It’s strange, though. Even though Staten Island is right there—and there is no space in this place—she’s somehow also distant from them. And dimmer than she should be, her high-rises shadowed and streets oddly clouded, as if something’s laid down fog in thick obscuring lines. Bronca reaches, but cannot touch her. Manhattan tries, too, and comes closest, his bustling businesses almost brushing her commuter hubs… but at the last moment, she shies away. Very strange.
Not the only one they’ve come for, however. The others stir restlessly, so Bronca takes hold of the wheel of them and spins it. She is the guide. And in order to see where the singularity of New York is, she must back out of the other world. She must shift her perception up a level, and then up again, until it becomes possible to see the entire universe. (She feels Queens’ awe, because she alone understands the scale of what they are seeing, but Bronca shies away from the girl’s eager grasp of the numbers. They are immense. They contain multitudes. That’ll do for Bronca.) And then they shift up again.
Before them floats the immensity of space and time as Bronca now understands it: not just here but everywhere, not one universe but an infinity of them. It is an endlessly growing broccoliesque mass, here in the no-place of perception. Each branch consists of thousands of universes stacked atop each other like plates of mica, forming columns that snake around and branch off, dominoes set up by someone with no sense of order. There is an order to it (and she hears another part of herself, Queens, thinking loudly, A fractal tree!), but in its immensity and dynamism, in the ferociously energetic churn of creation, it’s almost an overwhelming thing to grasp. Not limitless, as Bronca first thinks, but vast beyond her ability to easily imagine. A thousand branches (that Bronca can see) grow and then crank out two thousand fissioned-off children that then generate four thousand grandchildren, and…
But abruptly there is a hollow thoom, and a ripple, and one of the bigger thickets of branches collapses before them. It happens so fast. There is a fleeting blue-shifted glow, and then that whole twisting cluster burns away, all the way back to the stem it branched off from. Bronca feels the others shudder in anguish and horror, and she shares it. As beautiful as that brightly burning chain is—like the most amazing fireworks ever—they all know what it means. Countless universes have just died, or become as never-were, like the branchings that must once have spawned Atlantis.
But Bronca draws their attention to what floats in this branch’s place, tiny but bright, not connected to the other universes but blazing and stable all on its own. A singular point of light.
Bronca spins them, and again they behold themselves: they are such a light. They have witnessed the birth of another city like themselves, somewhere in the multiverse. Many such lights dot the tree, interspersed among its splits and folds—thousands of cities, glowing like jewels against the formless dark. There are places in the distance that seem to lack those lights; the tree’s trunk, maybe? But amid the nearby crown? Cities. Everywhere.
And now Bronca uses the strength of the other four to direct them back and down and in, to the centerpoint of them all—
Before them, in a pool of mottled light, lies the primary avatar of New York. He curls atop a bed of ancient newspapers, asleep. There’s a layer of pale dust on his Black skin; he’s been here for days. He looks so alone there, self-contained but unguarded, so young, so fragile. The thought comes: I will do anything for him, which is not Bronca’s thought—Manhattan, whose conviction is part knight-errant discovering the quest to which he needs to devote his life, and part raw lust. Still, Bronca feels it with all the conviction of her own heart. Ours, is what she does think, which surprises her because she’s never been the possessive type. Someone else in their gathering reacts to this, but there is pleasure in the reaction. Yes, flows the thought, echoed this time by all of them. It doesn’t really matter anymore who it comes from. Ours. He is
ours, and we are his, of course, but
wait, this isn’t good, how are you in my head
Focus, Bronca pushes through their growing anxiety. Too many strong egos all tangled up together. This isn’t going to last long. Where?
The pool of light spins, and for the first time they get a good look at the walls of the place where the primary lies, albeit fleetingly. There are white tiles in patterns, arches decorated with a mosaic of colored bricks—(Bronca gasps suddenly. She knows those tiles.) There is no real sense of placeness or direction. Bronca tries to stop the spinning, reaching out—down—toward the primary again, but she cannot control it—
And far below them, as they pull away, the primary avatar’s one visible eye suddenly opens.
Getting warmer, he says without words.
Then he opens his mouth, and they twist and fall again, into the yawning blackness between his teeth—
Someone shakes Bronca roughly. She resents the hell out of whoever’s done this. “Leave me alone,” she snaps. “I’m old. I need my fucking rest.”
“Old B, if you don’t get up right now, I’mma pour cold coffee on you, and if that doesn’t kill you with a heart attack, you’re gonna die from cussing me out. Get up.”
So Bronca pulls herself awake. She’s lying on the rattier of the two couches in the staff meeting room, which means she’s going to be sore and achy whenever she manages to sit upright. Some of the keyholders are busy upstairs; she can hear one of them distantly doing something with the circular saw, and it’s a testament to how tired she is that she actually slept through that racket. There’s still daylight coming in through the exhibit hall glass, so she couldn’t have slept that long. It’s maybe 8:00 p.m.? In June, the sun doesn’t really set ’til around nine.
The others are still there, flopped across the chairs or couches. Veneza’s the only one on her feet. Manhattan’s actually sitting on the floor near a couch, which Bronca feels compelled to warn him against; he’s not going to have any feeling left in his ass if he spends too much time on industrial concrete flooring. Too late, though, because he’s blinking blearily as if he, too, just woke up. Brooklyn’s awake, barely. Queens is rubbing her face, but then she rummages in her backpack and pulls out a packet of chocolate-covered espresso beans, popping a handful into her mouth. She offers some to Brooklyn and then Manhattan.
And then someone else walks into their circle: a tall Asian man in a business suit, maybe in his fifties, with a face like carved marble and a mouth set in a permanent downturn. He’s not Bronca’s main concern, however. The man is carrying someone else over his shoulder. A limp body in a more stylish suit, although grass-stained and filthy.
“Oh my God,” Brooklyn says, reaching for her phone and immediately thumbing the “emergency call” button. Manhattan scrambles to his feet, shaking his head to clear it.
“Put that away,” snaps the stranger to Brooklyn. He’s got an accent, but it’s unusual. Chinese-inflected British English, Bronca decides. “He’s a city. Paramedics can’t fix this.”
They all stare, but Brooklyn puts her phone away. The Asian man flaps his hand rudely at Queens until she gets off the couch, and then he lays the unconscious man across it. This man is younger, leaner, Latino-ishly brown although in a more ambiguous way than usual. He reeks of cigarette smoke. There’s no blood that Bronca can see, but he’s gray in a way that has nothing to do with skin color. It’s the strangest thing to see—as if the whole of the world is in HD color, but this man has somehow regressed to the days when televisions were just three channels and grainy black-and-white pixels. And there’s something… around him? Bronca blinks, squints—and then, when she shifts her awareness partly into cityspace, she understands. There is a kind of translucent envelope surrounding the unconscious man and suffusing his flesh. It has an attached line, like an umbilicus, which trails away to someplace in… South America. Brazil, she guesses, though she’s only 50 percent sure she could pick that country out on a map, and she can’t remember the names of any cities there except Rio.