The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Are you feeling all right?” Bern asked.

  “Fine.”

  “No discomfort?”

  “Don’t nag, Wally. I’ll let you know, okay?”

  The conviction remained: she was teetering on a precipice. He’d try to keep her moving. Laughing. Relaxed.

  He spent the afternoon showing her two of his favorite objects in the city: El Greco’s painting of Toledo at the Met—“A city made of chalk,” he said—and, at MoMA, Giacometti’s little wooden sculpture, The Palace at Four a.m. The dream of a castle, a romance, a life, as fragile as a child’s drawing. In both museums, people chattered about the recent deaths of Bergman and Antonioni. “The age of great filmmaking is over,” said a bearded professor-type in line next to Bern. He smelled of tweed and ink.

  Outside, on Fifty-third, the afternoon sky arced over silver buildings, spectacularly purple and blue; against it, the city looked sharp and flat, like construction paper.

  Times Square, for the hell of it. A digital avalanche. In the cavernous Toys “R” Us, people lined up to buy the last Harry Potter book (“The age of great publishing is over”). Ads for coming films, Hostel, Saw, Live Free or Die Hard. It would be a summer of torture.

  On the subway, three blonde high school girls handed out pamphlets: “Jesus Made Me Kosher.”

  For dinner, Bern tried to take Kate to a refurbished Italian place in the Village, one of his favorites. It was closed, “For Sale or Lease,” its windows shuttered. Shaken, Bern let Kate lead him up Hudson to a place called Fatty Crab. “Fusion,” Kate said. Bern didn’t know what this word had to do with food. But his dinner was excellent: scallops and jasmine rice garnished with shaved bonito.

  “So,” he said when he’d ordered the wine. “In the museums today … did I become pedantic at any point? Too much the teacher?”

  “You were fine, Wally.” She smiled distantly. Butterfish glistened on her plate. She sighed and rubbed her belly. “I guess I’m getting too big for the dance classes.”

  “Is that what’s hampered your mood?”

  She shrugged.

  They ate quietly, Kate staring at her stomach, Bern grieving for the old restaurant. How quickly worlds vanished! Villages. Cottages. City blocks. He could fill a book with place names and streets, and within a year it would be a guide to nowhere.

  By the time their desserts arrived—coffee for Bern, frozen fusion for Kate—he wondered what could salvage their evening. For separate reasons, they were bound by lassitude, and it was tugging them to the bottom.

  They walked to the Fourteenth Street station and caught a train to her neighborhood.

  He reached for the almond oil.

  “That was an astonishing meal, didn’t you think?” Kate said, falsely cheery, setting her keys on her dresser. “Thank you, Wally.”

  “Rub your belly?”

  She stared at him. She sat on the edge of her bed. “Wally?”

  “Yes?”

  “You should know. Gary called me last night,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t going to tell you.”

  His scrotum tightened. “Oh?”

  “I think it finally struck him. He’s going to be a father whether he’s with me or not—and his baby’s going to grow up without him.”

  Bern swallowed hard, surprised at the breadth of his panic, stunned by his commitment to this woman. He was just a friend. He understood that. He sat beside her. “Does he want to come back?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he knows. I do think he’s having a fling.”

  “This is what’s made you so glum.”

  “You’ve said that twice tonight. Have I been glum?”

  “What do you want, Kate?”

  In the glare of a streetlamp, the leaves on the sidewalk trees made slow, gentling shapes on her walls. Just below her windowsill, a store sign pulsed, purple and green. She reached for his hand and held it. The curve of her belly reminded him of a cedar trunk in the back of his grandfather’s closet. As a child, he’d always wondered what was in it.

  Well. Tonight, all he could do was continue to astonish. “Shall we?” he said, sure of nothing else, waving the bottle of oil.

  “Okay.”

  Purple. Green. Purple. The leaf-forms on her walls squirmed like little fists. She unbuttoned her blouse. “Wally?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me. Please. What are you thinking right now?” she said. “Are you mad?”

  He unscrewed the bottle cap. “I’m thinking I don’t understand how you can resist me.”

  “I don’t know.” She smiled, smoothed his hair, his brows, his lips. “I really don’t know.”

  But he did.

  Of course he did. Who was he fooling?

  Just now, he had flirted with her like a kid. She liked the oil and their little ritual, but he realized his hands were rough, his skin loose and beginning to spot. She did not recoil from him, physically, but that was because, and only because, she’d put limits on their intimacy. This wonderful, funny, lovely girl. He was supposed to know better.

  Yes.

  But where did that assumption come from? The Almighty Authorities had no place in this apartment tonight. Who needed—what was—conventional behavior?

  How far was he willing to go? How much latitude did he have here?

  And really, shouldn’t he be embarrassed that Katie seemed so much smarter than he was? She knew before he did that his best bet as a suitor was not as a sexual specimen but as a knight errant, serving his sweet lady. Chivalry was his strength. Empathy. Obviously, Gary lacked courtly impulses. But no. No.

  The point was, Bern was no suitor at all. When Kate said “friend,” she meant friend, notwithstanding her vanity (just enough to be charming) and the pleasure she took in the power of her body.

  Still, the context was clear: for Kate, flirting with Bern was just an aspect of friendship, like the touching she allowed him during rubdowns. Her nonchalance stupefied him—a generational matter, he supposed; endeared her to him, and certainly aroused him. He kept looking for an opening, but the oil was only oil, pleasant on her skin, not an elixir (Spirits of the Dead!) intoxicating her into ignoring his flaw: his incontrovertible, irreversible age.

  He squeezed out twice as much oil as usual tonight. One last chance to use it up.

  “Mmmm,” Kate said.

  “Yes?” Bern said.

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  The Empire of the Dead

  Bern was scheduled for a routine colonoscopy on Wednesday morning, forty-eight hours from now. Today, carefree indulgence. Tomorrow, penance and prep.

  He showered, dressed, and fixed himself three scrambled eggs, bacon, and two flour tortillas warmed in the oven. Glancing at the flowers he’d bought on a lark yesterday to cheer the place up—they were arranged in a vase on his kitchen counter—he pictured his ex-wife as she had looked in her New York days. It was Marla who first discovered moss roses for sale here, at a street market on Third Avenue. She decorated their small apartment with them (then, they lived on Christopher Street, above a shop that sold sex toys).

  One morning, she told Bern she wanted to get pregnant. He laughed and said a baby wouldn’t make her happy. Lord, how callous had he been? The fact was, he wasn’t prepared for a child; he wanted to make a mark at work, and he didn’t bother to try to understand what Marla needed.

  The day, nearly twenty years ago, she returned to Houston, where they’d met, she laid a riding crop she’d bought at the sex store on the kitchen table. “Work seems to be the only thing that whips you into a frenzy,” she told him. “I can’t do it. Take that to the office with you. Maybe you can use it on your colleagues. Or yourself. Think of me when you do.” She picked up her suitcase and walked out the door, gripping a single orange rose against her cream-colored sweater, right between her breasts.

  Several times, Bern had tried to imagine the moment she braved the erotica boutique. He had not been able to do it. What had that moment cost her? What had she hoped t
o gain from it? Did she ever regret her impulse—or did she see it now as the finest moment of her life? A mark of independence?

  The week she left New York, he did tuck the whip (creepy-slick, heavier than he would have thought) into his briefcase and took it to the office. He stuck it in a desk drawer. For about two weeks, he’d open the drawer with his left foot in the late afternoons, stare at the thing, and weep. Eventually, file folders covered it over. Bern hadn’t seen it in years.

  He finished his eggs and left the sticky plate in the sink.

  Down in the lobby, Ryszard, the building’s super, swept the black-and-white-tiled floor. He bent above his broom like a crone in photographs of early-twentieth-century Russian bread lines.

  “Good morning,” Bern called to him.

  Ryszard nodded.

  Behind him, Mrs. Mehl, perhaps the building’s oldest tenant, basked in a pear-shaped slant of sunlight on the couch, below the slow but increasingly apparent fade of a painting of New Jersey on the wall.

  “Oh. Hello,” Bern said.

  She was trying to remove a wool scarf but it was caught in her furry coat collar. Bern gave her a hand.

  “Thank you,” she said. “People don’t help people anymore. Especially in this part of town.” She wiped her dry lips with the back of a papery hand. “Pained me something fierce to relinquish my uptown place, years ago.” She eyed Bern to make sure she had his attention. In the past, she’d rarely acknowledged him—though he had tried and failed to help her find her lost cat, once. He’d left fliers all around the neighborhood.

  For some reason, this morning she needed to talk. Bern stood patiently, smiling. “Rent-controlled, fifty years’ worth of our stuff in the closets, coats, board games, scrapbooks … now, there was a neighborhood. Harlem, between Second and Third. People took the time to introduce themselves and say hello on the streets. They considered your burdens their own. True neighbors. Herbert and I settled there in ’32. The El used to run right past our window.”

  Ryszard carried his broom across the room, as far away from the couch as he could get. Clearly, he’d lived many times through Mrs. Mehl’s travails.

  “When they tore down the El and the war started in Europe, we heard what this nation did. Sold the iron from the El to the Japs, and they turned it into bombshells to use against our brave, good boys,” Mrs. Mehl said.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Bern said.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Nothing much.”

  “Now here I am, all on my own.” She dabbed her eyes. Her fingers trembled. Bern produced a handkerchief from his coat pocket. “Thank you,” said Mrs. Mehl. “Nobody helps anybody anymore.” She clutched Bern’s handkerchief to her bosom. He didn’t try to retrieve it.

  2.

  He caught a local to work. In his office, he tossed his briefcase onto a wooden chair and hung his coat on a wall peg next to a glossy poster. DISASTER TIMELINE, it said. Beneath this heading, a list of dates: July 18, 64 AD, The Great Fire of Rome; October 21, 1868, The San Francisco Earthquake; October 8, 1871, The Great Chicago Fire; September 8, 1900, The Galveston Hurricane …

  Bern took five minutes every morning to stare at this dismal roster and contemplate what he should learn. Increase the space between buildings; decrease population density; use fire debris to fill in low-lying places, where malaria and other diseases might fester in standing water; restrict the heights of houses in relation to street width.

  Next to the poster, he’d hung a copy of Hammurabi’s Code, the world’s oldest known building law, the original of which was carved into ancient Babylonian stones: “If a builder build a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then the builder shall be put to death,” it said.

  Bern straightened the papers on his desk and laid out his most recent sketches for the light scoop of a building he’d been asked to renovate. He’d been pondering the project for two months now. Below his window, a man in the street yelled at a speeding cabbie.

  “Wally? Got a minute?” A rap at the door. Jerry Landau, Bern’s supervisor—florid, pencil-necked—stuck his head in. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Landau said. Behind him, a pale young man with slick, black hair, biscuit cheeks, and a slender nose stood with his hands in his pockets. “This is Murphy. Sam Murphy. He’ll be joining our team,” Landau said.

  Bern rose. He and Murphy shook hands. The boy’s knuckles were unusually white. Eyes like a gull’s. “Where you coming from?” Bern asked.

  “MIT,” Murphy said.

  Not just another young gun. A whole armory, rolled into one.

  “Next few weeks, Wally, share your thinking with Sam on the projects you’re working on. Help him learn the ropes, see how we do things around here,” Landau said.

  “Sure. We could start with this.” Bern turned to the sketches on his desk. “Right now, I’m designing a light scoop for a local foundation. Their building is rather unusual, and the problem is, this fire escape on the east wall—”

  “Oh, Sam’s already taken care of that,” Landau said. “I gave him the specs yesterday, as an example of what he might expect at first.”

  “Yeah, it was a little perplexing,” Murphy said eagerly. “But after studying it a while, I figured we could combine the light scoop with a ventilating chimney, roof-mounted …” He pointed to Bern’s sketches. “Enhance the stack effect there, see? And we install these motorized trickle vents. You get your natural airflow, and the occupant can control the operable windows.”

  Landau beamed. Bern thought: Oh my. This shmuck—who is he? He’s my goddamned pallbearer! Quick! Get me my pension.

  “There’s a basement in a brownstone over on East Fifty-fourth, by the river … some water damage, too small for the owner’s needs. He wants to expand the laundry facilities for his tenants, provide better access. I’d like you to take a look at it, Wally,” Landau said.

  “What about that building over by Fifth?” Bern asked. “The one you asked me to survey yesterday?”

  “Oh, I think we’ll give Sam the lead on that one. It’s pretty straightforward, no? Why don’t the two of you chat for a bit, get to know each other, then you can stop by my office, Wally, and pick up the basement specs, okay?” Landau withdrew.

  Bern set his briefcase on the floor and motioned toward the empty chair. Murphy sat and studied the DISASTER TIMELINE. “Whoa,” he said.

  “Reminds me of the seriousness of our calling,” Bern said.

  “I think it would freeze me up to look at that every day.”

  “So. What gets you moving?” Bern asked.

  “Oh! Possibility!” Murphy said. “All the ways to do this terrific city. Parks, for instance. You work much on parks? They’re such marvelous liminal spaces.”

  “Meaning—?”

  “Well, the way I see it, city parks are ironic, right? I mean, we all live here because we like the urban fabric. But we demand, along with our elevators and automated bric-a-brac, groomed trees, spiffy gardens …”

  “Contrast. Relief,” Bern said. “Seems natural.”

  “Yeah. Clearly, we crave both. So parks … maybe we play around with them a little, right? … extend the city into the park, say, with metallic sculptures … concede to nature, but remind the stroller—”

  “I don’t follow you,” Bern said. “What—you’d soften the ugly by adding to it?”

  “No, no, no!” Murphy said, laughing. “Don’t be so literal, Wally.”

  “Designs are literal.”

  “I’m just saying, introducing a little whimsy, a bit of the unexpected, into something like a city park can educate public taste, so—”

  Bern rolled up his drawings of the light scoop. “It’s easy to laugh at public taste,” he said, standing stiffly. “But it can’t be dismissed. People’s preferences are based on pretty sound principles. Comfort, shelter. They’re not as unsophisticated as they seem.” He hated
his scolding demeanor. This young man … the perceived threat of him … had put him on the defensive, forced him into a more conservative stance than usual.

  “But,” Murphy began, “a sudden ironic awareness …”

  “What about the poor slob who just wants to sit somewhere nice and eat a sandwich?” Bern said.

  Murphy rose. “Well. I’m sorry, Wally. We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I was just thinking aloud with you.”

  Bern shrugged. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry, too.”

  Murphy pointed at the rolled-up sketches under Bern’s right arm. “I didn’t mean to steal your thunder. Landau gave it to me as a kind of test, I guess. I didn’t know.”

  So. Smart and nice. Bern couldn’t stand him.

  Murphy turned to leave. He waved at the tragedies on the wall. “Seriously, though. I’d think about something else here, Wally. This can’t be good for you. How about a pinup of Lindsey Lohan?” He grinned, an attempt at lusty camaraderie, but—who was Lindsey Lohan? Apparently, Farrah Fawcett had slipped into the ether while Bern wasn’t looking. He was surrounded by too many young people.

  “Catch you later,” Murphy said. “Thanks.”

  Bern said, “Sure.”

  The basement specs were uninspiring. Bern phoned the building’s owner and made an appointment to survey the place three days from now when he’d survived his colonoscopy. He stuffed his light scoop sketches into a drawer and spent the rest of the afternoon arranging and rearranging the drawing implements on his desktop. American Venus. German Fabers. The Conte charcoal leads. Resilient steel nibs for his pens.

  Various moods required a graphite arsenal. Differing shades of hardness. Was this a “dark line” day (after all, he’d begun this morning thinking of Marla), or was Bern feeling more delicate than that? What kind of mark would suit him in this moment? He picked up a pencil, rejected it, tried another, and wound up drawing nothing.

  Early that evening, in his apartment, he read the “Before the Procedure” brochure his doctor had given him on his last visit. Tomorrow, clear liquids all day, but nothing was forbidden him tonight except foods peppered with whole seeds (popcorn, berries, nuts, breads, cereals, tomatoes). Twenty-four hours earlier, he had stopped taking his blood-thinning pills. On the kitchen counter, he set out the disposable bottle and the pouches of powder to be mixed with water when the time came. He’d leave work early tomorrow, come home around two, and begin the purge.