The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  One of the people with Strawberry Manbun is a stoop-shouldered, pallid thing who looks like he’s got consumption or some other Victorian-named disease. Doc Holliday, she decides. “I don’t expect you to understand what I’m trying to do with this piece,” he snaps. “It’s irony, if you haven’t figured it out. MoMA’s got twenty-two abstract paintings of clitorises, so.”

  Bronca feels herself getting heated. Not good. She needs to keep her head. “And you think a kinky shock meme is the logical response to a clitoris? What’s the gang rape supposed to be, in conversation with women’s reproductive health?”

  “It’s a commentary on female genital mutilation,” says this kid who looks fifteen. He can’t keep the grin off his face. Can’t even shovel his bullshit right. “See? She’s Black. I mean, African Black.”

  Bronca takes a deep, steadying breath, and puts on her fakest smile. “Okay. I appreciate the time you gentlemen have put into today’s meeting, so I’ll keep this brief. The Bronx Art Center was incorporated in 1973, and it’s funded by the city as well as private donors. Our mandate is simple: to showcase the cultural complexity of this magnificent borough, through art. We—”

  “Are you giving us the spiel?” asks Strawberry Manbun, sounding disgusted even as he laughs. “Is this some kind of, I don’t know, commercial brush-off?”

  Bronca’s got a flow going now. “—embrace and celebrate the diversity of the Bronx through all of its races, ethnicities, genders, abilities, sexual orientations, national origins, and minority religions, as well as—”

  “We live in the Bronx,” says Fifteen, who’s gone from giddily grinning to red-faced fury with a speed that speaks of a tantrummy childhood. “I grew up right here. I have a right to show my art here!”

  Riverdale, Bronca guesses. Land of lawns and Tudor estates and NIMBY as a way of life. “That’s not how it works,” she tells the boy. “We exist to broaden the New York art scene beyond Manhattan, but we’re still part of that scene, and we have to showcase good art if we want to make our bones. There’s a million-five people in this borough, and a lot of them are artists. We can afford to be choosy.”

  “And even if we couldn’t,” Jess blurts, as she obviously thinks Bronca’s getting off-track, “we don’t do bigotry. No stereotypes. No rape-as-fetish. No homophobic gotchas…” She’s turning blotchy herself; with one hand she flails at Bronca, obviously wanting her to take the thread back.

  “So do you have any questions?” Bronca asks, in a tone that makes it clear she wants no questions.

  “We haven’t shown you the centerpiece yet, though,” says Strawberry Manbun. When Bronca stares at him, affronted by his cheek, he favors her with a smile that sets off all her warning bells at once. There’s a high glaze to his gaze, which might actually be high given the vape sticking out of his pocket, and which does nothing to conceal how pissed off Mr. Manbun is right now. He’s up to something. “If you see our best work and still say no, we’ll go. No hassle. Just take a look. That’s all we ask.” He spreads his hands, the picture of pissed-off innocence.

  “Why would I want to see more of this?” Bronca gestures at the triptych. It looks like shit. She wants her rods and cones scrubbed.

  “It’s a more abstract piece,” says Doc Holliday. He’s turned to one of the other beard-wearers that Bronca hasn’t bothered to name yet. That one trots out into the corridor. Bronca registered the plastic-tarp-covered piece when they came in, but forgot it during the assault on her senses afterward. The new piece is big, maybe ten feet on a side, and canvas to judge by how light it seems as they carry it in. The nameless one starts peeling tape off the plastic tarp. Holliday moves between this unpeeling operation and Bronca—Bronca assumes so she won’t be spoiled by glimpses of whatever is beneath the tarp, rather than the full effect at once. Real artists don’t do this. Only bullshit artists are this fucking dramatic. He’s also super earnest. “I just want your opinion on it, please. I’ve gotten some good feedback from a gallery in Manhattan.”

  Yijing stirs. She’s got a fixed look of disgust on her face, and for once Bronca loves that prissy way she pushes her chin forward. “Which gallery?”

  The guy mentions one that Bronca’s actually heard of. Bronca meets Yijing’s eyes to see if Yijing’s impressed enough by the name. Yijing purses her lips. “I see,” she says, but Bronca suspects Yijing will soon call the dealer who owns that gallery to find out what the hell is wrong with them.

  Strawberry Manbun looks a query at Doc Holliday, and together they move to position the piece against one of the open display walls. In a moment, they’re ready. “I call this one Dangerous Mental Machines,” Doc says, and then they pull down the loosened tarp.

  It’s definitely not like the others, Bronca sees instantly. Those were caricatures of art—the kind of thing that people who hate fine art think constitutes the bleeding edge of the field. This is the real deal. In fact, as the colors resolve into intricate patterns-within-patterns, she begins to realize just how much skill must have been involved in making it. There is technique here. A lot of Neo-Expressionism, but some of the grace of graffiti. Everybody wants to channel Basquiat, but most people can’t control it. Basquiat couldn’t control it. Whoever made this, though—because Bronca knows full well Doc and Fifteen didn’t—can.

  But.

  It’s a street scene, or the suggestion of one. A dozen-odd figures wend, disproportionately, into the distance, along a busy road. Something about the density of the shops, and their clutter of signs, feels familiar. Chinatown. It’s a night scene, and a rainy one; there’s a sheen of colors like wet road pavement. The figures are barely more than ink-swirls, faceless and indistinct, but… Bronca frowns. There’s something about them. They are dirty, these figures—clad in drab non-fashion, with sleeves rolled up to show blackened hands and shoes smeared with grime and aprons stained with blood and less identifiable bodily fluids. They loom, these dirty creatures, for whom the word people is a laughable misnomer. And as a haze in the air suggests the smell of wet garbage tangled with evening mist, Bronca can almost hear their chatter…

  (It has grown dim and quiet in the gallery room. Strawberry Manbun stands at the edge of her vision as if spotlighted, smiling at her, watching her face greedily. No one else moves.)

  But the chatter is not like what she’s actually heard, walking through Chinatown. Real street chatter, there, is just talk—a preconcert warm-up cacophony of tonal languages, English, and a smattering of European from the tourists, interspersed with the laughter of children and the shouts of angry drivers. What Bronca hears, here in front of the painting, is something higher pitched. A gabble.

  (It’s late afternoon. What she’s hearing isn’t what she should be hearing. The wheezy old HVAC should be rattling faintly as it strains against the summer heat. The Center faces a major thoroughfare, but where are the traffic sounds from outside? She should hear the buzz of a straight-line saw, now and again, as the woodshop turns out requests for Center artists. It’s just never this quiet in the Bronx Art Center, not at this time of day. Bronca frowns… before the painting draws her back from this distraction.)

  A gibber. The faces loom, seeming to shift as Bronca takes in the painting.

  (Oh, wait. There’s something. She can hear)

  A chitter. Like the screechy, chitinous bree of an insect, broken up with distance and movement.

  (Veneza’s voice: “Old B. Yo, Old B. Buh-rr-o-nnn-ca.” Bronca hates it when Veneza says her name like that, making a syllable of every phoneme. It makes her worry that she’s having a stroke, which is why Veneza does it.)

  Now a new sound. Something heavy and wet slapping the polished concrete of the Center’s floor behind her. It makes her think of a docking line being pulled up onto a pier. She can even smell seawater faintly. She doesn’t wonder why someone has unrolled a wet rope in the room, however, because the faces in the painting suddenly seem to loom closer, painted-wet and expressionless. They’re what’s chittering. Jittering.

>   The faces turn to follow her.

  The faces turn and loom and they are all around her—

  A hand grabs Bronca’s shoulder and yanks her backward sharply.

  There is a moment in which the universe pauses, stretching just a little. Bronca hovers, caught in the pliability of the moment for a long, pent breath—and then reality snaps back into place.

  She blinks. Veneza stands beside her, frowning in concern. Her hand is still on Bronca’s arm; she’s the one who pulled Bronca back. The painting stands before them, just paint on a surface. Bronca has the sudden feeling that it never changed. The room around her, on the other hand…

  Because Bronca is meant to be the guide, she understands precisely what has happened—although it’s a complicated thing to try to think through, and she’s glad she probably won’t have to actually explain it to anyone. There’s a lot to consider: particle-wave theory, meson decay processes, the ethics of quantum colonialism, and more. But when one really gets down to brass tacks, what’s happened here is an attack. An attack that came dangerously close to not just killing her, but destroying her. And New York with it.

  “Old B?” That’s Veneza’s charming nickname for her, which has caught on among the younger artists who use the Center. Veneza, whose middle name is Brigida, is Young B. “Feeling okay? You spaced. And…” She stops in midsentence, mouth still open for the next word despite her hesitation, and then she finally pushes on and says what she was going to say. “I don’t know. Shit got weird for a second.”

  Understatement of the spacetime continuum. “I’m good.” She pats Veneza’s hand to reassure her, then turns to face Strawberry Manbun and his cronies. Manbun isn’t smiling anymore, and Doc Holliday is frowning outright.

  “Cover up that shit,” Bronca snaps at them. “Took me a minute, but I get it now. ‘Dangerous mental machines,’ hah.” She looks around and sees confusion on Jess’s and Veneza’s faces. Yijing, though. Yijing might be an ass, but she at least shares Bronca’s love of expensive liberal arts university education. She’s glaring at Doc Holliday, furious anew. So Bronca continues, “Yeah. That was H. P. Lovecraft’s fun little label for folks in Chinatown—sorry, ‘Asiatic filth.’ He was willing to concede that they might be as intelligent as white people because they knew how to make a buck. But he didn’t think they had souls.”

  “Oh, but he was an equal-opportunity hater,” Yijing drawls, folding her arms and glaring at the men. “In the same letter, he went in on pretty much everybody. Let’s see—if I recall, Black people were ‘childlike half-gorillas,’ Jews were a curse, the Portuguese were ‘simian,’ whatever. We had a lot of fun deconstructing that one in my thesis seminar.”

  “Shit, even the Portuguese?” Veneza looks impressed. She’s half-Black and half-Portuguese, Bronca recalls, and doesn’t get on well with her Portuguese relatives.

  “Yep.” Bronca puts one hand on her hip. They haven’t yet covered the painting—which isn’t a painting—but Bronca now knows better than to look into it for more than a moment. Jess and the others should be safe, because this attack was aimed solely at the city of New York, or a sufficiently significant portion thereof. “I could see it if you were trying to turn a mirror on Lovecraft. Show how twisted his fears and hatreds were. But this painting reinforces them. This shows you New York as he saw it, the chickenshit little fuck, walking down the street and imagining that every other human being he met wasn’t human. So, gentlemen, again, what part of ‘we don’t do bigotry’ do you not understand?”

  Doc looks stunned that Bronca’s still talking. Strawberry Manbun looks like he’s holding in a whole heaping mass of mad—but he puts on a smile and nods for one of the others to rewrap the painting. “Okay,” he says. “You gave it a chance and you still don’t like it. Fair enough.”

  It isn’t enough. Guys like this aren’t really interested in fair. But Bronca steps out of the way to let the group wrap up and remove their work, ending up next to Yijing. For the next ten minutes or so, she and Yijing get to play United Flavors of Stink Eye at Manbun’s whole operation.

  But there’s something weird about the whole group of them, Bronca muses while they work. Well, weirder than a bunch of rich-kid “artists” thinking that a taste for stereotypes and fetish porn make them avant-garde. First there’s the painting. Doc and the rest seem immune to it, too, which means they’re ordinary people, not like Bronca and the five others who are even now wandering around somewhere in the city, probably trying to figure out what they should do with themselves. But no one ordinary could have painted that thing. Second, there’s the fact that they even tried this. Why waste time trying to get the Center to put their shitty art on display? Why not just use that as a pretext for the meeting, then come out of the gate with the big bad painting and catch Bronca with the element of surprise? Which means there must be more to this. Bronca narrows her eyes and looks them over for any sign of a wire.

  She sees nothing—and, she grudgingly concedes, she wouldn’t know what to look for. She hasn’t kept up on surveillance technology for a good twenty years or so. Her son gave her a smartphone, and she actually likes being able to watch movies on it, but it still feels like only yesterday that people were using rotary phones and dialing letter-number combos—

  Something flickers. Bronca blinks, her attention caught. Wait, is that a wire after all? Down by Strawberry Manbun’s ankle, as he carries the other end of a crate containing a piece of the bronze sculpture. No. Bronca might not know anything about covert listening devices in the twenty-first century, but she’s pretty sure they don’t look like… a loose shoelace? He’s wearing thong sandals, so it can’t be that. (She grimaces at his nasty toenails.)

  But there, floating just above the long bones of his foot: something is sticking out of the skin. It looks like an especially long and wispy hair. White, not strawberry blond. At least six inches long… although as Bronca watches, it stretches upward as if trying to touch the crate he’s carrying. Nine inches. A foot, just shy of the crate’s wooden wall—and then it stops and contracts. Not long enough, apparently. It resumes its initial position, just resting along Manbun’s foot, just a hair trying to play it cool. Maybe it’ll try again once it’s grown some more.

  Bronca doesn’t know what it is, exactly. It does not exist within the lexicon of knowledge that she has absorbed, and that in itself is deeply troubling. But she can add one and one.

  So when the “artists’ collective” is done, she follows Manbun to the door. It’s close enough to the end of the day. She’ll lock up early, give the staff a break after this. But first she says to Manbun, as he’s walking out, “Who are you working for?”

  She expects him to dissemble. He seems the type. Instead he only smirks and says, “Oh, don’t worry. You’re going to meet her soon. Face-to-face, she said. Without a bathroom door to protect you.”

  Bronca presses her lips together. It’s like that, then. “Ask her how that turned out last time,” she snaps, and shuts the door in his face. It’s a glass door, which makes the gesture less of a fuck-you because she can’t slam it without risking the glass, but it still feels good to see his smirk fade.

  And then they’re gone.

  Bronca locks the door behind them and watches until they’ve gotten into their cars—one an enormous Hummer, the other a Tesla, both worth more than she makes in a year—and driven off into the trafficset. Then Bronca exhales and turns to face the others. They look shades of mad to worried. “Yeah, so that happened.”

  “I know some guys,” Yijing says immediately. “I say I make some phone calls. Fuck those dudes up.”

  Bronca raises her eyebrows. “You. Know people about that life.”

  “Not unless that means a whole lot of lawyers.” She folds her arms. “That was harassment with a side of intimidation. You can’t tell me it wasn’t. Bunch of fascist dudebros or whatever they are, coming into a place run by women of color, with that ‘art’?” She puts her fingers up to make air quotes around the last word.
“Fuck those motherfuckers.”

  Damn. Not that Bronca disagrees. Jess is quiet, though, so Bronca prompts her. “Jess?”

  Jess blinks, then frowns. “I think we need to tell the people using the workshops upstairs that we’re shutting down tonight, even for keyholders. Make sure the building is empty.”

  Bronca rocks back on her heels, floored, while Veneza goes, “Whaaaaaaaa?” Yijing immediately starts to complain, but Jess raises her voice enough to talk over all of them. “Just as a precaution,” she says, but it’s as sharp as a shout. “I’m just saying. Because I don’t know if you ladies got a brownshirt vibe off those dudes like I did, but I’ve got two grandparents who would smack me sideways if I didn’t say this. The others died in a concentration camp. Capisce?”

  Bronca capisces, nodding slowly in grim agreement. Because, well. She grew up missing a few elders, too—and contemporaries, for that matter. It’s not paranoia when people are actually setting fires and shooting up nightclubs.

  But. “Not the keyholders,” Bronca says. “I’ll warn them, but some of them have nowhere else to go.”

  Several of the Center’s artists in residence are literal manifestations of the term—kids kicked out by their families for being queer or neuroatypical or saying no, adult artists priced out of rooms of one’s own, even one woman Bronca’s age who recently left her husband. She makes the most amazing glass sculptures. He beat the shit out of her and destroyed one of her best sets before she started sleeping on a beanbag in her Center workshop.

  The working spaces aren’t really designed for habitation, so the Center doesn’t run afoul of any housing regulations… technically. Bronca gets around it by periodically reminding the keyholders that the space is to be used only temporarily. She’s been saying that to some of them for years.

  Veneza, her expression grim, moves behind the desk and sits down at the reception computer, doing something Bronca can’t discern. Jess sighs, but says, “Yeah, okay. Not the keyholders. But warn them, at least. And… you’d better call the board. Get them ready.”