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As more and more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens. Eventually it gets so deep that it forms a pocket, connected only by the thinnest thread
many parts of the city begin to multiply and differentiate. Its sewers extend into places where there is no need for water. Its slums grow teeth; its art centers, claws. Ordinary things within it, traffic and construction and stuff like that, start to have a rhythm like a heartbeat, if you record their sounds and play them back fast. The city… quickens.
I’m the midwife, see.
protector,
“São Paulo,”
Fortitude, not Patience. I know my strengths.
the world can’t hurt you if you just ignore everything that’s wrong with it; well, not until it kills you anyway.
fleetingly see him for what he is again: the sprawling thing from my dream, all sparkling spires and reeking slums and stolen rhythms made over with genteel cruelty. I know that he glimpses what I am, too, all the bright light and bluster of me.
The full word is Manhattan.
Like paper cuts, or little quick slaps to the face.
Money talks and bullshit walks in New York. In a lot of cities, probably—but here, the nation’s shrine to unrestricted predatory capitalism, money has nearly talismanic power. Which means that he can use it as a talisman.
anemoneic
a spectral hedgehog.
three exclamation points’ worth of excited
As Manny steps out, however, something seems to swipe its way across his perception. When he blinks, the hallway light is brighter, its shadows reduced, its contrasts softened,
safer, somehow, than it did a moment before.
see you again, São Paulo.
She’s looking at Bel.
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.”
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?
“Worst mugging ever, mate,” he quips with a shaking voice.
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.
Manny starts casting the bills around the edge of the field of white, make-it-rain-style.
The city might welcome newcomers like Manny, but mind-controlling parasitic otherworldly entities are the rudest of tourists.
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.
“I take it you’re Manhattan.”
Dudes like you—smart, charming, well dressed, and cold enough to strangle you in an alley if we had alleys?”
Figured you’d be meaner, actually. The kind of dude who didn’t stop at just threats.” I haven’t always, Manny thinks, in despair.
Oh no we love him
“I don’t know how I knew. I just feel it. That’s been my whole day so far—doing and thinking stuff that doesn’t make any sense, just ’cause it feels right.”
as she straightens and flicks imaginary lint off her denim jacket to compose herself.
Time to call this heifer out,
She’d stolen—borrowed—her father’s steel-toed construction worker boots so that she could walk through a brickyard on her way to do errands.
Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.
He is hyperaware of her presence. Sometimes, when she moves near him, the room seems to shift a little, its center of gravity adjusting in some way that he cannot see or feel—but he tastes it sometimes, which makes no sense. Gravity doesn’t have a taste. But if it did, Manny thinks it would taste like sudden salt moving across the tongue, from slightly flavorless and sweet into a bitter, metallic weight that makes his eyes sting and his nose burn and his ears itch a little.
He hears: I’m not free anymore before he gets it, and then he understands why she’s told him this. “You think becoming whatever we are is changing us,” he says. “Remaking each of us, but in different ways.” “Yeah. I think that’s, uh, the price of what we’re getting. Your memory, my peace of mind, who knows with the others. But I guess that makes sense? Being the city…” She shakes her head. “Means we can’t be just ordinary people anymore.”
And then there’s Jersey.” She rolls her eyes. “What about Jersey?” “It’s Jersey.
it is Veneza’s delight that settles Bronca’s heart. Bronca never wanted this. And even though she knows why she was chosen, how important it is, she has not known how to feel about any of it, except resignation and frustration and dread.
Hollis
