A City Dreaming (29 page)

M mostly just scowled.

They disembarked at one of those stops in the Bronx that might be anywhere in the city or anywhere in the Western world, for that matter, faceless and indistinct. M followed Rollo down a few blocks of sidewalk overpasses and blank asphalt, stopping at one of the anonymous hundred-unit apartment buildings. Rollo buzzed a number. A voice answered. Rollo spoke briefly. The door opened.

The elevator wasn't working, so they were forced up the stairwell, near-lightless and well-defaced. Some of the graffiti were tags, jerky and incompetent or sweetly curved. Some of the graffiti were slogans, coarse gibberish regarding the habits of the neighborhood girls, lyrics to rap songs. Some of the graffiti were stick-finger cartoons of the pornographic variety. And some of the graffiti were incantations written in a language that had not been spoken aboveground since before the last ice age, strange symbols that seemed to fade when you stared at them.

“What do you know about these guys?” M asked.

“They're good people. Nice folk all around.”

“Then they would be the first friendly drug dealers I've met in a spare century of using narcotics.”

After what seemed to M, whose regard for physical activity was less than overwhelming, a very long time, they came finally to the correct floor. Rollo led M down a long, not particularly well lit hallway, stopped at one of the doors, and knocked loudly.

The man who opened it was short and stout and sad-eyed, and M did not find that he hated him right off, which was disappointing. It was always easier when you could loathe a man, when you found his existence such an affront as to want to move swiftly into violence. But this one looked like he could have been a pen salesmen or a professional mourner. A child was crying in a nearby room, another reason that M did not want to have to do anything too permanent to him.

“Rollo,” said the man, less than smiling.

“Arturo, sorry for the short notice.”

“Not at all,” Arturo said, but he gave M a long stare that did not seem overwhelmingly friendly, an impression reinforced by the thin, scarred Latino standing behind Arturo and carrying something that looked like a sawed-off shotgun except the hammer was a scorpion's tail and the barrel—at that moment, happily, pointed away from everyone—was a dried snake.

Another thing that M liked about Arturo was that he did not start fast and heavy with the pleasantries, which is something you normally get with drug dealers, sweet-mugging you like a letterman at junior prom.

“Who's your friend?” Arturo asked.

“I'm M.”

“Just M?” asked the one holding the gun.

“You can call me Martha, if it'll give you something to do.”

It was one of those typical, horrible New York apartments where the kitchen is a diagonal line drawn down the center of the living room, where tile meets carpet like ocean meets the sand. There were couches and chairs. M waited for Arturo to choose one, then sat down opposite him. Rollo did a lotus on a divan in the corner, gloved hands resting on his knees. The man with the gun stayed in the kitchen.

“You stop by to pick something up?” Arturo asked. “We got a special arrangement with Rollo, but I could see my way to decanting a few fingers of bliss for a friend of a friend.”

“Is that what I am?” M asked.

“I'm hoping so.”

“I'm hoping so too, Arturo. I'm hoping that very much. I'm hoping that we can part today having shook hands and traded phone numbers. I'm hoping to invite you to Christmas dinner and the bris of my firstborn son. But mainly I'm hoping that you're going to forgive Rollo his debt and hand over whatever assurances he's offered you.”

“I'm afraid those desires are mutually contradictory.” Arturo would have been a good inquisitor, back when that was a job that a person might have—bereft of sadism but lacking utterly in compassion, the sort who would pull out nine toenails but leave the tenth untouched.

“Who the fuck are you, man?” the one with the gun asked, not quite angry but moving in that direction. “Coming in here and playing king?”

“I told you,” M said. “I'm M.”

“I know who you are,” Arturo said quietly, before settling his muscle with a look. “But I didn't know you were you so close with Rollo. Are you so close with Rollo?”

“I'm sitting here, aren't I?”

“Do you know what bliss is?”

“Yes,” M said, “but I suppose you'll tell me anyway.”

“You ever meet one of those things that seem a little bit like people but really aren't that at all? You ever meet a concept wearing human skin?”

“I've had some experience with them.”

“Bliss is what they leave behind after they've visited their worshippers or their enemies, the little bit of residue that remains on their altars, in the ceremonial cups of wine and the bodies of their sacrificial victims. Spirit cum,” Arturo explained, the vulgarity casual and unexpected. “Spirit blood, spirit breath.”

“Such was my understanding.”

“Not so easy to find one of those things these days,” Arturo said. “Not so easy to summon it. Not so easy to placate it once you've got it in place. Not so easy to ask it to leave in a way that won't make it angry. Not so easy to harvest what it leaves behind. Not so easy to transport it.”

“Sounds like a rough business. You ever think about maybe opening a salon?”

“Infrequently. Point being, it's a lot of trouble to get even a little bit of bliss—and we've been giving quite a lot of it to your friend these last months.”

“So what does he owe you exactly?”

Something passed between Arturo and Rollo. “Rollo's an artist,” Arturo explained, still looking at Rollo. “And an artist needs a manager.”

“So that's fifteen percent of nothing, or have you not noticed that our dear Rollo is an indigent?”

“We have faith in our long-term yield. Regardless, we're convinced that it's in everyone's interest if Rollo continues as part of our stable for the foreseeable future.”

“Not everyone. Where you live, Arturo?”

“Where does it look like to you?”

“To me it looks very much like the Bronx, but I must be mistaken. Because the White Queen owns this part of the Bronx, as everyone knows. And one thing about the White Queen—we're personal friends she and I, so I can tell you—she would not be happy to see a pocket existence take root in the Financial District. She wants Rollo gone, and she doesn't care about any deal you may have made with him. Another thing about the White Queen: She's not the White Duchess, or the White Lady, or the White Princess even; she's the motherfucking White Queen. You understand what I'm saying?”

“I think I might.”

“She's the top dog, she's the stud bull, she's the one and only,” M shrugged. “She's one of two, anyway. I'm not sure if I think you're a smart guy yet, Arturo, but you can't be dumb enough to suppose yourself in a position to take a shot at the title.”

“I don't think that.”

“I'm happy to hear it.”

“But you aren't the White Queen.”

“Not the adjective or the noun.”

“And if the White Queen is so concerned about your boy in the corner, then why didn't she come and visit us herself?”

“Because she likes to see us peons dance. It's a preoccupation of royalty. I can assure you, however, if things don't get wrapped up to her satisfaction she'll make time for a visit.”

“Wrap things up like maybe kill the two of you? Would that be wrapping things up so far as the White Queen would be concerned?”

“Death has a certain finality to it—though you'll find you won't get much for two corpses.”

“You'd be surprised some of the people I know,” Arturo corrected. “But most importantly I'd be getting the satisfaction of knowing that I didn't get fucked over by a cleft-assed faggot and his big-talking, empty-chested partner.”

M waited a while for the threat to spread to the far corners of the room. Then he asked, “Got a pen?”

“What?”

“A pen. Or a pencil. A writing instrument of any sort.”

“You planning on putting down a number? I told you, it's not about money. Rollo and I have an arrangement.”

M stared at Arturo for a while, who sighed finally, looked over at his boy in the kitchen to make sure that someone was still paying attention, then went into a corner and got a ballpoint from a desk. He gave it to M, who, in the interim, had managed to find a cocktail napkin that had been hidden about his person. He doodled on it aimlessly, or seemingly so. “You ever kill a chicken, Arturo?”

“Only in the figurative sense.”

“Thing about chickens is that they don't like being killed.”

“Clever creatures.”

“To a point. Anyway, if you're by yourself, and you need to kill a chicken, there's this little trick you can do: Hold their necks down and draw a line in the dirt.”

“And?”

“That's all. The chicken goes numb when it sees it, insentient. That's when you make with the butcher knife.”

“A fascinating digression into homesteading, but . . .”

“Nothing organic runs straight, you ever notice that?” M continued, attention focused on the picture he was drawing. “Crooked or curved or bent, but never straight. You show a chicken a straight line, you're exposing it to a conception of reality that its mind has not evolved to comprehend. The resultant comatose state is a kindness, a blessing, a defense to avoid pondering matters that would otherwise break its machinery. Follow?”

“I follow.”

“People are no different. Do you understand how big the universe is, Arturo? Or that behind and inside and all around it is an infinite set of universes of the same scope? Or that there is something beyond that also, something that no human words could hope to express? What if there were a symbol that could transmit this understanding to you in one sudden and blinding flash, as the line does to the chicken? Which would flood your mind with revelations such as to blank the very canvas of your soul—not, like the chicken, for a few blissful seconds, but for the remainder of your life, a span
that would surely seem an infinity to you, drifting endlessly between fragments of eternity?

“And what if,” M said, capping his pen and putting it onto the table and holding the cocktail napkin up, faced away from Arturo, “I just finished drawing that sign? Do you think you would want to look at that, Arturo? Do you think that you could avoid looking at it before your man puts two in my back? Do you think that whatever Rollo's lost you is worth taking that sort of chance, with your kid crying in the next room?”

A girl, M could tell in the silence that took hold then, her wailing for a long moment the only sound that could be heard, apart from the hum of the refrigerator and the distant bleating of sirens.

“Is that what's on the napkin?” Arturo asked.

“Could be.”

“Then how come you can look at it?” the gunhand asked.

“Maybe I'm lying,” M said, “or maybe I'm the sort of person who remains unfazed by the face of God. If I was the latter, I bet I could get to you before you managed anything with that cannon.”

Arturo's sad, hard, heavy eyes stared at the coming conflict unblinking. “This is where we're at with this?”

“It would seem to be the case.”

“He worth that much to you?”

“That would also seem to be the case.”

“Who's going to make me whole?”

“I don't know that anyone can do that for anyone,” M said sadly. “But if you contact the White Queen, she might see her way to peeling off a few bills.” Which would bring M's compensation for the afternoon back down to nothing, but he hadn't really supposed he would get through unscathed.

Arturo looked at his man in the kitchen. His man in the kitchen looked at M. Rollo looked at the wallpaper and smiled softly.

“Done,” Arturo said.

On the windowsill was one of those garish votary candles that you can buy in the Latino section of most grocery stores, except this one had a picture of
Santa Muerte
floating over a pile of decapitated skulls. M held the napkin over the flame, then blew the ashes softly out into the late afternoon.

•  •  •

When they got back to Rollo's pad, what would become his going-away party was steadily building steam. The wispy blonde girl had called a dozen of her friends, brunettes and gingers and green-haired pixie-cut queens of hipsterdom. The smell of marijuana almost overpowered the synesthesic overflow of the bliss. Rollo gave greetings all around but bopped on past, up the stairs to his room, then out the fire escape. M followed in train. Out on the roof, the sun hadn't quite yet given up the ghost, the last dim rays illuminating the concrete. Rollo slipped on his sunglasses. M rolled a cigarette and started to smoke it.

“What was on that napkin?” Rollo asked.

“A smiley face,” M said, which might have been the truth. “Where you going to go?”

Rollo shrugged. “San Francisco, maybe. Or Pondicherry. New York in the summer is the pits, anyway.”

“And when did you hear I was back in town?”

“A month ago.”

“She's predictable, the queen. Likes to have problems taken care of but doesn't like to dirty her hands. I guess you figured all you needed to do was get a little loud, make a little trouble, and she'd send me out to put things right.”

Rollo took the cigarette out of M's mouth and shifted it into a smile. He spread his arms out to encompass the street below them and the horizon beyond that. “I missed you. Shit if I didn't miss you. Do you remember that time with Janice, when we all took peyote and wandered around Central Park, and we met that couple that was about to break up, and Janice convinced them to get engaged?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think they went ahead with it?”