Man in the Empty Suit (33 page)

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.”

The brown bag. I nodded. “How’d you get in there?”

“That’s been my room for a long time. I know that hotel like you know that hotel. Not hard getting in and out. You know that.” I did. I wondered if I really could make it my home as he had.

I stood. “Will you be okay?”

He laughed. “Have been for a long time.”

I looked up at the sky just as the sun slipped behind a cloud, slipped back out. “When do I go?”

“I don’t need to tell you that, do I?”

“No.”

He watched me a moment. “You’ll be fine, you know. Get a job. Meet people. You will meet people.”

I nodded. “What about the convention rules? You’ve just told me my future.”

“Fuck the rules.”

Sun fell on his face. He seemed brighter than the light.

“So how can I destroy the raft?”

“When you go back, arrive over the river. You’ll have to swim like hell, but that thing sinks like a rock.” This all made such lovely sense. What was it that cut inside my head?

Behind us an awkward voice muttered, “Rock, rock.” A group of parrots eyed us with curiosity.

He pulled a bag of sunflower seeds from his pocket and began to throw them one at a time to the birds, who talked to one another about the heat, about the hazards of driving, about things that mattered only if the world worked.

My feet burned to move, and I said, “I’ll be going, then.”

“Yes. You should. Good luck.”

Before I thought it, I said, “Did I just … fail?”

He lowered his chin to his chest and took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”

I raised a hand in a good-bye he didn’t acknowledge. The library sat beyond the park’s yard. I was going to go there, do as he suggested. As he’d made sure I would know.

I stayed where I was. “You had no right.”

Seeds fell from his now-still hand. “What?”

“You kept me there, when I might just have left it all behind. If I’d left—”

“If you’d left, there’s no guarantee she would have lived.”

“You had no right.”

His hand shook, and I recognized in his face the shock of what I’d just done. He’d remembered the moment differently. I’d untethered from even him. I left him to feed his muttering birds.

I headed for the library, wondered if Emily would be inside to let me in, to let me climb to the roof, or if I’d have to break in. I would have liked to say good-bye to her. As I approached the back of the building, I realized I was embracing ignorance. The old man had expected I would go to a moment when I could spend decades waiting for the party to arrive. Instead I could return to the point I would have been at had I lived my life chronologically. My return could reintroduce me to life in a way I hadn’t lived, had feared. I thought of the clock at Grand Central and wondered if my life would end up leading me there to redesign it, or had that been an act of the man feeding birds in the park? I guessed I would find out.

I climbed the steps and began to hammer on the old doors, hoping Emily would answer, and wondering if I might recognize her as a young woman someday, if I returned to the library steps some half century earlier. Could I sit and wait and recognize her, call to her by name and introduce myself as a man she knew briefly, once? Or Emma? Or Phil?

I knocked, knowing that I would find a place weighed in my favor just by there being one person willing to help me more than I’d ever been willing to help myself. I had no idea what was on the horizon. The future vibrated with uncertainty. I had failed. I had ignorance. I had hope.

In no particular order, thank you to: All of my family, my parents, my brother by blood Matthew, Stephanie, Aidan, Sue; Janet and all of FinePrint; Bronwen, Juliet, Meredith and all of Soho Press; my brothers by ink Jeff and Dan, and everyone who takes the time to put up with me in any capacity. And to my readers: Any effort I put into this work falls short of the honor you bestow by reading it. Thank you.