Miss Subways: A Novel

by David Duchovny

  She thought she recognized the Dragon King delivery guy from the reservoir shenanigans. She wondered how she might broach that subject. As she looked through her purse for a cash tip, she sensed his melancholy leaking into the room. He wasn’t just a grown man on a bicycle now, he was a man, no doubt with hopes and dreams and a rich interior life.

  She decided to swim against that cold current. Maybe she had prayed for him in her Sacré-Coeur. She looked frankly into his eyes. He was a middle-aged Chinese man with straight, flat graying hair cut in a kind of a traditional pageboy. Unfortunate for a man his age. He wore cheap, shower-ready flip-flops and a button-down short-sleeve shirt with a pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. And he was crying.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. He shook his head—no. She pulled the money away from his hand. “Tell me,” she teased as if the tip were dependent on his acceding to communication. He looked at her, as if to question whether she really wanted to perform this serious breach of protocol, her humanity reaching to his humanity across class, language, sex, race, and gluten-free soy sauce. She did. He seemed relieved, actually. He pointed to his cigarettes, asking permission. She said sure and even asked if she could bum one. He gallantly lit hers, then his own.

  They smoked together as if they’d just had transgressive sex, rather than a word or two. Emer hadn’t smoked since high school. The smoke burned her throat and she coughed, but the nicotine felt good in her blood. She forgot how you get high at first.

  When his cigarette was almost down to the end, he spoke. “Need God’s help.” His accent was heavy, his vocabulary limited and short on verbs and articles, but his intent was focused.

  “God’s help?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Help how? Like church? You want a priest?”

  “Priest no! Interview. You help. You know God?”

  “Sure. We’ve spoken from time to time.”

  He didn’t get the joke; he didn’t look like he was in the mood to get any jokes at all.

  “Good. Good. You come?” He smiled for the first time; his teeth were a stained and crooked mess.

  “Where?”

  “You help? Father, Son, Holy Go?”

  He reached his hand out again, put the five-dollar tip gently back in her palm, and closed her hand over it. “You help me?”

  She was touched by his gesture. “How?”

  “I show. You come. I show.”

  He mimed putting on a coat and made motions with his hands for her to come with him.

  “Now?” He smiled like it was the best idea they’d ever had together. She didn’t want to go, really. She had school in the morning, but she’d opened this door, and now felt responsible. She reached for her jacket and walked to the elevator with him, smiling and repeating to herself, “Holy Go.”

  HAN SO-LO

  PAPA, LIKE A PRACTICED SITCOM ACTOR, raised his eyebrows at the odd couple as they left the building. The deliveryman stood astride his delivery steed and motioned for Emer to take the seat. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Han.”

  “Han So-lo?”

  No laugh.

  “Okay, Han, give me an address, I’ll take the subway.”

  He shook his head. “Chinatown cray.”

  “I can find, give me address.” She felt like a racist, dropping words, dropping the “it,” dropping the “the,” and resolved to stop that.

  “Faster,” he said. “I faster. Bike.” What the hell—she hopped on the bike seat behind Han, who, remaining standing, began to pedal, heading downtown. It was a long way to Chinatown. She had to put her hands on his waist to keep from pitching off, cutting a slightly more romantic silhouette than she cared to project. She glanced behind as they were pulling away and saw Papa standing on the sidewalk, shaking his head, giving them the Haitian stink-eye.

  The ride downtown was difficult, more difficult for Han for sure than Emer, but oddly beautiful. Han’s bike was semi-motorized, so it was more of a bicycle/motorcycle hybrid. If Emer had ever ridden a bike this far along Manhattan, she was never at leisure to look around. She was used to moving underground, or in cars that were moving too fast or crawling so slowly that she could not relax.

  They rolled past Times Square, a place Emer hardly ever came to, especially at night, and which now seemed to make Blade Runner obsolete, she marveled; the city got sleepier after Madison Square Garden, home of her father’s beloved, beleaguered Knicks.

  As Han began to sweat, his legs pumping, Emer feared she might be seen by the parents of children she taught in the Village, since many of the St. Margaret’s families lived down there. How would she explain her position, riding bitch to Han So-lo? Did she have to explain anything at all? Did it fall within acceptable behavior for Ms. Emer? At stoplights, she looked down so as to be less visible to pedestrians. No one called out her name. Han chain-smoked the whole way down, his nicotine exhalations a kind of vehicular exhaust.

  MAY WONG, MISTRESS-DISPELLER

  DOWN AROUND MOTT STREET in Chinatown, Han finally slowed and, coasting with one leg on the pedal, skidded the bike to a stop in front of a store. Han hurried into the storefront, saying “please,” and motioning for Emer to follow. He led her through the back of the establishment—which seemed to be a cavernous warehouse for those Asian knickknack 99-cent-type stores, like Azuma or Zuma, that used to pop up on the Lower East Side like fungi. It was easy to be dismissive of all the knock-off ceramics and crapola, but Emer always thought it spoke to a more basic human need to fill empty spaces with hoped-for beauty, or something like beauty, more like a plastic simulacrum of the notion of the beautiful, and on a budget. As if clutter could hold the horror at bay.

  She waded past what seemed like thousands of porcelain cats, lava lamps, backscratchers, and black light posters, the very source of the dreck Nile, to a hidden back room where a makeshift classroom had been thrown together.

  There were ten or fifteen young adult Chinese people sitting at desks in shadowy half-light, while a man in front of a chalkboard—the teacher, she supposed—harangued them in a native tongue. The teacher stopped when he saw Emer. He offered her his chalk, pointed at the blackboard, and said, “Teach.”

  “Teach what?”

  The teacher looked at Han, like—maybe you should’ve taken care of this already. “Teach them God. Jesus. Judas. Crucifixion. Born again. The whole nine.”

  “Why?”

  “I tell you later. You teach now.” Now it was Emer who looked to Han, who in turn smiled back as if to say, Well, this is what we agreed on, isn’t it, go ahead. The adults all had notebooks like grade school kids, pens poised and at the ready.

  Emer launched into an improvised, condensed version of Christianity. Jesus-lite. She didn’t know she had this Reader’s Digest Bible tucked away in her brain, but she did. She surprised herself with the details she seized upon. It was the religious version of Desert Island Discs—Who’s Next. Nevermind. Thriller (gotta dance on the island). To the desert island of the one God came—the Virgin Birth, the tripartite God, the Judas Kiss, driving money changers out of the Temple, turning the other cheek (number one without the bullet).

  The tripartite God, so difficult to embrace and to digest—the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—but no doubt a holdover and call back to polytheism. Approach it that way? Ghost was a fully laden word to these people; this was a world where ghosts were very active and often malevolent—so she stuck with the Holy Spirit.

  She got bogged down in dogma—the fight over transubstantiation and consubstantiation, whether Jesus was the wafer or symbolized by the wafer (had worlds really gone to war over that?), were subjects so arcane that she lost hold of what she was talking about a moment after, like cupping water in her hands. She drew diagrams; she made puns no one got; but no matter what she said, these students gave her absolutely all of their attention. They seemed to write down every word like they were taking transcription at a trial. Emer felt as if she were passing a test she’d
been studying decades for. She was a priest today. The Priestess of Chinatown.

  After at least an hour of this, and with Emer showing no signs of slowing down, the teacher stood and started clapping and nodding, and walking toward her; all the students followed his lead, they also stood and clapped for a full two minutes. Emer was high, on a roll, and decided to end with a joke, her father’s favorite from when she was a little kid—“Thank you, thank you, and one last thing, you probably won’t be asked, but—how do we know Jesus was Jewish? Okay, he didn’t leave home till he was thirty-three, his mother thought he was the Son of God, and he went into his father’s line of work.” She saw people starting to write it down—“No, don’t write that down. That’s not … anyway … good night, Chinatown, I love you, don’t forget to tip your server! Good night!”

  The good students abruptly gathered their notebooks and things, and left Emer alone with Han and the teacher. The teacher opened his wallet and offered Emer what looked like a couple hundred bucks. Emer said no, but Han accepted half of it sheepishly.

  “Okay, now tell me. What the hell was that?” she asked the teacher.

  “Asylum from China.”

  “Really?”

  The teacher looked to Han as if to ask, Is she cool? Han nodded. The teacher handed her a card with a name on it, a lawyer’s card. “My name is Dave,” he said, continuing, “Asylum from religious persecution. America will save these people, but they need to answer questions about why they were persecuted in their homeland. Religious persecution is best and easiest. Forced abortion, forced sterilization—all go against Christianity. We teach them crash course to be Christian so they can stay in country and live. All they need do is answer a few rubbish questions. Christianity 101. My best teacher quit last month, she got married and moved to the suburbs.”

  “Knowing this stuff doesn’t make you a Christian.”

  At that, Dave convulsed in laughter. “Tell it to ICE.”

  “So you’re a lawyer, Dave? Dave the lawyer, lawyer Dave.”

  “Yes,” the teacher said proudly.

  “You’re ripping these people off. What you’re doing is illegal.”

  “I am saving their lives. I have no problem breaking the law for that. I have no problem taking money for that. They have no chance in China. I give them a second chance.”

  Han, who had been smoking quietly, stepped aside and said, “My daughter.” He revealed to Emer a pretty young girl, maybe twenty years old; she had been in the “class.” “My daughter live good now,” Han said. “She stay New York, she answer Jesuses question right.”

  “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” she said, smiling. “Water into wine. Turn the cheek.” Her gratitude was so genuine, Emer had to smile and take her soft hand. She began to feel decent about what she’d done tonight, when a heavily made-up young Chinese woman grabbed her arm and pulled it like a leash. “You don’t wanna be here with these deadbeats.” Emer said hasty goodbyes to Han and lawyer Dave, not going so far as to promise to come back and do it again next week. The woman led Emer back through tchotchke world, then outside to the street.

  “You need this,” the woman said, handing her a card. “May Wong,” it said, “Mistress-Dispeller.”

  “Mistress-Dispeller?” Emer asked, her head still uneven.

  “I get rid of the other woman.”

  “What other woman?”

  “Yes, if your man has been fooling around with another woman, we will approach her with a better offer to move on.”

  “A better offer?”

  “Money, a job, a new city, even another man. Whatever it takes. We make a plan. We use PowerPoint.”

  “This is a real business, then?”

  “Nothing but business.”

  “But I don’t have a husband.”

  “That is temporary.”

  “Is it?”

  “Maybe. I’m a mistress-dispeller, not fortune-teller.” She smiled.

  “You’ve used that one before.”

  “Never. Just for you.”

  “So if I did have a husband and he was having an affair, you would find this woman, and say, ‘Hey, how about taking this job in San Francisco for a couple years?’ Something like that?”

  “Yes, something like that. You make it sound easy. It’s not. I am a professional. Trained. We are connected. You hire a mistress-dispeller, you don’t just hire May Wong, you hire a network you can trust.”

  “Not very romantic.”

  “Neither is being alone.”

  “You’ve used that before.”

  “Never. Just for you.”

  “You work outside of Chinatown?”

  “We would like to expand, to franchise. That’s why I am talking to you.”

  “The Starbucks of mistress-dispellers.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear.”

  “Why not.”

  “Yes, why not. It’s good business, makes everyone happy. Husband, wife, mistress, kids. All happy happy happy.”

  “No one gets punished?”

  “Not my job.”

  “No one learns a lesson?”

  “A lesson about what?”

  “Cheating.”

  “Not my job.”

  “You make a good point.”

  “I make a good living. Champagne dreams. I buy my own tits.”

  She hoisted her formidably augmented breasts up front and center and made them do a proud little dance. May continued:

  “Maybe you get tits, you get man. Men like tits.”

  “I have heard. Your advice is wide ranging.”

  “Feel my tit. Feels good. Real.” She squeezed them in Emer’s direction.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I have same doctor who did Kim Kardashian.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “How you know?”

  “Well, for one, I think she lives in LA.”

  “You know her?”

  “No, I’m kinda just guessing from her oeuvre.”

  “Then how you know?”

  “You’re right. I don’t know.”

  “He do her ass, too.”

  “No. Stop.”

  “He put a tit in her ass. Or something like this.”

  Emer couldn’t help visualizing that particular phrase, apart from the medical procedure, as a very ungainly sex act, perhaps. She started laughing hysterically. “‘He put a tit in her ass’? You’re killing me.”

  “Keep the card.”

  May Wong walked away with her fake tits, red silk dress, and five-inch pumps, navigating and sidestepping the potholes of the Chinatown sidewalk as if by heel sonar. Emer felt faint, like some episode might be coming on, or maybe she was in the middle of one; she felt a ridiculous sublimity in her soul, boomeranging so fast from Christ to Kardashian. She needed to sit, quickly, so she set her ass down in the middle of the street, a mistress-dispeller’s card in her hand, and Han So-lo, her ride back home and out of this strange night, nowhere in sight.

  LOVE TRAIN

  FROM HER VANTAGE POINT on the ground, Emer could see the entrance to the subway, and that familiarity seemed like a good idea. She got herself up, walked to the end of the block, and went underground. She felt better immediately. She would be home soon. The train was not crowded at all. Her mind was fully occupied, sparking in all directions with the night’s Chinese fireworks. It was after eleven.

  Emer closed her eyes, felt like she might nap on the way home. In spite of herself, by sheer habit, she searched above her head for something to read and found a Train of Thought:

  Forgive me those rough words. How could you know that man is held to those whom he has loved by pain they gave, or pain that he has given—intricacies of pain.

  —W. B. YEATS

  Yeats again. The conductor on this line was no existentialist, but an Irish Romantic. She thought of her father and mother, she thought of herself, seemingly unencumbered by such intricacies, and none the better for that. The MTA must be on a Yeats kick, she thought;
well, better than Billy fucking Collins, that’s for sure. She started to nod off—an amazing thing, that we can sleep in this noise, with this movement, with so many strangers around.

  A few stops in, the doors opened and in walked Con. Again. Emer felt a wave of good feeling break over her body. He himself was so stunned to see Emer that the doors closed on his shoulders and he had to hustle inside to avoid being left behind or crushed. He sat down next to her.

  “Emu,” he said, “I’m not stalking you.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “You’re out late.”

  “Is that a problem for you?’

  “Our first argument.”

  They laughed.

  “You didn’t call me,” he said.

  “Our second argument. This just isn’t working.”

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, I honestly don’t know. I wanted to.”

  “Okay. Okay. You wanted to is good enough for me.”

  “But something stopped me.”

  Con nodded. He seemed to understand what she was saying, even though she really didn’t understand what she was saying. That was a neat trick.

  “The last few weeks,” he said, “I’ve found myself thinking about you. And I don’t know why. Sitting here with you is like déjà vu. I feel like we’ve done it before. But nothing else is familiar, except you. Déjà you.”

  “Cheeseball.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”