Miss Subways: A Novel

by David Duchovny

  Emer defended herself. “I was teaching it as a story. Hell, I wasn’t teaching it, I read it as an exercise in imagination, I didn’t post it as scientific fact.”

  “Well then, what the fuck happened with a trigger warning?”

  “I forgot my trigger warning.”

  “You can’t forget the trigger warning. The (trigger warning) fucking trigger warning is our (trigger warning) fucking insurance (trigger warning) fucking policy. I don’t like the (trigger warning) cunting thing any more than you, I feel like my (trigger warning) balls have been cut off, but I (micro-aggression) bloody well have to do it.” He took a small bow after that virtuouso performance.

  Sometimes she loved Sidney. He scared her, but she loved him. Sidney turned around and offered Emer a view of his ass. “Would you like to speak to Mrs. Hager yourself? If you look up there I’m sure you’ll see her head peeping out. Say hi to Mrs. Hager. Have you ever had a middle-aged Wasp take up residence in your ass?”

  “Your (trigger warning) ass?”

  “My (trigger warning) ass.”

  “Can’t say that I have, Sidney.” Emer absentmindedly fingered the scar on her scalp.

  In the middle of all this, it dawned on Emer that the Sidney in front of her had been the protoype for the little doorman in her dreams, who, it came to her, was called Sid. It took her right out of the conversation, and she actually said aloud, “You’re Sid. You’re Sidhe!”

  Sidney took a step back, nodded, and said, “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s just I remembered something.”

  “You remembered my name.”

  “It’s nothing, Sid, just something I thought of.”

  They stared at each other. Emer felt like she was challenging him, but she had not meant to.

  “Just a dream I had.”

  “You dreamt about me?”

  “You were in a dream I had.”

  She felt suddenly like she wanted to choose her words very carefully. He paused and looked away, seemed to smile or grimace, Emer couldn’t quite tell.

  “I’m flattered.” He turned back to her now. “Anyway, Emer, you might have to do some damage control. A couple of the parents now feel ‘unsafe.’ Maybe take a couple of parent-teacher conferences. As a palliative and prophylactic. Might take some extra time, but I think it’s worth it. To me, anyway.”

  “Whatever you want, Sid.”

  “What I want has very little to do with any of this. Anyway, please don’t stray from the approved curriculum. You’re a valued teacher here, but these parents are rabid, entitled freaks. I had one ask me yesterday if third grade was too early to put in a week in Costa Rica for Habitat for Humanity—as in, would it still count on the college application if she ‘gets it out of the way now.’”

  “I hear what you’re saying, Sid.”

  “Good. Now would you like to say goodbye to Mrs. Hager?” He turned to show his rear again. “’Cause if not, we’ll be on our way.” He made it to the exit, and then turned back to Emer, stopping her just before she went back into the classroom. “And Emer…”

  She turned. He was now backlit by the bright sun coming through the stairwell window; there were dust motes swirling about his head in the slanting light like a halo or particulate heavy smoke from a strange fire. His whole aspect seemed changed, or rather felt changed, because, lit like this, she couldn’t really make out his features to gauge expression or intent. He was glowing, otherworldly. She couldn’t see his lips move, but she heard what he said. Before he turned and walked away down the stairs, he called out, with no trigger warning:

  “Watch your ass.”

  CORVUS FUGIT

  EMER DIDN’T CLIP THE BIRD’S WINGS. The mere phrase itself bothered her, and she didn’t know how to do it, and the procedure she saw online looked tricky, and she didn’t want to risk taking the bird out of the building to a pet store to get it done. The bird was thriving and flying around the small apartment. She was afraid that he would fly too hard into a mirror or a closed window so she had draped blankets over reflective surfaces. Her apartment began to have a humidity of its own, like a jungle ecosystem, and Emer thought of it as an oasis.

  It crossed her mind that she might appear crazy to a stranger, or even a friend. Not the cat lady, but the bird lady. But it was only one bird, after all. How crazy is that? Not very. She worried that Corvus’s cawing, which was getting more full throated and confident by the day, and the varied assortment of grunts, clicks, and guttural shout-outs that sounded to her as differentiated as a secret language, would slice through the old walls, alerting nosey neighbors to her secret world within.

  Corvus was extremely intelligent. He already knew his name and, adorably, like a dog, would follow her from room to room, waddle-hopping as she went about her day. This waddle-walk lent Corvus an old-fashioned, gentlemanly, fussy air that was quite winning. There was something so satisfying in this domestication of a wild animal that was of a different order from the bond between man and dog. Though Corvus felt trainable, he also felt wild and unattainable. Kind of what you’d want in a man, she thought.

  If you want to catch a bird, Jim Gunnels always said, become a tree. So she looked around the fetid apartment, and at Corvus, and decided to open some windows. When she lifted the pane, it felt momentous in a minor key, like a graduation for the bird, the opening of one world to another, the inside meeting the outside. She went out for coffee. She felt as free as she wanted Corvus to feel.

  A few days ago, Izzy had called, and called her out. “Okay, something is up with you. You’ve gone underground.”

  “Not really.”

  “Just tell me about the man and spare me the faux shame.”

  “Well…”

  “I knew it.”

  She would tell someone. She had to. She didn’t mind secrets. The density of secrets would sometimes lend her dimension, make her visible and vibrate in the way she had to conceal, and that density placed her more firmly on planet Earth, in less danger of floating away. But she liked having a confidant too, a co-conspirator. It was about a bird.

  “A bird! As in English-speak for ‘girl’? You’re one of us now? Welcome to the team!”

  “No, a bird bird.”

  “Oh, like Polly Wanna Cracker?”

  “More like that, yeah. A baby crow I rescued from the street.”

  “So are we talking about sex? At all?”

  “Nope. Bird. Corvus, I call him.”

  “Well, that’s pretentious.”

  “C’est moi.”

  “I’m pretty sure this is the wrong direction. But at least he’s black.”

  Walking to Pain Quotidien, Emer almost wanted to cry. She realized that these were child-centric feelings she was having about the bird, and that this was a moment, like a first day of school or a graduation, when the offspring stakes out some independence from progenitors. So she was doubly sad, sad about Corvus growing up and possibly “leaving the nest,” and sad that she was having these feelings about a bird and not her own child.

  The sun was setting. Summer was coming, and she felt a little unstable, flashing hot and cold, like the seasons. She couldn’t decide on a hot or iced mocha frappé/latte (she always sang this in her mind as the song “Lady Marmalade”—“mocha chocolata ya ya”). What a fucking mess I am, she thought.

  She went with iced, as a nod to the future summer, not the past spring, though she couldn’t seem to locate a bounce in her step. She walked with her eyes on the ground, but she was still aware of the sheer numbers of couples with young babies out for an early evening stroll in the nicening weather. Some kind of tyranny of normalcy was taking over the Upper West Side, at once consoling and horrifying.

  She watched as a father paid for a syrup over shaved ice for his son from a Latino vendor, knowing they viewed this transaction as exotic and archetypal, almost like a touristy pocket in their own safe world. She was reminded of something Izzy had told her about the Village in the mid-’90s when, as a just-out lesbian,
she lived there on Christopher Street, a ground zero capital of Gay America; Izzy had seen a young man in a purple NYU T-shirt unpack a set of golf clubs from a Range Rover. Golf clubs! In Greenwich Village! The Village of Dylan Thomas and Stonewall. “That’s when I knew it was over,” Izzy said. “That golf bag was the Trojan Horse that all these little straight hedge-fund fucks spilled out of under cover of night. They won. We lost. No sleep till Brooklyn.” As Emer was laughing about this, she felt someone tap her shoulder kind of hard. She turned around while pulling back to see who would be so forward. No one there.

  She turned homeward again. The sun had disappeared for the day behind the taller buildings, but she hadn’t made three steps when she was tapped again. Harder this time. She wheeled around, saying “Hey!” and again, no one and nothing there. As she circled around looking, something glinting and wet on her shoulder caught her eye. Matte white, creamy, and lumpy—bird shit. “Oh, fuck me,” she said. “Gross.”

  Realizing she had only her bare hand to wipe it off, she headed to a trash can to see if there was a thrown-away napkin or something, when a cawing stopped her. She felt she recognized that voice, as it occurred to her as more voice than sound. She looked up, and there, perched on the intersection of signs, 92ND ST/COLUMBUS, was a crow. She walked out into the middle of the avenue, almost getting hit by a procession of deliverymen on bicycles heading the wrong way. The cyclists, maybe eight of them, weaved around the scared-stiff Emer with the impassive confidence and precision of circus performers, blowing her hair back but leaving her unscathed. The riders had the aspect of a presidential motorcade for some hungry dignitary. She could read on the side of their plastic bags the name of their restaurant, Dragon King. Maybe she’d complain to the management. But maybe not—no harm, no foul, Emer thought.

  The black bird, which she was sure was Corvus flown the coop, rose up and veered eastward. Emer gave chase, toward the park.

  GO ASK ALICE

  EMER WAS GIDDY from following her overhead bird, and Corvus waited for her, sitting in the branches of a big tree on the east side of Central Park West. When Emer caught up, she could see that Corvus had been joined by a murder of other crows, though she felt she could pick him out of that lineup, the way a parent of twins always knows who’s who. The crows made an arrow formation, Corvus the point, and headed deeper into the park. Night was falling.

  She followed the crows as one follows logic in a dream. She pushed through some shrubs and low-hanging branches to an opening by the model boat pond. There she watched the crows alight on the statue of Alice in Wonderland at the north end. Curiouser and curiouser, Emer thought. There were a couple of elderly folks sitting at the base of the sculpture.

  Emer took a seat on one of the benches that ring the oval pond. She watched as more elderly people materialized out of the night, like slow-walking zombies, and congregated around Alice, touching the bronze sculpture as one might a religious relic. The moon was bright tonight, nestled in a high ceiling of windblown clouds that gave it a type of strobe effect. The old people huddled together as the crows had done. Emer tried counting them—twenty, now thirty. She looked around. There were a few other pedestrians, but no one seemed to notice this eerie assembly at the foot of Alice.

  A hand landed on Emer’s shoulder. It scared the shit out of her, she was so focused forward. A man brushed by her in the direction of Alice. Emer recognized the stained chinos and the shuffling gait.

  “Pops?” she said.

  The old man stopped, his back to Emer, then turned to face her. It was Jim Gunnels, all right. He seemed in a trance. The man’s eyes shifted, as if he had trained his focus from a great distance, from eternity itself, then onto Emer. He smiled and tipped an imaginary hat to her. “Lough Derg,” he said, and then, seeing her confusion, added, “The Red Lake.” He resumed shuffling toward Alice.

  Emer looked around for Ging, but the nurse was nowhere in sight. She wondered if she was losing her mind for real—but how could you know when you’d gone ’round the bend? Wasn’t being pretty sure you weren’t crazy kind of a possible sign that you were? She’d had an episode in college where she’d stayed in the school infirmary over Christmas holidays junior year. Did that give her a “history of mental illness”? Was this like that?

  That episode was over a breakup with an unfaithful boyfriend and an uncharacteristic spate of B’s, and therefore “situational,” and understandable in the land of cause and effect, “healthy” even. That had been the takeaway back then. The exception that proved the rule. But when do the exceptions pile up and make a new rule for which the old rule becomes the new exception? This recent, constant dreaming, the unspecific, lingering sense of regret—barfing for a baby crow, for fuck’s sake—felt more mysterious and systemic. When was the moment that the scales tipped you into Crazyville and you stopped interrogating yourself and your weirdness and rescued five or six cats and a raccoon to go with your pet crow?

  But her senses were too acute to be failing: she could feel everything around her, smell the grass and the musky standing water of the pond, see the moon and make out the face that always looked aghast to her—as if the moon, in its slow orbit, were watching Earth the way drivers slow down at the scene of an accident. Each long night was a new, slowly unfolding catastrophe.

  Maybe she was lonely, maybe she was deeply unfulfilled, maybe she was looking too hard for magic, but she was not nuts. Not yet. And she had just watched her father, in the throes of dementia, walk into the park at night alone. She had better keep her shit together.

  The elderly group was milling about the statue, haltingly, stiff in the motions of the aged. She heard Corvus caw and fly up. The black bird headed north and the murder fell in behind him. Slowly, like ancient ducklings, so the old followed. And dutifully, almost reverently, so did Emer.

  THE DRAGON KING DELIVERS

  THE GROUP OF ELDERLY MOVED, a cohesive mass beneath the murder of crows, with the slowness of a monster jellyfish, pulsating vaguely north through the park. The amoebic organism got to the Bridle Path and climbed up along small bridges and riskier embankments to the runners’ path around the reservoir.

  Emer maintained a discreet distance. She watched Corvus land on the steel-and-cast-iron six-foot fence that rings the water. Behind the bird, she watched as the fountain emerging from the southern end of the reservoir intensified, reaching all the way, like a rainstorm, to the elderly huddling on the runners’ path.

  The water seemed to have an immediate, salutary effect on the old. Like wild animals, they began to scamper up the fence and dive into the reservoir. Emer had never seen any living thing in that water, beyond the tough urban mallards and the never-been-to-sea gulls. Her own father scaled the fence and scrambled down the twenty-foot-high earthen berm and dived, with the grace of a man fifty years younger, into the black water.

  She took a few more steps forward. She was maybe fifty yards away now, but a big fat crow cawed evilly at her, and she stopped. It seemed like the birds didn’t want her any closer. She looked around to see if anyone else was witnessing this, but the crows were dive-bombing stray pedestrians away from the scene, like avian bodyguards.

  The reservoir had been dug from the schist by about a thousand Irish immigrants in the 1860s. The old people were now swimming in its stagnant waters like withered, gray Olympians. Yet they made no noise; it was like watching one of those old musicals with the water ballet interludes on mute in the black and white of night. The spray from the fountain, built in 1917, and capable of spewing water sixty feet high, grew ever higher and thicker, casting shapes now, similar to when fireworks displays outline forms with light.

  The old men and women in the water began to reconfigure and cohere and make love as one—a roiling, rolling, moonlit mass of time-slackened bodies sliding over one another like a bucket of gray eels, the image occurred to Emer, but sweeter, if not sexier. She couldn’t find her father within the orgasmic organism. For that, she may have been thankful, ’cause she didn’t kno
w if she was ready to see her demented old dad, working-class Catholic Jimmy Gunnels, doing the AARP nasty with some stranger(s) in a Busby Berkeley–redux water orgy.

  The spray above the swimmers/lovers, backlit by the moon, took on the shape of a dragon. The lovemaking mass of supplicants began moaning at the beast. “Dragon King,” they chanted. And “Lough Derg,” the name her father had used.

  Allowed in by the bouncer-like crows, the same procession of Asian deliverymen on bikes that had nearly taken Emer out earlier in the evening made a reappearance on the runners’ path. In unison, they donned garbage-bag raincoats against the spray and began throwing their cardboard cartons of food and goodies toward the liquid mouth of the Dragon King, currying its primitive favor with burnt offerings and fried rice. Pounds and pounds of chicken lo mein, moo goo gai pan, and fortune cookies went flying over the fence and into the water.

  The Dragon King, its mouth of spray salivating, shook its mammoth head in pleasure, water flying off in all directions. A droplet landed by Emer’s feet. She bent to touch it. It dried instantly. She picked it up. It was shiny and hard, like a guitar pick, catching rainbow colors like a fish scale. It smelled disgusting—like dead fish, monosodium glutamate, and raw innards. She looked up again. The Dragon King seemed pleased, its undulating translucent gullet moving the food down to its underwater cave. The seagulls, ducks, and crows were feasting on his floating scraps, and the old folks, for now, remained young.

  THE DAY BREAKS, HER MIND ACHES

  ONCE AGAIN, THE ALARM COMES TOO SOON. Emer has a snippet of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on her phone that does the trick most days. Kurt Cobain howling, “a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido, a denial.” She’d like to take the ukulele to it, but her head is heavy on her pillow today, her hair matted again with sweat from fitful dreams. She waited to come back to herself, to feel fully within her body again. Images from the night before flashed at her, like she was in a car speeding by. Corvus. Alice. The reservoir. Her father. The dragon. All so real. But not possible. Well, some of it possible, but surely not. She fingered the scar on her scalp, but it had no answers, or even comfort.