefers the bang of ignorance, which is a diversion, a loud noise that allows him to switch these unique pieces out for some simple connective wire while nobody’s looking. And while this new chain might still serve its original function, and even resemble the old chain, it is fragile and inflexible, like a sock you’ve ejaculated in too many times. And that was the world that Don had created in Veracity, one that looked and acted like a charming country community, but was actually just a crusty semen-sock of a town.
“Howdy, neighbors,” boomed Don’s pleasant, commanding base as we entered his office, “Now, how can I serve you?”
My wife crumpled to the floor. “No!” she wailed, “It can’t be you! It just can’t be!” and she covered her eyes. But I knew what to do. I knew that you needed to treat this man the way Gryffindor’s treated the Bogart in professor Lupin’s Defense Against the Dark Arts class: with humorous disdain. “You know what, Don,” I said, “You’ve done so much for us during our vacation in Veracity, why don’t you let us serve you?” I turned to my wife and said, “You remember Saturday Night Fever, right babe? Lay me down a beat,” and turned back to face Don.
For a moment, I thought she hadn’t heard me. She remained in the fetal position, sobbing silently into Don’s priceless Oriental rug for several very long seconds. But just as my confidence was beginning to wane, I heard her fist thump into the ground. Boom... boom… boom… her fist thudded into the carpet over and over again in increasingly short intervals until she landed at 104 beats per minute.
I felt that beat in my bones, coursing through me like peer-pressure after a dare. I caught it and used it. Sauntering up to Don’s desk I sang:
“Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk,
I'm a woman's man: no time to talk.
Music loud and women warm, I've been kicked around,
Since I was born.”
My wife continued to lay on the ground, but began making Seinfeld-esque base-guitar noises that gave my performance more context. Don looked amused at first, but as I persisted into the second stanza, his façade weakened and uneasiness began to tinge his calculated features. I stood up tall and pointed off into the distance, staring along my outstretched arm as if at a far-off calamity. Don looked where I pointed. And as he did I humped my hips forward violently against his desk and launched into the Chorus:
“Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother,
You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin',
And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.”
Don looked at me like a non-believer must have looked at Christ after the resurrection. “I crucified you!” his eyes seemed to say, and he stepped back from his desk. He seemed to me a MacBeth, horrified by the outcome of his misdeeds and tortured by the figments of his past. He grew pale and retreated further, but I would give him no quarter. In desperation he raised his fist above a red button on his desk, similar to the one that the Penelope look-alike had above hers. But before he could spam his intercom, my wife sat up and sang, in a breathy falsetto,
“Ah, ha, ha, ha,”
And then I came in, “Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,”
And then she got to her feet, joining me at Don’s desk, to continue, “Ah, ha, ha ha,”
And we both sang, as high and as loud as we could, “Stayin’ aliiiiiiiiiiiiiive,” and stood across the mahogany desk from Don defiantly, watching his hands fumble with his red button. “You’re in my world now, baby!” I said to him, and my wife supported me with a short but poignant woo. It looked like we had control over the situation, so my wife stepped forward and slapped Don full in the face, chanting, “Feel my wrath, foul demon!” But eventually, Don managed to press that red button and men in S.W.A.T. gear stormed his office and detained us. They asked Don what they should do to us, and for a moment I saw images of me and my family standing in line out front of the office of Doctor Tryme, forever seeking respite from an ailment that the doctor himself manufactured. But before this macabre fantasy could manifest, he, out of fear, or maybe out of some primitive magnetic repellence to us, ordered them to run us out of town. So they picked us up and marched us to our car, where, without looking at our children, we sped away from Veracity.
When we made it home life went on like it had before for a little while. But Veracity was never far from our thoughts. And soon, the memory of that vacation became too much for my family to bear. The problem was that we all remembered it differently. Did we really leave the kids in the car? Was it my wife who insisted upon going to the Veracity police? Did I really sing the Bee Gees in Don’s face? And if so, did my rendition really convince him to let us go? To this day we argue about the specifics. My kids seem to think it was all fake, just another one of dad’s, “News,” stories from a time in which journalism still existed.
And maybe they’re right. What is narrative but a prerogative with a path? What is a story but politics with legs? I sure as hell don’t know any more; but as I tell and retell my story, the only thing I’m sure of is that I wish that third throwing dart had been a missile, and instead of visiting Veracity, I had destroyed it. Because anyone who believes in the power of truth, has never tasted the intoxicating sweetness of fiction. And yet everyone who believes in the power of fiction, paradoxically, uses it to design truth. Reality, however, lies somewhere between truth and fiction, like an old journalist writing stories about his life, trying to trace the thread that leads to now.
