Man in the Empty Suit

by Sean Ferrell

  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.

  There was a noise below, and for a moment I thought the Inventor might have returned. Instead a rat bounded up the steps and, with no fear, scurried between us through the open door. We watched its bald tail disappear. That rat had a better idea of where it was going than I did. I wished for a plan, but all I could think of was Seventy.

  I said, “I saw you with an Elder. Red tie, black cane.” She didn’t answer. “I want you to go tell him to meet me in the room where we met our friend. Say it just like that.”

  She gripped the railing. “What if the children find me?”

  “They’ll be terrified, hiding and afraid to see you. If they’re anything like I was.” As I said it, I realized I wasn’t sure it was true. “Just tell him. Please.”

  She nodded and held out her hand. I took it, and she gave me a gentle squeeze. “Good luck.”

  THE BODY’S ROOM was locked. I wanted to break in the door, but we were only two floors removed from the party—an unexplained crash would bring me running.

  If the Elders all assumed I had this under control, their confidence was misplaced. They relied on logic that I knew would eventually fail. For them the fact that they were even here mitigated the threat of the death. But I understood that the adjustment of a single element had more drastic changes. My nose had broken and not broken, and I’d both casually recognized this and drawn attention to it. The latter adjustment had brought about the hunt for answers that the Inventor was now involved in, the stampede of children, the modification of my—o
ur—childhoods. Elements could change, be twisted, and have impacts beyond my imagining. This meant that the death could still happen. I was confident it would. And Seventy’s confidence, his assurance, even his presence mystified me.

  I found a doorway down the hall from the Body’s room and crouched in the shadows. Two floors up, electricity blazed, but this floor wallowed in darkness. I watched the door and counted minutes, listened to water trickle in the walls. Lily would have reached Seventy by now and would have made herself clear. He was old. He walked with a cane. He’d navigate slowly up the steps. I waited ten minutes. I would wait ten more, I thought, then leave. Five minutes into the second ten, the stairwell door opened, revealing the silhouettes of Seventy and Screwdriver. I, for reasons I chose to ignore, reached into my pocket and held the gun.

  Screwdriver reached the Body’s door first. He keyed the lock and opened it, turned on the light and held the door open for Seventy. I stepped out of the dark and approached them. Screwdriver saw me first and gave a simple nod. I nodded back. He was a few years older than me, but I saw in his face a grim determination I knew I’d always lacked. I wondered if it was being forged now.

  Seventy was not as warm to me. “What the fuck have you been doing?”

  “Trying to find out why I die. How was dinner?”

  Screwdriver laughed. Seventy shot him a glare but then started to laugh himself. “You know the meatballs are all dried out.” His smile fell, and he looked older than seventy. Perhaps he should have been labeled Eighty? I’d stick with Seventy until I knew for sure.

  “Everything has gone to shit down there,” he said. “The Youngsters are out of control. They’re actually threatening people. They’ve laid off now, but for a while it looked like us against them. And they keep multiplying. There were never this many here before.”

  “And they’re young.” Screwdriver crossed his arms, and I noticed dirt smeared across his shirtsleeves. I wondered where he’d been. “There were never kids here.”

  “They know that something is up,” I said. “They want in.”

  Seventy shook his head. “Christ, no. Don’t tell them anything. And what the fuck happened to your head?”

  “I was hit.”

  Screwdriver grunted. Seventy worried the knob of his cane. “Who hit you?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

  “The Inventor.”

  Seventy nodded. “We were a bit arrogant back then. He must have figured out that you were up to something.”

  “Not him. I think he’s answering to someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “The Nose, maybe. Look. I know you brought in Lily. She shouldn’t have been here in the first place, but now that things are falling apart, we need to get her out of here.”

  Seventy stared at the floor. “I didn’t bring her.”

  I didn’t expect an answer, but I asked anyway. “Who did?”

  I looked from Seventy to Screwdriver. Screwdriver pointed down at the Body. I’d forgotten he was there. I drew back the sheet. He had nothing to add. I was beginning to feel anger at him for getting killed. Anger at me. “All right, so what?” I said. “One of you must remember where it was she came from.”

  Seventy wiped at his face with an open palm. “That’s just the thing. We don’t. Now that we’re not tethered, that girl could be from anywhere. She refuses to even say.” He shrugged. “I tried to convince her to leave.” Was I really going to be so passive at his age?

  I re-covered the Body, the sheet tented over his face. What had he been thinking, bringing that woman here? If in fact it had been him. I didn’t believe I could fully trust either of these two. At least they hadn’t brought the one I really didn’t trust. “Where’s Yellow?”

  Seventy chuckled. “He was busy. We’re trying to keep some semblance of normalcy down there. In fact, you should come down. The movies are about to start.”

  “Christ, no.”

  “It’s tradition,” Seventy said pointedly. “You come make an appearance, and then you get back to work.”

  I reached into my pockets. One hand slid through the hole where the pocket had been ripped out; the other fell against the gun. I remembered that the pocket lining was stuck to my forehead and yanked the fabric from my temple. The pocket, black and sticky, smelled of sweat and blood. I noticed the filth on my hands. Dirt filled the nails and creases. It made them look old.

  I said, “I’ve got Youngsters threatening me. Right now half of them probably think they killed me. How come I have to figure out all this shit by myself? How about some of you guys pull some of the weight?”

  Seventy circled the perimeter of the room and stopped near the door, eyes vacant, mind probably replaying events. I felt sorry for speaking and didn’t want to hear a reply. I knew whatever he had to say would fall at my feet like a dead thing, stinking.

  Finally he said, “I’ve waited, year after year, to figure out how it happened. Worked to put together pieces. But the death kept creeping up. And fingers have begun to point at you. I used to think you were the killer. I don’t think so anymore, though, because you’re not as done in as some of the others. If you were blacking out, or out of control, maybe, but you’re not. So unless it’s premeditated, it’s not you.” He smacked his cane against the floor. “We don’t know who the killer is. That’s the main reason we keep coming back here. You know. This thing stopped being fun almost from the first year. From this point on, it’s nothing but work. We’ve all been trying to piece things together to figure out what happened. So if we can’t provide you with answers, it’s because we worked hard to keep from upsetting the balance of things.” He pointed the cane at me, and I didn’t care for how sharp it looked at the end. “We maintained the balance, until you. Balance is something you didn’t care for, and at this stage the apples are bouncing from the applecart too quick to count. Well done. Now, if you don’t think you can stop bitching about having to save our life”—and he gestured from Screwdriver to the Body to himself, his finger swirling to include the floors beneath us—“then maybe you could just focus on saving your own.”

  Seventy turned and left. Screwdriver watched me for a moment. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then thought better of it. He held up the door key and smiled. He placed it in the keyhole and walked away. The key, the room, the Body were mine now, my responsibility.

  I felt awkward staying there with him. I walked to the hall, shut the door, and locked it.

  From the stairway I heard echoed laughter. The movies had begun.

  ON MY WAY to the ballroom, following the sounds of films I knew too well to want to see again, I passed the men’s room. I ducked in to wash my face, clean my head wound, try to find something in the mirror that reminded me of me. What I found was a flooded floor, blood on a sink, and signs of epic failure on the part of myselves to remember to flush. I stood before a sink with a perpetually running faucet and splashed water over my face and hair for the second time that night. I watched a face I ought to have recognized emerge in the mirror.

  The movies started after midnight. Time-travel pictures, both small-budget films and blockbusters, all of them laughable for one reason or another. I watched them in the crowded ballroom, which would quiet down when they started, projected on the wall, the cracks of the plaster adding depth to films that otherwise lacked any. The time travel depicted was spectacular or dangerous. Nothing like time travel actually was in my experience, as banal as moving from one room to the next, watching ice melt, as banal as becoming hungry again, catching a cold, noticing a recession of hairline, a growth of nails, hair, paunch. Time travel was a simple slide sideways instead of forward. It was, I’d discovered when the raft had first hummed to life, no different, in any notable way, from doing nothing. We forget, I think, that we are born to travel through time, to trip into the next moment over the bump of the present, to keep looking over our shoulder to find that bump, understand it, and in doing so trip over the next. And on. And on.

  No matter how o
ften I saw some of the films—and no doubt the alcohol helped lubricate the humor—the serious foibles of the travelers, the difficulties they endured in their adventures, never ceased to be absurd. Depictions of traveling through time as if it could be an experience in itself. As if a brain designed to perceive only slow forward progression could magically decipher backward travel, as if color and swirling images, glimpses of moments happened or about to happen danced in a kaleidoscope. As if there were anything but darkness and the roar of blood in your ears, as if there were anything different from the normal panic of living. And so I laughed year after year at the movie heroes, their dangers and discoveries. Threats always came from outside, and in monstrous form. Obstacles appeared as questions of timing, not choice. Logical inconsistencies abounded. How could they not? I laughed most at these, as I do now at my own. Only now do I realize that logical inconsistencies are what allow for us to travel in time in the first place, keep us tripping forward or—like me—sometimes backward or sideways. I was blind to my own illogic and still am, though now by choice. Sometimes to discover a solution is to forget the problem.

  Now I entered the ballroom and found an unfamiliar scene.

  The room was divided into two groups. The Elders sat as near to the projected image as they could, the bottom of the film on the wall fuzzy with their hair as they reached across one another for popcorn. Behind them circled the Youngsters, rattling like disturbed sparrows. Their number had grown, and behind me came the slap of sneakers on hardwood as more arrived. From the ages of six to perhaps twenty-six, there must have been a hundred. More. Multiples of every age stood in clumps, fought one another over cookies and candy, crunched popcorn underfoot, nudged one another as older Youngsters squealed past. Only the really small ones, the six- and seven-year-olds, seemed worried or frightened. I tried to see if I could spot the youngest one, the one who’d witnessed my “death” in such a shattering way, but couldn’t locate him in their crowds. More children ran past me and found themselves. The noise was unnerving.