Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

before you decide—”

“Decided when we were there.” Frank shrugged. “I like having a family. Yours feels like home to me.”

“Thank you.” Alicia smiled then and added, “Guess your interview was promising after all.”

Frank chuckled. “Yes, ma’am.”

He had a healing gunshot wound in his thigh, a job, and a home. All told, Frankie Lee figured that it was the best day he’d had since he died. Being dead wasn’t anything like the preacher said it would be, but considering the life Frankie Lee had led, that wasn’t such a bad thing. He nodded his head at his boss and headed off to find his room.

“Frankie Lee?”

He paused and looked at her.

“Is it as bad as all that over there?” she asked haltingly. “It’s been a while since I was alive.”

Frankie Lee thought about the bullets that had ended his own life. A bullet is a bullet. The difference was how many of them tore into him that day. He shrugged. “I won’t be eager for those thirty years to end.”

“Oh.” Alicia faltered, but it lasted only a moment before she said, “Maybe it’d be good for you to tell me what’s new over there in the living world; I can’t take care of everyone if I’m out of touch.”

And Frankie Lee saw the side of his boss that proved he had done right by trusting his guts: Alicia was good people. He kept his smile subdued and nodded. “You’re the boss.”

“I am,” Alicia agreed before going back into the General Store.

For a minute, Frankie Lee stood there, looking at the strange pioneer-era building, and then out over the city where a towering castle loomed. Eras clashed and coexisted. Nothing at all like the preacher said. It wasn’t the life he’d known or the afterlife he’d expected, but he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face. Some things were constant: Finding a place where a person belonged, a job that made a man feel good about himself, and a boss he could respect—those were the keys to a happy life. Or a happy afterlife, in this case.

And Go Like This BY JOHN CROWLEY

John Crowley was born in Maine, grew up in Vermont and Indiana, and ran off to New York City, where he worked on documentary films and began to write novels. He’s received three World Fantasy Awards (including a Life Achievement Award) and the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His novels include Little, Big and the Aegypt Cycle. Other works include The Translator and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. His most recent novel is Four Freedoms (2009).

There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.

—BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Day and night the jetliners come in to Idlewild fully packed, and fly out again empty. Then the arrivals have to get into the city from the airports—special trains and buses have been laid on, of course, day and night crossing into the city limits and returning, empty bean cans whose beans have been poured out, but the waits are long. The army of organizers and dispatchers, who have been recruited from around the world for this job—selfless, patient as saints, minds like adding machines, yet still liable to fainting fits or outbursts of rage, God bless them, only human after all—meet and meet and sort and sort the incomers into neighborhoods, into streets in those neighborhoods, addresses, floors, rooms. They have huge atlases and records supplied by the city government, exploded plans of every building. They pencil each room and then mark it in red when fully occupied.

Still there are far too many arriving to be funneled into town by that process, and thousands, maybe tens of thousands, finally set out walking from the airport. It’s easy enough to see which way to go. Especially people are walking who walk anyway in their home places, bare or sandaled feet on dusty roads, with children in colorful slings at their breasts or bundles on their heads—those are the pictures you see in the special editions of Life and Look, tall Watusis and small people from Indochina and Peru. Just walking, and the sunset towers they go toward. How beautiful they are, patient, unsmiling in their native dress, the Family of Man.

We have set out walking too, but from the west. We’ve calculated how long it will take from our home, and we’ve decided that it can’t take longer than the endless waits for trains and planes and buses, to say nothing of the trip by car. No matter how often we’ve all been warned not to do it, forbidden to do it (but who can turn them back once they’ve set out?), people have been piling into their station wagons and sedans, loading the trunks with coolers full of sandwiches and pop, a couple of extra jerricans of gas—about a dollar a gallon most places!—and setting out as though on some happy expedition to the national parks. Now those millions are coming to a halt, from New Jersey, north as far as Albany, and south to Philadelphia, a solid mass of them, like the white particles of precipitate forming in the beaker in chemistry class, drifting downward to solidify. Then you have to get out and walk anyway, the sandwiches long gone and the trucks with food and water far between.

No, we’ve left the Valiant in the carport and we’re walking, just our knapsacks and identification, living off the land and the kindness of strangers.

* * *

There was a story in my childhood, a paradox or a joke, which went like this: Suppose all the Chinamen have been ordered to commit suicide by jumping off a particular cliff into the sea. They are to line up single file and each take his or her turn, every man, woman, and child jumping off, one after the other. And the joke was that the line would never end. For the jumping-off of so many would take so long, even at a minute a person, that at the back of the line lives would have to be led by those waiting their turn, and children would be born, and more children, and children of those children even, so that the line would go on and people would keep jumping forever.

This, no, this wouldn’t take forever. There was an end and a terminus and a conclusion, there was a finite number to accommodate in a finite space—that was the point—though, of course, there would be additions to the number of us along the way; that was understood and accounted for, the hospital spaces of the city have been specially set aside for mothers-to-be nearing term, and, anyway, how much additional space can a tiny newborn use up? In those hospitals too are the old and the sick and, yes, the dying, it’s appalling how many will die in this city in this time, the entire mortality of Earth, a number not larger than in any comparable period, of course, maybe less, for that matter, because this city has some of the best medical care on Earth and doctors and nurses from around the world have also been assigned to spaces in clinics, hospitals, asylums, overwhelmed as they might be looking over the sea of incapacity, as though every patient who ever suffered there has been resurrected and brought back, hollow-eyed, gasping, unable to ambulate.

But they are there! That’s what we’re not to forget, they are all there with us, taking up their allotted spaces—or maybe a little more because of having to lie down, but never mind, they’ll all be back home soon enough, they need to hang on just a little longer. And every one who passes away before the termination, the all clear, whatever it’s to be called—will be replaced, very likely, by a newborn in the ward next door.

And what about the great ones of the world, the leaders and the presidents-for-life and the field marshals and the members of parliaments and presidiums, have they really all come? If they have, we haven’t been informed of it—of course, there are some coming with their nations, but the chance of being swallowed up amid their subjects or constituents, suffering who-knows-what indignities and maybe worse, has perhaps pushed a lot of them to slip into the city unobserved on special flights of unmarked helicopters and so on, to be put up at their embassies or at the Plaza or the Americana or in the vast apartments of bankers and arms dealers on Park Avenue. Surely they have left behind cohorts of devoted followers, henchmen, whatever, men who can keep their fingers on the red button or their eyes on the skies, just in case it has all been a trap, but we have to be realistic: Not every goatherd in Macedonia, every bushman in the Kalahari is going to be rounded up, and they don’t need to be for this to work —you can call your floor thoroughly swept even if a few twists of dust persist under the couch, a lost button beneath the radiator. The best is the enemy of the good. He’s an engineer, he must know that.