This is how it works, he realizes in wonder. This is what he needs to defeat the tendrils. These total strangers are his allies. Their anger, their need for a return to normalcy, rises from them like heat waves. This is the weapon he needs, if he can figure out how to harness it.
“I’m Manny,” he says to the cabdriver, on impulse. “You?”
She looks surprised, then grins. “Madison,” she says. “I know. But Number One Mom says I got conceived via IVF in a clinic just off Madison Ave, so…”
Too Much Information. Manny chuckles anyway, because he’s all nerves and could use a laugh. “Okay, here’s the plan,” he says. Then he lays it out for her.
She stares at him like he’s crazy, but she’ll help. He can see that in her face. “Fine,” she says at last, but it’s just a show of reluctance. Maybe New Yorkers don’t like to be seen as too helpful.
They lay out the flares and triangle markers to encourage people to go around the fast lane. Because the cab isn’t moving, angry commuters glare and honk as they pass, assuming that the cab is somehow making the traffic worse. It probably is. One guy starts screaming at Manny loudly enough to spray the inside of his door window with spittle, though fortunately he’s also too angry to remember to roll the window down first. It’s a measure of how much everyone is picking up on the weirdness, though, that no one veers back into the fast lane even after they pass the parked Checker cab.
The mass of tendrils is growing as Manny watches. There is a low, crumbly sound that he can hear from that direction, now and again when the wind carries it to him: probably the sound of roots digging into asphalt, and probably into the rebar within the asphalt, and maybe into the bedrock that’s under the road. He can hear the tendrils, too, now that they’re close enough: a choppy, broken groan, stuttering and occasionally clicking like a corrupted music file. He can smell it—a thicker, much-fishier brine scent than that of the nearby East River.
Trimethylamine oxide, he thinks out of the blue. The scent of the deep, cold, crushing ocean depths.
“What now?” Madison asks.
“I need to hit it.”
“Uh…”
Manny looks around before spotting exactly what he needs—there, in a convertible sports car’s open back seat. The Indian woman driving it stares at him in blatant curiosity. He steps toward her quickly and blurts, “Hey, can I have that umbrella?”
“How about pepper spray?” she suggests.
He holds up his hands to try to look less threatening, though he’s still a six-foot-tall not-white guy, and some people are just never going to be okay with that. “If you loan it to me, I can clear this traffic jam.”
At this, she actually looks intrigued. “Huh. Well, for that I guess I can give up an umbrella. It’s my sister’s, anyway. I just like to hit people with it.” She grabs the umbrella and hands it to him, pointy tip first.
“Thanks!” He grabs it and trots back to the cab. “Okay, we’re golden.”
Madison frowns at him, then at the tendril flare, as she opens the cab’s driver-side door to get back in. “I can’t see what’s beyond that thing,” she says. “If there are cars, and I can’t brake in time—”
“Yeah. I know.” Manny vaults up onto the Checker’s hood, then its roof. Madison stares while he turns and arranges himself to sit straddling the roof, one hand gripping the OFF DUTY sign. Fortunately, Checkers are high and long, narrow-built for city streets. He can get enough of a grip with his legs to hold on, though it’s still going to be dicey. “Okay. Ready.”
“I am so texting my weed man as soon as this is over,” Madison says, shaking her head as she gets into the cab.
The umbrella is key. Manny doesn’t know why, but he’s okay with accepting what he can’t quite understand, for now. What’s really bothering him is that he’s not sure how to use it. Given that everything in him cries out that the forest of tendrils is dangerous—deadly if it so much as touches him, maybe because the tendrils look like anemones, which sting their prey to death—he needs to figure it out fast. As Madison starts up the cab, he experimentally lifts the umbrella, metal tip pointing toward the tendril mass like a jouster’s lance. It’s wrong. The right idea, but the wrong implementation; weak, somehow. The umbrella’s an automatic, so he unsnaps its closure and presses the button. It pops open at once, and it’s huge. A golf umbrella—a nice one, with no hint of a rattle or wobble as Madison accelerates and the wind pulls at the umbrella. But still wrong.
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.
They’re speeding now, doing at least fifty. The tendrils shadow the sky and the air has turned cold and the smell of lightless oceans has grown nauseating and it’s getting hard to hold on to the cab’s roof. He hangs on anyway and half shuts his eyes against the wind and the burning salt of the thing’s scent and what is he doing? Pushing out the interloper. But he’s an interloper, too, isn’t he? And if he doesn’t do this exactly the right way, then only one of the interlopers here is going to walk away from this confrontation intact, and the umbrella isn’t strong enough.
Then, when the Checker is only feet away, close enough that Manny can see the slick, pore-flecked skin of the tendrils, and his side screams with agony like someone’s jabbed an ice-cold pike through him—
—he remembers the words of the woman who gave him the umbrella. I just like to hit people with it, she’d said.
Manny lets go of the OFF DUTY sign. Immediately he starts to slide back on the cab’s roof because they’re going so fast that he can barely hold on with his legs alone. But he might survive falling off the cab; he won’t survive contact with the nest of tendrils if he doesn’t get this umbrella up. He needs both hands for that, wrestling against the wind and his own fear, but in the welter of seconds that he has, he manages to lift the open umbrella above his head. Now he might die, but at least his hair won’t get wet in any sudden rain shower.
Suddenly there is energy around him, in him, blazing rusty red and tarnished silver and greened bronze and a thousand colors more. It has become a sheath around the whole cab—a sphere of pure energy brightening enough to compete with the June midday sunlight—and in its suddenly loud song Manny hears the horns of a thousand cars trapped on the FDR. The hissing air is eclipsed by the shouted road rage of hundreds of mouths. As he opens his mouth to shout with them, his cry is delight and the ecstasy of suddenly knowing that he isn’t an interloper. The city needs newcomers! He belongs here as much as anyone born and bred to its streets, because anyone who wants to be of New York can be! He is no tourist, exploiting and gawking and giving nothing but money back. He lives here now. That makes all the difference in the world.
So as Manny laughs, giddy with this realization and the power that now suffuses him, they strike the tendril mass. The sheath of energy surrounding the cab burns through it like a checkered missile. Of course, the cab is part of the power; this is why the city sent it to him. Manny feels the umbrella snag on something and he clings tighter to it, rudely not lifting it or moving it aside because I’m walking here, I have the right of way and he’s playing metaphysical sidewalk chicken with this violent, invasive tourist—Then they’re through.
Manny hears Madison yell from inside the cab as they get through the mass and see that there’s a line of stopped cars dead ahead. She slams the brakes. Ma
nny loses his grip on the umbrella as he frantically grabs for the OFF DUTY sign, catching it even as his whole body flips onto the windshield and hood. The cab spins out as Madison throws the wheel; now, instead of flying forward, he’s being thrown around by centrifugal force. In his panic, he loses his grip on the sign and doesn’t know how he finds the strength to grab for the edge of the hood below the wipers, even as his legs come loose and most of his body flies free in the direction of the stopped traffic. If the cab flips, he’s dead. If he loses his grip and gets tossed onto the hatchback up ahead, he’s dead. If he falls off the cab and under the wheels—
But the cab finally skids to a halt, a bare inch away from the stopped car up ahead. Manny’s feet thump onto the hatchback’s trunk, not entirely of his own volition. It’s okay. Just nice to have something solid under his feet again.
“Get your feet off my fucking car!” someone inside shouts. He ignores them.
“Holy shit!” Madison sticks her head out the window, her face panicky, like how he feels. “Holy—Are you okay?”
“Yeah?” Manny’s honestly not sure. But he musters the wherewithal to sit up, and look back down the fast lane.
Behind them, the tendril forest has gone wild, its fronds whipping and flailing like a dying thing. It is dying. Where they punched through its thicket of roots, there is a Checker cab cutout like something from a kids’ cartoon—complete with an umbrella-shaped hole on top of its roof, and a hunched human silhouette underneath. The edges of the cutout glow as if hot, and the fire rapidly eats its way outward and upward, fast as a circle of flame burning through a piece of paper. Within seconds this burn has eaten its way through the base of the tendrils, then starts burning all the way up. No ash or residue remains in the wake of this process. Manny knows this is because the tendrils aren’t really there, aren’t really real in any way that makes sense.
The destruction is real, however. Once the last of the tendrils has burned away, a hovering, brightly colored knot of energy—the remnant of the sheath that surrounded the cab, now a wild, seething thing of its own—dissipates in a miniature explosion that ripples concentrically outward. Manny shudders as the wave of light and color and heat passes through him. He knows it won’t hurt, but he’s surprised when it warms the place on his side that hurt so badly before. All better now. More dramatically, tendrils that have attached themselves to the nearby cars wither away the instant the energy hits them. He feels the power roll onward out of sight as it passes beyond the nearest buildings and into the East River.
It’s done.
And as Manny climbs off the cab’s hood and settles back onto the ground, once again he feels something waft through him, from the soles of his shoes to the roots of his hair. It’s the same energy, he realizes, that suffused the cab when it torpedoed through the tendril mass—and which soothed him at Penn Station, and which guided him from there to here. That energy is the city, he understands somehow, and it is part of him, filling him up and driving out anything unnecessary to make room for itself. That’s why his name is gone.
The energy begins to fade. Will his memory come back when it’s done? No way to know. Though Manny feels he should be frightened by this realization, he… isn’t. It doesn’t make sense. Amnesia, even if it’s temporary, can’t be a good thing. He might have a brain bleed, some kind of hidden injury; he should go to a hospital. But instead of being frightened, he is actually comforted by the presence of the city within him. He shouldn’t be. He has an inkling that he just had a near-death experience. But he is.
The East River churns at his back. He looks up at the towering breadth of Manhattan: endless high-rise co-ops, repurposed banks, cramped housing projects sandwiched between ancient theater houses and soulless corporate headquarters. Nearly two million people. He’s been here one hour, but already he feels like he has never lived anywhere else. And even if he doesn’t know who he was… he knows who he is.
“I am Manhattan,” he murmurs softly.
And the city replies, without words, right into his heart: Welcome to New York.
CHAPTER TWO
Showdown in the Last Forest
Madison drops Manny off up in Inwood. “It’s way out of my way,” she says as he hauls his bag out of the car, “but there’s a great empanada place around here that I like. Anyway, I think my cab likes you.” She strokes its broad old real-leather dash, as if petting a horse. “This thing’s engine is gas-guzzling shit, but it ran smoother on the way up here than it ever has before. Maybe running over semi-visible sea monsters is good for the spark plugs, or something.”
Manny laughs at her through the open passenger window. “Well, I’ll be sure to call you and your cab to help next time, too,” he says. Because there’s going to be a next time, he feels certain.
“Ugh, thanks, no, pass,” she says. Then she tilts her head to the side and gives him a once-over so frank that Manny finds himself blushing. It ends with her grin and wink. “You, uh, ever want to consider a different kind of ride, though, call Checker Cab Dream Weddings and ask for me.”
Manny can’t help chuckling, though it’s awkward. He doesn’t think he’s used to such aggressive flirting. She’s pretty, and he’s interested, but something makes him reluctant to take her up on the offer. What? He’s not sure. Maybe it’s just the fact that he seems to be transforming into the living embodiment of a major metropolitan area, and that’s not an ideal time to start dating anyone. So he tries to make it kind as brush-offs go, because it’s not her, it’s him. “I’ll, uh, keep that in mind.”
She grins, taking the rejection in stride, which makes him like her that much more. Then she pulls away from the curb, and there he is alone in front of his new home.
It’s one of the older apartment buildings of Inwood, sprawling over half a block and with an actual garden out front, he notes as he walks through the wrought-iron gates. Someone in the building has planted poppies and, he thinks, echinaceas. In the foyer, which is huge, there are black-and-white tiles on the floor and fancy cornices in marble along the walls. The ceiling is embossed tin buried beneath so many layers of paint that it looks lumpy. No doorman, but this isn’t that kind of neighborhood.
None of it feels familiar. The address was in his phone, thankfully, on a sticky app marked with New addy!!! followed by barely legible finger-scrawled information. But he does not remember ever visiting New York before.
(What kind of person abbreviates “address” to “addy”? he wonders. What kind of person is three exclamation points’ worth of excited about having a new address? Is that the sort of person who would rent an apartment and pick a roommate sight unseen?)
The sluggish, ancient elevator is the kind with an inner gate that must be pulled shut before the whole thing will move. On the top floor, the elevator doors open to reveal a hallway lit murkily by ancient fluorescents and stretching away into a distance that shouldn’t be possible given the length of New York city blocks. From within the elevator, it’s eerie, like something out of a survival horror video game. As Manny steps out, however, something seems to swipe its way across his perception. When he blinks, the hallway light is brighter, its shadows reduced, its contrasts softened, and its faint scents—lingering food smells from someone’s dinner, dust, paint, a whiff of cat piss—sharpened. Now it’s just a hallway… but it feels safer, somehow, than it did a moment before.
Weird. Okay, then.
4J is the apartment number in his phone. Manny’s got a key tagged with the same number, but he knocks just to be polite. There’s a thump of hurried feet from beyond and then the door opens, held by a lanky Asian guy who’s got sleep lines all over one side of his face. But he brightens and spreads his arms at once. “Hey, roomie!” he says in a heavy British accent. “You made it!”
“Yeah,” Manny says, grinning awkwardly. He has no idea who this man is. “Had some, uh, some trouble on the FDR.”
“The FDR? Isn’t that on the east side of the island? Why would your cab go that way from Penn? Was
the traffic that bad, after that horror show at the Williamsburg?” But the man ignores his own question in the next instant, stepping forward and grabbing Manny’s suitcase. “Here, let me. Your boxes and other suitcase all got here a few days ago.”
It’s all so normal. Inside, the apartment is enormous, with a full-sized kitchen and two bedrooms that are nicely spaced from each other—one just past the living room, the other farther down the hall, past the bathroom and a storage closet. His roommate has claimed the closer one, so Manny heads to the far end of the apartment to find a spacious room that features a full suite of bedroom furniture. Apparently pre-amnesia Manny wanted a furnished space. There aren’t any sheets on the bed, and there are dust bunnies in the corners, but it’s nice. The window displays a great view of a commercial parking lot. He loves it.
“See? Yeah?” says the roommate, watching him take it all in. “It’s a great flat, yeah? Just like the pictures I sent you.”
Pictures. He’s the kind of guy who signs a lease based on pictures. “Yeah, perfect.” But he can’t keep calling his roommate “you.” “Uh, this is embarrassing, sorry, but your name—”
The man blinks, then laughs. “Bel. Bel Nguyen? PhD candidate in political theory at Columbia, just like you? What, was the train ride that bad?”
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