A City Dreaming (7 page)

And The Lady was most definitely a place where you would be served alcohol in exchange for money. The beer selection rotated weekly but was always very solid. The cocktail menu was cute but not too cute; the finger food was edible; the happy hour specials reasonable and perhaps even a bit more than that. The jukebox was all Britpop and alt-country. M would slip in with a paperback that he could read if things were slow but otherwise operated as an effective opening line for women who were doing the same thing: “You're reading a book, I'm literate,” etc.

And of course there was Dino, thick and pasty and eternally good humored, a walking advertisement that being handsome was no great shake, at least not all the shakes worth shaking.

“Hey, Dino,” M said.

“How you doing?” Dino asked, passing over a water.

M ordered a drink with rum and honey and beaten egg whites and warm
water. It brought up his core temperature by about three degrees. Celsius, that is, not Fahrenheit.

“You look down,” M said.

Dino shrugged. It is a bartender's job to receive troubles, not pass them on, and Dino was a very good bartender. But M was a very good customer, and it seemed Dino felt comfortable opening up on the matter. “I think we're going to have to close the bar.”

This would have made a lesser man spit up his cocktail, but M was made of somewhat sterner stuff. “Fucking yuppies.”

“Not the rent,” Dino said. “At least, not exactly.”

“What's the problem?”

“There's this thing in the back.”

M thought that no thing described as a thing in the back had ever done him any good and didn't anticipate that this one would break the streak. “OK.”

“It's kind of special.”

“Like, how you mean, special?”

“Like how the bar is kind of special, you know? Think about it.”

While doing so, M realized that the first time he had come to The Lady he had taken a trolley car, a conveyance the city had, for no reason M could appreciate, long ago gotten rid of. And now that he took a moment to consider the matter, hadn't The Lady been in the Village then? But M could also distinctly remember dipping in one evening with a charming androgynous creature when he had been very, very high on uppers, and he was quite certain that it had been after coming out of a club in Alphabet City.

“I see,” M said. It was not so very surprising. There were holes everywhere, if you cared to look.

“So this thing in the back,” Dino said, “it's the reason . . . well, it's why we're the only bar outside of Belgium that can get Westvleteren on tap, and that the health inspector is always in a good mood when he stops by.”

M thought about the many oysters he had enjoyed inside The Lady. “But if he wasn't in a good mood when he came in, you'd still pass, right?”

“Anyway, the last few weeks, it's been getting kind of hinky on me.”

“Hinky, you say?”

“Hinky.”

“Hinky like how?”

“Hinky like maybe it would be easier if you just took a look at it.”

“Why me?”

Dino looked at M in a way that suggested M's reputation had preceded him.

This was not what M had been anticipating when he had walked into The Lady fifteen minutes earlier. But he righted himself from his stool all the same. Behind the counter was a trap door leading to the basement below, a steel gate just big enough for an unwary busboy to fall in and break his neck. Dino undid the bar, which was to M's mind awfully thick, and lifted it vertical. Standing next to it was a dinged-up Louisville Slugger, which Dino shouldered. “Things come out of it, sometimes,” he explained.

The one other person in the bar looked like he never left it, and when he did it was only to go to another one very close by. “You're on till we get back,” Dino said.

The drunk burped but didn't look up.

Going downstairs seemed to take a lot longer than M thought it should, though Dino didn't seem to pay it any mind. It was strange how quickly a person grew used to this sort of thing, falling into a comfortable armistice with the impossible. But it was an armed truce, and as they finally reached the basement, M was reminded why.

Things were going sideways pretty fast. The walls couldn't make up which type of wall they wanted to be, going from redbrick to cobblestone to a hideous shade of chartreuse paint. The stock likewise rotated through the preferred beverages of a dozen generations, oak caskets of grog mixing with crates of Old Milwaukee.

“How long have you had this place?”

“I bought it after I came back from the war.”

“Which war was that, exactly?”

“I rode a horse, and we were mostly still using swords.” At the back of the room was an access door, and Dino opened it and walked inside.

M could smell it before he saw it, burnt ozone and fresh gasoline and movie-theater popcorn. The thing inside was throwing off electricity, but
the electricity was neon pink and hung weblike in the air for some seconds before bleeding away into the ether. It gave M the impression of a womb and an old-fashioned toaster and a dish of lukewarm blood pudding and also of a whole host of things that ought not be layered together flatly onto one point in existence.

“I don't know what this is supposed to be,” M said, “but I don't think it's supposed to be doing this.”

“No.”

M looked at Dino. Dino looked at M.

“Free drinks for a year,” Dino said.

Nation, ethnicity, language, regional sports affiliation, the vast slate of peculiarities with which most people define themselves, these are more or less marked out for you by birth, and to M's way of thinking, there was no particular point in getting worked up over whatever arbitrary whim of fate had made you German instead of French. But a man chose his bar, and that placed upon him a more serious moral obligation than country, race, or creed. M didn't really need free drinks for a year, but a man who wouldn't fight to save his own bar, the bar he's chosen as his own bar, or perhaps which had chosen him—well, these were not ranks of which M wished to become a member.

M sighed. M scratched his head. M wished he had taken a shot of vodka before coming downstairs. “Top shelf?” he asked. “Not just rail?”

“Anything you want,” Dino promised.

The thing to remember about going into a place that
isn't
, or that
is
in an incomprehensible fashion, is to make sure to hold on very clearly to who you are, or at least who you want to be. “I am a bad-ass motherfucker,” M said, reaching out to touch the glowing womb or the old-fashioned toaster or whatever.

“All right,” Dino allowed, though by that point M couldn't hear him.

“I am an A-list, blue-label, two-fisted champion of all that is noble, upright, and sweet-smelling,” M told himself as he made his way down a road of golden cobblestones, surrounded on all sides by a lush green forest, a forest that seemed more like painted on backdrop than actual foliage. Jumping back and forth just off the edge of the pathway were anthropomorphic swarms of
characters, bright maroon 4's hopping on top of indigo capital D's. M noted their googly eyes and sharpened teeth.

“A is for atrocity,” said the first letter of the alphabet. “And also abortion, apartheid, and anarchy!”

“Me times ten thousand is the number of children who died of sudden infant death syndrome in 2015!” a smiling number 7 informed M.

“When I bebop down the street,” M retorted, “the ladies stare and moan, and the boys piddle themselves and wonder where I bought my shoes. I taught Hemingway to box and Casanova to fuck.”

M walked against the current on a moving track, the kind you see in an airport but stretching off infinitely into the horizon. Running alongside the conveyor belt were a swarm of harried passengers, businessmen trying to catch the 6:15 to Houston and nuclear families that had missed their connection to Orlando, stuck in limbo wearing Mickey Mouse hats and swelled fanny packs.

“Airline travel is a leading cause of global warming,” said a towheaded girl of about five, though with her thick lisp it sounded more like “Aiwine twavew is a weading cause of gwobaw warming.”

“On your trip to Cuba you released ten thousand metric tons of carbon dioxide!” her elder brother exclaimed. “It resulted directly in the death of two subspecies of Tibetan grasshopper!”

“My penis is moderately longer than most men of my age and ethnic group,” M observed, “and I am reasonably confident no one ever faked an orgasm in my presence.”

M was standing in the doorway of the kitchen of his childhood home. His mother had a fetus cooking in a cast-iron pot on the stove, and her eyes were open wounds. “I never loved you,” she said. “You were a disappointment in every way you could be.”

His father echoed this sentiment from his spot at the head of the table. “I wanted to kill you before you was born,” he said, “chisel you right out of her twat.” Over the checkered tablecloth a copy of
The Telegraph
read
NAZIS OCCUPY LONDON, KILL EVERYONE
.

“I wish I'd listened,” his mother responded, ladling the horror she had cooked into two bowls and setting them on the table. “Oh God, how I wish I had listened.”

“I don't ever raise my voice except when I need to,” M said, raising his voice, “and when I do, motherfuckers sprint off and hide behind whatever they can find to hide behind. If I look scared it's because I'm trying to trick you, and if you've noticed, then it's already worked.”

He was standing on black pavement in an endless night, the only illumination provided by rickety lampposts at uneven intervals, dimming and glowing as if of their own volition. “There's no point to anything,” a voice said.

“You're going to die, one way or the other,” added a second. “Probably you'll die here and soon, but either way it's just delaying the inevitable.”

“And it won't have meant nothing,” a third added sadly. “Not to anyone. And you know that, even if you won't admit it.”

M found he wasn't wearing shoes any longer, and each footfall echoed into his bones, up his legs and all the way to his spine. “I've been to every populated continent,” M said, plunging onward, though he could feel his breath getting short and his mind starting to rupture, “and who would want to go to the unpopulated ones? I once hitchhiked from Vilnius to Donostia in two days, and I never paid a fare or resorted to magic.”

The road swayed beneath him, narrowed, became a plank of wood running over an abyss. Distant drifting spheres streaked through the darkness, though as they came closer M could make out that they were attached to stalks, the little bubbles of light bait from the creatures gliding through the firmament.

“We will chew on you forever,” said one of them, the sound like the movement of tectonic plates, the rumbling of a hatred outside the scope of human ken. “And every second for us will be a pleasure.”

“We exist only to dream up torments,” the voice of an early morning DJ added, “and we've been brainstorming since before the beginning of time.”

“I once ate an entire ham in a single sitting,” M said, struggling now. “I have the high score on Ms. Pac-Man machines in twelve different countries, and one of those countries is Japan!”

This seemed to be distinctly unimpressive to the vast and cumbersome forces that existed just outside of his vision, waiting impatiently for him to stumble. But now M could see what he was looking for, a glowing switch set
eye level into the nothingness. Of course it was not this at all, only what his limited perceptions conceived of it as, but this is how M saw it and so this is how we will refer to it. To break into a run was to show weakness and thus court disaster; also, since he was not really running but passing a mental projection through an infinite nexus of alien possibilities, it would probably not bring him to his destination any more quickly. But M did up his pace a bit, as much as he dared.

And the things that did not want him to reach it began to gnash their endless rows of teeth and to moan and to howl, the sounds drowning out the echo of his feet against the bridge and the beating of his heart—but not, interestingly, his voice, which sounded weak and tinny but had not yet gone silent. “My vinyl collection is extremely solid, especially in terms of deep soul! I have several times made love to a woman on a beach! I am competent at the game of chess!”

And clearly now we were at the end of M's stock of ego, which, even to the most prideful of us, is not inexhaustible. But in the instant before being eaten by an infinite, tentacled vagina, M reached out and grabbed the lever and pulled it sharply down, and reality winked back into view.

He spent the next few minutes vomiting up unbirthed chunks of existence, formless blobs that came out as liquid and landed on the ground as parti-colored tarantulas with bejeweled wings and snotty slicks of gasoline and three issues of
Teen Beat
from the summer of 1986.

Dino ran dutifully about the room, bopping the more mobile of the creations with his baseball bat. M did not bother to help even after he had finished retching, just sat in the corner, trying to reestablish those blocks on his perception and understanding that allow a human being to maintain a semblance of sanity.

“Bar snacks too, Dino,” M said, after a few moments had passed. “As many as I fucking want.”

“Fair enough,” Dino said, splattering the brains of an anthropomorphic slinky with razored teeth. “Fair enough.”

M got a call from Andre late one Thursday afternoon. “Bonjour, my good friend! It has been far too long since last we spoke!”

“Too long,” M echoed, though that might have been a question and not a statement.

“What are you doing tonight?”

“I hadn't quite narrowed it down yet.”