A City Dreaming (32 page)

M did not like being around when other people were not. It went against the way of things. He had spent the better part of his life happy to be exploring some third-world hellhole or distant, sun-baked wasteland, secure in the knowledge that in a trendy bar half a planet away, one attractive person was asking, “Where is M, exactly?” and another attractive person was answering, “Who can say, darling? That one's not for being tied down.”

But not being around required money, and that summer, for some reason M could not quite put his finger on, he had none, or at least not much. His savings dried up and no one came by to offer him any of the odd jobs that were his bread and butter. He had a streak of bad luck with cards that left him breaking even three straight weeks in a row. By the time the dog days had really hit, he barely had enough left to pay for rent and weed. He spent most of that August reading in bars until the sun went down and then walking home very slowly, hoping the heat wouldn't ruin his hair.

M was getting high on his front stoop, waiting for late morning to become early afternoon to become sunset to become evening. It was a Saturday, which was not one of M's favorite days, because it meant that there were more people on the streets—hipster kids sweating through their graphic T-shirts and neighborhood folk walking past shirtless, too fat or too thin, and all of them smelling. And M smelling, though he had showered twice that day.

A car pulled up, but leaning the way he was M could not see much of it, and it wasn't worth the effort to move. An immense pair of Wallabees impacted the sidewalk and walked over to M, interrupting his view of the concrete.

“Let's go,” Bucephalus said.

Straining to look up M saw his reflection in Bucephalus's sunglasses, or maybe just in Bucephalus's eyes. “OK,” he said.

Bucephalus's car was something between a Cadillac and a steam engine. It was bright as a recent bruise. It had rims like Ben Hur's rival—razor-sharp and gleaming. It had enough legroom for an NBA center and air-conditioning
amenable to an emperor penguin. They weren't using the air-conditioning, though. They were flying up Eastern Parkway with the top down, Hall and Oates blaring out of the speakers, which were, needless to say, terrifyingly loud.

Bucephalus drove eastward and eastward, farther out that way than M had ever been. There was a rumor that Brooklyn went on forever, that it just continued onward until you reached the end of the world, a flat drop into nothing. M did not believe this personally, but he could understand how it had gotten started. Finally, they stopped at one of the endless rows of projects—those strange, magnificent, cancerous contusions, monuments to naïveté long devolved into outright anarchy. Some boys loitering around the entrance hooted at Bucephalus's car, in admiration and threat. If a man is someone old enough to kill a person, then some men loitering around the entrance hooted at Bucephalus's car. They stopped hooting after Bucephalus got out, though, deflated at his very presence, made a hole for him to walk through, and stared sideways, at their shoes and the street and the sun itself.

M hadn't thought the elevator would work, but it did. The light inside didn't really, though, flickering back and forth between overbright neon and blank darkness.

“How come you never return my calls?” Bucephalus asked.

“I had a feeling I'd end up doing something like this.”

“That was a good guess.”

The elevator opened, and M followed Bucephalus down a corridor that did not smell like roses. Bucephalus stopped and banged on one of the doors, hard enough to bend the hinges.

“Who is it?”

“It's the man,” Bucephalus said. “Now open up.”

The door opened. The quarters were tiny, nasty, dilapidated. They had been furnished with things that you find out on the street, or that should have been put there.

Bucephalus brushed through quickly, M following with rather less enthusiasm.

“Who the fuck is this?” the caretaker asked. He was the sort of skinny one gets from living through a war or being addicted to narcotics.

Bucephalus pivoted the one-eighty in a flat quarter second, swelled up
like a puffer fish. “He's the motherfucker just walked in with me, and that makes him the second most important motherfucker in the room. He's gonna chill for a minute. Now offer him some motherfucking Froot Loops.”

The man shrunk his head into his shoulders. “You want some Froot Loops?”

M did not.

Bucephalus went into the bedroom and closed the door. The junkie sniffed and blinked. M looked at the couch and decided to remain standing.

Time passed uncomfortably. M began to realize that there was something very strange inside the bedroom, and living beside it was having an insalubrious effect on the man. The crack wasn't helping, but crack hadn't grown a line of gills up his neck.

“What number am I thinking of?” the caretaker asked.

“Twelve?”

“No.”

“Thirty-seven?”

“No.”

“I don't know.”

“It was twelve.”

M nodded.

“The name of the Lord is a hundred and twenty-seven syllables, and the sixty-eighth is
ba.
”

And how the hell had he learned that?
M wondered.

“I know what Cain did to Abel.”

“I think we all do.”

“But I
know,
” the man said.

When Bucephalus opened the door, M got a glimpse of vast, pale flesh, pitted like old cheese, as well as the strong scent of a woman's perfume. “Let's go,” he said.

M did not desire to dispute him.

“I can't do this much longer, man,” the junkie said as M followed Bucephalus outside.

“A few more days,” Bucephalus told him and slid a small roll of bills into his hand.

“You said that last time.” But he took the money.

Bucephalus's car had not been touched. M got into the passenger side. They did sixty out of the parking lot, eighty down the road, and a flat hundred once they hit the freeway. Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, Bucephalus reached over and opened the glove compartment. Inside were fifteen years in prison if you caught the wrong judge. He pulled out a plantain-size blunt, lit it against the tip of his finger, and puffed out fat worms of smoke like exhaust from a diesel engine. After a long time, he handed it to M.

Bucephalus barely slowed down once they hit the city, running all the yellows and most of the reds. M thought of being in the pocket like he was doing Fred Astaire to the universe's Ginger Rogers, seamlessly pirouetting past bad luck, a divinely assisted two-step. But for Bucephalus it was more like a mosh pit, with him being the biggest bull in the crowd—just plow straight into shit and make sure you ain't the one gets knocked over.

Bucephalus parked his car next to a fire hydrant in the West Village, opened his door, and exited without speaking, and what could M do but slip out as well. The next few hours were something of a blur. They drank a lot. M realized that whatever was in that blunt was not weed, or not exclusively weed, and he thought about asking what it was but decided he was probably better off not knowing. Bucephalus started and won a fight with a bouncer whom he claimed had made a crack about his indigo eye shadow, though M had not heard anything. In a small room in the back of a dive bar, Bucephalus played tic-tac-toe with what M thought was a kobold and won three times in a row despite having to go second. They bought illegal fireworks from a Mexican bodega, then ran up and down Houston Street throwing them at tourists. Later, M would have vivid memories of being bitten by a fluffy, white, two-headed dog, but checking his ankles he found neither mark nor scar. That did not mean it did not happen, of course, but it suggested there was little reason to worry about it.

Evening found M in a very fancy restaurant somewhere near Harlem, wearing a suit, which he had not previously owned and knew for certain he could not afford to purchase. Curiously, Bucephalus was dressed the same as he had been all day: baggy jeans and a white T-shirt and a chunky gold chain.
He was on his third highball—or at least there were three empty highball glasses in front of him, though he might have been far deeper into them than that.

“You ever eat dog?” Bucepehlus asked.

M discovered that his body was now lighter than air, desirous of rising up into the firmament. It could only be kept still through the sort of rigorous mental effort that left little energy for conversation. “What?”

“You ever eat dog?”

“Yeah.”

“How about snake? You ever eat snake?”

“Once.”

“Shark fin?”

“Back when it was still legal.”

“What did it taste like?”

“I didn't love it.”

“What about man?” Bucephalus asked, forking a long spur of carpaccio and chewing it over while smiling. “You ever eaten man?”

M didn't say anything. Bucephalus was just trying to frighten him. That it was working did not invalidate that fact.

When the waiter came by, Bucephalus demanded two orders of foie gras, a T-bone steak, and another highball. M ordered a cheeseburger.

“What kind of an ignorant motherfucker comes to a restaurant like this and orders a cheeseburger?” Bucephalus shook his head. “He doesn't want a cheeseburger, he wants the filet, medium rare. And he wants the brussels sprouts with bacon as a side. And he wants another beer.” The waiter nodded. It seemed that M did not have so much of a say in the matter. And indeed the brussels sprouts were delicious.

By the time desert came—raspberry cheesecake for Bucephalus and Armagnac for the both of them—gravity had regained its implacable hold on M's torso. When the bill arrived, Bucephalus paid without looking, setting down a series of crisp hundred-dollar bills in even time. He gave the
maître d'
one of these as well, and the kid who brought them their car.

Blazing south, the city seemed at once vicious and fecund—things in
the darkness howling and fucking and eating each other, creating life at a just slightly faster pace than they were destroying it. Street lamps broke the shadows playing across the face of his chauffeur, though not for long and never entirely. Stopped at a red light next to a police cruiser, Bucephalus pulled another blunt out from the dash, lit it, and blew smoke into the direction of the adjoining patrolman, who, worry-lined and on the back end of his twenty, studiously ignored the provocation. There were things out in New York that night that a man did not want to face on his own, not even with a siren and a loaded service weapon.

The bar they went to was at the top of a building a few blocks from the river, and it had a nice view so long as you pressed your face against the window. The women had bodies that looked like someone's idea of human, all tight skin and smooth curves, and M hated them and wanted them simultaneously. The men they were with he just hated, tall and broad-shouldered and vapid as the monologue of an Alzheimer's patient.

One of them, straight as a rod and dark as berry, caught Bucephalus's eye. “How you doing?” he asked, in a Spanish or perhaps Italian accent, the son of a leather-jacket magnate, held together with cocaine and hair product.

Bucephalus smiled at him and flexed his chest muscles. “Sweetness and light, gorgeous, sweetness and light.”

Gorgeous laughed and moved a little closer. M moved a little farther away.

“You new to the city?” Bucephalus asked.

“Been here since the winter,” the boy said.

“What do you think?”

“I love it,” he said, his melted chocolate eyes heavy on Bucephalus.

What's not to love, M thought, barbarism and hypocrisy nestled cheek to cheek. M had lived too long among the impoverished to have any illusions about their nobility of spirit; they were loud and ignorant and generally unhygienic, every bit as amoral and prejudiced as their social superiors and far more likely to mug you. But even so, they weren't any worse than the parasites roaming across Midtown and the Financial District—men and women who would die without ever having created anything, without ever having accomplished anything, whose sole and exclusive goal was to consume and
to consume and to consume until their shriveled black hearts gave out in one final belch of selfish ecstasy.

“It's the center of the universe,” the boy continued, “a microcosm of the world.”

And whose decision had this been, to cull together humanity in its vastness and narcissism, to distill the species to its essence, and to offer the spirit without a chaser? What ignorance, what inexperience, what idiocy was required to think that what one yearned for was more of humankind, rather than less!

M said something vulgar, which Bucephalus and his willing victim seemed to take as a suggestion, disappearing into the bathroom. M was left with nothing to do but drink heavily and think ill of the world.

Bucephalus came back a little while later, but the boy did not. Bucephalus ordered a shot and drank it, and then he slapped a C-note down on the bar. “This place is dead,” he said. “Let's get the fuck out of here.”

And M was too drunk or too bitter or too bitterly drunk to object.

They found themselves in a club, as M had feared they would. As a rule, M did not enter a club unless he was high, and he found a guy selling something that he could not prove was not Tylenol, and so he took two of them for his headache.

The music was awful, gibbering drum and beat, like the next-door neighbors fucking, the arrhythmic pounding of their four-poster against your TV wall. M bought a five-dollar bottle of water from the kid selling them, finished it, and bought another. His head began to spin. After a while he realized he was dancing. The music was incredible, the pulsing
thump-thump-thump
of existence, refined until it was as potent as ethanol, and M wallowed in a teeming crowd of flesh and sound.

A hand fell onto his shoulder, and M whirled around to embrace its owner, almost certain to be a member of that happy fraternity of bipeds to which M himself belonged, a brother or a sister beneath the moon. Best yet the hand belonged to Bucephalus, who actually
was
sort of M's friend already, M's friend in so far as he had brought M to this party, which by M's thinking was probably the greatest party in the history of human existence. “I'm on ecstasy!” M yelled happily.