Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we continue N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became with Chapter 10: Make Staten Island Grate Again(st Sao Paulo). The novel was first published in March 2020. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for attempted rape, neonazis, and racial slurs.
Chapter 10: Make Staten Island Grate Again(st Sao Paulo)
The roof is Aislyn’s favorite retreat. Tonight, the city skyline entrances her. Her mother Kendra’s appearance is unprecedented, and Aislyn impulsively asks her to stay. After a “companionable silence,” Kendra asks if Aislyn made it to the city yesterday.
Kendra Houlihan has aged well, except for the “slow, sad weariness” in her eyes. As Aislyn has learned that women pretend to be dull so men can feel sharp, their friendship has grown. Still, it’s a shock when Kendra admits that she hoped Aislyn would “make it.” She confides that she wanted to be a concert pianist and won a Juilliard scholarship. Then she got pregnant, and married Matthew Houlihan. When he’s drinking, Matthew still mourns his miscarried son Conall. He doesn’t know that, determined to pursue music, Kendra got an abortion. So great was Matthew’s heartbreak, she felt she had to give up her scholarship. She doesn’t want Aislyn to sacrifice her own dreams.
Downstairs Aislyn finds Matthew with a rare visitor. He introduces the younger man as Conall McGuinness. No, not a fellow cop. They’re just working on a “thing” together. Matthew tells Kendra to prepare the guest room. Before retreating, Aislyn notices a white tendril protruding from the back of Conall’s neck.
Sleepless, Aislyn goes into the backyard and contemplates the “distant, increasingly desperate call of the city.” Then she notices Conall, sprawled on a lounger, wearing Matthew’s too-big pajama bottoms. His bare chest sports several tattoos. An Irish trinity knot surmounted by the numbers 14 and 88. Muscular Norse gods. Over his heart, a swastika. Conall’s pleased the tattoos didn’t make her “run screaming.” Matthew did say she was “a true daughter of the isle.”
Aislyn wonders if the Woman’s spying through Conall’s tendril. He asks crude questions about whether Aislyn’s had sex with nonwhites. Just trying to tell if she’s his type. She’s definitely not, Aislyn says, but Conall persists, pointing out his erection, grabbing her hand, asking if she doesn’t want to escape “this shitty island.” Aislyn can’t understand why Matthew’s befriended Conall, but realizes “on some level, her father is this man.” Jerking free, she exudes a “sphere of pure force” that tosses Conall through the fence. She leaves herself, commanding Conall to say she “wasn’t here.”
Aislyn walks briskly, without destination. She feels “her island, editing perception around her.” No one notices her. When Matthew checks his backyard surveillance cameras, he’ll see only an indistinct figure.
A car rolls up behind her. The driver is “ferociously lean, dark-haired, and something other than white,” a cigarette between his lips. He calls, “Staten Island?” Momentarily Aislyn perceives her city reeling into “defensive configuration” in response to the larger “foreign, neon-bright skyline”.
The man tells her to get in. White fronds suddenly block her way, then grapple with the car. The Woman in White seizes her: “Whew! He almost got you.”
Aislyn shakes off the Woman, who has changed from the ferry-side sophisticate to a chunky woman in a tracksuit, white hair streaked with dyed auburn. She’s infuriated the Woman didn’t stop Conall’s assault.
Meanwhile the car breaks free. Its driver exits, radiating “stylish menace. The Woman babbles: he’s “another city,” and she hates him. Aislyn now feels he’s “bigger and stronger and a man and foreign.”
The man blows cigarette smoke and shrivels the fronds from “translucence into absence.” Sao Paulo, the Woman calls him. He accuses her of violating their ancient understanding that once a city’s been born, her attacks end. The Woman objects: her kind shouldn’t need to “protest their own assault before you’ll stop.” Before he’ll recognize them as people.
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Even Though I Knew the End
Aislyn, conflating an assault on the Woman with assaults on other women, challenges Sao Paulo: What does he want? Surprised at her anger, he explains he’s come to find her and the “others.” The city needs to “complete its maturation.” When Aislyn says she doesn’t need his help, he looks at the Woman as if Aislyn can’t speak for herself.
Still “thrumming…with thirty years of suppressed fury,” Aislyn emits another force wave. An avatar on home ground, she blasts Sao Paulo over his car. His forearms snap; in the other reality, an earthquake splinters a Sao Paulo highway. The Woman abandons her host, leaving the human to wander off, dazed. Sao Paulo’s instinctive defense rakes Aislyn, damaging Staten Island’s lone subway line.
Aislyn staggers home, unseen by the cops investigating their back yard. Sinking into sleep, she realizes that despite the city’s call, only Staten Island protected her tonight.
The city can “go hang.”
This Week’s Metrics
Mind the Gap: “A city’s commuter conduits are its lifeblood.” And when avatars lash out at each other, those conduits are literally broken: a splintered highway in Sao Paulo, and trenches across the one subway line linking Staten Island to the rest of New York.
The Degenerate Dutch: Aislyn’s father is working with his “friend” Conall on a “thing.” Given Conall’s Nazi tattoos, one can all too easily guess what kind of thing he has in mind.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
In last chapter’s comments, someone raised an interesting critique: halfway through The City We Became, it felt like we were only getting towards the end of the introduction. I hope they’ll excuse me from riffing on the complaint, because it helped me get a handle on what I like about the book’s pacing, and what’s so interesting about it.
Pacing and story structure can feel instinctive even as they vary wildly. This is granular: there are things you learn to expect from the stories told in particular cultures and ethnicities, particular genres and subgenres. I tripped over this early in my exploration of the Weird: I was frustrated that narrators often refused to acknowledge the Big Scary Thing’s reality until the last page. I was used to subgenres where we acknowledge the Big Scary Thing early on, because the story is about handling the problems created by said Big Scary Thing. Godzilla is, after all, not about people denying the existence of the giant monster crushing half of downtown. *stops to scribble down story idea* Ahem. But much of the Weird is about psychological reactions to the mere existence of the Big Scary Thing. The conflict is different, and the pace is different.
The Weird is also originally a genre of privilege, where all too often the Big Scary Thing is the shocking truth that you are not cosmically important. If you already know that—if you have it forcibly brought home to you by other humans on a regular basis—Weirdness becomes something else again. Maybe the horror comes from the denial and apathy of those with power, or from your commonality (or theirs) with the Big Scary. Or maybe it comes from what you have to do, in order to fight something even bigger and scarier than other humans.
This last challenge arises in “The City Born Great,” where the main New York avatar objects to embodying white yoga ladies. Doesn’t a homeless queer kid of color do enough to carry those people on his back? It isn’t fair that he should avatar for people who hate his guts. But that very reasonable refusal may be part of why he couldn’t become New York all by himself.
Now, five avatars have arisen to embody five boroughs. We know how this goes—here are all the signposts for a familiar story form. It’s an ensemble: maybe like a heist or a superhero movie. Our big question is how the team members will work together, each bringing particular skills and quirks, to achieve their goal. There’s a tempo to it: we meet each person on their own for just long enough to admire what they bring to the table, they join forces by the 20-minute mark, and then we’re into the meat of the story. There will be arguments and personality conflicts, but the actual working-together is a given.
But here, several avatars are resisting that call to action. Some even reject their wholeness with the other boroughs—the legitimacy of coming together as a team in the first place. No one else has ever helped the Bronx, why should they help others? Staten Island isn’t really part of the city. And so on. Overcoming that resentment and resistance is the major challenge they face before they can defeat the Woman in White.
Seen this way, we’re looking not at the expected structure of a superhero movie, but of something closer to an enemies-to-lovers romance. The Woman’s approach to destroying New York fits neatly: she sees human prejudice, our refusal to see our commonality and wholeness, as our biggest vulnerability. And so it is, even when she isn’t directly involved.
Aislyn is most vulnerable to the Woman because she’s most vulnerable to xenophobia. Even picking up on the Woman’s shitty taste in tools doesn’t make her better disposed to other avatars. Knowing her father is an abuser—with shitty taste in surrogate sons—doesn’t give her the wisdom to reject all his claims about the world. Even learning her mother’s backstory, and hopes for her daughter to get out, doesn’t erase inculcated phobias. Of everyone in this book, Aislyn comes closest to late-life Lovecraft: sheltered to the point of anxiety and xenophobia, tempted by the cosmopolitan and conversation with the other, and still thinking of that temptation as wrong. Even the power she brings to the avatar table is one of denial: we aren’t like those people. Everything’s fine here, not like in the city.
Aislyn’s equal fear of elder god and fellow city evokes an accusation from the Woman: we do the same thing to her that we do to each other. We refuse to see her people as people, assaulting them while pretending we simply haven’t been asked in the right, civilized way to stop. She exploits that prejudice because she doesn’t think she can prevent it. Or, like several of our avatars, doesn’t think she should have to.
Which in turn raises an unexpected question: if the avatars can eventually learn to get along with each other earthquake-free—can they and the Woman in White learn to do the same?
Anne’s Commentary
It took me a while to figure out the title of this chapter. “Make Staten Island Grate Again,” no problem when the MAGA battle cry continues to grate on our ears. What was this “(st Sao Paulo),” though? “St” is an abbreviation for many things. “Saint,” for one, but “Sao” already means “saint.” How about “street,” “state,” “stet,” “short ton,” “stitch,” “stanza,” “stone”? None of those make sense.
Or—how about reading the title “Make Staten Island Grate Against Sao Paulo”? I get it now, and for sure, Staten Aislyn grates against newborn New York’s much put-upon mentor. I sympathize with Sao Paulo and his snapped forearms, but I guess you can’t blame a total-noob avatar for failing to modulate her City-ForceTM attacks, especially when they’re fueled by thirty years of repressed fury.
On the other hand, I don’t feel sorry at all for Conall, or for the fence: Dad Matthew’s outer fortification.
On the third hand, Kendra’s history broke my heart. She doesn’t explain how she got involved with Matthew. Sadly, we can easily imagine the circumstances for ourselves, the domino of proximity tipping into the dominos of loneliness and initial attraction and the dunning advice of family and friends to be practical, stop the crazy dreaming. A working class Catholic girl from Staten Island does not take the stage at Carnegie Hall—more likely, some big Black dude will drag her into an alley and mug and rape and strangle her the first day she ventures into Manhattan, borough of iniquities, doesn’t she know that? Better to stick to one’s home place, one’s home people, one’s home destiny. Doesn’t she know that?
Aislyn knows it. She’s been told often enough. She has her mother’s example in front of her every day. The big city sings a siren song, her father insists, and what do sirens do with those they lure? They eat them. Better to let Dad Matthew eat his little Apple. At least he loves her. He keeps her on the paths of righteousness. He’ll even provide her with a proper husband, a true son of the isle. Which isle? Ireland? Or Staten Island? Admittedly, the bad shit that happens everywhere happens on Staten Island, too. Never mind. It’s still the home of decent people, like himself.
Like himself is the creed that condemns Matthew, when like Matthew is Conall. “On some level, [Aislyn realizes] her father is this man.” He can wallow in the worldview that “Evil comes from elsewhere…Evil is other people.” There’s comfort in the black-and-white. It’s an enviable illusion Aislyn has never entirely shared. She’s been drawn to the kaleidoscopic reality of the city: shifting, complex, terrifying and exhilarating. That has made her a suitable subavatar for New York. Her roots in Staten Island’s hidden, denied complexity make her a suitable—the suitable—avatar for the borough.
And under all this, concurrent with it, is another reality, the deep Staten Island of which Aislyn (like it or not) is now the embodiment. After her lifelong indoctrination in vulnerability, Aislyn can swat aside tormentors. Such power, however, is also a vulnerability. Enter again the Woman in White, just as Sao Paulo approaches Aislyn for the first time. Last chapter we saw her manipulating Bronca’s sympathies; this chapter she’s at it again. For Bronca, she played the undervalued and abused “employee” of a higher evil. For Aislyn, she plays the victim of Sao Paulo’s callous aggression—why, he doesn’t even recognize the Woman as a person until she protests his assault! Fresh from Conall’s would-be-rapist clutches, Aislyn’s receptive.
And—again—maybe there’s something more than manipulation in the Woman’s complaints? In Sao Paulo’s reaction to her accusation, Aislyn sees not only confusion and anger but guilt. Is her observation accurate? She hasn’t lived with Matthew all her life without absorbing his prejudices against “brown foreign” men who may be “Muslim, or some other kind of woman-hating heathen barbarian.” She even throws a NIMBY at Sao Paulo before swatting him into the darkness. “ ‘You don’t belong here,’ she snarls … ‘Not in this city, not on my island. I don’t need you. I don’t want you here!’ ”
The Woman in White gets swatted by the same outburst of City-ForceTM, but she’s not “Aislyn’s intended target.” In her outrage at Sao Paulo’s “entitlement,” Aislyn has set aside her outrage at the Woman for not interfering with Conall’s game. That’s got to be pretty encouraging for the Woman, balm for her recent rejection by Bronca.
And then, as her last act of a busy night, Aislyn decides to ignore the city’s call. After all, it was Staten Island that empowered her, not the other boroughs. Going full-on parochial, she assures herself that “everything she needs in life” is right there in her Island. Whereas, “the city can go hang.”
But who, then, will hang with it?
Next week is our 400th post! Join us for our anniversary weird-watching tradition, with Detective Harry Philip Lovecraft featured in Cast a Deadly Spell.
Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden is now out! She is also the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
