The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

Veneza shakes her head slowly, but Bronca suspects this is less denial than amazement. “Can you make, I don’t know. Any part of the city, do anything?”

  “Yeah, I can—some parts easier than others—but that’s nothing.” Bronca curls her finger again, and the pipe grumbles back into place. Then she lifts her other arm, grinning as she watches Veneza because even though this is the dance and she knows what will happen intellectually, it’s still an altogether different thing to experience. And some things are best experienced through the eyes of the young.

  So when the river rises into the air, the whole five-hundred-foot-wide expanse of it, and curls an elbow and a wrist and long, watery fingers like some kind of immense, spectral Rosie the Riveter parody, it is Veneza’s delight that settles Bronca’s heart. Bronca never wanted this. And even though she knows why she was chosen, how important it is, she has not known how to feel about any of it, except resignation and frustration and dread. Now, though, as Veneza goes, “Holy fucking shit,” it feels good for the first time.

  She allows herself a bit of smugness. “It is pretty damn rad, huh.”

  “Nobody says ‘rad’ anymore, Old B, damn.”

  “Yeah, well, they should. Always liked that one.”

  “You know, though…” Veneza frowns a little. “This is pretty small, if it’s… symbolically part of you? I mean, if that’s your arm, then the rest of you ends, like, just across the street from the park.”

  “It’s not exactly proportional.” Nor does the borough emulate her body in any predictable shape or way. This riverbank has a thousand potential fingers to her five, for example, and some of them have claws. The borough’s heart is actually a different river—the Bronx River, of course. The borough’s teeth, rotting but still sharp, are the isolated projects; its ears are a thousand recording studios, all born of the boogie-down sound. And its bones are the stones underneath it all, ancient as ancestors.

  Veneza can’t seem to take her eyes off the water-arm. “Can you make it flip me off?”

  Bronca snorts and turns her hand to lift the middle finger. The river follows, twisting about, and when a fifty-foot column of water lifts from the middle of its fistlike mass, a spritz of droplets hits them both in the face. “Oh, gross,” Veneza cries—but she is laughing even as she mops herself off. Then she blinks, staring. Because Bronca has lifted the river from its bed… and yet there is the river, flowing along quietly as it has for millennia.

  “This isn’t the same kind of real as what you’re used to,” Bronca says gently.

  “What, it’s a hallucination? Goddamn polluted river water in my face—”

  “It’s not a hallucination. It’s just that… reality isn’t binary.” She sighs and uncurls her arm, relaxes her fingers. The great water-arm shifts back into the middle of the river and straightens out, becoming again the river that it has been all along.

  “There are lots of New Yorks,” she explains. “In some of them, you turned right coming out of the subway this morning. In others, you turned left. And you also rode a dinosaur to work, and somewhere else you ate some funky ant-ball snacks at lunch, and somewhere else you’ve got a side gig as an opera singer. All of those things are possible. All of them have happened. Got it?”

  “Like science fiction?” Veneza tilts her head, eyes narrowing in thought. “The many-worlds interpretation? Quantum physics? Is that what we’re talking about?”

  “Eh, if it wasn’t on Star Trek, I don’t know.” Though Bronca does have a vague memory of a weird episode about a mirrored universe where everyone was evil, somehow signified by men wearing goatees? And in this universe they wear manbuns. Whatever.

  “I’m going to tell you a creation story,” Bronca says. “It’s not like the ones my people tell. Not even like the ones your people tell. The one I’m about to tell you is…” She considers, then laughs as she thinks of a term. “More like a unified field theory of creation. So try to follow along.

  “A long time ago, when existence was young, there was just one world that was full of life. No one can say if it was bad or good. It was life.” She shrugs.

  The river beside them runs through other planes where other Broncas speak—a thousand other tellers telling a thousand other tales, beneath ten thousand different skies. If Bronca concentrates, she can see them, skies where a second sun has risen or the night air is purple and gold and burns with what would be toxic to her. She tries not to see them, however. Veneza deserves her full attention for now… and it’s dangerous even to look at some things. The city has warned her about this.

  “That first world, that first life, was a miraculous thing. But each decision those living beings made fissioned off a new world—one where some of them turned left, and another where some turned right. Then each of those worlds fissioned off more worlds of their own, and so on, and so on. How do you top a miracle? You don’t; you just make another universe, which will start making its own miracles. And so life proliferated—across a thousand million universes, each one stranger than the last.”

  Bronca repositions her hands, one flattened in the air a few inches above the other. Then she ladders them, one above the other, to suggest many layers. A mille-feuille of worlds, she means to suggest, each building on the other, forming coral columns that rise and split and twist apart and split again. An endlessly growing tree, sprung from a single tiny seed, whose branches are each so wildly different that life on one would be unrecognizable to life on another. With one important exception.

  “Cities traverse the layers.” In this world Bronca points at the skyline that rises above the trees of Bridge Park, on their side of the river. “People still tell stories of how terrible the Bronx is. At the same time, somewhere, some realtor is talking up how amazing it is, so that people with money will come and buy up everything. At the same time there are the folks who live here, for whom it’s neither terrible nor amazing; it just is. All of these things are true, and that’s just within our own reality. It’s not just decisions, is what I’m trying to say. It’s… Every legend of this city, every lie, those become new worlds, too. All of them add to the mass that is New York, until finally all of it collapses under its own weight… and becomes something new. Something alive.”

  Fuck yeah, says the voice in her head.

  Shut up, sweetie, I’m busy, she sings back.

  Veneza is turning, looking at the trees and the water and the night-lights as if it’s all new. It is. She says, in a tone of wonder, “Always used to look at the city from the rooftop at home. It always looked like it was breathing.”

  “It was. Just a little, then.” Fetuses breathe their own amniotic fluids, consuming themselves as practice for the day when they will metabolize something wholly different. “But today, everything changed. After today, the city’s going to be alive in a way that it wasn’t before.”

  “Why today?”

  Bronca shrugs. “The stars aligned? The Creator got bored? I don’t know. The timing doesn’t matter; the event does.”

  “Yeah, I guess I’m not paying attention to the right things.” Veneza sobers. “That painting today. Tell me about that.”

  Yeah. Bronca needs to stop showing off. She sighs and turns away from the rocks, beckoning for Veneza to follow her back toward the Jeep. “Right, the painting. Basically, one of the realities out there is not super jazzed that our reality exists. Fuck if I know why—but whatever the reason, something from that reality tries to kill cities whenever they become alive the way New York has just done. They tried this morning, and did some damage, but failed in the big push.”

  Veneza’s eyes widen. “Oh, shit. The Williamsburg!”

  “The Williamsburg.” Bronca nods grimly. “Which could’ve been a lot worse; it was going for the whole city, like I said. Something stopped it. Someone like me, another person who is now the city.”

  “What, like…” Veneza pauses, frowning. “There’s more people who can make the river move?”

  “There are six of us. One for each borou
gh, and another who’s the whole city. That’s the one who stopped the attack this morning. That entity from the other universe”—the Enemy, her mind whispers—“is still here, though. And something’s changed about the way it presents itself. It’s supposed to be a horrible big thing that attacks cities at the moment of their birth. That’s how it’s always happened before—always, across thousands of years. Now, though, its tactics have changed.”

  And that’s got Bronca very worried. There is nothing in the lexicon about the Enemy co-opting human minions to deliver monstrous paintings. Are the others having this kind of trouble, too? Maybe she should…

  No. No. Beyond preparing Veneza as best Bronca can, she’s staying out of this fight.

  “The painting.” Veneza, whose thoughts have obviously followed the same path, shivers visibly. “Stuff in it was… moving.” She trails off, her voice haunted.

  “Remember what I said about life from those other places not being something that even looks alive, to us.”

  “What, there are actually people who look like two-dimensional paint smears somewhere out there?” Veneza shakes her head. “Fuuuuuck.”

  That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.

  They get in the car, and Bronca turns them back toward the expressway, heading for New Jersey. Veneza’s quiet beside her, digesting what she’s said. But there’s one more important bit that Bronca has to get across.

  “So.” She takes her eyes off the road just long enough to fix them on Veneza. This part is important. “Remember that thing I did with the river? I did the same thing at the Center today. If I’m careful, if I do things right, I can push those people, the Enemy, back into their world, or at least out of my immediate vicinity. You, though, you can’t do that. So next time you see some fucked-up shit—”

  “Come get you. Got it.”

  “Uh, well. Yeah, that works, too. But if I’m not around? Book it. Run away, not toward it like you did today. Okay?”

  At this, however, Veneza scowls. “If I hadn’t run toward the crazy, and pulled you back when they started reaching for you with all their little…” She waggles her fingers and makes a face. Bronca frowns in surprise. Those things had been reaching for her? “Then you would have been, I don’t know, paint food.”

  She’s so damn stubborn. “Well, if I’m not in imminent danger that you can save me from, get the fuck out. Because I don’t want to think about what will happen if those things grab you.” When Veneza’s jaw sets, Bronca pulls out the big guns. “Please. Do it for me.”

  Veneza winces, but some of the stubbornness goes out of her. “Damn it. Fine. Okay, then.” She frowns a little, though, troubled. “But why could I see it, when Yeej and Jess couldn’t? They didn’t move, actually, while it was happening. It was like they were in a freeze-frame, with the lights down low. Same with those guys who brought the painting. You, though, were normal-looking. And me, I wasn’t frozen at all. Why?”

  “There are always people around who are closer to the city than others. Some of them become like me, and others just serve the city’s will, as needed.”

  Veneza gasps. “Oh, shit, you mean I could’ve been like you?”

  “Maybe, yeah, if you weren’t from Jersey.”

  “Oh, fuck.” It’s a testament to the fact that Veneza isn’t a kid, though she acts like one sometimes, that she doesn’t seem thrilled by the prospect of developing extradimensional superpowers. She grips the Jeep’s door handle instead, as if she needs it to feel more secure. “Jesus, B. So, I mean, it’s awesome that, uh, you’re a city? Congratulations! I want to be accepting of this new stage in your identity formation. But if people are showing up at work to try and swallow you with paint-monsters, what are you going to do if you get doxxed? Those things in your house.”

  Bronca’s been trying not to think about that. “Hell if I know.”

  Veneza remains silent for the rest of the ride to Jersey City, which is only another ten minutes or so. When Bronca pulls up to Veneza’s apartment building—a small, nondescript low-rise across the street from a half-vacant lot—she stops at the curb. Veneza doesn’t get out, though.

  “You need to crash with me?” she asks Bronca, in perfect seriousness.

  Bronca blinks in surprise. “You live in a studio.”

  “Right. No roommates. Luxury living.”

  “You don’t have a couch.”

  “There’s a whole two-by-six trash-free space on my carpet, I’ll have you know. Or hell, share the bed. I changed the sheets, like, five days ago. Seven! Eight. Okay, I’ll change the sheets.”

  Bronca shakes her head, bemused. “No homo. Not with you, anyway.”

  “I swear I won’t ravish you in your sleep, B.” Veneza glares at her despite the banter. “Even though you did just tell me that an entire universe’s worth of city-eating monsters is out there trying to fuck you up, so maybe you could stop worrying about your virtue for a minute and think about your life instead?”

  She really is a sweetheart. Bronca sighs, then reaches over to ruffle her puffs. Veneza pretends to dodge, but then she permits it because she doesn’t really mind, and because Bronca makes sure they still look cute afterward. “I can keep those things out of my building,” Bronca says. “I think. But to do even that much, I need to be in New York. The city I’m part of? Which is not the city we’re in right now?”

  “Oh.” Veneza sighs. “Right. Forgot this whole thing has rules.”

  She gets out of the car, taking more time to get her purse out of the back seat than is strictly necessary. By this, Bronca knows she’s still trying to think of a way to help. “Hey.” When Veneza looks up, Bronca nods at her. “I’m gonna be fine. I was at—”

  “‘Stonewall, I stomped on a cop,’ yeah, I know. Informants aren’t paint-monsters from the fucking id.”

  It’s called the Ur, Bronca thinks, but she’s scared Veneza enough. “Either way, I got this. Good night.”

  Grumbling, Veneza shuts the door.

  Bronca watches ’til she’s inside, then heads home. And as the city welcomes her back within its borders, she prays to any god that will listen, across any dimension, that her friend will be safe.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Thing in Mrs. Yu’s Pool

  The Queen is in Queens, contemplating the stochastic processes of a trinomial tree model, on the strange warm day when everything changes. The Queen—whose real name is Padmini Prakash—doesn’t want to be working on her Computational Analysis project, which is why she happens to be daydreaming about some Lovecraft meta that she read on Tumblr, and looking outside, in the moment of the city’s rebirth. The meta wasn’t so much interesting as funny, science-side Tumblr arguing with fantasy-side over the comical notion that non-Euclidean geometry could somehow be sinister, and concluding that Lovecraft was probably just scared of math. The view through her window isn’t especially interesting, either. Just a westerly view of Queens’ myriad of neighborhoods and churches and billboards, with the very Euclidean spires of Manhattan looming beyond. It’s a bright, sunny June day, all of 11:53 a.m., and the day’s a-wasting as Americans say, so with a heavy sigh, Padmini turns her attention back to her work.

  She hates financial engineering, which of course is why she’s getting a master’s degree in it. She would prefer pure mathematics, where one might elegantly apply theories toward the cleaner (or at least decontextualized) goal of understanding processes, thought, and the universe itself. But it’s a lot harder to get a job in math than finance these days, especially with the H-1B lottery getting tighter and the ICE gestapo waiting to swoop in on any pretext, so here she is.

  Then something—instinct, maybe—prompts Padmini to look up again. Thus she is staring directly at the Manhattan horizon in the precise moment when a titanic tentacle curls up from
the East River and smashes the Williamsburg Bridge.

  She actually doesn’t know which bridge it is, at first. She can’t remember one from another. Still, the tentacle must be pretty big for her to be able to discern that it’s a tentacle at all. That’s not real, she thinks, with the instant scorn of any true New Yorker. Just two days before, big white film-production trailers took over her entire block. That happens all the bloody time these days, because movie people invariably seem to want multicultural working-class New York as backdrop for their all-white upper-class dramedies—which means Queens, since East New York is still too Black for their tastes and the Bronx has a “reputation.” Given that the tentacle is enormous but translucent, rising above the waterfront condos of Long Island City and flickering like a poorly connected monitor—or cheap special effects—naturally Padmini concludes that it’s some kind of hoax: 2012 called; it wants the Tupac hologram back. And then she giggles, inordinately pleased by her own cleverness. Math Queen’s got jokes.

  But the tentacle is awfully heavy-looking as it strikes the bridge. Padmini must concede that they got that detail right in the special effects; heavy masses displace more air than smaller things, and the lag caused by that much friction would make for visibly sluggish momentum. This tentacle is going just a little too fast to be in free fall, but Padmini figures they can tweak it in postproduction. Or maybe they’ll play it off by saying the tentacle is just phenomenally strong? That wouldn’t ruin the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

  As the tentacle hits the bridge, the bridge twists up in holographic silence—but an instant later, the wind shifts and carries with it the sound of metal tearing and concrete cracking and horns blowing. Padmini’s apartment building shudders. And… now there are screams, Dopplered by distance but unmistakable. All the way in Jackson Heights, miles from Williamsburg even as the crow flies, Padmini can hear screams.

  Then riding somewhere behind that sound wave comes a wave of… emotion? Anticipation? Dread and excitement. Something is wrong—but also right. All around her there is a sudden and intense rightness, shivering through the trees of her building’s backyard and thrumming up through the old frame house’s foundation. Dust puffs through cracks in the walls. She inhales the faint scent of mildew and rat droppings, and it’s disgusting, but it’s right.