The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  That’s it. Manny straightens, setting his jaw.

  The Black woman is staring at the white woman now. “You actually called the cops on these men? For what, walking in the park while Black and Asian?” She lets out an incredulous laugh. By the time that laugh has faded, however, Manny’s walked over to the white woman and snatched the phone from her hand.

  “Whoa,” says Bel, more startled than prohibitive. Manny ignores him. The woman yelps and draws breath to scream, but before she can, Manny steps in closer and wraps a hand around the lower half of her face, covering her mouth.

  The Black woman utters a swift curse, but then backs up to where she can watch the two paths coming out of the woods. The white woman grabs for Manny’s arm rather than trying to wrench away. It’s exactly what Manny expected; she’s clearly unwilling to back away from someone whom she regards as having no right to exist in public, let alone within her personal space. She isn’t scared, not really. She assumed that he would not dare attack her.

  Well, then. It’s the work of a moment for Manny to switch his grip to the woman’s throat instead. Her eyes widen. “Don’t scream,” he says.

  She inhales. In a sharp movement, Manny tightens his hand and turns them around, yanking the woman off-balance and angling his body so that the couple on the grass won’t see. (Not that they’re paying attention. To judge by their positions and the way they’re moving, Manny suspects they’re actually filming themselves having sex in public. No reason not to be careful, though.) If they do happen to glance toward the group around the tulip tree rock, it will look like Manny’s just standing close to the woman while they have an intimate talk.

  The woman freezes, scream taut but unreleased in her throat tendons. Manny loosens his grip as soon as it’s clear she’s taken the hint. He only wants to keep her quiet, not cut off her air, and he needs to keep his grip gentle or he’ll leave finger marks. There’s an art to doing this.

  (How does he know that? God.)

  Once she’s still, Manny asks her conversationally, “Don’t drug dealers usually kill snitches?”

  She inhales a little, her eyes locking onto his. Now she’s scared. Manny smiles as, with his free hand, he thumbs through her phone. It’s all fine and friendly. Just a little shakedown between friends.

  “I’ve always heard that about dealers,” Manny continues as he searches through the phone’s stored data directory. Got it. Next, active apps. “I mean, we’re not drug dealers. But if we were, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that you just stood there filming us. That just doesn’t sound safe, does it? But I think you filmed us because you didn’t think we were dealers. Because we were just ordinary people going about our own business, and it bothered you to see us comfortable and unafraid. So now you’ve inserted yourself into something very dangerous. Hold still.”

  She freezes at the whipcrack of those last two words. This close, he can feel the tension in her body. Easy to tell she was shifting her weight, about to try to lunge away. Satisfied, Manny resumes thumbing through her phone.

  “Anyway, let’s see… ah, you’re on Facebook. Live?” He browses her settings. “Guess not. And you don’t have any backup apps logged in…” He glances at the top of her Facebook profile and beams in delight. “Martha! Martha Blemins.” The woman makes an unhappy sound around his hand. “That’s an incredibly pretty name, Martha. And Blemins is such a unique spelling. I see you work at Event Flight. As a marketplace analyst? That sounds really important.”

  Martha Blemins is terrified now. Her hands have locked around Manny’s wrist, but he can feel them trembling, the palms a little damp. Tears have begun trailing from one eye. She’s so visibly on the brink of panic that Manny is honestly surprised when she manages to speak. “Y-you can’t hurt me,” she says, her voice wavering. “You b-better not.”

  Manny feels a great wave of sadness come over him. “I can hurt you, Martha,” he confesses. “I know how, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve hurt someone else. I think… I think I’ve done that a lot.”

  He knows this is true, suddenly—and he hates that this, out of the gray undifferentiated morass that is his past, is the knowledge that’s returned to him. Her pulse flutters fast against his palm. This will have traumatized her, he feels certain; it’s a mugging without the mugging. She’ll never sleep easily again in New York, never walk to work without looking over her shoulder. He’s in her head now, waving at her from the little box of assumptions that she carries about Certain Kinds Of People. The fact that she applied these assumptions preemptively means there’s nothing he could’ve done to change them, but he still hates that he’s just confirmed her stereotypes.

  The sound of sirens is fading. Either the police passed by on their way something else, or they’ve parked and are headed this way on foot. Time to go. Manny lets go of Martha’s throat, steps back, and—after wiping it carefully against his pants leg and holding only the rough edges of her decorative case—hands her phone back to her. She grabs it and stares at him, mute with shock.

  “Have a really nice day, Martha,” he says, meaning it. But he has to add one more thing, if they are to be safe from the danger she presents. He has to be more dangerous, in her mind. So he says, “Hopefully we won’t ever see each other again.”

  Then he backs away, down one of the paths that leads away from where they last heard sirens. Bel is staring at him, though he moves to follow Manny after a moment. The Black woman sighs but falls in as well, and Manny turns to head up the hill with them.

  Martha stays where Manny’s left her, not making a sound, and not turning to watch them leave.

  They’re almost to the edge of the park—no cops so far—before the Black woman finally says, “I take it you’re Manhattan.”

  He blinks out of melancholy and turns to her. She’s pulled some kind of breakfast bar out of her bag and is eating it.

  “Yeah. How did you guess?”

  “Are you kidding? Dudes like you—smart, charming, well dressed, and cold enough to strangle you in an alley if we had alleys?” She snorts to herself, while Manny tries not to let her see how much this assessment hurts him. “Dime a dozen on Wall Street and at City Hall. Figured you’d be meaner, actually. The kind of dude who didn’t stop at just threats.”

  I haven’t always, Manny thinks, in despair.

  Bel makes a sound that’s somewhere between an audible swallow and a throat-clearing. “So you remembered who you were?” When Manny frowns at him, he smiles. It’s rueful and doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “I mean, you’re back to being the bloke I met before. The one with the edge.”

  Manny wrestles with several responses before deciding: “No.”

  “Don’t sound too sure there, mate.”

  He isn’t, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. To distract himself, he considers the Black woman and guesses, “Queens?” She gives him such a disgusted look that he immediately amends, “Brooklyn.”

  This seems to mollify her. “Yes. It also has the virtue of being my name. Brooklyn Thomason. Esquire, though I’m not practicing anymore. Went into politics instead.”

  Her name is actually Brooklyn. And she remembers herself. Which means that whatever has happened to make them what they are, memory loss isn’t part of the normal process.

  “How did you know?” he blurts. “How to find me? How did you know to play music? Why don’t I know any of this?”

  She regards him coolly, despite the sweat that dots her brow after steady uphill walking. They’re circling around the park, Manny realizes. His spatial awareness is completely foiled by the trees, but he suspects they’re heading south and will emerge from the park somewhere near… Dyckman? He remembers seeing that on his phone’s map. “You’re not from here, are you?” she asks.

  “No.” He stares at her, wanting to know how she knew that, too. The bike salespeople at Penn Station seemed to think he was a local.

  She sees his confusion and sighs. He gets the fleeting impression that she doesn’t like tal
king to him, though he can’t tell why. Maybe it’s personal, or maybe she dislikes men who jack up women, on general principle. “I don’t know how I knew. I just feel it. That’s been my whole day so far—doing and thinking stuff that doesn’t make any sense, just ’cause it feels right.”

  Manny lets out a slow breath to calm himself. “Yeah. Same.”

  Bel’s calmer now, and his regional accent has faded back into generic Britishness. “I’m glad I have no idea what you’re talking about. It sounds, ah, fraught.”

  Brooklyn snorts at this, though she then focuses on Manny again. “I’ve heard… something… since I was a child,” she admits. “Muttering, feelings, images. Felt things, too—little twitches and sighs and touches. All for so long that I don’t even really think about it anymore. For a while I talked back. Never told anybody they were love songs to the city, but not everybody needs to know everything.”

  Her expression has gone flat, and he understands then what she doesn’t like—not him, but the fact that she has to speak about something so obviously personal. He nods back, trying to convey that he won’t use this against her, but she just shakes her head, annoyed at the situation regardless. That’s when something about her scowl hits Manny. He stops in his tracks. She stops after another step or two, then turns back with visible reluctance. There’s a held breath in her expression this time, as if she’s bracing herself for something. That’s his confirmation.

  “Oh wow,” he says. “You’re MC Free.”

  “Whaaaaaat.” Bel stops, too, staring at her. “Oh, shit, you are.”

  “I’m Brooklyn Thomason,” she replies. It’s gentle, but firm. “MC Free was my stage name thirty years and thirty pounds ago. These days I’m on the city council. I got a JD and a fourteen-year-old and a side hustle renting out vacation property.” Then she sighs, relenting. “But… yeah. That’s who I used to be.”

  “My God,” Bel says in a tone of naked reverence. “The greatest of the early female MCs. Lewisham was all over you back then. I grew up on your music.”

  Brooklyn’s expression turns faintly sour. “Every time somebody says that to me, I pop another gray hair. You notice I dye it now?”

  Bel winces and takes the hint to get over it. “Yyyyyeah, sorry. Shutting up.”

  They all shut up for a while, because the hill has winded them. On impulse, Manny lifts his eyes to the tree canopy as they walk. It’s cooler, here in the forest shadows, than it is on the asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks. Strange to think that there are probably wild animals in this forest, like raccoons and maybe deer or coyotes; he’s read that those are making a comeback in some areas of the city. But other kinds of animals abound here, too. How many other people, besides Martha Blemins, have been mugged here? How many beatings, how many stabbings, how many rapes? Whole villages of Lenape were driven away from the city and its immediate vicinity by the Dutch; how many of them died in the process? How much blood and fear has soaked into this old bedrock?

  I am Manhattan, he thinks again, this time in a slow upwelling of despair. Every murderer. Every slave broker. Every slumlord who shut off the heat and froze children to death. Every stockbroker who got rich off war and suffering.

  It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to like it, though.

  They reach Dyckman after a while. The clotting traffic on the street means that rush hour has started. School’s out, sending packs of same-aged children forth to flow along both sides of the street. No one’s looking at Manny and company as they emerge from the park. If the police did respond to Martha’s call, there’s no sign of them anywhere nearby. Then again, given the Williamsburg, they probably didn’t bother to come.

  “So what now?” Manny asks.

  Brooklyn sighs. “No idea. But I’ll tell you what: I’m pretty sure there’s a reason all of this is happening, all of a sudden.” She eyes him. “You know the bridge thing is part of this, right?”

  Manny stares at her. Bel looks from one to the other of them, incredulous. “The Williamsburg? What, fell down because of—” He gestures vaguely in the direction of the tulip tree rock. “Those squiggly things, and that other woman?”

  Brooklyn frowns at him. “Other woman?”

  “The one that Mrs. Nosy Parker turned into for a moment. Before you showed up.” He shivers a little. “Never seen anything creepier, except those horrid little white things.”

  Brooklyn shakes her head in confusion, and Manny has to explain. It’s actually difficult to find the words for what they saw, though after a few attempts he manages to get across that the woman Brooklyn saw was just temporary housing for someone, or something, else. “She controls those things,” he says, gesturing at the back of his neck while Brooklyn digests what he’s said. “I’m sure of it. The ones on FDR Drive, too. Anything those tentacles touch.”

  “Something told me to avoid the FDR today. Not that I usually drive anyway; took the subway.” Brooklyn sighs. “That’s how I, I don’t know, felt you? There was a crisis response meeting for city leaders up in Washington Heights. I was about to head home, but something told me to take the train uptown instead. The, uh, something, got stronger, the closer I got to you. Then there you were, in trouble.”

  “There are five of us,” Manny says. He watches Brooklyn start as she takes his meaning.

  “Oh, hell. You think the other three are in trouble, too.” She frowns, then shakes her head slowly. “Look, I’m glad I could help you, but… I didn’t sign on for an extra job. I got a kid, and my father is sick. You want to try and find them, go ahead. I have to get home.”

  Manny starts to speak, to try to persuade her, and then something catches his attention from the corner of his eye. He follows it and finds himself looking across the street, at a little bodega on the corner. Next to it is a laundromat that’s been gracious enough to put a tiny, rickety bench out front. An elderly man sits there with a small dog on a leash. He’s busy chatting in Spanish with a woman, who stands in the doorway of the laundromat; they’re laughing about something. But the dog is watching Manny and company with a steady, fixed stare that does not at all feel like the gaze of an animal.

  Then Manny looks closer. Between its clawed toes, like bits of ghostly grass picked up on its last walk, are half a dozen gently waving white tendrils.

  Brooklyn sees it, too. “Are you fucking kidding me.”

  Staring at the dog, his skin all over prickling, Manny says, “It’s what happened on FDR. The tendrils, anything that got close to them…”

  “Like a goddamn disease,” Brooklyn breathes.

  Bel is staring at the dog, too. He’s squinting a little, as if the tendrils are hard to see, but then he grimaces and visibly shivers. “I saw that old fellow walking his dog earlier, when we were walking. If everybody who was in the park just now is, um, infected, then I imagine it’ll be all over the city within a day or two.”

  They all fall silent for a moment, digesting this.

  “The white things came off of that woman when I got rid of the others,” Brooklyn says. She’s hiding it well, but her confident facade has slipped a little at the sight of the dog. The dog makes this something insidious, and ominous. “She was only marinating in her own evil, nobody else’s, by the time we were done.”

  Manny finds himself thinking about the wave of force that spread outward from FDR in the wake of his little stunt with the cab. He has an idea of what it is now: the city’s energy, dissipating outward in a circular wave once Manny no longer needed it in concentrated form. How far did that splash of energy go? He can’t guess, but he remembers seeing it kill all the white tendrils that it touched.

  A powerful weapon—if Manny can figure out how to use it consistently. Manny turns to Brooklyn. “Look, I can’t make you help me, but if I have to do this on my own, I’m going to need a crash course in how to be a New Yorker.”

  She blinks. Then there is another of those peculiar shifts in which the world doubles—and here in the other, weirder New York, his perspective is sudd
enly wider, higher. Macro scale instead of micro. And here in this other realm she looms over him, vast and sprawling, wildly patchwork and dense. Not just older but bigger. Stronger in many ways; her arms and core are thick with muscled neighborhoods that each have their own rhythms and reputations. Williamsburg, Hasidim enclave and artist haven turned hipster ground zero. Bed Stuy (do or die). Crown Heights, where now the only riots are over seats at brunch. Her jaw is tight with the stubborn ferocity of Brighton Beach’s old mobsters and the Rockaways’ working-class holdouts against the brutal inevitability of rising seas. But there are spires at Brooklyn’s heart, too—perhaps not as grand as his own, and maybe some of hers are actually the airy, fanciful amusement-park towers of Coney Island—but all are just as shining, just as sharp.

  She is Brooklyn, and she is mighty, and in this instant he cannot help but love her, stranger or not. Then she is just a middle-aged woman again, with a shining, sharp grin.

  “I guess I could help you with that,” she concedes. “I guess I have to, if this shit is spreading. But there ain’t no one way to be a part of this city.” She slips into and out of the vernacular like changing purses, effortless and with ever-perfect fit. Manny soaks it all in, getting a feel for the cadence, trying to keep up. “Takes most people a year, at least, to really feel the city’s call.”

  The city’s caul, he hears. Her nose moves when she says it, as if there’s a w in the word. The accent layers extra consonants into words and extra meaning onto thoughts. “I’ll give it my all,” he replies, deliberately adding a w to the last word and testing out its new flavor. It’s not quite right. Brooklyn instead of Manhattan. But still better than the Midwestern accent that currently infests his language, and which he now consciously decides to shed. It does not belong here.

  “Let me call my family,” she says at last, with a sigh. “Tell them I’ll be late home. Then let’s go find a coffee shop or—”

  And then they both feel it. In the other world, Brooklyn and Manhattan step back, to the degree that entities with foundations instead of feet can do so, to make room for the explosive, brilliant skylineburst of another of their number.