A City Dreaming (15 page)

“Thanks! It's about the community, really—setting up a space for people to come together and do their art or work on the great problems that are facing society. To live up to the full potential they have inside them, all with the aid of nature's most beneficent stimulant, the coffee bean.”

M took a deep breath. This wasn't going to be easy. “And so many different franchises springing up . . .”

“How else to reflect the extraordinary diversity of the drink? From the common Ethiopian arabica, smooth-flavored and casual, to the precious kopi luwak, brewed from beans fermented by the digestive process of the noble Asian palm civet, truly, there's nothing like coffee.”

M looked at his cup. “Digestive process?”

“We only use beans that are taken from
wild
civets. Some of our competitors use
tamed
civets, which,” the thing shook his head back and forth, “well, you can imagine.”

“Wild civets?”

“See, we believe that making good coffee is about more than just giving someone a smile while going about their day. Coffee can be a real source of positive change in this world. Did you know that every drop of our coffee comes from free-trade farmers in third-world countries? Or that, for each cup of espresso sold, we donate five cents toward a charity that provides support for organic Romanian goat herders?”

“So you're saying this coffee has been shat out by some sort of marmot?” M asked.

“Only the best!”

Something about having discovered he had just drank feces, or something that had been suspended in feces, gave M a little extra nerve. “I gotta say, there's been an awful lot of shops opening in the neighborhood these past few weeks.”

“People love coffee.”

“Believe me, man, you're preaching to the choir—I can't get through the day without having a cup. The thing is, I can't get through the day without other things too—food, for instance, and clothing—and lately those are harder and harder to find.”

“People love coffee,” it said again, and this time there was a weight on top of it.

“Look, I love coffee. Coffee is great. Coffee might be, literally, my favorite thing on earth. But even still, I don't think that I like it to a point where I would want to be exclusive. It might be nice if, in addition to drinking a great cup of coffee in the morning, I might buy soap or visit a bank.”

“I don't think you know what you're asking,” it said, hands up as if trying to stop M from sprinting off a cliff. “Sure, our expansion might have made it a bit more difficult for you to pick up some staple goods. But what is that when held against the joy of a freshly brewed pot?” Outside the windows in the room that was not a room, something crackled. It was not quite thunder, because
thunder is caused by electrons flowing through clouds, and M was no longer in a place where the rules of physics, or at least his rules of physics, held much sway. “There are prices to pay for living in Brooklyn—one has to make certain sacrifices. If you want your box stores and your cheap groceries, you might as well move out to Jersey. You can buy your shoes at Walmart and get your morning coffee at a Starbucks.” It snarled out the last word like a Serbian cursing.

“No one's suggesting that,” M said, trying to mollify the minor god. “The one time I set foot in Starbucks I'd been forced at gunpoint, and even then the fumes were enough to make me vomit. If Adolf Hitler himself came in here right now, and he was about to bring a Starbucks espresso up to that little thumb-width mustache of his, I'd knock it right out of his hand. If you were to poison me and then mix the antidote in with a cup of their house blend I would die in agony on the floor rather than drink it.”

The thing nodded again, happy that he and M were on the same page. “You had me worried there for a minute. I was thinking maybe you were one of these poor bastards who don't know a double-roasted espresso from a mug of Folger's instant!”

They both laughed at the absurdity. M decided to try a different tack.

“Really I just came by to congratulate you on all the good work you've been doing in the neighborhood. I have to say, the success you've been having, it's unprecedented.”

“Thanks! Well, like I said, you make a good product, people will come, right? It's basic stuff.”

“Absolutely, absolutely. And the product here is so tremendously good, I'm sure it won't be long until the whole country gets to appreciate it. It's amazing to think, in a few years, when you've got shops blanketing the nation, hell, the world, I'll be able to say I went to the original franchise.”

“Excuse me? Every one of our coffee shops is independently owned and operated.”

“Well, not really—if I'd walked into that Estonian joint you opened the other day and went through the stockroom, I'd end up here, right? So really it's just an elaborate franchise. You should be happy about it—pretty soon you'll be taking things national. Imagine it: One of your coffee shops in every strip mall in the land, sandwiched between the Cinnabon and Chipotle!
Hang out at Davos with all the other titans of industry, talking about synergy and . . . words like synergy!”

“No!” the thing croaked. “Never!”

“You can partner with Urban Outfitters and release a line of coffee-inspired clothing! You'll sell branded water, and prepackaged ham and cheese croissants!”

“Those things are disgusting!”

“It's unavoidable. It's the end result of any late-stage capitalist process. You know, Starbucks started as a couple of proto-hipsters and a dream, and look at them now! The way is paved for you, my friend. Bourgeois conformity within three years. No way around it, I'm afraid.”

The thing about these—well, call them spirits or demons or
loas
or whatever you wanted—was that they had more power than any mortal adept, enough power to rework reality in any fashion they chose. But they couldn't choose much, the rules of their existence being adamantine and unbreakable.

“You could put out a line of instant brew!” M said, giving the thing one final shove over the cliff. “Just shake and drink!”

It blinked twice, horrified, and then reality blinked away also.

M found himself back in the coffee shop that had been a supermarket but was now just a big, empty room—an empty room partially filled with two dozen extremely confused hipsters, each trying to figure out why the internet had gone out, and the lights, and where the cute barista was, and, also, while they were on the subject, what in the name of God had happened to their coffee?

Outside the day was gray and rainy, and M discovered that whatever cosmic backlash he had caused had taken with it all of the coffee shops in the neighborhood, even the ones that had been around before this most recent wave of expansion, which was unfortunate, as he belatedly realized that he had not yet drunk his morning cup.

“Harumph,” M said, not for the last time.

A week into February and, for reasons that M could not quite put his finger on, he fell completely out of the pocket. Bad luck accrued around him. He arrived too late for things—buses and trains, ticket sales and happy hours and last calls. Or too early—for drink specials and to avoid meeting ex-girlfriends and their handsome, brutish boyfriends. He did not win a game of chess for ten straight days, not one, dropping match after match to half-wits and crack addicts and half-witted crack addicts, pushing himself up from chairs and away from computer screens while cursing his sudden stupidity. His brain felt slack, liked he'd laid himself out with sativa, which—fair enough—he had been doing, but this was a symptom or an attempt at a remedy, not the cause itself.

M was not sure what he had done to fall out of favor with the Management—why those cosmic forces, normally so inclined to look with favor upon his foolishness, had decided to avert their eyes from him. M did not understand a lot of things about his life. M thought that most of his peers were equally ignorant but less willing to admit it.

In practical terms, being out of pocket resulted in two serious difficulties: The first was that, against his desire and better judgment, he ended up taking on an apprentice. And the second was that a biker gang tried to kill him. But more on that in a moment.

M was at The Lady one late afternoon when the kid came in—and
kid
was the only word for him. He was stocky and short and blond and had the face of a newborn. He was wearing a polo shirt and red kicks. He took a stool one over from M, ordered a PBR, opened it, and sat drinking slowly for a while, building up his courage. “A candidate sits before you, awaiting initiation,” he said, voice hushed and serious.

“Fuck you talking about?” M asked.

The kid had the sort of coloring that you could literally watch his blush spread across his face. “Sorry, is that not something you say? I read that in one of the hidden texts of the true Rosicrucians. It seemed like the real thing. Some of the exercises worked at least.”

“Don't read books,” M said. “Don't trust them. Not enough that everyone talks all the time, they have to go and start putting thoughts down all permanent like?”

M's wholehearted denunciation of literacy proved only a brief obstacle for the young man, who shrugged his shoulders and held out his hand. “My name is Flemel,” he said.

“Bully for you, Flemel,” M said, ignoring it.

“I know what you are.”

“Tired of this conversation?”

Flemel laughed. M didn't like Flemel's laugh. It wasn't menacing or anything, quite the opposite. It was an amiable laugh, a natural laugh, a laugh between two friends. But M didn't want any more friends, and often felt he could do without most of the ones he already had.

“This has been great, but I'm sure you have something really important and exciting to get to, and I'd feel bad if I detained you any longer.” M put a little bit of English on the end of it, enough to send his newfound admirer heading out the door and off to this nonexistent rendezvous.

The boy's eyes glazed over for a few seconds, but then he shook his head back and forth and smiled. “You'll have to do better than that.”

There was no way that M was in so bad with the Management that he couldn't convince a civilian to look the other way. M had been convincing civilians to look the other way for—actually, M couldn't remember, but it had been a long time, M knew that much at least. And that meant that Flemel must be on his way toward being in good with the Management himself, even
just a little, and that meant that M's life was about to get more complicated.

“Look, kid,” M began, in his most reasonable tone of voice, “I'm pretty busy working on this day drunk. How about you tell me what it is I can do for you, and I'll tell you I can't do it, and then you can leave me alone.”

M's beer was empty, and Flemel waved at Dino and pointed at it. “Another for my friend.”

“Another for the total stranger was I think what you meant to say.” But M ordered a stout anyway.

“You're an initiate.”

“I told you already, that doesn't mean anything to me.”

“One who walks the paths unseen?”

“Are you hitting on me? This isn't a gay bar, you know. Not that I have any problem if that's the way you swing, but just so we're all clear.”

“A wizard?”

M just laughed and shook his head.

“You're someone who can do things that other people can't do,” Flemel said finally, dangling from the end of his rope. “And I'd like to learn how to do the same.”

“If I was what you think I am, would I be getting loaded in a dive bar in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Yes,” Flemel said. “I think you would.”

M scowled some more and downed his beer and headed out. Flemel stayed where he was and watched M walk out through The Lady's bay windows. M told himself on the walk back to his apartment that the hiccup was just that, and it would be gone by tomorrow. But it had been too shitty a month to really believe it, and so when he swung back around the next day and saw Flemel sitting next to his usual spot, smiling and waving, he was displeased but not surprised.

From then on, Flemel was waiting in The Lady most afternoons. He didn't say much, just sat near M, not quite staring but close enough. It threw off M's rhythm entirely, would have even if he wasn't already out of the pocket. He spent a while trying to convince Dino to throw him out, but Flemel hadn't done anything but sit quietly and drink, and you couldn't ban anyone from a bar for that.

It was Flemel who saw the guy first. A big man, huge really, closer to seven foot than six, ash blond dreadlocks falling down to his ass and a well-worn leather jacket with
MOAB'S MINIONS
emblazoned on the back. He was moving past The Lady's front windows at a not-unimpressive clip, three long steps being enough to carry him out of sight, though at two and a half he stopped abruptly, went wide-eyed, and pressed his face up against the glass. Flemel could see where time had aged his features, crow's-feet stretching out from his eyes, his beard more white than blond. Flemel could also see where someone, presumably not time, had burned a stretch of flesh running diagonally across his face, from the right temple to the dimple in his chin. His eyes were fierce and furious and delighted. Flemel found himself afraid.

M was reading a paperback and did not look up when the man came in. Nor did he look up as the man walked over, though his footfalls seemed, to Flemel at least, as loud as bass drums. M did not look up until he could feel the man's warm breath on his face, smelling of onion and egg and liver, and even then it took a while.

“Can I help you with something?” he asked finally, sounding unhelpful.

The giant did a weird sort of thing with his face, the lower half expanding into a grin just this side of jubilant, the top half—his coal-black eyes, the functioning one at least—all but bursting with fury. “Bet you never thought you'd see me again.” His voice was like a diesel engine pulling into gear.