Man in the Empty Suit (30 page)

“You thought I wouldn’t watch for you?” Yellow held a fist in my face. If the sweater were any less dapper, he might have been threatening. “Quit getting in the way. Do as you’re supposed to.”

My side was killing me, and I worked to force a breath into my lungs. “What?”

Accomplice nudged Yellow. “Is he serious? Shouldn’t he have been upstairs by now?”

Yellow shook his head. “The Suit goes upstairs soon. This one disappears for a while. That’s what we’re trying to prevent.” He leaned in on me. “Look. We’re all on the wrong side of this death, and it’s got to be straightened out.”

Now I did feel sick. “Why?”

“The shooting. Because of the shooting.”

“I’m working on it.”

“No you’re not. The Suit is. You’re the shooter.”

I looked at them both. I shifted, and we all heard my gun knock against the toilet-paper dispenser. I said, “I’m the shooter?” Did he mean I’d shot the Drunk or that I would shoot Lily? Which was more important to him?

Accomplice touched my shoulder. “Look, trust us. This all works out.”

Yellow shook a fist at Accomplice. “The hell it will. He keeps
getting in the way. I shouldn’t have had to put the gun under the table.”

“You know that everything will work out.”

The bathroom door squeaked.

Both Yellow and Accomplice put a finger to their lips. Yellow called over the stall door, “We’re almost done in here. Two more minutes.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

They stared at me, and Yellow said, “It’s him.”

Accomplice nodded. “I’m really sorry I can’t be of more help.” Both Yellow and I looked at him. “All I want is to get on the right side of the shooting.”

Yellow said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

The end of a screwdriver appeared in the gap between stall door and frame and flipped up the latch. The stall door opened, and Screwdriver grabbed Yellow by the collar and yanked him out. Accomplice put his hands up and smiled at me. “Good luck. You’re doing fine.”

Accomplice turned, and I leaned around him to see Screwdriver punch Yellow in the jaw. Yellow fell into the gap between two sinks and slid to the floor. Blood on his chin, splattered on tile; he moaned. Accomplice kept his hands in the air and stepped out of the stall past Screwdriver. To Yellow he said, “Again, sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

Screwdriver pointed at the door. Accomplice left.

Screwdriver joined me in the stall, shut the door, and looked down at me. “How you doing?”

I sat on the toilet and considered the question. My side was feeling better but still ached.

“That should feel better soon. It’ll look worse than it feels.”

I lifted my jacket and shirt. The skin was already turning a deep purple.

“You’ll be fine.” He didn’t wait for me to respond. “You get the mood. There’s a general—”

“Impatience.”

“Impatience. Yes. Give me the gun.”

His hand hung before me, empty. I said, “Why move my raft?”

“I didn’t.” His smile said he knew more. He wouldn’t say what. “I’ve got to make sure you’re ready for what comes next. Give me the gun.”

Gun lifted from my pocket, I handed it to him. As I did so, his eyes locked on something. At first I thought it was the gun, but as I drew my hand away, he reached out and grabbed my wrist. He pulled the sleeve back and turned my hand over, stared at the tattoo I’d gotten from Lily.

“Is there a problem?” I could see the same tattoo on his arm, just as I’d seen it on the Body, just as I imagined Seventy had it and Yellow and everyone in between.

Screwdriver’s eyes locked on mine. “He said you were tethered.”

“Who?”

“The old man.” I imagined he meant Seventy. “He said you and I were tethered.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Screwdriver turned his own wrist so that it was parallel to mine. We stood beside each other, arm resting against arm, each of us looking down at our tattoos.

Our parrots faced in opposite directions. If our hands were north, then my parrot flew west, his east.

Screwdriver, voice shaking, “He said you weren’t tethered to the Body, but you are. What does that mean?”

“You and I
aren’t
tethered.”

“What does
that
mean?”

I said nothing. He pulled back and stepped partway out of the stall. I could see his mind trying to realign around this new information. Long moments of listening to water drip in from leaks behind the sinks, the toilets, in the wall. “What has he been telling you?” I asked at last.

He watched dirt stains on the floor, Yellow’s blood drying on the tile, our face in the mirror. “Nothing. Nothing. It’s too late. I’ve got to stick to the plan.”

“I’ve learned that our planning doesn’t account for shit.”

He laughed and looked back at me. “It’s all I’ve got.”

“If you’re finding that things are moving off the track, you can make your own choices. You don’t have to listen to the old man. We can still change things.”

He continued to hold my gun in his hand, bounced its weight up and down, looked at his own tattoo. He shook his head, an internal debate I was losing. “No. No, there’s too much to be done for you to go around fucking everything up. This will still work out. You’re doing fine. And I’m sorry.”

“For?”

He swung his fist, gun handle out, in one smooth upward arc, struck me once on my right temple, and I was out.

I REMEMBER BEING
in line behind the Pilaf Brothers. I remember seeing the way they suspiciously glanced at one another, how fixated they were on an Elder I couldn’t see from where I stood. I remember the plates on the floor and the ugly pattern of the rug, the worn spots where jute backing was black as soot, the sounds of chanting through the bathroom door. I remember thinking that when the one who would break his nose would leave the bathroom, he’d trip on those plates, and how simple it would be to fix it, and I remember thinking that not one Elder, not a single one, ever offered him any patience or thoughts or help, not because it was the right thing, and not because it followed a rule, but because doing so had been easier than facing the truth: that our brilliance was a failure. Our failure was in not trying. I remember hating every Elder and thinking,
to hell with the rule
.

I remember moving the plate aside, if only to spare myself that sliver of suffering.

I WOKE ON
the bathroom floor, my head pressed against the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl. There was an oozing gash across my temple, and a dull throb rolled down my head and neck. Overhead, the lights rose and fell with my breath. After a minute I found arms and legs, sat up, then stood. The bathroom empty, Yellow’s blood dried under the sinks. I checked myself in the mirror. I was filthy, still damp, and now mottled with bathroom-floor grime. My pocket was heavy with familiarity. With a sinking feeling, I took the pistol out of my pocket and looked at it carefully. It was loaded with one bullet. Screwdriver’s commitment to follow the set path. I could follow that path, too, but in my own way.

I returned to the stall, emptied the bullets, and dropped them in the toilet. I flushed, but they just spun at the bottom of the bowl. Another flush and again they refused to go down. I took long strips of toilet paper and wadded them into
balls and dropped them into the bowl, hoping some traction would force them down. Instead the toilet plugged and overflowed, rusty water spilling over onto the tiles. I stood above the toilet, watching the water rise, trying to think clearly. Then I closed and latched the stall door and lay down in the cold puddle to crawl out from underneath the door, sloshing water across the floor with my belly. When I stood, dripping, I realized that not only had I locked the bullets in the stall, I’d left the gun behind, too, on the toilet tank. I left it.

The few Elders in the mostly empty hall gave me looks but left me alone. Apparently, seeing Screwdriver beat up Yellow was enough to convince them to let me take my course.

The ballroom already echoed with preparations for the films. I wondered where all the Youngsters could be. The Inventor might have gotten hold of Seventy. I’d told him to hold him upstairs, so I’d look there. At the main stairs, I lost track of which floor I was on and climbed until I thought to stop and look around. The fifth floor perhaps, maybe the sixth. I ignored the rubble and entered the hallway, unsure of where to go or what to do. Excited chatter echoed in a room several doors away, like birds trapped under a blanket. As I walked down the hall, I caught the sound of a child crying, then a crash. A woman screamed a curse. Preteens and children erupted from the door ahead of me, poured into the hallway, knocked me backward, flowed around and over me. I worked to hold my ground. Some glanced at me over their shoulders, then followed the shrieks of the children to the stairwell at the end of the hall, disappeared into its darkness.

In the room they’d come running out of, I found the Inventor and a single wailing six-year-old. On the floor lay
the Suit, unconscious, in a position that illustrated his—dare I say my—understanding of the evening’s events: arms locked in a near shrug. Lily knelt beside him. I wanted to reach out to take her hand, to pull her up like pulling a flower from the ground, take her from the hotel, away from the swirling torrent. I knew she wouldn’t come.

Across the room the child sobbed. His face curled out around his open mouth; snot and tears coursed over his face, dripped from his chin, wet the collar of his pale blue shirt. I started toward him, tried to imagine what his terror meant to the Inventor’s perceptions, how he must remember the moment. I wasn’t tethered to any of them and could remember nothing of the children’s time in the hotel, but the Inventor might. I wondered if he had already untethered himself from the children or if he’d been wiser than I was. I looked over to him, curious if he showed any concern or compassion toward his own youthful suffering, but I couldn’t see, too distracted by the gun he held.

“What the hell are you doing with that?”

The Inventor looked down at it and studied its weight. “I found it.”

“Bullshit.”

His eyes left the gun and glanced around the room. Even in the dark, I could see his skin flush. “Someone gave it to me?”

In this light, flushed as well with indignation and shame, gun bloody from the pistol-whipping he’d given the Suit’s temple, I thought of him as a guilty child. Couldn’t he have been more curious? I wondered. Had the world held so little for him? He was the one who began all this, who traveled where no one else might have been able to, ever, and yet he
had nothing to show for it but an embarrassed face and a misused weapon. Whichever of me had given him the gun, I was to blame for this child’s corruption.

I reached into my own pocket and felt the emptiness there. “Which one gave it to you?” I didn’t ask “who” because I knew “who.”

The six-year-old gasped for air. The Suit shifted but remained unconscious.

From the door came the answer: “I did.” The Nose walked in, robes wrapped tight around him, and stood beside me, not wasting a glance at the bleeding Suit or Lily. “I gave it, but not to him. It’s been passed forward.”

My heart stopped. I felt the pulse of the timepiece in my pocket, like a fluttering bird. “You pulled it from the trash?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The Nose shrugged. “I watched you go outside and hide it. It couldn’t have been for no good reason. I figured if it was worth you hiding, it was worth my taking.”

“And you gave it to—”

“Pimples.”

“Who?”

“Us at sixteen.” He smiled, unrepentant. “Told him to hang on to it, that it might be needed at some point. I told him where to find the raft, how to come here. Figured we’d need to outnumber the Elders. I think he’s the one who started going back further, bringing the children.” Six had finally stopped screaming. He pressed himself into the corner, happy to be ignored.

I opened a window, hung my head outside, and listened to
the rain hit the building and the sidewalk below. “You brought the children here?”

The Inventor coughed before answering. A delaying habit I worked hard to avoid. “Not on purpose. The Elders are up to something. You said so yourself. But then I realized it wasn’t really the Elders. Not all of them.” He waved the gun toward the Suit. “It was him, mainly. I realized that instead of trying to figure out what the old man was up to, we’d better figure out what Suit was up to.”