Man in the Empty Suit (7 page)

“Something I have to show you.”

“Not again.”

“Just go to the right. Second door.”

I followed his directions, and he followed me. My jacket hung uneven from the gun’s weight, and I tugged down on the opposite side. I passed the first door and approached the second, from which light fell through to the corridor’s floor. Shadows moved and voices echoed. As I stepped into the doorway, I was blinded for a moment by the brightness. A ceiling fixture
with three high-wattage bulbs and a cluster of floor lamps illuminated every corner. The room’s windows were papered over, and rain lashed against them. Along the walls dozens of chairs were stacked one upon another; piles of table linens and round tabletops leaned against the dark windows. In the room’s center sat a table, its round top covered by a white cloth. The cloth lay over a human figure, turning it into a landscape, a snow-covered mountain range, head and feet the highest peaks. At either end stood Seventy and Screwdriver.

I cleared my throat. So did they.

Seventy placed a hand on the tabletop. For a long moment, I thought he would pull back the cloth in some sort of magical reveal. Even though I’d already seen the Body, the idea disturbed me. I didn’t want to see it again. I knew I needed to see it again. I wondered when I’d begun to think of it as “it.”

Instead Seventy used the table for support. “How goes your investigation?”

I let out a breath that sounded like a tire deflating. “Well, I did meet a woman.”

“You
saw
a woman.”

“Yes. With you. Who is she?”

Seventy and Screwdriver looked at each other. Seventy’s posture spoke of secrets, but Screwdriver released a shuddering breath that reminded me of Sober, and I caught a whiff of his grim determination. I wanted to ask questions I knew he wouldn’t answer. Voices, nasal and angry, came from outside—parrots just beyond the papered windows, arguing about investment opportunities.

Seventy said, “When you’ve met her, you can say you met her.”

“I get it. Who is she?”

“I’m not trying to be difficult. You’ll understand when you meet her. There’s a huge difference between seeing her and meeting her,” Seventy said. “And a larger difference between meeting her and knowing her.”

“All right, so I saw her. I’ll meet her later.” I tried one more time. “Who the fuck is she?”

Yellow, who was still standing behind me, placed a hand on my shoulder. “Be kind. Avoid your normal pedantic, condescending tone. She can’t stand it.”

I was disappointed that the drinks I’d had downstairs were wearing thin, and Yellow’s comment pushed me toward surly. “You would know.”

Screwdriver said sharply, “Watch your mouth.”

Seventy raised a hand. “Enough. We’re all on the same side here.”

Any thoughts I’d had of revealing the gun to them disappeared. Either they knew I had it, in which case I’d be revealing something as obvious to them as my shoe size, or I’d be tipping my hand. Why I felt I had or needed a “hand,” I didn’t know. But I did, and I kept it hidden.

Seventy took hold of the cloth. With all the spontaneity of someone who had waited thirty-odd years to utter a line from a play, he said, “It’s time for you to see the next great piece of our puzzle.” Then he pulled off the cloth.

As I’d feared, I had to look at the Body, which had become a he again to me. He lay there, eyes half open, hands to his sides in a supplicant position, with an expression of almost willful acceptance of his fate. Practically shrugging at death. I’d witnessed supposed saints laid in tombs with less beatific expressions.

The Body’s beard resembled the Drunk’s, though more neatly trimmed. His clothes were rumpled and askew, revealing the parrot tattoo on his wrist. I looked quickly at Screwdriver’s and Seventy’s wrists to see if I could catch a sign of it there. They both somehow chose that moment to tug cuffs lower.

Yellow guided me forward so we all stood like the points on a compass. As we listened to the thunder, I glanced from Yellow, slightly hostile but also somewhat sympathetic, to Seventy, the elderly statesman of the group, to Screwdriver, who struck me as grim and threatening. I wanted to examine the Body’s face to see if he shared my imperfect profile but couldn’t make myself. “So.”

“Dipshit,” said Yellow as he took hold of the Body’s head. “So you’re looking at this.” He turned it to the side. At the base of the neck was a bullet hole—large enough for two fingers—with blue-black bruising around it.

Seventy pointed at the wound, his finger shaking at the end of a tremoring arm. “He was shot. We were shot. You will be shot.”

Yellow took hold of my shoulder. “You. You will be shot.”

I dug my hands into my jacket pockets and wrapped my right one around the too-heavy gun. It was slick under my fingers. My stomach tightened with disgust as I realized that everyone here was a liar. “Why didn’t you show me this earlier?”

Yellow straightened to our full height and said, “Because we didn’t show you until now.”

“It’s something we all remembered.” Seventy let go of the table. He vacillated between looking like the most frail and the most competent of us.

I said, “Shot in the back.”

“No.” Seventy, voice calm, hands shaking. “That’s the exit wound. Entry is under the chin.”

Screwdriver, apparently serenely capable of touching the Body as often as necessary, tilted the head so that I could see the hairs on his chin. What I noticed at first were the stray whisker clippings that rested on his collar, as if just trimmed. Screwdriver pointed to the hole lost in the beard. We all nodded.

I said, “Gun?”

“We don’t know.” Yellow shook his head. “Probably a .22.”

I knew nothing about guns. I should read up, I thought. “Do you know about guns?”

“Enough. I read up. Researched. Picked up a few things.”

“Picked up a few things about guns or picked up a few guns?”

He raised his eyes to me. “What?”

I’d said too much. “Nothing, I was just wondering. Never mind.” He certainly didn’t seem to know about the gun. In fact, he seemed rather confused. I kept my hands in my pockets, teetering between panic that I looked like I was hiding something and panic that I would end up lying dead on a dinner table in a third-floor storage room. Still leaning over the Body, I made myself look at his face. The nose had my bump. This was me. Would be me.

Screwdriver cleared his throat. From my perspective he was the three on a clock. Yellow was the nine, Seventy the twelve.

Eyes so wet they could lick me, Seventy studied me across the table. “Something’s not right here.”

I met his gaze. “What?”

“This isn’t how I remember things. I’m getting confused.”

Yellow nodded. “Me, too.”

Screwdriver, also nodding, rubbed at his temples.

Yellow looked at me. “You should have known already that he was shot.”

I rubbed the gun in my pocket. “How should I have known?” I’d never wanted to look at something as much as I wanted to look at that gun at that moment.

Seventy gripped the edge of the table for support. “This can’t fall apart. Not now.”

Screwdriver grabbed a chair from the nearest stack and set it on the floor. He helped Seventy sit. Seventy patted his arm with affection, as a father would a son. Was I really to get so old that I thought of myself as a child? I wondered. Then I remembered that the corpse on the table before me was a possible answer to my question.

Seventy took deep breaths and held his hands over his eyes. “I need a drink.”

Both Screwdriver and Yellow looked from him to me with wide eyes. Yellow gestured to my jacket. “You’re the only one with anything.”

With great reluctance I let go of the gun. I feared they would see through my pocket, as if my hand had offered it protection. I pulled the flask, newly heavy with scotch, and handed it to Yellow. He unscrewed the cap and tilted the flask toward Seventy’s nose like smelling salts, as if the odor alone would be enough. I knew it wouldn’t be.

“Go on, give it to him,” I said. It was the first time I’d told an Elder what to do, the first time one had ever listened. This felt different. The confusion and fear on their faces put me
in control. I was no longer tethered, I reminded myself. They didn’t know what I might do. Of course, neither did I.

Yellow wrapped Seventy’s old fingers around the flask and held them there until they grasped on their own. When he let go, his hands shook a little. Seventy’s eyes were closed, wet running onto his cheeks—not tears, something thicker. He put the flask to his heavy lips and tilted it back. Scotch poured into his mouth, and he choked, spit it out, coughed again. I watched him with absurd fascination. He tipped it gently this time, gulped it down, stopped, and then tipped again.

Yellow took hold of the old man’s hand, pulled the flask away. “I think that’s enough.”

Seventy gave up the flask with effort, and Yellow passed it to me. I took a sip from it. He had emptied more than half. I promised myself to go back down and fill it. Perhaps steal a bottle.

Seventy looked up at me. “The good scotch.”

“Of course.” I wiped the flask mouth and recapped it.

“You will have to hurry down to refill that. The Brats are about to run low.”

Yellow didn’t like us chatting about alcohol. He shot me daggers as he patted Seventy on the back. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Seventy shuddered. “I’ve got some bad twinning going on. A lot of history that’s severed.” He looked from Yellow to Screwdriver and back. “Things aren’t as they should be. I remember both of your perspectives, but this isn’t how this played out. It’s getting muddy here. As if we’re all untethered.”

“That’s just what he said, ‘untethered.’ ” Yellow pointing a finger at me. “When we were outside.”

“Did I?” A silly denial. It was all I had.

Yellow frowned at me. “Don’t pretend you don’t remember.” I wondered at what point I became so humorless.

Seventy ran a hand over his face. “Suffering with youth. That’s all I’ve ever done.”

“What can we do?” Fear was Yellow’s driving force. I wondered if he had some stake closer to this than even I did.

“Nothing to do.” Seventy listened to the rain on the window, eyes unfocused. I thought I heard wheels grinding deep inside his head. “We figure this out. The murder, the untethering.”

The four of us each had our own death to prevent, but each of us was too myopic to consider anyone but himself. Each of us in that room was a ball of self-centered anxiety, a nervous animal waiting for the opportunity to claw. Yellow, twitching with panic, kept himself at a distance, his arms folded defensively. “But what caused it all?”

“Well I think that’s obvious.” Screwdriver locked my gaze and then turned away. I was somehow at fault, or would be, soon, but he wasn’t blaming me. I suddenly felt I could trust Screwdriver. His anxiety was softened by a sadness. He approached this as so much business to deal with, and yet when he looked at me, it was with sympathy.

Yellow snapped at me, “What the fuck did you do?”

Seventy raised a hand. “Stop it. He doesn’t know. All he knows is what has happened, not how it’s different. It’s Nose and Savior all over again. You do know about the nose?”

I kept my hand near my pocket. “Yes. I know about the nose.”

“Good.” Seventy nodded to himself. To Yellow he said, “Now, you should take him upstairs.”

Yellow did such a comic double take that I nearly laughed. “What? I remember he doesn’t see it until—”

Seventy stopped him with another raised hand. “Don’t you see? Events are already out of our recall. Sticking to your memory doesn’t help, and keeping another piece of information from him only increases the chance that he won’t find it. We should have shown him the bullet hole downstairs. Something isn’t working, and we need to force the issue.”

Seventy’s voice was small, but both Yellow and Screwdriver lowered their heads and took it in. Screwdriver looked slightly nauseated, and I wondered if it was because he was older, that, like Seventy, he was getting more confusion of memory, more twins running through his head. We were all so much the same person in our paranoia and fear—so many identical expressions passing over our faces, our hands dipped into pockets at the same angle—that for a moment it struck me as funny.

Finally Yellow put a hand on Seventy’s shoulder. “You stay here and rest. Go downstairs when you feel better.” He didn’t need to tell anyone that he meant for Screwdriver to stay there with Seventy. To me, over his shoulder, “Come on. There’s something else you need to know.”

“And then?”

“And then you’re on your own. Things have unraveled here. We have nothing else to show you.” He marched out of the room.

Seventy gave me a smile. “You can do this. Don’t worry.”

I nodded and followed Yellow out the door.

Seventy called to me, “Keep an eye out for a gun.”

I stopped and looked back at him. Was there something
in his face that said he knew? Yellow, from the hallway, said, “What if he’s already found it?”

I watched Seventy watch me. “Have you?”

“No.”

Neither Seventy nor Screwdriver blinked.

Yellow said, “What if he’s lying?”

Seventy thought a moment, then scratched at his chin. “If he’s lying, he’d better have a damn good reason.”

Yellow returned to the doorway, stood shoulder to shoulder with me. “Do you? Have a reason?”

“If, and I’m not saying I did, but if I’d found a gun, wouldn’t it be wise to keep it to myself to be certain of where it came from? Wouldn’t it create more panic if word of it leaked out?”

Screwdriver smiled. “Actually, if I were you and I’d found a gun, I’d lie, because I wouldn’t be sure whom I could trust. No knowing who shot the Body.”

I stared at Screwdriver, waited for some wink or twitch telling me that he and I were somehow still tethered, but no sign came. My trust of him, founded on nothing, grew. Of all of us in the room, he and I thought the most alike. Yellow was the strange gap. Closer to me in age but inexplicable in his misunderstanding and lack of patience.

I was good at lying to myself. Always had been. “In any event, I haven’t found a gun.” It weighed down my jacket, probably about to rip through my pocket and thud to the floor.