A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  This was the way things were in the city, and indeed in the world, as you yourself will know if you have ever tried to get from point A to point B. What seems very certain at the outset of a journey becomes shakier farther into it, for maps are slippery things, false as a whore’s embrace.

  But M was a stouthearted sort and had little going on that Sunday, and, also, he did not like to start going somewhere and then turn around before arriving. M did not have this completionist fetish regarding other matters—he would happily leave a meal uneaten and a book half read—but in matters of travel it was something of a matter of pride. In the distance the supple curves of the Verrazano Bridge stretched over the Narrows, and M swore he would rest beneath it before returning home.

  He walked past apartment buildings that seemed to be mostly glass, and he walked past tenements like fortresses, like small cities, families and extended families and even little subnations packed within its walls. He walked past Apostle Island brownstones and Hummelestown brownstones and several types of brownstones, the construction of which he remained ignorant. He walked through a hipster neighborhood and a Spanish neighborhood and an Italian neighborhood and an Arab neighborhood and then another Spanish neighborhood.

  He grabbed a late brunch at a small diner in a neighborhood called Fort Crain. The waitress had been scowling for so long that it had worn a groove in her face, and her legs were mostly varicose. He ordered the country breakfast, sunny-side up. The eggs came out on a platter like the rim of a truck tire, and they were bigger than any egg M had ever seen, bigger than an ostrich egg, which is a very big egg, certainly as large an egg as you would ever need to eat. M did not ask about their origin. Instead he sopped them up with a trencher of bread, spreading yolk onto the side of fried potatoes, enough spuds to shame an Irishman. The coffee was strong as the kick of a mule though far more pleasant, and two drops of the house-made hot sauce were as fierce as a bale of pepper. For perhaps the first time in his life, M did not manage to finish a side of bacon, pushed aside his feast with half a pig remaining. The bill came to sixty-five cents. M put a dollar on the table and split.

  Having swallowed enough food to Mama Cass a hippo, M strode onward with a fury. He walked past St. Tobhein’s Park and Billicker’s Way Station. He strolled past Alp’s Favor Square, a happy suburb of smiling parents and stumbling toddlers. He walked past a hundred bars and five hundred restaurants and two thousand liquor stores. He halted briefly in the Church of the Unwary Traveler, lit a quick candle, and then returned to the sunlight.

  He found a seat on a bench at Tabby Skin Park overlooking a portion of the Hudson Bay that was bluer and cleaner than any length of it he had ever seen before. Serious-looking men with tawny skin tossed lines into the water and pulled out fat, flopping fish large enough to feed a family. M texted Boy and told her that he was going to have to take a rain check for dinner that night. Then he rolled a cigarette and rubbed his legs, which were starting to remind M that he was not a long-distance runner. There was a commotion from the fishermen, one of whose catch had responded badly to being caught, leeched a long, purple tendril around his tormentor, and struggled to pull him into the brine. A fellow piscator grabbed a knife the size of a cutlass and moved quickly to sever the stalk, while a group of others grabbed the angler turned quarry, trying to keep him from being reeled into the sea. M waited to see how the contest ended—victory for the bipeds, always to be celebrated—and then continued on.

  M did not carry a watch anymore, in part because he was just too devil-may-care and in part because in situations like this they tended to become either inert or unreadable. M had spent a small fortune on timepieces before this had become clear to him, could remember an awkward conversation with one watchmaker in which he tried to explain why all of the components in his double hunter had turned into dark chocolate. Never again, he had promised himself afterward. Anyway, without a watch he could not be sure but still it seemed to him that this Sunday afternoon was lasting much longer than other Sunday afternoons he had known. He walked and he walked and he walked, and the sun beat down on him, long after it ought to have surrendered its stage to the moon, as it did so gracefully most evenings.

  And still the city stretched onward, onward and forever. M had never realized the sheer ethnic diversity of this part of Brooklyn, Khazars going up to Barth Street, and from then on it was mostly Scythians until one came to Little Bactria, red-and-green flags fluttering from every window. M stopped at the sort of restaurant that served paper plates on plastic tables and ate a chunk of charcoaled lamb which could have been spitted on a Tartar’s lance. It was the best thing he had eaten since brunch, the skin crispy, the flesh itself spilling over with juice. The owner, who was also the hostess and also the wife of the cook, brought him some complimentary tea afterward. “Where you from?” she asked in better English than M could have replied in whatever her own tongue was.

  M told her.

  “Where is?”

  M told her.

  “I have never heard,” she said, dismissively. “Where you go?”

  M shrugged, pointed south.

  She looked at him a long time. She was that certain type of ex-Soviet woman who would have killed more than her share at Stalingrad. “Is not nice place,” she said, but when it was clear he was not going to change his mind, she shrugged and let him pay his bill.

  Hours later and the Verrazano Bridge remained immutable in the distance. There were no longer any street signs, or if there were, they had been removed by the inhabitants. M’s legs ached, quietly but growing louder. He did not feel like ducking into a bar to rest any longer, especially as time, which he thought had clearly been on pause at some point, was back to functioning normally—which is to say that it was getting dark, and perhaps getting dark rather too quickly, although M’s circadian rhythms were at this point so mangled that he could not say for certain. What he could say for certain was that the increasing numbers of youths he was walking past, who seemed of some no-longer-determinate race or nation, were staring at him with increasing hostility, and there seemed to be more of them. He had not seen anything written in any language with which he was familiar in a very long time. He wore blisters onto his feet and then those blisters burst and the leather in his sandals—which he would not have worn if he had known he was going to be doing this—were damp and sticky with blood.

  And still M continued. He had the bit between his teeth now, when momentum becomes purpose, the sheer impetus of motion, forward, forward, forward. Below his left wrist was a tattoo of a wheel, and it seemed to spin as you looked at it. The hooligans on the corners, the dacoits and the bandits, the purse snatchers and the knockout artists, saw a man possessed with a sense of purpose that there was no point in shaking, any more than you would stand in front of the L train, and gave him a wide and respectful berth.

  In time the unfortunate inhabitants degraded further, until they seemed so desperate and miserable that they were no longer even objects of fear, incapable of doing anything other than staring with wide, tragic, hateful eyes. M walked past them without returning the compliment, without a break in his stride, with the even rhythm of a session musician, as if he could walk forever, as indeed he was beginning to think he might need to.

  Wealth decayed into poverty decayed into anarchy decayed farther into wilderness, and things seemed only to get softer, quieter. At first there were more vacant lots and the vacant lots were greener, but then at a certain point the vacant lots seemed to make up most of the horizon, with only the occasional empty building to blot out the verdant sea of weeds. These overgrew the stairwells of the R train that M continued to walk past, reality insisting on maintaining some tenuous grip even in the most distant corners of its domain, though the signposts had ceased to have any names, and the roads were pot-holed and crumbling. There were crickets. It had been a long time since M had heard so many crickets. The stars twinkled lustily in the night sky, their grandeur undiminished by streetlight. He could still see the Verr
azano in the distance, and he no longer held any hate for it. It beamed down beneficently, so high above the world’s foolishness that it could even afford a sense of sympathy.

  M trekked onward. His legs no longer hurt. He could not really feel them. He could not really feel anything anymore, only the soothing rhythm of his steps, which were flagging but had not yet failed. M’s iPod, which had been blinking sad messages at him for a very long time, went out finally. He wrapped the headphone cord around it and laid it respectfully into the green.

  He saw the end of the road approaching with surprise at first, thought it was a mirage, or something like the bridge, which was not a mirage but which seemed impossible to reach. When a few blocks farther on it failed to recede into the distance, shock changed to elation, and then a quick mingled burst of regret, as at the end of every journey.

  It was very late. The Verrazano arched above him, its anchor points lost in the infinite horizon, stretching eternally in both directions. The water went on forever, Staten Island lost in the soft darkness. M slipped beneath a chain link fence, climbed down onto the empty overpass, jumped the ledge. Beneath it the beach was wide and white and made whiter by the moon. The bay lapped against it, a soft black brilliance to contrast the sand. A girl sat on a rock near the waves, and she wore white as well, and M found he did not dare look at her directly.

  “It was worth the walk, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” M agreed. “Yes. By God, yes.”

  20

  * * *

  A Soporific for the World Turtle

  Boy came running into The Lady one early afternoon in May. “We’ve got a problem.”

  M had been trying to teach Flemel to play chess for the better part of a month, but Flemel did not seem to have any head for it. M had said it would help with his studies, but this was a lie; he just thought it would be nice if he could get a decent game together without having to walk to the park.

  M sighed. It was a sad commentary on humanity that no one ever came sprinting into a room to tell you good news. “Someone will solve it,” M said. “Someone always does.”

  “He’s waking up,” Boy said.

  “That’s impossible,” M answered, taking Flemel’s rook with a fianchettoed bishop.

  Flemel sighed.

  “How many times do I have to warn you of that one?” M asked.

  Flemel’s mouth spread into an O, but before he could respond, Boy upended the board, spilling carved wooden pieces everywhere.

  “Why did you do that?” M asked. “Now he has to pick them all up again.” M turned to Flemel. “Well? What are you waiting for? Pick them all up again.”

  “Will you forget about beating the child at chess? We have bigger problems: He’s waking up,”

  “You just told me that,” M said, “and I just told you that he isn’t. He only wakes up once every half century, and I was around last time when we put him back to bed. I can’t remember when that was, exactly, but it couldn’t have been more than a decade or two.”

  “I was there last time also, you overconfident little shit,” Boy hissed, “and I’m telling you that our old rules have gone invalid. He’s waking up. Haven’t you noticed anything off today?”

  “I had Indian for dinner last night. Sometimes it plays with my digestion.”

  Boy looked very much like she wanted to hit M then, but she managed to set aside her rage, given the gravity of the situation. “The queen has called a meeting.”

  “Which one?” M asked.

  “Both of them.”

  “Shit,” M said, pushing aside the board that Flemel had just finished setting up.

  “I told you,” Boy said, “He’s waking up.”

  “Who’s waking up?” Flemel asked.

  “Take the set and go back to your apartment,” M said. Then, checking himself: “No—take the set and get on a train going west out of the city. West,” he repeated rather stridently. “Under no fucking circumstances are you to go through Penn Station. Do you understand?”

  “Why? What’s going to happen in Penn Station?”

  “It’s an all-hands-on-deck sort of thing,” Boy said. “We might as well bring him along.”

  “You understand in that saying that hands refers to ‘sea hands,’ meaning sailors, meaning people that can be of assistance in the situation, meaning the rookie is out.”

  “Positive reinforcement is not his strong suit,” Flemel told Boy conspiratorially.

  That he was impossible to offend was one of the things M did not like about Flemel. M kept trying anyway, though. M was not one to back down at the first sign of difficulty. “That was not a suggestion, that was an order. I’m the one wearing the conical hat and sweeping the wand around, dig it? It’s your job to mop my fucking floors, but today I don’t want my floors mopped. I want you to find a way out of the greater metropolitan area.”

  “You keep telling me I’m not your apprentice,” Flemel said. “You told me that three times today. When I came in, you told me that I wasn’t your apprentice and that you never wanted to see my baby face again. And then I think you called me ‘Backstreet Boy,’ which really just showed your age.”

  “He probably wouldn’t be able to escape the flood,” Boy said. “Not unless he can get off the Eastern Seaboard. But either way, we don’t have time to argue about it—and your presence most assuredly will be missed, so let’s get a move on.”

  M couldn’t think of a clean way to leave Flemel behind, and anyway it sounded like he was going to need every drop of Managerial goodwill that he could hold on to, and so Flemel ended up following them to the nearest subway stop and onto the next train.

  “The old meeting spot?” M asked.

  “Yup,” Boy said.

  “You want to do the honors?”

  “No need. The queens have sprung for a gate—anybody with a hint of talent will find themselves on an express train to Midtown.”

  “Shit on a shingle.”

  “I told you, it’s crisis time.”

  “Is someone going to explain what this is all about?” Flemel asked.

  M shrugged, stared out the window at the underground caverns below, and made a gesture toward Boy like she might as well satisfy Flemel’s curiosity.

  “You know Manhattan Island?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “It’s not really an island.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s a lot of things, depending on how you’re looking at it. But for right now, it’s a giant turtle who’s been kind enough to hang around a while, so that we could build the greatest city since the fall of Rome on his back.”

  “Oh,” Flemel said. “OK.”

  “He’s a lethargic fellow, the World Turtle,” Boy continued, “and when he gets fitful, every fifty years or so, all the practitioners in the city get together and give him an extra-strength shot of Xanax, and he dips back under.”

  “But?”

  “But for some reason he hasn’t slept as long as usual,” M broke in, “and if he wakes up he’s going to go wherever it is that he was before he was in the river, and that will be trouble for those several million people who live and work and fuck on top of his shell. In hopes of heading off this unfortunate event, the two most powerful magicians in the city, who have hated each other desperately and for the better part of forever, have put aside their differences and called a conclave in a magic clubhouse, and we’re going there now, to meet up with everyone who can do anything that everyone else can’t to try and figure out some way to put the old bastard back asleep for a few more decades.”

  The train slowed to a crawl. “What’s below the turtle?” Flemel asked finally.

  “It’s turtles all the way down,” M informed him, stepping out of the now-open doors.

  The chamber had been built a century earlier, when the great lords and ladies of that age—the Childe Rothstein, Alastair “Bossman” Tweed, the being whom the uninitiated refer to as Mary Astor—had hoped that buildin
g a council house might serve to unify the city’s wizards, to offer a neutral territory to hash out the problems of the day. It had been a stupid idea. M had told the Childe that once, in a bar in the Bowery, celebrating the beginning of Prohibition with Canadian liquor. Wizards were a factitious and untrustworthy lot, and there wasn’t any point in spending untold millions (and back then, millions had been a lot of money) and no small amount of the Management’s goodwill just to build a drawing room that wouldn’t see use more than once or twice a century. As it turned out Rothstein hadn’t gotten to see it at all: He was shot in the back over a gambling debt, if you believed the history, though everyone who knew anything about anything knew he had been carried down into Hell for trying to fix a papal election. But that had been the thing about the Childe—too smart for his own good, didn’t like a scam unless he could watch it double back on itself a few times.

  The parlor he had envisioned had never been very good for much, for all of the reasons M had outlined, but one had to admit that it was really very pretty—the platonic ideal of the early-twentieth-century drawing room, except bigger, as big as it needed to be, growing antechambers and bars and tables and stools and waiters and liquor and finger food and everything else that might be required at any given moment. And today, with the entirety of the city’s wonder workers pressed inside it, the chamber needed to be plenty big—plenty big, indeed.

  “Close your mouth, junior,” Boy said, elbowing Flemel in the side hard enough to make him wheeze. “You’ll catch fireflies.”

  “Fairies more like,” M said. “Christ, what a sideshow.” M forgot sometimes just how many of them there were, these wonder workers and necromancers and illusionists and diviners and cantrip makers and artificers and channelers and chronomancers and psychics and half-holy men and he could go on and on and on but he would rather not. So far as M was concerned being in good with the Management was a means—a means to a supernaturally long life, a life of ease and, if not plenty, at least sufficiency. A means for meeting pretty girls and getting into interesting sorts of trouble and getting out of that trouble with your skin and your skull and your soul intact. So he forgot sometimes that for the greater portion of his confederates, being in good with the Management—oh, hell, why not just say it at this point, everybody else was—being able to do magic was an end in and of itself. It was what made them special, what set them above the rest of the world, would-be Merlins spending their days sniffing around for a dark lord to fight, some grand quest to justify their own pointless existence. They could keep it, M thought. M did not suppose he was destined to do anything, but if he had a fate outlined for him since birth, it involved islands off the coast of Brazil and freshly made caipirinhas.