9

Having imagined it a hundred-thousand times, Miranda has a rather strong preconceived notion about what exactly will happen when Gwami the Seer opens her eyes after such a long sleep. The accounts will reactivate, and as if by celestial snap, the world will affect a golden hue. A shockwave will burst forth from the epicenter of the event, a ripple in space-time causing momentary migraines in any passerby as it shoots outward, and those affected will just know, the information silently but successfully shared, that Gwami the Seer has returned to life. It will be spoken of in hushed tones by teenagers and then louder by the ten o’clock primetime anchors. It’ll be national news within an hour.

Only it doesn’t happen anything like that.

Shoulder to shoulder, jostling back and forth with all sorts of yellow-clad zealots, Miranda can’t keep her fingers in precise enough position to accept all the necessary terms and conditions let alone input all the necessary passwords. And some of them are intense. Digits, symbols, ancient hieroglyphics, emojis, there is no price too high for security. Only right now, she’s paying it.

Someone’s elbow hits her hand hard and forces a sequence of renegade 3’s onto the screen. People are animals. People are savages. If only she could’ve done this before she joined their march, but alas, that would’ve been impossible.

Reviving Gwami the Seer earlier might have set off alarms, would have notified any interested parties that Gwami was transmitting again, but through a new device, one located right here in New York City. If Cindi is right and Big Banana does have everyone in their pockets, that subtle information alone might have given them an opportunity to mobile forces against her. With Cindi (and, you know, the world) counting on her, Miranda couldn’t take the risk. But since the timer on the Statler Building is in its final hour, she’s betting the company has neither extra time nor energy, fully focused on ensuring the unabated success of this, Big Banana’s Big Day.

And if she were to do it outside of this enormous mass of humanity, one that has already accepted Miranda into its girth, they might be able to pinpoint her location still, send an assassin or satellite laser to take out the lone human occupying the certain slat of space from whence the resurrection occurred.

She’s cutting it close time-wise, she knows, and she’s surrounded on all sides by folks who probably won’t like what it is she’s plotting right now, but these are small sacrifices to be made en route to a world sans bananas. And so, she types away.

The great horde’s ebullient brand loyalty more than makes up for the lack of bananas Miranda has experienced in these last few blissful weeks. Like football fans at a tailgate, the downtown marchers wear their college allegiance on their sleeves, literally. The streets are a swarming sea of tall banana hats and yellow vests yellow jeans yellow shoes yellow blinking sunglasses with LED bananas dancing around the lenses. Banana ice freezing the more lucrative necks, banana ice sold by yellow trucks with ouroboros lines snaking around their exteriors.

This is the spirit of the Bash extended outward. It is a solar system of bananas. Manhattan, at least the southern half of it, has become Big Banana’s private island, private playground, private prison. Hmm, she thinks, those are all pretty damn good metaphors.

Ducking off into a side street and pressing herself close to the wall, Miranda quickly and quietly sends small defibrillator shocks into Gwami’s lifeless online body. Her Instagram, her Twitter, her Tumblr, the entire connected limbic system of Gwami the Seer begins to jerk, twitching across the enormous internet expanse. As each reloading screen sends her to a new-but-oh-so-familiar timeline, Miranda looks up, awaiting the world’s changing color, seeing if the people passing by start reaching into their bags for Advil.

But it doesn’t, and they don’t.

And maybe that’s because — boy oh boy — her follower count has suffered. While it was obviously inconceivable to reach Gwami’s full former followers count right from the start, neither she nor Cindi could have imagined the actually awful effects of her extended inactivity. It’s bad. She has maybe a 20th of the following she claimed at her height. Even that number is optimistic. And judging by the profile names and activity logs of those who’ve stuck around, most of them are either unmanned bots or one-off accounts some teenager made for, like, their dad, pre-stocked with all the “necessary” follows. This is bad, bad because the entirety of the plan rested on enough people hearing that Gwami had returned, cautiously craning their necks to see what she was up to and, lo and behold, she’s got a live stream going? Maybe I better tune in, you know, to engage with “the culture,” a culture that very quickly and forgivingly latches on to their old, familiar teet. But this, this will not do.

Makes sense, though. When you’re inactive, after all, you’re boring, and while general following habits are highly-individualized, there is one constant between all users: nobody follows boring shit. Boring old inactive Gwami hasn’t been moving the cultural needle, wasn’t provoking or prodding or contributing to the wave; she was just sitting there, dead as a morgue stiff, turning blue and putrid and puffy. Nobody wants to look at that.

Thus, Gwami the Seer is revived with only the most dedicated (or least aware) followers as witnesses.Thus, the mob joining her downtown jaunt towards the Bash en larger and larger masse probably have little idea Gwami has returned to save them. Miranda has an inkling that, no matter how long she waits, the the world will contentedly keep its current coloration. The frolicking folks around her do not seem dazed nor now knowing nor armed with strange new certainty. Nothing’s changed. Big Banana business as usual.

The good news, however, is there’s a certain palpability in the air, a general expectation of coming content that means people will all be armed with their phones, and all day. Thank Big Banana for that, for this small part in their own sabotage. Word will travel quickly. All these people with their phones, and the crazy part is that nothing’s even been officially announced yet, it’s just that the countdown timer is ticking closer and closer to 00:00:00 after having spent weeks filled with more well-defined integers. The vague promise of something is apparently all it took to get these fine New Yorkers off their asses and into their finest, yellowest clothes, enough to get them marching down the streets of Manhattan Island on a windy autumn day, preferring a nice walk in the breeze to the mobbed subways below.

Although she would love nothing more than to remain locked-in to her own phone, watching her follower count slowly rise the way she used to, watching the world slowly come to realize that there’s a Lady Lazarus in their midst, Miranda feels she has no choice but to shut the phone off for now, sucking its life with a smooth two-button press. There will be no tracking today, or at least not right this second. She posts an innocuous “hey, is this thing on?” out into the world, and then it’s off for real this time. The dopamine desire for likes drains from her brain, and Miranda, hands stuffed in pockets, shuffles along with the rest of the crowd.

It will remain unbeknownst to her until after this whole thing is over (but not long after) that it didn’t take long at all for Gwami’s Resurrection and Big Banana’s Mystery Alarm Clock to claim their rightful places as dueling top stories, the two trading blows at the tops of tabloid sites. The world tunes in to this clash of the titans; the primetime anchors order their PA’s to update the teleprompter (“Yes, Gavin, right the fuck now!”).

Miranda, meanwhile, is just doing her best not to be trampled.

The crowds, which were already hard to move through or breathe within, suddenly start flooding in from up out of the sewer grates and the subway stations, fully gagging the sidewalks. When the mere walkways are unable to contain their girth, they create a traffic nightmare in the streets. And this is a dangerous crowd, pulled along indiscriminately by its own mass. A cracked skull underneath their yellow Yeezys would feel like nothing more than a pavement bump; even if they had the decency to look back on what they’d just flattened, the swarm would have already covered it up. The only option is to stay moving, eyes up and forward.

Gazing upon a veritable sea of yellow, Miranda fears her utter lack of spirit might invite violence.

The crowd: bedecked in so much yellow you might think they grow such threads as leopards grow spotted coats, and with the frenzy that comes with deindividuation.

She, Miranda Swami: wearing, you know, normal people clothes, jeans and shit, with a spindly black scarf over her dainty neck.

The crowd: bananas.

Miranda Swami: decidedly not.

An easy enough fix: Miranda throws fifty dollars into the hands of the nearest pushcart operator and says, “Gimme all I can get for this.”

To her torso: a t-shirt with an arrow pointed up to her face, and scrawled in blocky yellow writing, Going Bananas Right Now.

To her domepiece: a trucker hat bedecked in Andy Warhol’s famous Velvet Underground bananas.

To her neck and arms: plastic-gold links shaped like bananas. If she shakes herself around, she jingles.

At an adjacent Banana Republic (who’ve really leaned into the trend), Miranda ditches her dark jeans for bright yellow sweatpants and her black flats for neon yellow, steel-toed boots. Prepared, she is, to kick some teeth in with flair. She comes out of the store looking as much a fanatic as the rest. Sliding some banana-shaped glasses over her eyes, Miranda goes full incognito. Wow, what a powerful feeling, this being completely disguised, completely at ease, completely a part of the trend.

O God, O Christ, it feels good to be a part of something so big…even if it’s only a ruse. With renewed confidence, she dips into and out of empty pockets within the crowd. She stops to greet a policeman. Someone lets their unleashed dog come lick her hand. O strange new world, that has such people in it.

Around her, the hundred-thousand voices blend into a single continuous, cacophonous yelp. Mixed up in the smattered sounds are police sirens, and the first hint that she has arrived at the Bash proper are the spinning yellow lights of the smoothly ululating police cruisers around its circumference. Yellow lights? Come on. So on the nose. No idea how they convinced the city to oblige that one, or the yellow police barricades, the yellow license plates, the yellow paint splatters dotted deliberately on the otherwise manicured sidewalks. Very un-NYPD. Ditto the yellow helmets on the officers, ditto their waving, yellow, metal-detecting batons. All the better to defend the innocent with, my dear.

The mass of bodies is soon squished into a straight line, into a dozen straight lines, the lot of them becoming a hydra’s mass of snake necks making their way slowly into metal-detecting lanes. Policepeople in obfuscating visors bark orders through megaphones, but with all the noise and all the voices, it sounds like they’re just barking, grunting. Miranda gets shoved from the back and shoved again, is nearly crushed between a couple of overweight gentlemen with their phones up, one with a child on his shoulders.

At the front of the line, a masked militiaman, — neon-yellow vested and with a Here-to-Help badge declaring their commitment to the crowd’s safety —, waves over her with a baton. When it begins beeping down by her phone-carrying pocket, as it does with everyone, Miranda’s insides start to freak out, and she can feel the coming on of an anxiety attack. But there’s no anxiety at the Bash. There are no bad feeling in the Bash. Those things have been focus-group-tested away. She’s waved through the gates. 

A few steps inside, and a clown hands Miranda an ice cream cone, then goes cartwheeling off to find some new girl in need of a sweet treat. Miranda is too entranced to really appreciate the gesture.

There’s some screaming and carrying on from out in the crowd behind her, and if Miranda were to look back to the entrance, she’d see that all of the lanes into the Bash have been unceremoniously closed off, that the massive gathering of people who lollygagged a few moments more than she are being denied entrance, being told that the Bash is at capacity, being told to come back another day. Judging from the shouts and snarls, humanity out there is breaking down, threatening to dissolve into a full-fledged animal riot. People really love their bananas.

But she doesn’t turn around. She can’t. Because after hearing so much about it, seeing it so many times from afar, hating it so senselessly for so long, after sweating and swearing and creeping towards it all day in the crevices between taller and fatter and more fanatical folks, Miranda is finally experiencing the Bash.

The Bash is creativity as its most pointless: meandering, and, thus, brilliant. It is creativity untethered to the real — it exists a world away from the practical, from mortgages, paperbacks and jury duty, from the structured and deliberate thought of the unwealthy. Creativity is almost always a matter of wealth, as wealth allows for free imagination unrelated to the rote requirements of survival. You might have all the world’s poetry pushing up through your pores, but if you spend 18 hours a day working two jobs and the other six blustering through sleep, it will matter not. The Bash is an imagination let loose and then manifested via means. It is the crossbred offspring of enviable affluence and maddening vision.

The five square blocks that comprise its area swell with the Totality of Banana. It overtakes Miranda like a sudden fever. The crowd parts as if to let her experience it all at once. Food carts sell frozen bananas in cups or cones while dwarfs in banana costumes get juggled like bowling pins by beefy circus performers on stilts. There are costumes upon costumes and custom banana peel bracelets woven by wrinkled Guatemalan transplants in paint-splattered smocks. Banana earrings and belts and home décor all for sale at everyday low prices, and a yellow, plug-in Toyota encircled by velvet ropes. MC’s with yellow hair lead street-corner charges in the Cha-Cha and Electric Slides. Somebody hands her a balloon; someone hands her a pamphlet on agricultural deregulation. Fire dancers and an exhibition in a heated tent called “Musaceae from Around the World.” All the streets painted yellow and ditto all the faces of the children. A caged lion lazes in human clothes, or, wait, is it a caged man covered in fur? Things appear and disappear as if in a delirium, exposed and swallowed up by the pulsating, swirling crowd as they run and jog and skip hither and thither. The fever dream continues, here revealing a trio of magicians pulling bananas out of any passing handbag, and there someone in a yellow body-suit is scaling a building with suction-cup hands. The encircling skyscrapers are all covered in anthropomorphic banana graffiti six-or-seven stories-high. If this is a nightmare, it is a particularly xanthaphobian one. And it’s all perfectly primed for the posting.

Click clik click click. Flash flash flash click.

Some kids pass around an illicit flask. Someone ignores the No-Smoking signs. A gaggle of too-human policemen apply their visors, blocking their eyes.

Even if you were completely taken by the desultory nonsense blitzkrieging your senses, as Miranda is, it’d still be impossible not to notice the gratuitous police presence. I mean, there is law enforcement everywhere. So many cops; the bored beat walkers without purpose indulge in the food stalls while their ranking officers wear aviators and lean angrily upon their car windows. That is to say, even those with authority seem unsure of their role, such is the sheer glut of them. And all in yellow. Is this normal for the Bash? Even in an omnithreatening world, this seems redundant.

Mixed-in with the throng of law enforcement proper are a bevy of less intense, yellow-vested folks, like who manned the metal detectors, motorcycle-masked and militia-like, dragging along dogs trained to grow feverish at a stray sniff of explosives or ecstasy. Even this many years later, the phantasm of 9/11 hangs over any public gathering, a phantasm made more solid by Parkland, by Newtown, by Las Vegas. Madmen don’t need a grand gesture to leave a mark anymore, just a doorman caught unawares and an open window somewhere far, far away. Makes all this hyper-local security seem superfluous. Surely, some should be setting a perimeter, locking down every one of the 686 windows peering down upon the Bash. Perhaps they are.

There used to be such strength in numbers, now there’s just vulnerability. 

Maybe they know she’s here.

Someone walks past smoking an illicit joint. The dogs curiously decline to notice. A man drops his turkey-leg and snickers at himself. A woman get ketchup on her Mink and howls. Somewhere, church bells ring.

Overcome by stimuli, Miranda is hardly aware of her movement, or that she’s part of a phenomenon, but mindlessly follows the crowd forward, pushing past the slower sorts, ducking under fat arms and sneaking past wobbly children as her subconscious leads her and everyone else forward.

Somewhere on the way, she gets a whiff of expensive men’s cologne.

And this has two profound effects.

1) It reminds her that nearby, probably hyperventilating into a paper bag, is Caleb, her blood-relative and once-confidante, enjoying his final moments before becoming the most famous person in the world. Does he know she’s here? Does he know she’s here to watch his life’s work be destroyed? Does he know that she’ll be the instrument of his destruction, the way he was the instrument of hers?

It is to be justice, at long last. 

And

2) Miranda realizes how quiet everything has become. That, and everyone’s stopped moving.

The whole crowd has just stopped. Everything has stopped. The police sirens and the barking, sniffing dogs, all of it observing an impromptu moment of silence. Miranda looks around her, at all the individuals, big and small, short and tall, dressed for summer and fall, but catches nary a stray eye. They’re all looking down at their phones. Miranda alone gazes up to the sky, to the cobalt cap of the Statler-Abramson Building, to a countdown timer which no longer displays numbers, but displays instead a web-address.

Some people in the crowd begin whimpering. A man takes his presumed wife into his arms and begins kissing her forehead, tears of joy streaming down both their faces. Miranda — fuck it — bites, flips a switch and imbues her phone again with computing power, revealing herself to the world, sure, but the temptation to visit www.BananaTime.com is too much.

It’s only a yellow background and a message in Impact. TODAY IS A VERY IMPORTANT DAY, it reads, AND WE’RE SO EXCITED TO SHARE OUR BIG NEWS WITH YOU. TO EVERYONE AT THE BASH, WE WANT TO THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE, YOUR SUPPORT, AND YOUR PRESENCE IN SUCH A TRYING TIME. WE AT BIG BANANA LOVE YOU TOO! WE WANT TO SHOW YOU JUST HOW MUCH. COME JOIN US AT ZUCCOTTI PARK (FOLLOW THE SIGNS) TO BE A PART OF OUR NEXT CHAPTER.

FOR THE REST OF YOU OUTSIDE THE BASH, DON’T WORRY, WE LOVE YOU TOO! TUNE IN AT 4pm TO OUR BIG BANANA LIVE STREAM AS WE UNVEIL TO THE WORLD OUR NEXT C-E-O.

EXCLAMATION POINT.

(WE’RE FREAKING OUT TOO). (sic).

The people in the crowd, those that aren’t debilitated by emotion, look around at each other, desperate to make knowing eye contact with everyone else lucky enough to have shown their brand allegiance early enough and on the right day. Smiles of we did it, and how great is this? pop up on bearded and bandaged and bespectacled faces. The rigorous part is over, all that love and lust for the brand, and here is its reward. An event of wild geopolitical importance will be happening here, now, for a teeny-tiny audience. They were doing it all for some until-then unknown incentive, and now that it’s been revealed to be bragging rights, they can relax. That’s what they were hoping for all along.

Police cars begin encircling the Bash’s perimeter, blocking off any wayward entry-ways, discouraging the dissatisfied masses with less luck from trying to squeeze over, under, or around the barricades.

There’s the initial emotion, there are the shouts of joy to God himself, and then, when the sensational dust has metaphorically settled, the members of the crowd, some hand-in-hand, some resting their heads on their neighbors’ shoulders, begin shuffling softly towards Zuccotti Park, herded there, in fact, like sheep. Miranda’s just going with it, whatever. She already had the ending spoiled for her.

After much shuffling, Miranda’s body comes to rest, along with all the others. Caught tight in the midsection of a bloated crowd hundreds of people over capacity, all the anxious feet and paperweight phones are almost too much to digest for as middling a stomach as the Bash’s nucleus, the mediocre Zuccotti Park. Less known as a park than a well-manicured median where once Wall Street was Occupied, it is in reality one of those mid-street islands of elevated grass strips and stone benches that exist hardly for pleasure, moreso to honor some hero cop from the 50’s.

The park and surrounding streets are laid over with a turf triangle which points all incoming fanatic feet forward to a platform at its nose. This particular stage, raised just a few feet off the floor, is a people’s stage, a stage surrounded by security, sure, (armed forces with riot-controlling cannons and visors and all of them white of skin and yellow of shirt), but so near to the ground to almost imply that, yeah, if the guards weren’t here, you might walk right up onstage and shoot jive with the new CEO, whoever it may be, and all the big brass of Big Banana would look at you from their twelve thrones at the back of the stage and smile in approval.

Two metal bars erected on the leftmost side of the stage support a massive LED screen, presumably one that will broadcast all the happenings up-front to those in back.

And because Big Banana basically owns the trademark on onanism, two enormous, gilded yellow B’s flank the stage, glittering with lights that, come dusk, will be lit bright enough for even the astronauts to look down upon and worship.

By this point, most of the phones, including Miranda’s, are busy getting the best-angled picture of the stage possible. The feverish mass, desperate to claim official ownership of this singular experience they’re about to share, must make sure everyone is aware. So many phones, and so close together, all so obviously the centerpiece of their owners’ attention. It’s time, then. Now. The realization swoops in from above. Time for Miranda to reach her hand up Gwami’s back and into her mouth and make her speak.

She logs in. She begins the end. She aggro’s the final boss. She posts.

“Get your fill of the new and improved @GwamitheSeer at #thereturn, broadcasting live and direct from the Bash #BigBanana #BananaCEO #BBCEO #EasterinAutumn.”

And just like that, the world acquiesces to a golden hue, a shockwave seems to burst forth from her phone, a ripple in space-time itself, and everyone in the crowd — faces looking at their phones and then up and around them — just knows, the information silently and successfully shared, that Gwami the Seer has properly returned to life. And by now, it is national news.

Almost immediately, Miranda starts seeing all these poor souls looking around the crowd, hoping maybe to spy someone with curiously familiar facial dimensions, the saboteur source of a quite cryptic little message apparently emanating from within their canary cohort. The interaction is immediate, the curiosity unabating. More and more faces pop their eyes up and around. But Gwami isn’t really there with them, and her puppeteer looks just like the rest, peering up and down from her phone just as they do theirs.

Maybe Gwami’s post added some urgency to the event, because the feedback falls away from the speakers, a line of lights sighs to life across the stage, and the music is hushed. With the sun stopped high in the sky, pausing where it will have the best view, reflecting soft orange off of the speakers and the building sides, it starts. And just like that, Gwami ceases to be the center of attention.

All these poor people, where are they supposed to direct their eyeballs?

Up at the stage, of course. Gwami was only ever going to be a momentary distraction. And when the Board comes out, the place goes, only somewhat figuratively, bananas. There should probably be more security. But despite their deficient numbers, despite the bull-moose energy of the crowd, the security forces remain stolid as the Board takes the stage; all the bastards are wearing yellow, waving open-handed at the crowd, making this feel like some bizarre college commencement sans the robes and diplomas, avec the self-satisfied smiles and practiced, camera-ready poses.

Adelaide Ansley blows kisses to the crowd, showering everyone with her love. What a sweetheart. Dominic Lambrusco, muscles surging underneath a too-tight tee chosen by a PR intern, drops to one knee and high-fives all the fans pushing wildly against security, desperate to lay hands on this man, this sex symbol, he who’s worth somewhere in the ballpark of $600 million, most of it acquired in arms dealing, sure, but who cares? This isn’t a Washington Post exposé, and look at those arms!

MaryJane Kant and Dolly Meyers shoot t-shirt cannons, while Derek Cassiopeia throws handfuls of yellow confetti out towards the audience. Originally, he was to throw dollar bills with Cindi’s face on them, but there was fear this would confuse the simple crowd, causing a premature panic. There was time allotted for panic later.

Adelaide Ansley approaches a microphone, hushing the crowd with an open palm before saying with rockstar cadence, “Thank you all for coming! Thank you for your love and your support! Cindi would be proud. But we’re done mourning Cindi. It’s time now to celebrate her legacy!”

That’s exactly what the crowd needs to hear, because they as a mass swing their limbs skyward and some even start speaking in tongues, their eyes rolled back in their heads, possessed by some strange profligate force, and anyone with a hat throws it up in the air like they’ve just graduated. In a way, they have.

Dominic Lambrusco is handed another microphone. “Cindi was the greatest leader. She taught us what it takes to lead: integrity and responsibility, insight and humility!” His sharp-cheddar voice echoes through the city square. A woman nearby swoons. It is unclear whether anyone catches her.

Miranda hears the man’s words and thinks of her brother and scoffs.

“The first thing we asked ourselves about any candidate was this: would Cindi like this person? Would Cindi respect them? If they weren’t indebted to making the world a better place, then surely she would not.”

For such canned, corny remarks, they really incite some latent Dionysian thrum in the crowd. Someone beside her rips their shirt off, and Miranda understands too late that the gathering has assumed an increasingly sexual vibe — there’s all this screaming, and sweat too, and straight-up moans if you listen hard enough. Or maybe her imagination is compensating for what are, really, just the innocent, exulting wails of an otherwise pleasant dithyramb.

There are more prepared remarks; there is a slipshod slideshow about Cindi’s effect on the company and on the Trans community, though, curiously, there are no activists or celebrities interviewed. The rather meditative tone of everything onstage clashes with the crowd’s wild spirit. To be fair, these people would continue on to ever more feverishness no matter what actually happens on stage, but the proceedings still seem rather tone-deaf, rather carelessly designed, rather out of character. It’s a misfire. On the biggest stage, at their biggest moment, Big Banana misfires.

Something is definitely amiss, because with Big Banana, nothing ever is.

The Board settles into their back-of-stage thrones, smiling and whispering to each other, posing unassumingly for pictures, looking at the slideshows and advertisements — whatever it is up on that screen — seeming all too tranquil while the crowd is almost literally gnawing at its own arm. Can’t they hear the shrieks? Can’t they even comprehend what it is they’re doing to these people? Or, shit, is this like Christmas for them? Must be. A bunch of godless capitalists made uninhibited and raw by their false idols…sounds like something a demon would be into.

Though it’s daylight, and though even the rowdiest demons would be intimidated by this crowd, something fearful bedevils Miranda, something that makes her stare compulsively into all the open spaces between bodies and pray fervently that Cindi will appear soon, take over soon, cause a big enough commotion to break the mob monotony; this waiting is unbearable. It’s a dangerous, deathly thing she’s involved in, and she can’t escape the certainty that worse things are yet to come. For here is a crowd excited, and the excitement has turned into sex, and sex left unchecked always turns into violence.

A video starts playing, recollecting Big Banana’s history. There’s triumphant music, and some, like, back-stage and unauthorized videos of the Board members engaging in such family-friendly activities as Going to the Water Park and Eating Ice Cream in the Green Room. It’s unclear if anyone but Miranda appreciates the bizarre juxtaposition between the innocuous schtick on stage and the sweaty, yellow Woodstock wildness of the crowd below. Nobody, even the Board, seems really sure of what’s to come next. Most of them are just sitting there, waiting. Naomi Freemen is very conspicuously checking her watch…and checking it again. As if she has somewhere better to be.

The video ends, and it is in the great spreading silence that follows, the kind of silence which precedes something, that Gwami finally goes live. Miranda raises her phone up like an offering, joining the 600 others recording the very same thing.

Miranda watches as Agatha Wolonksy, standing motionless and cold behind her golden chair, suddenly looks up, her own phone screen raised in Miranda’s direction, transparently trying to place the now-live Gwami the Seer in the crowd. A man in a suit hurries over to her, and they exchange whispers; those whispers travel through each individual Board member to the front of the stage, where Adelaide Ansley, a nanosecond of actual panic flashing across her face, takes a standalone mic in hand and breaks the inaction.

“Okay! Who’s ready to meet our new C-E-O?”

The sex sounds turn to snarling, and huge swaths of the crowd swirl together in violent mosh-pit typhoons. Bodies slam-bang-boom collide. Fistfuls of hair fly away in the breeze. Teeth enter hands, and two women begin hollering, their necks nuzzling against one another’s.

“Woah, woah, woah. I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I saaaaaiiiiid: Who’s ready to meet our new C-E-O?”

People are dropping to all fours, are literally beginning to howl. Dads bounce kids with blood-shot eyes on their shoulders. A foursome nearby starts taking off their shoes.

Adelaide continues on unabated, speaking in ambiguities about the promised candidate. With each forthcoming sentence, oddballs in the crowd begin to, like, transcend the riot and freeze, looking towards the stage with eagle-eyed intensity, rapt by some unspeakable force, perhaps the same one that’s just now supplied Miranda with body-shivering chills.

It’s unclear where they came from or when exactly they approached, but a horde of the yellow-vested, white-masked miltiamen have gathered at the back of the stage. Miranda’s body shouts at her brain to get out of here, but she can’t reasonably move backwards and point the camera up at the same time. Whatever is going to happen will happen with her in the center.

Agatha Wolonksy begins whispering to a man with an M16 at the back of the stage — is that legal? — when a shrill gasp erupts from the center of the crowd, timed perfectly with the huge screen’s schlocky slideshow cutting to a grainy static, and Miranda is already streaming, thank God, to like 90,000 viewers right then (they showed up out of nowhere, and all together), and now the giant screen begins to distort, displaying, instead of the Big Banana logo swiveling coolly, a dark room in grey, surveillance-camera style, and everyone’s cameras point either towards the disturbance in the crowd or at the screen.

Cindi’s familiar, semi-lascivious voice begins speaking all muffled and coarse from out of the speakers, the crowd quiets somewhat, straining to hear, and nobody even realizes that there’s tear gas rising up from the ground until it’s already in their eyes and their mouths. They hardly even hear the rubber bullets until they or their neighbor or their wife gets smashed in the neck and back and thighs. The shirtless guy beside Miranda gets hit in the eye. Reality cracks.

And then, all Hell breaks loose.

For a moment, everything stops — the coughing and groaning and flying elbows, and even the bullets hang in mid-air. This unnatural pause brings a sound, a low moan like an ohhmmmm, produced as the tectonic plates below ground strain to break their temporal restraints. The ohhmmm rises in pitch and volume. You can almost hear the sound expanding and expanding and expanding, enveloping more and more frequencies within it, before, all at once, contracting into itself. Zwwooooosh. The ensuing screech is too acute to be heard properly, but it breaks all the nearby windows, ravages all the nearby eardrums. Small shards of glass begin falling from above, a bloody snowfall of broken, yellow windows.

Was that an EMP? She still has service, somehow, so unlikely. And all this smoke? Is it Napalm or something? Agent Orange? Whatever it is, it envelops all of the Bash before anyone’s bearings can conceivably be gotten. Trapped inside the cloud, breath becomes scarce and reduced to gasping. The grit and dust and glass and horrible ash stick to any open eyeballs or sweaty forearms. The collective headache is unforgiving.

Somewhere inside the helter-skelter, Miranda keeps her phone shoulder-high, capturing as much of the twisted carnage as she can. Her free hand grabs blindly at a nearby shoulder, using it to propel herself forward. She takes a thrashing arm to the face but regains momentum as she rushes forth through smoke then around a pair of trembling, embracing figures and forward, forward, and the smoke even seems to be thinning when thunk, her stomach collides with a police barrier, sending her harshly to the ground. Her phone falls flat upon her nose, and in her scramble to pick it up, she sees her own face looking back at her.

An already terrible moment has been made worse: Gwami the Seer’s face has been revealed to the entire world. 

And the fucking balls on our heroine, I swear to God: she smiles. Wide. 

In a world of less chaos, less hostility, less bizarre, Miranda might begin a much-entitled freak out. But adrenaline, good adrenaline, won’t let her leave this immediacy, grabs under her armpits, raises her up to her legs and with a final push, lifts her onto the hood of a nearby police car. For one moment, thrust into a random pocket of clean air, she can point her phone clearly onto the pandemonium, catch her breath and wipe her eyes. In its gratuity, such overflowing chaos tends to look muted, as violent, churning waves do from far onshore. 180,000 people are watching the world crumble through her eyes. It takes all her willpower not to start reading all the comments scrolling like automatic wildfire up and down her screen.

With the mayhem transforming the landscape into one stunned tableaux vivant of blood and screeching frenzy, it’s the stage, still calm and in such stark contrast to the rest of the landscape, that draws her attention. On that stage she thought she might see the Board frozen in panic, and at their vanguard, Caleb standing worried, looking for her, spying his sister in the crowd and sending his army of personal security forward to rescue her.

She’s half-right. On the stage, standing just where they were, like automatons, are the Board, only they’ve changed their clothes, slipped into something more comfortable, more uniform, these drab yellow jumpsuits, like the militiamen were wearing, jumpsuits that tighten thick around the ankles and around the neck leaving only shiny hands and faces and soot-blackened feet exposed. And behind the Board is — what in tarnation? — the Board? Another nearly complete set. Twelve all in a row. And behind them, another Board. Again!

Stripped of their yellow shirts and white visors, the militiamen-cum-Board-Members seem equally inhuman, their empty faces betraying no emotion, no thought. Miranda, though she has felt much new sensation recently, finds herself diving to new, never-before-seen depths of pure terror. The few remaining rules of the world have collapsed to dust atop her toes. As rows and rows of Board Members like rows and rows of shark teeth march forward into the smog with military precision, Miranda knows there’s only one directive she can cling to:

Survive, god damn it.

Survive to tell the motherfucking tale.

Escape becomes all-important. Miranda turns to run and steps right into the/a Dominic Lambrusco, who smashes a rifle butt into the bridge of her nose. There’s no time to react, only to drop her phone and fall backward through an undergrowth of flailing limbs onto the turf below. The floor skins her cheek; blood trickles from her nose drip drip drip onto her left hand and the tear gas swells in thick billows but sniff-sniff-sniff, there’s something else sulfuric and semi-noxious mixed in with its vinegary odor. Miranda looks up expecting to see the sun, but it has hidden behind a building for safety. It’s only the cobalt point of the Statler-Abramson Building visible in the sky overhead. On its face, the web address has vanished, replaced instead by a yellow smiley face. Beneath it, Chinese-restaurant-bag encouragement: Have a Nice Day.

Then the smoke, voracious, comes forward to eat the sky and eat Miranda too, and it does and everything goes black.

Life reeks of sulfur, burnt rubber, boiling tires.

Miranda’s legs feel as if they’ve been blasted by shrapnel. She begins to crawl, desperate for movement of any kind.

A pair of crushing black boots sprint by, kicking dirt and street water up into Miranda’s face. If they had been but two inches to the left, the boots might’ve sank through her skull as a heavy spoon crunches through the shell of a soft-boiled egg.

She pushes herself to her feet, but balance is hard to maintain when you can’t see the sky. Which way is up? Screams and shouts, absorbed and refracted by the smoke, seem to oscillate in and out from everywhere at once. Sightless, accosted by shrieks, and disoriented like a big wave surfer thrown under, Miranda lurches around wildly, scrambling for a handhold that might keep her upright.

Only able to open her eyes for split seconds before the ash cakes on and leaves them stinging, she moves blindly, her hands flailing in front of her, here smacking someone in the face, there cracking their knuckles against the mirror of a parked car. She pulls herself along with whatever she can grab, resting on door handles and trying, when her eyes are open, not to look off into the distance, for in the boiling light within the smoke, all things come to look strange, harrowing, horrifying.

She makes herself flat against a building, and through an open scar in the fog, she sees three of the Board members moving robotically forward. The one in the middle, a facsimile of Fausto Gutierrez, the guava-fruit heir — a man whose metaphorical plastic insides she once filled with buzzsaws that really spun — drags an unconscious woman by her ankle, the lady’s head smacking against each and every upturned asphalt boulder. An Arthur Haynes-copy beside him stops, sniffs, begins to look towards Miranda, but the smoke rushes to fill its former gash. When it opens again, the girl is gone.

Something caws from above, and Miranda finds that if she stays low, almost in a duckwalk, she can move with her eyes open. Ash and charred bits of building matter drift indolently to the ground, interrupted only by the quaking crash of a window-washer’s lift that couldn’t quite hang on. One such contraption falls some twenty feet in front of her, sending her hurtling back, sending metal chips shooting out like burst grenade shrapnel, sending up a cloudburst of flame that splits the smoke.

The action draws the attention of some meandering, marching Board members, two Adelaide Ansleys and a Dolly Meyers — sans expression of course, but if you came close enough you could see their pupils vibrating wildly within their iris prisons — who approach through a flame-scorched circle in the cloud, inspecting the lift for blood or other human gore they can lick off for further fuel. Miranda, lacking a better option, plays dead under some slashed rebar wires. There’s sufficient blood smeared on her face, and though the footsteps get close, perhaps that too-convincing blood is why they eventually step away.

Despite her fear, Miranda’s clothes are hardly even damp, for the air is so dry and acrid with chemicals and fire-heat that the sweat wicks away as it forms. Her throat has become sandpaper. Her eyes can’t produce tears at any fixed, normal clip so they produce as much as they can whenever possible. Miranda runs through more smoke, bent low as possible, crying and bleeding and coughing and coughing, and gagging and coughing some more.

In a clearing in the center of the street, three ropes descend down from above the cloud.

Miranda spots them first. The relief is insane, the confusion terrific, but why would her body care about its mind’s hesitancies? This is an escape, a friendly helicopter full of stand-up National Guardspeople here to airlift medics in and the wounded out. She runs to the ropes but stumbles on a raised brick, tripping and sliding down the pavement on two now-skinless elbows. She looks back up at the ropes.

A white man with brown hair and a purple, swollen eye has the same idea she did. He limps frantically over to the rope, grabbing it with both hands, wrapping his arms around it tight like it’s his mother, and tugs. It pulls up, a fishing hook reacting to a hit.

And then there’s this awful, unforgettable noise. The noise of a high-speed blender, a smoothie maker, a Magic Bullet or Robocoup…an efficient and merciless destruction.

And the falling charred remnants of building and tree and scaffold add the chopped-up bits of a white man with brown hair and a purple, swollen eye to their feather-falling ranks.

Another person rushes forward to the rope and Miranda shouts “NO!” but the smoke comes in with calculated force to obstruct her vision. The smoke that’s been doing her plenty favors, sparing her from harm best it can, keeps her now from witnessing this fresh horror. Her elbows busted up but adrenaline keeping them from being a concern, Miranda pushes herself back and back and back; the smoke cloud, be it out of concern or torment, follows and follows and follows.

For how long or how far does the smoke let Miranda push herself back before it tires of the game? It might be ten blocks, it might be two; might be taking an hour or thirty seconds. The smoke has long since blocked out the sun and the light, and her phone is by now smashed into pieces. All possible windows have been shrouded over.

Backwards, she rises and steps and falls and crawls and then drags herself, tripping over small fissures, tumbling into a slight sinkhole, the very Earth keeping her from collecting her bearings. The sky and the planet both seem to be in on some gag, some prank that takes away first her legs, then her arms, then her mind. Her hand passes through something wet and pre-mushed. If Miranda weren’t so preoccupied, she might be bothered to wretch.

Things start to fade away. The thoughts go like when you’re smoking a cigarette; eyesight next, a mask tightened over her face. And, God forgive her, she lets it happen.

It’s not acquiescence to death necessarily, but a letting go of her own story threads for a second.

For there is a plot, a plot that’s moving.

And that plot requires her. Right?

And something has been looking out for her this whole time. Her work here, she knows in her soul of souls, is not done.

The smoke overtakes her, gets right up into them nostrils, and blots out her thoughts.

Whatever the smoke is doing, she’ll let it. She’s been left with no other choice. The mask sets upon her eyes, and the last thing she sees is yellow. Bright, putrid yellow. And everything smelling oh so sweet.

🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌 🍌

When she comes back to life, it’s just in time to see two beakless birds with human teeth swooping down to steal a clementine out of her cracked, bloody hand, but she doesn’t protest. She lacks the willpower, and besides, the birds look ornery. Best avoid a scrap and preserve her energy, lest the next interloper threaten more than the fruit she carries.

Wait! Listen! What has happened to the screaming and sirens and the insane cackling cracks of straight-up clefts opening in the Earth? It’s all quiet, all dissolved into a single, underlying thrum. The dull roar of the city, she finds, is her only companion.

The circling birds, squawking and hissing at each other as they fight for the last of the citrus skin, leave for another target further away. Soon they’re gone into the smoke and haze, somebody else’s problem now.

So, she sits alone in what appears to be the debris of a ruined fruit stand, unaware of how she got here, praying for mercy from the birds, wishing there were a more varied selection of produce around her than the meager corpses of kiwis, smushed tangerines and, of course, bananas. Aloe leaf would be nice for her cuts. But she makes do with the kiwis. Even after they’ve been crushed and smattered, their insides smashed and their outside charred, they’re still the best things she’s ever tasted. She would eat the spines off a cactus if it meant an end to the gravel throat and the stomachache.

No matter the circumstance though, she refuses to touch the bananas, which are all strangely intact.

Although weirdness has been coming at her pell-mell, the atmosphere here is somehow calm. The smoke, or something in it, has kept her from immediate destruction. And taking her here, to this spot?? Icing. The fruit cart, compared to everything else around her, seems an oasis. The smoke is definitely clearing, or at least lightening, and if she looks up, she thinks she can make out a suggestion of blue sky. A blaring police siren flashing blue and red and yellow explodes out of the nearby smoke, screams past the cart — only it’s light visible — before disappearing, sound and sight alike, into the further cloud. Now tell me? Would that happen in Hell? (maybe)

Miranda shuts her eyes, still stinging from the soot. She tries to relax, tries to breathe, licks kiwi guts from her bloody fingers. But those birds, their squawks become shrieks, aren’t content to stay gone: they return with a full phalanx of their hungriest cousins. The time for repose has passed. Safety will have to be found elsewhere. Slowly, Miranda backs away, further from the pushcart until her back is against a building on the opposite side of the street. The birds circle and swoop and, wisely, also stay away from the bananas.

Above her, the awning of Len’s Chinese Grocer glows red, unperturbed and nary scratched. It actually makes sense that these lesser Chinatown supermarkets would be spared; they’re so tight and cramped and never air-conditioned, and it’s likely any wayward hellion would think it had already been tagged by other, earlier demonic forces. But Len’s is fortuitous, for it grounds the girl. This is, in fact, a grocer Miranda has visited many a time, for the owner, whose name is Yu and has a gold front tooth, is happy to sell cigarettes at a lower-than-the-state-minimum price, and when Miranda has been particularly tight on cash/not talking to Mother and Father, it’s to Len’s she treks, getting Parliaments and Takis for whatever spare change she has in her pocket. Len’s, she knows, sits on an oft-trodden street in East Chinatown. Hell might have boiled over, but it’s boiled over onto the same New York that was here before.

A formal exit route at long last presents itself: amble along east — if you hit The Doughnut Plant, you’re going the wrong way — and get to the East River Park. Maybe she could catch a ride from there to the Palisades on a passing barge.

Tears come to her eyes; she’s never felt so fully a New Yorker. God Bless the Grid.

Miranda looks into Len’s, smushing her eyes to the glass. Though hampered by ambient smoke, she can just about discern that the rows of shelving are all empty. In kind of a half-trance, she tries the door, finding it open but the store inside lacking her friend. If she were a more courageous type, perhaps she would call his name softly, finding him huddling for safety in the walk-in freezer behind the storefront, enlist him in her journey and gain a welcome compatriot in her stroll through Hell. But Miranda Swami’s trying to get the fuck out of dodge; it’s just maybe a smoke would help steady her hand.

Surely, Yu won’t mind if she walks quietly around to the back of the register, selects a pack of Parliaments — or, you know what, maybe two packs — smacks a ten-dollar bill upon the counter, and lights up right then and there, in the soft sepia light and orange glow of mid-street cinders.

One cigarette indeed steadies her nerves, the next clears her head, the third sits heavy in her stomach. Lighting the fourth, she exits Len’s, trying and failing to keep the ding-dong door-chime from ringing as she does so. She closes the door softly, turning back out to the ash and knowing, just knowing, that with the bloody scars on her cheek and the limp cigarette hanging from her mouth, that she looks fucking cool. Some things just don’t change with each generation’s fresh morality, and one of them is that a badass, beat-up, bloody broad with a fire stick in her mouth is going to look dope as hell. And she knows it.

Something about her appearance imbues Miranda with confidence as she walks quietly east towards the water. The walking along goes great at first, and the strange outline of horrible things, perhaps not wanting to fuck with her, seem satisfied staying in their shadows; only their silhouettes can be seen through the haze, and only if Miranda actively looks for them. She should have taken a water bottle from Len’s too. She’s prepared to smoke her throat bloody.

Maybe it’s her imagination, hmmm probably not, but doesn’t it seem like the fog is lifting as she moves further east? Maybe it too is now afraid of getting in her way. Does this mean everything is going to be okay? She hears the unmistakable squeak of a Prius horn, which means maybe normal New York is returning from its holiday, and are those subway screeches she hears from down in the grates beneath her?

As if it were watching her, waiting until she could find some bit of self-assuredness and safety in the smog, a new, sinister sensation slithers out from the smokescreen. Miranda feels in the silence behind her a presence. A chilling presence. You too know this feeling, of something unseen watching you, its eyes upon your neck. It’s worst when alone in the dark, when nothing is there to distract you from the indelible nearness of the watcher. Miranda, all good things sapped from her, refuses to turn and face it, for facing it might make it real. She lights another cigarette, but can’t steady her hands. It falls from her quivering lips, landing with a sizzle in a puddle of grey liquid. Fearing what immobility might force her into confrontation with, Miranda continues on, repeating the prayer of the child who’s heard midnight footsteps outside her door, who hides underneath her blanket thinking If I can’t see it, it isn’t real.

If I can’t see it, it can’t hurt me.

Just a few more blocks.

She stops finally, finding herself panting from absurd fright, but there it is, dogging her, the same feeling, the same assurance by her autonomous nervous system that she’s being followed. Something in the delirium is tracking her steps.

Then, it’s like someone takes a balloon to her arms: All the hair raises, puppeteered by unseen static, and she feels in her stomach what’s about to happen, so she turns, turns to see a figure coming at her slowly from the dusk. But it’s not running at her, nor is it trying to hide or pounce, and, oh thank heavens, oh thank the Lord, it’s a man. It’s just a man! Threatening on any other day, the idea of a white man approaching her on a dark and deserted city street is, right now, rock-candy sweet. Hardly threatening at all, it’s an elderly street vendor, in a white smock and pants and capped by one of those old diner-style Back to the Future hats. A wonder he’s survived this situation at all. Even more curious is the spotless, nondescript hand-trolley he pushes. Perhaps he has come, has followed her, this emissary of good, to bestow upon her harmless Earth treats, ice cream or dirty water dogs or honey-roasted cashews with the sweet street smell they give off. Perhaps he is here to spur her onward, another plot device to push her towards the end of this arc.

“Hey!” Miranda screams, waving her gnarled arm, utterly incited by any company at all.

The man comes closer, and closer still, smiling with rotted yellow teeth (weird), white hair hanging like stalactites from his ears and nose (gross), and attached to his cart is a solitary balloon (kinda lame), a balloon that’s mylar yellow (oh no) and very much in the shape of a banana (oh my god).

The static returns, and the man, smiling as he does it, takes a hand from behind his back, a hand clasping a slick, black pistol, and points it at Miranda.

This is so American: even when a portion of the country has literally been consumed by Hell, the most immediate danger is still some old, white man flaunting his second amendment rights. So typical.

Right when the gun goes off, the actual single nanosecond amongst the billion every moment, Miranda is pushed forward, physically pushed as if by cosmically strong shoulders, her full weight thrown towards the old man’s old legs. The bullet whizzes by. She can actually hear it sizzling through the air as it passes, taking a chunk of her ponytail with it. Her nostrils will catch whiffs of burnt hair for the rest of the day. But her own heaved shoulder connects with the man’s knees, which crack in a brittle, elderly way — his poor legs already so arthritic and problem-riddled, aside from the very new and debilitating medical issue of having a full-grown woman smash down upon them at top speed.

She gets back up and starts running, a new kind of adrenaline coursing within her plasma, and she’s not running like before, not running to get away from something, but running to get away from everything, running with speed enough to jerk out of her paltry skin altogether.

There is no direction or sense in her escape, only fever. She can still hear, or imagines she hears, the creaky wheels of the handcart and the clop-clop of her would-be-assailant’s clogs on nearer and nearer pavement, and it doesn’t matter what gargoyles and mutants and marching satanic soldiers she sees, for she’s lost herself in the steps, in the unflappable fog, running, running straight without the option or desire to stop, the clop-clop behind her camouflaged now by an abrupt wail of car horns and the soft creak of their chassis being pulled along, sounding close but not quite here. A subway rumbles below, sending a ripple through the very Earth. It’s also become quite windy.

And still her legs churn, apparently operated by a different motor than the one controlling her spent, swaying torso. Her brain is so full of unchanneled signals, so many neurons firing simultaneously, that it’s a wonder she can even manage consecutive, alternating steps. Still somehow enveloped in the cloud, it’s unclear whether the smoke has continued growing in volume or if she is dragging a personal portion of it with her.

Fear of this magnitude dulls time’s edges, whittling away at the seam between moments until everything, structurally unsound in the first place, collapses. Although tempted to believe that time has stopped outright, Miranda is already wary of temporality’s treacherous tricks. Her feet keep moving, the concurrent sounds materializing and disappearing in rhythm with her footfalls, so time spurts forward still; her thoughts still move from left to right. This metronomic motion couldn’t happen outside of time. Nor in death. The safeguarded knowledge that somehow, despite everything, she’s clung to life is enough to keep her moving forward, forward, forward for God knows how long, forward until the subway’s rumbling becomes distant and the clop-clops die away and a new smell enters into her sweaty, smoky olfactory glands, glands so damn happy to be whiffing something even the slightest bit different: freshness.

It’s the kind of freshness that comes from trees; trees with prickly branches bursting intermittently into the canopy of the thinning smoke. Trees that are harbingers of new circumstance, as merciful daylight and blue sky finally appear through an aperture in the cloud’s apex. The blue above, with a graceful power, swoops down to street level and blows away the last ardent haze. It’s the breath of a watchful God commanding the smoke to dissipate. And the smoke, powerless to this wind’s whims, obeys.

Miranda stops short, nearly falling over, as all the adrenaline within her, no longer necessary, flees fully through her toes. Swaying, she holds herself steady against a mailbox, sucking in as much air as possible with every breath. The smoke in her eyes has left the world blurry, but even with the details smudged she can see color, greens and beiges and birds-eye blue.

She can now see the trees for more than just their branches. Their woody stems exploded through the sidewalk cement long ago, hoping for a prolonged taste of the same, sweet sun that now kisses Miranda’s cheeks, that falls flat on her outstretched tongue, tasting like butterscotch. A bird flies overhead, not some sooty midtown gull but a forest songbird, a lark or robin or a cardinal, all but the latter grossly out of season. Along with the freshness comes a chill, a welcome chill, one that dries the sweat on Miranda’s upper lip and begins to evaporate the ocean in her underarms. She wishes for sturdier boots, for a more robust collar. Ah, the familiar wishes and complaints. From this, she knows she’s back in New York.

But this is a different facet of New York, green and brown and not grey, with real residences, a few stories at most and thin, thin like parodies, thin like the suburbs, thin like stilted cabanas along the shore, the home less the focus than the terroir. How can this quiet, birdsong place be contained in the same city, nay province, as the overflowing garbage cans and typhoid vagrants of Midtown, or as the smoke-spitting barges parked and belching along the south harbor? It’s too green, too pristine, too still.

The symmetrically-spaced mailboxes have family names on them. Miranda imagines the Montana’s and the Sheehan’s and the Richard’s all safe in their houses, watching today’s events unfold on the 65” in their family rooms and not out in Manhattan personally dodging Hell. If they’re even in Brooklyn that is. Actually, it doesn’t seem like anyone is in Brooklyn.

On second thought, it might really be too green, too pristine, too still.

It’s like Brooklyn after a plague, like the population fled something sinister, leaving all their belongings behind, their bread unleavened. Toys and trikes lie overturned in the yards, cars have been left running beside paid parking meters; perhaps there’s been a mass Christian disappearance, and she’s solely, Judaically been Left Behind. A liquor store with an open door is without discernible leadership, and a subway station staircase transports no commuters.

If Miranda had any capacity for fear left in her, she might very well fear. But only clear, present danger would exhaust her final reserves now, not this total but tolerable weirdness. So, she walks forward with less anxiety than she might otherwise have, approaching a far-off tree line with no emotions whatsoever except a desperate desire to relax, reach the firework canopies of green and red and yellow and autumnal orange like molten nickel, and just relax there. There’s no other park this could be than Prospect Park, mammoth and densely-forested, replete with cool patches of moss and crabgrass where a weary girl can lay her head. She’d do anything for a nap.

If her senses hadn’t spent the day so overwhelmed, perhaps she would see Him sooner. Like from the other side of the street, where she stops to look both ways for sudden, speeding traffic. She doesn’t even see Him as she passes, for He’s on a bench to her right, and she’s only focused ahead, on the trees and the nearest pathway into them.

“Miranda Swami?” He says, the voice like gravel parting underneath a snake.

Something in His voice restores her to normalcy, and she turns to see Him in his full effect: a man, sitting alone on a bench behind her. Under the outstretched arms of an old, very weepy willow, He sits, this man, this first presence felt since exiting the smokescreen. Her heart begins to beat, for some beings carry in their very vibe a kind of warning. 

But it’s not like she can ignore him, because events were always going to deposit her here, with Him. It was always a mathematical certainty that they’d both be here; every incident in the universe has conspired to this point, to this meeting. To this turning point.

The man, statuesque until now, shuffles a bit, rustling the ends of his long tan trench-coat against the leafy debris on the sidewalk. A shabby, brown derby hat shields his face, and it’s pulled pulled down low, so as to an old-timer engaged in a park-side afternoon siesta.

He finally looks up at her. He’s got these great green eyes, two illuminous, unblinking emeralds with facets to spare, and fetid, yellow skin like rotten flan. What could conceivably be deemed a “smile” appears on the bottom half of what could conceivably be deemed his “face” (though his whole body is kind of his face) revealing rows of tiger-shark teeth, all serrated and gleaming and that’s when Miranda gets it.

She’s crossed a certain point. She has aggro’d the final boss; she never stopped to buy potions. 

She knows this man.

“Miranda Swami!” he shouts.

And not a man at all.

“You’ve made it! I was beginning to think —”

Him and his ilk have haunted her dreams a-thousand-and-one times. 

“ — you had lost your way. Or met an, ahem, unfortunate end over there.” 

Does he know the torment his fruity friends have caused her?

“A pleasure to see you again,” he says.

Who are we kidding, of course he knows. It’s his business to.

This literal, and very much alive, Banana Demon, a truly Big Banana, extends his gloved hand for a shake, but anyone could see the half-hidden claws trying to poke out of the fingers. Miranda’s hardly in control of the hand that takes the Banana’s. Turns out there was indeed some fear left over. Here, it is, put to good use.

“It’s been a long time coming, Ms. Swami. A long time. My friends call me A.B. And you look like you could use a friend,” he grumbles, his voice like a silty mudslide.

As a matter of fact, she could.

“I know we have sort of a reputation to the contrary, but I won’t bite, I don’t even have a digestive tract. “These,” he says, knocking on his jagged teeth with a fingernail, “are just for show. I promise. I just want to talk. Here, sit,” he says, moving over, making space.

Smooth-talking as always, A.B. has lured another one, folks. The girl, as if in a trance, meanders to his side, exhales, and thus, accepts her fate.