Man in the Empty Suit (29 page)

Middle Brat held out the folded note to the Suit. It dripped inky whiskey. “Is this yours?”

The Suit took it and read the message. “No,” he said. He set it afloat in a puddle of liquor.

I reached for it, trying to fail at acting casual. The Drunk was awkward before, he’d be awkward now. “Must be mine.” I pocketed it.

Events were lining up too well. Seventy escorted Lily to the table beyond the bar. He pointedly did not look at either the Suit or me. I laughed at the list of things he must have to remember, all the details of his times here that he must recreate. Then I remembered my own list, details I had to undo. I had multiple guns. I had to get rid of them, hide them somewhere in an upstairs room. I left the bar knowing that the Suit wouldn’t notice or care.

I left the ballroom and spotted a group of familiar faces in the crowd of me. The Pilaf Brothers. My nose was about to not be broken. At a spot where I could witness the nonchange of my face structure, I leaned against the wall, then squatted down against it. Others walked around me with only a moment’s glance. The line at the bathroom grew by one when Savior joined. The Pilaf Brothers muttered and munched on rice. They stared in my direction conspicuously. This was all a plan, I thought. One placed his plate on the floor and looked back at me with a grim smile. I prepared for the event, the mix of trip and recovery that demonstrated untethering, but at that moment a pair of legs stepped in front of me. It was Yellow.

“Can we talk?” His face flickered with panic.

I still didn’t like him and took some consolation in the fact that we were untethered. “I suppose.”

“You know what’s happening here. You realize what you have to do.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

He was flushed, sweating heavily in his yellow sweater.

“You look hot. Take off the sweater.”

“Fuck the sweater.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me from my squat, tried to yank me down the hall. I pulled back, peered over his shoulder. There I was, on my way to not breaking my nose.

I whispered, “What the fuck’s your problem?”

Yellow leaned in so that only I could hear him. I could smell whiskey on his breath. Lots of it. I was impressed that it didn’t show more. He didn’t stagger, nor did his words slur when he said, “You were supposed to plant the fucking gun.”

He looked me in the eye, blinking rapidly. I was locked in place. My arm felt cold in his grip. “What do you know about the gun?”

“You’re monkeying around with my timeline. Fuck things up and we lose what little control we have. Stick to what you remember. Do what should happen.”

“Where did you move my raft?”

His teeth bared. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

We appraised each other for a moment before Screwdriver appeared.

Screwdriver grabbed Yellow’s arm and twisted it to force him to release me. He shrugged at me, almost like an apology, then pulled Yellow close and said something into his ear. Screwdriver cautiously patted at my jacket and found the
unused revolver, yanked it free of my waistband, and handed it to Yellow who nodded several times and moved off through the crowd.

Screwdriver said to me, “Keep doing what you’re doing. We have no doubt you’ll figure this out.”

“The gun is no good,” I said. “It doesn’t have any bullets.”

“No, I collected them off the lobby floor. I already put them under the table.”

I tried to breathe but couldn’t. So I was tethered to Screwdriver? He knew where to find them? “Why would you do that?”

As if to answer my question, he raised his head and yelled out to no one and everyone, an affected slur mushing the words, “I told you I could barely remember it.” After, he stepped away, as if embarrassed, eyes on me, all but pointing. I looked to the restroom doors and saw Savior, Nose, and the Suit begin their swirl of nasal investigation. It was that moment that the untethering began. It was in that moment that I’d broken free and trouble had leaked in. That moment was the reason I was going to die in a couple hours. Screwdriver had slipped off. I turned to walk away from the stares.

Young eyes followed me through the hall, but once I had reached the lobby, only the Elders watched me. In the ballroom I found Seventy walking toward the table Lily sat at, a drink in both hands, cane hanging over his arm near a crooked elbow. He sat, and they smiled at each other. I stopped. I couldn’t recall when I’d last spoken to Lily. I was jealous of his being with her. Details of the room fell away, sounds muffled. I reached out to tap Seventy’s shoulder.

He turned and looked up at me with a grin. “Yes? How are things going?”

“What are you doing?”

“You’re drunk, and you smell like the saloon spittoon.”

I leaned over, my eyes on Lily, waiting for her to break her pleasant visitor smile and reveal she knew me. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe we all looked alike to her. “I’m not drunk. I’m trying to stop this thing from happening, but you’re actively working toward it. And you lied about what’s going on.”

Seventy’s smile faltered. “What do you mean?”

“How did Screwdriver know what to yell? I thought you all were untethered.”

Seventy screwed up his face. “We are, but that doesn’t change some facts. For example, I should think it would be clear that he knew what to yell because he was always the one to yell it. Not you.”

Questions about the raft floated in my head, but somehow I kept my mouth shut. Was it possible he didn’t know that Screwdriver knew something only I knew?

I looked from him to Lily, whose smile was gone. She knew who I was. I reached out and touched her hand, the same one held by Seventy. For a few moments, we made a sandwich of her fingers, Seventy and I. She didn’t pull away, but her muscles tensed. I said, “You’re on the wrong side of this. You should get out now.”

She shook her head. “This is my place. I remember it this way.”

I laughed. “Have you remembered how this ends?” When she wouldn’t respond, I said, “Shit. Just go out that door. Please.”

Now she did pull her hand away. “I know what I’m doing.”

To Seventy I said, “You’re not as in control of this as you imagine.”

No smile. They were all for the Suit, apparently. “Who among us is.” Not a question.

I reached into my pocket and found the two revolvers I still had. I stood and turned, and my eyes fell on the Inventor. He was leaning back in his chair with a group of Youngsters, who watched the Suit skulk across the room to the bar again, their envy and impatience obvious. They thought him everything they longed to be, even as they recognized that from him it was all downhill to me. I marched across the room, and behind me I heard Lily tell Seventy, “Here’s where he does something stupid.”

I stood across from the Inventor until he looked up. Everyone at the table had youth’s arrogance, each assuming their own brilliance beyond their years. The Inventor was the youngest, but the others treated him with deference, since without him they wouldn’t be there. They hadn’t yet remembered that his arrogance was rooted in fear and self-loathing, hadn’t yet seen through their own dark cores to that hard truth. I hated and marveled at them.

When the Inventor finally looked up at me, he said, “How will I get that scar?” His companions laughed. Of course there could be no answer, if I followed the rules. It had been my habit to test this rule and laugh at the Elders’ reaction.

I reached up and found the line on my temple, which he’d delivered to me six months earlier, which he would deliver to the Suit later that night. “Come with me and I’ll tell you.”

The table fell silent. He said, “Seriously? What about the fourth rule?”

“Fuck the rules.”

The Youngsters looked at the Inventor, and he looked at me. I was unorthodox, feared and exciting. They all exchanged glances. Those older than the Inventor understood that this hadn’t happened previously. They weren’t as drunk as the Bar Brats, and they leaned in to whisper with one another about my deviation from the understood timeline. A few quivering fingers combed figures in the water rings on the table. I felt a little dizzy. Although I was already untethered from them, I realized with some flips of my stomach that I had just untethered them from one another, and not in a minor way. My conspiracy cut them loose. I could almost see each of them—they looked at one another as at strangers—with the streams of their thoughts and fears pouring out ahead of them, in similar currents but each one unique, slightly apart, arrogant, and paranoid enough to think himself the prime mover, the source of the current. I recognized that need, though I no longer felt it myself.

The Inventor lacked their frames of reference. Untethered but unaware, he said, “Okay.” His voice cracked, and I realized, perhaps again, perhaps for the first time, how young he was, barely out of rude dreams. He was a baby. I looked at his face, my own, and wondered who he was. I called on a child to vanquish men.

To the others at the table, I said, “Stay close. He’ll be back, and he’ll need you. God help him, you’re the only friends he has.” The others, slightly older than the Inventor, seemed even more naïve. I wondered at myself then. Was I either better or worse off than any of them?

I steered the Inventor around the corner toward the hallway
full of our future and past chatter, forced passage, belches, farts, rude jokes, odors, inhibitions, fears, taunts, and terrors. I leaned in close to his ear and whispered. “There’s something going on.”

His eyes were large, his lips lifted in a conspirator’s smile. “What?”

“Elders,” I said.

The smile dropped. “You’re an Elder.”

My eyes glazed, and I lost focus for a moment.
What am I doing?
I thought. “You realize that’s all relative. Next year you’ll be your own Elder.”

“I guess.”

“Elders—
my
Elders, if that’s how you have to think of it—are up to something. There’s a woman—”

“Someone brought a woman?”

I smelled hormones. “Forget the woman. She’s not important. What’s important is who she’s with. An Elder, the eldest of us. Old man. Tweed suit. He walks with a cane.”

“And a woman.”

I took hold of his arm and squeezed. “She’s not the key here. The old man is. You understand. Tell me yes.” I tightened my grip.

He winced. “Yes.”

“She’s just a flag waving you to him. You find him, when he’s alone, not with her, and you take him to someplace upstairs.”

His eyes darkened as he tried to imagine an upstairs that hadn’t fallen downstairs.

I said, “Trust me. There are places. Fourth floor you’ll find lots of empty rooms. Take him to one and keep him there. Have some of the others help you if you have to. Nothing
too harsh. He’s an old man. He’s who you will be. Treat him as you would want to be treated.” I instantly regretted those words. I knew it meant poor treatment at best.

“What if he won’t come?”

“Convince him. You started this whole show. He’ll listen to you. He’s just you, after all.”

“He’ll know I’m lying. He’ll remember.”

“He won’t. You’re not on the same timeline. Part of the reason he’s up to something.”

He blinked rapidly in confusion, and I realized I look ridiculous when confused. “What?” he said. “What’s he doing that’s so—”

“Just trust me, right? Now remember: only him. Not the woman. No one else. Anyone asks where he is or why you took him, no answer. Keep him there until dawn.” I released my grip. The boy would do as I asked. “Are we agreed?”

“Yes, all right. But at the end you tell me what all this was about.”

“At the end, if you can do this, I’ll tell you everything.” Because if he could, it wouldn’t matter any longer if he knew.

The Inventor skulked into the ballroom to gather his future conspirators. If only they took Seventy upstairs and kept him there, this plot might fall apart. If the plot fell apart, perhaps Lily would survive.

In the alley at the hotel’s back entrance, Phil’s building, dark windows yawning, stood over me. Dirty rain stung my face. I felt I might never be dry again. Steel drums half filled with refuse lined the wall. I pulled out the gun I’d taken from the Drunk, the one responsible for shooting Lily. I wrapped the gun in some newspaper and buried it under the garbage
in one can. I pictured the bullets skidding across the tile floor of the neighboring building’s lobby. I wished I’d kept them, if only so Screwdriver hadn’t gotten them. I’d keep the final gun as a warning to others. If I needed to wave a useless weapon, I would. Yellow would have planted the gun by now. I’d need to get under the table before the Suit. Efforts to maintain events was idiocy. Seventy and Screwdriver were maintenance. I would be avoidance.

I entered the lobby for the third time, dripped on the carpet, smiled grandly at Elders who muttered about me under their breath.

“I’m gonna be sick,” I whispered with gusto into the crowd, and found an easy path to the buffet table. For a moment I feared that the gun would be gone, that the evening was slipping away too fast. As I knelt down, I landed in the arms of Yellow and another Elder I’d not seen yet.

Yellow took a tight grip, his fingers squishing filthy rainwater from my jacket. “Poor old boy,” he muttered, eyes on the rivulets running down my temples. “Under the weather?”

They pulled me off my feet and took hold of my arms, Yellow’s fingers jabbed deep in my armpit. I heard a pop in my back as they twisted, and I grunted in pain. They moved us quickly through the halls toward the restrooms. The crowds of Youngsters were gone, and Elders watched them drag me through halls despite my calls for help. Yelling was unnecessary and my calls perfunctory. The fact that they all watched and did nothing meant they never would.

“Help,” I said to one, voice calm despite my pain. “I think I’m being kidnapped.” He turned away, and Yellow dug his fingers deeper. “Careful,” I warned. “We’re ticklish.”

In the restroom an empty stall waited, and we entered as a trio. Stall door slammed, footsteps as others left, and the bathroom door clicked shut. Accomplice let go, but Yellow threw me down. I fell forward hard against the toilet, striking my side, losing my breath. When I looked back at Yellow and his Accomplice, they glowered at me. I tried to stand. Yellow shoved me against the toilet, and I sat down.