A City Dreaming (20 page)

“What do you think, M?” Abilene began. “In what form shall I make my triumphant return to the city proper?”

“I've always wanted a pet gorilla,” M opined. “Or a banana slug, maybe. Those things can get up to three feet in length.”

“Perhaps something a bit more subtle.”

“It's your show, Abilene.”

“Indeed it is, M. I'm so glad that you've remembered. And your part in it, as I said, is a modest one—travel to the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets, sneak through some side exit, sniff around until you can find the owner, and then return me to my preferred shape.”

“I got it.”

“Don't try to get overclever with Corlo, either,” Abilene said, narrowing her eyes. “He's out of your league altogether.”

M grunted something that might have been agreement.

The screech of the approaching train stole the attention of the handful of awaiting passengers, and by the time it came to a stop, M and Flemel were standing above a short-haired tabby cat, more of the alley than the silk pillow variety. A quick bound and she entered the train while nestled in the crook of M's arm, her presence as clear a violation of the MTA's rules as her transformation was the broader laws of physics.

It was not until the doors shut that M recalled his long-standing cat allergy, a condition that had broken off nearly as many relationships as his poverty and general aimlessness. By Grand Army Plaza he was sniffling, by Bergen his nose was running like a gazelle with its tail lit on fire, and by the time they reached the Barclays Center and a horde of passengers flooded the train, he was sneezing all but uncontrollably.

It did not help his humor, which was ill to begin with. “M will not be free,” he misquoted, “until the last queen is strangled with the intestine of the last cat.”

“She seemed OK.”

“Well, heck, you've known her for almost twenty-five minutes, your opinion on the matter must be just sound as sterling.”

“But . . . she watches out for the borough, right?”

“She owns the damn thing! I put mice traps beneath my oven, but no one has any plans to award me the Medal of Honor.”

“You've got a real streak of anarchy in you, M. I hadn't noticed.”

“Not at all—the world is a terrible place filled with very nasty people. Wise government consists of finding the biggest one and giving them enough property so that they have a personal incentive to keep everyone else in line.”

“What about her counterpart?”

“The Red Queen, the White Queen—it's the noun you need to be looking at here, not the adjective.”

“If you hate her so much, why don't you leave her like that?”

“I don't hate her. I just prefer to appreciate her from afar. Besides, if she stayed a cat forever, there would be nothing to stop Celise from taking over all of the city. Believe me, the only thing worse than two queens would be one empress.”

Across from them sat a family of tourists, milk-fed corn huskers of the classic model, fanny packs and oversize cameras and
I
NY
shirts. “What an adorable kitty!” said the mother, thunder-thighed and wide-smiling. “What's her name?”

“Pudding Pop,” M said after a moment. “Princess Pudding Pop the Third.”

“What a lovely name.”

“Thank you, yes. When I got her from the pound, I looked at her, and
there it was, just leapt into my mind like a bolt of lightning or the living flame itself: Princess Pudding Pop the Third.”

“Can I hold her?” asked the daughter shyly.

“Absolutely,” M said without hesitation, shoving the cat into her hands, which he hoped were sticky with chocolate or gum resin. “She loves to be petted. Vigorously. She also really likes it when you pull on her ears.”

“Cats don't like that,” said the brother.

“Look, whose cat is this, exactly? It's mine, clearly, otherwise I wouldn't be carrying it on my lap all the way to goddamned Manhattan.” This spurred off another unpleasant bout of sniffling. “I'm telling you, Princess Pudding Pop the Third loves nothing better than to have her ears vigorously stretched.”

It was difficult to tell that from Princess Pudding Pop's reaction, which echoed unpleasantly through the train car. The family of tourists got off at the next station, looking back at M warily and wondering if they should drop a call to the ASPCA.

M and Flemel alighted at Wall Street and made their way topside. Flemel had to use his phone for directions, because everything in the Financial District looked the same to M—the buildings and the people, too for that matter, wading through a sea of faceless finance drones as if sprung from an off-brand dragon's tooth. The office building at the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets at least broke the mold slightly, the standard glass skyscraper buttressed by a strange profusion of esoteric symbols, pentagrams, ankhs, stars of David, mandalas, and rosy crosses. Guarding the front entrance were a handful of oddly serious-looking security guards, eyes hard and fast moving, shoulders stretching their suits. Seeing them, M sucked a tooth and continued on. Halfway down the office block was a chain coffee shop, and slipping through a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
, they found themselves in the bowels of the adjoining building.

No doubt the lobby of Corlo's building was your classic monument to conspicuous consumption—a beautiful, ethnically ambiguous receptionist and a million dollars' worth of Damien Hirst on the walls. But the sublevel in which they entered was the usual catacomb. Princess Pudding Pop the Third jumped down from Flemel's hands and led them deeper into the labyrinth, possessed of some preternatural directional sense, scampering through the
maze of passageways, stopping only when she came to a bright metal door, then turning and mewling expectantly.

“Shit,” M said.

“What's the problem?” Flemel asked. “You can pick locks, right?”

“Not very well.”

“You told that goth girl at The Lady the other night that all you needed was a hat pin and twenty minutes, and you could open any door in the world.”

“A master thief packing a solid twelve inches,” M said, shaking his head back and forth. “You are really an embarrassment to me, do you know that?”

“Is there a problem here?” asked a voice from behind them, one of distinct unfriendliness.

They turned to discover a very large man, bigger than M or Flemel, probably bigger than both of them set together, carrying an automatic pistol sized to fit his massive hands.

“Yeah, lots,” M began. “First, you see, there's this cat, and I'm allergic to cats.” M let out a violent sneeze as if in evidence. “I don't like them apart from that, to be honest.What's the point of taking care of a creature that would eat you if it was big enough? Just as soon have nothing to do with them, a feeling I share toward this apprentice whom I've got stuck with—not sure how that happened really. You use a guy as a scapegoat against a murderous crew of Nazi bikers
one time
, and he just keeps showing up, week after week, taking up space, changing the color of your couch, expecting you to teach him magic. Also, I'm starting to think I might have gotten finagled into tipping the balance of power between the two great potentates of New York City, whose continued stalemate is the only thing that keeps the place remotely tolerable. The ocean levels are rising at a rate unprecedented in history, I read a news story recently that said that
every single seabird in the world
has at some point digested plastic, they're making another
Transformers
movie, any objective observer would have to conclude that we are nearing the end state of a capitalist society that seems to exist for no grander purpose than to consume and consume and consume and consume, without meaning, point, or guiding philosophy, death is an inescapable and absolute foe against which no struggle will avail us, the Earth is only a few billions years away from being consumed by an exploding sun, the universe itself only a few billion
years away from its own effective expiration from heat death, and I'm pretty sure there isn't a God.”

“Oh,” the guard said after a long moment, his eyes lost staring at the enormity of M's misfortune.

“Yeah, so . . .” M took a deep breath. “That's kind of weighing on my mind. Can you do anything about any of those?”

“I . . . don't think so.”

“No?” M grimaced. “Then maybe just go ahead and open the door?”

Despondent, the guard took his hand off his weapon and filched out a ring of keys.

“Thanks,” M said, rather brightly given the slate of concerns facing him, the race, and the planet.

“Don't mention it,” the man said mournfully, then wandered off to find a bar or put the muzzle of his pistol to his temple.

Through the egress and Princess Pudding Pop the Third again took lead, down another hallway and then up a small flight of stairs and into the spring sunlight. In the center of Corlo's vast metal edifice, a facsimile wilderness had been created—some shrubbery and even a few stunted oak, a well-manicured wood-chipped path leading round it. The centerpiece of this cut-rate pleasure garden was an artificial stream that jutted up from some subterranean reservoir and trickled on its way about a hundred feet before disappearing back into the ground. On normal afternoons no doubt the patio was filled with financiers and PR potentates enjoying the twenty-five minutes of personal time they were allotted daily, swallowing office doughnuts and power bars while frantically checking their stock tickers, faintly cognizant of the greenery that surrounded them.

But today was not a normal day, and the only person to be found in the small swath of faux wilderness was the owner himself. Qashi Corlo belonged in a hand-tailored suit, charcoal or jet black, with a rhino-leather briefcase carrying inside it a hundred million in bearer bonds. He did not belong in waders and an oversize hat with colored lures hanging from the brim, holding on to a rod and a reel that seemed nearly the length of the river itself. This was what he was clad in at the moment of M's arrival, however, and, as coincidence would have it, at this self-same moment Corlo laughed and reeled
back his catch, a spot of silver pulling up from the artificial waters, wriggling bright in the afternoon sun.

M drew his attention, deliberately or unintentionally, with a loud sneeze.

There are limitations on how furious a person can manage to look while holding erect a fishing pole. Corlo bumped neatly against them. “You can't have it!” he yelled. “It's mine!”

“You can keep it!” M responded, seeming just as angry, indeed more so. “I wouldn't take it if you gave it to me! I wouldn't take it if you sent it to me on a silver platter carried by a beautiful naked woman! What is it?”

“The Salmon of Wisdom, of course!” Qashi yelled, then a moment later and under his breath, “Shit.”

The Salmon of Wisdom begins life as a fry of modest intellectual ability, and over the course of its long centuries and even millennium of existence, swimming, feeding, spawning, observing the foibles of the various surrounding species, contemplating the categorical imperative, it eventually grows to full maturity as the living repository of all knowledge—animal, human, and divine. Until at some point, it slips up, as even the cleverest of creatures are apt to do, and gets snatched by some or other pisactor that absorbs its collected erudition by means of consumption, and the process begins all over again. In keeping with its inconceivable omniscience, the Salmon of Wisdom is capable not only of navigating the traditional routes of its kind, but also of finding itself in any other running body of water—oceans, estuaries, bathtubs, sewage systems, and, apparently, the small fake river that some Frank Lloyd Wright epigone had installed in the courtyard of Corlo's building.

“So that's what this is about,” M said after a moment, to himself, or to the firmament, but in any case not really to any of the assembled—feline or human. “How'd you find it? Finnegas had to wait around for half a lifetime before it showed, and that was back when it confined itself to Eire.”

“Old Finn did not have access to the latest in big-data technology. I've had a handful of supercomputers working on this problem for the better part of the twenty-first century, figuring out the exact moment when the salmon would make its arrival in my domain. And now I have him!” Corlo said, gesturing at his captured fish. “All the world's knowledge, a vast, nigh-infinite
understanding, the secrets of the cosmos, the hidden names of all living things, celebrity gossip, incantations foul and pure—”

“How were you thinking of preparing him?”

“What?”

“Fry, baked, boiled—what's your plan?”

“I hadn't thought about it really.” Corlo admitted after a moment.

“You hadn't thought about it?” M asked, incredulous. “All these years waiting around to capture him, you never spent a moment wondering how you were going to eat him? Here's what I'd do, personally: find one of those little hole-in-the-wall joints in Chinatown—Queens would be better, really—an authentic one, where you're the only English speaker and there are typos all over the menu, and have them fry it up for you.”