The Empire of the Dead (32 page)

The East River burbled, thick and mucoid. He turned a corner. In the street there appeared to be a huge chocolate milk spill. Three
coatless businessmen conferred by an ash can. “Two percent of two billion is a big number,” said one. In the window of a little market, a rack of the day's papers: the
Irish Voice, France-Amerique,
the
Guardian, Amsterdam News
(“New Black Faces”),
India Abroad, Jewish Week
(“The Difference between Non-Jewish and Un-Jewish”).

Appropriately, he saw at a bend in the river the Secretariat's mirrored green façade. Ordinary and bland. Bern hated to admit it, but across the street, Trump's World Tower filled him with more global optimism than the United Nations. Taste or no taste, at least Trump tried to proclaim
something
—even if it was only the arrogance of wealth.

Bern ate in a steamy sushi place whose antiquated sound system played Warren Zevon: forceful anthems of self-destruction, bitterness, divorce. As he listened, he thought about his ex-wife, to whom he hadn't spoken in over a decade, as well as recent flings with women (one of whom he'd met through a dreary personals ad). In the end, either Bern or the women worked too much, felt exhausted on weekends, and called things off. There just wasn't much interest, all around. Is this what happened to people when they reached a certain age? Or was it him?

He wondered if he had given up on sex and love. Briefly, he imagined the thin, dark face of the saleswoman he'd encountered days ago—Marietta. He chewed his edamame. Was he disappointed in himself? Not the prize-winning professional he'd thought he'd become? The saint in his personal life? What would late life hold in the absence of women, their laughter and often embarrassing questions? He shoved his plate away. His wasabe had no
zing
. When Zevon sang “Reconsider Me,” Bern thought him malevolent and untrustworthy.

After lunch, he spent another three and a half hours studying specs in the basement, trying not to brood on his solitude. The stuff here reminded him of a taxidermist's shop he'd seen on vacation with Marla, his ex, in Paris's Seventh Arrondissement (their last trip
together). One afternoon, in a Beaux Arts building smelling like rich red wine, Bern had discovered row after row of dark wooden cabinets housing butterflies (aqua and gold), horned beetles (so black they were purple), peacock feathers, yellow birds no bigger than sewing spools. Fossils. Fish skeletons. In the back, in a vast space arrayed like a furniture showroom, stuffed zebras, ostriches, tigers, and giraffes. A swan stood in a corner, its tail feathers singed the light brown of caramelized sugar. The shop's owner explained to Bern and Marla that the bird had been rescued from another taxidermist who had lost most of his inventory in an accidental blaze. At the time, Bern hadn't flashed on his grandfather's swan, but since he had been thinking about it this afternoon, he wondered at the connection his mind must have made that day among the stilled animals—for, leaving the shop, he had been crazed with the need to rush back to the hotel with Marla and make love for the rest of the day: a stay against wearing-away, he figured now, though at the time it felt like a response to the thrill of unapproachable creatures brought near.

On his way home that evening, he peered through McGee's front window. The store was closed and dark. He couldn't see the pets. He pictured the roadrunner crimped in its cage, dying, perhaps, from the mixture of perfume and artificial fresheners in the air, still experiencing in its olfactory memory (did birds possess such an attribute?) dust from the back roads of Texas, bluebonnet blossoms, fresh peaches on sun-baked trees.

In his apartment, he poured a glass of wine, disappointed to find no messages on his phone. Not that he'd expected to hear from anyone. He thought of the boxes in his closet. The basement had reminded him of family cast-offs he hadn't combed through in years. He rose from his couch, picked a box, and untaped the lid. Dusty wool. Mildewed paper. Right away, he found what he'd hoped to discover—the item nagging at him, just below consciousness, most of the day.

He would need to get a turntable. He hadn't owned one since '95, '96.

On his lap he held the record album. His grandfather had given him this recording one birthday, when Bern was just a boy:
The Sounds of Texas
, an oddball assortment of noises and effects. A strange and ridiculous gift, Bern always thought. Now, tonight, far from home, from childhood, it made more sense to him: “Track # 1: ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas,' Performed by the Kilgore High School Marching Band,” “Track # 2: Railroad Cars Uncoupling,” “Track # 6: Sawmill Blade,” “Track # 8: Prairie Dogs Digging,” and “Track # 12: Road Runner.”

In Houston, his family had lived near the lip of a bayou. Roadrunners roamed wild down there, among muddy, twisted oaks. Every night, Bern went to sleep to their sounds, which he couldn't quite remember. A whistle, a call? His parents were gone now, along with his grandfather. He sat back, remembering them, closing his eyes and rubbing his chest.

“Wally, how come you haven't built anything?” Monday morning at work. Young Murphy blocking Bern's doorway. At his desk, Bern hunched over sketches of the building on East Fifty-fourth, pencils strewn like pickup sticks. “What do you mean?” he asked, irritated. He had been trying to grasp the
essence
of
basement
.

“Well, at Landau's suggestion, I've gone through the company files,” Murphy said. “Getting up to speed on the institutional history. I didn't mean to snoop or anything, but I notice you tend to take the renovations you're assigned—and the designs are usually wonderful, by the way—but then you hand the initial plans off to others, who finish the projects and take most of the credit. Why is that?”

“It's the way things are done,” Bern said.

“No. I mean, that doesn't appear to be the pattern with others.
Landau isn't pressuring you, is he?” Murphy said. “I mean, he doesn't force you to surrender your—”

“No, no.”

“Then why don't you build?”

I like things that already exist better than things that do not.
Who said that? “Naturally, the permits—”

“You know what I'm talking about, Wally. And—forgive me—I saw some of your speculative work. The plans were tucked into the files,” Murphy said. “Really innovative. Your ideas for that old factory uptown? The curtain wall? Very nice.”

Bern remembered those sketches. Many years ago now. An abandoned aluminum-sided cube beneath a railroad bridge on 125th Street. A meat wholesalers' district. Men smoking on uneven sidewalks, wrapped in smocks as bright as marbled fat. A smell of blood in the air, pressurized steam from coiled hoses, river rawness—bracken and bones in the tidewater. Everywhere, a sting of meat-dust, stirred by passing traffic. In the late afternoons, the bridge cast structural shadows on the west side of the building and on the reflective sides of delivery trucks, a crisscross pattern suggestive of propeller blades, which Bern had used, along with the corrugations in the preexisting aluminum, as the basis for an airy design.

“Why didn't that project go forward?” Murphy asked. “If I were Landau, I would have championed it.”

Bern shrugged.

“When's the last time you brought something to fruition?”

Another shrug.

“You're far too modest, Wally.”

“‘The builder is trapped between error and obsolescence.' Someone said that once.”

Murphy laughed. “Listen, can I take you to lunch? I'd like to pick your brain, hear more about your experiences here over the years.”

“I have this basement.” Bern tapped his desk.

“Don't worry, Wally. I don't expect you to be my buddy.”

The kid was trying. Give him that. “Maybe another time.”

“Okay, Wally. Suit yourself. I admire your work. Really. You should
build
.”

Maybe Landau was right. Perhaps Bern shouldn't push back so hard at his new co-workers. Still, he didn't entirely trust this preening Mr. Murphy. Too much ambition. Did Bern even
remember
ambition? It could make a man ruthless.

On his way to the washroom, he ran into a colleague, Chris Henderson, in the hallway. They'd been hired at the same time: the Dark Ages, before Murphy's first diaper. The poor bastard looked quartered and beaten. “How are things, Chris?” Bern asked. Henderson had just finished chemo.

The man picked at his lip. “Wally, I've been meaning to ask. Do you suppose on Thursday, you could swing a couple of hours to go with me to the hospital? They're going to run some bone marrow checks and I'll probably be a little woozy afterward. My wife's out of town, my other arrangements have fallen through, and I might need assistance on the subway, getting home.”

Bern owed Henderson for help, recently, pricing a brownstone renovation. “No problem, Chris. I'll clear my desk,” he said.

“Thanks, Wally. Thanks a lot.” He turned away, pinched by internal shadows.

Bern dearly hoped the bathroom would be empty: a moment's solace. These days, the briefest encounters rattled him. Murphy. Henderson. But a tall, bald man in blue overalls stood at one of the urinals, legs apart, pissing like a thoroughbred. From the back, Bern recognized him as one of the regular maintenance men. He didn't remember the fellow's name. He had once given Bern a tour of the attic when Bern bumped into him after-hours one Friday and expressed interest in the man's extensive knowledge of the building. At his feet now sat a sweat-darkened leather tool bag. The man
nodded hello. “Keeping busy?” Bern asked, unzipping at the end of the row.

“Oh, you betcha. When are you geniuses going to come up with a place takes care of itself, so I can prop my feet up on a big desk and kick back the way you do?”

Bern laughed.

“Like today. Fucking birds.”

“What's that?” Bern said.

“Oh, migration season for some species or another. I don't know. This morning, I get a call—the lights on the roof are disrupting their damn flight patterns at night. Disorienting them. Something about the angle of our particular building. I gotta go up and disconnect.”

“How do you get up there?” Bern asked.

“Ah, yeah. That's right.” He grinned. “You're the fellow likes to know the ins and outs.” And
he
liked to be the Big Shot. He picked up his bag. “Come on. I'll show you.”

Bern finished his business, washed his hands, and followed the man—Simpson, he remembered now—to a freight elevator, out of sight of the normal business corridors. The elevator smelled of fiercely polished iron platings, not to mention the earthy sweat in the creases of Simpson's leather bag. The door opened onto a narrow concrete room where another door, with a wire-reinforced double-glass window in it, led to the building's roof. Twelve stories up, in a mild breeze with a scent of snow, though the day was sunny and dusky blue, Bern (his heart cantering!) surveyed the foliage, patterned grids, and movements below. From this perspective, everything looked orderly and random all at once—a healthy sign, Bern thought, for surely a city dies when it strays too far from its pathways or deals strictly in necessities. He stepped forward, stood steady. He was glad he had bought, last week, a firm new pair of shoes.

A pale full moon, the color of chardonnay, bobbed in an orange dust cloud in the vicinity of Battery Park. Already, pier lights
sparkled on the water. Greenhouses, jails, administrative centers. Church spires rose among circles of stone.

Simpson pulled from his bag a paint-crusted screwdriver and fiddled with spotlights the size of snare drums. The lights were disported every few feet around the inner edges of the rooftop. Opaque plastic plates, red, green, and white, filled the fixture's barrels. Simpson mumbled and cursed. Bern searched the sky but saw no birds. He thought of the roadrunner wilting in the back of McGee's.

To the north, the Cloisters, the delicate medieval buildings, the very top of Manhattan, a place Bern hadn't visited in years.

He leaned over the south-side parapet. All around him, windows like picture slides—each slide a life superimposed on many other lives. The old medieval argument: is the world as perfect as it can be? Could the Lord improve it if He wanted to? God could grant trees the power to think and talk. But would they still be trees? This would not be perfecting the world, but rather, producing another world entirely. A splendid idea—but, Bern thought, gazing at dashing scraps of color below, surely we would miss this sad old place.

“All right. Now the damn birds can see where they're going,” Simpson said, rising. His joints creaked. Loose tools jingled in his bag.

“Thanks for bringing me,” Bern said.

Simpson glanced at the streets. “Don't seem so awful up here, eh?”

“Sweet, really.”

“Well, now, I wouldn't go that far,” Simpson answered, shouldering his bag. “Hell, I just improved your odds of getting smothered in bird shit on your way home.”

The mild weather broke. Snow blurred the gold domes and display windows of the neat, well-mannered shops along Madison Square Park. It clung to the black trees and grayed the air where cheerful men swept sidewalks and shook the park's shrubbery free
of ice; burlap wrapping made snug the delicate plants beside the benches. Soft office lights in the upper-story windows of pale-blue buildings turned violet in the twilight. Everywhere, bells seemed to ring: the chiming and crackling of frost. Smoke and chestnut-flavored breezes greeted walkers rounding chilly corners. A woman with a big white dog appeared to be strolling in the company of a polar bear. At the edge of the park, a man wearing a fig-colored coat, with his fine shoes mired in slush, stood waving at a woman in a curved window halfway up the Flatiron. The light behind her head was the purple of plums.