Miss Subways: A Novel

by David Duchovny

  Sid manipulated the phone, and now Emer saw an old couple walking the beach hand in hand, some perfect-looking, fine white sand, blue water beach, two old people hand in hand in the stiff syncopation of easy, well-worn love, her and Con. She welled up.

  “There’s your fantasy, your endgame.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do I know anything?” Sid took the phone and tapped at it again. “Everybody’s a fucking wizard with these things. It’s all in the cloud. The cloud. There used to be gods in the clouds. The cloud is now the god. I was taken unawares. I did not see phones screaming across the sky the way the dinosaurs saw asteroids, I assure you. But I digress. Where was I?”

  “I have no idea.” Emer suddenly felt so tired.

  “Ah yes, look again.”

  He held out the phone and the scene changed from the beach back to the street: Con and Anansi walking in the rain downtown. Anansi stumbled on her high stilettos, and Con steadied her as they laughed at her clumsiness. But Anansi held on to his arm after she’d regained her balance, and Con had not yet released her. Emer went to the window and looked out. It was raining. Sid said, “Keep watching.”

  “I don’t wanna see.”

  “You should keep watching because in less than a minute, Con is going to die.”

  “What?”

  “Oh yes, that Anansi is a spider, she’s right death itself, and she’s gonna walk Con in front of a car.”

  “Why?”

  “Does a spider need a reason to catch a fly? She’s hungry. Her bite is her kiss and it kills. And maybe she’s angry about the book. It’s hard to tell with those people.”

  “What people?”

  “The gods of Africa. We came willingly, they were forced. They retain an attitude. I don’t agree, but I can relate. Or I agree, but don’t relate. This man wrote a book about gods purporting to know their whereabouts and desires—I’d say he threw down the gauntlet, wouldn’t you? It’s a pretty classic case of hubris, or overreaching, no? As well as his right-wing-spin shenanigans, that might anger gods of color. She means to silence him one way or another. She is no doubt making her own offer to him at this very moment, and she and I are not necessarily on the same page or timetable. I’d say you have about thirty seconds to make up your mind.”

  “Make up my mind about what?”

  “You can save him. You can save Con from death, from Anansi. Death is only one version amongst an infinite number of possible outcomes.”

  “Well, then yes, of course I want to save him. Save him! Stop it!”

  “There’s no sport in that, no pathos, no justice, no juice. There is a balance. A quantum of wantum that does not vary. To save something, something must be sacrificed. That’s the way it goes, and the way it goes pleases me.”

  “What, what must be sacrificed?”

  “Can’t you tell by now?”

  Emer sat down. “My wish.”

  “Smart lass, I knew you’d be fun to play with. You have about fifteen seconds. Give up your secret wish to spend an old age with Con and he will live.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “He will live, but here’s the kicker, he will not know you. That’s the deal.”

  On the phone screen, Con and Anansi were walking up the middle of a dark wet street. Emer could see a car turn the corner ahead, its lights hitting the couple.

  “There’s the car now. Here it comes. You can save him, but from here on out, you will be strangers. To prove your love for him, you have to let go of your love. That has a kind of delicious symmetry, you have to admit. That’s one scenario, where he lives and you live on, knowing he is the love of your life, but unknown to him. The pain is only yours.”

  Emer saw inside the car. The footage on the phone was cut like a movie, switching back and forth between Con and Anansi and the interior of the car, where the driver was nearsightedly texting through pince-nez and glancing up at the road.

  “And if you can’t, then just close your eyes and do nothing. You’re good at that. And when you wake up, it will be like he never existed. That’s another scenario. You live and Con is erased.”

  “But I don’t want to kill him.”

  “Why is he with that spider?”

  “He’s trying to make a future.”

  “A future with you?”

  “Why? Why me? Why am I getting this deal?”

  “Because your love is lukewarm and your wish is half-assed and prideful. I’m from another time and place, my dear, when love made the cup run over and love killed. That’s what I stand for. When gods and men wrestled, fought, and fucked; and the offspring of their union was sometimes hideous, sometimes wondrous. Sometimes the Minotaur, sometimes Hercules. Win some, lose some, get mauled, raped, and eaten by some. Your love is the holding of hands, the peck on the cheek, the Cialis couple in matching tubs. Your love is the tepid treacle left on Oprah’s hanky.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “When was the last time your knickers got wet just because your man walked into a room?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think like that.”

  “Why not? Where are your lady balls? You need to remember why you fell in love in the first place.”

  “I remember…”

  Emer opened her mouth to speak, but nothing emerged.

  Sid laughed scornfully. “You won’t let him be a man and you won’t let yourself be a woman. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I am grinding an ax—I am on the short side, and I suppose that comes with its own issues—but admit it, this is the best conversation you’ve ever had with a doorman. And the truth remains that you humans have become muted, and we gods have become bored. You’re boring! You’re an animal, lass, fucking well live like one. I am not punishing you, I am punishing your life-negating rationality, and your deification of Lord Mediocrity. Nature will not be denied forever, nature will exact her revenge.”

  Emer felt off balance. She looked outside at the rain falling hard, a spring rain scrubbing the city streets for a moment of clarity.

  She said, after a while, “But I do love him.”

  Sid took a deep breath and nodded, then finished what was left of his drink.

  “So watch what your love does to him.”

  On the phone screen, the driver of the car looks up from texting, but it’s too late. He turns hard, tires squealing on wet pavement, missing Anansi but plowing over Con with a sickening noise at impact. Sid grinned like a teenager at an action flick—

  “Ooohhhhhhh … that’s gotta sting.”

  “No! Omigod! No!”

  “Don’t fret. I’ve made this offer dozens of times, you’re neither bad nor good.”

  “You’ve done this to others? Other women?”

  “And men, too. Don’t be sexist. Yes, in New York City, people disappear into the gray. This is one way they disappear—love. Love and money. Reality will always be the favorite reality show of the gods. Past century, though, I did a lot of my deals on Wall Street. Lotta gamblers down there. The whole subprime-mortgage thing? That was mostly my minions dangling carrots and benjamins. Ponzi was an Italian Sidhe back in the day. You’re welcome.”

  Emer was now crying. Sid reached up and put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Or. You could press rewind.”

  “What?”

  “Rewind. Rewind time itself—can’t do that on a Samsung.”

  “Yes, yes, press rewind.”

  “You have to press, I can’t—rules.”

  Emer pressed the left-facing arrows and the car came careening backward, death in reverse.

  “Cool,” Sid said. “Let’s watch that again, that was an epic hit.”

  Sid pressed PLAY again, and the little figures on the screen took up where Emer had seen them before, the driver texting, Con and Anansi walking and laughing, arm in arm, as if they were fated to. It played right to a few moments before impact. Emer pressed PAUSE, the equal sign, two parallel lines that will not touch unto infinity.

  Sid saw Em
er perched between Scylla and Charybdis. He spoke to nudge her this way or that: “Hey, doormat, he’s feeling like a king and making his deal with the spider, with the devil, with death, with success, whatever—he’s taken her arm and who knows how much more, he’s selling his soul and not consulting you.” She heard the words, she saw her man joined to another woman, she knew the terms. She spoke:

  “Fuck his ambition. And fuck him.”

  “You’ll be a stranger to him, you understand? And a stranger you must remain. An absolute stranger.”

  “Right. Will we still live together?”

  “What is wrong with you, woman?”

  “I mean, will it be like he wakes up in bed tomorrow and doesn’t recognize me like a movie where the guy gets amnesia and I get to nurse him back to health and he ends up loving me even more than he did before?”

  “What fecking god-awful movie is that? No, that’s not how this one goes. He ain’t waking up in your bed. Ever. You’ll never know him. He will be alive somewhere on the planet, and his life with you will be a poorly remembered dream, and you have to stay away from him or he dies all over again.”

  “Okay, okay—you don’t have to be so impatient. The rules aren’t all that clear but, okay, I understand now. I think.”

  “You give up your claim on his heart and soul and body in the past, present, and future?” He poised his finger threateningly over the PLAY icon.

  “Yes.”

  “Then press ‘stop,’” he said dejectedly.

  Emer pressed STOP.

  “Now press ‘delete.’”

  Emer pressed again, but hit PLAY instead. “Shit, that’s ‘play’!”

  “Whoopee, he’s a goner!”

  “No! Where’s ‘delete’?”

  “It’s your phone. How the fuck should I know?”

  Emer moved her finger over the screen like a child speed finger painting; she found the trash icon.

  “Delete!” she kept pressing and saying, “Delete! Delete! Delete!”

  “You don’t have to keep saying it. Just the finger is enough.”

  “Delete!”

  “Deleted.”

  “Deleted?”

  “In the trash. He lives.”

  A video on the screen showed the car swerving mightily to avoid hitting Con and Anansi. The headlights illuminated the startled but safe couple and moved off, leaving them in darkness. Then the screen went black.

  “Cuchulain lives,” Emer said.

  Sid nodded. “The man lives. Love dies.”

  PART

  2

  [The walrus came] from “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” “Alice in Wonderland.” To me, it was a beautiful poem … Later, I … realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, “I am the carpenter.” But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it?

  —JOHN LENNON

  EMER II

  ISAAC HAYES’S EASY LISTENING, masochistic soul classic “Walk on By,” not the less lethal, better-known Dionne Warwick cover, jostled Emer from deep sleep like a hot buttered two by four. Emer grabbed for the phone on her bedside table at 6:46 a.m. on March 21 to swipe-silence the alarm, but then leaned her head back on her pillow. Not to doze, but to recall a dream, and the song was helping.

  Never a sound sleeper, Emer had slumbered hard last night; she felt an indentation on the mattress, as if she hadn’t stirred for hours. It felt almost like the deep sleep after surgery or a seizure, which she used to get as a kid, but hardly experienced at all as an adult.

  It reminded her of a time in college when she had smoked so much weed and got so paranoid that all she wanted was to black out, then wake up no longer high. She had closed her eyes on her dorm room single mattress and had a sensation of falling through blackness, descending through different levels of consciousness, like an anchor sinking through a pitch ocean of lethe. It was pleasant, but she felt she was picking up too much speed as she fell, as a body must through space, and she intuited that just below the last, deepest, most forgetful level of sleep was death, beyond the pleasure principle, from which there was no return, and if she kept falling like this, she would break on through to the other side of sleep and die. She willed herself to jump out of bed that night in college, convinced in her stoned way that she had saved her own life.

  But Emer had been altered by the experience; she felt she now knew there were dimensions we were normally barred from, where different laws applied, physical and spiritual. That’s the type of sleep she felt she had had last night. One that allowed disparate worlds—dreams, waking, somewhere in between—to touch for a moment. The sleep of the dead.

  What had she dreamed? There was a bowl of melted ice cream on the nightstand. She remembered that she’d wanted to watch Fallon for some reason, but must’ve dozed off. She recalled a midget and a wager; though she knew midget wasn’t a word she was supposed to utter out loud, she felt okay speaking it silently in her head. The midget had had an Irish accent and a magic phone. She picked up her own phone to check it. Looked through her pictures—her dad, some friends, work photos, a series of “keep calm and fill in the blank” slogan/stickers. Nothing strange. Isaac Hayes sang “walk on by” but he meant “please, please stay” … ah yes, in the dream, she’d had a boyfriend. Was it the midget? No. The little man was something else. A boyfriend—that’s how she knew it was a dream.

  She grabbed her computer, opened a new file, called it “Big Dream” and jotted some recollections, though, as the dream itself faded, some images might have been free association or after-the-fact glosses—midget (this time she wrote the word on the screen and felt less good about it—but it was a dream, and we can’t police our dreams, she thought, don’t judge, keep at it), magic midget phone, spiders, there were spiders, or a spider, death, somebody might have died, love, Nobu (Nobu?), yes, Nobu (and it was fading, fading, now she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t making the rest up)—car accident, seeds of some sort, seeds—and … and … it was gone.

  All the images from last night receded and fled from any sort of specificity, replaced now by a deep, pervasive feeling of ambient loss, of being bereft. Bereft of what, she did not know, but the intensity of the loss feeling shocked her. Felt like a death. Now she was fully awake, barred off from that world; she could not get back or get it back. Emer was back. Time to work. Time to make the doughnuts. Walk on by.

  As she waited for her coffee, she picked up her ukulele and began strumming Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow,” which sounded castrated, hysterically funny, and bad-ass on the uke. She’d taught herself to play a few years back, and had been horrified to find it listed so often on the dating sites she sometimes observed without participating in. Playing the ukulele was the new ironic hipster thing to do, like artisanal beer and this and that from Brooklyn. She hated the hipness, but loved the uke, its plucky, ballsy innocence and inescapable association with Hawaii and its white sand beaches.

  She drank her coffee out of her “Shrinks do it for 50 minutes” mug, a gift from her friend Izzy that was chipped on the rim so she always had to rotate it or risk a cut lip. She should have thrown it away long ago, it was a health hazard, but Emer had trouble parting with things she liked, and if she owned a thing long enough she would start to ascribe feelings to it—“Poor old mug,” she thought, you shouldn’t toss something in the garbage just ’cause it’s old and not what it used to be. Even if it cut you sometimes.

  SAINT MARGARET (OF ANTIOCH)

  EMER TAUGHT FIRST GRADE at St. Margaret’s Catholic School on the Lower East Side. Every morning, if the subway gods were smiling on her, she’d find a seat on the train and look about for reading material. There was the ad for Miss Subways again. She wondered what her entry bio might sound like: “Meet Emer Gunnels. ‘Guns’ is a first-grade teacher who lives alone. Weep for her.” No. “Emer is reasonably happy, thinks Twitter is the end of the world, hasn’t seen Hamilton but lies about it; she als
o ‘worries about the environment.’” That sucked. “Meet Guns, that’s what her millions of Facebook friends call our newest Miss Subways—she enjoys Harry Potter fan fiction, artisanal fruit ciders, and stand-up 69—”

  She laughed—she had no idea where that came from. She didn’t even like Harry Potter. Oh, she was on a roll now—no, it was stand-up 69 she didn’t like, or she didn’t know if she liked it as she’d never tried, and didn’t really know what it was, though she could hazard a pretty good guess given the precise numerical terminology. It seemed … strenuous? It had been a while since she’d had sex at all. With another person corporeally present. “Meet Emer Gunnels—it’s been a while since she’s had sex…” She imagined doing one of those stripper moves on the pole in the middle of the subway car and shook her head so hard the dude sitting next to her glanced over with genuine concern.

  No creepers, manspreaders, or Lehmanschpreaders today—thank God. She found a Train of Thought to occupy her need to read—

  Be not afeared: the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

  That if I then had waked after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,

  The clouds methought would open and show riches

  Ready to drop upon me that when I waked

  I cried to dream again.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Yempest

  That was how she had felt this morning, awaking from that dream, that she would cry, like Caliban, to go back and dream it some more. Oh, that Billy Shakespeare, he got everywhere first, didn’t he? He took the virginity of the language itself, after Chaucer had bought her a few drinks. She noticed a misprint, courtesy of the MTA, Yempest for Tempest. So good. She liked The Yempest almost as much as Yakbeth, the dark and bloody tale of an overly ambitious moose, or Yamlet or A Yidsummer Night’s Dream, which would kind of write itself, she thought.

  She closed her eyes, listened to the rumble of the train, and fought back the latent claustrophobia of a packed car. Be not afeared, she thought, this isle of Manhattan is full of noises. So many noises could become an overwhelming din, so she mindfully separated the sounds out—the tracks, the hum, the human voices, sound of feet, opening and closing doors—but it was even too much one by one, and as the sounds mixed with scents, synesthesia took over, the perspiration and halitosis merged with feelings and interpretation—a general, unquiet desperation. She oscillated between the separateness and the oneness—the individual players in the orchestra and the whole. And then she gave up, and let it all wash over her. A sweet little subway doze she half hoped would gain her reentry to her big dream. It did not.