3

One thing about the City is it’s different at night. The people are different, and so are the routines they engage in. Alternative businesses quietly open in the lacking light, peddling in obscene transactions that would shame a well-lit world. People move queerly, either more loosely or more self-aware — women in heels tip-toe along city sidewalks while the freshly drunk sway in search of something to lean against. In the daytime, it’s a hive of commerce and interaction, but at night it’s an oblivion of lost souls.

Night time is when they say the Demons come out, breathed from their subterranean lairs by the last gasp of the sun. In the deep night, those pitch-black hours when their power is greatest, they can take shape in this world, exploding into being from formerly spectral forms, able to stretch their legs (should they have legs) and unfurl their wings (should they have those as well). In the night, they take flight, seeking out sinners to punish and mischief to make. But you and I are reasonable folk, and we don’t believe that drivel, do we? Sure, countless eye-witnesses have put their demonic testimonials on the internet for our pleasant consumption, but do you really believe in that garbage? In Sasquatch? Mothman?

More than most, especially at such a moment of erased rationality, Miranda does. Her parents, guided by a Professor-friend’s truly terrible child-rearing book, used the threat of demon-snatching on their youngest to encourage good behavior (see Kontrolling Kids: A Dialogue on Efficient Parenting, chapter three, “The Implantation of Supernatural Phobia”). It could just as easily have been Krampus, or an eternity in Christian Hell, but, no, her parents wanted to use something both believable to a child (we’ve all heard the stories) but patently absurd to an adult, so when she grew up enough to begin questioning them, they could A) explain their actually-quite-effective reasoning, and B) easily debunk the fear of Demons in their now obedient daughter. Demon talk, after all, kept her safe in bed while her compatriots were sneaking out to beer busts and sleeping around in the senior’s cars, kept her from speaking against her elders and coveting thine neighbor’s goods.

Eventually, Miranda did grow old enough to question her parents, and they did successfully A) explain their reasoning and B) debunk the fear of Demons in their now obedient daughter.

Or so they assumed.

In truth, if you’re anything like Miranda, you, or a part of you, will always despise your parents for the lies that got you to behave. Something about the parental willingness to fib makes obvious their weakness, their charlatan reliance upon parlor tricks. And even when they explained and debunked, they never did apologize, did they? Mother looked her daughter in the eyes and said, “It was for your own good.” And she truly believed that. She’d believe anything to keep from seeing her own fault.

And if you’re anything like Miranda, you know logically it’s all ridiculous, all a lie, that the “eye-witness accounts” read aloud to you before bed were merely the psychotic ramblings of other grown kids with Mommy issues who were never quite able to quit fearing the Bogeyman in the closet. You might know this logically, yet you still feel goose-pimples upon your spine at the whiff of something rank in the night air, in the sidestepping shadow you swore you saw duck into that alley, at the mere suggestion of Demons walking free amongst the drunkards and the nightwalkers and the dealers and thieves.

Enter Miranda into the world of deep night in New York City, where terrestrial forces give way, after straining all day against them, to others that defy comprehension yet walk on two legs like all else, masquerading as a part of the milieu.

Ipso facto, Miranda keeps her eyes away from alleys and stays breathing through her mouth. Adding supernatural panic into her already-bubbling emotional cauldron might lead to a psychotic break or murderous rage, both of which, of course, would be playing right into the Demons’ hands. Or claws. Tentacles? General appendages*.

Whether demons are actually watching her from the shadows or not, she shouldn’t be doing this. She should turn back home because this is stupid. She’s staking her safety on spam, and more than likely, she’s going to get hurt. A girl walks alone in the city, and a-hundred-thousand awful things wait to happen to her.

Somewhere inside her, this is known. Somewhere inside her, little voices scream and little arms are raising all available alarms. Her mind’s safety centers are following protocol exactly, so if things do turn sour, it’s not on them. They’re going forward with all the requisite sweats and itchiness, with the dizziness and budding migraine headaches they’re authorized to enact.

It’s just too bad none of their best efforts will have any effect. Miranda’s lunch with Caleb was profound fuel for her already un-right mind. Caleb’s latest slight was pointed enough to pierce right through some crucial myelin sheath and reroute a couple neuron firings. Before, all Miranda had wanted to do was sink into nothing. Now she wants to destroy something. Now she wants bloodshed. It’ll be a rebirth for Gwami, and a baby Armageddon for everyone else. And that’s why, at this very moment, Miranda hurriedly ignores her fears and sweats and teeny inner voices the entire trip up ‘til 135th street, following the phantom instructions as they appear in the world before her.

In the same abrasive, abrupt font as the first text messages, more otherworldly directions plague her steps across the city. They rode uptown with her, replacing the blocky text on the MTA buses’ foreheads (Get on this Bus, Miranda), drew her eye to the bottom of electronic billboards (Turn left at 88th), smuggled themselves into LED crawlers in the storefront windows (Don’t stop or make eye contact with anyone), texted her the same message every few minutes, pinging and re-pinging the same location, some 24-hour video-game café in East Harlem. It’s been conspiratorial messages and ads for bananas (hopefully not from the same source) all the way uptown.

A block or two from her destination, it again begins to drizzle. Remember kids: in the city, even drizzles are dangerous. Because the drops fall at an angle, curving around umbrella edges, and accumulating power as they bounce off the skyscrapers, even the slightest rain feels rather like a choosy thunderstorm.

Ah, a Drizzle in Harlem! That might have been a Langston Hughes poem. Ah, Harlem!, you once were center of a world, site of a revolution! Ah, Harlem!, how you fell, fell into a vat of some fearsome acid, becoming sinister-sounding and bloated by your own dismal expectations. Ah, Harlem!, you stand rejuvenated by city-commissioned graffiti and day-cares and hair salons. O, Harlem!, you metamorphic Kaleidoscope; you have been everything there is to be, without rest. You have existed only in transition, impossible to amp down, observable only in superposition.

Two years ago and just before dawn, Miranda-cum-Gwami went to town on a bit of beige brick on 118th Street. If memory serves, the piece she did then was a mix of spray-paint and traditional brush-work, an allegorical mural where a half-dozen monkeys with billionaire faces clambered over puny skyscrapers as if they were Tarzan trees. The racial aspect of the metaphor was lost on most (probably for the best), but even still, the tiny spot sandwiched between a Baptist Church and an Urban Outfitters Pop-up became so highly-trafficked that the NYPD had to install an officer on round-the-clock guard duty. After a month behind hastily-erected bullet-proof glass, the city had the section of wall removed and replaced, the graffiti sold to the highest bidder and, thus, condemned it to collect dust in the basement of the Guggenheim, you know, as the artist intended.

Miranda considers a detour to scope out the former spot, but a talking traffic signal says, “Stop. Stop. Miranda. Don’t get distracted. Stop. Walk, Walk, Walk.” She takes its advice.

Besides the amber streetlights and a stale yellow glow coming from that third-story window, the only light on this block is the fluorescent, laundromat shine of the prophesied internet café, a rather austere, sterile kind of haven for some 30-odd Indian and Southeast Asian boys (do their parents know where they are?)click-click-clicking away. Miranda walks in slowly, trying to gauge which of the gamers — all too enveloped in their monitors to notice the intrusive female, which is actually kind of nice — could be her puppeteer. What a bizarre place this is: silent, all silent except for keyboard clacks and mouse clicks. I suppose you could call that Millennial Silence.

There are no open computers, so Miranda stands awkwardly for a moment, clutching her bag tight, awaiting an imminent ambush. Those aforementioned parts of her brain are straight-up freaking out right now. But a new text on her vibrating phone breaks the paranoia.

Enter the door. Close it behind you.

On cue, a door, silver and curt, is opened by invisible hand in the back of the café. No more pronounced than a janitor’s closet, its sudden aperture draws nary a single eye away from its designated screen. Miranda looks around, not just to see if the door has gained another’s attention, but to see if maybe someone will look at the door and then, puzzled, over at her waiting there, and shrug as if to say, “Hey girl, you do what you gotta do, we’ll all understand.” Even one regular client’s slightest permission would provide her confidence. But alas…she’s followed every instruction thus far, so why not one more? Miranda squeezes past a row of thin-lipped Bangladeshi boys and then slips through the door, closing it behind her.

Passing through is like passing into another world. Instead of fluorescent lights, everything is bathed in a UV Glow, all purple and neon green and everybody’s grimacing white teeth vibrantly bioluminescent. “Everybody” in this context meaning the six or seven uncouth-looking characters who, unlike their compatriots out front, very, very much notice Miranda’s intrusion into their space. They look up with their nose rings and their gauges, their glass eyes and face tattoos, their fingertip-less motorcycle gloves, staring poison, prison stares. It’s a small hexagonal room, filled near to bursting with interlocking office cubicles, and it sure doesn’t seem like outsiders ever venture in. Hence the stares.

But Miranda doesn’t immediately announce herself as a cop or a narc or whoever busts internet criminals, so the gang returns to their presumably illicit activities while Miranda tries to act like she’s been here before. Everyone is plugged into these ancient computers, blocky, tan monstrosities like you’d find in some early-90’s government lab, computers that look like they’d eat her phone if she brought it too close. They’re beasts, and only one is open, forcing Miranda’s next move.

This terminal isn’t welcoming and does not come with directions. But two helpful clues exist for her viewing pleasure: a phone cord and a pair of VR Goggles both dangle from the desktop CPU. Some instructions don’t require clarification. Her phone she plugs into the machine, bringing the brute machine to crackly, cranky life, and the goggles she wraps tight around her skull.

The goggle’s screen sputters with long, green, digitized lines of swift-moving binary code. The lines form a dot matrix that thickens and thickens and coalesces, nay dissolves, nay explodes — somehow dissolves and explodes — into a long, mustard-brown hotel hallway flanked by red and orange doors. Most of the blocky doors are closed, but a few are cracked open, revealing opaque lights and shifty, silhouetted forms. There’s a painting on the wall of a sad clown, and another opposite of a drab bowl of fruit. Miranda gets the shivers.

This is clearly a place for secrets and secret dealings. And she’s clearly an intruder.

A little black box appears in the center of her vision, and the program automatically inputs into it what looks to be the local IP address. This, it seems, is some kind of key.

Stripped of agency, Miranda is whisked down the hallway, feverishly overtaking corners and twisting through a sequence of near-identical corridors. This is a Minotaur maze, though the beast has yet to show itself. If in control of her own movements, Miranda surely would end up traipsing through this place forever, but the Program’s autopilot follows a precise plan. She’s slowed, she’d placed in a straightaway, and an eye-catching door circumscribed with a shimmering whiteness opens at the end of this last long hallway. Into it she goes, overtaken by a blinding white light. She’s stupefied for a second, but sight slowly returns, and when it does, Miranda finds herself in a room that can only be described as a shrine.

It’s a shrine to Gwami the Seer.

All around her are relics of Gwami’s life. Clips from her fame-making internet videos fade in and out like posters on the walls before dissolving completely. In their stead come private pictures of her and Lakshmi: she yelling at him, he on his knees before her, she sitting upon her famous gnarled throne (Lakshmi had it commissioned from a local craftsman who swore the roots around its base and back were bound in good swamp juju). Over there are her various profile pictures, arranged in chronological order. On the ceiling, all of her graffiti art muralized and transposed in hyper-realistic detail, a dramatically impressive little bit of coding. Even the floors are carpeted in her posts, comments and diatribes, all funny and funky and positively tickled to be trodden upon. It’s Gwami’s life made three-dimensional. Someone had archived everything she’d ever done, and laid it out like a leaf trap above a spike-filled pit. There would hardly be a circumstance where Miranda wouldn’t willingly fall in.

Against the far wall is a table, small and black and Ikeanly unassuming. Sitting at it, less so, is a lecherous Carmen SanDiego, a tall, spindly woman’s figure whose wild red hair falls to the hip of a gleaming, white trench coat. A very stylish cowboy hat drapes an impenetrable shadow over its wearer’s face. Her face, quite literally, is being foreshadowed. Take that as you will.

A line of text slithers forth from the Woman’s mouth, a beige backed text-bubble inflates around it. “You made it,” the Woman says. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“You underestimated me,” Miranda types back. She doesn’t need to think about it; speaking like this is as automatic to the Modern Millennial Woman as a heartbeat.

“In fact, Miranda Swami, we do exactly the opposite. We know your potential. Yours, not Gwami the Seer’s.”

A shudder emerges from Miranda’s neck and slides down her spine. The woman says, “Do you like the room? As you can tell, we’re big fans.”

“Who’s ‘we?’ Big Banana? Is this all some kind of —”

“Very blunt. Straight-forward, ignorant of possible consequences.No, Miranda Swami, we are not Big Banana. In fact, there is no Big Banana, at least not as you know them. And that is precisely the problem: nobody really knows them. They are a dark and cryptic organization, and yet, they have curried such favor in the wide world. But you, Miranda Swami, you came the closest of anyone to the truth. And you have been punished for your discovery. As expected, they couldn’t allow you to continue.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were right, Miranda Swami. About so much. This ‘company’ is not as altruistic as they would have you believe. Nor are they just some environmentally-destructive, socially-manipulative alpha corporation as you believe they are. No. They are something much worse.”

“And what’s that then?”

The woman stands suddenly, her avatar running its finger along the nearby stretch of wall. How does she have such body control here?

“Miranda Swami, do you like this room? We wanted you to feel at home here. Do you feel at home? Do you feel safe? We wanted you to recover a little of what was taken from you.” 

Miranda pauses. “Yeah, it’s nice, I suppose.”

“We’ve been collecting these, watching you, waiting until the time was right. The time is finally right, Miranda Swami.”

Chills run down Miranda’s back. A charged energy travels through the goggles into her skull, and every small hair on her arms and shoulders stands at attention.

“Miranda Swami, Gwami the Seer, whoever you believe you are, you must know this: Cindi Lapenschtall did not jump off of a building. It was a hoax, all chicanery. And all those important voices calling for your death? Manipulated, paid-off, bribed, ‘negotiated with.’ You wonder why there were no voices coming to your defense? It was not financially feasible for them to do so. The culture has been bought, Miranda. This entire saga, Gwami’s entire downfall, it is a vast and insidious marketing stunt intended to destroy you, intended to draw sympathy towards their brand.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sure. A hoax. Totally. Then where is Cindi now? Then who did they throw off that building if not her? Making all of these claims…why don’t you prove it? Enough talk, I want something concrete!” Miranda’s getting flustered underneath her goggles, her face turning a thankfully-unseen scarlet.

“‘Prove it,’ she says. ‘We shall,’ says I. Have no fear. But not yet. Prove yourself first. Come find me again. Do not be vexed. Those who live truly enough in this world will learn to navigate it. I do believe we will meet again.”

“Wait I —”

But that’s all there is. A gargantuan power-surge knocks the electricity out of the entire room, and, apparently, the entire block. Miranda rips the defunct goggles off, plunged into a world of similar darkness as the one she so suddenly exited the moment prior. For a second, she thinks she may have died. But in the afterlife, would there be this many outraged Pan-Asian expletives being thrown around? It’s a regular Babel, a certain madness pervasive in every screamed word. Miranda doesn’t wait for answers. She grabs her stuff and bolts in the direction of the door. There’s a lot of flailing, and at some point, a door, and then a larger scrum. The outer sanctum has devolved into monkey cage chaos, meandering moonlight offering the only slight visibility. Somewhere, a hand lunges for Miranda’s breast, grazing it. Miranda, always half-expecting something like this, swings her bag halfway around her, connecting noisily with someone’s face. If it was her assaulter, great. If it wasn’t, well this is a blow against all men on behalf of all women. She escapes with herself mostly intact, her heart beating like a kick drum.

It doesn’t dawn on her until she’s halfway home on the 1-train that she’s shoulder-deep in the plot of a spy novel. Conspiracy? Underground organization? Dark Web secrets and mystery abounding? 

Which scares her more: the more-poignant threat of Big Banana’s insidiousness, or that some shadow organization has been watching her every move for God-knows-how-long, collecting every artifact she carelessly left lying around the internet? Talk about Macro and Micro issues. Anyone on this train could be an agent of either sleeper cell, watching her for clues as to whether she really is who they think she is.

A lesser woman might be crippled with the responsibilities entrusted to her, paralyzed by the importance of every decision she’ll soon make. But this is Miranda-fucking-Swami here, and even with all the depression, all the pain Gwami’s death caused her, she can just as easily tap out of whatever plot pulls her along, ditch her phone, forget this ever happened, and return to the simple life of a struggling artist. Or, maybe, just maybe, if she can charm Judith LeMeur tonight…

Wait. What time is it? 

Oh shit.

Oh no, the gallery.

She jumps off the train at Harold Square, her heart trying its best to break through her breastplate. When signal returns at street-level, she sees that aforementioned escape route has vanished, Gwami-like, before her eyes.

You might have thought he’d have given up after four, maybe even five missed calls. But no, it’s a whopping twelve. Twelve times this poor professor dialed Miranda, probably pacing, probably praying that she would show and spare him the embarrassment, the embarrassment that grew with each failed attempt. She can almost see him, bedecked in tweed, glasses low on his nose. “No, I don’t know where she is, really, I was very clear, 7:30 I told her. I just hope she’s okay!” Low, doofy voice, Gerry-curls; poor guy, he needs a win.

“Professor, hey,” she says into the receiver, “I fucked up, didn’t I?”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I am.”

“Okay, maybe meet me down here. We should, uhm, talk.”

Everyone always wanting to “talk,” wanting to “chat,” beat around the bush, dilute the full brunt of a negative situation. If she were a little bit bolder, or a little less distracted, she’d spare herself the extra $2.75 subway ride to the gallery and just call the guy back up, demanding to do this dance ASAP and over the phone. But the $2.75 is soon gone, and she’s outside the gallery working up the courage to go inside, and in time she does, flashing her student ID to the security guard as she hurries past, but he calls her —“Hey, young lady! Yes you!”— back because she needs to sign-in and she says but I go here what do I need to sign-in for and he shrugs and says not my call, policy, and she says but it’s my gallery and that’s my name on that brochure right there and he says, well it’s my detail, so sign the form, the form he actually literally physically throws at her. She scribbles something down and slides it back to the guy, going on her merry way with a fat, satisfied smile. A few minutes from now, he’ll look down and see that the snotnose girl wrote “DICKHEAD” in big, blocky letters across the entirety of the paper. She didn’t even sign her name.

“It’s just that…Miranda you have to understand —”

“Professor, with all due respect, I have a lot to do, a lot on my mind, can we just get to the point?” 

“It was just an opportunity, Miranda. A big one. And you kind of blew it.”

“Did she say anything about the pieces?”

The Professor stalls, not wanting to be driven off-topic. “She said they were fine, that they showed real potential, but —”

“But what? She liked them! Isn’t that enough for now? Why did I even have to be here?”

“Because she wanted to meet the artist, Miranda. Ask you about intention, experience, have you walk her through everything, piece by piece.”

Miranda’s forefinger and thumb go to massage to her nose, desperate for something to do. “She’s an art critic, can’t she just critique the art?”

“It’s not about the art, Swami. Don’t be naïve. It’s about the artist. It’s about the queer daughter of a former Congressman creating a series of high-concept pieces in her dorm-room well outside the bounds of her Graphic Design degree. Art is only compelling because of the artist; you understand that, right?”

“But this is bullshit!” Miranda shrieks. “She stood me up, and she was all ‘I’m soooooo sorrrrrrry,’ and ‘can’t we just rescheule?’ But if I do it to her, that’s just it? Everything I worked for is just disregarded?”

“Judith LeMeur isn’t the only critic that matters, you know.” 

“You’re actually serious? She actually won’t see me?”

“Well, I —” But he trails off.

“What?”

“Miranda let’s not —” 

“What!?”

Sighing, Gillibrand shuffles through his phone, pulling up a voicemail, and holds the device horizontally, speakers facing Miranda.

“Charles,” an elderly woman’s curt, sharp voice says through static, “I don’t think I have to tell you how disappointed I am in today’s events, and in you. This was a very embarrassing ordeal for me. As you know, I am extremely busy, and I do not have the time nor the energy to wait around for another of your self-important pseudo-artists to work me into their schedule. You can tell this ‘Miranda Swami’ when you see her that there are rules in the art world, and respecting those responsible for your future success is the first. The next time you want to peddle one of your little, ahem, social projects around me, please have the decency to ensure they aren’t a truant. Good day.”

“How’s that for context.” Gillibrand says. Don’t let the sentence structure fool you, it most certainly was not a question.

Miranda’s bag feels supermassive on her shoulder all the way home. She’s sore in her side, and every foot falls heavy underneath her. She nearly trips over a package left on her doorstep, and, angry at the cause of her near faceplant, she kicks it over the threshold into the kitchen.

The place is dark, meaning the Twins are at some work thing (they sleep with their light on). Miranda is thus spared any eavesdropped gossip. The kitchen lights illuminate illuminate a couple of things. First, two identical letters, sliced open at the top, in tinted yellow envelopes, lay on the counter. Miranda can see the B’s through the paper, the Twin B’s, the sign of the devil, the number of the beast. An urge to pry takes hold of the girl, and she listens in perfect stillness for a moment, applying the scientific method to her Hypothesis on the Absent Roommates. It certainly seeming to be correct, Miranda takes hold of one of the letters, catching a whiff of the synthetic banana fragrance spilling out its decapitated neck. Just like those fuckers to do a scratch-and-sniff type deal.

The letter is made of heavy card stock and is filled with praise, praise that’s typed out in Courier, discussing what a wonderful first month it’s been having the recipient, in this case Kathy, on board.The letters firmly make plain the fact that her great enemy has invaded her home, unsatisfied with taunting her from afar. She tosses the envelopes aside, and if the Twins wonder why she was going through their stuff, hang ‘em.

The second is the just-kicked box, not the Amazon order of impulsively-purchased blouses or makeup remover usually piled up by the door, but a naked wooden crate marked only by a fuzzy postcard on its upward face, a postcard with the word “PROOF” scrawled on it in red marker. The 6”x 8” picture on the inverse side is blurry, sure, but all surveillance-camera footage is. Nothing is in the frame but a figure, a figure in dark glasses and a heavy shawl, but tall, tall and long in both chin and tooth. It is absolutely the aforementioned proof.

The figure in the frame is unmistakably Cindi Lapenschtall, and the date on the photo is three days prior. Cindi looks great for a dead woman, hardly any rot on her, but, Hell, she’d look great in any state.

The fact that they know where she lives, that they have clear proof that Cindi Lapenschtall is alive, that fighting against them seems right now more unwise than going off on this mini-adventure at their behest, all of these are reasons enough to tear open the package, remove the familiar VR goggles inside, pry off and crumple the post-it tagged onto them that reads, Join Us, Miranda Swami, Become Yourself, and march the whole thing into her room. Everything other than the goggles she throws in a pile onto the bed while the goggles she lays out beside her, contemplating not just one, but the two lives she lost in a span of just a couple weeks.

What an awful day it’s been. An awful day in an awful world. She wishes to escape this one into another: a trip to the shore house might be in her future. If only she weren’t so damn exhausted. But fortunately, a much less committal getaway is dangling a carrot beside her. A getaway that doesn’t even require her to leave the East Village. Hell, she won’t even have to leave her room.

Phone aside. Phone silenced and off in the corner so she won’t be bothered by classmates asking for homework help or delivery service ads. She has some exploring to do. She applies the goggles to her dome, plugs them into her computer, and waits for a dot matrix to appear. She waits to be taken away. To there. To Gwami.To something else entirely.