A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  M managed to unjam the lock, and Flemel managed to mostly wipe the shit off his shirt. Through the front and out into a crack house, the smell of waste and body odor and mildew and human misery and, of course, crack, so overpowering that M pinched his nose shut, pulled aside a door long rotted off its hinges, and headed into a craft-beer bar.

  “What do you have by way of an IPA?” M asked the bartender, bearded and tattooed as appropriate.

  “I thought we were in a hurry!” Flemel reminded him.

  M scowled. “Three shots of Jameson,” he said. They downed them, then walked into the doors of the women’s bathroom and out of the changing room into a boutique lingerie store in the Village, customers shrieking and blushing.

  They ended up finally in an apartment overlooking the park—a sunny day, a city that would not be around much longer if swift steps were not taken. The apartment was in the middle of renovations: The wood floors were unfinished and stacks of building materials took up most of the corner.

  “And here we are,” M said, pausing for a moment and pointing at a door that should have led into a bathroom. “That’s the last one, right there.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t be the one opening it, however,” Talbot said. “Turn around slowly, and don’t do anything to spook me.”

  “What an unexpected development,” M said. “Is that a shrunken head you’re pointing at me?”

  “A bit much, I agree. But it’s my employer’s and it works. A quick hit of this and your mind will be as scrambled as bootleg cable.”

  “We wouldn’t want that.”

  “I have to say, M, if I had known it was this easy to get you to give up the location of the heart, I’d have made a go at it years back.”

  “I guess I’m just too trusting. It’s my most severe character flaw. It might be my sole character flaw, now that I think of it. What happens next?”

  “I open the door and become God.”

  “Is that what’s in there?”

  “The heart of the city,” Talbot said, all but salivating. “The pulsing soul of the urban center of the world, of any of the worlds, every thought and fear and passion and instinct and bit of energy all coursing through, mine for the taking.”

  “Don’t burn yourself,” M said. “Mind if I roll a cigarette?”

  “You touch your pockets and I’m going to fry out your brain,” Talbot said, dropping quickly out of his reverie and turning the shrunken head on M once again. “Friend or no friend.”

  “I think it’s clear we’re the latter,” M said, but he kept his hands up. “Well, have fun becoming God. Try to remember us mortals fondly.”

  Talbot looked at M a long time, as if expecting further resistance. Then he shrugged and, with one hand still pointing the shrunken head firmly in M’s direction, he crossed slowly over to the door, reached his hand around the knob, twisted, pulled the door open—

  M kicked Flemel in the back of the leg, just below the knee, hard enough to send him sprawling. M took the opportunity to look at the wall a while, and thus the only person who can claim with any certainty what exactly it was that lay beyond the door Talbot had opened was Talbot, whose eyes went wide as beer mugs and whose mouth began to drool.

  “I’m going to go ahead and roll that cigarette all the same,” M said, though while doing it he sidled over to the door, careful not to look at it, and then slammed it shut.

  Talbot gave no sign that he noticed. Whatever he had seen was working fast: His face began to droop like wax melting off a candle, and then his shoulders drifted downward as well. “How . . . did . . . you . . . ?” Talbot managed, each word coming with great and growing effort.

  “Know you were going to betray me? A lot of reasons. First of all, your plan was terrible and didn’t make any sense, and if there was anyone in this damn city with an ounce of self-possession, it wouldn’t have worked. The World Turtle just happens to wake up thirty years ahead of schedule? You just happen to suggest tapping the heart? Absurd. But more importantly, Talbot, we were never friends; you were just a guy I bought drugs from.” M turned away abruptly. “I have no idea why I’m still talking to you.”

  Indeed, it was clear that Talbot was not paying attention to anything M was saying. His eyes were open, his pupils were dilated, his body was frozen stiff.

  “What is he looking at?” Flemel asked.

  “I’m really not sure. The spirit that used to inhabit Lou Reed showed it to me. Well, the door to it at least. Whatever it is, he seems happy looking at it, doesn’t he?”

  “What happens to Talbot?”

  M shrugged. “He might get over it. He might not. No idea, really.”

  “Then this isn’t the heart of the city?”

  “No.”

  “But you know where it is?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you do.”

  M didn’t answer. He retreated back to the exit and opened it to reveal a normal-enough-looking hallway. Apparently whatever magic had allowed them to flicker across the city did not work in reverse. M held the door for Flemel, then followed him out.

  • • •

  By the time M and his starstruck apprentice returned, it was all over—the turtle coaxed or quieted back into its slumber. No small task, not even for every single individual with the slightest shred of talent in the city. For many of the weakest of them, it was the last endeavor they would ever attempt, their minds and souls and bodies burnt out as part of the collective effort. Even the stronger of the adepts would find themselves exhausted for weeks, the goodwill of the Management substantially exhausted.

  “What happened?” M asked.

  Boy was lying partway against one of the paneled back walls and partway against Andre, who was sound asleep. “It’s done,” she said. “Where the fuck were you?” But she was so tired that she couldn’t even put much into it, sounded nearly concerned.

  “Yeah, sorry.” M called over a spectral bartender, the mobile hands pouring him a shot of gin. He threw it back and continued, “I kind of got caught up solving the mystery behind who made all this trouble for us, saving the day, ensuring that justice and truth prevail.” M ordered and drank another shot of gin. “The American way, also,” he added, before strutting off to the center of the room.

  The central dais was half full with the crème de la crème of magical society. The queens, Alatar, and the East Asian man whose name M did not know remained at the table. The rest had found their way to some other corner of the room.

  “The prodigal son,” Abilene said. She looked tired but not exhausted, in contrast to the rest of the assemblage, and M didn’t doubt that she had more than enough left to snuff him out.

  “Your absence was noted,” Celise said from the other end of the table, and with as much sweetness.

  “I wasn’t the only one missing for the finale,” M said. “Talbot was with me.”

  “We’ll make sure to have stern words with him as well,” Celise said. It was a sign of how exhausting settling the turtle had been that her eye makeup was slightly smeared.

  “I’m afraid that’s going to be rather difficult. He’s set to be spending a while staring into a porthole into the nothing that lies between the worlds.”

  “And why is he doing that?”

  “There are a lot of ways to answer that question,” M said thoughtfully. “Because he was weak-willed and venal and not very smart. Because he thought that power was a thing to be grasped at rather than avoided. Because he started trouble with me. Because he was a big dick. But mainly because Alatar here ordered him to.” M took the shrunken head out and tossed it over at Alatar’s feet. “Look familiar?”

  M did not like Alatar, but Alatar had not become one of the most powerful wizards in the city, and thus the planet, and thus all of existence and the many existences attached to it, by being entirely a fool. He did not shout or sneer or even blink. “I’ve never seen this before in my life.”

  “There’s no one else here who could craft a fe
tish of such potency and would choose so tasteless a form. A shrunken head?” M shook his head back and forth. “Good God, Alatar, all that power and you’re still a child.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alatar said, stroking at the curved oak of his staff.

  “You knew that Talbot was my friend, or that Talbot thought he was my friend at least, and you supposed that in the confusion he might manage to worry something out of me. Except that I don’t worry, and Talbot wasn’t my friend, and your fingerprints are so clear on this that you might as well have dipped them in ink.”

  “To what end?” Alatar asked, his raptor eyes blinking. “What is it that you possibly possess that I might have interest in?”

  “Don’t play the fool,” began the White Queen.

  “You want to know where the heart of the city is,” finished the Red.

  “There’s no proof,” Alatar said, hands gripping the wood of his staff tightly. “It’s his word against mine.”

  Abilene looked at him wonderingly for a moment. “This is not a court of law,” she said. “This is the jungle.”

  “Red in tooth and claw,” Celise confirmed. “And I believe him.”

  “And I believe him also,” Abilene added, “and really that’s all there is to the situation.”

  “I invoke the peace!” Alatar said, and now you could see a crack in his facade. “No harm to be done to another within the conclave. I’ve kept my end of it. None could say otherwise. Word was given! Oaths on the old things, the true things, the things of power!”

  Abilene laughed. Celise laughed also. M thought it was the only time he had ever seen the two act in concert. He found it immensely unsettling.

  “It’s our peace, Alatar,” Celise answered. “And we can break it any time we please.”

  M wondered if all of the rest of the members of the convention had pulled themselves together and thrown themselves at the two women—well, goddesses, if we’re being accurate about it—would they have been able to overcome them? And he thought probably, maybe, but it would have been a shitty way to spend what for most would end up being the last afternoon of their lives.

  Happily, this was not an eventuality that needed to be explored. M, for one, believed himself, and it seemed that most of the rest of the people in the hall agreed. Certainly, they did not disagree so much that they were going to ally themselves with Alatar.

  “Shall I handle this, Abilene?” Celise asked. “Or would you like to do the honors?”

  “It’s your borough these days, Celise,” Abilene said sweetly. “I wouldn’t want to steal your thunder.”

  Celise smiled back. You wouldn’t even have known that they hated each other, unless you had eyes in your head.

  Alatar went for broke then, because whatever Celise was about to do to him wouldn’t be any worse than what would happen if he violated the unwritten but harshly enforced rules of the Management, or at least not much worse, and also they were down in the subterranean caverns of existence and the Management generally didn’t mind if you mucked about a bit. His display of offensive magic was as impressive as M had ever seen, or nearly so, but then again those sorts of fireworks were not really in M’s line. Bright as hell though, energy streaking out from his staff and toward Celise, a swarm of parti-colored orbs flying off to engulf her, fire rising up from the ground, lightning coming down from the ceiling—the whole gamut. M realized watching it that he had allowed himself to be fooled by Alatar’s Renaissance-faire getup and his crippling lack of hipness—but the man could spell, you had to give it to him. And all this after he had spent the afternoon calming down the World Turtle! Impressive stuff, it really was.

  Of course, it wasn’t anything close to Celise, not within a kilometer or a mile or a fucking light-year. After a moment, the fire died down, the pyrotechnics dimmed, Alatar struggled to breathe, and the target of his attention remained standing where she was, calm as the surface of a subterranean lake.

  “All finished?” Celise asked, her garden-party affect unperturbed, no hair ruffled, no thread of clothing out of place. “I wouldn’t want to spoil your last performance.”

  For once in his long years of carrying it, Alatar really needed the staff, would have collapsed without it to support him. He didn’t respond to Celise’s taunt, didn’t even look at her, too exhausted to raise his eyes from the ground.

  Celise smiled and whispered something and gestured with her open hand, as if calling for a maid. And then Alatar, who had up until that point been a six-foot-something man, with a white beard and a long nose, was a mouse sitting mournfully on the floor.

  Isn’t that cute, you think—well, think for another moment longer and you’ll think otherwise, having your form folded and crushed and bent into that of another, a human brain and the body of a rodent, performing horrible little rodent tasks, eating trash and shit, ferreting between walls, dodging cats and rats and humans. It was like a lot of those things from the old fairy tales: You realize they aren’t cute, they aren’t cute at all, they’re horrible, and why exactly do we keep telling them to children?

  Not that Alatar didn’t deserve it. Manhattan was a nice place, after all, and even if you didn’t love it, you could hardly want its many million inhabitants to die miserably, drowning in the Hudson River. And as for what would have happened had he gotten his hands around the heart, if he had ever managed to tap that geyser of power—well, that did not do to bear thinking about.

  “Thank you for the help, M,” Celise said, after the rodent had scampered away.

  “Yes, thank you, M,” Abilene said.

  M did not appreciate the two of them staring at him at the same time; it was like being drawn and quartered. “Don’t mention it,” he said, leaving the dais and stepping down into the sea of staring eyes and wan faces.

  “Hero of the day, mate,” Stockdale said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Your name just gets louder and louder.”

  If M was happy about this fact, he did a good job of hiding it.

  21

  * * *

  Boy and the Forest Spirit

  “What are you doing tonight?” Boy asked, arriving unexpectedly at The Lady late one July evening.

  M nodded at his beer. “I’m doing it.”

  “Up for a walk?”

  “Why?”

  “Just thought I’d give you something to do.”

  “So this is a favor? How kind of you. But I’m just not sure I feel comfortable asking you to put yourself out any further than you already have.”

  Boy scowled, ordered two shots of rye, and drank one of them. “It’s maybe not entirely a favor to you.”

  “No?”

  “In fact, it might be the reverse.”

  “Mightn’t it?”

  “A while ago I convinced this guy to live in the park.”

  “All right.”

  “Not a guy, exactly.”

  “Which park?”

  Boy gestured broadly. “All of them.”

  “I see. And?”

  “Every so often, he needs to be given a good reason to stay there.”

  “What’s a good reason?”

  “It varies. Last time it was tickets to a World Series game. The time before that he wanted a vegetarian slice from Bucoli.”

  “Surely you can order a pizza without my assistance?”

  “The time before he wanted me to climb to the top of the Empire State Building and kill the thing that was living there.”

  “Is there a thing living at the top of the Empire State Building?”

  Boy drank the shot of rye she’d been saving. “Not anymore.”

  “So, in fact, the favor would be really more from my end?”

  “I’ll owe you one.”

  “Deal! And I’ll trade that future assist for not having to go along with you on this one.”

  A step too far, and Boy, more comfortable with anger than weakness, got up from the chair that she was sitting on and pointed a skinny finger like the barrel of
a revolver at M. Her face swelled up red.

  There would be spleen all over him if he didn’t act quickly, so he did, joining Boy on his feet and making tranquil gestures with his hand. “Just playing hard to get. You know I’d never let you out unescorted.” He ordered two more shots of rye, even managed to hold on to one of them this time. Then he paid the bill and left.

  M walked out of The Lady less sober than he liked to be when dealing with things beyond human ken. “Where we headed toward? Prospect? Don’t tell me we’re going all the way to Central.”

  Boy shook her head and pointed toward the small triangle of green across from The Lady, where Washington Avenue intersected St. Marks. “That’ll do fine,” she said.

  They crossed against traffic, though there wasn’t much of that so late in the evening. The area Boy had indicated was twenty square yards, perhaps half of which was grass, the other half being red dirt and condom wrappers and empty forties and dog shit.

  “This isn’t much of a park you’ve stuck him in,” M said.

  “I told you, he lives in all of them.”

  “Why do you want him to hang around so badly?”

  “He’s good for the plants.”

  “Sort of a supernatural fertilizer?”

  “If that helps you.” Boy shook out her pack of Gauloises and smoked two so rapidly that M barely had time to roll one of his own.

  The nearest street lamp fizzled, then went out. There was an old homeless man sitting on one of the three benches that marked the outline of the small plot of untilled land that only a desperate real estate agent could pretend was a park. He got up and lumbered over, and M started to say that they didn’t have any money, which was a lie, but it felt better than saying that he had money but wasn’t going to give it to the man, because he suspected he would only spend it on drink, and also he looked smelly and generally distasteful, but Boy put a hand up to M’s chest and whispered, “That’s him.”

  The Park Manager—for this was the way M now thought of him—was old and gnarled, and walked along with the aid of a staff, or what looked like a staff, though as M got closer he realized it was actually an entire tree, a weeping willow or something, three or four times the size of the manager himself, with a full bough of summer leaves. And his skin wasn’t just gnarled, it was actually knotted, like the wood of an oak, and his dreadlocks looked more like roots than hair, and his smile was moss green. He stopped a few feet from the two of them, and the butt of his staff knitted itself swiftly into the ground, roots branching out through the grass and into the asphalt itself, smaller shrubs growing off of the cutting with supernatural rapidity.