Man in the Empty Suit

by Sean Ferrell

  Testing them was pointless. I’m sure more would show up if I tried. I was tired of everything. Something told me to hide in the finished room. Up the main stairs, I heard only dripping water. The Youngsters’ hunt for the Suit and Lily must have taken them upstairs by now. Possibly as far as the dumbwaiter. I found myself on the fifth floor, in front of that door unlike the others. Clean and cared for. My door, open. I sat on the bed under the burning lights and looked at the mess the Suit had left. The bed was rumpled, the video equipment still warm. I checked the bottle under the bed and found it nearly empty, as I knew I would. I finished what remained. Beside it was the brown paper bag. Written on it was the message in my handwriting—“In case of emergency, break glass”—the message that I hadn’t written. My hands shook as I read it.

  The bathroom sparkled with splashed water. I added to the puddles, washed my face, my neck. Suddenly I was desperate to wash away the filth of the Drunk and stripped to the waist. I looked at the reflection in the mirror, watched water drip from long whiskers, run down my neck and onto my chest. My cheek glowed red with Screwdriver’s punch. My hair hung in greasy ropes to either side of my face. I had never seen myself this filthy before. I washed myself again, stripped naked, scrubbed at myself with wet hands. I looked around the bathroom and found no soap but a pile of scratchy towels. I wet one in the sink, ran it over myself again and again, turned it gray on one side and switched to the other side, then another towel. Standing before my reflection, cold, tired, bruised, I couldn’t care what might have happened before. I held a strand of my long hair in my hand and pulled at it, felt the grease it left on my fingertips. I remembered the shooting, the hooded eyes of the Drunk, the angry whispered words condemning whomever they lit upon. Perhaps me, perhaps Lily. No one. Who did I blame for this? I pushed back my hair and looked at my face, my eyes. Red and puffy, they blamed no one. The Suit needed that, to see my eyes, to recognize I wasn’t a threat.

  The liquor bottle smashed easily in the tub, curtain drawn, reduced to a handful of large shards. I picked up the largest shard and turned it in my hand until I found the best angle, careful to avoid cutting myself. I ran water and went to work with the glass blade. Handfuls of hair fell away, shaved with a minimum of skin cut free. The water ran. Hair clogged the drain, the bowl began to fill. I worked blind on the back of my scalp, yelped when I nicked myself, brought my hand back covered in blood, ignored it and cut more hair. I felt with oversensitive fingers for hair too long to be called stubble and worked the glass edge at it. At last the uneven shave was done. My scalp ran red in some places, but not for long, I imagined. I looked nothing like the Body. His beard wasn’t on my face. If I died, I couldn’t be him.

  I hoped I’d miss the gathering upstairs but knew I wouldn’t no matter what I did. Still naked, I climbed into bed and fell into a dream where I managed to bury the gun in the soil behind my childhood home and walk away, certain that no one saw, no one knew. I don’t know how long I slept, but I woke to the sound of water splashing on the bathroom tile. I hadn’t turned off the hair-clogged sink. It had overflowed, and an inch of water covered the carpet. I stood in it, watched the ripples move to the periphery and return. On the bathroom counter was the gun, the one I’d left on the toilet tank downstairs. Seeing it made me feel sick, but not surprised. Someone was placing all the necessary pieces together for a bloodletting. I felt sympathy then for Screwdriver, working so hard to do what he thought right, putting pieces into place that would lead to someone’s bleeding to death on the penthouse floor, and as I felt sympathy for him, I felt a little of it melt into me as well.

  I dressed and pocketed the gun. The suit, still wet from rain and sliding under the bathroom stall’s door, stank like I’d already died in it. I put it on anyway, ill at its odor, its clammy grip. I stood at the door and pretended I wouldn’t go upstairs, pretended that the Elders weren’t outside the door at that moment, ready to put the gun in my hand and make me shoot myself or take that bullet as the Drunk had before.

  I went upstairs.

  GRAFFITI SCARRED THE stairwell walls. I saw only the mistakes, the partial handprints that speckled the plaster and handrail, small disks like blood on the steps, bubbles of latex dried to permanent teardrops at the bottoms of letters. In a way the messages revealed that Lily was trying to control the evening. Her need to escape, to save herself, was proving to be her failure.

  Someone, or someones, was running ahead of me in the stairwell. I didn’t worry if they saw or heard me. I hadn’t planned on chasing them. I hated the idea of catching up, because that scenario ended one of two ways. I wasn’t going to kill tonight. That left me with the other end of that pointed, shit-covered stick. I focused on my stinging scalp, the cuts that speckled it like Emily’s new constellations. I wouldn’t be the dark, harried Drunk they expected. Perhaps that was all it would take.

  They clattered up the steps. I knew it was me. I knew it was Lily. She was tired, her head spinning from her graffiti, her death visions coming fast, I’m sure, as she recalled her memories of the chase, the shooting, her own death in the home she’d grown to hate.

  I pulled my gun from my pocket. It was loaded—Screwdriver again. His job was to ensure that all the elements came together. He was good at his job. I’d ditched the bullets at the bottom of the toilet, yet here they were, fished out. Was I locked on the path? I opened the chambers and removed the bullets. Nothing was set. Being untethered must prove that, I thought. I still drew the sharp end of the stick but could make sure that Lily didn’t join me on it. I left the bullets on the steps. This gun, at least, couldn’t kill her. I imagined that the Elders expected me to kill the Suit, to untether all of us older than him on this side of the Body, and they must have trusted that I wasn’t tethered to them. Kill the Suit and whatever happened to me wouldn’t affect them. But I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t give them the Body they needed, and I could no longer be the Body they needed. If it meant the end of the Elders, I can’t say I felt all that much need to defend them and their behavior.

  Above me the suite door slammed shut. Locks chattered.

  I turned to the servants’ entrance that would lead into the suite’s kitchen. It remained painted shut. I could hear someone moving on the other side, the Suit, trying to find some way out. I heard his footsteps fade back out to the living room. Something drew my eye up. On the doorframe rested a screwdriver. I pulled it down, worked it into the gap between frame and door, a gap barely there, filled with white paint. As dark as the stairwell should have been, I felt full of light. I felt my stomach rising, my heart skipping beats. I worked the screwdriver along the seam, split the paint, levered back and forth, heard wood creak, yanked at the door and felt it give, then give again. I tugged once more, and it released me into the kitchen with a loud crack. Beyond the doorway to the light-filled living room, I heard whispered warnings. I looked at my hand. Between one moment and the next, I’d somehow lost the screwdriver and replaced it with the gun.

  A window hung open, and a breeze blew the door shut with an authoritative bang. I put the gun down, rubbed my hands over my ravaged scalp, felt my fingertips slicken with blood. I thought for a moment to run water, clean myself, make myself less threatening. As if I had the ability to hurt anyone here any longer. The man who’d fired the shots that killed Lily really had died, even before he—I—stepped into the room. I was no closer to shooting the Suit or Lily than the six-year-old I’d watched cry with his rusted relic gun.

  The Suit’s gun clicked.

  I placed mine on the counter. As different from the Drunk as I could be in that moment, head shaved, unarmed, I stepped into the room, hands up. Fuck the Elders, I thought. Fuck their need to be on the other side of the death. If my death meant nothing more than a claim to innocence, innocence I hadn’t had since I’d built the machine, then I could live, and die, with that. If I failed now, it was only because of the laziness and guilt of my life up to this point. I stepped out knowing only that I could hurt no one other th
an myself.

  Suit and Lily clung to each other beside the open window. The words I’d heard the Drunk mutter rose in my throat, rumbled at the back of my tongue, but I choked them down. I realized that they had been meant as a warning but were far too poorly chosen. Last words should do more than invite demise.

  I looked at Lily and said, “I’m so sorry. For everything. For bringing you here. You should go. Both of you. Go away, don’t come back. Go. Shoot me if you need to, but go.”

  The Suit narrowed his eyes, unsure what I meant, hand shaking, gun getting the worst of it. I imagined the trigger fairly close to release. Lily put a hand up and placed it on top of the gun, wrapped it round the Suit’s hand, lowered it toward the floor. The gun that had gone off in my hand six months ago was lowered, unfired. I realized I was wet with sweat and breathing fast. Both Lily and Suit watched me, then, realizing I really was as I looked, ill and harmless, came to help.

  I repeated my suggestion. “Go. Both of you. Get out of here.”

  Suit, eyes older than I would have remembered them as being, laughed. “Where to?”

  To Lily I said, “Phil’s place.”

  Suit stared at me. “Who the fuck is Phil?”

  “He was her father,” I lied.

  Lily nodded. She took Suit’s hand, tried to pull him with her. He stayed rooted, watched my face. His eyes held themselves on my temple. Hand to it, I felt for what fixed him, and found my scar.

  “We’re tethered,” he said.

  “We were.”

  His eyes narrowed, returned to mine, his own hand to his still-raw wound, “You have my scar.”

  “Of course I do.”

  Lily tugged at his hand again, and this time he followed. They disappeared through the doorway. Footfalls called to me for a minute, faded, turned to echo. Behind me someone muttered, “Tether, tether.” A parrot at the open window, head tilted to one side, blinked at me hopefully. “Tether.”

  Long after they were gone, I sat in a sheet-covered chair, eyes on the eastern horizon, blinking away stars in my vision that refused to disappear. I thought of things I could have said to both of them, but him especially. Advice rolled around in my head, but it was for no one except me. He would live with her as I had, but not as I had. She was not the woman I’d found. She was another, no better, no worse, different, and in control of what she would be to him. I wondered if he would ever know of her what I knew of her, her past, the woman she had tried to leave behind and reinvent, if that part of her would be shared with him or anyone, or if she would become someone else entirely, carrying around the vision of a death that was once her own but was now some other woman’s, no more than a dream. How long before she convinced herself it was just hallucination or fantasy? I wondered. How long before she could forget that it had been memory and that I was real, too? That getting past me, away from me, was to leave part of herself? I laughed at myself then, at my last attempt to cling to vanity. She had the Suit, she would either keep or lose him. She would not miss me. She would be fine.

  Heavy, slow footsteps broke my reverie. “You’ve been up here a long time.” It was Seventy, cane tapping at the chair’s legs. Fingers touched my shoulder, by accident at first, searching for support, but they lingered, and I realized he was trying to console me.

  “Nothing to go down for. You won’t find them. They’ve left.”

  “I know. Watched them leave. Climbed down a section of the fire escape that hasn’t fallen yet. Never will forget how I hurt myself back then in that rush. I was certain we were being chased.”

  He sat in another chair, turned his face to watch me, sunlight brilliant. The light brought out his age, the spots across his forehead, the wrinkles I hadn’t seen in the horrible and inconsistent lighting downstairs. He tried to smile, turned his head again, and as he did, I spotted the line above the temple, pale as paper, thin. He shared my scar.

  My hands shook. “We were tethered.”

  Face too calm, too at peace, he said, “Until you shot the Drunk, yes. I never did that. But then you kept it from happening a second time. You let us go.”

  I couldn’t speak. He’d never shot the Drunk. He’d gotten away. He’d done everything that I had just helped the Suit do. Our eyes stayed on each other until he looked away and said, “Yes. I’m tethered to him.”

  “And the others?”

  “Some of the others.” I wondered which. Yellow at least.

  I held my hands together, laced fingers, covered, flexed them. Somewhere under my skin ran blood. I felt for the pulse of it in my own hands. I was cold, as if inanimate.

  I said, “You needed to make sure you got her.”

  “I can’t tell you what happened, you know that.”

  “But you did. You made sure you got her.”

  The others had been as used as I’d been, untethered from me and him, tricked by promises he knew to be untrue, details he hadn’t lived. I squeezed my hands again and felt bone and blood. I hadn’t his memory; none of us did but him. In that moment I realized he’d lived a life with Lily, however long it lasted, decades perhaps, and that he’d only ever come back to the hotel to ensure that his life would take place.

  He said, “You’ll help me now. You’ll have to grow your beard back a bit. You’ll lure the Suit to the penthouse, and then you can help make sure everything happens as it’s supposed to.”

  “I won’t be Screwdriver.”

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

  He’d said this to me before. Did he really not remember? Something had changed.

  His eyes were too merry.

  “Were you happy with her?” I asked.

  “You know I can’t—”

  “You never knew her. Not like I did.” I didn’t have proof, yet I was certain. His eyes darkened and knuckles tightened around the cane. “I know it,” I said. “I forgive you. But you’ll never know what I know. You’ll never know her like I did.”

  He looked out the window. I could tell he tried to unhear me.

  I said, “Did she ever tell you her real name?”

  His eyes darted to me, just barely, but enough for me to know he’d never known that Lily wasn’t her truth. I’d opened a seal he’d never known existed.

  I stood and cataloged the room, looked for some kind of comfort. There was nothing for me. I left Seventy behind with his lifetime of memories and questions he’d never thought to ask, about what he’d missed, what I knew, what lurked in the gaps that I knew Lily had left in him. I left the room and chased Lily’s and Suit’s echoes to the ground floor.

  Without a body there had been no need for any of the others to stay. Elders were gone. The convention over, all that remained were the empty food tables and litter. I wondered if another visit in another year would prove to have corrected everything, as no body existed now, if there was no longer any mystery to solve, or if I might find myself able to watch everything from outside. It was a question I considered for less than a moment, for I knew I wouldn’t ever revisit. The convention, if it existed in this new circumstance, would take place with the Elders and Youngsters who’d been before, but not me. I wasn’t tethered to them and wouldn’t reconnect. I would go and find something for myself, separate from them. Alone and in the world, as I should always have been.

  I remembered that I had no raft. To return and ask Seventy where it might be wasn’t an option. Instead I simply left the hotel, walked down the street.

  I walked past Lily’s building. I couldn’t go there. She and Suit most likely watched me from her windows. I wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t give the impression I even thought of doing so. I buried my hands in my pockets, and though I couldn’t think where to go, I walked on.

  The sun rose behind the buildings ahead of me as I walked toward Bryant Park. The crews had been hard at work in recent weeks, and trees stood ten yards apart down the center of Sixth Avenue. Broken asphalt chunks made improvised planters. The trunks and what little soil filled the holes was wet with water from so
meone—local tenants, probably—reaching out to make something, even something bound to die, grow. Emma’s stand was dark and locked, as was her coffee-shop home. Perhaps I intended to wait for her, perhaps not. I don’t know anymore. Years make this part fuzzy, despite the clarity of the earlier events. I do know I sat on the bench by her kiosk. I sat and stared at the ground, sidewalk cracks, and parrot droppings. In the road, pedestrians with purpose navigated through tourists with none. Someone sat beside me. Long moments passed—or didn’t, I didn’t care—before I allowed myself to wonder why he stared. I turned and saw my face, the face I have now, old, lined, filled with the effort I’d avoided all my life, and I blinked only once to be sure the face was real.

  Older than I imagined possible, he had outpaced Seventy by some years. His face cracked, teeth showed me a smile I hadn’t seen much of lately, if ever.

  “You’ll be looking for a raft, then.” Pleasant voice, not as old as I thought it might be, light in the eyes; maybe life covered that face, not years.

  I nodded. “Yeah. I have no idea where—”

  “Up on top of the library.”

  I turned and glanced over at the old gray building. “Okay, thanks.” Gratitude rose in me until I realized he must have hidden it from me.

  “I knew you’d be fine.” He stretched out his legs, flexed until something popped. “You’d be fine and she would live.” At his wrist, a little westward-headed parrot echoed my own. I was tired and couldn’t figure why something in this felt like swallowing a glass shard.

  I ran a hand over my head, forgetting that my hair was gone, that cuts decorated my scalp. I caught one and winced at the pain. He mirrored me, ran his hand over his own barren scalp—bare from age, not from shearing. “Your haircut tells me you got my message.”