The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  “It’s fucking cold up here, you know that?”

  “It is.”

  They stood together, shaking, not talking. The rooftops reminded Bern of a half-waking dream he’d had in the hospital, after his heart surgery: a dream of flight over vast western canyons, gorges, rivers. Someone had left a Carlos Nakai CD in his room (the previous occupant? Had he or she recovered or died?). The nurses played it for Bern on his bedside player: soft Native American flute music, soaring notes, the breath of high but gentle winds. His imagination followed the music up, up and as he lay in bed he willed himself over grassy plains and rapid water, gaps in the ground washed orange with sunset, shadows on the rocks cascading like colors freed of their substances, floating off into space. Purple. Black. Forest green. He glanced at Henderson. If he could clutch the man, leap with him into the air, carry him into the timeless safety of that pleasing old dream …

  “I’m freezing my ass off, Wally.”

  But no. This was a heavy time for them both.

  He had to buy a turntable. He ought to get that poor sick creature out of McGee’s.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll take you back inside now,” Bern said to his friend.

  For a long time that night, after setting up the turntable (he’d found it for sale buried in old clothing on a back shelf in McGee’s) and listening to the “co-co-cooing” of the roadrunner on the record—a more grating sound than he had recalled—Bern couldn’t sleep.

  When he did, he dreamed of Marla. She told him she had found a new house for them. “You and me,” she said, touching his arm. He wanted to tell her they couldn’t do this, but to say so would destroy her. She’d burst into flames in front of him. The dream shifted, then, to the house—a shack at the top of a long flight of loose wooden stairs overlooking a Houston bayou. Bern climbed the steps. When he opened the door and moved inside, he began to tumble through space, his arms whipped by kudzu. “Goodbye,” he said: a farewell, he knew, to all the women in his life. Then he was no longer part of the dream. He saw Marla, naked, curled on a gray mattress, weeping.

  6.

  Saturday. Good Shabbos. When had Bern last uttered those words? Last night, The Sounds of Texas had reminded him powerfully of his grandfather, the old man’s insistence that Bern take seriously his Hebrew lessons and his mitzvoth to others.

  Midafternoon. A glorious return to mild weather. With Texas tolling in his head, Bern stepped into McGee’s. In the pet section, Marietta was yelling at a bald man in a sagging white suit. Some poor schmuck who had asked an innocent question, Bern thought. But no. Apparently, this man was her boss. “Even the ferrets are croaking!” Marietta shouted.

  “That’s not your concern,” the man said. “We have people looking after that. Your concern is moving product.”

  “No. I quit. You hear me? Enough. The animals can’t flip you off—see, look at their little paws, they’re just dying to give you the finger—but I won’t take this shitty treatment.”

  The man was ready to slap her. Bern stepped forward. “I’d like to buy this bird, please.” In fact, he had no idea what he was doing.

  “Which one?” the man grunted. “The macaw?”

  “The roadrunner.”

  “Imported from Brazil. It’s a—”

  “Coo,” Bern said. He approached the dusty cage. “Co-co-cooo.”

  The bird lifted its head and flicked its long black tail. Its front toes wiggled, along with the four large toes (two on each foot) in back. Marietta laughed. “Our sign is wrong,” she told her boss. “I’ll ring this fellow up. Then I’m out of here.” The boss walked away, windmilling his arms.

  “So,” Marietta said to Bern. “Finally. A man of action.”

  “Cage come with?”

  “You’re not going to keep him in it, are you?”

  “I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Do you want to come with me?” It wasn’t the bird. Maybe his heart—his heart was doing the talking.

  “What do you mean? A Free Willy sort of thing?” She laughed at him. “Jesus. You’re serious?” For an instant, she seemed to consider his offer. “You’re a nut, you know that?” Then she held out her hand and took the bills he proffered.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “No, thank you. Truthfully, I was beginning to worry about him.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Oh—young girl, unemployed in New York? What can go wrong?” She gave him the nicest smile.

  Out on Twenty-third Street, Bern hailed a cab, hiding the cage behind his legs. The bird was maybe two feet tall.

  “Whaddya got there? Is that an animal?” said the cabbie.

  “A bird in a cage. Perfectly safe,” Bern said. “Just a few blocks, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  “Goddamn right!”

  The roadrunner bit the cage’s bars. Behind each eye was a patch of blue skin. Bern admired the white crescents tucked among the round brown feathers of its wings.

  “So where we going?” the cabbie asked.

  Where indeed? Bern cooed to the bird.

  The approach to Brooklyn Bridge always confused him: a maze of chain-link fences blocking pedestrian paths from winding streets and the sprawling, trash-strewn parking lots of nearby government compounds. He made his way past weedy patches of grass (garbage bags, abandoned tires) and stone façades. A dumping ground at the base of a national monument. Well, welcome to New York, Bern thought. A smell of wood and earth.

  He found a staircase with iron banisters and climbed past half-moon windows in the bridge’s brick face. A toilet bowl lay overturned in the grass beneath him. Long ago, the bridge’s underside used to house printing shops, grocers’ supply stores, and ship chandleries. A buzzing hive. When he crested the stairs, the sky snatched his breath, vaulting behind tense, harplike cables. He set the cage on the ground. In the distance, in blue-gray haze, the raised arm of Miss Liberty. A warning, a wave. The outline of Ellis Island: a piled-up old overcoat. On the other side of the bridge, behind the former New York Post building, patterned enclaves of public housing, old TB infernos that Robert Moses had hoped to eradicate (“When you operate in an overbuilt environment, you have to hack your way with a meat ax,” he said). Knickerbocker Village, where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg kept family secrets and lived in mortal terror. Bern lifted the cage again. The bird was silent and still. He wove among mothers with children, among laughing and crying young lovers. Prisons. Bern had forgotten how much of Lower Manhattan was marked for detention. Public plazas, federal buildings, the dead zone around City Hall. It was always a relief to walk up Centre Street, past the official buildings and into the clamor of Chinatown and Little Italy (on such a walk, the Twin Towers’ absence, he realized, would be a constant, quiet pressure over your left shoulder) and then over to the Bowery, teeming with kitchen supplies. It was like stepping out of the Empire of the Dead, back into colorful life.

  The water was green, cleaner than it used to be (the city did some things right). Bern had a sudden craving for oysters. The erotic smell of bracken. Tankers; to the north, beyond the Williamsburg Bridge, the tiny pyramid of a stark white sail. Buildings should never be taller than ships, he thought. The brick and wood of the bridge’s Manhattan side gave way to the stone of the Brooklyn end.

  Above the shoreline, he paused for a brief look around before turning and walking back. Next to a grocery store and a butcher’s shop, he saw a small sign on a house: “Madame Olympia, Reader and Advisor.” The future! A bored-looking woman sat on the stoop, sizing up passersby.

  Your time is short, Bern thought.

  He spun around, fell in love again and forever with Manhattan. Damn the place. It trembled with searing, reflected light. Strips of emblazoned filth echoed with the music of concrete-mixing trucks, rhythmical pile drivers. The city raising, destroying itself. Intimate avenues, great open trenches. Sunlight painted the bridge’s girders, purging them of their materiality, making them shimmer. The raw smell of the tidewater—fusty, bloody—made Bern dizzy.
A sexual swoon. He didn’t understand himself and he wouldn’t pause, now, to try.

  There were ghosts on this bridge. He had stood here on September 11, on his way to Brooklyn for a site visit. A breathtaking sky—and then billowing white smoke, variegated and rolling. The sweet, fleshy odor … like fried something-or-other in a Chinatown food cart. People on the bridge whipped out handkerchiefs and tissues, covered their noses and mouths. In the distance, fluttering paper: migrating geese, suddenly blind. In an astonishingly short time, hucksters began prowling the bridge, offering organic pills to assist healthy lungs in dissolving tainted air particles. An instant conviction—though no one knew, yet, what had happened—that many were missing. Bern didn’t know whether to be grateful or sad he had no one to make love to at home, for he understood sex would be different tonight: sweeter for some, dogged for others. But not the same for anyone.

  On the edge of the bridge, now, he was nearly overcome by the smell of onions and roses wafting from a wire-mesh trash can, whose sagging plastic lining called to mind the word uterine. Theatrical gestures on the streets: playful shoving and pushing, heads thrown back, arms raised. A reflection of pickle-green light on the side of a passing bus. At a makeshift fish market, old women plunged their arms into crushed ice. Fish scales flashed in the sun, like hundreds of tiny mirrors appliquéd to handbags. From the ice’s vapors the women pulled gritty shells, bloody tentacles.

  He made his way up Allen Street. Newsstand headlines: “U.S. Senate Tries to Force Vote on Pulling Troops Out of Iraq—Fails to Win Republican Support,” “Mayor’s Traffic Plan Crashes.” Next to Bluestockings Bookstore (a poetry reading was in progress, hosted by “the hardest-working guinea butch dyke poet on the Lower East Side,” the emcee said), Bern set the cage on the sidewalk and rested. His arm was sore from the weight. He needed to sit. He had to figure out what to do. What in Christ’s name had possessed him to purchase this bird?

  He headed for Katz’s Deli and took his ticket by the door. The place was so busy, no one noticed—or if they did, no one cared about—the cage. It tugged him toward the floor. He was sweating and his heart beat rapidly. On his table someone had left a Xeroxed flier, an incoherent rant against the “Sons of Ishmael and their Hatred for America.” A sign above the meat counter said, “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army.”

  Around the room, he recognized familiar features, the Jewish faces he had known, growing up—Ashkenazi, Sephardic—light and dark, long and wide. Smiling, frowning. When he had first come to New York, he would wander from the Gramercy Park Hotel in the evenings and visit this deli. He felt its hominess, the kvetching, the noisy chewing, the aggressive nose-blowing, sneezing, and coughing. Behold our humanity, in all its goofiness, grime, and glory. Now, looking around, sipping his tea, Bern knew intimately the bully, the good son, the placating middle child, the rabbi. The damaged girl who would damage others in return. The boy who would succeed in spite of himself. He saw intransigence, forbearance, anger, and love—everything but the wisdom that could only be had through the long patience of being dead. And, of course, he figured, glancing at the roadrunner, admitting, at last, how lonely he had been in his quiet rooms (architecture no solace!), how much loneliness he had to look forward to: wisdom was what he was after.

  Another cab to Central Park. By now, it was early evening. He got out at Strawberry Fields. A half-moon appeared to burn a hole among the bare limbs of a tree. Twittering and scrabbling in the bushes. A lone teenager sat on a bench, singing “Instant Karma.” He was dressed in white, a baggy shirt—the eternal harlequin, straight out of a history book. Bern headed into the park with the bird in its cage.

  In a clearing surrounded by holly bushes, he set the cage on the ground. A pain in his chest: close to the surface of his skin. Perhaps it was only muscular. Monitor yourself. Let me know.

  What does a roadrunner eat? This bird was domesticated, weak. Its chances of surviving out here …

  An owl hooted in a linden tree. At the clearing’s far edge, above a sculpted outcrop of rock, moths bounced off a softly glowing lamp. They looked like snow. The air smelled of rotting wood. Bern knelt and opened the cage door. The ache grew stronger in his chest. Then it subsided. The roadrunner poked its head out, took two looks around. It darted into the bushes. Bern’s heart leaped. He didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad. What had he done? He stood and set the empty cage on a rock. The bird’s slurring echoed in the darkness—the music of Bern’s boyhood rising in the center of the city, hanging there in the trees.

  7.

  “Chris is on the roof,” Landau said.

  Bern was seated at his desk, staring at his sketches of the basement and wondering what to buy for supper (now that his favorite haunt had closed—to make way for a block-long condo—and he worried again about scrabblings in his chest): milk, veggies, fruit, and water? He focused his eyes on the deep shade and blinding sunshine in the doorway. “What did you say?”

  “Somehow, he discovered the freight elevator. Go talk to him, Wally.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “I had to let him go. You knew that, right? These youngsters … they’re … we need room to … please, Wally.”

  Bern stared at his pencils. “Why me?” he asked.

  “Because … I don’t know, you started work here around the same time. You’re the same generation. You share similar sensibilities. I don’t know, Wally. Just get your ass up there! Please!”

  The elevator was maddeningly slow. It smelled of old, cold coffee.

  Henderson stood with his hands in his pockets, rocking on the balls of his feet. He was near the north edge, facing, in the distance, the Flatiron and the Empire State. He watched a plane glide low over the Hudson. Hair whipped around his eyes. Bern approached him from behind. “Chris?” he said.

  “Oh. Wally. Hello.”

  “How’s it going, Chris?”

  “Pretty day.”

  “You’re not, uh …”

  Henderson laughed. The sound caught like a slip of paper in the wind. It died instantly. “Thinking of doing something foolish? No.”

  Bern didn’t know if he should trust him. He stepped close. His shoes felt thin.

  “Did you know, Wally, that most of the manhole covers in Manhattan are made in Haora, India?”

  “No.”

  “West Bengal. They’re forged in unsafe foundries, I’m afraid. Molten steel. Workers barefoot, nearly naked …”

  “I didn’t know that,” Bern said. If something happened, would he be responsible? After all, he’d shown Henderson this migratory path.

  “I have a friend over at Con Ed who does some of the buying—roughly three thousand covers a year—and he’s told me this. He’s been over there. Every six months. When he asks the operators about the terrible conditions, they tell him, ‘Accidents do not happen here.’”

  Bern craned his head, but the streets were too far below for him to see anything.

  “Just as, I suppose, layoffs don’t happen here. We live in the City of Oz, right? Happily ever after. For everyone.”

  “I heard. I’m sorry, Chris. Really. I suspect I won’t be far behind.”

  A chilly gust.

  “Well. We look on the bright side, right?” said Henderson.

  “Right,” Bern said.

  “My cancer’s in remission. So far.”

  “That’s right,” Bern said, patting Henderson’s shoulder.

  “And I took my wife out last night. Our first real date in years.”

  “Good for you, Chris.”

  “Took some convincing. But we had a nice time, in the end. McCoy Tyner at the Blue Note. He’s about a billion years old, but man oh man, can he play! Did a splendid version of A Love Supreme. I think I was nine years old when I first heard that album.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “Before the show, there was this fellow in front of the club. A junkie, I suppose. I don’t know what a junkie looks like, but this was my idea of one, gaunt and sinewy, hollow-eye
d. He was hawking CDs. His own. ‘You probably heard of me,’ he said. ‘My stage name is—’ and he muttered some African word. My wife was appalled by him, but me … I sort of admired his fortitude. Night after night, out on the streets. It all depends on how you look at it, eh?”

  “That’s right,” Bern said, shivering. From here he could see the green-gold fringe of Central Park. The Cloisters, up north.

  He wondered where his roadrunner was.

  “It’s freezing, Chris. Let’s go in,” he suggested.

  “I like it. Go ahead, Wally. I’ll be there shortly. It’s kind of peaceful up here.”

  “No. No, I’ll wait for you.”

  “Don’t you find it peaceful?”

  “I’m cold.”

  “I’m not going to jump. I promise.”

  “I know, I know. I’m just …”

  “What?”

  “Come inside, Chris. Please.”

  “You think?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  When the elevator door slid open, Landau greeted them with raw relief. “Hey hey, Chris!” he cried. He slipped his arm around the man. “Everything good?”

  “Fabulous.”

  “Fine! Well, that’s just fine! Let’s … well … listen! How about we step around the corner for a drink? On me, eh? Wally, join us?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  Bern heard the pleading in his voice. “I’m sure,” he said.

  Landau scowled. “Chris, ever had a dirty chili martini?” he asked rapidly. People had gathered in the hallway. New young faces. Bern didn’t know any of them. When had they been hired? They stared at Henderson, each other, the floor. “Hot peppers. First sip makes you wish you were never born. By about the third, you’re never so glad you’re alive.”

  Henderson gave Bern a wry little grin.

  “I’ll give you a call sometime,” Bern said. He wondered if he would. There was no malice in this thought, just an intimation of awkwardness. A fear that, from here on out, the two men would have nothing to say to each other. He watched Landau lead Henderson away. People turned to look at Bern. Murphy appeared at his side. “Is he okay?’ Murphy asked.