Man in the Empty Suit

by Sean Ferrell

  She laughed. “I should have known he met someone. He was in such a good mood.” She gestured for me to find a place to sit. My brown paper bag crinkled, the sides dark with grease. I offered her some of my dinner, not knowing what it was but certain I wanted to share it with her. She refused. I opened the bag and found three pieces of baked chicken and a triangle of cornbread. I apologized for my hunger and started to eat. Phil, lying on his back, began to talk. What he said sounded like the middle of a sentence begun hours earlier, a river of thoughts someone else had released, and I was left to find my way into the conversation without help. After a minute I realized he was musing about the uses of the many objects of his apartment once he was done cataloging them.

  “I just need to make sure not to lose track of anything,” he said. “Once I get through the minutiae, the small stuff, I’ll be ready to open it up to the public. This is the stuff they need. Emma’s always saying that, she’s always saying how she doesn’t have this or that. Well, I’ve got it. I’ve got it all, but it needs to be listed and organized, and then it’ll be ready to go back to work.”

  Sara nodded and leaned forward to stroke his hair. “That’s right,” she whispered. He closed his eyes. His drink, sitting on his chest, moved up and down with his breath.

  Candlelight glowed through Sara’s long white cotton shirt, revealed the shape of her body. I let my eyes linger, perhaps too long—she caught me looking. I tried to appear interested in chicken bones as I tossed them into the bag.

  Phil, his eyes closed, said, “Have you seen my things?”

  Sara smiled, a patient I-have-to-answer-this-so-often smile, and I smiled back. She said, “Yes, you know I have.”

  “Not you, girl.” His eyes struggled open and rolled awkwardly to find me. “You. Have you seen my things?”

  I looked around me. “Yes,” I said. “They’re very nice?” My compliment twisted out of my mouth as a question. I looked at Sara to see if I was on the right path. She winked at me through the low light.

  Phil became upset, thrashed on the floor like a dying fish until he had turned onto his side, craned his neck to see me. “No, no. This is just crap. The sorting area. I mean my real things. The good ones. Have you seen them?” His eyes watered. Hard sounds clicked in his chest as he spoke. To Sara, his voice impossibly deep and filled with gravel, “Take him and show him. Would you, sweetheart?”

  Sara uncoiled and rose from the floor. “Of course.” She searched for shoes under the table. I gathered the remnants of my meal and crushed the bag into a ball. Unsure where to put it, I carried it with me, followed Sara to the door. She stopped and called over her shoulder, “We’ll be back in a few minutes.” Phil mumbled and waved, ushering us out.

  Sara carried a small lantern. I followed, my mind racing. Seeing her was harder than I’d imagined it would be. This was Lily, but not yet, calling herself another name and caretaking her alcoholic father. This was the same set of stairs I’d watched Screwdriver carry her up.

  At the third floor, she stopped at a door and turned to me. I could hear a smile through the dark when she said, “Get ready for his great collection of things.” Her laugh was slightly cruel. She opened the door, and we stepped inside.

  The third-floor apartment was more densely cluttered than the one Phil lived in. The items were bigger, more organized, closer to clean. A line of refrigerators blocked the windows. A rebuilt car engine sat atop cinder blocks two feet from the door. The walls were dotted with nails and hooks on which hung assorted devices. Battery-powered screwdrivers, electric toothbrushes, music players, each in a sealed plastic bag and pierced onto the hook or nail. Each item was labeled or tagged, numbers and letters separated by dashes written in a looping hand, a catalog system that perhaps only Phil understood. Maybe not even him. Bookshelves stood in the room at seemingly random locations, each stacked with some particular item. Cans of beans, unopened battery packs, stacks of pristine telephone directories. The bookcases stood mute in the dark room; the lantern cast their shadows one way and then the other. I felt as if we’d snuck into a cemetery and looked over the names of dead we didn’t know, as if the things on these shelves were mysteries from a time unknown to anyone.

  Sara set the lantern on the floor. “Welcome to Phil’s room of things.” She approached the shelves of beans and took one down, searched through her pockets for a can opener, and pried the top free. “Impressed yet?” She went to the kitchenette in the corner, found a spoon in the sink, and began to eat the beans from the can. “Come on in. He’ll quiz you about this stuff, so you’d better look around.”

  I was entering a sacred space; Phil’s devotion made it special. Sara leaned against a kitchen counter and watched me as she ate. I surveyed clean blenders, shiny toasters, cords tucked in tight coils, boxes of forks, spoons, knives, no two alike but each polished to a shine even in the dark. Some of the nails in the nearest wall held photographs in frames, old pictures—a child laughing in a park, a woman on a boat, a man over a computer keyboard, a strange hat on his head and a curious smile on his face. From others dangled ballpoint pens still in bubble packs, children’s action figures, three pristine white bathroom tiles. At the center of the wall, a dark spot caught my eye. I leaned in. I was only inches from the item when I realized what it was. Inside the plastic bag, sealed tight against moisture and age and time, untouched for who knew how long, was the gun—the one I now had in my jacket pocket—as well as six bullets.

  My hand sank into my pocket and wrapped around the same grip and trigger at which I looked. I held my breath a moment, felt my guilt and my hatred of the thing roll inside me, and then I pulled myself back. I turned away from the wall, guilty needles in my head, and found Sara gone. Across the room from me was a hallway, another unspace, dark and rattling with sounds of someone moving. I followed the sounds, left the lantern behind me, and felt myself sink into the darkness. The air was thick and still, the windows closed. I breathed through my mouth to avoid smells of mildew, mold, rot. In between me and the streetlit windows, I saw Sara’s figure float across the room. I heard the squeak of bed springs.

  Her voice cut into the darkness. “So what do you think of his things?”

  “I don’t know. Some are better than others.”

  “That’s true. I don’t care for the weapons.”

  I agreed.

  Several long moments scurried between us, me in the doorway of the black room and her sitting on an unseen bed, springs mousing out minor protests—nothing compared to what I imagined they might do, could do, I was certain, if I joined her. I held out a hand and steadied myself with the doorframe.

  She said, “You know I’m not his daughter, right?”

  “No, I didn’t.” At first I found this a relief. Then I realized all the complications it implied in her relationship with Phil. “What—”

  “I work for him.”

  I didn’t think I wanted to hear this. I wanted her to stop talking, to let me retreat to my fantasy of the eccentric collector’s daughter. Now I could only think of what he paid her for.

  “Listen, I should really—”

  “I’m not a prostitute.”

  I held the doorframe and sought some way to decipher her words. She let me float free for a minute, maybe two, before she continued. “I’m an actress. I help people reenact relationships or moments from their past. I’ve been Phil’s daughter for five years, but he gives me enough freedom to work other clients into my schedule. I’m available for you if you want. I could see in your face that you have something you’ve replayed in your head over and over. I can help with that. Help you get past it.”

  The bed springs woke again as she stood. Her head and shoulders rose into view before the empty pane of the window, and I started at how close she was.

  “Let me know if you want to talk more,” she said. “I do both role replacement, like with Phil, or direct reenactment.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Role replacement is me playing
the part without a context. We just go about our time as if I’m your missing person. Reenactment is a specific moment, which we play out as it happened. That costs more.”

  I nodded as if any of this made sense. Her voice sounded so close; I wished it would go away. Her breath touched my neck. Her hands found my arm, and she gently forced me loose from the doorframe, to open the space for her to exit. Our bodies had been intimately close for only a moment. I took in a breath of her and said, “You aren’t really named Sara.”

  “No,” she said. She was more visible in the lamplight now, and her smile made me remember how sweet she tasted when I kissed her. “Sara was Phil’s daughter. She died twenty years ago. I’m just holding her place.”

  I waited for her to tell me her name, to release the sound of Lily to me, and I was also somehow hoping this wasn’t the woman I’d met in the hotel. Yet it was—there was the same intellect, the same understanding, sad and tired, of how things worked. She knew the world too well, and she was past worrying about it. At last, just as she started to turn from me, I realized I had to ask her myself. “What is your name?”

  She didn’t stop her turn or look back to me, only kept moving down the hall to the lighted room and its layers of things no one missed. “Jessica,” she said. “But don’t call me that. No one calls me that. Not for a long time.” Somehow I could hear the truth in what she said, same as I heard the truth in everything she’d said, even the things that hadn’t been true.

  I called down the hall. “Sara?”

  A long pause. It was her game that we were playing, but she was somehow uncomfortable with it. Finally, a yes in answer.

  I said, “If I were to invite you to go somewhere with me, a trip, out of the city, would you go?”

  “Of course not.”

  A series of unspoken reasons floated past. She didn’t know me, she couldn’t leave Phil, and a thousand unknowns.

  There was a clatter as she threw the empty can into the sink. “Don’t take anything, he’ll know,” Jessica’s voice called from the stairway. “If you want to hire me just look for me here.” Her steps clicked down the stairs, and I was left alone with an old man’s obsessions and the realization that my own wants and desires had not only been awakened but stolen by someone who didn’t exist. Lily had been but imagination, no different than Sara was for Phil. I’d known nothing of her, nothing of her past or why she’d suddenly appeared. Yet even knowing that someone I didn’t have any chance of saving had been lost, and that the person I’d watch die in six months was someone I wouldn’t even know—even that didn’t make me want to leave. If anything, I wanted Lily, a shadow of an idea, more than ever.

  My shoes scraped out a rhythm on the steps as I descended to the ground floor and found my way across the alley to the hotel. It was haunted, Phil had said, and I knew why. It was filled with ghosts I’d put there, ones who had no business being anywhere. The basement door to the hotel was open, the lights of the first few floors already burning. I walked to the finished room and opened it with my key. The bed groaned as I lay on it and sank into sleep.

  DAYS UNROLLED, CREW shorter, and I passed them working at the library, hauling wagonloads of books to Grand Central, propping up scaffolds that wobbled as librarians drew volumes from the piles, carrying them to the dark train platforms to be pulled upstate to other librarians. I tried counting time in tasks instead of hours or days, all my tasks the small parts of one larger: getting Sara away from the city. The smaller would lead to the larger, as minutes build hours. I had time. I always had.

  It took the painters nearly three weeks to traverse the length of the main waiting room. The platforms and scaffolds drifted slowly across the floor as the shifting piles of books were adjusted slightly, consciously or not. Books pulled free and replaced, the pile a little further along. Assistants delivered food or fresh paint, stalked the floor on stilts to reach the pulleys and ladders that rattled at the scaffolds’ sides. Some days the painters couldn’t reach an unedited spot and sat cross-legged under their illustrated sky. They smoked or slept, their snores echoing from the ceiling, their dreams probably filled with fumes from the painted stars overhead. Below them the piles of books melted away, like giant cubes of ice, pieces dripped away and disappeared. The piles grew smaller. One of the scaffolds nearly collapsed, and I and several wagon pullers had to reinforce it.

  When the last star was finally painted, the aqua-green ceiling gone, the old zodiac replaced, the scaffolds were dismantled, and with them the last of the original book piles. Instead we built up two new piles at the eastern end of the terminal. Almost immediately the painters and the assistants began to reassemble the scaffolds on our new piles of books. That very evening the painters commenced the labor of painting the stars again, this time with midnight blue paint rather than black. The stars they used this time were not small points but rather large, childish crosses like asterisks. I had been coming for three weeks and stopped and watched the ceiling begin to change again, to be rewritten once more over the new artistic design. I had not heard discussion among the artists or seen any rendered plans exchanged—to my eye it was eerie and spontaneous. I stood, ate a sandwich the bartender had provided, and watched the work. Parrots had gotten into the building and circled along the perimeter, asking about bus routes and weather patterns. Emily found me staring at the sky.

  I asked, “Why have they started over?”

  She laughed. “You don’t look up much, do you?”

  I wondered what she meant but didn’t say anything.

  “No sky they paint up there is true. Not even the first one they painted over. The sky has changed again. The zodiac was useless. They had no choice but to start again.” She stood a few minutes and watched the work with me. After a time she drifted away.

  I watched the painters, chewing in silence. At the center of the room, the four-faced clock glowed solemnly. From where I stood, I could see two of the faces, and as I occasionally checked them to see their time slowly unwind, I recognized why they felt so familiar. From my pocket I fished out my timepiece. The hands from the two clockfaces matched four of the hands on my timepiece. The clock had been altered to perform like my watch. I sensed Seventy’s work in this. Some kind of message.

  Perhaps this is why I was only curious and not confused by the artists’ repainting of the ceiling: I was like them. I crossed myself out and started over again and again. My party was proof, the deaths I’d caused in self-driven conspiracy were proof, and so, too, was the dizzying reality that at some point I came back—how soon would I, how far back had I—and adjusted the clock so that it counted moments for no one but me and the woman I would kill. I stared at the clock until I could breathe again.

  I shook my head as I wondered how many ways I could fuck myself over.

  IN THE EVENINGS I visited Phil, and sometimes Sara. I rarely spoke to Sara alone, but when I did, the conversations were quiet and unimportant. I felt nervous around her. She never brought the sale of her services up again, but I saw them in practice every day. I didn’t know how expansive their act was until the night I found a note taped to the hotel door. The note, written in Sara’s clean hand, read, “Dinner party at 8. Please come.” I heard Phil’s voice dictate the last line: “Please bring drink.”

  I had never reclaimed my flask from Phil, but I returned to the raft atop the hotel to find the bottle of whiskey I’d taken weeks before from the bar while the Elders slept under the film projector’s light. In my room I showered, dressed, and left the hotel through the main exit.

  Phil’s apartment was packed, two dozen people filling the space available, toes touching, glasses and jars sloshing drinks on pant legs and dresses. Laughter poured out the door into the hallway. Emma lounged in a chair near the door and reached out to touch my elbow. I thanked her for finding me my job with Emily, and she shrugged. “You look like a man who always has options.” She pointed to the tables near the windows. “They have food and drink over there. Too far for me, but you go.” />
  I said I’d bring her back something and struggled past people who smiled or glowered depending on how heavily I stepped on their feet. Two librarians from the station smiled and waved. The food was picked over. I placed my bottle of whiskey on the table, unopened, found a small glass jar I hoped was clean, and filled it with water. When I turned, I found myself face-to-face with Phil. He looked at my drink, then at me. “Gin? You brought gin?”

  “Water.” I held the glass up between us. We regarded each other through the distortion. “I brought the whiskey.”

  “Ah, yes. Okay.” He wasn’t drunk yet. I wondered how he managed to function so well without food. I had never seen him eat, only drink. “I can’t stand gin. Have you seen Sara?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She was looking for you.” His eyes fought to focus on trays laden with moldy cheese and stale crackers. His chagrin was obvious. “I think … ah, you know—”

  I didn’t, and didn’t ask for an explanation, since I knew I wouldn’t get a clear one. Phil exposed truths the way clouds exposed the sun—accidental, brief, and sudden. He dipped his nose into a few bottles, made a gasp of discovery, and filled his glass to the top with a thin red liquid. He smiled at me over the stuff, took a drink, grimaced, and smiled again, deeper.

  “Sara needs someone to watch over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she’s a caretaker. She needs a project. That’s why she stays with me. I can’t pay her much.” He stopped; embarrassment flushed his cheeks. I pretended not to have heard or understood, didn’t react to his revelation that she was a hire, not an heir. He sipped his drink and started again. “She knows I need her, so she stays. But she needs more than just me.”

  Someone bumped him from behind, and his red drink splashed out of the cup. He spun to shout a long string of obscenities, then either forgot we’d been talking or decided he’d said enough and staggered away through the tangled guests.