A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  He caught a whiff walking out of the subway, fresh-baked cookies and the color crimson and a Fela Kuti groove. North a bit and it gave way to day-old musk, like you’d smell on your sheets the morning after a hard night of lovemaking, and a sort of yellowish chartreuse and an early Edith Piaf song. He walked a few blocks in the wrong direction, started to lose his sudden synesthesia, realized he’d taken a wrong turn, and circled back.

  Rollo of the Laughing Eyes now lived in a townhouse sandwiched between two very large apartment buildings near the corner of Beaver and Broad Streets. At first glance M was given the impression that what he was looking at was not a building, but a representation of one, and not a very good one either—a picture made by a toddler, pointing at the squiggly lines and saying, “That’s a door, and those are windows, and can we put it up on the fridge?” After a moment it snapped back into coherence, sort of, in a manner of speaking. Each and every brick was a different color: crimson and sky blue and puke green. Out-of-season plants bloomed side-by-side with horticulture of a distinctly apocryphal nature—century-old Banyan trees flourished over mandrake, petioles like Jewfros.

  The passersby couldn’t bring themselves to notice yet, but you could see it infecting their reality. Finance bulls hurrying to working lunches slowed as they passed, dollar-sign eyes gone hazy. Packs of East Asians flitting north toward the tourist traps of central Manhattan stopped and looked aimlessly around for something to take a picture of, cognizant of the spectral emanations but not quite able to identify the source. Most of them kept walking, though M knew that the more sensitive or joyous or miserable—those who had just lost a parent or gained a lover—might get a stronger glimpse of it, might even find themselves inside. Celise was right, as she had an unpleasant habit of being: The chancre was growing, and it needed to be excised.

  The door was open, as of course M had known it would be. The entry was unfurnished, as was the room beyond it and the room beyond that, empty except for tobacco ash and dead soldiers and the artwork that caked the walls and the floors and also the ceilings—a stunning and unstable panorama that M made a point of trying not to look at too closely. In the third room there was a foldout couch. On top of it were a banker type wearing a sport jacket and tie but no pants and a lithe, dark-haired youth of striking and effeminate beauty who scowled hard when M came in, possessive of the flesh with which he was intertwined. Above them was a reproduction of “The Birth of Man” with David Bowie standing in as God. M kept walking.

  In the small kitchen a girl cooked breakfast half dressed. She was willowy and fair and stunning-looking and clearly not yet twenty. Pink nipples were clear against her white cotton undershirt. “Rollo’s upstairs,” she said, smiling. “Would you like some breakfast?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll make something anyway,” she said, turning back to the stove.

  The art inside Rollo’s room was fresh, less than a day old, so young that it didn’t quite know what it wanted to be yet, a mural extending across the walls that was either a beautiful woman or the noonday sun and either way, too bright to look at directly. Rollo was wrapped in a sheet below it, sleeping soundly on an eggshell pad. M crouched down and lit a cigarette and looked at Rollo for a moment without saying anything. He seemed younger than he had the last time M had seen him.

  “Hello, Rollo.”

  Rollo’s eyes were bright green when they opened, and his smile was authentic or seemed to be so. “If it ain’t the boogeyman himself.” He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his chest was sallow and fleshless. He had long leather gloves over both his hands, unusual sleeping attire in any bed M had ever shared.

  “Were you maybe thinking of putting on pants today?”

  “I guess if it’ll make you more comfortable. Go grab yourself some coffee, I’ll be down directly.”

  In the kitchen, the girl whom M was a little bit in love with was cooking up a storm. Eggshells gathered atop coffee grounds, potatoes bronzed and onions fried, severed orange halves awaited exsanguination. It was unhygienic but appetizing. The dark-haired boy and his playmate were sitting at the counter, the latter looking blank-eyed and lost, like he’d just come off the line at the Somme. When Rollo came down a few minutes later, he kissed each in turn, on the lips but not quite passionately, informed the girl that he would “take breakfast in the garden,” then led M through a back door.

  Outside a small jungle grew in the shadow of the neighboring apartment buildings. Lengths of ivy climbed up the glass and steel, thick roots the size of M’s arms. A baobab tree offered abode to a chittering pack of golden-furred monkeys, diving and gamboling and almost laughing, though, of course, man alone was given the capacity for laughter, uneven recompense against his foreknowledge of death. If you stared straight up, you saw the normal Manhattan sky, but if you were looking at something else—at one of the tricolor parrots that chirped away in the tree, or at the foreign, pear-shaped fruit at which the birds gnawed, or at Rollo himself—then you would have sworn above you was the eternal blue sky of the Pampas, or the Garden Route down Africa way.

  “Christ, Rollo,” M said. “How much of that shit have you been doing?”

  Rollo shrugged. “I don’t really keep track anymore.”

  “The entire house is painted with it, you can smell it from five blocks away. You think that day trader has a family he should maybe go back to?”

  “I’d always heard that day traders reproduce asexually. Cut off a finger and throw it in a pot of water and wait a week.”

  “I bet they’re wondering what happened to him. I bet they’ve called the cops. I bet they’ve put up posters.”

  “Calm down. He’s only been here a few days.”

  “How much has he seen in those few days? Enough to put a fissure right down into the center of his brain. And he isn’t the only one, either. A few more weeks and we’re going to have Burning Man taking place in Lower Manhattan.”

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “It would be terrible,” M said, as he did not at all like Burning Man, “although happily it’s an impossibility, because if you don’t shut down this little circus you’re running, the next visit you’re going to get is from the White Queen, and she won’t be sitting down for breakfast.”

  This did not seem to interest Rollo very severely, at least not nearly as much as the soft weave of the dandelion he was holding. His Lower East Side Lolita came out carrying a tray with two plates of huevos rancheros, two cups of coffee, two cups of freshly squeezed juice, silverware, and a bottle of hot sauce. She set everything down and kissed Rollo on the forehead. “I’ll be in the front room. Call if you need anything.”

  “She’s very pretty,” M said, after she had left.

  “Hannah?” Rollo nodded happily. “She’s a darling, just as sweet as God’s grace.”

  “What did she look like before you found her?”

  “So far as as I’m concerned, exactly the same.”

  “And when it runs out? When midnight comes and she goes back to being fat-assed and sad-eyed?”

  “Who says it has to run out?”

  “Everything runs out, Rollo. You can only keep the tinsel up so long.”

  “Then she’ll have had her few shining moments—how many can say that even? You worry too much about the future.”

  “You’re the only person who thinks that.”

  “How are the eggs?”

  “Fucking incredible,” M said, unhappy and unsurprised. In Rollo’s state, beauty and pleasure accrued naturally around him; any creative gift would be enhanced. That very pretty black-haired boy would be on a top-twenty list within five years time, and a very pretty black-haired corpse five years after that. He had that look to him that they all got when they’d been around Rollo too long, beautiful and damned.

  Rollo didn’t eat any of the eggs or drink any of the coffee, but after M had done a fair bit of both, he started to talk: “Heck, M, you know me. I’m not trying to make any trouble.”

  “Just
seems to find you?”

  “I liked the look of the building,” he protested halfheartedly. “If it’s such a problem, I’m happy to blow town.”

  “I think that would be best for everyone.”

  “Or at least I would if I could.”

  “How much are you in for?”

  “More than I can pay.”

  Which wasn’t much of a surprise. Enough bliss to ink half the building, enough bliss to grow this garden cheek by jowl with reality, to push it out like a cuckoo does a rival’s egg. M saw now that the things he had thought were monkeys shifted color against the tree, and were those little nubs going to be wings some day soon if Rollo didn’t leave Lower Manhattan? Yes, M thought that they were. “I’m a bit light at the moment,” M said. “And while I appreciate the personal bonds of loyalty between a dealer and his client, under the circumstances it might be best if we solved both of our problems by having you disappear.”

  For the first time in the conversation Rollo looked a bit chagrined. “I’m afraid I’ve given . . . guarantees.”

  “Guarantees?”

  “Hair and fingernails.”

  M pushed his plate away in disgust. “What the hell is the matter with you, Rollo? Hair and fingernails? Did you sign away your firstborn as collateral? You didn’t have a true name you could tell them?”

  “There was a project I was working on,” Rollo said. “I needed a few cans.”

  “A bathtub, more like. A child’s fucking swimming pool.” It is as wise to argue with an addict as it is a madman, or the sea. M chewed over his tongue a while and smoked a cigarette. When it was done, he ashed it into the verdant jungle grass and stood. “Let’s go meet your man.”

  Rollo took him on a side route back through the house and onto the street. They stopped in one of the antechambers, where Rollo had crafted a pietà that took up most of the room and somehow space beyond that as well. “What do you think? I put it up yesterday.”

  “It’s the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever seen,” M admitted unhappily.

  It was a long subway ride up to the Bronx. Rollo smiled at babies and flirted with old women. Between 66th and 110th Streets, a group of Latino youths demonstrated a limited grasp of break dancing for the dubious pleasure of the passengers, dubious save for Rollo, who found the exhibition a source of toddlerlike joy, got up from his seat, and took part enthusiastically if not with any great skill.

  M mostly just scowled.

  They disembarked at one of those stops in the Bronx that might be anywhere in the city or anywhere in the Western world, for that matter, faceless and indistinct. M followed Rollo down a few blocks of sidewalk overpasses and blank asphalt, stopping at one of the anonymous hundred-unit apartment buildings. Rollo buzzed a number. A voice answered. Rollo spoke briefly. The door opened.

  The elevator wasn’t working, so they were forced up the stairwell, near-lightless and well-defaced. Some of the graffiti were tags, jerky and incompetent or sweetly curved. Some of the graffiti were slogans, coarse gibberish regarding the habits of the neighborhood girls, lyrics to rap songs. Some of the graffiti were stick-finger cartoons of the pornographic variety. And some of the graffiti were incantations written in a language that had not been spoken aboveground since before the last ice age, strange symbols that seemed to fade when you stared at them.

  “What do you know about these guys?” M asked.

  “They’re good people. Nice folk all around.”

  “Then they would be the first friendly drug dealers I’ve met in a spare century of using narcotics.”

  After what seemed to M, whose regard for physical activity was less than overwhelming, a very long time, they came finally to the correct floor. Rollo led M down a long, not particularly well lit hallway, stopped at one of the doors, and knocked loudly.

  The man who opened it was short and stout and sad-eyed, and M did not find that he hated him right off, which was disappointing. It was always easier when you could loathe a man, when you found his existence such an affront as to want to move swiftly into violence. But this one looked like he could have been a pen salesmen or a professional mourner. A child was crying in a nearby room, another reason that M did not want to have to do anything too permanent to him.

  “Rollo,” said the man, less than smiling.

  “Arturo, sorry for the short notice.”

  “Not at all,” Arturo said, but he gave M a long stare that did not seem overwhelmingly friendly, an impression reinforced by the thin, scarred Latino standing behind Arturo and carrying something that looked like a sawed-off shotgun except the hammer was a scorpion’s tail and the barrel—at that moment, happily, pointed away from everyone—was a dried snake.

  Another thing that M liked about Arturo was that he did not start fast and heavy with the pleasantries, which is something you normally get with drug dealers, sweet-mugging you like a letterman at junior prom.

  “Who’s your friend?” Arturo asked.

  “I’m M.”

  “Just M?” asked the one holding the gun.

  “You can call me Martha, if it’ll give you something to do.”

  It was one of those typical, horrible New York apartments where the kitchen is a diagonal line drawn down the center of the living room, where tile meets carpet like ocean meets the sand. There were couches and chairs. M waited for Arturo to choose one, then sat down opposite him. Rollo did a lotus on a divan in the corner, gloved hands resting on his knees. The man with the gun stayed in the kitchen.

  “You stop by to pick something up?” Arturo asked. “We got a special arrangement with Rollo, but I could see my way to decanting a few fingers of bliss for a friend of a friend.”

  “Is that what I am?” M asked.

  “I’m hoping so.”

  “I’m hoping so too, Arturo. I’m hoping that very much. I’m hoping that we can part today having shook hands and traded phone numbers. I’m hoping to invite you to Christmas dinner and the bris of my firstborn son. But mainly I’m hoping that you’re going to forgive Rollo his debt and hand over whatever assurances he’s offered you.”

  “I’m afraid those desires are mutually contradictory.” Arturo would have been a good inquisitor, back when that was a job that a person might have—bereft of sadism but lacking utterly in compassion, the sort who would pull out nine toenails but leave the tenth untouched.

  “Who the fuck are you, man?” the one with the gun asked, not quite angry but moving in that direction. “Coming in here and playing king?”

  “I told you,” M said. “I’m M.”

  “I know who you are,” Arturo said quietly, before settling his muscle with a look. “But I didn’t know you were you so close with Rollo. Are you so close with Rollo?”

  “I’m sitting here, aren’t I?”

  “Do you know what bliss is?”

  “Yes,” M said, “but I suppose you’ll tell me anyway.”

  “You ever meet one of those things that seem a little bit like people but really aren’t that at all? You ever meet a concept wearing human skin?”

  “I’ve had some experience with them.”

  “Bliss is what they leave behind after they’ve visited their worshippers or their enemies, the little bit of residue that remains on their altars, in the ceremonial cups of wine and the bodies of their sacrificial victims. Spirit cum,” Arturo explained, the vulgarity casual and unexpected. “Spirit blood, spirit breath.”

  “Such was my understanding.”

  “Not so easy to find one of those things these days,” Arturo said. “Not so easy to summon it. Not so easy to placate it once you’ve got it in place. Not so easy to ask it to leave in a way that won’t make it angry. Not so easy to harvest what it leaves behind. Not so easy to transport it.”

  “Sounds like a rough business. You ever think about maybe opening a salon?”

  “Infrequently. Point being, it’s a lot of trouble to get even a little bit of bliss—and we’ve been giving quite a lot of it to your friend these last
months.”

  “So what does he owe you exactly?”

  Something passed between Arturo and Rollo. “Rollo’s an artist,” Arturo explained, still looking at Rollo. “And an artist needs a manager.”

  “So that’s fifteen percent of nothing, or have you not noticed that our dear Rollo is an indigent?”

  “We have faith in our long-term yield. Regardless, we’re convinced that it’s in everyone’s interest if Rollo continues as part of our stable for the foreseeable future.”

  “Not everyone. Where you live, Arturo?”

  “Where does it look like to you?”

  “To me it looks very much like the Bronx, but I must be mistaken. Because the White Queen owns this part of the Bronx, as everyone knows. And one thing about the White Queen—we’re personal friends she and I, so I can tell you—she would not be happy to see a pocket existence take root in the Financial District. She wants Rollo gone, and she doesn’t care about any deal you may have made with him. Another thing about the White Queen: She’s not the White Duchess, or the White Lady, or the White Princess even; she’s the motherfucking White Queen. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I think I might.”

  “She’s the top dog, she’s the stud bull, she’s the one and only,” M shrugged. “She’s one of two, anyway. I’m not sure if I think you’re a smart guy yet, Arturo, but you can’t be dumb enough to suppose yourself in a position to take a shot at the title.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “I’m happy to hear it.”

  “But you aren’t the White Queen.”

  “Not the adjective or the noun.”

  “And if the White Queen is so concerned about your boy in the corner, then why didn’t she come and visit us herself?”

  “Because she likes to see us peons dance. It’s a preoccupation of royalty. I can assure you, however, if things don’t get wrapped up to her satisfaction she’ll make time for a visit.”

  “Wrap things up like maybe kill the two of you? Would that be wrapping things up so far as the White Queen would be concerned?”