A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  “Excuse me? Every one of our coffee shops is independently owned and operated.”

  “Well, not really—if I’d walked into that Estonian joint you opened the other day and went through the stockroom, I’d end up here, right? So really it’s just an elaborate franchise. You should be happy about it—pretty soon you’ll be taking things national. Imagine it: One of your coffee shops in every strip mall in the land, sandwiched between the Cinnabon and Chipotle! Hang out at Davos with all the other titans of industry, talking about synergy and . . . words like synergy!”

  “No!” the thing croaked. “Never!”

  “You can partner with Urban Outfitters and release a line of coffee-inspired clothing! You’ll sell branded water, and prepackaged ham and cheese croissants!”

  “Those things are disgusting!”

  “It’s unavoidable. It’s the end result of any late-stage capitalist process. You know, Starbucks started as a couple of proto-hipsters and a dream, and look at them now! The way is paved for you, my friend. Bourgeois conformity within three years. No way around it, I’m afraid.”

  The thing about these—well, call them spirits or demons or loas or whatever you wanted—was that they had more power than any mortal adept, enough power to rework reality in any fashion they chose. But they couldn’t choose much, the rules of their existence being adamantine and unbreakable.

  “You could put out a line of instant brew!” M said, giving the thing one final shove over the cliff. “Just shake and drink!”

  It blinked twice, horrified, and then reality blinked away also.

  M found himself back in the coffee shop that had been a supermarket but was now just a big, empty room—an empty room partially filled with two dozen extremely confused hipsters, each trying to figure out why the internet had gone out, and the lights, and where the cute barista was, and, also, while they were on the subject, what in the name of God had happened to their coffee?

  Outside the day was gray and rainy, and M discovered that whatever cosmic backlash he had caused had taken with it all of the coffee shops in the neighborhood, even the ones that had been around before this most recent wave of expansion, which was unfortunate, as he belatedly realized that he had not yet drunk his morning cup.

  “Harumph,” M said, not for the last time.

  12

  * * *

  Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  A week into February and, for reasons that M could not quite put his finger on, he fell completely out of the pocket. Bad luck accrued around him. He arrived too late for things—buses and trains, ticket sales and happy hours and last calls. Or too early—for drink specials and to avoid meeting ex-girlfriends and their handsome, brutish boyfriends. He did not win a game of chess for ten straight days, not one, dropping match after match to half-wits and crack addicts and half-witted crack addicts, pushing himself up from chairs and away from computer screens while cursing his sudden stupidity. His brain felt slack, liked he’d laid himself out with sativa, which—fair enough—he had been doing, but this was a symptom or an attempt at a remedy, not the cause itself.

  M was not sure what he had done to fall out of favor with the Management—why those cosmic forces, normally so inclined to look with favor upon his foolishness, had decided to avert their eyes from him. M did not understand a lot of things about his life. M thought that most of his peers were equally ignorant but less willing to admit it.

  In practical terms, being out of pocket resulted in two serious difficulties: The first was that, against his desire and better judgment, he ended up taking on an apprentice. And the second was that a biker gang tried to kill him. But more on that in a moment.

  M was at The Lady one late afternoon when the kid came in—and kid was the only word for him. He was stocky and short and blond and had the face of a newborn. He was wearing a polo shirt and red kicks. He took a stool one over from M, ordered a PBR, opened it, and sat drinking slowly for a while, building up his courage. “A candidate sits before you, awaiting initiation,” he said, voice hushed and serious.

  “Fuck you talking about?” M asked.

  The kid had the sort of coloring that you could literally watch his blush spread across his face. “Sorry, is that not something you say? I read that in one of the hidden texts of the true Rosicrucians. It seemed like the real thing. Some of the exercises worked at least.”

  “Don’t read books,” M said. “Don’t trust them. Not enough that everyone talks all the time, they have to go and start putting thoughts down all permanent like?”

  M’s wholehearted denunciation of literacy proved only a brief obstacle for the young man, who shrugged his shoulders and held out his hand. “My name is Flemel,” he said.

  “Bully for you, Flemel,” M said, ignoring it.

  “I know what you are.”

  “Tired of this conversation?”

  Flemel laughed. M didn’t like Flemel’s laugh. It wasn’t menacing or anything, quite the opposite. It was an amiable laugh, a natural laugh, a laugh between two friends. But M didn’t want any more friends, and often felt he could do without most of the ones he already had.

  “This has been great, but I’m sure you have something really important and exciting to get to, and I’d feel bad if I detained you any longer.” M put a little bit of English on the end of it, enough to send his newfound admirer heading out the door and off to this nonexistent rendezvous.

  The boy’s eyes glazed over for a few seconds, but then he shook his head back and forth and smiled. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  There was no way that M was in so bad with the Management that he couldn’t convince a civilian to look the other way. M had been convincing civilians to look the other way for—actually, M couldn’t remember, but it had been a long time, M knew that much at least. And that meant that Flemel must be on his way toward being in good with the Management himself, even just a little, and that meant that M’s life was about to get more complicated.

  “Look, kid,” M began, in his most reasonable tone of voice, “I’m pretty busy working on this day drunk. How about you tell me what it is I can do for you, and I’ll tell you I can’t do it, and then you can leave me alone.”

  M’s beer was empty, and Flemel waved at Dino and pointed at it. “Another for my friend.”

  “Another for the total stranger was I think what you meant to say.” But M ordered a stout anyway.

  “You’re an initiate.”

  “I told you already, that doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “One who walks the paths unseen?”

  “Are you hitting on me? This isn’t a gay bar, you know. Not that I have any problem if that’s the way you swing, but just so we’re all clear.”

  “A wizard?”

  M just laughed and shook his head.

  “You’re someone who can do things that other people can’t do,” Flemel said finally, dangling from the end of his rope. “And I’d like to learn how to do the same.”

  “If I was what you think I am, would I be getting loaded in a dive bar in the middle of the afternoon?”

  “Yes,” Flemel said. “I think you would.”

  M scowled some more and downed his beer and headed out. Flemel stayed where he was and watched M walk out through The Lady’s bay windows. M told himself on the walk back to his apartment that the hiccup was just that, and it would be gone by tomorrow. But it had been too shitty a month to really believe it, and so when he swung back around the next day and saw Flemel sitting next to his usual spot, smiling and waving, he was displeased but not surprised.

  From then on, Flemel was waiting in The Lady most afternoons. He didn’t say much, just sat near M, not quite staring but close enough. It threw off M’s rhythm entirely, would have even if he wasn’t already out of the pocket. He spent a while trying to convince Dino to throw him out, but Flemel hadn’t done anything but sit quietly and drink, and you couldn’t ban anyone from a bar for that.

  It was Flemel who saw the guy first
. A big man, huge really, closer to seven foot than six, ash blond dreadlocks falling down to his ass and a well-worn leather jacket with MOAB’S MINIONS emblazoned on the back. He was moving past The Lady’s front windows at a not-unimpressive clip, three long steps being enough to carry him out of sight, though at two and a half he stopped abruptly, went wide-eyed, and pressed his face up against the glass. Flemel could see where time had aged his features, crow’s-feet stretching out from his eyes, his beard more white than blond. Flemel could also see where someone, presumably not time, had burned a stretch of flesh running diagonally across his face, from the right temple to the dimple in his chin. His eyes were fierce and furious and delighted. Flemel found himself afraid.

  M was reading a paperback and did not look up when the man came in. Nor did he look up as the man walked over, though his footfalls seemed, to Flemel at least, as loud as bass drums. M did not look up until he could feel the man’s warm breath on his face, smelling of onion and egg and liver, and even then it took a while.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asked finally, sounding unhelpful.

  The giant did a weird sort of thing with his face, the lower half expanding into a grin just this side of jubilant, the top half—his coal-black eyes, the functioning one at least—all but bursting with fury. “Bet you never thought you’d see me again.” His voice was like a diesel engine pulling into gear.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other.”

  “Twenty-five years and you still as pretty as the day we first met.” The giant sneered, teeth like broken pieces of concrete. “Not for long, though.”

  M cocked his head up at the giant, looked over at Flemel, shrugged, and looked back at the giant. “Friend,” he said, still pleasant, “you’ve got the wrong guy.”

  The giant laughed again. It was not a friendly laugh. It didn’t really even sound like a laugh, so much as stones rumbling against one another or a round being chambered. “You aren’t going to get out of this that easy.”

  M turned back to his novel. “I got no idea who you are. We’ve never met before.”

  The biker put two sausage-link fingers on the cover of M’s book and closed it with some force. “Look again.”

  M sighed, tightened up his eyes, and sucked at his teeth. “Did you used to do my taxes?”

  “Do I look like the sort of person that does other people’s taxes?”

  “Do I look like the sort of person who pays them?” M asked. “Did you sell me a scooter in SoHo?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hit on me outside a gay bar in the Village?”

  “No!” If the giant had been a rain cloud, he would have been pouring; if he had been a nuclear reactor, he would have been poisoning flora; if he had been a volcano, he would have been destroying the homes of the people foolish enough to have built their homes at his feet. Since he was just a man, albeit a very large one, his face got plum-tomato red, from the broken capillaries in his nose to the cartilage in his cauliflower ears. He ran one hand along his terrible scar. “You did this to me, and I’ve been waiting twenty-five years to do the same back. The same and worse.”

  “That’s a nasty scar,” M agreed. “I’m sure I would remember doing something like that to somebody. You got a name?”

  “Aloysius.”

  “Well, that proves it. It couldn’t have been me. How often do you meet a man named Aloysius, let alone burn out his eye? Even my memory can’t be that bad.”

  “It was you.”

  M hemmed and M hawed. M drank the rest of his beer. “What were the circumstances, exactly?”

  “Little Italy? 1988? You danced with my girlfriend? She had brown hair?”

  “I lived in Little Italy in 1988. And I have on occasion danced with people’s girlfriends. The brown hair isn’t distinct enough to help us out one way or the other. But the rest . . .” M took another long look at the giant and shifted in his seat right to left to get a fuller picture. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t remember any of this at all. Do you know what the bar was?”

  “There a problem here?” Dino asked.

  “Back away, fat man,” the giant said, “this don’t concern you.”

  But Dino seemed to disagree. Below the bar he had wrapped his fingers around the Louisville Slugger that he kept for chasing out vagrants and disposing of the occasional extradimensional entity. “This is my bar, and anything that happens in it concerns me.”

  “It’s all right, Dino,” M said, gesturing the shillelagh aside. “It’s all right. How about you bring me and Aloysius a couple of shots. Let the man know I don’t have no bad feelings.”

  Dino poured a few fingers of whiskey, but he kept his eyes on Aloysius and his hands near his weapon.

  “Look,” M said, handing one of the drinks to the giant. “You say I once did something that destroyed your face and ruined any chance of ever leading a normal life. I say I didn’t. This is a subject upon which reasonable men can differ. Let’s drown our disagreement in liquor and call it even.”

  Aloysius smacked the glass out of M’s hands. Dino had his cudgel out from underneath the counter, the end stained with red blood and purple ichor. Flemel tightened up his fists from a few spaces away, though he had no clear idea of doing anything.

  M scratched at his ear. “No call to waste good booze.”

  “I’m going to kill you before the day is out,” the giant said, backing out of the bar. “I’m going to kill you with my hands. I’m going to make your skull into an ashtray.”

  “I guess this is my shot?” M asked, then took it. “Each their own.”

  The giant left, but he didn’t go far. He hung out on the sidewalk outside and spent a while watching M and making calls on his phone. M went back to his book.

  “I can’t follow you around everywhere,” Dino said, putting the bat beneath the counter.

  “No, I don’t suppose you can.”

  So far as Flemel was concerned, this was just about the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him. Two weeks he had been waiting around for M to do something that would justify Flemel having leeched onto him, something that would confirm his belief that M was a member of the confraternity the existence of which long study of esoterica had suggested and his own fumbling attempts at wizardry had confirmed. “What are you going to do?” Flemel finally asked M.

  M licked his finger and flipped the page on his book. “About what?”

  Outside the bar, two other men had arrived on Harleys, and if they weren’t quite the size of the scarred giant, they were still not the sort of men with whom one would want to Jell-O wrestle. “About the guys trying to kill you.”

  “Oh, them,” M said, turning to look at the trio of men standing outside glaring at him angrily. “I dunno. I’m sure they’ll forget about me soon enough.”

  Flemel didn’t think he was right, but then again he figured if having his life threatened by a man like Aloysius was insufficient to spur M into worry, there wasn’t much he could do. After a while, Flemel went to the bathroom. While he was gone, M found a couple of paper clips from behind the bar, twisted them into a sort of stick figure. He grimaced while pulling out a few strands of his long, brown hair, then tied them neatly around the waist of his new effigy.

  When Flemel came back from the bathroom, M had his coat on and was offering Flemel his own jacket. “Probably best if you were to split out before there’s any trouble.”

  “You sure you don’t need my help?”

  “They won’t do anything during rush hour on Washington Avenue.” And indeed there seemed to be a few too many pedestrians milling about for the giant to deliver the torment he had promised M. “I’ll give them a good shake on my way home and leave them tumbling aimlessly around Prospect Park. Anyway,” M said patting him on the shoulder, “you have a lovely evening.”

  Flemel figured he would wait until M got around the block, and then follow the bikers who were going to follow M. He didn’t know what he was going to do after
that exactly; the few bits of chicanery he had gleaned from grimoires and frequent practice would be of no particular use in the situation. But what Flemel lacked in knowledge, strength, or planning he made up for in courage, or recklessness, which in a young man is virtually the same thing. Nor had it escaped Flemel that this might be just the opportunity he was looking for, a chance to demonstrate his utility, worm his way into M’s good graces. But somehow M managed to give him the slip after barely a block: He took a left on Atlantic and Flemel took a left on Atlantic only to discover that M was no longer on Atlantic, at least not anywhere that Flemel could see. And so after a few minutes of trying to catch M’s scent and failing, he gave up and decided to head home. He was halfway back to the windowless room in the house he shared with a half dozen almost-artists in the smellier portion of Gowanus when he felt a tap on his shoulder and then a sudden, savage blow to the back of his head.

  When Flemel came to his knees were scraping against concrete, then wood, and then he realized that he was being carried into a vacant house, dragged through a dilapidated corridor and into the nearest room, Aloysius splintering the lock with his size-24 foot, an all-purpose skeleton key. The two bikers spilled Flemel into a corner, though after a few slow seconds he managed to right himself.

  “Keep a lookout,” Aloysius said. “Make sure the screams don’t draw any bystanders.”

  The chubbier of the two bikers reached into the back of his waistband and came out with a .38. “You need to borrow my piece?”

  Aloysius had a smile that would have swallowed a goose egg. He pulled the handle of a butterfly knife from his jacket, extracted the blade with a practiced motion. “No way in hell,” he said. “I’m going to take my time.”

  The fat one put his gun back into his waistband, then followed the thin one outside the room. The door shut.