The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Sure,” Bern had said, wondering where the opening lay in this genteel arrangement. There was always an opening. Her solicitude had tempered his fears of unseemliness. He could be patient. In a shockingly short time, he had learned to depend on her company, as he had formerly staked his comfort on solitude.

  Now, today, on Fifth Avenue, anticipating supper with Kate at the Cedar (Gary—whom Bern had not yet met—had a late evening at the theater, with rehearsals for a new play), Bern reflected on how his renewal had arrived: not with the Ann Cline book or his sketches of huts, but from the conversations Kate tripped him into, the challenge of articulating his cherished principles to a person who had never heard them before. New people! Who knew?

  He wished he could share his revival with the city. Apparently, post-9/11, the thirteenth century was “in” again. Barricades. Blocky walls. The old/new urban style. He thought once more of the Freedom Tower. The prismatic glass panels planned for its base couldn’t hide the flinch in its frame. The other day in the office, one of Bern’s young colleagues had joked that, in the age of expanding terrorism, architects required military training: “Mark my words. We’re going to see Rem Koolhaas marching around Rockefeller Center in a helmet and a flak jacket.”

  If only the city had kept its lightness. Bern missed the “Phantom Towers,” the twin beams of light cast into the sky from Ground Zero, six months after the shock: a powdery afterimage of what had once existed on the spot and a public echo of the private vigils that had taken place with candles in every neighborhood. An architecture of the imagination.

  He also missed the spirit of sober whimsy visible in the attacks’ immediate aftermath: for instance, the suggestion (who had made it … some artist?) that the barricades around the smoking pit be replaced by plastic piping—shifting, soft, ringed with buckets for flowers. Instead, burdened by habitual politics and the egos of celebrity architects, the site’s fate had locked into a predictable pattern, with little hope of renewal.

  Either way, Bern thought—vulnerability or an impregnability so forbidding even citizens felt imprisoned—suicide was the end result.

  Perhaps a giant marble head of Robert Moses was the most appropriate marker for the site. Vandal planners could sneak into the area at night, swords at the ready, zoning codes hand-printed on vellum clutched to their armored bosoms. Ritual dances could be aimed at cursing the mayor. Chanting, drumming, spray-painting Jane Jacobs’s face on the Power Broker’s pockmarked nose, a nose the size of a motorboat.

  The city’s many layers. If Bern had helped Kate manage them, she had enabled him to tunnel back into and forgive himself his first reckless enthusiasms here: the art parties he’d been invited to on upper Broadway and in SoHo and Chelsea when he’d just arrived, a fresh young professional. For a few years he’d stayed active in the art scene, shyly attending openings, until the high energy of mingling with strangers finally wore him down.

  He recalled Dan Flavin’s wedding in the Guggenheim—’92? ’91? A friend of a friend, a staffer with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, had gotten Bern an invitation to the gala because the artist’s young bride, a painter, was a Texan. Bern’s acquaintance thought he might know her, as if Texas were no bigger than a kitchen. The bride was stunning, tall and dark-haired in a shimmering white Isaac Mizrahi dress. All night, Bern skirted the edges of the ceremony.

  He didn’t long now for the awkwardness of grand public occasions, preferring his sandwiches in the corners of quiet bars, but jogged by Kate’s fondness for the city’s tchotchkes he remembered the mystery and magic of certain moments. For Flavin’s wedding, the museum’s inner walls were bathed with ultraviolet light, with yellows, pinks, and greens turning the corridors into rivers, the walls into warm energy. That night, Bern felt the building and everyone in it would lift into the air; he imagined the bride’s dark hair grazing his face as they rose hand in hand into paradise, scented with blossoming moss roses …

  The one blemish on Bern’s private wall of remembrance was his ex-wife’s unhappiness. Marla came from an old Houston family with conservative politics and narrow social values, yet she had always seemed easygoing and nonjudgmental—until New York. The prodigious drinking and sexual energy at art parties rattled her. She claimed she wasn’t homophobic, yet Bern felt her stiffen in the presence of gays. Manhattan acted as a palette knife, scraping off the unfixed surface of her personality and revealing the coarser base underneath. A common enough story. But this isn’t fair to her, Bern thought. Even in 1983, when she complained about the city’s squalor, its noise and dirt and heat, its exorbitant prices—“Back home, for this rent, I could get the fucking Astrodome!”—he understood that deeper currents shocked her into smashing against her surroundings, and he may have been part of the problem. Just as the city’s rhythms unlocked movements in her behavior that Bern hadn’t sensed before, it unleashed his latent capacities for self-absorption, obsessive work, quiet anxiety. This much he had learned about himself in twenty years: whole swamps of his quirks remained hidden from him. He had known from the first that Marla didn’t have patience for his pronouncements, not the way Kate did now.

  What continuing part, if any, did Bern play in Marla’s mental life? A few years ago, a friend informed him her father had died, a gentle man whom Bern had always liked, and he had given her a brief condolence call. He hadn’t spoken to her since then—over a decade now.

  Remembrance. Hopeless.

  Over the years since Marla’s departure, he’d developed a reputation in the office as a loner, slightly off-kilter, seldom dating, seldom leaving early for the day. He worked hard, earning the firm a small, steady profit, so his job was secure. But the young guns (he was about their age when he started), these kids with their software lingo, their gossip about Robert Venturi and postmodernism, viewed his passion for history, his “seeking the truth in building” as quaint. Behind his back (but not so softly he didn’t hear it) they called him the “Utopian.” In the coffee room, one of them would quip, “You know, Wally, eventually every utopian experiment ends in tyranny and disaster,” and they’d all crack up. Bern thought it a serious point, worth pursuing.

  What he really wanted to tell them, if they had granted him the courtesy of entertaining his ideas, was that he didn’t care about Utopia. From his office window he could point to billboards, tenements, distant shipping cranes, sewer pipes exposed beneath jackhammered sidewalks, the used clothing store … he could turn and ask his colleagues, if they had ever gathered in his office to listen (as he often imagined them doing—on a pleasant late afternoon, say, the sun in bright squares on his carpet, a lazy warmth in the room), “What do the things we see around us have to do with our inner lives? Is this blandness a reflection of who we are? Or do we come to reflect the objects we live among?”

  But the original young guns had all moved up or out, leaving Bern in the same old spot surrounded by fresh faces, men and women whose years he did now exceed. Considerably. The youngsters got the corner offices, the sexy commissions (trendy night spots, restaurants in Trump’s benevolent shadow) while the nonprofits trickled down to Bern, the social service agencies in need of a bit more room, old churches looking to remodel, foundations with cash restrictions—projects for which a slow pace and a simple approach could still turn a profit for the firm and earn Bern’s bosses citizenship points throughout the community.

  Lately, function was the firm’s motivational catchword, according to Jerry Landau, Bern’s immediate supervisor: workplace as System, with each component fulfilling its designated capacities. Bern understood function in more natural terms, as the suffering of a process, the way wood weathers over time or the body experiences mild discomfort as it goes about its sweet digestive task.

  He stood now facing St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Shadows of birds moved lazily on the white marble arches. A man with a camera bumped his shoulder, mumbled “Sorry,” and moved to take a picture of the church’s shaded steps. The man said something in French to a female compani
on. Bern caught the words sacre and cité. Sacre, he recalled from school, meant “cursed” as well as “holy.”

  He remembered reading, years ago on an airplane, a not-bad thriller about an IRA man who rigged the cathedral with bombs.

  The church’s treelike spires and gently bending portals reminded him of his moment with Kate the other night in front of the Presbyterian’s arch. Mysterious groves, these houses of worship, forests encased in stone, hiding secret rituals. Wind wheezed in the gaps among the rose-colored windows. The breath of orphans, Bern thought, children now forgotten, whom monks once tended on this site, long before the cathedral was built. The structure’s thin arcs resembled oak limbs laden with ornaments: animal skulls, pelts, and hides—the leavings of a sacrifice, the attempt to dress up murder as a thoughtful gift to the gods.

  Bern shivered, the sunlight cold on his skin. A group of Japanese tourists joined the French couple in a digital snap-fest. Bern turned. He didn’t want to hurry back to the office, to the chatter of his young colleagues. Moving slowly down Fifth, he was startled to see a pair of homeless men kneeling under a makeshift shelter in the space between a clothier and a bank. Since Giuliani’s Days of Stomp-and-Thunder, the homeless had become largely invisible in New York, especially in an area such as this. The men recalled recent photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans.

  A shopping cart, cardboard, blue plastic tarp … but the squatters had also outfitted their space with metal buckets of differing sizes and paper kites arranged to create an airy, split-level effect, almost Oriental in its aesthetic. Ingenious. While in grad school, as part of his dissertation project—an investigation into architectural origins—Bern had traveled to some of the world’s political hotspots. Nicaragua, Yemen. He had witnessed brilliant adaptations of the “primitive” to the modern, to organic necessity, to cultural arrogance: in Managua, he had marveled at the marriage of native stone to Spanish colonialism, and in Sana’a, at the use of dun-colored mud in sheltering animals, children, and the elderly—but never, he decided now, as he admired what these men had done with their scraps, had he seen such elegant adaptability.

  Dread. Bern thought, Isn’t that what drives construction—fear of harsh sunlight, wind storms, lightning? Honoring terror, a precondition for beauty, instead of trying to stave it off? One of the men shared with the other a slice of uncooked frozen pizza.

  This spot, with an asking price of nearly $1,500 per square foot, was, Bern knew, one of the most expensive strips of real estate on the planet.

  He passed an IRS branch office. With each ticking second, an LED sign above its door tabulated the national debt. The numbers, in the trillions, flashed as quickly as the burps of a Geiger counter he remembered using in his middle-school science class. One day, he had sat with twelve other sweaty kids in the center of a football field to measure the assault of the earth by solar rays.

  On the north side of Union Square, Bern saw a billboard touting “Lifestyle Buildings.” He didn’t know what a “Lifestyle Building” was, and he experienced a moment of panic. Was it possible that eventually you lost your edge in the city? Dulled by overwork, so you couldn’t even spot a wedge of geese …

  When he reached the office he spoke to no one. Two of his colleagues argued in the hallway outside his door—something about a realtor “flipping a building, repping a new client.” “We all know product doesn’t move that far south of the fucking park,” said one of the men. “Everyone in America knows that!”

  5.

  The wide glass doors of Bern’s building infused him with relief from half a block away. A quick change of shirts, a fresh tie before running to meet Kate … when he entered the lobby, he saw Mrs. Mehl sitting hunched and red-eyed on the sofa. Ryszard, the super, knelt beside her, dabbing her face with a wet cloth. Two tall blondes and a dark woman with taut, boxy hair (a look Bern associated with fashion magazines and stoned stupidity) stood in the center of the room. They held whippets on diamond-studded leashes. The dogs were gorgeous, vividly sculpted, gray with wispy orange streaks down their legs.

  “I told him, ‘Why shouldn’t I style my personality after my pet?’” one of the blondes said to her companions. “Style is style, darling. You take it where you can get it.”

  Bern thought, No animals were harmed in the making of this psyche.

  He nodded hello to Ryszard and asked Mrs. Mehl what had happened. She said she was taking her cat to the vet, making her way through the lobby when “these three harridans stomped in with their smelly old beasts and scared my little poopsie. She ran out the door.”

  “We should have known we had the wrong building,” the dark woman said to her friends. “Look at this dump. Stephane would never stay here. He’d be ill.”

  “All right, all right,” Ryszard grunted, waving his arms. No matter the concern—a burst pipe, a minor break-in, a scuffle in the elevator—from Ryszard it was “All right, all right” and a choppy wave of the arms. He was Polish, pretended he had never learned much English (though he managed just fine with the language when he wanted to), couldn’t repair a paper clip, yet somehow had earned the landlord’s trust. He’d been a fixture in the building for years.

  True, he was strangely effective in emergencies involving livid people. Bern figured this was because Ryszard’s presence was such an anomaly, people backed off rather than engage a fellow with whom it was clear there could never be any resolution. He reminded Bern of a puffer fish he’d seen once in a wildlife documentary.

  The whippets left the building, tugging the harridans behind them.

  Ryszard pressed the wet cloth into Bern’s hands and shuffled to the stairway. Bern helped Mrs. Mehl into the lift. She was the very image of reduced yet indomitable dignity, like the homeless men on the street. “I’ll draw up some fliers. We’ll post them around the block and over at McGee’s,” he told her. “We’ll find your cat.” For once this week—the fire escape still nettled him—his drawing skills might be useful. Mrs. Mehl described the animal to Bern. “Her name is Madame Anna Mona Pasternak,” she said. “After my aunt, in Minsk.”

  “That’s unusual.”

  “It’s her name.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course.”

  “Put it on the flier.”

  “I will.”

  The old woman moved slowly down the third floor hallway, and it occurred to Bern she could pass away before they found her pet. He wouldn’t be surprised to hear in the morning that she had died in her sleep. Well, he thought: life among others.

  The phone in his living room blinked its round red eye. A message from Kate. The moment he heard her voice, he convinced himself she had called to cancel. “Wally, I walked by the Cedar today at lunch. It’s closed!” she said. “There’s a sign in the window, saying the disruption is only temporary.”

  He stared at his moss rose. What was more distressing—the news about the Cedar or the insecurity Kate’s voice had just caused him? Was he becoming too dependent on this girl?

  “Why don’t you come to my place?” Kate said.

  Her place.

  “I’ll fix us some gumbo. A salty little taste of the Gulf, how’s that? And Wally? I know what you’re thinking.”

  Flame in his cheeks.

  “You’re thinking it’s another loss—the Cedar.”

  His shoulders fell. Once again, his insecurities had forced him face to face with his vanity. Naturally, it didn’t occur to Kate that her invitation would arouse him, even mildly. She didn’t think about him the way he thought about her. Wasn’t that clear by now?

  “The sign does say ‘Temporary,’” Kate observed. “Let’s wait and see, okay? It doesn’t mean the sky is falling again.”

  Sweet girl.

  “I’ll see you around six?” she said. The loud click of her hang up echoed the ticking of the numbers on the national debt sign.

  Bern pulled from his closet a fresh white long-sleeved shirt. Should he iron it? The collar was askew. Wouldn’t ironing suggest—reveal—to Kate a hope on h
is part?

  It’s said that Carlo Lodoli was perpetually disheveled and dank, distracted as he moved through the world. Yet young people flocked around his tattered, tottering frame, eager to hear his talk.

  In the bedroom, Bern considered his face in the mirror of his dresser. Querulous. Pale. An expression of frozen surprise. He recalled the lost eyes and mouths on the wall at St. Vincent’s. Tucked inside the wooden edge of the frame around his mirror was a newspaper clipping, yellowed now, about the discovery of an old burial ground in Lower Manhattan. Workers had unearthed ten to twenty thousand slave remains when they dug a pit for a new federal building. Bern had kept the clipping to keep alive in his mind knowledge of what Kate called the city’s layers—the island’s onion skins. Paper and bone. A passing breath.

  The clipping nudged another scrap on the mirror, also beginning to yellow: “Ten Rules for Cardiovascular Health.”

  Bern’s dresser was thick with relics from his past: a framed quote from an Isaac Babel story: “You Must Know Everything.” Marla had given it to him for his twenty-eighth birthday. A cherrywood box for paper clips and pennies, also a gift from Marla. A comb, rarely used. An empty container for “Cactus Candy,” a souvenir of Houston, vividly blue and green with a hot yellow streak on the side of the box. Probably these things will outlast me, Bern thought. Through the years, their hard edges will soften but remain, and here they’ll stay: testimony to the life I lived, good or ill.

  Kate’s place resembled a parochial school, with framed, out-of-register prints of St. Patrick and the Virgin on the wall above a bookshelf. On the shelf were candles in thick glass containers imprinted with the faces of saints and prayers for salvation, fortitude, and luck.

  The solemn atmosphere, broken only by a couple of sports magazines left open on the floor, was bolstered by Faure’s Requiem, playing softly on the CD player. Bern recognized the stately Kyrie.