City of Truth by James Morrow

its heyday shuttled both freight and humans around the metropolis, Nietzsche had of late fallen victim to the revolution in private transportation, becoming underpopulated and inert, an urban moonscape. I followed Martina to a depot, its tracks now deserted but for the occasional rusting Pullman or decaying boxcar. How stealthy I was, how furtive — how like a dissembler already.
    A roundhouse loomed up, its turntable lying before the switchyard like an enormous lazy Susan, its barns sealed with slabs of corrugated steel. A diesel switch engine sat on the nearest siding, hulking into the wet summer air like the fossilized remains of some postindustrial dinosaur.
    Martina drummed on the door — a swift, snappy paradiddle — and a tall, devil-bearded man answered, his gaunt features softened by the dusk. "I'm Spartacus, come to free the slaves," she told him — a code phrase, evidently. I flinched at the falsehood.
    "Right this way, brave Thracian," he replied, stepping aside to let her pass. Sneaking around back, I groped along the sooty, rust-stained walls. A high, open window beckoned. I piled the handiest junk together — pickle barrel, apple crate, 55-gallon drum — climbed to the sill, and peered in.
    Liars — everywhere, liars. There were over four hundred of them, chattering among themselves as they gripped kerosene lanterns and drifted amid the empty rails, gradually converging upon a makeshift wooden podium suspended several feet above the ground on stilts. The women were dressed outrageously, in low-cut sequined blouses and spangled stretch pants, like prostitutes or chorus girls; Martina fit right in. The men's attire was equally antisocial. They wore tuxedos with white gloves; riding cloaks and jodhpurs; lavender suits that might have been stolen from pimps.
    A burly man in a zoot suit mounted the steps of the podium carrying a battery-powered bullhorn. "Settle down, everybody!" came his electrified bellow. The mob grew quiet. "Take it away, Sebastian!" somebody called from the floor.
    The liars' leader — Sebastian — strutted back and forth on the podium, flashing a jack-o'-lantern grin. "What is snow?" he shouted. I fixed on Martina. "Snow is hot!" she screamed along with her peers. A dull ache wove through my belly. I closed my eyes and jumped into the thick, creosote-clogged air.
    "What chases cats?" asked Sebastian.
    "Rats chase cats!" the liars responded in a single voice — a mighty shout drowning out the thud of my boots striking the roundhouse floor. Rats chase cats : Jesus. My discomfort increased, bursts of nausea deep within my gut. I backed against a rivet-studded girder, my body camouflaged by shadows, my footfalls masked by the rumble of the crowd.
    "Now," said Sebastian, "down to business..." Gradually the nausea passed, and I was able to monitor the ugly schemes now unfolding before me.
    The dissemblers, I soon learned, were planning yet another attack on Veritas's domestic tranquility. For one astonishingly disruptive afternoon, they would revive what Sebastian called "that vanished and mythic festival known as Christmas." Anything to demoralize the city, evidently, anything to rot it from within, anything to sicken our supposed souls. At 2 P.M. on December 25th, when Circumspect Park was packed with families out for a happy day of skating on the duck pond and drinking hot chocolate by bonfires, the liars would strike. Costumed as angels, elves, gnomes, and sugarplum fairies, they would swoop into the park and cordon it off with snow fences, discreetly taking a dozen hostages to discourage police intervention. Sebastian's forces would next erect a so-called Christmas tree on the north shore of the pond — a Scotch pine as big as a windmill — immediately inviting Veritas's presumably awestruck children to decorate it with glass balls and tinsel. Then, as evening drew near, the dissemblers would perform a three-act adaptation of a Charles Dickens story called A Christmas Carol . I knew