A City Dreaming (2 page)

They spent two days cocooned in love, then M walked Jessie to the subway so she could catch her next flight. On the way back to her place he stepped into a bar for a quick drink, brushing past a furious, goateed gentleman who was on his way out. It turned out that the angry hipster was the bartender, or had been the bartender but wasn't any longer, and the manager liked M's look and also was desperate, so he asked if M knew how to mix a drink. M didn't, really, but he said he did, figuring he could pick it up as he went along. The first night some of the patrons were less than pleased with their Negronis, but after that M pulled it together.

The tips weren't bad and it was a good way to meet girls, but M got pretty sick of it after about three days, so he was happy when on the fourth a tall, thin man with wild hair came in and ordered a Belgian ale. After three of these and an hour listening to M's travel stories, the man broke down in despair, said he was sick to hell of the city and had just broke up with his girlfriend, and here he was about to hit thirty and he hadn't been out of the country in almost a year, only once to Toronto, and that, they both agreed, didn't really count. And so M told him, Hell, if that's the way he felt about it, he should just go, split right on out, M would look after his apartment while he was gone. M was the sort of person who could explain things to people in a certain sort of light, and after an hour, the man returned with a packed bag and an extra set of keys for M to use.

Which was just as well because by then Jessie was back, and either the idea of having a scruffy-faced wanderer eating her Fruit Loops had become less attractive or she somehow had sniffed out the fact that M had not been entirely faithful while she was away. M's new place was in Crown Heights, and he didn't think it made sense to commute all the way from central Brooklyn to Queens for a job that he didn't want anyway. It was fortunate for him that while drinking away his last twenty at a bar near his new digs he ran into an old friend—well, not quite a friend, but an acquaintance at least, a small-time wonder worker M had met years ago and not thought much about since. It
turned out that this half chum needed someone to go on a ride with him and perhaps say some strong words to some people they would meet at the end of it. M was a person known to use such words on occasion, though in this particular instance it was unnecessary, and his presence alone proved sufficient for him to come back to his apartment sometime later that evening with eight thousand six hundred dollars, everything he could chisel out of his sort-of friend.

Thus it was that within three weeks of repatriating, M had found an apartment, spending money, a wardrobe, and a slate of electronics that the previous generation could not have imagined but which their children considered a critical requirement, all without putting any deliberate effort into it. That was the one problem about being in the pocket—sometimes you got the sense that you weren't the one in the driver's seat exactly, that the Management, or the universe or whatever, had marked out the route already, and you were just going through the motions.

But it was hard to worry about that sort of thing now that M was back in New York, and have you heard of New York, and do you know that it is the center of the universe? Its inhabitants will be happy to educate you, tossing back cigarettes and shots of liquor, bustling between job interviews and blind dates and Ponzi schemes, so confident it's hard not to believe them. It had been a long time since M had left the city, and returning to it with virgin eyes, he was bowed by the glut of options, activities, opportunities, adventures. Do you want to eat Mexican-Korean fusion at four in the morning? Have cocaine delivered directly to your door, swifter and more reliable than your local pizza parlor? Go see an experimental play inside of a prewar meat locker?

M did all of those things the first few weeks, spilled himself into the city's recondite enormity. October is a good time to be in New York. Evening comes quickly, but the weather is warm enough to get by in a long-sleeve T-shirt and a leather jacket, and M looked good in a long-sleeve T-shirt and a leather jacket, as a happy few of the city's females came to learn. M wandered back streets and side alleyways, smiled at children, frowned at beggars, scowled at corner boys, leered at the preening flock of beauties that made up the larger portion of Manhattan Island. He did nothing to draw the Management's attention, beyond generally finding himself luckier than most
of the rest of the population. He made a point of not letting any of his old acquaintances—friends and enemies and that far larger category somewhere in the middle—know of his return. Word would spread soon enough, and with word, trouble.

But for a while it was enough to slip through the city like vapor, to remember and rediscover, to take pleasure in the surfeit of human possibility which is New York's defining quality.

M was shame-walking his way back to his apartment in the hours just before dawn one Sunday morning. Her name was Melanie, he was pretty sure, but it had been loud in the bar and he knew better than to ask once they'd gone back to her loft. M hadn't wanted to stay the night, but he had hoped to cuddle for maybe half an hour, just to get back within stumbling distance of sobriety. But Melanie (?) was having none of it. Maybe there was a rival coming home at some point, or maybe, outside of the flattering half light of the bar, she had decided M was not someone worth knowing any longer. Regardless, around three in the morning, M stepped out of the door of an apartment building in Tribeca, and who in this day and age lived in Tribeca, apart from pop stars and the heirs to oil fortunes? It took him twenty minutes to acknowledge no cab would pick him up and another twenty-five waiting at Chambers Street for the night train and a half hour atop that before he was back in Crown Heights. When he reached the street he was scowling, making sure none of the late-evening denizens mistook him for someone worth hassling, and he did his best not to stumble on the way back to his apartment.

He had just taken off his coat when his phone started to buzz. Normally M ignored his phone late at night—what good could possibly come of a text at this hour—but he unsoberly supposed it might be Melanie (or whomever) dropping him a postcoital compliment.

It was not. “KDNAPD GWNS CNL PRATS —BOY,” the text read.

M sighed and spent a few seconds wondering how Boy had figured out that M was back in town, but Boy knew lots of things people weren't supposed to know, and there was no time to dwell on it, not with Boy's text-speak still to decipher. The first word was easy enough, and he could only assume that PRATS was “pirates.” Boy was not British, and anyway, if she had been captured by a pack of prats, she wouldn't have had any trouble dealing with the situation herself. That left “GWNS CNL,” a linguistic construction that M's drink-addled brain struggled to unravel.

“Gowanus Canal!” M erupted cheerily some moments later, happy to have found the right fit. But the smile fell off his face near as swift as it had gotten there, and when he again spoke the words aloud, they sounded more curse than exclamation.

In the end, M figured there was one of two ways this situation would play out. The first was that the pirates would flog Boy with a cat-o'-nine-tails or keelhaul her or make her walk the plank or some other sort of nonsense. M didn't think this was very probable, but he wasn't mad about the possibility. It seemed far more likely that, despite her rather desperate text, Boy would find some way to break free of her captors, murder them all in a fashion at once brutal and novel, and then come knocking on M's door, prepared to do the same thing to him.

M liked this possibility even less.

Gowanus was a forty-minute walk from his apartment, which at least gave M time to clear his head. It was not as clear as he would have liked it to be, given that the situation seemed certain to get nasty, but it was better than it had been at least. Gowanus was all but deserted at night; even the bums and thugs had better things to do than stroll around the abandoned factories and industrial warehouses and shuttered artist colonies, smelling the ripe raw sludge of the canal.

M had not known that there were pirates on the Gowanus Canal, but it didn't exactly surprise him, either. He stared for a while into the canal itself, the slow-moving water so dark it failed to reflect the moon, which was now edging toward the horizon. Indeed, the lateness of the hour was a source of some concern. M didn't know anything about canal pirates, but he did know
that things that did not entirely exist often ceased to exist entirely after sunrise, and no one could say with any certainty what exactly would happen to any souls unfortunate enough to get caught among their number after that. Nothing good, M supposed.

M's understanding was that the last time anyone had bothered to analyze the water in the Gowanus Canal, they discovered it was mostly herpes simplex 2 and heavy metals, mixed with a smattering of human feces for garnish. So wading upriver was straight out. Boy was just about M's oldest friend in the world, but there were limits to everything. Scowling, he pulled out his key chain and the small clasp knife attached to it, then drew a not particularly shallow cut along his hand and let a few drops of blood leak into the water below. One would hardly think, given the fetid morass that was the Gowanus Canal, that two or three centiliters of fresh blood would have been enough to draw any particular attention—but M had long ago discovered that in these sorts of situations, the old traditions worked best. Anyway, he didn't have any other ideas.

M was midway through his second rollie when he noticed the stink of rum and gunpowder and heard a faint sea shanty chanted off-key. Everything that M knew about sailing could be distilled into a shot glass and thrown back without wincing, but all the same he couldn't help feeling that whoever crewed the boat was skirting the lines of coherency, likely to draw the Management's ire. It was as if you had taken a clipper and compressed it into something the size of a large rowboat, each individual feature miniaturized into absurdity. The prow was an anime mermaid—big eyes and bigger tits and no nose to speak of—and hanging over it was a fat man wearing a pair of bright purple trousers and a curved dagger in his teeth. The crow's nest was barely larger than a custodial bucket, and it swayed back and forth, as did the pendulous, ill-protected breasts of the woman who rode in it. Rounding out the trio was a too-thin man standing on the quarter deck, scowling and shaking a cutlass in M's direction. “Avast there, ye scurvy landlubber!” he yelled, right hand on the hilt of his blade, left on the beard that hung down toward his ankles. “For what do you call the Pirates of Brown Water! Speak true or meet with swift retort!”

“This is how this is going to go?” M asked, disappointed but not really
surprised. “You picked up a friend of mine. I'd like to get her back. Or at least I'm going to try to get her back.”

“A friend of yours? A fair lass, perhaps?” asked the one hanging on the prow. “Might be we have her. Might be we haven't. You'll have to talk to the captain about that.”

“I'm guessing he's somewhere back up that river of shit?” M mumbled, but he knew the saying about pennies and pounds, or in this case, shillings and doubloons. Throwing aside any concerns that his added weight would capsize the craft and leave them all with mercury poisoning and super-AIDS, he leapt gingerly aboard.

“I'm Rum,” said the one still hanging on the prow.

“I'm Sodomy,” said the girl on top of the crow's nest,

“I'm La—”

“I get it, I get it,” M said, waving them along. “It's very clever. Can we get a move on? I've got an appointment with a bed that I'm late for.”

“Tack windward!” Lash yelled up at the mast.

Sodomy scrambled down from her perch and then did something with the sails that resulted in the ship making a graceful three-point turn and heading back in the direction it had come from.

“Fucking Christ,” M said.

Rum hopped down from his place at the prow, and despite the thick rolls of fat on his arms and his waist and his neck and various other places, he gave the impression of being capable enough with the knife that suddenly appeared in his hand.

M sighed. “By Poseidon's beard,” he said unhappily.

“By Poseidon's bloody beard, indeed!” Rum exclaimed.

From the back of the boat—it had a special nautical name, but M didn't know what it was—Lash began to belt a sea shanty that sounded remarkably like an early Smiths tune. Sodomy and Rum also took it up, singing zestfully. It was not at all the sort of sound that M would have chosen to hear, what with his drunk rapidly turning into a hangover and also hating sea shanties and not particularly liking Morrissey.

They should not have been able to sail upriver, as the Gowanus Canal is surrounded on both sides by buildings large enough to block out the wind.
But they were well past the point where things functioned logically, and M was not surprised to find their little ship, despite running low in the water with his added weight, made good time. The longer they sailed, the louder the three chanted; and the louder they chanted, the wider the Gowanus Canal seemed to get, until one began to feel that it ought really to be called the Gowanus River, and at some point the Gowanus Bay, and then, finally, the Sea of Gowanus, though M crossed his arms and resolutely refused to offer it that title.

After what seemed a longer period of time than the evening had remaining, they came to a version of the Union Street Bridge, which was mostly wooden and somehow extended over the infinitely expanded body of water atop which they floated. M could just make out the barrel of cannon by the dimming moonlight and the flickering torches set beside them.

“Who goes there?” a voice bellowed down from the bridge. “Say the password or face my musket!”

Lash looked at M warily, unhappy about risking security in front of an outsider. Then he turned back around and shouted out toward the overhang. “Arggggghhhhhhhh!”