The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  He took the elevator down to the lobby. Outside, he moved past the Clinton, the old brownstone next door housing the elderly and the blind. At Sixth and West Twenty-third, a gray-haired man sold knockoff watches, wallets, and cell phones next to a row of newspaper dispensers: Gay Singles ads. Three steps away, on the corner, two army recruiters stood in front of a rickety folding table, passing out pamphlets.

  The sidewalks glistened. They were dry: no water, film, or oily substance. With existence, Bern thought. Glistening with existence? Could this be joy, he asked himself. If so, why did it flood him now? He was alone. His last love, a delightful young woman, had just returned to her former lover (maybe Bern really preferred being on his own?). He was facing an invasive procedure, possibly a layoff (damn that young man!) …

  But here he was in the world. What joy!

  Gum cast from the mouths of others, ground into the concrete, pushed against the rubber bottoms of his shoes. The air was as green as sea water. Bern glimpsed rust and peeling paint, cracks in glass, chips of fleshy pink in the faces of fire-red bricks. The back of an old warehouse blazed azure in the low-shooting sunlight, shimmering, insubstantial.

  Chatter. Argument and song. Everywhere, the talk on the streets was loud and vital: a huge collective breath riding a smell of burnt pretzels and car exhaust. The city would talk all night.

  Across a thronged avenue, a glass wall fronted another glass wall around a bank atrium, milk white and coolly fluorescent: “ephemeral architecture,” a style favored by Bern’s younger colleagues. Transparency, a blurring of outside and in. Bern liked the lightness; on the other hand, it seemed to him undeniable that one of the things people sought in their surroundings was the illusion of permanence. To admit, up front, that nothing will stay, the steps, the floors, the streets … all we’ll ever know …

  Bern shivered. Victor Serge, it was—a Russian writer he’d read and admired in the past—who said, “What is terrible when you seek the truth is that you find it.”

  Huddle and cling, behind cheap walls. It’s what we have, Bern mused. At least that. The thought encouraged him.

  He hurried along the streets, the primeval urban forest, while all around him, in bright headdresses, beads, and skins, the city’s savage children, young and old, danced with one another, whooping, howling.

  By the time he reached Bleecker Street, his heart galloped: not from physical exertion, but rather from anxiety, anticipation about his upcoming procedure. His future at the firm. His senses were keen tonight! He would wander, relish the air—do whatever he pleased.

  He had read in the paper about a place called Fish, an unpretentious new eatery at Bleecker and Jones with a waterfront ambience. This evening, before tomorrow’s monkish diet, he would live in style—yes, by gum (as his grandfather used to say)!

  Salmon on ice in the front window; dim lighting; a worn mosaic floor. The waitress’s quick, graceful gestures pleased him. He ordered Blue Point oysters and Angels on Horseback. A glass of chardonnay. He took his time, savored every swallow. The waitress was in training. She neglected to take the empty oyster platter from his table until he was nearly ready to leave: the ice melted, and when she picked it up, water splashed all over the floor and into Bern’s pant cuffs. “No problem, no problem,” Bern told her as she blushed and scurried back to the kitchen.

  On the street, afterward, Bern passed a scruffy man on the corner, in cutoffs and no coat, shouting at passersby, “You’ve all had your dinners! Now give me some money so I can have mine! Jesus wants you to, Goddamn it!”

  His heart beat crazily. He ambled past the Village Vanguard and saw the name Paul Motian on a handbill posted by the door. The drummer and his band were scheduled for a nine o’clock show: thirty minutes from now. Beneath the club’s red awning, Bern hesitated. He was fading. It had been a hard day and tomorrow would be harder. Did he still have the gumption to mingle with strangers?

  A figure emerged from the shadows, a mummy wrapped in a khaki jacket. Bern’s heart kicked. “Fuckface,” the man mumbled, holding out his hands. Bern slapped a dollar into the fellow’s grimy palms and, to end the encounter decisively, hustled down the steps into the jazz lair.

  The dark basement room hadn’t changed much—not in years. Red floor-to-ceiling curtains hung behind a piano, a set of drums, and three or four microphones. A smell of beer-soaked cotton rose from cushions along the back wall seats. Black and white photographs of musicians formed crooked rows over the tables, reflecting thin blue beams from spotlights near the stage.

  Abandon hope, all ye who enter: a distinct Underworld, the Vanguard, a journey out of—into?—a dark wood. Fleetingly, Bern imagined finding venerable Dante (surely a jazz lover) at a table here, nursing a beer with Virgil or, if the moon and stars aligned just right, his old flame Beatrice. The poet would be wearing his red robe and laurel crown, maybe sporting a Brooks Brothers tie. Bern paid his cover and found a sturdy chair against the wall away from the door. From here, he had a view past the floor tom-tom to the bass drum’s pedal. Good. He liked to watch a drummer’s feet: the music’s anchor.

  At a table next to him, two girls he took to be in their early twenties sipped tall, orange drinks. Their talk, full of academic jargon, pegged them as New School types. Creative writers. Back story, deconstruction, narrative arc—at the moment, they seemed to be deconstructing the erotic potential of a boy with whom they shared a class. Hardly angels—but then, this was the Inferno, was it not? Bern relaxed with his beer.

  An old co-worker of his, Pete Somebody, a man who’d passed away many years ago, used to brag to Bern that he’d seen the famous Bill Evans sessions here in June 1961. Paul Motian on drums, Scott LaFaro on bass—just days before LaFaro died in a car wreck. “It was the last set of the night, few folks left in the club,” Pete would say (his story, well rehearsed, never varied). “The trio went into a lovely little tune called ‘Jade Visions.’ Evans lowered his head—he almost touched the keyboard. His hair, soppy with sweat, raked the tops of his fingers. Then he reared back, shaking. I was in the front row and, man, did I get drenched! In my eyes, on my lips. At first, I thought, ‘How disgusting!’ But then I realized, ‘Jesus! This is Bill Evans’s sweat!’ I didn’t wipe my face all night.”

  Bern smiled, recalling poor old starstruck Pete. Apparently, the New School girls mistook his smile for flirtatiousness, and flashed him loopy orange grins. He bent to his beer. His heartbeat had slowed, but disturbing pulses rippled through his chest and upper arms. He knew this wasn’t angina—but the mild ache he felt in the middle of his back now, right between the shoulder blades, worried him. Maybe it was better to sit here, surrounded by others. Just in case.

  He looked up, squinting into the dim light, his fellow patrons gaudy silhouettes … how many here in ’61, on the night Pete loved to recall, had died since then? Pete. Evans and LaFaro. How many objects in the room remained from that time? The curtains? Some of the chairs? The photographs on the walls? Traces of Evans’s sweat on the floor, preserved under layers of wax.

  What was it like for Paul Motian, now an old man, to return to the club night after night, a space he’d played regularly for more than forty years, so many of his band mates missing or dead?

  Now, Motian appeared behind the drums. Wiry. Bald. Wearing shades. The curtains whispered. Don’t look back, said his ghosts (or so Bern imagined). The corners of the drummer’s mouth curled down. “Okay,” he said. The word seemed to conjure his fellow musicians. Bern was aware of the instruments’ sounds before he saw fingers and lips manipulating pedals, keys, and strings. But in an instant there they all were: arms, legs, and heads, pumping, swaying, kicking. Breath. More breath. A flitting rhythm filled the room.

  Motian played smoothly, occasionally lunging toward his cymbals, always guarding his chest (maybe Bern was projecting). Recently, when one of his clients learned that Bern had survived double bypass surgery, seven years ago, he exclaimed, “Me, too! Last year—and guess who I met, afterward, in cardiac reh
ab? Weird jazz guy, drummer—Motian is his name. I never heard of him, but my buddies tell me he’s famous. He never said much, just did the treadmill. I hear he’s back playing now.”

  Motion waved his sticks, counting the band into another tune. Bern rubbed his chest. No, not angina. Right before his surgery, what he felt was a slow constriction inching like thick, hot oil through his arms and lungs. If that’s what he experienced again tonight, he’d take himself straight to St. Vincent’s. This, he figured—the ache, the elevated heartbeat—was the anxiety he’d felt all evening. Agitation about work. His colonoscopy. Seven years ago, when the boiling oil choked his arteries and he couldn’t catch his breath, he had taken a subway to the hospital (a ride he didn’t remember). The doctors laid him on his back. They hooked him to a heart monitor and fed him nitroglycerin pills, which gave him a grainy headache. He stayed there overnight, dreaming of Nicaragua, the last place, and the last time, he’d thought he was going to die. Nicaragua. He was thirty-one years old then. On a bus one evening, on an architectural tour of the northern half of the country, he had wound up in a town called Ocotal, near Honduras. From across the border, Contra rebels lobbed mortar shells into the mountains east of town. When the blasts began, Bern was standing in a grungy motel john, staring out the window at a Red Cross ambulance. His ears popped. His bladder blazed. He couldn’t stop the stream. As the bombs fell, he pissed himself and the walls. I’m going to die holding my dick, he thought. God bless my tax dollars.

  All night, in his New York hospital room, his dreams replayed that absurd and terrifying moment, from a war long forgotten.

  The next day, in a large white room vibrating with primal rock music, several young male nurses prepped Bern for an angiogram. He felt a sting in his right leg, near his penis. Immediately, dizziness overcame him. Someone turned his gurney so he could see a television monitor hanging from the ceiling: there, on the screen, the interior of his heart, an intricate, tidy design. The arteries resembled cascading streams—Fallingwater, Bern thought. God bless Frank Lloyd Wright. “Left main,” someone remarked. “Eighty, eighty-five percent blockage.”

  The next thing he recalled was cool liquid, head to toe; a dim blue light, and the hands of beautiful women tending him, shaving his chest and legs. His soul had passed over, beyond the Fixed Stars, into the Empyrean.

  He awoke in a lake of pain. He was the lake. Plastic tubes stuffed his mouth and throat. “You made it,” someone said. He didn’t like the note of surprise in that voice: had there been some doubt about whether or not he would make it? What have I done to bring this on myself? Bern thought. “Breathe,” said the voice. “Stay awake, now.” Later, he learned the surgeons had collapsed his lungs during the operation, to get a better angle on his heart, and he wasn’t breathing on his own. Those first few hours after the operation, a machine did the work for him. Once the machine was off, if he drifted toward sleep, his breathing got too shallow, and the nurses shook him awake. For months after leaving the hospital, he dreaded slumber.

  In the ICU, he was a Frankenstein’s monster of pacer wires, IVs, and yellow tubes draining fluids from his chest into a humming plastic container. A young doctor—my god, were they letting children into med schools these days?—explained to him that he had rerouted Bern’s left mammary artery. Then he had “harvested” a saphenous vein from Bern’s right leg and sutured it to the aorta, to bypass the blockages.

  Now, Motian tapped the crown of his ride cymbal. A crisp ping. A tolling bell.

  “So, technically, you were dead, right?” a colleague said to Bern the day he returned to work, his chest still tender and aching. “I hear they pack the heart in ice, then afterward, shock it back into rhythm.” Bern went numb, and spent the rest of the day gazing through his office window at Lower Manhattan, the various construction zones.

  The song stopped. Another—“I Have the Room Above Her”—began. Bern had been mistaken. This music had nothing to do with the drummer’s quick feet. Motian barely touched his bass drum. No timekeeping. Piano phrases wandered around the melodies as though lost on a forest path. The tenor sax keened like a distant bird. Motian’s brushes whispered across the snare: over here; no, over here; let’s take a look over there.

  Midway along the journey of our life.

  In those rare interludes when a beat held for a bar or two, Bern tapped his foot, a clumsy, mocking echo of the pattern.

  If Motian had slowed after his surgery, he had whipped himself back into shape. On stage, he was a rapacious storm. Generally, Bern was happy, too, with his adjustments since his illness. At first he’d been afraid to eat (no fried foods, no more eggs, red meat, or cream), fearful of exerting himself, but then he’d found a balance: careful moderation. As he recovered more strength, he stopped restricting his activities. And he didn’t brood on what had happened to him—though whenever he felt his heart rush or experienced the slightest twinge in his arms, chest, or back, naturally he wondered.

  On his last day in the hospital, a weary doctor had told him, “Usually, the veins we use in bypass operations, like the one we took from your leg, have a good ten-year track record.”

  “Wait a minute. What are you saying?” Bern responded, shooting up in bed. Cool plastic tubes wrapped his body. “Are you saying I’ll be back here in ten years?’

  “Well,” the doctor said, “you’ll let us know, won’t you?”

  Two of Bern’s colleagues who’d fallen ill in the last three years seemed to fare much less well than he did. Chris Henderson, trained at the University of Oregon, a good anodized aluminum man, had beaten leukemia, at least for now; ever since, he’d become tentative, delicate. In the office, he drove everyone crazy. Did I make the coffee in the break room too strong, he’d ask. Was I talking too loudly with my client just now? Bern wanted to tell him, Don’t worry about it, Chris. Do whatever the hell you want, just like before.

  Raymond Davis, a lung cancer survivor, had become creepily buoyant, a bon vivant. After work, he’d try to herd everyone to bars for tequila shots. “Live it up, man! What’s the matter with you?” he’d admonish anyone who turned him down. Bern liked Chris and Raymond but mostly avoided them now. It seemed to him they had not recovered from their traumas, that their maladies had taken root in their brains and warped them, terribly. They had shrunk; friendly leeches, polite and earnest, feeding on others’ concern. They targeted Bern, especially, if he let them: a fellow sufferer. He feared that to spend time with them would be to stay sick.

  On the sidewalk outside the club, after the set ended, Bern flipped up his coat collar against the night’s chill. Behind him, the New School girls huddled against the wall, sharing a hand-rolled cigarette. Motian appeared in the doorway wearing his shades. He glanced past the awning at the sky—skeptically, as though the air’s calm was deceptive. “Mr. Motian,” said one of the girls, stepping forward, smelling of sweat and sugary alcohol. “Mr. Motian, we think you’re brilliant.” Motian appraised her, nodded exhaustedly, said “Okay,” turned, and shuffled down the stairs.

  From the shadows, the mummy lurched at the girls—the man to whom, earlier, Bern had given money. The girls fell back against the wall, and the mummy lumbered down the street toward the darkened windows of the Village Cigar Shop.

  Bern headed up Seventh. The mannequins of Fantasy World, standing in the window wearing teddies and leather boots, offered him synthetic, come-hither looks. Come-hither-big-boy-and-squeeze-my-plastic-butt.

  He wandered past Abingdon Square—the children’s swings creaking, empty, on their chains. West of the square, candlelight dithered sweetly behind the lace curtains of a small Italian restaurant. It had a new name these days. What was it? Ah, yes: Valdino West. Bern remembered its old incarnation, Trattoria de Alfredo. When he and Marla first moved to the Village, they spent a couple of romantic evenings munching melons and prosciutto at a window table here. On Bern’s starting salary, the place was too expensive, so they didn’t come here often. Bern stopped on the sidewalk now and gazed
in the window. The décor hadn’t changed significantly: large wine bottles on a shelf lining the tastefully painted yellow wooden walls. White tablecloths. Flowers in bottles. Couples holding hands.

  On Marla’s thirtieth birthday, Bern had brought her here. As a gift he had bought her a gorgeous rare edition of Dante’s Vita Nuova translated by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, with hand-painted pictures of lovers in gardens, churches, or at feasts (that purchase had set him back a month or two!). He had found the volume at the old Gotham Book Mart. “To our new life,” Bern toasted his wife. Inside the flyleaf, echoing Dante’s words to Beatrice, he had written, “Happy birthday, to the lady to whom my master has named me.”

  Marla would be fifty-one years old now. Bern wondered if she had ever made it to Tuscany, always a dream of hers. With whom might she have gone? Her new best friends, her lover or lovers (to his knowledge, she had not remarried), were people he had never met.

  The night of her birthday here, they had experienced one of their first New York celebrity-sightings, though like most New York celebrity-sightings it was disappointing, a minor event involving a man only a few folks in the crowd knew anything about. At a table next to them, someone pointed out the window at a pale, portly fellow on the sidewalk, and said, “That’s Max Frisch! He’s a writer!” The man seemed confused, and scurried away from the restaurant when he noticed people staring at him. Since then, Bern had meant to read Max Frisch. He never had.