The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  Bronca tilts her head, trying to follow where Jess is running. “For what, a protest or something?”

  “Yeah,” Veneza interjects. “Thought so. C’mere, I wanna show you guys something.”

  They all move behind the desk to see the monitor. Veneza has a browser window open to YouTube, and she’s done some kind of search that’s brought up a bunch of videos with lurid title cards and leering faces. Bronca’s about to ask what she’s supposed to be seeing when abruptly she recognizes one of those smirks. “Hey!” She points at the screen. It’s Strawberry Manbun.

  “Are you fucking kidding me,” Jess mutters, before turning away with a groan. “Oh, of course.”

  “What?” Bronca frowns after her, then at Veneza. “What?”

  “Yeah, so, I just did a reverse image search on that logo in their email.” Veneza taps a mark at the corner of the video, which Bronca remembers seeing elsewhere now. On their emails and on their business cards. It was a warning of how terrible the art was going to be: a stylized A surrounded by vaguely Nordic runes and ugly curlicues. Completely unintelligible and hard to remember, which basically defeated the whole point of even having a logo. “It’s the logo of the ‘Alt Artistes.’ This is their channel.”

  She clicks on one, enlarges it, and scrolls to somewhere in the middle of its timeline. The screen fills with Strawberry Manbun’s face, looking ripely furious and with his manbun coming apart from the force of his gesticulations.

  “—the nail in the coffin, the dunnit in the who!” he is saying. In the background is what looks like a hotel room. “This is what these revisionists insist upon, the disrespect for a superior culture that brought them Picasso, and Gauguin, and—”

  “Mute it,” Bronca says, already annoyed by the sound of his voice. Veneza does so, thank God. “We get the idea. So these guys are some kind of… performance artists? They make shitty art, try to get it into galleries, fail because it’s shitty, but then they make a video telling everybody it’s reverse racism?”

  “I guess? It’s not that logical. They say whatever gets their audience excited enough to click on the videos or send them donations. Also, Picasso stole from African artists and Gauguin was a pedo who gave a bunch of brown girls syphilis, but what the fuck do I know.” Then she taps the bottom of the video, where Bronca has to squint to make out a number. It looks like…

  “Tell me that ‘k’ doesn’t mean thousand,” she says, drawing back in stunned horror as she realizes it. “Tell me forty-two thousand people haven’t watched this shit!”

  “Yep.” Veneza goes back to the search results and points out other horrifically large numbers. “That was one of their higher-count vids, but still. And, like, there’s a whole industry of dudes like this. The more inflammatory they are, the more people watch them, and the more money they make.”

  “White dude whining as a growth industry,” Jess says grimly. She’s blond and cute and pale as paper, so Bronca guesses she gets a frequent dose of white dude whining from types who don’t realize she’s not quite on the same team before they start with the globalist conspiracy theories. “I was going to say we should warn the board about possible violence, but I forgot this is a thing, too.”

  “Yeah,” says Veneza. “Fans of dudes like this are fucking cultists. Anything he says, they’ll suck it up. They’ll put your address on the internet, if they can find it. Send death threats to your boss, stalk your kids, send a SWAT team to your house, show up with a gun themselves… the works. You guys need to lock down.”

  “Lock down?” Bronca stares at her. “Lock down what?”

  “Your identities. Your personal information. I can help you get started, but we’re going to have to stay late.”

  They get into it, tossing around plans and fallbacks while Veneza hops on endless name-search sites and tries to tell them over a couple of hours how to hide the online paper trails of a lifetime. It’s dizzying, terrifying stuff—scarier still when Bronca suddenly realizes something fundamental about what’s changed since her real spitfire days. Back then she had to worry about the government tapping her phone. It still probably does, but all the other stuff’s been outsourced. Now, instead of just a COINTELPRO operation, she’s got to worry about that and some dude stalking her relatives from his mother’s basement, and kids bombarding her with death threats because it makes them feel like part of the (terrorist) gang, and a troll farm in Russia using the Center as the next cause célèbre to whip up Nazis. All the people who really are a threat to the country; somehow they’ve been convinced to do its dirty work, more or less for free. She would admire it if it weren’t so damn horrific.

  By the time they’ve done as much as they can—because Veneza can only help them reduce the threat; there’s no way to eliminate it entirely—it’s late. Yijing and Jess head home, while Bronca and Veneza linger long enough to send out an email to the workshoppers about online safety.

  Bronca goes outside to let down the night shutters. As she’s finishing up, however, Veneza comes out of the Center’s staff door, looking shaken. She’s a sturdy kid in a lot of ways—and really, Bronca shouldn’t call her a kid. Veneza’s done with college—Cooper Union, because she’s got a good head on her. But right now, the girl’s brown skin is ashen.

  “The bathroom,” she murmurs. “I don’t know, B. It’s always creepy in there. But tonight that last stall just woogied me right the fuck out.”

  Bronca grimaces. She should’ve burned some sage and tobacco, or scrubbed that stall down with ammonia, or both. “Yyyeah. Let’s just call that one haunted.”

  “Except it wasn’t, yesterday. What the hell’s changed between yesterday and today? It looks the same, but everything’s weird all of a sudden.”

  Veneza turns to look over the street. The Center sits on a slope overlooking the Bronx River and the on-ramp of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which has finally stopped being a parking lot now that rush hour is over. But beyond this, in the distance, the nighttime cityscape spreads across the horizon. Northern Manhattan isn’t as impressive as the part of the island that tourists like. Bronca likes this view better, though, because it makes clear that New York is a city of people, not just businesses and landmarks. From here, when the air isn’t hazy, one can take in the endless apartment blocks of Inwood and the gigantic public schools of Spanish Harlem, and even a few of the stately row houses that remain on Sugar Hill. Homes and schools and churches and neighborhood bodegas, with only the occasional glass-and-steel condo high-rise to mar the view. This is a view of the city that only the Bronx sees on the regular—which is why, Bronca feels certain, Bronx people don’t take any shit from arrogant Manhattanites. End of day, if people want to make a life in New York, they all gotta eat, educate their kids, sleep, and get by somehow. No sense in anybody putting on airs.

  But Bronca also sees what Veneza’s picking up on. The city is different, because yesterday it was just a city, and today it is alive.

  There is precedent for this. There are always those more attuned to a city than others—though usually not when they’re from completely different states. Veneza’s a Jersey City girl. Bronca probes carefully. “What do you mean when you say everything’s weird?”

  “The bathroom stall! Also? That painting those guys had. The last one.” She shudders. “You were spacing out, so maybe you didn’t notice. But everything changed. Like, the whole gallery. All of a sudden Yijing and those guys were gone, and the room was empty, and it got real quiet. The light was strange. And the painting wasn’t a painting—”

  She stops abruptly, looking uneasy. And Bronca realizes all of a sudden that she’s facing a choice about how to deal with Veneza. She can play it off. Tell the girl that what she’s sensing is nothing. Daydreams, or a flashback from the mushrooms she once told Bronca that she tried. Veneza is so much of what Bronca could have been, if she’d come up in a better world—and so much of what Bronca is now, because the world is still a goddamn shitshow. Bronca wants so badly to protect her.

 
That’s ultimately what settles the matter. Because if Veneza is seeing these things, then she needs to know that they aren’t hallucinations. She needs to know to run.

  So Bronca sighs. “The painting was a doorway.”

  Veneza’s head whips around so fast that her Afro puffs jiggle. She stares at Bronca for a long moment. Then she swallows and says slowly, “And we weren’t just looking at a painting of abstract people on an abstract street, were we? We were actually going there. To a place that actually looked like that.” She takes a deep breath. “Old B, I really wanted you to tell me it was another mushroom flashback.”

  “People in hell want ice water. And technically that was an expressionistic street, but that’s just me being pedantic to make myself feel better.” Bronca smiles sadly. “Kinda glad I’m not the only one visiting Weirdshitistan, though.”

  “I mean, I got your back anywhere, B, but dayum.”

  Damn indeed. Bronca sighs, rubbing her eyes, hating for the umpteenth time that this whole mess has dumped itself in her front yard. She’s got other shit to deal with, damn it. She should be fixated right now on buying unnecessary cute stuff for her future grandson, granddaughter, or two-spirit child, but here she is up to her neck in otherworldly art attacks.

  “Yeah, that’s… okay, look,” she says. “We gotta talk. Because you can’t have my back on this, see? You don’t… you’re not.” Is there a word for what she and the other five have become? The knowledge that has dumped itself into her mind is long on concepts but short on vocabulary. “You don’t have the… boots.”

  Veneza looks down at the sandals she’s wearing. “Yeah, it was like ninety degrees today, so.”

  Bronca shakes her head. “You drive?”

  “No. Short on gas money ’til payday.”

  “Then come on. It’s past the hour when the MTA and New Jersey Transit turn into pumpkins, so let me drive you home. There’s, ah, something I need to show you, anyway, along the way.”

  “Oooh, a mystery. I’m all aflutter.” Veneza hefts her bag, and they head for Bronca’s old Jeep.

  Bronca lays it all out on the drive toward Jersey City. It’s easier to believe here, along one of the city’s thicker arteries, watching the red blood cells of its people and commerce come and go. Above them, clouds backlit by the moon race toward the Palisades, and to the left, ever-present and ever a presence, is the light-speckled silhouette of the city. Tell her everything, that city whispers to Bronca, whenever she hesitates over some especially weird or frightening bit of intel. The Enemy is different now, craftier, crueler. Help her survive. We like having allies, don’t we? Real ones, anyway.

  True that.

  Then while Veneza silently digests what Bronca has told her, Bronca turns off the expressway just before they would’ve crossed the bridge that leads to Washington Heights. They’re on the edge of the Bronx. Traffic is light here, the streets relatively deserted given the time of night. Nothing but housing projects in the area, and the city’s done everything it can to isolate the people who live in them—fences, highways that cut the neighborhood in half, a no-man’s-land of industrial blocks hemming the residential area in. There’s one sad-looking grocery store in the area that Bronca knows of, but they pass ten payday lenders and dollar stores while she drives, dotting every half-busy thoroughfare like fast-proliferating tumors.

  When Bronca pulls into the gravel road that leads into Bridge Park, it’s hard not to feel some apprehension. She remembers the days when the “park” was just a wasteland of rotted buildings, and nobody hung out here at night except bums, crackheads, and bored teenagers looking for somebody to fuck or fuck with—like a big brown-skinned Indian with a dyke cut who just needed someplace to hear herself think. It’s not like that now, though. The park has been landscaped into a bland expanse of lawns and benches and dogwood trees that line the old bike trail. These days there’s a whole other kind of danger, because Bronca’s heard too many stories of the cops hassling neighborhood folks out of the park, so that the more affluent white people moving in will feel safer. And she’s still a big brown-skinned Indian with a dyke cut, here late at night in the company of a young Black woman for no reason that a bigoted cop would be able or willing to understand.

  She’s not quite the same woman, though. As Bronca parks and gets out, she reaches for her city, and the city sighs a long purr of pleasure in response. No one will interfere, it promises without words. This is our place, no matter what interlopers think. Come, and show her yourself.

  She shivers a little. Hearing voices—even if it’s not so much a voice as a stream of impressions and feelings—really should freak her out. It doesn’t, though.

  “So, I’m a little freaked out,” Veneza says. When Bronca turns, the younger woman is eying her skeptically. “Like, if you were a dude, I’d be pulling out the pepper spray that you don’t know I have.”

  “Pepper spray is legal in the city. I know Jersey dumb-asses think we’re all peace-loving hippies here, but read a website, damn.”

  “Oh. Well, just saying. You’re being unusually weird.”

  Bronca laughs. “Yeah, that’s not gonna get any better. But there’s some things that I’m not sure I can explain with words. Come on.”

  The Harlem River spreads beyond the cobbled path and the railings. There’s not much to see at this point, east of the more dramatic skylines of Washington Heights and well south of the true suburbs of Yonkers and Mount Vernon. Just a murky, poorly lit river running sluggishly in the warm night air. There’s a low, graffiti-flecked wall on the Washington Heights side of the river, running along Harlem River Drive, but for the Bronx it’s nothing but shoreline, which is twisty with fallen tree branches and moss-slimed rocks and a couple of old rusty shopping carts that have been there for as long as Bronca can remember. The water smells faintly of sulfur, because there’s probably a sewage spill somewhere. This part of the Bronx is on the come up, but it’s been poor as shit for a long time, and this is a city where politicians don’t care about infrastructure even for wealthier neighborhoods.

  A different kind of infrastructure has made itself present, though, as of about 11:54 a.m. eastern time. Bronca walks down to the water, her footing sure and quick. Veneza follows, much more carefully. When Bronca stops, Veneza almost slips on a wet rock, though she catches herself. “Old B, if you’ve decided to go serial killer on me, just stab me on solid ground, okay? I don’t want to die in this nasty shit, catching fucking chlamydia or something.”

  Bronca laughs, then holds out her arm for Veneza to grab onto. “You should be able to see it from here. Okay.” She points down the riverbank. “Tell me what you see.”

  Veneza looks. Bronca can tell that all she’s noticing are the darker shadows of tree roots and old pipes against the water. “Your tax dollars not at work. What am I supposed to be seeing?”

  “Just shut up for a minute. Let me…” Hard to do two things at once, be in two places at once, think with two selves at once. But this is important. “I’m gonna flex.”

  If Veneza has a smart remark in reply to this, Bronca doesn’t hear it, because she has subsumed herself into the sound of the water and the chirr of the insects and the endless drone of cars making their way over the expressways and the GW in the distance. But that isn’t the only sound she can hear, is it? It is beneath the others, the pillar supporting them, the metronome giving them rhythm and meaning: breathing. Purring. A lot of stuff is fucked up and wrong in New York, but isn’t that part of the city, too? Situation normal. So even though it is only half-awake, and its avatars are scattered and afraid, and its streets teem with parasites trying to burrow underneath and multiply and kill the host… here, in this place, the Bronx dreams peacefully.

  Here, Bronca may be all that she truly is.

  So she lifts a foot, and puts it down twice. Lifts it again, taps twice, turns. The city’s hum rises to a song. Its heart beats—fast, tap tap tap tap tap tap. These are her rhythms. She turns with them, dancing from rock to rock,
catching the weight of her movements with her core so that her steps fall lightly. This is the dance.

  “This is the story,” she says. Her eyes have shut. She doesn’t need to see the rocks or watch for slippery spots; the rocks are grandfathers who have invited her feet, so she goes where they have bidden. The story is in her, flowing, guiding her steps. Dance is a prayer—and though she has not danced like this in years, not since she stopped going to the pow-wows and stopped enjoying the dyke clubs and stopped tromping through brickyards to embrace the strength of the land underneath, it comes back to her like she’s never left. Tap tap tap tap tap tap.

  This is the city.

  Tap tap tap tap tap tap.

  The city is her.

  Tap tap tap tap tap tap.

  “This is my finger,” Bronca says aloud. She lifts one hand, palm down, fingers loose. Then she lifts her index finger.

  In the near distance, maybe thirty feet off, one of the massive curving pipes that arcs into the river… moves. With a hollow metallic groan, it rises from the water. Uncurls, still rising, until it sticks straight out over the water at the same angle as Bronca’s finger. Bronca keeps the arm up even as she turns and leaps onto another stone so that Veneza can see.

  Bronca opens her eyes then and glances at Veneza—who is staring at the pipe, her mouth hanging open. Bronca smiles and brings the dance to a halt physically. In her mind, however, she’s still dancing. She is the city and the land underneath, and because of that, she will always dance.

  “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Bronca says, still holding her arm up. Now Veneza is staring at Bronca. “This is the change in the city that you’ve been sensing, and the truth you have to remember. Whatever you see… first and foremost, it’s real. Second, it can be dangerous. Understood?”