But no. Manny frowns to himself as this rationale rings false to his instincts, and particularly to that calculating, brutally rational part of himself that seems to be a remnant of his old personality. That part of him offers an alternative explanation. Bel was no good to you if he couldn’t see the tendrils, it says. If he got taken over by the Woman in White, you would’ve had more trouble to deal with. As himself, he was at least… useful.
Yes. Bel’s cash had given him the idea to use the credit card—which he needs to cancel, yikes, since he just left the thing there—and concern for Bel had kept Manny focused. And Madison wouldn’t have agreed to drive for him if she hadn’t seen the giant fountain of tentacles erupting from FDR Drive. So need-to-know, as Brooklyn had said… but not Bel’s or Madison’s need to know. This is about Manny’s need for others to know, so that he can use them as tools.
The city had done that to Bel and Madison just as it had coldly stripped Manny’s identity from him, leaving nothing behind but a pleasant exterior and the ability to ruthlessly terrorize strangers into doing his bidding. And if that’s true… Manny isn’t sure it’s safe to think of the city as an ally. Nor is it safe to assume himself to be one of the good guys.
Brooklyn’s thoughts seem to be tracking with his. “Still want that crash course in New Yorker–ness?”
“Is it something I have a choice about?” He hears the bitterness in his own voice.
“Sure you do.” When he looks up at Brooklyn in surprise, she shrugs. “Everybody’s got a choice. Whatever weird-ass shit is happening, it’s related to the city, so the obvious way to cut it all off is to leave.”
That’s… not quite what Manny was expecting to hear from her. But he feels the truth of it, as he frowns at her. Just leave. Go back to… He doesn’t remember where, but it doesn’t matter, does it? Go to Penn, hop the next train to Philly or Boston or anywhere else, break his lease and no-show for his grad program. He’ll lose a lot of money and his pride, but maybe his memory will come back. And more importantly, he knows somehow that someone else will take his place as Manhattan. It will become someone else’s job to fight the invisible deep-sea life and the possessed marketplace analysts—and he knows now that there will be more such battles. That’s what the Woman in White promised, after all. All of this is just the precursor to something much bigger.
The city will go to war with the army it has, when that time comes. Does Manny want to be in that army? He’s really not sure.
The bus has finally appeared, rolling with obscene slowness around a corner. He’s got an MTA card; there was one in his wallet, bought by the man he used to be. He hopes that man wasn’t too cheap to buy an unlimited card.
They get on the bus. (It’s not an unlimited card, but proto-Manny has put fifty dollars on it. Go, proto-Manny.) As it pulls away from the curb—slow as molasses, God had better help Queens and the Bronx because by the time Manny and Brooklyn finally get there, New York will have crumbled into ruins—Manny decides to focus on what he can control, for now. “Tell me about New York, then,” he says. “Tell it to me like I’ve never been here, or don’t remember if I have. Because, uh, I don’t.”
“You don’t…?”
Manny takes a deep breath. “I… don’t remember who I was.”
“What?”
It’s hard to explain, Manny finds as he tries to do so. He tells her all about Penn Station, and how he can remember the lyrics to MC Free’s songs but not his mother’s face. When he falls silent, Brooklyn’s staring at him. After a time, Manny is convinced that she won’t comment on his amnesia—but then she says, “I hear music.”
He frowns at this apparent non sequitur. She continues. “I hear it all the time. I was one of those kids who was always beat boxing, always thinking up lyrics, talking to myself on the subway platform, you know? But now it’s, like, fucking symphonies. The click of a woman’s heels on the sidewalk. An old car’s bad timing belt, schoolgirls playing slaphands with a rhythm chant… all of it sets off something in my head. Like tinnitus, except beautiful.” She rubs her face in her hands. “It’s woken up a part of me that I thought was gone. But I let that part of myself go for a reason—so I could focus on shit that matters.”
“Music doesn’t matter?”
“Not as much as health insurance for my baby.” She scowls. “I’d already been getting sick of the business before I quit, because it kept trying to push me to be someone I wasn’t: sexier, harder, whatever. When my daughter came along, I decided I couldn’t live that life anymore, and I’m happy as I am now. But this new music is, like, trying to drag me back to who I was. And it’s wrong. I’m not Free anymore.”
He hears: I’m not free anymore before he gets it, and then he understands why she’s told him this. “You think becoming whatever we are is changing us,” he says. “Remaking each of us, but in different ways.”
“Yeah. I think that’s, uh, the price of what we’re getting. Your memory, my peace of mind, who knows with the others. But I guess that makes sense? Being the city…” She shakes her head. “Means we can’t be just ordinary people anymore.”
You definitely aren’t human, Manny thinks, remembering what the Woman in White told him. It felt like a lie, but…
Abruptly Brooklyn groan-sighs and rubs her eyes. “Fuck it. Let’s focus. Okay. New York for beginners.” She turns on her phone, swipes past a couple of apps, and then turns it so he can see. It’s the MTA subway map, familiar to him already.
“Manhattan,” she says, pointing to the narrow island in the middle. He resists the urge to twitch. Then she starts at the top and moves in a clockwise half circle around the island, using a little stylus to point to each borough. “The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island. That’s the official city, even though Long Island’s actually the same island that Brooklyn and Queens are on. Yonkers managed to keep from getting counted as part of the city; Staten Island tried to get away and lost. And then there’s Jersey.” She rolls her eyes.
“What about Jersey?”
“It’s Jersey. So anyway, this map? It’s bullshit.”
Manny blinks at her. “But you just…”
“Yeah. And that’s why I showed it to you. This is the first thing most people see when they come here. Even people who’ve been here for years think this is the city.” She shakes the phone for emphasis. “They think Manhattan is the center of everything, when most of the city population is actually in the boroughs. They think Staten Island is some tiny thing, an afterthought, because they shrank it down to fit this map. But it’s bigger than the Bronx, at least geographically. So, lesson one of New York: what people think about us isn’t what we really are.”
He eyes her, wondering if that was an intentional dig at him. “Like how Council Member Brooklyn Thomason—Esquire—is secretly MC Free?”
“Ain’t much of a secret, baby. Brooklyn puts it all out there.” She taps the map again, in a different place. “Queens is what’s left of old New York: retirees, the working class, and a whole lot of immigrants, all working their asses off for a house with a backyard. Goddamn techies keep trying to take over, and they’ll probably win eventually, but for now all they got’s a polluted-ass neighborhood called Long Island City. Which is on Long Island because Queens is on Long Island, but isn’t part of Long Island. You follow?”