A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  He had just taken off his coat when his phone started to buzz. Normally M ignored his phone late at night—what good could possibly come of a text at this hour—but he unsoberly supposed it might be Melanie (or whomever) dropping him a postcoital compliment.

  It was not. “KDNAPD GWNS CNL PRATS —BOY,” the text read.

  M sighed and spent a few seconds wondering how Boy had figured out that M was back in town, but Boy knew lots of things people weren’t supposed to know, and there was no time to dwell on it, not with Boy’s text-speak still to decipher. The first word was easy enough, and he could only assume that PRATS was “pirates.” Boy was not British, and anyway, if she had been captured by a pack of prats, she wouldn’t have had any trouble dealing with the situation herself. That left “GWNS CNL,” a linguistic construction that M’s drink-addled brain struggled to unravel.

  “Gowanus Canal!” M erupted cheerily some moments later, happy to have found the right fit. But the smile fell off his face near as swift as it had gotten there, and when he again spoke the words aloud, they sounded more curse than exclamation.

  In the end, M figured there was one of two ways this situation would play out. The first was that the pirates would flog Boy with a cat-o’-nine-tails or keelhaul her or make her walk the plank or some other sort of nonsense. M didn’t think this was very probable, but he wasn’t mad about the possibility. It seemed far more likely that, despite her rather desperate text, Boy would find some way to break free of her captors, murder them all in a fashion at once brutal and novel, and then come knocking on M’s door, prepared to do the same thing to him.

  M liked this possibility even less.

  Gowanus was a forty-minute walk from his apartment, which at least gave M time to clear his head. It was not as clear as he would have liked it to be, given that the situation seemed certain to get nasty, but it was better than it had been at least. Gowanus was all but deserted at night; even the bums and thugs had better things to do than stroll around the abandoned factories and industrial warehouses and shuttered artist colonies, smelling the ripe raw sludge of the canal.

  M had not known that there were pirates on the Gowanus Canal, but it didn’t exactly surprise him, either. He stared for a while into the canal itself, the slow-moving water so dark it failed to reflect the moon, which was now edging toward the horizon. Indeed, the lateness of the hour was a source of some concern. M didn’t know anything about canal pirates, but he did know that things that did not entirely exist often ceased to exist entirely after sunrise, and no one could say with any certainty what exactly would happen to any souls unfortunate enough to get caught among their number after that. Nothing good, M supposed.

  M’s understanding was that the last time anyone had bothered to analyze the water in the Gowanus Canal, they discovered it was mostly herpes simplex 2 and heavy metals, mixed with a smattering of human feces for garnish. So wading upriver was straight out. Boy was just about M’s oldest friend in the world, but there were limits to everything. Scowling, he pulled out his key chain and the small clasp knife attached to it, then drew a not particularly shallow cut along his hand and let a few drops of blood leak into the water below. One would hardly think, given the fetid morass that was the Gowanus Canal, that two or three centiliters of fresh blood would have been enough to draw any particular attention—but M had long ago discovered that in these sorts of situations, the old traditions worked best. Anyway, he didn’t have any other ideas.

  M was midway through his second rollie when he noticed the stink of rum and gunpowder and heard a faint sea shanty chanted off-key. Everything that M knew about sailing could be distilled into a shot glass and thrown back without wincing, but all the same he couldn’t help feeling that whoever crewed the boat was skirting the lines of coherency, likely to draw the Management’s ire. It was as if you had taken a clipper and compressed it into something the size of a large rowboat, each individual feature miniaturized into absurdity. The prow was an anime mermaid—big eyes and bigger tits and no nose to speak of—and hanging over it was a fat man wearing a pair of bright purple trousers and a curved dagger in his teeth. The crow’s nest was barely larger than a custodial bucket, and it swayed back and forth, as did the pendulous, ill-protected breasts of the woman who rode in it. Rounding out the trio was a too-thin man standing on the quarter deck, scowling and shaking a cutlass in M’s direction. “Avast there, ye scurvy landlubber!” he yelled, right hand on the hilt of his blade, left on the beard that hung down toward his ankles. “For what do you call the Pirates of Brown Water! Speak true or meet with swift retort!”

  “This is how this is going to go?” M asked, disappointed but not really surprised. “You picked up a friend of mine. I’d like to get her back. Or at least I’m going to try to get her back.”

  “A friend of yours? A fair lass, perhaps?” asked the one hanging on the prow. “Might be we have her. Might be we haven’t. You’ll have to talk to the captain about that.”

  “I’m guessing he’s somewhere back up that river of shit?” M mumbled, but he knew the saying about pennies and pounds, or in this case, shillings and doubloons. Throwing aside any concerns that his added weight would capsize the craft and leave them all with mercury poisoning and super-AIDS, he leapt gingerly aboard.

  “I’m Rum,” said the one still hanging on the prow.

  “I’m Sodomy,” said the girl on top of the crow’s nest,

  “I’m La—”

  “I get it, I get it,” M said, waving them along. “It’s very clever. Can we get a move on? I’ve got an appointment with a bed that I’m late for.”

  “Tack windward!” Lash yelled up at the mast.

  Sodomy scrambled down from her perch and then did something with the sails that resulted in the ship making a graceful three-point turn and heading back in the direction it had come from.

  “Fucking Christ,” M said.

  Rum hopped down from his place at the prow, and despite the thick rolls of fat on his arms and his waist and his neck and various other places, he gave the impression of being capable enough with the knife that suddenly appeared in his hand.

  M sighed. “By Poseidon’s beard,” he said unhappily.

  “By Poseidon’s bloody beard, indeed!” Rum exclaimed.

  From the back of the boat—it had a special nautical name, but M didn’t know what it was—Lash began to belt a sea shanty that sounded remarkably like an early Smiths tune. Sodomy and Rum also took it up, singing zestfully. It was not at all the sort of sound that M would have chosen to hear, what with his drunk rapidly turning into a hangover and also hating sea shanties and not particularly liking Morrissey.

  They should not have been able to sail upriver, as the Gowanus Canal is surrounded on both sides by buildings large enough to block out the wind. But they were well past the point where things functioned logically, and M was not surprised to find their little ship, despite running low in the water with his added weight, made good time. The longer they sailed, the louder the three chanted; and the louder they chanted, the wider the Gowanus Canal seemed to get, until one began to feel that it ought really to be called the Gowanus River, and at some point the Gowanus Bay, and then, finally, the Sea of Gowanus, though M crossed his arms and resolutely refused to offer it that title.

  After what seemed a longer period of time than the evening had remaining, they came to a version of the Union Street Bridge, which was mostly wooden and somehow extended over the infinitely expanded body of water atop which they floated. M could just make out the barrel of cannon by the dimming moonlight and the flickering torches set beside them.

  “Who goes there?” a voice bellowed down from the bridge. “Say the password or face my musket!”

  Lash looked at M warily, unhappy about risking security in front of an outsider. Then he turned back around and shouted out toward the overhang. “Arggggghhhhhhhh!”

  “Arggghhhhhhh!” the sentinel shouted back at them.

  “Argggggghhhh!” Sodomy and Rum add
ed.

  Having nothing to add to the conversation, M kept silent.

  They floated beneath the bridge and then into some sort of subterranean chamber, which distantly resembled a sewer, the real city merging with the strange, piratical existence that Lash and the rest of his crew had collectively willed into being. They tied up at the quay a hundred or so yards into the cavern, sharing space with two-man rowboats and jury-rigged catamarans and Arabian dhows, as improbable and anachronistic a fleet as had ever been gathered in one place. The waiting mob of pirates offered M a distinctly unpleasant greeting, punctuated by the occasional buffet or elbow, as well as a running speculation as to the sanctity of his anus and how long he might be expected to maintain it.

  If M felt nervous, you would have been hard-pressed to tell. They moved him past surplus East German army tents with barrels of grog sticking out of them, and piles of what looked like costume jewelry scattered about the ground; past drunken wenches and severely inebriated catamites; past three monkeys and a one-eyed parrot reciting what M thought was a passage from Rimbaud. They came finally to a chair made of bone, atop which sat a man the size of several men, drinking from a goblet also made of bone. His beard was black as night, and slow-burning fuses had been set inside the braids. His eyes were brutal. His nose was hooked. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, unarmed.

  “Captain Grimdark welcomes you to the abode of the Pirates of Brown Water,” he said, leaning forward on the point of his cutlass. “Seems we’re getting awful popular with you bright-siders.”

  M found himself distracted by the tawny roots in the captain’s beard—brunet leading into ebony—but he shook himself out of it. “Thanks,” he said. “Yeah, it’s quite a place you’ve got down here. It’s . . . real subtle.”

  The captain rose up from his chair with a grace notable in such a big man, flung his arms wide, and went into easy oration: “For year upon year, we’ve lived beneath you, growing strong in the dark, learning the secrets of the city’s waterways. From the coasts of Staten Island to Montauk, women weep when they see our colors above the mast, and mothers quiet their children by mentioning Grimdark’s name! Our swords are sharp, our cannons primed, our . . .”

  M’s phone beeped, and he fished it surreptitiously from his pocket while the captain was involved in his melodrama, thinking it might be from Boy. But it wasn’t.

  Unknown Number:

  Did you see my earrings on the way out?

  M:

  Who is this?

  “—meaner than Black Bart, prettier than Anne Bonny, Frencher than Francois l’Olonnais—”

  Unknown Number:

  Madison.

  M:

  You think I stole your earrings?

  Madison:

  I’m just asking if you saw them.

  “—taken more plunder in one day than Kidd did in his whole career—”

  M:

  Did you check your nightstand?

  Madison:

  Of course I checked my nightstand.

  M’s looked up to discover the tip of Captain Grimdark’s cutlass a few inches from his throat. “We boring you, boy?”

  “Sorry, sorry,” M said. “It’s this girl I went home with last night. Tonight. Whatever. She thinks I stole her earrings.”

  Apparently this bit of theoretical villainy was small potatoes for the captain. “What did you come here for? Answer fast or feel the tickle of my blade!”

  “Oh.” M put his phone away. “Nothing, as it turns out. I was checking on a friend, but she’ll be fine. This is a great setup, though. Looks just like a LEGO play set I once bought a girlfriend’s nephew. Maybe you could just take me back to where you picked me up? Or, actually, is there a 3 train around here?”

  “If ye think,” the captain began, swelling up like a snake bite, “you can stroll into the nest of the Pirates of Brown Water and stroll right out again, then you’re madder than a drink-crazed Scotsman!” There was much affirmative hooting and hollering from the assembled crowd. “Mayhap there’s someone up above who’d pay to have you ransomed? Or should we just make you a cabin boy? You can fetch me grog when you aren’t taking your time in the barrel!” More laughter followed, as well as the firing of muskets.

  “So no 3 train?” M said, taking a seat on one of the nearby crates. “Fair enough. She probably won’t be very long.”

  Rum scratched at his neck fat. The embers on the captain’s beard burned down a tick. Water lapped against the beach. The one-eyed parrot began the first line of “Man From Nantucket,” but there was a thud and a squawk and it went quiet.

  “What do you mean,” the captain asked finally, giving voice to the mob’s nerves, “she probably won’t be very long?”

  “At some point Boy’s going to work whatever party drug she’s on out of her system, and then she’s gonna wake up with a hangover and a keen instinct for mass murder. You ever see someone pick their teeth with a spinal cord? It’s . . .” M struggled to find the words, then gave up. “I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

  “Pig’s guts!” the captain remarked after an awkward silence. The crowd mimicked his merry disregard. “You’ll need more than a bluff and a prayer if you hope to win free of the Pirates of Brown Water!”

  “I don’t pray that much,” M admitted. “Honestly, when I got her text, I figured you guys were some sort of interspatial privateers, freebooters floating through space-time, not a bunch of extras from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Boy will be cleaning viscera from beneath her fingernails before dawn, and I’ll be wondering how to explain to my cleaner why there’s brain on my sweater. Again.” M shook his head back and forth unhappily. “I knew I should have ignored that text.”

  He got another one then.

  Madison:

  Maybe they fell into your pocket somehow?

  M:

  I told you I didn’t steal them.

  Madison:

  I didn’t say you stole them. I’m just wondering if maybe you accidentally scooped them into your pockets on your way out.

  M:

  That’s a clear euphemism for theft.

  “Who is your friend, exactly?” Lash asked.

  Actually Lash had asked several times, but M had been busy with his phone and also wanted to build some anticipation. “Are you telling me you kidnapped the most dangerous human being within six or seven realities, and you don’t even have any idea who she is? Boy the Infernal? Astarte’s nemesis? The Doom of Atlantis? I suppose I can’t entirely blame you. People who meet her have an unfortunate habit of not living all that long afterward. Actually . . .” M checked the time on his phone. Below his wrist was a tattoo of a choirboy kneeling. “You guys made it about what, three hours? That’s not bad. You’re beating par.”

  “We caught her stumbling near a porthole,” said a scruffy man with an E-Street Band headscarf. “She said rude things about my parentage!”

  “That sounds like Boy, all right. Sharp tongue, but you can get away with it if you’ve got ichor in your veins, instead of blood. Can any of you claim divine heritage? No? Likely go quick then. Say, you didn’t leave anyone to guard her, did you?”

  The captain looked at Lash. “Just Tibault and Callahan.”

  “Well, I hope no one liked Tibault or Callahan that much.” M’s phone rang, and he answered it casually. “Hello? Yeah. Yeah? Great. The nightstand? Yeah. All right then, be well.” He put the phone back in his pocket. “Girls, man. What can you do?”

  But the rest of the assemblage seemed not to suppose M’s romantic difficulties the foremost issue at the moment.

  “If your friend’s so terrible,” the captain asked, “then how did we snatch her so easy?”

  “I dunno. Maybe she was in a K-hole. Probably she didn’t think there was anyone stupid enough to make trouble with her. You know, actually,” M said, again standing, “now that I think about it, she might decide to do all of you indiscriminately, with fire or acid or some sort of giant worm monster, and all things consid
ered I’d rather not be around for that. When she gets death on her mind . . .” M sucked his teeth. “Not pretty. But you guys will be fine. Sure, I once saw her make a Great Old One weep, but you have, like, antiquated firearms and whatnot.”

  “A Great Old One?”

  “All those tentacled eyes bawling—let’s just say there are some things humanity was never meant to see.”

  “This whole thing was an accident!” the captain protested. “We meant no offense!”

  “That’s really how you’re going to play it? You accidentally snatched her up and shoved her into a dungeon?” M shrugged. “Good luck. I ought to warn you, Boy’s not really the forgiving sort.”

  “There must be something we can do!”

  “Suicide? Though she might decide to track you down in hell, so I can’t guarantee it would do any good. Look, guys, this has been great and everything, but the longer I’m here, the more likely it is something gets done to me like what’s inevitably going to get done to you, and I’d really rather not have that.” He waved at the crowd, and they parted obediently, like the waters before Moses or preschoolers before a gym teacher. “I’m sure I can find my own way out. You’ll probably be busy praying, or weeping quietly in corners.”

  “Wait!” the captain said.

  M stopped short. “Yeah?”