A City Dreaming (41 page)

“But you're comfortable taking money from a man shilling for a great corporate parasite that is destroying the planet?”

“Then you admit your job is immoral?”

Andre threw his hands up. “I never denied it!”

“I fucked a stranger on your birthday!”

“I fucked two!” Andre yelled. “And one of them was Brazilian!”

Boy clutched her tiny fists together hard enough that M thought one might burst. “You are an insensitive lover!”

“I know you are trying to hurt me, but that's a lie, and a cruel one.”

Boy looked down at her feet. “I apologize.”

The guardian inched back toward them, a gaggle of happy puppies looking to be petted, multiracial toddlers giggling, emperor penguins bowing to each other. “You see,” he seemed to say, “there is nothing really bad, not anywhere in the world, just misunderstandings between friends. If the lion and the lamb would come to visit me, I could convince that old kitten to rub his head against the downy softness of his prey, lick away the wounds he made.”

“Andre, Boy has told me that she suspects Serge Gainsbourg to be an elaborate practical joke perpetrated by a nation too lazy to create their own form of popular music,” M said. “Boy, Andre never served in
La Resistance
, though if you were dumb enough to believe otherwise, you can hardly blame him for the lie.”

In fact, it seemed that Boy very much felt that she could, launching herself at Andre and screaming vigorously. Boy was about as dangerous a person as one might fear to find, but in the throes of passion, she regressed to a young girl's preferred means of combat, fingernails scratching at Andre's face. “All those stories about you and Camus!”

“I would have fought beside him!” Andre said, retreating from Boy's onslaught. “Had I been alive at the time!”

“You'd have been walking lockstep with Pétain!”

“I am mostly Jewish!”

“An excuse! An excuse from a Frenchman, what a change of pace! I bet you didn't even march in '68!”

“Everyone marched in '68! It was all that anyone ever did! I marched so much I got the clap from a Spanish girl! And when we marched, do you know what we listened to?” The thing inside the cave with them flinched. “Serge Gainsbourg!”

“Alsace-Lorraine is German! Croissants are pretentious rolls! You have a small dick!”

And now the spirit was retreating in full, burrowing back into the ends of his cave with a few metaphysical grumblings about the cruelty of the race, and what could you expect of people anyway, and this is why humanity can't have nice things.

With him went the better part of Boy's anger, though as a precautionary measure, and no longer weighed down by the spirit's falsified sweetness, Stockdale wrapped up the diminutive femme fatale in a bear hug and carried her to the other end of the cavern. Andre looked morose and bled a little, but not for long, because M wasn't entirely certain how long the spirit would remain subdued, so he hustled them swiftly into the chamber beyond.

It was smaller than the one they had come through, the ground and walls formed of sandstone, lit by a pyre that occupied the center of the room and much besides. It was like an atomic clock, or the infinite complexity of a circulatory system, or a gaggle of geese whirling in synchronous midair union. It was everything right and natural and ordered, water smoothed by the titanic forces surging below, anarchy shaved to equilibrium.

“Holy shit,” Boy said.

“Yup,” M said.

No one else said anything for a while. They just watched it swirl.

And then Celise, who had not been there before, or at least no one had seen her, said, “Marvelous. Absolutely magnificent. You've done splendidly, M, just splendidly.”

“As is so often the case, my dear Celise, you speak rather sooner than you ought.” Abeline said this, and she had also not been there before.

The two queens of Greater New York, these potentates, these modern-day Merlins, stared at each other with a hatred nursed through long ages until it seemed as much figurative as real, as if of the dog's hatred for the cat. And then, almost simultaneously, they turned their gazes on M, and M got the sense that whatever enmity they held for the other was, in this moment at least, dwarfed by their rage at him.

“If I didn't know any better,” Celise said, fury eating through her makeup, “I would think that you had gotten it into your head to betray me.”

“I know you entirely too well to think that you've done anything but,” Abilene said. “You sneaky, ungrateful, reactionary bit of hipster trash.”

“Let's not get personal,” M said. “I didn't promise either of you anything.”

“Yes, you did,” Celise said.

“Yes, you did,” Abeline said.

“Well, then, I guess I lied,” M admitted, and without further ado leapt onto the platform and into the heart of the city. On his left arm, just above the wrist, one could see a question mark.

If at any point M had imagined he might hold this vast torrent of force, this eternal pulse of light and heat, then as soon as he entered into it—as soon as his first jut of hair penetrated the periphery, the instant their quantum fields entangled—he knew that hope for madness. It was like riding a bronco hopped up on bath salts; it was like tapping an active volcano; it was an orgasm that crescendoed eternally. He could not wield it, he had not a fraction of the control required, but he could release it, act as a conduit, jettisoning it in a vast bloom, spilling out the overflow into the air and the night above them.

Well and good, but what was
it
, exactly? It was the city, of course. It was everything the city had ever been or ever could be, which is to say that it was everything, period. It was an old woman dying in an uptown apartment, unnoticed till the smell seeped through the walls. It was a toddler in a five-thousand-dollar stroller pushed past brownstones by an immigrant woman who didn't make that in three months. It was Slavic flesh burnt scarlet on Coney Island sand. It was dark-skinned men without a hundred words of English on the 5 train at six in the morning, a long commute to work a long day to make little money. It was Park Avenue adolescents ruined by too much too young. It was fat German tourists getting their pictures taken with the costumes in Times Square, off-brand Spider-Men and Disney characters played by potential pedophiles. It was the young and the cool and the tragically hip, burning brightly. It was cops on the take and indifferent politicians and a
callous media. It was a garden blooming amid the concrete. It was people trying to be something that they were not. It was beautiful and hideous. It was a rose and a tumor. It was like a foreign taste, or the first hint that there is something in another person that could make you fall in love with them—you have to say either yes or no, you have to run forward at a dead sprint or shut yourself off entirely. You have to make a choice. It is required of all of us, in the end, even of M.

From the flickering still-beating heart of New York City a light swept upward into the troposphere, expanding out like a colored parachute, falling slowly and with kindness.

•  •  •

Tommy had been staring over the side of the George Washington Bridge for a long half hour, the water dark and inviting, but just then he took out his cell phone and called Beverly, and lo and behold she picked up and said something kind to him (which was rare enough to be noteworthy), and even though it was late, she put Tommy Jr. on the phone, and Tommy told him he loved him, and Tommy Jr. acknowledged the same, and they talked a while longer, and when Tommy hung up the phone, he found he had walked all the way to Harlem, and he couldn't remember what had brought him to the river.

Bill was working late that night, like he worked late every night, but he stopped for a moment and looked out the window of his office, where far below people laughed and drank and danced. He couldn't see them, of course—he was too high up—but somehow he knew it. And he got to thinking about a promise he had made himself to see Zanzibar before he died, and he was forty and in good health, but still, a promise is a promise is a promise. So Bill buzzed Anne, his assistant, a pleasantly plump divorcée with teeth of which she was unnecessarily ashamed who didn't mind working late but minded that she had nothing it was keeping her from doing. Bill said that he needed a plane ticket to Zanzibar, and Anne laughed and asked when, and then Bill said tonight of course, and Anne was quiet for a second, and then Bill asked if she wanted to come, and Anne thought,
My God, he's finally lost it
, but what she said was yes. And it is my understanding that Bill still lives in Zanzibar, and though Anne left after a few weeks, she remembers the place with great fondness.

Eddie was in the sort of Brooklyn bar that doesn't serve artisanal cocktails or microbrewed beer, and he was thinking about going out and making a mistake, figured on calling for one more shot to steady him before he went out and made it. There was a jukebox in the corner that had never worked before, but it started working just then, pumped out one of those classic soul tracks, Stax maybe or Twinight, a little burst of joy and rhythm. Eddie pulled his hand out of his pocket and set it on the bar and snapped along, and then sang along as well. The bartender, an elderly Latino man who had never shown Eddie the slightest kindness in all the time he had drank there, started laughing and clapping. And why had he stopped singing, Eddie wondered. And why couldn't he start again? Maybe try to get a band together, a solid four-piece in matching suits—classy, old-school, the way it had been done once, the way it could be done again. The gun sat forgotten in his pocket.

Girls in Lower Manhattan, girls with dreams in their heads and innocence in their eyes, girls working long hours as cocktail servers and hostesses, girls kind enough to forgive their indecent beauty, came unexpectedly to the attention of talent scouts and managers and agents, found the avenue of their ambitions suddenly unclogged, and were quick to sprint down it. Bearded boys all along the coast of Brooklyn put finger to keyboard or brush to canvas or pick to untuned guitar, and those few of talent produced things of genius, and those without any—a far greater number, needless to say—still when they woke up the next day and looked at what they'd done, said, “Hell, this isn't so bad. This isn't so bad at all. At least, I like it, and who cares what anyone else thinks?” Old couples locked in loveless marriages up and down Queens looked over at each other and saw something they hadn't seen in a long time, maybe had never seen, and fucked like whores and laughed like children. Old friends who had not talked for years, who had fallen out of touch for no good reason, no very good reason at all, ran into each other in bars and clubs and subway stations, and they laughed and hugged each other fiercely and asked, “How the hell have you been?” and conceded that they had been “Not so bad, not so bad at all.” Children were allowed up past their bedtimes. Shy boys found themselves slipping off barstools and going across rooms and even, God be kind, standing on dance floors, and homely girls felt as pretty as they had always known themselves to be and got up to join
them. A thousand secret admirers took their courage in hand and spoke to someone to whom they had always wanted to speak, friends of friends and pretty bartenders, and if maybe only a hundred found their hoped-for results, still, better to have loved and lost, right? And anyway, even magic can only do so much.

In future years statisticians and sociologists would go mad trying to explain the extraordinary uptick in births that would take place nine months later—not the ones who had been in the city that night, though. They'd just smile at their colleagues' flights of fancy and contorted hypotheses, laugh a bit, look out the window, and remember that night, that one single, shining evening when the city was theirs, and the game seemed worth the candle.

•  •  •

M found himself on the ground, the cluster of faces in his field of vision looking concerned, then ecstatic at his revival. Even Boy was crying, though she'd have denied it afterward if you'd asked her. M remembered, though.

No point to it, he was fine, as soon as Stockdale pulled him up to his feet he felt just gorgeous, right as rain. And that little disagreement they had been having a moment earlier, about M's integrity, and which of the queens was going to become a god, that was small potatoes given the feel of the evening. Not even Celise felt like killing M anymore, though she would later, her future self cursing her present self's softheartedness. Abilene forgot the conflict entirely, never brought any of it up again. And soon they were all walking back the way they'd come, stopping to pick up Bucephalus, who looked tired and bruised and triumphant. They were still miles from the surface, but then Celise made a little snarl with her fingers and they came across an emergency exit door set into the rock face of the chamber, and walking through that, they found themselves just outside of the trestles in Prince Street Station, and then up on the street. Boy knew a bar nearby that she said she hadn't been to in a while but remembered fondly, and though the place was packed and loud and cheerful, they managed to find themselves a booth in the back.

Outside and all along the Hudson River Valley, from Yonkers down to the Statue of Liberty herself (a handsome woman, looking only a bare quarter of her hundred and twenty five years), lights shone, and people smiled.

Around nine the next morning, while most of the city slept off the gift M had given them, he stepped onto a plane bound for somewhere that was not America. He had a compass rose tattooed on his left forearm. I can't tell you where he is now, but I'll drop you a line when he decides to come back.

Thanks go out to—Mom and Dad, David, Alissa, Mike and Marisa. Julian. My grandmother Elaine. Chris Kepner, Oliver Johnson, Anne Perry, Judith Regan, Ron Hogan, Stacy Creamer, Lucas Wittmann, Gregory Henry, Pamela Kawi, Mia Abrahams, Jared Shurin and Justin Landon. Mike Rubin, Peter Backof, Robert Ricketts (apologies for a previous misspelling), Sam Feldman, Elliot Smith, Rusty Mason. John Lingan (and co), Alex Cameron, Will Crain. Will Pank, and Super-fan and frequent Nile Special drinker Rob Newton. The Boston kin and their new additions, the Mottolas one and all. Kiki. All the haters and most of the fans.