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 wrap up N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became with Chapter 16: New York is Who?, as well as the Coda. The novel was first published in March 2020. Spoilers ahead!
“R’lyeh draws near, she thinks, and flinches at the welt this whips across her thoughts.”
Chapter 16: New York is Who?
Aislyn has teleported Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx from Staten Island to Wall Street; they reappear sprawled before the Charging Bull statue along with Veneza. She’s pale and covered with the slime of the monster that nearly swallowed her, but regains consciousness as Bronca bends over her. From the “deep, atavistic fear” with which she describes her ordeal, it’s clear her psyche has suffered more than her body.
Bronca urges Veneza to focus on the here and now. Queens gets Veneza to giggle with promises of stink-quelling incense, but then recalls Staten Island’s treachery. Can they hope to revive New York minus one borough? Also, Hong is no longer with them. They can only hope he’s been zapped back to Hong Kong: Their immediate mission is to find the primary, however futile that may prove.
All pile into Bronca’s Jeep, where Brooklyn arranges for an aide to meet them at City Hall Station with keys. What with the white structures sprouting everywhere, traffic’s terrible. More disturbing still are all the tendril-infected humans. Veneza says the structures are “connector pylons” for the Woman’s city—she means to plant it square atop New York. Haven’t they noticed the shadow of descending R’lyeh? Though the sky is cloudless, the sun risen, the whole city is darkening.
At the Station entrance Brooklyn’s aide turns over keys and a flashlight, and they venture inside. On the subway platform they find the “scattered corpse of a biomechanoid monster,” part immense stubby-legged worm, part train. Its lead car is jammed into a side tunnel. Out of its ruptured conductor’s cab Paulo appears, panting. He leads them through the debris to a naked, bloody and exhausted Manny, King Kong no longer.
The newly arrived boroughs report Staten Island’s alliance with the Enemy. Paulo is appalled. Manny sighs and leads them into the alcove where the primary lies sleeping. The four faithful gather around him. The skylight above New York darkens. When R’lyeh lands, it will destroy not only New York City but their entire universe.
From outside the circle, Veneza calls to Bronca. She’s sweating, dazed. Bronca goes to her, then sees the girl as she’s seen herself and the other boroughs: a city. She’s become the avatar of her home place, Jersey City. Why not? Jersey City’s even closer to Manhattan than Staten Island, and don’t its inhabitants tend to call themselves New Yorkers? As Paulo hurriedly explains, living cities aren’t defined by politics or artificial boundaries, but by what their people believe.
There’s no time for Veneza to grow into her new reality. Luckily she’s lived with them through the Woman’s assault; luckily, as Bronca realizes, this transformation is what Veneza has wanted all along. Five now, the boroughs regroup around the primary. It’s the end of the world, but they’ve become family, and joy is joy whatever the circumstances. “Who are we?” Manny asks as the alcove goes dark. Dark, except for the light the primary radiates. The boy opens his eyes.
It’s he who answers Manny: “We’re New York… Aw, yeah.”
Buy the Book
The Crane Husband
And they are New York, “a single titanic concussion of sound… a violent wave of pure percussive force… methane-green sewer fire that races through the streets.” The fire burns away all alien white growths, all the tendrils infesting people. Packs of freed New Yorkers hunt down the multitudinous embodiments of the Woman and rend them into “featureless undifferentiated ur-matter.” R’lyeh quails, caught between realms, too far gone to return to the “buffer dimension.” Cleansing city-energy has destroyed its anchors in New York; without them, R’lyeh will be “lost in the formless aethers outside of existence itself.”
The Woman in White—R’lyeh—seizes her only salvation, the anchors remaining on Staten Island. The small angry borough will sustain her for now, finally getting its wish to be free.
Meanwhile, the remaining boroughs plus Jersey City are just fine. They are New York.
Coda
New York and his boroughs gather at Coney Island to celebrate their victory, along with families and friends. Paulo and Hong were wrong to think the New York subavatars would be devoured by the primary as was the case in London. Two very different cities, after all. Manny’s a complication, of all the boroughs the one meant to “serve” primary New York. A knight, an enforcer, a lover if New York will allow that further intimacy. Somehow the two of them will figure it out.
Paulo discusses the coming Summit of living cities in Paris. They’ve been wrong about a great many things, and will want to hear directly from New York about the Enemy’s new stratagems. From the sunny beach, they can see Staten Island. It looks unchanged, but the avatars can perceive that it “sits in a deep well of gloom.” Aislyn has betrayed them, completely.
Paulo rises to fly back to his own city. New York feels a pang at the departure of his mentor and could-have-been lover. But he rejoins the boroughs, and Manny says, “Welcome back.” To which New York replies “No place in the world that can compare.”
And they all smile “with the magic of this truth.”
This Week’s Metrics
Mind the Gap: Train monster.
The Degenerate Dutch: “Magic xenophobia” is the worst superpower.
Libronomicon: The primary avatar lies on a bed of “tabloid tales and buried ledes.” How better to describe New York than a combination of stories larger than life, and small personal stories that most of the crowd misses?
Madness Takes Its Toll: Veneza is pretty freaked out by R’lyeh’s angles. Bronca suggests compartmentalization, and figuring out when you’re ready to handle triggers. “Some thoughts are poison. You can think them, but only when you’ve got the strength—or therapy, whichever floats your boat.”
Anne’s Commentary
As I’ve started watching the series version of What We Do in the Shadows (late to the vampiric party, I know), it amuses me to see the bloodsuckers wander around Staten Island, encountering werewolves and dudebros and werewolf dudebros but no wormy extradimensional invaders. At least not as far as I’ve gotten. Were they to meet the Woman in White, what hilarity and carnage might ensue?
The Manhattan vampires look down on the Staten Island vampires. I guess this is a superiority/inferiority complex affecting borough residents of all species. If there are other Mythosian city-avatars (a lizard-ghost representing the Nameless City?), they’re probably sneering at R’lyeh, stuck as she is on so unfashionable a borough. And to have her defeat come partly at the psychic hands of Jersey City! Not even a real NYC borough! No fair, however Paulo tries to justify it!
Paulo has a lot to explain here at City’s climax and denouement. Isn’t it too convenient for Veneza to step in for Aislyn at the last minute? Too borough ex machina? Granted that Paulo’s explanation seems plausible: Living cities aren’t defined by boundaries imposed by politics—they’re defined by what their residents believe. If Jersey City people believe they’re part of New York strongly enough to routinely claim they’re New Yorkers, Jersey City is part of New York. Belief in one’s collective-derived power and the visualization (construction) of desired results are at the core of city magic. Ergo, Veneza can become the embodiment of a Jersey City that counts as a subunit of New York.
But what makes me embrace the Veneza-twist is not so much what Paolo says as how Jemisin has developed the character in earlier chapters. At first I expected Veneza to be a bit player rather than someone plot-crucial; Yijing and Jess—especially adversarial Yijing—seemed more like characters to watch out for. Then we follow the warm and complex relationship between Bronca and Veneza—Old B and Young B—and watch Veneza demonstrate her capabilities. She takes control after the Alt Artiste confrontation, showing her Center fellows how to lock down their online identities. Though a Jersey City girl, she demonstrates “city-attunement” to New York, realizing with Bronca that the place has changed, yesterday just a city, today a living entity. She’s also sensitive to alien incursions like the creepy presence in the bathroom stall, and she partly shares Bronca’s reality-shift in the gallery, how the room goes empty, how the light becomes strange, how the Alt Artistes’ special painting isn’t really a painting. When Bronca hesitates to confide in Veneza, the city-voice in her head tells her to trust the girl. To help her survive. To accept her as an ally.
Bronca’s shocked to see Veneza in city-space, a city-embodiment like herself, but the shock’s short-lived. After all, Veneza’s been in on the weirdness from the beginning, an effective borough-ally, and “very belatedly” Bronca realizes that Veneza has hoped to emulate the boroughs and realize her own avatar-potential. She’s earned the transformation, especially after her ordeal in the Woman’s interdimensional way station. What greater proof of Veneza’s psychic sturdiness than to retain her sanity in the face of what shouldn’t exist?
In the Coda, Paulo offers New York a vague explanation about why he didn’t consume his subavatars as London did. The Summit believed this would happen. Hong told the boroughs their primary would probably need to devour them in order to revive. Surely these elder cities weren’t speculating on inadequate evidence, or else Hong wouldn’t have scared the shit out of the boroughs by way of full disclosure. Paulo admits that it might have been “foolish on its face” to assume New York must behave like London. After all, he “cannot think of two cities more different than this one and that one.” But he doesn’t explain what the operative differences could have been. In truth, his explanation is less explanation than careful apology for the Summit having planted foot in mouth over the cannibal thing.
The cannibal thing’s fictive function is actually to ramp up the stakes and make the boroughs’ resolutions to persist more heroic, with Queens providing some realistic reluctance.
Ultimately, all’s well for the boroughs, everybody alive and intact and enjoying their beach day. Manny’s past remains mysterious, his romantic future uncertain. New York feels the erotic tension between his “knight” and himself, but is optimistic they’ll figure it out, somehow.
New York and his five “other selves” aren’t as carefree as they appear. They’ve purposefully chosen this end of Coney Island for their celebration, because from there they can see Staten Island and face the shadow hovering over it, as deeply gloomy as that one over Innsmouth, if not more so.
More so, I fear. Don’t worry. There’s a Summit meeting in Paris to discuss the situation, and another novel for our living cities to, well, live through!
Ruthanna’s Commentary
I had a suspicion that “eating” might be more metaphorical than literal, though with Jemisin you never know. I’m glad everyone gets to stay sapient and corporeal, albeit with the mortifying ordeal of being known turned up to 11!
I did not see “Screw Staten Island, we’ve got New Jersey” coming, but Veneza deserves it. And Aislyn and R’lyeh Squigglebitch deserve… whatever they’ve got. Mutual haunting via spaciotemporal anomaly? Sister cities with benefits? Supervillain team-up? They deserve it; the rest of the world not so much.
And hurrah for Veneza, promoted from sidekick to fellow avatar! Defining city-ness based on legal boundaries was bugging me. I wonder if the other knowing-support folks, like Manny’s cab driver, were also backup avatars-in-waiting. Or are. After all, New York keeps spreading down the eastern seaboard, incorporating smaller cities as it goes. New unofficial boroughs seem like a distinct possibility.
So what makes the difference between the Tragedy of London and the Awkward Assigned Family of New York? One possibility is a difference between the avatars—more compatible personalities that can find a way to mesh, or even less compatible ones that do a better job of combining collaboration with snarky individuality. Another possibility is that our heroes got their willingness to sacrifice for the greater good just right, making the actual sacrifice unnecessary. Maybe R’lyeh interfered with London’s integration—not preventing it, but forcing sub-avatar consumption and leaving the surviving primary more brittle.
The possibility I like best, though, is that it really is a difference between the cities. London, after all, was the center of an empire. It devoured other places—or tried to. Naturally it would devour itself. But New York’s boroughs all have strong separate identities even as they share a central identity. New York spreads by adding new sections, new peoples: drawing on a very New York-ish argument about immigration metaphors, a tossed salad rather than a melting pot. New York’s archetypes allow for multiple selves; New York’s avatars follow suit.
So what remains hanging for The World We Make? First and most obviously, there’s the upcoming Summit, a meeting that promises to compare to Endless family dinners for awkwardness and uncomfortable conversations. Everyone knows—or should know—now what R’lyeh is up to, and that the Enemy is no longer a one-city-at-a-time problem that fully-fledged urban areas can safely ignore. Nevertheless I expect lots of arguments about whether the problem is real, whose problem it is, and maybe (if we’re very lucky) how to solve it.
Second, there’s the larger question of the harm that cities do in their birthing. R’lyeh shows that it’s possible to control the destructive interactions between universes. Her creators wanted a weapon against the city-forming parts of the broccoli, but maybe there’s a nuclear-power-plant equivalent of her atom bomb. Maybe she could act as an intermediary to negotiate an interdimensional research collaboration at the new University of R’lyeh? Somehow I suspect this is not the plot of World. But perhaps we’ll at least learn more about Ignorance-Is-Bliss Cosmology 101.
And then—of great importance—how about getting Nameless Central Avatar into a proper relationship? Manny is available and interested, but a hair intense. Still, his ability to hold back until NCA says go is promising. And then there’s Paolo. Maybe not boyfriend material, but potentially regular one-night stand material. Who also has a not-thing with Hong. I imagine that over the centuries, the telenovela quotient of inter-city relationships has gotten high.
Somehow I suspect that this is not the plot of World either. But I intend to find out ASAP.
Next week, we turn to an old gothic tale, Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” You can find it in Fitz-James O’Brien: Gothic Short Stories or the Dark Descent anthology. Then in two weeks, we start on our new longread: Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black.
Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden is out! She is also the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. 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 on Mastodon as [email protected], 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.
