The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Of course,” Bronca says, wry. Minions. It’s almost comedy. Bronca lip-points toward the Artistes, not bothering to look at them. “And them?”

  The Woman glances at them. Bronca gets the sense that she is genuinely puzzled by Bronca’s question. “I have no more need of those parts. Consume or repurpose them as you please. They’re very malleable.”

  Then she turns, without another word, and steps forward. It is as if she’s stepped into a hole in the air that Bronca cannot see. First the front half of her is gone, and then she picks up her trailing foot, and the latter half vanishes.

  Bronca edges forward cautiously. But when she steps forward and swipes at the air with her hand, her hand passes through empty air. Any opening that was there has sealed itself. Exhaling, Bronca straightens and turns to the Artistes—only to find Veneza just beyond the pile of men, staring at her with wide, shocked eyes.

  Bronca considers her protégé, putting her hands on her hips. “You okay?” she asks. The look on her face means that Veneza must have witnessed at least some of that whole confrontation. She’s going to have questions.

  “Well, I mean, just the sight of something awful and incomprehensible isn’t going to send me off frothing at the mouth,” Veneza says. It’s nonchalant, but there is a shaken note to her voice nonetheless. “I’m from Jersey.”

  Bronca coughs a laugh. “Thought I told you to run if you saw weird shit.”

  “I saw these asshats.” Veneza lip-points at the Alt Artistes; that’s a Lenape thing she’s picked up from Bronca. One of the Artistes sprawls facedown, and Bronca can’t see him breathing, so she really hopes he isn’t dead. The other two are almost spooning; Fifteen, who’s still conscious (but fetal, and groaning with his hands pressed over his face), is the little spoon. It would be cute if they weren’t racist sexist homophobic dipshits. “So I came to make sure you were okay. And then I see—” She falters a little. Her gaze flicks to the wall behind Bronca. Where the da-dump lurked.

  “Yeah, that would’ve been the time to leave.”

  “Couldn’t think.” Veneza shakes her head and presses the heels of her hands to her eyes for a moment. Bronca tenses, but Veneza makes no move to tear her eyes out. The lexicon warns that that can happen. “Fuck, I’m gonna have nightmares for days. So that’s what’s after you? For real, I mean? Just, like, working through esses resíduos de pele? That White bitch?”

  Bronca tries, she really tries, to be a role model sometimes. Occasionally. Okay, not often. “We shouldn’t use ‘bitch’ to refer to women in the pejorative—”

  “I’m using it to refer to a nonhuman nonwoman. So is this whole scheme like, an extradimensional shakedown or some kind of fuckshit like that, is that what I’m seeing?” Veneza’s voice has gone more than shaky; it is seismic. She’s trembling, too, and now her hands are rubbing tears from her closed eyes. Bronca sighs and goes over to her. “Skippy the tentacle monster sends her little bigot fuckbois to harass you on the internet? Like, is that how Lovecraftian horror works now, because… I can’t…”

  Bronca just holds her. It’s what they both need, for a while.

  Then they hear feet on the stairwell, and one of the keyholders pushes open the door. It’s Yelimma, the glass sculptor with the abusive ex-husband. She’s carrying an aluminum baseball bat. Two other keyholders, both homeless twentysomethings, hunch behind her, peering out at Bronca. Yelimma takes in the sprawled Artistes and Veneza’s visible distress. Her nostrils flare. Bronca shakes her head quickly, though she’s not quite sure what Yelimma is signaling that she intends to do, or what she’s telling Yelimma not to do. She hopes it’s Do Not Use Bat, or at least Not For Now.

  “Call the police,” she tells Yelimma. “I’m gonna go pull the videos from our security cameras for them.”

  “Make a copy,” Veneza snaps. She’s better now, though her eyes are red and she’s still a bit twitchy. “What’s wrong with you? Make a copy and a backup copy and a hidden backup copy. NYPD gets the originals and you’ll never see them again.”

  “I don’t have time for all that,” Bronca begins, and of course as soon as she says this, Veneza makes a disgusted noise and heads toward the reception desk.

  “You call the police, then,” she tells Bronca. “I’ll make sure they don’t fuck up the video evidence. Yelimma, hit the Artistes if they give you lip.” Then she’s off.

  Yelimma comes over, a wry look on her face. “You okay?”

  Bronca, who has closed her eyes for a moment to disengage with the waiting, ready, martial spirit of her borough, lets out a long slow breath, and then nods. “Yeah.” Surprisingly, under the circumstances. But she is.

  It takes the police a fucking hour to show up. It’s still the South Bronx. By then one of the Artistes—Doc—has come to, although he seems more confused and high than anything else. He sits shivering against the wall while Yelimma watches him with a taut attention born of experience. He keeps saying that he’s cold, and asking how he got there. Bronca supposes that whatever the Woman in White did to him could have affected his memory, but she also knows that the Woman in White could not have used Doc and company unless there was something sympathetic, synchronistic, within all of them. So even though Manbun might actually be comatose or catatonic instead of just unconscious, Bronca can’t muster much in the way of pity for him. She just hopes he doesn’t die in her gallery.

  When the cops do finally show up, they try to talk Bronca into not pressing charges. The Artistes are nice white boys from well-connected families, it turns out, caught breaking and entering by a bunch of hippie brown women; of course the cops don’t want the smoke they’re going to get from these families’ lawyers or the press. Veneza gives them a thumb drive featuring footage of all three men crowbarring the Center’s shuttered exhibit door—the only door in the place that isn’t on the alarm system because a sensor got damaged a while back, which they knew somehow. The footage shows them sneaking in, one carrying a visible can of lighter fluid. Veneza’s also added time-stamped photos that she took of Murrow Hall, and the piled-up, marker-vandalized paintings. Bronca makes sure the cops note the smell of lighter fluid, still very detectable on the absorbent photo paper. One of the cops makes noises about how it could interfere with the investigation if Bronca shows the video footage anywhere, “like online or to the news.” Bronca smiles and says, “You and the DA handle things the way they need to be handled and we won’t have to.”

  So finally they take the Artistes away in zip-cuffs, or in Manbun’s case, on an ambulance stretcher.

  By this point, it’s dawn. The keyholders are all up, doing what they can to help put the Center back together. At Bronca’s request, they put up the Unknown self-portrait again, despite the damage. Takes more than a marker to destroy something that amazing. Veneza runs out for donuts and coffee, and as word spreads on social media about the break-in, other artists and patrons from around the borough start showing up. They bring brooms and tools. One guy whose uncle runs an ironworks shop shows up with the business’s truck, carrying several beautifully worked iron gates. He measures and mumbles but is eventually able to fit one that can replace the busted exhibit door shutter. It will be better than anything the Center’s budget could afford. He’s installing it for free.

  When Bronca finally takes a moment to sit down in her cluttered office with the door closed, she puts her hands over her face and cries for a minute.

  Then someone knocks, and she knows it’s either an emergency or one of the many strangers in the place right now, because the Center staff knows better than to bother Bronca while the office door is shut. Scrubbing the back of a fist over her eyes, she grabs a tissue for her nose and calls, muffled, “What.”

  The door opens, and three people stand there. Even if Bronca hadn’t been raw inside, she would know them by the sudden, almost painful ring of recognition that sounds throughout her soul. They are kin, battle companions, the missing fragments of her self. They are Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, and they’re g
rinning, ostensibly elated at having found Bronca.

  “What the shit do you want?” Bronca demands.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Make Staten Island Grate Again(st São Paulo)

  Aislyn is up on the roof again, gazing at the distant city in the night, when her mother scares the life out of her by touching her from behind. She yelps loudly enough for her voice to echo from the nearby houses, and turns to glare at her mother. “Mom! Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “Sorry, sorry,” her mom says. “But are you sure you should be up here? That allergy attack you had…”

  Aislyn has spent the past twenty-four hours on Benadryl to try to reduce the hives she picked up at the ferry station. They’re mostly gone now, and not as itchy, though the Benadryl has made her dreamy-headed and slow. Sitting on the roof is one of her favorite pastimes ordinarily, but between the drug and the soft, constant song of the city, the experience has become sublime. “I’m good, Mom. It feels nice out here. The wind’s so cool, and you can smell the harbor even from here…” It feels so good, in fact, that on impulse she adds, “Sit down. Look at the city with me.”

  The roof of the Houlihan home isn’t much more than an access door and some satellite dishes, though her father jokingly calls it their “rooftop bar.” Aislyn’s put two folding lawn chairs out here, and she knows that her father often takes advantage of them, because she has to pick up his beer bottles and put away his binoculars whenever she comes up. This is the first time her mother has ever climbed up, however, so she watches with some interest as Kendra (she’s thought of her mother as this since her teens, because it’s what her father calls her) settles gingerly into one of the lawn chairs. It creaks and slides back a little beneath her weight, which makes her yelp, then laugh nervously.

  “Sorry,” Kendra says again. “I don’t like heights.” But then she falls silent, gazing at the cityscape. Aislyn is pleased to see her mother’s face, too, relax into wonder. Manhattan is scary to contemplate up close—and, apparently, full of bees—but from this safe distance, it is a jewel to behold.

  They sit for a few moments in companionable silence, and then her mother says, “So, did you make it to the city yesterday?”

  Aislyn starts, her heart constricting, though she doesn’t know why.

  Aislyn does not understand her mother. Kendra is basically an older version of herself, black-haired and slender and so pale that sometimes there’s a green cast to her skin. Aislyn often finds herself hoping that she’ll grow up to be as beautiful as her mother, since Kendra has only fine threads of gray hair and a few minute wrinkles, even in her fifties. Black Irish holds the years well. However, Aislyn does not want her mother’s eyes. All of Kendra’s age lives here, not in lines but in constant, darting flickers and a slow, sad weariness. Back when Aislyn was a teenager, she often thought of her mother as dull. Since then Aislyn has come to understand that women sometimes have to pretend to be dull so that the men around them can feel sharper. Adult Aislyn has had to do the same thing, with increasing frequency as she’s grown older. So she and her mother are finally beginning to become friends… but it’s fragile, like any friendship formed amid stress. And her mom has never intruded so far into territory that Aislyn regards as inviolably hers before.

  She shifts a little, trying not to show her discomfort, although the rickety lawn chair betrays her by creaking loudly. “How did you know?”

  Kendra shrugs a little. “You usually take your car to go shopping. The bus is so slow. But NYPD photographs license plates at the ferry station.”

  And her father almost found out anyhow, because of her panic attack. Aislyn sighs in careful frustration. “I just…” And then she can’t think of anything else to say. Her mother has also lived nearly her whole life on Staten Island. How can Aislyn say, I just wanted to leave you and Dad and everything I’ve ever known to go to the city you’ve spent years warning me against? And for what? To meet total strangers who are part of me, part of New York, and I am part of New York, I don’t think I want to be but I am—

  And then Kendra destroys Aislyn’s entire image of her, and perception of herself, with a single sentence. “Really hoped you would make it,” she says quietly.

  Aislyn flinches hard enough to make the chair shift back. She stares at her mother. Kendra offers another of those tired smiles, though she doesn’t look at Aislyn while she does it. Just keeps her gaze on the city.

  “Wanted to be a concert pianist when I was young,” she says, further flooring Aislyn. “I was really good. Got a scholarship to Juilliard and everything. Wouldn’t have had to pay a dime except MTA fare every day.” She sighs softly. “I mean… I was really good. Fucking amazing.”

  Aislyn can count on one hand the number of times that her mother has dropped an f-bomb over the entirety of her life. But that isn’t the thing that’s jolted her the most. “Um… I’ve never seen you touch a piano. You don’t even listen to music on the radio, except when Dad does.”

  Kendra smiles a little, with just one corner of her mouth, while the rest of her face remains its mournful, immobile self. She doesn’t say anything.

  Aislyn can’t believe this. “Because… your parents said no?” Her maternal grandparents are dead now—heart attack for Grandpa, undiagnosed liver cancer for Grammy—but Aislyn remembers them as being very traditional. Stolid, no-meat-on-Fridays Catholics. Aislyn’s strongest memory of them is Grammy telling her how she should dress and carry herself if she wanted a good husband. Aislyn had been seven when she died.

  “I was pregnant, love. Married your father not a month after I got the acceptance letter.”

  Aislyn knows about this: Conall, the brother she should have had, but did not due to a miscarriage. Aislyn was born a few years later. No one really knows if Conall was going to be a boy, of course. He was a blob with flippers by the time he left the building. But when her father drinks, he talks about what he could have had: a brother-in-arms to help the family face this terrible world, instead of a daughter who is only another useless thing to protect.

  Aislyn knows that the idea of working motherhood is anathema to both her parents. But since Conall… wasn’t, and it would’ve only meant working wifehood, Aislyn frowns. “You still could have gone. Couldn’t you? If…” She has tiptoed around Conall for years. Her father still grieves. Her mother keeps her own counsel on the matter because that’s what women have to do sometimes, she has always told Aislyn.

  “I meant to go. Your father wasn’t much help with, oh, anything, but I was determined to find a way to make it work.” Her mother smiles again. That little half-a-mouth smile, less than a quarter of her face. Her gaze is distant, somewhere well beyond the city. “That’s why I had the abortion.”

  Aislyn’s mouth drops open.

  “But afterward, he was so heartbroken that I…” Kendra sighs, the smile fading. “I decided it was right that I should give something up, too.”

  God. Aislyn has to swallow, hard, to muster words. “You never told Dad?”

  “Why would I?” So many answers wrapped up in that one. Why would she tell a conservative, son-hungry man that she’d aborted his baby? Why tell a husband that it was his fault for forcing her to choose between one dream and another? And then there is the matter of how he would have reacted.

  Aislyn shifts again, realizing she’s drawn back from her mother a little. She didn’t mean to. It’s just… a lot.

  But her mother isn’t done. “So I hoped you would make it out. I thought at least one of us should, I don’t know, see the world? Try new things. It’s why I sent for those brochures from colleges in the city.” She grimaces a little as Aislyn stares at her again in shock. Aislyn had gotten in so much trouble for those brochures. Her father had assumed she’d requested them. He’d ranted for most of the night about how terrible the city was, and how much he’d sacrificed to keep her safe, and how it was her choice of course but he expected her to make good choices. A week later, she’d enrolled in the College of St
aten Island.

  “Jesus Christ,” Aislyn mutters—and then she winces, realizing she’s forgotten herself. Her mother has always grumbled about blasphemy when her father says the same thing.

  “Yeah, that was a real shitshow, wasn’t it?” her mother says. Okay, Aislyn’s going to stroke out any minute now. “Sorry.”

  Finally, though, her mom gets to her feet and turns to Aislyn. All at once Aislyn finds herself imagining a different version of her mother: still the same woman, still limned by the distant light of the city—but wearing a stylish little black dress and with her hair elegantly coiffed instead of just a fraying bun at the back of her neck. The way she’s seen concert pianists dress on TV. There would be fewer lines in her face, Aislyn decides, considering this stranger who has been her mother for thirty years. Lighter circles under her eyes, if any. And her eyes would be just beautiful, instead of beautiful and tired and sad.

  Then the moment passes, and Kendra is just Kendra again.

  “Don’t stay here,” she says to Aislyn. “Just don’t… if the city calls you, Lyn, listen to it. And go.”

  Then she pats Aislyn on the shoulder and heads for the roof access door. Aislyn sits there for a long hour more, staring not at the city, but at the door that her mother passed through.

  As Aislyn comes downstairs, she realizes someone else is in the dining room with her father. That’s unusual enough; Aislyn’s father doesn’t like intruders on his territory. But when she leans around the door to see who it is, she is surprised to find her father sitting at the dining table with a man of about Aislyn’s age whose entire appearance screams antifa. Or commie, or weed head, or any number of other things that Matthew Houlihan has called young men who look like this. The young man is wearing perfectly rectangular black-rimmed glasses and a conspicuously old-fashioned mustachio, curled and waxed at the tips. His arms—mostly bare; he seems to be wearing only a short-sleeved button-down with suspenders, the kind of outfit her father has called “gay” on other men—display unimpressive biceps and such a profusion of tattoos that Aislyn cannot make any one of them out. He sits close to Aislyn’s father, kitty-corner at the table edge, showing him something on a tablet computer; they’re both snickering at whatever it is, like small boys at CCD lessons on Sundays. Her father, a broad man even up to his balding pate, is literally twice the younger man’s size. It’s like watching a bulldog snicker at a dachshund’s jokes.