Dark Cities

by Christopher Golden

  Yes, something was wrong.

  She had to find the children. She had to count them again. Then they had to get off of this train. Tonya knew these things, but the wall of flesh around her bloated when she thought about moving. She could see only pieces of people: a briefcase, an engagement ring, a neatly pressed lapel, another briefcase— the promise of her future. Her future, not her students’. No red.

  “Movie Club! Come to me right—”

  Tonya gasped and nearly fell when a sudden clamp pinned her knees. When she looked down, two moon-sized, teary eyes were staring up: Sharmanita was on the floor as if she’d crawled there, holding her tightly.

  “I wet,” Sharmanita said, or maybe Tonya only read her lips. Tonya made out the large splotch of moisture between the girl’s kneeling legs, like spilled coffee. Sharmanita was twelve, but she’d started having daytime accidents after she saw her brother shot down at the park. She had run to him when it happened, staining her clothes with his dying blood. Today, her eyes looked the same way they had looked in her close-up during his funeral on the front page of The New York Times, full of the centuries-old question: Why? Several of Tonya’s undergrad activist friends had changed their social media profile photos to her slain brother Jamal’s school photo in homage, for a time. Tonya never told them she was Sharmanita’s teacher now, and that those photos had done nothing to keep dead Jamal’s sister from wetting herself in public.

  The train car careened, and Tonya’s weight lurched against sharp shoulders. No straps or support bars were within her reach. If Sharmanita didn’t let go of her, she would fall.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be back soon,” Tonya lied, because she had no idea how far they were from home. Thank God Mrs. Lopez would be back soon. Tonya raised her tattered voice to try to be heard. “It’s OK, Sharmanita! Have you seen the others? Were you calling me?”

  Lights flickered in the train car. Pitch black, then overbrightness. One time. Twice.

  The vise around her legs vanished as the lights returned, sickly and dim, ready to be extinguished by the wind howling through the car.

  Sharmanita and her bright red scarf were gone from sight, as if she had never been.

  THE REVELERS

  by

  CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  We’ve all had a friend like that.

  Jon was mine.

  Jonathan Vincent Carver showed up in my class halfway through seventh grade, something to do with his dad’s job. Like a military brat, he’d been moved from state to state his whole life and he had the combination of feigned arrogance and desperate yearning that often goes along with that kind of upbringing. Translate that to mean that he lied a lot, said whatever he had to say to be accepted. To be liked. They were little white lies, mostly, so my buddies and I didn’t mind much. Jon was usually good company, and by high school, he’d become one of my closest friends.

  If you’re lucky, you gather a small tribe together when you’re young, people you believe will have your back in the dark times. But even the lucky don’t usually stay that lucky. College comes and people drift and change. Jon put on a mask of arrogance and faux-charm in his quest to enter the business world, the kind of thing he believed would make him a lot of money after graduation. He recognized the process, pursued it with an admirable single-mindedness, but at the same time, he held on to his high school friends and the tangible truth of our tribe, the people we’d been. It was only later that I’d realize he needed the reminder of who he’d been because he was finding it harder and harder to remember that the grinning salesman face was only a mask.

  The first clue came our junior year in college. He’d been going to Fordham down in New York and come back to Boston for a long weekend right at the beginning of baseball season and he wanted to catch up. I was his touchstone, you see. That reminder he needed. He could only do Sunday night—he had no classes on Mondays that semester, but I did, and my political science professor had scheduled a test at 8:50 a.m. The test had me worried, but Jon had always been so persuasive.

  We met early for dinner. He told the waitress all about our high school glory days, and then he sprang it on me—he had tickets to the Red Sox game. Could we eat in a hurry and head over to Fenway Park? I insisted that I couldn’t, offered to let him out of dinner and he could shanghai someone else into going with him. He let it go… until we’d eaten, and then somehow I let him talk me into it, but only because he promised to drive me back to campus as soon as the game let out. I still needed to study and the clock was ticking, but him driving me back would save me three quarters of an hour or so.

  What he hadn’t told me was that he had a couple of pals from Fordham meeting us there—guys I’d met before, guys who only saw Jon’s mask and who had fashioned their own façades of smug assholery. He hadn’t told me, because he knew I’d never have gone along to hang out with these two.

  When the game ended, the Fordham boys wanted to go out drinking. Jon extolled the virtues of this plan, trying to persuade me, but I had an early exam I wasn’t ready for, remember, Jon? And you promised to drive me back to campus?

  He gave me a sour look, pulled a twenty out of his wallet, and tucked it into the pocket of my jacket like I’d just given him a sloppy back-alley blowjob and this was my reward. “Sorry, man. You’re right. Take a taxi on me. I owe you.”

  I couldn’t even argue. All of the abuse I wanted to hurl his way just sat in my throat, lodged there like something I’d need the Heimlich to choke up. The Fordham boys went off, having quite a laugh.

  Have you ever tried to get a taxi within a mile of Fenway Park right after a Red Sox game?

  Yeah. It’s like that.

  The moment stuck with me. I ran into Jon’s father in a restaurant a few months later and I couldn’t help myself. I told him that story. The elder Carver seemed disgusted but unsurprised, and that was when I realized that even his parents thought their son was a bit of a prick.

  We saw each other less and less. We graduated. He came back to Boston for work, while my fortunes took me to New York, to a magazine publisher where I’d been working for a couple of years by the time I got that phone call from Jon. The phone call that led to meeting Mollie and Leigh and the party in this girl’s apartment.

  “Tim Donovan,” I announced as I answered the phone.

  “Timmy! You don’t need your dancing shoes, but put your motherfucking drinking hat on!”

  I laughed, sat back in my chair. “What the hell do you want, Carver?”

  “What time can you kick off work?”

  My cubicle had a great view of Times Square. Rent would drive the company out of there a few years later, but those were halcyon days, so even a little punk like me had a view. I poked my head up to see who might overhear, but the three other staffers who shared the office were all elsewhere—coffee break, cigarette break, or running errands for the higher-ups.

  “I usually get out of here around seven. The boss is out of town, though, so I figure six o’clock sharp,” I said. “From the question, I assume you’re in town.”

  “I have meetings till three-ish,” Jon said. “Then I’ll hit up my local office for a few hours and meet you at six-thirty. Wherever you want, provided there’s a bar with women in it.”

  * * *

  We met at Dooley’s Tavern, an Irish pub at the corner of 57th Street and 7th Avenue. It was the kind of place we’d always frequented in college, all brass railings and dark wood soaked in decades’ worth of spilled ale, so the whole place had the stale-beer stink of fraternity basements. In those days, to me, that was the scent of nostalgia.

  I slipped through the door at quarter past six and sat at the bar to wait, ordered a pint of Guinness and chatted up the bartender for half an hour until Jon arrived. The bartender’s name was Leigh, a tall brunette with wildly curly hair and mischief sparkling in her dark eyes. Smart and funny, she kept the conversation going, kept the counter clean, kept the drinks coming, managed to take care of everyone without making anyone else fe
el left out.

  “Maybe your friend’s not coming,” she said at one point.

  “Nah,” I said, “he’ll be here. He’s what you call ‘mercurial.’”

  “Meaning he thinks his time is more important than yours,” Leigh observed. She cocked an eyebrow, maybe realizing that had been a little more honest than it was smart for a bartender to be if she wanted decent tips.

  I smiled. “Oh, there’s no doubt that’s what he thinks.”

  And you let him? She didn’t ask the question, but I could see it in her eyes.

  Half a second later, Jon pressed himself against my back, reaching around me to start caressing my chest through my shirt. I spilled a couple of ounces of my beer onto my pants and laughed, twisting out of his grasp before he could tweak my nipples.

  I swore at him, setting my beer down, but I was laughing as we embraced. We’d had a lot of good times together. Despite the way our friendship had withered, I was happy to see him. His eyes were glassy from the several beers he’d doubtless already had while he spent the afternoon at his “local office,” which was a stool at a strip club half a dozen blocks from our present location.

  “So this is the infamous Jon,” Leigh said, placing a coaster on the bar. “What’ll you have?”

  Jon grinned, studying her like she was the menu. “Is that an open-ended question, or are we just talking alcohol here?”

  Leigh arched an eyebrow. “Why don’t we start with alcohol and see where that takes us?”

  It might have been a bartender’s diplomacy, a way to sidestep the come-on, or she might’ve been flirting with him. I wasn’t sure at the time and I’m not really sure now, regardless of where it went. It always astonished me how successful Jon was at seducing women. He wasn’t the best-looking guy in a room. Too short, too cynical, too many damn teeth in that shark smile. The pickup lines he used should have been comedy gold. Sorry about last Christmas; Santa forgot to pick me up. That shit should not have worked, and yet somehow he’d figured out the formula, the perfect ratio of cockiness to charm, to move things from conversation to copulation.

  He flirted with Leigh. As I downed my second Guinness, I did the same. We told stories about our high school and college days, trying to amuse her but mostly just amusing ourselves. It felt good to reminisce.

  “This guy and I grew up together,” Jon told Leigh, brow furrowed. “Hung out at each other’s houses after school, drank in the woods together, did our stupid science project together. Life goes on, right? But if you have a couple of friends you can hang onto from when you were a kid, it means something, y’know? There’s always someone who knows who you really are.”

  Leigh cocked her head, her lips pursed together, pert with attitude. “You’re either sweeter than you look, or drunker than you sound.”

  He laughed. “Maybe both.”

  I put a hand on his back. “All right, brother. Time to get a table and order something to eat.”

  He made a pistol out of his thumb and forefinger. “Excellent idea.”

  Jon picked up the bar bill. I worked in publishing and he worked in sales. The guy could have sold ice to Eskimos, so needless to say he was making a shitload more money than I was. I offered to pay, but he rolled his eyes. He knew my salary.

  Leigh waved over a waitress and introduced us. “Sit in Mollie’s section. She’ll take good care of you.”

  Mollie looked me up and down the same way Jon had looked at Leigh. Almost elfin, she was a tiny redhead with a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and she wore a black skirt so short it might as well have been called a sash. Mollie started to lead us over to a table.

  “Hey,” Leigh said as I turned away from the bar.

  I glanced at her.

  “He’s everything you said he was.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  She smiled. “Probably both, don’t you think?”

  I returned her smile and carried my third Guinness with me to the table.

  * * *

  In the interest of honest reporting, I must say we were drunk as fuck. We’d had our dinner and talked for hours about old times and new times. Being with Jon had reminded me why we had been such close friends in high school and college. He might have been a bullshitter of the highest order, but he knew me better than almost anyone and I knew him, and one of the first things I’d realized about post-college life was that those kinds of intimacies were hard to come by. I had started to wonder if maybe I still loved him a little more than I hated him.

  We had pulled other patrons into our conversation, but most of them had left after a while, and come last call, there were about a dozen customers left in Dooley’s. Mollie had closed out her station half an hour before and sat at one of the many empty tables around us, tallying her tips for the night and making sure all of her math had been correct. In the midst of that, she’d said something nice about my eyes, and Jon had taken that as his cue to play matchmaker. He spent some time extolling my virtues, and when Mollie had taken off her apron and grabbed her coat, instead of leaving she took a seat with us and got a beer of her own. We were seven or eight drinks ahead of her.

  “You know the drill, amigos,” Leigh called from behind the bar. “You don’t have to go home—”

  “—But you can’t stay here!” the chorus of people with nowhere better to go chimed in.

  Mollie had just said something funny and I realized I’d smiled a little too long at the joke. Smiling at her was easy. She confessed to being an actress and a dancer and that she had been writing a musical about a cocktail waitress in 1940s Los Angeles who spent her nights serving stars of the silver screen and dreamed of being discovered, but who felt invisible every moment of her life, except when she went to the movies. Sitting in the theater with the lights down, Mollie said, the waitress could always feel like she lived amongst those stars.

  I fell in love a little, I think. Drunk as I was.

  Jon said he’d produce her show after he made his first million, but only if he got to help with casting, so he could see if all of the stories about hungry young actresses were true. Maybe once I would’ve laughed, but you couldn’t hear Mollie talk about her dreams and think that line was funny. Unless you were Jon.

  Mollie laughed politely as she finished her beer. Last call had come and gone, so I offered her the rest of mine. The staff were getting their coats on when Leigh came and stood beside Jon’s chair, hands thrust into the pockets of her ratty old pea coat, a bright raspberry scarf around her neck. Out from behind the bar, she seemed taller than ever.

  “Where are you guys going from here?” she asked.

  I blinked in surprise and glanced at Jon, who grinned. To him, it didn’t seem at all unusual that Leigh might want to spend more time with him, no matter that she was stone-cold sober and we’d been drinking for hours. We weren’t incoherent— we’d been drinking all night, but we’d had a meal and hours had passed—but we were drunk enough to irritate sober people.

  “We have no plans,” I said.

  “We do now,” Jon corrected me, sliding back his chair and standing to look up at Leigh. “We’re going wherever you’re going.”

  Mollie downed the last of my beer and stood as well. “Leigh and I are headed to a party, if you guys want to come.”

  “Might be we’ve partied enough,” I found myself saying. Then I saw the disappointment on Mollie’s pixie features and wondered what the hell was wrong with me. “You guys don’t mind us being so far ahead of you?”

  “Mollie’s got a little packet of something to help us catch up,” Leigh said.

  The mischief in her eyes made Jon very happy. Mollie took my hand and guided me away from the table, and suddenly we were leaving the restaurant and walking the streets of New York, and pretty soon I wasn’t sure where we were, which was quite a feat when you consider that most of Manhattan is comprised of numbered streets and avenues. It’s hard to get lost there. I wondered if I’d lost count of my drinks at some point during the nigh
t.

  Then Mollie slid her arm through mine and started to sing a wordless tune, softly but beautifully, and I stopped worrying. I worried too much, Jon had always told me. I felt sure, in that moment, that he had been right.

  Mollie took a little plastic bag out of her pocket, tapped a couple of pills into her palm and swallowed them dry. She offered them around. Leigh took two, but cautioned Jon and me to start with one each, given we were already slightly hammered. I followed their advice. Always the cautious one. But not so cautious I wouldn’t take a pill a pretty girl gave me out of a plastic bag from her pocket.

  “Where’s the party?” he asked Leigh.

  “This girl’s apartment.”

  “That’s all you know?” I asked.

  Mollie bumped me with her hip. “It’s supposed to be a massive bash. Late night party, past the witching hour in New York City. What else do you really need to know?”

  I smiled, recognizing truth when I heard it. “This girl’s apartment” really was all I needed to know.

  * * *

  We never met the girl. Or at least, I never did. The party raged on the third floor of an old brownstone jammed between two modern structures, like a piece of an earlier New York had been somehow passed over by the passage of time. Forgotten. I hoped for one of those great, claustrophobic elevators with the accordion gates, but the place was a walk-up. Whatever Mollie had given us had kicked in on the way up the stairs, so as the thump of blaring hip-hop drifted down from above, Jon started bopping to the music. He took Leigh by the hands and danced up the last flight of steps. At the landing there were cases of empty beer bottles, neatly set out for return and redemption.

  “Empty!” Leigh said, laughing in frustration, as if she’d really thought they might be full cases of beer. Her pills had kicked in, too, and her eyes were wide and hypnotic. That’s mostly what I remember of her from that night, those kaleidoscopic eyes. I might have dreamed them, I don’t know. It’s been a long time since then.