A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  “Shall I wrap it up for the madame?” the owner asked.

  “No,” Anais said. “Thank you.”

  Back in the thoroughfare, M took her arm again quickly, smiling like a lure, pulling her back into the general direction of happiness.

  “You’re such a good guy, M,” Anais said. “You deserve to be with someone who makes you happy.”

  “That’s a lot of responsibility to put on Salome’s slender shoulders.”

  “Not really. It’s no more than I’ve taken on with Ibis, or Ibis with me.”

  “You’re a lot stronger than I am, though.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true. The thought of being single seems so utterly exhausting.”

  “Happy for both of us, then, that we’ve found ourselves in the conditions best suited to our inclinations.”

  The next stall had mirrors of all kinds: cheval glass and compacts and thin baking sheets filled with mercury, beaten lengths of shiny metal, little pools of unnaturally still water offering the full cruelty of reflection. Anais spent a while staring into one of those common sorts of artifacts that improved the viewer’s form the longer they looked. “Don’t you get tired of it after a while? All those nights waiting round for someone to text who you know will never text, and going out to bars that you don’t want to go to, and drinking overpriced drinks? The endless tumult? The chaos and the uncertainty?”

  “That’s life you’re describing. And yes, I do get tired of it, but the alternative seems rather extreme.”

  “I just don’t know what I would do without Ibis,” Anais said, very much like she meant it.

  The Anais in the mirror had hair that was just a shade more vibrant than her prototype had ever enjoyed. Her hips were narrower, her bust was wider and her smile bent sultry. “He makes me happy. Every day I wake up next to him I feel lucky. I know that whatever else happens, I can rely on him. We’re a team, you know?”

  “Sure,” M said, turning away. “Of course.” The collage of quicksilver distorted his slight frown, magnified and echoed it till it seemed to reflect back against him from every vantage point. Anais continued on a while longer, further paeans to the glories of monogamy. M remained unconvinced, but then again, M was not the target, and walking out she seemed happier than she had walking in.

  “You get older, M, you start to like the idea of having someone around waiting for you.”

  “But I’m a lot older than you are, and I don’t feel that way at all.”

  Ibis and Salome returned then, each carrying two fists of booze.

  “And how are we doing here?”

  “Lovely,” Anais said brightly. “Everything all right?”

  “Perfectly fine,” Ibis answered, smiling broadly and handing his girlfriend her drink.

  The next tent sold band posters from this and other realities, and while perusing the stock, Salome and M discovered they both loathed Jefferson Airplane. As a bonding agent, shared enthusiasm has nothing on mutual antipathy, and from such small seeds have mighty oaks grown. Further conversation revealed that Salome had been to Belarus once, which M thought was pretty interesting, M being who he was. He would not have expected it of Salome, and he was happily surprised as well to find that she not only knew every member of the Kinks, but could name them, and though neither saw any particular reason to purchase the black velvet painting that depicted them and had inspired this line of discussion, still it proved more kindling for the fire. In fact, with his blood now something like one and a half percent alcohol, M could admit that perhaps he had been too quick to judge Salome. In her favor remained the happy jiggle of her jiggly parts, as well as the newfound knowledge that he had been too quick to assume that said voluptuousness corresponded to a dullness of wit. This was another reason that M had trouble agreeing with Anais—because people, who were terrible and selfish and banal and just, I mean just horrible, just absolutely, you get the idea, were somehow also fascinating and occasionally quite lovely and, broadly speaking, worth meeting. M had simply never quite managed to figure the math by which one person was better than many people.

  Though neither Ibis nor Anais seemed to be having any trouble sorting it out, occupied at a nearby prize booth, ensconced in their own love. She tittered and blushed. He mugged broadly. On his third try, Ibis managed to sneak a ball through a net, and Anais laughed and clapped her hands and rewarded her knight with a firm kiss, as was just, right, and proper. As spoils he received a sad-looking teddy bear, and when he passed it back to Anais, she blew up with joy like a tick with blood. They were the very picture of monogamous bliss. They were the sort of happy that might have made M, long accustomed to solitude, wonder if perhaps he was using his time to its absolute best effect.

  “How long have you been sleeping with Salome?” M asked Ibis a few minutes later, before Salome and Anais had returned from the bathroom, but after they had purchased and mostly consumed a tray of yucca-fried chicken slices.

  Ibis coughed up some hot honey sauce. “I’m not sleeping with Salome.”

  “I guess you’d best just find me a spot in bedlam, then, because I’m apparently going mad.”

  “If I was sleeping with Salome, why would I have invited you to go on a double date together?”

  “You didn’t, Anais did, and you couldn’t think of a way to get out of it.”

  “And why would Salome agree?”

  “To torment you, obviously. The same reason she’s wearing that dress in this weather.”

  “She has a marvelous ass,” Ibis agreed, rather sadly.

  “You really aren’t good enough for her.”

  “Who?”

  “Both, but I meant Anais.”

  “No,” Ibis agreed, “but she doesn’t realize it.”

  “She really loves you, you know.”

  “I love her!” Ibis observed, indignant. “That’s nothing to do with it.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “I just get . . . tense, you know? Anais is great and everything, but Salome is, Salome is—”

  “Oh, I understand. It’s not complicated. You’d prefer to have sex with more than one woman. There’s no great mystery to it.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t like you as much as I sometimes think.”

  “You know you can’t say anything,” Ibis added. “That’s bro code.”

  “I was never signatory to that pact,” M said. But he kept quiet after Salome and Anais had returned, offered them the rest of the food, which Anais munched happily.

  “M just came back from traveling,” Ibis said, though by this point it was clear his heart wasn’t really in playing matchmaker.

  “Really? Where?”

  “All around. I was in Paris a little while.”

  “Did you ever go to that bar by Père Lachaise that serves housemade rum?”

  “With the duck charcuterie?”

  “Yes, and that voice in the bathroom that they say is the ghost of Jim Morrison.”

  “I don’t think it is.”

  “No, me neither.”

  M laughed. Anais smiled broadly. Ibis drank the rest of his drink. They headed back out into the market.

  The next booth was not a booth at all, only a space between them, and in the center of that space was a banked fire and two chairs. On one of the chairs sat a wizened old woman wearing a mottled assemblage of rags. On the other chair sat no one, and then M.

  “You again,” the woman said. Her accent was thickly Slavic—borscht and Basil the Bulgar-Slayer. “Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time?”

  “I’m too old to learn lessons.”

  “Suit yourself. Standard stakes?”

  “I’m low on dragon scale this month. What would you put up against a child’s first memory of snow?”

  The old woman sucked at her few remaining teeth, yellowed calcite jutting arbitrarily through pinked gum. “Depends on how fresh.”

  “Daisy fresh.”

  “I could make you conversational in ancient Babylo
nian.”

  “Could I read it?”

  The crone shrugged.

  “So I could, like, order a meal in ancient Babylonian?”

  “Something like.”

  “How often do you suppose that would come in handy?’

  “Hmm.”

  “The recollection against the language, and I get to break.”

  “You’re the visitor,” the old woman agreed.

  M spat on his hand. The old woman did the same. They shook over the graying embers of the fire.

  “Thomas Edison,” M began.

  “Nikolai Tesla,” the woman responded flatly.

  “Karađorđe Petrović.”

  “Tito.”

  “Stalin.”

  “Ivan the Terrible.”

  “Catherine the Great.”

  “Jenna Jameson.”

  “Shit!” M said, then scowled unhappily and paid her.

  “Any time you want a rematch,” the woman said.

  “You’re cheating,” M said, which was true but he knew he couldn’t prove.

  Salome looked on, half impressed, which was more than half the reason M had done it. “That wasn’t bad.”

  “No, no,” M said with perhaps a touch too much self-deprecation. “I never should have gotten involved in the Balkans.”

  “I suppose if she lost very often, she wouldn’t be making a living at it.”

  M’s reserves of false modesty depleted, he put two fingers on Salome’s arm and pulled her slightly closer. “I suppose not.”

  It was getting late. The river of patrons had trickled to a stream. The vendors were starting to pack away their gear, cognizant of the remaining few hours before dawn. The greasepaint was beginning to run, the dream stuff to clot over. In a few hours it would be sawdust and taffy, and anyone foolish enough to wait round to see it might well discover that elves are not to be trusted, that their smiles hide sharp teeth. Also, Anais was tired and making no effort to hide it, yawning heavily, Ibis attending to her. A peculiarity of the goblin market meant that however long you walked you were never very far from where you came in, and by mutual agreement they headed back toward the exit.

  Outside the wind had picked up, going from harsh to torturous. A cab was passing by, and with an instinct for gallantry that he rarely observed, M flagged it down and offered it to Anais and Ibis.

  Anais hugged M tightly before she left and pulled him down to whisper something into his ear that was kind and reassuring and fundamentally misguided. Ibis shook his hand vigorously and stared too long into his eyes. “I’ll text you tomorrow,” he said, holding the door open for Anais and sending him strong psychic signals as to how he ought to best spend the remainder of the evening.

  “No rush,” M answered. The taxi sped its way back northeast, toward Park Slope and bourgeoisie normality.

  “Well,” Salome said, turning back to M before the car was out of sight.

  “Yes,” M said.

  “This has been lovely.”

  “Entirely.”

  “Tired?”

  “Not a bit of it.”

  “There’s a bar nearby.”

  “There usually is.”

  Though in the event they gave it a pass and went straight on to M’s.

  10

  * * *

  Friends New and Old

  It was about the size of one of those rubber balls that spoiled children get from toy machines at the front of supermarkets, a reward for not shrieking while Mommy is shopping, or at least not shrieking very much. It was the color of a cherry-flavored fruit roll-up. It was the color of blood. Inside of it a string of lights tumbled and swirled.

  “I don’t think I can swallow this,” M said.

  “You don’t really need to swallow it,” Talbot said. Talbot was wearing tattoo-tight pants and a sleeveless T-shirt. His hair was mussed. M had known him since the mid-’60s, when, for a while, he had been the only person on the East Coast who had a direct line to Owsley’s top-secret, possibly government-funded LSD laboratory somewhere outside of San Francisco. And if that connection had dried up at some point over the last fifty years, he could still usually be relied upon to provide narcotics at semi-reasonable prices. M had always felt this to be a solid basis for friendship.

  “What you see is only the physical manifestation of the creature on this plane of existence,” Talbot explained. “Once it comes into contact with your aura, it’ll dissipate entirely.”

  “But I have to put it in my mouth.”

  “I suppose it could be taken as a suppository.”

  “What’s it called again?”

  “Brain Rape,” Talbot said. “It’s all the rage in Berlin.”

  “Who ever knew the Germans to be wrong about anything?” M popped the thing in his mouth. There was a brief sensation of falling from a great height, and then of being caught and lifted back to his feet by hands both strong and kind. When he came back to, the capsule was gone. “What is this supposed to do again?”

  “What’s the farthest you’ve gotten backstage?”

  “Pretty far.”

  “Ever get to where things that are start to run into things that aren’t?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Brain Rape says hello to what lives there.”

  “How long does it take to work?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. The guy who sold it to me sort of . . . disappeared.”

  “Oh.”

  Which sounded ominous, but after thirty seconds nothing had happened, and then someone began to bang loudly on the door, demanding they vacate the men’s urinal, which they did.

  “I want my twenty back if this doesn’t kick,” M said.

  “Find me later,” Talbot answered, before falling out into the crowd.

  The start of a new year was not a source of any particular enthusiasm for M. He had seen too many of them. But still, any excuse for a good party, or a party at least. M had not yet made up his mind about this one in particular, but he was for frivolity in the abstract. The warehouse was far enough into the back end of Brooklyn as to have taken on some of the characteristics of fantasy—Brooklyn, being a slightly separate dimension so far as the Management was concerned—but other than a few sets of horns and the occasional pointed ear or third eye, there was surprisingly little to distinguish this particular gathering from your garden-variety warehouse party. Fey hipsters gamboled, bike messengers compared beard lengths, sweet young things tempted drunken passersby. There were three different DJs in the three different rooms, and M did not like what any of them were playing. The ground was unfinished, there were holes in the walls, everything smelled strongly of mildew, and yet a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon still cost you five dollars.

  M found Andre where he had left him, overdressed and out of place. M was not entirely clear what Andre had done to get himself exiled from his usual crew of finance wizards and drug-addled debutantes, forced to half beg an invitation to accompany M to “whatever he happened to be doing for New Year’s.” No doubt he was strongly regretting it, Andre being that sort of Manhattanite for whom going to Brooklyn was a dishonor just this side of seppuku.

  “Did everyone here come direct from their grandparents’ closet?” Andre asked.

  “I told you not to wear a suit.”

  “I always wear a suit.”

  “I can hardly be blamed for that.”

  “What took you so long at the bar?”

  “I ran into Talbot on the way over there.”

  “Talbot? Surely you aren’t mad enough to have taken something that Talbot gave you?”

  “It’s New Year’s.”

  “Did you bring me any, at least?”

  “Buying drugs is like playing dodge ball: Every man for himself.”

  “We don’t play dodge ball in France.”

  “Something else for which I can’t be held responsible.”

  “Why is one of your eyes a different color than the other?”

  M could not see his left eye—t
hat’s not the way eyes work—but he did have the distinct sensation that something was off about it. To begin with, it seemed no longer willing to obey his commands, turning and twisting of its own volition; and to continue, the images it offered were hallucinatory yet infinitely precise. Closing his right eye and peeking down at his arm he could see through the skin and the veins, into sinew and bone and farther still through the cell and the molecule, and then deeper down into its constituent atoms and the things that were smaller than atoms and the things that were smaller than the things that were smaller than atoms.

  “Hello,” said the voice from M’s left eye.

  “Howdy.”

  “What are you, exactly?”

  “A human.”

  “Same as the other one? Too bad.”

  “Why too bad?”

  “He started to get very boring, I turned him off. I hope you won’t be boring.”

  “Me? No, not at all. Quite the opposite. Fabulously interesting is how most of my friends would describe me.”

  “I’ve never described you that way,” Andre said. “What exactly did you take?”

  M ignored him. “Say, how long do you think this . . . association of ours will last?”

  “Last?” asked the voice.

  “How much time do you think we’ll be spending with each other?”

  “Time?”

  “Time is the name humans use to describe the expansion of the universe. It’s used to arrange events in sequence, and generally to avoid going mad.”

  “This is getting boring . . .”

  “Look, there’s Boy!” M exclaimed. “She’s riveting. You’re going to just love her. Thrill a minute, that one!”

  “Yeah? You think?” Andre slicked back his hair. “Well, what are we waiting for?”

  M would not have noticed Boy if she had come in by herself, dressed as she was like virtually the entirety of the rest of the assemblage—birth control glasses and carefully disheveled hair. But happily she’d come in with Bucephalus, and Bucephalus was the sort of person who stood out in a crowd, even if that crowd contained its fair share of not-quite humans. He was as big a man as M had ever seen and bigger than some things M had seen that were not men. He wore loose jeans without a belt and unlaced tennis shoes and a tight white T-shirt that barely reached above his nipples. He had biceps the size of M’s head, and written in Gothic script across his bullock clavicle were the words EVIL QUEEN. He had a Union Jack do-rag tied around his enormous skull. His skin was black as ash, and he had painted his eyelids indigo. M did not like most of Boy’s friends, but Bucephalus was the only one of whom he was somewhat afraid.