Man in the Empty Suit

by Sean Ferrell

  I watched the street a moment, surprised that I had caught these scrap collectors. A handful of pedestrians passed through the alley. They wore suits or coveralls, carried bags and umbrellas. They looked suspiciously like commuters, and if the city weren’t a ruin, I might have thought this the end of the workday stream.

  Among them hobbled a man on a cane. His white hair caught my eye, still at a distance, crossing toward this building. I nearly turned away before realizing it must be Seventy, that he could only be coming for me. I tried to leave the room, but Lily’s body lying before me became a barrier I could not cross. I choked on guilt. Such a short time before I had lain next to her, and now I could barely look at her. I sat on the floor and waited for Seventy. I waited a long time.

  When his face appeared at the door, he said, “Can I speak to you outside?”

  “I’d rather not leave her.”

  “It will be just a moment.”

  I edged around the perimeter of the room and followed the old man to the stairs. The room had filled with light, and as a result the hallway seemed darker than tar. From somewhere downstairs a radio shouted out old songs, Top 40 hits from an era long gone quiet, but too fast, voices pitching up too high.

  “Where’s Screwdriver?”

  Seventy laughed. “Is that what you called him?”

  We refused to look at each other. The dark of the hallway obliged us.

  “Lily’s not dead in the past.”

  I said, “Don’t you think I’ve already fucked things up enough?” I had meant just Lily, but the way Seventy was nodding I realized it could mean so much more.

  “Oh, yes. You have. You fucked everything up very nicely. But now you know your goal has changed. Lily didn’t deserve this. Fuck what happens to you. You’re dead already. But Lily—”

  “How?”

  “All you have to do is keep her from going to the hotel. One of us invites her. Stop that invitation. How hard can that be?”

  I watched the floor between us. The songs on the radio fuzzed out and were replaced by voices speaking Chinese.

  “Shit,” I said.

  He nodded. “You’ve got no fucking choice.” He gripped his cane like a club, as he had before.

  “You gonna threaten me again?”

  “Don’t have to. There’s a whole group of Elders who are ready to kick the shit out of you if you try to chicken out.”

  I put on the jacket. “Why can’t one of you do it?”

  “We don’t need to go back,” he said simply. “We already know you do.”

  I laughed and returned to the room where Lily lay, surveying it for anything I might have dropped. On the table was the strange silver device, the only thing she’d given me. I took that. I lifted the video camera, popped out the tape and pocketed it.

  From the door Seventy held out a hand. “I’ll take the tape.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s mine.”

  I pulled the tape out, thought that I could snap open the cassette and rip the tape before he could stop me. I handed it to him, certain it was the wrong thing to do. At her sink I ran a glass under the weak stream of dirty water, filled it, and drank, then refilled and drank again. I’d need to get food but didn’t want to look through her cupboards.

  The hallway was empty, Seventy already gone. I didn’t see him or any Elders on my way to the raft. Truth was I didn’t look for them. Instead I focused on my own hunger and the weight of the guns and the odd metallic squid in my pocket. How far back I needed to go was a guess. I thought six months would be sufficient. As if to confirm this, my hand dipped into my pocket and hit the extra timepiece I carried. Of course six months was enough. It already had been. I worried the watch I’d found meant I was doomed to another failure.

  I’d have to find someplace long-term to set the raft. I’d figure that out when I got there.

  I PARKED THE raft atop the hotel. I’d never done that before, not even when I scouted it.

  The fall day was clear and cool, and it was just after dawn when I arrived. Exhaustion from nearly twenty-four hours without sleep made me careless, and I nearly fell from the raft. My back hurt, and I stumbled as I walked. I was very hungry and felt slightly drunk but couldn’t remember the last drink I’d had.

  An alarm blared when I opened the rooftop door, but the buzz seemed to come from a distance, as did my footsteps and the rattle of the handrail. They were like sounds traveling through water. I descended, counting the steps without meaning to, trying to ignore the sense that something was wrong. The feeling grew slowly, and empty corners pulled at my attention. I kept expecting to see figures lurking or unexplainable shadows.

  The fifth floor was where the graffiti had begun last night, six months from now. The red-painted messages on the walls were gone, or rather hadn’t been painted yet. I stood for a moment, stared at the cracked wall, and almost dropped off to sleep standing. I didn’t want it to be as simple as it had to be: If I never put the messages up on the wall, they would never appear. I leaned against the railing and watched a spider climb a thread between me and the wall. Sunlight rainbowed along the silk. Without warning, the spider stopped and toppled from the strand, a fresh line tied to the first. It nearly reached the floor before slowing, then climbed again.

  I sat on a step and emptied my pockets. I had the guns, the device, and a key. It was for 503, the furnished room. I would go there, I thought, rest, and then I’d find food on the streets, and then I’d find Lily.

  The key fit. I expected the key to fit, but nothing else. I knew instinctively that the room it opened to wouldn’t be anything except the peeled wallpaper and bared lattice behind the plaster, knew in that moment that I would be the one to refurbish it the way I’d found it last night. I wondered how long it would take to find the furnishings and to make the room presentable. It would be, I knew, an undertaking.

  I was wrong. The room was finished and as clean as I’d found it the first time, six months in the future. My shock was nothing compared to my exhaustion. I stepped in and fell onto the bed. Sleep came quickly, but even in my dreams I was tired and hunting.

  I woke slowly, not knowing the room for a blissful moment, then sinking into recognition. I’d fallen asleep so fast that I was still dressed, on top of the bedcovers, the door still open. I went to the bathroom, washed my face, drank water to fill my stomach, and returned to bed, afraid to close my eyes. The light outside was low. Dusk or dawn, I couldn’t tell. I checked my watch and found I’d slept for twenty hours, through to the next morning. My stomach hurt, and I pushed the curtains away from the window. Below me morning walkers were already out, dressed for jobs the city didn’t look like it could support: ties and jackets, tweed skirts, black leather shoes.

  I went down to the street and crossed the alley to the neighboring building. It was, as it would be when Lily was shot, open. I wound my way up the stairs to her door. I knocked before I knew what I would say. I was hungry to the point of illness, my stomach turned upon itself with sharp spasms. I held myself up against the doorjamb and knocked again. After a minute, footsteps clicked toward the door. A man’s voice came through.

  “I’ve got a fucking gun. Get the fuck out.” The voice was thick with sleep. I’d seen nothing in Lily’s apartment to make me think she lived with anyone. In fact it had been almost bare, unlived in, as if she’d just appeared there one day.

  I put my hand against the door, as if to feel it for warmth. I said, “I’m looking for Lily. I think she lives here.”

  A pause and then locks grinding, four, from top to bottom. The door swung away from my hand. Before me stood a man, thin, hinting at transparent, long past sixty years, bones propping the flesh of his stubbly face, hand wrapped around a pistol not unlike my own. His short white hair was swept all to one side from sleep. Beyond him stood garbage, piled waist-deep in most places, even higher in some. Old newspapers stacked to the ceiling. Radio parts lining shelves along the room’s perimeter. Boxes of old lamp parts—coiled
cords, finials, shade holders, bulb sockets like empty eyes. A sheet lay on the floor, a pillow nearby, his head’s imprint deep at its center.

  Stupid with hunger and exhaustion, I said, “I’m looking for Lily.”

  “I know,” he said. “You said that. She’s not here. Never has been.”

  “You live here alone?”

  He looked back at the room, as if to check for other occupants, as if unsure himself. “Why don’t you come inside,” he said as he wandered into the room, distracted by something I couldn’t see or hear. I closed the door behind me. He went to his sheet and sat cross-legged on it, rubbed a hand over his hair, perhaps to get blood flowing, to reawaken from what must feel like a strange dream, me arriving at his door and demanding to see a woman he didn’t know. I looked for a place to sit but found none. I opted to lean against a stack of crates, but when I did so, the entire stack shifted and I almost fell.

  The man smiled. “Be careful, alright? I keep an ordered house.” He laughed at his own joke and searched the floor around him until he found a bottle with amber liquid in it. He pulled a stopper free and took long gulps from the nearly empty bottle. He looked at me, not so much daring me to ask for a share as needing me to, as if he’d share with me anything he had, but he’d be damned if he’d offer. I joined him in his drink by taking my flask from my pocket and removing its stopper. He smiled and raised his bottle to me. My nearly empty flask didn’t stop me from matching his draw from the bottle, and when we lowered our drinks, he shuddered and blew out a whistle.

  “Shit, that’s awful.”

  “Why drink it, then?”

  “Nothing else to do with it.” He laughed again. “So who’s this Lily you’re after?”

  I moved a mayonnaise jar filled with thumbtacks away from the edge of his table. Six months from now, it would be on Lily’s counter. She might not be here yet, but she would be.

  I said, “She’s just a woman I met once. She lived here, or I thought she did.”

  “Lied to you?”

  “No. Just the truth is a little.…” My hand waved in a circle, as if it explained anything.

  He let me not finish my sentence. He looked at the two, maybe three gulps left in his bottle, and I could see his inner debate about finishing it now or saving it. I held up my flask to him. “Try this. It’s twelve-year-old scotch.”

  He hesitated to take it. “You sure?”

  “Consider it a housewarming present.”

  He smiled and unstoppered the flask. He sniffed at the mouth before tasting it, eyes closed and smiling as he drank. He tilted his entire head back, and I felt a pang at his taking so much. When he had finished it, he pulled the flask away slowly, then lowered his head. “Yes, that’s old all right.” He smiled at me. “I do know a girl, but she’s not your Lily. Least I don’t think so. But she can help you.”

  I looked around at the collection of scrap metal and paper, glass jars filled with pins and paper clips. Finding food was all that mattered. “I’m not interested in hiring a—”

  His face fell. “She isn’t a prostitute. Won’t sleep with you, not even if you had money. No.” His fingers fanned as if preparing for a magic trick. “She helps you remember those things that you forgot made you happy. She remembers things for you.”

  Desperate to vanquish his loneliness, he sought to keep me by offering help, but his needs were outweighed by mine. I was used to waiting for history to catch up to me, to staking out events. I’d spent days waiting for battles, weeks waiting for births. To fully appreciate assassinations, one needed months. I needed to be here when Lily arrived, and it would be easier to keep watch on the apartment if invited in. I was too tired and grieved to feel callous for using him. The only thing I craved more than forgetting the image of Lily crumpled on the floor was sleep, but to encourage allegiance I would go to meet this woman. I asked him his name.

  “I’m Phil,” he said.

  “All right, Phil,” I said. “Where is she?”

  We walked through Times Square and down the center of Broadway. To either side of us, the sidewalks were filled with crowds, not moving anywhere, only looking at one another with uninterested eyes. These were vendors without customers. Thousands of bracelets, key chains, plated watches, necklaces, and earrings sparkled in hundreds of open briefcases, trinkets identical from one to the next. Salesmen watched one another wander by, shadows with clearinghouse savings. A few cars passed through, ancient, rusted, and nearly as done in as their drivers. They drove through intersections with flashing yellow lights, passed the ruins of theaters sporting worn posters and marquees dripping letters.

  Phil walked ahead of me, talking constantly, his words cutting the current of people to either side. Despite the sun the air was cool and people around us were wrapped in light jackets and lengths of fabric. I realized that some wore curtains, or pieces of curtains, from the theaters. On one corner Phil stopped to see the end of a street performance—four gray-haired old men break-dancing on cardboard flats. They spun in place, slowly, like the hands of a dying clock, until one moaned and came to a stop. The others went to his side but refused to touch him. His arm was cast at an unnatural angle. Onlookers from the crowd tried to help, but the dancers themselves disappeared into the crowd, as if fearing reprisal.

  Phil motioned to me to continue south. “They’ve never been able to come up with a better ending,” he said.

  “That’s part of the routine?”

  He shrugged. “It’s all I ever see of them. It’s for the tourists, mainly. They give the ‘hurt’ one some money, and he goes home to the others.”

  I looked around us and wondered how to tell the tourists from the locals. Above us advertisements flashed. We turned east on Forty-second Street. More traffic came through here, bicycles and hansom cabs. We retreated to the sidewalk and headed toward a cluster of trees. Construction equipment roared around us. A team of orange-vested workers jackhammered a hole into the concrete in the middle of the street. A large man with a potted tree jumped from the back of an idling flatbed. With a blade in one hand, he cut open the plastic pot and pulled the sapling free, its potting soil white with roots grown tight to the pot’s shape. He dropped the tree into the fresh hole, and the others began to shovel dirt around it. Another worker pulled a hose from the nearest fire hydrant, already leaking water into the gutter. He threw the hose onto the newly planted tree’s base even before the others had finished covering the roots, and then they all moved on quickly, only one of them remaining behind to finish the job, smoothing, tamping with his shovel, dropping to his knees to spread earth back into the hole, placing as carefully as he could the remains of the concrete over the open dirt, making for a rough display of the small ginkgo. When he finished, I finally noticed the other trees they had planted. The street was cluttered with roughly circular holes, each sprouting a small, nearly dead ginkgo. They stood in uneven rows along Bryant Park and beyond. I was reminded of cemeteries that grew from battlefields, the parks that grew from cemeteries, and I sank into the urge to check my hands for dried blood. They were clean, somehow, but shaking. The small green leaves brushed at our shoulders as we threaded our way, with the rest of the pedestrians, into the overgrown rectangle of Bryant Park.

  Ginkgoes and sweet gum filled the park’s lawn. Saplings, some five feet taller than those just planted, covered the lawn leading to the back of the large gray expanse of the public library. Green folding chairs, many of them broken, sat in clusters; conversation filtered through the trees, laughter.

  Phil nodded and smiled, either to himself or to the voices in the shadows, as he walked toward an information booth at the corner of the library building. “We’ve got to check in with Emma first. She knows where most of the girls are.”

  Emma’s girth filled the small booth entirely. I wondered how she forced her way inside each day, or if she ever left. Two black chopsticks held a wispy coil of gray-blond hair in place above a still-pretty face. We stood close enough to know that her thickly layer
ed perfume didn’t hide her natural odor.

  Emma looked up and smiled. “Phil, how are you?” I realized at once that she was a person with whom one shared secrets, without coercion.

  “Emma, I need to find Eden.”

  Emma’s eyebrows rose.

  “Not for me.” He presented me with a grand wave of his arm. “For him.”

  Emma tried to be nonchalant in her appraisal of me. I became conscious of the pistol’s weight in my pocket and paled at the thought of what I’d so recently done with it.

  She said, “I’m afraid Eden is no longer around.”

  Phil nodded, not really understanding for a moment, and when he did, his head kept bobbing. “What? She left?”

  Emma pulled a bag of licorice from beneath the counter, leaned back to make room for it between herself and the old wood, and placed it on her lap. “Left or otherwise. Not sure.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. What are her regulars doing?”

  Emma laughed. “Trying to remember on their own.”

  Phil’s eyes bounced between her face and the bag of licorice. She relented and offered the bag to him. He took a handful, probably as many as he thought he could get away with, then turned to me, offering from his small stash. I needed food, but not the way Emma looked at me. I waved it away.

  I said, “Thanks anyhow, but I’m going to head back.”

  Emma leaned forward. Apparently my refusing her candies improved me in her estimation. “You look horrible, sweetie. You need someplace to stay?”

  “No, I’m up at the hotel.”

  Both Emma and Phil stopped chewing, black licorice bits stuck in their teeth. Phil swallowed and nearly choked. “The Boltzmann? Next to my building? That hotel?”

  I said that was the one.

  Emma put her licorice away, placed her elbows on the uneven counter in her booth, and leaned heavily onto it. The boards groaned. “Honey, that hotel is haunted.”

  Phil nodded again. “Weird stuff in there. Someone walking around. Voices. Lights at night. But no one goes in. No one comes out.”