Man in the Empty Suit

by Sean Ferrell

  Lily, lips trembling, had remained silent through my conversation with Mark. Now, as his needle was about to drop, she said, “Remember, this is a surprise. Don’t peek,”

  “I can’t cover it while I work,” Mark said. “So you’re just going to have to look somewhere else.”

  Lily put her hand on my shoulder a moment, enough to let me know she hoped that what was about to happen was what was meant to happen. My own hope lay with hers, but I also saw the Body and his tattooed wrist. I’d ignored that memory for months; I couldn’t any longer.

  Mark was ready. “Look at me. I want you to think of a time of day, any hour, I don’t care which. I want you to whisper that hour into my ear.”

  Behind me Lily paced like a cat. My mind flashed to all the times I’d looked at a clock in my life, and I tried to think of any one time that stuck out. In the ceiling above me, a parrot called out numbers, but I couldn’t focus on a single one even though I tried. All that came back to me was the time it had been when Lily died, when I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly nine in the morning. Behind me I could hear her flipping through books and shuffling tattoo photographs in three-ring binders, but the hour she died lit up my head. I wanted the bird in the ceiling to give me another number, but it had stopped talking.

  I couldn’t make myself say “nine.” “You pick,” I said to Lily.

  Behind me the nervous shuffling stopped. “No, you have to pick.”

  We could have argued. I could have tried to force her to choose, sat silent until either she gave in or Mark tired of us, of me, but I didn’t. I was more than a little sick when I leaned forward and whispered “Nine” into his ear.

  Mark nodded, and Lily sat on the chair behind him, under the window. She pulled off her sweater, the tank top beneath seeming to show more parrots than I’d ever seen on her before—impossible given how often I’d seen her naked, yet there they were in an uncountable flock, almost moving with the sounds of the birds above us. I felt hollow inside as I recognized I knew nothing about her. “Just look at me,” she said.

  “This will hurt,” Mark said an instant before jabbing the needle into my arm with a metal buzz. I fought not to flinch and lost. The fire rushed up my arm and blinded me. Each time Mark paused to wipe blood and ink from my skin, I prayed that he was done. I waited for the conversation offered. None came. Lily’s eyes were on the street outside, her ears on the ghosts of conversation from the parrots. Above us one parrot sang “Happy Birthday” and another answered with mangled “I love you”s that never quite sounded right, never quite managed to carry the weight of what they ought. The words sounded sadly familiar. I longed for more lies.

  When Mark finally finished, I didn’t need to look. My grave marker was in my skin, my invitation to the private party at my own convention. Lily stood, came to the table, and peered over Mark’s shoulder. I watched her eyes, waited for her smile, some glimmer of approval. Instead she turned away and pulled her sweater on, despite the heat. She reached into her pockets for money I didn’t know she had, didn’t know anyone still used, and laid the bills out on the table for Mark. I heard her feet pounding down the ramp before I finally looked down at the parrot on my arm. Small, a simple black outline, but clearly a parrot, flying west if my hand was north. I thought of the parrots right above me as “I love you”s warbled in my head.

  Mark gave instructions on caring for the wound, instructions I almost committed to memory. The last thing he said was, “She’s a question mark, that one.”

  I gathered myself and headed back to the hotel at my own pace, unsure of what I had done wrong but certain I had done it, had always done it, would do it again.

  Anxiety built as March passed, and in the last week I was exhausted but not sleeping, night after night trying to will myself asleep and hearing the pounding of my internal clock. One night, in a growing streak of insomnia, I dragged myself from Lily and our bed and dressed. Out the living-room window, the hotel throbbed with light.

  I didn’t stagger or trip as I left the building. In the street the rise and fall of light from inside my hotel was bright enough to make me shade my eyes. I crossed the street to the entrance, made my way past the ballroom and through the kitchen. The bulbs and lamps Lily had laid out for her work were buzzing. I clicked off each lamp as I went. At last I reached the walls of graffiti. I stood and looked at the words, allegiances to scars, descriptions of rooms she hadn’t yet entered, the command to fly east that she had refused—looked at them once more before I turned off the last lamp.

  I was safe in the dark from the words that lined the halls. I wanted to erase all the messages Lily had left for herself, but I couldn’t. They stood for so much I didn’t know about her, the parts of herself she kept from me. I couldn’t erase them, but I could darken them. I gathered lamp cords in my hands and pulled. Below me lamps fell and bulbs broke, the already dark stairs clattered with lamps falling up to me as I yanked them in by their cords. Eventually I pulled the right one, and far below, a plug was pulled from a socket and the remaining lamps blinked out. I’d have pulled the building down if I could.

  Broken glass crunched beneath my heels as I descended. At the fifth floor, I stopped and looked down the hall. The door of my room was open, and a box of light lay across the wet carpet in front of it.

  When I reached the room, I found it cleaned of almost everything but my suit and the video camera. A typewriter sat in the closet. On the dresser was a folded piece of paper. I hesitated to open it, knowing already what it said. I opened it anyway, saw that it read the same as when I’d found it on the bar six months ago, when the Brats had offered it to me and the Drunk had taken it: “If it’s dark, I’m gone.” I put the note on the bed and ran, splashed down the hall and nearly fell down the steps. I rushed back to Phil’s apartment. My lungs ached, and my calls bounced back to me from the bare white walls.

  Lily was gone, as she must have known she would be, remembered she would be, if she woke and saw the hotel dark, if the collection of lamps she’d left for me to turn off ever was turned off, if she found me gone long enough to give her the chance to disappear. The note was her only good-bye. I sat in the middle of what had been Phil’s room and looked around at the blank spaces, the vacancy of Phil compounded by hers. I felt like those walls—like I’d been bleach-stained where she’d touched. I felt an ache in my wrist where the parrot flew west.

  I returned to my hotel. My main concern had been to find out which of me had invited her. I’d carried her invitation back with me. She’d sent it to herself. The machinery of events was grinding away, with all the gears lined up for both Lily’s and my deaths. There was only one piece missing, one thing I hadn’t done. Every hope was useless, every effort wasted. My life had been an illusion of arrogance, a trick I’d fooled myself with, a deceit that I could step outside of events and watch history unfold yet remain unaffected. The machinery of it all was revealed. Let me be that part, I thought, a dark and darkening horizon in my head.

  I made the bed and then undressed. I took the suit from the closet and put it on, then sat on the bed facing the camera. I scoured the room for a brown paper bag and a ballpoint pen, found them in a dresser drawer. I wrapped a bottle from the dresser in the bag, twisted the bag around the bottle’s neck. How had I thought that staying away was enough to avoid a bad end for Lily and for me? It seemed that some fates were predatory, would leap up and take you if you didn’t search every dark corner for them.

  I put the bottle underneath the bed. I found one videotape inside the camera and another unopened in a drawer. Lily had brought things here to echo random unexplained memory, but they weren’t a mystery to me. I rewound the tape to the beginning and hit “record.” I sat on the bed and waited. When I was certain the tape was running, I reached under the bed and began my salute, opening the bag, opening the bottle, and drinking. Whiskey burned my throat—my first drink in months. The sweetness of it surprised me. I didn’t recall actually tasting drinks before, only gettin
g them inside me. This was different. I knew that this would be the last drink I’d ever have, that I would likely get sick, that I was toasting my lack of faith in myself, my lack of purpose, the path I’d been on, my failure. It was as if this were my own wake, a farewell from a place I couldn’t imagine I’d ever reach or understand. I pulled from memory nods and smiles at the door, cues for my younger self to look at Yellow, to drink, to wonder what came next.

  Done drinking my half of the bottle, I drunkenly wrapped bottle and unused videotape in the bag. I remembered then the message that had been on the bag—its meaning still unclear to me—and found a pen on the dresser. I was supposed to write, “In case of emergency, break glass,” which was what the bag had said when I’d found it. I wouldn’t do it. My one rebellion against what I knew was coming. I stuck the wrapped bottle far under the bed. A noise in the hallway. I pressed “stop” on the camera and headed to the door, the whiskey swirling around me. I felt particles on my face. Bits of plaster fell from the ceiling, and water trickled down the wall. Here was the growing puddle I would find when I first saw the finished room. Everything was the same. Now the gears were set for the party, and all I had to do was follow the currents.

  Only I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t. If fate was predatory, then I’d have to challenge it. Let my other selves find the tape and wonder what it was. I wouldn’t be there. I would leave. And would take Lily if I could find her, convince her to leave with me. I had to try. If I didn’t find her, then, burning knot in my gut, I’d leave without her.

  I pulled the door shut and walked down the now-wet hall floor. As I passed the other doors, I wondered what I might have found behind them, if I might have left other items there, other tethers that I might ignore or cling to, other paths I might put myself on simply by imagining they existed.

  MY SEARCH FOR her started the next day. I followed the streets east as far as the bridges. She’d sworn to never leave the city, and I believed her, not because she was trustworthy but because I knew it was true of both of us, I felt it in my bones more real than gravity. I searched the riverbed, dry and filled with garbage and abandoned cars, and knew I wouldn’t cross over. I turned back and headed north. Days passed. I begged for food or scavenged through boarded-up buildings. I crossed back and forth over the city. To Hell’s Kitchen, then east to Central Park, where I wandered up to Harlem and kept going north. When I reached the Cloisters, I turned back. Some streets just tasted wrong, like aluminum on the tongue. I didn’t see her anywhere. I searched the Central Park camps, with their rings of barbed wire and patrols. I scanned the line of people with their pillowcases of canned goods in front of the Plaza Hotel, waiting to be interviewed for acceptance into the clans.

  “What do you think you would be able to offer a clan?” asked one of the tie-wearing interviewers. He, like the others, sat behind an office desk that had been hauled out onto the sidewalk.

  A pert young woman with uneven bangs smiled anxiously. “I’m assertive and good with traps.”

  The interviewer made notes on a clipboard.

  I returned to the eastern edge of the city for no reason other than that it was opposite where we’d been together, and something in the message of “fly east” wouldn’t unhook from my thoughts. None of the street crews on the West Side had seen her. Emma claimed she hadn’t either, although I thought she might lie.

  I walked past the hospital again and found it more dilapidated in the light. Across the street the dorms were buzzing like a hive. The children I’d seen before caught me looking at the many windows and ran out to chat. The oldest teased me that the woman I sought was my “girlfriend,” the word stretching out along her wide, wicked, child smile.

  “You love her,” she purred. I gave the kids some apples that Emily had given me and continued down First Avenue. I walked nearly to the tip of Manhattan. At the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, I considered walking across the East River. I stared across the muddy ground between me and Governors Island. Her promise to not leave the limits of the island repeated inside me. I felt an ache in my body. My back rippled with every step. I needed to rest.

  I headed to the subway. I’d been in the tunnels but never seen trains, although others claimed they still ran. The nearest station was City Hall. I passed the agent’s booth and jumped a turnstile. On the platform, candles burned in sconces bolted to the support beams. Commuters read books or old newspapers. I picked up some pages myself and read news decades old, thought of the papers that Lily freed after Phil’s death. The train that eventually arrived had no headlights, and so it burst from the black tunnel like an eel, its brakes screaming. My heart beat faster, but when the train slowed, I saw that the interior was lit and filled with people.

  I stepped into a car nearest the conductor, as if he provided some kind of protection, and examined the other riders. Entire families called the train home. I saw men and women lost in the vague intimacies of life. Five children received reading lessons from a man who seemed father to none of them, a legal pad on his knee as he drew letters, upside down and backward from his perspective. “Cat,” he wrote. “Dog.” I watched until he wrote “Train,” and the children gave knowing smiles to one another.

  A blanket lay across several seats, and beneath it moved the shapes of two lovers. I walked past them and those who casually sat near them, reading or sleeping or watching. I found a seat beside a woman with a small electric hot plate attached to a battery. She cooked eggs she sold for a dollar a plate. People lined up and offered their money. She served in order, throwing oil and eggs into a small black pan. She took pity on me and gave me an egg for free. I had no cash and offered her my jacket, but she refused it. In a thick accent, she said, “Be nice to someone else. It all comes back.” She said something in a Slavic tongue, smiled, and turned to her next customer. I ate the egg in silence.

  At the next stop, a priest stepped on board, and the people nearest the door shouted at him to leave. Someone from farther down the car shouted back, “Until he hurts someone, he stays, just like the rest.” It might have been the teacher, but it could have been anyone.

  The priest walked among the passengers, speaking of God and holding a cup for donations. None came. One man told him, “You’d be better off becoming a carpenter, like Jesus. Then you’d be productive.” The priest ignored him and quoted a passage from the New Testament.

  I returned to Phil and Lily’s building, my building. I was nearly crippled, my back so knotted that standing was difficult. The stairs to the top floor nearly wrenched me apart, and with every step I recalled seeing Lily carried up them. I had failed spectacularly in my attempt to save her. She had disappeared, and I knew that whether I returned to the party or not, she would be there. My guilt was crippling me.

  The next day I regretted having come back to that place. No one knew I was there. I had little food. I spent hours on the kitchen floor, lying on my back or my stomach. I crawled through the apartment on all fours, searching for food. Instead I found the remains of Phil’s hidden stores of alcohol hidden behind cleaning products in the bathroom, in the lowest kitchen cupboards, and under threadbare blankets in a closet. I medicated the pain, found that even if the pain didn’t leave, at least I did. I drank myself to a stupor during that day and the next and wandered in and out of consciousness during the night. Awake, I cursed myself and Lily, Phil, Emma, whoever passed through memory. When I sobered enough to look out the window at the hotel, sunlight blurring its windows, I would wonder what day it was for an instant and then turn to the next bottle. I relived Phil’s death. I talked to ghosts and memories. I waited for suns to rise and set.

  When at last I ran out of Phil’s remaining stash, I filled the bottles with water and watched light filter through them, ran my fingers through the rainbows they cast on the floor. I waited for daylight to break through and catch them in new ways. I drank the bottles during the evening, telling myself over and over that there was more I could have done, nothing else I could have done. My ears were fill
ed with my own circling babble, and just before I fell asleep, I heard words slip from me that made the pain in my back crackle like electricity.

  “It was her choice to go,” I said. Then I fell asleep.

  The following morning the pain was gone. I woke and turned to my side and didn’t shudder or moan. I lay still for several minutes, sure the pain would creep up and take me again, certain it waited for me to think it gone in order to injure me more when it returned. When it didn’t, I sat up and looked around the room. It was dark, and the sky outside the windows rolled with heavy clouds. Thunder shook the bottles on the sill.

  Rain splattered against the bottles, ran from the sill down the cracked plaster wall, and pooled on the wooden floor. The puddle was growing, gathering bits of plaster debris, dust, small pieces of paper that floated across the top like water bugs. The water followed the unseen contours of the floorboards, the paths dictated by grain and wear, toward the center of the room, jogged sideways twice, and then formed a pool beside my mattress. If the rain continued, I knew that the mattress would be ruined. For the first time in days, I stood. I found the tentacled device, no milky fluid or smell of memory around it. It was as if someone had cleaned it. I took it back to the mattress, lay down, and held the device to my chest.

  Outside, the storm continued, the sky so dark it was impossible to say if it was day or night. Streetlamps and neighborhoods blinked on and off in the distance. Nearby, lightning lit the streets. I followed the odor of food down the hallway to the living room and found a milk crate with three Styrofoam containers inside. I opened the top one and found a turkey dinner with potatoes and broccoli. I opened the other two and found two more of the same. Had Lily taken some odd kind of pity on me, or had Mana or Josh come to make peace with Phil? I put two in the refrigerator; the third I ate with my bare hands. When I was done, I left the container on the floor and carried the device back to bed. No longer bogged down by my stomach, I knew what I wanted: to see if the device worked. I wanted to see Lily again, even if only in memory, and this twisted thing might give me that. But I was still afraid to find out. I curled my hands around it and held it under my pillow.