A City Dreaming Read online

  “And how the hell have you been? You were planning to set up a distillery in Inkinshire, if I remember correctly—double malt, you’d promised me. How’d that end up going?”

  Bill made the sort of sound which, were it coming from your car, would suggest you needed to have your brake pads replaced.

  “And Madge? How is Madge these days? I hope you held on to her, she’s a good egg if ever there was one!”

  Another shrill squeal of a similar type.

  “I hate to make a break for it, Bill, what with us not having seen each other in so long—but my train’s just a moment or two out, and it would be a damn shame if I missed it.”

  Bill grunted something that sounded rather regretful.

  “Don’t suppose you could do me a solid and keep this riffraff off our backs? Bad element, you know. Not to be trusted and so forth.”

  Bill nodded and smiled, exposing crooked green teeth the size of M’s hands. Then it turned and let out a bellow that flickered dark the nearby torches, and began to wade back the way it came, its club swinging lustily.

  Things screamed in the dark.

  M returned to the other end of the barricades and the astonished looks of his comrades. “Confidence is nine-tenths of everything,” he explained.

  The screams grew louder, so loud that they nearly drowned out the arrival of the train, which had the facade of a Gothic church, and no windows.

  “Where’s it going?”

  “Gotta be better than here,” Stockdale said, holding the door until his companions could enter.

  But as M took a seat and looked back the way he had come, he saw that above the door was a stained glass panel reading, “Abandon all hope . . .” and he thought to himself, Fuck.

  • • •

  The Alighieri Special was in a state of furious decay. The standing bars were bent, most of the seating had been torn out, and there was trash everywhere. The lights flickered on and off. The scent of urine was almost overpowering. It was somewhat worse than your average L train.

  “Happy Valley Station, next stop,” a voice said.

  “Rapists’ Corner, next station,” it said again a few minutes later.

  “Your Mother Never Loved You, change for the 4 train, the B train, and the Long Island Railroad.”

  “That’s a bit much, don’t you think,” D8mon asked, licking his lips.

  “Isn’t it just?” Stockdale commented.

  The doors closed, the train began to pull away.

  D8mon lit his last cigarette and tucked it into his smirk. “They’ll have to do better than that.”

  But of course, they did.

  A few stops later M’s cell phone began to emit a loud, bleating shriek, as if transmitting from an abattoir. Stockdale’s began to do the same a moment later. For some strange reason D8mon’s iPhone began to play a remix of a Katy Perry song. D8mon swore that he didn’t have any Katy Perry on his iPhone, but no one believed him. By the next stop, all of their electronic devices were behaving in ways contrary or at least unrelated to their normal functions. M’s phone showing something that seemed like a pornographic snuff film involving humanoid bunny rabbits, though M did not look at it long enough to be sure. When the door opened next, they tossed their mobiles onto the platform. M half expected something to rise up and catch them—severed hands of the hell-caught dead—but nothing did. M did not suppose he’d be so lucky if he stepped outside himself.

  The urine smell was replaced with rotting flesh, and then cotton candy, and then rotting flesh again. The voice coming over the loud speaker began to tell the story of a child being tortured and eaten, a few sentences each stop (“and then they sharpened their knives against her sternum, and then they nibbled at the corners of her clavicle”). M ignored it, and eventually it stopped. For a very long time afterward the names of the station were the only thing that could be heard, and mostly they seemed straight from an unpublished H.P. Lovecraft story, consonants crammed inconsiderately against one another.

  “Grand Army Plaza, next stop.”

  D8mon perked his head up all of a sudden. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes,” M said.

  “The conductor said Grand Army Plaza.”

  “I heard him.”

  There was no need to observe that this was the first stop in however long they had been on the train that existed in the reality they came from. Grand Army Plaza Station was deserted but looked like it always did, like it had a thousand other times that M had seen it. Part of his soul died when the door closed.

  “Next station will be Franklin,” the speakers announced.

  “I’m going to take it,” D8mon said, standing up swiftly. “It could be our last shot.”

  M didn’t move. “It’s a trick,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Franklin doesn’t come after Grand Army Plaza.”

  “Of course it does,” D8mon said, wanting it to be true enough to speak with certainty.

  “It does not.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “If you’re heading downtown, then it goes Franklin, Eastern Parkway, Grand Army, Bergen. If you’re heading uptown, it’s the reverse. But either way, Franklin does not come after Grand Army Plaza.”

  “They’re trying to fuck with you,” Stockdale said.

  “They already have,” D8mon insisted. “Don’t you get it? This is hell, right here, the three of us stuck smelling piss for the rest of eternity.” And after he said it, he stood up, took a few steps toward the door, and wrapped his hands around one of the poles.

  “Hell is not an existentialist play,” M said, “it involves knives and hot poker sodomy. Do not get off this train.”

  “D8mon,” Stockdale repeated, “do not get off this train.”

  The train started to slow down. D8mon was still standing at the doorway, wide-eyed. “How long have we been here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could it be years?” D8mon asked. His eyes were blinkered. His pompadour, however, was still immaculate.

  “It could be centuries,” M said, and if you didn’t know any better he seemed very much to be losing his temper. “And it doesn’t matter—because hell is eternity, my friend, and it’s an eternity with needles in your eyes, and I assure you what we have at the moment is preferable.”

  D8mon reached into his pocket and came out with a small caliber handgun, the kind of thing that might be used to rob a convenience store. The way he held it, M got the sense D8mon hadn’t had a lot of practice. Then again, you don’t need a lot of practice to shoot two friends at close range. “If you don’t have the balls to make a move, that’s your business,” he said. “But I’m not going to spend the remainder of forever stuck in a subway car.”

  “You’d rather be blowing razor-blade chewing gum?” M asked, but he put his hands up, to show that he had no intention of obstructing the man.

  Stockdale looked like he was going to say something, but then he too shrugged and leaned back against the wall. D8mon was a big boy. He could make his own mistakes.

  The train opened, and D8mon took a few steps closer to it, till he was skirting the exit. Then he whooped loudly and leaped onto the platform.

  The doors shut sooner than they should have, or at least sooner than M thought they did on normal trains, like a trap closing, or a coffin. D8mon was quickly lost from sight.

  M sat back down. Stockdale did also. M began to silently rethink his policy on bad decisions.

  “Eastern Parkway, Grand Army, then Bergen?” Stockdale asked.

  M didn’t answer. The names of the stations went back to being incomprehensible or horrifying and often both.

  • • •

  The door opened. “Last stop,” said a voice from the speaker.

  They sat there a while, a long while, still half fearing it was a trick. Finally an attendant came on and asked them politely to leave, and they allowed themselves to be ushered off.

  The Nexus was bright and very clean a
nd seemed to be built mostly of crystal. It was vast beyond comprehension, but somehow its vastness was not intimidating. Smiling travelers moved by swiftly but without any sense of hurry, commuters on their way somewhere, youthful travelers with bright eyes and heavy backpacks on their way anywhere. On a board stretching upward to the sun every conceivable destination flickered past, the letters rattling over one another loudly. They found their way to an information kiosk, where a pretty young woman in a sky-blue outfit smiled at them. “Can I help you get somewhere?” she asked pleasantly.

  M looked at Stockdale. Stockdale looked very tired. M thought he probably looked the same.

  “Crown Heights,” M said.

  The attendant smiled and nodded and gave them directions. It was a straight shot, she said, thirty minutes to Nostrand.

  They found their platform, the train arriving not long thereafter. They found a seat. Half an hour later the doors opened on reality, for whatever that was worth. It was morning. M and Stockdale found their way to a nearby breakfast joint, had a bite to eat, smoked three cigarettes each, and then went home to sleep.

  No one ever saw D8mon again. No one has seen him yet, at least.

  6

  * * *

  A Moral Obligation

  M found himself on Washington Avenue late one rainy afternoon toward the beginning of December. He often found himself on Washington Avenue in the late afternoon and often afterward found himself inside a dimly lit little cave called The Lady, and then up at the counter, and then down on a stool. And why not? An establishment where a person will serve you alcohol in exchange for money? That was a good idea, to M’s way of thinking. M could see how it had caught on.

  And The Lady was most definitely a place where you would be served alcohol in exchange for money. The beer selection rotated weekly but was always very solid. The cocktail menu was cute but not too cute; the finger food was edible; the happy hour specials reasonable and perhaps even a bit more than that. The jukebox was all Britpop and alt-country. M would slip in with a paperback that he could read if things were slow but otherwise operated as an effective opening line for women who were doing the same thing: “You’re reading a book, I’m literate,” etc.

  And of course there was Dino, thick and pasty and eternally good humored, a walking advertisement that being handsome was no great shake, at least not all the shakes worth shaking.

  “Hey, Dino,” M said.

  “How you doing?” Dino asked, passing over a water.

  M ordered a drink with rum and honey and beaten egg whites and warm water. It brought up his core temperature by about three degrees. Celsius, that is, not Fahrenheit.

  “You look down,” M said.

  Dino shrugged. It is a bartender’s job to receive troubles, not pass them on, and Dino was a very good bartender. But M was a very good customer, and it seemed Dino felt comfortable opening up on the matter. “I think we’re going to have to close the bar.”

  This would have made a lesser man spit up his cocktail, but M was made of somewhat sterner stuff. “Fucking yuppies.”

  “Not the rent,” Dino said. “At least, not exactly.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “There’s this thing in the back.”

  M thought that no thing described as a thing in the back had ever done him any good and didn’t anticipate that this one would break the streak. “OK.”

  “It’s kind of special.”

  “Like, how you mean, special?”

  “Like how the bar is kind of special, you know? Think about it.”

  While doing so, M realized that the first time he had come to The Lady he had taken a trolley car, a conveyance the city had, for no reason M could appreciate, long ago gotten rid of. And now that he took a moment to consider the matter, hadn’t The Lady been in the Village then? But M could also distinctly remember dipping in one evening with a charming androgynous creature when he had been very, very high on uppers, and he was quite certain that it had been after coming out of a club in Alphabet City.

  “I see,” M said. It was not so very surprising. There were holes everywhere, if you cared to look.

  “So this thing in the back,” Dino said, “it’s the reason . . . well, it’s why we’re the only bar outside of Belgium that can get Westvleteren on tap, and that the health inspector is always in a good mood when he stops by.”

  M thought about the many oysters he had enjoyed inside The Lady. “But if he wasn’t in a good mood when he came in, you’d still pass, right?”

  “Anyway, the last few weeks, it’s been getting kind of hinky on me.”

  “Hinky, you say?”

  “Hinky.”

  “Hinky like how?”

  “Hinky like maybe it would be easier if you just took a look at it.”

  “Why me?”

  Dino looked at M in a way that suggested M’s reputation had preceded him.

  This was not what M had been anticipating when he had walked into The Lady fifteen minutes earlier. But he righted himself from his stool all the same. Behind the counter was a trap door leading to the basement below, a steel gate just big enough for an unwary busboy to fall in and break his neck. Dino undid the bar, which was to M’s mind awfully thick, and lifted it vertical. Standing next to it was a dinged-up Louisville Slugger, which Dino shouldered. “Things come out of it, sometimes,” he explained.

  The one other person in the bar looked like he never left it, and when he did it was only to go to another one very close by. “You’re on till we get back,” Dino said.

  The drunk burped but didn’t look up.

  Going downstairs seemed to take a lot longer than M thought it should, though Dino didn’t seem to pay it any mind. It was strange how quickly a person grew used to this sort of thing, falling into a comfortable armistice with the impossible. But it was an armed truce, and as they finally reached the basement, M was reminded why.

  Things were going sideways pretty fast. The walls couldn’t make up which type of wall they wanted to be, going from redbrick to cobblestone to a hideous shade of chartreuse paint. The stock likewise rotated through the preferred beverages of a dozen generations, oak caskets of grog mixing with crates of Old Milwaukee.

  “How long have you had this place?”

  “I bought it after I came back from the war.”

  “Which war was that, exactly?”

  “I rode a horse, and we were mostly still using swords.” At the back of the room was an access door, and Dino opened it and walked inside.

  M could smell it before he saw it, burnt ozone and fresh gasoline and movie-theater popcorn. The thing inside was throwing off electricity, but the electricity was neon pink and hung weblike in the air for some seconds before bleeding away into the ether. It gave M the impression of a womb and an old-fashioned toaster and a dish of lukewarm blood pudding and also of a whole host of things that ought not be layered together flatly onto one point in existence.

  “I don’t know what this is supposed to be,” M said, “but I don’t think it’s supposed to be doing this.”

  “No.”

  M looked at Dino. Dino looked at M.

  “Free drinks for a year,” Dino said.

  Nation, ethnicity, language, regional sports affiliation, the vast slate of peculiarities with which most people define themselves, these are more or less marked out for you by birth, and to M’s way of thinking, there was no particular point in getting worked up over whatever arbitrary whim of fate had made you German instead of French. But a man chose his bar, and that placed upon him a more serious moral obligation than country, race, or creed. M didn’t really need free drinks for a year, but a man who wouldn’t fight to save his own bar, the bar he’s chosen as his own bar, or perhaps which had chosen him—well, these were not ranks of which M wished to become a member.

  M sighed. M scratched his head. M wished he had taken a shot of vodka before coming downstairs. “Top shelf?” he asked. “Not just rail?”

  “Anything you
want,” Dino promised.

  The thing to remember about going into a place that isn’t, or that is in an incomprehensible fashion, is to make sure to hold on very clearly to who you are, or at least who you want to be. “I am a bad-ass motherfucker,” M said, reaching out to touch the glowing womb or the old-fashioned toaster or whatever.

  “All right,” Dino allowed, though by that point M couldn’t hear him.

  “I am an A-list, blue-label, two-fisted champion of all that is noble, upright, and sweet-smelling,” M told himself as he made his way down a road of golden cobblestones, surrounded on all sides by a lush green forest, a forest that seemed more like painted on backdrop than actual foliage. Jumping back and forth just off the edge of the pathway were anthropomorphic swarms of characters, bright maroon 4’s hopping on top of indigo capital D’s. M noted their googly eyes and sharpened teeth.

  “A is for atrocity,” said the first letter of the alphabet. “And also abortion, apartheid, and anarchy!”

  “Me times ten thousand is the number of children who died of sudden infant death syndrome in 2015!” a smiling number 7 informed M.

  “When I bebop down the street,” M retorted, “the ladies stare and moan, and the boys piddle themselves and wonder where I bought my shoes. I taught Hemingway to box and Casanova to fuck.”

  M walked against the current on a moving track, the kind you see in an airport but stretching off infinitely into the horizon. Running alongside the conveyor belt were a swarm of harried passengers, businessmen trying to catch the 6:15 to Houston and nuclear families that had missed their connection to Orlando, stuck in limbo wearing Mickey Mouse hats and swelled fanny packs.

  “Airline travel is a leading cause of global warming,” said a towheaded girl of about five, though with her thick lisp it sounded more like “Aiwine twavew is a weading cause of gwobaw warming.”

  “On your trip to Cuba you released ten thousand metric tons of carbon dioxide!” her elder brother exclaimed. “It resulted directly in the death of two subspecies of Tibetan grasshopper!”