Aishwarya shrugs. “It doesn’t matter if I do or not. Craziness is happening, so let’s figure out a way to get done with the craziness quickly so you can get back to your life, yes?”
Padmini laughs a little, but Manny sees the gratitude in her eyes.
Brooklyn sighs. “I have to get back, anyway,” she says. “I told my daughter I’d be late, but I don’t want to be out all damn night trying to hunt down borough-people. And city-people. Especially when we have no idea where to start, with two of those.”
Manny feels the same, but some of that is the general jangling restlessness that he’s been feeling since Padmini mentioned an overall embodiment of the city. They need each other, he feels certain, but they especially need this sixth one. And he feels especially, instinctively certain that they need to hurry up on that last bit.
“This must be happening in other cities,” Padmini says, interrupting Manny’s reverie. She’s scowling, as if annoyed that the world makes less sense today than it did the day before. “We can’t be the only weird ones, can we? Have there been disasters like the bridge anywhere else today?”
“No,” says Aishwarya. She sighs. “The usual bad news everywhere, but nothing like the bridge.”
Then Manny remembers. “The Woman said something about São Paulo being here.” With the person who is New York.
“The city of São Paulo?” Brooklyn asks. “It has a… person? Shouldn’t that person be in São Paulo?”
“I don’t know. But if it’s true, then what’s happening to us is something that must have already happened in that city. And that settles something I’ve been thinking about since you brought it up.” He nods to Brooklyn. “When you said that we can leave, and the city will pick someone else. I think you’re right about that; it feels right, and that’s pretty much all we’ve had to go on so far. But I also feel like… past a certain point, we’re no longer going to have that choice. The whole city is probably supposed to be like Padmini’s building, safe from the Woman in White. It isn’t, not just because we don’t know what we’re doing, but because something’s wrong right now. We’re incomplete. Without each other, and the one who is New York, we can’t secure the whole city. But if we ever manage to do that…”
Brooklyn groans. “I get it. Then we’ll be like São Paulo. Wherever we go, even if it isn’t New York, we’ll be… New York.”
Padmini sits up, looking alarmed. “What, forever? But—no!”
They all look at her in surprise. Even Aishwarya. Padmini grimaces. “It’s just… look, this is a lot to deal with! It’s nice that both of you have come to help, but—” She shakes her head, a coronal rather than lateral movement, conveying her struggle to articulate the problem. “I don’t know. I just… I can’t become Queens. I’m not even a US citizen! What if my internship company doesn’t hire me, and I can’t find another job that will give me a visa? Then I’ll be puttering around Chennai, being Queens! That can’t be right.”
They all stare at each other in uncomfortable silence.
Mrs. Yu opens the door again, just enough that they can see half of her face. Manny’s getting used to ignoring her; she’s obviously eavesdropping, but that’s also just part of life in a city. She doesn’t put another plate out this time, however, just peering out at them through the slit between door and frame. Her gaze roams them all and lands on Manny. “You hùnxuè’ér?” she asks. “Hapa? That’s what the young people call it now.”
Manny blinks out of trying to understand why he understands Toishanese. “Uh, no.” Not that he knows of.
“Hnh.” She examines them all again, then presses her lips together in annoyance. “In China, many cities have gods of the walls. Fortune aids them. It’s normal. Relax.”
“Okay, what the fuck,” Brooklyn says.
“Yes, exactly,” says Aishwarya. Padmini frowns at her. “There are many in my country who believe that, too. Lots of stories. Lots of gods, lots of avatars—probably hundreds. Some are patrons of cities; you could call them city gods. It’s wild to think you’re one.” She glares at Padmini, whose expression takes on a sort of aggrieved blankness. An old habit of tactful silence, Manny guesses. “But if you are, then you are.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Yu opens the door more. Behind her, on one of the apartment’s couches, her younger grandson is asleep. His brother sits nearby reading a school textbook as if they did not just fight for their lives that afternoon. “Real gods aren’t what most of you Christians think of as gods. Gods are people. Sometimes dead people, sometimes still alive. Sometimes never lived.” She shrugs. “They do jobs—bring fortune, look after people, make sure the world works as it should. They fall in love. Have babies. Fight. Die.” She shrugs. “It’s duty. It’s normal. Get over it.”
And there’s really not much they can say to this.
Brooklyn’s expression softens. “Sorry, ma’am. We’ve been here for a while. We should get out of your hair, shouldn’t we?”
“You saved my grandsons’ lives. But yes.”
So they get up and file out, which necessitates going through Mrs. Yu’s house. Manny takes care to thank her for the dumplings.
Aishwarya stops on the sidewalk outside, glaring at them as if they have personally conspired to trouble her. “You both will have to stay with us,” she tells Brooklyn and Manny. “If our building is a safe place, and if having you around makes Padmini safer. I don’t have any clothes to fit you, and there’s only the floor…”
“My apartment building will work, too,” Manny says. Then he grimaces. “Uh, but it might be the final straw for my roommate.”
Brooklyn, however, is shaking her head. “I’ve got a place that should do, actually, if this whole business works the way I think it does. More than enough room for all of us. Hang on.” And she takes out her phone again, turning away from them to begin dialing.
Manny wonders if she’s asking her aides to create some kind of safe house for half-apotheosized cities to hide out in. Padmini is staring at him oddly, though, and he raises his eyebrows. “What?”
“I thought you were a little Punjabi, maybe, until I heard what Mrs. Yu said. What are you, then?”
“Black.” It comes out instinctively, and feels true.
“You look… half-white?”
“Nope. Black.”
“Black Latino or maybe Black Jewish or, what is it, Creole…?”
“Plain old ordinary Black.” It feels like a familiar conversation. He has gotten this a lot, throughout his life. “I mean, probably other stuff besides Black somewhere back down the line, but I don’t remember if I ever knew what. Or cared.” He shrugs. “America.”
She chuckles at this. Aishwarya is watching Brooklyn; Padmini seems to relax a little amid this reprieve from her aunty’s disapproval. “Queens—the borough, I mean—looks like you, too. So many shades of ‘what-are-you’ brown. But…” She inhales with a little ah. “Manhattan has Harlem. And Central Park used to be a Black and Irish neighborhood; I read about that online somewhere. They took the land from those families to make the park. And there’s that memorial downtown, at Wall Street, where they found a bunch of Africans buried in unmarked graves. Slaves. I guess some were free? But there were thousands of them, all buried under…” She grimaces. “Uh, where I work. So, what Manhattan is now, white people run so much of it, but it’s literally built on the bones of Black people. And Native Americans and Chinese and Latinos and whole waves of European immigrants and… everybody. That must be why you look so… everything.”