Man in the Empty Suit (27 page)

I pulled the door shut and walked down the now-wet hall floor. As I passed the other doors, I wondered what I might have found behind them, if I might have left other items there, other tethers that I might ignore or cling to, other paths I might put myself on simply by imagining they existed.

MY SEARCH FOR
her started the next day. I followed the streets east as far as the bridges. She’d sworn to never leave the city, and I believed her, not because she was trustworthy but because I knew it was true of both of us, I felt it in my bones more real than gravity. I searched the riverbed, dry and filled with garbage and abandoned cars, and knew I wouldn’t cross over. I turned back and headed north. Days passed. I begged for food or scavenged through boarded-up buildings. I crossed back and forth over the city. To Hell’s Kitchen, then east to Central Park, where I wandered up to Harlem and kept going north. When I reached the Cloisters, I turned back. Some streets just tasted wrong, like aluminum on the tongue. I didn’t see her anywhere. I searched the Central Park camps, with their rings of barbed wire and patrols. I scanned the line of people with their pillowcases of canned goods in front of the Plaza Hotel, waiting to be interviewed for acceptance into the clans.

“What do you think you would be able to offer a clan?” asked one of the tie-wearing interviewers. He, like the others, sat behind an office desk that had been hauled out onto the sidewalk.

A pert young woman with uneven bangs smiled anxiously. “I’m assertive and good with traps.”

The interviewer made notes on a clipboard.

I returned to the eastern edge of the city for no reason other than that it was opposite where we’d been together, and something in the message of “fly east” wouldn’t unhook from my thoughts. None of the street crews on the West Side had seen her. Emma claimed she hadn’t either, although I thought she might lie.

I walked past the hospital again and found it more dilapidated in the light. Across the street the dorms were buzzing like a hive. The children I’d seen before caught me looking at the many windows and ran out to chat. The oldest teased me that the woman I sought was my “girlfriend,” the word stretching out along her wide, wicked, child smile.

“You love her,” she purred. I gave the kids some apples that Emily had given me and continued down First Avenue. I walked nearly to the tip of Manhattan. At the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, I considered walking across the East River. I stared across the muddy ground between me and Governors Island. Her promise to not leave the limits of the island repeated inside me. I felt an ache in my body. My back rippled with every step. I needed to rest.

I headed to the subway. I’d been in the tunnels but never seen trains, although others claimed they still ran. The nearest station was City Hall. I passed the agent’s booth and jumped a
turnstile. On the platform, candles burned in sconces bolted to the support beams. Commuters read books or old newspapers. I picked up some pages myself and read news decades old, thought of the papers that Lily freed after Phil’s death. The train that eventually arrived had no headlights, and so it burst from the black tunnel like an eel, its brakes screaming. My heart beat faster, but when the train slowed, I saw that the interior was lit and filled with people.

I stepped into a car nearest the conductor, as if he provided some kind of protection, and examined the other riders. Entire families called the train home. I saw men and women lost in the vague intimacies of life. Five children received reading lessons from a man who seemed father to none of them, a legal pad on his knee as he drew letters, upside down and backward from his perspective.
“Cat,”
he wrote.
“Dog.”
I watched until he wrote
“Train,”
and the children gave knowing smiles to one another.

A blanket lay across several seats, and beneath it moved the shapes of two lovers. I walked past them and those who casually sat near them, reading or sleeping or watching. I found a seat beside a woman with a small electric hot plate attached to a battery. She cooked eggs she sold for a dollar a plate. People lined up and offered their money. She served in order, throwing oil and eggs into a small black pan. She took pity on me and gave me an egg for free. I had no cash and offered her my jacket, but she refused it. In a thick accent, she said, “Be nice to someone else. It all comes back.” She said something in a Slavic tongue, smiled, and turned to her next customer. I ate the egg in silence.

At the next stop, a priest stepped on board, and the people
nearest the door shouted at him to leave. Someone from farther down the car shouted back, “Until he hurts someone, he stays, just like the rest.” It might have been the teacher, but it could have been anyone.

The priest walked among the passengers, speaking of God and holding a cup for donations. None came. One man told him, “You’d be better off becoming a carpenter, like Jesus. Then you’d be productive.” The priest ignored him and quoted a passage from the New Testament.

I returned to Phil and Lily’s building, my building. I was nearly crippled, my back so knotted that standing was difficult. The stairs to the top floor nearly wrenched me apart, and with every step I recalled seeing Lily carried up them. I had failed spectacularly in my attempt to save her. She had disappeared, and I knew that whether I returned to the party or not, she would be there. My guilt was crippling me.

The next day I regretted having come back to that place. No one knew I was there. I had little food. I spent hours on the kitchen floor, lying on my back or my stomach. I crawled through the apartment on all fours, searching for food. Instead I found the remains of Phil’s hidden stores of alcohol hidden behind cleaning products in the bathroom, in the lowest kitchen cupboards, and under threadbare blankets in a closet. I medicated the pain, found that even if the pain didn’t leave, at least I did. I drank myself to a stupor during that day and the next and wandered in and out of consciousness during the night. Awake, I cursed myself and Lily, Phil, Emma, whoever passed through memory. When I sobered enough to look out the window at the hotel, sunlight blurring its windows, I would wonder what day it was for an instant and then
turn to the next bottle. I relived Phil’s death. I talked to ghosts and memories. I waited for suns to rise and set.

When at last I ran out of Phil’s remaining stash, I filled the bottles with water and watched light filter through them, ran my fingers through the rainbows they cast on the floor. I waited for daylight to break through and catch them in new ways. I drank the bottles during the evening, telling myself over and over that there was more I could have done, nothing else I could have done. My ears were filled with my own circling babble, and just before I fell asleep, I heard words slip from me that made the pain in my back crackle like electricity.

“It was her choice to go,” I said. Then I fell asleep.

The following morning the pain was gone. I woke and turned to my side and didn’t shudder or moan. I lay still for several minutes, sure the pain would creep up and take me again, certain it waited for me to think it gone in order to injure me more when it returned. When it didn’t, I sat up and looked around the room. It was dark, and the sky outside the windows rolled with heavy clouds. Thunder shook the bottles on the sill.

Rain splattered against the bottles, ran from the sill down the cracked plaster wall, and pooled on the wooden floor. The puddle was growing, gathering bits of plaster debris, dust, small pieces of paper that floated across the top like water bugs. The water followed the unseen contours of the floorboards, the paths dictated by grain and wear, toward the center of the room, jogged sideways twice, and then formed a pool beside my mattress. If the rain continued, I knew that the mattress would be ruined. For the first time in days, I
stood. I found the tentacled device, no milky fluid or smell of memory around it. It was as if someone had cleaned it. I took it back to the mattress, lay down, and held the device to my chest.

Outside, the storm continued, the sky so dark it was impossible to say if it was day or night. Streetlamps and neighborhoods blinked on and off in the distance. Nearby, lightning lit the streets. I followed the odor of food down the hallway to the living room and found a milk crate with three Styrofoam containers inside. I opened the top one and found a turkey dinner with potatoes and broccoli. I opened the other two and found two more of the same. Had Lily taken some odd kind of pity on me, or had Mana or Josh come to make peace with Phil? I put two in the refrigerator; the third I ate with my bare hands. When I was done, I left the container on the floor and carried the device back to bed. No longer bogged down by my stomach, I knew what I wanted: to see if the device worked. I wanted to see Lily again, even if only in memory, and this twisted thing might give me that. But I was still afraid to find out. I curled my hands around it and held it under my pillow.

Rain hammered the buildings, and I lay listening to its work. I could imagine the years of dirt that washed away down the drains of the city, the dust taken from the air. It tasted cleaner. I ate the other two meals when I became hungry and then wondered at who had brought them. The empty containers floated around the living room on top of the half inch of water that covered the apartment floor. It ran under the front door, spilled over the steps, and rained down the stairwell. My mattress squished beneath me.

Another day or night and I woke to more smells. I followed them to the living room and this time found a plate wrapped in foil. Under the foil, held firm by coagulating gravy, were nine Swedish meatballs. I walked to the window, looked across the alley, and saw lights glare from the first and second floors of the hotel. My party was tonight. I saw one of myselves run through the rain to the front entrance. The Elder, I was sure, who had brought this food. In a flash of lightning, I caught another scurrying along the side of the building, a Youngster, probably one of the first, maybe even the Inventor. I left the plate on the sill, and rain mixed with the gravy.

Lily would be there tonight. If I could have convinced her to leave with me, then the deaths would be avoided. Six months hadn’t been enough. A year would be. I’d go further back. I’d try again.

I found my suit in the closet and my three guns. I’d been wearing clothes that belonged to Phil, so going back in them, meeting Lily and Phil a full year earlier, while wearing his clothes would lead to unwanted questions. A year earlier, or more. Two, three? And no memory device; she’d never steal her memories back from me. I changed into the suit and then weighed what to do with the guns. They anchored me to the spot as I debated. If they weren’t present in the present, if I took them further back and got rid of them, if I also took Phil’s gun from a year earlier, then the Suit’s events might change so dramatically that the shooting would never occur. I’d never come back here, and I might not know what events would come, but at least the deaths might be avoided.

At the front door of the building, I watched the hotel pop in and out of sight as lightning flashed, the scramble of the
guest-hosts arriving. I couldn’t go back, but I had to go back. It had to come to this, to my return. I wasn’t going to attend the party. I was going to get back to the roof, to my raft, and then I’d be gone from my Elders and Youngsters for good. I’d save myself from myself, and Lily as well. To do this meant hiding in plain sight. I’d have to act like I belonged so that I could disappear. And in a flash of lightning, I knew how to do it. In that flash I saw my reflection in the door glass. In that reflection I saw the Drunk.

I had lost weight, gained gray and a beard. My eyes were dark, my hair long and unruly. I was sober but didn’t look it. I was the Drunk. I was the one who would kill Lily. I wasn’t a drunk. I wouldn’t kill Lily. No one would want me there. No one would talk to me. I could walk through the lobby and to the stairs, reach the roof, and be gone. But I needed to be cautious. Taking the guns with me to the past was one step. The second was keeping them from working. I took the guns from my pocket and emptied the bullets, dropped them to the floor of the lobby. They clicked around my feet, spun away into the dark. I repocketed one gun, stowed the others in my waistband, hidden under my jacket, and stepped into the storm.

I ran across the alleyway through the rain, getting drenched, and went in through the side entrance. An Elder, head wrapped in a plastic shower cap, jacket soaked through to his shirt, swore as he wiped rainwater from his sleeves. Two Youngsters, both near the Inventor’s age, laughed at the Elder with the sad recognition in their eyes that they would, one day, literally be him. Their high-pitched giggles seemed forced. One of them looked up at me, and I realized he would later become the Nose.

“Oho.” he called. “The life of the party has arrived.”

I felt the weight of my jacket, the water running down my back. I played my part. “Is the bar open?”

Both boys laughed. Had I really been so self-centered and judgmental? I had.
I am
, I thought. “Not yet,” he said. “They’re waiting for you.”