A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  For Lisa Stockdale, Myke Cole, and Andy Keogh.

  And, for the city of New York, of course. May you last a little while longer yet.

  1

  * * *

  A Night in Paris

  It would help if you did not think of it as magic. M certainly had long since ceased to do so. He thought of it as being in good with the Management, like a regular at a neighborhood bar. You come to a place long enough, talk up the chick behind the counter, after a while she’ll look the other way if you have a smoke inside, let you run up your tab, maybe even send over some free nuts on occasion. Magic was like that, except the bar was existence and the laws being bent regarded thermodynamics and weak nuclear force.

  So when Idle walked into the Talleyrand, throwing off intangibles like an arc welder, what M thought was—Man, this guy must have naked pictures of the owner or something.

  The Talleyrand was a small tavern on a Parisian side street a few minutes’ walk from the Seine. It was one of the places around town where people like M occasionally gathered, which most days was reason enough for M to avoid it. But the Talleyrand had a stash of prewar absinthe, from back when you could still taste the wormwood, and M liked to get drunk on it when he was feeling nostalgic.

  Idle was tall, with ash blond hair and surfer-boy good looks, as if to spite which he’d pounded about a half kilogram of metal through each orifice and any fold of skin that would allow it. He was dressed like an extra from a Clash video, and he sneered at everything and everyone that came across his path. He spoke no French and was the sort of person who saw no reason such ignorance should be an impediment to living in Paris.

  Idle stood in the door a while, scanning the bar with a dazed expression, the bystanders growing nervous without quite knowing why. M hunched low in his chair, though it soon became clear his vague attempt at concealment was futile. Idle picked up two pints of Belgian stout at the bar, then made his way over. He set one in front of M, and he sat down behind the other.

  “Idle.”

  “M.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m here to kill a man.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not you.”

  “Happy to hear it.”

  “Have a drink.”

  M thought it imprudent to argue. The tattoo on his left forearm was of an umbrella holding off rain.

  On the jukebox Johnny Cash was doing a version of “A Boy Named Sue” with lines that M had never heard before, which no one had ever heard before, some pocket reality version of the Man in Black called up from all the energy coursing about the room. Idle stared at M with bloodshot eyes and a scowl more unpleasant than the one he normally wore. “No one likes you, you know.”

  “No?”

  “You’re always laughing behind your hand at everyone.”

  “Am I? Behind my hand, you say?”

  “Like that,” Idle said, tugging at the copper hoop that ran through his left nostril. “Like that exactly.”

  “What are you up to, slick?”

  “I told you—I’m here to kill a man.”

  M thought hard on what he would have to do if Idle really lost it. A slim handful of possibilities came to mind, and he was rejecting them each in turn when the door opened and the object of Idle’s antagonism became blindingly clear.

  St. Loup was tall and dark as charred hardwood and very handsome. His suit was straight from La Belle Epoque, the sort of sartorial affectation which M didn’t suppose was any handicap to picking up American girls on the Champs-Élysées. M knew St. Loup somewhat, in the sense that they had been running into each other for half a human lifetime. They had never had any problem, at least none that M could remember, but then again St. Loup was not on that list of people for whom M was willing to die. This was, in fairness, a very small list—this was a list that would fit on the back of a movie ticket, or the torn corner of a cocktail napkin.

  Another thing about St. Loup was he had some weight to him, a lot more than Idle. M wasn’t great with time, most of the people in his line weren’t—you see enough of it and it stops meaning much—but St. Loup was pretty old, not ancient but venerable. Under normal circumstances, M would have picked St. Loup to put Idle down easy, like a bitch does with a pup.

  But these were not normal circumstances. Energy rolled off Idle like stink waves in a Sunday comic. It was too much pull to be carrying around up here in reality; it made the Management antsy, got them focusing on you in an inauspicious fashion.

  If M had been St. Loup, he would have turned around and walked straight back the way he had come, maybe even sprinted. That was what M told himself he would have done, at least, though M had on occasion been known to live above himself, or below. Regardless, St. Loup didn’t run, not even after Idle ripped himself upright with enough force to send his chair spinning to the ground.

  “Bonsoir, monsieur,” St. Loup said, folding his gloves beneath his arm and doffing his top hat. “Is there something that I might do for you this evening?”

  M had it on good authority that St. Loup had gotten his training as a gris-gris man in what was now the Dominican Republic, reading the future in chicken entrails and cooking up love potions. Why he had chosen to remodel himself after a member of a decayed aristocracy that had fallen out of fashion some several world wars previous M could not say. He had seen other adepts with far more eccentric and unpleasant tastes. M would, for instance, take St. Loup’s impersonation of a character from À la recherche du temps perdu over Idle’s deliberate deformation of his body.

  “It’s not because you’re black,” Idle began. M wasn’t sure if it was the sheer amount of draw that was making Idle talk like a crazy person or if Idle had just gone crazy.

  “I’d hope not,” St. Loup said. “This is the twenty-first century, after all.”

  “It’s because of Katherine.”

  “Who?”

  To judge by the sudden shuddering that overtook Idle just then, this was the wrong question to ask. “Katherine, my girlfriend. Was my girlfriend. Now she’s your nothing, I guess.”

  St. Loup made a sound in the back of his throat that conveyed some vague sense of regret. “Kat, you mean. I daresay that she played things out the way she wanted it.”

  “And what about what I want?”

  “Well, my friend,” St. Loup continued, with an impressive degree of sangfroid, given that he was staring at a primed cannon, “we don’t always get what we want.”

  “Not always,” Idle agreed, “but tonight.”

  Johnny’s voice hammered through the speakers, angry and dissonant, like something running you down in the dark. M was widely considered the coolest thing on the continent, and his heart was beating so hard in his chest he thought he might scream. Idle crackled, and reality stretched to accommodate him. The walls pulsed and warped, existence going hallucinogenic. The lights went strobe and the crystalline ornament on top of St. Loup’s cane shattered, sending fragments through his hand. He screamed. The bystanders screamed also. Idle laughed in a rather maniacal fashion. M stayed quiet.

  St. Loup stumbled back toward the bar, half tripped over a stool, then righted himself, calling up whatever he could, trying to spark some burst of energy through the agony of his pulped fist and the virtual certainty of his demise. A swirling copper carapace tightened up from his ankles, over his pressed pants and the clean white cream of his shirt, coiled and contorted around his wounded arm, sealing off the flow of blood and protecting him—in theory at least—from further injury. It was the sort of patently impossible thing at which the Management tended to look askance, a work of wonder that could only be accomplished by an adept of great talent.

  It also was no help whatsoever. Idle was all but glowing, he was so thick with th
e pulse. He wiggled his index finger, and the air around it coalesced into slender crimson tendrils, and then the tendrils shifted into flat-headed vipers, a surging mass of them, and then the mass flowed through the air, snakes atop snakes swimming through the firmament, and then they had surrounded St. Loup and his copper shielding, and then they had penetrated it. And then there was no more St. Loup to be seen, the spectral serpents swelling over and obscuring him.

  And then they were gone as well, and what was left was something closer to a slab of meat than a human being, and it collapsed and leaked blood out onto the floor.

  Idle seemed as happy in that moment as anyone M had ever seen, happy as a child on Christmas morning, happy as a virgin bride, happy as a junkie who just topped off. He did not have long to enjoy it.

  Because here’s the other thing, to return to our earlier analogy: No one is such a good customer that they can, say, start throwing glasses at other patrons or take a dump behind the bar. You push the boundaries far enough, and at some point the Management will have to call in the bouncer.

  And reality has a hell of a bouncer.

  There was a sound of something screaming. No, there was the sound of everything screaming: M and the rest of the patrons in the bar, and the bar itself, the heavy oak counter, the seats and the leather booths, the taps and the kegs they led to, the bottles of whiskey and vodka, the floor, the ceiling, the air between them, the cobblestones on the street outside, the night and the city and the world beyond that.

  Everything but Idle, who turned then to look at M for a single moment, smiling, apparently pleased with the choices that he had made.

  And then Idle was not standing next to the counter, victorious in single combat. And then he was not sitting at the table with M, and then he was not walking into the bar, and then he was not opening the door. And then he was not on the sidewalk outside, and then he was not in Paris at all, and then he had not been in London either, and then he had never been born.

  St. Loup was still dead, of course. Not even the Management could bring a man back to life—this was something M had learned long ago, to his not-insignificant despair. But as for the remainder, or at least the majority of Idle’s other works, these had been rendered null by the Management’s alteration. The surgery was imperfect, leaving bumps and tears in the record, particularly for those who had known the man well or been around to witness his demise. There was a scar in M’s mind that would never go away, and if he worked very hard at it, he could get a sense of what had happened in a fuzzy sort of way, at the price of a headache that was more agonizing than painful.

  It was while M was sitting in the Talleyrand, wondering how he had ended up with two half-drunk pints of beer in front of him, that he decided he had seen enough of Paris in autumn, and it might be time to toddle off back to the States.

  2

  * * *

  The Pocket

  The greatest advantage to being in good with the Management was that things went well for you so long as you moved out of the way and let them. M thought of this as being in the pocket. Being in the pocket meant doors open just before you walk into them, taxis stop when you toss your hand up, and bank errors always turn out in your favor. It meant throwing a hard eight after you’d just put your last bill down, meant that the cop who busts you for possession turns out to be an old drinking buddy. It meant walking down the street in perfect synchronous rhythm with the music on your iPod and the traffic lights and the pulsing beat of existence itself. It was why M didn’t worry about little things like money or travel visas or having a permanent residence or much by way of possessions.

  And what did the Management demand, in exchange for all the kindnesses it saw fit to bestow on M? M wasn’t altogether sure, and he’d learned from experience thinking too hard about being in the pocket was the surest way of falling out of it. Just do what came natural and let the chips fall where they may. Not being big on forethought anyway, this suited M just fine.

  M met Jessie a half hour after landing at JFK, in one of the bars in Terminal A. She was a stewardess for Singapore Airlines—the Occident had long since switched over to flight attendants, but in the East they still had stewardesses, and Jessie was clearly the latter: burnt sienna skin and walnut brown eyes, an ass like a ripe peach. After finding out M had no place to stay, she decided to give him one—her apartment in Queens, or the bed in her apartment in Queens, to be precise. And since, being a stewardess, Jessie wasn’t in Queens that much, she said she didn’t mind if M hung around a while, just until he could get back on his feet.

  They spent two days cocooned in love, then M walked Jessie to the subway so she could catch her next flight. On the way back to her place he stepped into a bar for a quick drink, brushing past a furious, goateed gentleman who was on his way out. It turned out that the angry hipster was the bartender, or had been the bartender but wasn’t any longer, and the manager liked M’s look and also was desperate, so he asked if M knew how to mix a drink. M didn’t, really, but he said he did, figuring he could pick it up as he went along. The first night some of the patrons were less than pleased with their Negronis, but after that M pulled it together.

  The tips weren’t bad and it was a good way to meet girls, but M got pretty sick of it after about three days, so he was happy when on the fourth a tall, thin man with wild hair came in and ordered a Belgian ale. After three of these and an hour listening to M’s travel stories, the man broke down in despair, said he was sick to hell of the city and had just broke up with his girlfriend, and here he was about to hit thirty and he hadn’t been out of the country in almost a year, only once to Toronto, and that, they both agreed, didn’t really count. And so M told him, Hell, if that’s the way he felt about it, he should just go, split right on out, M would look after his apartment while he was gone. M was the sort of person who could explain things to people in a certain sort of light, and after an hour, the man returned with a packed bag and an extra set of keys for M to use.

  Which was just as well because by then Jessie was back, and either the idea of having a scruffy-faced wanderer eating her Fruit Loops had become less attractive or she somehow had sniffed out the fact that M had not been entirely faithful while she was away. M’s new place was in Crown Heights, and he didn’t think it made sense to commute all the way from central Brooklyn to Queens for a job that he didn’t want anyway. It was fortunate for him that while drinking away his last twenty at a bar near his new digs he ran into an old friend—well, not quite a friend, but an acquaintance at least, a small-time wonder worker M had met years ago and not thought much about since. It turned out that this half chum needed someone to go on a ride with him and perhaps say some strong words to some people they would meet at the end of it. M was a person known to use such words on occasion, though in this particular instance it was unnecessary, and his presence alone proved sufficient for him to come back to his apartment sometime later that evening with eight thousand six hundred dollars, everything he could chisel out of his sort-of friend.

  Thus it was that within three weeks of repatriating, M had found an apartment, spending money, a wardrobe, and a slate of electronics that the previous generation could not have imagined but which their children considered a critical requirement, all without putting any deliberate effort into it. That was the one problem about being in the pocket—sometimes you got the sense that you weren’t the one in the driver’s seat exactly, that the Management, or the universe or whatever, had marked out the route already, and you were just going through the motions.

  But it was hard to worry about that sort of thing now that M was back in New York, and have you heard of New York, and do you know that it is the center of the universe? Its inhabitants will be happy to educate you, tossing back cigarettes and shots of liquor, bustling between job interviews and blind dates and Ponzi schemes, so confident it’s hard not to believe them. It had been a long time since M had left the city, and returning to it with virgin eyes, he was bowed by the glut of options, act
ivities, opportunities, adventures. Do you want to eat Mexican-Korean fusion at four in the morning? Have cocaine delivered directly to your door, swifter and more reliable than your local pizza parlor? Go see an experimental play inside of a prewar meat locker?

  M did all of those things the first few weeks, spilled himself into the city’s recondite enormity. October is a good time to be in New York. Evening comes quickly, but the weather is warm enough to get by in a long-sleeve T-shirt and a leather jacket, and M looked good in a long-sleeve T-shirt and a leather jacket, as a happy few of the city’s females came to learn. M wandered back streets and side alleyways, smiled at children, frowned at beggars, scowled at corner boys, leered at the preening flock of beauties that made up the larger portion of Manhattan Island. He did nothing to draw the Management’s attention, beyond generally finding himself luckier than most of the rest of the population. He made a point of not letting any of his old acquaintances—friends and enemies and that far larger category somewhere in the middle—know of his return. Word would spread soon enough, and with word, trouble.

  But for a while it was enough to slip through the city like vapor, to remember and rediscover, to take pleasure in the surfeit of human possibility which is New York’s defining quality.

  3

  * * *

  Gowanus Canal Pirates

  M was shame-walking his way back to his apartment in the hours just before dawn one Sunday morning. Her name was Melanie, he was pretty sure, but it had been loud in the bar and he knew better than to ask once they’d gone back to her loft. M hadn’t wanted to stay the night, but he had hoped to cuddle for maybe half an hour, just to get back within stumbling distance of sobriety. But Melanie (?) was having none of it. Maybe there was a rival coming home at some point, or maybe, outside of the flattering half light of the bar, she had decided M was not someone worth knowing any longer. Regardless, around three in the morning, M stepped out of the door of an apartment building in Tribeca, and who in this day and age lived in Tribeca, apart from pop stars and the heirs to oil fortunes? It took him twenty minutes to acknowledge no cab would pick him up and another twenty-five waiting at Chambers Street for the night train and a half hour atop that before he was back in Crown Heights. When he reached the street he was scowling, making sure none of the late-evening denizens mistook him for someone worth hassling, and he did his best not to stumble on the way back to his apartment.