Long Island City. Which is on Long Island because Queens is on Long Island, but isn’t part of Long Island. You follow?”
“No.”
She laughs, and doesn’t bother to explain further. She taps the Bronx. “This part of the city gets hit the hardest by everything. Gangs, real estate scams, whatever. Hard people, too, if they came through any of that… so in a lot of ways, this is the heart of New York. The part of itself that held on to all the attitude and creativity and toughness that everybody thinks is the whole city.”
“So we’re looking for a hardworking non-techie in Queens, and somebody creative but with an attitude in the Bronx? That narrows it down.” Manny sighs. “What about—” He taps Staten Island on her phone.
Brooklyn’s lips purse a little, more in disapproval than contemplation, he thinks. “That one will be a small-town thinker, even though they’re part of the biggest American city. They don’t want to be part of New York there, remember. They won’t let you forget it.” She shrugs. “An asshole with a chip on their shoulder, basically. And probably a Republican.”
The bus eventually grinds its way to the subway station that they need, where they switch to the N train. “Should’ve grabbed a limo,” Brooklyn mutters. Rush hour is in full swing; the subway is packed. They’re standing, and Manny is trying not to elbow anyone by accident. It’s his first time on the subway, but he’s too distracted by the crowding to really enjoy it. “Well, street traffic might’ve been just as bad.”
“A limousine seems excessive,” he says.
“‘Limo’ just means a non-hailable cab, honey. Anything that’s not a yellow or a green taxi, we pretty much call a limo, here—including the kind of fancy limos you’re thinking of. Except it’s also called a ‘car service’ in Brooklyn.” She shrugs. “All of those are getting eaten up by Uber and Lyft anyway.”
“Why is it different in Brooklyn?”
She gives him a look, which he supposes he deserves. It’s different in Brooklyn because Brooklyn does its own thing. He’s trying to learn.
They swap the N for the 7 at Queensboro Plaza. Manny’s getting tired of standing when he starts to feel the tickle of imbalanced gravity again, and this time it’s not coming from Brooklyn. He shifts his position to offset it, and sees Brooklyn do the same; they meet each other’s eyes and nod. “Good,” she says, pleased. “I was starting to worry we’d have to go all the way out to Flushing. Looks like our girl’s in Jackson Heights instead.”
They get off and head aboveground. As they stand on a corner across from a garblemouthed street preacher, Manny gets the bright idea to try a variation on the trick that Brooklyn used to track him down. He experiments with a few keyword combos on various local social media. On the “Queens” plus “weird” search, he finds many complaints about drag queens in poorly chosen ensembles. In addition to this, however, are several tweets from people located in Jackson Heights that mention children’s screams and “a weird rumble.” Then as they’re watching that feed, someone posts, “Lol this old lady’s pool tryna eat her kids, TMZ want pics?”
The photos are blurry—a backyard pool with a strangely dark floor, two flailing children, an equally blurry black-haired figure at the edge of the pool—but they’re enough. Instantly, both Manny and Brooklyn feel the pull of the black-haired woman.
Then Brooklyn’s cell phone bleats, and she plucks it from her purse to scan the message. “Well, well, well. I’ll be damned. Looks like we just found the Bronx, too.”
She turns her phone so that he can see. On the tiny screen is a photo of a mural. It’s hard to discern, at first. There are lines amid the splashes of paint, but they tangle and cross in dizzying profusion over the rough brick on which they’re painted. Then something orients in Manny’s brain, and that other part of him inhales, and all at once he understands exactly what he’s seeing.
It is the other place. The other him. The city he has become. New York City, as its whole and distinct self rather than the agglomeration of images and ideas that are its camouflage in this reality. He understands, suddenly, why he has seen that other place as empty; it isn’t. The people are there, but in spirit—just as New York City itself has a phantom presence in the lives of every citizen and visitor. Here in this strange, abstract mural,