The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Manny?” the woman blurts before Manny can reply. She looks from Bel to him and back to Bel. “His name is Manny?”

  “Shit,” Bel says. “Sorry, shouldn’t have used your name—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Manny keeps his gaze on the woman, so he sees it when she inhales—and all at once her face distorts. For an instant she is very not human, her eyes flashing from yellowy brown into glaring white and her cheekbones seeming to shift and multiply under the skin of her face—and then her expression settles into a bright, manic-eyed grin.

  “Manhattan,” she breathes. He shivers with the pull of it. There is power in the way she speaks his name, power that she seems to know how to use in ways that he does not yet, and this frightens him. So does the avid, greedy malice in her unstable eyes. “You are Manhattan, where money talks and bullshit walks! Do you never sleep, young man? I see you aren’t wearing silk and satin.”

  Manny tries not to let the nonsense confuse him. What matters is he faces an adversary who radiates danger. How does one fight spectral alien sea-tentacles in human form? He has no umbrella here, no antique cab… nothing but the Shorakkopoch rock, which he doesn’t know how to use.

  On FDR, he followed his instincts, and they eventually led him to the solution. Keep her talking, his instincts say now, so he obeys again.

  “On FDR,” he says, meeting the woman’s bright-eyed gaze, “I killed your creature with an umbrella. Or…” He amends himself as intuition flutters at the back of his mind. “No, not your creature. You?”

  “Just a little bit of me. A toe, to hold.” She lifts a foot, which is clad in a simple white-leather ballet flat, and waggles the toe. Her ankles are swollen; too much time sitting at a desk, Manny guesses, and apparently being possessed by monsters from the beyond does nothing for the circulation.

  “I’d expected to lose that toehold,” the woman continues, with a long-suffering sigh. She turns and starts pacing, clutching the cell phone to her breast with a melodramatic sigh. “We usually do, when you entities actualize, or mature, or whatever you call it—and we did lose it, later. Someone came along and stubbed our toe, damn it. Such a vicious little thing he was. Positively thuggish. But after he was done with me and I lay bleeding and hating in the cold depths between, I found that my toe still held. Just a little. Just one toe, in just one place.”

  “FDR Drive,” Manny says. His skin prickles with chill.

  “FDR Drive. Until you tore even that toehold loose. That was you, wasn’t it? You people all look alike to me, but I smell it now. Like him, but not.” Her head tilts from one side to the other as she says this. It is a gesture that feels both contemplative and contemptuous. “Too late, of course. Before you ever got there, I’d infected quite a few cars. Now we have hundreds of toes, all over the Tri-state area.” She bounces a little on the balls of her feet, then frowns down at herself as if annoyed by her momentary paucity of toes.

  In Manny’s mind, fountains of tentacles are erupting on highways and bridges throughout a hundred-mile radius. He tries not to let her see how much this idea frightens him. What does it mean? What are they doing? What will they do, once they’ve infected enough cars and people and—

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” asks Bel.

  She rolls her eyes. “The politics of spacetime fractionality and superpositioning,” she snaps, before dismissing Bel again and sighing at Manny. Bel just stares at her. “Well. You’re obviously part of that other one, which means that you have four more bodies out there somewhere. Four more, oh… what do you people call those? Organs?” She stops abruptly, frowning to herself, then rounds on Bel and points west. “You! Human! What is that?”

  After a deeply worried glance at Manny, Bel follows her gesture to Spuyten Duyvil Creek. She’s pointing past it, actually, at a dramatic-looking cliff beyond which is dotted with houses and condo buildings. “Westchester?” Bel suggests. “Or maybe the Bronx. I wouldn’t know, I’ve only been here a couple of weeks.”

  “The Bronx.” The woman’s lip curls. “Yes. That’s one. Manhattan is another. The one I fought, he is the heart, but you others are the head and limbs and such. He was strong enough to fight us even without you, but not strong enough to stand, after. Not strong enough to push me out now. Thus does the toehold become an entire foot.”

  In spite of everything, Manny is actually beginning to understand. “Boroughs,” he murmurs in wonder. I am Manhattan. “You’re talking about the boroughs of the city. You’re saying I really am Manhattan. And”—he inhales—“and you’re saying there are others.”

  The woman stops pacing and turns, too slowly, to study him again. “You didn’t know that until just now,” she says, her gaze narrowing.

  Manny goes still. He knows he’s made a mistake by showing his hand, but only time will reveal how bad a mistake it was.

  “Five of you,” says the woman in white, in satisfaction. (Like that, something in Manny’s brain adjusts the designation into capital-letter status. The Woman in White.) She’s smiling, and it’s cold. “Five of you, and only poor São Paulo to look after you all! He’s with the one I fought. You’re alone. And you don’t know what you’re doing at all, do you?”

  Manny’s stomach has knotted with fear. He can tell she’s about to do something, and he still has no idea how to fight her. “What do you want?” he asks, to stall her. To buy time to think.

  She shakes her head and sighs. “It would probably be sporting to tell you, but there’s no sport in this for me. I just have a job to do. Goodbye, Manhattan.”

  All at once, she’s gone. The Woman in White, that is; between one blink and another, the white woman’s clothes and hair flicker back into their ordinary tints. She slumps a little, just an ordinary brown-eyed woman again. But after a moment of confusion, the woman’s lips tighten and she raises her cell phone again. The camera light goes back on.

  But something worse is happening. When the hairs on the back of Manny’s neck prickle, he jumps and wheels around, suddenly convinced that someone is coming at him from behind. He sees the forgotten young couple on the lawn, still picnicking, but otherwise there’s nothing there—

  Wait. No. Rising from cracks and spars in the asphalt of the path… are ghostly little white nubs.

  Manny grabs Bel and yanks him back just as white nubs rise through a crack he’d been standing on. More wriggle through even the unbroken portions of the asphalt. When Manny sees that no white nubs are rising from the narrow ring of bare soil that surrounds the tulip tree rock, and perhaps another three or four inches beyond that, Manny pulls them both to stand within this apparently protected circle. “What are—” Bel begins. Bel can clearly perceive the white nubs, Manny is relieved to see. At least he doesn’t have to explain this, too. Bel backs himself against the rock, looking around in horror as the nubs become inchworms.

  “Just disgusting,” says the woman. She stands amid an ankle-high lawn of the tendrils now—and the one coming from the back of her neck has fissioned into two, both of them uncannily oriented on Manny. Incredibly, through all this, she’s still recording them. Or—not just recording? An instant later a voice crackles from the phone’s speaker. Manny can’t make it out, but he hears the woman say, “I need the police. There are these two guys in Inwood Hill Park who are, I don’t know, menacing people. I think they’re drug dealers, and they won’t leave. Also, they’re having sex.”

  “Listen, woman, I don’t think you know what sex looks like—” Bel splutters. In the distance, the young couple giggles, though Manny doesn’t think it’s because of what Bel said. They’re busy making out and haven’t noticed what’s happening by the rock.

  The woman ignores Bel, intent on her conversation. “Yes. I will. I’m recording them. Right, uh-huh.” She hesitates, then screws up her face and adds, “African American. Or maybe Hispanic? I can’t tell.”

  “I’m obviously British Asian, you stupid bint!” Bel stares at her openmouthed. Meanwhile, however, the tendrils are sti
ll growing, and getting long enough that they’re going to be able to touch Bel and Manny even if they climb on top of the rock. Which probably isn’t going to help, since the rock isn’t big enough for two people to stand on.

  Which reminds Manny that the rock is meaningful. An object of power—somehow. Shorakkopoch, site of the first real estate swindle of the soon-to-be New York. What can he do with that?

  Oh. Ohhhh.

  He pushes at Bel. “Get up on the rock,” he says. “I need the room. And give me whatever is in your wallet.”

  It’s a measure of how freaked out Bel is that he complies, scrabbling onto the rock and groping for his back pocket. “Worst mugging ever, mate,” he quips with a shaking voice.

  Manny has pulled his own wallet out of his pocket. He finds himself remarkably calm as he opens it and rummages for something that will serve that tickle of an idea in his mind, and a detached, analytical part of him contemplates this lack of fear. He should be terrified, after seeing what these tendrils have done to another human being. What will it be like to have his body invaded and his mind overtaken by whatever entity these things serve?

  Like dying, he decides. And since some part of him has faced death before—he’s aware of that suddenly; it’s why he’s so calm—Manny also decides that he’s not going out like that.

  There’s not much in his wallet. Some receipts, a five-dollar bill, an Amex card, a debit card, an expired condom. No photos of loved ones, which will strike him as odd only later. An ID—but immediately he tears his eyes away from this, not wanting to see the name he had prior to this morning’s train ride. Who he used to be is irrelevant. Right now, he needs to be Manhattan.

  The instant his fingers touch one of the credit cards, he feels a flicker of that strange energy and focus that he had on FDR. Yes. “Land has value,” he murmurs to himself, distracted from the rising, whipping field of white all around him. “Even public land, like in a park. It’s just a concept, land ownership; we don’t have to live like this. But this city, in its current form, is built on that concept.”

  “Please tell me you aren’t losing it,” Bel says from where he’s crouched on the rock. “I don’t think both of us can afford a psychotic break at the same time. We just signed a lease.”

  Manny looks up at him—and tosses the fiver to the ground, just beyond the rock’s ring. He feels rather than hears a sudden, hollow, high-pitched squealing from where the bill has landed, and he knows without looking what has happened. Where the bill has touched the asphalt, it has hurt the tendrils, and caused the ones in that immediate area to withdraw.

  Bel stares at this. Frantically he pulls a handful of disordered bills out of his wallet. Some of them are euros, some British pounds, US bills, and a few pesos; clearly Bel travels a lot. He tosses one of the pound notes. It lands not far from the bill Manny threw, but nothing happens.

  “I told you to give it to me,” Manny says, snatching the wad of bills from Bel’s shaking fingers. Doing this strengthens the strange feeling; Manhattan was built not only on land valuation, but stolen value.

  “Just trying to help with this bollocks,” Bel snaps. “God, do whatever nonsense you have to do, they’re getting closer!”

  Manny starts casting the bills around the edge of the field of white, make-it-rain-style. He quickly sees that the money is having an effect, but not much of one. A five-pound note clears the space underneath it, but no more, and he loses sight of it after a moment amid the surrounding field of tendrils. The euros and pounds work, too, but it seems to depend on their value. A hundred-dollar bill clears not only its own space, but an inch or so around itself. A hundred-euro note clears slightly more—but all of it together adds up to only enough space to keep the nearer tendrils from being able to reach Manny. And if the tendrils keep growing, they’ll eventually be able to reach Manny no matter how many additional inches of land he’s gained.

  That’s it. Suddenly, Manny understands: he is effectively buying the land around the tulip tree rock. But it costs a lot more than sixty guilders now. “Bel, do you know how much Manhattan real estate runs? Per square foot?”

  “Are you actually insane.”

  One of the taller tendrils whips toward Manny’s thigh, and he swats it with a twenty-dollar bill. It squeals and withdraws. “I really need to know, please!”

  “How the bloody fuck should I know? I’m a flat renter, not a buyer! Maybe a thousand dollars a foot? Two thousand?”

  That’s the problem, then, Manny realizes, with a bitter groan. Manhattan real estate is horrifically expensive, and they don’t have enough cash to buy their own lives.

  In desperation, he tosses his Amex, and that has the biggest effect yet, clearing a rectangular chunk of space the size of a sedan. Apparently he’s got good credit. Bel doesn’t have any cards, however, and there are tendrils beyond the space he’s cleared—and now Manny’s only got the debit card left. How much money is in his bank account? He can’t remember.

  “Okay,” says the woman, with satisfaction. Manny is stunned to realize he forgot her for a moment. She smiles at them from amid the thickest knot of gently waving tentacles, her head and shoulders now festooned with at least a dozen. “The police say they’re on their way. You people might have been able to get away with doing drugs or blowing each other in broad daylight before, but I didn’t move here to put up with stuff like that. We’re gonna get you out, one by one.”

  Manny’s consternation about Manhattan real estate prices is eclipsed by sudden dry-mouthed fear. If the police do show up—which isn’t a guarantee; even as a newcomer, he can tell Inwood is still too brown a neighborhood for a definitive or quick response, especially during a citywide emergency—they will walk right into the rapidly growing field of white tendrils that now surrounds Manny and Bel. And if one tendril has turned a nosy, racist white woman into a conduit for disembodied existential evil, he doesn’t want to see what infected NYPD will become.

  He’s getting ready to throw the debit card, and hoping desperately that that account just happens to contain a million dollars or so… when they hear another cell phone.

  New York, New York, big city of dreams…

  It’s mostly a gabble of tinny sound from this distance. Probably an iPhone. But from the gabble, Manny can make out handclaps over a beat. Electronic drums and… a record scratch? Like in old-school rap?

  Too much… too many people, too much…

  Manny whips around to see a middle-toned Black woman coming toward them along a path that converges with the Shorakkopoch clearing. She’s tall and strong, with an upright carriage and thighs that are nothing but curve, the latter accentuated further by the pencil skirt she’s wearing the hell out of. Some of her bearing comes from all this style, plus smart heels and an elegantly texturized, honey-blond-dyed cap of curls—but most of it’s just her. She’s a presence. She looks like either a CEO on her way to an incredibly stylish meeting, or a queen who just happens to be missing her court.

  Then Manny sees that she’s also holding up a cell phone. Instead of filming, however, she’s using this one to blare music. The song is a little before Manny’s time, but he’s heard it once or twice, and—ah. With every tinny beat of the synthesized drums, the field of tendrils that has filled the tulip tree rock clearing begins to twitch en masse. As Manny inhales in relief, the woman steps onto the cobbles, and the tendrils flinch away from the brisk click of her heels. The ones she steps on actually scream, in tiny hissing squeaks as they writhe—and then vanish. When she directs the phone downward, the ones that haven’t already withdrawn shudder as if each beat is a painful blow. Then they crumble away, leaving no residue or sign that they were ever there. The tendrils are crumbling away everywhere.

  Too much… too many people, too much…Yes. The city might welcome newcomers like Manny, but mind-controlling parasitic otherworldly entities are the rudest of tourists.

  “Five of us,” Manny murmurs. He knows who, or at least what, this woman is.

  Bel t
hrows a look at him, then shakes his head. “Friend, I sincerely hope you drink. I’m going to need something potent and extremely fruity after this.” Manny laughs, as much to release pent adrenaline as anything else.

  By the time the chorus ends, the tendrils are gone, and the clearing is as it was before: trees, grass, asphalt, a lamppost, a rock, and Bel and Manny crouched to defend themselves against (now) nothing. Even the tendrils on the neck and shoulders of the white woman have vanished—and she now stares at all of them, especially the Black woman, with rising alarm. But. She’s still filming.

  Manny and Bel turn to the Black woman, who stops the music at last and tucks the phone into her tote purse. (A Birkin, Manny notices with some admiration. Apparently he’s the kind of man who knows his expensive Birkin bags.) There’s something familiar about her, but Manny can’t place it. Maybe it’s just that she’s like him. He stares at her, filled with an inchoate hunger.

  “So, I’m guessing y’all haven’t figured out how this shit works yet,” she says to them. Her gaze rakes Bel, then Manny, and stops there, narrowing a little. “Oh, okay. Just you, then.”

  Manny nods, swallowing. Another like him. “I, uh, I don’t know anything. Do you?” He knows it sounds inane, but he can’t think of anything else to ask.

  She raises her eyebrows. “Well, that depends on what you’re asking. If you mean have I suddenly started hearing crazy business in my head, and seeing those white pigeon-feather things all over my hood? Yeah. If you want to know why, I don’t even know.” The woman shakes her head. “I had to kill three patches of them just to get to the 3 train.”

  “Pigeon-feather things?” But Manny understands that she means the tendrils. To him they look like sea creatures, but he can see the resemblance to feather shafts, too.

  “You people really are the worst drug dealers,” says the white woman, shaking her head. “Just brazenly talking about your designer drugs.” In the distance—Manny can’t tell if they’re actually approaching or just happenstance—they can hear sirens.