A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  “He’s fun-looking!” the voice from M’s left eye said. “I like his hat!”

  “Howdy,” M said.

  “Got any coke?” Bucephalus asked.

  “Not on me.”

  Bucephalus shrugged and headed into the party.

  “Charming as ever,” M said.

  “Better than yours,” Boy said, running a long eye over Andre and seeming not to like what she saw.

  “Andre,” Andre introduced himself, reaching out to take her hand.

  Boy scowled and ignored it. “I thought you told me you hated this guy?”

  “I hate all of my friends.”

  “You said you hate me?” Andre asked.

  “I’ve said worse things to you about her,” M said. “Andre, why don’t you go grab Boy a drink and tell her everything that’s wrong with me. I’ll pick you up again down the line.”

  Boy had a scowl that would peel paint, but she took Andre’s arm all the same. M went outside to smoke a cigarette and try to get his head together.

  “This is incredible!” the voice burbled happily. “This is so much fun! Everyone should do this all of the time.”

  “Tell that to the attorney general,” M said.

  “Smoke another one!”

  “It’s kind of cold.”

  “Smoke another one,” the voice insisted.

  So M did and managed only to get out of smoking a third by introducing his voice to the concept of alcohol, which M described as “using the same orifice for a somewhat different purpose,” an explanation that was sufficient to generate enthusiasm on the part of his ethereal companion.

  M was at one of the bars trying to decide if he ought to start the voice off on liquor or beer when Stockdale sidled over from the other end, a pretty Latin girl in tow. “Here’s my man right now,” Stockdale said, slapping M on the shoulder. “Good to see you. Got any coke?”

  “Why do people keep asking me that?”

  “It’s not an unreasonable expectation. This is Adda,” Stockdale said.

  “Nice to meet you, Adda,” M said. “I don’t have any cocaine.”

  Adda shrugged unhappily.

  “Having a nice night?” Stockdale asked.

  “You know,” M said, “I kind of am.”

  “Who’s this?” the voice asked.

  “Stockdale,” M said. “We’re friends.”

  “Damn right,” Stockdale said, slapping him happily on the back before taking Adda off to a quieter corner of the party.

  “What’s a friend?” the voice asked.

  “A friend is someone whose company you enjoy and whom you trust to get you out of trouble.”

  “Like Andre?”

  “God, no. I wouldn’t trust Andre to water my plant.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I kind of like him. I mean, he’s good for a hoot or a holler.” Two women of child-bearing age giggled at the other end of the counter. One of them had an ass like God’s ass, if God were a twenty-one-year-old ingenue. M smiled at them both.

  “What are we doing now?” the voice asked. “I’m getting bored again.”

  M spent a while trying to explain sex to his left eye, but it seemed that its species did not reproduce sexually or, for that matter, at all.

  “So you make copies of yourself?”

  “Not exact copies.”

  “Do the copies listen to you? Like, can you order them around?”

  “Not really. At least that never worked on me.”

  “Why would there need to be any more of you? There seem quite enough of you as it is.”

  “More than enough, in fact. But that’s not really why we do it. Not the only reason. I mean, it’s not my reason for doing it at all, actually, more of a bug than a feature.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  M spent a while explaining. The two girls at the other end of the counter moved away uncomfortably.

  “So essentially it just boils down to friction?” the voice asked.

  “I think that’s simplifying the matter a bit.”

  “Well, you’ve convinced me. Let’s go have sex with someone.”

  “And don’t we wish it were that easy. Share a smoke?”

  The voice was amenable, and so M was back outside when he saw Ginger and her crew walking through the crowd like Patton through Normandy. Ginger had red hair and piercing dark eyes and was dressed like a sexy vampire, which was the only sort of vampire that anyone ever dresses as. At her side an adolescent-looking androgyne in a Catholic-schoolgirl outfit smoked a cigar the size of a porn star’s phallus. Taking the rear was a Pacific Islander wearing a charcoal suit and standing as tall as two regular-size people. There were a number of others, though M didn’t bother to pay attention to them specifically—they were all equally hip, tattooed, fedora-ed, and mustachioed.

  “Shit,” M said.

  The bouncer had squared shoulders and fat biceps and a swirling tattoo that ran up his face, and he was not mad enough to try to make them wait in line, let alone pay a cover. The long row of would-be partiers shot dagger eyes at their backs but didn’t make a fuss either.

  “If it isn’t Boy’s boy,” Ginger said, sauntering past the velvet rope.

  “That’s cute, the way you put boy next to Boy like that,” M said. “Where did you get your MFA? Sarah Lawrence?”

  Ginger laughed and brushed her hand up against M’s cheek. “I like your scruff,” she said.

  “Yes!” the voice exclaimed. “More of that!”

  “Is your friend around?” Ginger asked.

  “I have lots of friends,” M said, pushing Ginger’s hand away from his jaw gently. “And I’m friendly with all of them.”

  Ginger smiled that nasty smile of hers and tossed crimson ringlets off her pale forehead. “I hope not that close,” she said, before leading her crew inside.

  “Where did she go?” the voice asked angrily. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “She was just flirting with us to try to get back at Boy,” M explained.

  “They do that?”

  “All the time.”

  “I’ve got a lot to learn about women.”

  “You and me both.”

  “Let’s get a drink!” the voice said happily, Ginger and her coterie forgotten in its enthusiasm to renew its acquaintance with alcohol. “And then maybe take another crack at that sex thing.”

  “In a minute, in a minute,” M said, stubbing out his cigarette and darting inside.

  But it took near twenty of these to find Boy, and the voice complained the entire time: Why were they puttering around in the back rooms of this gathering when there was yet so much to taste, to swallow, to smoke, to desire, to befoul, and to consume?

  “It’s called loyalty, damn it!” M explained. “There are more important things in life than cigarettes, alcohol, and sex. Not by much, but still.”

  “Is this that friendship thing?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  When he finally found Boy, he found Andre as well, sitting close to each other on a couch in one of the side rooms, and Andre was whispering something into her ear, and she had one hand on his knee and didn’t seem to mind their proximity.

  “You know that scarlet-haired vixen whom you’ve been sort of perpetually feuding with?” M interrupted.

  “Ginger? Sure, I put a half a bag of sugar in the tank of her Vespa when I saw her on Halloween. And then last month I tricked her into visiting one of those side dimensions with snakes and shadows that look like snakes.”

  “Well, she’s here.”

  “Yeah?” Boy looked a little pleased, inspected her unpainted fingernails elaborately. “I guess she got free then. What’s it to me?”

  “She’s got the cast of Glee walking backup.”

  “Boy’s got me,” Andre said gallantly.

  “I’ll make sure to call you if I need a recommendation from the wine list,” Boy said.

  “Perhaps I’m being less clear than I ought to,” M continued. �
��It’s been a confusing sort of night. I’m trying to warn you that there’s someone in the building who wants to kill you. More than one, probability would suggest, but one for certain.”

  “I heard you,” Boy said, tilting her neck in a fashion that let Andre look down her limited cleavage. “And what do you want me to do? Run? If Ginger wants to find me, she can find me. Or maybe I’ll go find her. This party is boring as hell,” she snapped her eyes back down on her quarry.

  Andre smiled. “Perhaps we should try to find somewhere more interesting?”

  They say opposites attract, but they were wrong, because Andre and Boy were exactly the same—ranging wolves with red-flecked grins.

  “Boy did not seem to appreciate your loyalty,” the voice from M’s eye continued as M returned to the main room and the bar that occupied most of it.

  “People don’t always know what’s good for them.”

  “Friends seem like a lot of trouble.”

  “You are not wrong.”

  Bucephalus was at the other end of the counter M ended up at, and he stared at M in his implacable, frightening sort of way.

  “There’s that man with the hat again,” M’s left eye observed.

  “Fuck is the matter with you?” Bucephalus had a voice like concrete being rubbed against steel.

  “I’m on drugs.”

  “What kind of drug is it that puts a god in the center of your brain?”

  “He’s on to us!” the voice yelled.

  “The very strong sort,” M said, but he said it rather warily, because in a room full of people who were not people, and people who could do things that regular people could not, Bucephalus had been the only one to notice M’s change of circumstance. M had never been entirely clear whether Bucephalus was as good as he was frightening, but now he had his answer.

  “Boy know the bitch is here?” Bucephalus asked.

  “I mentioned it to her. She seemed unconcerned.”

  “You ever notice that Boy’s a little bit reckless?”

  “Yes, Bucephalus,” M said, ordering shots for the three of them, “I had.”

  Bucephalus threw his shot back like it was water, then went to chat up a towheaded queen popping gum at the corner of the bar. M knocked his two drinks down a bit more slowly, and after the second he was feeling the sort of happy that leads rapidly toward nausea. Also, his left eye was now distorting not only space but time as well, tracing through earlier transmutations of existence: what the warehouse had looked like before the party when everyone was setting up, and twenty years earlier when it had actually been used for storing things, and hundreds of years before that when it had been nothing but swamp and greenery, and also, simultaneously and more disturbingly, what it would look like at some point in the distant future, with the metal framework burnt and rusted.

  “What’s going on?” the voice asked.

  “We’ve got the spins,” M explained “You should lie down and put your foot on the ground.”

  “I don’t have feet. Or a ground. This is part of this whole drinking thing?”

  “Not the best part.” M caught a glimpse of Stockdale’s time trail, followed where he had been half an hour before to where he was currently, making the sort of conversation with Ginger that necessitated lots of touching.

  “You again,” M said.

  Ginger smiled, winked, and turned back to Stockdale. “You had your shot, pretty boy.”

  “Can we help you with something?” Stockdale asked, in a tone that made M think Stockdale did not really want to help him with anything.

  “I need to make wee-wee.”

  “I’m sure you can take care of that yourself.”

  “No,” M said firmly, “I can’t. Without assistance, I’m going to piss all over myself.”

  Stockdale swallowed the rest of his beer and nuzzled Ginger’s neck, and then followed M in the direction of the toilets, though of course they stopped halfway.

  “Is there a term for the opposite of a wingman?” Stockdale asked. “Footboy? Flippergirl?”

  “What happened to Adda?”

  “Adda and I had a difference of opinion over whether or not we should have sex in the bathroom,” Stockdale explained gallantly, “and have parted ways. I’ve reason to believe that Ginger will feel differently.”

  “Have you seen the bathrooms here? Hardly copacetic to copulation.”

  “A coat room? The back of a friend’s Cadillac? I’m not picky.”

  “You know that Ginger is at crossed swords with Boy.”

  “I’ll make sure not to invite her to the threesome.”

  “And that she’s only talking to you because you’re friends with me, and I’m friends with Boy.”

  “Gift horses, teeth,” Stockdale said. “You get my point.”

  “Ginger is a nasty piece of work.”

  “Actually, she and Boy are a lot alike.”

  “Of course they’re a lot alike, that’s why they hate each other. Have you ever met a woman before or did they just tonight let you out of your monastery?”

  “Half-wit,” said the voice.

  “Good one!” M said.

  Stockdale looked at M quizzically. “Boy’s your friend. She and I are barely more than acquaintances. And weighing secondhand loyalty against that ass . . .” Stockdale shrugged and turned back toward Ginger’s posterior, giving its owner a little wave. “You can see where this is going.”

  M threw his hands up and went to get another drink.

  “I don’t think Stockdale knows that you and he are friends.”

  “He knows, he’s just letting his cock do his thinking at the moment.”

  “I think I’m starting to get this,” the voice said while they stared at the flesh offered on the dance floor. “They cover up some parts so you pay more attention to the parts they haven’t covered up?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Clever sort of species, humanity.”

  “We do what we can.”

  M was using his newfound perception to identify those partygoers whose futures included him and a bed. There was a well-built brunette he had his eye on and who apparently, in a fair selection of the posterities M was looking through, found him charming enough to go home with even though he lived in Crown Heights and she in Greenpoint. Then he caught sight of Boy’s future contorting its way through reality.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Yeah, doesn’t look great, does it?” asked the voice.

  “I think I’d somewhat underrated the degree of danger facing Boy.”

  “Well,” the voice said, twisting his eye back toward the brunette. “We did our best.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “Didn’t we already decide that Boy was best left to her own decisions?”

  “That was before I watched her get murdered in five minutes.”

  “Don’t get too worked up about it,” the voice cautioned. “Everything that is exists simultaneously with everything that ever was, will be, or might have been. Infinity overlaps to such a fine degree as to make the outcome of any event essentially a matter of perspective.”

  “I’m quite partial to my own particular time stream, in so far as I’ve yet to find a reliable way to break out of it.” It took M a minute to realize that he was watching Andre and Boy head toward one of the back exits in the immediate present, and not in one of the countless infinity of futures through which he was flicking. Ginger and her pack, which now apparently included Stockdale, followed shortly thereafter.

  “So Boy is your friend, and Stockdale is your friend, and they’re going to fight each other?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe. It’s not impossible.”

  “This whole friendship thing makes not a bit of sense to me.”

  “Let’s say you buy a new couch. Who do you think is going to help you take that couch up to your shitty walk-up apartment? Movers? They require a minimum of two hours, and that’s like a hundred and fifty dollars for ten minutes’ work. But more importa
nt, you don’t want to be the sort of person who has to use a moving service. The sort of person who doesn’t have anyone to help them carry a sofa up three flights of stairs is a sad person, a person with no hope at all.”

  “I don’t have a sofa.”

  “That’s not the point!” M yelled. People looked over at him, but he was too excited to care. “A friend is someone who, when they ask you to do something, you say yes, even if secretly you wish they hadn’t asked you.”

  “Are we friends?”

  “I’d say we’re on our way.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right, then,” the voice said, sounding pleased. “Let’s go do something awful to the enemy of my new friend’s old friend.”

  On his way to the exit, M passed Bucephalus, who had just finished rolling a blunt on the bar and seemed to recognize what was going down despite not, to the best of M’s knowledge at least, having an extradimensional entity lodged in his ocular cavity. “Been in a fight before?” M asked.

  “One or two,” Bucephalus answered, sealing his smoke and wedging it behind his ear.

  “I don’t think so,” the voice said. “Are they fun?”

  “They’re fun if you win,” M said.

  “Damn right they are,” Bucephalus responded, getting off from his stool and following Boy outside.

  Some reasonable way down the alley were Boy and Andre, and to judge by their somewhat ruffled state and the shadow they were simultaneously occupying, violence was not foremost on their mind. Not quite so farther down was Ginger, who had Stockdale’s hand on her ass and her crew of miscreants beside her. Not very far down at all stood Bucephalus and M and the creature living inside of M’s eye.

  “A standoff!” M muttered excitedly. “Damn it if you didn’t pick a good night to visit New York!”

  “If it ain’t the bitch,” Ginger said.