The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Such innocence,” muses the stall woman.

  Okay, then. “Yeah, so, it’s been nice exchanging poetry lines,” Bronca says, flipping the spout and washing her hands just to seem like she’s been doing something. “Hope everything, uh, works out in there.” Since the woman’s been on the pot for a good twenty minutes at least.

  One of the three locked stall doors pops open. The loudness of the pop startles Bronca, and she whirls with dripping hands as the door slowly swings outward. No one inside.

  “Things are working out just fine,” says Stall Woman. “I’ve got a foothold, you see.”

  “On the toilet?” Even now, Bronca can’t hold back the snark. She’s going to die a smart-ass one day.

  Giggle, giggle. They’re all twelve years old up in this joint. “On so many things. On Staten Island. On this city. On this so-innocent world. Maybe even on you, sweet thing.”

  Bronca deliberately pulls a paper towel so the woman will know Bronca isn’t standing around wigged out. Even if she is. “I’m about to become a grandma, honey. You sweet on old ladies?”

  The second stall door pops open with a slower, grinding ch-clack. Bronca doesn’t jump this time, but the little goose bumps on her skin do a thing as the door swings open, because it does so slooooooowly. Creaking the whole way, like something out of a horror movie. And all at once Bronca’s hands fumble in the paper towel. She’s hyperaware of everything—the hint of mold in the air, the stink of someone’s former meal, the scratchiness of the cheap-ass brown paper towels she has to buy because that’s all the budget can handle. The silence of the bathroom, its ventilation mechanisms on the fritz again. The closeness of the fetid air.

  The last stall door, yet unopened.

  “I’m sweet on everyone,” says Stall Woman. Bronca can practically hear her grinning in there. “A whole city full of people so sweet that I could just gobble them up, and the streets and the sewers and the subways, too. Also, you’re not old! Barely more than newborn. Old enough in spirit that the charm offensive isn’t likely to work on you, though. That’s the thing I never quite get about your kind. You’re all the same kind of nothing, but your nothings don’t function in the same ways. Have to use different approaches with everyone! So frustrating.” Stall Woman utters a soft sigh of exasperation. “Have to watch that. When I’m frustrated, I speak too much truth.”

  It occurs to Bronca that she cannot see any hint of Stall Woman through the cracks around the door. Most bathroom stall doors aren’t truly private, after all, just a kind of courtesy screen. Easy to see around. (Bronca’s pretty sure men designed them.) For that last stall, there’s nothing to see through the seam cracks. Just blank whiteness. It’s as if someone has covered the cracks with sheets of copier paper—but who would do that? No feet visible under the door, either, she can now see.

  “Truth’s not a bad thing,” Bronca says. Time to call this heifer out, so Bronca can stop feeling the little hairs tingle on her skin. “I’ve always thought it best to quit fucking around and just say what you mean.”

  “Exactly!” says the woman, almost proudly. “This doesn’t have to be hard. If I could change your nature, make you less harmful, I would! I like your kind. But you’re all so inflexible, and dangerous in your innocence. And none of you are likely to volunteer for genocide—which I suppose I can understand. Neither would I, in your shoes.”

  She pauses to sigh while Bronca thinks, Wait, what did she just say?

  “But wouldn’t you like to still be alive, when the end comes? You, and that sweet son of yours, and your grandchild-to-be. I’ll even throw in your exes—the still-alive ones, I mean. Wouldn’t you like this little, um, place of yours here to still be standing when all else has been flattened into nothingness?” Bronca bristles in mingled outrage and confusion, but the woman in the stall continues, oblivious or uncaring. “I can make that happen. Help you, help me.”

  Bronca has never, ever responded well to threats. Not even when everything about this situation, everything about this invisible woman, has her so unnerved that she’s broken out in gooseflesh. But this ain’t her first rodeo. She knows better than to show weakness.

  “I think I’d like you to come out here and say that to my face,” she snaps.

  There is a startled pause. Then the woman in the stall laughs. It’s not a giggle this time. This is a full-on, rich, rolling belly laugh, though with a scratchy edge that makes it less than pleasant to listen to. It goes on insultingly long, too, and finishes with “Oh, my! Oh, honey. No. It’s been a long day, and this shape is such a pain. I’ve had to step into my parlor, so to speak, to rest. So trust me… you don’t want me to open that door right now.”

  “Yeah, I really fucking do,” Bronca snaps. “You gonna sit in a goddamn toilet and threaten me and mine?” It’s bluster. She’s sick with fear, even though fear usually pisses her off, makes her even more ready to fight. Now, though, every instinct is a-jangle with warning that somehow she isn’t ready for this. She can’t let this chick get away with threatening her… but she also doesn’t want to see what’s inside that bathroom stall.

  “It isn’t a threat,” says Stall Woman. And suddenly, her voice is different. Less pleasant. Less husky, more… hollow. Like she’s outside the stall somehow, speaking from much farther away. Like the stall is not a tiny cubicle but a vast, vaulted space; her voice echoes off surfaces that should not be in there with the toilet and the tampon box. And she’s not smiling anymore, this unseen woman within a South Bronx bathroom stall; oh no. Bronca can practically hear the words being gritted through teeth.

  “Consider it advice. Yes, advice, useful advice to counter your useless innocence. You willlll see things in these next few days, understand.” Almost electronic, that extended word. Like the stutter of an audio file that’s corrupted or otherwise incompatible with whatever system it’s trying to run on. “Fresh things, unique thiiiings! When you d-d-do, remember this conversation, would you? Remember that I offerrred you a chance to live, and you ssssspurned it. I held out my hand and you b-b-burned it. And when your grandchild lies torn from its m-m-mother’s belly, split and spilt upon the ground like so much garbage truck falloff—”

  Bronca clenches her fists. “Oh, that’s fucking it—”

  And in that moment, something ripples through the room.

  Bronca starts, looking around in momentary distraction from Stall Woman. That ripple felt like an earthquake, or the subway having a bad day, but nothing’s rattling and the closest subway line runs three blocks away. Bronca hasn’t moved, and yet she feels like she has. Inside.

  Stall Woman is still jabbering, her voice growing louder and faster with every word. But somehow, Stall Woman becomes unimportant. There is a stretching… a snapping-into, like a puzzle piece finding its place. A becoming. And all at once Bronca is different. Bigger than herself.

  Out of nowhere Bronca finds herself remembering a day from her childhood. She’d stolen—borrowed—her father’s steel-toed construction worker boots so that she could walk through a brickyard on her way to do errands. The brickyard was full of rubble from a building demolished so long ago that it had sprouted flowers and ivy, but she’d decided to cut through it to avoid some of the neighborhood boys, whose catcalling and attempts to follow her had lately shifted from speculation into an active hunt. There had been one man (they were all grown men, and she all of eleven years old; her low opinion of men is so well earned) who moonlighted as a security guard, and who’d been especially persistent. Rumor had it that he’d washed out of being a cop somehow; something involving improper behavior with an underage witness. Rumor also had it that he liked Hispanic girls, and nobody around the Bronx could keep it straight that Bronca was something else.

  So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyon
d fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.

  Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.

  Stall Woman’s voice abruptly cuts off its mad rant, midsentence. Then she blurts, with palpable petulance, “Oh, not you, too.”

  “Eat a bag of dicks,” Bronca says. Veneza taught her that one. Then Bronca moves forward with a purpose, with her fists clenched and a grin on her lips because in spite of herself she’s always loved a good rumble, even if it’s the twenty-first century and nobody calls it a rumble anymore. Even if she’s gotten old and “respectable.” She is still Bronca from the brickyards, Bronca the scourge of Stonewall, Bronca who faced down armed police alongside her brothers and sisters in AIM. It’s a kind of dance, see? Every battle is a dance. She was always a good dancer at the pow-wows, and these days? The steel-toed boots dwell permanently in her soul.

  As she advances on the bathroom stall, its latch clacks and starts to swing open. There is only white around the edges of it—not light but white, and in the most fleeting of instants, Bronca glimpses a sliver of a room. It has a white floor, and in the distance is an indistinct geometric shape that seems to be… pulsing irregularly? What confuses Bronca more, however, is that the strange shape is at least twenty feet away. As if the stall is not a stall, but a tunnel, burrowed into the plumbing and lathing and somehow terminating elsewhere, because Bronca knows there’s no space like that in or outside of the Bronx Art Center.

  But before the door can swing open by more than a few inches, and before Bronca can catch more than a fleeting glimpse of something that her mind warns against even thinking about further, Bronca braces her hand on the nearby tile wall, lifts a foot, and kicks the fucking door in.

  There is an instant of resistance. A strange, soft sound, as if she has kicked a pillow, followed by a thunderhead rumble of imminent lightning.

  Then the stall door blurs away from her. It’s as if it has flown off its hinges and down a rectangular tunnel sized to fit, or as if the door sees itself in a mirror of a mirror; now there are a dozen doors, a million, an impossible number wending away into infinity. There is a startled, furious wail from beyond it—Stall Woman, her voice skirling into a shriek so earsplitting that the glass in the windows spiderwebs and the industrial light fixtures sway and flicker—

  Into silence. The stall door, hinged and ordinary again, slams inward from the force of Bronca’s kick and whacks into the tampon box before bouncing back. The stall is empty. There’s no tunnel, no other place, just an ordinary wall right behind the very ordinary toilet. The light fixtures stop swaying and the light steadies. There isn’t even an echo of that shriek to linger in the air.

  Then, in the aftermath of this, Bronca stands where she is, swaying a little as a hundred thousand years or so of knowledge falls into her mind.

  This is a natural thing. She’s the eldest of the group, after all, and the city has decided that she is the one best prepared to bear the burden of knowledge. So when the bestowing is done, Bronca stumbles back against the nearest sink and catches her breath. She’s shaking a little, because now she understands what a close call she just had.

  And yet. Even though she knows what must be done—they must find and protect each other and learn to fight together, it’s crazy but it’s true—she sets her jaw. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t need it. She has responsibilities. A grandchild to nurture and spoil! She’s been fighting all her life, goddamn it. Has to work five extra years just to be able to afford a semblance of retirement, and she’s tired. Does she still have it in her to fight an interdimensional war?

  No. She doesn’t.

  “The other boroughs will just have to look out for themselves,” Bronca mutters, finally making herself straighten up and head for the bathroom door. The Bronx has always been on its own; let them learn what that felt like.

  In Bronca’s wake, the empty bathroom stall is silent and still.

  Except for right behind the toilet. There, though it is barely more than a nub, its length having been burned away by Bronca’s furious and unexpected retaliation… a stubby, not-quite-invisible white nodule twitches fitfully, then settles down to bide its time.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Quest for Queens

  They’re waiting for the crosstown bus, and it’s taking forever. This has given them time to strategize, however. Beyond knowing which boroughs have “awakened” or psychic-Bat-signaled or whatever they end up calling it, Manny and Brooklyn have no idea how to actually find their comrades once they reach those respective boroughs. Or rather, Manny has no idea. Once at the bus stop, Brooklyn declares that she needs to do some “research,” which seems to consist only of a brief, terse phone call to someone that Manny tries not to listen to, out of politeness. After this, Brooklyn explains, “If my hunch is right, we’ll know what’s up with the Bronx in a few hours.”

  “Is it a hunch, though?” Manny looks up the street. They’ve been waiting for twenty minutes. Feels like forty. The afternoon has grown hot and close, the air thickening with humidity, and Manny’s got three new mosquito bites. “It isn’t coincidence that you could just… feel me, the way you did. And right now, with you, I feel…”

  He is hyperaware of her presence. Sometimes, when she moves near him, the room seems to shift a little, its center of gravity adjusting in some way that he cannot see or feel—but he tastes it sometimes, which makes no sense. Gravity doesn’t have a taste. But if it did, Manny thinks it would taste like sudden salt moving across the tongue, from slightly flavorless and sweet into a bitter, metallic weight that makes his eyes sting and his nose burn and his ears itch a little. In the other place, the Weird New York, he can see her shifting, an incomprehensibly huge firmament of cityscape matched only by his own jutting skyscraperness, both of them overlapping in ways that simply wouldn’t make sense in the real world, but which fit the way they’re standing next to each other. That’s what’s causing the gravitic shifts, he suspects; too much mass and breadth in one place at the same time. Perhaps because of this inherent contradiction with the laws of Normal New York physics, however, that vision never lasts. She always becomes Brooklyn the woman again.

  And Brooklyn the woman looks as cool as if she just strolled out of industrial-strength air-conditioning. She’s not sweating, doesn’t look fazed by the long wait for the bus, and the mosquitoes have so far ignored her. “A hunch and a connection,” she says with a shrug, when he trails off. “When I got off the train, I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for—and then I just happened to pass a store selling TVs. All of them were playing a commercial for the local news. There was cell phone video of some dumb-ass riding on top of a cab down the FDR. You gon’ be news at eleven, new boy.”

  “Delightful.”

  She chuckles at his annoyance, then sobers. He sees a very slight tilting of her shaped brows that lets him know she’s as puzzled by all the mysterious happenings as he is. “As soon as I saw you, though, I knew who—what—you were. It was like… like seeing you, having a person to connect to the concept of Manhattan, helped me focus. Then I knew where you were, direction-wise. I figure we try public transportation again, and hope we get another hunch along the way.”

  So they just need an idea of who Queens is. A name, a face, a half-seen grainy photograph à la Bigfoot. Just a little help, to track down one person out of one and a half million. Easy.

  Manny sighs, rubbing his eyes. “This is nuts. All of it. Before you showed up, I’d been thinking I should go to a hospital and see if I’ve suffered some kind of head trauma. But I didn’t go because it also just feels…”

  “Natural,” Brooklyn fills in when he shakes his head in lieu of words. “N
ormal. Yeah, I get it. I was right there with you, on the brink of calling my therapist for an emergency session—especially when it popped into my head that Grandmaster Flash could save me from the invisible feather monsters. At that point it was just too goddamn weird to be something that came only out of my subconscious or alien airwaves or whatever.” She loops a finger near her temple. “Still trying to figure out why your roommate could see it, though. Even in that video, I saw what you were fighting on the FDR, but no one else seemed to. Your roommate’s the first person I’ve encountered—other than you—who has, uh, city-vision, or whatever.”

  “Actually, that happened on FDR, too,” Manny says. “The woman who drove the cab for me saw the… big, uh… squiggly… thing. Other people did seem to know it was there, though, at least on some level. Enough to route around it if they had time. That’s what caused the traffic jam.”

  “Need-to-know weirdness only. Okay.” Brooklyn snorts at her own quip.

  It feels right, though. Manny remembers how Bel kept squinting at the white things that had surrounded them—as if he could only just see them, and still wasn’t sure they were real. Even then, however, Bel had seen more than most of the people on the FDR. So had Madison. They both needed to see the tendrils, or they would’ve been harmed by them…

  But no. Manny frowns to himself as this rationale rings false to his instincts, and particularly to that calculating, brutally rational part of himself that seems to be a remnant of his old personality. That part of him offers an alternative explanation. Bel was no good to you if he couldn’t see the tendrils, it says. If he got taken over by the Woman in White, you would’ve had more trouble to deal with. As himself, he was at least… useful.

  Yes. Bel’s cash had given him the idea to use the credit card—which he needs to cancel, yikes, since he just left the thing there—and concern for Bel had kept Manny focused. And Madison wouldn’t have agreed to drive for him if she hadn’t seen the giant fountain of tentacles erupting from FDR Drive. So need-to-know, as Brooklyn had said… but not Bel’s or Madison’s need to know. This is about Manny’s need for others to know, so that he can use them as tools.