Emer went to check on her dad, who was propped alertly in a wheelchair with Ging-ging in the center of the room. Emer approached, asking, “How’d you like it, Pops?”
Jim Gunnels teased his daughter. “I loved it, Bill, but Ging thought it was a piece of shit.”
“Not true,” protested Ging, laughing wearily yet happily, accustomed to the old man’s hard wit.
“Well,” her father said, “I’m looking forward to you reading me the whole thing, Bill. And I don’t know why people think it’s a novel, sounds like a goddamm straight-up history of New York City to me.”
She kissed him on the top of the head, and as she straightened up she noticed a couple in the far corner smiling at her. A tall, dreadlocked black woman and her very handsome, very Irish-looking consort. Standing at his father’s side was a mixed-race young man that must be their son. A passing gent patted the boy on the head. She watched as the boy’s eyes turned red and his loose, pocketed ’fro seemed to become a nest of snakes. The boy’s father leaned down and whispered calmingly in his ear. The boy’s eyes returned to green, the snakes returned to hair. The father looked at Emer, shrugged, and mouthed, “The sequel.”
Izzy interrupted this, towing a man in with her hand. The man seemed both embarrassed and charmed by Izzy’s boisterousness. He was handsome in an Ivy League way, sporting a slightly unraveled, tweedy flair that smart college girls would cotton to. When he offered his hand to Emer, she felt a current run from him up her arm that was so startling, she had the urge to check if he had one of those dime-store novelty buzzers secreted in his palm. She recovered and spoke first. “Hello, I’m Emer Gunnels.”
“I know who you are. I just spent the last ninety minutes trapped in the web of your imagination. Oh, that’s a terrible line.”
“I’ll take it.”
Izzy prompted him: “Do you have a name?”
“Oh shit, my manners, my name is Cuchulain Constance Powers.”
“Jesus, that’s a mouthful.”
“That’s what she said,” Izzy offered up, going for that old chestnut, and continuing, off Emer’s look, “Too soon? Too soon.”
The man continued, “I’m a professor of comparative religion, actually, not true, associate … professor of comparative religion at the New School, well, again, wait, at the New School … Annex.”
Emer smiled. “You’re an honest man, Cuchulain Constance Powers.”
“Some people call me CC, or Ken, or Cahouligan, but Con is fine. You know, I feel like we’ve met before. Jesus, another line. I’m just gonna walk away while I still have some dignity.”
Izzy held his arm. “You can’t get away now. We’ve got you.”
He smiled. “Well, every year, I teach Read Lightly, Goddess to my sophomores.”
Emer smiled back. “That should keep it in print, thank you.”
“And you actually came to lecture my class once about five, six years ago. So we have met. Briefly.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
“I’m quite forgettable, that’s like the most memorable thing about me.”
Izzy was basically drooling on the side. “See that? He’s got the funny, chicks dig the self-effacing thing. The funny and the smarty-pants combo platter. Good-looking man, too, I wouldn’t toss him out of bed for eating crackers. Go ahead and tell her she’s a genius. Emer—present your tush so he can blow smoke up it.”
“Izzy.”
“It’s the wine! In vino veritas, queen.”
Con looked gently at Izzy, and then turned back to Emer, noting that she was not apologetic for her rambunctious friend, and liking that.
“I’d be happy to blow smoke. I think you have cojones, great big cojones.”
Emer nodded. “Okay. Thank you? Go on.”
“I think you’re gonna get attacked left and right by the PC police over stereotyping and fast-and-loose appropriation of cultures, but I also think you don’t care; I think those are just red flags for the bullshit bulls; I think you’re playing a longer game.”
“I won’t disagree. I mean, my great big cojones won’t disagree,” said Emer.
“Neither will I,” said Izzy, “’cause I have no idea what y’all are talking about.”
Con took a step closer to Emer. She noted for the first time that he was tall; she found herself looking up to meet his eyes. It was a pleasant sensation.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.
Emer nodded.
“Do you actually believe in past lives? Or is it merely a trope?”
“No, not really. Trope, I guess. Well, I see that belief as an excuse not to live, or to find a seemingly logical explanation for ineffable shame or inexplicable good fortune similar to Original Sin or Calvinist Predestination, based upon the past actions of an unprovable actor.”
“Or merely not taking full responsibility for this life?” Con added, “I think a design for the future, a hope for the future, in the form of a plan, or even a wish—that can be a way of not honoring the present, of living in denial. I mean, hope and fear, they’re really just—”
“Bastard brothers?” Emer interrupted.
They locked eyes like there were two conversations happening simultaneously, one heard and one wordless. Emer was reminded of a line from Keats. Something like “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, sweeter.” She wondered if she should say it out loud.
Izzy said, “Unprovable actor? What’s an unprovable actor? You mean like Matthew McConaughey? Clearly this conversation requires more wine than I currently have in my possession.”
“I believe,” Emer elaborated, “more like all our lives are happening at the same time on different planes, a very, very deep present. And if that’s not scientifically true, it is philosophically true in a pragmatic sense.”
Con nodded. “No time like the present.”
“Are you making fun?”
“Absofuckinglutely not,” he said.
“Oh shit,” Izzy deadpanned, “he means business.”
“You have a way with adverbs, Con,” Emer said.
They all smiled and fell silent and stared at one another for a moment or two.
“Is there something else you’d like to ask?” Emer asked Con. “I get the feeling there is.”
Izzy wide-eyed stage-whispered loudly enough to stop conversations ten feet away. “She’s single!”
“True story,” Emer said.
“As am I,” Con said.
Izzy blurted, “Case closed. He’s a keeper.”
Izzy backed away and went in search of more chardonnay. Con asked his question. “Do you see this story, this love story, spinning out into infinite variations? Or are you saying that this one, the one that ends with the man making the ultimate, romantic sacrifice for the woman in the eternal struggle between perfection of the life or of the work—that that’s the best of all possible worlds?”
“I’m a writer, I don’t ‘say’ anything, I write around it.”
“Touché.”
“But I guess I’m ‘saying’ that, yes, there are infinite variations on a love story, but the best outcome, the best possible world is the one we are in right now. I have to believe that for my own sanity; and that this ending, the ending that’s being written by Fate, negotiated tonight between my book and its audience, is the best ending.”
“In other words, you don’t know how it ends.” He smiled.
“Not a clue.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he said.
“I think this is a longer conversation,” she said.
“I think you’re right. I’d like to have that conversation.”
“Maybe we will. But not tonight. ’Cause I gotta go talk to these Hollywood peoples, Hollywoodians—about selling my soul to Tinseltown.”
“Oh, I don’t like that ending,” he said.
“Then stay tuned,” Emer said. “But it was nice to meet you, Cuchulain, CC, Con, I mean again, nice to meet you again. See you.”
; “Nice to see you again, too.”
They shook hands, and Emer felt that electric surge of the novelty gag run up her arm and had the impulse to not let go.
Emer drifted to the other side of the room to continue with some agents who had expressed interest in turning her vision into a series of movies about gods interbreeding hybrid powers in New World offspring. Con, feeling suddenly alone and awkward, moved away to grab his overcoat, but Izzy, materializing out of nowhere like an inebriated apparition, grabbed his arm and said, “Don’t go anywhere, you idiot.”
“What?”
“Dude, she’ll be back.”
And as if on cue, Emer turned again away from Hollywood and headed back to Izzy and Con, Izzy stage-muttering, “Whoa, sooner than I thought.”
“Con?” Emer said.
“Yes, Emer.”
“It’s my birthday.”
“Is it really?”
“Yes,” she said as she shook her head no.
“Twenty-nine?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Well, if you’d given me a little more heads-up, I would’ve gotten you something,” he said.
“That’s very sweet,” she said.
They stared at each other. Izzy said under her wine breath, “Not awkward at all.”
Con smiled and asked, “Any wishes?”
Emer did not need to think. She made her wish. “Yes. A wish. I’d like to go somewhere right now, Con. With you.”
“No time like the present,” Con said.
JAMAICA II.0
IT’S LONG PAST RUSH HOUR, so the train is not packed at all. Emer and Con enter the car and find a seat immediately. The conductor welcomes new riders to the train and rattles off the upcoming stops.
“You’re a cheap date,” Cuchulain says.
“That’s what you think,” Emer replies.
The conductor concludes the itinerary, “And the last stop will be Jamaica. Watch the closing doors.”
The train shudders and moves forward, disappearing into the familiar unknown of a dark tunnel ahead. Emer takes Con’s hand as the world outside swoons and fades away.
JAMAICA, OF THE MIND
AN OLD COUPLE WALKS DOWN THE BEACH hand in hand. They might be in their eighties, if they’re lucky. Maybe the beach is in Costa Rica, maybe it’s Jamaica. Or some other Jamaica of the mind. We don’t know. The beach is pretty deserted, but there’s a young kid who sits there every day with a Polaroid camera and some glass bottles. His name is Ruggerio or Sylvester or Sidney. We’re never sure. He’s figured out a little racket.
The old couple, they call themselves Con and Emer, passes the boy and he aggressively asks them to pose for a photo. They have a few bucks on them so they give them to him. He takes their photo and retrieves a light green glass bottle and cork from his weatherworn backpack, and he tells them to make a wish, put the photo inside, cork it, and send it adrift on the ocean—let fate take it, he says; he actually says, “Let fate take it.”
The old couple likes that idea. They like the idea of living in a bottle together, they like the idea of letting fate take it. They insert the photo through the neck of the green bottle and cork it up tight. The old man, Cuchulain Constance, like the virtue, but his friends call him Con, like the man—his shoulders hurt, but he winds up like the ballplayer he used to be and throws the bottle as far out into the sea as he can. It lands way short of where he’d hoped, and he shrugs, like: I ain’t the man I used to be. Emer looks at him with eyes that say: That’s okay, I remember the man you used to be.
Nevertheless, the bottle makes it past the small breakers and, rather than being brought back to shore immediately by a wave, starts to bob out to sea.
Cuchulain and Emer sit on the sand and watch until the bottle is no longer visible. Sometimes they think it’s lost only to find it a moment later popping up again. Their eyes are not so good. A couple of times, the bottle flaps its wings and flies off, and they realize they’ve been looking at a gull. They laugh at the magic of misperception.
After an hour or so, there are no specks or whitecaps to interrogate; the bottle is sunken to the bottom, or in the belly of a whale, or floating out to new lands, new times, finding a future they will never know, entering new parallels and parallel lives.
They won’t be alive much longer, but one day, someone will find that bottle and wonder who the strangers in the photograph were. Someone may make up stories about the strangers and what they did. And some of it will be true.
All of it will be true.
AN END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So much gratitude for my editor, Jonathan Galassi, whose continued belief and encouragement and steady hand quietly teach me more about being an author each time we persevere. Three novels with you, and without you, zero. My agent, Andrew Blauner, who somehow sees me and somehow still believes. And to Eleanor Chai, who long ago, when I pitched this story as being about a woman named Maudey, told me there was something in it. I would’ve given up on it if not for that. Thank you to Chris Carter for twenty-five years of showing me—a too heady, word-besotted AWOL graduate student/actor—the glories and importance of plot and the structure of the unbelievable. And to the Collegiate high school faculty of the 1970s, who introduced me to Yeats and taught me to write—Jim Shields, Dr. Stone, Boss Breimer, et al. And Maria DiBattista, who taught me Woolf and Beckett when I was nineteen and continues to teach me to this day. My sister, Laurie, a master teacher, who gave me a wealth of pedagogic stories to pull from. To Chantal Clarke for her judiciously fascinating research assist. And finally, to Rachel Chapman and those brilliant Yale undergraduates (you know who you are, I do not) who staged Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer back in 1985 or so and showed me a weird romance that stayed in my mind all these years, waiting, like the gods, their turn, waiting …
ALSO BY DAVID DUCHOVNY
Holy Cow
Bucky F*cking Dent
A Note About the Author
David Duchovny is a television, stage, and screen actor, as well as a screenwriter and director. He lives in New York and Los Angeles. You can sign up for email updates here.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by David Duchovny
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
Excerpt from “The Choice” from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran, copyright © 1933 by The Macmillan Company. Copyright renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, and A. P. Watt on behalf of Gráinne Yeats.
“Home at Last” by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. Copyright © 1977 Universal Music Corp. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation for North America. International copyright secured. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited for World excluding North America.
Descriptions of the emu, emu constellation, and emu myth that appear in the chapter “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” have been adapted from the following sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_astronomy; http://www.sacred-texts.com/aus/mla/mla15.htm.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part 1
Emer
/> Cuchulain Constance
Give Us This Day Our Daily Pain
Anansi
Jesus, and Other Familiar Strangers
Izzy
Juno
Sidhe
Part 2
Emer II
Saint Margaret (of Antioch)
Jimmy Gunnels
Corvus Corvidae
Birdie Num Num
The Corvster
Kijilamuh Ka’ong
Train in Vain
My Dearest Fellatio
Corvus Fugit
Go Ask Alice
The Dragon King Delivers
The Day Breaks, Her Mind Aches
Pascal Was a Gamblaholic
Fear and Trembling
The Sacred Heart
Between the Dog and the Wolf
The Woman Who Fell to Earth
The Weird Sisters
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Go
Han So-lo
May Wong, Mistress-Dispeller
Love Train
Hammer of the Gods
The Immigrant’s Song
A Mosquito, My Libido
Emily D
The Schwartz-Silberman Effect
The Waters
Spooky Action at a Distance
Wombat
Donkeys See What Happens
Miss Subways: A Novel Page 23
