Miss Subways: A Novel

by David Duchovny

  “Corvus!” Emer knelt on the ground and picked up the bird. But his spirit was gone.

  “What did you do? What did you do?”

  But Sid had moved on. He was on all fours under the sculpture, checking the business card in his little hand.

  “Okay, okay—I believe you,” Emer cried. “I respect you. Whatever you want. Just stop killing things.” She walked over to Sid on buckling knees.

  “Here we are,” he said, with some effort, pulling at something on the ground, a handle.

  The covering gave. A bright light rose up from beneath the ground, impossibly, casting a vertical shaft upward, like when the city commemorates 9/11 downtown. Emer got down on the ground, too. She tried to peer into the light, but it burned her eyes, and when she looked away, she saw dozens of ghost moons transfixed upon the night sky. “Come under here with me,” Sid said.

  “What is under there?”

  “The furnace of making.”

  “The furnace of making what?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Another riddle.”

  “Another stipulation. You must translate what you see and share it with the world from the hand of a human, from the mind of a time-bound, earthbound Deathling.”

  “I’m not a processor like that; I’m not a systems maker. I’m just a teacher.”

  “You’ll be a publicist of sorts. A visionary. Or dead.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “You’re already in the game, Deathling. You have no choice but to play on.”

  “I want out.”

  “Your wants are what got us here.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “You damn well should be. You’re scrapping with gods and monsters now.”

  “You’re not Sidney, are you?”

  “Yes and no. No and yes—told you I’m a doorman, sometimes I’m on this side, sometimes on that side. I tire of your vacillating jibber-jabber. You may enter.”

  Sid pushed her forward and down, into the light. She saw shadows, what Plato must have seen in his cave a couple of thousand years ago, in Technicolor, what John Lennon saw when his mother died, what Leonardo saw when he met Lisa Gherardini.

  Shapes came in and out of focus as if the world turning on its daily axis were itself the turning of a lens in her eye, her soul camera. Emer fell down slowly face-first through heavy liquid space, and felt her fingers moving, as if to gain purchase on a passing ledge, or to write upon the air.

  THE WORLD NYPL

  EMER AWOKE WITH HER HEAD on her computer keyboard. It was day outside, and by the angle of light, past morning. She didn’t know how long she’d been writing, or how long she’d been asleep, but the keys had made small square indentations on her hot, glistening forehead. She felt feverish. She glanced at the bottom of the computer screen and saw that the word count of this file, labeled “Godsforsaken,” was over 55,000. Impossible, she thought, must be gibberish, but saved it anyway.

  Tomorrow was graduation day, so Emer didn’t have to go into school today, which was just as well. She needed to talk to Con, to see him before she would run into him again at the ceremony. She called his number for the first time since she had called and hung up. They arranged to meet at the main public library at Forty-second Street. She wasn’t sure why that location, but it seemed inherently neutral, public yet private, quiet, quaint, and safe.

  She grew up using the New York Public Library and even came to adore the unfortunate-sounding acronym—NYPL—as being apropos, as we all were suckled on the teat of this knowledge. And she just loved that main building, with its stone lion sentries and the books—the magnitude. It was a palace built for books when books were royalty, like a still-standing ruin of a religion long dead, the religion of the written word. Somehow she felt as safe in there as she would in a church. “Sanctuary,” like Charles Laughton, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, lisped, “sanctuary.”

  Emer entered the main hall and went to find an out-of-print book she remembered from her childhood revolt against the God who would not let her love him like she wanted. It was called The Old World Book of Faeries and Demons and it couldn’t be removed from the library. She perused it in a corner, and saw much that made her pause in wonder and sudden recognition—it was all in there, the Bean Sidhe, the Gancanagh, Papa Legba, the Dragon King, and Anansi the trickster, the spider goddess, and much more. She took pictures of page after page with her phone.

  Con showed up a few minutes late. They kissed hello. She felt the tip of his tongue on her lip, drawn to his taste and his scent. Gancanagh. He pulled at the old hardcover to get a better look. “What’s this crazy shit?”

  “It’s crazy shit, yes, that’s what it is. I have to tell you some things, and it’s probably gonna sound crazy metaphorical, but I want you to know I am not crazy, or metaphorical. I am being sane and literal.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but okay, go ahead.”

  She told him all she could remember of the first dream—of Sidney and Sidhe, of Anansi, the video of his death, of the deal and whether or not the deal was adhered to, of Nietzsche and the eternal return, of her personal intersection with the immigrant history of this country writ small here in New York City, of deliverymen and mistress-dispellers, of parallel universes and the new physics corroborating the essential oneness of matter—stuff she knew nothing about really, but intuited from fractured firsthand experience. Con sat and listened, stone-faced, it seemed to her. Emer’s sincerity precluded any jokes. Finally, she fell quiet, having exhausted herself after what must have been twenty minutes.

  Con, with the practiced timing of the actor he was, waited the requisite number of beats before saying, “So … are we gonna have sex again or what?” Emer didn’t react.

  Con breathed out audibly. “You’re serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m confused.”

  “It’s confusing.”

  “No, not all this,” he said, waving dismissively at the giant compendium of folktales and folk deities.

  “About what, then?”

  “About this … I don’t have the words for it … fantasy?”

  “It’s not a fantasy.”

  “Then it’s, fuck, I don’t know. I mean, if you don’t want to see me anymore, I get it, but this is so weird.”

  “You think I don’t want to see you?”

  “Emer, you just told me a ridiculous story about fairies and spiders, basically the gist of it being that my life is in danger if I continue to see you.”

  “I’m not making it up.”

  “Oh, because it’s in this comic book here, you’re not making it up.” He angrily pushed the big book away.

  Emer paused and tried to stand for a moment in Con’s shoes. His reaction made sense, probably a lot more sense than anything she had been saying. She felt desolate, alone again, naturally.

  “How else can we explain our feelings?” she asked. “The intensity, the feeling that this is not the first time with us?”

  “I don’t know, but there are a thousand explanations I’d go to before this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like love, like fate, like we fit, like you got chocolate on my peanut butter. I don’t know. I’m not a poet. But this is not literal. Love is big and we are small. Love is bigger than us and in order for us to embrace it we make stories up. Don’t start believing the stories we make up to explain things that have no explanation. There’s such a thing as mystery.”

  Emer saw she’d been a fool to share her madness. She should have just told her father; he had a mind that could accept this beautiful nonsense. As right as Con was for her, she was not right for him. She could see that now. And yet she did not give up. Almost from outside herself, she heard herself keep at him.

  “But maybe…”

  “What?”

  “Have you heard of ghost planets?”

  “Ghost planets now? Jesus, you jump around.”

  “What is the moral reason to do anyt
hing? Is it my pleasure? Or is it simply some imprecise calculus of figuring out the greatest good for the greatest number? Or is there a hard and fast thing called the right thing?”

  “Goddammit, you lost me. I always get in over my head at the library.”

  But Emer was gathering steam again. “I think of morality as like the Earth, this lonely planet in cold space. And we are influenced by the things we see and know we know—the planets in our orbit that exert ethical gravity over us, et cetera.”

  Con countered, attempting to bring the discussion back down to earth. “Can you try to be a little more monosyllabic—I’m an actor.” Emer smiled sadly at his habitual self-effacement, his chronic short-selling of himself, as he continued, “It sounds to me like you’re upset at some, like, religious notion of being a quote unquote adulterer.”

  “No. Not exactly. But I am worried about the unknowns and the unseen.”

  “Ghost planets in the mind?” he ventured, sounding like a game show contestant unsure of his answer.

  “Exactly. What if we use God—or gods, or past lives, or future lives, or heaven and hell—as spiritual dark matter, all things that cannot be seen or proven, all moral ghost planets that we allow or conjure up to inform, influence, our morality? And we choose to act as if these things are not now real at our spiritual peril?”

  “Let me try to follow—so in this way, we jerry-rig moral lives in this life, this life the only one we can see and touch at the moment and know for sure?” he asked, as if he had lost belief in what he was saying mid-sentence.

  “Something like that.”

  He paused. She could see that he was breathing hard.

  “If you just don’t want to see me anymore, then say it. Have the balls to say it.”

  “If I knew what I wanted to say, don’t you think I’d come out and just say it?”

  “I don’t know at this point.”

  “No, but I do know, I just can’t find the words. But I have the sense that neither of us is what we could be.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning—you’re an actor.”

  “Hey now.”

  “No, what if you haven’t challenged yourself in this life because you’ve been made comfortable, your mind has been lulled to sleep? What if you’re really a king in disguise who has forgotten his true nature?”

  “That’s kinda Disney,” he said dismissively.

  “I was thinking more Lotus Eaters.”

  “Hey, it’s the fucking ghost planet of high school literature.”

  “Yes, you’re angry! But yes. And you recall that knowledge from some other place, but maybe you are a sleeping Ulysses, or maybe I am too, and maybe the only way we wake up is to reject this love, is to choose perfection of the work. You have been relying on looks and charm, and relying on the kindness of women—first Mama, and now you want to rely on me.”

  Emer could see that Con was stung.

  “So you’re doing this for me? Your not seeing me anymore is for my own good, a silly fucking actor? So you leave and I leave Mama and then and only then maybe I can pee standing up and be a man without the help and love of women?”

  “Maybe. I don’t really know; it’s all so hazy to me.”

  There was a palpable shift. Con stood back up, brushing something invisible off his chest. “Look, Emer, we got lucky.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had some fun that we probably shouldn’t have, and we got away with it, we didn’t get caught.”

  “We did get caught.”

  “We didn’t get caught, and now maybe you’re right. We should just walk away from it and bury the bodies as deeply as we can and hope for the best.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  “It’s what you want, for Christ’s sake!”

  He said that too loudly for the library. People turned and glared.

  “Don’t tell me what I want,” Emer said, “and don’t put words in my mouth. I believe I’m trying to help both of us.”

  “I guess I don’t want your help. I guess I’ll put on my big-boy pants. Let’s forget this ever happened.”

  “Not possible.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He left without kissing her goodbye.

  IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING

  EMER SAT FOR A WHILE, unable to move. Alone. But she was less alone among these books. She could stay in the library forever, happily enough entombed. She decided, strangely for her, to steal the old book—fuck it, you know, where had playing by the rules got her? She was mad and wanted to lodge her protest, if only with the ether; she would take this book. Her heart was beating fast at the prospect of literary theft.

  She looked for her backpack to smuggle the pages out. The backpack was gone. It had been right at her feet. She looked around the room; she retraced her steps since entering the building. Nothing. It had her wallet, driver’s license and ID, MetroCard, everything. Even her phone. This was a situation. She slipped the ancient book under her shirt and tucked it in. She looked pregnant.

  On the verge of panic, she exited the NYPL without triggering any alarms or arousing suspicion, and prepared herself for the lonely walk back home, when she caught sight of a familiar-looking bag sitting atop the trash of a nearby can. She hustled over to it—it was the fabled, the dreaded unattended backpack in midtown Manhattan. It looked very much, no, exactly like hers—but what if someone had put a bomb in it? Or anthrax? Or plutonium? Or whatever the new terrorist sarin du jour was? It could’ve been out of her sight for over an hour. How long did it take to plant a bomb? How heavy was a bomb? What color was plutonium? What did anthrax look like? She had no clue. We think we have been prepared for modern times, but we have not. She spent most of her time in a school, she was a baby out in the big, bad, real world.

  She picked it up. It was heavy, she thought, heavier than when she packed it this morning, it seemed. She unzipped the top slowly to look inside. She got scared. It was definitely her bag. Her wallet and cash, phone, everything still inside. She looked around to see if anyone was watching, transferred the book from her belly to the bag, then slung it over her shoulders, and began jogging uptown to blow off some adrenaline and disappointment, and hoping not to blow up.

  Once she got home, she placed the wayward bag on the bed and gingerly went through it more thoroughly, trying to understand the extra weight. It was one of those backpacks for serious hikers, had been a present from Izzy from her Dykes That Hike club a few years ago, with a thousand zippers and what seemed like dozens of different hidden compartments and pockets. She went through them all and couldn’t find anything except maybe a strange bulkiness to one of the panels.

  She got a knife from the kitchen and cut into the bag, into its lining. A Polaroid picture became visible, and then another. About three stacks of forty old-fashioned Polaroids each packed neatly like bricks of cash or drugs, hidden in the lining of her backpack. Strange enough, but what was even stranger was the relationship documented in the Polaroids. One stack was all of Emer and Con, but not one moment that Emer could remember. Seemingly taken on long-ago vacations, even some taken in Emer’s apartment, for which she had absolutely no recollection. Wonderful moments all. It was like a greatest-hits compilation from a band that never existed.

  One entire stack seemed to have been taken at a fair where you pop your head through a cardboard diorama and some carny, for a couple bucks, takes your picture as Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley, or Antony and Cleopatra. She flipped through these funny ones—Con as Muhammad Ali and Emer as Joe Frazier, Abbott and Costello, Bonnie and Clyde, Dracula and a victim, Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, Beavis and Butt-Head—Con and Emer as just about every duo, tragic, comic, and farcical, in history.

  The third stack was even more puzzling. It seemed to consist of photos taken from the future. Emer and Con were progressively older in these. This sequence ended with a sweet shot of an old man and woman with their backs to the camera walking away into the sunset on a des
erted tropical beach. Into their own sunset as well. Emer couldn’t help noticing that her ass had held up pretty well in old age. She laughed at the thought, then froze, overwhelmed finally. Something or someone was really trying to teach her, or touch her. Or fuck with her.

  All of a sudden, she felt strangely energized, and ravenous. She didn’t feel safe going outside again, so she ordered in from Dragon King.

  THE WIFE-DISPELLER

  HAN GOT THERE FAST. Emer understood from Han, she thought, that his daughter was doing well, and had passed muster as a fake Christian; she’d been given asylum for now, and was even seeking employment at a local church. Emer didn’t know if he was kidding about that last part. Han would not accept payment for the food or a tip, and before he left, cigarette drooping from his lip like a Belmondo with dumplings, asked, “You okay, Teacher?”

  “No, Han, I’m not okay.”

  “Very good.”

  “Nope.”

  “Very, very good.”

  “Glad we talked, Han. Hey, listen, if I need you and your boys tomorrow to, you know, just kind of ride with me, protection, can I call on you?”

  “I owe you,” he said, and off he went.

  Emer poured herself a glass of red wine and ate a little. The doorman, Novak, buzzed up. “May Wang here to see you.”

  “Wong?”

  “What you said.”

  “Send her up, thanks.” Emer couldn’t remember if she had exchanged addresses with May. She unlocked her door, and, a minute later, May Wong, Mistress-Dispeller, flowed in dramatically like she was being trailed by an invisible retinue of chattering attendants.

  “I have excellent deal for you,” she announced, precluding any discussion of how she came to be here by launching immediately into the why.

  “What deal?”

  “It’s a good deal. You know what I do.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “Baby doll, what are you? You’re a mistress.”