The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  What did you expect? laughs something, not quite a voice, in his head. It’s a good-natured laugh, not the malicious kind. Laughing with, not at. You’re not New York, you’re Manhattan. Nice try, but pulling everyone together is his job, not yours.

  Abruptly, he is somewhere else.

  Somewhere in Normal New York. Down—underground? It’s dark. He glimpses white tile walls shaded with shadow, a gray concrete floor. A subway station. Smell of dust and a whiff of ozone, oddly clean of the ambiance of stale urine that Manny remembers from his one experience of the subway. Somewhere nearby, but not too nearby, a train rumbles past; in the shadows cast by a shaft of sunlight coming from somewhere above, pedestrians hurry past one another. And before him—

  Before him, on a bed of ancient newspapers, curls a sleeping young man.

  Manny stares down at him, transfixed. The young man is a slight figure, painfully thin, dressed in dirty jeans and worn old sneakers, his gangly-looking limbs sprawled a bit in repose. Manny cannot see his face clearly, though he is bathed in the mottled light from above. Something about the shadows, the angle… He wills himself closer, suddenly aching to see more, but nothing happens. It isn’t enough, this mere glimpse. He needs… He needs…

  I’m his, he thinks suddenly, wildly. I want to be… oh, God, I want to be his. I live for him and will die for him if he requires it, and oh yes, I’ll kill for him, too, he needs that, and so for him and him alone I will be again the monster that I am—

  Blink; the vision is gone. Manny finds himself sitting on the stairs again, the others around him, his mouth still full of blood, his mind blank. Padmini and Brooklyn have sat down, too, both dazed. Brooklyn glances up at him and her expression tightens minutely, in a way that Manny cannot read. A politician’s poker face.

  “You saw him,” she says. Not a question. “So there really is a sixth. New York.”

  Yes. Manny swallows and nods, tonguing his bottom lip where his teeth have cut it. His nose is bleeding, too. He hears the shakiness of his own voice; it’s a good match for how he’s feeling all over. “So. Visions. That’s new.”

  “Group visions. Yeah.” Brooklyn takes a slow breath. She sounds a little shaky, too. “I’d say it was all in your head, but apparently it’s in mine, too.” Manny nods unhappily.

  “And mine,” says Padmini. Aishwarya is sitting near her now, but Padmini’s still managing to look wobbly on her step. “Do either of you know where that was?”

  “I’ve only been here one day,” Manny says. He pushes himself up a bit more and pinches his nose shut, tilting his head back.

  Brooklyn shakes her head, too, however. “Not a clue. Bet it’s not Brooklyn, though.”

  “Wh—” Because the vision came to Manny most powerfully. “Oh.”

  “Describe it,” Aishwarya says, frowning at him.

  He shakes his head, too out of it to marshal his thoughts. Padmini speaks for him, and as she does so, he marvels at the clarity with which she has seen into his mind. “We were somewhere underground. A subway station, but a strange one. Dark. Except there was sunlight. And there was a boy lying on some newspapers.”

  Young, but not a child. Early twenties, Manny would guess. Black, dark-skinned. Lean. Probably quick when he moves.

  “Newspapers?” Aishwarya looks from Padmini to the rest of them, her eyes wide. “Like a puppy or something?”

  “No. Like a bed.” Brooklyn rubs her eyes, then gets to her feet. “Stacks of papers, some still with the straps on. He was lying on a bed of newspapers, somewhere in a disused portion of some subway station. Which narrows it down to, oh, like twenty possible places. Hell, every now and again, we find tunnels we forgot over the years, so he might be in one of those. I don’t even know what the hell this is about.” She’s watching Manny closely. “I get the sense you do, though.”

  “Do you want to go to a hospital? I can call a rideshare.” Padmini has found a tissue somewhere on her person and is ineffectually trying to dab at Manny’s nose. He takes it from her and swabs the blood off his face.

  “No,” he says. “Thanks. This’ll stop in a minute.”

  “You hit that step hard. What if it’s broken?”

  “Not my first broken nose, if so.” Manny shifts his attention over to Brooklyn. “I don’t know anything more than you do. I think I saw him, we saw him, because there are three of us here. If we want to see more, more of us need to be together.” The Bronx, or Staten Island. Or maybe all of them will need to be together before the knowledge of where the sixth one, the true New York, lights up in their minds like a HERE THERE BE DRAGONS pointer.

  Brooklyn says nothing for a moment. Then she murmurs to Padmini, “Go on up and get your stuff, baby. We’ll catch a Lyft or something, but still, best to travel light.”

  “Oh. Right.” Padmini gets to her feet with Aishwarya’s help, and they hurry on up the stairs. When the door to their apartment has closed, Brooklyn shifts to sit on the stair above Manny.

  “You remember more about who you used to be?” she asks. It’s casual.

  He checks his nose. Seems unbroken. The bleeding has slowed, too. “Some.” It’s casual.

  She purses her lips. “I, uh, got a little more from that vision than just that boy. New York, I mean. I think I picked up on some of you.”

  Yes, he rather suspected that she had. Padmini doesn’t seem to have, but maybe she’s dealing with so much strangeness that this is just more of the same. He waits for Brooklyn to make her point.

  “When did you start remembering?”

  “I don’t. Not really.” Some of that, however, is because he does not want to remember. His real name is on his ID, for example, but he has kept himself from looking closely at it. There are contacts in his phone that he isn’t interested in calling, texts he does not mean to answer. These are choices, he understands, as meaningful as his choice to remain in the city rather than fleeing on the next train to God knows where. He can be who he was if he wants to be, but only up to a point. Something about the old him is incompatible with the new identity that the city wants him to have. So he has chosen to be Manhattan, whatever that might cost.

  “Hmm,” Brooklyn says. Noncommittal. Leaving him space.

  Manny’s tired. It’s been a long day.

  “I used to hurt people,” he says, sitting back against the stairwell wall and gazing into the middle distance between them. “That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? I don’t remember everything. I don’t remember why, but I remember that much. Sometimes I did it physically. More often, I just scared them into doing what I needed them to do. But for a threat to have any teeth, sometimes… I followed through. I was good at it. Efficient.” Then he sighs, closing his eyes for a moment. “But I’d made the choice not to be that person anymore. I remember that, in particular. That’s why most people leave their old lives and come to the big city, right? New start. New self. It’s just turning out to be a little more literal for me than for most people.”

  “Mmm,” she says, taking a deep breath. “Serial killer?”

  “No.” He doesn’t remember feeling pleasure in the things he did. But he does remember that causing pain and fear was as easy for him as terrorizing Martha Blemins had been, in the park. Meaningless. He’s not sure that’s any better than being a serial killer. “It was… a job, I think. I did it for power, and maybe money.”

  But somewhere along the way, he’d chosen to stop. He clings to this proof of his humanity as if it is the only thing that matters. Because it is.

  “Well, that’s pretty damn fitting, for Manhattan.” He can feel the weight of her gaze. “You’ve got some weird feelings about that young man.”

  Manny sighs a little. He’d been hoping she hadn’t gotten that, too. Some things should remain private, for God’s sake.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I wasn’t exactly expecting to get yanked into, I don’t know, a Vulcan mind-meld or whatever, so I didn’t think to, uh, not look. Hope you didn’t get any of me.”

 
“I don’t think so.”

  “Good.” She folds her arms and leans on her knees. Her legs are primly aligned, her skirt not at all rucked up; she is the picture of elegance in this ugly, wood-paneled old stairway. But that’s worry on her elegant face. “So, between us, I’m getting a bad feeling about what happens if and when all six of us finally get together. If that was a taste of it… I don’t think I want five other people in my head.”

  Manny shrugs. He doesn’t, either, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that they must find one another, or die. “Maybe it won’t be so bad when we find the—the New York. Maybe he’ll… regulate it. Or something.”

  “You’re very optimistic for a possible serial killer. I like that about you.”

  It makes him laugh, which he apparently needed, because he feels much better. “How are you doing with all this, apart from existential dread?”

  She shrugs, but he’s good at reading people. It must have been a professional skill for him once. She’s terrified, in her quietly elegant way. “I’d think about leaving—not that I want to, of course. New York is my home. Fought for this city all my life. But just to keep my father and my daughter out of the line of fire, you know? I’m doing this instead, for now, because seeing this through offers a possibility for both: help the city and keep my family safe. But if things get too tight…” She shrugs eloquently. “Not sure I love New York enough to die for it. Definitely don’t love it enough to sacrifice my family for it.”

  “You said your daughter was fourteen.”

  “Yep. Can’t nobody tell her nothing.” Brooklyn relaxes visibly with the change of subject, and smiles with fond exasperation. “Dad says she’s payback for all my lip when I was her age. But she’s got a good head on her shoulders, too. Just like her mama.”

  Manny chuckles. He can’t remember whether he was mouthy growing up, but it’s nice to imagine that he might have been. “Anything I can do to help your family, I will.”

  Her expression softens. Maybe she likes him a little more. “And I hope you get to become the person you actually want to be,” she says, which makes him blink. “This city will eat you alive, you know, if you let it. Don’t.”

  Then she gets up, because Padmini is coming out of her apartment, still trying to stuff things into a backpack while Aishwarya hands her things she’s forgotten and bags of food. Brooklyn moves to help. While the women murmur and work together on getting the pack zipped, Manny chews on Brooklyn’s words. They feel like a warning of many things.

  Then the women come down, and he gets up to take any baggage that Padmini will let him carry, which isn’t much, though Aishwarya readily plonks two filled reusable grocery bags on his arms and a tiffin stack into his hands. “Ready,” Padmini says, looking at them anxiously. “And, ah, I have dinner for us, if you want. Also, I called my supervisor and let him know I won’t be able to come in to my internship for the next few days. I now have the flu.” She coughs a little, experimentally. “You get a cough with the flu, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” says Manny, fighting a smile.

  “Oh. Well, I did mention a fever of 110 and that I had my period, too. He’ll think I’m delirious from one or the other.”

  “Get well soon,” Brooklyn says drily. “Let’s go, then.”

  They catch a Lyft that carries them along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The nighttime cityscape of Manhattan is perfectly positioned for Manny to stare at for most of the drive, and he does so greedily, fascinated despite the knowledge that he is staring at himself. He’s a little overwhelmed by all of it: the bright, startling order of the highway, even as half of its drivers seem determined to run their own private speed races. The high-rises that loom over or alongside the highway, and the fleeting vignette glimpses he gets into other people’s lives: a couple arguing in front of an ugly painting of a boat; a roomful of people, which must be a dinner party; an old man pointing a remote at a TV with both hands and yelling. At one point their highway runs between two other highways, underneath a third, and alongside a service road that’s actually bigger. It’s madness. It’s amazing.

  It’s nothing more than what any large city has… and yet it is more. Manny feels the pump and life of it. When he rolls down the window, he sticks his face out as much as the seat belt allows, and inhales the rushing air. (The driver gives him a skeptical look, but shrugs and says nothing.) He lets this breath out, and the wind gusts hard enough to shake the car a little, making the driver curse and Brooklyn clap a hand over her hair to keep it from being too messed up by the open window. She throws him a warning look, knowing full well what he’s been up to, and he smiles back apologetically.

  He can’t help it, though. He is falling in love with a city, and men in love are not always considerate or wise.

  When they arrive at the address Brooklyn has given the driver, it’s deep in a neighborhood that the map calls Bedford Stuyvesant. They emerge from the car to face a pair of brownstones, stately narrow things, which seem to have been similarly renovated and decorated. One is still in the traditional style, with an ironwork gate opening onto a stoop of steps; there’s even a historical landmark plaque beside its first-floor door. The other, however, has been modified: no steps, no gate, and the garden apartment door opens directly onto a pretty brick-lined and plant-strewn courtyard. The arched double-door entryway is much wider than that of the other brownstone, and its doors are more modern. Manny spots an automatic door-opener button to one side.

  Padmini whistles. “This is very rich,” she says, admiring the building. Then, to Brooklyn: “You’re very rich.”

  Brooklyn snorts, although she also stops on the sidewalk to let them gawk, plainly enjoying their admiration. And, Manny notes, she doesn’t deny the “rich” part. “We’ll be staying there,” she says, nodding to the traditional brownstone. “Unless either of you have issues with steps? My family lives in the accessible one; Dad uses a wheelchair. You’ll get a little fourteen-year-old attitude from my daughter, but if you don’t mind that, we can all crash there, too.”

  “I’d love to meet your family, but steps are fine,” Manny says. Padmini agrees, so Brooklyn leads them up the steps of the traditional brownstone.

  Inside, Padmini’s very rich gets compounded with and stylish. Someone’s renovated the place; original details like a fireplace (with a marble mantel!) and a carpeted, mahogany-bannistered stairwell have been joined by a modernist chandelier that looks like a frozen explosion, and trendy furniture that’s too visually striking to be entirely comfortable. Manny likes it anyway.

  And best of all: the instant they walk inside the building, Manny feels a skin-shivering return of the sensation they felt in Padmini’s and his own apartment buildings. The architectural lines look sharper, the walls’ texture finer. The light brightens just a touch; the room smells fresher.

  “Yeah, thought so,” Brooklyn says, grinning. “Ain’t nothing more Brooklyn than a brownstone, baby.”

  “Are you in real estate?” Padmini asks, still a bit wide-eyed.

  “Not really. Only own these two buildings. I grew up here, see.” Brooklyn sighs as she slips her shoes off. Manny and Padmini quickly follow suit. “Dad bought both buildings in the Seventies. Just sixty grand for this whole entire building. The city was struggling in those days. White people ran off to the suburbs because they didn’t want their kids going to school alongside little José and Jaquita, so the same bad economy that hit everywhere else did double damage here. But Dad held on to the buildings, even when the property taxes nearly ate us alive. When I was fourteen, I was snaking toilets and moving furniture. Jojo don’t know how good she’s got it.”

  “Your daughter?” asks Padmini.

  “Right. Short for Josephine, named after Baker.” Brooklyn shakes her head, then grins. “Anyway, now both buildings are worth millions.” She grins and beckons for them to follow as she starts giving them a tour. “Just managed to finish the accessibility mods to the other building before the whole block went histor
ic-landmark, thank God, or I’d still be in a paperwork fight with the city. And I still had to promise to never modify this one, to soothe all the ruffled feathers.”

  “People had a problem with you making a brownstone that a wheelchair user could live in?”

  She snorts. “Welcome to New York.” She gestures to the airy, crown-molding-accented kitchen. “Anyway, we rent this one out to tourists for the extra income.” She shakes her head in amusement. “‘Historic townhome! City views! Vintage accents!’ Five thousand per unit per month, bam, and more during special events or holiday seasons. Dad calls it the ‘Clyde Thomason Pension Backup Fund,’ since the city keeps threatening to take ’em away.”

  Brooklyn shows them each to a neat little guest room, and orders Chinese for dinner. Queens has the meal that Aishwarya packed for her, but she nibbles from the fried rice, and freely shares the fragrant lamb curry and idlis from her tiffin. It’s a humble, quiet supper as they sit around the kitchen island, but it’s such a relief to just be able to relax for a while that Manny savors it.

  He does feel guilt because, somewhere in the city, the avatars of the Bronx and Staten Island are alone, possibly afraid, and definitely in danger. And somewhere beneath them all—in the subways, in the dark—the avatar of New York slumbers alone on a bed of trash, with no one to keep him warm. No one to protect him.

  Not for long, Manny vows privately. I’ll find you soon.

  And then… well. Manny came to New York because he no longer wanted to be what he was. The city has taken his name and his past, but only because he was willing to give those up in the first place. Perhaps he should not be ashamed that the city has laid claim to the rest as well, including the parts he thought undesirable or unsavory. Of course New York would find a use for those. No city can exist without someone like him—this city in particular cannot—and maybe it’s time he accepted that.

  And is it so terrible to be terrible, if he puts all the awfulness of himself into the service of the city?