A City Dreaming (40 page)

Around that point, it had started to smell, really smell, individual and distinct strands of rot, the F train at rush hour, clouds of body odor all but viable in the air, maggoty sliders left outside of a White Castle in late August, the sour plastic odor of cooked cocaine.

“Is that something we should worry about?” Stockdale asked M.

“Do I look worried?”

“You do.”

“Best follow my example.”

It got darker. The outline of M's torchlight died a few yards in front of him, and thus it was only from the change in the air that they realized the chamber they had come to was wider than the passage they had left. And it was only M's instinct—the dim sixth sense of a species long hunted—that led him to exhaust some of his draw just then, in a sudden burst of radiance that drew a scream from something inhuman and that hovered afterward in the air, illuminating the room and the monster living inside it.

Andre shrieked. Stockdale had his switchblade out in an eye blink. Boy tensed her fists. M said, “Bucephalus, this was sort of where I thought you would come in.”

But Bucephalus was already walking forward, his grin as wide as a slit throat. He cracked one knuckle after another, each twisted finger echoing like a rifle shot in the dark. The beast was eight feet at the shoulder and seemed to consist mostly of large teeth and thick, odoriferous, matted fur. At first glance, M would have said it was mostly rat, but there was a lot of crocodile in there also, as well as platypus, and perhaps some squid. It smelled like you had shoved one dead thing into another dead thing and let them stew in the sun for a long while. When it roared, which it did just then, M felt a tremble of some distant ancestral fear, a time before walls or fire or sharpened sticks, when mankind was at the mercy of anything that ran or crawled or flew.

M would have given two-to-one against the creature if there had been anyone around to take the bet.

But there wasn't, nor was there time to linger and watch the fireworks, especially because two-to-one still gave a thirty-three-and-something percentage chance against Bucephalus, which wasn't at all low, and M knew that
he would not stand a two-to-one chance against the creature or anything like that. So he hurried on, Stockdale and Boy and Andre in tow, skirting the fracas and slipping through the exit.

The last M saw of Bucephalus, he was strutting up to the thing, his proportions all wrong, his hands the size of cinder blocks and a skull the circumference of a basketball, and when he struck, a line of the beast's teeth shattered back into the depths of its maw, blood streaming out of the stumps, and the thing roared again, and Bucephalus roared as well, but louder.

The next cavern was the length of a football field and the height of a cricket pitch. The walls were covered with some faintly luminous strand of lichen, and it was shaped like an onion, the roof tapering into an open point. It seemed empty at first, the companions walking forward tentatively, knowing that they were not yet through with their trials, and by convention, the second round of a thing is never easier than the first.

There was a sound like rushing water, and a spectral smoke, bustling and burbling, flooded through the hole in the ceiling. M's eyes went wide and the lights went out and then there was only the screaming.

“—the fucking
schvartzes
taking over the entire damn city—”

“—I'm your mother, goddamn it, you'll show me some respect or so help me—”

“—Nurse? Nurse? Jesus Christ, nurse, it hurts, nurse? Nurse—”

“—I told you twice already I don't give credit, bother me again about it and I'll—”

M made a swift series of movements with his hands and then held them forward as if he were propping up a wall, and some of what he had been building up over the course of the past few weeks concentrated itself onto his open palms, and the voices went from deafeningly painful to extremely unpleasant.

Boy and Andre and Stockdale stood within M's aegis, taking shelter in the wind tunnel, clawing themselves back from the edge of madness. “Fuck, God, what was that?” Boy asked.

“It's the city, it's the city,” Andre said, seated Indian style, taking it worse than the rest of them, though the rest of them had not taken it so easy. “It's the fucking city.”

“The second guardian,” M announced.

The voices got louder, and the nimbus of soft blue light that M had settled in front of him got fainter, the frantic dark eating through it like time wearing away an epitaph on a tombstone.

“—make sure you drop the gun in the canal afterward—”

“—give you a raise if I could, Eduardo, but with the margins these days—”

“—but you said you loved me, baby, I only ever did it because you said you loved me—”

“—that's enough to pay back the interest, but it won't affect the principal—”

“Someone do something,” M screamed, and in the scant second that his head was turned, the darkness surged forward. Now the sound was like putting your head against an amplifier, and the light around M's hands was dim, very dim indeed. He gestured frantically, and the dark and the voices retreated for a moment, but only for a moment. Andre was on the ground with his hands against his ears, Boy helpless beside him, M looking pale and ghastly.

“—pretty little girl, Daddy's pretty little thing—”

“—not my problem, one way or the other—”

“—says she was too busy, but she'll get to it tomorrow—”

“—Spare a dollar so I can get something to eat? Anybody spare a dollar so I can—”

“—Do I look like I give a shit?—”

Stockdale thus far had not done much, though there was something in his motionlessness that might have suggested a coiled spring, had anyone been looking at him. Of course no one was, M's attention concentrated exclusively on keeping them alive a few desperate seconds longer, Boy trying to hold her mind together, and Andre all but lost. Stockdale hunched his head down into his shoulders and bruised his way out of M's shell, the darkness setting upon him instantly, swirling like a flock of ravenous birds, like a swarm of hate-sharpened hornets, battering him, cutting his clothes as neatly as a switchblade, streaks of blood beginning to appear on his hands and his neck and his face. But his eyes were closed and he didn't seem to notice, at least he wasn't screaming, indeed he seemed to be chanting a monotone,
gaining volume against the gloom, stilling and silencing the chaos. Long strains of multisyllabic speech, speech that in a past indistinct from legend had chained the raksashas to their hell, had brought the pre-existential anarchy to book, had given form and purpose to the primordial stew. Continuing like the
thump-thump-thump
of a good bass line groove, ordering the shadows, which bent around Stockdale now, like a dog brought to heel or a student called to attention, a solid syncopation, the pulse of the divine. And even the cruelest spirits, those fragments of memory or thought or dream that had gotten lost down in the bowels beneath the city, festering like a wound, those splinters of souls razored through with misery, mouth-foamed and foul, pulled back into the corners of the cavern.

And then Stockdale went silent as well, and there was nothing left to hear but arrhythmic heartbeats, slowing gradually.

By the time M managed to turn on his flashlight, there was nothing left to see, the little beam dipping back and forth in his unsteady hands. “I thought you were high church?”

“Only aesthetically,” Stockdale said. Boy helped Andre up from the ground, and as they moved into the next room, M could see blood running from the unfortunate Frenchman's ears, wondered again at how close they had come, and decided with firm effort to put it out of his mind. They were not through yet, M supposed, and he had already burned through most of his charge.

They entered the next cavern keyed up despite their wounds, ready to be leapt upon by some or other chimerical malefactor, by rotting zombies leaching up from the ground, by the tattered ghosts of adventurers long dead, by demons noxious and spirits most foul.

Nothing. The ground was smooth white stone. Brass braziers hung down from the ceiling, yellow light flung itself happily against the walls, smelling of camphor and rose oil. A door stood open and inviting across the room, though no one made any effort to pass through it.

“I could use a breather,” Stockdale said.

“After what you just did?” Boy answered with uncustomary friendliness. “Take all the time you need.”

“I wouldn't mind a moment myself,” Andre said.

M found himself thinking about the first dog he had ever had, bringing it home as a puppy and resting next to it by a roaring fire, long walks in the sunlit fields as it bounded by his side. What a handsome thing it had been and how it had always loved him! “There's something in here with us,” he said.

“Of course there is,” Boy added. “Did you just realize that?”

“We need to get out of here,” M responded sharply, though he made no move to follow his own direction.

“Have any of you ever had a really good croissant?” Andre asked. “I mean a really, really good one. My grandmother used to make them special for us when we would come to visit. She had a little villa near Carcassonne, and in the mornings we would sit out on the patio and she would serve croissants with apple jam and fresh milk.”

“That sounds beautiful,” Boy said, wrapping Andre's arms around her. “That sounds so, so beautiful.”

“I will take you there sometime,” Andre said, and seemed to mean it. He leaned down to kiss her, and she responded passionately. “You will love it,” he said, tearing up with happiness. “You will love it.”

Stockdale was walking back and forth with his hands held stiffly behind his back, singing “God Save the Queen” at the top of his voice. M slapped him hard across the face, but it didn't dent the grin. “You've always been a true friend to me,” Stockdale said.

I probably got you murdered,
M was thinking, but it was just about the last nasty thought he had left in him. Because he had been a pretty good friend to Stockdale, and Stockdale had been a pretty good friend to him. M started thinking about this one time when they'd both taken an impromptu trip up to Luxembourg, just the two of them, trying to figure out how to ride the pair of motorcycles they had just bought, drinking Trappist ale and eating mussels Portuguese. M shook his head back and forth as fiercely as he could, as if to give himself whiplash, and started chanting to himself, “Molotov cocktails and weeping children and the Department of Motor Vehicles and Dachau and Superfund sites and date rape and famine and the goddamned Eagles Reunion Tour . . .”

“T-shirts fresh out of the dryer,” the last guardian said happily. “A crackling fire on a snowy day. Walking along the Seine in September, the little book
dealers with their stands. The smell of a naked woman. Sleeping beneath the Southern Cross. Brazilian beaches. Belgian beer. Dutch weed.”

“I love Dutch weed!” M said, catching himself by the fingernails then, and only barely. “I am a self-obsessed pothead, sliding through the day on liquor and self-delusion. My carbon footprint is the size of a monster truck, and if I die tonight I'll be ghosting three separate women. I'm jealous of everyone all of the time, I just hide it better. I'd take what you have if I thought I could get away with it.”

“Hey now,” Stockdale said, turning toward M and looking momentarily put out. “I won't listen to any of that nonsense.” He put his hand on M's shoulder, brimming over with kindness, and M started thinking about what a good father Stockdale would have been, if any of them had ever gotten around to having children, and if Stockdale wasn't going to die soon. “It's not such an easy thing, being a man. You did all right for yourself. Better than all right.” Stockdale handed M a flask of gin that he had secreted somewhere about his person. M took a drink to his dear friend's good health, and then another one because why not? There was so much good in the world, so much to smile at, blessings uncountable.

The thing was closing in, M could feel it spackling in at his peripheries, wrapping itself around them like fudge on a gingerbread cookie, leading them, head bowed and smiling, into the coffin it had prepared. A happy sort of coffin, a coffin with silk for a lining and a down comforter to lay atop you, but a coffin all the same. Stockdale was taking long swigs from his flask and reminiscing fondly about his family, of whom M had only heard him speak once or twice, in the most terrible and frightening situations, and even then only to damn them. Andre and Boy were waltzing very slowly, a quarter turn every half minute, gazing into each other's eyes, and is there anything to compare to love? Is there anything at all, anything that has ever been built, grown or coalesced that can compare to love? Love as deep as the Mariana Trench and wild as a summer storm?

“Boy,” M said, all of a sudden. “Last week Andre called you a lipstick feminist, principles forgotten as soon as it's time to pay a check.”

Boy blinked once. Boy blinked twice. On the third blink, her eyes were back to their usual furrowed fury. “You said what?” she asked, pushing Andre away.

“Andre, I can tell you with certainty that Boy has cheated on you twice since you've been together, though I suspect the actual number is considerably higher.”

“Was it with Thomas?” Andre shook his head. “It is unreal what a slut you are.”

The sweet-natured spirit surrounding them, the kindhearted strangler, that rolly-polly murderer, flinched back a bit. “Why can't everyone be friends?” he asked, “and laugh together, and play Yahtzee maybe, and sleep quietly deep beneath the earth?”

“You think I fake my commitment to feminism?”

“Would Elisabeth Cady Stanton let a man pay for everything?”

“Not all of us are comfortable taking a job shilling for a great corporate parasite that is destroying the planet!”