The working spaces aren’t really designed for habitation, so the Center doesn’t run afoul of any housing regulations… technically. Bronca gets around it by periodically reminding the keyholders that the space is to be used only temporarily. She’s been saying that to some of them for years.
Veneza, her expression grim, moves behind the desk and sits down at the reception computer, doing something Bronca can’t discern. Jess sighs, but says, “Yeah, okay. Not the keyholders. But warn them, at least. And… you’d better call the board. Get them ready.”
Bronca tilts her head, trying to follow where Jess is running. “For what, a protest or something?”
“Yeah,” Veneza interjects. “Thought so. C’mere, I wanna show you guys something.”
They all move behind the desk to see the monitor. Veneza has a browser window open to YouTube, and she’s done some kind of search that’s brought up a bunch of videos with lurid title cards and leering faces. Bronca’s about to ask what she’s supposed to be seeing when abruptly she recognizes one of those smirks. “Hey!” She points at the screen. It’s Strawberry Manbun.
“Are you fucking kidding me,” Jess mutters, before turning away with a groan. “Oh, of course.”
“What?” Bronca frowns after her, then at Veneza. “What?”
“Yeah, so, I just did a reverse image search on that logo in their email.” Veneza taps a mark at the corner of the video, which Bronca remembers seeing elsewhere now. On their emails and on their business cards. It was a warning of how terrible the art was going to be: a stylized A surrounded by vaguely Nordic runes and ugly curlicues. Completely unintelligible and hard to remember, which basically defeated the whole point of even having a logo. “It’s the logo of the ‘Alt Artistes.’ This is their channel.”
She clicks on one, enlarges it, and scrolls to somewhere in the middle of its timeline. The screen fills with Strawberry Manbun’s face, looking ripely furious and with his manbun coming apart from the force of his gesticulations.
“—the nail in the coffin, the dunnit in the who!” he is saying. In the background is what looks like a hotel room. “This is what these revisionists insist upon, the disrespect for a superior culture that brought them Picasso, and Gauguin, and—”
“Mute it,” Bronca says, already annoyed by the sound of his voice. Veneza does so, thank God. “We get the idea. So these guys are some kind of… performance artists? They make shitty art, try to get it into galleries, fail because it’s shitty, but then they make a video telling everybody it’s reverse racism?”
“I guess? It’s not that logical. They say whatever gets their audience excited enough to click on the videos or send them donations. Also, Picasso stole from African artists and Gauguin was a pedo who gave a bunch of brown girls syphilis, but what the fuck do I know.” Then she taps the bottom of the video, where Bronca has to squint to make out a number. It looks like…
“Tell me that ‘k’ doesn’t mean thousand,” she says, drawing back in stunned horror as she realizes it. “Tell me forty-two thousand people haven’t watched this shit!”
“Yep.” Veneza goes back to the search results and points out other horrifically large numbers. “That was one of their higher-count vids, but still. And, like, there’s a whole industry of dudes like this. The more inflammatory they are, the more people watch them, and the more money they make.”
“White dude whining as a growth industry,” Jess says grimly. She’s blond and cute and pale as paper, so Bronca guesses she gets a frequent dose of white dude whining from types who don’t realize she’s not quite on the same team before they start with the globalist conspiracy theories. “I was going to say we should warn the board about possible violence, but I forgot this is a thing, too.”
“Yeah,” says Veneza. “Fans of dudes like this are fucking cultists. Anything he says, they’ll suck it up. They’ll put your address on the internet, if they can find it. Send death threats to your boss, stalk your kids, send a SWAT team to your house, show up with a gun themselves… the works. You guys need to lock down.”
“Lock down?” Bronca stares at her. “Lock down what?”
“Your identities. Your personal information. I can help you get started, but we’re going to have to stay late.”
They get into it, tossing around plans and fallbacks while Veneza hops on endless name-search sites and tries to tell them over a couple of hours how to hide the online paper trails of a lifetime. It’s dizzying, terrifying stuff—scarier still when Bronca suddenly realizes something fundamental about what’s changed since her real spitfire days. Back then she had to worry about the government tapping her phone. It still probably does, but all the other stuff’s been outsourced. Now, instead of just a COINTELPRO operation, she’s got to worry about that and some dude stalking her relatives from his mother’s basement, and kids bombarding her with death threats because it makes them feel like part of the (terrorist) gang, and a troll farm in Russia using the Center as the next cause célèbre to whip up Nazis. All the people who really are a threat to the country; somehow they’ve been convinced to do its dirty work, more or less for free. She would admire it if it weren’t so damn horrific.
By the time they’ve done as much as they can—because Veneza can only help them reduce the threat; there’s no way to eliminate it entirely—it’s late. Yijing and Jess head home, while Bronca and Veneza linger long enough to send out an email to the workshoppers about online safety.
Bronca goes outside to let down the night shutters. As she’s finishing up, however, Veneza comes out of the Center’s staff door, looking shaken. She’s a sturdy kid in a lot of ways—and really, Bronca shouldn’t call her a kid. Veneza’s done with college—Cooper Union, because she’s got a good head on her. But right now, the girl’s brown skin is ashen.
“The bathroom,” she murmurs. “I don’t know, B. It’s always creepy in there. But tonight that last stall just woogied me right the fuck out.”
Bronca grimaces. She should’ve burned some sage and tobacco, or scrubbed that stall down with ammonia, or both. “Yyyeah. Let’s just call that one haunted.”
“Except it wasn’t, yesterday. What the hell’s changed between yesterday and today? It looks the same, but everything’s weird all of a sudden.”
Veneza turns to look over the street. The Center sits on a slope overlooking the Bronx River and the on-ramp of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which has finally stopped being a parking lot now that rush hour is over. But beyond this, in the distance, the nighttime cityscape spreads across the horizon. Northern Manhattan isn’t as impressive as the part of the island that tourists like. Bronca likes this view better, though, because it makes clear that New York is a city of people, not just businesses and landmarks. From here, when the air isn’t hazy, one can take in the endless apartment blocks of Inwood and the gigantic public schools of Spanish Harlem, and even a few of the stately row houses that remain on Sugar Hill. Homes and schools and churches and neighborhood bodegas, with only the occasional glass-and-steel condo high-rise to mar the view. This is a view of the city that only the Bronx sees on the regular—which is why, Bronca feels certain, Bronx people don’t take any shit from arrogant Manhattanites. End of day, if people want to make a life in New York, they all gotta eat, educate their kids, sleep, and get by somehow. No sense in anybody putting on airs.