“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 still 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.