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 11: So, About That Whole Teamwork Thing. The novel was first published in March 2020. Spoilers ahead!
“In Plato’s stories, Atlantis was swallowed up by earthquake and floods. But the real disaster is that Atlantis became just a story.”
Chapter 11: So, About That Whole Teamwork Thing
All the borough-avatars except Staten Island have gathered in Bronca’s office. She instantly hates them. Brooklyn, she recognizes as MC Free; it figures a homophobic-lyric-spouting self-described feminist would become a politician. Manhattan’s way too slick, probably exploiting his uncertain ethnicity to manipulate everyone he meets. Queens can’t possibly be as innocent as she seems. Bronca doesn’t need them—didn’t she defeat the Woman in White by herself? After Brooklyn disses Bronx residents as people who can’t “get their stuff together” but resent the success of the other boroughs, Bronca throws the avatars out of her office. She’s exhausted, scared, too old for this burden, but she lets Veneza talk her into another meeting.
Fortified with a meal, Bronca takes the lead sharing her citified memories. She confirms there’s a sixth avatar, New York itself. They must find both him and Staten Island. Besides their shared abilities, each borough contributes different strengths. The Bronx has the deepest history, lived by generations of her Lenape ancestors, so Bronca’s the group memory. Brooklyn hears the city’s music. Padmini wields math-magic. Manhattan? Bronca senses his attraction to sleeping New York, and Manhattan suddenly realizes his role is to protect the “primary,” at any cost.
To find the primary, Bronca explains, they’ll have to “become what [they] are in the other place,” the reality in which they’re massive and urban. All myths, spiritual visitations, even sufficiently vivid imaginings, create new universes. Every human spins off thousands; we think we’re anchored in one universe while actually falling through them so fast they blend together, layer after layer. When enough humans occupy one space and develop a “unique enough culture,” their city enters metamorphosis and choses a “midwife,” a “champion,” to birth it. If birthing’s successful, the city becomes virtually invulnerable to the Enemy. But if the Enemy gets at a partially born city-avatar, it dies hard. Like, for example, Atlantis. Nascent New York fought off the Enemy alone, but the effort’s left him in a coma from which the united boroughs must awaken him.
Bronca notes that a birthing city “punches through other universes.” Brooklyn intuits this “punch” must be detrimental to the “punched,” and Bronca admits that city-birth destroys other realities, along with every living thing in them. All are shaken, particularly Padmini. Manhattan forces her to acknowledge that she wouldn’t sacrifice her family and friends instead. Bronca adds that nature requires “many things [to] die so that something else can live,” sacrifices for which the living must offer gratitude.
The other boroughs describe “looking for weird stuff” on the Internet as an avatar-finding method, but no luck with Staten Island. Brooklyn suggests driving around SI until their “city-dar” kicks in. Bronca redirects the immediate search to New York, and together they slip into city-reality, becoming vast. They perceive “lost sister” Staten Island, but she’s oddly distant and dim. Bronca shifts them up a level so they can see the “immensity of space and time,” the “infinity of [universes like] an endlessly growing broccoliesque mass,” a “fractal tree.” They witness stacks of universes collapse, dying or becoming “never-were,” to be succeeded by a singular point of light: a newborn city.
Bronca shifts to “the centerpoint of them all,” and they see the sleeping primary on his newspaper bed. To each borough comes the conviction that “He is ours, and we are his.” Bronca breaks the ecstatic and anxious moment to focus on the boy’s surroundings, and recognizes the wall tiles…
She comes to on a couch, to see the others similarly spent. Two strangers enter: A fiftyish Asian man in a business suit deposits a limp body on Bronca’s couch. The collapsed man is Latino, uncannily gray-skinned. Her city-space awareness discerns the translucent envelope surrounding him, with an umbilicus trailing off to… Brazil? It also recognizes the Asian man as a city. Call him Hong, he says, then rummages cigarettes from the Brazilian’s jacket and blows smoke. Sao Paulo gains a little color, though what he really needs is his native polluted air. Too bad he can’t travel. Too bad none of the boroughs sensed his injury and that none seems concerned about who wounded him. It wasn’t the Woman. Only another city on its own ground could have overcome him, and if it wasn’t them, it must have been –
Staten Island. All but Brooklyn are incredulous; she thinks it’s just like contrarian Staten Island to “stab an ally in the back.” Meanwhile Veneza has dug something from the meeting room freezer. Brazilian chocolate, she explains, Brigadeiro. She presses one to Sao Paulo’s lips, murmuring Portuguese encouragements learned from her father. He shivers and regains color. Revived, he berates Hong for letting the “Summit” delay his arrival in New York.
Unperturbed, Hong phone-displays an aerial photo showing a sunset New York “at its brightest and most beautiful.” Staten Island, however, seems dim, miles farther from Manhattan than it should be. An excitedly misspelled post asks: “MORE TERRISM?!”
Cityspace is cityspace, Hong explains, while peoplespace is peoplespace, separate universes bridged only by avatars, normally. This photo shows that cityspace Staten Island is withdrawing from New York, and peoplespace has noticed. The Enemy’s working in novel ways. Have the borough-avatars at least found the primary? No, Manny says, but Bronca remembers the tiles. She finds a picture in a book on Beaux Arts style. They figure out that the primary is in the decommissioned Old City Hall Subway Station.
Hong says they have to move fast—and hope the primary will derive enough strength to protect the city by consuming the four currently-allied boroughs
Silence. Then Brooklyn says, “I’m sorry, what?”
This Week’s Metrics
Mind the Gap: Of course the primary avatar is sleeping it off in an abandoned subway station. Where else would he go?
The Degenerate Dutch: Bronca, stressed and sleep-deprived, dismisses all the other boroughs—but saves particular rancor for Brooklyn/MC Free “who’d felt plenty free to start beefs with every other woman in the field and drop all the same kinds of homophobic bullshit that the men had done, while having the nerve to call herself feminist.”
Anne’s Commentary
In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy comes up with one of literature’s most memorable opening sentences: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The so-called “Anna Karenina principle” reinterprets Tolstoy’s durable truism for general use: A deficiency in any one factor pertinent to success must doom an endeavor to failure. And Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, shoots at a similar idea with “For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.”
You may now blurt out, like Brooklyn, “I’m sorry, what?” As in, what does all that have to do with today’s City chapter, huh? Well, for starters, let’s apply the Anna Karenina Principle to Jemisin’s chapter title: “Yeah, So, About That Whole Teamwork Thing.” That would give us the premise that all successful teams succeed in the same way; each screwed team screws up in its own way. Add the success-critical factor that in successful teams, there is no “I.”
Come to think, there’s no “We,” either. Unless it’s a “We” that becomes in absolute integration an “I,” and let’s forget the whole “no I in team” bromide.
I know. I’m the one who brought it up.
Anyway. At the height of the borough-avatars’ immersion in “cityspace,” Bronca achieves the epiphany that “He [New York] is ours, and we are his.” The others approach the same epiphany, only to be scared off by the excessive intimacy and surrender of integration: “wait, this isn’t good, how are you in my head.” The avatars are “Too many strong egos all tangled up together,” Bronca realizes. “This [their integration] isn’t going to last long.”
Bronca should know, because her own ego is arguably the strongest of the bunch, and the touchiest. She starts off “hating” every one of her supposedly fated allies, even sweet-natured Queens—Padmini’s got to be insincere, disingenuous, because nobody could be that “gormless.” Manhattan’s smile “shows too many teeth.” He’s a manipulator, an exploiter, like the Dutch who “gave trinkets to people of the Canarsee,” her people. As for her and Brooklyn, it’s an immediate clash between alpha matriarchs, fangs bared from the get-go.
Cursed with so many ways to be unhappy, can this “family” possibly cohere? Burdened with so many inherent deficiencies, can this team possibly succeed in its endeavors? Finally, if Aristotle’s right about there being only one way to be good, can such diverse characters collectively avoid badness? Brooklyn knows they must cohere, succeed, stand against the Big Bad.
And we the readers know they can do it.
Here’s my interpretation of Tolstoy’s opener as fictive creed rather than statistical principle: Happy families, all alike, inert, frictionless, are a BORE to write and read about. Unhappy families, individually imperfect, in many ways mismatched and prone to conflict, these are the odd couples and motley crews and crazy-quilt bands it’s INTERESTING, even EXHILARATING, to follow. Give the “unhappy families” a common cause, a compelling reason to overcome personal demons and interpersonal differences, now you’ve got the potential for one of what movie-Sam Gamgee calls “the great stories…the ones that really mattered.”
At least you can deliver a hell of a ride, which with her avatar-family Jemisin is certainly doing. Throwing in spiky partners in cityhood Sao Paulo and Hong, ups the octane level, then brakes the fictive vehicle with a jolt when Hong casually drops a line about how New York will need to consume his subavatars. That’s after the last image Bronca takes from her cityspace vision of New York is of she and her fellows sucked into “the yawning blackness between his teeth.”
Yawning blackness, especially between teeth, that’s rarely a comfortable destination.
I’m loving it.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Maybe the real eldritch abomination was the friends we made along the way. Ouch. And, eek.
So many layers of abomination this week. First, my least favorite kind of multiverse to live in is the kind where human decisions spin off endless universes where we ate something else for breakfast and/or chose to say the horrible thing rather than keep quiet and/or kick someone whose well-deserved kicking we nobly resisted. Every decision, every wish, every lie creates a new reality. Nothing makes human existence more meaningless than having every possibility play out a billion times, so that all choices go all ways. Larry Niven’s “All the Myriad Ways” barely touches on the real horror of the lost distinction between thought and action.
And then—does all sapience have this power? Or is everyone else just living in the broccoli flower of universes created by humanity’s worst impulses? Reason enough for helpless populations of tentacle monsters to fear our passing tread.
And then—worse—eventually everything we create with our thoughts collapses under the weight of those same thoughts, giving birth to something gloriously cosmopolitan on the retconned backs of billions. I’ve gotta admit, when we learned earlier that cities birth themselves by connecting through all the layers of reality, I imagined synthesis rather than destruction. This is so much more horrific. Comparing it to hunting deer seems woefully inappropriate.
And then—not as bad, but still not good—the core avatar needs to consume the component borough avatars to gain full strength? Excuse me, what? That seems, at minimum, likely to get in the way of Manny’s romantic aspirations. About that whole teamwork thing, indeed. No wonder the sub-avatars have so instinctively resisted each others’ mental crowding.
No wonder the Woman in White has talked about saving billions, and sees humanity’s bigots as the most representative, most useful members of the species. I so didn’t want her to be right. And it makes Sao Paulo’s seeming confusion a lot less cute. (Speaking of Sao Paulo, I appreciated Hong Kong’s brusque, grumpy caregiving. Pollution as an integral part of a city’s identity, what a concept; the chocolates seem much more pleasant.)
I’m not sure what to make of all this, and that’s probably the point. In the set-up that the New York avatars have been given, everyone is complicit in unimaginable horror, and everyone is a victim a moment from getting eaten or unexisted. And the only thing that could make it worse is if all that horror happens for nothing—if the city that birthed itself through collapsing realities itself collapses.
The list of previous failures is telling. Bronca says failed cities “explode,” but that explosion takes many forms. Pompeii falls to natural disaster, but is at least remembered. Atlantis becomes only a story. Some cities don’t even get that, even their names lost.
And then… Tenochtitlan. I’m not convinced it belongs on that list. Spanish invaders and smallpox are genocidal, but the city is, in fact, still there. Descendants of its rulers are, in fact, still there. As best case scenarios go it’s not exactly reassuring, but it’s not Atlantis either.
Maybe Aislyn, for all her fears, can help find a way out of this tangle. I’m not counting on it, though.
Next week, we celebrate Halloween—and get a warning about the dangers of setting up a haunted house attraction—with John Langan’s “Kore.” You can find it in his new collection, Corpse Mouth and Other Autobiographies.
Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden is now out! She is also the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is available from Lethe Press. 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 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.
