The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Always bad blood between the Bronx and the rest of the city,” Brooklyn says. Bronca’s nastiness has finally earned her full attention, however; she’s turned to face Bronca now, with her arms folded and an Oh, so it’s like that expression. Time for the earrings to come off, then. Bronca braces herself. “Plenty of good stuff here in this borough. Lots of good people. But they can never get their stuff together enough to exploit it properly—so when everybody else does, the Bronx throws a shitfit and claims it’s disrespect. It ain’t even that, though, sis, see?” Brooklyn plasters a thin smile on her face. “Disrespect would mean we care.”

  Bronca plants her hands on her desk and pushes to her feet. “You can see yourself right the fuck out of my office.”

  Brooklyn snorts and is halfway to the door before Bronca can draw another breath. Manny glares after Brooklyn, but then spreads his hands to plead with Bronca. “None of us is going to survive this alone—”

  She shouts, “Get. Out!”

  They leave. They stare at her like she’s crazy while they do it, but they go.

  In their wake, Bronca sits down again. She’s shaking. She doesn’t know what she feels. She’s eaten half a donut. She’s running on a couple of hours’ sleep amid one of the worst three-day periods of her life, and she has faced death at least twice in that period. (Maybe three times. She has an idea that if she’d been any less powerful in the moment that she kicked the bathroom stall door open… well. At least twice.) Maybe she’s being irrational. In fact, she’s pretty sure she’s being irrational. But for fuck’s sake, they were getting on her nerves.

  She’s sitting there, seething and staring at the uneaten half of the donut, when the door opens. She inhales at once to start shouting again—but it’s Veneza. Veneza is always okay. So Bronca subsides into quiet seething while Veneza comes over and sits down in the chair that Manhattan, whatever he calls himself, once occupied. She just looks at Bronca, expressionless.

  That’s enough. Bronca crumples beneath this gentle, silent admonishment, falling onto the desk and putting her forehead down on her hands. “I can’t take this,” she says. It’s more of a sob than a declaration. “I’m too fucking old for this. I’m scared and I can’t go home and I’m not me anymore. I can’t. I just can’t.”

  Veneza takes a deep breath and blows it out through pursed lips. “Yyyyeah, I figured they were hitting you with a lot all at once.” She’s silent for a moment. Veneza has always known when to let Bronca have silence. “Want me to tell ’em to come back later?”

  “Tell them to never come back.” But she knows that’s not going to fly, so she sucks in a breath to let Veneza know she’s not completely crazy. “Tell them to give me an hour.”

  “Gotcha.” But Veneza’s got more to say, Bronca’s pretty sure, since she doesn’t move. After a long moment in which Bronca finally starts to calm down, Veneza says, “You know… I hated New York before I met you. You’re the one who showed me how to love it.”

  “Kiss my ass.” Bronca says it to the desk. She’s sulking and she knows it and she wallows in it. “I hate this city.”

  Veneza laughs. “Yeah, well, you New Yorkers—everybody except the new ones—always say that. It’s dirty and there’s too many cars and nothing’s maintained the way it should be and it’s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter and it stinks like unwashed ass most of the time. But ever notice how none of you ever fucking leave? Yeah, now and then somebody’s elderly mom gets sick down in New Mexico or something and you go live with her, or you have kids and you want them to have a real yard so you bump off to Buffalo. But most of you just stay here, hating this city, hating everything, and taking it out on everybody.”

  “Your cheering-up technique needs work.”

  Veneza chuckles. “But then you meet somebody fine at the neighborhood block party, or you go out for Vietnamese pierogies or some other bizarre shit that you can’t get anywhere but in this dumb-ass city, or you go see an off-off-off-Broadway fringe festival play nobody else has seen, or you have a random encounter on the subway that becomes something so special and beautiful that you’ll tell your grandkids about it someday. And then you love it again. It glows off of you. Like a damn aura.” She shakes her head, smiling to herself a little wistfully. “I get on the train to go home every day, and sometimes I look around and see all these people glowing. Filled with the beauty of this city.”

  Bronca, frowning, lifts her head to stare at Veneza. Veneza is looking through the glass block window that dominates one side of Bronca’s office. You can’t really see anything through it—just the blurry shapes of people as they pass along the sidewalk, and the occasional bus. Still. It’s a little bit of the city, moving and vivid and alive. The colors and light of the glass play over Veneza’s face in a way that makes her momentarily ethereal. For not the first time, Bronca wishes that she’d had a daughter. Veneza is amazing, everything she could have wished for in a child. But Bronca is content to have an amazing friend instead.

  With a slow, tired smile, Bronca sighs. “Yeah. Okay. An hour. Uninterrupted.” Then she will apologize to the other parts of herself, swallow a bit of pride, and join them as she knows she should. She still doesn’t fucking like them, and might never. But. She needs them to save the city that Veneza loves. That’s enough of a reason to put up with all this shit.

  Veneza grins as if she hears this thought, and heads out to tell the others.

  Bronca’s surprised by how much the others don’t know. She is the one who was given to know the history of the whole business, but she thought they would’ve gotten something. It lessens her anger a little; if they literally had to figure out everything from scratch, including how to find each other, then maybe she can cut them some slack. It also turns out that they intended to find her the previous day, but then they lost it to Brooklyn nearly burning herself out by sealing off the entirety of her borough. Bronca resists the urge to yell at them about this, because they’re not supposed to do that. They need each other, working together, to amplify the power and reduce resistance and do other stuff for which there are no words. They need the primary avatar to focus all of it. But she can’t yell at them, not even Brooklyn, because they didn’t know. And, really, that’s her fault.

  So it’s time she explains a few things.

  While Yijing and Jess handle the business of the Center, Bronca has a sit-down with her fellow boroughs in the staff break room. Veneza’s there, too—mostly to keep Bronca in line, she jokes, but it’s not really a joke and Bronca is grateful for her presence. (The others give Veneza the hairy confused eye for a moment, then Veneza starts offering around the bag of microwave popcorn she’s brought. Queens goes, “Ooh, kettle corn,” and that’s it, Veneza’s in.) It’s actually been several hours rather than just one, because Bronca had to divert some time to interviews by two news crews who showed up unannounced to cover the vandalism and arrests. Naturally, spotting a city council member on the premises, they roped Brooklyn Thomason into commenting, too. Brooklyn gave a pretty good impromptu speech, too, answering the question of what a council member from a different borough is doing helping a Bronx institution with, “An attack on the Bronx is an attack on all of New York,” which even has the virtue of being true.

  So now they’re all sitting around eating delivery pho. With real food in her, Bronca’s inclined to be a little less of an asshole, so they’re all getting along better. Brooklyn even apologized for being an asshole back, and it turns out they actually tried to call her when it became clear they wouldn’t make it to the Center before this morning. (Uselessly. Voice mail’s full of hate messages and nobody listened to it.) They’re all buddies now. Which is good, because Bronca’s got some stuff to tell them.

  “Okay, so,” she begins. “We’ve got to find Staten Island. With four of us together, that should actually be pretty easy; we’re already calling to her, but together we can narrow down her location and go to her—if she doesn’t find us first. But what we really need to focus
on, even while we’re looking for SI, is tracking down the primary avatar.”

  They stare at her like she’s just spoken in Munsee. (She checks with Veneza, because sometimes when she’s tired she does slip into that; she spent a few years trying to learn the language when she was younger, and it comes out at odd times now. Veneza shakes her head. Nope, just incomprehensible English, then.)

  “So there really is a sixth one,” Brooklyn finally says. She throws a look that Bronca can’t read at Manhattan.

  Good Lord. “Uh, yeah there’s a sixth one. You didn’t know that?”

  Now both Queens and Brooklyn are looking at Manhattan. Manhattan grimaces a little, then takes a deep breath. “We… suspected. But our source for information was that woman.” He doesn’t need to describe her; Bronca nods. They all know who the Woman is. “And, uh, a vision.”

  Okay, that’s not something Bronca was expecting to hear. She raises her eyebrows. “A vision.”

  He’s light-skinned enough to blush visibly, which is almost cute. Then Queens clears her throat and adds, “I saw it, too. We all did. That’s how we knew it wasn’t just, oh, car exhaust fumes.”

  “But we didn’t know what to make of it,” Manhattan continues. He still looks distinctly embarrassed. Bronca’s starting to wonder what exactly happened in this vision of his. “None of us really understands how this works, or why it’s happened to us, so naturally we’ve, uh, had a lot of denial to work through first.”

  “Can’t see why you would,” Veneza mutters under her breath, though more than loudly enough for all of them to hear. “Squiggly shit coming out the damn walls…”

  Manhattan shakes his head and focuses on Bronca. “You seem to understand more about this than the rest of us. How?”

  Bronca’s briefly tempted to spin them some bullshit about it being a Lenape legend. She doesn’t because she’s too tired for bullshit. So she says, “All cities know it. It’s like… I don’t know. Ancestral memory, or something; it comes from the other cities that have made it this far. When we become avatars, the knowledge pops into our head. Or in our case, since there are six of us—one is the usual for most cities—the knowledge popped into my head. Have to admit, though, I figured you guys would’ve gotten at least some backwash.”

  “There are a lot of things in my head,” Manhattan says, without apparent irony. “Nothing about why cities turn into, uh, us.” He gestures around the table.

  “Yeah, well,” Bronca says. “There’s stuff we can all do, but then each of us gets unique skills on top of that, because each borough contributes different strengths to what makes New York what it is. Bronx has the most history.” Endless generations of Lenape stretching down the lines of the past—changed, though not destroyed, by colonialism. The survivors moved to south Jersey and thrived, but the Bronx is their ancestral land. “So I got the memory of what came before.”

  “I don’t think I got any weird skills,” Queens says. She sounds sad about it.

  Brooklyn considers. She looks tired, Bronca realizes at last—and when she recalls why Brooklyn is so tired, the realization pivots her perception of Brooklyn, just a little. Securing her borough had wiped her out for the whole day, and she’s lucky it didn’t put her down for longer. Maybe her manner is not so much distance and hauteur as exhaustion and some kind of simmering anger—the latter not aimed at Bronca, though as Bronca has seen, Brooklyn’s more than willing to let rip at all comers. But there’s something going on with her, something besides turning into a living city. Bronca files it away for later.

  “I’m not sure if I got any weird abilities, either,” Brooklyn says. “I hear the city’s music, but maybe that’s just because, you know, former musician.”

  Manhattan’s got that distant look on his face again. Bronca pokes at it deliberately. “Well?”

  He takes a deep breath. “That painting downstairs. The one the vandals defaced, which you call a self-portrait of Unknown. I, ah… That was the vision I had. That exact thing—same angle, same lighting. I couldn’t see his face, either.”

  Interesting. “So you know where he is?” asks Bronca.

  “No. If I knew, I would be there.” Manhattan shifts, a momentary irritation flickering over his expression before he controls it. “He’s alone, and that woman is after him. Someone has to protect him. I am supposed to protect him.” He blinks once, and pauses, and there is something about his manner that hints at sudden surprise. “I am supposed to protect him.”

  “Sounds like we’ve found your thing, then,” Brooklyn drawls.

  Queens, the kind soul, leans forward and puts a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll find him,” she says.

  “Yes.” And then Manhattan’s gaze shifts, sun to moon, warm to ice. The speed of the change is breathtaking, and Bronca doesn’t unnerve easy. He’s not even looking at her, just the floor, speaking his desire into existence. “We will.”

  And God help anyone who gets in his way. Bronca shakes her head, though, just to warn him that she’s got nothing good to offer on that count.

  “I don’t know where the primary is, either. And we might not be able to find him without Staten Island. But to track him down, we have to, uh, become what we are in the other place? Here?” Suddenly it’s hard to explain, not because of English but because words are inadequate. They all nod as if they get it, though; okay, so far so good. Warming up to her subject, Bronca leans forward. “When we do, we’ll see the full complexity of our existence. There will be a deep point that draws us in; that will be him. Then we switch back to this world, and… voilà. We’ll know him in this world, too. If it works.”

  Queens is looking around at all of them. “Wait, so, all these, well I guess, visions I keep having, of us as both people and as huge cities, are me seeing into an actual place? I thought the whole thing was just…” She grimaces. “I don’t actually know how to say it. Representations of the world? Like a mandala.”

  Bronca says, “I don’t know anything about mandalas. It is a representation of this world, if that’s what you mean. But it’s also a world in itself—a real one, where things like position and distance and size don’t mean the same thing as here. It sounds a lot like different things I’ve read about over the years. The Australian dreamtime. Jung’s collective unconscious. Vision quests and sweats, like what some of my people do.”

  Queens inhales. “Oh, I thought you were Latina. You’re the other kind of Indian.”

  “Original flava, baby,” says Veneza, hunting in her popcorn bag for any remaining kernels. “This side of the planet, anyway.”

  Bronca rubs at her short hair. She really needs some sleep. And it feels weird to be telling this story now, in the summertime. Stories are for winter, when the animals have gone to sleep; that was what her mother always said. But maybe this doesn’t count as a story so much as a lesson.

  “So, here’s the thing,” she tells them. “All of that stuff is true. All the other worlds that human beings believe in, via group myths or spiritual visitations or even imaginations if they’re vivid enough, they exist. Imagining a world creates it, if it isn’t already there. That’s the great secret of existence: it’s supersensitive to thought. Decisions, wishes, lies—that’s all you need to create a new universe. Every human being on this planet spins off thousands between birth and death, although there’s something about the way our minds work that keeps us from noticing. In every moment, we’re constantly moving in multiple dimensions—we think we’re sitting still, but we’re actually falling from one universe to the next to the next, so fast that it all blends together, like… like animation. Except there’s a lot more than just images flipping past.”

  She stops to see if they’re following. They’re more than following; all of them are staring at her, completely rapt. It’s a little unnerving, but Bronca knows why: because on some level, they can perceive it. Because of what they’ve all become, their minds work differently now. It’s a lot easier to explain something that people already innately understand.
>
  So she takes it to the next level, and makes the gesture that she did for Veneza: one flat hand topping the other, then she ladders them. Layer over layer over layer.

  “What we are transcends the layers between worlds. Actually, when a city is born—when we are reborn as cities—the birth process kind of smashes through them.” She keeps holding one hand flat, then arrows the other down into it, making the flat hand crumple and curl up. “What we are, what we’re made of, is many worlds coming together. Reality and legends. This world where we’re just people, and that world, where we can be miles-wide cities that just happen to be sitting a couple of feet across from each other because the laws of space, physics, don’t work the same way.”

  Manhattan blinks, realizing something. “When I first arrived, there was damage there. Busted lights, cracks in the ground. Like an earthquake had happened. And as soon as I became part of the city, I forgot my name.”

  “You forgot—” Okay, maybe Bronca’s going to have to cut them a lot of slack. “What, like amnesia?”

  He nods, jaw set and brows furrowed, then glances at the others. “All of us have a similar story. Sometime in the morning, the day before yesterday, we all had a… moment. That’s when the city changed. I think I arrived here right after that moment. Something happened in that moment; some kind of fight. That was the damage I saw, and I think the loss of my memory is how it affected me in this world. Then not long after, that thing on FDR Drive…” He puts a hand to his side and grimaces, as if his ribs hurt. But it’s memory, and he lowers his hand after a moment. “If I hadn’t stopped it, it would’ve killed me. That’s the takeaway, here. Something hurts the city, it hurts us. Something kills us, and… what, the city dies?”

  “More like explodes,” Bronca says.

  Silence. They’re all staring at her. Yeah, she kind of figured that would get their attention.