Man in the Empty Suit (10 page)

Images of broken noses swam in the darkness before me. It was a reassuring vision, and when I woke for the second time, I found myself struggling to scratch my nose. Something kept my arm pinned. I groaned and opened my eyes.

I lay on my side with my hands tied behind my back. Whatever I’d been tied with was cutting into my wrists. Lily was pressed against me, back-to-back, and our fingers touched. Some kind of wires bound her wrists. I stopped struggling
and silently prayed that the dark room would cease its steady rotation.

A flash of lightning came through the peeled paper on the window. We were in a hotel room stripped bare to the lath and floorboards. Bits of wood and broken tile covered the floor. Around us a dozen youthful figures of me formed a wide arc. Some seemed as young as seven or eight, crowded together for security or fear. The hushed rattle of conversation among them made me think of birds.

I cleared my throat. “You’ve all broken a number of the convention rules, you know.” I sounded froggier than I would have liked, but the message still struck home. The Prepubes looked at one another with the concern children show at an adult’s displeasure. “Someone untie me now so we can get back downstairs.”

A teenager’s voice, deep and cracking, called from near the door, “We’re supposed to keep you here. It won’t be long.”

Lightning flashed again, and in the brief light I saw the fear in their eyes. They knew that what they were doing was wrong. That was the appeal, what made them do it. I wondered who it was who took their childhoods away from them by inviting them here.

“Who’s the oldest here?”

The group parted, and a single teen stood by himself. He was awkward, thin, hands buried deep in his jean pockets as if he was unsure what to do with them. I didn’t remember seeing him at the party before, and I understood why. Pale light from the street caught the glimmer of braces on his teeth, an otherworldly silver smile. It was me when I was eighteen. The year I’d begun my work on the raft.

I asked him, “What are we doing here?” My eyes wanted to shut again. In moments of panic, my body’s reaction is to shut down, to find a safety in lack of energy. Lethargy must be a genetic defense. The cells that don’t move don’t get hurt.

The Inventor ran a hand across the unruly hair that crowned his head. “Just wait a few minutes, okay? He’ll be here soon.”

“Someone’s got you on the wrong track. You shouldn’t even be here.”

He looked to the floor. “I belong here more than anyone. I came up with it.”

His voice was deeper than mine. I wondered about hormones and their effect on the body. Overcompensating for youth with excess maturity.

I said, “Listen. There’s no need for me to be tied up. And this nice lady doesn’t belong here.”

He said, “I talk to you while you try to escape, and then we fight, and I knock you down hard and kill you.”

Some of the children were crying.

“What?”

He hesitated. His voice shook when he answered. “You heard me. If you don’t do exactly as I say, I’ll kill you.” Children fluttered nearby. I scanned their faces and saw mixtures of fear, worry, excitement. Nowhere did I see recognition. They thought of me as someone other than themselves. I imagined they saw the same lack of recognition in my eyes.

“What makes you think you kill me?”

“I’ve seen it a dozen times.” His hand waved over the group. “Some of them run. A lot of them stay. They’ve all seen what I’ve seen. Only one here hasn’t.”

He indicated the smallest of the crowd, a six-year-old. He stood nearest the windows, as scared of the dark as he was of me and the others around him. I wondered if he had any concept of what was happening. I wanted to grab him and take him back to the books and puzzles that I knew littered the floor of his room.

I suddenly remembered being six, playing in my second-floor bedroom in the hundred-year-old house. Outside the window a large spruce grew. Walls painted sky blue, a midnight blue bedspread with stitchwork scars. Me on the floor, on hands and knees, surrounded by toy cars. All of them have a story, in my mind, as they drive under my hand to places I haven’t bothered to give names. I remember lifting the mattress and placing the cars, one at a time, under it. I did this again and again, car after car, until they were all gone, all clustered together under the mattress, not having gone anywhere other than in my imagination. Pretending to have a place to go made it so much easier to get there.

I imagined now that instead of playing with cars this six-year-old remembers the raft, the nausea that the trip induces, the flash of darkness. Arriving somewhere wet and dark, getting out and running through trees in Central Park, or in deserted alleys downtown, crying while Elders shepherd him through this ruined city. Not old Elders. These elders are only a few years further along than he is, but that’s enough. And I see them take him to a man of eighteen years, the Inventor, for whom this new memory would be wrapping over the old one. I wondered at the older children’s inability to console, to empathize. Before them stood a fearful child,
and they did nothing for him, nothing for themselves. Their own version of rule number four. I thought of me breaking my nose.

Fingers played along the wires that bound my wrists. Lily. “Harsh,” I said to the Inventor. “Scaring a little boy like that.”

“You won’t distract me.” He didn’t even look at the child. “I remember being him and screaming. I’ll get over it.”

I clearly wasn’t tethered to this one either. I’d never been that child. “You won’t help his suffering because you suffered? Do you realize that it’s you who’s
making
him suffer?”

Lily had the twist of metal undone. I tried to wriggle my wrists without being too obvious. The storm was reaching its peak; it had to be near midnight. Every time the lightning burst through the window, I was certain that one of the dozen children would see her working on the wire and call out.

The Inventor said, “You’re arguing about the color of the chips during a losing poker game. It’s happening as it happened, as it is supposed to happen.”

“That’s bullshit.” Some of the children looked to one another, the glimmer of fear mixed with amazement at the bad word I’d thrown at their leader. “You know I’m right. All of you. You know you didn’t come here as kids. You know you were brought here by someone who had no right.”

“But that person is you,” the Inventor said, arms wide to include the whole group. “It’s always been you. You know that.”

“Not me. I never went back.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No.”

“I think you did. I know you did. We all do. You went back so that we could do this. So we could stop you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” The fog inside my head refused to lift.

The Inventor reached into his back pocket and pulled out a gun. I immediately recognized it and moaned.

Lily gasped. “Jesus.”

The Inventor stood in a wide gap the others created. He towered over everyone else, his face gone black in the sudden darkness. I pulled hard at my wrists and tried not to wince.

The Inventor said, “I want to know what happened to your nose.”

Lily stopped working on my wrists. “What?”

“He was in a panic. He ran into a bathroom to check his nose in a mirror. Something important happened, and we want to know what. Hurry, she’s almost done with your binds.”

At that, Lily started working again.

“Listen to me,” the Inventor went on. “Unless you tell me what is going on, I’m going to have to hit you with this and kill you. I don’t want that.”

“If you kill me, then you know you’ll be killing yourself.”

He said nothing. Lily finished with the wire, and my hands fell away from each other. The group of children had already begun to back away. They’d always known the precise moment of my escape and had done nothing to prevent it. They were even more slavish to rule number four than I had been.

I said, “Give me that gun.” As I said it, something knocked against my hip. It was the gun I carried. So the gun he held wasn’t the one I’d found. These children had no idea what they were doing.
Amateurs
, I thought.

“It won’t really be killing myself. There has to be some way around it.” I could hear his internal logic buttressing his words. He’d been through this puzzle. As many times as there were kids in the room, he’d witnessed my “death.” Twelve years? I’d only just this night been shown the Body, and they’d worked for a lifetime to understand the intricacies of their actions. I worried that this one might be right: What if killing me didn’t really matter?

“How can you be so sure you’re not killing yourself?”

“Because of the Elders.”

“I’m an Elder.”

“Only subjectively. I’m talking objectively. Those who are really old. Older than you.”

“What about them?”

“If killing you really did kill me, then they couldn’t be here.”

I nodded slowly. “That would make sense if it weren’t possible to become untethered.”

He shook his head. “That still doesn’t make sense. I’ve thought about it since he heard you say it.” He gestured toward the smallest boy, who now cowered in the corner. “Go ahead and give your explanation. I’ve got a response. Hurry up. I’m going to have to kill you in a moment.”

This one was painful to talk to. I was too tired and drunk to think clearly. I needed to get away from him and catch my breath. “Untethered means that your actions here could predicate a new reality for you. One that puts you on a different track from the Elders.”

“You’re making that up. I’m not sure if you’re just drunk or crazy.”

Lily walked around me, her heels grinding bits of rubble.
“This has gone on long enough. He won’t shoot. How could he?”

The Inventor said, to himself, to me, “This is it.” His eyes on mine, he raised his gun. The group of children began to scream and run. Everyone but Lily, me, and my six-year-old self knew what was coming and wanted to get away from it.

I lunged past Lily and reached for his gun but missed. The whiskey still bounced around in my head, and I wasn’t sure I was moving in a straight line. He pulled the gun away and spun in place. As the weapon came around to complete the circle, he raised it and smashed me in the temple. Stars burst in my vision, and I staggered into a wall.

The Inventor muttered, “That won’t really kill you.”

Screams burbled darkly around me for several moments, minutes, perhaps a lifetime. Voices, all my own, washed over me without meaning. I only knew the blood in my mouth and the grit of the floor in my cheek, the feeling of limbs oddly buoyant. I slept and dreamed of black rocks underwater. A voice whispered soundlessly, then again. I opened my eyes.

Lily knelt beside me, her hands on my head. Something hot and sticky ran down my temple. “Hold still, you’re bleeding.” She rummaged through my pockets, removed the videotape, and dropped it. She started toward the other pocket, where my gun was, and I grabbed her hand.

“What are you looking for?”

“Something to stop the bleeding.”

“Here.” I pulled my empty pocket inside out and ripped it from its seams. So much for the Suit, I thought. She finished tearing the pouch of fabric free and pressed it against my head.

The room around us was empty. Everyone else, every child and Youngster, had gone. Even the storm had moved on, although in the distance thunder echoed up the canyons of the city. I lay on the floor for several minutes, maybe a quarter hour, Lily pressing the thin fabric to my head, her free hand stroking my temple. I closed my eyes and listened to the storm recede. In the past I had done this, closed my eyes and listened to the storm fall away as the party downstairs wound down, imagined the century earlier when I’d arrived. In my mind’s eye, I could see others of me, around tables speckled with nearly finished drinks, heads tilted left and right, ears searching for that last reverberant peal of thunder, the end of the spattered rain.

I reached for Lily’s hand. “Where’d everyone go?”

She nodded, as if answering an unasked question. “They started screaming. The little ones especially. Older kids grabbed younger ones, and they tore out of here. The last one to leave was the one who hit you.” She looked back at the doorway as if seeing him there now. She was not affected by multiple versions of me, only by my actions. She made my head spin. It was like I was a balloon, floating, and everyone else held my strings.

I said, “Who the fuck are you?”

Her eyes stayed on the door, searched for things I couldn’t imagine. “I told you. I’m Lily.”

I shook my head, and the room shook along with it. “That explains nothing.”

Her hand held my cheek. “It’ll have to do.”

I tried to sit up. The room made one lazy turn, then settled down. My head had left a rather large hole in the plaster where I’d ricocheted off the wall.

“Why won’t you tell me? It’s me, for Christ’s sake. You act like I don’t know it’s someone older than me who invited you.”

“He made me promise.”

“Break the promise. I promise, he’ll forgive you. I already do.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why?”

“He trusted me. He made me promise. And I’ve already hurt him enough.”

Even through the dark, I could see a flicker in her eyes. She was protecting something she thought worth the effort. The fact that it was me made me ashamed. I hadn’t even been willing to protect myself, as the screaming six-year-old would attest.

She helped me to my feet. While I was out, the hall lights had come fully on, and her face looked sculpted and clean, out of place in the decrepit room. I had no idea where in the hotel we were. We headed toward the rear stairway, which was silent. I headed upstairs. Lily followed, pulling at my coat.

“I think we should go back to the ballroom,” she whispered. I didn’t respond, kept climbing. After another floor she said, “None of them would help the little one.” She said this with a secretive hush to her voice, as if she were afraid to let herself hear it. Unbidden, up popped an image of my face at six, eyes full of tears, nickname hovering above like an ad on the side of a bus: Little One. What was it that compelled me to reduce them to labels? I wondered, and then just as quickly I wondered why I thought of them as “them” when they were in fact “me,” again and again and always.