Man in the Empty Suit

IT IS UNFORTUNATE
for me that I am, by most any objective measure, a genius.

I was forced to realize just how unfortunate on my thirty-ninth birthday. As had been my custom for nineteen years, I arrived at the Boltzmann Hotel in Manhattan on April 1, 2071. One hundred years earlier, across town at New York Medical Center, lay my mother, lightning flashing outside the single window in her gray cube of a hospital room as I kicked and refused to come out. Later, in my twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh subjective year, while horribly, inevitably drunk, I paid a visit to the hospital on the night of my birth in 1971. I’d stolen an orderly’s uniform and faked my way through the halls, arms filled with bedpans, until I found the maternity ward. There she’d been, my mother, younger than I could ever remember, screaming and sweating. Inside her was me, preborn me, nascent genius (by objective standards,
not mine), stuck on her pelvis and grinding my head into her spine.

She never saw me. I left after placing a bedpan on the floor—the doctor had to trip on it, fall headfirst against the bathroom doorknob, and spend the rest of the night concussed and vomiting. He had to be replaced by an intern and a near-retirement nurse who knew more than all the rest of us present, who took hold of me and pulled me into the world despite all my objections. I knew this from many tellings of “The Night You Were Born.” So I left the bedpan for the doctor.

That was the only year of my time-traveling life when I spent my birthday anywhere other than the Boltzmann. It was the year I stopped serving drinks to myself from behind the bar and focused instead on the drinking of them before it.

As I traveled, I counted my days. When another 365 had passed for me—subjectively, not objectively; objective time and I stopped talking years ago—I would direct the raft back to April 1, 2071. I would dock in the city at easily recalled locations—the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, the mayor’s Gracie Mansion bedroom, beside the Astor Place “cube” statue, atop the Empire State Building’s observation deck—and then walked directly to the Boltzmann. These places would echo with my footsteps, silence sealing in around me as the raft cooled and lost the pop and crackle of heated filaments and nearly burned-out wiring. In parking, my focus was making the raft easy to find. My celebrations were cloudier each year, and by my thirty-ninth subjective birthday, the possibility of entirely forgetting where I was parked and being stuck in the vacant city seemed very real. Sometimes I left chalk arrows on walls, signed with my age, pointing me back to where I’d
left the machine. I could also follow my own footprints in the ever-present mud—a mix of the constant rain and the slow demise of the city’s concrete and stone. The city in 2071 is full of good parking places. Just one subjective year earlier, when I was thirty-eight, I had parked inside what was left of Lincoln Center. It resembled a rookery, flocking with parrots, their inane chatter filling the darkness with conversations echoing Playbill notes and intermission critiques of performances ended decades earlier. Manhattan had become a parrot’s island. I’d parked at Lincoln Center with Isadora Duncan in mind, a sentimental ode—I’d just left her in 1927—but upon returning to the raft, I’d found it covered in bird droppings. Lesson learned.

This time I parked in the dried-out bowl of Central Park’s Pond. My machine winked in about four inches above the brown-clay mud bottom and then slid slightly lower into the septic water. I swore softly, but there was no finding a better spot. Once landed, the raft took nearly a full twenty-four hours to run again, and so parking was always cautious guesswork seasoned with a rush of panic. I powered the raft down, muttering to myself about the stupidity of choosing such a spot in a rainstorm. None of the drug dealers doing business in the bushes around me said anything. People willing to brave the storm to hang out in Central Park weren’t the sort to talk about seeing a shuddering metallic platform appear in midair. I took my time covering the raft with a blue tarp and left the park, guided by familiar lightning flashes, one ear perked for parrot conversations.

I could take my time, and did, spoke loudly to myself as I walked. No one would mind. No one would hear. I’d seen
few people on the streets on my first trip to that date, and I saw fewer with every visit. Buildings lurked, dark and empty. Electricity worked sporadically at best, rising and falling as if with a tidal pull. The hotel I’d made my base was abandoned, rotting and rotted, and I’d never seen a soul other than myself near it.

Exiting the park, I slipped in some mud, landing hard. I didn’t mind. My coveralls were always filthy. I’d recently been on the raft for twenty-three days straight during a cool September, docked in a fir tree in the Teutoburg Forest in the first century, waiting to see Germanic tribes battle Roman soldiers. I had grown sticky with sap, camouflaged with dirt and needles. I’d nearly given up after two weeks, when a small group of Romans, sick with dysentery, filthy as rats and rank as shit, finally staggered into view and built a camp. They were slaughtered a week later, in the middle of the night by some hunters while I slept, their skulls left nailed to the nearby trees, including one directly below me. History books yet again proved how far off the mark they could be.

I found a subway entrance near Times Square and descended to the train platform. The station, lit somewhat strobingly, echoed with my steps. I was alone and cold in my nudity as I peeled away the filthy coveralls. In one pocket I found my two flasks, one for business and one for pleasure. This was time for business, and I opened it and poured water onto a rag. I cleaned my body as best I could. The water lasted only a little while, the rag slightly longer before it ended up tossed onto the tracks. I didn’t feel clean, but I could pretend I looked it. Thoroughly frozen now, I rubbed my skin dry with my palms and then pulled my new clothes out of my travel
bag: a suit, the Suit. At last my turn to wallow in the shit of self-adoration.

Nineteen years felt like a long time to wait to finally become yourself. Since my first visit to the hotel, my wardrobe had been a means of understanding events, framing them, and of differentiating. I recognized versions of myself based on what they wore. This me was Turtleneck, that one Ugly Tie. Yellow Sweater. Spats. Hanfu. Toga. No matter when I came from, I tried to look my best. Most impressive of all was the Suit. Simple, black, foreboding. I had longed to wear the Suit since the first time I’d seen myself in it, longed to be the type of person who had such confidence and focus, someone above the fray. Every year the entire party—all my selves—paused in respect when the Suit made the Entrance into the ballroom. All my other visits to the party were tainted. I always tried too hard to be the center of attention, even with myself. Especially with myself. But the Suit was beyond that; everyone paid attention to him without any effort on his part at all. A few times I tried to get close to him, to get a sense of when I might be him, but I had never been able to get his attention. It was as if he were attending a party to which no one else was invited.