A City Dreaming (28 page)

“If violence was an option,” M asked, “why didn't we take it earlier?”

But it was too late to play coulda-woulda-shoulda, too late to do anything but go back through the whole process again, as rapidly as possible, crisscrossing the borough at a frantic-seeming pace. Again they complained about the gap between north and central Brooklyn. Again the R train was late. They took more speed.

With the sun moving swiftly through the sky, they arrived back at the little triangle of greenery that M now knew, beyond any possible doubt, was legitimately a park. The Park Manager waited on a bench. He looked more like an old man now than he had looked earlier, when he had looked mostly like what he was. But there was a rather too-intelligent-seeming squirrel seated near him, and the starling in the tree above him
caw-caw-cawed
their arrival.

Boy dropped the box of Dough-Cros onto his lap. “I hope you choke on it.”

The man, or whatever, did not look at Boy, but he opened the box slowly. The squirrel skittered over, pulled off a bit of the pastry, and set to eating it with small, swift bites. The starling in the tree swooped down and began to peck at one as well. The man did not try any, but he smiled wider and wider.

“You had better grow like an adolescent hard-on,” Boy said to him.

“Do you mind?” M asked.

It did not mind, offering the open box to M. He took one with strawberry frosting, nibbled at it, and shrugged. “It tastes a lot like a doughnut.”

“You shut your fucking mouth,” Boy commanded.

M went back to eating his Dough-Cro.

M's cell phone awoke him one morning around nine, flashing the name of a girl whom he had gone out with several times but who had abruptly and without explanation stopped calling him some weeks earlier. He pitched his voice to characteristic nonchalance. “Hello?”

“M,” Celise said from the other end, “how wonderful it is to speak to you.”

“You're not Kristen.”

“Is that what your phone was reporting? Technology these days. The world has been going downhill since the gramophone.”

“Indisputably. Well, no harm done.”

“While I have you,” Celise continued smoothly, “perhaps you'd be a doll and look into something for me? It concerns an old friend of yours—”

“Friend? That doesn't sound like me at all. A renowned misanthrope, I rarely leave the house, have no close acquaintances, quite loathe unsolicited phone calls—”

“Rollo of the Laughing Eyes?”

The line went still.

“M? Have I lost you?”

“What about him?”

“He's been making rather a ruckus in a townhouse near South Ferry Station. Of course, if you aren't up to it, I'd be happy to pay him a visit myself,
but it might end in a bit of a mess, and I couldn't make any promises about the collateral.”

“I'll take care of it.”

“Of course you will, you darling thing you. Just head to Wall Street and start smelling the air. You're sure to find him. Get it done today and I'll send something jingly as a sweetener. Just a gentle nudge off the island. Perhaps out Brooklyn way. I'm sure the bitch would be happy to have him.”

M hung up the phone and thought about that last lie. Even Abilene, with her half-tender heart and her love of all things eccentric, would not want to have anything to do with Rollo of the Laughing Eyes. M showered quickly, pulled on a pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt, and went to grab the train.

He caught a whiff walking out of the subway, fresh-baked cookies and the color crimson and a Fela Kuti groove. North a bit and it gave way to day-old musk, like you'd smell on your sheets the morning after a hard night of lovemaking, and a sort of yellowish chartreuse and an early Edith Piaf song. He walked a few blocks in the wrong direction, started to lose his sudden synesthesia, realized he'd taken a wrong turn, and circled back.

Rollo of the Laughing Eyes now lived in a townhouse sandwiched between two very large apartment buildings near the corner of Beaver and Broad Streets. At first glance M was given the impression that what he was looking at was not a building, but a representation of one, and not a very good one either—a picture made by a toddler, pointing at the squiggly lines and saying, “That's a door, and those are windows, and can we put it up on the fridge?” After a moment it snapped back into coherence, sort of, in a manner of speaking. Each and every brick was a different color: crimson and sky blue and puke green. Out-of-season plants bloomed side-by-side with horticulture of a distinctly apocryphal nature—century-old Banyan trees flourished over mandrake, petioles like Jewfros.

The passersby couldn't bring themselves to notice yet, but you could see it infecting their reality. Finance bulls hurrying to working lunches slowed as they passed, dollar-sign eyes gone hazy. Packs of East Asians flitting north toward the tourist traps of central Manhattan stopped and looked aimlessly around for something to take a picture of, cognizant of the spectral emanations but not quite able to identify the source. Most of them kept walking,
though M knew that the more sensitive or joyous or miserable—those who had just lost a parent or gained a lover—might get a stronger glimpse of it, might even find themselves inside. Celise was right, as she had an unpleasant habit of being: The chancre was growing, and it needed to be excised.

The door was open, as of course M had known it would be. The entry was unfurnished, as was the room beyond it and the room beyond that, empty except for tobacco ash and dead soldiers and the artwork that caked the walls and the floors and also the ceilings—a stunning and unstable panorama that M made a point of trying not to look at too closely. In the third room there was a foldout couch. On top of it were a banker type wearing a sport jacket and tie but no pants and a lithe, dark-haired youth of striking and effeminate beauty who scowled hard when M came in, possessive of the flesh with which he was intertwined. Above them was a reproduction of “The Birth of Man” with David Bowie standing in as God. M kept walking.

In the small kitchen a girl cooked breakfast half dressed. She was willowy and fair and stunning-looking and clearly not yet twenty. Pink nipples were clear against her white cotton undershirt. “Rollo's upstairs,” she said, smiling. “Would you like some breakfast?”

“No.”

“I'll make something anyway,” she said, turning back to the stove.

The art inside Rollo's room was fresh, less than a day old, so young that it didn't quite know what it wanted to be yet, a mural extending across the walls that was either a beautiful woman or the noonday sun and either way, too bright to look at directly. Rollo was wrapped in a sheet below it, sleeping soundly on an eggshell pad. M crouched down and lit a cigarette and looked at Rollo for a moment without saying anything. He seemed younger than he had the last time M had seen him.

“Hello, Rollo.”

Rollo's eyes were bright green when they opened, and his smile was authentic or seemed to be so. “If it ain't the boogeyman himself.” He wasn't wearing a shirt, and his chest was sallow and fleshless. He had long leather gloves over both his hands, unusual sleeping attire in any bed M had ever shared.

“Were you maybe thinking of putting on pants today?”

“I guess if it'll make you more comfortable. Go grab yourself some coffee, I'll be down directly.”

In the kitchen, the girl whom M was a little bit in love with was cooking up a storm. Eggshells gathered atop coffee grounds, potatoes bronzed and onions fried, severed orange halves awaited exsanguination. It was unhygienic but appetizing. The dark-haired boy and his playmate were sitting at the counter, the latter looking blank-eyed and lost, like he'd just come off the line at the Somme. When Rollo came down a few minutes later, he kissed each in turn, on the lips but not quite passionately, informed the girl that he would “take breakfast in the garden,” then led M through a back door.

Outside a small jungle grew in the shadow of the neighboring apartment buildings. Lengths of ivy climbed up the glass and steel, thick roots the size of M's arms. A baobab tree offered abode to a chittering pack of golden-furred monkeys, diving and gamboling and almost laughing, though, of course, man alone was given the capacity for laughter, uneven recompense against his foreknowledge of death. If you stared straight up, you saw the normal Manhattan sky, but if you were looking at something else—at one of the tricolor parrots that chirped away in the tree, or at the foreign, pear-shaped fruit at which the birds gnawed, or at Rollo himself—then you would have sworn above you was the eternal blue sky of the Pampas, or the Garden Route down Africa way.

“Christ, Rollo,” M said. “How much of that shit have you been doing?”

Rollo shrugged. “I don't really keep track anymore.”

“The entire house is painted with it, you can smell it from five blocks away. You think that day trader has a family he should maybe go back to?”

“I'd always heard that day traders reproduce asexually. Cut off a finger and throw it in a pot of water and wait a week.”

“I bet they're wondering what happened to him. I bet they've called the cops. I bet they've put up posters.”

“Calm down. He's only been here a few days.”

“How much has he seen in those few days? Enough to put a fissure right down into the center of his brain. And he isn't the only one, either. A few more weeks and we're going to have Burning Man taking place in Lower Manhattan.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“It would be terrible,” M said, as he did not at all like Burning Man, “although happily it's an impossibility, because if you don't shut down this little circus you're running, the next visit you're going to get is from the White Queen, and she won't be sitting down for breakfast.”

This did not seem to interest Rollo very severely, at least not nearly as much as the soft weave of the dandelion he was holding. His Lower East Side Lolita came out carrying a tray with two plates of huevos rancheros, two cups of coffee, two cups of freshly squeezed juice, silverware, and a bottle of hot sauce. She set everything down and kissed Rollo on the forehead. “I'll be in the front room. Call if you need anything.”

“She's very pretty,” M said, after she had left.

“Hannah?” Rollo nodded happily. “She's a darling, just as sweet as God's grace.”

“What did she look like before you found her?”

“So far as as I'm concerned, exactly the same.”

“And when it runs out? When midnight comes and she goes back to being fat-assed and sad-eyed?”

“Who says it has to run out?”

“Everything runs out, Rollo. You can only keep the tinsel up so long.”

“Then she'll have had her few shining moments—how many can say that even? You worry too much about the future.”

“You're the only person who thinks that.”

“How are the eggs?”

“Fucking incredible,” M said, unhappy and unsurprised. In Rollo's state, beauty and pleasure accrued naturally around him; any creative gift would be enhanced. That very pretty black-haired boy would be on a top-twenty list within five years time, and a very pretty black-haired corpse five years after that. He had that look to him that they all got when they'd been around Rollo too long, beautiful and damned.

Rollo didn't eat any of the eggs or drink any of the coffee, but after M had done a fair bit of both, he started to talk: “Heck, M, you know me. I'm not trying to make any trouble.”

“Just seems to find you?”

“I liked the look of the building,” he protested halfheartedly. “If it's such a problem, I'm happy to blow town.”

“I think that would be best for everyone.”

“Or at least I would if I could.”

“How much are you in for?”

“More than I can pay.”

Which wasn't much of a surprise. Enough bliss to ink half the building, enough bliss to grow this garden cheek by jowl with reality, to push it out like a cuckoo does a rival's egg. M saw now that the things he had thought were monkeys shifted color against the tree, and were those little nubs going to be wings some day soon if Rollo didn't leave Lower Manhattan? Yes, M thought that they were. “I'm a bit light at the moment,” M said. “And while I appreciate the personal bonds of loyalty between a dealer and his client, under the circumstances it might be best if we solved both of our problems by having you disappear.”

For the first time in the conversation Rollo looked a bit chagrined. “I'm afraid I've given . . . guarantees.”

“Guarantees?”

“Hair and fingernails.”

M pushed his plate away in disgust. “What the hell is the matter with you, Rollo? Hair and fingernails? Did you sign away your firstborn as collateral? You didn't have a true name you could tell them?”

“There was a project I was working on,” Rollo said. “I needed a few cans.”

“A bathtub, more like. A child's fucking swimming pool.” It is as wise to argue with an addict as it is a madman, or the sea. M chewed over his tongue a while and smoked a cigarette. When it was done, he ashed it into the verdant jungle grass and stood. “Let's go meet your man.”

Rollo took him on a side route back through the house and onto the street. They stopped in one of the antechambers, where Rollo had crafted a
pietà
that took up most of the room and somehow space beyond that as well. “What do you think? I put it up yesterday.”

“It's the most beautiful thing that I've ever seen,” M admitted unhappily.

It was a long subway ride up to the Bronx. Rollo smiled at babies and flirted with old women. Between 66th and 110th Streets, a group of Latino
youths demonstrated a limited grasp of break dancing for the dubious pleasure of the passengers, dubious save for Rollo, who found the exhibition a source of toddlerlike joy, got up from his seat, and took part enthusiastically if not with any great skill.