close to the door and yells, “It’s Padmini! I hear her! I want to say hi to Padmini!” before someone else inside the house shushes him and moves him away from the door.
And somewhere between the third floor and the fourth, where Padmini lives in Aishwarya’s place, Manny gets it. This is just one building amid thousands in Jackson Heights—but here, in this four-story walk-up, is a microcosm of Queens itself. People, cultures, moving in and forming communities and moving on, endlessly. In such a place, nurtured by the presence and care of its avatar, the borough’s power has permeated every board and cinder block of the building, making it stronger and safer even as the city as a whole totters, weakened, against its enemy’s onslaught.
It makes Manny ache, suddenly, to feel the same wholeness all over the city. Shouldn’t everyone here have this? He’s been here only a day, and already he’s met so many vividly interesting people, seen so much beautiful strangeness. He wants to protect a city that produces such experiences. He wants to help it grow stronger. He wants to stand at its side, and be true.
There is a kind of ringing that sounds, suddenly, through his soul. He stops in the middle of climbing the steps, startled—and Brooklyn turns as well, inhaling a little. Padmini, facing the opposite direction on the next landing to lead them up, stops and shuts her eyes for a moment. He feels the reverberation between them, and it shakes him into the other space—where, for the first time, he realizes that he has never been there as a man. He’s a city. When he stares at the strange empty streets, the damage (mostly healed now, because they are growing stronger), the wavering beautiful light, it suddenly strikes him that this is the equivalent of looking at his own navel. And in the instant that he makes this connection, his perception reels and rises and pulls back until suddenly he sees the whole of himself: he is Manhattan. And in the near distance, barely dwarfed by his own skyscrapers—another! She is Brooklyn. And beside her, close enough to join hands, sprawls a new marvel. Padmini is enormous, endless miles of low-story sprawl. When she turns, he hears the melodies of a thousand different instruments, sees the faceted sparkle of stained glass and industrial fiberglass and occasional specks of diamond, tastes salt and bitter earth and sharp fiery spices that bring tears to his eyes. Right there! His other selves. The city they need to be. He lifts his hands in the other world, the world of tiny people, and through the pounding of his own pulse he becomes aware of them doing the same. Yes, like this, together, they can be so very strong if they just—
All at once Manny’s perception snaps back into his flesh-and-blood body. He stumbles on the steps and falls, clumsily enough to face-plant on a riser; blood floods his mouth. A solid ten seconds pass before Brooklyn and Padmini react; Aishwarya beats them both to it, gasping and trotting down the steps to help him sit up before the other two do the same. It’s taken that long for Manny to figure out why he’s on his face.
What did you expect? laughs something, not quite a voice, in his head. It’s a good-natured laugh, not the malicious kind. Laughing with, not at. You’re not New York, you’re Manhattan. Nice try, but pulling everyone together is his job, not yours.
Abruptly, he is somewhere else.
Somewhere in Normal New York. Down—underground? It’s dark. He glimpses white tile walls shaded with shadow, a gray concrete floor. A subway station. Smell of dust and a whiff of ozone, oddly clean of the ambiance of stale urine that Manny remembers from his one experience of the subway. Somewhere nearby, but not too nearby, a train rumbles past; in the shadows cast by a shaft of sunlight coming from somewhere above, pedestrians hurry past one another. And before him—
Before him, on a bed of ancient newspapers, curls a sleeping young man.
Manny stares down at him, transfixed. The young man is a slight figure, painfully thin, dressed in dirty jeans and worn old sneakers, his gangly-looking limbs sprawled a bit in repose. Manny cannot see his face clearly, though he is bathed in the mottled light from above. Something about the shadows, the angle… He wills himself closer, suddenly aching to see more, but nothing happens. It isn’t enough, this mere glimpse. He needs…