The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  I could.

  The air in Europe smells of confectionery, my father had told me. Even in the bars where it mixes in with the smell of alcohol, cologne, perfume and the pungent aroma of French and German tobacco, you can smell candy. Makes you feel like a kid all over again.

  He had been right, as I was to find out. But my first week had failed to ignite the same enthusiasm in me as it had in him and already I was showing signs of being homesick.

  At night, in the sumptuous hotel rooms, you could look out of the open window and have to strain to hear anything. No planes flying overhead, no stilted rap music from passing cars and not even the distant wail of police sirens prowling the concrete corridors of Manhattan looking for transgressors. Or the perfect cup of coffee.

  The fact was, the coffee tasted too bitter and there probably weren’t any transgressors here. And believe me, when a New Yorker starts to get misty-eyed about the prospect of not being mugged then you know somethings wrong. I’d known it pretty well since the second day. But it hadn’t really hit home until a chance meeting with a middle-aged but very attractive woman with a hauntingly soothing purple hair-colouring.

  It was my eighth day in Europe.

  We happened to be standing next to each other in Neugartenstrasse, an otherwise empty street, staring at a cherubic statue of a naked young boy. In fact, I had been so engrossed in the statue that I had not even seen the woman approaching: one minute I had considered myself alone and the next she was there.

  The boy had his hands held aloft behind his head and his pelvis thrust forward, an abundant and constant stream of water fountaining from his little delicately sculptured penis and rattling noisily into the small lake around his feet. Presumably the water was circulated by means of a system of tubes and pumps, though no evidence was visible. I didn’t know and was beginning to care even less. This lack of interest had undoubtedly been heightened – if not caused entirely – by the fact that, somewhat foolishly, I had bought a German – French phrasebook and so was having a hard time making sense of anything. But the pictures were vaguely interesting.

  The woman glanced up the street and produced from her coat pocket a small tin cup which she then held beneath the stream until it filled. Turning to me, the cup already lifted to her lips, she said, “On ne sait jamais, parait qu’en buvant de cette eau, on trouve un bon mari.” Then, with a throaty laugh, she drained the cup and turned to me, smiling proudly. “Ah,” she said, dabbing at her lips with a gloved hand, “c’est magnifique, non?”

  I frowned, smiled and shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” The words came out as a rattling stammer and I made a mental note to spend some time studying foreign languages before I next ventured behind Europe’s lace underskirts.

  “You are not French, monsieur?” She looked shocked.

  I shook my head. “American. New York,” I added, as though the first admission were not a sufficiently heinous crime.

  She frowned and pointed to the guide book in my hand. “Then why do you have a French translation book?”

  I waved the book and gave a small laugh, feeling my ears turning bright red. “Ah, yes,” I began. “A. Mistake. I. Bought. It. In. Error,” I explained, separating the words as though teaching rudimentary English to a visiting Martian…one of those saucer-eyed, spindly-legged figures that habitually stop cars on Nevada highways in order to engage in a little anal exploration with passing hayseeds driving pick-ups, called Duane or Clyde – the hayseeds, not the pick-ups. “What was it that you were saying?”

  “I said, legend has it that by drinking this water one will find a good husband.”

  “Ah.” Her English was perfect which meant that any further utterances from me could be effected in a fraction of the time I might otherwise have taken. But no further utterances seemed to be forthcoming.

  “You are here on holiday, yes?”

  “Vacation, yes.” I waved a hand at the urinating statue. “Seeing the sights.”

  She frowned again and smiled a little slyly as she returned the tin cup to her ample coat pocket. “But you are looking for something, yes? You are not simply on holiday.”

  I shrugged and shook my head. “No… I mean, yes. I’m just taking a break.”

  She took hold of my arm at the elbow and leaned close. I could smell peppermint and perfume, a heady and intoxicating mixture, and, just for a second, I felt my pulse quicken. “I know,” she confided, confirming this revelation with a series of sharp nods. “You are looking for something. You are chasing a dream.

  “We are all chasing dreams, Mons – I am sorry, Sir. But it is only when one learns not to look that one can truly find. When you have mastered that, perhaps you will have success. You must go to Meissen.”

  “Meissen?” It sounded like something Dick Dastardly’s dog, Muttley might have said, his teeth clamped on some unfortunates pants-seat.

  She lifted her shoulders and made a sad shape with her mouth. “Perhaps, perhaps not,” she said, answering some unspoken question as she looked me up and down. “But most everyone finds what they are looking for in Meissen. There is a magic there that…oh, I don’t know.” She laughed. Then I laughed.

  We could have been sitting in a bar off Fifth Avenue, drinking margaritas and discussing a new Neil Simon play. But we weren’t, and suddenly that fact hit me: I was a long way from home.

  Her face became serious. “You must find the dream,” she said. “But take care for there are those who would take it from you.” The light in her eyes gave them a momentarily fearful glint, and then it was gone.

  I smiled respectfully and considered several responses, none of which seemed appropriate. Instead, I decided to stone-wall it out and wait for her to say something else.

  She removed her hand from my elbow and patted the bulge in her pocket. “Ah well, perhaps you will wish me luck in finding my own dream, eh? And I wish you luck with yours, whatever and wherever you eventually find it to be.” Then she was on her way, her high-heeled shoes clacking on the paving slabs, sashaying up the street like a would-be movie star. But in truth, she was already fading and still looking for her leading man.

  I left the phrase book beside the statue. Maybe it would turn out to be somebody else’s dream.

  That night I tried to figure out just what my own dream was.

  By three o’clock in the morning, an empty bottle of hoc and a full ashtray on the table beside me, I had decided, in that wonderfully lightheaded and euphoric way that only comes after too much alcohol, that the woman had probably been right. I had to go to Meissen. Why not?

  I’d done the galleries and sidewalk cafes of Paris and Brussels, and now Hamburg, until I was cultured out, and I’d seen and marveled at enough gargoyle-festooned architecture to make even Frank Lloyd Wright yawn and ask what was on at the movies. My mind was made up and it felt good. A decision had been made. I pulled off my trousers and stretched out on the bed.

  Sleep came immediately. Beneath its sheet of oblivion my father came into my hotel room and sat beside me. It was a very clear dream…so clear that I saw the light shining briefly into the room from the corridor outside. Then the darkness returned and I saw only my fathers shape until he reached the bed. Then, in the glow of the moon through the windows, I saw him in his entirety.

  He was wearing an army uniform and though he was much younger than when I had last seen him – lying in a hospital bed surrounded by drips and blinking machines that were busy stealing him from me – I recognized him right away.

  When you see this, he whispered to me, you must look at it.

  I could see something in his hand but couldn’t make out what it was. But whatever it was, it wasn’t very big. What is it? I asked.

  A dream, he said. It’s only a dream. But it is not yours alone. It belongs to everyone. And you must show it to them.

  If he said anything more, I don’t remember it.

  Feeling groggy, even after breakfast and several cups of black coffee plus a half-pack of Sa
lem, I caught a train later than I had planned, packing my suitcase in a haphazard fashion that I was sure I would regret when it came time to remove the clothes so casually thrown inside. Then, with the memory of my late father’s nocturnal visit still as fresh in my mind as though it had really happened, I arrived in Dresden where I boarded the Theodor Fontaine, one of only two cruisers built to negotiate Germany’s second-longest river, and set off along the Elbe to Meissen.

  It was like sailing into a children’s story book.

  My guidebook – this time an English language edition – told me that the city of Meissen had escaped the Second World War with barely a cup and saucer being rattled. It showed.

  On either side of the river, wild flowers grew in such abundance that it was hard to imagine humans living there at all. Ubiquitous herons and buzzards and kites seemed to support such a conclusion and the occasional Hansel-and-Gretel riverside houses, and the barely glimpsed spired churches and turreted castles nestled as though forgotten deep in the lush woodland heightened the feeling of being deliciously trapped inside a fairy tale. I sat transfixed watching it all float by, daring myself time after time to jump ship. Like the man in the old Twilight Zone episode, I felt I had found my very own Willoughby – a magical domain that waited for anyone brave enough to relinquish all that had gone before and take a chance on finding true happiness.

  We stepped off the boat and into this fairyland grotto speaking in the hushed and reverent tones of acolytes seeking an audience with their God. And well might it have been so.

  If God had decided to spend his time making pottery instead of people, he would first have had to create somewhere like Meissen. The city is home to the oldest china factory in Europe, where some 600 artists are employed to hand-paint each item. But with price tags that range from $100 for a thimble to around $8,000 for a six-piece floral coffee set, it’s a hobby that’s affordable to only a few. Gods included.

  Following a brief check-in at my guest-house and the welcome putting down of my bags, I washed and hit the streets. There was a stillness and calm about the place, drifting up the narrow house-lined streets and down cobbled alleyways in which the very air itself seemed to have lain undisturbed since the dawn of time. Fragmented footsteps echoed desultorily, hunched rooftop gargoyles stared with wide and unmoving eyes, beveled store-front windows reflected our passing images like funhouse mirrors, making the resulting elongations and distortions somehow more in keeping. And so it was, road-weary but mentally alive and even strangely rested with the onset of twilight, I came across the welcome glow and muted hum that characterizes a bar in any country in the world.

  Vinzenz Richter established his notorious wine tavern on Am der Frauenkirche in 1873, notorious because of the array of weapons and instruments of torture housed in its cellar…the function of every item explained in gory detail (though thankfully not demonstrated) nightly by the current owner, one Gottfried Herrlich.

  It was here, drinking my third stein of Muller Thurgau, that I saw Dennis Dannerman.

  The last time I had seen Dennis was maybe five years earlier, in Salsa Posada, a small Mexican eatery on Thompson Street, right across from El Rincon de Espana – what a delight: the best Mexican or Spanish food in town and right across from each other.

  Dennis tended bar at Salsa’s, seeing to folks while they waited for a table, feeding them Gold and Silver Label tequila, copious amounts of Dos Equus or Tecate beers, and mixing cocktails for the folks who like to go to Mexican restaurants to drink them (and who, presumably, like to go to cocktail bars to listen to Los Lobos on the PA system). And all the time, he could carry on a conversation – a real conversation, not one of those cheesy streams of polite but vacuous niceties you get from some bartenders – and he’d laugh and take drink orders for the tables already eating and not miss a single beat or get a single order wrong. And best of all, he didn’t throw the bottles around, though I always believed he could have done if he’d wanted to because I believed he was a special person, one of those people you come across maybe only two or three times in a lifetime.

  But there were two more things that made Dennis special, at least as far as I was concerned: the first was that, like me, he loved jazz music, particularly anything by Horace Silver or Chet Baker; and the second was that we both shared the same birthdate – the Fourth of July. I didn’t find the second one out until, when I had been going into Salsa Posada for several years, Nick Hassam and I had called in there just for a few slammers to celebrate my birthday – the fortieth – before continuing around a few well-chosen dives in the Village to get completely blitzed. When I asked where Dennis was, the girl behind the bar explained that he’d taken the night off to celebrate his own special event, the Big Three O. I couldn’t wait to call in again when he was on duty, just to compare notes…in that strangely metaphysical way that many Cancerians seem to do. But I never did get the chance.

  It was maybe a month later, six weeks at the most, that I finally got back to Salsa Posada, again with Nick. Still no Dennis. This time, when I asked about him, the girl behind the counter gave me a strange smile and sidled off to the woman by the payments desk. A brief hushed conversation resulted in the woman coming up to me and telling me, in a tone of muted respect, that Dennis was dead. He’d piled his Corvette into a road sign on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on his birthday.

  And now here he was shuffling around a tavern in Meissen, Germany.

  At first, I figured it must be Dennis’s double.

  But, as I watched him going up to different people – not everyone, just one or two, seemingly picked out after careful consideration – and showing them something, talking to them quietly, holding onto their coat sleeves, I decided that, no matter what we’re taught about dead people being considerably immobile – not to mention silent – this one was the exception.

  There was no question that it was Dennis so, obviously, the announcement of his death was somewhat exaggerated. Clearly, a mistake must have been made. Maybe he’d lent his car to someone and they’d totaled it, destroying any evidence to the contrary in the resulting conflagration. Maybe it suited him to be “dead” – after all, here he was several thousand miles away from New York apparently immersed in another life. Lots of maybes. But I decided to bite the bullet and speak to him.

  When he finished talking to an elderly couple over by the bar, the man nodded and placed his drink on the counter. Then the man took his wife’s drink -I assumed the woman was his wife – and, even though neither glass was empty, the two of them just turned around and walked out. I recorded all this at the time but it didn’t seem particularly significant. At least, not then.

  I picked up my own glass and wandered across to Dennis, approaching him from his right side as he surveyed the other people. He was just standing there, not doing anything, no drink, nothing. Just as I was reaching out, I saw that he was holding a piece of old card in his right hand. Then I made contact.

  He didn’t turn to me but simply glanced in my direction and then his eyes faced front again.

  “Er fragt, wo man am besten isst,” he said without looking around. He laughed and shook his head. “Und was kann ich fur Sie tun?”

  “Dennis?”

  Still he didn’t turn but when he spoke his voice was almost a whisper. “Is it really you?”

  I moved around so that I was facing him. “That’s what I thought about you. How are you?”

  He stepped back a little so that he could get a good look at me, which also enabled me to get a good look at him. “I’m fine. How about you? How’s New York?”

  “Same as ever. It’s just New York”

  “New York is never only ‘just’ anything.”

  “No, I guess you’re right there.”

  He nodded, gave a small smile and started to look some more at the people around us.

  “They told me you were dead,” I said. His expression didn’t alter and he continued to scan the room. “The woman in Salsa Posada.”

  �
�Cheryl.”

  “Cheryl,” I echoed. “She said you’d crashed the car.”

  Still nothing. I followed his gaze and scanned the faces. They were just people having a good time, drinking the beer, talking, making out. Pretty much like any bar I’d ever been to. Without turning, I said, “You waiting for someone?”

  “Kind of,” he said.

  I turned back to face him. “Do you live here now?”

  His eyes shifted back to look at me. “Look,” he said, “I’m really busy right now. Can we do this some other time?”

  I shook my head in a mixture of annoyance and amazement. “I don’t get it. They tell me you’re dead and then I find you in a bar in…”

  “Meissen,” he offered.

  “In Meissen, and you won’t even pass the time of day.” I pulled out my pack of Salem and lit one. “I had something to tell you that I thought you mi…”

  “We both have the same birthdate. Fourth of July.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I know everything.” He waited a minute or so and then went on. “I knew you were here, for example…here in Germany.”

  “How?”

  He sighed. “Siglinde Erhard told me.” Then he said, “And I knew she had told you to come to Meissen.”

  Siglinde Erhard had wanted a man to care for and to care for her more than anything else in the world. This was what Dennis Dannerman told me as we walked along the bank of the River Elbe, the moonlight playing amidst the ripples in the water.