Miss Subways: A Novel Page 8

  Yes, these were legitimate questions and deep, worthwhile historical concerns, but she was reminded of Wordsworth and how we “murder to dissect.” Everyone bending over backward to not cross any lines, like a huge game of gender-race-neutral mental Twister. “I want you guys to think of something, something weird that doesn’t exist, maybe.”

  “How can I think of it if it doesn’t exist?”

  “Imagine.”

  “A unicorn pooping rainbow sherbet.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Rainbow sherbet pooping a unicorn.”

  That brought down the house. Even Emer had to laugh at that bit of homegrown surrealism. “Okay, these are all great. So now, what did the Creator say about the cold? Anyone?”

  “He said he couldn’t make it go away.”

  “The Creator says that, even though he’d like to take away cold, he can’t because once he’s had a thought, and he thought of cold, he can’t unthink it, which means, I think it means that we are all creators, creators of thoughts, and the things we think cannot be made to disappear, cannot be unthought—which means what?”

  A quiet child raised her hand. “It’s a busy, busy world, and crowded.”

  “Yes.” Emer smiled at that precise locution. “It’s a busy world and it also means that rainbow-pooping unicorns and rainbow sherbet unicorns all exist as of five minutes ago.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Oh, no? Then try to unthink those things. Everybody unthink the pooping unicorn.”

  She waited a few moments.

  “Is it gone?”

  “No!”

  “I can’t get it out of my head. I’m naming him Ray ’cause he won’t go away.”

  “Nope, he never will. Exactly—that’s what part of the story is saying about the power of your mind, it can think things that never were, and once thought, those things are here forever.”

  A child said, “It’s a busy, busy world.”

  TRAIN IN VAIN

  THE SUBWAY HOME WOULD NOT MOVE fast enough. Emer was pondering Corvus, worrying. She kind of weirdly looked forward to barfing for him again tonight. She remained standing, as if that could speed things up. She found a Train of Thought to occupy her mind.

  When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

  —CARL JUNG

  Wow, that was some heavy shit for the subway. Emer wondered if they had a Jungian conductor today. The quote seemed to make sense, to have truth, but Emer couldn’t quite pin it down, so she reserved final judgment. She thought it might be a good antidote to one of her least-favorite sayings of all time—“it was meant to be.” She hated when people said that. “Oh, I guess it was just meant to be.” Obviously, whatever happened was “meant to be.” It was such a cop-out. But Jung was saying, it seemed to her, that if you didn’t know yourself, shit would happen that appeared “meant to be,” but was really you making it happen unconsciously.

  Your unconscious was fate, or God. If you didn’t do your homework and get to know yourself, you would be buffeted by fate, by your own shadow. The world would seem to lack free will, but it was really your own self-ignorance that made you powerless. Or something like that. Freud said character is destiny. That was similar, but not the same. Young Jung was rebelling against his master. It started to make her brain cramp.

  Like the thing she recently heard about time, likening it to a guitar string between two points, the past and the future—but the weird thing to her was that a fixed point in this theory was the future, and the present is always vibrating, tuning, and moving to get a fixed past in line with a fixed future. So the past is unchangeable, though somewhat knowable, and the future unknown but set. It was like Schrödinger’s cat—the cyanide vial is always both broken and unbroken, the cat is always alive and dead until we open the box and look, the looking, knowing itself, being the end of the experiment, the end of life: life is the experiment. The future was as random and fated as the past. She liked that, though it blew her mind, and didn’t make a lot of human sense.

  What little she knew of science made her feel stupid. She thought of taking up the guitar. Or the drums. She thought Schrödinger and Heisenberg should have opened up a law firm, or a bake shop. Not a pet shop. You wouldn’t want Heisenberg to babysit your kid any more than you’d want Schrödinger cat-sitting. Sometimes Heisenberg is watching the kid, sometimes he’s not. It’s uncertainty at ten bucks an hour. She chuckled. Another limited version of free will. Her future was fixed, she just had to get in line with it. Cool. Okay, how?

  The train passed through a “ghost station” at Eighteenth Street, an abandoned stop. Emer stared at the retired platform, wondering if it missed all the feet it used to support. There she was again, ascribing feelings to things. She also wondered if the ghost station was like one of those ghost planets—invisible to us except for the power they wield over the orbits of planets we can actually see. We know of the existence of such ghost planets exerting the influence of gravity only because of the inexplicable, erratic orbital behavior of the affected planets. Does the ghost station wield that type of power over the trains and the bodies of citizens? she mused. When we become erratic as people, she thought—okay, when I become erratic, she specified—could it be a ghost exerting influence on me? A ghost planet? A ghost station? The ghost of an idea?

  No, she guessed the station was not nostalgic for busier days, when she saw something moving and a pair of eyes transfixed her. There was a guy standing there on the empty platform, looking homeless or something—big guy, hulking, menacing, even. And it reminded her of those occasional stories in The New York Times about bands of homeless seeking shelter from the winter in the warmth and privacy of disused subway tunnels and abandoned stations. It could be another one of those apocryphal New York stories, like the baby alligator craze that ended with fearful owners flushing their growing gators down the toilet and, over time, unwittingly creating a race of blind crocs in the sewers, alligators that had never seen the light of day. Like the stories of phantom limbs where amputees could feel cramps in muscles that no longer existed, the city was full of ghosts and phantoms. Alligators and stations. The phantom limbs of the city.

  But the eyes holding her from the platform were real. She maintained eye contact with the blurry man as she quickly sped away; he held up something like a coin or a piece of jewelry on a string or length of leather, in the way a hypnotist might present a coin to a willing mark. He seemed to her like he was specifically looking for her, for Emer, not just anyone. The object caught the light momentarily, she saw it gleam, and with that flash, the man’s head seemed to take on the form of a crocodile, like Sobek, the ancient Egyptian deity.

  Emer knew her fluid mind was projecting associations—hadn’t she just been thinking of toilet-flushed alligators? Egyptian society and religion was part of the first-grade curriculum—near infants studying the infancy of civilization. So she knew Sobek. Isis. The underworld. She blinked and Sobek was gone; she saw the human face again, and then both the man and the shiny thing were gone, strobed behind metal stanchions and lost in darkness, the train having hurtled past.

  What was the homeless guy’s story? Why did she have to give him a story? So she could blame him, make him deserving of his fate. Could she empathize without poetic inflation? Why couldn’t she just help? Just jump in and help. So much of life in New York City necessitated looking away—from pain and disaster, other people’s suffering, the sheer amount of possible stories that came your way every day. You could open up and empathize with all of it, and thereby explode your soul into smithereens and paralysis, or you could look the other way and think of the baby crow in your apartment. Why was it easier for Emer to extend her heart to a crow and not a lover, to a crow and not a homeless man on an abandoned platform? Why did she have to turn this homeless man into a mythological deity? Was her heart infinite or was it just a certain size?

  Was it her heart or a phantom heart that obsessed about Corvus, her boy,
now as she looked up, trying to shake/shiver like a wet dog, to vibrate these sticky ideas off her, derail this particular train of thought; she saw a man across from her, a nice-looking man who seemed familiar. Another familiar stranger? She’d never noticed him on this line before, she was sure.

  And then it hit her.

  He was the man of her dreams—well, not that, but the man from her recurring dream, the one her mind called Con. She didn’t know that for a fact, but she knew, she knew it as what she might call a “soul fact”—her gut. She had a picture of the man in her mind from the dream. It, or he, had been dreamed, he had been thought, and once thought, could not be unthought.

  Maybe, more likely, she’d seen this dude before, on the subway, or somewhere else, and for some reason, he’d made an impression, and then she dreamed about him. Yeah, that was way more probable. But it was super weird anyway. She whispered the name aloud to herself as a question—“Con?”

  Just then, the man looked up. And smiled.

  MY DEAREST FELLATIO

  THE NEXT COUPLE WEEKS PASSED with Corvus growing and apparently thriving. She no longer had to regurgitate for him, and he ate a medley of seeds and berries she tossed in the blender. One Thursday, Emer was called to sub for sixth-grade English class. It was actually one that Izzy taught, in addition to her duties as school psychologist. Izzy was sick and called in the favor. So while her own teaching assistant babysat her younger kids, Emer rode herd on the middle schoolers.

  The assignment had been to compose a letter from one character in Romeo and Juliet to another. It was a good idea—giving minor characters a voice, a density and dimensionality they might not have access to over the course of the story, something of what Stoppard had in mind for his Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead—that pawns have the dreams and fears of rooks and bishops, queens and kings. That Izzy was a clever teacher.

  One student read her letter from the Nurse to the Apothecary, making sure to give them names—Mary and Steve—and then going on to place an extensive sixteenth-century Shakespearean stream-of-consciousness pharmaceutical order while complaining about her own aching feet (all the while adding the abbreviations that texting has generously given the language)—“Oy, my dogs are barkin’ fml (Steve-o!) … how are your newts? Are they fresh? My mistress has full on RBF and FOMO at the mo, but please set aside four newt eyes ttyl.”

  When she was done, and it was time for the next missive, a boy rose from the back row and announced, in all innocence and seriousness, that he was going to read a letter written by Mercutio. Emer nodded. She shared the English major’s general love for the witty Mercutio, and wished he had lived to have his own vehicle written for him. She saw in Shakespeare’s in-depth creation of a minor character who dies so early one of the deepest wisdoms of the play, in all of Shakespeare, actually; the fact that the best and the brightest do not necessarily mature into greatness, that there is random tragedy and random fate, and that the quickest, funniest, smartest character in this play, and by extension the world, could be murdered during a stupid family quarrel stoked by a couple of stupid, horny teenagers.

  It was a profound and heartbreaking truth—not only the good die young, but also the best and brightest, bravest, most charismatic. Emer was hoping that the assignment would touch upon some of these issues when the boy announced that the letter was “from Mercutio to his cousin Fellatio.”

  That blow was so unexpected that Emer barked a seal-like laugh, and collapsed into convulsive giggles. It was a good ten seconds before she relaxed her diaphragm enough to draw a cautious breath, which unfortunately fueled another run of laughter. She looked up through tears at the class, which seemed mostly nonplussed at her mirth, and at the boy, who she could see had not intended to make this joke, and in fact was looking a little hurt.

  “Do you want me to start over?” the boy asked. “This is a letter written from Mercutio to his cousin Fellatio—”

  “No! Don’t start over!” Emer managed to yell at the kid. “Okay, okay—just pick up where you were…”

  The boy swallowed and blinked, confused, and cleared his throat. “Okay—‘My Dearest Fellatio…’”

  Emer literally doubled over. This time, though, she found the “Dearest” funny. “Wait, no, stop, please … oh my, look at the time…” There were a good twenty minutes left in the class. “Why don’t we take the rest of the period as a ‘study’—okay? Get a jump on tonight’s homework.” She managed to get to the door and out into the hallway, where she could give in to a couple more giggle fits. On some level, she would forever be a five-year-old. Jesus. She thought about how she would laugh again when she told the story to Izzy.

  She looked up at the sound of heavy feet coming down the hallway and saw the not always welcome face of St. Margaret’s headmaster, Sidney Crotty, a very short man. The clumping that preceded Sidney was caused by the heavy lifts he wore in his shoes, which was like the open secret/joke of the school. By fourth grade, most of the kids could see eye to eye with their headmaster. No one, absolutely no one, had ever seen Sidney in bare feet or out of his heavy black shoes with the two-inch heels and three-inch lifts.

  Sidney was a pocket-sized Jesuit priest who had taken the school through the transition from strict Catholic education to Ivy League prep. Despite his stature, before the advent of cell phone cameras, say before the mid-’70s at least, Sidney had been known to drop a truant high schooler twice his size with a clipping left hook on more than one occasion. He had the reputation as “pound for pound the baddest Catholic on the Lower East Side.” You got the feeling he would fight like a wild animal, clawing and biting, and you’d have to kill him to make him quit; and if you did kill him, as he was dying, he would find a way to clamp on to you with his teeth so you would eventually die of exhaustion carrying this attached dead priest around.

  Those “good old days,” as he called them, when you could slap a child for insolence and not see your world come crashing down as a result, were long gone, but there was still a sense of flashing, righteous hostility with Sidney Crotty, and his being handcuffed over time by the tide of political correctness and enlightened pedagogy had channeled all that potential violence into a colorful vocabulary and a well-honed passive aggression.

  Even as it was part of Greenwich Village, St. Margaret’s had sat out the ’60s, keeping the boys’ hair short and the girls in bland brown jumpers. But as the Village changed and was overrun by moneyed folks, and the bankers and hedge-fund cowboys chased out the gays and the artists, the mission and position of the school changed. Sidney oversaw this questionable regime makeover with an expert hand and a winning, constant air of incredulity and bemusement underneath a small man’s terrier toughness. Having traded Keds for Cole Haans, both feet of the school were now firmly in the new city—both big-heeled, high-lifted, size-six boy’s feet.

  “There you are, slumming it up here in the middle school. May I have a word?”

  “Of course. Here or…?”

  “Here is fine. Have you been crying?” He offered her a hanky from his jacket pocket. He still carried a pocket square. His clothes were custom made; they had to be. She’d never seen him in leisure wear, but she wondered if he could shop at Gap Kids or had bid on any outfits from the Prince estate. She dabbed at her eyes with the hanky.

  “Thank you. One of the kids, oh god, it was funny. It just hit my funny bone.”

  “Diving right in … I’ve been having to deal with some parents this week, last couple weeks actually, parents in your class, both sides of the culture wars, really. Not a big deal, but I think you need to be aware. Yes, we are a liberal school and yes, most of our parents would contort themselves to circumlocute any tinge of racism on the one hand or association with the Christian right on the other.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “That was a bit of a preamble, wasn’t it? A little birdy told me—did you serve watermelon as a snack a couple weeks ago?”

  “Maybe, probably—I sometimes bring a watermelon
in for the kids. They love it.”

  “Their parents don’t love it.”

  “What the hell, Sidney, sugar?”

  “Sugar? Ha, no, it’s not sugar. An African American kid, Obama Johansson, well, not the kid, but his mother, his white mother—she said that watermelon made her and her child uncomfortable and could you find a less-offensive fruit.”

  “A less-offensive fruit?”

  “Yes, a less-offensive fruit. I’m quoting. Or snack.”

  “What’s a less-offensive snack? Not a banana, I’m thinking. Too cisgender a fruit?”

  “Banana seems fine to me. As long as they’re not too big. People get uncomfortable around those.”

  “No graham crackers—crackers will make white kids uneasy. No white bread—well, white bread does kinda suck.”

  “I’m not the enemy here.”

  “I know, Sidney, I’m sorry. I don’t envy your position. Is that all? No more watermelon?”

  “Did you read your kids a story that could be interpreted as arguing against Darwinism?”

  “Darwinism? I don’t think so.”

  “Advocating Creationism? Some blessed Indian thing?”

  “Oh god, yes, maybe, the story of Rainbow Crow.”

  “Okay, well, that has some parents up in arms that you’re back-dooring Creationism into the young hearts and minds of their privileged progeny.”

  “I’ll have to go back and read it, but I don’t think so.”

  “I have Molly Hager’s mother crawling up my ass that she’s okay with teaching creation myths of Indians as long as you give equal time now to Genesis and some Hindu shit. Our curriculum, as you know, is Post-Christian Christian but de-emphatic—though we do lean slightly on our Bible, we maintain a separation of church and curriculum, and we can’t be seen to be teaching any one body of belief too much at the expense of another. Everything is a story placed in its de-phallocentrized sociopolitical context.” His tone was so arch, she couldn’t tell if he was a true believer, a half believer, or taking the piss out of the whole thing.