Padmini Prakash (Queens) Quotes in The City We Became
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, Manny sees the truth that he now lives.
And he knows as well: the person who is the Bronx made this.
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
“Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”
[…]
“They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”
Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breaths. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”
[…]
[Manny] takes [Padmini’s] shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”
“Millions of lives in exchange for four?” She shrugs. It looks nonchalant but isn’t. “That ain’t even a debate.”
[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.
“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”
Padmini Prakash (Queens) Quotes in The City We Became
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, Manny sees the truth that he now lives.
And he knows as well: the person who is the Bronx made this.
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
“Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”
[…]
“They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”
Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breaths. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”
[…]
[Manny] takes [Padmini’s] shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”
“Millions of lives in exchange for four?” She shrugs. It looks nonchalant but isn’t. “That ain’t even a debate.”
[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.
“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”
