A City Dreaming (9 page)

The emergency exit led to a blank white corridor, faceless and institutional in comparison with the main room itself, and at the other end of it M could see Andre looking somewhat frightened. Standing in front of Andre, and presumably the reason for his concern, was Alatar of the Upper West Side. Of course M couldn't see his face, but he could see his back, which was covered in a long dark robe, and his hands, which were gripped around a shaft of elm with a crystal sphere atop it, and there were not so many people who dressed like that, not even among the sort of people M knew.

“You've got some nerve, sneaking into my party.”

“Please, Alatar,” Andre was saying, looking vaguely wounded, “I had an invitation. I even had a plus one!”

“That was before I knew of your betrayal!”

“There is a perfectly reasonable explanation, if you'd but allow me to get a word in edgewise . . .”

“No one steals from me and gets away with it!”

Andre grunted understanding after a long moment. “Yes, the bid on that tech company . . .”

“What did you think this was about?”

“Nothing, it doesn't matter,” Andre said, just as cool as ice water having now caught a view of M. “In any case, it couldn't possibly have been more than a few hundred thousand dollars. Hardly worth bloodshed. I'm sure we can figure this out.”

“It's not a question of the quarter million,” Alatar said. “As a point of pride, I don't leave a thief alive to steal twice. As much a public service as anything else.”

M decided at this point to make a clucking sound in the back of his throat, and Alatar turned swiftly to face him. He had a nose like a beak and eyes like glacial ice. His skin hung down in folds from his forehead and the nape of his neck. He had a ring on his index finger like the carapace of a beetle. He was, in short, a walking, talking genre cliché, though this did not make him any less dangerous.

“You,” Alatar growled.

“I am me,” M admitted, though it was unclear how he felt about it.

“I didn't know you were back.”

“The sole blemish of ignorance on your sterling facade of wisdom.”

“What?”

“Hmm?”

Alatar scowled harder. He had a face made for scowling, like a bush is made to flower or a knife to carve flesh. “You with him?”

“More like he's with me.”

“You ought to choose your companions more wisely.”

“I'll take that into consideration,” M said.

“No doubt,” Andre said.

“Did you know this fucking Gaul chiseled me out of a quarter million dollars?”

“I think it the twenty-first century's foremost tragedy,” M said, “that your bank account is not quite so large as it once was. Truly a source of deep melancholy, though I'm succored by the certainty that it will swiftly regain its balance.”

“I'm afraid I can't be so sanguine about the matter.”

“It's a duel you're after? Fine, but as the challenged party I get my pick
of weapons, field, and time. And I choose chopsticks, Xi'an Famous Foods, 4:00 a.m. yesterday. First one to drop a flat noodle loses their soul. Your man can call on mine.”

“You aren't nearly as funny as you think you are.”

“Come off it, Alatar, you know as well as I do that we're not going to have a pissing contest here in the middle of the hallway. This is Manhattan, in case you haven't noticed, and Celise doesn't like it when her pawns play without her.”

“Don't presume too far on the White Queen's affections,” Alatar said. “She's done without you for the past five years. I don't think she'll be beating through the bushes were you to disappear another time. And I'm not such a minor piece these days myself.”

“A pale duke? A cream baron? An eggshell marquis?”

“I'm bigger than you are, anyway,” Alatar said. His eyes were furiously stygian, flecked here and there with gold. There was a commotion coming from the main room, but he hadn't yet noticed it.

“That's possible. What are you willing to wager to find out?”

“I could ask you the same question—you actually like this one enough to throw down over him?”

“I've been wondering that all night, actually. Still haven't come to any conclusions, though in the event I think it's probably a moot point.”

“I'm afraid I would have to disagree,” Alatar said, crooked nails clicking against his staff. “I've allowed this frog to go on sharing my air for longer than I ought. For that matter I'm coming to feel the same way about you.”

M cocked his head. “Hear that?”

And indeed Alatar did hear that, that being several hundred of the city's finest, or at least wealthiest, citizens, engaging in collective and full-throated shrieks of terror. It was unsubtle. It was the kind of thing you would have trouble missing.

“That's the sound of your waitstaff eating your guests,” M said. “If I were you, I would get in there before the mayor finds his face gnawed off. Or I suppose you can stick around and we can have that fight you seemed so excited about.”

But Alatar was already gone, back into the main room as fast as his steps could carry him. M noted that he did not use his staff.

“Thanks,” Andre said.

“I'm keeping the suit,” M said, following after Alatar.

Andre held the door open for him. “Seems only fair.”

Back inside, the zombies had switched from
The Serpent and the Rainbow
to
Dawn of the Dead
, made furious by their necromantic servitude and looking to wreak bloody vengeance before falling fully into the grave. Of course, living or undead, human teeth aren't really made for, say, gnawing a hand off an arm, and the zombies seemed not to remember how to use weapons—but still it was a frightening period for the partygoers, most of whom were a good way to inebriated, none of whom had been expecting the evening would end with a mass melee against the undead. A man in a tuxedo barricaded himself behind an overturned table and was thrusting away at a gorgeous ginger woman with his umbrella. Two frat-boy finance types were trying to impale their ex-bartender with a wooden leg from one of the tables, apparently confused with the category of monster they were facing. Amidst the madness those waiters and servants who had not yet drank saline continued to go about their business, offering trays of grilled oysters and wagyu beef sliders to a group of partygoers now less interested in filling their stomachs than in avoiding filling something else's.

“It's a zombie rebellion!” Andre observed.

“Better than a zombie jamboree,” M said, unable to resist the temptation. He lit a cigarette, which was technically speaking against the rules, but then again not so much against the rules as, for instance, cannibalism.

“What exactly did you do?”

“There are downsides to anchoring the flicker of a dead man's spirit to the flesh he previously inhabited,” M said, “beyond the moral, I mean. It's an unnatural association, easily broken if you can put a bit of sodium into their drinks.”

“Zombies don't drink!”

“That's a common misconception,” M said, slipping aside to allow an aging blonde with fake tits and a floppy feathered hat to sprint screaming through the exit, and for her pursuer, by chance the same zombie who had been serving them drinks all evening, to follow her out. “But in fact zombies need to eat and drink, just like people. The only thing that separates zombies
from people is that they can't eat salt. And that they're dead, of course.”

“Salt?”

“Yeah. Shatters the bond. Drives them . . .” M made an encompassing motion with his hand at the violence in front of them.

“Crazy?”

“Actually this seems an altogether rational reaction to their situation. If I were them, I'd want to chew off someone's shoulder too.”

Those members of the party who were in good with the Management were cashing chits left and right, blasts of light streaming across the air, curses and hexes whirring past each other. Alatar had taken up a position on the stage and was, so far as M could tell, engaging in a ritual to summon some sort of monster or spirit to deal with the consequences of his necromancy, a circular process that M found awfully shortsighted.

They fumbled their way toward an exit as the chaos turned to carnage. The zombies, of course, were unable to recognize M as the agent of their deliverance, but there was a lot of flesh to chase after, and Andre and M were not men entirely bereft of resources, and they managed their retreat without difficulty.

“This is why no one invites you anywhere,” Andre said.

“People don't invite me places?”

“Never. Not anywhere.”

M shrugged, grabbing the Nick Drake LP from where it sat forgotten on the prize table. “Try to remember that next time you think about asking me for help.”

M came out of a coffee shop with fifty cents that he had been meaning to give to the barista before she had rubbed him the wrong way, and so instead he dropped them in the cup of the homeless man leaning against the wall outside.

“Abilene would like to see you,” said the vagrant.

“See if I give you anything again,” M said, even though he knew it wasn't really the man's fault. “Well, where is she?”

“Who?” the homeless man asked, looking up confusedly.

M cursed a while and walked home. Two youths sat smoking a joint on his stoop, neighborhood kids he didn't know. Neither of them were tenants, but M's apartment building had the nicest stoop on the block, and so there were often people taking advantage of it. The younger looked up at M as he was getting his keys out. “She's having a party in Bushwick tonight,” he said, rattling off an address. “You should drop by.”

“Who the hell do you know in Bushwick?” the older one asked.

“No one,” the younger one asked, turning to face his brother, for only brothers are capable of such easy dislike. “Why the fuck you asking?”

In so far as Abilene was an unquestioned force for good in the world, at least in the most concrete give-food-to-the-hungry–shelter-to-the-sick–succor-to-the-weary kind of way, M could not bring himself to dislike her. But he could not really say he liked her either, or at least he never wanted to be around her, which is an awfully close cousin.

She'll probably try to foist a stray on me,
M thought sadly. He began to wonder idly about how he might spend the evening if he did not go to the party, looked up movie times and checked if there were any concerts to attend, knowing as he did it that it was pointless; his evening was booked solid. And indeed, around 7:30 that evening, he put on a fresh shirt, bought a bottle of wine from a nearby liquor store, and started walking northeast.

Her block was run-down and less than lovely, but here and there you could see signs of resurgence: flowers crawling through the concrete, a health-food co-op on the corner. That was the way it was with Abilene. Her very presence was nourishment to the beclouded metropolis. The address M had been given led to a three-story brownstone, one of those architectural gems that dot the outer boroughs and can be found in even the most miserable and dilapidated areas. The door opened shortly after he pushed the buzzer. M wasn't sure if Abilene knew it was him by some extrasensory means or just didn't mind letting strangers into her party. Both, probably.

The stairwell was old and wooden and pretty and seemed to take forever to ascend, only partially because M did not want to be ascending it. M stood outside the door for a moment, with a bottle of cheap red and an RNC elephant tattooed below his wrist. After a moment's knock, the door opened, and a half goddess in an ugly dress opened it.

You wouldn't have made much of her, probably. Short, dowdy, muddy skin of indeterminate racial origin, frizzy hair, no makeup, fat thighs, and a pair of deep brown eyes that suggested a weight of lead or the dark infinity between the universes or the womb. Maybe you would have made something of her after all. She was smiling and held a calico kitten the size of a stick of butter. “My Mags just dropped yesterday! Here, hold her.”

The kitten's eyes were large as silver dollars and plaintive as a redheaded orphan. M made sure not to look directly into them so as to avoid being hypnotized. “I'm really not in the position to foster a kitten right now, Abilene.”

Abilene laughed and set the mewling little sack of flesh back on the floor. “A pet would do you wonders, M,” she said. “Your problem is that you don't know what's good for you.”

M thought he knew what was good for him just fine, considered himself something of an authority on the subject, and felt that undignified burr of
pride that any professional experiences when their expertise is questioned. But it was Abilene's house party, and also she could break him in half with a wink of her crow's-footed eyes, and so M just handed Abilene the bottle of wine and let himself be ushered inside.

Abilene's place looked like it always did, whenever and wherever M had visited her, going back however many decades. Lots of growing things, flowers and vegetables and herbs, some of which could be purchased at a garden store, and some that could not—the rows of mandrake behind the couch, for instance, and the many-headed carnivorous plant that hung from the window and rustled though there was no breeze. The furniture was well-worn and comfortable, and there were tapestries on the walls and all sorts of not-exactly-attractive bits of artwork: Javanese puppets and South American soapstone and African sculptures that were either shamefully phallic or overwhelmingly vaginal. Some of these likely served as fetishes, but M suspected the better part were just crap that Abilene had collected. Power is no guarantee of taste.

Eight or nine people were milling about, and M did his best to give each a general impression of friendliness without having to actually converse with any one of them. They were peas in an organic pod, all afire for some personal passion and certain that his heart was dry kindling. M wanted to try to explain to them that his soul was damp wood, and they'd be better off trying to find someone in the treated briquette range, but they rarely seemed to hear him.