Man in the Empty Suit

by Sean Ferrell

  We headed upstairs, thinking to double back to the main stairway, but at the landing outside the fourth floor I heard voices, and we continued up. The light grew as we climbed. Lily leaned to look up. “If we reach the top, it ends there.”

  Before I could ask what she meant, I heard footsteps below us. I leaned over the railing and peered down through the squared spiral of stairs. My shadow fell large before me, down the floors. In the center of it, looking back up at me, I saw myself. It was the Nose.

  To Lily I whispered, “Get up and climb.” We made our way up the stairs, stumbling on glass and plaster, our footfalls mixing with those of the Nose behind us. He didn’t call out. He didn’t say anything. He worked to gain on us, his breathing fast and hard, and I heard the call of the gun he carried as it hit the handrail. My exhausted, hungover body burned with the effort. Lily and I tripped each other in our rush. My hand on her arm, I tried to balance her. Finally we reached the top, the penthouse landing. To our right yawned the mouth of the elevator, to our left the door of the apartment that I’d only ever been in once, twelve hours earlier. In the dark it had seemed deserted, but now I saw the unmistakable signs that someone had been living here. The floors were worn but clean, the drop cloths over the furniture a temporary protection. New drywall sheets lay on the floor, and a bucket of dried plaster with trowel sat near the door. Repairs were under way.

  In the kitchen the service exit was painted shut. I quickly searched the rooms, looked out the windows. Outside, the fire escape still clung to the upper floors of the hotel. I ran back to the apartment’s entrance and found Lily looking down the stairs.

  “He’s stopped,” she said. “I think he’s waiting for more of them.”

  I tugged at Lily to follow. “Come on. We’ll go back down the fire escape.”

  “It collapsed.”

  “Not all of it. We can get down a floor or two.”

  She looked from me to the stairs and back. “If he’s stopped, maybe he’s not that dangerous. Maybe we can talk to him.”

  “He’s got a gun.”

  “So do you.”

  I tapped my leg with the revolver. “That’s different. I need it.”

  “For what?”

  “To keep him away from us.”

  She reached out to brush my cheek. “You know, the only one who’s fired a gun around here is you. They haven’t—”

  “Listen to me. They’re dangerous. They don’t know what’s at stake.”

  “They saw the body.”

  She was right. They had seen the Body. Their quest for answers had been transformed, the moment they found the Body, into something else. I tried to imagine what I would be thinking if as a child I’d been shown the cadaver I would become.

  “Whether they’ve seen it or not is beside the point,” I said. “Things have spiraled out of control. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Footfalls echoed in the stairway. I grabbed her hand and pulled her through the main room. Dawn chose that moment to arrive, and direct sunlight coming through the wide windows blinded us. I moved on instinct, swinging the window into the room. I was leaning out to survey the fire escape when a loud snapping sound erupted from the kitchen. It could only be the painted door breaking open. My eyes still blurry from the bright sunlight, I saw my arm rise on its own, the gun suddenly weightless in my hand. I aimed at the dark gap of the kitchen doorway. For a terrible moment, nothing happened. When at last a figure stepped into view, I thumbed back the hammer. My eyes cleared enough to see the same gun in the other man’s hand.

  “I’ll kill her,” he said.

  I squeezed the trigger.

  The gun sounded a double shot, though my hand jerked only once. I watched him collapse, watched him fold over at the waist like an empty suit. His head hit the floor hard, and he moaned as his body crashed down around him like a collection of parts. I wasn’t breathing. I realized that I was looking at the black suit I now wore, that the jacket I’d given to Screwdriver was on the floor, wrapped around the man I’d shot. I stepped toward him, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life, and grabbed a shoulder. I was sure it would be Screwdriver, but when I turned him over, the face was wrong—more haggard. A gash oozed blood at his temple at the same place the Inventor had struck me. Blood dripped from the whiskers of his chin, the bullet wound in his neck lost beneath the unruly beard, blood flowing down his front, dyeing his shirt. I gulped for air. I clutched at his collar and shook him, tried to make the empty, blank eyes focus on me, but they didn’t move. I felt his chest, and my bloodied hand came away without a heartbeat. It was the Drunk. In his hand was the pistol I also held, smoke twisting from the barrels of both. He had faced me, had aimed at me, yet his bullet had missed.

  I turned to look at Lily and found her lying on the floor, a red-black puddle growing beneath her.

  I think I screamed. I must have. I want to have done so.

  I crawled to her, spreading blood across the floor in streaks. Her eyes were wet with tears.

  “Take me home. I want to go home.” Her voice was thin and airless. I reached around her, found the exit wound at her back. I tried to hold it closed with my palm, my tears dripping onto her red dress. Behind me came footsteps. I turned around as Seventy and Yellow stepped into the suite from the hallway. Behind them was Screwdriver, my jacket in hand, face flushed and sweaty, masked in anguish. He knelt beside me. Lily looked up at me and sighed.

  “Take me home,” she repeated.

  Screwdriver started to lift her from me, and Yellow had to pull my hands away. He helped me to my feet but would not let me follow. Screwdriver paused as Lily said something to him. He nodded and turned around. I heard a tapping and realized that my hands were shaking, the gun knocking out a message against the floor. I tried to let go of it, but my fingers refused.

  “She wants her things.”

  Seventy waved him away. “We’ll bring it. You take her home.”

  Screwdriver handed me the jacket, as if in payment for Lily, collected her against his chest, and left. Before me were the bloodied floorboards where she had lain.

  Yellow turned his attention to the Drunk. “He’s dead.”

  Seventy gave a withering look. “We knew he would be. Take him upstairs. We’ll send him to yesterday in my raft.”

  Yellow nodded, hauled the Drunk into a sitting position, and then rolled the Drunk’s body over his shoulder. With great effort he rose into a crouch, bearing the body to the stairs, the Drunk’s feet dragging behind him. Seventy and I were alone in the penthouse living room, blood smeared across the floor. We listened as the sounds of Yellow’s struggle moved up. The roof door opened, and I was surprised that an alarm sounded, so like the one I’d heard when the elevator descended. It stopped after a moment. At my feet was the Drunk’s gun and in my hand my own. I knelt and picked up his, identical to mine but coated in dirt and missing one more bullet. I looked at my own gun and realized that the bullet in line to fire next would be the bullet to kill Lily. I was cold and shaking.

  Seventy, his lined face tired, said, “Okay. Now that that’s over with, let’s get out of here.”

  Seventy and I walked through the hotel halls. I lost track of where we were, and Seventy never said. I carried both revolvers, one in each hand, both warm as if ready for more shooting, as if there were anyone else here as dangerous as I was. We passed plaster holes and bared latticework, door after door, all identical. Somehow the Youngsters’ search had not come this way.

  At last Seventy stopped in front of a door and handed me a key. “Open that up, will you?”

  I shifted both guns to one hand and opened the door. It was the finished room, where I had watched the video on the miniature TV, where Lily had first kissed me. I tried to hand him the key, but he refused it.

  “Keep it,” he said. He looked tired enough to fall. “Empty your pockets.” He sat on the bed, in the exact spot where I had earlier.

  “Why?” I fought the urge to vomit on the floor and instead
squeezed my eyes closed. Lily’s image lurked behind my eyelids, crumpled, bleeding.

  “Empty your goddamned pockets. She’s dying.”

  I put the guns on the bed first, followed by the twin timepieces, six months different, then used tissues and spare buttons. The tape was last, and the only thing he took.

  “Keep the guns,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You better.”

  I said, “I won’t. I can’t. Not after what—”

  Seventy raised his silver-knobbed cane and pointed it at me, like a wand, as if his will might fly from it and turn me into a frog or a table lamp. “You take those guns with you when you leave here or I’ll beat you so you can’t chew snot.”

  I took the guns from the bed and stuck one into my remaining jacket pocket, the other into my waistband at my back. I didn’t want to bear their weight.

  Seventy stepped into the closet, out of my view. I stood next to the bed looking at the items I’d carried with me. Change from different eras. Buttons that had come with the suit. I’d traveled years beyond my lifetime, beyond the lifetimes of anyone I’d known as a child. I’d gone back to watch seeds planted and then moved forward to see centuries-old wood taken from the same spot. I’d met children who had no idea I’d later walk over their graves and the graves of their children’s children; I’d met them and watched them play games they thought would never end. And all I carried around were the buttons that came with the jacket I’d ruined. Nausea boiled inside me.

  Seventy pulled the camera out of the closet and off the tripod and held it out to me. “Here, this is hers. She asked for it. Take it to her.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “The building across the alley, just next door. She lives there.”

  I took the camera and held it at my side. “Why did she come here? Who invited her?”

  Seventy stood beside the bed. “We did. I did. You. You will. She came because that’s what happened.”

  Suddenly I was seeing the room through a dark circle at arm’s length, a hole the size of a plate. My breathing was too loud in my ears, and the walls moved around me. I needed to leave. I reached out with my free hand and felt for the door. Before I left, Seventy said, “You should hurry. She doesn’t have long.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “How about you stop her from coming here? How about you keep her the fuck away from this hotel?”

  I left him in the room, standing next to the bed, heavy on his cane, with my buttons and ancient coins lying around him like treasure. Perhaps he’d remember where they came from. At that moment I had no idea.

  EARLY-MORNING SUNLIGHT poured between the buildings in large shafts. People were out, in groups of twos and threes, moving among mounds of garbage and debris that had piled up during the night’s storm. Some were beginning to clear rubble from the street and collect it in large barrels. Behind me rumbled a flatbed truck. I was surprised to see a vehicle running.

  The entrance to the neighboring building was open, without even a door. I scanned for signs of where Screwdriver might have taken Lily and found a set of stairs and an out-of-service elevator. Climbing the stairs, I was overcome by the repetition of it. Not the fact that every floor was just like the previous and the next but the feeling that I knew the building and this stairway. I looked on through the small circle of my vision, certain that when I finally reached the top, I’d find Lily and then pass out. Consciousness was only borrowed for the climb. I watched steps go by beneath me, the dirty white linoleum spotted with black circles of still-wet blood. The struggle to focus was exhausting. I stumbled and caught myself on the sill of an open window. Below me scrambled tiny figures on rain-washed streets. I remembered to climb. A shadow moved in the square of light ahead of me—a man burdened with something heavy. A woman’s arm, hanging over his own, swung to the rhythm of his walk. It was Screwdriver, and he turned to look down the stairway at me.

  “Help me, would you?”

  As fast as I could, which felt not fast at all, I climbed the last six stairs to the landing at the top floor. I helped him carry Lily’s inert body into a large apartment. Screwdriver led us down a hallway and into a bedroom where a bare mattress on a pallet lay at the center. We placed her on the bed, and I sat on the floor.

  Lily’s voice was a secret. “Bring me that needle.”

  The tunnel I watched the world through swung around the room. Nothing connected to anything; I caught only glimpses of early daylight bursting through windows, crumpled bed-sheets, water-damaged walls, a collection of old liquor bottles. At last something moved past me, through my line of sight, and my eyes followed. Screwdriver rummaged through a pile atop a paper-covered table, returning with a small, shining statue, like a squid with its tentacles spiraled around its body. As he walked back to Lily, I could see that the object was twisting as he carried it, opening at the base, the arms opening to reveal a long silver needle.

  My voice, thick in my throat: “What are you doing?”

  Screwdriver didn’t answer. He knelt over Lily, hands shaking as he gave her the device. Lily took the object, raised it to her head. I couldn’t see what she did with the needle—Screwdriver blocked her from my view—but she moaned as a whirring sound came from the device. Her feet traced slow arcs across the bed. I felt sick. At last the sound stopped and her body relaxed. She held up the device and said something to Screwdriver as he took it from her.

  His voice quivered. “I’m so sorry.” He looked over his shoulder at me, eyes red and tearful. Their whispers crawled along the edges of the room and under the sparse furniture, just out of reach. As I strained to hear, my vision blossomed, and I took a deep, shuddering breath. The room came into focus.

  Screwdriver, crying, leaned down to kiss Lily on the forehead. Then he stood and walked to me, the small, shining device bright silver in his outstretched hand. “She wants you to have this.”

  I looked at it, unsure I even wanted to touch it. “What is it?”

  “Take it. She’ll explain it to you.” His voice crackled.

  I took it, started at the chill it held. “Can you help me find a doctor?”

  He shook his head. He was barely holding himself together. “I’m leaving now. She wants you to take care of her.”

  I shook my head, just as he had. Identical. “Stay. Please.”

  His breaths came short and fast. “I can’t stay. I can’t see her die again.”

  Again.

  Behind him Lily talked to herself in bubbling whispers.

  “Why me? What can I do?” I was desperate for his help.

  “She trusts you.”

  “She barely knows me.” I knew that this was wrong the moment I said it. The words pinched in my chest and made me twitch.

  Screwdriver almost reached for the device in my hand. He didn’t want to leave it. That made me want to keep it more. He said, “You can do this. Know that.”

  Lily muttered from her bed, hands stretched toward the ceiling as if to catch something. I knelt beside her. She lowered her hands and held her side, blood leaking between her fingers and soaking into her mattress.

  I looked over my shoulder at Screwdriver. He was in shock, no different from me, eyes narrowed and face pale. He shook his head and turned away. “Fix this.” He sounded as if saying those words severed a part of him. He didn’t look back as he left. Watching him leave made me feel as if I were leaving, as if I were abandoning Lily. I thought I could hear him gasping for breath on his way out. Her hand reached over and found mine, fingers sticky with blood. The room smelled of copper. She looked up at me and said something. I leaned in, straining past roaring blood in my ears to hear her voice.

  “Not him,” she said. “You.”

  “Why me? I mean, why not him, too? We both can help you.”

  She spoke again, her voice so weak it was only air, and I had to force myself to hear her, will myself to understand. I heard her more through the skin than through my ears, her breath
brushing the hairs on my cheek—soft, wordless promises of trust and love that were unearned. Her eyes were on me but looked through me, too wide, too seeing, her lips slightly parted. I leaned in and kissed her eyes and then her mouth, a deep kiss for me, only me, because she was gone. Lily had died the moment her breath brushed my cheek, I knew it. I sat with her and listened to the sounds of voices through open windows—parrots or people, I couldn’t say—close but indecipherable, no longer hidden under the labor of her breath.

  Guilt weighed me down. I waited for my shaking to stop. When it did, I found myself holding something in each hand: in one, the small silver device, the squid, whose oblong glass head was now full of pale pink liquid; in the other, the video camera. The power light on. I felt the gentle hum of it, and realized that Seventy had turned it on and set it to record before handing it over. I looked into the lens for a moment, realized that it would be recording me then, catch me looking into it, and I turned it away. As I did, I felt a tug at my cheek, the cheek that had felt Lily’s dying breath, and I felt for an instant that the camera had taken something from me. I dropped the camera onto the table and reached up to touch my cheek. It was cold. I climbed into Lily’s low bed, lay beside her, and fell asleep.

  I woke at midday to the sound of laughter. The sun stood overhead, and the apartment was hot and filled with indirect light. I went to a window to find it already open. Below, in the alley between her building and the hotel, a crowd had formed around the fire-escape scaffold ruin. Groups of men worked on the twisted metal in concert, brandishing small handsaws, laughter rising at jokes I couldn’t hear. They seasoned themselves with bits of rust. In minutes they had the steps and ladders in parts and the parts loaded into wagons and old shopping carts. Most of the men pulled their wagons themselves; one had a large dog attached to a harness, its tongue hanging low despite the shade. In the short time they’d worked, the scaffold had been deconstructed, nothing left behind but bits too thin and brittle to be of value, and a paprika-colored dusting on the ground.