And best of all: the instant they walk inside the building, Manny feels a skin-shivering return of the sensation they felt in Padmini’s and his own apartment buildings. The architectural lines look sharper, the walls’ texture finer. The light brightens just a touch; the room smells fresher.
“Yeah, thought so,” Brooklyn says, grinning. “Ain’t nothing more Brooklyn than a brownstone, baby.”
“Are you in real estate?” Padmini asks, still a bit wide-eyed.
“Not really. Only own these two buildings. I grew up here, see.” Brooklyn sighs as she slips her shoes off. Manny and Padmini quickly follow suit. “Dad bought both buildings in the Seventies. Just sixty grand for this whole entire building. The city was struggling in those days. White people ran off to the suburbs because they didn’t want their kids going to school alongside little José and Jaquita, so the same bad economy that hit everywhere else did double damage here. But Dad held on to the buildings, even when the property taxes nearly ate us alive. When I was fourteen, I was snaking toilets and moving furniture. Jojo don’t know how good she’s got it.”
“Your daughter?” asks Padmini.
“Right. Short for Josephine, named after Baker.” Brooklyn shakes her head, then grins. “Anyway, now both buildings are worth millions.” She grins and beckons for them to follow as she starts giving them a tour. “Just managed to finish the accessibility mods to the other building before the whole block went historic-landmark, thank God, or I’d still be in a paperwork fight with the city. And I still had to promise to never modify this one, to soothe all the ruffled feathers.”
“People had a problem with you making a brownstone that a wheelchair user could live in?”
She snorts. “Welcome to New York.” She gestures to the airy, crown-molding-accented kitchen. “Anyway, we rent this one out to tourists for the extra income.” She shakes her head in amusement. “‘Historic townhome! City views! Vintage accents!’ Five thousand per unit per month, bam, and more during special events or holiday seasons. Dad calls it the ‘Clyde Thomason Pension Backup Fund,’ since the city keeps threatening to take ’em away.”
Brooklyn shows them each to a neat little guest room, and orders Chinese for dinner. Queens has the meal that Aishwarya packed for her, but she nibbles from the fried rice, and freely shares the fragrant lamb curry and idlis from her tiffin. It’s a humble, quiet supper as they sit around the kitchen island, but it’s such a relief to just be able to relax for a while that Manny savors it.
He does feel guilt because, somewhere in the city, the avatars of the Bronx and Staten Island are alone, possibly afraid, and definitely in danger. And somewhere beneath them all—in the subways, in the dark—the avatar of New York slumbers alone on a bed of trash, with no one to keep him warm. No one to protect him.
Not for long, Manny vows privately. I’ll find you soon.
And then… well. Manny came to New York because he no longer wanted to be what he was. The city has taken his name and his past, but only because he was willing to give those up in the first place. Perhaps he should not be ashamed that the city has laid claim to the rest as well, including the parts he thought undesirable or unsavory. Of course New York would find a use for those. No city can exist without someone like him—this city in particular cannot—and maybe it’s time he accepted that.
And is it so terrible to be terrible, if he puts all the awfulness of himself into the service of the city?
It is unexpectedly comforting, this possibility. When he settles down to rest, he drops off to sleep almost immediately, and dreams eight million beautifully ruthless dreams.
INTERRUPTION
The instant Paulo climbs out of the cab, he knows what he’s seeing. The apartment building is unobtrusive in nearly every way, except that it is more Queens than any other part of the sprawling borough that Paulo has seen. It has become the locus for a city avatar’s power.
He can also sense the prickle of the Enemy’s work nearby—but somehow, unlike Inwood, this breach has done less harm. After the cab leaves (with a substantial bill, since Paulo told the man to drive around a bit so that he could pinpoint the area of disturbed dimensional integrity), he slips down the narrow dark gap between the framework houses, and hops over the chain-link fence so that he can get a better look at the site. An aging plastic aboveground pool. It has the same pale, acrid scent as whatever infected the monument rock at Inwood. More power has been applied here, decisively and precisely, excising the infection with a surgical efficiency that Paulo cannot help but reluctantly admire. Between this and its proximity to the apartment building locus, and possibly other factors that Paulo cannot fathom, it seems unlikely that this site will attract… hangers-on.
He hears a voice calling in Chinese to someone else within the house, and quickly he exits the backyard. At the apartment building, he presses the buzzer for the topmost apartment, meaning to work his way down. When an indistinct feminine voice, fuzzy with feedback, murmurs through the intercom speaker, he says, “I’m looking for someone who knows about what happened to the pool in the backyard next door.”
There is a pause. Then the voice says, again indistinctly, “[Something something] ICE? We’re here legally, and whichever [something] reported us can go to hell!”
“I’m most definitely not with ICE, the police, or any organization you’ve ever heard of.” Paulo steps back, onto the building’s walkway, so that anyone looking out the window can get a good look at him in the walkway lighting. He sees someone at the window, but they’re there and gone too quickly for him to discern. Going back to the intercom, he debates whether to ring the apartment doorbell again or move on to the next floor. Then there is another indistinct murmur through the speaker, and the building’s front door buzzes to let him in.
On the fourth floor, a plump fortysomething woman in a sari cracks open the door to peer at him, without bothering to take the chain lock off. Paulo can see a middle-aged man in the background, on his feet and scowling belligerently, with a baby’s feeding bottle in one fist. The woman is defensive, too, but Paulo understands this. Everyone is wary of strangers, in a city.
Her gaze rakes him as he reaches the top landing of the stairs. “You don’t have permission to enter,” she says at once.
“I only want to speak,” he says. “I can stand right here and do that.”
This makes her relax fractionally. “What now?” she asks, in accented, annoyed English. “Are you a reporter? I heard that someone mentioned it on Twitter, but it’s still hard to believe you’ve come about a pool. It’s the middle of the night.”
“My name is São Paulo,” he says, expecting it to mean nothing to her. Most of the Americans he meets have never even heard of him. Or else they think he’s part of California. “I’m looking for—”
Her gasp catches him by surprise. “They said—oh. You’re real?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Quite real, yes.” There’s only one reason she would ask such a question. “You’ve seen things that aren’t real lately?”
She shrugs. “Craziness. Everywhere in this city. But most recently, next door, yesterday. Other people came, who talked about the craziness. They were… like you.” She narrows her eyes at Paulo then, as if trying to discern something she cannot articulate. “I don’t know.”