A City Dreaming (27 page)

“We hope that the evening finds you well,” Boy said, bowing deeply, “and that you drink deep of the moonlight.”

Aren't you the charmer,
M thought, but he kept his mouth shut. These things that were not people could be testy at times, and you never knew what times those would be, so you were better off just being polite, period.

The Park Manager didn't say anything, but a squirrel that M belatedly noticed standing on one of the lower branches of his tree-staff did. “The moonlight is bright on you tonight, Cinnamon Siddhartha Moonbeam.”

It sounded particularly funny coming out of the mouth of a squirrel, but it would have been pretty funny regardless. Boy's pupils swelled wide in her head. M kept his face as blank as a washed chalkboard, but he did blink twice, very rapidly, and hoped Boy didn't notice.

“What boon do you wish of me, O Keeper of Fields,” Boy asked finally.

“I have heard whispers and mutterings and tidings and rumors,” the squirrel said.

“From Van Cortland Park to Governor's Island,” squeaked an up-stretched caterpillar, “they speak of it.”

“Yuppies and indigents, smiling children and bitter freaks and bleary-eyed hippies,” croaked the bullfrog sitting in the roots of the staff.

“Wall Street execs and city workers, cops on the beat and pensioners, throwing me scattered bits of bread, all, they all speak of it,” cried a pigeon resting on one of the branches.

“Cast of fucking
Bambi
out here,” M said under his breath.

Boy ignored him. “And what do they whisper, Boon of the Green?”

“Dough-Cro,” twittered the bird.

“Dough-Cro,” croaked the toad.

“Dough-Cro,” squeaked the squirrel.

“Why don't you just step on my balls in stiletto heels,” Boy exclaimed. The pigeon returned to the boughs of the tree. The squirrel hid. The Park Manager himself continued smiling.

“She does not speak for me,” M clarified. The squirrel peeked back out of the hole and made the sort of sounds that squirrels make.

“A Dough-Cro?” Boy less asked than cursed.

“What's a Dough-Cro?” M asked.

The caterpillar stretched down from the branches of the tree, took up residence on the Park Manager's head, and chirruped, “it's like a doughnut-croissant.”

“You want a doughnut and a croissant?”

“No,” Boy said, face redder than her dyed-red hair. “He wants a Dough-Cro.”

“Before noon tomorrow,” the Park Manager himself said, voice weak from disuse. “It's no fun without a timeline.” The Park Manager smiled and went back to being silent. Boy swore loudly.

“Looks like we need to go find a Dough-Cro,” M said unhelpfully.

“Fuck you, tourist,” Boy said, happy to have someone to turn her anger on that wasn't an immortal spirit of the forest. “Bloomberg can't get a
Dough-Cro. Jesus Christ is seventh on the wait list. Fathers trade firstborns for a Dough-Cro, and maidens their virginity.”

“I'm not a virgin.”

“Not even your asshole?” Boy got vulgar when she was angry, which was most of the time. She took a pocket watch from her leather coat, looked at it, and cursed. “It's almost midnight,” she said. “By now the line will be all the way to Prince Street.”

“That's it, then,” M said happy to wash his hand of this thing that was credibly threatening to ruin his evening. “No Dough-Cro.”

“Do you like the parks?” Boy asked furiously. “Do you want them to continue growing, in defiance of the soot and the smoke and the trash and the endless fucking waves of people? Then we need to get this thing a Dough-Cro, and we need to get it for him before sunrise, or the deal is off.”

“It's your show, doll. I'm just here for moral support.”

“I know a guy,” Boy said, turning south and starting rapidly toward the nearest subway station. “But it won't be easy.”

Because it turned out that the guy Boy knew lived in Williamsburg, and they were in Prospect Heights, and since Boy refused to go anywhere in the city except via public transportation—which Boy insisted was a point of personal pride but which M suspected was a curse or some sort of bargain she had made with something—it took an hour and a half to get there. The moon was high and full when they walked out of Grand Street Station, the streets thronged with the hip and the desperate to seem so.

“This place becomes dreadful at night,” M said. “It's like a haunted carnival.”

“I had a nose ring before nose rings were cool,” Boy said.

“Where is this place?”

“It's a warehouse.”

“Williamsburg is entirely warehouses.”

And indeed the block they were on seemed to consist of nothing but. Boy stopped at one with loud music and a bunch of people smoking out front.

“You on the list?” asked the not-quite human working security at the front, beer-bellied and seven feet tall not counting his horns.

“No,” Boy said.

“You gotta be on the list if you want to come in. Or you gotta defeat me in a physical trial.”

“Thumb wrestling,” Boy said, pulling up the sleeves on her T-shirt.

Being the best thumb wrestler in the history of the world was not something that was going to get you so very far in life, sad to say, but wherever you could go with it, Boy had been. This now included the inside of a half-real party in Williamsburg, M taking the opportunity to slip past while the goon was busy trying to force his fingers back into place.

Boy's guy looked like most of the rest of the party—sallow skin taught in undersize jeans and a throwback Nets jersey. “I can get you a box of Dough-Cros,” he admitted, “but I'm going to need something in return.”

“Yeah?”

“I'd like tickets to the new Captain America musical.”

“No one wants to see the new Captain America musical,” M said, “come on.”

“I do.”

Boy sighed. “I don't know anyone who has those.”

“One of my brothers has a pair,” the guy said. “But he lives out in Carroll Gardens.”

Which was where they went, though it took a while. The address they had led to an all-night pizza parlor, the kind that advertised one-dollar slices and occasionally got cockroaches mixed in with the dough. There was an old-fashioned rotary phone in the back, and if you dialed six three times a false door opened beside it. Up four flights of stairs a rooftop party was coming to an end, the remaining few guests pairing off desperately, terrified at the prospect of going back home to face the dawn alone with their own crippling horribleness.

The Second Brother, for this was how M now thought of him, looked nothing like his predecessor, being black and—well, maybe not morbidly obese, M wasn't a doctor, but fat enough that he'd have had trouble meeting women or walking upstairs or standing unaided. But there was something that he had in common with the first man they had met, or the first boy they had met—whatever—some shared facet of douchebaggery. He was wearing a hoodie with a symbol on it that M did not recognize but supposed was ironic.
“I've got tickets for the Captain America musical,” he said. “But you'll have to get something for me.”

M was not at all shocked to discover this was the case. “Which would be?”

“I want box seats at Yankee Stadium.”

“Sure you do,” M agreed. “And I bet you even have a brother who can get his hands on them.”

“Yup.”

“But you won't just give him a call yourself?”

The Second Brother gave them a look that suggested this was not just impossible, but utterly absurd—like finding the square root of a negative number.

By now, M had accepted that this was just going to be one of those nights, and there was no point in fighting it. A lot of nights were like that for people like Boy and M, nights that made sense the way things make sense to a small child or someone deep in the midst of a dream. It was part of the price they paid to the Management for being what they were, or at least that was the way that M thought of it.

Boy, predictably, dealt with the situation less gracefully and was still cursing while they were on the subway going toward Bed-Stuy, the scattering of late-night passengers eyeing her warily.

“Don't worry,” M explained. “She's on cocaine.”

The audience nodded and went back to thinking about themselves.

The Third Brother wanted reservations to a restaurant on the Lower East Side that hadn't opened yet but was already booked solid for six months, some sort of Taiwanese-Scandinavian fusion thing, reindeer-meat baos and whatnot. It sounded perfectly ghastly to M, but there was no accounting for taste.

By the time they walked out from meeting with the Fourth Brother, who lived on a sixth-floor walk-up in Windsor Terrace and wanted tickets to see a band M had never heard of but was certain he would not have liked, and who was, paradoxically, a slightly overweight woman with dyed-blue hair, the moon was growing dim, and Boy was getting nervous. “It's like a goddamned matryoshka doll,” she said. “How many of these are there?”

“Seven.”

“That was rhetorical.”

“All the same.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“It's always either three or seven,” M explained.

Despite the deadline, they grabbed a late-night snack at a nearby diner on Park West. M had eggs with corned beef hash and wheat bread with two pads of grape jelly and two pads of strawberry and an orange juice and several cups of coffee and two pink pills that Boy said would “help keep the edge on.” For dessert, he had more coffee and another one of Boy's pills and a slice of apple pie à la mode. Boy didn't eat anything, but she drank three chocolate milk shakes and chain-smoked cigarettes and guzzled down her supply like so much PEZ.

They left, shadowboxing their way through the borough, walking supersoldiers with Booker T and the MG's playing as their backup. M found himself stepping over telephone wires, and it was all he could do to keep Boy from starting a fistfight with a passing cop, just for the hell of it.

“We're on a mission!” he yelled, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her back and forth until her mohawk looked like the lure on a fly-fishing hook. “We don't have time for this!”

“I know,” Boy yelled back at him. “I know!”

But M would not let go. “What was it? Can you remember?”

Boy reminded him and they were back on their way to Bay Ridge as fast as the choked silver snake wiggling through the city's rib cage could carry them, which was not all that fast, the R train only coming around once every thirty minutes—minutes that, with M and Boy's dilated sense of time, seemed to last far longer. They spent it grinding their teeth and scratching themselves. Passersby stared.

The Fifth Brother lived in a housing development, and his room was guarded by a crackhead with six arms, holding (in descending order, and going right to left) a dirty razor, a scale, a crumbled wad of five-dollar bills, a Saturday-night special, a human head, and nothing. Blood dripped from its mouth. “What is the secret to life?” it asked.

“Crack,” M said.

“Correct!” the thing replied happily. “Do you have any?”

“No,” M said, but the crackhead with six arms let them by anyway.

The Fifth Brother wanted the number of a twenty-four-hour, farm-to-table weed-delivery service that was known exculsively by major rap stars, ex-mayors, and, apparently, the Sixth Brother, who lived in Brooklyn Heights and wore a wifebeater ironically. He didn't have a beard, but his mustache had been waxed and twisted and waxed and twisted until it extended out a foot and a half in either direction, sharp-bristled as a wire-headed brush. Sleeping at the entrance to his room was what to M looked very much like a hellhound, big as a small horse with teeth the size of a large rat, exhaling little bursts of flame when he snored. The Sixth Brother wanted VIP passes to the Sleet Room, which Boy explained was a special exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art at which people did not quite get sleeted on.

“I could not sleet on you right now, if it's such a big deal,” M said, holding his hands up in the air and making wavy motions with his fingers.

But for whatever reason that did not satisfy the Sixth Brother, and so they were off again. It was getting late and M was getting antsy, antsy on top of the speed, which had made him pretty antsy to begin with. “So, what happens if we don't get your friend this Dough-Cro? Is this trouble like the Botanical Gardens aren't going to be as nice as last year, or is this trouble like crop blight crippling the Eastern Seaboard?”

“How do you feel about the color green?”

“Strongly in favor.”

“Then we'd best get the man his Dough-Cro.”

The Seventh Brother lived in the basement of a brownstone off Atlantic Avenue. His room was dank and dirty and so was he. He was wearing the same wifebeater as the previous sibling, but he was wearing it unironically. Indeed, to judge by its rather used quality—the yellow underneath the armpits and the BBQ sauce stains on the front—it might well have been the only thing that he owned. His beard was white and wispy and ran down to his ankles. “I can get you into the Sleet Room,” he said. “But I'll need something in return.”

Boy was making hurry-up motions. M seemed to be concentrating very hard on his shoes.

“I require,” he said, pausing until M looked up, “a Dough-Cro.”

M actually thought that was funny and was going to say something about being “bitten by ouroboros,” which was pretty clever given that he hadn't slept in a while and was high on speed, but Boy beat him to it, shrieking and popping the Seventh Brother in the face with a small, bony, savage, pointy fist.

“I think you killed him!” M said, kneeling down beside the now-supine Seventh Brother. But just then he came to with a pained breath, and it was clear that she had not.

Boy rifled through his clothes with a speed and coolness that suggested long practice. From his right hip pocket, she pulled out a laminated badge for the Sleet Room.