Man in the Empty Suit

by Sean Ferrell

  Weeks passed. Phil couldn’t eat and barely drank. He crunched ice chips, grunting as he did so. He refused to die but talked of nothing else. His voice shrank to silence. His body withered to a husk, and the movement of his skin against itself sounded like dry leaves sliding one over the other. Even his tongue made whispered sounds in his mouth, so that when he moved and talked, it sounded as if a hushed conversation were taking place just out of sight, a conversation about things better not spoken of, things that would become apparent in a minute, or the one after that, after he was gone.

  Lily disappeared for longer and longer periods. Some days I didn’t see her at all, thought she must have fled, hoped that she would but knew she would return. She always did. Sometimes I found her asleep in her bed, dirty with some work I couldn’t guess at, asleep with her face turned to the wall. I could climb into bed behind her, feel the heat of her pooled under the covers and pressing back against me. She smelled of paint and dust, and I wondered if she had become a painter for the library. I could take her and she accepted it without a word, her hands reached around to hold mine against her chest. She would remain silent except for small intakes of air and whispers I couldn’t make out. Sometimes I would hear her swear she made no promises to me. The next day I would wake alone.

  The weather turned cold and the days dark. Winter passed quietly. I opened the windows and tried to pull fresh air in to Phil. The apartment stank of him. Despite daily sponge baths and my having removed most everything from the room that might smell—sandwiches and fruit squirreled in desk drawers, a potted fern long dead, half-finished glasses of water turned yellow—the room stank of the rot taking place inside him. When not working at Grand Central, I sat in Phil’s room going through his papers. In inks too varied to count, on papers of every size and color and age, some brittle with years, some still smelling of the ream they’d fallen from, he’d cataloged everything. Meticulous notes listed how many nuts and bolts he’d found, numbers of hammer heads, still-viable lightbulbs, and even an accounting of those bulbs not viable, by size and wattage, and then those bulbs he had not kept. In the end, without dates or a system to follow, I’d begun to gather the pages according to size of paper, smallest to largest. While I compared the sheet to his life catalog, I spoke aloud to Phil, a running monologue on his system and ideas I had for improving it. I found that he quieted when he heard my voice, or at least I could not hear him and his whispering tongue. I read some pages out loud, wondered at moon phases and weather changes. I convinced myself that he enjoyed the talks, despite the occasional rattled breath and rolling eyes beneath lids.

  It was a bright morning in February when his breath changed and the whisper in him grew loud enough to hear. “Sara,” he said. “I need to see Sara.”

  I hadn’t seen her for two days. I put the papers on the desk, almost carefully, and left Phil’s room. I’d been inside for such a long time that I was shocked to find the rest of the apartment flooded with cold air and light. I’d left the windows open in two rooms, and snow had accumulated on the sills. I heard flakes crunch under my feet as I grabbed a jacket and headed for the stairs. I reached the ground floor but didn’t know where to go for Lily. Up and down the street, I saw only a few trails in ankle-deep snow. Most of them crossed the street to the hotel, my hotel, where I hadn’t been in weeks. I followed the trail into the hotel. The lobby was dark.

  I took the main stairs two at a time to the fifth floor. From the landing I saw nothing in the hallway, only the lights rising and falling with the ebb and flow of power. My room was open. I couldn’t remember what I had done with my key, but obviously she had taken it. I could have called out but didn’t. Instead I approached cautiously and peered in. Every surface in the room was covered in items I had not missed from Phil’s home. They were piled along the dresser and across half the bed, the other half of which was dented into the shape of her sleeping body. Next to the closet sat the video camera on the tripod. The bathroom was dark. A row of six bottles of twelve-year-old scotch sat before the mirror. The metallic squid sat between two of those bottles on the dresser, and the milky fluid that had filled its glassy head was gone. I took the device and squeezed it until I thought it might break. Why hadn’t I shattered it before?

  A metallic thud drew me to the back stairway, where chains of extension cords wound up the steps. Along the cords hung light fixtures of various shapes and sizes. An ornate brass lamp from the lobby, now without its shade, was tied to the railing half a floor above me, its light shooting straight up the staircase shaft and reflecting from the walls. Cold air gave way to high heat from the lamps; I felt like I was walking up a chimney. I stepped over cords and broken glass. My shadow rolled around me, leaping up the stairs and onto the walls above me. By the time I reached the sixth floor, the light was clear and clean and even. I heard someone above me dragging something metal up the steps.

  “Lily?” I called. I’d barely raised my voice, but the name echoed everywhere. The noise stopped, as if she were holding still like a scared animal, as if silence would convince me to leave. I found her at the seventh-floor landing with a metal stepladder and a can of red paint. Her hands seemed blood-dipped and raw. She looked down at me almost with relief.

  I said, “What are you doing?”

  She shrugged, a casual gesture that the situation didn’t warrant. “I’m trying to figure it all out.” She looked from me to the wall. Before my eyes could take in the words, I knew what they would say. In front of her was the message “A scar can be trusted.” Above her, on the wall of the next turn of stairs, it said, “More than one.” Below that the odd command to “Fly east.”

  Some things would happen despite my efforts, I realized. Perhaps because of my efforts to avoid them they happened the way they were meant to.

  “You used this.” I held up the empty vial. “You shouldn’t have.”

  She shrugged again. “It was never yours to keep from me.”

  “What?”

  “You’re trying to keep me tied to your truth, but you’ve got no right. You don’t know me. I don’t need to be saved. And I won’t be, if I do this right.”

  “Do what?”

  She pointed at the still-wet words. “It’s all mixed up. But I think it will become clear soon enough.”

  I said, “I can help.”

  “No you can’t.” She turned her back to me. “This is mine. Like a kind of poetry that only I can write and understand.”

  A chill ran up my spine, and I needed to sit on the stairs. Had I really convinced myself that I was only an observer?

  “Leave with me,” I said. “Let’s leave the city and not come back.”

  She shook her head. “You know I don’t do that. I can’t. I can’t leave Phil.” Her eyes scanned her work. “And there’s all this to figure out.”

  I felt the stairs tilt under me. Everything was happening too fast. I’d come here tonight because of Phil, I remembered now. “He’s asking for you. He’s—”

  She waited for me to finish my sentence.

  “I think he’s almost gone.”

  She dropped her paintbrush and ran down the stairs.

  I listened to her footsteps grow distant and followed slowly. I was dizzy and sick. I was guilty over the relief I’d felt at the thought of Phil’s death, that it offered us a way out. If he died, might she leave with me? I pushed that aside. She would need time. I’d been his constant companion for days; she hadn’t spoken with him in weeks. Instead of returning to their apartment, I went to the finished room and sat on the bed. In the closet hung my filthy, abused suit.

  Any thought that I could control the movement of history drained from me. I was a passenger here. This river flowed only one way, and I could see the cliff’s edge, hear the falls roar. I should have crushed the thing into the carpet. Now it was too late. I knew she wouldn’t leave, not even if Phil was gone. Not even if she’d shown herself her own death. Not when memories were dripping all around her, tiny puzzles like jewels to be stu
died and cared for. Me, the great problem solver, I knew nothing other than that bullets waited for both of us.

  I followed Lily home. The sun gone, stars battled the streetlamps’ flickering. The city embraced its brownout. I crossed the alley and traced the sounds of my footsteps to Phil’s apartment. The door stood open. Inside, Lily paced the living room, tracking through melting snow piled under open windows. She stopped at one window, arms tight around her, and rested her head on the pane. Her breath clouded the glass. The cold night air slipped across our feet. Suddenly she was shrieking out the window, calling to Mana and Joshua and Emma, screaming to them as if they were in danger until her words turned to unpronounceable sobs. Leaving her choking back her cries, I slipped on slush through the hall to Phil’s room. He lay on his back, face tilted to the ceiling, eyes closed. I leaned over him and put my ear to his mouth so that his cold lips touched my skin. Nothing.

  Kneeling over him, I remembered Phil’s asking me to watch Lily and realized I wouldn’t be leaving the city. I wouldn’t leave without her, and she wouldn’t leave. I found her on the ground floor tearing apart piles of Phil’s newspapers and throwing the pages out the front door. The breeze lifted them and tugged them back and forth in front of the building. I sat on the bottom step, watching her. When she finished with the last paper, she went inside and returned with a box filled with antique glass milk bottles, which she carried to the middle of the street and dropped without care. Before they crashed against the pavement, she had already turned away. I stayed and watched her as she emptied the building of everything but Phil himself. I was certain that she was as untethered as I was, as removed from any guidance or mooring.

  OVER THE DAYS that followed Phil’s death, Lily emptied the apartment and scrubbed it clean, then repainted. It was, again, as it would be, white. She spoke of it as if she were leaving it soon but never did so. The day after Phil died, she’d brought in the park’s ground crew, who had silently gathered Phil in his blankets, wrapped tight as a mummy, and carried him I don’t know where. I never asked.

  I went back to work, putting in enough hours to earn two sandwiches, which I brought home, As we ate, Lily would say things to test the silence. “It’s ham today,” she might say. “Nice to have a change.”

  I agreed. “Don’t know where they got it, but it’s good.”

  She would eat the sandwich, and I would take my seat at the window. From here I could see the entire alley and part of the street. If anyone approached the building from the hotel, I could be down the stairs to meet him in moments. I carried a pistol with me, the one I thought of as mine, the one that killed the Drunk. Lily never asked why I watched. She probably had memories that I didn’t trust myself, probably surmised I was waiting for my own figure to turn the corner, looking for her. She ate the sandwiches and then returned to the work of painting all the rooms on all the floors of the building. She was nearly halfway up, on the fifth floor, and the only time she left the building was when she needed paint. I accompanied her on these trips out, disguised as her helper.

  “You can’t carry all those gallons yourself.”

  She would laugh. “No, of course not.”

  I kept an eye out for myself as we went from hardware store to hardware store searching for gallons of white paint. No one looked our way.

  We ate and talked. If the brownouts turned too dark for reading, we’d follow each other’s voice down the hall to the bedroom. We undressed in the dark, apart, meeting at the mattress. Mornings we woke tangled in sheets and each other.

  One morning, the windows open for warming breezes, Lily and I stood in the kitchen eating bread she’d gotten from some wandering market near the park, and I asked her what she thought of leaving the city with me.

  She laughed. “To go where?”

  I didn’t know.

  “I came to this city to stay,” she said. “I’ll die here. I’ve always known that.”

  “We could go and then come back.”

  She pursed her lips, almost a smile. “Maybe some other time.”

  We didn’t say anything for a while after that, the sound of someone hammering giving a metronomic tick through the open windows. I’d begun to suspect that the jumble of memories was untying itself, that she knew more than she pretended.

  At last I said, “We could go somewhen else.”

  As if that were a trigger she had waited to hear pulled, she put down her sparse breakfast and said, “You haven’t ever asked me about what I remember.”

  I considered changing the subject. Instead I said, “You’ve never asked when I’m from.”

  “I know what I need to know.”

  “Which is?”

  “We both have layers of lies to spin out for each other. Lies about how things will be okay. We’ll do that later. Right now I simply say that you do what you do thinking it’s for me. But it’s not. You’re doing all this for you. I know, selfish.”

  Our bread sat on the counter. It was rough and tasteless. I wanted to say she was wrong, but the fact that I hesitated made me fear she was right. If she spoke first, it would be the last we’d speak of this. I couldn’t let her end it there. I had to.

  She ran her hand over her shoulder, across the tattoos that perched there. “Take a walk with me?”

  What little faith I had in my altruism evaporated at her words. “Where?” I asked. She wouldn’t say, just smiled.

  I followed her down Sixth Avenue. It was a warm morning for February, and we stayed on the shaded side of the street. She was always one step ahead of me, no matter my speed. We walked beneath empty office buildings until we reached an entrance with a jury-rigged ramp that reached all the way to the center of the street. Multiple banisters and handles decorated the walls, bolted and screwed into seemingly random locations.

  I followed her up the ramp and down a dark hallway toward an open door busy with voices. There were only two people in the room, a naked woman and a man in a wheelchair, tattoos peeking from collar and wrists of his leather jacket. His legs, wrapped in leather, capped in unscuffed work boots, were strapped to the wheelchair’s leg rests.

  He focused on his work, the humming needles and wiping of blood preoccupying him, seemingly unaffected by the beautiful naked woman under his hands. The strange chatter of voices, repeated and overlapping, muttered from a radio I couldn’t see. The tattoo he pressed into her back was an intricate pattern of hooks and chains, styled to appear as if they were woven through her skin. She glanced at us over her shoulder, made no move to cover up or welcome us in.

  My eyes darted back and forth, from the woman lying on the table to the tattoo pictures displayed all over the walls to Lily. Her own tattoos snuck around the short sleeves of her shirt. I’d never asked about them. I realized I was probably about to find myself marked in the way I’d been shown I would, given the brand I wore at my end.

  We watched for fifteen minutes before the naked woman had had enough. She raised one hand, and without a word the artist stopped. Fresh bandages were laid, tape applied. He cleaned trays and threw away gauze and paper towels while she dressed. They exchanged words, and she bent to hug him. When she left, he grabbed the wheels of his chair with either hand and spun to face Lily. His scowl cracked into a smile easily enough.

  “And how are we today?”

  Lily hugged him, just as the other woman had. As she did, her shirt lifted and I could see a few of the birds at her waist. She talked to him in a whisper, the unseen voices loud enough to cover her conversation. I looked around for the radio and instead found holes in the ceiling tiles, wooden dowels and bird feeders hanging nearby. Through the gaps in the ceiling, I saw movement, the flutter of green feathers. A gray head with black, beadlike eyes leaned through and stared at me. The man had a nest of parrots living in his ceiling. There was no radio. They secreted to one another, mostly about tattoos and symbols, meanings and menacings that must have been discussed in the tattoo parlor over the years.

  Lily came back to me. “Mark will
be giving you a gift from me. But you can’t see it until it’s done.”

  “What will it be?”

  No answer. She knew I already knew. We began to layer our lies in silence. Mark, back turned to us, busied himself with needles and ink. I sat on the edge of the table the woman had just vacated. It was still warm from her body. The room smelled of a mix of rubbing alcohol and bird dander. Mark finished his preparations and smiled at me. It was a hard smile to receive. Hard eyes and white teeth, sharklike. I became acutely aware of the chair he sat in, the needles on the tray beside him, the rustling of feathers above our heads. Murmured secrets.

  “She said she wants it on your wrist.”

  I nodded.

  He laughed. It was worse than the smile. “She wants it there. But where do you want it?”

  “If she wants it on the wrist, put it on my wrist.”

  Mark set down the needle. “Listen, I’m not having you come back in two days bitching that the goddamn thing is in the wrong place or doesn’t make you feel like she digs you, so when you’re sure of where you want it, you come see me. Or not. I don’t care either way.”

  All I could think of was the party, the Body, the way it was promised to me, every bit of it, the ink, the bullet, the painful recoil of a gun in my hand as it shot the Drunk, the smell of copper as Lily bled into her bed.

  I said, “Just give me the damn tattoo, whatever she told you to, wherever she told you to, and let me go live what little of my life I give a shit about. Can you do that?”

  Mark maneuvered his chair closer to the table and smiled his unpleasant smile. “There you are,” he said. “Was that so hard? Sit down on that chair, arm across the table.”