The City We Became

A man (later called Manny) is preparing to exit his train at Penn Station, gathering his luggage. He worries when he only sees one suitcase but then remembers sending his other things ahead to his new apartment. He and his roommate are entering the same graduate program. Strangely, he’s forgotten the school he’ll attend. He’s also forgotten his own name but hasn’t noticed yet. Manny hears passengers murmuring about a bridge and a possible terrorist attack. He wonders whether he made a mistake moving to New York. Yet despite disapproval from coworkers and family—whose names he can’t remember—he believes New York is his “future.”

Manny makes his way out of the train and up the escalator when, suddenly, he feels intense vertigo, hears millions of voices screaming, and focuses in on a particular voice yelling at someone that they don’t belong and need to leave. Utterly disoriented, Manny wonders whether the voice is yelling at him.

Manny comes back to reality on his knees in Penn Station, with a woman and a man checking up on him. The man tells Manny that he keeled over; the man and woman pulled him out of the crowd’s way. Manny tells them he’s fine and murmurs that he feels “new.” The woman asks whether he is new to the city. He agrees, looks around for his luggage, and realizes that his helpers have protected it as well: “He feels alone in the city. He is seen and cared for in the city.”

Manny is reassuring the man and woman that he’ll seek medical attention when he has a vision of the station, emptied of people, collapsing. When he comes to, they’re staring at him. They both suggest he eat something. He thanks them, noting that New Yorkers have a reputation for being rude. The woman tells him New Yorkers are “only assholes to people who are assholes first.” Then she leaves.

The man asks Manny whether he wants the man to get him food. Manny declines, finds a Starbucks carry-cup in his luggage, drinks from it—and realizes he cannot remember where he filled it, where he’s going to school, or his own name. The man tells Manny to get “real coffee” and “home food” from a “Boricua shop.” Then he asks Manny’s name. Manny looks around and blurts that his name is “Manny.”

The man introduces himself as Douglas Acevedo and offers to help Manny any way he can. When Manny expresses surprise at Douglas’s generosity, Douglas tells Manny he looks like Douglas’s son. Manny, having a strong intuition that Douglas’s son is dead, thanks him again. In Spanish, Douglas tells Manny not to worry about it. Manny realizes Douglas assumes he’s Puerto Rican. He looks up and notices where he found his new name: a sign reading Manhattan. Manny identifies intensely with this name.

In the Penn Station men’s room, Manny examines his own face. He recognizes that he might resemble Douglas’s son but intuits that he’s not actually Puerto Rican. He dresses “preppy” and appears to be in his late 20s, with a handsome yet “nondescript” face. Manny thinks his nondescriptness is handy—a thought he doesn’t understand and finds disturbing.

Exiting Penn Station, Manny feels a phantom pain in his thigh. Suddenly he sees two different versions of New York: the ordinary city full of people and an empty, stormy New York, dilapidated yet beautiful. Manny has an intuition that he needs to do something or both versions of the city will be destroyed.

Manny intuitively knows that he needs to go east and asks a man renting bicycles—whom he thinks of as Bike Guy—what’s in that direction. Bike Guy replies obscenely. Another woman, also renting bicycles, intervenes. Manny asks her how he can walk to FDR Drive. When the woman asks what kind of tourist walks to FDR Drive, Bike Guy denies Manny is a tourist. The woman tells Manny to take a taxi.

Manny looks around and finds that the sight of chain stores are “irritants” but that small stores, billboards, traffic, and foul odors ease his pain. Without knowing how he’s received the information, he tells the bicycle woman that he has a ride. Suddenly an old-timey Checker cab stops in the street right in front of him. Manny tries the door. When he finds it locked, he thinks that he needs it to open, and it opens for him.

When Manny climbs into the Checker, the driver (Madison), a young white woman, tells him the Checker isn’t a working taxi but an “antique” rented for special occasions. Manny asks her to take him to FDR Drive. Sensing the “ritual of getting-in-a-cab” gives him power, he offers her a 100-dollar bill. She assumes it’s fake. He offers to pay her in 20s, but he senses 20s have more power because they circulate more—he doesn’t want to use them because he doesn’t want to “force” her. She says she’ll drive him for 200. He pays her. As she drives, Manny ponders that in New York, money has “talismanic power.”

As the driver (Madison) takes Manny toward FDR Drive, he sees a car pass with “feathery white tendrils” coming out of its wheels. Manny intuits that the tendrils exist in multiple dimensions, like his vision of ordinary New York and the strange, empty New York. He also sees the tendril seem to react to his presence. The driver asks Manny whether he sees the tendrils too. When he admits he does, she asks why no one else can. He says he doesn’t know but promises he’ll destroy the thing that caused it if she takes him to FDR. He tries not to think too hard about what he’s saying, because he needs to believe in himself to maintain his mysterious power.

When the Checker reaches FDR Drive, Manny sees more cars infected by white tendrils and then a 20- to 30-foot tendril growth coming out of the fast lane. Although most drivers can’t see the growth, they are instinctively avoiding it, causing a traffic jam. Manny exits the cab and asks the driver (Madison) whether she has an emergency car kit. She says yes and tells him to act fast—the police will arrive soon and “they’re not gonna help much.” Intuitively, Manny asks her whether she’s a city native. She tells him she grew up in Chelsea with two moms. Manny senses the New Yorkers around him are his “allies.” He introduces himself as Manny and asks her name; she tells him she’s named Madison because the IVF clinic her mothers used was near Madison Avenue.

Manny proposes a plan to Madison. She helps him use her emergency kit materials to divert cars around the tendril growth. As the growth gets bigger, Manny notes it smells like ocean—specifically, like “trimethylamine oxide.” After telling Madison that he has to hit the growth, Manny asks an Indian woman in a nearby stopped car for her umbrella. The woman threatens to pepper-spray him, but when he tells her he can use the umbrella to end the traffic jam, she gives it to him.

Manny climbs on top of the cab, holding the umbrella. He senses he needs the umbrella, but he’s not sure what for. With Manny clinging to the roof, Madison drives at the tendril growth. Manny opens the umbrella, but that use of it is somehow “still wrong.” Manny observes that the growth is beautiful but hostile to the city. He muses that “some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.”

As the cab gets closer to the tendril growth, Manny holds the umbrella over his head. Somehow this gesture causes an energy “sheath” to appear around the umbrella, Manny, and the cab. Manny realizes that unlike the growth, he is not an “interloper” because he has chosen to live in New York, whereas the growth is an “invasive tourist.” The energy sheath allows the cab to burn through the growth.

On the growth’s other side, Madison slams on the brakes to keep the cab from hitting stopped cars ahead. Looking backward, Manny sees the fiery hole their passage made in the growth, which burns through the remaining tendrils. His energy sheath dissipates, burning up tendrils attached to cars as it does so. Manny realizes that this energy is New York City somehow, and that it “driv[es] out anything unnecessary to make room for itself”—including his memories. Manny whispers, “I am Manhattan.”