Miss Subways

by David Duchovny

  “Shoulder to the boulder,” she echoed, and nodded, but didn’t move. “But now what, exactly?”

  “Now,” Sidney sighed, “we wait.”

  “For what?” Emer asked, handing Sid back his wet hanky.

  “Nothing. Hopefully.”

  DONKEYS SEE WHAT HAPPENS

  FOR SOME REASON, the catastrophic image Sidney had planted in Emer’s mind, of a volcano or an explosive, took root and blossomed. Each day thereafter at school, Emer felt hyperaware, like a bomb-sniffing airport dog, attuned to smells and sounds humans could not hear—the ticking of the clock, the rumblings of the nearby subway, the rush of a class of little feet up the stairwell were all harbingers of a natural or man-made disaster about to come down on her head. Sidney had requested they speak no more of the matter unless there was a “conflagration.” A few days later, Emer had texted Sidney to ask how he was doing, and he texted back that she shouldn’t text him, that he was too old, “like Hillary,” to know how to put electronic things in the trash.

  Emer shared his helpless paranoia before the “cloud,” and thought that was good thinking, so she typed back, “Okay, let’s see what happens,” and sent it, only later realizing that autocorrect had chosen the more colorful if less comprehensible “Donkeys see what happens.” Sidney had not responded. Apparently he was okay with letting donkeys see what happens, and that had been that for their texting.

  She had also been barred by Sidney from confiding to anyone else what had happened, especially Izzy, her closest friend on the planet. This isolated her further in her own world of paranoid perception and heightened awareness to clues and conspiracies, either real or imagined. She felt the processes of her brain tilt away from left to right, from the rational to the intuitional, from logic to superstition—gathering patterns and subtexts, and storing them, the way a person badly lost during an afternoon hike in unfamiliar woods might, as the sun went down and the temperature dropped, begin to conserve water. Just in case. She saw double-dealing and plots everywhere.

  Of course, Izzy noticed that Emer was “off,” and inquired after her. But Emer was able to keep her emotional distance and generally avoid her at school, dodging most of her phone calls and texts. When Izzy confronted her one day, and Emer was on the verge of telling her best friend the truth, Izzy threw her the bogus lifeline of suggesting that maybe she had been seeing the mystery man. Emer gratefully latched on to that, admitting that the relationship had continued, but that he was married, and that was the cause both of Emer’s secrecy and of her apparent recent increase in self-loathing and inauthenticity.

  Sweet Izzy pooh-poohed the idea of adultery as something Emer should take responsibility for, telling her that was between the man and his wife, and that she was a free agent. She scolded her mildly about harming a “sister,” but was more happy that Emer was finally into a guy after so many years. Emer felt relieved, but also burdened by the fact that she would now have to falsify updates about this relationship for Izzy. This increased her sense of isolation and bifurcation. She figured that eventually, in a month or so, she would tell Izzy that they had broken it off, and that would be that. She felt like an actress in a play who had forgotten her lines and was now improvising “in character,” hoping the audience would not catch on before she could get back on book again.

  A few weeks of Uber, Lyft, and taxis went by, and Emer was beginning to resent the amount of money spent, so she ventured back onto the subway one late spring morning. She did miss the commute, the crowded privacy, the loud quiet, the Train of Thoughts.

  And sure enough, a week of subway riding to and from school eased her up a little. Like things were gonna be okay, the bomb wouldn’t go off, the volcano wouldn’t erupt; this was not Pompeii; Con would not reappear. Once, she saw a man on the train who fit Con’s silhouette, and she was surprised by her reaction. After the initial rush of fearful adrenaline, Emer felt a wave of hope, a flirty, giddy anticipation, which made her realize she really did want something more from this man. Maybe an explanation? So she kept riding the subway, telling herself it was over, hoping, and barely admitting this to herself, that it might not be.

  During these weeks, she spent a lot of time with her dad, who, true to Ging’s report, was deeply into Pokémon Go. When Emer wondered aloud if this was dangerous to her father, Ging-ging pointed out that “at least it gets him out of the house. No Pokémon in this building.” She went with him and Ging on one of these hunting excursions, her father in a wheelchair, holding the phone in his hand like it was a Geiger counter.

  As a young man, and after he retired, Jim had loved to fly-fish, and even disappeared upstate now and then to rent a cabin in the Catskills with some buddies. Emer saw this game as an evolution of fly-fishing or even the big-game fishing of Hemingway and the machismo of the previous century—these strange new gods and creatures, with their specific natures and tendencies and dangers, were very similar to the strange world below the surface of the waters. So she signed off on all things Pokémon Go, resolved to study its ways so she could converse knowledgeably and engage with the old man, gave Ging the rest of the day off, and wheeled her father into Central Park for some big-game hunting.

  Once in the park, the old man said, “Alice,” so Emer rolled him to the statue. He asked her to wheel him around and around the figures, as if looking for something, a crack or an opening. He pointed to the ground, where Emer saw a business card of some kind. She picked it up. It said, “Go Ask Alice Enterprises / 23 Central Park Westeast.” There was no such address on the city grid, and this was indeed a nonsensical, Alice in Wonderland type of address. Emer figured it must be part of a game or social movement of which she was unaware, and was about to toss it, when her dad said, “Keep it.” Then he said, “Reservoir.”

  Emer wheeled him north along the Bridle Path, and parked him within sight of the fountain and its geyser. He tried to get out of his chair, to move toward it, but he didn’t have the strength. He was like a believer at Lourdes, Emer thought, remembering his Cocoon-like rejuvenation of that night, or her dream, she didn’t really know which. Was he asking for help or showing her his vision? “Think there’s any fish in there, Pops?” she asked. Jim nodded—like, oh hell yeah. Emer laughed at his happy certainty. “Sharks?” Jim shook his head no, just as certain. “You’re not afraid of sharks, are ya, Pops?”

  “No.”

  “No, not my pops. My pops isn’t scared of nothing.”

  He shook his head in somber agreement, and then deadpanned, “Your mother.” And they both laughed and cried a little.

  “You wanna go for a swim, Pops?” she asked him. He looked up at her, tears in his eyes, and nodded yes. She pondered what she could do—hoist her father over the fence where he would then drown, and she would spend the rest of her life misunderstood as a patricide and pariah? He was staring through the fence at the shimmering, liquid oval as if it were literally the reservoir of his lost hopes and vitality. She wondered if it hurt to be so close to the cure for loss. It must.

  She wheeled him around to face away from the water and pointed him back home. “Another day,” she said.

  He craned his neck back to meet her eyes as she pushed him. “Promise?” he asked like a child.

  “Promise,” she promised, not even knowing what her promises meant anymore.

  LOVE IS THE DRUG

  A COUPLE OF TIMES THAT SPRING, Emer spotted Con picking up Mama’s daughter after school. They made eye contact and Emer, as subtly as she could, even though it felt cartoonishly big, shook her head and mouthed the word no. Con just as subtly and resignedly nodded yes, as if to himself, looking down, and that was that. Emer felt emboldened by these ghostly exchanges, and the next time she saw Con in the main hallway of the school, waiting to pick up Ashia, she took Ashia’s hand and walked her over to the man. She would now take it to the next level, she was going to move past what was, erase it, and normalize this nasty situation. She felt tall enough to ride this roller coaster. As Emer and the little
girl approached, Con held his hands out at his sides in confusion, looking like he was about to be arrested for a crime he wasn’t sure he’d committed.

  “Introduce me to your father, Ash.”

  “He’s not my father. My father’s in Africa. This is Con.”

  “Nice to meet you, Con.”

  “You’ve met him, though.”

  Already this had gone sideways. Why had she asked to be introduced to a man she’d already met? And fucked. Con took her hand again and shook it. He was good at that.

  “At parent-teacher meetings. Yes, you’re right about that. Nice to see you again, Ms. Emer.”

  His touch was still powerful to her, like that addictive entity, the Gancanagh. What the hell was that? She felt like she’d been given a morphine drip. She tasted sugar at the back of her throat, dreams knocking at the back door of her consciousness. What was this man? What was this man to her? She pulled her hand back too quickly, too violently.

  “You guys are weird,” Ashia said rightly. “Let’s go. I’m hungry.” And she made to leave the building.

  “Good to see you,” Con lamely said, and took a step to the side, as if to retreat, yet remaining open to being asked to stay. Emer had no words. She was both high and hungover around this man; he was the drink and the morning after. She was looking at her hand like it was the site of some sort of penetration, where the needle had just been.

  He said, “Can we talk, please, somewhere else. I want to explain.”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  And then for some reason, she said, “You give up easy.”

  Before Con could respond to Emer’s sudden and inadvertent charm, Sidney appeared from behind a much taller adult, like a sideways jack-in-the-box. Emer actually jumped.

  “Sidney!”

  “Hello. Hello.”

  “Do you know Ashia Waters’s father, Con? It’s not Waters, is it?” She was using too many words.

  “No, it’s Powers. Con Powers.”

  “You know our headmaster, Sidney Crotty.”

  “Yes, of course, of course,” Sidney said, but did not extend his hand for some reason. They stood in triangular silence for a moment, until Con said, “I’d better get going,” and took another step back. He gave a harmless little neutered wave/salute, and then, as no one stopped him this time, off he went.

  After watching him disappear, Sidney, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like an untalented ventriloquist, hissed, “What the fuck was that?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. There’s nothing.”

  “Nothing will come from that nothing, my dear. Speak again.”

  “What?”

  “The bard. Parse it out later. You are opening the proverbial can of worms. For fuck’s sake, Emer, don’t be stupid.”

  A third grader overheard the tail end of the conversation and announced, “Mr. Crotty just said ‘stupid’!” Sidney gave Emer one last hellish look and then grabbed the little boy up in mock anger, quickly defusing his use of the most controversial word of the twenty-first century. As Sidney roughhoused with the little boy, she turned away and closed her eyes for a second, and said silently to herself, This must be what fate is.

  SOUL TRAIN

  SOME QUIET DAYS WENT BY, but now Emer half expected, half dreaded that she’d see Con on the subway. She knew she’d foolishly picked at the scab, rubbed the lamp, opened the box. She kept a seat open for him by doing her own miniature version of manspreading—womanspreading. She was in the vanguard of this as yet unacknowledged phenomenon. So she wasn’t all that surprised when Con appeared at Fiftieth Street and stood above her. She pulled her legs together and he sat down next to her. She laid down the law: “You have three stops, speak.”

  “Hold on, let me set up my Teleprompter so I stay on message.”

  “Funny. Wasting time, but funny.” She felt herself in some kind of character, like the hard-ass best friend. She liked herself in this role.

  “Okay. We’d never met. Never. I didn’t know who you were.”

  “I believe that. Doesn’t make this any better.”

  “It kinda does.”

  “It makes our mistake morally defensible, which is more than I can say for this moment right now.”

  “I’m not married to Mama. We used to date. We haven’t been together like that in about three years.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit.”

  The train stopped at Sixty-sixth Street and got quieter as people shuffled off.

  “But you live with her?”

  “Yes, I live with her. But as separate … entities. She sleeps in one room, I sleep in another.”

  She wanted to believe him. But it would be easier if he were full of shit. She didn’t know yet.

  “Why have you stayed together?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Too bad for you, only a couple stops left.”

  “It’s too complicated for right now.”

  “Try me.”

  “She’s very wealthy, money from her family, the family is very old-fashioned African. But they like me well enough. They like me with her. She’s afraid the money will go if I go.”

  “And you spend this money, too?”

  “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “Charming.”

  “Emer, I have asked to leave. I have made all the arguments, but she won’t allow it.”

  “Won’t ‘allow’ it?”

  “She’s from a very powerful family. I swear it makes sense. That’s what it feels like.”

  “Whatever. You’re saying you two have an ‘arrangement.’”

  “Something like that.”

  “‘Something like that’ meaning there’s one arrangement for you and another for her?”

  “No. We’re in a ‘you do you’ mode.”

  “Is that the mode you like?”

  “It’s the mode I find myself in.”

  “So you’re passive, a victim of cushy circumstance?”

  “I like to think of it not as passive, I like to think of it as complicated.”

  “Is there a difference between ‘liking to think’ something and just ‘thinking’ it?”

  “I like to think so.” He smiled, pleased with himself.

  Seventy-ninth Street came and went. They sat in silence as the doors opened and closed on Eighty-sixth Street, which meant that Emer was not going to visit her father this afternoon. Each little step she took, each moment she dallied, she knew which way she was headed, but she told herself, at any minute she could stop, there was always the opportunity to pull the emergency brake. She’d done nothing wrong. They’d done nothing wrong. He was a nice guy. She was a nice girl. She reached for his hand. “Jesus,” she said.

  “What?”

  “When I touch you. It’s like. It’s like a drug.”

  “You sound like my Irish grandmother.”

  “Gross.”

  “No, not like that, she used to tell me that I was handsome, you know grandmas, she said I was one of the Gancanagh.”

  “I actually know what that is.”

  “Yeah? What is it?”

  “Kiss me.”

  He kissed her. She felt the drug enter her through their shared saliva. The next stop was hers.

  “Why me?” she asked him sincerely. “Of all the women in New York, of all the women on the subway, you pick a thirty-eight-year-old first-grade teacher. It’s bad TV writing.”

  “Well, I was on General Hospital. Three-episode arc.”

  “Don’t ever say that again.”

  “Maybe you don’t see yourself the way I see you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe you’re my Gancanagh.”

  “Gancanaghs for each other?”

  “Sure. That just sounds like what people call chemistry. Chemistry squared. Simply.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. You can’t have a female Gancanagh.”

  “Why not? Like a succubus or a Lilith? I’ve heard of those.
Can’t we make up our own rules?”

  “No,” she said. “There are so many reasons why this is a terrible idea, and they only start with the aboveground shit of what you’d call polite society. My life—I have seen these visions and I have made deals, and I am in danger.”

  “We’ve all made bad deals. Life is hard.”

  “You don’t get it. On some fundamental level of morality, of God’s will or the will of the gods, I am not allowed to see you. Specifically.”

  “I feel like you’re being dramatic. Ever so slightly.” He smiled.

  “Feel my head.” She took his hand and traced the scar where her tumor had been removed. “I had a tumor.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, ssh. Don’t. Long time ago, I had a tumor and it gave me visions, and I’m okay now, but I’m still witchy, I still have these visions from this ghost tumor, ghost visions. And I’m not crazy.”

  “I don’t think you are.”

  “You’re not just saying that? Maybe you wanna get off this train right now before I take it all the way to Crazytown.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “So my visions—whether they’re visions or reality or dreams—don’t matter to you?”

  “Might matter.”

  “Might matter, right you are, okay. But these visions offer up a world and a world that has rules, and these rules say you can’t just make up your own rules. That’s when society breaks down, all hell breaks loose, and chaos reigns.”

  “Cats and dogs living together?”

  “What?”

  “Bill Murray? Tootsie? I’m desperate.”

  She felt like she should tell him the secret. He deserved it, or she deserved to say it out loud and tell him.

  “I think you’re a poet and you’re just beginning to know it,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Maybe we can collaborate.”

  Emer had had enough of this banter, and yet she felt she hadn’t even begun to partake of this familiar stranger’s sweetness. She straightened her shoulders. “Yeah, why don’t you come home and collaborate with me,” she said, “now.”