“Anyway, let’s see… ah, you’re on Facebook. Live?” He browses her settings. “Guess not. And you don’t have any backup apps logged in…” He glances at the top of her Facebook profile and beams in delight. “Martha! Martha Blemins.” The woman makes an unhappy sound around his hand. “That’s an incredibly pretty name, Martha. And Blemins is such a unique spelling. I see you work at Event Flight. As a marketplace analyst? That sounds really important.”
Martha Blemins is terrified now. Her hands have locked around Manny’s wrist, but he can feel them trembling, the palms a little damp. Tears have begun trailing from one eye. She’s so visibly on the brink of panic that Manny is honestly surprised when she manages to speak. “Y-you can’t hurt me,” she says, her voice wavering. “You b-better not.”
Manny feels a great wave of sadness come over him. “I can hurt you, Martha,” he confesses. “I know how, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve hurt someone else. I think… I think I’ve done that a lot.”
He knows this is true, suddenly—and he hates that this, out of the gray undifferentiated morass that is his past, is the knowledge that’s returned to him. Her pulse flutters fast against his palm. This will have traumatized her, he feels certain; it’s a mugging without the mugging. She’ll never sleep easily again in New York, never walk to work without looking over her shoulder. He’s in her head now, waving at her from the little box of assumptions that she carries about Certain Kinds Of People. The fact that she applied these assumptions preemptively means there’s nothing he could’ve done to change them, but he still hates that he’s just confirmed her stereotypes.
The sound of sirens is fading. Either the police passed by on their way something else, or they’ve parked and are headed this way on foot. Time to go. Manny lets go of Martha’s throat, steps back, and—after wiping it carefully against his pants leg and holding only the rough edges of her decorative case—hands her phone back to her. She grabs it and stares at him, mute with shock.
“Have a really nice day, Martha,” he says, meaning it. But he has to add one more thing, if they are to be safe from the danger she presents. He has to be more dangerous, in her mind. So he says, “Hopefully we won’t ever see each other again.”
Then he backs away, down one of the paths that leads away from where they last heard sirens. Bel is staring at him, though he moves to follow Manny after a moment. The Black woman sighs but falls in as well, and Manny turns to head up the hill with them.
Martha stays where Manny’s left her, not making a sound, and not turning to watch them leave.
They’re almost to the edge of the park—no cops so far—before the Black woman finally says, “I take it you’re Manhattan.”
He blinks out of melancholy and turns to her. She’s pulled some kind of breakfast bar out of her bag and is eating it.
“Yeah. How did you guess?”
“Are you kidding? Dudes like you—smart, charming, well dressed, and cold enough to strangle you in an alley if we had alleys?” She snorts to herself, while Manny tries not to let her see how much this assessment hurts him. “Dime a dozen on Wall Street and at City Hall. 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.
Bel makes a sound that’s somewhere between an audible swallow and a throat-clearing. “So you remembered who you were?” When Manny frowns at him, he smiles. It’s rueful and doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “I mean, you’re back to being the bloke I met before. The one with the edge.”
Manny wrestles with several responses before deciding: “No.”
“Don’t sound too sure there, mate.”
He isn’t, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. To distract himself, he considers the Black woman and guesses, “Queens?” She gives him such a disgusted look that he immediately amends, “Brooklyn.”
This seems to mollify her. “Yes. It also has the virtue of being my name. Brooklyn Thomason. Esquire, though I’m not practicing anymore. Went into politics instead.”
Her name is actually Brooklyn. And she remembers herself. Which means that whatever has happened to make them what they are, memory loss isn’t part of the normal process.
“How did you know?” he blurts. “How to find me? How did you know to play music? Why don’t I know any of this?”
She regards him coolly, despite the sweat that dots her brow after steady uphill walking. They’re circling around the park, Manny realizes. His spatial awareness is completely foiled by the trees, but he suspects they’re heading south and will emerge from the park somewhere near… Dyckman? He remembers seeing that on his phone’s map. “You’re not from here, are you?” she asks.
“No.” He stares at her, wanting to know how she knew that, too. The bike salespeople at Penn Station seemed to think he was a local.
She sees his confusion and sighs. He gets the fleeting impression that she doesn’t like talking to him, though he can’t tell why. Maybe it’s personal, or maybe she dislikes men who jack up women, on general principle. “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.”
Manny lets out a slow breath to calm himself. “Yeah. Same.”
Bel’s calmer now, and his regional accent has faded back into generic Britishness. “I’m glad I have no idea what you’re talking about. It sounds, ah, fraught.”
Brooklyn snorts at this, though she then focuses on Manny again. “I’ve heard… something… since I was a child,” she admits. “Muttering, feelings, images. Felt things, too—little twitches and sighs and touches. All for so long that I don’t even really think about it anymore. For a while I talked back. Never told anybody they were love songs to the city, but not everybody needs to know everything.”
Her expression has gone flat, and he understands then what she doesn’t like—not him, but the fact that she has to speak about something so obviously personal. He nods back, trying to convey that he won’t use this against her, but she just shakes her head, annoyed at the situation regardless. That’s when something about her scowl hits Manny. He stops in his tracks. She stops after another step or two, then turns back with visible reluctance. There’s a held breath in her expression this time, as if she’s bracing herself for something. That’s his confirmation.
“Oh wow,” he says. “You’re MC Free.”
“Whaaaaaat.” Bel stops, too, staring at her. “Oh, shit, you are.”
“I’m Brooklyn Thomason,” she replies. It’s gentle, but firm. “MC Free was my stage name thirty years and thirty pounds ago. These days I’m on the city council. I got a JD and a fourteen-year-old and a side hustle renting out vacation property.” Then she sighs, relenting. “But… yeah. That’s who I used to be.”
“My God,” Bel says in a tone of naked reverence. “The greatest of the early female MCs. Lewisham was all over you back then. I grew up on your music.”