A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  “That’s queen bitch to you,” Boy snarled, moving as seamlessly from sex to violence as an ’80s action movie. “That’s an interesting miniskirt. Did you go to Hot Topic and ask for something with which to catch a predator?”

  “You’re one to talk. You look like you’ve been trimming your hair with gardening sheers.”

  “What shade of dye are you using these days? Strumpet Scarlet? Whore’s Red?”

  “I’m afraid that concealer isn’t living up to its name: Your pockmarks come through clear as crystal, or did someone throw battery acid into your face?”

  “Reginald seemed to like it,” Boy said, smiling nastily. “Carl, too, if memory serves.

  “You steal this one also?” Ginger asked.

  “Ladies, ladies,” Andre began, putting both of his hands up as if to ward off criticism, “surely there’s no need to resort to name calling.”

  Ginger pointed her index finger at Andre, brought her thumb hammer down against it. “Pop,” she said, and Andre was flung backward against the wall of the alley hard enough for M to hear his skull smack brick. Boy snarled and darted forward, brushing off Ginger’s second shot and diving at her enemy. They tumbled over one another, eschewing magic entirely, needing the visceral thrill of physical violence, bruised knuckles, bloodied lips. The hermaphrodite in stockings was breathing something into her hands that would no doubt have grown into a problem for Boy had Stockdale not hooked a foot around her ankle and sent her sprawling, true colors revealed in a moment of crisis, as M had known it would be. The Polynesian ogre returned the favor—cold-cocking Stockdale hard enough to leave a civilian drinking protein shakes through a straw. Bucephalus giggled and crossed between them, and then the two heavyweights were engaged in fisticuffs so swift and furious that M had trouble following them.

  “This is great!” the voice said. “This is so much better than smoking! Is this what humans do all the time—fuck and fight?”

  “That would be the larger part of it. You think you could help out a bit?” M asked his friend living inside of his left eye.

  “How exactly?”

  “Something big enough to make me look important, but not so big as to realign the axis of existence?”

  “Like this, you mean?”

  There was a sudden sunny flash, and an aria cut through the evening, and a sphere of bright, warm light came into existence in the air above the combatants. Then the illumination darted down in all directions, tentacles of moonshine striking Ginger and her coterie prone to the ground, nestling them in its heat, leaving each mewling like tummy-rubbed kittens, eyes staring blissfully up at the moon.

  “Exactly,” M said. “That was perfect!”

  But the voice didn’t answer, and after a moment M realized he was only seeing the present, and not very much of that either, and that the voice was gone.

  M spent a moment in bittersweet reflection at the loss of his new friend. Not a very long one, however. “I am a mage both wondrous and terrible!” M insisted, stretching his arms up in the air. Below his left wrist was a pair of clasped hands in black ink. “My powers are ineffable and vast! Look upon me, mortals, and know fear!”

  “Humble, too,” Andre said, managing to lift himself up from the ground.

  “I didn’t know you had that in you,” Boy said.

  “I’m a very important sort of person,” M said. “You don’t give me enough respect.”

  “You spared me the indignity of sullying my hands,” Stockdale said grandly, “and for that I thank you.”

  “A drink might square it,” M said, “just so long as you remember what I’m capable of, and tread softly in the future.”

  Back inside, M discovered that they had just missed midnight, the crowd midway through the second verse of “Auld Lang Syne,” the one that no one really knows, where you have to make up for ignorance with enthusiasm. Stockdale, punch drunk or just actually drunk, took up after them very loudly. Bucephalus was supporting him on his way to the bar, and once they got there Boy ordered a round of drinks for everyone.

  “To M, and the year ahead.”

  “To friends new and old,” M corrected.

  11

  * * *

  The Spirit of the Age

  When M woke one Tuesday a few weeks into the New Year to discover three more coffee shops had opened up in his neighborhood, he was perturbed.

  “Harumph,” he said.

  Still, he did need a morning cup of coffee, and so he chose one of the new places more or less at random and walked inside. It claimed to serve Estonian espresso, which M, having spent some time in Estonia, did not remember being a thing. The barista was a pretty, short, dark-haired girl with dimples and a poorly chosen nose ring. She seemed disappointed M didn’t want anything more complicated than drip coffee. January’s favorite song played on the radio.

  M sat at an unfinished wooden table in an unmatched chair and tried to remember how many coffee shops there had been in his neighborhood when he had moved in a few months back. He decided to count his neighborhood as ending at Washington Avenue, although some would have said Vanderbilt would have been more appropriate, but if he went by Vanderbilt he’d be sitting there all day. Park Perk and Eskimo’s and Adieu’s and the Brown Bomber and Solomon’s Brew and Brokeland Coffee and Zummi’s and the Happy Werewolf made eight. Nine with that joint the Hasidim ran on Prospect that he never went into. Also, any of the innumerable restaurants in the area would serve you a cup of coffee, and most of the bars as well. And also the bodegas, which generally had a pot going and ran about one to a block. And, of course, M had his own coffee maker.

  “Does that seem strange to you, at all?” M asked a man sitting next to him. “Three coffee shops opening in one day?”

  The guy laughed. “What can I tell you? It’s Brooklyn.”

  Which was true as far as it went, but still.

  Heading out the next afternoon, he grabbed a cup of coffee at the joint across from his house. A week earlier, it was vacant, a fit haven only for roaches and crack addicts, but in the interval, it had been refurbished in what was someone’s idea of a Parisian salon circa 1920—though M had spent time in Parisian salons in the 1920s and didn’t remember them being so hatefully twee. It had two tables that could have comfortably sat a family of gnomes. It had a full set of Flaubert’s works, leather-bound, above the espresso machine.

  The barista was a pretty, short, dark-haired girl with dimples and a badly chosen nose ring.

  “Welcome to Marcel’s!” she said, happily. “What can I get started for you?”

  M gave her a nasty look. “You don’t work here,” he said.

  The girl laughed. “Why, of course I do!”

  “No, you don’t. You work in that Estonian coffee shop. I saw you there yesterday.”

  The girl laughed again. M got the feeling that he would get the same response with anything short of physical assault. M glowered at her a while, but he still ordered a large coffee with cream. It was delicious, though M bitterly resented that the only available seating was a repurposed antique barber’s chair.

  When M walked outside of Marcel’s, he called Boy and asked if she had time to meet up, but Boy was crawling out of her bed in Williamsburg, a short eternity from Crown Heights, and so M had an hour to kill at least. If it had been later, he would have gone to a bar, and if it hadn’t been raining, he would have gone to the park. But it wasn’t later and it was raining, so he ended up just going early to the coffee shop at which he was to meet Boy. It had a rather strong nautical theme, which didn’t make sense on all sorts of levels. The internet connection was fast as lightning, the coffee as strong as a punch in the gut. The croissant he ate was flaky.

  After Boy had been late thirty minutes, M decided to split, only to run into her outside, looking rather furious. Boy often looked rather furious, though in this case the target of her rage seemed to be M. “Where the fuck were you?”

  “Where the fuck were you?” M asked. “The coffee shop at the c
orner of Washington and Park,” M said, pointing back at the way he’d come. “I’ve been sitting there for half an hour.”

  Boy looked at M strangely for a moment, then pointed kitty-corner across the street to a cute little joint that hadn’t been there when he’d walked past an hour earlier. It had wide bay windows and comfortable-looking couches.

  They went to get a beer at The Lady, which seemed like the safest choice.

  “I saw this happen in the late ’70s,” Boy said. “Broadway was an unbroken string of disco joints from the Financial District to the Bronx. There was a three-month period when I had to trek out to Jersey to buy a pair of pants. But this kinds of aberration doesn’t last forever. It’ll straighten itself out eventually.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  Boy shrugged. “It’s not my neighborhood.”

  Crossing down Franklin the next morning, there were more new coffee shops than M could keep track of. Everyone he walked past seemed to be coming in or out of one of them—bodegas remained unvisited, boutique sandwiches uneaten, thrift stores unexplored. Walking past a black barbershop, M saw a line of empty swivel chairs, the proprietor looking out the window with big, dark, sad eyes. He held a razor in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. It was almost enough to tempt M out of apathy. Not quite, though.

  Then, on Friday, M went to buy some fruit at the only decent supermarket within twelve blocks in any direction only to discover it, too, with an incongruousness M felt was clearly pushing the boundaries of coherent reality, had turned into a coffee shop. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked. Since he was inside of a small warehouse, all of the shelving jettisoned to make one large, open space, vacant except for a distant section in the back with a counter and some chairs, his question echoed louder than he intended. The twenty-odd berets typing away at their MacBooks looked up at him unhappily.

  M snarled, set his shoulders, and strode right up to the barista, head down, like a bull to a matador, like a soldier ready for war. “I need to see the manager,” M said firmly. “Right now.”

  “Of course, sir,” said the smiling ingenue working the register. “We’ll get him in just a moment.”

  And sure enough a smiling man in a flannel shirt whisked his way out from the back and offered M his hand to pump. “I’m Nigel,” he said. “Is there something the matter?”

  “Not you,” M said. “The real manager.”

  M was still not quite sure if Nigel and all the rest of his staff and all the rest of the Nigels and all the rest of their staffs had had a Day of the Truffids pulled on them or if they were just side manifestations of whatever was at the heart of this unpleasant change. That they had some capacity for independent thought (apart from the uniform at least) seemed to be confirmed by the look of pure terror that Nigel gave to the cashier. “Look, man,” Nigel said, “I’m not sure that’s the best idea. He’s . . . awful busy.”

  “Look, buddy, if I need a recommendation on which flavor macchiato to go with, I’ll drop you a line. Past that, I don’t need advice. I need you to take me to the man you answer to.”

  Nigel shrugged and pointed at the door he just came through. “That way,” he said. “Isn’t a man, though.”

  But M wasn’t listening. He unzipped his coat overdramatically and went to make trouble.

  There was a moment after opening the door and walking through it wherein M wasn’t doing either of these things, when he was suspended in some strange netherworld, an instant that would have been terrifying if he had been capable of processing it, but since he wasn’t, it just seemed like a strange sort of blip in his mind, a scratch on an LP, snow flickering across an old television set.

  “Come on in,” said the thing sitting behind the desk. “Can I pour you a cup of coffee?” Before M could answer, it had already decanted half a pot into an oversize ceramic cup and thrust it across the table.

  “Thanks,” M said, taking a seat. He took a sip out of politeness. It was the best cup of coffee he had ever tasted.

  “On the house!” the thing said. It was trying to look like a human and only partially succeeding. Its hair was hair until it got up close to its scalp, then became something that clearly wasn’t hair. It had a flannel shirt and a badly rendered beard. The tattoos running up its arms were straight gibberish, random symbols and letters that did not add up to words, and M could swear that the hands at the end of those arms switched between possessing four digits and five, shifting whenever he looked away. It had big, brown eyes, dark as—well, as a cup of coffee, though it annoyed M to have to think that. “Always happy to speak with a satisfied customer—and if you aren’t satisfied, then by golly, I’m going to satisfy you!”

  The setting had the same not-quite-real feeling as the thing itself. There were bookshelves everywhere and books inside them, but if you looked closer you saw their spines were unlabeled, and M felt confident that if he had plucked one, it wouldn’t have opened or would have opened on blank text. The landscape outside was windblown and barren, as if you had built an office park in the middle of Siberia.

  “First, I’d just like to tell you how much I love the new shop.” M had found that when it came to these strange deviations of reality, these ungainly manifestations of the zeitgeist that sprung up when the passions and prejudices and joys and miseries of the populace came in contact with whatever mystical current was required to give them some semblance of life, it was best to try to just explain the matter calmly, as to a child or a madman. Always being very conscious, of course, that children are cruel and madmen are mad, and that this particular tempestuous toddler or muttering transient could warp the foundations of existence in ways potent and incomprehensible.

  “Thanks! It’s about the community, really—setting up a space for people to come together and do their art or work on the great problems that are facing society. To live up to the full potential they have inside them, all with the aid of nature’s most beneficent stimulant, the coffee bean.”

  M took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be easy. “And so many different franchises springing up . . .”

  “How else to reflect the extraordinary diversity of the drink? From the common Ethiopian arabica, smooth-flavored and casual, to the precious kopi luwak, brewed from beans fermented by the digestive process of the noble Asian palm civet, truly, there’s nothing like coffee.”

  M looked at his cup. “Digestive process?”

  “We only use beans that are taken from wild civets. Some of our competitors use tamed civets, which,” the thing shook his head back and forth, “well, you can imagine.”

  “Wild civets?”

  “See, we believe that making good coffee is about more than just giving someone a smile while going about their day. Coffee can be a real source of positive change in this world. Did you know that every drop of our coffee comes from free-trade farmers in third-world countries? Or that, for each cup of espresso sold, we donate five cents toward a charity that provides support for organic Romanian goat herders?”

  “So you’re saying this coffee has been shat out by some sort of marmot?” M asked.

  “Only the best!”

  Something about having discovered he had just drank feces, or something that had been suspended in feces, gave M a little extra nerve. “I gotta say, there’s been an awful lot of shops opening in the neighborhood these past few weeks.”

  “People love coffee.”

  “Believe me, man, you’re preaching to the choir—I can’t get through the day without having a cup. The thing is, I can’t get through the day without other things too—food, for instance, and clothing—and lately those are harder and harder to find.”

  “People love coffee,” it said again, and this time there was a weight on top of it.

  “Look, I love coffee. Coffee is great. Coffee might be, literally, my favorite thing on earth. But even still, I don’t think that I like it to a point where I would want to be exclusive. It might be nice if, in addition to drinking a great cup of coffe
e in the morning, I might buy soap or visit a bank.”

  “I don’t think you know what you’re asking,” it said, hands up as if trying to stop M from sprinting off a cliff. “Sure, our expansion might have made it a bit more difficult for you to pick up some staple goods. But what is that when held against the joy of a freshly brewed pot?” Outside the windows in the room that was not a room, something crackled. It was not quite thunder, because thunder is caused by electrons flowing through clouds, and M was no longer in a place where the rules of physics, or at least his rules of physics, held much sway. “There are prices to pay for living in Brooklyn—one has to make certain sacrifices. If you want your box stores and your cheap groceries, you might as well move out to Jersey. You can buy your shoes at Walmart and get your morning coffee at a Starbucks.” It snarled out the last word like a Serbian cursing.

  “No one’s suggesting that,” M said, trying to mollify the minor god. “The one time I set foot in Starbucks I’d been forced at gunpoint, and even then the fumes were enough to make me vomit. If Adolf Hitler himself came in here right now, and he was about to bring a Starbucks espresso up to that little thumb-width mustache of his, I’d knock it right out of his hand. If you were to poison me and then mix the antidote in with a cup of their house blend I would die in agony on the floor rather than drink it.”

  The thing nodded again, happy that he and M were on the same page. “You had me worried there for a minute. I was thinking maybe you were one of these poor bastards who don’t know a double-roasted espresso from a mug of Folger’s instant!”

  They both laughed at the absurdity. M decided to try a different tack.

  “Really I just came by to congratulate you on all the good work you’ve been doing in the neighborhood. I have to say, the success you’ve been having, it’s unprecedented.”

  “Thanks! Well, like I said, you make a good product, people will come, right? It’s basic stuff.”

  “Absolutely, absolutely. And the product here is so tremendously good, I’m sure it won’t be long until the whole country gets to appreciate it. It’s amazing to think, in a few years, when you’ve got shops blanketing the nation, hell, the world, I’ll be able to say I went to the original franchise.”