Brooklyn’s expression turns faintly sour. “Every time somebody says that to me, I pop another gray hair. You notice I dye it now?”
Bel winces and takes the hint to get over it. “Yyyyyeah, sorry. Shutting up.”
They all shut up for a while, because the hill has winded them. On impulse, Manny lifts his eyes to the tree canopy as they walk. It’s cooler, here in the forest shadows, than it is on the asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks. Strange to think that there are probably wild animals in this forest, like raccoons and maybe deer or coyotes; he’s read that those are making a comeback in some areas of the city. But other kinds of animals abound here, too. How many other people, besides Martha Blemins, have been mugged here? How many beatings, how many stabbings, how many rapes? Whole villages of Lenape were driven away from the city and its immediate vicinity by the Dutch; how many of them died in the process? How much blood and fear has soaked into this old bedrock?
I am Manhattan, he thinks again, this time in a slow upwelling of despair. Every murderer. Every slave broker. Every slumlord who shut off the heat and froze children to death. Every stockbroker who got rich off war and suffering.
It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to like it, though.
They reach Dyckman after a while. The clotting traffic on the street means that rush hour has started. School’s out, sending packs of same-aged children forth to flow along both sides of the street. No one’s looking at Manny and company as they emerge from the park. If the police did respond to Martha’s call, there’s no sign of them anywhere nearby. Then again, given the Williamsburg, they probably didn’t bother to come.
“So what now?” Manny asks.
Brooklyn sighs. “No idea. But I’ll tell you what: I’m pretty sure there’s a reason all of this is happening, all of a sudden.” She eyes him. “You know the bridge thing is part of this, right?”
Manny stares at her. Bel looks from one to the other of them, incredulous. “The Williamsburg? What, fell down because of—” He gestures vaguely in the direction of the tulip tree rock. “Those squiggly things, and that other woman?”
Brooklyn frowns at him. “Other woman?”
“The one that Mrs. Nosy Parker turned into for a moment. Before you showed up.” He shivers a little. “Never seen anything creepier, except those horrid little white things.”
Brooklyn shakes her head in confusion, and Manny has to explain. It’s actually difficult to find the words for what they saw, though after a few attempts he manages to get across that the woman Brooklyn saw was just temporary housing for someone, or something, else. “She controls those things,” he says, gesturing at the back of his neck while Brooklyn digests what he’s said. “I’m sure of it. The ones on FDR Drive, too. Anything those tentacles touch.”
“Something told me to avoid the FDR today. Not that I usually drive anyway; took the subway.” Brooklyn sighs. “That’s how I, I don’t know, felt you? There was a crisis response meeting for city leaders up in Washington Heights. I was about to head home, but something told me to take the train uptown instead. The, uh, something, got stronger, the closer I got to you. Then there you were, in trouble.”
“There are five of us,” Manny says. He watches Brooklyn start as she takes his meaning.
“Oh, hell. You think the other three are in trouble, too.” She frowns, then shakes her head slowly. “Look, I’m glad I could help you, but… I didn’t sign on for an extra job. I got a kid, and my father is sick. You want to try and find them, go ahead. I have to get home.”
Manny starts to speak, to try to persuade her, and then something catches his attention from the corner of his eye. He follows it and finds himself looking across the street, at a little bodega on the corner. Next to it is a laundromat that’s been gracious enough to put a tiny, rickety bench out front. An elderly man sits there with a small dog on a leash. He’s busy chatting in Spanish with a woman, who stands in the doorway of the laundromat; they’re laughing about something. But the dog is watching Manny and company with a steady, fixed stare that does not at all feel like the gaze of an animal.
Then Manny looks closer. Between its clawed toes, like bits of ghostly grass picked up on its last walk, are half a dozen gently waving white tendrils.
Brooklyn sees it, too. “Are you fucking kidding me.”
Staring at the dog, his skin all over prickling, Manny says, “It’s what happened on FDR. The tendrils, anything that got close to them…”
“Like a goddamn disease,” Brooklyn breathes.
Bel is staring at the dog, too. He’s squinting a little, as if the tendrils are hard to see, but then he grimaces and visibly shivers. “I saw that old fellow walking his dog earlier, when we were walking. If everybody who was in the park just now is, um, infected, then I imagine it’ll be all over the city within a day or two.”
They all fall silent for a moment, digesting this.
“The white things came off of that woman when I got rid of the others,” Brooklyn says. She’s hiding it well, but her confident facade has slipped a little at the sight of the dog. The dog makes this something insidious, and ominous. “She was only marinating in her own evil, nobody else’s, by the time we were done.”
Manny finds himself thinking about the wave of force that spread outward from FDR in the wake of his little stunt with the cab. He has an idea of what it is now: the city’s energy, dissipating outward in a circular wave once Manny no longer needed it in concentrated form. How far did that splash of energy go? He can’t guess, but he remembers seeing it kill all the white tendrils that it touched.
A powerful weapon—if Manny can figure out how to use it consistently. Manny turns to Brooklyn. “Look, I can’t make you help me, but if I have to do this on my own, I’m going to need a crash course in how to be a New Yorker.”
She blinks. Then there is another of those peculiar shifts in which the world doubles—and here in the other, weirder New York, his perspective is suddenly wider, higher. Macro scale instead of micro. And here in this other realm she looms over him, vast and sprawling, wildly patchwork and dense. Not just older but bigger. Stronger in many ways; her arms and core are thick with muscled neighborhoods that each have their own rhythms and reputations. Williamsburg, Hasidim enclave and artist haven turned hipster ground zero. Bed Stuy (do or die). Crown Heights, where now the only riots are over seats at brunch. Her jaw is tight with the stubborn ferocity of Brighton Beach’s old mobsters and the Rockaways’ working-class holdouts against the brutal inevitability of rising seas. But there are spires at Brooklyn’s heart, too—perhaps not as grand as his own, and maybe some of hers are actually the airy, fanciful amusement-park towers of Coney Island—but all are just as shining, just as sharp.
She is Brooklyn, and she is mighty, and in this instant he cannot help but love her, stranger or not. Then she is just a middle-aged woman again, with a shining, sharp grin.
“I guess I could help you with that,” she concedes. “I guess I have to, if this shit is spreading. But there ain’t no one way to be a part of this city.” She slips into and out of the vernacular like changing purses, effortless and with ever-perfect fit. Manny soaks it all in, getting a feel for the cadence, trying to keep up. “Takes most people a year, at least, to really feel the city’s call.”