A City Dreaming (25 page)

“I think you already have, Abilene,” Celise answered coldly.

“A point of etiquette, nothing more. The floor is yours, unequivocally.”

“Jesus Christ,” M muttered, “I'm never getting out of here.”

M felt a hand on his shoulder, which was a bit of physical intimacy that he found unattractive among his closest companions and in far less tense situations.

He turned around to discover the hand belonged to Talbot.

“You miss me?” Talbot asked.

“Daily,” M said. “Several times a week, at least.”

“How you been?”

“I get by. I think I sort of thought you were dead.”

“What, New Year's? Not quite. Woke up three weeks into January, sitting in the corner of an empty warehouse with a Rip Van Winkle beard.”

Back on the main stage, Abilene and Celise had managed to put aside the question of who would begin the meeting and moved on to actually beginning the meeting, though that was as far as they'd gotten. Of course, the issues at hand were all but infinite—how exactly was the ritual to be performed, what somatic and verbal and material components would be required, who would offer them, the endless and endlessly complex minutia required for a spell of this magnitude. It was like putting on an incredibly elaborate stage play without any rehearsal, arriving at the theater to have some overworked grip grab your shoulder and whisper, “You're Peter Bottom. Here's your mask. Hope you know your lines!” with a bad review meaning the destruction of all life on Manhattan. And behind all that, interfering with every other decision, however minor, was the question of how to balance the ritual such that all of
the major parties were weakened equally, or approximately so, thus ensuring the perpetual stalemate continued as it had in years past.

“This isn't going to work,” Talbot muttered too loudly, while Abilene and Herald Sampson Fitzgerald Dupont the whatever were quibbling animatedly over whether or not dried Cactacae flower could be used as suitable replacement for
Mors ontologica
and, if so, whether the ratio was seventy-four to nine or one hundred and forty-eight to seventeen.

“It worked last time,” M said.

“Last time we knew it was coming; last time we had the muckety-mucks planning things, laying the groundwork in advance. And for that matter, last time it barely worked, if you remember; left me so drained I couldn't light a cigarette or read a palm for three months.”

“What do you suggest?” M asked.

Talbot made a show of looking around, then leaned in close and whispered, “The heart of the city.”

M scowled. “That's the worst idea I've heard so far today,” he said. “And the morning has been chock-full of foolishness.”

“What's the heart of the city?” Flemel asked. He had leaned in close to M when he had seen Talbot do so, and thus become a de facto participant in the conversation.

“What does it sound like? It's the middle, it's the navel, it's the axis mundi.”

“Everything in the city goes into it,” Talbot added, “and everything comes back out again.”

“So the heart is inside the turtle?”

“The turtle is just the island of Manhattan,” M explained tiredly, “and possibly also the entirety of existence. Forget about the turtle, OK? The turtle and the heart are two different things. You've gotta get rid of this notion that A always equals A. Sometimes it equals B. Sometimes it equals Ω. Sometimes it doesn't equal anything.”

“I've never liked the Rosicrucian pentacle,” Abilene said. “The Celtic broken cross offers superior stability without the normative monotheistic overtones.”

“So what do you think?” Talbot asked.

“I think it's like opening a peanut with a sledgehammer.”

“It would save everyone a lot of trouble, wouldn't it?”

“So would drinking cyanide.”

“Your ancient Phoenician needs work, I'm afraid,” Celise said witheringly. “That particular series of consonants evokes Yamm to ensure the good fortune of the cod yield, which is a worthy enough endeavor but rather unrelated to the situation at hand.”

“At the moment it doesn't sound so bad,” Talbot said.

“Have fun, then.”

“With the cyanide?”

“With tapping the heart.”

“Well, therein we run into a complication.”

“Life abounds in them, I'm afraid.”

“I don't know where the heart is.”

“No?”

“Though I'm told you do.”

“Who told you that?”

“You did.”

“That doesn't sound like me.”

“We were on acid.”

“Which time?”

“At the Talking Heads show? Two tabs with a picture of the Golden Gates on them?”

M scowled. “You really don't think they'll be able to piece it together?”

Talbot waved his hand at the proceedings. “Are you feeling optimistic?”

“Of course you'd prefer that we used powdered mandrake root, you've got a controlling interest in the only mandrake farm within half a reality,” Abilene told Celise angrily.

“Fortuitous for all of us, given its value as a binding agent. I'd think you'd be happy that someone had the foresight to lay away a stock substantial enough for our purposes.”

“Yes, we're all so blessed that your instinct for monopoly has run off any competition.”

“Well, I think it's about time I toddled off.” Talbot tipped his hat. “There's a Murphy bed a few blocks from Washington Square Park that ends up in the city of Cleveland. You're welcome to come along, if you'd like.”

“No, no,” M said. “I like New York. I mean, I like it OK. Actually I often find myself sort of lukewarm on the place, but perhaps not to such a degree that I want it to go the way of Atlantis.”

“If we're going to do it,” Talbot said, “then we ought to do it now, and we ought to do it quiet. If the queens get wind of it, we'll be tramping down there with half the room.”

“I'd just as soon the location remain between the two of us,” M said.

“The three of us,” Flemel altered, “or I make a scene.” Flemel had long since realized that the only way he could learn anything of importance from M is if he tricked or bullied him into it. Normally this was a difficult task, but draped over a barrel M didn't bother to argue.

The trio found themselves making their way back through the crowd and asking one of the spectral bartenders where the exit was, the gloved hands pantomiming a series of directions that, when followed, took them up a sort of fire escape and onto a busy Midtown street.

“Well?” Talbot asked. “Where is the thing, exactly?”

“It takes a bit of getting to,” M explained. “Just follow my lead.”

M abruptly stopped in front of a Sbarro, opened the door, and waved them through. Flemel discovered himself standing not on polished floors surrounded by the smell of cooking grease, but on lush carpet, surrounded by oak bookshelves leading up to a ceiling mural of a centurion falling on his sword.

“No time to dally,” M said, “there's a city to save.” Striding forward with purpose to the nearest exit, a great oak monstrosity that he pulled open and stepped through.

The door to a broom closet in Penn Station led to the bathroom of a steak house in Queens, where they squeezed into a dumbwaiter and went up three flights to the top of the Empire State Building.

“You know, I've never actually been here before,” Flemel said, stopping for a moment to enjoy the view.

“You look much longer,” Talbot returned, brushing a bit of lettuce off his shoulder, “and you'll get to watch it disappear beneath the water.”

Which was spur enough for M to brush past a security guard and through a door marked
NO ENTRY
and into an executive office overlooking the park, interrupting a grunting bout of lunchtime cunnilingus.

“Don't bother, don't bother,” M said, waving the CFO of a Fortune 500 company back between the legs of his assistant. “We won't be but a moment.”

And indeed they weren't: The ebony double doors exiting the CFO's office turned out to be the egress to the bonobo cage at the Bronx Zoo, where M narrowly avoided being struck with a handful of feces by disappearing through the warden's gate and into an abandoned warehouse.

Flemel was not so lucky, however, and they wasted a few minutes as he tried to find something in the vastness of the concrete bunker with which to scrape shit off his flannel shirt. “How do you know where this place is, exactly?”

“The Engineer showed it to him,” Talbot answered.

“Who's the Engineer?” Flemel asked, ever curious.

“The Engineer was the man who built the heart,” Talbot began.

“No one built the heart,” M said definitively, trying to undo the rusted-shut latch on one of the doors. “When the first avaricious Dutchmen cheated the first innocent Iroquois, the heart was here. When Alexander Hamilton got caught by a cheap shot from Aaron Burr, the heart was here. When Monk Eastman fought Paul Kelly to a hundred-and-seventy–round draw over control of Five Points, the heart was here. The Engineer just knew the location.”

“And how did he know that?” Flemel asked.

“Because he was the Engineer, obviously,” Talbot explained. Sort of.

“The Engineer was . . . special.”

“Like we're special?”

“You aren't that special. And no one was special like the Engineer was special.”

“What happened to him?”

“No one knows,” Talbot said.

“Someone might know,” M explained. “But we don't know, and neither does anyone else we know.”

“I don't understand,” Flemel said.

“This insistence that questions have answers,” M said. “It's one of your less attractive qualities.”

M managed to unjam the lock, and Flemel managed to mostly wipe the shit off his shirt. Through the front and out into a crack house, the smell of
waste and body odor and mildew and human misery and, of course, crack, so overpowering that M pinched his nose shut, pulled aside a door long rotted off its hinges, and headed into a craft-beer bar.

“What do you have by way of an IPA?” M asked the bartender, bearded and tattooed as appropriate.

“I thought we were in a hurry!” Flemel reminded him.

M scowled. “Three shots of Jameson,” he said. They downed them, then walked into the doors of the women's bathroom and out of the changing room into a boutique lingerie store in the Village, customers shrieking and blushing.

They ended up finally in an apartment overlooking the park—a sunny day, a city that would not be around much longer if swift steps were not taken. The apartment was in the middle of renovations: The wood floors were unfinished and stacks of building materials took up most of the corner.

“And here we are,” M said, pausing for a moment and pointing at a door that should have led into a bathroom. “That's the last one, right there.”

“I'm afraid you won't be the one opening it, however,” Talbot said. “Turn around slowly, and don't do anything to spook me.”

“What an unexpected development,” M said. “Is that a shrunken head you're pointing at me?”

“A bit much, I agree. But it's my employer's and it works. A quick hit of this and your mind will be as scrambled as bootleg cable.”

“We wouldn't want that.”

“I have to say, M, if I had known it was this easy to get you to give up the location of the heart, I'd have made a go at it years back.”

“I guess I'm just too trusting. It's my most severe character flaw. It might be my sole character flaw, now that I think of it. What happens next?”

“I open the door and become God.”

“Is that what's in there?”

“The heart of the city,” Talbot said, all but salivating. “The pulsing soul of the urban center of the world, of any of the worlds, every thought and fear and passion and instinct and bit of energy all coursing through, mine for the taking.”

“Don't burn yourself,” M said. “Mind if I roll a cigarette?”

“You touch your pockets and I'm going to fry out your brain,” Talbot said, dropping quickly out of his reverie and turning the shrunken head on M once again. “Friend or no friend.”

“I think it's clear we're the latter,” M said, but he kept his hands up. “Well, have fun becoming God. Try to remember us mortals fondly.”

Talbot looked at M a long time, as if expecting further resistance. Then he shrugged and, with one hand still pointing the shrunken head firmly in M's direction, he crossed slowly over to the door, reached his hand around the knob, twisted, pulled the door open—

M kicked Flemel in the back of the leg, just below the knee, hard enough to send him sprawling. M took the opportunity to look at the wall a while, and thus the only person who can claim with any certainty what exactly it was that lay beyond the door Talbot had opened was Talbot, whose eyes went wide as beer mugs and whose mouth began to drool.

“I'm going to go ahead and roll that cigarette all the same,” M said, though while doing it he sidled over to the door, careful not to look at it, and then slammed it shut.

Talbot gave no sign that he noticed. Whatever he had seen was working fast: His face began to droop like wax melting off a candle, and then his shoulders drifted downward as well. “How . . . did . . . you . . . ?” Talbot managed, each word coming with great and growing effort.

“Know you were going to betray me? A lot of reasons. First of all, your plan was terrible and didn't make any sense, and if there was anyone in this damn city with an ounce of self-possession, it wouldn't have worked. The World Turtle just happens to wake up thirty years ahead of schedule? You just happen to suggest tapping the heart? Absurd. But more importantly, Talbot, we were never friends; you were just a guy I bought drugs from.” M turned away abruptly. “I have no idea why I'm still talking to you.”