The Empire of the Dead (14 page)

One of the most moving artifacts recovered at Pompeii, he remembered, was a stone fragment with the impress of a young woman's breast in it.

A man moved to tears by ghostly breasts.

A girl walked through the park, singing “Across the Universe.”

Was it silly or noble to take personal responsibility for the world's history?

Surely, it was dangerous to feel so much inner stimulation. But the excitement made him happy. His good health left him reeling. Overjoyed. He sat as still as he could, a conserver of energy—a quiet, elegant form. Next to him, the inanimate women enjoyed one another's bodies.

For a while longer Bern sat, content and unmoving, with stone.

The building seemed to shudder with the sigh of the opening door, and a dusting of snow blew into the lobby. Bern stepped inside with the kitten in his arms.

“Oh no,” said Ryszard, the super. He was standing by the elevator doing nothing Bern could see.

“You didn't witness this,” Bern said. “It won't concern you.”

“No?” Ryszard scratched his belly. “We'll
all
be cat watchers. Day and night. She'll have us on our hands and knees.”

“She's a lonely old woman.”

“I've swept this floor for eighteen years. Loneliness? It's like utility bills. Slip slip slip. In your mailbox. Every day.”

The kitten, golden, gray, purred against Bern's chest.

On the third floor, listing precariously inside the doorway of her apartment, Mrs. Mehl wept. Bern knew she'd never gotten over the loss of her previous cat.

“I thought you'd like the company,” he said. He'd always wanted to do more for her than help her upstairs, now and then, with her grocery sacks. She wore a wool nightgown, now, exposing her veiny ankles. Her skin smelled of Vaseline. She held out her arms and the kitten nuzzled her neck.

“What do you call her? Him?” she said.

“Him, I think. Whatever you want.”

“No. You. Please.”

Names imprinted on Bern during his Torah studies back in Texas came to mind. Childhood lessons with the rabbi. Ishmael, whose
moniker means
Heard by God
. Isaac,
He Who Laughs
. And who does the Almighty anoint as the Chosen One? The joker. Go figure.

“How about Jacob?” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Bern.”

“I'll run out and get you some fresh cat food, okay?”

What he didn't tell her was that the doorman on East Fifty-fourth who'd been offering, all week, free kittens from his building's overrun basement had found Jacob this morning pawing six of his brothers and sisters. They lay asphyxiated, curled in a heap near a leaking gas pipe. Through tears, the doorman said, “Well,
this
little fellow's a survivor. Maybe I should keep him. What happens to him if your old woman keels over tomorrow? She's pretty frail, you say?”

“I'll bring him back to you,” Bern said.

The man nodded and bagged up the others. “You see something like this,” he said, “and you don't know whether you're meant to hold on to the tragedy part or the miracle part.”

When Bern returned to Mrs. Mehl's apartment with the cat food, he found the kitten, eyes closed and purring, in her lap. “I'll just set this over here,” he said, and left the bag on the kitchen floor. The austerity of her place always startled him. The first time he'd carried her groceries up from the lobby, he'd expected Miss Havisham: Old World knickknacks, newspapers and spider webs in the corners. Instead, the space was mostly bare of furniture. A simple hutch displaying blue willow china. Two Eames chairs at a square oak table. A love seat with green and blue embroidered cushions placed neatly on each arm. The décor bespoke a straightforward, elegant life. It struck Bern as admirable.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Mehl.

“Can I do anything else for you this evening?”

“You can pour me a brandy,” she said. “And have some yourself.” She pointed. Bern located the bottle and two small glasses. “Herbert, my husband, got me in the habit years ago,” she said. “One
small shot each night.” He drove a bus for a living, she said, until the morning his heart signaled it had done all the work it was going to do. “I miss him every day,” she confessed, taking a spot on the love seat. Bern sat in one of the chairs.

“And you?” she asked. “I always see you by yourself.”

“Long divorced,” Bern said. “But solitude isn't so bad.”

“I suppose not. Though you're young yet, from where I'm perched. Getting old … loneliness isn't the worst of it. I have happy memories. The worst is being useless. Knowing the world has passed you by with its brand new gadgets and manners. I can't tell you the number of things I don't know how to do anymore because the packaging has changed or the mechanisms or the requirements or—ach!” She raised her glass to Bern. “I'm less patient than I used to be because I don't understand how people can be so shallow. I don't like this in myself. It's condescending of me, and I realize it's because young people are simply inexperienced, and me—I've been through so much, I'm barnacled over and can barely move. But still.” She shook her head. “Simple things, like reading the book review. Do you know, last Sunday, in the
Times
, one reviewer said of a book's author, ‘He seems the kind of man I'd like to have a beer with,' as if this were a serious critical judgment, a sound way of evaluating a book's worth. No. I don't understand the world anymore.”

She had confused several issues, Bern thought, but she was magnificent in her indignant melancholy. And her brandy tasted fine.

“After Herbert passed, my nephew, Bob, took care of me and tried to keep me up to date. Then drink swept
him
away.”

“I'm very sorry.”

“A fine painter, Bob. Abstract stuff. Not my cup of tea, but even
I
could see the boy had talent, and everybody who knew anything about those fellows—Pollock, Rothko, the lot of them—drinkers, too, you know—said Bob was just as good as they were. Did he care? Oh no. No, no, no. Wouldn't promote himself. Just wanted to paint, he said. The purity of the artist. Pah!”

“Is his work available?” Bern asked to be polite.

“Scattered from here to Kingdom Come. All over Manhattan, in peoples' apartments, warehouses …”

“And no one's tried to collect it?” He was getting tired now.

“Are you kidding?” said Mrs. Mehl. “He never kept track of anything. If I had the strength I'd try to find them. I'm sure, if his work was presented to a gallery, those rich old poofters in their penthouses would give him his due. Oh well. Too late now.”

“Bob, you say?”

“Bob Mehl. Could have made something of himself, believe you me. Instead, he left me all alone here with my cat. And then my cat ran away.”

She stroked Jacob, who stretched his short hind legs.

“There are a lot of galleries here in Chelsea. I'll ask around,” Bern promised.

A little civility at the end of the day. It did wonders.

Pipes howled inside the walls as they usually did when someone turned on a steaming shower in a nearby apartment. The building was ancient, crotchety, full of groans against the naked weight of its occupants.

Architecture, Bern thought. Did it ever
really
comfort anyone?

Mrs. Mehl leaned forward to breathe the kitten's fur. Bern washed out his glass. Gently, he pressed the old woman's hands. He said, “Have a very pleasant evening, Mrs. Mehl.”

“You, too, Mr. Bern.”

The following morning, in his Eighth Street office, Bern sharpened pencils, preparing to make preliminary sketches for a small brownstone renovation. A new task, however humble, was always a joy. What was it Cezanne said?
With an apple, I will astonish all of Paris
.

Raymond Davis, one of his colleagues, about Bern's age—maybe a bit closer to sixty—poked his head in the doorway. “That's it,” he said. “Finito.”

“Raymond?”

“They laid me off.”

“Oh no.”
Restructuring
: a gloomy refrain in the hallways lately, as the firm brought more youngsters into the fold and enticed or forced retirements at the other end of the scale. Bern figured his time was coming soon.

“What do you say, Wally? An early lunch? Join me in a valedictory shot of tequila?”

“Well—”

“What the hell, eh? For old times' sake?”

Since he'd had a malignant tumor removed from his right lung two years ago, Davis finished every spoken sentence with an unspoken
Tomorrow we die
.

“Haven't I been your pal?” he asked Bern now.

“Yes you have, Raymond.”

Davis said he had to make a stop at the Municipal Archives to check some lot numbers. One last job. “From there, we can walk to Chinatown.”

“Chinese tequila?” Bern asked.

“Let me tell you, you haven't lived till you've imbibed Mandarin firewater.”

Thirty minutes later, Bern stood with Davis in the security line inside the municipal building downtown. The female guard who inspected their IDs and took their pictures, a pretty black woman with long dreadlocks and a smile promising naughtiness, flirted with the male guard who oversaw the metal detector, a tall white man with a gut the size of a housecat. Amid their horseplay, the woman asked Davis and Bern, “What's your business?” Her boredom was as palpable as the Lysol sting rising in waves from the clean marble floors.

Bern stepped through the metal detector trouble free. Not Davis. No matter how many times he emptied his pockets of change, paper clips, and pens, he set off the alarm. The technology knew: something is wrong with this man. The guard ran a wand over his arms and legs and let him past.

Inside the archives, a bald man in a bland uniform barked at
people lining up for birth, death, and marriage records. While Davis leafed through books, Bern stood by a grimy window, dispirited.

“
No tenemos
,” the bald man snapped at a confused Hispanic woman. She held a slip of paper covered with names and dates. Probably the only links to her past. “You understand me, lady? Go home.”

Davis scribbled the information he needed into a notebook and motioned he was ready to leave.

At the intersection of Park Row, Worth, and Mott, one of the city's most guarded spots, ringed with traffic barriers and armed officers, the New York Ironworks advertised “50% Off All Rifles and Pistols.”

From discussions of permit requests at the firm, Bern knew restaurant owners were trying to add extra outdoor seating in Chinatown—a push by the city for greater economic stimulus. In genteel neighborhoods, this could be an enhancement. Here, it blocked not only walkers but also deliverymen and cargo loaders. Add to this extra trash bins and the bollard posts erected after 9/11, and you had, Bern thought, an ambulatory crisis.

Davis led him to a modest shop beneath the Manhattan Bridge next to plywood stalls hawking international calling cards and bus tickets. In the shop's back room, accessed through a thin curtain Bern wouldn't have noticed on his own, cigarette packs lined the walls. Shuanxshi, Yes, Seven Wolves, Marlboro. “Knockoffs,” Davis said. “Imported illegally. Cheapest smokes in the city.” He bartered with an acne-faced Asian boy over a box of faux Marlboros. Bern wondered how he had discovered this place; Davis had become increasingly reckless after his encounter with the scalpel.

They found a dark bar beneath street level, down sloping concrete steps: forty-year-old American black-light posters (Bern recalled them from his adolescence—peace doves, Adam and Eve naked on a mountaintop), leafy incense. Davis ordered two shots of tequila and lit a cigarette.

“Raymond, should you be smoking?” Bern said.

“You going to be a scold, Wally? Is
that
why you're all alone?”

“Sorry.”

“What the hell, you know? Who cares?”

“How
is
your health?”

“Don't know. Feel like shit most of the time. What else is new?”

“What are you going to do?” Bern said.

“Beats me.” Davis raised his glass. Bern toasted him. “Eighteen years. And what? One day you're here, next day
poof
. Ah well. I should never have gotten into this racket in the first place. I blame my dad.”

“Was he an architect?”

“Ham radio operator. Back in Indiana. He planted an enormous steel tower in our front yard so he could yak at Sweden. Or Australia. Damn thing threw a huge shadow on my bedroom wall. I was afraid it would topple, some night, in a thunderstorm and crush me. I think I've always longed for a safe space.”

The tequila numbed Bern's lips. He felt his mouth hover an inch or two from his face above the paper placemat with its cryptic Chinese horoscopes.

“Dad thought
talk
was a nuclear deterrent,” Davis said. “Make enough friends worldwide, we'll all be okay.” He threw back his drink. “What a nut. One more?”

“No,” Bern said. “I really should—”

“Right.
You've
still got a job.”

“Low blow, Raymond. So do you, technically. Unless you want
me
to take those numbers in.”

“Sorry, Wally.”

“It's all right. Shall we?”

“I'm going to stay for another.”

“You're sure?”

Davis grinned like a Halloween skull. Bern laid two bills on the table. “Okay. On me,” he said.

“Wally. You trying to belittle me?”

A crazy impulse—the alcohol and the incense: Bern grabbed the back of Davis's neck and kissed the top of his head. “Take care of yourself, Raymond.”

A walk to clear his mind, a chocolate shop for an espresso and a cherry truffle, a CD store (the only one remaining in this neighborhood). Some late-night music: Ahmad Jamal, Abdullah Ibrahim. And
this
nifty little item: Jordi Savall. Medieval ballads. Dreams of sacred order.