Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

I looked at her and realized that I didn’t have an answer.

“When I was six my mother bought me my first paint set. My father took me to the top of Jimn Mountain when I was nine. I remember the first time I kissed a boy. I remember breaking my arm when I tried to scale Dell Wall. All of that will be erased, won’t it?”

“But you will rebuild it somewhere else, in some other time.”

“You don’t understand! Humans are not like a wall, where the bricks of our experiences are interchangeable. Each instant is precious, unique. You rob the universe of the sacred. Can’t you see that?”

“I … I have known nothing else,” I said. “Until I met you.”

“Is that consolation for ruining my life, that the ghost of annihilation has second thoughts?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“But you have.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“What wasn’t?” she said slowly.

“The destruction of your city.”

“What city?”

“Gelecek.”

“What a beautiful name,” she said. “Where is it? And who are you? How did I get here?”

I sighed and had to look away.

“I feel funny,” she said. “As if … I’m not supposed to be here. My body feels … light. Like air. What’s your name?”

“My name?” I said. “My name is … Destruction.”

When I looked for her again, there was only sand. The girl, the horse, everything was gone, even my suit of flesh. I cried out to the stars, but they did not respond.

* * *

I did not move from that spot. My brothers came to me on the sand. They said, “Come back to the Jeen with us, Brother, for you have no reason to dwell among form now.”

And I said, “Leave me.”

The sun rose and set a hundred times, and my brothers came to me again and again. “Please,” they begged. “It’s not proper that you be apart from us. Come and obliterate a city with us and feel your old self again.”

But how could I? In each city might dwell the spark of Agna or Dina or her kin. I could not bear to erase her from existence again.

“Go away,” I told my brothers, and they did.

I sat there in the same spot of sand where Dina had disappeared, while the sun turned in slow orbits overhead. I felt like a top, spinning, spinning, but never slowing.

The stars and sun turned through slow aeons, and still I did not move. One silent afternoon, a dark cloud appeared in the sky. Once in a hundred years it rained in the desert; today it poured down in great sheets. The sky grew as dark as the gloaming, and the sands turned to mud. Forks of light split the sky in dreadful thunder.

I collected myself into human form, gave myself strong arms and hands, and began to mold the wet sand into a brick. The pounding rain seemed to shout Agna’s songs across the desert, and to their tunes I crafted another brick, and then another, fashioning them into a rudimentary wall. I knew it was temporary. I knew that tomorrow, when the sun rose hot and burdensome above the sands, my wall would grow weak. The desert winds would topple it in time, that all was, essentially, nothing. But heaven help me, I couldn’t stop.

Weston Walks BY KIT REED

Kit Reed is the author of The Baby Merchant, Dogs of Truth, and Thinner Than Thou. Her short novel Little Sisters of the Apocalypse and the collection Weird Women, Wired Women were both finalists for the James Tiptree, Jr., Award.

Her most recent novel, Enclave, appeared in 2009. Her short fiction has been published in various anthologies and magazines, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Yale Review, Postscripts, and The Kenyon Review. Her next short story collection, What Wolves Know, will be published in 2011.

* * *

When your life gets kicked out from under you like a chair you thought you were standing on, you start to plan. You swear: Never again. After the funeral Lawrence Weston sat in a velvet chair that was way too big for him while the lawyer read his parents’ will out loud. He didn’t care about how much he was getting; he only knew what he had lost and that he would do anything to keep it from happening again.

He was four.

Like a prince in the plague years, he pulled up the drawbridge and locked his heart against intruders. Nobody gets into Weston’s tight, carefully furnished life, and nobody gets close enough to mess up his heart.

Now look.

* * *

When your money makes money you don’t have to do anything—so nothing is what Weston ordinarily does, except on Saturdays, when he comes out to show the city to you. It isn’t the money—don’t ask how much he has— he just needs to hear the sound of a human voice. He lives alone because he likes it, but at the end of the day that’s exactly what he is. Alone.

It’s why he started Weston Walks.

He could afford an LED display in Times Square but he sticks to three lines in The Village Voice: “New York: an intimate view. Walk the city tourists never see.”

He’ll show you things you’ll never find spawning upstream at Broadway and Forty-second Street or padding along Fifth Avenue in your puffy coats. This is the insider’s walking tour.

Nobody wants to be an outsider, so you make the call. It’s not like he will pick up. His phone goes on ringing in some place you can’t envision, coming as you do from out of town. You hang on the phone, humming “pick up, pick up, pick up.” When his machine takes your message, you’re pathetically grateful. Excited, too. You are hooked by Weston’s promise: Tailored to your desires.

What these are, he determines on the basis of a preliminary interview conducted over coffee at Balthazar, on him—or at Starbucks, on you—depending on how you are dressed, and whether he likes you well enough to spend the day with you, in which case he’ll let you pay. He is deciding whether to take you on. No matter how stylish your outfit—or how tacky—if he doesn’t like what he hears, he will slap a hundred or a twenty on the table at Balthazar or Starbucks, depending, and leave you there. It’s not his fault he went to schools where you learn by osmosis what to do and what not to wear. It’s not your fault that you come from some big town or small city where Weston would rather die than have to be. Whatever you want to see, Weston can find, and if you don’t know what that is and he decides for you, consider yourself lucky. This is an insider tour!

You’re itching to begin your Weston Walk, but you must wait until the tour is filled, and that takes time. Weston is very particular. At last! You meet on the designated street corner. You’re the ones with the fanny packs, cameras, monster foam fingers, Deely Bobbers, Statue of Liberty crowns on the kids—unless you’re the overdressed Southerner or one of those razor-thin foreigners in understated black and high-end boots. Weston’s the guy in black jeans and laid-back sweater, holding the neatly lettered sign.

He is surprisingly young. Quieter than you’d hoped. Reserved, but in a good way. Nothing like the flacks leafleting in Times Square or bellowing from tour buses on Fifth Avenue or hawking buggy rides through Central Park. He will show you things that you’ve never seen before, from discos and downtown mud baths nobody knows about to the park where your favorite stars rollerblade to the exclusive precincts of the Academy of Arts and Letters—in the nosebleed district, it’s so far uptown—to the marble grand staircase in the Metropolitan Club, which J. P. Morgan built after all the best clubs in the city turned him down.

Notice that at the end Weston says good-bye in Grand Central, at Ground Zero, or the northeast corner of