A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  “They’ve called in all the freaks on this one,” M said, making their way toward the bar and leaving Flemel to play catch-up.

  “You won’t have far to walk if you need your palm read,” Boy said.

  “I take back what I said earlier: The kid could outwork half these hacks.” One of whom—pale, ponytailed, wearing a black trench coat—shook M’s hand in passing and pressed a business card on him. Continuing on M discovered it read, RAVEN DARKFYRE, INITIATE OF THE THIRD CIRCLE, then dropped it with a swift shudder.

  “He’s kind of cute,” Boy said.

  “I suppose if you’re in the mood for something emo. Wait, you mean my apprentice? You can have him,” M grumbled, but then, seeing the predatory look in Boy’s eyes, amended his statement. “For the love of God, woman, he’s not enough meal to tide you over till dinner. And what about Andre?”

  “What about Andre?” Boy asked.

  It turned out M didn’t really have an answer to that either. He saw Ibis and Anais through the crowd, was thinking of heading over when he noticed Salome standing beside them, laughing at something Ibis had said, and decided against it. Their liaison had ended the morning after they had met at the goblin market, never to be repeated, and by mutual, if unvoiced, consent, neither had bothered to contact the other. M was wondering vaguely how many other ex-paramours were in this audience when Alatar of the Upper West Side stepped out from the crowd and obstructed M’s passage with the tip of his quarterstaff.

  “Why, if it isn’t Dumbledick himself,” M said. “That’s a lovely phallus you’re carrying. Bigger than last time, or am I wrong?”

  “Last time, last time, last time,” Alatar repeated. “You mean when you ruined my party, set my servants to eating my guests?”

  “You shouldn’t brood so much over past injuries—bad for the digestion.”

  “You got lucky.”

  “And I’m feeling lucky today,” M answered, “and anyway we’re in the conclave right now, and I’d hardly think the queens would appreciate it if you violated their peace.”

  “The queens won’t always be around.”

  “You know where to find me,” M said, thinking as he said it that he should probably move apartments and change his number.

  “How do you know the heavy?” Boy asked, eyes crossed. Boy did not like to be left out of the loop on anything.

  “Ask Andre,” M muttered, who by coincidence he happened to see then, taking up space at one of the many bars that dotted the chamber—little islands of alcohol set amidst the opulence, each manned by a pair of floating, oversize, white silk gloves. Bucephalus sat at the other end of the bar, looking frightening and earning himself a wide berth. Stockdale was standing next to him, though in fact M had always gotten the sense that Stockdale didn’t like Bucephalus, only tolerated him because he was friends with M. Of course M didn’t really like Bucephalus either, only tolerated him because he was friends with Boy. God only knew why Boy tolerated him.

  “Can you make a Gordon’s Breakfast?” M asked.

  The glove snapped its fingers and set to it.

  “What’s the news?” M asked after he had finished fortifying himself.

  “Apart from the fact that the old man is looking to take another dip?” Stockdale shrugged. “We’re all waiting around for Red and White to get the thing started.”

  Bucephalus began to curse then, lengthily and potently enough that M worried it might attract the attention of some malevolent deity. He paused to take a swig from what looked like a bottle of grain alcohol, and then he said, “You know how much pull this is going to take? Last time we put him down I didn’t have enough mojo left to light a candle.”

  “I remember,” M said.

  “I don’t,” Flemel said, having found them again despite M’s best efforts. “How did we manage it?”

  “Brute force,” Boy said. “Don’t get too close to any of these seventh-rate chicanerists. Half of them will find themselves drained to the quick come evening.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Small fish tend not to fair so well in these sorts of things,” Stockdale said. “Get pulled too deep into the ritual, exhaust themselves entirely.”

  “Speaking of which, anyone know what ritual we finally settled on?” Boy asked.

  “It was lunar-based,” Stockdale recalled. “The Chinese zodiac, if I’m not mistaken. So no help there.”

  “I remember it took the queens three days to agree on it,” Boy said.

  “It’ll be worse this time.” Stockdale finished his old-fashioned and was handed another by the floating left glove. “They hate each other more.”

  “They hated each other quite a bit back in the day.”

  “Sure, but back then they were just two women who didn’t like each other. Now they’re ideas, sides, team colors. It’s not the same.”

  “How the hell are we going to put him to sleep?”

  “That’s not really the question, now is it?” M asked quietly.

  “What is?”

  “Why is he waking up?”

  But before they could speculate there was a—well, it wasn’t a sound exactly, but that was the easiest way to think of it, as if a small man inside your skull was ringing a cocktail spoon against a glass flute. And then the room did something that violated the laws of Newtonian physics and probably quantum physics as well, though M was not as familiar with the latter. And then they were all, every one of the several thousand individuals in attendance, circled closely around a small stone dais atop which the elite of New York magical society sat.

  “Wow,” Flemel said.

  “Don’t embarrass me,” M hissed.

  There is no position so critical, no office so important, that the occasional, and even the more than occasional, utter incompetent will not wind up filling it. Heart surgeons, popes, presidents, it makes no difference. Look around and you will see an existence replete with people who are betraying, in a most egregious manner, the powers and responsibilities that have been entrusted to them.

  Which is to say that M would not have given a thimbleful for most of the eight men and women considered important enough to sit up at the round table. Abilene and Celise were there, of course, at opposite ends of the circle, and though he disliked the former and distrusted the latter, he had to admit that they were the only wizards on the podium whom he would not have preferred to see buried in a coffin and dropped into the sea. They had power and they weren’t simpering fools, and if they had not already been the de facto rulers of New York, he’d have been happy to vote them into that miserable position.

  Especially when compared with the other candidates. To the immediate left of Celise was Herald Sampson Fitzgerald Dupont VII, or maybe VIII. He seemed unable to sit still for more than a second or two, every pocket concealing a different electronic device competing for his attention, like a John Cage symphony of cacophonous beeping. Clockwise to Dupont sat Qashi Corlo, looking like he’d come straight from a board meeting and would be going back to one as soon as he was through with this business. Across the table sat a wizened East Asian in a perfectly tailored suit whose name M did not know. Next to him was Alatar, leaning back in his chair and straining his hand around his oak staff. And next to him was—oh, hell, M didn’t even want to look at them anymore. It was enough to make a person want to go square, work a regular nine-to-five, grow old and fat, and crumble to dust—at least you’d be surrounded by other adults.

  “Would you like to begin, Celise?” Abilene asked.

  “I think you already have, Abilene,” Celise answered coldly.

  “A point of etiquette, nothing more. The floor is yours, unequivocally.”

  “Jesus Christ,” M muttered, “I’m never getting out of here.”

  M felt a hand on his shoulder, which was a bit of physical intimacy that he found unattractive among his closest companions and in far less tense situations.

  He turned around to discover the hand belonged to Talbot.

  “You mis
s me?” Talbot asked.

  “Daily,” M said. “Several times a week, at least.”

  “How you been?”

  “I get by. I think I sort of thought you were dead.”

  “What, New Year’s? Not quite. Woke up three weeks into January, sitting in the corner of an empty warehouse with a Rip Van Winkle beard.”

  Back on the main stage, Abilene and Celise had managed to put aside the question of who would begin the meeting and moved on to actually beginning the meeting, though that was as far as they’d gotten. Of course, the issues at hand were all but infinite—how exactly was the ritual to be performed, what somatic and verbal and material components would be required, who would offer them, the endless and endlessly complex minutia required for a spell of this magnitude. It was like putting on an incredibly elaborate stage play without any rehearsal, arriving at the theater to have some overworked grip grab your shoulder and whisper, “You’re Peter Bottom. Here’s your mask. Hope you know your lines!” with a bad review meaning the destruction of all life on Manhattan. And behind all that, interfering with every other decision, however minor, was the question of how to balance the ritual such that all of the major parties were weakened equally, or approximately so, thus ensuring the perpetual stalemate continued as it had in years past.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Talbot muttered too loudly, while Abilene and Herald Sampson Fitzgerald Dupont the whatever were quibbling animatedly over whether or not dried Cactacae flower could be used as suitable replacement for Mors ontologica and, if so, whether the ratio was seventy-four to nine or one hundred and forty-eight to seventeen.

  “It worked last time,” M said.

  “Last time we knew it was coming; last time we had the muckety-mucks planning things, laying the groundwork in advance. And for that matter, last time it barely worked, if you remember; left me so drained I couldn’t light a cigarette or read a palm for three months.”

  “What do you suggest?” M asked.

  Talbot made a show of looking around, then leaned in close and whispered, “The heart of the city.”

  M scowled. “That’s the worst idea I’ve heard so far today,” he said. “And the morning has been chock-full of foolishness.”

  “What’s the heart of the city?” Flemel asked. He had leaned in close to M when he had seen Talbot do so, and thus become a de facto participant in the conversation.

  “What does it sound like? It’s the middle, it’s the navel, it’s the axis mundi.”

  “Everything in the city goes into it,” Talbot added, “and everything comes back out again.”

  “So the heart is inside the turtle?”

  “The turtle is just the island of Manhattan,” M explained tiredly, “and possibly also the entirety of existence. Forget about the turtle, OK? The turtle and the heart are two different things. You’ve gotta get rid of this notion that A always equals A. Sometimes it equals B. Sometimes it equals Ω. Sometimes it doesn’t equal anything.”

  “I’ve never liked the Rosicrucian pentacle,” Abilene said. “The Celtic broken cross offers superior stability without the normative monotheistic overtones.”

  “So what do you think?” Talbot asked.

  “I think it’s like opening a peanut with a sledgehammer.”

  “It would save everyone a lot of trouble, wouldn’t it?”

  “So would drinking cyanide.”

  “Your ancient Phoenician needs work, I’m afraid,” Celise said witheringly. “That particular series of consonants evokes Yamm to ensure the good fortune of the cod yield, which is a worthy enough endeavor but rather unrelated to the situation at hand.”

  “At the moment it doesn’t sound so bad,” Talbot said.

  “Have fun, then.”

  “With the cyanide?”

  “With tapping the heart.”

  “Well, therein we run into a complication.”

  “Life abounds in them, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t know where the heart is.”

  “No?”

  “Though I’m told you do.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “You did.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me.”

  “We were on acid.”

  “Which time?”

  “At the Talking Heads show? Two tabs with a picture of the Golden Gates on them?”

  M scowled. “You really don’t think they’ll be able to piece it together?”

  Talbot waved his hand at the proceedings. “Are you feeling optimistic?”

  “Of course you’d prefer that we used powdered mandrake root, you’ve got a controlling interest in the only mandrake farm within half a reality,” Abilene told Celise angrily.

  “Fortuitous for all of us, given its value as a binding agent. I’d think you’d be happy that someone had the foresight to lay away a stock substantial enough for our purposes.”

  “Yes, we’re all so blessed that your instinct for monopoly has run off any competition.”

  “Well, I think it’s about time I toddled off.” Talbot tipped his hat. “There’s a Murphy bed a few blocks from Washington Square Park that ends up in the city of Cleveland. You’re welcome to come along, if you’d like.”

  “No, no,” M said. “I like New York. I mean, I like it OK. Actually I often find myself sort of lukewarm on the place, but perhaps not to such a degree that I want it to go the way of Atlantis.”

  “If we’re going to do it,” Talbot said, “then we ought to do it now, and we ought to do it quiet. If the queens get wind of it, we’ll be tramping down there with half the room.”

  “I’d just as soon the location remain between the two of us,” M said.

  “The three of us,” Flemel altered, “or I make a scene.” Flemel had long since realized that the only way he could learn anything of importance from M is if he tricked or bullied him into it. Normally this was a difficult task, but draped over a barrel M didn’t bother to argue.

  The trio found themselves making their way back through the crowd and asking one of the spectral bartenders where the exit was, the gloved hands pantomiming a series of directions that, when followed, took them up a sort of fire escape and onto a busy Midtown street.

  “Well?” Talbot asked. “Where is the thing, exactly?”

  “It takes a bit of getting to,” M explained. “Just follow my lead.”

  M abruptly stopped in front of a Sbarro, opened the door, and waved them through. Flemel discovered himself standing not on polished floors surrounded by the smell of cooking grease, but on lush carpet, surrounded by oak bookshelves leading up to a ceiling mural of a centurion falling on his sword.

  “No time to dally,” M said, “there’s a city to save.” Striding forward with purpose to the nearest exit, a great oak monstrosity that he pulled open and stepped through.

  The door to a broom closet in Penn Station led to the bathroom of a steak house in Queens, where they squeezed into a dumbwaiter and went up three flights to the top of the Empire State Building.

  “You know, I’ve never actually been here before,” Flemel said, stopping for a moment to enjoy the view.

  “You look much longer,” Talbot returned, brushing a bit of lettuce off his shoulder, “and you’ll get to watch it disappear beneath the water.”

  Which was spur enough for M to brush past a security guard and through a door marked NO ENTRY and into an executive office overlooking the park, interrupting a grunting bout of lunchtime cunnilingus.

  “Don’t bother, don’t bother,” M said, waving the CFO of a Fortune 500 company back between the legs of his assistant. “We won’t be but a moment.”

  And indeed they weren’t: The ebony double doors exiting the CFO’s office turned out to be the egress to the bonobo cage at the Bronx Zoo, where M narrowly avoided being struck with a handful of feces by disappearing through the warden’s gate and into an abandoned warehouse.

  Flemel was not so lucky, however, and they wasted a few minutes as he tried to find something in
the vastness of the concrete bunker with which to scrape shit off his flannel shirt. “How do you know where this place is, exactly?”

  “The Engineer showed it to him,” Talbot answered.

  “Who’s the Engineer?” Flemel asked, ever curious.

  “The Engineer was the man who built the heart,” Talbot began.

  “No one built the heart,” M said definitively, trying to undo the rusted-shut latch on one of the doors. “When the first avaricious Dutchmen cheated the first innocent Iroquois, the heart was here. When Alexander Hamilton got caught by a cheap shot from Aaron Burr, the heart was here. When Monk Eastman fought Paul Kelly to a hundred-and-seventy–round draw over control of Five Points, the heart was here. The Engineer just knew the location.”

  “And how did he know that?” Flemel asked.

  “Because he was the Engineer, obviously,” Talbot explained. Sort of.

  “The Engineer was . . . special.”

  “Like we’re special?”

  “You aren’t that special. And no one was special like the Engineer was special.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “No one knows,” Talbot said.

  “Someone might know,” M explained. “But we don’t know, and neither does anyone else we know.”

  “I don’t understand,” Flemel said.

  “This insistence that questions have answers,” M said. “It’s one of your less attractive qualities.”