Category: Fiction

Riding a bus through the soul of a city is different than riding it through the physical world, as you might expect.  The physical world has limits: the island of Manhattan is thirteen miles long and just over two miles wide at its widest point.  Depending on what shape they’re welded into, steel, concrete, and glass can only support so much of their own weight.  Two objects can’t occupy the same space.  Time only ever moves forward, so whether you miss something dearly or if it’s a scar on your memory, once something is gone it can never really come back.    

None of that is true about souls.  Souls are about meaning.  That’s as true about the City’s soul as it is about yours.  That’s how the Statue of Liberty can be a mile-high colossus whose lamp can be seen thirty miles out to sea – not that I would recommend going out into the soul of the wild ocean beyond the harbor.  That’s how Coney Island can be as big and full of wonders as you remember it from when you were a kid, instead of being a three-block remnant filled with carnie rides.  That’s how Manhattan can be as big as it looks in the movies and TV, with Studio 54 from the heyday and Nineties nightclubs separated by only a few blocks of Eighties urban decay.

And that’s how I can be accosted on the bus by gang members from The Warriors.  Not the Coney Island Warriors themselves, oh no.  They might actually be reasonable.  Not even the Baseball Furies, who everyone pictures when they’re thinking of The Warriors. 

So I’ve somehow been transported to the Soul of New York City.  How was your morning?

I get off the train at 59^th and Lexington and head up the stairs, stopping just long enough to give a young homeless girl a dollar bill infused with luck.

By noon, she’ll have enough money for a room with a hot shower, some new clothes, a real meal, and a bus ticket back to Georgia.  And yes, that’s what she’ll use it for.  I scribbled a little suggestion on the bill to make sure.  Her eyes will never notice it, but her unconscious mind will.  I usually don’t like to do stuff like that, but if I didn’t, she’d still be in the City next Wednesday, at which point she’ll be hit by the M60 bus.  How do I know? 

Because that’s what I do.  Economancy.  Money magic.     

Hey all. I know I haven’t had a lot of material for you over the past few months. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing at all. One thing I’ve been writing is a piece of serial fiction for a private newsletter that I call The Economancer. Now, thanks to the generous permission of that newsletter, I’ll be able to share The Economancer with all of you in weekly serial format – my own little penny dreadful. Hope you enjoy.

You probably don’t think of New York City as a place for magic.

Or maybe you do.  You’ve been primed by tv and movies where if anything weird happens, it happens in the Big Apple – Dr. Strange, Men In Black, The Avengers, Ghostbusters – everything from aliens to ghosts to giant lizards.

(Though I have to ask: who starts a whole business just to “bust” ghosts?  Sure, some ghosts are trouble, but most are just minding their own business.  I mean, you’ve been here all this time, and I bet you never even noticed Phil in elevator shaft A1!  Are you gonna bust ghosts just for being ghosts?  That’s vitalist!)

But I’m not talking about magic in movies or TV.  I’m talking about the real stuff.