They’ve stopped for the moment, so Manny opens the rear passenger-side door to get out. A few of the cars behind them immediately set up a banshee chorus of horns, protesting even the possibility that he might slow things down more, but he ignores these and leans over to speak into the window when the driver rolls it down. (She has to lean across the seat and turn a manual crank to do this. For a moment he stares in fascination, then focuses.) “You got emergency flares?” he asks. “Triangle reflectors, stuff like that?”
“In the trunk.” She puts the car in park and gets out herself—there are more horns at this—but she’s glancing over at the tower of tendrils. Its tips wave above the pedestrian bridge that crosses this part of the FDR. “So that’s what this is all about?”
“Yep.” Manny pulls out the emergency kit when she opens the trunk. He’s keeping most of his attention on the thing, though. If any of those tendrils come at them… well, hopefully they won’t.
“You better hurry and do whatever you’re going to do. Cops are probably already on the way to deal with the, uh, obstruction. I don’t know if they’ll see it—nobody else seems to, or a lot more people would be getting out of their cars and walking—but they’re not gonna help much.”
He grimaces in agreement. Then he notices the way she’s glaring at the fountain of tendrils. He has a tiny epiphany, beginning to understand. “You from here?”
She blinks. “Yeah. Born and raised right over in Chelsea, two moms and everything. Why?”
“Just a guess.” Manny hesitates. He’s feeling strange again. There are things happening around him, to him—a rise in tension and power and meaning, all of it pulling toward a moment of truth that he’s not sure he wants to confront. Beneath his feet there is a vibration, a pulse like wheels clacking steadily over track segments that thrums in time with his pulse. Why? Because it does. Because, somehow, everything on this road and under it and around it is him. The pain in his side is awful, but ignorable because somehow the city is keeping him functioning, feeding him strength. Even the idling of the traffic-bound cars feeds him, pent energy just waiting for its chance to leap ahead. He looks around at the drivers in the nearby cars, and sees that most are glaring at the tendril thing, too. Do they see it? Not really. But they know something is there, blocking the flow of the city, and they hate it for that alone.
This is how it works, he realizes in wonder. This is what he needs to defeat the tendrils. These total strangers are his allies. Their anger, their need for a return to normalcy, rises from them like heat waves. This is the weapon he needs, if he can figure out how to harness it.
“I’m Manny,” he says to the cabdriver, on impulse. “You?”
She looks surprised, then grins. “Madison,” she says. “I know. But Number One Mom says I got conceived via IVF in a clinic just off Madison Ave, so…”
Too Much Information. Manny chuckles anyway, because he’s all nerves and could use a laugh. “Okay, here’s the plan,” he says. Then he lays it out for her.
She stares at him like he’s crazy, but she’ll help. He can see that in her face. “Fine,” she says at last, but it’s just a show of reluctance. Maybe New Yorkers don’t like to be seen as too helpful.
They lay out the flares and triangle markers to encourage people to go around the fast lane. Because the cab isn’t moving, angry commuters glare and honk as they pass, assuming that the cab is somehow making the traffic worse. It probably is. One guy starts screaming at Manny loudly enough to spray the inside of his door window with spittle, though fortunately he’s also too angry to remember to roll the window down first. It’s a measure of how much everyone is picking up on the weirdness, though, that no one veers back into the fast lane even after they pass the parked Checker cab.
The mass of tendrils is growing as Manny watches. There is a low, crumbly sound that he can hear from that direction, now and again when the wind carries it to him: probably the sound of roots digging into asphalt, and probably into the rebar within the asphalt, and maybe into the bedrock that’s under the road. He can hear the tendrils, too, now that they’re close enough: a choppy, broken groan, stuttering and occasionally clicking like a corrupted music file. He can smell it—a thicker, much-fishier brine scent than that of the nearby East River.
Trimethylamine oxide, he thinks out of the blue. The scent of the deep, cold, crushing ocean depths.
“What now?” Madison asks.
“I need to hit it.”
“Uh…”
Manny looks around before spotting exactly what he needs—there, in a convertible sports car’s open back seat. The Indian woman driving it stares at him in blatant curiosity. He steps toward her quickly and blurts, “Hey, can I have that umbrella?”
“How about pepper spray?” she suggests.
He holds up his hands to try to look less threatening, though he’s still a six-foot-tall not-white guy, and some people are just never going to be okay with that. “If you loan it to me, I can clear this traffic jam.”
At this, she actually looks intrigued. “Huh. Well, for that I guess I can give up an umbrella. It’s my sister’s, anyway. I just like to hit people with it.” She grabs the umbrella and hands it to him, pointy tip first.
“Thanks!” He grabs it and trots back to the cab. “Okay, we’re golden.”
Madison frowns at him, then at the tendril flare, as she opens the cab’s driver-side door to get back in. “I can’t see what’s beyond that thing,” she says. “If there are cars, and I can’t brake in time—”
“Yeah. I know.” Manny vaults up onto the Checker’s hood, then its roof. Madison stares while he turns and arranges himself to sit straddling the roof, one hand gripping the OFF DUTY sign. Fortunately, Checkers are high and long, narrow-built for city streets. He can get enough of a grip with his legs to hold on, though it’s still going to be dicey. “Okay. Ready.”
“I am so texting my weed man as soon as this is over,” Madison says, shaking her head as she gets into the cab.
The umbrella is key. Manny doesn’t know why, but he’s okay with accepting what he can’t quite understand, for now. What’s really bothering him is that he’s not sure how to use it. Given that everything in him cries out that the forest of tendrils is dangerous—deadly if it so much as touches him, maybe because the tendrils look like anemones, which sting their prey to death—he needs to figure it out fast. As Madison starts up the cab, he experimentally lifts the umbrella, metal tip pointing toward the tendril mass like a jouster’s lance. It’s wrong. The right idea, but the wrong implementation; weak, somehow. The umbrella’s an automatic, so he unsnaps its closure and presses the button. It pops open at once, and it’s huge. A golf umbrella—a nice one, with no hint of a rattle or wobble as Madison accelerates and the wind pulls at the umbrella. But still wrong.
The tendril mass looms, ethereal and pale, more frightening as the cab accelerates. There is a beauty to it, he must admit—like some haunting, bioluminescent deep-sea organism dragged to the surface. It is an alien beauty, however, meant for some other environment, some other aether, and here in New York its presence is a contaminant. The very air around it has turned gray, and now that they’re closer, he can hear the air hissing as if the tendrils are somehow hurting the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen they touch. Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.