however, Veneza comes out of the Center’s staff door, looking shaken. She’s a sturdy kid in a lot of ways—and really, Bronca shouldn’t call her a kid. Veneza’s done with college—Cooper Union, because she’s got a good head on her. But right now, the girl’s brown skin is ashen.
“The bathroom,” she murmurs. “I don’t know, B. It’s always creepy in there. But tonight that last stall just woogied me right the fuck out.”
Bronca grimaces. She should’ve burned some sage and tobacco, or scrubbed that stall down with ammonia, or both. “Yyyeah. Let’s just call that one haunted.”
“Except it wasn’t, yesterday. What the hell’s changed between yesterday and today? It looks the same, but everything’s weird all of a sudden.”
Veneza turns to look over the street. The Center sits on a slope overlooking the Bronx River and the on-ramp of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which has finally stopped being a parking lot now that rush hour is over. But beyond this, in the distance, the nighttime cityscape spreads across the horizon. Northern Manhattan isn’t as impressive as the part of the island that tourists like. Bronca likes this view better, though, because it makes clear that New York is a city of people, not just businesses and landmarks. From here, when the air isn’t hazy, one can take in the endless apartment blocks of Inwood and the gigantic public schools of Spanish Harlem, and even a few of the stately row houses that remain on Sugar Hill. Homes and schools and churches and neighborhood bodegas, with only the occasional glass-and-steel condo high-rise to mar the view. This is a view of the city that only the Bronx sees on the regular—which is why, Bronca feels certain, Bronx people don’t take any shit from arrogant Manhattanites. End of day, if people want to make a life in New York, they all gotta eat, educate their kids, sleep, and get by somehow. No sense in anybody putting on airs.
But Bronca also sees what Veneza’s picking up on. The city is different, because yesterday it was just a city, and today it is alive.
There is precedent for this. There are always those more attuned to a city than others—though usually not when they’re from completely different states. Veneza’s a Jersey City girl. Bronca probes carefully. “What do you mean when you say everything’s weird?”
“The bathroom stall! Also? That painting those guys had. The last one.” She shudders. “You were spacing out, so maybe you didn’t notice. But everything changed. Like, the whole gallery. All of a sudden Yijing and those guys were gone, and the room was empty, and it got real quiet. The light was strange. And the painting wasn’t a painting—”
She stops abruptly, looking uneasy. And Bronca realizes all of a sudden that she’s facing a choice about how to deal with Veneza. She can play it off. Tell the girl that what she’s sensing is nothing. Daydreams, or a flashback from the mushrooms she once told Bronca that she tried. Veneza is so much of what Bronca could have been, if she’d come up in a better world—and so much of what Bronca is now, because the world is still a goddamn shitshow. Bronca wants so badly to protect her.
That’s ultimately what settles the matter. Because if Veneza is seeing these things, then she needs to know that they aren’t hallucinations. She needs to know to run.
So Bronca sighs. “The painting was a doorway.”
Veneza’s head whips around so fast that her Afro puffs jiggle. She stares at Bronca for a long moment. Then she swallows and says slowly, “And we weren’t just looking at a painting of abstract people on an abstract street, were we? We were actually going there. To a place that actually looked like that.” She takes a deep breath. “Old B, I really wanted you to tell me it was another mushroom flashback.”
“People in hell want ice water. And technically that was an expressionistic street, but that’s just me being pedantic to make myself feel better.” Bronca smiles sadly. “Kinda glad I’m not the only one visiting Weirdshitistan, though.”
“I mean, I got your back anywhere, B, but dayum.”
Damn indeed. Bronca sighs, rubbing her eyes, hating for the umpteenth time that this whole mess has dumped itself in her front yard. She’s got other shit to deal with, damn it. She should be fixated right now on buying unnecessary cute stuff for her future grandson, granddaughter, or two-spirit child, but here she is up to her neck in