A City Dreaming (31 page)

Well
, M thought to himself after a few minutes.
Things do not always go as intended.
He stood up, brushed off his jeans, and went back inside.

Spencer and Bryce and Laurence were speaking quietly to one another around one of the tables in one of the kitchens. They shot M long, searching looks as he came in, the looks of predators, or people who thought they were predators.

“Everything all right there, sport?” Spencer asked. “You were gone a long time.”

“Fucking office,” M said. “Can't get away for twenty-four hours without the whole thing collapsing on top of itself.”

“But today's Saturday,” Bryce said.

M laughed and slapped the beefy bourgeoisie on the shoulder. “Not in Shanghai!” he poured himself a glass from the pitcher of Bloody Marys that sat on the counter.

“I . . . hadn't realized you were so up on the markets, old boy,” Spencer said, skeptical or concerned.

“What did you think, Spencer? I'm some wastrel, wandering stoned around central Brooklyn all day? I push high-yield derivatives on third-world buyers. Long-term and low interest, am I right, boys?” M did not know what most of these words meant, but he had learned years earlier that no one in finance understands the arcane processes beneath which they labor. Sure enough, all the men laughed, anxious that anyone might think they missed the joke. The ladies were demure enough to admit ignorance, however, smiling with dimwitted loveliness.

“I'm just surprised: You work in finance, but the other night at the bar you said you'd never been to the Hamptons before,” Spencer said.

“I said I'd never
driven
to the Hamptons before. Normally, I take my helicopter—not that I mind roughing it,” M said graciously. “Besides, if I'm going to take a weekend off, I'd just as soon jet the red-eye to Cannes.”

“Cannes?”

“I know, I know—you're going to say the south of France is dead—but it's been in the Hanover family for ages, just ages. Almost an obligation.”

“House of Hanover?”

“The nouveau riche call us Windsor,” M said with a strong note of disdain. “And, of course, Uncle Nathan always insisted we had a touch of the Hapsburg jaw, but personally I never saw it.” M laughed like he was trying to catch a fly in his mouth, and after a moment everyone joined in. “So,” he began, finishing his drink, “are we about ready to get down and do this, or what?”

The assembled looked around uncomfortably. “Do what?” Misty asked. Or maybe it was Muffy, M wasn't sure.

“The games, of course. When are we going to start the games?”

Everyone looked very confused. Not M, obviously. M looked certain as a mother's love.

“Sorry, sport?” Spencer ventured finally.

“The games in honor of the dark lord. To determine who gets sacrificed.”

Bailey's drink shattered on the floor. M pretended he didn't notice.

“Excuse me?” Spencer asked, after a long, breathless interval.

“That's what we're all here for, right? I mean, it is the seventeenth of August.”

“You . . .” Laurence looked concerned. “You know about Moloch?”

“Who works in derivatives and doesn't?” M asked, incredulous. “I ensure my bounty of good fortune the same way you do yours—by sacrificing the loser of the sacred games to the dark lord.”

“The sacred games?” Bryce asked.

M looked at Bryce like he had just defecated on the lace. “Yeah, the sacred game. What do you guys do?”

Bryce looked at Spencer. Spencer looked chagrined. “We kind of . . . get a different person every year and then kill them at midnight.”

M's jaw dropped. M's eyes bugged. M flushed and sputtered. “I just . . .” M shook his head back and forth, trying to pull himself together and only
barely succeeding. “I just don't even know what to say to that. Amber, can you get me another drink—that's a dear thing, thank you so much. I mean, I had heard standards had gone to hell here in the colonies, but I had no idea, just no idea.”

Spencer and Bryce and Laurence and Hunter hemmed and hawed a while. Amber brought M a drink, then sat down next to him, close enough that he could feel her leg against his and smell her hand lotion. “Look,” M said, “I don't know how you do it down in the Hamptons, but my family has been sacrificing human souls to the Emperor of Dust and Shadow since the high middle ages, and there's no way in the lord's home that I'm going to break with tradition because you poor saps haven't done due diligence with the scripture.”

Everyone looked down at their feet, justly shamed.

“Well . . .” Bryce began after a long few moments. “What does your coven do?”

“First of all,” M said, “we don't call it a coven.”

“What do you call it?”

“A hootenanny,” M said. “And every year on the seventeenth of August, you get your hootenanny together and you play the sacred games, the loser getting . . .” M brought a finger sharply across his throat.

Everyone nodded at each other. This was a good idea, they all seemed to agree, this idea that M had made up a minute previous.

“How do we . . .” Amber began but didn't finish.

“How exactly does one play the games in honor of the dark lord?” Madison asked in her stead.

“One does not play the games in honor of the dark lord,” M said rather testily. “One
undergoes
them.”

“Of course, of course, so sorry,” Madison apologized.

“It's not me you need forgiveness from—it's the Prince of Wasps and Scorpions.”

“Forgive me, dark lord Moloch.”

“The dark lord Moloch does not forgive!” M declared. “As far as the games go, first we need to determine who will be the officiant.”

M, with the near-unanimous support of the group, consented to adopt
this position—though he claimed to be greatly disappointed not to be able to participate directly, and insisted that, should he return next year, someone else would serve as referee. “With that settled then,” M said, “I suppose the thing we need to do now is find a couple dozen eggs.”

A few minutes later they were out at the beach, Bryce watching his yolk seep into the sand with undisguised horror. Spencer, still holding his own egg aloft on a sterling silver spoon—not the one he was born sucking on—put a hand on Bryce's shoulder. “Tough luck, old boy.”

“I'm afraid that's a point against you, Bryce,” M said. “But worry not! There's six more events to go!”

The three-legged race was next, followed by the rock-paper-scissors contest. Spencer proved oddly unbeatable in this game of random chance and was disturbed in the extreme to discover at the end of it that, in contrast to the previous two events, the winner of the rock-paper-scissors contest was the loser of the who-gets-sacrificed contest, at least in so far as Spencer picked up a point. “I don't have time to explain to you every single rule,” M said, irritated. “Read your scriptures—everyone knows that Moloch hates rock-paper-scissors. Your victory is compelling evidence of the dark lord's disdain.”

None of the rest of the participants argued this point.

Madison and Bryce tied for last in hokey pokey and picked up an extra point each. It looked for a while that Bryce was going to head into halftime so deep in the hole that it would be impossible to ever climb out, but Spencer failed dramatically at shaving whipped cream off of a balloon, and by the end of it, he and Bryce were both tied.

Dinner was held to be a pleasant affair by all involved, laughter expelled and liquor imbibed—although Allison got an extra point for calling the hootenanny a coven and Phillip for drinking rosé with the second course, an act which, M explained, the dark lord considered blasphemy most foul, and not in a good way. But still, there was an energy to the entire endeavor that had been missing the night before, that had been missing, M pretty much suspected, in the entirety of his newfound not-friends' lives up to that point.

Then it was back to the games, less steadily but more hastily, since the events had to be finished by midnight. Flashlight tag took rather longer than
M had anticipated, though Madison proved a rare hand at hunting down the other members of her party.

“All right, Amber,” M was saying some time later, sitting in a heavy leather chair in the main drawing room, the great bay windows behind him offering a magnificent view of the beach and the sea and the night. “This one's for the win. What's your answer going to be?”

On the couch across from him, Amber considered the matter silently, brain straining beneath her lovely cream-colored forehead. Muscles long unused sloughed off their torpor, struggled to life. “Brittany Murphy?”

M looked long at the card from the Trivial Pursuit: Girls Only! game that he had found in one of the back closets, and turned it around slowly. “Correct!” he yelled.

It was the single greatest moment of Amber's life, the first time in almost thirty years of pointlessness that she had wagered anything of value and won. She felt so happy she wanted to weep. With this loss, however, Bryce was once again tied for last with Spencer, and thus also wanted to weep, though for different reasons.

“What happens now?” Amber asked, still flush with her victory. “We need a sacrifice, don't we?”

“Of course we need a sacrifice,” M said, rather gruffly. “Imagine such a thing! Not having a human sacrifice on the seventeenth of August! We just need to turn to the tiebreaker.”

“Which is?”

“It doesn't come up much,” M admitted. “But in case of a tie, loser is the poorest.”

Spencer and Bryce paced each other like bucks feuding for a mate. Or like the bucks feuding for a mate that M had seen on the National Geographic Channel, before the National Geographic Channel dedicated itself entirely to proving the existence of Bigfoot.

“Do inheritances count?” Spencer asked.

M laughed. “Liquid assets only, I'm afraid.”

To judge by Spencer's sudden drop in color, this was not good news from his end. He put his hands up and began to back away from M, but before he could say anything, Amber had snatched up an empty bottle of merlot from
the table and struck poor Spencer a telling blow across the back of his head. Popular wisdom to the contrary, this generally does not knock a man cleanly unconscious. It does, however, hurt terribly, and rendered Spencer capable of little more than rolling on the ground and moaning.

“That was excellent, Amber,” M said. “The dark lord would be very proud.”

Amber blushed with happiness. Simply glowed with it.

M was happy to let the other participants take the lead for the sacrifice itself, which was long, over-elaborate, and breathtakingly painful. It was not the worst thing that M had ever seen, but it would have been for most of the rest of us.

Breakfast, by contrast, could have been filmed for a spread in
Ladies' Home Journal.
Heaping platters of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, thick slabs of bacon just the right side of burnt, and endless cups of rich, hot, dark coffee. The surviving members of the hootenanny carried with them the telltale signs of people who have woken up from a truly magical evening, a once-in-a-lifetime evening, quiet and smiling and content to enjoy the sunlight. The couples seemed honestly and authentically happy, losing themselves into each other's eyes. They had survived something spectacular together, had risked and won and come through shriven, purified.

There was something legitimately like heartbreak when M revealed that he would not be able to return next year. “My mother would never let me hear the end of it,” he said. “She's become quite sentimental about family, after we lost little Adelweid two summers past.” M took a quick aside with Bryce, “You never saw a worse egg carrier.”

Bryce nodded sympathetically.

“But I tell you truthfully that I feel comfortable leaving the event in your capable hands. You've made real strides, all of you. In fact”—M found the tab of a beer can in his pocket and handed it to Bryce—“I want you to take this, Bryce, as a symbol of your new position. I hereby name you high officiant of next year's games.”

Bryce's blue eyes swelled to the size of duck eggs. He closed his fist around it and bit back tears. “I won't let you down,” he said.

M patted him on the shoulder. “I know you won't.”

And all too soon, or much too late, it was time to make their good-byes. It went without saying that M would take Spencer's car, now that Spencer would have so little use for it. There were handshakes and bro hugs and air-kisses all around, and then M was adjusting his mirrors and about to take off.

“Remember! The dark lord's feast is a time for friends and family, so make sure to invite all of them that you can. And feel free to drop the bottom two next year, if you have enough people. The dark lord just lives for that kind of shit.” And then he was off, burnt rubber and black exhaust.

M totaled the car about a week later, trying to re-create the chase scene from
The French Connection
with Boy, which, ultimately, was just as well—wealth might have proved corrupting to his rigid moral instincts.

August is a time for standing on sand, M thought, or at the very least grass, not for slapping sandals against concrete, dodging between the shadows of skyscrapers and housing projects, sweating through your hair product.

This was a point of view widely shared by his fellow citizens, most of whom did their best to flee the metropolis if at all possible. Stockdale had returned to England for the month, using as his excuse that he wanted a pint of bitter at an appropriate temperature, and that it was cricket season, and that he secretly hated all Americans. He would be back in the fall, complaining of pea-soup fog and desperate for a decent tamale. Andre and Boy had recently split, broken dishes but no bones, which put this one at about par, though you wouldn't know it by how hard each was nursing the wound. “I am thinking about getting away from everything for a while,” Andre had told him, with the wistful tone of melancholy that had dropped panties from Toulouse to Tehran. “Perhaps visit an ashram.” Though ultimately he bought a ticket to Monaco, which is a fine country if you liked beautiful women and hated the income tax, but which would not have been at the top of M's list had he been searching for inner peace. Boy made less of a fuss; upon arriving to pick her up for a concert one evening, M had discovered a note pinned to the front door.
GONE TO THE DESERT TO TAKE ACID
, it read in neat blue ink, and below that, in block letters and crayon,
DO NOT LOOK FOR ME
. Even Flemel, whose
presence M had grown used to the way one does a sty or a nut allergy, had headed back west to see his family. Another reminder, as if M needed one, of just how young his apprentice was. If M had ever had a family he could not remember them. Or he chose not to, at least.