Man in the Empty Suit (26 page)

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.”

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 getting 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.