A City Dreaming (37 page)

M found that he could.

“Anyway I don't know, but Christine might know. You know Christine?” he asked, but then continued without waiting for an answer. “Of course you do. She's that tall Ukrainian chick that works weekends, hot as hell. You know how those Slav girls are, least all the ones that come here. But she was close
with Alice, I think they were roommates for a while, I never got the whole story.”

“Where's Christine live?”

The bartender told him. Then he tried to give M the addresses of four other colleagues who Alice knew a bit, and also the address of his sister-in-law who he thought might be able to shed some light on the situation, and also the addresses of two ex-girlfriends, who M did not think would be of any great service, and also a guy who had once played bass in a band the bartender had been in, basically just because. M had leaned too hard on him. Too much drink and his mood and M had overshot his mark. M figured the condition would dissipate with a night's sleep, but he made sure to take down his address and schedule—the bartender was extremely keen to tell him—and to remind himself to check back next week and make sure nothing had come permanently unhinged.

M took the bottle of whiskey with him when he left, walking down Franklin Avenue, drunk and furious and daring the world to jump at him, just daring it. Christine lived about a dozen blocks south, and he swayed the whole way, weaving from sidewalk to median. His intangibles trailed out behind him like a diaphanous cloak of despair, everyone he passed got pulled, casually and without deliberation, into his story, into his funk, found their days getting that little bit worse, went home and drank too much and missed work the next morning, screamed raw throats at husbands, set cruel hands on children.

Christine would not have opened the door normally, not to a stranger standing on her stoop at eleven-thirty in the evening, not even a hipster dude with the name of a popular band imprinted on his T-shirt. But M was not to be denied that night, M was the Management's favorite customer, M was at that narrow point where desire and reality turn to meet each other, like lovers twisting in for a kiss.

“What do you want?”

“Retribution?” M realized that the bottle was empty, and he tossed it off the stoop. “A vengeance bloody and righteous? To unbind the eyes of justice and see her sword fall on a well-deserved target?”

He was leaning on her too hard, he realized then, like he had the bartender.
They were so fragile, minds like tissue paper or cobweb, you could crush them and not even notice. “Where does Thom live?”

“Thom?” Christine asked, dead-eyed and mind-fucked.

“Thom, Thom, Thom, Alice's boyfriend, Thom the cruel, Thom the dickish, Thom the damned. Where the fuck does Thom live?”

And of course she told him, and then she told him a number of other things, unable to stop herself, tongue lolling out like a character from a Tex Avery cartoon, traumas she'd suffered as a child, fears and dreams, but mostly fears, about her job and her boyfriend and what sort of mother she'd make, if she even wanted to be a mother given the state of the world—oh, the state of the world, the state of the world, the state of the world. But M hardly managed to listen past the first sentence. He had enough misery to take hold of; he didn't need more. He told Christine to get some sleep and to feel better in the morning, and she slammed shut her door and went to do just that.

No rest for the wicked, however, and at the bodega downstairs M bought two cans of Steel Reserve, butting in front of the big black youth waiting in line for a sandwich, snarling at the Arab behind his bulletproof glass, leaving twenty dollars on the counter, and pitching off into the nearest subway station. The train pulled in just as he got down there, the universe tilting in his direction like a round loading into a chamber.

There were a dozen-odd passengers in the car, but they emptied out as soon as they came to the next station, as if M was a particularly foul-smelling or unstable-seeming indigent. At the top of the stairs a drug addict was asking people for change, but he didn't bother to ask M, indeed as M passed he decided to head right over to see his dealer even though he was a couple of bucks short and the man did not take credit, DID NOT TAKE CREDIT, discovered he needed his evening hit immediately, needed it as much as he'd ever needed anything in his life, which is to say as much as he needed every other hit he had taken.

M walked on, despair spreading in his wake. Everywhere else also, though you couldn't blame that on M.

A soft-souled sort like Alice, thin-skinned, far from steady, and a prick like that in his hipster jeans, quoting Pitchfork reviews and the one Bukowski poem he had ever learned. Easy prey, he must have figured, easy prey, maybe
not quite pretty enough for him normally, but there she was just standing behind the bar, why not throw out a few lines, snarl her with his charm. But you get tired of that sort of thing eventually, after a few fucks, tired of her bony hips and her too-kind eyes. And what else do average-looking girls exist for but to catch a bit of cum and then get tossed away, like multiuse condoms?

M was very drunk by this point.

Well, Thom would find out otherwise, wouldn't he? The world was a crooked place but M would see it run straight this time, even it right out, Management be damned. Management be good and damned, because what was the point of all this esoterica, ritual, meditation, study, all this chicanery and brouhaha, what was the point of delving about in the darkest and most obscure corners of reality, what was the point of jeopardizing the very existence of your soul if you could not occasionally right a wrong?

Approaching the building, M held up his hand, as if getting ready to wave at someone, and his palm glowed a shade of red that no one has yet managed to name. He skipped up the steps of Thom's stoop, and he pointed at the door, and the lock snicked open. M stopped outside of 1C, and he banged on the door three times, each blow like a sledgehammer against the wood, each blow like a fall from on high, each blow like the retort of Gabriel's great horn.

The man who answered it was Thom, and Thom wasn't as pretty as M remembered, not at all. He was skinny and not very tall and actually, now that M looked at him, his jeans weren't even that tight; they were just jeans. He had a stupid beard, but that was about the worst you could say of him. Coming over, M had imagined he'd bust in on the man midcoitus maybe, Thom's new Alice languishing on his twin-size bed, and M could save her from the same fate as her predecessor. But he was alone, and behind him his apartment was quiet and dark, and he wasn't wearing a shirt, and his eyes were bloodshot, and he seemed to have been drinking.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“What did you do to Alice?” M asked, the words slurring into one another, coming like a pressure boxer, punches in bunches, and Thom flinching from each one. And the funny thing is that M didn't even need to lean on him, as he had the bartender and Christine, didn't need to use up any of the Management's favor in breaking him down. Thom had somehow been
waiting for this, like a child awaits the strap, waiting for someone to show up at his door, maybe not M necessarily, maybe he didn't have the particulars in mind, but
someone
, some agent of order, to call him to account, to offer punishment, and after punishment, redemption.

“I killed her, man,” Thom said, his head hanging as from the noose. “I killed her.”

And how much did M want this to be true, how much did he want to believe it. What joy it would have been to stand among the righteous for a moment, just for a moment, to lay a fierce and terrible reckoning upon the head of this boy who so clearly deserved it. But what if he didn't deserve it, or what if he didn't deserve it any more than everyone else did?

After a while, the light from M's hand went out, and then M did the same, without another word, back down the steps and through the front door and four blocks north to the subway.

Some days, there seemed very little point in magic. Some days, there seemed very little point in anything, but M soldiered on just the same.

It was shaping into a pretty good party, until they stumbled over the corpse.

This would be the last outdoor gathering of the year. You could tell that without looking at a calendar or the mall decorations, turkeys grinning at their slaughter and Indians doing the same. Tell it by the kernel of real cold on the wind and the occasional scattered scent of wood smoke. But winter hadn't come quite yet, and you could still make do in a flannel shirt and a leather jacket. At least that was what M was wearing when he and Flemel had met Boy and Andre in a bar in Carroll Gardens, en route to Ibis and Anais's spacious two-bedroom condo in Park Slope, wooden floors and exposed brick and the last backyard garden left in central Brooklyn. Of course, in reality, there was barely enough space for a few rows of maize, but then what is reality after all? Ibis opened the door looking blue-eyed and handsome, Anais on one arm, almost smiling. Backs were slapped and goodwill was enunciated, and then they were led through a concrete corridor and out a wrought iron gate and into a miniature Versailles, bonfires illuminating a starlit sky, ancient elms bowed with autumn's parti-colored bouquet. On a decayed Roman ruin, beside a trickling spring clearer than any body of water New York had seen for a century, a handsome man did a credible cover of a Neil Young song. There was booze and music and girls and a hint of winter in the air, of mortality, and between all of that, M was starting to feel some of the last few months' nastiness slough off him. They found Stockdale at the
bar, his burns healing better than the most optimistic dermatologist could have predicted, and he greeted M and Flemel enthusiastically. Boy passed some cocaine around to those who were interested. M had rolled a few joints before coming, because one never knows, of course, because one just can't say for certain. They were stepping out to find a quiet place to light up when Boy gasped and Flemel pointed and Stockdale said, “Shit.”

M reached down and put two fingers on Ibis's still-warm neck, though he couldn't have held out much hope, simply by virtue of the yawning aperture that offered a clear view of his internal organs. There was a moment, kneeling over the corpse, when he looked old, our M, very old indeed, perhaps almost as old as he actually was.

Then he was standing and scowling and crossing swiftly to the exit.

“Shit,” Stockdale said a second time.

“Those motherfuckers,” Boy said, her face had gone from cream to rose to summer tomato. “This is the White Queen's doing, sure as stone.”

“You don't know that.” Stockdale said.

“Who the fuck else would it be?” Boy asked, standing furiously. “Celise has been trying to get her grubby little claws on this section of Brooklyn for years. This was the opening salvo, and I'll be damned if it passes without a response.”

“Celise, like Celise the White Queen?” Flemel asked.

“Sweet Christ, boy,” Boy said, face hard, “doesn't M tell you anything?”

“Not really.”

A pair of partygoers, stumbling through the evening in hopes of finding a comfortable spot to copulate, saw the four of them, and then saw the thing they were looking at. The male squealed loudly.

The crowd was swift to gather. There was a brief and pointless period during which some of the more optimistic imagined they might render Ibis medical assistance, and then things turned quickly to recrimination.

“Son of a fucking bitch,” Cavill said. Cavill was wearing jeans that would need to be removed with a razor, and would have been difficult to take seriously were he pointing a gun at the skull of your firstborn child. “In his own home!”

“Don't get to doing nothing foolish, junior,” Salome answered, standing
tall to meet him, a cocktail dress riding up her shapely thighs. “We were invited with full promise of safety.”

“Did you notice the man who pledged it has his rib cage visible?”

“An unfortunate tragedy,” Salome said, her tone flippant but her eyes very dark. “But that doesn't mean you get to scapegoat any of us into a tomb.” Behind her you might have seen M performing a series of complicated passes beside the exit, though you probably wouldn't have, there being more compelling things to look at just then.

“Who the fuck else would have done it?” Cavill said. “Did the White Queen plan this outright, or did you just see an opportunity and take it?”

“Yes, it's been a long-standing plot of mine to kill an old friend at his party while surrounded by the enemy.”

“Why don't we all just go back to using our indoor voices,” M said, having finished his business by the door and returned to the main stage.

“The fuck are you?” Cavill asked.

M started to roll a cigarette. “You know who I am.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So, me being who I am, and you being who you are, I just told you to lower your voice.”

“Fuck this,” Cavill said, though Flemel noticed he didn't yell it. “The Red Queen will hear of this atrocity. By God, she will.”

“In good time,” M said. “Though not quite yet.” He struck a match and brought it to his cigarette, and the night went bright with a corresponding series of trailed explosions flickering from the exit, firecracker pops and swirls of illuminations, strange patterns of flame writhing across the length and breadth of the metal gate before disappearing as suddenly as they came.

Everyone stared. Except for M. M smoked his cigarette.

“What the hell was that?” Cavill asked.

“You're such a tough guy,” M said. “Why don't you go find out?”

Cavill sneered and began walking toward the exit, purposefully and with swift steps—but somehow he ended his journey a dozen feet from the promised egress, looking round bewilderedly.

“Just can't pull yourself away from me, can you?” M asked.