The Empire of the Dead (31 page)

Does grief explain Susan's pull for me? Hell, since OK City, perhaps grief is all I'm capable of feeling.

There's a smell of old tires in the air. Far off, toward the mountains, the
whish
of cars on a road. Mesquite twigs scrape the cuffs of my pants.

Late afternoon. I cut through a field of brittle weeds. Crickets leap. The architects have lengthened the theater's foundation. They've pieced together a partial prototype of the stage: a wooden box with a trap door at the top and an entrance and exit to the Underworld.

I sit on the edge of the Globe and peer down a limestone slope filled with fissures. Mud, pinyon powder, some kind of white and red mineral deposits in the faces of rocks. A faint humming in the earth. Do unseen caverns stretch beneath my feet? Underground streams? Hidden fires, hidden lives? Many old stories, legends, must have sprung from this land. Mexicans, Native Americans, European missionaries. The ghosts of the dead, passing from one world to the next.

Come home.

Our home is death.

Is death our home? Mother, Father, Susan.

For a moment, I'm dizzy at the edge of the stage. A hawk circles overhead, its gyre a steadying pattern. My eyes focus.

A grainy scraping below me, in a little ravine. A rain of pebbles. I turn. Huffing up a weedy incline, a young woman hikes, carrying a baby. She's wearing black cotton pants, cut midcalf, a dark blouse. Purple yarn ties her long black hair. Skin the color of wet clay. She's wrapped the baby in a brown cotton blanket. The baby squirms. The woman stops when she spots me.

I start to say something—I'm not sure what—but she shakes her head. Her eyes dart. “Town,” I tell her. “If you're looking for town—something to eat?” I point. My movement makes her flinch.

Men's voices. Nearby. The barking of dogs. Metallic clinking—belts, keys? The voices rise and fall, coming closer. The woman whimpers.

I don't think. I open the trap door in the floor of the stage. “Hurry,” I say. It's too obvious, the first place they'll look if they see it. I crawl in after the woman, pull the door shut, and sit beside her in the dark. I should have stayed outside, talked to, distracted the men. What am I doing?

Too late now.

An odor of loam and sweat. The baby gurgles, a low moan. I urge the woman to silence her child. From underneath the blanket she pulls a mesh bag. Inside it, a plastic bottle, a little book filled with pictures of angels. The woman turns the pages of the book and the baby settles, watching.

Boots. Crunching gravel. Men laugh casually, some moving past us. Maybe they're not pursuing this lady. Maybe they haven't spotted her. Routine patrol? The baby makes a guttural sound. Above us, on the stage, a radio crackles. “North perimeter,” someone says. “A whole damn family.” The men march away—or so it sounds. Is it the woman's family they're after? Has she been separated from her lover, father, mother? What terrible thing has erupted in the center of her life? Where will her pilgrimage lead?

In light through small cracks in the wooden floor above us, I see her face now that my vision has adjusted to the dark. She's very young. A teenager. She starts to stand. “No,” I whisper. “Wait a
while longer. To be safe.” I can tell she doesn't understand me, but she grasps my gestures. She sits back down and rocks her baby in her arms. “My name is Adam,” I say, placing my hand on my chest. “You?” I point at her.

“Maria,” she says.

“And
la niña
?”

“Anna.”

I laugh. She looks at me, puzzled. “Maria,” I say. “I think you got lucky this time. But I don't know if I've done you a favor. Did I?”

She stares at me.

More movement outside. Maybe just the wind, but for a long time—I begin to lose track—we wait. Marty will wonder what's happened to me.

Finally, Maria stirs and I know I can't stop her. I nod, put my fingers to my lips. Slowly, I open the trap door. The sun has set. Night air touches our skin. I breathe deeply. The world. Here we are in the world. Maria scrambles up, pauses, looks down at me, smiles. Then I hear her run through the weeds. The baby cries. Or laughs. I can't tell. They're bound to be caught soon. Forgive me. But then I think: I took care of this woman. Briefly. Unwisely, perhaps. Badly. But: I am capable of taking care of someone. Maybe even my brother, no matter what Marty feels about me. No matter what Susan thinks is best for the two of us. No matter what Anna believes about the fraying limits of my powers.

Does it matter that my parents are ghosts?
Forgive me. An American Revolution. I didn't stop it. If I could have, I would have …

God knows my brother needs care. Susan could use me. With the crackpots, I always held something back—my tithing to grief?
Taking care of someone.
Giving willingly, not surrendering to need. A pair of eagles passes overhead. I don't feel burdened or sad.

I emerge from the hole. A disorienting mesh of odors and sounds. A bright flash. The Marfa Lights? The deep unknown? Dirt. Sage. Leaves. Come home? Above me, pulsing steadily, the stars.

McGee's, next to Bern's building, sold many strange and wonderful things: high-end kitchen implements, ladies' perfumes, pets. Bern wasn't sure what this combination said about his West Side neighborhood. One day, he popped into the shop for an extension cord. He meandered up the aisles past Spanish combs and plastic flowers, old water pumps, shower nozzles, hat stands, paintings of bullfights on velvet, and bins of used yarmulkes. The narrow pathways smelled of foot powder and sweetened toilet water until he reached the animals. In a back corner, an oppressive odor of fur and pine-scented air freshener hung like invisible webbing. In a cage, four black terriers wrestled one another among shreds of the
New York Times
. Kittens slept nearby in a tall-sided box, unperturbed by the canary calls showering down on them. Bern noticed a saleswoman, a dark-haired beauty wearing a plastic nametag: “Marietta.” He smelled the mint flavoring of the gum in her mouth. Behind her, frantic scrabbling. In a large cage, a big brown bird with gold talons and chest feathers the color of wheat rattled the enclosing wire with stringy wings and his beak. A sign on the cage said “Macaw.”

“Your sign is wrong,” Bern told Marietta. “I grew up in Texas and I used to see these birds. This is a roadrunner.”

“Nuh-uh,” said the woman. “Imported from Brazil. A rarity.”

“I'm telling you,” Bern said. After its flurry, the bird drooped, perfectly still. “And it looks sick.”

“He's fine.” She shuffled a stack of receipt books on a counter littered with newspaper ad supplements.

Bern peered between the wires, into the bird's dark eye. The pupil glistened. Your time is short, Bern thought.

He bent closer to the cage, hands on knees. Fifty years old. Something is trying to talk to you.

No. Not the bird. The angina he'd felt again last week; the stress test he'd taken, which turned up nothing; the impatient young doctor who implied that Bern had wasted his time despite bypass surgery eight years ago. “Just monitor yourself,” the young man said, dismissing him. “Pay attention, and let me know if you feel any changes.”

Not the bird. But the creature stirred Bern. Its feathers resembled grass clippings, yellow and thin. All flesh is grass, Bern thought. Hang in there, old fellow.

For some reason, on Friday morning, the 4, 5, and 6 trains weren't running below Eighty-sixth Street. Bern hiked. Finally, with a speeding heart, he caught the M2. He stuck his MetroCard backward into the pay slot—he wasn't used to riding the bus—and pissed off the driver. It takes an enormous capacity for shame just to get across town, he reflected. I am blessed with such a capacity.

On East Fifty-fourth Street, near the river, a small fruit stand was temporarily abandoned. Perhaps the seller had taken a bathroom break. Bern watched an old woman pass the stand, place her hand on a bunch of grapes as though to snatch it, and apparently change her mind. In the end, her gesture appeared to be a sacrament instead of a near-theft.

In the middle of the block, he found the brownstone whose basement Landau, his boss at the architectural firm, wanted him to renovate. The building was faintly Tudor, with cream-colored window trim. One of Bern's new young co-workers had told him a pair of television stars lived in the place. He named them, but Bern didn't know who they were. Before leaving the office this morning, he'd encountered Landau in the coffee room. Landau warned Bern to “get the lay of the land quickly. The only way we can turn a profit
on this one is if you don't spend too much time on it. Don't screw it up, okay?”

“Jerry, when have I screwed things up lately?” Bern asked.

Landau stood nose to nose with him. “I used to be able to count on you, Wally, to work quietly, unobtrusively.”

“And you still can.”

“You've been a pain in the ass with these new hires, especially with this kid, Murphy. You could try to be more welcoming.”

Bern said nothing.

“I know, I know,” said Landau. “
He's
a pain in the ass, too. They all are. But what do we do? These kids are going to take this firm into the future. You'd better get used to it, Wally.”

So he'd been banished to a basement.

Inside the assigned building, the cherry wood moldings nicely complemented the dark yellow walls and floor tiles, pink with pigeon-gray borders. In the lobby, a plum-colored carpet led to the doorman's desk, lighted from above by a tiny chandelier shaped like an old gas lamp. The doorman, wearing black pants and a white shirt, no tie, was a friendly young fellow named Brian. His head was shaved like an NBA player's and he wore thick red glasses. He called across the room to another young man in black pants, standing by a marble-topped table near a row of mail slots, and asked him to take the front for a while. He was going to show Bern the basement.

The bowels of the building smelled of laundry detergent, bleach, Lemon Pledge, and oil paint, with a trace of old taffy and roach powder. The space's dimensions were hard to determine. The dim yellow ceiling lights, tucked among heating pipes, were not much help, and the clutter was befuddling: decades' worth of discarded furniture, appliances, radiator shells, and sports trophies. Propped against the wall beside the elevator were two framed movie posters, presumably removed from apartments when the tenants decamped or died years ago:
The Woman on the Beach
, starring Joan Bennett—“Go ahead, say it, I'm bad!”—and
Call Me Madam
, with Ethel Merman.

Brian kept up a constant patter, following Bern as he moved
among rows of musty boxes, toeing piles of paper, stacks of letters, mismatched shoes. “Must be interesting to be an architect in this city,” he said. “Though I bet you wish you were in on the World Trade Center sweepstakes, eh? Some folks are going to make scads off whatever goes on downtown. Best thing that ever happened to them.”

“No,” Bern said. “I'm content to stay small. Sketch my little huts and things.”

Brian laughed. The sound echoed in dark corners crammed with fishing poles and cobwebbed skis. Several pairs of children's socks lay in a sea of green and white powder on the floor in front of a busted dryer. On top of the machine, a tower of phone books radiated mildew. “Look at that,” Brian said. “No one uses those anymore.” He pulled a cell phone from his pants pocket and held it high. “I haven't given a thought to telephone books in five years.”

“So the owner … he wants to expand the laundry room, is that right? Over here?”

“That's the plan.”

“Shouldn't be a problem.” Bern stepped behind a rusty oil container. Several poorly conceived abstract paintings, heavy on browns and midnight blues, leaned against the wall behind the old metal drum. As he maneuvered around a three-legged coffee table, he heard a kitten whine.

Brian smiled. “We feed them,” he said, watching Bern's face. “Keep the rats under control. Though now
their
numbers are getting out of hand. Need a cat?”

“Don't think so,” Bern said, remembering the melancholy creatures in McGee's.

Brian slid his glasses to the tip of his nose and gazed over the bright red frame at Bern. “Funny. You
look
to me like a cat-daddy.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know,” Brian said. “Like you could use …
something
.”

He ran his hand across his chest, breathed deeply, shedding the basement. The river's waves were as thick as hair gel. Squinting at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, he glimpsed through the trees a corner of the Gothic madhouse, designed by the same architect who'd conceived St. Patrick's. Angels and the damned. Well, any city worthy of the name was built on the shoulders, horns, and wings of a vast population.

Cigarette butts bobbed on the surface of the green and black water.

Bern remembered the rest home in east Houston where his grandfather had lived out his days, in a shadowy room at the end of a long hall swollen with the maddened moans of men and women. In his room, his grandfather kept only a tattered copy of the Five Books of Moses, a family photograph, and a blue glass swan smaller than a fist. Where had it come from? It was an unlikely keepsake for this rough and tumble giant, a yellow-pine salesman on the back roads between Longview, Lufkin, Nacogdoches. A remembrance of Bern's grandmother, long dead? Or of some other woman? A family heirloom? The swan's eyes and the point of its beak had worn away from too much touching. It appeared to be hollow inside, a container for yesteryear's chills. Slowly, over time, Bern's grandfather, too, had lost the sharpness of his features. Now, in the rich loam of a field north of Houston, more and more encroached upon by condominiums and gated communities, the old man's definition was further abraded by earth-acid, the lime and spoors of the land he had loved and worked. That a glass creature, for all its fragility, could prove more enduring than this man's enormous and immovable body (or so it had seemed to Bern as a boy when, in games, he rushed against his grandfather's legs) was as imponderable to Bern as the composition of an interstellar cloud.