City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (60 page)

So that is what I have come to. So grotesque even a circus freak is repelled.

In that moment, she realized she had come to the end of her career. Only the Water Street bars could possibly remain for her.

That was when she made up her mind. She hadn’t told him anything the first time, but now she was decided.
Follow her
, Gyp had said, and she hadn’t disobeyed him. She already knew where Esther was: out in the Tin Elephant, with him.

Sadie walked out there along the boardwalk after she left the midgets’ show. It was nearly dark now, the first hints of fall beginning to spread their shadow over the beach. The boards stretched out endlessly over the desolate, sandy plain, toward an apocalyptic sunset, and only a few dark, slightly sinister figures broke the flat landscape. Most of the vacationing couples were gone now, leaving the whores and their customers to trawl the boardwalk.

She hurried out to the dilapidated tin hotel, where she stood under the light she had marked before. She waited for what seemed like a long time there, until it was completely dark and even the piercing white beacons of the park seemed very far away.

Sadie waited so long she wondered if they were there now after all, but she had noted the window well, and finally she saw her, coming out of the lobby, looking around herself a little furtively. She walked up to Esther—relieved to see her again, staring solemnly, uncomprehendingly back at her. Getting a certain pleasure out of seeing her face change.

“Well, chick,” Sadie said to her, “it looks like it’s time to start on my reform—”

Esther sat on the worn bedspread back in the Tin Elephant, where she had retreated as soon as Sadie had given her the news. Kid beside her, looking sheepishly at the floor.

“You could have told me, you know.”

“Ach!”
He waved one hand in the air. “It’s my
tsouris.
Why should you worry about it?”

“You might have told me.”

“I didn’t know he was your brother, you know. I swear to the Highest—”

“I know, I know.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, swinging her feet, trying to think what to do now.

“He’ll never let it go, you know.”

“I know.”

“He’ll never give it up. You got to get out of here.”

He only looked at her.

“You should have been gone already. And you stayed—”

“I stayed for you,” he said fervently. “That’s why I did it.”

“Enough! That’s nonsense talk. You got to go, and soon.”

“What about her? Will she tell?”

“No,” Esther said slowly, considering it. “No. Sadie won’t tell.”

“Unless he gets it out of her . . .”

They were quiet again, trying to ignore the whores cavorting in the hallways.

“He’s such a bastard,” she sighed.

I saw her. I saw her again at the show, after looking out for her for days and weeks, and then I was sure it was fated. She had come back, and I would not let her go this time.

I did the same trick I had performed for her before, leaping forward to stop up the baritone’s mouth. It was a signal to her—but this time she didn’t seem to appreciate it, didn’t laugh the way she had before.

She left her seat before the grand finale was even quite over. I didn’t care; I ran after her, plucking up another rose—a real, red rose, this time, which I had kept on hand in case she should ever return. Repeating myself, I knew, but wanting to do anything to get her attention, hoping she would take it as another lover’s signal.

And then—I saw her. I saw her up close now, instead of across the ring, and even as I started to mouth those infinitely unoriginal words—
I love you
—I stopped myself.

She was different. She had been put through the wringer by God only knew who—some beast of a pimp, a boyfriend, a husband. Her face was mottled and bruised, her hair chopped short. She looked like she had aged ten years since I’d seen her last, even under the hat she used to hide it. She looked like, well, like a common street whore.

She saw me staring. She saw the disappointment in my face, I know—unable even to complete my trite love sentiments, the real rose still in my hand. She saw me and the lips of her mouth turned up, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.

“Oh, I see,” was all she said, but I could see the wound; I could see the proud and bitter resignation on her face, just before she turned away.

What had I done? After all, I had seen into her soul. The bruises and the hair were just superficial marks. What had I done? In the crucial moment of my life, I had hesitated, and now she was lost to me.

She was already out of the Big Tent, but I couldn’t let her go. I had to follow her, explain myself to her somehow.

I looked back at the rest of my people, now finished with their act: jumping up and down, turning pratfalls and somersaults to entertain the crowd as it filed out. No one had noticed me, across the ring with my flower. Carlotta, my queen, was gazing placidly into the emptying stands, obviously pleased with how her speech had gone over.

I climbed the wooden barrier of the ring, crept out after the paying customers, smearing my showman’s makeup off on my sleeve. I followed them—followed
her
—out of The Little City, as my true self—leaving all the freaks behind. Out on the boardwalk there was no sign of her, but I couldn’t let that stop me. I would find her if I had to search the whole City—

They stood before the rampaging fossils, gazing up at their terrible teeth and claws, spikes and horns.

“Look at all the old monsters,” Jung murmured. “God’s anxiety dreams of Creation.”

Freud shot him a look—but Jung seemed to actually be referring to the museum displays. They were arranged in a powerful, almost sensational manner: head-to-head, rising up on their back legs—as if their skeletal remains were complete creatures unto themselves, still locked in mortal combat.

There was room after staggering room of them: brontosauruses and pterodactyls, woolly mammoths, and a
Tyrannosaurus rex
, all jumbled together. One particularly vivid tableau featured the fossil of a great sloth, stuck in a tar pit. A saber-toothed tiger had rushed in after it but now it, too, was stuck, snarling back over its shoulder at a pair of wolves. Already, the wolves, distracted by their own bloodlust, were padding obliviously into the tar trap, and their own demise—

The whole thing was a Pleistocene morality play. It was also a fake, of course. All the real fossils—sloth, tiger, wolves—would have been hopelessly jumbled and crushed by the weight of ages. Yet how evocative!

“How bungled our own reproductions are by comparison, how wretchedly we dissect the great artworks of psychic nature,” he muttered to himself. He thought particularly of the Rat Man case, thinking that somehow he had bungled it, had reduced its meaning in how he wrote it up.

Still there must be a way—

He looked over at Jung, engrossed in an exhibit on Ancient Man. If he could not do it himself it would have to be passed on, perfected, through his protégés. He, Freud, was just a conduit. The Cause must continue.

From the outside, the museum was another vast new American creation, ringed with fairy-tale turrets of soft pink granite. It fronted on the Central Park and there, on the museum stairs, a large, equestrian statue of Roosevelt, the former president, had been erected. He was dressed up like a cowboy, with an Indian chief and an African bearer at either side of his horse—a boy’s storybook idea of a hero.

Freud felt more at home in the park. He suggested they all go for a walk, but Ferenczi lingered at the museum with Brill to play with his latest toy, a new American camera, so he had Jung all to himself. They strolled along winding paths that opened out onto charming vistas of man-made lakes and meadows, little gingerbread bridges and fountains. The woods were filled with birds, and bold gray squirrels that seemed almost tame, hopping up to beg for tidbits.

“Still no porcupine,” he joked, and Jung smiled politely.

He was being most attentive, hanging on his every word, and Freud thought how good it was to be with him again, how like a brilliant, doting son he could be. Why he had been so suspicious of him, Freud could not imagine now. Some unruly bit of homosexuality, no doubt; he would have to root it out completely before it destroyed their relationship—

He was just trying to say something about it to his crown prince—when, abruptly, Jung pulled him off down another, lesser path, his face suddenly so troubled that Freud leaned over him in concern.

“What—what is it?”

“Mir hat getraumt,”
Jung said anxiously. “A dream came to me. If I could ask you . . .”

“Certainly, certainly!” Freud urged, surprised and delighted by this new offering.

“It’s not much, really, but it was extremely vivid. It started in a house—my house. I was on the upper story, in a salon full of fine old pieces of rococo furniture, old masters on the walls—”

“
Your
house?”

“
Ja, ja
—I wondered at it myself, that I should have some place so grand,” Jung said, very sincerely. “I said to myself, ‘Not bad.’ ”

“Not bad at all, Doctor,” Freud said dryly.

“But then, you know, I realized that I did not know what the bottom floor looked like, even though it was my house. I went downstairs—where I saw that everything was much older.”

“Older?”

“All the furnishings, the paintings—everything dated from at least the fifteenth or sixteenth century—perhaps even medieval! The floors were made out of simple red brick. Everything dark and murky.”

He paused—fine, stolid, Swiss head peering closely at Freud through his pince-nez, obviously trying to gauge his reaction so far.

“Please go on, Doctor. Unless that’s all—”

“No, no—there’s more! I decided, well, ‘Now I must really explore the whole house.’ Immediately, I came to a heavy door—”

“You opened it—”

“I opened it—and found a stone stairway leading down into a cellar. Naturally, I descended the staircase—and found myself in another beautiful, vaulted room. I could tell at once it was very ancient! There were layers of bricks between the stones, and chips of brick in the mortar—like classical layers of archaeology. I knew the walls dated back to Roman times—perhaps before!”

They had stopped in the path now. Jung’s manner had become quite agitated, Freud noticed. He gestured excitedly as he told his story, little flecks of spit flying from his lips. Somehow, Freud felt light-headed, almost faint himself.

“Was that all?”

“
No!
There’s more. My interest in this house was now intense. I looked around on the floor—and discovered a ring, sticking out of one of the stone slabs. I pulled on it—and the slab lifted. There was another stone stairway.”

“Another one!”

“This one made out of narrower, cruder steps. I followed them down to another level, into a low cave, cut into the rock.”

“And then?”

“The floor of the cave was covered with dust and broken pottery. Scattered bones—human and nonhuman, I think. And there—on the floor of the cave, as if I had been intended to find them all along—there lay a pair of primitive human skulls. Obviously very old, and half-disintegrated.”

“And then?”

“Then I woke up.”

“
Ancient
skulls?” Freud pondered, his eyes narrowing. “It sounds as if we are back to your peat-bog men, Doctor. Your lead roofer.”

“No, no, not like that, I don’t think! Believe me, it’s nothing to do with your death—” he said hastily, but Freud cut him off.

“You said you had some ideas about them. What were they?”

“Oh, they’re still very formative,” Jung fumbled, even reddening a little. He paused, the quick little eyes behind the pince-nez studying Freud’s face.

“It’s just, well, I thought perhaps the skulls might be my wife—and perhaps my sister-in-law,” he blurted out.

“Really?”

Jung nodded rapidly, turning away, and Freud felt relief wash over him.

Of course that’s it
, Freud assured himself, remembering a bad bit of business Jung had got into with a female patient a couple years before—one that had threatened to wreck his marriage and his career, before he had begged Freud to intervene.

This is just more of the same—another domestic crisis. He’s fallen in love with his sister-in-law, that’s all. How touching of him to confide in me!

They resumed walking, in silence now. Freud slid his arm reassuringly through his old pupil’s, and was rewarded with a boyish smile. Yet as he did, he couldn’t help thinking how closely Jung’s situation resembled Freud’s own intellectual love for Minna, his sister-in-law.

Could it be he is trying to flatter me? Or just dissemble?

They stopped again, at the end of their path. They had come out at another cunningly manufactured pond, still being constructed beneath a high rock. Atop the cliff was a decorative overlook, a lovely castle turret, right out of the Rhineland, or certain bluffs above the Danube where it wandered through Austria—

Just then the children came running up the path toward them, pumping their short, chubby legs. Freud smiled to see them: a whole nursery of well-dressed, upper-middle-class children, boys and girls, no more than four or five years old. They ran off the cinder path and onto a park green, squealing happily, their governesses laboring to keep up with them.

“How delightful they are!” Freud laughed. “You know, for a moment I even took two of them for my nieces. Of course, that was from the last time I saw them; they would be much bigger by now—”

“Yes, there are all kinds here,” Jung smiled back, nodding toward the children.

A park officer hove up imperiously, identifiable by his arm badge, and brown shirt and black tie.