A City Dreaming (33 page)

“This place is dead,” Bucephalus intoned. His bass came keenly through the club music, though he didn't seem to make any particular effort. “Let's move.”

And move they did, nestling themselves into Bucephalus's waiting Cadillac and jamming across the bridge. Midway through the ride, the ecstasy seemed to start to wear off, or at least M no longer felt so ecstatic. Bucephalus pulled over on a quiet street in Park Slope, brownstones silent so late in the evening. Emerging from the shadow of an elm tree a uniformed valet opened the door, nodded with submissive familiarity to Bucephalus, took his keys, and drove around the block. His partner led them inside.

It was not the first orgy M had attended, but it was the most elegant. There were mirrors and black silk. In the corners and in the alcoves and in the coatroom and on the light fixtures, people were doing things that M had never thought to do to anyone before—enthralling and horrifying perversities etching away at the nonchalance all modern people are supposed to hold about the act of sex. He wondered which of these burrs would take root in the fertile filth of his mind. That was the way of things, wasn't it? Nauseating, then forbidden, then erotic, then banal.

Bucephalus, M felt, had long ago reached the last stage, overlooking the proceedings with something that bordered on contempt. “Why did you bring me here?” M asked.

“I like you, M,” Bucephalus said. “But you're a faggot.”

“Is that a proposition?”

“You dip your toes, but you don't plunge in.”

“I like to test the waters.”

“Faggot, like I said. You don't trust yourself to come back.”

The party was like the bottom half of your mind sawed off and presented on a platter—every lust and vice and abomination that ever flavored your dreams and nightmares, just reach out and take it. He thought he saw a woman he once loved doing terrible things with a man he once hated. He thought he saw his mother writhing in ecstasy beneath the embrace of a half-dozen men. He thought he saw the devil.

“This is what it is, M,” Bucephalus said. “Gold and shit, cum and blood,
intermixed, layered over top one another. And it won't last forever.” Bucephalus took off his sweat-stained beater and strutted into the tide. “It probably won't even last much longer,.

M was not sure if he felt that to be a good thing.

Magic is as old as the word, and the word is very old, passed down mouth by mouth during humanity's long adolescence, an eternal-seeming childhood, bereft of history or tragedy. And then someone—we won't name any names, there are statutes of limitations on this sort of thing—came up with the notion of putting some of these words, or runes, or characters, down on paper, or papyrus, or into the living rock, and everything pretty much started to go to hell. And the first of these tomes, the primogenitor of story, the platonic ideal of the book, was the Infinite Grimoire. There, in primordial script, in a testament that was ancient when Old was very young indeed, was written the knowledge of how things had once been, malleable and half-formed, inchoate, subject to the whims and desires of passersby. How things once had been and how to make them so again. In short: magic as thought, magic without ritual or chant, magic as practiced by the divine.

Supposedly, at least, for it had to be said that no one had actually seen the Infinite Grimoire since well before the fall of the Roman Empire. Of course, the fact that no one had ever seen the Infinite Grimoire did not prove that the Infinite Grimoire did not exist. Every day, or close to it, one woke up and found out that the universe was bigger and stranger and less coherent than you believed it before. But still, M hardly thought searching for it was a sound financial strategy. One drills for oil, not pixie dust.

It was good work though and strangely steady. M had been not finding
the Infinite Grimoire for years, admittedly only some small fraction of the time during which humanity, and for that matter any number of things that were not humanity, had failed to find it. And yet he still kept getting contracts for it, running down a lead by some or other bibliophile, certain that this time—this time definitely—he had the hot tip on a line to divinity.

Tannery was one of these aspirants, a minor mage with a penchant for things rare and things lost, sallow-cheeked, loose-limbed, generally clad in black. On a warm evening in early September, M found himself in the basement of Tannery's house in Queens. Actually it was Tannery's mother's house, though Tannery had been living in it for as long as M had known him, which was far, far longer than a man ought to live with his mother. M had never seen the woman, though hearing her putter about upstairs, M had formed the impression of something vast and yet somehow dainty.

Tannery was spinning punk records, and M was doing some of Tannery's coke. Tannery wasn't doing any coke, which worried M, because Tannery loved cocaine, indulged in it from when he woke up in the later afternoon till he went to bed three days later. The only time Tannery didn't do cocaine was when he had some sort of caper planned, which was, coincidentally, more or less the only time that Tannery remembered he had M's number in his cell phone.

Well, you couldn't blame him. M was a lot of trouble. Tannery was a lot of trouble also, but there was no reason to double down on misfortune.

“I've always preferred Lou's later stuff, personally,” Tannery said, which was absurd and insane, but M had a policy of not arguing aesthetics with anyone who was giving him drugs. “But I have this version of ‘Sweet Jane' that was only ever issued in a limited run on mammal skin, and I think you'll enjoy it.”

“What kind of mammal?”

But Tannery was too deep in the groove to answer. “Those licks still kill me,” he said, tapping his hands along arrhythmically. Set out on a table behind him, a vast army of fully articulated G.I. Joes reenacted the Battle of the Bulge, dozens of superhero statues standing mute witness on a shelf above them, painted pewter statues of goddesses in red leather and black vinyl.

“Yup,” M said, doing another bump.

“I got a line on the Infinite Grimoire.”

“I think I heard this one before,” M said.

“No one's heard this before,” Tannery said, visibly angered. “I had to trade three empty djinn bottles to a traveling peddler for it.”

“Not the record—that you've got a line on the book.”

“Oh. But this one's a lock, this one's for dead certain.”

“Where's it supposed to be?”

“You'll never believe it—it's been in the Library the whole time.”

“How counterintuitive,” M said. “And completely irrelevant. Finding a book in the Library, not to get all
Purloined Letter
on you, is an exercise of almost figurative futility.”

“Not if you know where to look.”

“What, like if you had a map? A map of the Library would be the size of the Library.”

Tannery began to rattle off a stream of directions, a left at Gender Theory, your third right after the hall of High Fantasy, straight on till morning. “I bought directions from Sheelba at the Bizarre Bazaar. She hasn't steered me wrong yet.”

“And what's your way inside?”

“There's a gate from the back of the main Brooklyn branch.”

“Great! I live right by there. You can drop me off on your way.”

“I was sort of thinking you'd come along.”

“Why were you thinking that?”

“Infinity doesn't interest you?”

“Have you seen my apartment? I don't have enough space for a wardrobe.” M had found a bit of used cellophane from a pack of Camels and was rolling it into a very tight tube. “Who gets to read it first?”

“It's infinite—we each get to read it as long as we want.”

“But let's say we both had to go for a dump: Who would get to take it into the bathroom?”

“I would.”

“So it's yours, then?”

“Yeah.”

“In that case, I think you ought to toss me in a sweetener.”

“You've already gone through half my stash of sugar.”

“That was just basic hospitality, Tannery. Someone comes by, you offer them a glass of water, a cup of tea, fifty or sixty dollars' worth of cocaine. You want me on a ride along, I'm afraid it's going to set you back further than that.”

“How much?”

“Who else is looking for it?”

Tannery scratched at his acne with a sudden burst of intensity. “Most of the world, I would think. We're a power-mad sort of species, M, present company excluded.”

“Let me rephrase: Who is it that you're sufficiently afraid of that you've decided you want me riding along as shotgun?”

“Falcor Khat.”

M hoovered up more of Tannery's blow and thought a while, and what he thought was that Tannery had been boondoggled, hogswalloped, was apt to discover that this Nigerian prince was not everything he had built himself up to be. If Sheelba, whom M had never met but who was not renowned for her trustworthiness, had some idea where the Infinite Grimoire was, why hadn't she gone to find it herself, rather than trade its location for something worth less than infinity? M set his teeth against each other and enjoyed the familiar absence of feeling. On the other hand, if Tannery had been able to pay Sheelba, he would be able to pay M as well. On the other, other hand, while the jury was yet out on the existence of the Infinite Grimoire, Falcor Khat absolutely did exist. He was a name known of old and not known, if it wasn't obvious, for being overwhelmingly friendly.

But then finally, on the last hand, and it had not escaped M that he was counting like Charybdis, was the fact that he had simply done too much cocaine at this point to feel fear, or really much in the way of anything but the desire to get moving, get going, make some trouble.

“Twenty,” M said.

“Ten.”

“Twenty.”

“Twelve.”

“Twenty.”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen and the record,” M countered.

Tannery sucked his teeth miserably, then said, “All right,” and went to get the money and his coat.

Tannery was that peculiar sort of person who preferred to concentrate the vastness of his wealth and resources on things that he and a select handful of associates—not friends—could look upon exclusively, which is to say that he owned a conversion van and drove it wearing sweatpants and beat-up tennis shoes. He also refused to bring along any of his cocaine, which M thought displayed a shameful lack of gallantry.

“How is it that Falcor Khat has the same information you do?” M asked.

“I'm not positive he does. But I know he's been looking for it. Why—you worried for your skull?”

“I am. I like my skull. It's got all my thoughts inside.”

“But think of the rewards! Infinite power! Eternal life! The dream of man since time immemorial!”

M grunted. Infinite power would have been OK, at least he could see how it might come in handy on occasion. But M had found that the bigger you got, the more people tried to lean on you, for favors or just to see you fall, and who wanted to deal with that? As far as immortality went, that was obviously not any sort of good at all. Who had ever met death without some partial measure of joy?

Also, the book did not exist. That was the main point, M reminded himself. Foolish to feel tempted by a mirage. Pleased with his maturity, M weathered the rest of the drive in silence.

The main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library was closed at one in the morning, so any negligent elementary students hoping to finish their reports on the first Thanksgiving were going to need to spend the intervening hours coming up with a decent excuse. Or they could just use the internet. Tannery left his van next to a
NO PARKING
sign on Eastern Parkway, which was foolish, but then again M would be walking home, assuming he survived the evening, and thus figured it was Tannery's problem should the thing be towed.

It surprised M not at all to discover that though the library had technically been closed for hours, there was a small door in the back that was still
open, and that it led to a long, hushed corridor, and then into a chamber, which was more like the nave of an immense cathedral than the checkout room in a library. Libraries—like train stations, crossroads, church belfries, and attics—are places where worlds leak together, where the Management, in its ineffable wisdom, tends not to look too closely on what goes on.

They were in an octagonal room, exits at each cardinal point leading farther into the labyrinth, and peeking down one of them, M got a strange sensation of vertigo, of endless antechambers of erudition reflected indefinitely beyond the visible horizon. The walls were partially stained oak and mostly colored leather and faded parchment and glossy newsprint, pulped paper leading up to a ceiling high above, the dust-covered rolling ladders mute testament to how rarely any of them were unshelved.

In the center of the chamber was a circular checkout desk, and at the desk, in the process of stamping a card—for the Library, like the federal government and our neanderthal ancestors, has not gone digital—was a librarian, or the Librarian, as the library was the Library. She might have been of any age between spinsterish and old maid. She was shrewish, or perhaps waspish. She resembled the sort of animal that one would not want to be enclosed with in a small area. She was not, for instance, Angora rabbit–ish, or pygmy hedgehog–ish.

M put a hand on the counter and hung his head over it. “That's a beautiful scrunchie.”

The Librarian hissed, pushed M's arm off the desk with a ruler, then pointed at an embossed gold sign in front of her that read, in capital letters,
SILENCE PLEASE
.

“That's a beautiful scrunchie,” M whispered.

Tannery finished running through the directions in his head, pulled at M's shirt, and directed him northward. “This has been a distinct pleasure,” M assured the Librarian as he left. “With luck I'll see you on the way out.”