Miss Subways: A Novel

by David Duchovny

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “Either lie down completely or stand the fuck up. It’s gonna kill you in the middle. You being like this is allowing him to be the worst version of himself; I’m not just blaming him, I’m blaming you, too.”

  Emer laughed; she laughed, but she got it.

  “You sound like Oprah, except mean. Maybe I should ‘lean in’?”

  “Whatever you do, do NOT ‘lean in.’ Lean way the fuck out, if you have to.”

  “Thanks, Izzy.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I feel better now.”

  “That was not my intention.”

  “Haha. Thanks.”

  “Anytime. So what you gonna do?”

  “Eat ice cream?”

  “Emer…”

  “I’m gonna do me.”

  “Queen! Mean Oprah approves. Night-night, Guns.”

  JUNO

  PAPA WAS THE DOORMAN on duty tonight as Emer entered her building. An immigrant from Haiti, he’d been in the boxy, bland brown, vaguely militaristic uniform, as if conscripted into an unknown army of doormen, for as long as Emer had lived there. He’d been a tall man once, but was old and stooped now, and Emer instinctively helped push the heavy metal door open as Papa pulled it. Papa’s legs were noticeably different lengths, and he walked with a pronounced limp that he did his best to transform into a ’70s pimp roll. She could tell that her attempt at teamwork was an affront to his professionalism and manhood, so she stopped, but now, having anticipated her help, he had trouble opening the door, and he silently and unjustly blamed her for this fresh reminder of his diminished manliness. You had to walk on eggshells in this crowded world of men, she thought, with its invisible lines and slights real and imagined. It just never ends.

  She smiled and offered, “How you doing, Papa?” like they were on the same softball team, like she might just pat him on the ass next. Papa nodded a grumpy “Miss” at her as he barely impeded the heavy door from closing and crushing both of them. The thing was mostly brass and weighed a ton. Emer offered her clenched fist to Papa to bump. She had seen him doing this with the kids in the building and had envied the ease of this social maneuver. She had been taught this “hip” move by one of her tutorees back in 2010, and even though she sensed the world had moved on, she was going to ride this particular greeting past irony, through nostalgia, and into the sunset. They bumped fists and then Emer made the blowing-up gesture. “Blow it up,” she said. Papa bumped but he didn’t blow it up. Emer made her way to the elevator.

  It was 11:30 by the time Emer settled into her bed with her ice cream to flip between Fallon and Colbert, an ADD act that she called “watching Fallbear.” She checked her phone to see how many tutoring hours she had scheduled for tomorrow, and there was a text from Con with a photo of a piece of sushi that read “$45/piece!!! wish you were her”—ugh, “her,” not “here,” what an unfortunate typo. Couldn’t he have just proofread before hitting send? Her chest tightened, and then she breathed it out, the sudden image of Anansi’s exotic dreads. It meant nothing, close to nothing.

  She checked her e-mail and her voice mail. She looked through The New York Times on her phone. As Fallbear began their monologue in their eternally boyish, slightly too ingratiating way, she started reading an archived article about the spacecraft Juno, which had flown 1.7 billion miles toward Jupiter and had taken some amazing photos. She guessed 1.7 billion miles was close if you were Jupiter. You could clearly see Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede. She thought of all the gods’ names in Con’s speech and how we endlessly recycle these personifications—this Greek goddess was now a spacecraft; what was once the anthropomorphizing female embodiment of all we didn’t know was now the anthropomorphizing agent of all we did know.

  Thinking on Juno, Emer was surprised to feel a tear on her cheek—daughter of Saturn, sister/wife of Jupiter, mother of Mars and Vulcan—all forgotten now or morphed so many times into meaninglessness. The forgotten Greek goddess, among the legion of discarded deities of Con’s book, but also of this man-made spacecraft. This spectacular contraption made by human hands was now billions of miles away from the place of its conception. So, so far away. Like the goddess, also abandoned by the humans that worshipped her. And like the goddess, destined to get not much closer than 1.7 billion miles from her husband-planet as she dutifully took pictures of other bodies orbiting him. Fucking Ganymede. A boy? A boy! Oh well. And fuck you, Europa: you enthralled Galileo first, true enough, but you’re just the sixth-largest moon in Jupiter’s orbit, bee-yotch.

  Emer laughed off her own catty inner dialogue between planets, moons, goddesses, and spacecraft. But really, how scared must Juno be? How disconnected, lonely? Surely the hands that made her unwittingly encoded DNA through sweat, feeling, and attention into the malleable materials, and surely Juno must feel cold and afraid tumbling through space, snapping photos like a homesick tourist. It was just too much for Emer at the moment, and she gave herself permission to ascribe all her own feelings of orbiting abandonment to this dead goddess machine and allowed herself to fall apart by proxy. She was surprised at the vehemence of her sadness, her tears making jangly counterpoint to the obligatory laughter of Fallbear’s studio audience.

  Though it felt bottomless at first, her fellow feeling for the intrepid Juno was soon spent, and she dozed off.

  When she was awakened by a knock on her door, the uneaten ice cream had completely melted; she glanced at her phone and saw it was 3:37. She’d missed Fallbear and Con still wasn’t home.

  SIDHE

  “CON?” Emer called out as she shook off the drowse and headed to the front door. He’d probably gotten drunk on Nobu sake and lost his keys. She rubbed her face in her hands, trying to disappear the telltale signs of weeping. She opened the door and saw no one, then sensed something at her feet, and dropped her eyes, realizing this was a child here, no, not a child, a very short man, in a doorman’s uniform.

  “May I enter?” the small doorman asked. Emer was still stupid from sleep. “You have to ask me in. Those are the rules,” he said in a bored tone. This pint-sized doorman.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Emer recovered. “Come on in. It’s late.” She squelched an urge to lift him up like a baby, he was that small.

  The little man scowled at her as if he’d read her mind. He stepped into the apartment, keeping his eyes fixed up at her, pissed, it seemed.

  “Is there a problem?” Emer asked. “In the building? It’s very late.”

  “No, no problem in the building. The building is not the problem.”

  “So, what’s the deal, then?”

  “I’m Sid,” the little man said. “Pronounced ‘seed’ actually, but Americans call me ‘Sid.’”

  A strange little man, he had an accent. Was it Scottish? Irish? South African? Australian? One of those.

  “You’re a doorman in this building?”

  Sid nodded, looking around.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” Emer said as pleasantly as she could.

  “Sure you have.”

  “No, I think I’d remember.”

  “Oh yeah? Why is that?”

  Shit.

  “Because I remember things.”

  “Oh. Oh, good. I thought you might say ’cause I’m a smidge shorter than average.”

  “Are you? I hadn’t…”

  “I thought you might say because I’m a wee midget. An unforgettable mini-me in a monkey suit.”

  Emer laughed. “Can I laugh at that?” she asked, as she flashed on an image of anyone trying to break into the building picking Sid up and carrying him off like a fumbled football.

  “Fuckin’ well hope so, you giant woman, you,” Sid said. “I came on at two a.m., replaced Papa Legba, that shifty, limping interloper.”

  They stood there. She thought about calling the front desk, but she felt more curiosity than danger.

  “Would you like something to drink? Water? Sprite?” she asked, half ap
ologizing.

  “Sprite? Is that a joke?”

  “Oh god, no, I’m sorry…”

  “I’ll take an Irish whiskey, if you have it.”

  Emer nodded and walked over to the bar, still in a bit of a sleepy trance.

  “I have some Dewar’s scotch.” She knew a few of the doormen drank a bit on duty; she didn’t blame them. She would.

  “Scottish shite.”

  “And I have some Bushmills.”

  “Bless you, my child.”

  “How do you take it?”

  “The way they make it.” Emer poured a drink neat, brought it over, handed it down to him.

  “So…” she said. He downed the whiskey like a champ and offered the glass back to her.

  “More?”

  “It’d be rude to decline.”

  She poured him another. He savored it this time.

  “Where’s Con?” he asked, startling Emer.

  “What?”

  “Con. Your beloved. Your inamorato. Where he be?”

  “Um, that’s a strange question.”

  “Only if the answer is strange, my dear.”

  As so often in her life, she decided on politeness over confrontation, until absolutely necessary.

  “Well, he went out to Nobu.”

  The word no longer seemed funny coming out of her mouth. She felt the air around her change, like a temperature drop, and suddenly the little man seemed full of menace. He had a face “like a map of Ireland,” her father might have said—thick black hair, a prominent craggy nose, and eyes as turbulent and blue as the North Sea. Depending on how the light hit him, he was alternately handsome or troll-like. She felt like she couldn’t fully wake up, the oddness of the situation dawning on her as if from behind a screen; up and down and left and right felt wonky, like watching a sunset in a rearview mirror. She took a step back.

  “Business. He should be back any minute. Why?”

  “Business?”

  “Yes, with some associates.”

  “Associates.” He made the word sound like it smelled bad.

  “Well, do you want to tell me what you came here to tell me, ’cause he’ll be back any second, he texted me he was in an Uber about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Uber. Fancy.”

  Sid went to the door and shut it. He tried to lock it, but couldn’t reach the dead bolt. Up on his tiptoes, he could only scratch the bottom of the brass cylinder. He jumped up, grabbed the lock box with one hand like a monkey on a jungle gym, and did a pull-up, reaching and turning the lock successfully with his free hand. He landed hard and wagged his head.

  “Still got it.” He turned back to Emer, out of breath. “I came to return your phone. We found your phone.”

  “I didn’t lose my phone. I was just using my phone. Reading an article.”

  She looked back into the bedroom where she’d fallen asleep, but it wasn’t there. She checked her pockets, nothing. Sid reached into his doorman’s uniform; Emer gasped like he might be pulling out a weapon, but he produced a phone, one that looked like it could be hers, replete with a familiar crack in the screen and the ironic Hello Kitty sleeve.

  “When did you grab that?”

  “I didn’t grab it. It was found in the lobby. You must’ve dropped it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you know everything about your phone?”

  “What?”

  “Your phone, all these crazy new apps. Did you know there’s a spouse-tracker app called iSpy. You might want to think about that.”

  Emer had had enough. She was about to toss the little man out the door, when he offered her the phone. Clearly playing on the screen was a video of Con in what must have been Nobu yukking it up with the CAA boys and Anansi.

  “How did you…? That makes no sense.”

  Con and Emer never took pictures with their phones. It was their stand against modernity. They were committed to living their lives rather than documenting them on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. The one concession they had made as a couple to stashing memories was the purchase of an old Polaroid camera. So they had hundreds of little Polaroids taken over the years that Emer would toss in her “’roid drawer.” So, to see photos or a video of Con on a phone was strange, sacrilegious in the institution of their relationship.

  Sid replied, “Sense? No, there’s no sense to be had here anymore. We’re past all sense of sense.” She looked down at Sid. She was sure he reminded her of someone.

  “You’re not a doorman here.”

  Sid shrugged. “You caught me out. Was it the uniform?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you. I am Sidhe.”

  “Sid, yeah. Sid who? What’s your last name?”

  “No. Bean Sidhe. One of the Bean Sidhe.”

  Emer was nonplussed, though that term kind of rang a bell. Maybe through Con’s work? Maybe through some of the research she did for Con?

  “Bean Sidhe,” she repeated, trying to jog herself.

  “It’s a race. Well, it’s a type of Celtic fairy.”

  Emer took in a long, slow stunned breath and as she exhaled said, “You’re saying you’re a kind of … leprechaun?”

  “I am not a leprechaun! Fecking shoemakers!”

  “Elf?”

  “Watch yourself, Giantess! Sod Will Ferrell, fuck Keebler, and bum-fuck Christmas! Bean Sidhe, you gargantuan freak, Bean Sidhe!”

  “Okay, okay—Bean Sidhe, I’m sorry.”

  “Two thousand years ago, we were everywhere; now nobody’s heard of us. Do you know how hard it is to have to sit back and watch the vampires and the werewolves and the mutherfecking Game of Thrones Dinklages get all the tail? Maybe we need a publicist, haven’t had one since Yeats.”

  Emer found herself unable not to engage in this. If she accepted some of what he was saying as true, she might have to accept it all. Was this just a crazy person, a volatile, crazy little person in her apartment with the door locked behind him? Or was he something else entirely, something not quite human, or something a bit more than human? She made a real effort to remain calm as she surreptitiously found Con’s contact on the phone screen and pressed it to redial. Whatever would happen to her over the next few minutes, Con would hear, or it would be recorded on his phone.

  She relaxed just a bit. Some of the unpaid and unattributed research she had done for Con started coming back to her.

  “Bean Sidhe,” she mused. “Bean Sidhe … sounds like ‘banshee,’ and is associated with the banshee—spirits—usually of mothers who died in childbirth…”

  “I am neither banshee, though I know a few, nor am I a woman, clearly, I hope. I told you we need a publicist.”

  “Wailing spirits, omens of death—omens of death, right?”

  “There you go.”

  Emer started laughing like people do when they give in to a roller coaster. “You’ve come to kill me?”

  “Bite your tongue.”

  “You’ve come to tell me I’m gonna die?”

  “Now you’re back in the game, but no, not you.”

  “Where did you get that video?”

  She was still scared, but felt a sudden calm spreading like cherry-flavored Nyquil—her drug of choice did not exactly walk on the wild side—like whatever was going to happen, she was somehow ready for it, had somehow been preparing for it. And then she thought, This is probably the way a lot of people feel right before they’re murdered.

  “Where I got the video is unimportant, what is important is how you answer my question. Because I know about your wish.”

  “What wish?”

  “Your only wish. But first, here, look at this app. It’s called iRemember.”

  Sid took the phone from Emer and played with it, turning it horizontal to maximize the screen. She saw images of her and Con from when they met, but it was videoized like a Ken Burns doc—pushing in and out of static close-ups, stately local music to give a sense of history to their little story, a sense of sweep, as if
someone had been filming them as they fell in love. It was surprisingly moving.

  “That’s … who … I don’t … that was right after college…”

  Sid took the phone back and swiped at it a few times. “That’s history. This, as I showed you earlier, is happening right now.” Back on the screen came Con and Anansi. Now they were out of Nobu, but still somewhere downtown on a deserted street, walking arm in arm.

  “I don’t understand,” Emer said.

  “Of course you do. Fast forward.”

  “What?”

  “On the phone, fast forward.” Though she didn’t really want to, Emer felt herself compelled to tap the two right-facing arrows. The figures of Con and Anansi sped up cartoonishly as they entered another bar alone and shared some more drinks and comfortable postures. She was hurt, but she knew Sid was trying to get a rise, so she played it off.

  “You don’t feel it because of your wish. Your wish is prophylactic, a condom on the soul.”

  “Gross.”

  “I know you, Emer, with your old Irish name. I knew your ancestors before they came here and abandoned me. I know your mind and I ken your heart as I ken Cuchulain, too. You will indulge him in his wandering, saying to yourself, Aye, that’s a man—a man in search of his kingdom; you will indulge him tonight, saying to yourself, Let him have his day and let him find his way—he needs her, you say to yourself, he needs her money and influence and protection, and she needs his soul, and perhaps more than his soul, and so he may lead her on, hell, he may even lie with her. Oh, you sigh, he will come back to me, and after all, this is a sticky world and a man will do what a man must do.”

  It was as if he had spied into her soul, but more than that, had penetrated into the shadows of her soul, where she was most the small dark self she shared with no one. She felt exposed, violated.

  “No.”

  “No? You lie to yourself and you lie to me, and you shield yourself from the pain by wrapping yourself in the wish, the hope that in time the king will outgrow his wandering eye, outgrow his ambition, and you two will have an old age together. Look at this app now—iWish.”