The river between: Flushing under Blood Across the River

Book Two is called Blood Across the River, and the river is not the one most people picture. It is not the East River, and there is no island in it. It is the Flushing River, a short tidal stretch of water in northern Queens that most New Yorkers have crossed on the 7 train without looking down. The book lives on its banks: Queens. Flushing. The Gold River Lounge, and the river between.

A town older than the city around it

Flushing was chartered by the Dutch in 1645 as Vlissingen, after a port town in Zeeland. Twelve years later, about thirty of its residents signed a letter to Peter Stuyvesant, the colony’s director, refusing his order to stop sheltering Quakers. It is called the Flushing Remonstrance, and it is one of the earliest written arguments for freedom of conscience in North America. John Bowne, who held Quaker meetings in his house, was arrested for it, shipped to Amsterdam, and came home having won. The house, built in 1661, still stands on Bowne Street.

I think about that letter when I write Maya Wu. The question under the whole book is whether someone can protect you without owning you, and Flushing is a place that put its answer in writing more than three and a half centuries ago.

The river nobody looks at

The Flushing River is the tidal end of Flushing Creek, which runs north through the lakes of Flushing Meadows and out into Flushing Bay. For most of its history it was salt marsh. In the early twentieth century the marsh became the Corona Ash Dumps, a landscape of coal ash so grim that F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in The Great Gatsby as the valley of ashes. Then Robert Moses cleared it for the 1939 World’s Fair, and again for the fair of 1964, which left behind the Unisphere, the steel globe that still stands in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

The river itself never got a fair. It was straightened, walled in, and left to the tides. Downtown Flushing is on one bank and Willets Point on the other, two very different neighborhoods with a narrow stretch of slow water between them. That is the river between in the title. In the book, Maya’s cousin Annie is trapped on the other side of it.

Main Street, at the end of the line

Flushing–Main Street is the last stop on the 7, and coming up its stairs at night is like surfacing into a second downtown: bakeries still lit, signs in Chinese and Korean, the sidewalks as full at eleven as at noon. It is home to one of the largest Chinese communities outside Asia, and its main intersection is one of the busiest corners in the city. When Maya walks into Gold River for a private blood draw, she is walking into a lounge that belongs to that neighborhood and to no map.

What is mine

The Gold River Lounge is not on Main Street or anywhere else. Neither is Leo Lian, who owns it, or the red thread that appears around Maya’s wrist and burns like a claim. Those are mine, along with whatever is holding Annie on the far bank. The content note at the front of the book will tell you how dark it gets.

If you want to see the real thing, ride the 7 out toward the end of the line. Between the ballpark and Main Street the train crosses the river on its elevated track, just before it goes underground. That is the crossing. Look down. Then, if you want the rest, Book Two is here.

A correction. An earlier version of this post, and a few book descriptions on this site, set Book Two on Roosevelt Island. That came from an early draft. The published book is set in Flushing, and this page now describes the book you can actually read.