When No One Is Watching(68)
“Okay. Boom. Remember when you came to Mr. Perkins’s before the meeting and I was reading about Underhill? Well, no, you wouldn’t remember that, but this is what I was reading.” She pulls out an old yellowed pamphlet. “It’s this British dude jerking off about how great killing Native Americans is so you can take their land and about how America is great because it’s so uninhabited. The cognitive dissonance of that, right? He wouldn’t be out there killing Native Americans if no one was on the land. He was a mercenary for the colonizers, basically, and the Dutch hired him to kill the Natives around here. He helped pave the way for New York City as it is now.”
“Okay.” I take the pamphlet and stare at it, going along with her but worried for the first time that her beliefs are going to fall into the “all in her head” category. “So, this was in the 1600s?”
“Yes,” she says. “Now think about the info from the heritage center. The laws preventing Black people from passing down property they owned to their children were put in place in the 1700s. Weeksville was founded in the 1800s because you had to own land to vote, which is why they made it so hard for Black people to own land.” She’s nodding as she talks. “The people in Weeksville build a whole community, and then boom, suddenly the government just has to plow right through with Eastern Parkway, like no one lived there? Just like they did with the indigenous people. Just like they’ve done with so many communities when you do even the most basic Google search for this. Central Park was built on a Black community. I am leaving a whole lot out right now, but it’s like this cycle repeating over and over again.”
“Hey. Maybe we need to just think on this a bit,” I say.
“You don’t see the pattern? I thought you said we were both crazy. Damn it, Theo.” She plucks a packet of papers out, flips a few pages, and then shakes it at me. “These are internal documents from the VerenTech Pharma proposal. Compare this description of the neighborhood and Underhill’s little manifesto.”
Her eyes are wide, begging me to make the connection, so I glance back and forth between the two pieces of evidence she’s given me.
“Okay, are you saying you think some dude from the 1600s is involved in the VerenTech Pharmaceuticals headquarters?”
She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose before speaking.
“No! I’m saying that this VerenTech memo feels like the same thing. How they talk about all the resources in the neighborhood that are underutilized, even though we’re right fucking here? And now Abdul is gone and some racist motherfucker owns the bodega. Mr. Perkins—the Mayor of Gifford Place—supposedly just up and moved, without telling a single soul?”
“Where did you even get this from?” I ask, flipping through the pages.
Her hand slaps to her mouth then.
“Oh no. Fuck.” She pulls out her phone, swipes around, and her face falls. “Drea. I got it from Drea. She’s been typing for like three fucking days!”
I look at her, hunched over her phone, eyes wide, body taut with terror. I should get far away from here, right now. This is above my pay grade. I was going along with her, but right now she’s possibly having a psychotic break. Something is going on here, though, even if Sydney’s behavior is freaking me out.
I think of William Bilford mimicking the kaboosh of a nuclear bomb.
“Remember what you said about how you got caught at your company?” Sydney’s voice is suddenly dull. “That you triggered some internal system, or something?”
She gently pulls the VerenTech pages from my hand, flips to the first document, and reads it. “‘The Company (VerenTech) acknowledges that this Memorandum is a public record subject to disclosure but do hereby require that we be notified of any and all FOIA requests, both during the city selection process and in the event that a city is chosen, to allow the Company to seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy.’”
“Other appropriate remedy,” I repeat, taking the papers back from her. That seems like something designed to scare people on its own, but along with everything else it’s kind of ominous. “You know, there is a chance that Drea ran off. She’s an adult.”
“She wouldn’t,” Sydney says, a sudden fierceness in her tone. “It’s possible she made a mistake, but we’ve been friends for half of our lives. She’s never let me down and she sure as hell wouldn’t run from me.”
The look in her eye is how my mom looked at me when she’d let her asshole boyfriend move back in after telling me he was gone for good—indignation, hope, and desperation.
“Okay.” I nod and flip through the projection pages that show the future plans for the neighborhood. “Sometimes a company tries to push their luck. Get in ahead of the competition. Or ahead of anyone who might want to stop them. Same as a gang or any other criminal enterprise.”
I look at the clean, reimagined future of the neighborhood; this is what was sold to me and Kim by the realtors. They’d talked of revitalization and changing demographics and I’d nodded along because of course that had nothing to do with me, but I’d still get to reap the benefits. And when there are benefits to be reaped, there’s always someone ready to do some illegal shit to get even more of them.
I know that all too well.
Sydney sits on the floor beside the duffel bag and wraps her arms around her knees, staring at the couch as she thinks.