A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  They turned to discover a very large man, bigger than M or Flemel, probably bigger than both of them set together, carrying an automatic pistol sized to fit his massive hands.

  “Yeah, lots,” M began. “First, you see, there’s this cat, and I’m allergic to cats.” M let out a violent sneeze as if in evidence. “I don’t like them apart from that, to be honest.What’s the point of taking care of a creature that would eat you if it was big enough? Just as soon have nothing to do with them, a feeling I share toward this apprentice whom I’ve got stuck with—not sure how that happened really. You use a guy as a scapegoat against a murderous crew of Nazi bikers one time, and he just keeps showing up, week after week, taking up space, changing the color of your couch, expecting you to teach him magic. Also, I’m starting to think I might have gotten finagled into tipping the balance of power between the two great potentates of New York City, whose continued stalemate is the only thing that keeps the place remotely tolerable. The ocean levels are rising at a rate unprecedented in history, I read a news story recently that said that every single seabird in the world has at some point digested plastic, they’re making another Transformers movie, any objective observer would have to conclude that we are nearing the end state of a capitalist society that seems to exist for no grander purpose than to consume and consume and consume and consume, without meaning, point, or guiding philosophy, death is an inescapable and absolute foe against which no struggle will avail us, the Earth is only a few billions years away from being consumed by an exploding sun, the universe itself only a few billion years away from its own effective expiration from heat death, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t a God.”

  “Oh,” the guard said after a long moment, his eyes lost staring at the enormity of M’s misfortune.

  “Yeah, so . . .” M took a deep breath. “That’s kind of weighing on my mind. Can you do anything about any of those?”

  “I . . . don’t think so.”

  “No?” M grimaced. “Then maybe just go ahead and open the door?”

  Despondent, the guard took his hand off his weapon and filched out a ring of keys.

  “Thanks,” M said, rather brightly given the slate of concerns facing him, the race, and the planet.

  “Don’t mention it,” the man said mournfully, then wandered off to find a bar or put the muzzle of his pistol to his temple.

  Through the egress and Princess Pudding Pop the Third again took lead, down another hallway and then up a small flight of stairs and into the spring sunlight. In the center of Corlo’s vast metal edifice, a facsimile wilderness had been created—some shrubbery and even a few stunted oak, a well-manicured wood-chipped path leading round it. The centerpiece of this cut-rate pleasure garden was an artificial stream that jutted up from some subterranean reservoir and trickled on its way about a hundred feet before disappearing back into the ground. On normal afternoons no doubt the patio was filled with financiers and PR potentates enjoying the twenty-five minutes of personal time they were allotted daily, swallowing office doughnuts and power bars while frantically checking their stock tickers, faintly cognizant of the greenery that surrounded them.

  But today was not a normal day, and the only person to be found in the small swath of faux wilderness was the owner himself. Qashi Corlo belonged in a hand-tailored suit, charcoal or jet black, with a rhino-leather briefcase carrying inside it a hundred million in bearer bonds. He did not belong in waders and an oversize hat with colored lures hanging from the brim, holding on to a rod and a reel that seemed nearly the length of the river itself. This was what he was clad in at the moment of M’s arrival, however, and, as coincidence would have it, at this self-same moment Corlo laughed and reeled back his catch, a spot of silver pulling up from the artificial waters, wriggling bright in the afternoon sun.

  M drew his attention, deliberately or unintentionally, with a loud sneeze.

  There are limitations on how furious a person can manage to look while holding erect a fishing pole. Corlo bumped neatly against them. “You can’t have it!” he yelled. “It’s mine!”

  “You can keep it!” M responded, seeming just as angry, indeed more so. “I wouldn’t take it if you gave it to me! I wouldn’t take it if you sent it to me on a silver platter carried by a beautiful naked woman! What is it?”

  “The Salmon of Wisdom, of course!” Qashi yelled, then a moment later and under his breath, “Shit.”

  The Salmon of Wisdom begins life as a fry of modest intellectual ability, and over the course of its long centuries and even millennium of existence, swimming, feeding, spawning, observing the foibles of the various surrounding species, contemplating the categorical imperative, it eventually grows to full maturity as the living repository of all knowledge—animal, human, and divine. Until at some point, it slips up, as even the cleverest of creatures are apt to do, and gets snatched by some or other pisactor that absorbs its collected erudition by means of consumption, and the process begins all over again. In keeping with its inconceivable omniscience, the Salmon of Wisdom is capable not only of navigating the traditional routes of its kind, but also of finding itself in any other running body of water—oceans, estuaries, bathtubs, sewage systems, and, apparently, the small fake river that some Frank Lloyd Wright epigone had installed in the courtyard of Corlo’s building.

  “So that’s what this is about,” M said after a moment, to himself, or to the firmament, but in any case not really to any of the assembled—feline or human. “How’d you find it? Finnegas had to wait around for half a lifetime before it showed, and that was back when it confined itself to Eire.”

  “Old Finn did not have access to the latest in big-data technology. I’ve had a handful of supercomputers working on this problem for the better part of the twenty-first century, figuring out the exact moment when the salmon would make its arrival in my domain. And now I have him!” Corlo said, gesturing at his captured fish. “All the world’s knowledge, a vast, nigh-infinite understanding, the secrets of the cosmos, the hidden names of all living things, celebrity gossip, incantations foul and pure—”

  “How were you thinking of preparing him?”

  “What?”

  “Fry, baked, boiled—what’s your plan?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it really.” Corlo admitted after a moment.

  “You hadn’t thought about it?” M asked, incredulous. “All these years waiting around to capture him, you never spent a moment wondering how you were going to eat him? Here’s what I’d do, personally: find one of those little hole-in-the-wall joints in Chinatown—Queens would be better, really—an authentic one, where you’re the only English speaker and there are typos all over the menu, and have them fry it up for you.”

  Corlo shrugged, unenthused. “I’ll probably just steam it on a bed of kale. Better for my diet.”

  “God, I hate you,” M muttered to no one in particular.

  “Be that as it may—I don’t care how you found out about it, and I’ve no desire to debate culinary matters any longer. The salmon is mine, fairly caught, and if you imagine I’d allow you to come in here and steal it from me—”

  “Me?” M asked, as if the suggestion had never occurred to him. “You misunderstand entirely. I’m just hear to bear witness. I’m not the one who you’re going to need to go tête-à-tête with if you hope to ingest the condensed wisdom of the planet. I’m not the one against whose magical abilities you’ll need to measure yourself.” M sneezed again, rubbed his nose, and nodded at Flemel. “It’s big man over here.”

  “Him?” Corlo asked.

  “Me?” Flemel asked.

  “Yeah, him! Flemel here is a two-fisted killer of the old school, a real bruiser, Pelé with a pentagram, the mystical Michael Jordan.”

  “He looks like raw meat at a NAMBLA convention,” Corlo added.

  “OK, that was pretty good,” M conceded. “I’m going to probably steal that and use it later. But the fact remains that you’re face-to-face with one of the deadliest duelists in this r
eality and three or four of the adjourning ones.”

  “He’s barely a child!”

  “I bet those were the last words of a bunch of people who met Billy H. Bonney.”

  Princess Pudding Pop the Third was showing marked evidence of feline fury, scratching at the cuff of M’s jeans and hissing vigorously.

  “If he’s so deadly, then why haven’t I ever heard of him?” Corlo asked.

  That Flemel was as yet too terrified to utter more than a monosyllable of English served M in good stead just then. “He’s European. I imported him special from Norway, just for this little get-together. A cool half million and an ounce of powdered unicorn horn, just so he could turn you into a newt or send you hurtling into some alien dimension. I mean, I’ll leave it to him—he’s the specialist, after all—but whatever it is, it won’t be very good.”

  They say that to find the killer in any given room, you’d do well to search for the quiet one, the unassuming one, the one who looks like they aren’t trying to prove anything. And certainly, there could be few individuals with any claim to supernatural accomplishment who looked less prepossessing than Flemel just then—a youthful hipster, slightly chubby, wearing a faded band T-shirt and scuffed trainers.

  Corlo inspected him for a long time, trying to find the lion lurking beneath the surface. “I don’t buy it,” he said finally, “or in any event, I’m willing to chance the matter. I’ve been waiting for the salmon to fall into my hands for nearly forty years, and if that means squaring off against your hired help . . .” Corlo set his rod in a waiting holder, the salmon wriggling at the end, then brushed brine off his waders and stood squarely to face Flemel. “So be it.”

  Flemel went from his usual pink to something resembling eggshell.

  “You know something,” M admitted, “you are very slightly smarter than I’d earlier credited you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It was a low bar, however. Abilene, if you would be so kind . . .”

  And then, where Princess Pudding Pop the Third had once been hissing unpleasantly there stood the Red Queen, Nineveh’s second, an early draft of the mother goddess herself.

  Flemel looked less worried. Corlo, rather more so. M maintained his usual composure.

  “After this is over,” she began as a quick aside to M, “we’re going to have a long conversation about your sense of timing and, for that matter, the appropriate matter in which to treat a cat.”

  “What in the name of all the gods are you doing here?” Corlo asked, for the moment more shocked than anything else.

  “Stealing the Salmon of Wisdom,” M clarified. “That much I was being truthful on. Everything else, however . . .”

  “This is an act of war, Abilene,” Corlo interrupted. “Celise will be forced to marshal her forces and respond in kind.”

  “Undoubtedly, were she ever to learn of it. But then who’s going to tell her? Are you so keen to reveal to your mistress that you took it upon yourself to absorb the full strength of the salmon, during its first visit to the city in a hundred years? Do you imagine she will find failure sufficient defense against disloyalty?” Abilene tut-tutted disapprovingly. “I’m afraid she would do something very unkind to you before attempting to do the same to me. Though once I take this little morsel home for sashimi, I doubt I’ll have much to worry about from her end regardless. It will mean a violation of my strict veganism, but then, godhood requires certain sacrifices.”

  On the waiting rod, the Salmon of Wisdom jackknifed and buckled unpleasantly, straining for freedom with every bit of its fleshy strength. In front of it, Abilene and Corlo stared hard at each other, the first step in a process that would, if continued, almost certainly culminate in the destruction of the building and the surrounding neighborhood and much of the Lower East Side. In the midst of this interlude, the calm before the magical storm, M turned toward the fishing equipment and let out a tremendous, a prodigious, an absolutely Rabelaisian sternutation, sending green gobs of phlegm onto the stonework. No one seemed to notice, however.

  And then, just as the afternoon was to climax in a contest of cataclysmic or near-cataclysmic proportions, Corlo sneered and turned toward M. “I will not soon forget today’s intrusion—you’ve made more of an enemy today than you suppose.”

  “What about him?” M asked, pointing toward Flemel. “He’s the one you really should be angry at.”

  Flemel gulped, and Corlo scowled and stalked off into the building, rubber boots trailing water onto marble. He left behind the tattered shreds of his dignity and the ingenious Osteichthyes, the ingestion of which was sure to end Abilene’s status as coruler of greater New York, leaving her as sole claimant to the position.

  Abilene basked in her moment of glory for a time before speaking. “An excellent job, M, all things considered. Of course, it took you rather longer than was absolutely necessary, but then, all’s well that ends well. Don’t think I’ll be slow to forget your assistance, once the full and unfettered knowledge of existence courses through my tummy. Nor you, young apprentice—I hardly need omniscience to suppose your future a bright one.”

  Meaning to bow graciously, Flemel was taking a short backward step toward the fishing equipment when the black rubber treads of his kicks slid on an unseen tract of mucous and, arms windmilling wildly, stumbled and knocked the rod straight into the artificial river. Freed from its cruel torment, the Salmon of Wisdom was swift to make good its escape, a spurt of silver and it had dissapeared into the depths of the false stream and onward to some other body of water.

  “Oh, no!” M yelled with all outward appearance of regret. “Oh, no, Flemel, what have you done! Oh, you stupid, stupid, stupid little child!” He grabbed his apprentice by the shoulder, pulling him up off the ground only to shake him vigorously. “You’ve ruined everything! Now Abilene will never get to eat the Salmon of Wisdom!”

  This was more or less what Abilene was going to say, though perhaps accompanied by some form of punishment more severe than M was delivering. In any event, M’s doing so meant her thunder was pretty well purloined. “I’m sure it was an accident,” Abilene said through clenched teeth.

  “No, no!” M insisted, shaking Flemel back and forth like a pit bull with a rag doll. “He doesn’t get let off the hook that easy! That paisley thing is the last spell I ever teach you! For a while at least! Three, no, five weeks! And bring everything bagels in the future! Not whole wheat either!”

  “I . . .” Flemel attempted, but his teeth rattled too hard to allow full answer.

  “It’s fine, M” Abilene said, though the scowl marring her usually cheerful countenance might have made you think otherwise. “The important thing is that Corlo didn’t get it.”

  “Yes, that is indeed the most important thing,” M agreed, though he shook Flemel a few seconds longer all the same, only stopping when Flemel’s pale pallor had gone green. “It’s nice to know I can count on you to offer perspective in these moments of seeming despair. Do you want to reassume your cat shape here, or shall we wait until we get to the lobby?”

  It seemed the latter, though there was no clear answer, Abilene stepping swiftly out of the courtyard wearing a rare and unbecoming frown. Flemel followed behind her, trying to think of some apology or explanation that might satisfy the Red Queen’s ire.

  M kept an even pace behind them, humming a vague tune and very nearly smiling.

  16

  * * *

  Tit for Tat

  M took a flier from an East Asian adolescent near Canal Street one afternoon, discovered the reverse had an intricate insignia formed from a sweet-smelling ash, dropped it, and immediately started running. Halfway down the street he heard a child laughing and the crack of ice in a spring thaw, and then he was knocked off his feet and into a nearby wall, and then he bled for a little while.

  M had figured that returning to the city meant that at some point Rjurik would come for him. Reliability is one of the upsides of a good nemesis, and Rjurik was most definitely that.
For the first month or two, M had walked around uneasily, though he knew Rjurik was too smart to come at him right away and would wait until M had dropped his guard. Which is what had happened, obviously, otherwise M would never have been so foolish as to accept a curse from a stranger, one M felt working on him from the moment he touched it. It was clever. Rjurik didn’t go in for that sort of thing; he was strictly occidental in his style, must have brought the kid in as backup. The body blow was Rjurik’s own, though, and M did not think he would survive a second.

  Grim moments call for rash deeds, and there was no point playing by the rules any longer. The Management could call in his tab if it had to, better than giving Rjurik the satisfaction. M caught a glimpse of him coming out from an alleyway across the street, wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and smiling like the happy sadist he was. And then M began to speak, softly but distinctly; it would not do to make an error and unspool existence. The ringing in M’s ears was terribly loud, so loud that he couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he could feel the words take hold in the firmament, in the nebulous connectors that prop up reality.

  And then all the neon lights on Canal Street—there are many of them, if you haven’t been there—erupted, a falling cascade of sparks, shuddering droplets of fire brighter than the winter sun. If M wasn’t already deafened, he would have been then, as the mass of tourists—there are always tourists on Canal Street, even more tourists than there are neon lights—began to scream and run about frantically. The river of human flesh overflew its banks, and in the chaos M managed to pull himself up to his feet and start moving.

  M sprinted until some combination of his injuries and his smoking habits brought him up short. Then he made himself sprint a little bit longer, down into a subway station, through the turnstiles, and onto the next train. He rode it to Forty-Second Street, by which point his hearing had mostly returned.

  On principle, M did not like to ask for help, because he was incandescently arrogant and also because he did not like to return a favor. But misfortune has a way of laying bare the true bedrock of our characters, and once he was back at ground level M pulled his phone out of his pocket to call Boy.