Man in the Empty Suit (2 page)

In the meantime I’d browsed shop windows in many eras. I would know the suit when I saw it, I told myself. Patience—overrated, useless, relative—was not something I enjoyed. But the Suit was older than me, so I’d be him eventually. He’d been far older at one point, but I was gaining. As the subjective years passed and I realized that the gray in my hair began to match his, I grew to be more of a fatalist in my shopping. I would find the suit, I assumed. I didn’t need to put effort into the search.

Drinking helped. During a bender through the 1960s, I woke in Chicago near Soldier Field. I found a note pinned to my sleeve reminding me that the raft was on a docked barge on Lake Michigan, due to leave at noon. In my hurry to the docks, I nearly rushed past a men’s clothing store. In the window, on a headless mannequin, stood the suit. I hadn’t even needed to alter it; it fit as though it had been made for me. My turn had come. This year I would be the Suit, and I would make the Entrance. I mulled over a dozen memories of watching myself make the Entrance from my earlier perspectives—sitting around small tables in the Boltzmann ballroom drinking scotch, tequila, even—God help me, just that once—a wine spritzer, when the Suit walked in, powerful, impervious. I think the Suit may be one of the only reasons I kept returning. He promised, in a way so smart and casually expensive, that I would “make it.”

Now, on the night of the Entrance, I stood on the subway platform and wondered when to arrive. I checked my watch—my own design, eight hands spinning at various speeds to show both objective and subjective time, from years to seconds, laid upon a face that would never be the same twice. I was actually early for the gathering, which seemed strange. In my memories the Suit arrived late, made a dramatic entrance.

I wondered how I was going to kill time, at least a few hours. Despite the suit, I was exhausted and too long drinkless. I felt no different than I had prior to putting it on. Disappointing. I hesitated but went for my flask anyway. A toast to the suit. Two. I stopped there, since I remembered the Suit had not been drunk when he arrived. I would look sharp, polished, and focused on my way to the ballroom
bar. I walked slow; the liquor had made me feel better, more relaxed. I knew how these things worked; I trusted fate would deliver me at the right moment by presenting some unexpected obstacle to delay me.

Port Authority Terminal—redundant stairs, inexplicable turns, and filthy dead ends—had a tunnel entrance to the Boltzmann. Rainwater leaked through the ceiling and ran down walls, pooled at the bottoms of stairs where so much runoff had collected over the years that stalagmite stone grew black-gray on lower steps. I broke the first rule of feeling secure in the subway: Don’t look at the ceiling. I walked faster.

I reached the final turn before the entrance and paused, lurked behind girders. Shadows moved around me. Behind a garbage can. Beside a maintenance-closet door. Someone held the tattered remains of a Radio City Music Hall advertisement in front of his face as he skulked along the wall. These were other versions of myself, obviously older, as I had no memory of having hidden in those places. I made a mental note to remember to use those hideouts in my future, when I would be those paranoid, shadowy figures. Despite never seeing another soul near the hotel, I was annually embarrassed to be seen coming in, as if someone might notice the same man in an array of outmoded outfits—what amounted to a tacky historical fashion show—and wonder why his lapels were so wide or when the cape had come back in. None of me would be able to explain that.

My poster-carrying self made a break for it and charged the hotel’s entrance, shedding flecks of old glue. I took this as my opportunity and stepped out from behind the girder, hands
in pockets. I was the Suit, trying to be casual. I passed through the revolving door. The poster bearer, only slightly older than me, stood on the other side, brushing glue from his hands. On the dark granite floor lay his discarded Rockettes poster, beautiful legs kicking in a wrinkled heap. We nodded amiably at each other.

I gestured over my shoulder at the shadows behind girders and garbage cans. “Should we wait for a few more of them and enter together?”

“No, I don’t think so. We get a little more scared every year, don’t we? A little more cautious? They might be out there an hour.”

I nodded. He was dressed in a simple white shirt and a knitted sweater-vest. Unimpressive, I thought, compared to my suit. He wore a short, carefully maintained beard, one some Elders wore at various lengths, and his hair was neat and recently trimmed. I regretted not getting a trim myself, though I hadn’t yet made up my mind on growing the beard. I was still unsure of what it did for me, but apparently someday I would decide it was a good idea.

He looked me up and down. “I did love that suit.”

“Thanks. What happens to it?” I asked, knowing he wouldn’t answer. That was against the rules, too.

He half smiled. “You’d really rather not know.” He climbed the stairs into the hotel’s basement entrance. “Let’s go.”

I took one last look at the figures hiding in the shadows outside the revolving door’s thick glass, then followed his clicking soles up the stairs.

The elevator was waiting for us; it would break later in the evening. It was an old, wood-paneled box with a metal cage
pull door, and it looked more like a kitchen entrance than an elevator. In a couple hours, there would hang a sign on the door that read, in my handwriting,
Out of Order
. It was this sign that made the subway entrance so crowded. To be late meant a rain-soaked arrival through the lobby entrance.

We climbed in. He pressed the button and watched me take my flask from my pocket.

I tilted the top toward him and said, “Cheers.” He smiled and nodded. He produced no flask of his own. “Did you forget this?” I asked, shaking the suddenly-too-empty flask to hear its contents slosh. It had been a gift to myself, liberated off the body of a Union soldier at Gettysburg.

“No, I didn’t forget it. Just didn’t bring it.”

“Have a hit off mine, then.” Mine was his. Sharing it was no different from taking two drinks. I didn’t even mind the backwash. Just spit that my mouth hadn’t made yet.

“No thanks. Believe it or not, I’m trying to quit.”

I laughed and took a swig. “Good luck with that.” He knew as well as I what some of our older selves were like. The one that was the worst—the Drunk—made such a spectacle of himself that he drew attention away from the simpler drunks, the ones who merely spilled and swore as they struggled with their zippers in the bathroom. Without the Drunk around, any of them might have looked up at the barrel’s bottom. A chill ran through me as I realized that after my evening as the Suit, all I had to look forward to was thrashing about as the Drunk.

The elevator rattled as it rose. We passed the lobby, then the second floor. “Damn, what’s happened?” I reached out and pressed the L button hard. “Did you hit the right button?”

He stood at the back of the elevator, behind me. His voice was quiet as he said, “I thought I did.”

The hand of the dial over the door crawled clockwise past floor after decrepit floor. The Boltzmann had been old when people still walked the streets of the city, and after its abandonment it had suffered a slow degradation. The elevator buttons didn’t illuminate, and to my left was a pale section of paneling where a conductor’s coat had brushed for so many years that it left the wood polished and faded.

I said, “Wonder where we’re headed.”

“Only so many choices.”

The uneven ride was pierced by irregular cable twangs and metal clangs. The sound was exciting, unnerving. My hours and days were usually filled with nothing but the hum and throb of the raft’s quiet engine. Even the raucous music of a possible plummet was a nice change. As we reached the twenty-third and last floor, there were several violent shudders. I looked at my companion. He wore the calm smile of foreknowledge.

I pointed a finger at him, uncapped my flask again, and took a drink. “You could have warned me that we’d miss our floor.”

“Would it have changed anything if I had? We still needed to get into the elevator. The fact that I know how the ride turns out, and the fact that you’re frightened, doesn’t remove that need.”

“Awful self-centered of you.”

“And you.” He gave me the smug grin that I knew so well. It was a gift I hated to receive but gave so often.

At last the elevator shook to a stop. On the other side of the
door’s dark window, a few flashes of lightning streaked across a bare wall. I looked up at the dial. “We’re at the penthouse.”

“Let’s have our look.”

Thunder shook the building. “We get out?” One convention rule I never broke was number seven: Stay below the third floor.

“We do.” He pulled back the gate and stepped into a dark hallway. He didn’t wait for me, and the elevator door swung shut behind him, leaving me alone.

I looked at my watch. Still time to kill before my entrance to the ballroom. Following Sober into the suite was probably what delayed me, I thought. More thunder shook the elevator. I dreaded seeing the suite. None of the younger versions of myself who had visited the hotel over the years had ventured above the decayed building’s second floor. There were any number of reasons not to go. The roof obviously leaked, floors were rotten, and walls and ceilings gave way without warning. Sprawling, rust-colored maps had drawn themselves on the ceiling in the entrance, the lobby, the halls. Part of the third floor ran with water an inch deep, which was why I’d made the rule prohibiting further exploration. It was dangerous.

I opened the door and followed him.

The penthouse, dark except for lightning, was littered with ghostlike shapes of furniture in sheets. I was surprised by the lack of damage to the room. My older self watched rain pelt the city, his arms crossed, by himself even though I stood behind him, and I wondered if it had really been so important that I come here with him. The moment seemed his alone. I wondered what he might be thinking. In a flash of lightning,
I spotted a mark on Sober’s wrist, a tattoo. Another flash confirmed what I worried it was: a parrot, wings stretched in flight.

I had no plans to deface my body with a picture of a parrot—rats in drag. “Why do I do that?”

His eyes fell to his own wrist, and a sadness I could almost smell rolled off him. “You’ll know the moment you decide to do it yourself.” He looked up at me, sympathy in his eyes. It was worse than sympathy. It was pity. Pity for my ignorance. I felt a shameful burst of hatred for the superior position he held by having already been me, for his arrogance in pretending he’d victoriously claimed the high ground, for his assumption that aging is earning.

Sometimes the urge to strike myself was almost too much. I shook my head and pulled out my flask. I would refill it upon my dramatic entrance.

We haunted the penthouse for a few silent minutes, him watching the horizon, me pulling back sheets to reveal cheap furniture dolled up to look expensive.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“Enjoying the view, I think,” he said. “We might be a few minutes late, but we already know what sorts of events to expect, right?” He looked at my suit. “You must be ready for the Big Entrance.”

There was no denying it to him. I blushed in the dark.

“Don’t worry. You still make it. I’m probably the reason you make it later than you thought you would.”

“Oh, of course.” I feigned comfort. “I wondered what would occupy me for … what? Another hour?” I watched lights twinkle through the drops of rain on the window.
They quivered in the wind. All identical but separate, able to coalesce at an instant of contact. I was reminded of my separate selves downstairs.

A crash of thunder hit especially close, and Sober shifted in the dark, turned away from me. “You’ll excuse me for a moment. That’s my cue to explore the other rooms.”

As he disappeared into the dark, I watched neighborhood buildings flash in and out of sight. The city was an empty cemetery, markers over unoccupied graves. Was I really too lazy to make more trips through the recent past to see what had caused New York’s abandonment? Was I really so self-centered that I could handle only this one night? I’d seen this same lightning storm many times, but never from this height. I took a deep breath, suddenly looked forward to revisiting this moment when I became Sober, and before I exhaled, I felt guilt at having despised him for simply being older.

Thunderous echoes chased one another between the buildings. Beneath them chattered a mechanical rattle. I turned my head to listen. When I realized that the rattle came from behind me, not outside, it was too late. The elevator had descended.

Back to the elevator, tripping on furniture in the dark. Unseen glass smashed against the floor, and I crunched shards under my heels. I stumbled through the dark hallway, felt along the walls until I found the door to the missing elevator. I held on to it, suddenly needing the support, and listened to the grinding descent. I felt angry. Worse, I felt mocked. To be abandoned, in some sort of joke. I’d never played practical jokes on myself before. There was no point. I played a joke either on a Youngster, making myself a past victim, or
on an Elder, which was impossible because I could not trap memory.

As I wondered at Sober’s reasons, the elevator cables sang. Gears slowed, then stopped. I pressed my face to the elevator window and saw the car lights three floors below me. Above me, in the elevator’s main motor, rose a whine. Cables slipped, but the elevator stuck. Rather than stop, the motor groaned. The car’s lights flickered. An alarm sounded somewhere above me, a jarring bell. It started, stopped, then sounded again briefly, as if stuttering.

I called down to myself. “Hello?” There was no answer. My anger rose. “Hope you’re happy now.” No reason to leave me here, but at least I wasn’t trapped in the car with him. It occurred to me that my future self might have left me here so we wouldn’t both be stuck in the elevator. He might, in fact, have been saving the Entrance. But why not tell me this would happen? Elders loved keeping secrets. One more sign of the Elders’ superiority issues. I dismissed the fact that I would eventually inhabit those issues. Every single one.