The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  The city had done that to Bel and Madison just as it had coldly stripped Manny’s identity from him, leaving nothing behind but a pleasant exterior and the ability to ruthlessly terrorize strangers into doing his bidding. And if that’s true… Manny isn’t sure it’s safe to think of the city as an ally. Nor is it safe to assume himself to be one of the good guys.

  Brooklyn’s thoughts seem to be tracking with his. “Still want that crash course in New Yorker–ness?”

  “Is it something I have a choice about?” He hears the bitterness in his own voice.

  “Sure you do.” When he looks up at Brooklyn in surprise, she shrugs. “Everybody’s got a choice. Whatever weird-ass shit is happening, it’s related to the city, so the obvious way to cut it all off is to leave.”

  That’s… not quite what Manny was expecting to hear from her. But he feels the truth of it, as he frowns at her. Just leave. Go back to… He doesn’t remember where, but it doesn’t matter, does it? Go to Penn, hop the next train to Philly or Boston or anywhere else, break his lease and no-show for his grad program. He’ll lose a lot of money and his pride, but maybe his memory will come back. And more importantly, he knows somehow that someone else will take his place as Manhattan. It will become someone else’s job to fight the invisible deep-sea life and the possessed marketplace analysts—and he knows now that there will be more such battles. That’s what the Woman in White promised, after all. All of this is just the precursor to something much bigger.

  The city will go to war with the army it has, when that time comes. Does Manny want to be in that army? He’s really not sure.

  The bus has finally appeared, rolling with obscene slowness around a corner. He’s got an MTA card; there was one in his wallet, bought by the man he used to be. He hopes that man wasn’t too cheap to buy an unlimited card.

  They get on the bus. (It’s not an unlimited card, but proto-Manny has put fifty dollars on it. Go, proto-Manny.) As it pulls away from the curb—slow as molasses, God had better help Queens and the Bronx because by the time Manny and Brooklyn finally get there, New York will have crumbled into ruins—Manny decides to focus on what he can control, for now. “Tell me about New York, then,” he says. “Tell it to me like I’ve never been here, or don’t remember if I have. Because, uh, I don’t.”

  “You don’t…?”

  Manny takes a deep breath. “I… don’t remember who I was.”

  “What?”

  It’s hard to explain, Manny finds as he tries to do so. He tells her all about Penn Station, and how he can remember the lyrics to MC Free’s songs but not his mother’s face. When he falls silent, Brooklyn’s staring at him. After a time, Manny is convinced that she won’t comment on his amnesia—but then she says, “I hear music.”

  He frowns at this apparent non sequitur. She continues. “I hear it all the time. I was one of those kids who was always beat boxing, always thinking up lyrics, talking to myself on the subway platform, you know? But now it’s, like, fucking symphonies. The click of a woman’s heels on the sidewalk. An old car’s bad timing belt, schoolgirls playing slaphands with a rhythm chant… all of it sets off something in my head. Like tinnitus, except beautiful.” She rubs her face in her hands. “It’s woken up a part of me that I thought was gone. But I let that part of myself go for a reason—so I could focus on shit that matters.”

  “Music doesn’t matter?”

  “Not as much as health insurance for my baby.” She scowls. “I’d already been getting sick of the business before I quit, because it kept trying to push me to be someone I wasn’t: sexier, harder, whatever. When my daughter came along, I decided I couldn’t live that life anymore, and I’m happy as I am now. But this new music is, like, trying to drag me back to who I was. And it’s wrong. I’m not Free anymore.”

  He hears: I’m not free anymore before he gets it, and then he understands why she’s told him this. “You think becoming whatever we are is changing us,” he says. “Remaking each of us, but in different ways.”

  “Yeah. I think that’s, uh, the price of what we’re getting. Your memory, my peace of mind, who knows with the others. But I guess that makes sense? Being the city…” She shakes her head. “Means we can’t be just ordinary people anymore.”

  You definitely aren’t human, Manny thinks, remembering what the Woman in White told him. It felt like a lie, but…

  Abruptly Brooklyn groan-sighs and rubs her eyes. “Fuck it. Let’s focus. Okay. New York for beginners.” She turns on her phone, swipes past a couple of apps, and then turns it so he can see. It’s the MTA subway map, familiar to him already.

  “Manhattan,” she says, pointing to the narrow island in the middle. He resists the urge to twitch. Then she starts at the top and moves in a clockwise half circle around the island, using a little stylus to point to each borough. “The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island. That’s the official city, even though Long Island’s actually the same island that Brooklyn and Queens are on. Yonkers managed to keep from getting counted as part of the city; Staten Island tried to get away and lost. And then there’s Jersey.” She rolls her eyes.

  “What about Jersey?”

  “It’s Jersey. So anyway, this map? It’s bullshit.”

  Manny blinks at her. “But you just…”

  “Yeah. And that’s why I showed it to you. This is the first thing most people see when they come here. Even people who’ve been here for years think this is the city.” She shakes the phone for emphasis. “They think Manhattan is the center of everything, when most of the city population is actually in the boroughs. They think Staten Island is some tiny thing, an afterthought, because they shrank it down to fit this map. But it’s bigger than the Bronx, at least geographically. So, lesson one of New York: what people think about us isn’t what we really are.”

  He eyes her, wondering if that was an intentional dig at him. “Like how Council Member Brooklyn Thomason—Esquire—is secretly MC Free?”

  “Ain’t much of a secret, baby. Brooklyn puts it all out there.” She taps the map again, in a different place. “Queens is what’s left of old New York: retirees, the working class, and a whole lot of immigrants, all working their asses off for a house with a backyard. Goddamn techies keep trying to take over, and they’ll probably win eventually, but for now all they got’s a polluted-ass neighborhood called Long Island City. Which is on Long Island because Queens is on Long Island, but isn’t part of Long Island. You follow?”

  “No.”

  She laughs, and doesn’t bother to explain further. She taps the Bronx. “This part of the city gets hit the hardest by everything. Gangs, real estate scams, whatever. Hard people, too, if they came through any of that… so in a lot of ways, this is the heart of New York. The part of itself that held on to all the attitude and creativity and toughness that everybody thinks is the whole city.”

  “So we’re looking for a hardworking non-techie in Queens, and somebody creative but with an attitude in the Bronx? That narrows it down.” Manny sighs. “What about—” He taps Staten Island on her phone.

  Brooklyn’s lips purse a little, more in disapproval than contemplation, he thinks. “That one will be a small-town thinker, even though they’re part of the biggest American city. They don’t want to be part of New York there, remember. They won’t let you forget it.” She shrugs. “An asshole with a chip on their shoulder, basically. And probably a Republican.”

  The bus eventually grinds its way to the subway station that they need, where they switch to the N train. “Should’ve grabbed a limo,” Brooklyn mutters. Rush hour is in full swing; the subway is packed. They’re standing, and Manny is trying not to elbow anyone by accident. It’s his first time on the subway, but he’s too distracted by the crowding to really enjoy it. “Well, street traffic might’ve been just as bad.”

  “A limousine seems excessive,” he says.

  “‘Limo’ just means a non-hailable cab, honey. Anything that’s not a yellow or a green taxi, we pretty much call a lim
o, here—including the kind of fancy limos you’re thinking of. Except it’s also called a ‘car service’ in Brooklyn.” She shrugs. “All of those are getting eaten up by Uber and Lyft anyway.”

  “Why is it different in Brooklyn?”

  She gives him a look, which he supposes he deserves. It’s different in Brooklyn because Brooklyn does its own thing. He’s trying to learn.

  They swap the N for the 7 at Queensboro Plaza. Manny’s getting tired of standing when he starts to feel the tickle of imbalanced gravity again, and this time it’s not coming from Brooklyn. He shifts his position to offset it, and sees Brooklyn do the same; they meet each other’s eyes and nod. “Good,” she says, pleased. “I was starting to worry we’d have to go all the way out to Flushing. Looks like our girl’s in Jackson Heights instead.”

  They get off and head aboveground. As they stand on a corner across from a garblemouthed street preacher, Manny gets the bright idea to try a variation on the trick that Brooklyn used to track him down. He experiments with a few keyword combos on various local social media. On the “Queens” plus “weird” search, he finds many complaints about drag queens in poorly chosen ensembles. In addition to this, however, are several tweets from people located in Jackson Heights that mention children’s screams and “a weird rumble.” Then as they’re watching that feed, someone posts, “Lol this old lady’s pool tryna eat her kids, TMZ want pics?”

  The photos are blurry—a backyard pool with a strangely dark floor, two flailing children, an equally blurry black-haired figure at the edge of the pool—but they’re enough. Instantly, both Manny and Brooklyn feel the pull of the black-haired woman.

  Then Brooklyn’s cell phone bleats, and she plucks it from her purse to scan the message. “Well, well, well. I’ll be damned. Looks like we just found the Bronx, too.”

  She turns her phone so that he can see. On the tiny screen is a photo of a mural. It’s hard to discern, at first. There are lines amid the splashes of paint, but they tangle and cross in dizzying profusion over the rough brick on which they’re painted. Then something orients in Manny’s brain, and that other part of him inhales, and all at once he understands exactly what he’s seeing.

  It is the other place. The other him. The city he has become. New York City, as its whole and distinct self rather than the agglomeration of images and ideas that are its camouflage in this reality. He understands, suddenly, why he has seen that other place as empty; it isn’t. The people are there, but in spirit—just as New York City itself has a phantom presence in the lives of every citizen and visitor. Here in this strange, abstract mural, Manny sees the truth that he now lives.

  And he knows as well: the person who is the Bronx made this. He knows because the instant he understands the image, he feels that strange gravitic pull again, coming from somewhere to the north this time. Not as strong a pull as that of Queens, who is closer, but unmistakable.

  “Somebody creative with an attitude, you said,” Brooklyn murmurs, staring at the image, too. “That was just a guess on your part—but all my life, it’s how I’ve thought of the Bronx. That’s where hip-hop came from, and the best graffiti, and dances and fashion and…” She shakes her head. “I already had my people on the lookout for weirdness, but when you said that, I told them to look for a specific art piece. Couldn’t remember where or when I’d seen it, but I remembered enough of the details that they found it. And that’s her.”

  Brooklyn swipes her screen. Behind the photo is a text from Mark Vishnerio, Aide to NY City Council Member Thomason, from five minutes ago. Currently on display at a gallery in the Bronx. Tag reads “Da Bronca”—the performance name of a Bronca Siwanoy, PhD, director of the Bronx Art Center. Painting title: “New York, the Really Real.”

  Brooklyn glances up, gauging the sun. “It’s already rush hour—starts at two or three o’clock here, by the way, when the early school buses start screwing up traffic. Unless Queens joins us quick or the Bronx works late, we’re probably going to miss her if we go to the Bronx Art Center.”

  “Then we find her at home,” Manny says. “She may not be safe alone.”

  Brooklyn sighs and shakes her head. “Only so much ground we can cover. We could split up?”

  It would be the logical thing to do. But Manny grimaces. “That might just make us easier to pick off. Look, Queens needs us, right here and right now. Let’s deal with one issue at a time.”

  “More boroughs, more problems,” Brooklyn mutters, then nods in reluctant agreement.

  Manny fiddles with the rideshare apps on his phone and picks a spot on the map that feels roughly close to where they can sense Queens. Then they’re on their way, better late than never.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Interdimensional Art Critic Dr. White

  The pieces are bad.

  Bronca walks along the display wall, slowly so as to give herself time to think. She can see Jess from the corner of one eye, standing by the reception desk. Close to the phone. Behind her, seated at the desk, is the Center’s assistant, Veneza. Jess has got her poker face on, but Veneza is all big brown hostage eyes, which flick from Bronca to Jess to Yijing—yeah, Yijing, all hands on deck for this shit, and a united front, whatever else is going on between them—to their guests.

  Their guests cluster at the center of the room, though their spokesman, a young white guy with a strawberry-blond manbun and lumberjack beard, has positioned himself diplomatically between his group and Bronca. Says he’s the manager for the group, which is some kind of artists’ collective. The other members of the group are male and mostly white, too, though there’s a little guy among them who looks white-with-a-generous-topping-of-Indigenous South American. He’s got a scraggly version of the same dumb-ass beard, though. Trying so hard to fit in, he doesn’t seem to notice it fits his face poorly. He’d have been handsome without it.

  Gotta watch out for little dudes, Bronca remembers her ex saying once. By then they were still married, but had fully swapped teams; he was daddying half of Chelsea, and she’d cautiously joined Pink Crawfish, a lesbian dating service for women over fifty. Still friends, after weathering AIM lawsuits and AIDS die-ins and child-rearing together. Chris had always loved sharing all that earned wisdom with his friends. Such as: Little dudes are like those tiny dogs that everybody thinks are so cute. But they never stop barking and they’re crazy as fuck because their balls are too big for their brains.

  A true elder and warrior, Chris Siwanoy. She missed him. He might’ve had some idea what to do about this fucking shit.

  She turns to Strawberry Manbun, who’s watching her with an overly polite, fuck-you smile on his lips. He knows full well what she’s thinking. He’s waiting for her to say it out loud and violate the unspoken contract that covers white people who are doing everything short of tossing around the n-word in public. And hell, some even want that to be deniable.

  “Yeah, okay,” she says, half in reply to this thought. “Are you fucking with us?”

  Yijing groans and covers her face. Jess, though, folds her arms, which is her version of taking her earrings off. This isn’t going to be that kind of fight—Bronca hopes—but Bronca can see by the cold look on Jess’s face that she’s ready for anything. Little mean-ass Jewish chicks don’t play this shit any more than old mean-ass Lenape chicks do.

  Strawberry Manbun looks artfully stunned. He’s a shitty actor, though his résumé says he’s an understudy for a couple of Broadway plays. Bronca figures that’s a lie. These kinds of people always lie, and attack others, to cover their mediocrity.

  That’s what’s extra offensive about the art, see. It’s racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, homophobic, probably some other shit she isn’t catching at first glance. But it’s also terrible. Not that she really thinks it’s possible to make good art when you hate so many people—art requires empathy—but the Center has a good reputation, and Bronca’s used to having her professional time respected. Normally, people don’t bring her crap.

  This is crap.
A collage of lynching photos, zoomed in on dead or agonized Black faces, the whole thing surrounded by stick figures drawn pointing and grinning in white greasepaint. A triptych of charcoal line art daubed with watercolor: in the first, a dark-skinned woman with comically exaggerated lips, nipples, and vulva lies tied in that Japanese rope-art thing that Bronca can’t recall the name of. Her expression is somewhere between bored and soulless. In the second, a male figure is drawn on top of her, bare ass blurred to suggest thrusting movements. He’s wearing a shtreimel and sidelocks; Bronca’s amazed they haven’t tattooed the Star of David on his ass just to make sure viewers get it. In the third, the man is now a long-haired jumble of Plains-nation stereotypes, including a damn war bonnet. (His shoddily rendered breechcloth and leggings are in the way, so there’s a crude X-ray view through his body of the woman’s oversized vulva pushed wide open. So that the viewer doesn’t assume they’re frotting, Bronca guesses? Who the fuck knows.) A line of men with cocks in hand—or knives, at random—wait their turn beside her. And in all three images, while the men take their turns, the emotionless woman spews quotes from well-known feminists of color.

  There’s more, most of it just tedious rather than rage inducing; bad art makes everyone tired. The worst of these is a sculpture of a man bent at the waist to bare an enormous anal gape. It’s clearly been shaped to fit a human fist. But the triptych is the one they seem proudest of.

  Bronca points at the sculpture. “So, did 4chan put you up to this, or did you come up with it on your own?” She flicks a look at Veneza, who flashes her a quick nervous smile. Veneza’s the one who taught Bronca about “chan culture.” Bronca’s proud of herself for remembering the name.