The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  In the people world, they look at each other and murmur in unison, both slipping into a perfect South Indian English accent: “Oh, come on. The shape of the Earth is non-Euclidean. All that means is that you use different math! Don’t get it twisted.”

  Bel stares at them. “That is the creepiest thing I’ve seen today, barring the alien-mind-control spaghetti.”

  “Okay,” Brooklyn says. “Crosstown bus, then. There’s a stop a few blocks from here.”

  Manny nods. He knows instinctively that they have to go, though he does not yet have enough of a sense of the city to fully understand what he’s feeling. “Where…?”

  “Queens,” Brooklyn says. “Shit. That was Queens.”

  Of course. Manny takes a deep breath, then turns to Bel. “I think you’d better head back home. Sorry, but… This is going to get weird. Weirder.”

  Bel rocks back on his heels and lets out a whistled breath. “And as things have been entirely too weird for me already, yes, I agree. Go with God, and so on.” He steps back and waves. “Do try not to get eaten by the spaghetti people, though. Even now, you’re not the worst roommate I’ve ever had.”

  Manny half smiles and nods farewell, then turns to pace Brooklyn as she heads in the direction of the crosstown bus stop. He waits until they’re a block or so away from Bel, and well away from the tendril-infested dog, before saying, “So, is there a reason we aren’t taking a cab?”

  “Not sure what to tell the cabbie,” Brooklyn says. “Queens is huge; we’re not gonna just ‘feel the Force’ at random there. We’ll take the crosstown bus to where we can pick up the 7. Mass transit led me to you, so I’m hoping that’ll happen again there. Since I’m apparently doing this now. So much for going home.” She sighs.

  “Okay.” It’s frustratingly nebulous. But Manny understands precisely why she’s walking fast, and why they aren’t waiting for these peculiar new instincts of theirs to provide some more specific, concrete direction. The jittering, rapidly rising sense of urgency within him is undeniable. Queens is out there becoming its person, and that person is in danger. If they’re going to do her any good at all, they need to hurry.

  Except. Well. Manny’s pretty sure they’re already too late.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Our Lady of (Staten) Aislyn

  It’s time.

  Aislyn Houlihan is at the St. George Terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, trembling. She’s been here for twenty minutes, trembling. There are open seats because it’s early enough in the day, just before the start of rush hour, that the ferry won’t be anywhere near full—but she’s opted to pace in front of the glass window-wall instead of sitting. The better to tremble while she paces.

  The terminal is mostly just a big, brightly lit room where a few hundred people can assemble. There’s nothing that should be scary about it. Its walls are lined with ads for movies Aislyn isn’t planning to see and makeup she probably won’t ever wear. The people standing or sitting around her are hers, her people; she feels this instinctively even though her mind resists when her gaze skates over Asian faces, or her ears pick up a language that probably isn’t Spanish but also definitely isn’t English. (Quechua, her strange newer senses whisper, but she doesn’t want to hear it.) They aren’t bothering her, though, and there are plenty of normal people around, so there’s no good reason for her to be as terrified as she is. Terror doesn’t always happen for a good reason.

  There’s a garbled announcement over the PA system, and abruptly the big doors along one side of the room open up. Beyond them is an outdoor pier where the 2:30 p.m. ferry is preparing to leave. The hundred or so people cattling around the terminal begin moving toward it, and Aislyn belatedly tries to stumble after them.

  From the first step it’s wrong. Everything feels wrong. Staten Islanders normally take the ferry away in the mornings, leaving the island quieter, emptier. It’s afternoon now, though. All over the city—Manhattan is always the city—thousands of SI denizens are growing antsy with the end of the workday, shifting in their trendy seats, thinking wistfully of a place where there are still forests and ranches and mostly-unspoiled beaches, and where most families live in discrete houses and own cars like normal people. What Aislyn is doing is leaving the island at a time when most want to return to it. She is swimming upriver, reversing the polarity. The wrongness of it presses against her skin. Her hair follicles tingle. She tries to keep her feet moving anyway, use the flow of the crowd to counter the wrongness. Through the doors. Outside onto the pier, moving toward the boat. She’s choosing her own direction in life! The wrongness is just her imagination.

  Or… maybe something else is happening. Maybe it’s not the hard gust of wind off the harbor that’s making her steps drag; maybe it’s her own leaden feet and bedrock legs. Maybe the scalp tingling isn’t her hair streaming in the wind. Maybe it’s the island—her island—pulling at her in warning, in fear, in love.

  Or maybe it’s an incipient panic attack.

  She tries to fight it off, and gets as far as the ramp that leads onto the ferry. John F. Kennedy reads the ferry’s name, placarded on the wheelhouse; this is the name of her tormentor. Did JFK fear anything before somebody—the mob according to her father, a crazyman according to her mother—shot out his brains? If she gets on this boat, she’ll be going to a city where things like that happen on a regular basis. People kill each other on SI, too, all the time, but it’s different in the city. Everything is different there.

  If she gets on this boat, she will come back different.

  Someone nudges her, hard. “Hey, blocking traffic.”

  If she gets on this boat, will she come back wrong?

  Someone else puts a hand on her upper arm. It’s closely packed enough on the ramp that the person actually jostles her, grunting out a curse as the crowd shoves them forward and causes them to squish Aislyn’s right breast. It doesn’t hurt, and it’s obviously an accident, but when she glances around to see who’s touching her, her gaze skates over skin so Black that it’s like looking into a Magic 8 Ball before the little plastic thing inside bobs up to say: NOW PANIC.

  Her thoughts ignite—GET AWAY GET OFF ME DON’T TOUCH ME GET ME OUT OF HERE—and her body contracts without any conscious input. Now she is moving against the flow (with the island’s wishes, though, at last), lurching from one stranger’s horrifying touch to another and wondering the whole time who’s screaming with such an ear-piercing pitch. Only belatedly does she recognize her own voice. People around her freeze or jerk away from the crazy lady, but they’re still too close. Crushing her. She writhes around them, already turned toward the glass doors. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” someone says, and it sounds like they’re going to try and stop her. Who is it? She can’t let that Black guy touch her again.

  It’s a white hand that catches her wrist. She doesn’t see its owner, but she rakes her nails down flesh before yanking free. Someone else screams and then the crowd parts and finally, finally, she is free. She runs back through the glass doors, through the terminal. There’s a cop coming out of the single-stall family bathroom, still fastening his belt and with a folded copy of the Post under one arm. He yells after her, and Aislyn knows she should stop. Her father has told her and told her: Only criminals run. And she scratched somebody, isn’t that assault? She’s a criminal now. They’ll take her to RIKERS ISLAND, which is a completely different and much worse island than her own. They will make her leave SI, they’ll force her onto a police boat, and they’ll never let her come back—

  “But no one can make a city do anything it doesn’t want to,” says someone close by, in a puzzled tone, and Aislyn looks left to find a woman running beside her.

  She’s so startled that she stumbles in midrun. The woman quickly puts out a hand to steady her, and they both jog to a halt. She’s a little surprised to find herself well outside the terminal, between two of the dozen-odd bus platforms that edge up to it. Passing strangers stare and she flinches away from their gazes, but the breeze has worked t
o break her out of the cycle of panic. She swallows, beginning to calm.

  “There, there,” says the woman, who’s holding her shoulders now. She smiles comfortingly, and she’s comforting to look at: white-blond hair in a pixie cut surrounding a pale, gray-eyed face. She’s wearing sandals that clearly don’t impede her ability to sprint. Her white jeans are probably stylish; her white blouse definitely is. The woman speaks while Aislyn stares at her in breathless dumbness. “That’s better, isn’t it? Nothing scary here. No boats. No water. No illegal immigrants touching you. No peer pressure, trying to make you cross the harbor! I don’t blame you at all, by the way. Manhattan is very pretty, but he’s full of bees.”

  The nonsense of this monologue breaks the remnants of Aislyn’s panic. Manhattan’s an it, isn’t it? Not a he. And… bees? She giggles despite herself.

  But before she can process the words further, her phone starts ringing. She jumps violently. The woman pets her shoulder, incongruously—has been petting Aislyn since they met, as if determined to single-handedly replace the memory of all those strangers’ touches with just her own—but weirdly, this makes Aislyn feel better. She grabs her phone and sees MATTHEW HOULIHAN (DADDY).

  “Where are you?” he asks, when she answers.

  “Just out running errands,” she says. She’s never been good at lying, and her father is excellent at figuring out when she’s trying it, so she always makes sure there’s some truth in whatever she tells him. She did stop at the grocery store on the way to the ferry station, to buy garlic. “Got something at the grocery store, now shopping a little. Everything okay at work?”

  It’s always better to get him focused on himself rather than her. He sighs and takes the bait. “Just getting sick of these immigrants,” he says. He’s always careful to use acceptable words when he’s on the job, rather than the words he says at home. That’s how cops mess up, he has explained to her. They don’t know how to keep home words at home and work words at work. “These people. Had to arrest a guy this morning—just sitting in his car, right? I figured he was dealing. Didn’t find anything, but he’s got no ID, right? So I run his tag and tell him we’re calling ICE. Just to shake him up, see. He was acting all smooth. He says he’s Puerto Rican, they’re citizens, calls me all kinds of shit, starts talking about getting on that Twitter to complain about profiling.” She can practically hear her father’s eye roll. “Damn straight I profiled him. Right into a cell, for assault.”

  Making a conversation of his rants is a skill Aislyn has long since perfected. Pick a point in his last sentence, ask a question related to it, tune him out again. Only by doing this has she been able to make space for her own thoughts over the years. “Assault, Daddy? Are you okay?”

  He sounds startled, and also pleased, which is good. “Oh—no, Apple. Don’t worry about your old man. If he had assaulted me, I’d have kicked his ass over his beany head. Nah, I just needed something to run him in on.” She can actually hear his shrug. Then he chuckles. “Said he was listening to New Age music on his car radio to relax, if you can believe that! These people.”

  Aislyn nods absently while he rants, peering around and trying to remember which bus she’s supposed to take back home from the ferry. As she does so, though, her eyes catch on the strange woman, who’s still standing there with a hand on Aislyn’s shoulder. Aislyn can barely feel the hand; her nerves don’t seem to register its weight or the warmth that should be there. By contrast, her other arm—the one grabbed by the Black man on the ferry ramp—still tingles. Did he do something to her? Were there maybe drugs on his hands, and are they seeping through her skin? Her father has warned her that some drugs work this way.

  But what has caught her attention is what the woman in white clothing is doing, now and again, as she stands beside Aislyn. With her free hand, she’s touching other people as they pass on the sidewalk—not all of them, just a person here and a person there, and just a light friendly pat on the shoulder. They don’t seem to notice. But when one man stops to tie his shoe, Aislyn sees something odd. Where the woman has touched him, there’s a thin, pale nub poking through the cloth of his T-shirt. As Aislyn watches, the nub lengthens and thickens, growing until it wavers above the man’s shoulder, six inches long or so and drifting with the breeze. It’s white, about the thickness of yarn.

  Okay, that’s super weird. It’s also weird that the woman with the white-blond hair has chosen to remain so close while Aislyn’s on what’s obviously a private phone call. Maybe she’s just trying to make sure Aislyn’s okay.

  Her father is winding down. But just when Aislyn thinks she’s free, he adds, “Anyway, I just heard an alert over the channel and, well, I thought about you.” Aislyn tenses. The channel is what her father calls police radio. “They said a girl with your description caused a disturbance and assaulted somebody.”

  This, too, is habit: Aislyn chuckles it off. She knows she sounds nervous. She always sounds nervous. “Aren’t there a lot of brown-haired thirty-year-old white girls out there?”

  He chuckles, too, and she relaxes. “Yeah. And I can’t see you cutting somebody with a knife.” (A knife? she thinks—but her nails are pretty long.) “Or getting on that ferry.”

  Inadvertently, Aislyn stiffens. The woman in white pats her shoulder again, murmuring something soothing, but it doesn’t help as much this time. “I could get on the ferry,” Aislyn blurts. “If I wanted.”

  His chuckle annoys her now. “You? That city would eat you up, Apple.” Then, as if he’s heard her affront or cares about it, his voice changes to a more soothing tone. “You’re a good girl, Aislyn, and the city isn’t a place for good people. What have I always told you?”

  She sighs. “‘Everything that happens everywhere else happens here, too, but at least here people try to be decent.’”

  “Yeah. And what else?”

  “‘Stay where you’re happy.’”

  “Right. The city ever becomes the place where you’re happy? Go there. But as long as this is it? Stay home. Nothing wrong with staying home.”

  Yes. She has told herself this every day of her adult life, to console herself for being a grown woman who still lives at home with her parents. It’s a lie. She’s lonely and ashamed and she hasn’t given up hope for a life of excitement and sophistication, somewhere and sometime. But this is the sort of lie that she needs, especially in the wake of her disastrous attempt to board the ferry.

  “Yeah. Thanks, Daddy.”

  She knows he’s smiling. “Tell your mom I’m gonna be home late. An arrest means paperwork. These fucking people.” He sighs as if the Puerto Rican man sat around New Aging while brown just to make him late for dinner, and hangs up.

  Aislyn puts her phone away, then finally pulls her purse back up to her shoulder to compose herself—or she tries to. The strange woman is still holding Aislyn’s shoulder, although she’s frowning a little, as if wondering how her hand got there. Aislyn looks at the woman’s hand, too. “Uh, is something the matter?”

  “What? Oh.” The woman finally removes her hand and smiles. It’s a little strained. “Everything’s fine. I’m just going to have to do this the hard way, apparently.” Then her smile broadens, more genuine. “But I know I’m right about you.”

  For the first time, Aislyn begins to feel uneasy. The woman doesn’t look scary, but there’s something about her that’s a little off. “Right about what?”

  “Well, for one thing, I haven’t been able to claim you as my own.” The woman folds her arms and turns to face away from the ferry station, toward the cluster of tall office buildings and high-rise apartments that dominate this side of the island. “You have the right inclination, but even though the city just rebirthed itself this morning, you’re already closely enough bound with the essence of this place to keep me from pulling you in. You even smell like a city now, and not an ordinary human being.” She shrugs. Aislyn puzzles over all of this, then surreptitiously angles her head to sniff at her pits.

  The woman has
begun murmuring to herself as she stares at the paltry skyline of St. George. “Haven’t had this much trouble since London. Usually it’s easier to isolate the vectors. City morphology defies predictability, of course, but there are epigenetic manifestations, metabolic fluxes that should follow through in a perceptible way. It’s this city, though.” She shakes her head, scowling. “Too many New Yorkers are New York. Its acculturation quotient is dangerously high.”

  Abruptly the woman’s head swivels to face Aislyn. (That’s what it looks like, a swivel. As if the woman’s neck muscles are motors or pulleys or something else mechanical.) She looks thoughtful. “Do you know who you are?”

  “Uh, I don’t, uh…” Aislyn looks around again. Which bus platform was it? There are so many, and they all look alike. Maybe she should just pick one and start walking toward it. Because something about this woman has made Aislyn think she needs an exit strategy. “Sorry, but I don’t think…”

  There is a moment—in retrospect she will recall this with great clarity—when Aislyn feels the woman’s attention shift. Before now, the woman in the white outfit has been… not quite present. Underneath her comforting smiles, there has been a distance, and a… going-through-the-motions-ness, if that is a thing? All at once, however, the woman becomes here; she becomes more. Now she looms. She’s only a few inches taller than Aislyn, but within those inches, she towers. She smiles, and buried in the woman’s shadow, Aislyn feels small and forgotten and terribly, hopelessly alone.

  But in almost the same moment, that other feeling rises within her. It’s the feeling that hit her this morning, while she was in the middle of washing the dishes from breakfast and thinking about Scotswoman’s Secret, the romance novel she’d been reading the night before. She had been fantasizing a little, maybe, about being a proud, strong-willed noblewoman from the Highlands who decides to start discreetly sleeping with the handsome foreign stable hand, who isn’t Black but whose penis nearly is, except for the tip when it gets excited (that part is pink, and Aislyn isn’t sure whether it’s creative license on the author’s part or something that’s actually possible).