Man in the Empty Suit (12 page)

He escorted me toward the Elders, the floor sticky with
spilled drinks. All conversation stopped. Only the whiny dialogue and electronic sound effects of the movie droned on.

I felt conspicuous, a giant target. I regretted visiting the men’s room. I looked less thrown about, less wounded. The Youngsters might excuse themselves for their actions, convince themselves that the damage they inflicted was less than real, that they could get away with more of the same. Or worse. I held on to the gun in my pocket as I walked. I really needed a drink. My flask was gone, fallen down some rabbit hole, but ahead I saw several bottles passed between older hands.

Elders parted to allow me into the heart of their circle. Then aging faces closed in around me and the questions began.

A sixty-year-old in a dark blue blazer shook his finger at me, spit hanging from his lips. “What have you done?”

“You’ve been drinking again?” I asked. I observed. I hoped.

Angry recriminations from all sides, often slurred. Again and again the same question: “What have you done?”

“Nothing that should have come to this.” I closed my eyes briefly to escape their rheumy glares. Beyond the thin wall of gray or graying heads bubbled the growing mass of children, silent, curious, trying to listen in to our conversation. “A Youngster did this.”

Seventy held up a hand. “As I said before, now is not a time for blame. No one is to blame.”

“Bullshit,” said Blazer. “We know who’s to blame. This young shit fucked it up. All he had to do—”

“All he had to do is something we haven’t managed in years of trying.” Seventy’s attempt to smile like a grandfather failed. “You know what we know. And we know nothing. He at least has been trying to find out what happened.”

Blazer and the others waved Seventy’s assurances away. “What has he found, then?”

The Elders waited for me to explain. On the wall above our heads, a large spaceship was shaking itself apart as it tried to return to its own time, the crew hanging on to computer consoles as they pretended to quake with the vessel’s motion. An extra in the back of the shot conspicuously moved in the wrong direction, giving a strong impression of bad choreography.

I took a deep breath. “There was the furnished room.”

Blazer laughed. “We know about the room. We showed it to you.”

Yellow said, “Yes, but he watched the tape.”

Blazer fell silent, his face stone.

I realized I didn’t want to reveal what I had seen on the tape, or the second tape’s existence. “Yes, it was of me. Older. Not much. I was drinking.”

A voice from the back called out, “Where’s the Drunk?”

A murmur ran through the Elders. Elbows and shoulders knocked against one another as they spun to locate the Drunk. Their anger grew by the moment, a storm that builds energy from itself. They no longer snarled only at me but also at each other, a stomped foot leading to a thrown punch, a shove answering a glare. An Elder fell to the ground in front of me. I stooped and helped the old man to his feet. It was Seventy. He looked up at me, a sad smile on his face.

“We all just want to live,” he said. “I wish we deserved it.”

“He’s not here.” Blazer yelled, and others soon joined in. “He’s not here.” Some took this as a cue to go hunting. Groups of Youngsters, somehow better organized, splintered off to
follow, even though I doubted they knew who the Elders were looking for. I hoped a confrontation wouldn’t take place somewhere in the hotel’s dark hallways.

Seventy, trying to regain long-lost control, raised a hand. “It doesn’t matter where the Drunk is now. The Body is already a body. What matters is what he, or someone else, has left behind.” This brought silence. In this group no one was as old as Seventy. I wondered what this meant. If he was the end of my years, if there was only him and no further, what had he learned? Sad, I thought, that just when I finally became comfortable with life, as he appeared to be, that would be the end. To me he said, “What have you found?”

All eyes were on me. I had to tell them something of the truth. I relied on the massive paradoxes we were all awash in to keep my next lie from being too obvious. If any of them here had more information than I expected, it wouldn’t take long to find out. “The Youngsters have a gun.”

The group became absolutely still. Eyes left me, searched one another, the same aghast expression reflected back and back and back, each sure that one of the others was responsible.

An elder with nearly white hair licked his lips. “It’s the gun that shot the Body?”

“I assume.”

“And you’re sure it was a gun?”

“It looked a lot like one just before they hit me with it.”

“Good God, they’re armed?”

Children filled half the ballroom now, and I could see clogged hallways beyond the two sets of double doors, children jumping to see what fun was being had in our besieged group.

I lowered my voice. “They are still bound by their expected memories. Unlike you, who know that this is a paradox, they remember only these current events. Remember that. They are not afraid to hurt or kill. They tried to kill me.”

Blazer leaned in. “Why can’t we recall what you’re experiencing? Why are we all untethered?”

They huddled like a flock of terrified sheep. Being untethered from me they had dealt with. Being untethered from one another made them afraid.

“The Body was our link,” I said.

Blazer growled, “We need an observer. Someone to watch the Suit.” This as if I weren’t there. “Someone we can rely on, someone who we know is on our side.” I knew he meant “our side of the death.” At least I think he meant that.

Seventy said, “We don’t want to get in his way. He’s more motivated than any of us. After all, he’ll be the one to feel the bullet. One of us would slow him up and confuse him.”

Voices shouted Seventy down.

Blazer pointed at Yellow. “He should go, too. Everywhere that one goes.”

Yellow was scared. “I don’t think—”

More shouts of agreement. They converged on Yellow and Seventy. Again I was an afterthought. A hand grabbed my elbow, and I was dragged from the center of the group. Screwdriver. He led me to the door beside the bar. On the wall above us, the captain of the time-travel vessel congratulated himself for a job well done.

Screwdriver opened the door. Lily stood on the other side. “Hurry, before they realize you’re gone.” His face was white. He was worried he’d made a mistake.

“Why?” I asked.

“They’d kill you to save themselves.” He was staring at Lily, as if he wanted to grab her and hide her away for himself. “And besides, she convinced me.”

I walked through the door. Lily smiled at me, then at Screwdriver, who shut the door behind us.

“Why did he help me?” I asked her.

“I pointed out to him that if they were really all on the same side as you, then they would have your scar.”

“What scar?”

She touched my temple. “This thing. It’s going to be permanent. And I haven’t seen any of them with it.”

I worried about what that might mean.

“Let’s go,” I said. I didn’t know where we would hide but knew we must. The Elders were getting as feverish as the Youngsters. Panic leaked in like fluid through the hotel’s cracks. Lily and I moved along the dark hallway toward the kitchen’s service entrance. Large looping graffiti clung to the dingy walls, piecemeal caricatures, murals, indecipherable turf markers. I had ignored the paint for years. Blindness can be chosen. Not until I ran along the hall with Lily did a word catch my eye.
Scar
. The word was part of a longer message splashed on the wall in red. It had been painted with a brush instead of a spray can, which gave it an anachronistic urgency the canned messages lacked.

I stopped and read the whole message:
A scar is something you can trust
.

Lily retraced uneven steps toward me. She looked back the way we’d come, worry evident on her face. I took her cue and moved on.

Farther down the hallway, I spotted another sentence:
Can’t move ahead without the Body
.

It was as if the dead man upstairs had called to me, reached out through wires and walls to grip my shoulder and whisper into my ear.

I said, “We have to go upstairs.”

“What?”

“We can hide upstairs. I know a room. I have the key.” I reached into my pocket and felt past the gun to the key that Screwdriver had given me. As I did so, I realized that the videotape was missing. “We need to find the room where the Youngsters held us. I dropped something there.”

Her face was pale and clear in the dark hall. “Upstairs. One more trip upstairs. I don’t want to, but let’s go.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

She didn’t answer. She looked at me with eyes too bright for such a dark hall, and I forgot my questions, questions about why she trusted me and why she accepted so many of me running through the halls of a dead hotel, what it was that made her stand next to me and take my hand and say, “Okay, yes, let’s go upstairs.”

We turned and ran together, the messages lingering in my head. I thought of scars and a body that were part of my timeline now, perhaps always had been, if only I’d paid attention before. Might I have seen them when I was twenty, thirty, thirty-five? Could I have seen them and glanced away, convinced myself that the struggle of an Elder was not my struggle and the suffering of Youngsters beneath contempt? As I ran, I recognized my own sinister nature for the first time, my blindness and my anger, my self-hate, and it scared me.
I ran with Lily’s hand in mine. Her eyes flashed in the dark, reflected some light I couldn’t see.

I caught the spare shape of more letters in the dark, more slashes and splashes of the red brush. Words a foot tall covered the walls of the stairway, overlapping so that I caught only fragments. I tried to decipher even a single word but couldn’t make sense of anything except individual letters.

Lily suddenly sagged against me, heavier than her weight. Her eyes scanned the walls, her face tortured by what she saw. My curiosity about what the words said was overwhelmed by my desire to flee. I held her against me. “What’s wrong?”

She whispered, “These messages. They remind me of something.” Her hand was cold and her grip weak.

“What?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know yet.”

I lugged her up the stairs, trying to cover her eyes with my hand, but she pulled it away. We reached the second floor, and she gripped the door’s edge tight, sobbing. She hung from the doorframe, slowly gaining strength as she read, and when at last she turned to me and said she was ready to go, I saw that a door inside her had closed.

I asked, “What did it say?” I knew she couldn’t answer. I may have asked just to make sure she wouldn’t.

She shook her head, tears at the corners of her eyes. She took my hand, and even though she’d been dizzy and sick only minutes before, her grip was strong now, reminding me of our situation. She turned and led the way down the hall to the Body, led me to a room she’d never seen.

Outside the door I searched my jacket for the key, slipped deep into the lining through another hole. I was decaying like
the building around us—a little bit at a time, but to an inevitable ruin.

I opened the door, and she stepped in. The Body rested as he should, on the table under the weak bulb, the sheet tucked around him. I shut and locked the door. Lily slowly drew the sheet from the dead man. She wasn’t shocked, not in the slightest, only took his hand and held it, squeezing so tightly that her hand turned white. Her fingers played over the tattoo on his wrist.

“He’s so cold,” she said.

“He’s been there for hours.”

She nodded. “He has your scar.”

Without looking I knew she was right, but I walked to his side and saw the scar, a faded smudge of whiter skin, a crescent above his temple. I looked down at his face, my face, truly mine, at damage I only now realized hurt, and couldn’t look away.

The window paper had been torn off, and the sky outside was turning light. It was the color of mud. I wondered if Lily had ever seen the sky blue, as I had, as I could at any moment if only I boarded the raft.

“I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this,” I said. “It’s something I should have figured out on my own.”

“You can’t do this alone. That’s why it’s happening this way.” She put the Body’s hand back under the sheet and came to stand near me in the pale light. Before I could react, she had placed her head against my shoulder and leaned her body against mine. It fit as if it had always been there, as if my bones had grown around her figure. Her hands met behind me and reached for the muscles of my back. I returned her embrace
and held her tight against me. My urgency scared me. I tugged at her dress, yanked it above her waist, and she pulled at it with me, then worked at the buckle of my belt, tore at the front of my pants to release me so that I could enter her. When I had, we stood against the wall, arms knotted around each other, my knees bent and hers stretched to tiptoe. We stood still a moment, and I searched her eyes for the light I’d seen there before; I felt for it with the part of me inside her and couldn’t find it there either, and I told myself that I imagined it, that it hadn’t really been there at all, even though I knew it had been. The proof was that she looked away from me to lose herself in the moment, pressed herself against me without seeing me. We breathed ragged and tasted each other’s tongue. It didn’t take long. I withdrew from her, smelling her skin on mine, and we both fixed our clothes. We looked from the Body to the pale window and at each other. She raised a hand to me and began to speak, but there was a voice at the door. It was me, probably no more than ten years old.

“Hurry up,” he said. “I don’t like this floor.”

“Don’t worry about it.” The second voice was older. “There’s no one here anyway.” There was a crash of old boards breaking. “See, this stuff is just junk.”

“I still don’t like it.” The doorknob jiggled. “Hey, this one’s locked.”

I took Lily’s hand. We backed toward the window, her palm as wet in my hand as mine was in hers. Between us and the rattling doorknob lay the Body, an artifact, his silence balancing out the panic I felt at the hunting party on the other side of the door. Another voice had joined the first two, a deeper one—a teenager, who immediately took action.