A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  “I don’t know where he is,” Flemel said. It was the honest truth, but he didn’t like giving it and felt disloyal, not that M had ever done anything to deserve his fidelity.

  “What?”

  “M. I don’t know where he is.”

  “This is a pathetic fucking attempt at humor.”

  “Hey, man, we’re barely even friends. It’s not like he keeps me abreast of every move he makes. I don’t even know where he lives.”

  “You think playing crazy is going to make me forget what you done to me? Madmen scream just as loud,” he said, aiming the tip of his butterfly knife at Flemel. “Louder, even.”

  “What I done to you? What M done to you, you mean.”

  “What?”

  “What?”

  Two events occurred then simultaneously, or nearly so: Flemel realized he’d been played, and a little hiccup of sound wafted out from the corridor.

  Flemel was too focused on the first of these to note the second. “I didn’t do anything to you.”

  “You sang this tune already—I didn’t like it any more the first time.”

  “No, I mean, M did something to you, obviously, but I’m not M. Actually at the moment I can sympathize with your feelings of vengeance toward the man.”

  “You want to die a lying little punk, you be my guest.” Aloysius started toward Flemel with his knife.

  And then the door opened and standing there was, so far as Aloysius was concerned, a duplicate M, and this alternate M had a tattoo of a smiley face below his left hand and the fat biker’s revolver in his right. It was a confusing situation for Aloysius, one that this new M used to good effect, taking solid aim and firing off three shots. One went wide, but the rest lodged themselves in the knee and lower thigh of the leader of Moab’s Minions, who screamed and dropped the knife and fell down on the ground and then screamed some more.

  The M standing in the door lit a cigarette and watched Aloysius bleed. He emptied the rest of the bullets in his revolver onto the floor, then tossed it into a corner. He knelt down beside his enemy.

  “So this is zero and two for you,” M said, ashing his cigarette into the man’s hair. “If you want to have a go at three, I’m down at The Lady most afternoons.”

  Then the one M snapped at the other, and both exited into the evening, leaving Aloysius to find his own way home.

  Back outside, M reached into a side pocket of Flemel’s coat, took out the fetish he had put there, and crushed it ruthlessly below his boot heel. “The first thing you gotta remember if you’re going to be in this business,” he said, offering Flemel a puff of his cigarette, “is don’t trust anybody.”

  13

  * * *

  An Inevitable Coincidence

  Introspection was not a strong suit of M’s, nor of most of the adepts and practitioners he had known. He had faced dangers that would have made the hardiest gunslinger hang up his six-shooters, earned victories to satisfy a new Alexander, and suffered failures that would have driven a stoic mad with grief, though few of these found firm purchase in his mind. He wondered sometimes if a certain paramnesia was part of the payoff for being in good with the Management. But he didn’t wonder that long, because, well, introspection was not his strong suit.

  Still, there are things one does lose track of not so casually, like the heat of the sun or a pair of blue eyes.

  It is an odd truth about New York, a city of millions of people, of five boroughs and hundreds of square miles: but one will inevitably stumble upon one’s ex. M passed his coming out of the Strand one Tuesday afternoon, and before he could decide whether or not to pretend he hadn’t seen her, she had already come up and given him a hug.

  “It’s you,” she said.

  “Seems to be.”

  Splitting with her had been his impetus to leave the city the last time, of course. Or had his leaving the city been the reason they had split? When he had thought of her—walking alone late at night on white sand beaches, and in the middle of the afternoon in busy cafés, and sometimes (and this had always made him feel deeply ashamed, but he had no control over it) while entangled in the limbs of another woman, breathing shallowly in that moment of almost-catatonia that comes after orgasm—he had hoped that maybe she would have grown less pretty. But she hadn’t grown any less pretty. If anything, she’d done the reverse, which M felt to be poor manners altogether.

  “When did you get back?”

  M told her.

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because then we would have missed finding ourselves in this uncomfortable situation.”

  She laughed.

  There was a bar nearby. There usually is, that’s one of the things about living in the city. They found it and sat down across from one another at a little table by the window. M ordered a beer, but she made do with seltzer. M tried to remember if he had anything to apologize for. He didn’t think so. Or more accurately, there were many things he ought to apologize for—selfishness and pettiness and a lack of hygiene—but these were general failings, not germane to the conversation, not specific to their relationship.

  The drinks came. They sat together a while, near enough that he could smell her flesh, but not so close as to touch it.

  “How is Boy?” she asked.

  “Masculine.”

  “And Stockdale?”

  “English.”

  She smiled. “Give them my best when you see them.”

  “I will.”

  Of course, M had not missed the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, counting from the thumb, but it was only then that M noticed the slight protuberance in her dress. Seeing the first had been like hearing your name called, turning to look for the source, and having someone strike you swiftly in the solar plexus. But the second washed over him smoothly, a pain so old and familiar that you couldn’t even really call it that anymore.

  “When are you due?” he asked.

  “June.”

  “The father?”

  She smiled and looked down at her belly. “He’s a good ’un.”

  “I’m glad.” Surprised to discover he wasn’t lying, M decided to repeat it: “I’m glad.”

  “Thanks. It keeps me in a lot. I don’t see much of the old crew these days.”

  “Don’t you miss it?”

  “Not so much. There’s not really a point to it, you know? All those loud noises and bright colors but you never quite get anywhere. It’s all a little,” she shrugged, made a gesture with her hand like she didn’t want to say anything to offend him, then went on and did it anyway, “childish.”

  Eventually the drink was over, and then a second drink was also over, and two drinks is the stopping point after which once lovers become lovers once again, and it was clear that was not going to happen. M insisted on paying, though he didn’t really have any money that month, but still, better to skip a few lunches than sully your pride.

  He walked her outside and caught her a cab, and she held his hand and stared into his eyes, and M wondered if maybe he should have pushed harder for that third drink, belly bump or no belly bump. She had very pretty eyes. The moment stretched. Beneath his turban the taxi driver scowled, annoyed to be wasting potential fare at the busiest time of the day.

  She hugged M tight, and then she patted him on the back, and the moment was over. “You can’t keep doing this forever,” she said as she slid into the cab, M holding the door open to allow her passage. “We all have to grow up at some point.”

  M didn’t answer. He watched her car retreat into the distance, thinking he would probably never see her again. Hoping, really, because this was as good an endpoint as you were going to find—a wise man notices when the credits start to roll.

  Then he shook out a cigarette and lit it and observed an abandoned building in his peripheries, casting strange shadows on the asphalt. And he remembered this conversation about megapolisomancy he was having with Andre some days earlier: that certain buildings are nodes, nexuses of ley li
nes, pulsing centers of energy for the metropolis, which wasn’t true as it turned out, or at least this building wasn’t one of them. But in the basement, there was a creature that M had never seen before, and it was enough to keep him occupied until after dinner, and by the time he made it home that night, he mostly had stopped thinking about her altogether.

  Mostly.

  14

  * * *

  The Coming of the Four

  They noticed walking out from the bar, though it might have happened earlier.

  “Are those gas lamps?” Boy asked.

  “Shit,” M said.

  “Who’s been mucking about?” Stockdale asked.

  “Wasn’t me,” Andre insisted. “Boy, did you sneak something into the drinks?”

  Boy and Andre had started to see a lot of each other since M had introduced them, and this meant, by the inverse-square property of dating, that M saw a lot more of both of them. He had mixed feelings about this. He liked Boy and even sort of tolerated Andre, especially when he was kept on a leash, but being the mutual friend meant that he spent a lot of time watching them kiss and a fair bit of time stopping them from killing each other.

  “Not yet,” Boy answered, “though now that I think about it, the bar seemed a bit too authentic with its pre-Prohibition furniture, even by the standards.”

  “Nineteen twenty-five did not look like this,” Stockdale said.

  The snow had been there when they had walked into the bar, but not anything else: not the narrow alleyways, which curled below the steeples of castlelike brownstones; not the wood smoke hanging like an opaque shower curtain; not the cobblestones in the main street or the horseshit atop them; and certainly not the darkness, which alone would have made it clear they weren’t where they had been, which lay thick as wool over a pre-electric or post-electric or at the very least un-electric city.

  When M turned from inspecting their new reality, he discovered that Andre had somehow traded his ladies’ jeans and button-down shirt for trousers, a waistcoat, and a set of aviator goggles. A short blade and a strange-looking flintlock with an oversize barrel rested on opposite hips.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” Stockdale asked. Stockdale himself wore a black leather duster that ran down to his black leather boots. His rapier had a basket hilt and a jeweled pommel.

  “Of course, you would have a sword,” M muttered.

  Boy was dressed in something between a corset and a wedding dress. One side of her head was shorn bald, and from the other a cascade of blond hair trailed down to her ankles. She carried a Gatling gun, which nearly equaled her in height and mass.

  “You look like an extra in a pop-punk video,” M said.

  “You’re one to talk.”

  M looked down to discover he also had on a rather striking Edwardian getup—though not for very long. Despite the cold he removed his coat and tossed it on the ground, adding an empty scabbard and a bejeweled spyglass, both of which had appeared as suddenly as his new clothes. “Not interested, thanks,” M said, wrapping his arms tight and shivering.

  “Suit yourself,” Boy said, inspecting her new weapon.

  They went into the bar and then out again, but it didn’t do any good, as M had known it wouldn’t. The entrance was never the egress in this sort of situation.

  “If it’s an illusion,” Stockdale said, scaring some idling pigeons with a practice draw of his sword, “it’s a remarkably good one.”

  “This goes on forever,” Andre said, reaching his arm into a black leather purse that had appeared on his person. “That is not an exaggeration.”

  “We weren’t near any of the main portals,” Boy said.

  “Impossible to be familiar with all of them,” Stockdale said.

  Boy’s right shoulder, which coincidentally or not was the one her gun hung off of, was the mottled pink of an old burn. “A curse?”

  “Forever, I tell you, that was not hyperbole.” Andre was pulling out bottles from his pack, tiny vials like jewels and thick glass canteens that resembled grenades.

  “Awfully elaborate,” Stockdale said, running through a dance of thrusts, parries, ripostes, tripostes, coulés, derobements, and flèches.

  “You learn those with your third from Oxbridge?” M asked.

  “They sometimes are,” Boy said. “I once spent three weeks as a child in Victorian-era Britain before I finally realized my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend was playing a nasty little trick on me.”

  “How’d you take that?” Stockdale asked.

  “Badly.”

  “Wait, no, we’ve reached the end,” Andre said, a row of philters, jars, ewers, jugs, and urns laid out on the ground before him, as well as the tools to make more of them, alembics and crucibles and pestles—a veritable alchemist’s shelf. “Still, though, that’s a hell of a satchel.”

  Boy and Stockdale spent a while longer trying to figure out why they were where they were, though M didn’t really see the point. He had learned long ago that things are so much bigger than you could ever have any sense of that there was no point in supposing what was happening to you just now had any connection to anything that had happened to you before, or for that matter anything that had happened to anyone before.

  And indeed, by the end of the discussion they had reached no conclusions, except that it was clear that this New York winter—for it was an ineffable but undeniable certainty that they were still somehow in New York—was far worse than theirs. Colder, at least. Despite her outfit, Boy displayed no care for the frost, laughing and dancing in the snow, which was white and soft as freshly sheared wool, though less itchy. Stockdale and Andre swaggered happily after Boy, hands tight on the pommels of their weapons. M alone seemed unhappy about the business, and not only because he had gotten rid of his coat. The city was lonely-beach quiet, back-of-the-moon quiet, locked-in-a-coffin-beneath-the-ground quiet. Occasionally the clop-clop-clop of hooves and the clamor of hansom cabs behind them broke the silence, and M was not slow to note that on every carriage, a man rode shotgun while carrying the same, and each stared hard at the companions as he passed.

  “There has to be someone who can send us back,” M said.

  “Why do you think that?” Boy asked.

  “There always is. Or a glowing door or something. It’s the way these things work. The problem isn’t getting out; the problem is not getting sucked in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean don’t get too attached to that gun.”

  “I love this gun,” Boy said, hefting the barrel toward the sky. “I feel like Sarah Connor.”

  “Well, it isn’t really yours and try not to get confused on that point. You’re going to have to get rid of it eventually. Sooner rather than later, if I have anything to say about it.”

  They walked aimlessly. There was nothing else to do. Mostly they seemed to be enjoying themselves, their new toys and this fine adventure. Except for M, of course. After an hour they had passed hostelries and blacksmith shops, apothecaries and cobblers, towering cathedrals without any visible crosses and butcher shops with foreign cuts of meat in the windows. But they had not passed any magic portals or backlit doorways, nothing that suggested a passage back to their own existence. Down a narrow side street—and weren’t they all narrow side streets in this faux-Dickensian hellhole—they saw a sign depicting a fat man eating a ham and stopped in front of it.

  “A bite or two couldn’t hurt,” Boy said.

  “Someone has clearly never read Washington Irving,” M said, but he was too hungry to put up much of a fight. The fire inside was, if not roaring, at least mewling vigorously. There were long wooden tables and benches below those tables, all of which were empty.

  “Good to see you, friends, good to see you,” the publican greeted them, coming out from behind the bar. He had ears like cauliflower and skin like a potato. He was either a troll or an incredibly trollish-looking human. “Not so many come out to the Crown Inn now that the Pale King holds sway.”

  �
��That’s enough, Mr. Tumnus, thank you so much,” M said swiftly. “Just need a bite to eat, and then we’ll be back on our way. No interest whatsoever in being dragged into any of this Pale King business.”

  “I wish you luck, my friends,” the not-quite man said, leading them to a table. “But I’m afraid the Pale King’s hand reaches everywhere and is not particular about what it snatches.”

  Dinner was roast turkey, or what looked like a turkey, skin crisped and crackled, served with stewed apples and thick brown bread and about half a keg of ale between the four of them.

  “Who do you think this Pale King character is?” Stockdale said, forking a piece of meat.

  “It’s nothing to do with us,” M insisted. In the candlelight one could see a portrait of a scowling child just above his left wrist.

  “When evil roams without fear, is it not every righteous man’s business? And woman’s,” Stockdale added quickly, hoping to avert trouble.

  But Boy wasn’t listening. “I’m going to be pissed if I can’t fire this at someone,” she said, buffing her gun with the fold of her dress. “Like borrowing Ron Jeremy’s cock and going to mass.”

  “Any idea what would fit in my flintlock?” Andre asked. “The one thing that seems to have been forgotten in my bag is gunpowder.”

  “When did you start writing for National Review?” M asked Stockdale. “We have to start instituting regime change in fictional nations? Also, did any of your slick new outfits come with relevant money?”

  Inside Stockdale’s pockets were a handful of thick octagons made of some sort of blackish metal and featuring a glowering gentleman with a winter storm on the obverse. One proved more than enough to satisfy the innkeeper, so much so that he added another round of stout and even sat down to drink it with them.

  “We’re looking for a way out of here,” M said, midway through his cup.

  The innkeeper shrugged, his shoulders like knots in an oak. “We’ve a backdoor, but it just goes to an alley.”