If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  The first involved a man with whom the sister of a mutual friend went out, a guy who was fascinated but terrified by electricity. One night, drunk and stoned, he claimed to be from a reality where Con Edison had never moved from very crude Direct Current to Alternating Current. Thus the New York City of his birth was dangerously lighted and electrical fires were commonplace. The sister soon dropped him and we learned no more.

  Another was a bartender with what sounded like a French Canadian accent who worked at a place on Sullivan Street some years ago. He would claim once he’d had a few in him that he came from a world where Napoleon had conquered North America and Noveau York was French speaking.

  “You know,” my friend said, “that every time there’s calamity anywhere in the world: war, poverty, pestilence, man-made or natural disaster, refugees from that location appear in this neighborhood and open ethnic restaurants. It’s a law of nature.

  “We’ve got all the old and new trouble spots from Italy to Ethiopia, Vietnam to Afghanistan. I’ll bet Libya is next. If all of them end up here why not people from Alternate Realities.”

  When I mentioned this jokingly to a guy I know slightly, Frankie who’s an administrator the University, he told me in a condescending manner that everyone used to say Alternate Reality. But the label is now considered insensitive. The correct term is Diverse Origin Worlds or DOW. And that this was a situation which was just beginning to be better understood.

  I mentioned that troubles in places with less fortunate histories than ours always translate into refugees in the neighborhood. Frankie said, “Once you get used to tailors from Xingjian/Uyghur and Italian restaurants with waiters from Bangladesh there should be no surprise at some couple arguing about what nose to wear.”

  “Why would anyone from a place where people had life sciences so advanced that they could exchange body parts at will, come to live here?” I asked.

  “Why did so many people flee Europe when it was the center of culture and technology to come here?” he asked. “Stuff back home forced them to. Everyone keeps quiet about it but I’m told there are DOW support groups to help refugees over the rough passages in their transitions to this world. I think it’s kind of interesting!”

  Reconsidering the incident that had started all this speculation, I recalled the woman with whom the “one nose” guy was walking. The one she wore was casual but cute and slightly upturned. A fine piece of retrousse nosery if that’s what it was—far more stylish than his.

  I wondered if she had made some disparaging remark about the one he wore. A thoughtless person might do this, little considering that the nose someone else wears is the only one he owns and thus force him into an embarrassing confession.

  Other things happened over the next couple of weeks: a long ago lover came back and visited the city; I got some unexpected freelance work, found a new yoga teacher and a fine gelato shop. I pretty much forgot the man and his nose.

  Then one morning, stuck in traffic on Canal Street, I looked out of the taxi and noticed a sign in a third story window. It offered DOW counseling along with assistance on visas and immigration status. Later on that very same day I again passed the man and the woman on Bleecker Street.

  I’m 99% positive it was them. But the nose is an important part of one’s face and their noses were not the ones I’d previously seen. His was somewhat larger and more commanding. Hers was curved and a bit sensuous. I thought of Anthony and Cleopatra. They looked like satisfied and confident New Yorkers striding down the center of the sidewalk and forcing everyone else to walk around them.

  On a nice summer day a bit after that, I sat on a bench in Washington Square Park telling my friend Liz all that I’d found out about noses and Diverse Origins Worlds.

  Two extremely thin thirty-something women carrying nicely up-scale shopping bags passed by close enough for us to hear them.

  “For June it’s clothes for work, weddings and hauntings,” said the one.

  “Hauntings,” said the second one. “You mean at that abandoned place upstate?”

  “Uh-huh,” said the first.

  “But not enough of us are here for a real haunting!”

  “Not yet,” said the first woman. “But others are trying to get permanent visas.”

  “The easiest way is to marry a citizen,” said the second. At this they both laughed a bit and looked towards the fountain.

  Liz and I followed their gaze. Frankie, who first told me about Diverse Origin Worlds, wore a crisp jacket and a bow tie. He grinned and opened his arms to what would surely be his bride.

  Whips and Wands

  When a question from the past haunts you, rest is impossible until it’s tracked down and resolved. Mine involves the last night of Whips and Wands.

  Memories that might bother others don’t faze me. Gauntlets of girls flay the bare asses of boys who run up long, dark stairs with the flash of photo bulbs as the only light. At the top step stands Mistress Whipwell—aka Babe Jerome—in leather g-string and black boots, mascara-lined eyes framed by a black top hat and gold curls.

  What drives me is a front page tabloid photo of Whipwell/Jerome’s bloody body in a trash-filled alley. At this late stage of my existence I need to untangle my role in that. It’s why I find myself back in New York. But when you’ve been gone a long while, it’s hard to know where to start.

  After searching for what seems like years, I get lucky and more. In an exhibition of photos of 1950s Manhattan, there’s a shot of half a dozen boys jumping a fence in Madison Square Park. One looks right into the camera and I recognize the eyes. Know Jonny Keagan at any age and you remember them.

  Keagan is my key. He grew up in Kips Bay, a working class neighborhood centered on Second Avenue in the East Twenties and Thirties. When Whips and Wands opened there Jon ran the door. I need to find him.

  Instinct, a hunch, something overheard, eventually leads me to a book promotion at a big Barnes and Noble on Union Square. At the microphone, a shopworn author doubling as used car salesman and used car reads from a memoir of the legendary late 1960s and early ’70s.

  A few of the crowd are familiar. But I’ve been gone so long I’m invisible to them. Then I spot a figure wavering like a ghost or a memory. Jon Keagan, white haired, sits tall on the aisle with a cane across his knees.

  He turns his wide, almost unblinking eyes on me and whispers, “I’ve thought about you lately.” Jon stands and gestures toward the exit. As we leave the author’s saying, “An abandoned neighborhood contained a secret, dark jewel.” And I feel he’s talking about Whips and Wands.

  It’s dusk as we walk uptown and turn on East 26th Street. High rise towers look down on us. It was all five story walkups back when Babe Jerome in guy drag and me passed this way. I was stupid; a would-be actor who rode pay-for-play sex until I hit my late ’20s and was old. Babe Jerome was a spoiled brat who showed me S&M was where I could have a few more years of work.

  Jon carries his cane like a walking stick. He says, “I’m the neighborhood historian, people always asking about some candy store that burned down fifty years ago. But with ones like you from far away and long ago I feel like a priest, a magician.”

  The next couple of blocks it seems we’re back in the old New York, corner stores and bars, people sitting on stoops. But across Second Avenue where Whips and Wands stood there’s nothing I remember.

  Jon points to the wall of brick and glass. “When I was a kid Bellevue and all the other hospitals were over on First Avenue with their backs to the river. Everything else was my neighborhood.

  “Then one day the hospitals wanted to expand, to house their workers. A bunch of blocks got condemned, houses, stores, Mullins Hall where everybody had wedding parties, graduations. Buildings emptied fast but didn’t come down for a year. Landlords made money renting illegally. Whores, junk dealers: no one cared.

  “After the army I did door work at clubs—was good at it. Someone said Mullins Hall had a new name and was hiring. This drag with five o’cl
ock shadow, out of her skull on meth, interviewed me.”

  “Whips and Wands,” I say and remember peeling paint, flooded restrooms, manacles and blue lights, glowing death heads in dark halls. “Fairies and Sadists: a little pain, a bit of magic, Mistress Whipwell aka Babe Jerome presiding.”

  “She starts screaming at me. You tell her the word is I run a door like I got a sixth sense of who to let in and you say I’m hired. She tries to stab you with a scissors.”

  “I was the second banana, accomplice, sometime top and occasional bottom,” I say. “Baby Jerome inherited a chunk of money, spent it getting his girl on. What was left got put into Whips. In two months he’d break even, four months, she’d be rich again and I’d have a bankroll.”

  We cross Second, walk down the block to where the club stood. It’s a playground now. Guys shoot baskets in the dark.

  “The place got popular,” Jon says, “spoiled kids needing to get spanked. Then came the night I noticed unmarked cop cars all around. Mistress Whipwell and you were fighting. Instinct said to split.”

  He waits for my story. I drop my eyes and say, “All I remember is waking up with scratches on my face and arms, blood on my hands and no memory of anything but the fight I’d had the night before. Jerome banged my head on a wall. Told me we were through.

  “Then I saw the Daily News photo and headline, SHE-MALE IN PAIN PALACE DEATH PLUNGE. That’s when I found out about the raid and how she fell six floors head first off the roof. I got out of town. But I wondered . . .”

  “If you pushed her?” he asks and I nod.

  “You came out the door royally fucked up just before I left. I stuck you in a cab. You don’t remember?”

  I shake my head.

  “Whipwell jumped after the raid started. Maybe that was her release. Like this is yours.”

  I look into those eyes, realize nothing holds me. He watches me float up over the roofs of Manhattan.

  Tears of Laughter, Tears of Grief

  There’s a little shop way west on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. TEARS OF LAUGHTER, TEARS OF GRIEF has been there for years. It advertizes discreetly. “Trouble expressing yourself emotionally?” “Unable to summon the right response in a timely manner?”

  Which of us has not had those problems? And TOLTOG has the answers. Unable to produce a lingering tear? TOLTOG has handy eye drops! I stop in whenever I pass the shop. It’s a boutique, really, small but enticing. And the stock!

  Stuff one almost wants to find a use for. Sweat of your brow? Sprays on! Drool with envy? With an oral sponge! Sweating Blood is a simple application.

  The whole Blood Sweat and Tears treatment requires a little extra time and effort to apply cream, spray and eye drops. But what a pleasure to take that trouble!

  The staff is part of the charm, with their words of comfort (achieved with a gargle solution in several delightful flavors) and, sympathetic smiles (a small oral brace which doesn’t interfere with diction in any serious way).

  I was reminded of TOLTOG one day not long ago. I’d just started writing a story, a dystopian tale about an orphan boy in a desolate American landscape. His parents have been killed and eaten by Republicans and he is both starving and hungry for revenge.

  This, I was afraid, was turning out to be an example of what I call bright flash stories, ones that begin with an image, an idea, an opening sentence, sometimes with all three of those and then linger seductive, unformed and unfinished in back files.

  As I fretted about that I got an email informing me that Livonia Failbeck, described as she always was as, “A prominent American fantasy writer,” had died suddenly from a stroke.

  A surprise and a coincidence, I’d been thinking how Livonia would have taken my story of unutterable wrong, added some little curlicues to flavor the plot, and subtly turned the story into an affirmation rather than an angry cry.

  Normally, to write in the short forms is to dance a dance with obscurity. But Livionia’s formula had won her attention and awards. Twice in recent years I’d been at conventions because I was on an awards short list. Both times Livy herself hadn’t bothered to make an appearance—once because she was elsewhere receiving a more important award. Both times she won. Later she was pleasant about it, shrugging her shoulders at the whims of the fans, the mysteries of the judges’ decisions. But being a pleasant winner is easy, losing not so much.

  The announcement of the memorial service followed shortly on the death notice. It would be held here in New York City and I’d have to go, wouldn’t, in fact, have considered missing it. My problem would be decorum. Could I show the proper regret untinged by sardonic glee?

  Very shortly afterwards I felt all had gone well because I was at a spec fiction convention and I was receiving an award—THE GOLDEN GOOSE—given for excellence in short fiction. I remembered that Livonia Failbeck had won this prize seven times.

  My story of the orphan boy whose parents had been eaten was the one with which I’d won. Had Ms. Failbeck still been alive this would never have happened. And I stepped up to take the prize, aware that I’d Livonia’d the story with wry verbal doodles and a big, reconciliation for an ending. But I forgave myself.

  Apparently I’d forgotten that in fact the trophy WAS a goose—alive and big as me but a loud purple. Later that night after the applause and congratulations, after the victory celebration, we wandered down a hotel corridor. The goose wanted to go back to the bar, got a bit nasty about this. All I wondered was how I was going to get it through airport security and onto the plane.

  It was, of course, a dream, possibly brought on by this being the night before the Failbeck Memorial Service. I awoke with a strong sense of disappointment. It was as if the dream was a vision of an alternate life as opposed to the gooseless existence in which I found myself.

  There’s prophecy and warning in dreams. Often, though, one is reluctant to examine them too closely.

  Demeanor is important when you’re moving to succeed the old monarch. No one wants to be like Ozzie Nesbitt at the funeral of his legendary rival Norwood Fletcher. Some said Ozzie was drunk. They were being kind.

  When Ozzie sprang up, pushed Fletcher’s wife (once long ago Ozzie’s fiancée) out of the way and kicked the casket repeatedly, he was sober. He kept shouting, “Not much to say now you stupid bastard. Where are all your Hugo Awards now?”

  Obviously it was something he needed to express but it did Nesbitt’s career no good. All this was in the legendary past. These days, things are handled in a more seemly fashion.

  I headed for the little shop on Bleecker. When one is anxious, aware of how important an event could be, there’s the temptation to overdo things.

  Yes, I’ve heard those audios of the service in which my sobs compete with the speakers and the music. So demonstrative was my mourning that several people separately asked me when I was planning to rend my garments. And someone I’d thought of as a friend remarked aloud, “What, doesn’t TOLTOG have a sackcloth and ashes sachet, dear?”

  But I ask myself what Livonia herself would have done. And I don’t feel I was that far off her beat. Besides, she’s dead and someone will have to win those awards. I take my vision of the Goose to be a portent.

  “

  There’s A Hole in the City ” got written in the spring of 2005, three and a half years after 9/11. I’d watched the towers fall from a street corner a couple of blocks from my house. The story is as much memoir as fiction. It wasn’t just me who needed time to get a bit of distance before writing about that day and what came after. 2005/6 saw the appearance of all manner of stories, novels, films and music influenced by the destruction of the World Trade Center.

  I wrote “There’s a Hole in the City” for Ellen Datlow’s wonderful online Sci-Fiction. It received immediate attention, won the International Horror Guild and Million Writers awards and made the Nebula and Gaylactic Spectrum short lists. It’s been reprinted seven times so far and translated into German and Japanese.

  THERE’S A
HOLE IN THE CITY

  Wednesday 9/12

  On the evening of the day after the towers fell, I was waiting by the barricades on Houston Street and LaGuardia Place for my friend Mags to come up from Soho and have dinner with me. On the skyline, not two miles to the south, the pillars of smoke wavered slightly. But the creepily beautiful weather of September 11 still held and the wind blew in from the northeast. In Greenwich Village the air was crisp and clean with just a touch of fall about it.

  I’d spent the last day and a half looking at pictures of burning towers. One of the frustrations of that time was that there was so little most of us could do about anything or for anyone.

  Downtown streets were empty of all traffic except emergency vehicles. The West and East Villages from Fourteenth Street to Houston were their own separate zone. Pedestrians needed identification proving they lived or worked there in order to enter.

  The barricades consisted of blue wooden police horses and a couple of unmarked vans thrown across LaGuardia Place. Behind them were a couple of cops, a few auxiliary police, and one or two guys in civilian clothes with IDs of some kind pinned to their shirts. All of them looked tired, subdued by events.

  At the barricades was a small crowd, ones like me waiting for friends from neighborhoods to the south, ones without proper identification waiting for confirmation so that they could continue on into Soho, people who just wanted to be outside near other people in those days of sunshine and shock. Once in a while, each of us would look up at the columns of smoke that hung in the downtown sky then look away again.

  A family approached a middle-aged cop behind the barricade. The group consisted of a man, a woman, a little girl being led by the hand, a child being carried. All were blondish and wore shorts and casual tops. The parents seemed pleasant but serious people in their early thirties, professionals. They could have been tourists. But that day the city was empty of tourists.