The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,3
thousand, but eventually the time will come. The cord is cut and the city becomes a thing of its own, able to stand on wobbly legs and do… well, whatever the fuck a living, thinking entity shaped like a big-ass city wants to do.
And just as in any other part of nature, there are things lying in wait for this moment, hoping to chase down the sweet new life and swallow its guts while it screams.
That’s why Paulo’s here to teach me. That’s why I can clear the city’s breathing and stretch and massage its asphalt limbs. I’m the midwife, see.
I run the city. I run it every fucking day.
Paulo takes me home. It’s just somebody’s summer sublet in the Lower East Side, but it feels like a home. I use his shower and eat some of the food in his fridge without asking, just to see what he’ll do. He doesn’t do shit except smoke a cigarette, I think to piss me off. I can hear sirens on the streets of the neighborhood—frequent, close. I wonder, for some reason, if they’re looking for me. I don’t say it aloud, but Paulo sees me twitching. He says, “The harbingers of the Enemy will hide among the city’s parasites. Beware of them.”
He’s always saying cryptic shit like this. Some of it makes sense, like when he speculates that maybe there’s a purpose to all of it, some reason for the great cities and the process that makes them. What the Enemy has been doing—attacking at the moment of vulnerability, crimes of opportunity—might just be the warm-up for something bigger. But Paulo’s full of shit, too, like when he says I should consider meditation to better attune myself to the city’s needs. Like I’mma get through this on white girl yoga.
“White girl yoga,” Paulo says, nodding. “Indian man yoga. Stockbroker racquetball and schoolboy handball, ballet and merengue, union halls and SoHo galleries. You will embody a city of millions. You need not be them, but know that they are part of you.”
I laugh. “Racquetball? That shit ain’t no part of me, chico.”
“The city chose you, out of all,” Paulo says. “Their lives depend on you.”
Maybe. But I’m still hungry and tired all the time, scared all the time, never safe. What good does it do to be valuable, if nobody values you?
He can tell I don’t wanna talk anymore, so he gets up and goes to bed. I flop on the couch and I’m dead to the world. Dead.
Dreaming, dead dreaming, of a dark place beneath heavy cold waves where something stirs with a slithery sound and uncoils and turns toward the mouth of the Hudson, where it empties into the sea. Toward me. And I am too weak, too helpless, too immobilized by fear, to do anything but twitch beneath its predatory gaze.
Something comes from far to the south, somehow. (None of this is quite real. Everything rides along the thin tether that connects the city’s reality to that of the world. The effect happens in the world, Paulo has said. The cause centers around me.) It moves between me, wherever I am, and the uncurling thing, wherever it is. An immensity protects me, just this once, just in this place—though from a great distance I feel others hemming and grumbling and raising themselves to readiness. Warning the Enemy that it must adhere to the rules of engagement that have always governed this ancient battle. It’s not allowed to come at me too soon.
My protector, in this unreal space of dream, is a sprawling jewel with filth-crusted facets, a thing that stinks of dark coffee and the bruised grass of a futebol pitch and traffic noise and familiar cigarette smoke. Its threat display of saber-shaped girders lasts for only a moment, but that is enough. The uncurling thing flinches back into its cold cave, resentfully. But it will be back. That, too, is tradition.
I wake with sunlight warming half my face. Just a dream? I stumble into the room where Paulo is sleeping. “São Paulo,” I whisper, but he does not wake. I wiggle under his covers. When he wakes, he doesn’t reach for me, but he doesn’t push me away either. I let him know I’m grateful and give him a reason to let me back in later. The rest’ll have to wait till I get condoms and he brushes his ashy-ass mouth. After that, I use his shower again, put on the clothes I washed in his sink, and