City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (7 page)

My father had thought he would escape this marketplace. He had been an educated man, at Harvard, or so he said—after a lifetime in a carnival, you understand the whole world is just a story. He must have been quite a curiosity there, if he did go: a tiny, fastidious man, bustling earnestly about in his miniature suits, and cap and gown, gloriously oblivious to the sniggering behind his back.

He had studied law, thinking he could make his claim on the world. He didn’t understand;
his
parents had been normal, a dry-goods merchant and his wife from Utica—no doubt frightened by a geek during her time. It never occurred to him that knowledge of the law, good manners, a serious intention would not be enough. He had even married a big person, a dull, flaxen-haired farmer’s daughter from outside Braintree—the one girl he could convince that he had a future in society.

By the time I grew up, his greatest ambition was to make Barnum’s. Instead, we lived in a single room above one of the lesser Bowery dime museums. There was a surfeit of dwarves—always has been, always will be—and all my father could do was recite on request any line from Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens, or Blackstone’s Law, and we didn’t get many requests for that sort of thing on the Bowery.

The farmer’s daughter had left as soon as I was born. She must have known right away: by my twisted body, the grotesque shape of the head that tore her.
Good-bye, mother, good-bye! I’m only glad I hurt you while I still could.

At night, he would read to me from his books. Every few days he pulled a new one out of the traveling trunks he had stacked around the room: wonderful books, magnificent books! The whole literature of the world, jumbled together in the bottom of his trunks: Herodotus and Hawthorne, Poe and Plutarch, Milton and Mark Twain.

It didn’t matter to me what he read, as long as it was a good story. Washington Irving’s tales, or Melville, or Crane—I didn’t care. The whole world swam before me, and I loved it. I wriggled down in the little bed we shared, staring into the fire; listening to his tinny, passionate voice reading from
The World’s Great Narrative Poems
—“How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent,” and “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay,” and “The Highwayman”—

Whether or not he had ever been to Harvard, he read his stories beautifully, carefully, pausing every now and then to sip from his glass of brandy, or spoon some of the oatmeal he kept heating in a brass steamer over the fire. Stealing a look back to see my reaction before he set himself, he read as carefully as he would presenting a case to a jury—a real jury, a rapt jury, one not distracted into bouts of uncontrollable giggling by his very appearance.

During the day, I wandered through the dusty corridors of our museum—much to the displeasure of the proprietor, who resented the idea of anyone getting a look at the abnormal for free. I scuttled unobtrusively around the legs of the sailors and drummers, and the trolling whores, watching all the people I knew displayed in glass booths: the dog-faced boy and the Dahomean giant, the glass-chewers and the crayon-sketch artists and the armless wonders and the egg cranks—

Nearly everything was copied from Barnum, right down to the “Feejee Mermaid,” a dead manatee sewn into a giant fish tail, floating serenely in a sea of chloroform. The famous sign, “This Way to the Egress!!”—which seemed so clever until the day a bunch of Boston sailors nearly wrecked the place on finding themselves out in the alley.

One late afternoon I happened into a dark room where someone was showing magic lantern slides against a stretched white sheet. At once, I realized there was something different about this exhibit—something
authentic
to it. The rubes and the sailors stood rigidly, backs against the wall, their eyes glued to the pictures on the sheet.

I couldn’t make out what the pictures were at first: wondrous details of flowers, perhaps, or billowing clouds of smoke. Only after I had stared at them for a long time, again and again, did their true nature begin to emerge. They were case studies of venereal disease, doubtless filched from some doctor’s office: enormous black whorls, blooming like mushrooms, in perfect, miniature rings.

Most of the pictures were taken close up, or at least the subjects were turning their heads away, still modestly holding up a sheet, a bit of shirt over the rest of their body. But sometimes, too, the whole person was captured, staring listlessly back at the camera, faces as pitted and lifeless as their sexual organs.

I saw those faces-and those intricate, beautiful whorls and flowers-and I knew what I was. I ran out of the room, knowing then that there could be no escape for me, or the old man. We were life, too, just like those beautiful, terrible tumors, churned out by the same, offhanded perfection of the universe. We were just life, and there was no helping it.

My plan to win Carlotta came to me while contemplating the Dreamland imitation of Venice, catercorner from Hell: a perfect likeness of the Doge’s palace on the outside, as banally innocent as Hell itself inside. Here was no labyrinth of corridors, no watery, forgotten little cells—no Bridge of Sighs. Instead, there was a ludicrous imitation of the canals, winding their way around restaurant stands, and serenading quartets from Little Italy. The sky above painted the color of midnight, to hide the ceiling just above the waiters’ heads.

It was perfect: a trite, hermetic little city of our own. A new nation, of the mad and the misshapen, conceived on top of Hell, and dedicated to the proposition that all men can live in any world they please.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am small, I contain microcosms.

Matty Brinckerhoff was the one to take it to, I knew. Big Tim Sullivan was the money man, he and his partners would like it well enough once the dollars began to roll in. Brinckerhoff was the genius to sell it to them.

I knew where I would find him, even at this hour. I had sat up with him before, sweltering summer nights when I was too tired to get up my disguise for the boys’ bars, but too sleepless to lie in the arse of the Tin Elephant, listening to the whores and their customers.

He would be up there now. Up at the very top of the highest spot on Coney, the glowing white tower of Dreamland, just beneath its crowning ball, where his eagles were gathered—staring back across Surf Avenue at his lost paradise. The stunning, gold electric elevators were shut down for the night; I had to climb the whole seven flights to his office, insufficient legs trembling with the effort. I arrived panting, open-mouthed, in the incredible New York heat. Not yet dawn, and already like an oven.

“It is nearly perfect,” he said when I came in, without bothering to turn around.

He was just where I thought he would be: tilted back in his chair, legs propped up on the windowsill. His back to Dreamland, gazing out at his beloved Luna Park.

“Of course, it is not perfect. Nothing can be, that is why there is always the need to build another. But it is a great consolation to me.”

“Yes.”

Beside him was a bottle of good gin, a glass, a pitcher of iced lemon water, perspiring freely over his latest blueprints. When he was like this I knew he could go on babbling all night.

“They say I am not a serious architect, but visitors to an amusement park are not in a serious mood and they do not want to encounter seriousness. A
serious
arch is no more welcome at an amusement park than a clown at a funeral.”

“Yes.”

Was it frivolous? Silly? Amusing? Oh, yes—all that, and so much more. Even then, slumbering blissfully in the early morning gloom, with all its million lights extinguished, Luna Park looked like nothing else in this world.

It was still new then, uncorroded by time or fresher miracles. A vast ramble of trellises and hanging gardens, lagoons and turrets, flowered colonnades glowing orange and white and gold. Minarets and onion domes, roller coasters and loop-the-loops, fairy-tale castles and flying buttresses and miniature railways and huge mocking clown heads. All the world, rolled into a ball. Arab bazaars and Alpine peaks, and all the great floods and volcanic explosions and the latest wars.

And in the evening, in the electric glowing evening, it came into its own. It humbled Nebuchadnezzar and his hanging gardens, and made Kublai Khan a piker. When the lights went on it was all spinning wheels and rivers and pearls of frozen fire. Burning, burning along the sands of Long Island, burning but was not consumed.

“I had to throw all my books and plans into the ash heap, I stuck to no school, I departed from all known rules of architecture. It is no one style at all, really, but all the license in the world.”

“Yes.”

He turned to me for the first time then, but his eyes didn’t see me. His thick, dark, receding hair was frazzled by the heat, long moustaches drooping past the sides of his mouth. He dressed like a dandy but in the tropical, early-morning heat even his vanilla-ice-cream suit and green silk bowtie drooped, matching green carnation wilting in the lapel.

He pointed out toward his masterpiece.

“Everything here must be different from our ordinary experience—everything. We must manufacture the carnival spirit, in this manufacturing age, with all the will and ingenuity we are capable of. Whatever we see must have: life, action, motion, sensation, surprise, shock, speed—or at least, comedy.

“We must create a different world—a dream world. A nightmare world, if that’s what it takes!”

He paused, recovering himself, swaying a little from the effect of the gin. He ran a hand back through his ruffled hair, and drew himself up straight.

“And of course, we build for the ninety-five percent of the American public that is pure and good.”

He stopped then, his face twisting distastefully. For that was not what Dreamland had become, and we both knew it. He had realized his dream in Luna Park, all right, it was indeed like nothing else, ever—but not in Dreamland. How could he? How could it possibly have matched what he had already created—and anyway, Big Tim Sullivan’s syndicate, the money men, had insisted on something more conventional. Something solid, recognizable, relying on sheer electrical power to outshine Luna Park, and Tilyou’s Steeplechase down the street. The central tower we were standing in was immense and straightforward, a standard ball and eagle perched on top, gilded eagles running all up and down the sides—yet only one more wonder in an age that was rotten with them. Dreamland was bigger, its million bulbs glowed even brighter—but it was not fantastic.

Brinckerhoff had never gotten over it.

“I was betrayed, you know.”

“Yes,” I interrupted, before he could get started again. “Yes, I know. But I have an idea.”

He cocked his head, indicating his brief desire to listen. Matty Brinckerhoff scooped up ideas the way other men grabbed loose change off the street.

“For something that’s never been done before—”

I had his attention.

“An Empire of the Small,” I continued. “A Midget Metropolis. Just for us.”

The disappointment was visible in his face.

“Another dwarf circus?”

“No—something more. Not just some cardboard facades to knock down. A real town. A whole, permanent, year-round
city.
Everything built for us.
Scaled
for us.”

The droopy moustache and big, sad, hound-dog eyes showed signs of life.

“The real deal. No more Little Big Man Revue. A bunch of dwarves parading around—it’s been done. You can see that at any carny show in the sticks.”

He nodded slowly, and I poured it on.

“I’m talking about something more. A whole fairy city.”

“You would need everything.”

He was already pulling paper, drawing pencils, a t-square out of his desk.

“Everything—absolutely everything—”

“A miniature town hall. A precinct house. A tiny fire station with real, tiny hook-and-ladders—”

“Why not, why not?”

“A rail station. A post office. A church—no, a midget
cathedral—“

“A real palace,” I snuck in, “for a real king and queen.”

“There has never been such a thing!
A city—a real, livable city—built to your scale. The architecture of the small, and the low. Doorknobs two feet off the ground. Windows and doors that open with a child’s touch; fine and delicate as a Japanese pagoda. A masterpiece in miniature! Why not, why not—when all the world is getting
bigger?”

He was already mapping out the parameters of the town, bushy hair curling up demonically in the oven heat.

“Yes, a palace,” he murmured.

“. . . Perhaps the Palacio Nationale. From Mexico City . . . “ I suggested.

“But who would we find for such a thing? What king and queen?”

It wasn’t something he really concerned himself with. The buildings were what he loved; everything else was just props, to be filled in later.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I have somebody in mind.”

The rest of it was easy.

All it took was another trip up to the Bowery in my newsboy disguise. I waited for an appropriate moment, until after her first show was over and the Dudes were absorbed in a new production of
The Jew of Malta,
featuring added scenes in which Mose the Bowery Boy bounds onto the set and unmasks Barabas before he can have Abigail poisoned.

I made my way around the back, among the lascivious props of the Grand Duke’s: a particularly bulbous, bloodstained set of woman’s breasts. A bloody, papier-mâché head, with tear-away scalp; a horse’s head, bleeding from both eyes. Wading through the stage gore, I found what I was looking for: a wooden pistol, nearly as big as my arm. I picked up an enormous stage saber for good measure; this was my heroic hour. Armed with only these props, I stormed her dressing room. In one quick motion, I picked the lock and slammed the door open, prepared for whatever might come.