A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  “Why would I need to climb out the fire escape? Nothing’s on fire.”

  “Is that the problem? ’Cause I can make a fire. I can make a fire anywhere I want. Actually, your pants look flammable as hell.”

  M was sure he locked the door after letting Flemel in, but all the same after two quick knocks it opened smoothly, and there was no longer any point in trying to get Flemel to climb out the window or in threatening to set him aflame.

  “M,” Abilene began, smiling that schoolmarm smile of hers. “How lovely to see you again!”

  With his back to her, M was wincing, but when he turned around he had a grin to match her own. “Abilene!” he said, pulling Flemel forcefully across the same patch of ground they had just traversed. “What a pleasant surprise! I was just thinking how much I hoped you would show up unexpectedly and without contacting me first, and here you’ve done just that! Showing up unexpectedly without contacting me first, I mean. And what brings you here, exactly?”

  “Oh, you know how it is. Just in the neighborhood. Thought I’d come in and check out your new digs.” She appraised the aforementioned with a skeptical eye. “You really ought to get a rug.”

  “That’s a good idea, I’ll think about it.”

  “It would brighten up the place.”

  “I’ll jump it to the front of the queue.”

  “That picture is hung crooked.”

  “The world is an imperfect place.”

  “And you should put bars on your windows.”

  “I’ll call the super tomorrow.”

  “Do you have an alarm system?”

  “When I moved in, I scratched some wards against unwanted visitors, but I’m not sure they’re working.”

  “I see you have company.”

  “Oh, him?” M said. “He just came to fix the toilet.”

  “The toilet, you say?”

  “Yeah, thing’s been backed up for weeks. Feces all over the bathroom. Kitchen, too, though we’ve just managed to clean it. In fact, as much of a joy as it is to see you, given the high likelihood—I would say the virtual certainty—that the apartment is going to be knee-high in human waste in the immediate future, if I were you, I would beat a hasty retreat.”

  “M, if I didn’t know any better I’d think you were trying to hide something from me. But the only reason you wouldn’t want me to meet this charming young man is if you were lovers, and you’re much too square for that, or—” Abilene’s brown eyes went joyously wide, and she clapped a hand against her swelling bosom. “You took an apprentice!”

  “The former,” M jumped in quickly. “Not my usual bag, I admit, but he’s so cute I can hardly keep my hands off the little bastard.” And indeed he tightened his grip around Flemel’s shoulder just then, though if you had been looking carefully you might have seen the youth wince.

  “Oh, M, finally!”

  “I told you, we’re fucking,” M said, starting to sound desperate. “Frequently. I just figured, you know, why fight it anymore? Actually, this isn’t such a great time. I was just about to throw him against the bed and take him in a forceful fashion.”

  “What makes you think you’d pitch?” Flemel asked.

  “Please, M,” Abilene interrupted, “no one would ever buy you as a homosexual.”

  “Gender queer? Spectrum fluid?”

  “In those jeans?”

  “What’s wrong with these jeans? They cover my legs. They’ve still got most of their original coloring.”

  “Nothing. They’re lovely,” Abilene said, dripping with insincerity. “Regardless, you’ve worn your heteronormative stripes far too long to be changing them.” She looked pointedly at M, then back at Flemel.

  M sighed loudly. “Flemel, this is Abilene the Red, High Queen of Greater Brooklyn. Abilene, this is Flemel, lately of butt-fuck Michigan, currently residing in the borough, not that we longtime citizens had any say in the matter.”

  After a brief moment, Flemel bowed low, coming back up with a little flourish.

  “Aren’t you the charmer,” Abilene said, accepting his obeisance with a smile. “Clearly not something you learned from your tutor.”

  “Well,” M interrupted, “it was really great seeing you, Abilene—a thorough joy all around. And thanks for giving Flemel something to tell his grandchildren, but if there’s nothing in particular, I admit that—”

  “Actually, M, it occurs to me all of a sudden that there is a little matter I could use your help with.”

  “Yeah? That just occurred to you?”

  “We can bring your apprentice along—think of it like a field trip.”

  “He’s not ready.”

  “You don’t even know where we’re going.”

  “Is it down to the corner bodega to get me a fresh six-pack? Because otherwise, he’s not ready. That’s not gel in his hair, it’s afterbirth. He’s a newborn. Let him fucking lie.”

  “Do you suppose you could go an entire paragraph without resorting to profanity?”

  “Maybe,” M supposed, “but why chance it?”

  Abilene took a moment to center herself—among her many other esoteric accolades she had long ago reached the shike rank of Rinzai Buddhism, could reach tranquility in the midst of a wildfire or atop a wooden rollercoaster, an aegis that was generally sufficient to tolerate M for as much as two or even three hours at a time. “There’s an old . . . acquaintance of mine whom I would very much like to pay a quick visit to.”

  “Don’t let me stop you,” M said, smiling brightly and waving to the still-open door.

  “Far from being a hindrance, I see you as playing a positively critical role in my excursion.”

  “Oh? What would this friend’s name be, exactly?”

  “Qashi Corlo.”

  “I didn’t know the two of you were so close,” M said, not smiling anymore.

  “Positively fraternal.”

  “Admittedly, it’s been a while since I was peeking through my Who’s Who in Supernatural New York, but I seem to recall that Corlo owes allegiance to the White Queen, rather than the Red.”

  “Who would be so gauche as to put political concerns over personal affection?”

  “The White Queen probably would.”

  “She might,” Abilene admitted. “Grasping little harpy. Which is why my visit needs to be of a rather . . . clandestine nature.”

  “That would be where I came in?”

  “That would be exactly where you come in, M. I just need you to carry me onto the island, infiltrate Corlo’s castle, and find the man himself.”

  “So I’m a courier, in essence?”

  “Exactly! Nothing to it.”

  “You know, with the way the 4 train is running these days, it might take us all day to get over there, and no doubt this is a matter of some urgency.” M snapped his fingers as in a moment of sudden revelation. “A bike messenger would be the best option! A quick shot over the bridge, don’t need to worry about the vagaries of mass transit. And they look so cool in their cool pants and their fixed-gear bikes and vivid facial tattoos. Yup, a bike messenger would really be the way to go with this one. Me, personally, I’ve got this bathroom thing I’ve got to deal with—”

  “We’ve already established Flemel is not a plumber.”

  “—I mean, this sodomy thing, this sodomy thing I was in the middle of and so—”

  “M,” Abilene began, in the voice of a fretful kindergarten teacher, or a wrathful Old Testament God, “I’m almost starting to get the impression that you’re unwilling to do a small favor for an old friend whose own kindnesses toward you, were they to be stacked up in a corner of your apartment, would reach so high as to constitute positively a health hazard—”

  “No, no,” M insisted, “just . . . need to grab my shoes.”

  Flemel waited expectantly. M looked at him a while and considered the matter. On the one hand, what he had said to Abilene about Flemel being unready for even a casual escapade was essentially true. On the other hand, M didn’t r
eally want an apprentice, and maybe throwing him into the deep end would be sufficient to frighten him out of the whole wands-and-pointed-hats thing and into a more reasonable profession, like real estate or selling marijuana. Smiling at this unlikely but not impossible scenario, M gestured to his apprentice, and the two followed Abilene out the door and into the unfriendly February sun.

  On the way to the subway, they passed a coffee shop, one of the new ones that had sprouted up since M’s great act of exorcism. “Anyone want a drink?” Flemel asked with his customary friendliness, as grating to M as a horsehair shirt. “My treat!”

  “Oh, aren’t you just darling!” Abilene said. “I’ll have a green tea. Thanks so much.”

  “I’ll have a cup of coffee and a shot of espresso, and have the barista spit in the espresso, and then drink the espresso.”

  “A tea and two coffees, coming up,” Flemel said, disappearing into the shop.

  M lit a cigarette. “Stop smiling like that.”

  “Like what?” Abilene asked.

  “Like your horse came in. Like your daughter just got married.”

  Two birds on a branch nearby, ignoring the cold and inspired by the goodwill of their sovereign, tweeted happily to each other. “I can’t help myself, really I can’t. To see you finally assume the promise that I’ve so long known was buried deep, deep inside you, that, I admit, I had sometimes supposed I might never live to see . . .”

  “Look, Abilene, let’s not read too much into this, OK? I felt sort of bad because I almost got him killed, and he kept coming round, and in the end it just seemed easier to teach him a few things rather than argue about it all the time.”

  “You say that now, but responsibility has a way of maturing us.”

  “Interesting that you’d say that, because despite your own weighty slate of concerns, I confess that this little errand that you’ve involved me in seems the very height of frivolity, not to say outright foolishness. I hardly need to mention that an unannounced visit to the city would be the sort of spark which might very well ignite a general conflagration?”

  “Something so self-evident hardly required annunciation.”

  “And Corlo, to rely on the cheesecloth which is my memory, is one of those titans of finance who cling to Celise like cold sores on a truck-stop hooker. Any injury done toward him or, even worse, some attempt to subvert his current allegiance—”

  “Do you suppose that I would think for one moment to blight my territory by inviting someone like Qashi Corlo to take shelter in it?” The happy tweeting birds had gone silent.

  “Not really.”

  “I only offer that privilege to people I care for M, and in exchange for my goodwill and protection, I occasionally—very occasionally, almost never in fact—ask of them for some favor in return.” Abilene was still smiling, though one of the birds squawked furiously, and the other fled in terror. “And in those rare circumstances when I determine the assistance of one of my many followers would be advantageous, I do not require that they understand every nuance and peculiarity of my thinking, a demand that would be unfair and entirely out of character with the generosity for which I am justly famed. All I ask is that they perform said act to the very best of their abilities—or be gracious enough to find themselves some other locale in which to reside.”

  Flemel came out just then, entirely oblivious to the moment of unpleasantness.

  “You’re a darling thing,” Abilene said, taking the proffered tea. “He really doesn’t deserve you.”

  M’s MetroCard was cashed—it was that sort of day—and he had to give it a top-off before they could cross into the heart of Franklin Avenue Station. Of course, Abilene did not need a card—the turnstile, like everything else in Brooklyn, acquiescing neatly to her sheer force of personality. They made their way down to the Manhattan-bound platform and stopped there for a moment.

  “What do you think, M?” Abilene began. “In what form shall I make my triumphant return to the city proper?”

  “I’ve always wanted a pet gorilla,” M opined. “Or a banana slug, maybe. Those things can get up to three feet in length.”

  “Perhaps something a bit more subtle.”

  “It’s your show, Abilene.”

  “Indeed it is, M. I’m so glad that you’ve remembered. And your part in it, as I said, is a modest one—travel to the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets, sneak through some side exit, sniff around until you can find the owner, and then return me to my preferred shape.”

  “I got it.”

  “Don’t try to get overclever with Corlo, either,” Abilene said, narrowing her eyes. “He’s out of your league altogether.”

  M grunted something that might have been agreement.

  The screech of the approaching train stole the attention of the handful of awaiting passengers, and by the time it came to a stop, M and Flemel were standing above a short-haired tabby cat, more of the alley than the silk pillow variety. A quick bound and she entered the train while nestled in the crook of M’s arm, her presence as clear a violation of the MTA’s rules as her transformation was the broader laws of physics.

  It was not until the doors shut that M recalled his long-standing cat allergy, a condition that had broken off nearly as many relationships as his poverty and general aimlessness. By Grand Army Plaza he was sniffling, by Bergen his nose was running like a gazelle with its tail lit on fire, and by the time they reached the Barclays Center and a horde of passengers flooded the train, he was sneezing all but uncontrollably.

  It did not help his humor, which was ill to begin with. “M will not be free,” he misquoted, “until the last queen is strangled with the intestine of the last cat.”

  “She seemed OK.”

  “Well, heck, you’ve known her for almost twenty-five minutes, your opinion on the matter must be just sound as sterling.”

  “But . . . she watches out for the borough, right?”

  “She owns the damn thing! I put mice traps beneath my oven, but no one has any plans to award me the Medal of Honor.”

  “You’ve got a real streak of anarchy in you, M. I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Not at all—the world is a terrible place filled with very nasty people. Wise government consists of finding the biggest one and giving them enough property so that they have a personal incentive to keep everyone else in line.”

  “What about her counterpart?”

  “The Red Queen, the White Queen—it’s the noun you need to be looking at here, not the adjective.”

  “If you hate her so much, why don’t you leave her like that?”

  “I don’t hate her. I just prefer to appreciate her from afar. Besides, if she stayed a cat forever, there would be nothing to stop Celise from taking over all of the city. Believe me, the only thing worse than two queens would be one empress.”

  Across from them sat a family of tourists, milk-fed corn huskers of the classic model, fanny packs and oversize cameras and I NY shirts. “What an adorable kitty!” said the mother, thunder-thighed and wide-smiling. “What’s her name?”

  “Pudding Pop,” M said after a moment. “Princess Pudding Pop the Third.”

  “What a lovely name.”

  “Thank you, yes. When I got her from the pound, I looked at her, and there it was, just leapt into my mind like a bolt of lightning or the living flame itself: Princess Pudding Pop the Third.”

  “Can I hold her?” asked the daughter shyly.

  “Absolutely,” M said without hesitation, shoving the cat into her hands, which he hoped were sticky with chocolate or gum resin. “She loves to be petted. Vigorously. She also really likes it when you pull on her ears.”

  “Cats don’t like that,” said the brother.

  “Look, whose cat is this, exactly? It’s mine, clearly, otherwise I wouldn’t be carrying it on my lap all the way to goddamned Manhattan.” This spurred off another unpleasant bout of sniffling. “I’m telling you, Princess Pudding Pop the Third loves nothing better than to have her ears vigoro
usly stretched.”

  It was difficult to tell that from Princess Pudding Pop’s reaction, which echoed unpleasantly through the train car. The family of tourists got off at the next station, looking back at M warily and wondering if they should drop a call to the ASPCA.

  M and Flemel alighted at Wall Street and made their way topside. Flemel had to use his phone for directions, because everything in the Financial District looked the same to M—the buildings and the people, too for that matter, wading through a sea of faceless finance drones as if sprung from an off-brand dragon’s tooth. The office building at the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets at least broke the mold slightly, the standard glass skyscraper buttressed by a strange profusion of esoteric symbols, pentagrams, ankhs, stars of David, mandalas, and rosy crosses. Guarding the front entrance were a handful of oddly serious-looking security guards, eyes hard and fast moving, shoulders stretching their suits. Seeing them, M sucked a tooth and continued on. Halfway down the office block was a chain coffee shop, and slipping through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, they found themselves in the bowels of the adjoining building.

  No doubt the lobby of Corlo’s building was your classic monument to conspicuous consumption—a beautiful, ethnically ambiguous receptionist and a million dollars’ worth of Damien Hirst on the walls. But the sublevel in which they entered was the usual catacomb. Princess Pudding Pop the Third jumped down from Flemel’s hands and led them deeper into the labyrinth, possessed of some preternatural directional sense, scampering through the maze of passageways, stopping only when she came to a bright metal door, then turning and mewling expectantly.

  “Shit,” M said.

  “What’s the problem?” Flemel asked. “You can pick locks, right?”

  “Not very well.”

  “You told that goth girl at The Lady the other night that all you needed was a hat pin and twenty minutes, and you could open any door in the world.”

  “A master thief packing a solid twelve inches,” M said, shaking his head back and forth. “You are really an embarrassment to me, do you know that?”

  “Is there a problem here?” asked a voice from behind them, one of distinct unfriendliness.