The City We Became

“Just getting sick of these immigrants,” he says. He’s always careful to use acceptable words when he’s on the job, rather than the words he says at home. That’s how cops mess up, he has explained to her. They don’t know how to keep home words at home and work words at work.

“Not sure I love New York enough to die for it. Definitely don’t love it enough to sacrifice my family for it.”

[…]

“Anything I can do to help your family, I will.”

Her expression softens. Maybe she likes him a little more. “And I hope you get to become the person you actually want to be,” she says, which makes him blink. “This city will eat you alive, you know, if you let it. Don’t.”

Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.

Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.

The rest of her? Is as big as a city.

Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.

[…]

Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.

There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.

Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .

. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.

“I know an apology don’t make up for it […] I know it don’t, okay? I damn sure got called a dyke enough myself just for stepping into a ring that dude rappers thought was theirs by default. Motherfuckers tried to rape me, all because I didn’t fit into what they thought a woman should be—and I passed that shit on. I know I did. But I got better. I had some friends slap some sense into me, and I listened when they did. And I figured out that the dudes were fucked in the head, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to imitate them.”

[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.

The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.