A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  “So either way, he’s not here to break the tie,” M said.

  The conversation turned to Zenegal of Bombast. Where he was, if he was dead, what he had done before he had been made so.

  “Did Zenegal ever tell you about the time he got to the Nexus?” Stockdale asked.

  It is axiomatic that all roads, if you follow them long enough, connect to all other roads. The Nexus was the concrete realization of this hypothesis. Previous incarnations had seen it as a dusty crossroads, a hostelry, and a coaling port, but these days, in keeping with the zeitgeist, it was a subway station.

  “Yes,” M said. “Many, many times.”

  “You believed him?”

  “I didn’t entirely not believe him,” M said, taking a sip of his gin and tonic. There was a tattoo of a steam engine below his left wrist. “He said it was a long ways, but if you made it, you could hop a train anywhere you wanted, a straight shot, no connections.”

  No one said anything for a while, mulling over that possibility in silence.

  “I’ve always had some hankering to get a good look at Shimla, back when it was the second city in the empire,” said Stockdale.

  “I’ve never actually been to Tokyo,” D8mon admitted, rather ashamedly. “I keep meaning to go, and something keeps coming up.”

  Where it was that M wanted to go, he didn’t say. Regardless, when Stockdale stood up wordlessly, leaving enough cash on the table to cover the three of them—in short, when it was clear that the challenge had been offered—he was not slow in taking it.

  It was a bad decision. They had no real motivation in heading toward the Nexus, no plans and no provisions, nothing but a few words from an absent friend with which to begin their quest. And one thing about Zenegal was that, in spite of, or at least in addition to, being the Graffiti Prince and High Priest of the Cult of Funk, he had a rather loose relationship with the truth. But the thing about good decisions is that making them exclusively turns out, curiously, to be the worst decision a person can make; it leads to ruination, to a business-casual existence, to eating takeout and watching network sitcoms.

  In short, a bad decision is required to even things out every so often, and M was feeling up for making one that afternoon. Perhaps Stockdale and D8mon felt the same, or perhaps they were both foolish enough to mistake their bad idea for a good one. M was never entirely clear on the point, and afterward, what with how the whole thing ended, he never really felt like discussing it.

  • • •

  The Q from Seventh Avenue started normally enough, hipsters crawling their way into Manhattan for an evening’s entertainment, no odder or more surreal than your average ride on a New York City subway system, so fairly surreal. They got off at Kings Highway, six or seven stops down the line. M rarely rode the Q and so was not sure if Kings Highway was a real place or not, real in the sense of existing in the reality that M had been born in, rather than some other to which they were playing tourist. If it wasn’t his world, it was another similar enough not to stand out particularly, and they slipped onto the B without experiencing anything unusual. But fifteen minutes later, at Grand Flatroad Station, the train was suddenly packed with bipedal insects, not quite man-size, dressed in gilded-age hand-me-downs. One of them touched a spindle-haired tendril to his bowler hat and chittered something.

  “No,” M answered, realizing with a shock that he had understood the question without difficulty, “I’m not sure if this train goes to Moss Bottom Road. I’m not exactly from around here, you see.”

  The insectoid clicked its mandibles together. M found himself staring into the thing’s multifaceted eyes and had to remind himself to answer.

  “Thanks for the suggestion—I’m not sure we’ll be staying long enough to see the sights.”

  It bobbed its antennae back and forth in understanding, then turned to the paper it held in one of its . . . hands? feelers? claws? The headline read PRIME MINISTER AGREES TO TROUT NEGOTIATION—WAR WITH PRUSSIA AVERTED.

  “Peace in our time!” Stockdale said, rather too loudly.

  The mass of surrounding creatures edged away uncomfortably.

  “Don’t be an ass,” M muttered

  • • •

  At Idlewyld Station they snagged the back table in the dining car of a Victorian-era steam-engine train. It looked like a Victorian-era steam-engine train, and the people occupying it looked very much like Victorian-era citizens, but the meat that D8mon was picking looked distinctly greenish, and M was fairly certain the waiter had asked if they wanted “fish, chicken, or wyvern.” M stuck with gin, sipped it while staring out the window at a rural version of Brooklyn, quaint villages and bucolic forest scenery.

  Suddenly the car door opened and a pale-faced woman burst in. “Come quick! For the love of God, come quick! It’s the Admiral! He’s been murdered!”

  “Well, this is me,” M said, dabbing his lips with his napkin and standing. “I absolutely refuse to get involved in another locked-room mystery.”

  “I should say not,” Stockdale affirmed, grabbing his cigarette case off the table and following M out.

  D8mon forked a last streak of green meat into his mouth before joining them.

  • • •

  They were sitting on the Four Humours Express, surrounded by men in buckskin shouldering tarnished blunderbusses and dour-faced women in homespun cotton. On the seat across from M, a bony child held a fat pig. Whether the Four Humours Express was the vehicle that would take them all west—assuming that was where they were going—or if it would only leave them in front of a waiting fleet of Conestoga wagons, M could not possibly say.

  “What time is it?” asked a loud voice from the other end of the train, followed by some introductory music playing from a tinny boom box.

  “Showtime!” answered his hype man.

  “Christ damn it,” M said.

  The skinny child across from M gaped in horror.

  “I hate showtime,” D8mon said.

  “Everyone hates showtime,” Stockdale said.

  “I haven’t enjoyed watching anyone break-dance since Kool Herc was on the decks,” M added.

  “Maybe they’ll just do some juggling.”

  “Or recite a poem.”

  “Even worse.”

  But when they got off the train five minutes later, M was smiling. “Credit due,” he said, “that was amazing.”

  “I didn’t think it was possible to fit a squirrel up there, let alone a badger,” Stockdale responded, lighter by twenty dollars.

  • • •

  Our three adventurers were taking dinner at a bar in the vastness of St. Alban’s Station, which did not exist on any of the subway lines that M was aware of, though M very much thought it should have. A small establishment but bustling with folk of literally all sorts—day traders and MTA workers and Soviet cosmonauts and slumming international royalty, Brazilian vaqueros in leather chaps and bullwhips, spindly punk kids with safety pins stuck through their lips and eyebrows, white-clad Buddhist monks ordering red ale via hand signals so as not to violate their vows of silence. There was sawdust on the ground and a giant blackboard hanging over the bar read:

  Beer 5¢

  12 Oysters 10¢

  Fancy women, gnomes, and cyborgs not welcome

  “An admirable entrance policy,” Stockdale observed to the barman as he brought over three more pulls of stout.

  “These are the best goddamn oysters I’ve ever tasted,” D8mon said, slurping one out from its shell.

  “Your first time in here?” asked the man sitting next to them, bullet-headed, the chain of a watch coming out of one pocket and the butt of a revolver sticking out the other.

  “Our very first time,” Stockdale said, “though, Lord willing, not the last.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Crown Heights,” M said.

  “Crown Heights? You aren’t from one of those New Yorks where the Brits won in ’76?”

  “If you call disentangling yourself from a b
unch of ungrateful provincials losing . . .” Stockdale began. It was Stockdale’s considered belief that the British Empire did right in leaving the subcontinent and wrong in leaving everywhere else.

  M cut over him. “Our New York is part of the United States, by the grace of God.”

  But this wasn’t quite enough for their new companion, who was staring over at Stockdale in the way that a person might stare at someone before hitting them. He was barely more than five feet, but every inch seemed made of hard oak and scrap metal. M was wondering if maybe he could convince D8mon to fight him and then eat all of D8mon’s oysters while he was so engaged.

  Though it didn’t come to that, because all of a sudden Stockdale raised his half-empty glass of beer toward the sky and said in his speaker’s corner voice, “To the Apple herself, the beating center of the human race, mad and fierce and lovely. There was never in all the worlds a woman more beautiful or more heartless.”

  “To New York,” M said.

  “To New York,” D8mon said.

  “To New York,” the stranger added.

  Everyone drank what was left of their beer. In a fit of civic pride, everyone ordered another glass and drank that as well.

  “When did you say you were from, exactly?”

  “2014,” Stockdale said.

  “2016,” D8mon inserted.

  “Yes, right—2016.”

  “Hell’s bells, that’s a few years past expiration. I suppose you don’t see many of these, when you’re from?” he asked, pulling at the ends of his handlebar mustache.

  “Actually, a lot more frequently than you’d think,” M said.

  The stranger didn’t quite know what that meant, but he was in a good enough humor to overlook it. “What are you boys here for, then?”

  “We’re heading to the Nexus.” D8mon was drunk enough for his voice to carry a few stools down.

  “That’s a ways.”

  “You ever been there?”

  He shook his head. “The ¿ train should take you as far as Fourth Via Station. You want to get any farther, though, you’re going to need to find yourself a berth on the Alighieri Special.”

  “That’s an ominous title.”

  “It’s aptly named. If you’re set on going, I can tell you this much: The line goes through some of the . . . infernal regions. The train itself is safe—nothing can touch you while you’re on it. But the things that live round those parts are a tricky bunch—if you step out, you’re theirs. And that”—he shuddered—“doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  But they did think about it then, for a while, the three companions and probably the stranger as well, who added, “You sure you aren’t better off having a couple more oysters and then heading home?”

  Actually at that point M wasn’t at all sure of this fact, but there was no way at this point to bow out gracefully, and after a moment, Stockdale—who never missed an opportunity to utter an epigraph—answered for him: “Death or victory!”

  “I wish you the latter,” the man said, toasting their fortune.

  • • •

  They had been waiting on the platform of Fourth Via Station for about half an hour when a strange rattle could be heard moving toward them. Fourth Via Station looked like it was located in one of the realities that never got over having knights and so forth—the floor was cobblestone rather than concrete, the only illumination came from the flickering torchlight, and the name of the station was hung on an elaborately embroidered tapestry, complete with heraldry. Below it a filigreed hourglass hung from a wall arm, falling sand indicating the arrival of the next train.

  The platform was empty, except for M and his two companions. It seemed to be late in the evening. It was very dark, at least, but then torches don’t shed as much light as neon bulbs.

  It was these torches that revealed the source of the rattling. They looked at first like children, an impression aided by the fact that they coasted forward on old-fashioned roller skates, orange wheels sewed into burlap. But even by the dim light that conjecture faltered almost immediately. Their bodies were too thick, their skin a strange mixture of white and green, like a corpse that had been left in water. They wore heavy leather jackets and bright red ski caps, and their teeth were narrow, nasty little points.

  One had a length of chain in his hand that he swung back and forth in a fashion unsuggestive of amity. He called out in a language that seemed to have a lot of C’s and W’s stuck together. M didn’t speak it, but he understood a taunt regardless of the idiom.

  “What do we have here?” D8mon asked, though it was obvious enough in the broad strokes.

  “We call them redcaps,” Stockdale informed him. Actually, Stockdale’s people would have called them Rakshasas or something to that effect, but M did not think this was the time to deal with his friend’s false consciousness.

  “I’d call them trouble,” M muttered.

  They circled the three travelers like a pack of wolves that had recently seen the film Xanadu, to torture a metaphor rather cruelly. One of the bogies took Stockdale’s lapel between two of his clawed fingers, rubbed at the fabric, and smiled rapaciously.

  “What ho, chap,” Stockdale began, stiff-arming the goblin back a step. “You’ve got some cheek, all right, to place hands on a gentleman.”

  Stockdale’s new admirer chattered fiercely in his unseemly tongue. One of his confederates stopped in front of M, staring like a hawk at a coney. He had a string of bone fingers on a chain around his neck, and the coat he wore was emblazoned with scenes of slaughter and cruelty. M was wearing only his street clothes, faded jeans and a leather jacket, and he didn’t have any weapons on him that you could see. But after a moment, the goblin faltered, looked down at his roller skates, and backpedaled into the dark.

  There was a brief moment when M thought maybe they’d be able to bluff their way past, but then there was the sound of loosed steel and one of the goblins was angling a rusted dagger at Stockdale.

  Hari Kumar Stockdale was many things: He was a lover of nineteenth-century adventure stories. He was a frequent wearer of hats. He had once seen service on a whaling ship. He could not use chopsticks.

  He was a very hard man to kill. Inside of his jacket pocket was a gravity knife, a four-inch handle with a blade much larger, and then it was outside his pocket, and then it was open. If M knew Stockdale at all, and M did, this was one of the happiest moments of his life, playing Aragorn in the dim outskirts of reality. Worth the trip, you had best believe. And he proved himself up to the challenge, neatly dodging the goblin’s attack, pivoting and responding in a fashion that left the green-skinned creature bled white and tumbling, gracelessly, into the train tracks.

  The remaining hobs shrieked and faded back the way they had come.

  “You don’t really carry that everywhere, do you?” M asked.

  “Only when I leave the house,” Stockdale said.

  “Where are they going?” D8mon asked, sounding a bit worried. It belatedly occurred to M that he didn’t really know D8mon all that well, knew him to get a drink with maybe, but not to stand back-to-back against the rising tide.

  “To fetch us some tea and scones, I would think,” M said. But just in case he was wrong, they overturned a couple of the nearby benches, barricading themselves along the platform.

  There was a horn blast that made M think of a hanged man shitting himself, and then they rolled out of the darkness four deep, carrying knives and chains and planks of wood with nails sticking out of them. They hooted and they hollered and they screamed madness in their gutter speech. Stockdale held his blade aloft, looked ecstatic to be doing so. One of the goblins came closer than it ought, and Stockdale’s counterfeit Caliburn struck a second time, and the thing screamed and fled backward, missing an ear and much of its face.

  “The blood of Edward the Black runs in my veins!” Stockdale bellowed. “William the Marshal and John Churchill! Chandragupta and Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur! I am Hari Kumar Stockdale, and I will die with m
y boots on!”

  M was happy that someone was having a good time. The pack, the scrum, perhaps even the mob of goblins, were now wary of the barricade and of the flashing blade that hid beyond it, contented themselves by skating back and forth just out of reach of melee weapons and shouting.

  D8mon pulled an iPod out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, pointed skyward. It crackled and sparked for a quarter of a second, and then there was a sound like a MIDI thunderclap and a streak of light seared the chest of the foremost redcap, before dovetailing and hitting two more behind him. The rest scattered back into the darkness.

  “Not bad,” Stockdale said.

  “Thank you,” D8mon said. “I wish I’d brought my laptop, then you’d really have seen something.”

  “What’s the hourglass read?” M asked.

  D8mon looked over his shoulder for a minute. “There’s less sand in the top half than previously.”

  “Lovely.”

  “They seem to have slacked off, at least.”

  But then the platform began to, if not shake, at least resound loudly enough that one could be forgiven for thinking it was shaking. The thing that lumbered into the torchlight did so on its own two feet, rather than gliding along on a set of wheels. The thing did not seem graceful enough to remain upright, had it been roller-skating, though it made up for its lack of agility by being huge and muscled and mean-looking. It was twice the height of M at his shoulders, its skin was the black-green of a bad bruise, its tusks, somewhere between walrus and elephant-size, jutted out from its jowls. In one hand it carried a club fully the size of a normal man, knotted and warped as the thing’s skin, thick metal apples on chains hanging from the business end.

  “If you were thinking of saving the day in some heroic and unexpected fashion,” Stockdale said to M, “now would be the time to do so.”

  M took a deep breath, smiled, and hopped up over the barricade. “Bill!” he said, strutting forward toward the monstrosity. “I haven’t seen you since the ten-year reunion, back in ’08!”

  The ogre cocked his head at M, a task made somewhat difficult by the fact that its skull seemed to be attached directly to its overbroad shoulders. Its club hung forgotten in his off hand. After a moment it croaked an unintelligible response.