City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (34 page)

The four hundred chosen ones stood screaming before our palace. The good citizens of our model town—drinking and brawling, frolicking and fondling each other in the town square, where they’d been ordered to assemble. Slobbering obscene ditties up at our palace—

“God save the runt! God save the cunt!”

—giddy with relief, I knew, at having survived another test of their humanity. Goaded by the very idea of a queen, a superior being who was still
one of us.
Taking full advantage of that fool’s license which is all we are ever granted.

“Don’t go out there,” I warned her. “Leave it to tomorrow, at least, when they’ve sobered up!”

“But We are their queen,” she said, beaming as serenely, radiantly as any real monarch, so that even I was overawed. I still thought it was a mistake. Just as she was about to step out onto the balcony a brown blob of some unknown pedigree came flying up from the street, plopping on the balcony like a fish out of water.

“God save the runt—“

She didn’t even seem to notice it. She walked right on out—the whole insolent mob of them falling quiet the moment she appeared.

“My good people,” she said. “My
good people—“

—though it wasn’t so much what she said, some inane speech, no more or less mad than the palaver of all royals everywhere in the real, big world. It didn’t matter what she said, even mad as she obviously was. Standing there on the balcony of our palace in her widow’s mantilla, head straight and regal as any European monarch’s, and much more beautiful, she had made us a
people
with their own, magnificent queen. Simply by believing in it, all the way, by being the regal creature she was.

“My good people,”
she said—

—and they were good. And when she finished they burst spontaneously into applause. And when she made that peculiar, chopping, guillotinelike motion that passed for the sign of the cross, they actually knelt, and bowed their heads to receive her blessing.

Then they wandered off to find their wonderful new homes. To live, for once, like real people, in a real place—even if it was wrapped up in a greater flight of fancy. They could ignore all that, for the sake of happiness.

Except for the Big Tent.

The tent was what gave the lie to it all. It was set up just off the main square, painted with clowns, and lions and tigers snarling in their cages. It was here that we all ended up. For in The Little City, everyone—the police and the firemen, the priest and the mayor and the Queen herself—
everyone
worked the Big Tent.

They took a spin or two around town in our miniature train, then they filed inside—all the usual drummers, and the cigar rollers, and the draymen. The hair weighers and the cloth cutters and the soda bottlers, plopping down their nickels to watch us perform.

There were the bona fide circus acts, of course, the jugglers and the clowns and the tiny women who twirled by their teeth from a rope. Real animal trainers who faced down cats able to devour them in a single gulp.

But mostly what they saw was the rest of us—whose everyday existence had become another act, no matter what we did or how well we did it. Every matinee and evening, the alarums would ring out, and The Little City Fire Department would come galloping to the rescue: bells clanging, men clutching stoutly to the back of their cart—a fire department that never answered anything but false alarms. Every day, some midget would swipe a purse from a plant in the crowd—and police whistles would shriek, and The Little City mounted police would come riding in on their ponies to clap the malefactor off to jail.

In The Little City, we could hear God hiccough—and laugh and jeer and spit, every day. A whole gallery full of gods, who changed with each performance.

After each show the spectators were free to wander through our town and peer into our windows. Pushing their way through our doors, stumbling through our walls—leering at every perfect, miniaturized inch, so much superior to anything
they
lived in. We would parade down Main Street, leading them back to the big tent, where the whole town assembled to sing a maudlin farewell song—voices pitched as high as we could make them, until a baritone stepped forward at the very end, dipped to one knee, and sang the chorus again in a voice as deep as the bottom of the sea. It never failed to get a big laugh.

My Carlotta presided over all this with her usual mad aplomb. She made a short welcoming speech at the beginning and the end of every show, never varying so much as a word of it. During the grand tour she would receive guests at tea in our living room, glowering impressively at them if they sat before she did, favoring them with a smile or two if they were particularly obsequious. They ate it up, shaking with laughter behind their hands. She couldn’t seem to get enough of it.

I thought she didn’t understand: no matter how good our manners, no matter how fine our conversation or how accomplished we were, no matter how much we tried to be like
them
—it didn’t matter. It only amused them that we could do such things, like a horse that does arithmetic or a bird that tells your fortune. But she was not bothered by it.

“Royalty does not lie in what other people think,” was all she would say. “Otherwise, it could never exist. The point is that they come to see Us. They acknowledge We are queen.”

I hated it. Can you comprehend what it was like—living in a world where parades were a numbing, daily grind? Where everything you do, no matter how well and how honestly, is the same endless, running joke?

All those tea parties, day after day, with a bunch of snickering shopgirls, and brick masons. Watching them squeeze themselves down onto our miniature chairs and couches, gaping at the size of our tea service. Giggling as they broke the handles of the perfect, tiny china cups off on their pinky fingers. Asking me, again and again, without fail, if I had shot a
baby
elephant to make our umbrella stand—

Not that there was anything else for me to do: I had no real duties; The Little City ran itself. The rest of my subjects didn’t mind the intrusions, it sure beat how they had lived before. They even began to take their roles seriously—the firemen working real shifts, maintaining their equipment, their fine garden hoses and three-foot ladders and adorable ponies. The cops walking regular beats, even at night, after the tourists had all gone home. The newsies hawking their papers, despite the fact that there was no news at all in The Little City.

Soon, there were even marriages. They had to be performed in public, by our own Reverend Cherubim, at the delighted Brinckerhoff’s insistence. Nobody on the circuit had ever cared whether we were married or not. We were assumed to be like the African slaves, living in a state of nature. But now, matrimonial bliss was the order of the day. Matty Brink even reminded me of our own situation.

“She thinks she’s still married to the Emperor Maximilian,” I told him.

“So tell her it’s a morganatic marriage,” he shrugged. “After all, isn’t The Little City worth a mass?”

She
took to the idea like a trouper, of course. She was a great actress, and there are no actors so mad they can’t recognize a great part. In the end we were dragged out beneath the big tent like all the rest, shriven and wed before an overflow Sunday matinee crowd.

Brinckerhoff spared no expense. It was held on the all-important opening weekend of the season. The tent was covered with boughs of lilac and myrtle—my queen in a pure white dress of lace and bows, myself in the general’s uniform of an operatic country, sky blue and canary yellow. There were twenty-four bridesmaids to carry her endless white train, a twenty-four-man honor guard to walk beside them up the aisle, toy sabres rattling at their hips.

My poor subjects: they stood around looking as dazed and thrilled as if they were at the coronation of the Czar. The firemen and the police force standing at attention in full uniform, buttons and shoes shining. The ladies-in-waiting hurling white rose petals before us.

We strode majestically up the red-carpeted aisle to Mendelssohn’s march, stride by tiny stride—the gallery gods leering and calling out all sorts of predictably lascivious remarks. Up at the altar waited the Reverend Cherubim, standing on a stack of Bibles—a chubby little fool, with rosy cheeks and twinkling eyes, who had played this part for years. He wandered through a leering, pun-strewn ceremony before pronouncing us “half-man and
all
wife”—with a great, burlesque wink at the audience.

This drew a huge laugh, as did each of the wedding presents, also opened before the crowd: a gargantuan rolling pin, right out of Maggie and Jiggs, and nearly as tall as Carlotta herself. A pint-sized bed that was really a trampoline. A tiny touring car, out of which climbed dwarf after dwarf after dwarf.

The crowd loved them all, roaring as each one was unwrapped. But the greatest joke of all was us.

I stood at the altar, dressed in my general’s uniform, and lifted the veil of my beautiful beloved. Her eyes closed as she awaited my kiss, while thousands of guests looked on breathlessly—everyone of them ready to roar with derisive laughter.

Can you imagine it? Your silliest, grandest, childhood daydreams—anyone’s grandest dreams—transformed into a great public joke. In that moment, while my mad bride stood waiting blindly to receive my kiss, I realized I had been wrong to despise my father. That there was no way, no way after all, to outstrip their mockery.

The grand reception that followed was filled with celebrities, starting with everyone who walked in off the midway and plunked down their two bits. The proprietor, Big Tim Sullivan, was there, broad, fixer’s face betraying nothing, congratulating us as warmly and sincerely as if we had been any other two, normal citizens. Even Mayor McClellan came, well-welling and smirking down at us, cruel, aristocratic smile running across his lips, fingering my golden, tinsel epaulettes

—“If my father had had you on his staff, perhaps he would have swept the field at Antietam!”—

“Yes, then all he would have needed was a spine,” I told him, but he was already moving on down the receiving line, my small voice lost among the bigger people. A hand clamped down on my shoulder.

“Very droll, I am sure.”

Brinckerhoff swayed sardonically above me, reeking of gin. He staggered, bumping a miniature plaster head of Caligula off a coffee table, to smash on the Persian carpet. He steadied himself on my shoulder, and patted me knowingly:

“You are such a funny fellow. Well, now you can get busy on the issue,” he slurred.

“Whatta you mean?”

“Oh, you were right,” he nodded. “She’s a real queen. Now it’s time for you to be fruitful and multiply—or can’t you manage that?”

I flung his hand off my shoulder, left him stumbling over his damned elephant foot—but I suppose I should have anticipated it: the royal wedding would draw only one day’s play, two at the most, in the dailies. There were too many other rough miracles in this town.

So there would be children, skipping and singing on the sidewalks of The Little City—if not our royal progeny, then someone else’s. But what would happen if they turned out to be Big? Would they be banished from our magic kingdom, along with their dwarf parents? Or would they become one more addition to the act—the tiny parents spanking the recalcitrant schoolboy who towered over them? The schoolboy turning around and spanking the parents? Oh, the possibilities were limitless!

And what would happen when there were too many children, big or small? For our model city was a contained place, circumscribed by its toy railway. There was no room to expand, and the excess would have to be pushed out into the carny streets, and the unplanned world, and how would such decisions be made?

None of my constituents seemed to care. Theirs had always been a hand-to-mouth existence; they weren’t about to start worrying now. They went on personalizing their model homes, adding on rooms, planting trees and flowers and bushes, acting like regular people. Looking forward to the winter, when the winds would rake the beach, and the breakers would roll huge and gray out beyond the piers. When all the visitors would leave, and the parks would shut down, and it would be just us, alone in our own world at the spit end of a continent.

I couldn’t stand it. That was when I started sneaking back up to the watery world of the Bowery again, after hours. Not that anyone would miss me. Carlotta was the attraction; out-and-out madness always sells better than the more subtle kind. Brinckerhoff kept harping on my failure to come up with some kind of act to match her: another tiny general’s uniform, perhaps, or maybe a stovepipe hat so I could be a pint-sized Abe Lincoln.

“If you’re not goin’ to be a proper consort, why then you’d better consort,” he warned again.

But I was tired of Carlotta’s act myself. There is no aphrodisiac like madness, but it wears off quickly. Not that she ever reneged on our unspoken bargain: I had complete access to all that perfectly proportioned beauty. Soon, though, it had no more appeal to me than the matching oak pistols or the miniature Velázquez copy above our fireplace.

She could feel her allure diminishing: like all great actors, she was sensitive to the slightest fluctuation in how she was adored.

“Do you want Us to dance for you?” she volunteered one night, surprising me, dragging her costume, wooden knee clogs and all, into the study where I was sipping brandy in my smoking jacket and pyjamas, cutting my way through Roosevelt’s latest tome about slaughtering gazelles on the Serengeti.

“We have not danced for you for a long time,” she said, and I was so touched by her offer that I let her.

It was the same, strangely mesmerizing dance she had performed for the Baxter Street Dudes that night in the Grand Duke’s Theatre. The magical transformation from mechanical doll to living beauty, back to doll again, performed as perfectly as ever, without music, and an audience of one. So moving that when she had finished, falling woodenly to her knees, I leapt out of my chair and went to her, lifting her up by her hand.