Gandalph Cohen & The Land at the End of the Working Day by Peter Crowther Page A

urban fantasy is a sub-genre in itself, the hoary old medieval dreads and archetypes moved into town with credit cards and driving licences. This is a fantasy purely of and about the city. This is a fairytale of New York. The city is a super organism, the sum and more of the lives and activities it contains—and this is New York, goddammit: the city content about not being the capital of the United States, because it knows it’s the capital of the whole world instead.
    What might be the dreams and fears of the world’s greatest city? Go down to a place like The Land at the End of the Working Day and you just might hear them. We ride a wave of words a million years deep and that wave shows no sign of breaking? yet or ever.
     
     
    —Ian McDonald

Gandalph Cohen
    & The Land at the End 
of the Working Day

    Waiting for his drink, thinking about Tom ‘Ankles’ Talese—an epithet (of sorts) earned over many years as a result of the fact that Tom spends so much time so far up the Chairman’s ass that his ankles are usually the only parts of his anatomy visible—McCoy Brewer watches himself in the large mirror propped up behind the bottles on the back counter at The Land at the End of the Working Day, playing back the events of the past few hours.
    The Working Day is a two-flight walk-down bar on the corner of 23rd and Fifth that not many people know about, even though it’s been here for almost eight years and is just a block away from ‘The Dowager of 23rd Street’, the Chelsea Hotel. It’s there that the tourists go with their Nikons and their Pentaxes, capturing each other’s vacuous smiling face on cheap film—a strangely talismanic process that somehow imbues their empty lives with a little art and, maybe, just a little history— to take the shaky and badly-cropped results home to bore their friends at the end of interminable dinner parties for which the level (not to mention the sheer invention) of last-minute cancellations never ceases to surprise them … strange illnesses and bizarre accidents, such as obscure relatives (from equally obscure out-of-state towns) who have cut off their feet with a lawnmower.
    In the early hours of a clear morning—spring or fall, summer or winter—when Jack Fedogan’s booze has been flowing and the conversation has been just right, you can walk up the Working Day’s steps and out onto the waiting street, and you can maybe hear Dylan Thomas eternally whispering to Caitlin that he’s happier here than anywhere else, and her telling him she feels that way too, their voices drifting on the Manhattan breeze the way only voices can drift, moving away for a while and then moving back, saying the same things over and over like cassette ribbons, proving that no sound ever dies but only waits to be heard again.
    So, too, do the voices of James Farrell—who really was the hero of his own book, Studs Lonigan … and don’t let anyone tell you different—and Arthur B. Davies, Robert Flaherty, O. Henry, John Sloan, Thomas Wolfe and Edgar Lee Masters, all of whose names are recorded forever on a plaque fixed to the red brick wall of the Chelsea, the ancient echoes of their soft words wafting up the ten storeys past ten little cast-iron balconies, there to drift around the gabled roof and maybe roost a while, watching the sun come up across the East River and the distant smoky towers of fabled Brooklyn.
    There are other voices, of course, and if you strain real hard maybe you’ll even pick up Martha Fishburn, a native of Des Moines, telling her husband Garry he drinks too much as he stumbles up onto the sidewalk of many months past … or Nick Hassam, a British would-be writer of American detective fiction, telling both the street and his wife of one week, Nicky, that he’s having the greatest honeymoon anyone could ever have, that this is the most magnificent city and she the most wonderful wife.
    The people who come to The Land at the End of the Working Day are no strangers to