Fantastic Metropolis

The Candy Kid

“Wake up! C’mon, Gramps, rise and shine! It’s a new century now, don’t wanna miss any of it. And today’s special, real special. I got word from your floor nurse that you hit one hundred today. Ain’t everyday one of Slumberland’s residents notches up the big one-double-oh.”

The irreverent, irrepressibly careless young voice terminated the old man’s uneasy slumber. Accompanied by a waft of peppermint breath, this morning call for attention boomed annoyingly close to his hairy, flaccid-lobed, aged ear, shattering his shallow anxious dreamless sleep.

He opened his rheumy brown eyes to a placid nebula of sunlight, to the smell of bacon grease and the rattle of dishes on a wheeled trolley. He strained to focus on the blurry pink male face pulling back from his.

“Glasses. Get me my glasses, please.”

The kitchen aide declined. “Naw, I ain’t messing with no glasses. Let the nurse’s aide handle that. You don’t need no glasses anyhow just to drink your kinda breakfast. Nice can of vanilla Enfamil. Mmm-mmm! Look, I’ll power up the top half of the bed so you don’t choke, then I’ll put the straw right ‘tween your lips. Here you go—”

The hospital bed motors whined, and the elderly occupant of Room 1905 of the Slumberland Extended Care Facility felt his withered torso levered creakingly upward.

“Enough, enough.”

“Okay, don’t blow a fuse, centennial dude. Here, sip.”

The man weakly sucked some of the over-sweet nutrituous slurry up through the plastic tube, while the kitchen aide watched approvingly, all the while clicking around an omnipresent breath mint between his upper and lower teeth, as if to accent the old man’s own toothless condition.

“Everything cool now? ‘Cuz I got lots more breakfastses to deliver.”

The old man feebly spat out the tip of the straw. “Fine, fine.”

The kitchen aide turned to leave, but the old man stopped him with a question.

“Is it really a new century?”

“Yeah, sure, why would I say so if it wasn’t?”

“And it’s my birthday today?”

“That’s what your babysitter in uniform tells me.”

“Then I am a hundred now.”

“Cool. Well, save me some birthday cake, Pops.”

The aide left, whistling what sounded improbably like some old Broadway show tune from the man’s youth.

The old man lifted a trembling hand toward the fuzzy image of his paltry breakfast tray positioned over him on the extensible arm of a wheeled bedside platform, then altered the course of his motions to smooth the few wisps of white hair trailing across his bald, spotted skull. Sinking down deeper into his pillows, lowering his eyelids, spurning his insulting breakfast, the old man thought:

One hundred years since I was born.

Ninety-five since the dreams began.

Nearly ninety years since they ended.

And just that long have I been searching for a way back into them.

Impie

Every Sunday like clockwork the dreams had come, beginning when he turned five years old and continuing uninterruptedly for the next six years.

Like nothing else in his life before or since, the dreams had come to lend his whole juvenile existence deep meaning, rich excitement. More vivid than reality, they had cast his mundane life under a shadow, rendering the mortal world’s diurnal colors less bright, its successes less joyful–but also, in partial compensation, its failures less painful. All his waking experiences had paled against the memories of his Sabbath dreams. And only when his weekly excursion into that magical other world arrived did he feel truly alive.

At first, the dreaming had come hard. For several sequential weeks he had known the worst sort of frustration. Each week’s appointed dream during this initiatory period started and ended on repetitious notes, unvarying in their clunky monotony. (Although what occcured between the entrance and exit points shifted fantastically, a constantly changing canvas of wonders.)

He entered his dream each time by appearing to awaken in his own bedroom (a false virtual renouncement of sleep that paradoxically betokened a deeper immersion into those very waters of the unconscious). He would bolt up in bed at some disturbance, whether noise or motion or visitor. Sitting up curiously in that dream analogue of his familiar bulky bed, he would confront the miraculous: clowns, sprites, animals, fairies, once the smiling visage of the moon, all come to summon him to the realm of dreams, where furthers wonders–and the companionship of a certain Princess–were promised to await him as his natural reward, his secret birthright as it were.

He would leave his bedroom behind then with whatever guide had manifested that week, ready and eager to cross the changeable fantastical terrain separating him from the veritable kingdom of dreams. But disaster of one sort or another always intervened. Landscapes collapsed or fragmented around him, due either to his clumsiness or incapacity, or to some uncontrollable natural calamity. Often his own dream death aborted his quest. Then he would be plunged out of the bizarre geography of his pilgrimage, back into his cold sheets, usually to tumble awkwardly upon the hard floor, his flesh-and-blood postures mimicking the contortions of his astral form.

His parents would rush in then to see what all the commotion was about. His mother, robustly beautiful as a Gibson Girl; his father, all mustachioed Ben-Turpin bluffness. Or perhaps some relative spending the night would be delegated to check on the restless boy, doting aunt or dotty uncle.

His mother. Dead these fifty years now, all her golden piled tresses first turned gray, then white, then boxed away below the ground. His father, dead even longer, from frantic overwork during the Depression, when their family had lost the big Edwardian house where the dreams had visited him. But by then the dreams themselves had been absent for decades.

That was how my personal Golden Age ended, though. Remember rather how it began.

Week after week this truncated sleep charade continued. He accepted all the humiliations and frustrations, however, after some initial puzzlement. The characters who cajoled him were so convincing! Invitation, strange travel, impassable barricade or physical failure, then a sharp jolting exit. And how some of those exits had hurt! Falling onto the spiky thorns, pierced by arrows, gripped in the claws of a monster crab—
It hurt! It hurt! Now, nearly a century later, those assaults still hurt!

“Mistuh, what’s wrong? Where’s it hurtin’? You want me to call the nurse? Use your call-button, that’s why you got one.”

The old man opened his eyes and muzzily discerned close by his pillows the familiar black face of the janitor assigned to the nineteenth floor. Half-hopeful, half-fearful, the janitor’s broad face even in its undefined state seemed to the old man a dark sun radiating some kind of supernatural warmth. In one hand the janitor held a broom; in the other, he offered the patient the call-button dangling from its wire. A feather duster stuck in the janitor’s rear pants-pocket and rags tucked into his waistband made him appear to be wearing a plumed loincloth.

The old man suddenly realized that his pain was actual, not illusory, not a memory. Something was wrong in his chest. He scrabbled for the call mechanism, and the janitor helped him wrap his fingers around it.

“Yes, thank you, young man. I’ll call the nurse.”

The Princess

While he awaited some response to his emergency from the overworked and generally uncaring staff, the old man tried to forget the battering ram beneath his ribs by concentrating on his memories.

How had he finally surmounted those harsh barriers separating him from that mystical, sidereal domain that beckoned him so strongly? How had he gotten past the gates and locks and labyrinths? Only with the advent of the Candy Kid. That gaily gentle psychopomp had done the trick, bringing the mortal boy for the first time into the actual proud avenues and grand chambers of his appointed dream country.

Suddenly the steady assault from the invaders besieging the castle of his heart faltered, then redoubled, forcing a gasp from the half-upright man. He tried to calm himself with a massive injection of nostalgia.

All the glories he had seen with his eyes closed.

The people.

The places.

The incidents.

And the way they had made him feel.

Consider the people first, then; and among those, the lesser before the greater.

For unknown reasons, circus life had been the dominant theme among the unearthly crowds and retainers in his new home. Clowns, mummers, harlequins, pierrots by the score. Faces painted, necks ruffed, legs outlined by spangled tights, feet cased in pointy-toed or comically overbroad shoes. Hats conical, tufted, pompom’d and feathered. Then came the leopardskin-cloaked strongmen and aerialists, tumbling acrobats and dauntless animal-tamers. A gaudy perpetual Barnumscape, those background mobs.

Other colorful figures always hovering namelessly around him seemed drawn from Ruritanian courts and pseudo-medieval tapestries. Knights, dukes, earls, admirals, generals, countesses, grandees, diplomats, ladies-in-waiting, jesters.

Then came the impossibles from myth and legend: Father Time, giants, Santa Claus, dragons, Uncle Sam, mermaids, Neptune, wizards, witches, trolls, Mercury, pirates, Jack Frost, Martians even!

Finally, for balance: a few familiar figures from his waking world: Keystone Kops and bad boys and winsome orphan girls, mostly.

Yet somehow the whole outrageously heterogenous mix had cohered into a well-sorted citizenry, a true community. Was it just the surreal logic of the dreaming, or had there really been some ordering principle at work, a governing deity shaping the chaos into living art?

Of course, King Morpheus, stern and expressionless and rotund, ruled in theory over all. Name him first among those with whom the young visitor had grown intimate. But ultimately King Morpheus seemed ineffectual, more blustering figurehead than domineering tyrant, happier when departing for a vacation in his floating summer palace than when seated on the throne. And no one else occupied a plausible position of omnipotence. Doctor Pill, Uncle Dawn, Granny Hag, the Professor, Mr. Gosh–They were all minor players, each with their powers and provinces, but none capable of ruling the whole infinite sphere.

But what of the three people closest to him? Could any of them have been the secret governor? This question had plagued him for decades.

Impie the savage buffoon? Certainly not!

Flip? Green-faced, cigar-smoking Flip? Well, Flip was an enigma beyond plumbing. Yes, it could have been Flip, nephew of the Dawn Guard–
And the Princess?

His first, best, and, ultimately, his only love, asleep or awake? Could she have been pulling the strings all this time? Could it be her inexplicable spontaneous boredom or displeasure that had exiled him from his dream sanctuary?

No! They had been too much in love.

Children both, they nonetheless adored each other with an adult passion, innocent yet deep and complete. The Princess’s longing for him had been the catalyst that brought him over the borders of sleep. Together every possible minute, they walked hand in hand through the dreams, clad in fanciful brocades and plumed hats, or bathing suits, or ballgown and tuxedo, or Eskimo gear. When, as often happened, they became separated by the unpredictable circumstances of that garish, hectic empire, they longed fervently for each other, wept and strove to reunite. (Although admittedly he had strayed from time to time, gotten swept up in events, taken bad advice, even stolen a cheating kiss or two from paper dolls or glass beauties.)

No, if the Princess had indeed been the unacknowledged ruler of the world of his dreams, then surely she would not have forsaken him, her beloved, never have exiled him, cast him out forever. Powers beyond her control must have brought about their long painful separation. And certainly all would be different, if she knew now what he was undergoing–
“Bed 1905A! What’s the problem here now?”

The blurry female face above a dirty white blouse, swimming angrily into view, held no sympathy. The nurse gripped his wrist and took his pulse.

“Jesus, you’re off the charts. Did you get your meds last night?”

“No. Yes. I think so.”

She dropped his arm back rudely. “What a bunch of screwups they’ve got on that night shift. More effin’ work for us. Well, I suppose I’ll have to get the doctor now.”

“Yes, please. Get Doctor Pill–”

Doctor Pill

Of course, his parents had taken him to physicians and alienists when the dreams showed no sign of dissipating after several months, but instead grew stronger and more dominant. Alarmed by their son’s constant references to his “imaginary” world, and by the way the hallucinations affected his school work; disturbed by his deteriorating relationships with his peers and with his loving relatives, his mother and father had appealed to various authority figures for an explanation and banishment of his delusions. All in vain. Nothing anyone could say–from school teachers to priests to medical specialists–could convince the little boy that his dreams were unreal.

And so after a time, he wised up. Said nothing more about his weekly visits to another realm, beyond a blurted phrase or two when he invariably tumbled with a start from his nocturnal sheets. He tried to re-engage with ordinary life, with the dull routines of school and home and church. He exerted himself but failed to find much charm in the shabby appurtenances and tinsel attractions of the waking world.

But how could he, really, after all he had seen? Oh, he had learned how to fake an interest in what occupied everyone else, especially after the dreams had ended. (And what a painful transition that had been, into and through his dreary blank adolescence and young manhood.) But the sights presented to his opened eyes were washed-out and bland compared to those viewed from behind lowered lids every Sunday night.

He had ridden impossible animals across turbulent skies and from sun to sun across the Milky Way. Boats and cars and airships of every inconceivable stripe had ferried him from one locus of wonder to another. He had visited the Moon and Mars. He had swum with the sirens and helped any number of demiurges mismanage the diurnal workings of the cosmos. Seething jungles, tropical archipelagos, canyons with walls high as continents, sherbert-colored polar wastes, spiky caverns measureless to man: he had plumbed a vast range of strange climates and elastic geographies.

But most remarkable had been the abundant architecture of his dream civilization. Never had the greatest empire of any earthly Paradise boasted its like.

The builders worked big in Morpheus’s kingdom. And in what exotic materials! Porphyry and travertine, sandstone and marble, onyx and jade, chrysoberyl and ivory. Embellished with gilt, mosaics, scrollwork and mother of pearl inlays. Prinked out in a pastel palette or with pyrotechnic panache. Cyclopean ceremonial structures whose glittering, shadowy arcades and architraves, lintels and loggias, roofs and rafters, columns and corridors, porticos and patios, towers and tunnels, all stretched to infinity. (Once he had climbed a staircase all the way to the Moon.) But the sizes and textures and hues, although impressive, were the least of the attractions–and frights–of this world. The changeability of the constructions outweighed by far their grandiose dimensions.

Everything was mutable: roads could become caves, fireplaces open onto stairwells, floors become ceilings. Buildings–entire cities–sank into the soil, fell from the sky, dwindled and disappeared, or sprang from nowhere. It took a flexible mind to accept such a continuum, and the boy had prided himself on his adapatation to the dream universe (although of course he could still be shocked, right up to his final dream, a dire event whose significance had been betrayed by no grand conclusion or apocalypse.)

And the distinction between organic and inorganic hardly counted there: snowmen cavorted, beds sprouted legs, a boy became rubber, buildings tore themselves up from their foundations and ambled about. Nor did conventional rules of physics apply. Gravity was abolished, inertia coerced, cause-and-effect confounded.

How then could even a Coney Island rollercoaster or Central Park zoo be expected to entrance or delight?

Or, later, women, song, or wine?

The Doctor’s breath smelled of alcohol, and his high hat dislodged a shiver of snow onto the old man’s sheets, where the slush began to melt.

A cold stethoscope coined a minor discomfort against his chest, to match the greater within. “You’d better not be malingering, old man. I was at lunch, you know.”

“No, I think it’s my heart–”

The doctor withdrew in alarm. “Nurse, nurse, can’t you recognize a goddamn myocardial infarction when you see one! Call the ambulance!”

Ambulance? What did they need an ambulance for? (Although truth be told, that was one vehicle he had never yet ridden, asleep or awake.) Just give him the wonderful wand he had wielded in Shantytown, and he’d cure himself–

King Morpheus

In his early twenties, he had finally admitted the truth of his sorry condition to himself.

The dreams were never going to return. At least not with the vividness of their original run.

And the succeeding years had proven his sad suspicion correct. During a couple of brief unpredictable intervals separated by decades, some paltry semblance of the dreams had actually recurred. But all the actors therein seemed mere lifeless simulacra, all the colors of the land beyond sleep now pallid and dull, all the events a rehash of the originals. And, worst of all, when he entered these frustrating reiterations, he entered as a five-year-old, not the adult he now was. The actual bodily reversion did not trouble him; that condition was probably a predicate of gaining his dream empire. But the fact that he also reverted mentally truly dismayed him. This shearing away of any wisdom or experience he might have gained over the years indicated to him above all other clues that these were not true ascents or descents, no eruptions of grace or glory, but rather mockeries sent to him by some malignant counterforce.

So he had attempted to become a good, productive, functioning member of society. He had taken a job almost at random. What job it was he no longer even recalled, for at age one hundred he had been retired almost as long as he had been employed, and the job had never held any more of his attention or concern than was absolutely necessary to perform it with minimal competence. After the death of his father and the loss of his childhood home, his mother had gone to live with one of her own sisters (the old man was an only child), and he had found lodgings for himself in a cheap boarding house, the first of many such before his eventual consignment–through the agency of failing health–to this cheap and tawdry nursing home called Slumberland.

Of course, he had never married. Never even courted.

To betray the Princess? She of the winsome sighs and unstinting devotion? Unthinkable! And besides: what flesh-and-blood woman could compare to that fabled child bride of his spirit?

Recreations he had none. What could substitute for the sparkling attractions of his dream life? Incomparable parades, festivals, parties, dinners: he had played the guest at more grand affairs than the richest, most popular terrestrial socialite. Games? He had ridden sleds down glaciers, dived to the bottom of the sea, and drifted in a dirigible around the world, visiting the dream doppelganger of every state of his nation and every country of the globe. Dinosaurs and dragons had carried him through forests of giant mushrooms and entire cities built of children’s blocks.

Really, what kind of travel could lure him from his lonely tenement hermitage? He had been a giant in microworlds, and an ant in macroworlds. Tropical islands full of cannibals had known his step. He had helmed naval destroyers across jade seas of miracles.

And all the love and adulation he had received! Those dream affections had been the most painful birthrights to lose. In his dreams he had always been the center of attention. People fawned over him, catered to his every whim. He was pampered and petted, cossetted and consulted. Even when thwarted by his primal antagonist, Flip, he had felt himself honored by the magnitude of his opponent’s efforts. And if this universe of sleep did not precisely revolve entirely around him–there was always a disturbing sense of ongoing agenda and schemes much, much larger than his small self–then at least he always felt that he was one of its most privileged citizens.

And never had he experienced this sensation more keenly than when he visited Shantytown, that ghetto precinct of King Morpheus’s realm, where, with his miraculous wand, he served as savior to its suffering inhabitants, easing their pains and tribulations like Christ himself.

Of course, awake, he occupied no such exalted position. No savior amidst the mortal dust of existence, he was just one more of the faceless millions, another atom in the uncaring cosmos. How deeply that pained him, to the core of his soul!

Anxiety had burned away the booziness in the Doctor’s voice. “Where are those goddamn beta-blockers? Have those freaking junkies we call aides raided the pharmacy again? Didn’t we get a new supply? Christ, I can’t lose another old fuck! I’m already under review. At least get me some goddamn aspirin for his rotten heart!”

The old man wanted to tell the Doctor not to bother, but couldn’t quite find his voice. The pain had transcended itself to become a vacuity, a hollow at his center. And the hollow was rapidly expanding to empty the old man from the inside out.

“What’s going on here?”

The owner of Slumberland resembled a bloated plutocrat of yore, a figure out of editorial pages of the old man’s youth. Seen in detail through the old man’s glasses on previous visits, the owner recalled no one so much to the old man as Nast’s indelible image of Boss Tweed.

Now, waddling like King Cole, his plummy cheeks visibly flaring even as half-distinguished by the old man’s weakened vision, his waistcoat straining against his girth, the owner had apparently been attracted by the commotion in Room 1905, and rushed in to take command.

In the midst of the uselessly fluttering workers and gawpers, the old man rediscovered his voice, enough to croak out a single name, a name that surprised him as much as it baffled the listeners.

“Flip. Please, Flip. Help, please, Flip–”

Flip

They had torn off his shirt and laid abrasive paddles against his chest, but not yet triggered the Frankenstein jolts that might convince his balky pump to labor uselessly on, prolonging a life that should have ended ninety years ago, for all the utility or joy or good deeds the old man could realistically chalk up against his anticlimactic, purposeless span.

A choir of blurry faces hung about his bed: the Candy Kid, Doctor Pill, King Morpheus, the Princess, Impie–
But no Flip! Where was Flip? Flip would save him, sure he would, that rascal….

That green-faced, unblinking, cigar-smoking amalgam of Penrod, Jiggs, and Moon Mullins, who had first appeared in pure ornery envious opposition to the young visitor from the realm of wakefulness, yet who had become, in some strange fashion, his best friend among the dreamfolk (though still inherently prone to causing disruptions, detours and disasters galore). Often and often had Flip extended a saving hand when danger threatened. Wouldn’t he trump death now, darting in from offstage during the crisis of this final act?

The paddles crackled to life, and, under their misplaced harshness, the old man’s heart burst.

Waves of crimson occluded his dying eyes. The shimmering red draperies boiled for an infinite moment, then were sucked down as into a whirlpool, pooling into a single red knot——the ember on the tip of Flip’s cigar.

“Feelin’ kinda punk there for a minute, hey, kid?”

The old man took stock of his bodily condition first: no pain, an effortless vitality flowing through his limbs, his wrinkled, palsied hands smoothed to youthful elasticity and steadied by confidence, his head full of wavy brown hair.

His surroundings? A white canvas, untouched by artist’s brush or pen.

His clothing: a soft flannel suit of footed pajamas.

His sole companion? Flip, in red-and-white striped pants, garish weskin with buttons the size of dinner plates, billowy yellow cravat, insouciant top hat.

The reborn boy stuck out his hand, and Flip gripped it with his typical rude vigor.

“Sorry to take so long fetchin’ ya back, kid, but we had a busy night here at the Palace since we last saw each other. Rogue herd of gogglemops got loose in the pantry. Devil’s own work corralling them. Chef fell in the birthday cake batter too.”

“One night? Was that all it was?”

“Yeah, just a single night. How come ya ask? Time kinda drag for ya?”

“A little, yes. It seemed like years.”

“Well, you’re too many for me, pal. But ya know ya won’t have that kinda headache here. Plenty to keep ya busy. Almost too much sometimes, ya ask me. Now let’s get movin’. Lotta folks waitin’ for ya—including one special little lady, if you get my drift. You don’t wanna miss yer own birthday party. Hope ya don’t mind if yer cake tastes a little like the Chef.”

“How do we get there?”

Flip smacked his forehead. “Wotta lunkhead! After all this time, ya gotta ask me! Use yer wits, peabrain!”

The boy thought a moment, then gripped twin handfuls of the canvas and pulled, tearing open a wide jagged split, to reveal—
The real Slumberland at last.

---

“Slumberland” appears in Little Doors, Paul Di Filippo’s new collection due in November 2002 from Four Walls Eight Windows.