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 15: “And lo, the Beast looked upon the face of Beauty.” The novel was first published in March 2020. Spoilers ahead!
“I… didn’t think about the eating thing.”
Chapter 15: “And lo, the Beast looked upon the face of Beauty.”
Cities make their own luck. Madison’s aura-limned cab gets Manny and Paulo to their station without detours or delays. Cops guard the entrance; three white-tendrilled ones block the avatars, but their tendril-free boss says they’re “here to fix things.” “Those who would help protect the city see what they need to see,” Paulo explains.
The 6 trains aren’t running, so they board the lead car of an empty train. Feeling the “powerful nearby tug of the primary,” Manny city-energy propels the train to the defunct City Hall stop. Skylights reveal the Beaux Arts ironworks from Bronca’s book. Deeper in, only Manny’s phone-flashlight provides illumination. The Enemy must know they’re approaching their target, but all Manny thinks is here and at last.
New York is a too-thin young Black man curled asleep on bundled newspapers, yet “the most special person in the whole city.” The power he radiates makes Manny shiver, “feeding something in him that had begun to starve.” He reaches out, but can’t touch. When he pushes against the force, it becomes concrete-impenetrable.
Even Paulo’s “So eager to be eaten?” can’t dispel Manny’s urge to touch the primary. “I’m his. He’s mine,” he blurts. Paulo admits to envy that New York’s birth is a group experience—like most cities, Paulo endured the ordeal alone. He describes his struggles during Brazil’s 1960s strife. Hong, too, struggled alone in the Opium Wars. This makes Hong 200 years old, Paulo 70 or 80. City avatars live as long as their cities, unless they tangle with other cities or the increasingly virulent Enemy. Stillbirths are increasing.
Manny imagines the primary awake and vibrant, then pictures him muted by the loneliness he’s sensed in Paulo. He asks Paulo what the pre-city primary was like. “Angry,” Paulo replies, but he smiles fondly. “Arrogant. Frightened, but unwilling to let his fear restrict him.” To Manny, that’s a good description of someone who could embody New York. But touching him, waking him, requires the other subavatars.
Rumination is interrupted by noise from the subway tunnel, swelling to the distressed-metal screech of the train climbing from its tracks onto the platform. Manny freezes in terror.
***
Awakened by the racket outside her house, Aislyn investigates. In her front yard are three women: one stocky and “Mexican-looking,” one a “tall, stately Black lady,” the third an Indian about Aislyn’s age. An older “maybe Japanese” man picks himself off the ground. Above all floats the Woman in White, beaming over her shoulder at Aislyn.
The female strangers, Aislyn knows, are the other boroughs. The man’s a city, too, but not the missing Manhattan. Degrees of foreignness aside, they’re all intruders. The suppressed fury of thirty years casts around Aislyn a “shimmering, terrible light” that awes the “foreigner and her other selves.” She barks “Get off my lawn,” and the intruders are flung into the street. They right themselves painfully. Brooklyn says Aislyn knows who they are, and what the Woman is. Yeah, my friend, Aislyn counters. Sometimes people do bad things because they have to. At least in the Woman’s world, people try to be decent.
The strangers’ judgmental stares provoke Aislyn further: Maybe she doesn’t want New York to be okay. Maybe it should go to hell. Brooklyn and the Bronx move to grab Aislyn. The Woman opens an interdimensional portal to a black cavern in which Veneza lies unconscious. Too bad she didn’t check her back seat, the Woman jeers. If her friends want her back, they need to go now. Sure, she’ll destroy New York and eventually their whole universe, but quickly, painlessly. To relish suffering is humanity’s way. She can even make a temporary pocket universe for some humans to live out their lives in. Deal?
Aislyn’s shocked to see the black cavern protrude teeth—it’s really a monstrous mouth about to swallow Veneza! Yet the Woman is Aislyn’s only friend. Aislyn just wants the dilemma—and intruders—to go away, and so she wishes it with all her might…
***
The subway train’s become a train-serpent monster, mouth lined with jagged subway-seat teeth. Paulo’s cigarette smoke repels it only briefly. In “a red haze of instinct,” Manny snarls. He begins to grow huge, superhumanly strong, black-furred, the beast he’s always been within. His last thought is that he needs to watch better movies about New York.
King Kong charges into battle…
***
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Even Though I Knew the End
Aislyn shouts, “Go away! None of you belong here!” Her city-energy blasts the intruders elsewhere, along with the black cavern-mouth. The Woman remains, floating.
It took great effort to “drive away so many parts of herself.” Exhausted, Aislyn sinks onto her doorstep. The Woman gently touches her shoulder. They’re friends, right?
Aislyn murmurs, “Yeah. Friends.” Sharp pain stings her shoulder, then fades along with her confusion. She smiles: A whole city cares about her, even if the city’s not New York.
More strange structures sprout from Staten Island, “the infrastructure of a different city, laying the foundations of a different world.”
This Week’s Metrics
Mind the Gap: The trains are on Manhattan’s side… until they’re not. The shut-down 6 train gets Manny to the central avatar’s side, right before getting appropriated by R’lyeh.
The Degenerate Dutch: Aislyn can see Hong’s “filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill” in her family’s garden, and reacts badly for everyone involved, including herself.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Aislyn doesn’t like being called crazy. She puts up with it from her father, who she “loves”, but not from Queens.
Anne’s Commentary
The title of Chapter 15, you’ve heard it before, haven’t you? It sounds like something from the Bible or the Qur’an, or maybe from the often-retold French fairy tale, or maybe from Shakespeare, because didn’t the Bard come up with most things quotable? The full quotation is:
“And the prophet said:
‘And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty.
And it stayed its hand from killing.
And from that day, it was as one dead.’”
Credit is given to an “Old Arabian Proverb.” That sounds believable, right? However, it’s as genuinely Arabian as Lovecraft’s Al Azif, aka the Necronomicon. The actual “prophet” was American filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, who conceived and directed the original King Kong (1933). The “prophecy” was part of the opening titles of the horror classic, foreshadowing the tragedy of unrequited love to follow.
The moral is: Beast, none of this beauty-inspired hand-staying if you don’t want to be walking beast-toast. Beauty won’t want anything to do with Beast, except maybe in Peter Jackson’s Kong remake (2005), where she can’t help liking the big guy. Still, what long-term future is there for a relationship only a little more promising than Donkey and Dragon’s? At least Kong and his love-object are both primates, even taxonomic family-mates (Hominidae). There remains the troublesome size difference.
I take it that in Jemisin’s chapter Manny is the Beast and New York the Beauty. Manny fell in lust-love with NY at first visionary sight. At first in-body sight, his fate is sealed. The sleeping boy is the most special person in the city of which Manny has become a lesser but integral part. He’s now committed to sacrifice himself to the primary, if that’s what it takes to wake NY to full vibrancy. Manny’s most poignant sorrow is not that he himself will die, but that in becoming the one and only city avatar, NY will lose vibrancy and experience a solitary sadness like Paulo’s.
Manny is the Beast. He’s always been the Beast, only masquerading as a “good-looking, friendly creature.” At need, in crisis, he drops his mask and unsheaths his claws. At the ultimate crisis, defending the primary from the Enemy’s subway-serpent, he actually Hulks out and bursts from his man-size clothing to become the only monster-construct he can glean from his mental stock of NYC movies.
I don’t know that he could have chosen a better alter-ego than King Kong. Not only has Kong demonstrated his ability to rip other giant beasts apart (including the mega-snake in the 1976 movie), he’s a monster with a heart, ruthless but redeemable, if only circumstances allow. As Kong and Manny arrive in NYC to start new lives, the circumstances for both look sketchy.
Critical question for Manhattan: Has his sight of Beauty marked him for death, or is escape from that fate possible? For all of Hong’s pessimism, must what happened to the London subavatars happen to New York’s? Might it not, in the current unsettled state of city-formation, be its own peculiar exception to the rule? Besides, can anything happen without Aislyn?
And what’s to say about Aislyn? She just does not play well with other borough- and city-avatars. Talk about territorial, don’t you dare step on her lawn, or her driveway either, and especially not in her herb-bed (as a gardener, I appreciate her aversion to this last gross offense). If indeed its quintessence is belonging, territoriality is a natural behavioral trait for Staten Island. One meaning of to belong is to be the possession of a particular person or group. A second meaning is be part of a particular group. Belonging in both senses can be a neutral, or a positive, or a negative thing. Belonging is as belonging does.
For Aislyn, belonging to her family verges too much on belonging (as a possession) to her father. Schooled to fear pretty much all PoDs (people of difference), the idea of leaving her comparatively homogeneous island for the howling diversity of New York is overwhelming—how can she belong to such a wilderness in the way the other boroughs do? Nevertheless, attraction fights repulsion. The terrifying city is also the fairy city of light and possibility. Nevertheless, she must belong to some place greater, to someone more intimately, to a city, to a friend, at least one friend.
So far, the Woman in White has lucked out in Aislyn, having gotten to her first, having understood just how to play her, having been if nothing else white. In the Woman, Aislyn has a whole city who cares for her. Even if the city isn’t New York.
Even if it’s R’lyeh, the definition of difference to humanity, but hey, at least entities are decent there.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
There’s a thing, where people with just enough privilege to be dangerous, though oppressed enough that they ought to ally with other marginalized folk, pick the side of privilege and screw everyone over. Aislyn, avatar that she is, has become the personification of Nice White Women everywhere. As Sondheim tells us, “nice is different than good.”
The thing about Aislyn is that she has the potential to be good. She’s wanted to get out her whole life, wanted a destiny beyond what her father imagines for her. But when it actually comes along—in the form of people she’s been taught to fear—she can’t handle it. Or at least, can’t process the questions that it raises fast enough to choose the literal survival of her species over her father’s heuristic prejudices.
In an earlier chapter, I talked about her almost-nuanced kneejerk morality. It is true that sometimes people have to do bad things because the alternative is worse. It is true that there are no choices that will make you perfectly moral or pure. But when push comes to shove, Aislyn uses these realities to excuse the “bad things” she wants to excuse. R’lyeh makes her comfortable, and calls her a friend, and that’s all she can find her way to caring about.
Accepting anything that your “friends” “have to” do goes along with something equally dark: the idea that to survive, you “have to” drive away parts of yourself. Aislyn has, at this point, given up so much of her selfhood that R’lyeh can do what she’s been trying for the whole book: get a cordyceps tentacle into NYC itself. For Aislyn, it’s a relief to give up her incipient, discomfiting choices. For the rest of the planet, it may be deadly.
If the cost weren’t so high, that self-rejection might even be understandable. The destiny of a city avatar is not exactly an easy one. Even aside from the whole “eating thing,” it requires accepting an uncomfortable range of humanity’s variation. Aislyn freaks out about most of that variation, but even the central avatar shrank from representing yoga ladies. Those cracks, big enough to let R’lyeh in, must be awkward to embody. And if you succeed in being everyone, you become something singular and solo. Cities rub awkwardly with each other, and city avatars spend most of their lives isolated from their kind—and likely from the mortals who live and die within them. Sao Paulo, the New York avatars sense, is lonely, and that loneliness seems like their own best case scenario.
Loneliness, and anger. All the avatars share a tendency to react like cornered animals, spitting and attacking when threatened or just when asked to work together. Aislyn’s the worst, but Bronca got into a pissing contest with her fellow avatars as soon as she met them, and every shared cab is an opportunity for hissing. Admittedly, New York is not exactly known for diplomatic de-escalation, but maybe channeling some folks at the UN would be a survival skill?
There’s this thing—the tone argument—where people with privilege use the exasperated anger of the oppressed as an excuse for further oppression. But there’s also a thing where being polite to people is occasionally genuinely a useful way to get what you need. Or at least to avoid getting things that you really, really don’t need. I am thinking here of a friend on Long Island who absolutely could not resist swearing at cops whenever she got pulled over. It was both a justified reaction—Long Island cops being notoriously terrible examples of the species—and an excellent way to get a lot of speeding tickets. Similarly, maybe calling Aislyn a “selfish xenophobic little heifer” isn’t the best way to improve humanity’s chances of survival. It’s quite possible that talking to her more politely than she deserves would get no one anywhere—but the stakes are high, and maybe we could try it? Just maybe? I dunno, man, I’m from Massachusetts, nobody listens to us.
Polite, of course, is also different than good. Just ask R’lyeh, very politely offering to destroy the universe without suffering. It’s fine. Why wouldn’t we cooperate? After all, we can get a whole human lifetime in a dying pocket universe, if we like. Perfectly civilized. And thoroughly deserving of whatever rude words and hand gestures the City That Never Sleeps might provide in response.
At least we know that one thing can possibly stop her. Unfortunately, that thing is probably New York working as a team for once. And that, in turn, requires Aislyn changing her now-mind-controlled mind.
Next week, we reprint our coverage of a handful of H. P. Lovecraft’s holiday poetry. All of Tor.com takes a holiday for the last week of the year, and then we’ll return in January to finish up The City We Became! Happy holidays, all of them—may your stars be right, your candles bright, and your wrapping paper stash sufficient unto the tasks at hand! (And remember that the books in our bios make great last-minute presents.)
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.
