Man in the Empty Suit

by Sean Ferrell

  Yellow returned to the doorway, stood shoulder to shoulder with me. “Do you? Have a reason?”

  “If, and I’m not saying I did, but if I’d found a gun, wouldn’t it be wise to keep it to myself to be certain of where it came from? Wouldn’t it create more panic if word of it leaked out?”

  Screwdriver smiled. “Actually, if I were you and I’d found a gun, I’d lie, because I wouldn’t be sure whom I could trust. No knowing who shot the Body.”

  I stared at Screwdriver, waited for some wink or twitch telling me that he and I were somehow still tethered, but no sign came. My trust of him, founded on nothing, grew. Of all of us in the room, he and I thought the most alike. Yellow was the strange gap. Closer to me in age but inexplicable in his misunderstanding and lack of patience.

  I was good at lying to myself. Always had been. “In any event, I haven’t found a gun.” It weighed down my jacket, probably about to rip through my pocket and thud to the floor.

  Seventy waved us away. “Take him upstairs. Get it done.”

  Yellow swallowed his remaining argument and turned to the dark hall. “Come on.” He waited for me at the stairwell, his face painted in shadow. I tried to keep my face blank of any expression as I passed. Before I could go through the door, he grabbed my arm and squeezed. “I don’t know what you did, but if I find that you’ve ruined this.…”

  “You’ll what?”

  His threat hung in the air between us. I saw the realization in his face: He’d just threatened me, the one who was supposed to die. I wondered if he could recall the suspicion of him that had just bloomed in my head.

  “I just don’t—” He let go of my arm. “I’m sorry. Look. It all gets very confusing. The paradoxes are coming constantly now. Little things set them off. It’s very unsettling. I have memories of this working so smoothly, of everything going as we had planned it. But now.… Everything seems so fucked up.”

  I waited for him to say something else. His eyes appeared to lock onto something in the stairwell corner, but when I looked, there was nothing there. I said, “Are you done?”

  He regarded me as if just remembering I was there. “Yes. Yes, I’m ‘done.’ ” His anger was back. “You know, it really is unfortunate it’s you who has to deal with this. It’s too bad it’s not someone older.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because from what I remember, at your age you don’t have the capacity to imagine what this is like for anyone but yourself. You don’t really grasp the full scope of what’s happening. You’re still too much of a selfish prick.”

  I glanced down at my shadow, my hands shaking. “What is it that I didn’t understand in seeing the Body in there?”

  Light fell on Yellow’s face. He was pale, his lips quivering. His hands shook, too. Both our hands shook. “That’s not just you in there. It’s me. It’s all of us. If the timeline follows the path we imagine it will, it’s not just you who will die. I’ll cease to be. So will they. The moment you fail, the moment you catch up with him, that might be it.” He gestured back toward the room we’d left, toward the Body. “Everyone older than you is terrified.”

  My brain was slush. “How can it happen?” I asked. “How can you all even be here if …?”

  “None of us know.”

  He turned and took the stairs two steps at a time, his footsteps calling from farther and farther up. I watched my shadow on the stairwell floor. Cracks in the paint and mortar revealed the wire and the wooden studs behind the wall. I felt like that wall. My surface was shattered, and what was left behind barely held itself together. Yellow and the others saw my path leading to their destruction, but if I was right and I was no longer tethered to any of them, then it was only me who was going to die.

  I followed Yellow up the steps.

  By the time I found him on the fifth floor, I was exhausted and could think of nothing except sitting for a few minutes, but Yellow’s impatience kept me moving. Halfway down the hall, Yellow stopped and put his hand on a doorknob—Room 503. “You’ll want to see this,” he said. “Hurry. I need to get downstairs.”

  He opened the door, and Yellow and I both squinted into the bright light that spilled out. The room was fully made up, as if the hotel were still functioning and not close to collapse. Three lights blazed—one on the ceiling, a table lamp near the bed, and a floor lamp. Above the neatly made bed was a painting of the ocean. Poorly done. The windows were curtained instead of papered over. The wallpaper, old and worn, had been mended in places with what looked like packing tape. It showed yellow flowers, peonies, layered one atop another, ceiling to floor. The room had a warm, sunlit glow.

  On the dresser, next to an unused ashtray, sat a large plastic key ring. I walked to the side table and opened a drawer. A Bible and two pens rattled at the bottom. I touched the wallpaper, toyed with the taped patches. Up close the walls were the worse for wear, the paper faded and stained by please-don’t-think-about-it. The bed’s baseboard was banged up, and the nearby chair was dented along the edges. The room was shabby. It was also carefully staged, manicured as best as it could be, and smelled of ammonia and furniture wax. The rug was stained but vacuumed.

  I tried to swallow. “Are there any other rooms like this?”

  Yellow seemed afraid to cross the threshold. “No.” He stood in the hallway, hands in pockets. He appeared older than I’d originally thought. And more tired. “Look in the closet,” he said.

  “What’s in the closet?”

  “Open it and find out.”

  “You’re being childish.”

  Yellow shook his head. “I disagree. I think you’re being childish.”

  The closet door was massive. I took hold of the cold crystal knob and turned it. The knob came off in my hand. As if it were a bloody knife, I dropped it. From inside the closet came a clattering as the knob on the other side fell to the floor.

  “Are you kidding me?” Yellow joined me as I tried to fit the knob’s shaft back into the hole. “This didn’t happen when Seventy showed me.”

  “Don’t come unhinged,” I said. “It’s only a knob.”

  “Only a knob?” He was sweating and rubbed at his temples. I pulled out my flask and offered it to him. He accepted it, started to take a drink, then stopped himself and handed the flask back to me. As I drank, he knelt down to work the doorknob into place. I drank half of what was left and repocketed it, exploring the rest of the room as he tinkered. The dresser drawers were empty. As I bent to look beneath the bed, the gun in my pocket swung and knocked against my side. I’d forgotten it was there. No I hadn’t. How could I? All it did was let me know it was there. The whiskey warmed in my stomach.

  At last Yellow stood. “There. Now. Open the door.”

  “You open it. You’re right next to it.”

  His face flushed. “Just open the damn door.” He stepped out of the way, back to the hall where he’d hidden in plain sight before, as if the threshold gave him protection from whatever was inside. He shrank by the moment, as if his hair were thinning and graying while I watched. He seemed consumed by his yellow sweater, almost comical, a man in a large, limp banana suit.

  I turned the knob hard and pulled. Inside the closet was a television atop a small cart. Cables spilled from the back, some connecting to a videotape player, others connecting to a small silver camera on a tripod stand. It was a decades-old mini–tape recorder. Sometimes decrepitude doesn’t inhibit function. The entire contraption leaned into the corner, lens aimed up over my head, open-irised. I knelt to take a closer look. The television was thirteen inches, flat-screened. Scratches on the floor showed how often the cart had been wheeled forward. I plugged the cord into a nearby outlet and turned on the set, which popped to blue-lit life, its speakers emitting a low hiss. When nothing else happened, I tapped the up and down channel buttons. Nothing. I stood to examine the back of the set. There was no antenna. I returned the set to its original input, which I assumed was the camera. A cable lay on the closet floor, and I connec
ted it to the TV. A small red light appeared on the camera, and the blue TV screen turned to gray, INPUT 1 visible in the corner.

  I pressed “play.”

  On the screen appeared the bed behind me. The perspective was from just inside the closet, as if it had been shot from exactly where the camera stood now. I sat down on the bedspread’s black-and-red floral print and waited for something to appear on-screen. Just as I was beginning to fear that the video would prove to be a long study of the rose-printed bedspread, a figure crossed in front of the camera. It was me, older, growing a beard, still in the same suit. He was harrowed by exhaustion, more done in than the Body. He sat on the bed and faced the camera, and so I found myself staring into my own face. Looking at another me was like looking into a mirror that didn’t cast a reflection in reverse, as it ought to. It occurred to me that I was more used to seeing myself like that than in an actual mirror, that the collection of me that filled the hotel was a series of broken mirrors moving among themselves, hoping to find the one that worked properly, that produced a vision of what was true. I rubbed elbows with my own vanity.

  Video me pulled a brown paper bag toward him and rummaged through it, removed a bottle of whiskey. The bag dropped to the floor, and he kicked it under the bed. Corpse-still, bottle on his lap, he stared at me from inside the set.

  I glanced down at my own foot. The edge of a brown paper bag was just visible by my heel. I reached beneath the bed and pulled the worn bag toward me. A half-full liter bottle of whiskey fell into my hand. Gifts arrive in many shades of amber, I thought. Beneath the whiskey was a small videotape, still in its wrapper. The right size for the video camera. I held it in my palm and looked back at the screen. Video’s bottle, now open, perched on his knee. He jerked his head toward the door. I took his signal and looked at the door.

  Yellow watched me from the hall. If he could see, or had seen, the video, he made no move to reveal it. His face was screwed up with curiosity. Despite the questions I could see rattling in his head, he said nothing.

  Video was waiting for me. I marveled at dark circles beneath his eyes. He gestured, urgent, waved a hand in the direction of the door as if saying, Go on, go ahead.

  I turned back to Yellow. “Did you watch this?”

  “Are you crazy? This place reeks of paradoxes. I never saw it before, so I shouldn’t have seen it now. Seventy didn’t even remember seeing any of this shit.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “Did I fucking slur my words? No. You probably shouldn’t have seen it either.”

  “We’re not tethered. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You still shouldn’t be watching.” He shifted away from the door. The rug, which looked dry, made a squishing sound beneath his feet.

  “Why bring me here?”

  Yellow’s hands fluttered. “Because Seventy said I should. I don’t know why.” His distress was somehow comforting.

  On the screen Video raised his bottle to me, offered a silent toast. I opened mine in return and took a drink. I choked a little, and so did Video. I wondered if he might not be between me and the Drunk. His perspective was hard to place.

  After Video drank, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the still-wrapped videotape, the one I held. He placed a finger to his lips and then pocketed it. I took another swig from the bottle and put the hard plastic cassette into my pocket. It clicked against the gun. At the door Yellow watched me.

  I held the bottle out toward him. “Drink?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re watching that.”

  “Some good stuff on here.” I hoped my bravado was thicker than it felt. “It’s a bit racy.”

  “You would know.”

  I gulped whiskey through a smile. “Yes I would.” I’d pissed him off.

  On the closet television, Video toasted me once more. I was near the bottom of the bottle when he reached the halfway mark and recapped. He wrapped the bottle in the brown bag, took a pen from his pocket and wrote across the front of the bag, tightened the wrap, then shoved it under the bed, where I had found it moments earlier. I turned the bag over. I hadn’t noticed the writing the first time; the script was so small and the pen so light against the brown paper.

  It read, “In case of emergency, break glass.”

  I finished the bottle, recapped it, and stuck it into my jacket’s inner pocket. Between the loaded gun, the microvideotape, and the empty whiskey bottle, I was gathering a heavy little collection.

  To no one, myself, everyone, I said, “Okay, enough of this. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You’re drunk.” Yellow stood off from the doorway, hidden in the dark.

  I stood and did my best not to fall. “Not fully.” The whiskey had been effective. I was drunk.

  He said, “You’re chewing the inside of your cheek.” It was a technique I’d learned to sober myself.

  I couldn’t see Yellow’s face in the shadows. The room tilted around me a little. “I need a bathroom.”

  He pointed behind me. The bathroom door was ajar, and the white tile looked cool and inviting. I hesitated. At the door Yellow continued to hover. I suddenly feared that he’d known more than he let on, and I wanted to get away from him. I’d been too cavalier in watching the tape. Video had known that Yellow was in my doorway, but I still didn’t like it. It was possible that Video and I were tethered, that he was on the right side of the Body and still connected to me. I both hoped and feared that was the case.

  I said, “Listen, you can go.”

  “No, that’s fine. I can wait.”

  “You want to hear me puke? Is that it? Relive old times?” He didn’t move. “Is there something else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Another room? Some other thing I don’t know about? You said this was it.”

  “Yeah, this was it.”

  “Then fuck off.”

  His face twitched. I couldn’t recall ever talking to an Elder like this. In the past I’d felt anger toward Elders, given myself the pleasure of horrible fantasies about my older selves, then felt some embarrassment later when I approached those ages and saw certain glimmers in Youngsters’ eyes. But this was different. A simple expletive and I felt so much better. Untethered or not, I wouldn’t feel guilty about that.

  Yellow stepped away from the door and called back to me, “You’re on your own now. Good luck, you drunk piece of shit.”

  Self-loathing ran in both directions, I realized. I could hate both who I had been and who I would become. It was efficient.

  When he was gone, I moved quickly to the closet to eject the tape from the machine, then crushed it between my heel and the bathroom floor. The spool unwound, spiraled across the white tiles. There might have been more on the tape, but I relied on Video’s knowing that I prematurely smashed it. I gathered the plastic shards and flushed them down the toilet. Before I could put the second tape into the camera, I heard a squish of footsteps in the hallway. I stowed the tape and returned to the bathroom, made a grand show of it—ran the water, splashed my face, soaked my hair and slicked it back, gargled loudly, spit louder, turned off the water, and flushed the toilet a second time—before I left the bathroom.

  The woman from the ballroom was standing in the doorway. “Always have to slip out, don’t you?” She gave me a conspirator’s smile. Her face made me forget the worried frenzy of the evening, among other things.

  I tried to give my own conspiratorial smile in return but felt a lecherous grin lock onto my face. It wouldn’t let go. “I think I’m starting to hate crowds.” Just then the floor shook with thunder, and I imagined that I could feel the music from the ballroom bumping its way up through the superstructure.

  She crossed the room. Her bright eyes were lined with dark makeup that made them stand out even more than I’m sure they normally would. Her dress was a complicated silk arrangement—red waves emerged and disappeared. A split seam ran up one thigh, and it flashed at me once, twice, I prayed for a third as she
crossed to the foot of the bed and sat down. She turned and looked over her shoulder. The parrots tattooed there spoke to me.

  I wiped my hands on the towel I held. I didn’t remember picking it up, but nothing comes from nothing, so there you go. I sat beside her. There wasn’t much room, but she didn’t move away.

  “I was just washing my face. It gets pretty hot in that ballroom,” I told her.

  She nodded, quiet, as if trying to recall something. Her eyes roamed the ceiling. I got the feeling that she knew all my answers even though I hadn’t heard her questions. We both faced the open closet, the blank television screen. I wished I had shut that door, even though she acted as if she’d seen it all before.

  “What were you watching?” Her voice was silk scraping silk.

  “Nothing, really.” The unused tape in my pocket pressed heavily against my hip. It gave an embarrassing throb. “Just using the washroom.”

  “Washroom.” She laughed. So many of her questions sounded like answers, and they all seemed to amuse her. Her voice dropped to an even silkier volume, so that I almost had to read her lips. “You were watching something about me, weren’t you?”

  I couldn’t believe I’d destroyed the tape before watching to the end. Was it too late to retrieve the pieces from the plumbing and somehow reconstruct it?

  She laughed as I blushed. I kept my mouth shut and let her lean in a bit closer, let her press a bare shoulder into mine. Her breath was sweet—from rum, I thought—and her hair smelled of flowers. I looked at the peonies on the wallpaper, faded and yellow, and tried to remember what peonies smelled like. She smiled at me. Her hand touched my knee, ran upward to my thigh. The gun, only an inch from her hand, seemed to pulse. She studied the lines of my jaw and neck, leaned in and touched my lips with hers. Our breaths mixed.

  Her hands ran up my sides and drew me against her. She withdrew before I knew the kiss was over, and I watched her eyes harden as she leaned away. She examined my face. For just a moment, she ran her fingers over my cheek, up toward my temple and forehead, tender, as if caring for something only she saw. Her long nails sketched lightning trails on my skin that continued to vibrate even after her hand left my face. She pulled back my sleeve, and her fingers danced over the pale skin on my wrist. She smiled at it sadly, stood, and straightened her skirt. Red rose up her neck.