City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (66 page)

But still he did not go, and she could not leave him. Instead, she came back out, to Coney Island and one more weekend together. She leaned in closer, hooking an arm through his as their airplane sailed through the immaculate autumn air.

He got off the train, and lifted his face instinctively to the sea air—a slender, inconspicuous man now, in a conservative black suit and black bowler. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Whitey and Louie the Lump, waiting for him. He waved them on with a small, impatient gesture, and strode with the crowd into the Pavilion of Fun.

He stood there in the middle of the park, taking everything in—the booths, the rides, the endless, winding line for the Steeplechase under the beaming idiot’s face:
STEEPLECHASE—FUNNY PLACE—STEEPLECHASE—FUNNY PLACE
. He dropped his hand into his coat; fingering the rubber-handled Iver-Johnson .32 hidden deep in the inner pocket. Looking over every face, making sure that nothing got by him.

Sigmund Freud was jostled rudely forward by the big holiday crowd. All around him were the lowest types imaginable, waiting impatiently for their turn on the horses. Sailors with their tarts, seedy clerks with women still in bathing suits. Already pawing and groping at each other, unable to contain themselves before they got to the ride.

The park was astonishing in its sheer, unabashed vulgarity. The constant, nauseating smell of fried food, putrid shellfish and beef on a spit, and corn cobs. An incessant racket of bands, and reedy organ music.

“A magnified Prater,” he sniffed to Ferenczi and Brill, referring to the cheesy midway in the Vienna park—but the Prater was like a summer garden party compared to
this.
Everything louder, bigger, more hysterical—more
American.

At least it gave him some time to think, away from Jung—now zealously swimming his hundred laps, back and forth between the guideposts out in the surf. Since their aborted analysis at the Columbia clinic they had patched things up, at least on the surface. Jung had renewed his vow of fealty. He had offered again to go first at Clark, with the case of his daughter, and so introduce the delicate notion of child sexuality.

Freud had accepted all this with a show of equanimity. It wouldn’t do to break things up now—not over here, on the verge of their greatest triumph. They both understood that. Yet how real was any reconciliation? How long would it last back in Europe, with its incessant cant about national culture? Just how loyal could he expect Jung to be—under such mystical influences?

The reedy noise from the organ pipes swelled up again, making any further, coherent thought an impossibility. Freud tried to say something to Brill and Ferenczi—then held his hands up over his ears.

“I must have been mad to think I could make myself heard in this place—”

Big Tim Sullivan reached the park by sunrise and let his arms hang down to laugh. He had been walking all night, after they had eased the body of the boy away from him, and his shoes and clothes were covered with the dust of Brooklyn, but he didn’t mind. He stood waiting patiently for the park to open beneath the Angel of Creation, idly admiring her huge, perfect breasts.

A guard with a great white handlebar moustache marched up officiously to open the gate, blinking to see him in the early morning sunlight.

“Well, little fella, can’t wait to get in for the roly-coasters, can you?”

“It looks like, a great day for it,” Big Tim beamed.

“Well, sure!” the guard laughed, taking him for a bum. “Sure it is—if you got two pennies to rub together!”

Inside, a long line of cash girls marched past him to work in their immaculate white academic gowns. A tall, serious-looking Negro strode by to the powerhouse, wearing a wizard’s robe and a hat decorated with little crescent moons and stars and planets.

There was so much to see, but for now he just wanted to get to the ocean. He walked out through the park—stooping to carefully remove his dust-covered shoes and silk socks, before he stepped onto the pristine sand.

I spotted him over at Steeplechase. It was just luck I saw him at all, I was only over there looking for her and there
he
was: Gyp the Blood, large as life. Standing in the middle of the pavilion, turning in a slow watchful circle—looking over everything with the confidence of a man setting up his shot from a duck blind. His goons hanging back just behind him, obviously chafing for action—

A few more seconds and he would have had me. He was already looking over the crowd just to my left, taking in absolutely everything, the way he did. His eyes slowly, inexorably turning my way.

I jumped behind a sausage stand, sunk as low to the ground as I could get.

All I thought of was escape. I could have tried to warn him—warn
them.
But all I thought about under that relentless gaze, searching the crowd like a spotlight, was getting back to The Little City. It would be like a house of straw before him, I knew—yet where else for this little piggy to hide? There was safety in numbers—or at least hostages. Besides, he could never get past Carlotta. She simply wouldn’t let it happen—wouldn’t let even him disrupt her dream, her kingdom.

I crept away—out through the bungholes and the crawl spaces only we know about, back to The Little City as fast as my pathetic little legs would carry me. I went home to my queen. I needed her—needed her to protect me, needed her blind, unyielding madness to save me.

Freud was mounted on the mechanical horse, arms thrown around its neck like a little boy, barely able to get his buttocks down on the saddle. It lurched off at a terrific speed and he clutched desperately at his hat and walking stick, stomach churning with each dip, up and down the serpentine course.

The park spun dizzily by below him. He looked away—to see the sailor openly fondling the woman sitting in front of him. Unbuttoning the front of her dress, squeezing and sliding his large hands up and down over her soft, malleable breasts. She wriggled back against him, thrusting her bum up off the horse.

All around him, couples on the other horses rubbed and bumped against each other, all but copulating publicly, oblivious to anything else. Behind him, he could see Ferenczi watching them, too, his mouth hanging open. They rode like satyrs on the mechanical horses—wild as the steeds in his nightmare painting, teeth bared, nostrils flaring. All around them the coarsest, most abandoned public behavior he had ever seen, even in the army brothels, when he had done his reserve duty.

At the finish, he dismounted with trembling legs, pulling down his jacket, brushing the filth of the ride off him. He hurried off, not even waiting for Ferenczi or Dr. Brill—mortified to even be seen in such a place. He pulled his straw boater down over his head—looking up only just in time to see a dwarf in a harlequin’s outfit blocking his way, the little man’s hands hidden behind his back.

“Excuse me.”

He tipped his hat, moved around the grinning dwarf—and promptly felt a paralyzing pain in his buttocks. He spun around to see the dwarf dancing around him, waving the cattle prod madly around above his head.

He leapt desperately forward—anywhere, away from the mad little man—and landed on a grate that emitted a sudden blast of air that sent his hat flying. He went scrambling after it, but it evaded him now as if it were pulled along by a string, skipping from one blowhole to another. He dropped his walking stick, picked it up, dropped it again, groping forward to grab at the elusive hat where it lay along the boards.

Scrambling along on his knees, he heard a burst of harsh, convulsive laughter—and looked up to see a whole arena full of people, bleacher after bleacher of them, pointing and laughing at
him.
Somehow, he was all alone before them on a stage—on his knees, scrambling for his hat—the laughter growing louder and louder around him.

He straightened up, then leaned down with as much dignity as he could muster to retrieve his hat—carefully keeping his
derriere
turned away from the audience—and instantly felt another, agonizing pain. The demented dwarf bringing the cattle prod this time right up through his legs and along his genitals—Freud skipping and hopping wildly forward like one of the policemen they had seen in the movie on the rooftop garden, swatting vainly at the little man behind him while the crowd went wild.

Gyp stopped at the rows of animal cages in Dreamland, to mop his brow and take his bearings. At least Louie and Whitey were keeping back, as ordered. They were still conspicuous as canaries in their gaudy red and yellow gangster suits—but then he only needed them for insurance. Anything important, Gyp intended to take care of himself.

He rolled a cigarette and lit it, watching the animals in their cages. The crowds pushed right up to the bars, spitting and poking at the animals with the ends of their walking sticks and umbrellas, forcing the creatures back. The big cats, the panthers and lions and tigers, padded back and forth in the shallow recesses of their cages, growling fearsomely, muscles rippling in the bar-striped sunlight. And at the end of the row was an impossibly small cage that held a great gray elephant. The beast had no room to do anything more than march obsessively up and down in place—its eyes huge and yellow, and filled with a fathomless, mad fury.

Here the crowd was particularly thick, a couple of boys amusing themselves by sticking things in the elephant’s trunk—old cotton candy sticks, dropped ice cream cones, anything at all they found on the ground; seeing if it would eat them. A sign over the elephant’s cage read dramatically, stand back! mankiller!—but they seemed to have no fear. They planted them in the palpitating, nostrillike openings right at the tip of the trunk, then dodged back, giggling.

Gyp remembered his last dream, down in Mock Duck’s basement, reeking of damp wool and sweat, and perfumed smoke. How he would prefer to be down there now! Floating in that clean, clear place instead of performing this chore, satisfying as it would be.

Fook Yuen—Fountain of Happiness. Li Yuen—Fountain of Beauty

“We found the place,” Whitey said, coming up to him.

“We found it—The Little City.”

Gyp shook off his daydreams, dropped the half-finished cigarette to the ground, grinding it under his heel. Down by the elephant’s cage the boys were still dodging back and forth, the beast trumpeting madly at something they had fed it.

“All right, then. Let’s go see about our little friend.”

The psychoanalysts limped back over to the bathing pavilion to meet Jung, who looked fit as a seal in his sleek black bathing costume.

“Physical activity—there’s nothing like it, doctors!” he crowed, pumping his arms vigorously, showing his big, gravestone teeth, the eyes that were mere slits behind his pince-nez. “It’s as important to the mind as anything else! Strength through health, you know.”

“Yes, we’ve just been riding ourselves,” Freud said dryly.

“Oh, Carl, you should have seen what we’ve been through!” Ferenczi started, but Freud quickly suggested they get lunch, unable to bear the idea of Jung picturing him in such a humiliating, infantile position.

“There’s a likely-looking place—”

Brill ushered them over toward a large, elegant sign marked only “To the Roof Gardens.” A long line of dignified men and women were making their way to an elevator in a glass pavilion. More of the same vulgar crowd he had seen at the horse ride stood around gawking, but they made no move to join the line—which Freud took as a good sign.

“This must be a decent place, at least.”

They entered the glass elevator, crowding in with a dozen others, all politely silent. The door closed automatically, the elevator rose halfway to the roof—then came crashing back to the ground so hard Freud could feel his teeth rattle. They were all thrown together, the elevator listing halfway over on one side; the other passengers falling on Freud and Jung, Ferenczi and Brill at the back of the car, nearly crushing them.

The side panel of the elevator had at least lurched open, and they scrambled out on their hands and knees—Freud amazed they hadn’t all been killed.

So they are fallible, after all, this race of mechanical giants!
For a moment he felt oddly triumphant, even as he dragged his body out of the elevator, stepped over the side to the floor, at last—and promptly went skidding onto his ass.

He tried to rise—only to feel his legs go out from under him again, sliding helplessly in opposite directions. He put a hand on the floor to try and steady himself—and brought it up covered with grease. The whole floor, greased, save for the little path directly in front of the elevator.

On purpose!

All around him, Jung, and Ferenczi, and the other passengers were slipping and sliding, windmilling their arms wildly; Dr. Brill apologizing profusely even as he floundered and fell on his face. Outside, beyond the glass, he could see the vulgar crowds, laughing and pointing, already looking ahead to the next elevator.

I knew there was something wrong as soon as I got back. The streets were all empty, the whole city deserted as a graveyard—but that was to be expected. It was a Saturday, and everyone would be working the extra matinee, over at the Big Tent.

The Town Hall—
my
Town Hall—was wide open, though—the windows and shutters open, doors flapping slightly in the breeze as if someone had just turned the whole house out for a spring cleaning. I bolted upstairs, calling for my queen. Calling her name—

I couldn’t find her. Every
trace
of her was gone: the trunks packed full of elegant little doll’s dresses. The immaculate, miniature hairbrushes and the tiny, delicate vanity. Even the royal bedsheets and quilts, with their imperial, embroidered
CR
.

All gone. The music was starting up at the Big Tent, and it occurred to me she might be over there, already warming up for her daily identical performance. I pushed open one of the fine, tiny windows in the upstairs window, looking out toward the tent, in the square of the immaculate model town.