It pulls Manny out of introspection, and he turns to see that a woman is walking toward them. She’s portly, short, white with a florid complexion, and dressed for office work. Nondescript. There’s no reason for Manny or Bel to pay attention to her, in fact, except that she’s got a cell phone in one hand, upraised toward them. Its camera light is on.
The woman stops, still filming them. “Gross,” she says. “I can’t believe you two. Right out in the open. I’m calling the cops.”
Bel glances at Manny, who shakes his head in confusion; he has no idea what she’s talking about, either. “Oi,” Bel says. His accent has shifted, a little less BBC generic and a little more South London—somehow Manny knows this—and his expression has gone hard. “You recording us, love? Without asking? That’s a bit rude, innit?”
“‘Rude’ is people being perverts in public,” the woman replies, doing something on her phone that looks like zooming in. It’s pointed at Manny’s face as she does this, and he doesn’t like it one bit. He resists the urge to turn away or reach for her phone, however, since that seems likely to only incite further rudeness on her part.
He does step forward. “What exactly do you think—”
She reacts as if his single step forward was a full-on bull charge, gasping and mincing back several steps. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! If you lay a finger on me, I’ll scream and the cops will shoot you! You druggies! Druggie perverts!”
“Pervert I’ll own, maybe, but druggie?” Bel has shifted to put a hand on his hip, expression skeptical. “I’ll have you know I’m straight-edge. You sure you haven’t been overindulging on the Percocet, yourself, love? You’re definitely seeing things.” He waves a hand in front of her phone. She jerks it back and dances off to one side.
At which point Manny begins to wonder if he’s seeing things. Because as the woman turns her back toward Manny, he notices that there is something jutting up from the back of her neck through the tangle of her loose bun. It’s long and thin, somewhere between the thickness of a hair and a pencil, and as he stares, it moves just a little. Its tip flicks once, fitfully, when there is no wind. Toward Manny, then back up into the air. He narrows his eyes, and it trembles as if the force of his gaze has disturbed it. It flicks again, toward him and away.
Manny goes still, overwhelmed by an epiphany of familiarity. His thoughts are startled word salad, but those words are: Cordyceps, puppet strings, drinking straw, and more coherently, That thing on FDR Drive!
He drags his gaze from the white thing sticking out of the woman’s neck, to her face. “That’s not who you really are,” he says. “Show yourself.” Bel frowns at him.
The woman turns to him, inhaling and opening her mouth to complain again—and then she goes still. It’s the stillness of a bad freeze-frame, catching her mid-inhalation and before the expression on her face can settle into either contempt or anger, leaving it interstitially vacant for the moment. She hasn’t put down the camera, but her thumb must have gone slack; the recording light flicks off.
“The fuck,” Bel says, now staring at her.
Manny blinks—and in the nanosecond that his eyes are shut, the woman’s clothing turns entirely white. The suit, the shoes, even the pantyhose. Her hair, too, which abruptly makes her look like a cross between a church lady and a female Colonel Sanders. She starts moving again, chuckling at Manny and Bel’s obvious discomfiture and then raising her free hand to waggle in a ta-daaaaa gesture.
“What a relief!” she declares. Her voice has changed. It’s lower now, alto rather than soprano. Around this voice, her smile is all teeth and nearly manic. “It’s hard enough to act like one of you people already, but pretending that I didn’t know you was getting old. It’s good to see you again, São Paulo. Every place feels the same in this universe, your directions twist in and out like holes through cheese, but aren’t you a little out of place? I remember the taste of your blood being a little farther south.”
She’s looking at Bel. “What?” Bel says. He looks at Manny. Manny shakes his head—in denial, not confusion. He gets what’s happening, though he doesn’t want to get it. That white thing sticking out of her head. Antenna is another of the words that have risen to the top of his mind. The white thing is like a receiver, channeling someone else’s voice and thoughts and image from elsewhere.
(How do I know this? he thinks in a momentary not-quite-panic. I am Manhattan, comes the answer, which has its own questionish baggage. He’ll ponder it later.)
The woman, meanwhile, is peering narrowly at Bel, as if she’s having trouble seeing him, even though he’s right there. She glances at the camera as if to confirm what her eyes are seeing, then lowers the camera. “Are you”—and her head tilts—“not who I think you are? Are you something else, underneath that covering?”
Bel stiffens perceptibly. “Who I am is none of your fucking business, woman. You want to move along, or shall I move you?”
“Oh!” The woman inhales. “You’re just human. Pardon me, I mistook you for fifteen million other people. You, though.” She turns her gaze on Manny, and he sees then that her eyes have changed color, too. They were brown, but something has faded them to a brown so pale that they verge on yellow. It’s difficult to stare at those eyes and not think of predators like wolves or raptors, but Manny makes himself do so, because predators attack when one shows weakness.
“You definitely aren’t human,” she says to him. Manny manages not to flinch, but she laughs as if she’s sensed the aborted nerve impulse. “Well, I knew you had to go to ground somewhere after our battle. Here, though? A forest? Trying to air out the reek of the trash you’ve slept under?”
“What?” Manny frowns in confusion. The woman blinks, then frowns back, her eyes narrowing.
“Hnh,” she murmurs. “I was pretty sure I’d hurt you. Broken some bones. But you seem intact, to the degree that your species can be. And—” Abruptly her head tilts, belligerence giving way to confusion. “You’re cleaner than you should be. Even your smell is…” She trails off.
She’s crazy. But Manny knows, because of that awful white thing jutting from the back of her neck, that “crazy” is an inappropriate, incomplete word for what he’s witnessing. It’s impossible not to see that thing and understand that, somehow, this woman is affiliated with the giant mass of tendrils on FDR Drive. Maybe this is what happens to the people whose cars picked up tendrils in passing: if they touch a person, that person is then compromised in some fundamental, metaphysical, infectious way. Whatever’s speaking to Manny right now, through this woman, is not present—but that means there’s something out there broadcasting Tentacle Monster TV, and this woman’s got her own direct high-speed cable connection to it.
“So what are you?” Manny decides to ask.
She snorts, though she keeps staring at him. Without blinking; it’s creepy. “No small talk, just right to business. No wonder everyone thinks New Yorkers are rude. But no bluster, either, this time? Where has all of your—” She looks away for an instant, her eyes flickering as if scanning some invisible dictionary, and then her gaze returns. “—shit-talking. Yes. Where has your shit-talking gone?”