The Empire of the Dead (35 page)

“That's right,” Bern said, shivering. From here he could see the green-gold fringe of Central Park. The Cloisters, up north.

He wondered where his roadrunner was.

“It's freezing, Chris. Let's go in,” he suggested.

“I like it. Go ahead, Wally. I'll be there shortly. It's kind of peaceful up here.”

“No. No, I'll wait for you.”

“Don't you find it peaceful?”

“I'm cold.”

“I'm not going to jump. I promise.”

“I know, I know. I'm just …”

“What?”

“Come inside, Chris. Please.”

“You think?”

“I think so. Yes.”

When the elevator door slid open, Landau greeted them with raw relief. “Hey hey, Chris!” he cried. He slipped his arm around the man. “Everything good?”

“Fabulous.”

“Fine! Well, that's just fine! Let's … well … listen! How about we step around the corner for a drink? On me, eh? Wally, join us?”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure?”

Bern heard the pleading in his voice. “I'm sure,” he said.

Landau scowled. “Chris, ever had a dirty chili martini?” he asked rapidly. People had gathered in the hallway. New young faces. Bern didn't know any of them. When had they been hired? They stared at Henderson, each other, the floor. “Hot peppers. First sip makes
you wish you were never born. By about the third, you're never so glad you're alive.”

Henderson gave Bern a wry little grin.

“I'll give you a call sometime,” Bern said. He wondered if he would. There was no malice in this thought, just an intimation of awkwardness. A fear that, from here on out, the two men would have nothing to say to each other. He watched Landau lead Henderson away. People turned to look at Bern. Murphy appeared at his side. “Is he okay?' Murphy asked.

“I don't know.”

“Well.” Murphy glared at the others. They disappeared into their offices. “I'm sorry for him. It's hard on us all.”

“Yes,” Bern said.

“How about you?”

“Me?”

“Are
you
okay, Wally?”

“I think so.”

Murphy watched him closely. “Okay. Well. I hope so. Listen, Wally. I've got some ideas about a project I'd like to kick around with you. You know. Maybe work together some more. I've even spoken to Landau about the possibility.”

“You have?”

“Get our focus back. That's our challenge, right?”

Bern turned to look at him. “Tell me. How is it you're so interested in my work?” he asked. What he really wanted to know was, How can you be who you are? So jaunty when some of us see every reason to jump?

“I
know
good design. My mother was an interior decorator.” Murphy grinned. “I was the sort of privileged, cultured snob everybody hated in high school.”

“People still hate you,” Bern said. He tried to make it sound like a joke.

Murphy squeezed his arm. “I give them good reason,” he said. “And I confess, Wally, I'm damn proud of it.”

He left Bern alone by the break room: a smell of Cheez-Its and cold pizza. Bern walked back to his office. Until early in the evening, he worked on the basement, with the lights of Lower Manhattan burning yellow and blue in his window.

Murphy's project, a series of apartments, came in at ten mill—more than Bern was used to spending, but low even for a small-scale undertaking. The apartments would be managed by a nonprofit housing trust. Murphy suggested galvanized metal and lots of plate glass. Bern saw the wisdom in these choices. The kid wasn't half bad. An emphasis on communal spaces (at Bern's insistence): open-air walkways overlooking courtyards that connected to common rooms and shared kitchens, brightly lit stairwells. The key for a population of elderly, disabled, and mentally challenged—the target demographic, here—was to foil isolation however possible. Bern agreed with Murphy that the first floor should be devoted to social and medical services, the hub of the enterprise. The one aesthetic fillip Murphy clung to was to “answer” the “surrounding fabric of the city—the rough-and-tumble of the neighborhood”—with oddly pitched stair railings. As long as safety was not an issue, Bern felt fine with this.

To be working again, working at all, was good.

One Saturday morning (
Good Shabbos
!), after refining some sketches, he decided to visit the Cloisters. Perhaps, he thought, he could find inspiration in the buildings there. The old medieval arguments. Perfecting the world.

The sunshine was glorious. He caught the M4 at Broadway and West Thirty-second. As the bus moved up Madison, finely dressed people toting massive shopping bags boarded and enforced an awkward decorum, sitting stiffly, staring straight ahead, saying nothing. A group of silver-haired matrons rocked down the aisle, rattling book bags from the Met.

As the driver wound north, the fashionable passengers departed and were replaced by seedier types. Then, as the bus curled through
Spanish Harlem, he saw more and more elderly folks waiting impatiently at the wind-blown stops. The infirm. The wheelchair-bound. I am a healthy man, Bern thought, feeling his chest, watching an old woman shake red pills into her palm. As the bus approached Fort Tryon Park—an unlikely Paradise at Manhattan's northernmost tip—it overflowed with people in need of rest and redemption.

In the Cloisters' gift shop, where Bern first entered, light streamed through tall, leaded windows. Indoor fountains whispered. He perused the books.
The Florentine Church
.
Medieval Architecture
. A biography of Dante.

He strolled from gallery to gallery, past illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, and tapestries, past a Carolingian plaque with the face of John the Baptist stamped on it, past a blackened effigy of a lady from the Loire Valley, as well as Books of Hours and Romanesque altars. Silver reliquaries gleamed in blue and yellow light beaming from stained-glass windows. Arched stone doorways led them from one passageway to another. In the cool open spaces, even the crying of children took on the solemnity and grandeur of Gregorian chants.

Finally, he emerged into the Cuxa Cloister, a covered walkway surrounding a courtyard planted according to medieval herbals and books of poetry listing flowers and varieties of bushes. Pine cones, leaves, and animals—and a mermaid holding her tail—were carved into the capitals. Bern looked up: a daylight moon, the color of rich whiskey in a startlingly close and depthless blue sky. From somewhere, a faint honeysuckle smell.

How much does the moon weigh?

Or the touch of a finger?

Things a builder should know.

In memory, Bern heard the cooing of a bayou bird. He put a hand, once more, to his chest. What perturbations skittered inside him? He did and didn't want to know.

He walked around the Benedictine columns, and then among the thirteenth-century ornaments imported here to make the museum. Gothic balustrades. Vestibules. Archways from monastery windows
in the hills of ancient Paris. Peaceful—perhaps he should rethink his relationship to religion.

He came to an outdoor path overlooking New York. The roof above him appeared to be streamlined and sturdy. The birds nesting in its eaves seemed to come and go with freedom and ease. Venus, sapphire-colored, hung in the west, a precise wax seal. He remembered reading, once, probably in college, a description of a “personal experience of Eternity” (Boethius? St. Augustine?): it was, the author said, the sensation of having
complete and perfect possession of unlimited life at a single moment
. Or, as Dante put it, finding that spot where “every
where
and every
when
is brought to a point.” And from here, that spot would be—? Somewhere west of Manhattan, in the middle of the Hudson River. He gazed out at the water, the buildings and trees, the people he did and didn't know—invisible to him now. He thought of his daily walks, the scenes he witnessed, and the events unfolding without him. He checked his wallet for bus fare: his ticket to join his fellow travelers yearning for rest. Soon, this meditative mood would be broken and he would dissolve again into the present. There were more sounds of Texas to recall. A building project to finish. There were vintage books to buy in quaint, failing shops. He turned to admire, once more, the colors and textures of the interlocking pieces of the cloister, designed and fashioned by warm human hands long before the city existed.

“I Have the Room Above Her,” titled “Bern,” appeared originally in the
Georgia Review;
“Signs” and “The Empire of the Dead” appeared originally in the
Hopkins Review
; portions of “The Magnitudes” appeared originally in the
Georgia Review
and in
Gulf Coast
, titled “Magnitude” and “What It Was, What It Could Have Been,” respectively (I am grateful to Tracy Hayes Harris for her observations on the painting process, which I have borrowed from here); and “Basement and Roof” appeared originally in
Southwest Review
. I am indebted to the editors of these journals and to John Irwin, for his support of these stories. Thank you to Barbara Lamb for her kind attention to the manuscript and to Mary Lou Kenney and Hilary Jacqmin for their editorial assistance. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to Glenn Blake for his encouragement and steadfast friendship through the years.

Tracy Daugherty was born and raised in Midland, Texas. He is the author of four novels, five short story collections, and a book of personal essays, as well as biographies of Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller, and Joan Didion (forthcoming from St. Martin's Press). His stories and essays have appeared in the
New Yorker
,
Vanity Fair
, the
Paris Review
online,
McSweeney's
,
Boulevard
,
Chelsea
, the
Georgia Review
,
Triquarterly
, the
Southern Review
, and many other journals. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the Vermont Studio Center. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and PEN, he is a four-time winner of the Oregon Book Award. At Oregon State University, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and creative writing, he helped found the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.

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