Miss Subways: A Novel Read online

  She got up to pour herself a drink. She opened a fridge stocked with wine coolers. In his prime, her father had liked his Johnnie Walker Black and his Peter Luger steak, on those special occasions for a lower-middle-class man of that time, bloody, but in his present state was reverting to the taste buds of a child and preferred the sweetest, cheapest wines and Chef Boyardee cold from a can. Which was the “real” him? Guinness and salted almonds or Hard Lemonade and Oreos? Which version did she prefer? She took a sip from the attached straw. It tasted like an alcoholic’s chilled piss with a lemon squeeze. Her father called out from his bed.

  “I need to tell Emer something.”

  “What?”

  “For her ears only.”

  “Tell me, and I’ll tell her.”

  He motioned her close so he could whisper. Emer shivered when she felt his dry lips and stale breath on her ear. “Git some, Bill.”

  “Get some? Get some what?”

  “Git some, whilst you can.”

  CORVUS CORVIDAE

  EMER WANTED TO WALK HOME through Riverside Park. Poor Riverside Park, the redheaded stepchild to Central Park, the silver medalist, the Chrysler Building to the Park’s Empire State. Just as she stepped out of her dad’s building, a downpour announced itself in fat, dime-sized drops. Like sub-Saharan flowers that open at the merest hint of rain, the African sellers of umbrellas seemed to sprout up out of the barren asphalt when any sort of deluge hit, offering their knock-off wares. At a moment’s notice, as dark clouds blocked the sun, the fake high-end items, the faux-Prada bags and faux-Hermès scarves, were pushed aside and kept dry, exchanged for a seemingly infinite display of umbrellas.

  Emer approached a dark man in the colorful scarf wraps of his country behind a cardboard display upon which he was scrawling “10$” in black Sharpie. She knew these cheap things were good for only a couple blocks before they turned inside out at the slightest gust, but it was something of a New York tradition, buying a cheap umbrella. She offered the man a ten and he made eye contact as he extended his own hand and stopped, smiling broadly but weirdly, almost laughing.

  She hoped he wouldn’t haggle. She didn’t like that part of street sales. Her father, the Christian half of her parents, used to delight at December haggling with the sellers of Christmas trees. It was a New York City tradition the devout man adhered to religiously. He used to bundle Emer up and tell her what their mission was—to celebrate the birth of Christ by getting the best deal possible on a dead tree. He would coach Emer in his casual, breezy, unabashed New York anti-Semitism—to her mother’s begrudging amusement. He liked to call Jews “noses” or “hats” or “bagels”—and yet his prejudice was completely impractical and inert, like he’d been inoculated with a dead strain of the disease. His best friend, in fact, was “Matty the Hat.”

  “What are we gonna do, Emer darling?”

  “We’re gonna get a tree.”

  “How we gonna do it?”

  “We’re gonna ‘Jew them down,’ Pops.”

  “Shut your mouth, Emer. Never repeat that,” her mother admonished from the kitchen.

  “Correct,” her father elaborated, laughing. “We only haggle when the Savior is involved.” Her mom would scowl, and her dad would say, “Come on, baby, it’s Christmas.”

  Emer had no desire to negotiate this African down. And he seemed to have no desire to even take her money. Instead, the young man went off in some serious consultation with a coworker. Eavesdropping, Emer thought she caught the word announce or something like that, and she distinctly heard the word shango as they looked up in the sky. When the men realized she was listening, they moved a few more feet away.

  Finally, the first man came back and pushed the umbrella toward Emer, almost, it seemed, afraid to have his skin touch hers. “Announce,” he seemed to say again.

  “Announce? Announce what? What? How much?”

  “Shango,” he said, pointing up to the darkening sky. “Free. Friend Anansi. Free.”

  Emer wasn’t sure if this was a scam of some sort that she was slowly being ushered into, like those bogus African e-mails from the addresses of friends who had lost wallets and needed cash, and was afraid if she took the umbrella without paying that these men might pull something shady, but she was getting wet.

  “Thank you?” she said quizzically, and clicked open the umbrella, realizing immediately that the spring-loaded mechanism had imploded on its maiden voyage, and that this was the first and last time this umbrella would open or close. She turned and walked toward Riverside Park.

  It was raining harder by the time she got to the park, a proper spring rain, and the sound of the big fecund drops on her umbrella effectively and pleasantly drowned out the traffic. She marveled at how so many activities city dwellers seemed to prize were ones that made you forget you were in New York—strolling in Central Park, having a weekend getaway upstate, a rainstorm or a snowstorm blanketing the city sounds and bringing it to a muffled halt. She found it odd that so many people expressed their love for this metropolis by seeking and valuing experiences that negated it, either physically or psychically. As if what made the city great was directly correlated to your ability to leave it, in your mind or in your car.

  As she walked, she became aware of an undersound, a clicking or chirping. She stopped to locate it. She zeroed in on a fat tree trunk a few yards away. At its base, something was barely moving, or struggling to move. Approaching, she could see it was a tiny jet-black bird, a chick really, that must have fallen from the nest, and was drenched now, struggling to disengage from the mud.

  She knelt down to get a better look at the tiny creature, extending the shelter of her umbrella. She looked into the dark, wet, blinking eyes. If she wanted to, she could see dinosaur malevolence and power in the black hooded orbs or she could project the uncomprehending baby terror of a defenseless thing. She could not decide whether she was looking “at” the bird’s eyes or “into” them, whether the shiny dark surfaces were reflective barriers or receptive pools. We share the planet with such ancient beings, she thought, even in this city, as far from nature as man could get. There was still natural Mannahatta magic and horror if you listened closely. There are still tiny dinosaurs falling from trees.

  She looked up for any signs of adult birds in a nest and wondered if she should help this Jurassic avatar. Would that act of compassion be subverting nature?

  She reached out to see how “she” would react to her hand (she called the bird a “she” in her mind, though she had no idea what sex it was), but was stopped short of touching her by the secondhand knowledge (and here she wondered just how much of her city dweller’s wisdom was secondhand, especially of the natural world—and what a tenuous, once-removed hold we have on things we think we know, anyway…) that maybe some animals will reject one of their own once it had the smell of a human on it.

  Were we that feared and hated in the natural world now? she asked herself. Probably so, and probably with reason, as we humans were gods of destruction, we were Shiva, destroyer of worlds, bringing death and extinction wherever we went, she considered, as she looked up in the tree again to see if there was any concern or love at all up there. Mankind. Man not kind. Womankind. Woman kind. She did not come to destroy. Decisively, she scooped the baby bird up in one hand and gently slid it into her jacket pocket like a slick thief, and hurried on home.

  BIRDIE NUM NUM

  EMER GOT BACK TO HER BUILDING as fast as she could walk without jostling the bird too much in her coat. She put some old soft dish towels and shredded paper in a big salad bowl for a makeshift nest. She emptied and washed a bottle of Visine and then filled it with milk, and squeezed a droplet or two onto its beak, but the little bird didn’t seem to be hungry. She just lay sideways on the towels breathing so fast and shallow that Emer thought she couldn’t possibly continue long in that panic. She put the tip of her index finger against the bird’s breast and could feel the barest suggestion of a racing heartbeat. The bird made no concessio
ns to kindness and no protests. She half covered her with the paper towel like you might tuck a small child into bed.

  Emer went to the kitchen to see if there was any solid food fit for the bird. She grabbed some grapes. She found some almonds and even some sunflower seeds for some reason, so she cut all of them up as finely as she could, using a Cuisinart, added milk, and smeared a knife’s-tip worth of the goo on a small coffee saucer that she balanced near the bird. She swiped her fingertip in the mixture and touched it to the bird’s beak. Again no acceptance and no protest from her visitor. She thought about googling the number for some sort of wildlife rescue, but then figured she could handle it for now. She decided to call her Birdie Num Num generically, in homage to the immortal Peter Sellers, and by not naming, hoping to remain unattached.

  She curled up next to the salad bowl on the floor and started humming a tune. First, the Jackson Five’s cover of “Rockin’ Robin,” which she didn’t make it through, figuring almost immediately it was too on the nose, or even insulting since this clearly was not a robin. She grabbed her uke and essayed the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” Too sad. She went on to a verse and chorus of Pearl Jam’s “Black” before embarking happily, she didn’t know why, on a severely unplugged version of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter.” Its haunting melody, possible menace, and nonsense shadowing of Norse mythology seemed more or less on the money for this rainy evening.

  She fell asleep this way for a few hours and dreamed of the midget again, and of the boyfriend—Con was his name, she now remembered. And she had a clear picture in her mind of what Con looked like and was just as sure that she’d never met this person. Her dad was in the dream too, young and handsome and at the top of his game.

  When she awoke, her neck was stiff from sleeping on the floor. She went to the kitchen and ate a few grapes, followed by a handful of almonds and sunflower seeds. She realized she hadn’t eaten dinner. She took a few slugs of milk. She dozed and dreamed some more by the bird, and woke up again. The midget and the man named Con. It was as if that one dream was now playing continuously in her head and whenever she went to sleep, she reentered it; as if she had two lives—the conscious one and the dream one playing in separate movie theaters in her mind, showtimes conflicting, but screens never overlapping.

  It was 2:50 a.m. when she squatted again to check on the bird, and the chick seemed to crane forward and up in a spastic motion as she might hector a parent for food. Emer felt a primitive rising in her gut and swallowed it back, but then placed two fingers deeply down her gullet, and promptly barfed a little into her other hand. Surprised at herself, she held her open palm, the partly digested mixture of milk, seeds, and bile—toward the baby bird, the black orbs blinking. The bird tilted its eye to Emer and to the slop, to Emer and to the slop, then moved its head forward and began, miraculously, to wet its beak. Emer saw the world go blurry and then clear, as a tear from her own eye grew heavy then dropped into her palm. The bird ate that, too.

  THE CORVSTER

  EMER MASTICATED AND REGURGITATED AGAIN for Birdie Num Num in the morning, all the while thinking, No way am I gonna tell Izzy about this. She’d make fun of me, but at least I’m not one of those cat people. Over coffee, she googled blackbirds, crows, and ravens to see what the chances of domestication and survival might be, medical care, etc. From the descriptions, she decided that this was a crow, a baby crow, Corvus in the family Corvidae. She read that they were omnivores. At four weeks they were able to leave the nest, though their parents still fed them until they were sixty days old. So Birdie Num Num was a crow no older than sixty days and living in an apartment on the Upper West Side. It remained to be seen whether that was very lucky or unlucky.

  Ever the teacher, Emer reveled in the Latinate poetry of the taxonomical classifications—kingdom/Animalia, subkingdom/Bilateria, infrakingdom/Deuterostomia. What the hell was an infrakingdom? Phylum/Chordata, subphylum/Vertebrata, infraphylum/Gnathostomata, class/Aves, order/Passeriformes, family/Corvidae, genus/Corvus. There. Well, at least we know what we are. She spoke to the bird, “Hello, Corvus brachyrhynchos, I am Homo sapiens, we share kingdoms—Animalia and the Bilateria superphylum as well as the Vertebrata subphylum, obviously, and interestingly the infraphylum Gnathostomata—and I have no fucking clue what that is. Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz.”

  As she double- and triple-checked that all her windows were closed, she wondered if she should buy a birdcage. “That’s all the knowledge for now. All I’m sayin’ is that we have much in common, much to build on. I’m gonna bilateriate myself on out of here and I’ll see you after school. I’ll call you Corvus, ’cause that’s what you are and it sounds cool to me, like a male Corvette, a Corvette with balls. Later, Corvus. The Corvster.” And just like that, the little bird changed sexes.

  On the way out of her building, the young Serbian on duty, Novak, opened the door for her. She thought about asking him if he might check on the bird now and then, but decided not to. She wasn’t sure of the crow-owning rules in this tight-assed building.

  “Morning, Novak,” she said, and wondered if she sounded guilty of something.

  She started down the street and then doubled back to the building entrance.

  “Hey, Novak, listen, is there a doorman that works here who’s like…” She held her hand at about waist height.

  “A child, you mean?” asked Novak incredulously.

  “No, a little person.”

  “A little child person?”

  “Not a little child person…”

  “A child door man?” He paused between each noun like it was a sentence unto itself. Child. Door. Man. That staccato rhythm made Emer laugh. She realized she was in a buoyant mood. A. Buoyant. Mood.

  “No.” Once again, Emer held her turned-down palm around waist height. A sunflower seed was stuck to one of her fingers and she brushed it off.

  “Oh, a midget.”

  “Sssh, yes, named Sid or something.”

  “Yes, we have no midgets doormen.”

  “Yes, we have no bananas?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Emer half sang, “We have no midget doormen today.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” Novak replied solemnly.

  Emer smiled wide. Even this series of non sequiturs filled her with a sense of blissful order this morning. The little bird, something to care for, had made her giddy.

  KIJILAMUH KA’ONG

  DURING SCHOOL, Emer found herself thinking and worrying about Corvus. In the afternoon, at story time, she settled the kids into their seats, and to honor Corvus, began to tell them a Lenape legend she knew. “So you guys know the Lenape were a people that lived here on Mannahatta before the Europeans, right? We studied this. Indigenous is the word.” The kids nodded somberly, like they were going to get some medicine. Gliding past that genocidal minefield for another day, she soldiered on. “So the Lenape would tell themselves stories about how things came to be the way they are. So to explain winter, they said a Snow Spirit appeared and made the world cold. But before that, in prehistoric times, even before Mr. Crotty was your age…” The kids laughed, she had them.

  “Back then, the world was warm, and the crow had all the feathers of the rainbow and a voice like Adele, a beautiful singing voice. But after the Snow Spirit showed up, everyone was cold and grumpy, so all the animals needed a messenger to go talk to their god, who they called Kijilamuh Ka’ong—which means ‘the creator who creates by thinking what will be.’ So the other creatures chose Rainbow Crow to go up to the Creator and ask him to take the cold away.

  “Rainbow Crow flew up, straight up, for three days, and he got Kijilimuh Ka’ong’s attention by singing a beautiful song. But the Creator said that because he had already thought of Cold with a capital C, he could not now unthink it—cold was here to stay, he said. But he saw how sad that made Rainbow Crow, so he jabbed a stick into the sun and created Fire with a capital F, and he gave the burning stick to Rainbow Crow to bring back to earth.

  “On
the long flight back down, the burning stick in his mouth charred all his feathers black and made his voice raw and hoarse. Rough grumbles and ca-caw are the only sounds he makes now. But Rainbow Crow made it back down; he brought fire to all the creatures so they could be warm again, and because of that, he is revered—which means loved and respected—by everyone. And it’s also true that if you see a crow in the sunlight and look closely at his feathers, you can still see many, many colors highlighted there, shining in the black.”

  “Crows are cool,” said Liam Rosenthal.

  “Crows are black and scary,” added Eckhart Jones-Tillerson.

  “Don’t say ‘black’—my mother says that’s racial.” This from Brooklyn Spicer, whose mother worked for Merrill Lynch.

  Emer jumped in. “Okay, first of all, we say ‘racist,’ not ‘racial.’”

  “Told you.”

  “Wait, I’m not agreeing with you.”

  Some of the boys in the class, attuned to any kind of show of dominance, snickered as Emer continued, “No, not like that, ‘black’ in this story is merely a description of color, and as it’s said later in the story, the black of the crow actually contains all the colors of the rainbow. Right?” (Not technically, but the kids didn’t need to know that.) “And sometimes black things are scary, like the dark, just as some white things are scary, like ghosts—but that is not to say the black skin or the white skin of a person is scary.”

  Emer was troubled at how all interpretation now devolved into matters of race or gender or religion. There was no art anymore, even in children’s stories. Why wasn’t the crow female? Why was the Creator a ‘He’? Wasn’t Bald Eagle insensitive to men with hair loss? This is how we spend our time now.