Miss Subways: A Novel

by David Duchovny

  “I need to change the past,” he said. And then closed his eyes.

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “Trying to. But you’re talking a lot, Bill.”

  “How can you change the past?” she asked. “Pops? How? The past is what happened already.”

  “I need to see the future to figure that out, Bill,” he said. “Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” she agreed. And then—

  “Goddammit, I wish you’d stop calling me Bill.”

  She knew her dad had an illness, knew he wasn’t being an asshole or forgetful on purpose, but sometimes she simply lost patience. It felt to her sometimes like he did do it purposefully, though she knew intellectually that was untrue. Nice daughter, she thought, to take it personally when he loses his mind or shits his pants.

  “Oh? What would you like to be called?” her father asked.

  “Emer.”

  “Emer. Beautiful Irish name.”

  “Yes.”

  “Emer the dreamer.” Just like that, a moment of past grace in the now, an unexpected lightning flash of salvation.

  “That’s what you used to call me.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes. And Emer the schemer. And Emer who will never own a Beemer. But mostly Emer the dreamer.”

  “I shall try in the future.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Whatever floats your boat.”

  He seemed to drift off with closed eyes, asleep maybe. Peaceful, she hoped, and brave in his quest to change the past. She looked around for a Train of Thought to occupy her thoughts, and her eyes met the eyes of a familiar stranger.

  He was looking at her. Con was. The one she called Con was staring at her, unblinking, like he knew her. He smiled. She felt herself smiling back, felt her heart beating in her temples. She was excited, turned on, and guilty for some obscure reason, and not because she was sitting next to her father as a stranger flirted with her. Or so she thought. Or so she hoped? She felt something hot at the back of her neck. This wasn’t love at first sight. She didn’t believe in that. But this was intensity right off the bat. Though it wasn’t really first sight, what with the premonitions, dreams, and the other sighting, but it was definitely something at first something.

  Noticing that the old man next to her was asleep, and not wishing to broadcast their conversation above the din of the car on the tracks, the familiar stranger mouthed words at Emer silently and she mouthed words back, like a couple of kids trying to have a private phone conversation with their parents nearby, or new parents whisper-shouting, trying not to wake a newborn. They made exaggerated faces to form words, meanings, and reactions, so his initial voice in Emer’s mind, and hers in her own, would have been all caps.

  “I’VE SEEN YOU BEFORE!” he mouthed.

  “YES!”

  “WAS HOPING TO SEE YOU AGAIN!”

  “WHAT?”

  The man pantomimed “hoping” (which looked like praying) and “see” and pointed at her for “you” and made a rainbow in the air with his right index finger for “again.”

  “WAS HOPING TO SEE YOU AGAIN!”

  “SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!”

  “WHAT?!”

  “YOU WERE? YES! AGAIN! ME TOO!”

  Emer found herself in a more outgoing mode of her personality, driven by the mimed volume and charades aspect of the interplay. She felt a certain lightness that was unusual. She liked it, liked this version of herself.

  “I’M CON! MY NAME IS CON!”

  “I KNOW!”

  “YOU KNOW?!”

  “I MEAN. NICE TO MEET YOU, CON! I’M EMER!”

  “WHAT?”

  “I AM CALLED EMER!”

  She realized her diction sounded like a racist portrayal of the stilted Native American dialect in old Westerns. I am the one they call Emer.

  “EMER!”

  “EMU?”

  “WHAT?”

  “LIKE AN OSTRICH ONLY SMALLER!”

  “WHAT?!”

  “FLIGHTLESS BIRD! I THINK, MAYBE, NOT SURE!”

  “WHAT?!”

  “EMU?!”

  “EMU?! NO! EMER! ER! ER! ER!”

  As Emer was grunting out the “ER”s and flexing her arms like an angry Hulk to put the meaning of the sound over, Con gave up on the game, got up, and walked across to her. He put out his hand. She shook it. It was big and warm. Her own hand disappeared into it.

  “Con,” he said. He held on to her hand, applying just a little more pressure.

  “I am the one they call Emer,” she said. Her hand increasing pressure in return. He laughed. He got it.

  “Emer,” he repeated. “Like mer, like the sea, mer-maid. The Emermaid.”

  “Score,” she said. “Yes.”

  “Far sight better than Emu,” he said, still holding on to her hand.

  Her father opened his eyes and stared at their hands together. The train—well, not just the train, but the whole damn sweet world—came to a stop. The subway doors opened and Con spoke quickly—

  “This is where I get off. Nice to meet you, the one they call Emer. See you around campus.” He took her hand to his mouth and kissed it, turned, and exited the train.

  Emer drew her first deep breath in a while. Her father grasped the hand that Con had abandoned and said:

  “I know that guy, Bill,” he said. Bill again. Oh, well.

  “Yeah? Really? Where do you know him from?”

  Her father nodded, and said, “The future.”

  THE WOMAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

  THE VERY NEXT MORNING, Emer was back on the train. What did it mean that she spent so much of her life underground? Regardless of whether or not she’d ever be crowned, Emer felt in her bones that she was and always would be Miss Subways. And all these other familiar strangers, who every morning walk into this mass moving grave, and get shuttled to another life, modern-day Persephones all—what havoc must this wreak on our primitive subconsciousnesses? To be buried alive every day, to be resurrected for work, buried again, and then sleep. Then, who were we when we woke up reborn? Were we free to re-create ourselves daily—us subway people, reincarnation junkies?

  Boy oh boy, Uber was changing things, then. Uber über alles. Haha. Was she overthinking things? Uber-thinking things? She was. Was merely thinking actually overthinking? Perhaps. It’s just a fucking subway, she told herself, looking around for a Train of Thought to distract her from her personal Notes from the Underground. Sometimes a subway is just a subway. And finding this:

  The intellect of man is forced to choose

  Perfection of the life, or of the work,

  And if it take the second must refuse

  A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

  —W. B. YEATS

  She really had to meet the city employee whose domain it was to choose these quotes. He or she was quite the card. She marveled that Yeats thought perfection of either life or work was attainable. Wasn’t that the stunning male hubris of this sentiment? She looked around, like the sheriff of this compartment, for a possible manspreader to shame with her eyes and a shake of her head, but all the men were well behaved, keeping their laps to themselves. She wondered how many, if any, fellow riders were on their way to perfecting their work this morning, and how many had left perfected families behind to go back to work.

  She felt angry all of a sudden. At herself. She wondered if she’d let her job, her sacred job, go a little the past few months and was she shortchanging this year’s crop of kids. She often thought she could sail through a year blindfolded with her teaching hands tied behind her back, but surely that would be a sin. Sin. She hated that word, sin, it lodged in her soul like a guest that came for a Sunday and stayed for a lifetime. Sin—from the Old English syngian, related to the Greek hamartia, meaning “missing the mark,” from archery. The Old Testament, she knew, from her childhood rebellion, sparked by being barred from the priesthood by her ovaries, used six different nouns and three verbs to describe sin. You can tell what
’s really important to a culture by the number of words it uses for a concept. Sin to the Christians, like snow to the Eskimos. Trying to get it right, capture it, this feeling of sin, shadowing it with imperfect words because one word can’t seem to do the trick, can’t imprison the feeling linguistically. Sin had never been fully captured, was still loose, an escaped convict or an escaped conviction, in the world and in her brain.

  What would her perfect work look like? Hadn’t she wanted to leave something behind? A treatise on teaching? A book of some kind, surely, a testament that she’d been here on the planet and seen some things and had some thoughts about things she’d seen. What would the perfect life look like? A husband and children? No children, not after the fucking abortion. Dr. Coughlan, your name will live in infamy, you fucking butcher. But she’d let that go, hadn’t she? “Processed” with three separate shrinks over two decades. Why did it bubble up now and then like a murdered thing tossed in the river that washes up on shore?

  But she could adopt, couldn’t she? Wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing? Like Mia Farrow. Adopt a Benetton ad of all races, a model UN of a nuclear family. Didn’t even need a husband for that. Just a cagillion dollars. Cagillion was a word she would think, but never say, as a teacher of the language and of basic math. She would never say “cagillion” out loud. She had standards. Why was she attacking Mia Farrow? It was easy, but not nice. She took another sip of coffee. Maybe that was the problem.

  Looking for a Train of Thought was really just a dodge, she had to admit. If she were being honest with herself, she was hoping to see that man they called Con. And what did that mean—to be honest with oneself? How was that possible? Or how was it not possible? Especially if you were making it all up on a daily basis. Without a husband, without children calling out to her to be a rock of particular form and identity, she was perilously free. To the kids at school, being Ms. Emer—she knew how to do that, all right. That was a set of specifications she could adhere to in her sleep, most of the time anyway. The one who teaches us to read, kindly, real but not too real, Ms. Emer. Just real enough for the first-grade mind. There were ruptures, though, ruptures in time, in cohesive identity. She recalled a few now with a distinct shudder of displeasure—cross words, gossip, instinctive revulsion to certain kids she could never quite get over. But she refused to dwell.

  Amid all these trains of thought, there was a baseline of curiosity and want: she was looking for the man on the train, one man, Con—hoping, and also not hoping, that he might be buried alive with her here this morning. She didn’t know if this was his daily train, and figured not, as she hadn’t seen him before.

  At each stop, she looked at the open doorways to see what mystery guest was entering the car. In a city so crowded with people whipping around like electrons in a supercollider, there was so much chance for chance. And then, sure enough, as if she were a witch that could conjure spirits from the air, at Forty-second Street, the very groin of all Manhattan movement, the doors opened, like on the game show The Price Is Right, and in walked Con, or rather in ran Con. He hustled to Emer and slipped a piece of paper into her hand, then turned and ran out again before the doors closed. It was kind of comical. And charming.

  She unfolded the piece of paper and read his handwriting, which fully covered both sides. Handwriting—how quaint in this keyboard world—dated for this day in April:

  The emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) is the second-largest living bird by height, after its ratite relative, the ostrich. Emus are soft-feathered, brown, flightless birds with long necks and legs (!). They forage for a variety of plants and insects, but have been known to go for weeks without eating. Breeding takes place in May and June and fighting among females for a mate is common. ☺ The male incubates the eggs, during which process he hardly eats or drinks and loses a significant amount of weight.

  A constellation used in Aboriginal culture in Australia is the “Emu in the Sky.” The Emu’s head is the very dark Coalsack Nebula, next to the Southern Cross, and the body and legs are other dark clouds trailing out along the Milky Way to Scorpius.

  And this myth: An emu with very long wings once made her home in the sky. One day she looked over the edge of the clouds, and down on earth she saw a great gathering of birds. High in the gum tree, the Bell Birds were making sweet music with their silvery chimes, and Kookaburra, perched on the limb of a dead tree, was chuckling pleasantly to himself, while the Native Companions danced gracefully on the grass nearby.

  Emu was very interested in dancing, so she flew down from her home beyond the clouds and asked the birds if they would teach her to dance. The cunning old Native Companions replied, “We shall be very pleased to teach you our dances, but you could never learn with such long wings. If you like, we will clip them for you.” Emu did not give much thought to the fact that short wings would never carry her home again. So great was her vanity that she allowed her wings to be clipped very short. When she had done so, the Native Companions immediately spread their long wings, which they had previously concealed by folding them close against their backs, and flew away, leaving Emu lonely and wiser than before.

  She never returned to her home in the sky, because her wings would not grow again.

  Sincerely, Con

  (KLondike5-248-2876)

  P.S. You have the coolest, most beautiful mismatched eyes I’ve ever seen. Like Bowie. The woman who fell to earth.

  In addition to the text and phone number, there were some exquisite drawings in a cross-hatch pen stroke—of the Emu constellation and the long-winged, pre-ruse Emu. Beautiful, delicate stuff. She was quite charmed by it. She’d never heard of a bird called a “Native Companion,” and rather liked that assignation. The note was long, and the thoughts it sparked even longer. Emer missed her stop and had to get out and hump it back uptown to school in the sudden, unpredicted rain. Her hair and shoes got soaked. She didn’t care. A perfection of something or other beckoned.

  THE WEIRD SISTERS

  IN THE LUNCHROOM, Emer sat with Izzy, bullshitting as they ate. Emer kept an eye on three of her girl students who had been giving her a problem all year, and were huddled together at lunch today. Often a class had no dramatic kids, sometimes one, rarely two, three was more or less unprecedented for Emer in her small private school section. But these girls had been conspiring ceaselessly, like a gang of three, and creating unnecessary problems almost daily.

  As the year wore on, Emer had gotten more and more fed up. It really affected the feeling in the classroom. Each year’s class was like a play cast by fate—there were leading men and women; there were villains; there were clowns. It was pretty much the identical play every year with minor twists and turns differentiating it, so much so that Emer often wondered at how life, even at that age, had a sameness to it, that long-running cosmic dramedy of “the year I learned to read.” But this year had been awkwardly peopled by the cosmic casting director, the three “weird sisters” causing the production to be top-heavy with gossip, distractions, and meaningless, stupid incident.

  Emer could see from a few tables away that today the weird sisters were concocting a mixture of foodstuffs as if they were paint samples, as kids are wont to do. Into a paper bowl, like witches over a mini-cauldron, they put mustard, ketchup, mayo, salt and pepper, milk, yogurt, cereal, spit. Since time immemorial, such abominable agglomerations have been conjured in grade school lunchrooms, the girls eventually painting with them, while the boys usually ended up daring one another to eat them for some huge, hotly negotiated sum of money, like a dollar fifty.

  The gang of three had performed this stupid magic trick a number of times already this year, but seeing this waste of food anew, Emer, unbeknown to herself, hit her limit with these brats. She left Izzy and approached the girls’ table with a grim version of Ms. Emer’s face these coddled children had not seen before, telling them that waste was a “sin” and they were going to eat what they “made.” She wanted them to learn this secular eco-morality and get it good. If God was
mostly dead in the curriculum, there was still sin, there was still penance, there was still redemption, even for six- and seven-year-olds. The kids protested feebly, with their already well-honed sense of being affronted in their systemic self-entitlement, but Emer lifted the bowl in front of their faces, holding out a spoon with her other hand, and demanded that they reap what they had sowed. She was about to get biblical on their asses.

  Even as she did it, she felt an anger and a righteousness that were outsized to the situation. The episode had quickly escalated to parable, a teaching moment. But she couldn’t stop herself. One by one the girls relented and ate. “A big bite,” Emer commanded. The girls did as they were told and immediately started gagging and crying, snot and tears streaming down their faces as two of the three actually barfed up bits of lunch. Still, Emer wrote this up to their need for drama. The girls continued to cry, and spew, and dry heave above the colorful viscous effluvia. Emer felt justified, as she ordered them now, still retching, to clean up the whole mess; but then, and only then, did she dip her finger in the bowl to taste what she had made the girls eat, and realized there was a lot more pepper and phlegm in there than she had imagined. She herself choked back a cough, and felt her eyes water and bile rise.

  It was then she knew that she’d fucked up.

  THE FATHER, THE SON, AND THE HOLY GO

  AFTER VISITING WITH HER DAD, it was after 10 p.m. by the time Emer got back to her place, and Papa struggled to open the heavy door for her. She wasn’t at all sleepy and had forgotten to eat again, so she decided to order in from Dragon King. A couple egg rolls and some hot-and-sour soup should do the trick. While she waited for the takeout, she opened up a file on her computer and started writing down some of the things she had dreamed the past few months. She felt there might be something worthwhile in what she was going through, or at least there might be a through line, and if she got it out there in front of her, maybe she could see patterns and a fuller meaning emerge. Before she got too deeply into it, the buzzer rang, Papa telling her the food was coming up. She saved the file, meaning to label it “Godforsaken,” but mistakenly adding an “s” and writing “Godsforsaken” instead. She backstroked to excise the extra letter, but then reconsidered and deemed it a happy accident.