A City Dreaming

by Daniel Polansky

  Except that Boy wasn’t in his phone anymore, and neither were Stockdale nor Andre nor either of the Queens nor anyone else. His contact list was as long as it had ever been, but the entries were all in Cyrillic and Kanji and Wingdings, and when he started calling these randomly, the lines just rang and rang. He finally found a working pay phone, though it took him another twenty minutes for his memory, corrupted by years of electronic assistance, to provide her number.

  “Yo,” Boy said.

  “Fabulous falsehoods fall foul to the furious force of fact!” M shouted into the receiver. “Bulbous bowels bring bright bile to bitter boys!”

  “Fuck off, perv.”

  Things went similarly once he finally got in touch with Stockdale: M’s words contorted into gibberish, this time with an unsubtle flavor of racial bigotry. M gave up after that. He couldn’t remember anyone else’s phone number, and he knew that any other means of communication would get similarly jumbled, emails tortured, texts strangled and bent.

  He sat down against an alley wall for a few moments, trying to ignore the swelling in his ankle as he teased apart the strands of his curse. It was a clever one. It was tightly wound and touchy, and since M had actually held the fetish, it had particular potency. If he’d had the time to spend on self-loathing, he would have spent it, because that was a moment of breathtaking stupidity, but the situation was clearly too dire to waste in angry reflection.

  It had not been a particularly brutal March, but it was March all the same, and very nearly a March evening, and M was getting cold. Rjurik would have his apartment staked out, and he would find enough there to track M, nail clippings and pubic hair and the taint of old dreams. There were upsides to being wealthy and having lived in New York since before it was named that: You could put down roots into the ley lines and make friends with bad enemies. M was already in shit with the Management for that trick he had pulled getting out of Chinatown; he could feel himself grinding down against the pavement, reservoirs all but depleted. Rjurik’s had been a good plan, if rather inelegant—isolate him from anyone who might be of assistance, then break him right in two.

  M crossed the street to where a group of homeless men were playing chess, swapped coats with one of the less odoriferous, traded his cell phone for a ski cap. South a few blocks, he passed a busker singing pop-punk covers and gave him everything he had in his wallet, just north of a hundred dollars. The boy thanked him effusively and asked if he had any requests. “Burn your guitar,” M said, then threw his wallet into a mailbox.

  That first night was the worst. March is a false month, offering sun just long enough to convince you not to bring a coat, then hitting you with a row of sleet for your presumption. M walked until he could not stand, to try to keep warm and because he had nothing else to do. Night fell and the temperature dropped and M smoked his last cigarette, severing his final ties with his old life. Then he dropped the empty pack onto a subway gutter, and then he curled up in his new-old coat and went to sleep beside it. It had been years since he had slept rough, and he had forgotten how terrible it was, shuddering yourself awake every fifteen minutes, ceaselessly exhausted yet unable to attain release.

  M had last seen Rjurik in Edinburgh, unexpectedly getting a whiff of him around the Royal Mile and luring him into a nearby bar, one of those classic Scottish joints that go back before the Union, filled with the ghosts of long-dead patrons. M had convinced one of the sadder and more powerful of them that Rjurik was her long-lost lover, back now finally from the wars. When M left they were waltzing together silently, the ghost wearing that ecstasy known only to the dead, Rjurik blank-eyed and senseless.

  The cop who woke M the next morning wasn’t as unfriendly as he might have been, not as unfriendly as the people M tried to ask for money. M did not have it in him, or at least he did not have it in him at first, to actively panhandle, walking mad-eyed through subway cars spinning stories of need and despair. He found an empty coffee cup, took a seat against a wall in the Garment District, and waited to see if anyone would fill it. By dusk he was light-headed with hunger, and it was getting cold again, and he had ninety-four cents to show for twelve hours’ supplication. The group of homeless men he approached as darkness fell treated him with professional courtesy, not as an interloper, and gave him directions to a nearby church where he could find something to eat. That something was tasteless verging on inedible, and the God botherer who served it to him unpleasant, but M slopped it down gratefully before heading out to find a place to sleep.

  The time before Edinburgh, M was working on a post-breakup drunk in Alphabet City, and Rjurik had come in, fully charged and ready for a tussle. M fled through the backdoor and into a side existence, Rjurik on his heels, sprinting farther and farther into the firmament, past pocket universes and reflected realities, until they were so deep in the outskirts of eternity that the most basic of concepts—position and direction, substance and thought—become intertwined to the point of meaninglessness. There was a creature floating in the not-sky, something like a jellyfish and something like a premise, something like pure thought, and M had managed to get its attention, and the next thing he knew he was in Bangkok and thirty-six months had passed.

  M was attacked the fourth night, in one of the big shelters, hundreds of bunk beds tucked together in a subbasement, the echoed snoring loud enough to veil any untoward activity even if anyone had been around to listen. There were two of them and M’s ankle had not yet healed, but he was younger, or at least his body was, and he was protecting his anal virginity, which he thought was a prize worth fighting for.

  While kicking the teeth out of one of his would-be sodomites, watching the little flecks of white spray across the concrete floor, screaming furiously and in triumph, M was reminded of this one time he had taken over an abandoned house in the Bowery—this was back when the Bowery had abandoned houses instead of boutique coffee houses—and spent three weeks ringing the walls and the ceilings and the foundations with runes and wards and patterns meant to get the Management to ignore you, a sort of mystical blind spot. Then he had tricked Rjurik into following him inside and beaten him savagely with a length of piping, beaten him near to death though stopping, for whatever reason, just short of it. If Rjurik had been a civilian he would have spent the rest of his life on a feeding tube, but obviously Rjurik was not a civilian, and when he had come back around to try to kill M five years afterward, he walked upright and was as pretty as ever.

  By the second week M had gotten good enough at scrounging through dumpsters that he mostly did not need to go to any of the shelters for food. He went about his business methodically and without shame—indeed it astonished him how quickly he got used to living as something not quite human, the stares and the lack of them, the absence of attention. He did not blame the passerby for ignoring him; one could not be expected to look at the face of things all the time, one had to go about one’s business. M smoked crack for the first time in an abandoned subway tunnel. The MTA will tell you that there isn’t anyone living down there, but there are, little enclaves distributed across the city. He didn’t like it, but you never like a drug the first time you try it, and he felt confident he could pick up a taste if he decided to make the effort.

  Many years before, alone in a mountain hut in Lesotho, M and Rjurik had riddled for hours, the wind howling outside the walls, a summer storm the likes of which neither had ever seen nor would see again, talking until their voices gave out and the sun had returned. In the morning, they parted ways without a word.

  By the first days of April, the weather had changed, and M realized what mankind had lost by subduing his environment, by lying down in a heated apartment—that knowledge that you are a very small part of the world, that the grandest and the lowest of us alike are held in check by the rain. The curse was too tight to uncoil, but it could be sloughed off, like a starved man wriggling free of bounds attached when he was sleek. For three weeks M let his character melt off his frame. He forgot things about hims
elf, music he had liked and books he had read and women he had held briefly. Foreign beaches and candlelit dinners and a song his mother had once taught him. He let poverty and despair grind down around the hard essential core of his hatred, like a stone smoothed flat by the ocean. He caressed and formed it, he nurtured and loved it, until it began to take on the characteristic of a bullet in his mind, an arrow shaft of awfulness, the distillation of a short lifetime spent among the miserable and the impoverished and the defeated.

  Once in a Five Points brew house, Rjurik had walked up and shot him twice with a revolver, M only being saved by the intervention of a pack of Dead Rabbits and his own preternatural fortitude. Once at the funeral of a mutual acquaintance, they had each put away a bottle of scotch, sitting across from each other and observing the peace, waiting to see who would drop, knowing and expecting that neither would. Once they had been friends. Once there had been a woman.

  On a busy afternoon in April, M recognized himself in the burnished metal of a hot dog stand, staring blindly while the Arab inside screamed at him. The reflection was sallow and gaunt and his beard had gone from hipster rugged to flat-out begrimed. His eyes were on the wrong side of madness. M figured it was time to go and take care of the thing, while he still had some loose idea of who he was.

  • • •

  Isaac was at the back of the pack, thrilled to have been asked along and just wanting to get through the meal without drawing too much attention to himself. It was a badge of honor, a junior associate like him keeping pace with the big dogs, even though it was only coincidence that he had been in the conference room while plans for lunch had been made, his presence allowed but not outright requested. Isaac had long since realized that an exaggerated commitment to modesty would do him no particular good in the world of high finance. These were proud men, arrogant men, you might even say, though didn’t they have reason to be so? Starting salary for a trader at Edeilweiss and Grommer was two-hundred-plus bennies, and anyone still making that three years in was a borderline retard and ought to be sterilized in the evolutionary interest of the species. All you needed to do was keep putting in your hours, climbing up the greased slope to wealth and its inevitable by-products: happiness and satisfaction.

  And at the apex was Rjurik, six-feet-three inches of Nordic muscle, top seller since, hell, forever, for so long that if you asked HR about it, they looked at you cross-eyed and told you that junior associates don’t need to be bothering about that sort of thing. He was the platonic ideal of the investment banker, a Wall Street timber wolf, unapologetic in his greed and lust and strength.

  It was not that Isaac did not see the homeless man sitting blank-eyed on the park bench as they passed; it was that one does not make an effort to notice every ephemeral bit of stimuli that filters in through the senses, every cloud and trail of dust, every passing tourist, every pigeon or rat. Maybe walking alone late at night he’d have given the man a twice-over, but noontime on a Tuesday, surrounded by a half-dozen millionaire alpha males, only taking time off from making money to hit the gym, Isaac did not suppose there was a vagrant within the city limits mad enough to target them for aggressive panhandling.

  Rjurik wasn’t paying attention either, not until he had almost run into the man, and not much even then, turning toward him with a snarl, biceps ready for violence. But then the transient took Rjurik by his arms and belched fiercely, and Isaac smelled something indescribably foul and had a sudden impression of the most extraordinary despair, irremediable and absolute, although when he told the story to the cops of course he didn’t mention it, and when he went home that night, he drank enough whiskey to try to drive it from his memory—that night and many nights to come.

  Isaac and the rest of the group—Masters of the World each of them, thousand-dollar suits and hundred-dollar haircuts, half still jacked up from the previous evening’s coke binge—recoiled in horror. Rjurik dropped cross-legged on the ground, ruining his suit, and his eyes were blank and unresponsive. Standing above him triumphant, the vagrant reached down and pulled a pack of Camels from Rjurik’s breast pocket, lit one somehow, then spent a slow moment enjoying it.

  “Your move,” he said, before flipping off Isaac and the rest and walking, casually and with no hurry, into the park and the city beyond.

  Ten minutes elapsed while they tried to bring Rjurik out from his state of catatonia. When that didn’t work, Isaac made the executive decision to call an EMT, which he felt displayed a level of composure that he hoped would not go unnoticed by the rest of the team. It was clear, after all, there was now an opening.

  • • •

  Back in his apartment M bundled his clothes and threw them into the incinerator. Then he took a long shower and shaved himself carefully. Then he took a longer bath, waking up in lukewarm water before managing, with great strength of will, to pull himself off to bed.

  17

  * * *

  Little Else Happened in April

  Some months are like that. M enjoyed the slow improvement of the weather, and he spent a lot of time exploring the neighborhood coffee shops, which is less worthy of discussion than, say, exploring the Pacific Northwest. He read a lot. There was a girl around for a while, but nothing came of it, and then at some point M didn’t see her anymore. He enjoyed being within walking distance of a credible ramen restaurant. That was about it.

  18

  * * *

  May, However . . .

  . . . was just busy as hell, started busy and never wound down. M woke up one day and the city had shrugged off the last remnants of winter, a great brilliant lumbering beast recalling its strength of old, stamping its feet, roaring defiance at the heavens, threatening to scale Olympus and uproot what it found living there.

  Or something like that. M kept running into people he hadn’t seen in a long time, kept getting pulled into bars, parties, misadventures, tragedies. He would go out to grab a quick cup of coffee in the afternoon and wind up back in his apartment fourteen hours later, holding on to someone’s hand likely as not, a bright-eyed beauty stumbling through the world at a breakneck pace, both of them wanting so hard that they almost believed it a need.

  In one week, M made close to fifty thousand dollars, half taking care of a thing that needed to be taken care of for Abilene, half the next night at the World’s Oldest Floating Craps Game, rolling against a short, shriveled grandfather with a beard white as bone and skin black as pitch. M’s neck and the right side of his face were puckered with what looked like hickies given by a star-faced mole, courtesy of the thing Abilene needed doing, and he rolled seven times without direct assistance from the Management, statistically comparable to being struck by lightning while simultaneously bitten by a shark, and he would have rolled it again if the man hadn’t gone bust, revealing empty pockets and exiting without remark, never to be seen again in Manhattan proper, though M heard occasional rumor of him out Bronx way.

  He blew most of it next weekend on Stockdale’s birthday dinner, a seven-course meal of creatures that were extinct or had never existed: mastodon steaks and foie gras of phoenix and minotaur headcheese in a mandrake reduction. The wine parings were exquisite, and there was some drunken fumbling for the check afterward, but M ended up with the top hand, or the bottom, and walked out of the place smiling, having dropped in the course of three and a half hours the down payment on a small condo in Tribeca or a mansion in Long Island City.

  But what was money anyway, in the city, in spring? And of course New York is the city. It has enjoyed that distinction at least since the collapse of the British Empire, Stockdale be damned. It is not the prettiest city in the world. It is not the safest. It is not the cleanest. It is miserable in the winter, and for large portions of the summer. Many people, visitors and short-term residents alike, find it absurdly expensive, stultifyingly pretentious, not worth the time or the trouble or the expense. And they aren’t entirely wrong, but their opinion does not carry with it any weight of importance. Like the sun, like the Old Test
ament, like a beautiful woman, New York does not care what you think of it. History has rendered its judgment, and it is left to only us to uphold it.

  Consider: Suppose an alien being, some unworldly creature with origins in a distant nebula—superintelligent lichen or a giant floating amoeba or even the ubiquitous gray—were to appear on Earth desirous of seeing what we here on terra firma call a city. Where would you take him? To smoky London? To once-divided Berlin? To Tokyo and its spires? Of course not. You would buy him a ticket to Penn Station and apologize for how ugly it is, and afterward you would step out into Midtown and you would tell him that this is what man is, for better or worse.

  For that month, at least, it seemed to M the former.

  19

  * * *

  A Sunday Sojourn

  M’s feet began to itch one Sunday morning around noon. He walked downstairs, but they kept itching. He walked to the end of his neighborhood without finding a remedy. He walked to the museum, and then past the library. He walked to Prospect Park, and then he walked to the end of Prospect Park, and then he walked to the end of Green-Wood Cemetery, and then he kept walking, south into the hinterlands that led toward the bay. Still, his feet continued to itch.

  M was unsurprised to discover that, fifty or so blocks farther than he had ever been before, there started to appear things that were not on the map, at least not on any map M had seen. He had once known a girl who lived near Owl’s Park, but he felt certain that he had never seen mention on the MTA displays of a Heartsbane Wood Station, nor of the neighborhood known as Bucali’s Castle.