The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  In the lobby, on his way to the elevator, Bern had noticed the grime on the walls, the tiles like weak, malarial eyes staring at him. The stench of old cabbage and rotting meats in black plastic bags piled in a side room next to the elevator shaft caused his stomach to clench, the odors clashing with the scent of the single rose he’d brought for Kate. The feathery erotic charge tickling his skin since her phone message dissipated in the lobby’s pungent assault.

  The building’s hallways appeared to be part of a wasp’s nest, cells within cells. Rough, sandy walls. Holiday decorations—all out of season (red Christmas bells, cardboard skeletons, brittle and dry four-leaf clovers)—sagged on a few apartment doors.

  When Kate let him in, her roses and the cayenne prickle of the soup carried him back into East Texas bayous: the hunt for crayfish in muddy bottomlands packed with steamy brown leaves, warm seepage from rice paddies …

  “How nice,” Kate said, taking the rose from his hand. She placed it in a glass of water and set the glass on a wood plank atop her antique radiator, next to pots of roses. Starlike blossoms strained toward the window and the lights of the street. “Portulaca, the man at the market told me these were called,” Kate said, touching the flowers. “I’d never heard that name. I guess that’s what they say up here. Wine?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Bern said. Through her window he glimpsed satellite dishes, ash cans, rainspouts.

  She pulled the cork from a bottle of cabernet.

  “No Guinness?” Bern asked.

  “I only drink Guinness in bars, to impress older men,” Kate said. She saw him eyeing the saints. “I know. It’s like a K-Mart convent in here. I’m lapsed, don’t worry. What can I say—I like the kitsch. It comforts me. Childhood, you know. You?”

  He thought she meant the wine, to which he had already assented, and he stood puzzled. Then he realized she was asking about his religious upbringing.

  “Oh. Nominally Jewish. What the newspapers call ‘cultural Judaism.’ Little to do with faith, so I never had a chance to lapse—though my grandfather tried to interest me in the rituals. I must say, I’ve noticed in others that ‘lapsed’ is a pretty murky category.”

  Kate laughed and raised a thick brown brow. “A Texas Jew …”

  “It’s true, we were rare in our part of Houston. But not ostentatious … which is why my wife’s family, good Southern Baptists, finally accepted me in spite of their doubts.”

  “You married hellfire?”

  “She told me she had lapsed.”

  “I see.”

  Now the Requiem soared. The minor strains of the “Offertory” gave way to the “Sanctus.” The violas wept.

  Kate didn’t join him in the wine. For herself she poured a glass of mineral water. He felt the odd treat of seeing her beyond public arenas, among her private things, at a rhythm of her choosing. He would watch. He would learn.

  “Gumbo’s almost ready,” she told him. “Relax. Mi casa es tu casa … does that apply to rentals? Anyway, kick those magazines out of your way … Gary’s old baseball stuff …”

  At the mention of the name, Bern stiffened involuntarily. He stepped around the magazines as though they were predators whose sleep he shouldn’t disturb. The wine tasted like pepper.

  She ladled the gumbo into fat yellow bowls, topped off his glass of wine, and placed a stiff baguette, wrapped in a tea towel on a platter, on her tiny dining-room table. She switched off the lights in the kitchen. Candlelight perked across her forehead, nose, and cheeks. They toasted. The Requiem reached its climax—in “Paradisum.” The piece’s martial pacing opened up into lighthearted trills: for one jaunty measure, Bern caught something like a Rodgers and Hart beat. Perverse of him to hear, in sacred strains, the Great White Way. What kind of philistine was he? What was he doing here?

  “—stereotypes,” Kate was saying. “Two summers ago, in Northern Ireland—my first and only time there—and it was strange because I felt a pull from the place, given my family history and all, but I wondered how much I had talked myself into … you know, tourism and prefab nostalgia … and how much of my attraction was genuine? What did ‘genuine’ even mean?”

  Bern watched her face and nodded as she spoke. He brought a spoonful of steaming soup to his mouth. “This is delicious,” he said.

  “Could have used more salt. Anyway,” she said, rising, “what was I responding to? Some smell from the stones? The moss? The air? Were the genes stirring inside my body? Or was this feeling just bullshit, the magic of my Visa card?” She laughed, placing a new CD in her player. “Now for something completely different. Do you mind?” A computerized thudding imploded in her speakers.

  “Not at all,” Bern said.

  “Death Cab for Cutie,” Kate said, tapping the CD case. “I just discovered them. But Ireland. It was weird, Wally, because my family’s experience wasn’t the happy-go-lucky … you know … drunken revelry, storytelling, that sort of thing. The O’Dochertaighs—my ancient relatives—were the last of Donegal’s seventeenth-century clan lords. The summer I visited, I’d drive my rental car into some village on the coast, stop and ask directions, talk to folks. When they found out I was an O’Dochertaigh, their faces crumpled. ‘Ah God,’ they’d say, ‘not another one.’ They’d squint at me: ‘Yes, yes, you’d fit in any ditch around here.’ I mean, four hundred years had gone by, and still the O’Dochertaigh name was associated with brutality and war.”

  “Pleasant group, your folks. Available for weddings, wakes, and plunder.”

  “In a pub one night, a nice old gent even suggested to me … gently, politely, but still … that the O’Dochertaighs were just like the Israeli army, occupying Gaza. Centuries in the past!”

  “Well, but look what’s happening now in Belfast,” Bern said. “Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley breaking bread together. Unthinkable, right, even a few years ago.”

  “Yes, it’s confusing,” Kate said. “Incredibly hopeful, on the one hand, and on the other … you should have seen Derry, Wally. So moving. The ‘Free Derry’ murals at the Bogside, commemorating the Bloody Sunday martyrs. But there again … someone had come along and spray-painted pro-Palestinian graffiti across several of the pictures. Like there was no difference between … ah, hell …” She laughed. Her cheeks had flushed with excitement, the color of warm copper, a color Bern wanted to touch, the way he often felt compelled to run his hand along smooth staircase banisters in vintage buildings—the slow, comforting ascent, a retreat from the world outside.

  “I’m one to talk,” Kate said. “One of my ancestors, a warlord named Cahir, sacked Derry in 1608—a deliberate provocation of the British. He burned the place to the ground. So that’s my family’s legacy. Great, right? I’ve got the death of a city on my conscience, and the people there won’t let me forget it!” She laughed again.

  “What if I designed a hut for you?” Bern said. “‘The Atonement Hut.’ You could offer it to the Derry city council.”

  Kate smiled but her mood had slipped. “Wally?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think we’ll ever get over it?”

  He searched her eyes.

  “You know.”

  He had splattered soup on his shirt. He dabbed the spot with his napkin. “Naturally, certain individuals will never get over it,” he said. “But it seems to me that—except for the site itself—the city has moved on, for the most part. Doesn’t it seem so to you?”

  “Yes. I guess. But—should we move on? Maybe that’s what I’m asking.”

  “Ah.”

  “I mean, I know we have to. Sort of. But your hut—isn’t it …”

  Bern slid his hand toward hers—aware of the stain on his shirt, of the sweet smell of roses in the room. “Kate. By any chance, is this about New Orleans?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I—”

  “Maybe you should go back and see it. You still have friends there, right? Places that meant a lot to you.”

  “Yes. My friends the Lindahls have … well,
they lost …” She shook her head.

  “I’m not a believer in ‘closure,’” Bern said. “But I do trust reconnecting. Grounding oneself. When you told me you hadn’t been back since the storm, I confess I was shocked.”

  “First principles.”

  “Yes.”

  She removed her hand from his. “Well, this is awfully gloomy talk for such a lovely evening. I’m sorry. How did we get into all that? I was telling you about my family, my trip to Ireland.” She refilled his wine glass.

  “Will you join me?” Bern said. “I can’t drink the whole bottle.”

  “I shouldn’t.” She wrinkled her nose. A little girl’s face: an attempt to pass off as trivial something quite serious. Bern sensed this immediately. “It’s annoying, and I can’t believe myself,” Kate said rapidly, her eyes full of reflected candle flames. The room’s low light and its shadows made her face fluid, her nose and lips resembling tips of underwater reeds, now foreshortened, now elongated as the candles flickered. “This morning I realized … I think I’m pregnant,” she said. “Pure carelessness. I haven’t told Gary, not until I’m absolutely certain, and he’s going to … Wally? Wally, what is it?”

  She stared at him as though she feared his heart had exploded. And his heartbeat did quicken, surprising him.

  “It’s nothing, really. Just a little morning sickness,” Kate said. “That’s why I’m avoiding the alcohol.”

  Bern wiped his mouth and stood. He walked over to the bookshelves. Dizzy. The wine. The roses. He studied the face of a saint on one of the tall glass candleholders: an androgynous, childlike figure in a blue-plumed hat, with brown curly hair, dark eyes, and a rose-petal mouth. The saint, seated on a wooden throne, held a basket and a golden staff. “The Holy Child of Atocha,” said a paper label on the glass. “Purify our hearts by the example of your meekness.”

  He turned to Kate. Though she sat in shadow, he saw she had registered what surely marked his face. Sexual jealousy. A man of his age! Yes, yes: he was a pathetic gag gift at someone else’s party. A trick can of peanuts … pop the lid … the fake, ungainly snake.

  “Oh shit,” Kate said.

  Bern stared at his shoes: smeared with the dirt of the streets.

  Kate carried the yellow soup bowls to her tiny kitchen sink. Death Cab shook the room. The flowers trembled. “I thought we … I thought you understood,” Kate said.

  “Yes,” Bern said.

  “But?”

  “But.”

  She whirled to face him, her wet, soapy hands on her hips. “Can we get around this, Wally? I really enjoy our friendship.”

  Her words sent heat through his arms and caused an amorous swelling. Kate glanced at his pants. “Do you …” he said. “Excuse me, where is you-your …”

  His stutter appeared to enrage her. “Down the hall. To your left,” she said tersely.

  She didn’t have a hallway. He stood rooted, a disoriented, carnal clown. Then he remembered that, on each floor of this old building, three or four units shared a single bath. She meant the hallway outside her apartment.

  Architecture!

  He walked to the door.

  Institutional green tiles lined the bathroom walls. A toilet and a shower missing its curtain filled the miniscule space. Someone had left a plastic bag stuffed with pink soap and a hairnet hanging by a cord from the shower nozzle. The nozzle dripped black water. The toilet bowl was plugged with shit and enough paper to fill a Brooklyn phone book. The odor dampened his lust. Oh my god, he thought, recalling Kate’s outraged look, the firm set of her mouth, did she think I’d run in here to—?

  His vision blurred. His shirt stain seemed to spread, like the smell in the room. He tore off a piece of toilet paper and wiped his forehead. His stomach pitched. He took slow breaths until his pulse returned to normal.

  By the time he got back to Kate’s living room, rage coiled in the muscles of his arms, though he couldn’t locate its source. She stood in the kitchen where he’d left her, drying her hands on a towel. A sting of pepper in the air. The gumbo. His eyes watered. A smell of smoke. One of the candles had guttered.

  Kate wouldn’t look at him. “I’m sorry, Wally. Maybe it’s not possible to … I mean, for a man, a man who’s been lonely for a while, and a young woman—”

  “It’s possible, Kate. We’ll do it, okay?” His words sounded harsh. He had no control. “It’s just that, I didn’t picture myself babysitting some young couple as they worked out their little soap opera …”

  Mistake, he thought. Erase. Erase.

  “Babysit?” Kate said.

  “You’re right. I’m feeling sorry for myself. I shouldn’t …” Act your age, old fool. Tighten the screws. “I apologize.”

  Kate crossed her arms over her breasts. The dish towel hung from one of her hands and covered her torso, demurely. “I think you should go, Wally.”

  He made a formal bow. A bobbing punch-clown. “I’m sorry, Kate.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  “Thank you for dinner.”

  She nodded.

  Only steps away from Kate’s he felt his shoe crack—a slapstick flapping of the worn right heel—as he crossed Seventh where, apparently, the new St. Vincent’s would be built. Bern went through shoes at an alarming rate: three pairs in the last six months. Shoddy craftsmanship, he thought. Then: Of course she doesn’t want me. I’m just an old curmudgeon.

  In the middle of the avenue, a crumpled Starbuck’s cup blew against his instep.

  His heart beat fast again. His hands smelled of salt and cayenne, and faintly of the flower he’d cut for Kate.

  The western sky was glassy violet with a smear of orange. From the shadows of the hospital a dirty, khaki-clad figure reeking of gin and onions lurched at a pair of girls. “Cigarette,” he said. “Fuckface. Fuckface.” The girls fell back against a wall. Bern thought of stepping in—but why? To do what? Assert himself? At his age? These girls were old enough to stroll around the city on their own, to cope with whatever the streets tossed up at them. One of the young ladies fished a cigarette from her purse.

  Bern started to head up Seventh toward a subway station. On Kate’s corner, a raucous party erupted out of a brownstone’s doorway, down the building’s concrete steps. Young people laughing and drinking beer from silver cans. Many of them appeared to be interns at St. Vincent’s—they wore wrinkled green medical smocks. A basket of blue paper slippers, the kind doctors pull over their shoes for sanitary purposes, stood on the stoop. The revelers seemed to be using the slippers as party favors, wearing them on their heads or hands, or stuffing them into their pockets so they resembled boutonnières. Inside, the crowd danced to laborious hip hop while dressed to treat gunshot wounds, burns, and lacerations.

  Bern glanced back one last time at Kate’s place. Would she let him in now if he showed up, hangdog? Probably she’d gone to bed. He veered away and, thinking of her, missed the subway station. Well, it felt good to walk. It always felt good to walk. His shoe heel clattered on the street like the ceramic tiles hung on a chain-link fence, three or four blocks back, commemorating 9/11. The tiles came from New York well-wishers: “Oklahoma City is Thinking of You!” and “Arizona Says God Bless NYC!” When wind blew and shook the fence, the tiles rattled like seed-filled gourds.

  Tomorrow he would telephone Kate. Yes. He was the mature one here: it was up to him to make things right. They would forge a friendship, by God—against all odds. Men and women: it could be done. Belfast, right?

  Don’t get carried away, Bern told himself. After all, “making things right” meant taking small steps. Building a hut one mud brick, one pole, at a time. An apology. A design for a fire escape. A poster for a missing cat. He had learned his lessons from Lodoli, had become Lodoli, watching the great cities of his time wax and wane, and wax again. Live lightly on the earth, he thought, and leave all pages blank.

  On a sidewalk grating Bern paused impulsively, then steadied his feet as a subway train thundered beneath him.
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  Suitor

  The cabbie pushed a button and rolled down the windows rather than ease out of his coat as he drove. Shivering in the back seat, Bern concentrated on an ad posted in front of him in a small silver frame: a Lincoln Center staging of the Romeo and Juliet ballet. A few years ago, he had seen a production of Romeo and Juliet. The show’s second half featured few dances because, by intermission, most of the characters had been killed.

  Not the best story line, perhaps.

  Like his little pirouette with Kate. He was eager and afraid to see her now.

  The cab dropped him near the Dakota. A boy with skin as dully textured as Miracle Whip led a knot of tourists to the corner of Seventy-second Street. “The ghost tour begins in five minutes!” he called. “Spirits of the famous dead …”

  Bern slipped into the park across the street, between idle horse-drawn carriages. In a tiled circle inside a small plaza, a mosaic spelled the word Imagine. People sat on benches gripping Met bags, eating pretzels the size of babies’ fists, or reading papers—“Celtic Tiger!,” a piece about Irish entrepreneurs snatching up Manhattan real estate. A bald man with a blue dragon tattooed on his neck sat by a tree reading a biography of Einstein. Bern found a spot on a bench next to a Jamaican woman, apparently a caretaker hired to watch an elderly lady. The lady shook violently in a wheelchair, precisely in everybody’s way. Her companion waved a bagel in her face. “But I dropped it on the ground!” the old girl said. “Well then, I guess you can’t eat the damn thing now, can you?” said the nurse.

  Where was Kate? Making him wait. Punishing him for that terrible night last week.

  Of course, he deserved it. He had known she was living off and on with a guy. He had learned she was carrying Off-and-On’s kid. How could he have violated their friendship?

  We’re buddies, Kate had always said to him. Yes?

  He was too damn old for this. And she was far too young to tolerate his sorry needs (midtwenties? she’d never said). The perils of the city. This is what happened when you packed people tightly on an island. It was impossible not to feel the warmth of the body beside you.