But Bronca also sees what Veneza’s picking up on. The city is different, because yesterday it was just a city, and today it is alive.
There is precedent for this. There are always those more attuned to a city than others—though usually not when they’re from completely different states. Veneza’s a Jersey City girl. Bronca probes carefully. “What do you mean when you say everything’s weird?”
“The bathroom stall! Also? That painting those guys had. The last one.” She shudders. “You were spacing out, so maybe you didn’t notice. But everything changed. Like, the whole gallery. All of a sudden Yijing and those guys were gone, and the room was empty, and it got real quiet. The light was strange. And the painting wasn’t a painting—”
She stops abruptly, looking uneasy. And Bronca realizes all of a sudden that she’s facing a choice about how to deal with Veneza. She can play it off. Tell the girl that what she’s sensing is nothing. Daydreams, or a flashback from the mushrooms she once told Bronca that she tried. Veneza is so much of what Bronca could have been, if she’d come up in a better world—and so much of what Bronca is now, because the world is still a goddamn shitshow. Bronca wants so badly to protect her.
That’s ultimately what settles the matter. Because if Veneza is seeing these things, then she needs to know that they aren’t hallucinations. She needs to know to run.
So Bronca sighs. “The painting was a doorway.”
Veneza’s head whips around so fast that her Afro puffs jiggle. She stares at Bronca for a long moment. Then she swallows and says slowly, “And we weren’t just looking at a painting of abstract people on an abstract street, were we? We were actually going there. To a place that actually looked like that.” She takes a deep breath. “Old B, I really wanted you to tell me it was another mushroom flashback.”
“People in hell want ice water. And technically that was an expressionistic street, but that’s just me being pedantic to make myself feel better.” Bronca smiles sadly. “Kinda glad I’m not the only one visiting Weirdshitistan, though.”
“I mean, I got your back anywhere, B, but dayum.”
Damn indeed. Bronca sighs, rubbing her eyes, hating for the umpteenth time that this whole mess has dumped itself in her front yard. She’s got other shit to deal with, damn it. She should be fixated right now on buying unnecessary cute stuff for her future grandson, granddaughter, or two-spirit child, but here she is up to her neck in otherworldly art attacks.
“Yeah, that’s… okay, look,” she says. “We gotta talk. Because you can’t have my back on this, see? You don’t… you’re not.” Is there a word for what she and the other five have become? The knowledge that has dumped itself into her mind is long on concepts but short on vocabulary. “You don’t have the… boots.”
Veneza looks down at the sandals she’s wearing. “Yeah, it was like ninety degrees today, so.”
Bronca shakes her head. “You drive?”
“No. Short on gas money ’til payday.”
“Then come on. It’s past the hour when the MTA and New Jersey Transit turn into pumpkins, so let me drive you home. There’s, ah, something I need to show you, anyway, along the way.”
“Oooh, a mystery. I’m all aflutter.” Veneza hefts her bag, and they head for Bronca’s old Jeep.
Bronca lays it all out on the drive toward Jersey City. It’s easier to believe here, along one of the city’s thicker arteries, watching the red blood cells of its people and commerce come and go. Above them, clouds backlit by the moon race toward the Palisades, and to the left, ever-present and ever a presence, is the light-speckled silhouette of the city. Tell her everything, that city whispers to Bronca, whenever she hesitates over some especially weird or frightening bit of intel. The Enemy is different now, craftier, crueler. Help her survive. We like having allies, don’t we? Real ones, anyway.
True that.
Then while Veneza silently digests what Bronca has told her, Bronca turns off the expressway just before they would’ve crossed the bridge that leads to Washington Heights. They’re on the edge of the Bronx. Traffic is light here, the streets relatively deserted given the time of night. Nothing but housing projects in the area, and the city’s done everything it can to isolate the people who live in them—fences, highways that cut the neighborhood in half, a no-man’s-land of industrial blocks hemming the residential area in. There’s one sad-looking grocery store in the area that Bronca knows of, but they pass ten payday lenders and dollar stores while she drives, dotting every half-busy thoroughfare like fast-proliferating tumors.
When Bronca pulls into the gravel road that leads into Bridge Park, it’s hard not to feel some apprehension. She remembers the days when the “park” was just a wasteland of rotted buildings, and nobody hung out here at night except bums, crackheads, and bored teenagers looking for somebody to fuck or fuck with—like a big brown-skinned Indian with a dyke cut who just needed someplace to hear herself think. It’s not like that now, though. The park has been landscaped into a bland expanse of lawns and benches and dogwood trees that line the old bike trail. These days there’s a whole other kind of danger, because Bronca’s heard too many stories of the cops hassling neighborhood folks out of the park, so that the more affluent white people moving in will feel safer. And she’s still a big brown-skinned Indian with a dyke cut, here late at night in the company of a young Black woman for no reason that a bigoted cop would be able or willing to understand.
She’s not quite the same woman, though. As Bronca parks and gets out, she reaches for her city, and the city sighs a long purr of pleasure in response. No one will interfere, it promises without words. This is our place, no matter what interlopers think. Come, and show her yourself.
She shivers a little. Hearing voices—even if it’s not so much a voice as a stream of impressions and feelings—really should freak her out. It doesn’t, though.
“So, I’m a little freaked out,” Veneza says. When Bronca turns, the younger woman is eying her skeptically. “Like, if you were a dude, I’d be pulling out the pepper spray that you don’t know I have.”
“Pepper spray is legal in the city. I know Jersey dumb-asses think we’re all peace-loving hippies here, but read a website, damn.”
“Oh. Well, just saying. You’re being unusually weird.”
Bronca laughs. “Yeah, that’s not gonna get any better. But there’s some things that I’m not sure I can explain with words. Come on.”
The Harlem River spreads beyond the cobbled path and the railings. There’s not much to see at this point, east of the more dramatic skylines of Washington Heights and well south of the true suburbs of Yonkers and Mount Vernon. Just a murky, poorly lit river running sluggishly in the warm night air. There’s a low, graffiti-flecked wall on the Washington Heights side of the river, running along Harlem River Drive, but for the Bronx it’s nothing but shoreline, which is twisty with fallen tree branches and moss-slimed rocks and a couple of old rusty shopping carts that have been there for as long as Bronca can remember. The water smells faintly of sulfur, because there’s probably a sewage spill somewhere. This part of the Bronx is on the come up, but it’s been poor as shit for a long time, and this is a city where politicians don’t care about infrastructure even for wealthier neighborhoods.