The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Maybe so,” Bern said.

  Davis slipped away.

  Behind Bern, Henderson made loud clicking noises with his lips. Bern turned. “Oh. I’m sorry,” Henderson said. “My gums ache. It’s the GVH. Side effect from the bone marrow transplant and all the goddamn medications I’m taking. I just wish I could taste food, you know? Well. No complaints, no complaints.” He smiled unconvincingly.

  By the time Bern reached his office, his chest hurt. Too much time in the Sick Ward. Whatever happened to routine? he thought. The taken-for-granted? We are bored with the city? Boredom is possible only when you’re healthy.

  “Wally?”

  Murphy stood in his doorway.

  “Yes?”

  The young man laughed self-consciously, put his hands on his hips, and glanced at the floor. “I mean, you really don’t like me, do you? What’s the deal, man?”

  Bern stared at the pencils on his desk.

  “Is there something I can do to … I don’t know, make peace?” Murphy said.

  Bern’s mouth went dry.

  “I’m really not here to get up in your grille. Really. I’m not.”

  “Fine,” Bern said. “That’s fine.”

  Murphy shook his head. “All right, Wally,” he said. “Have a good day.” He drifted away, down the hall.

  Oh, go after him! Bern thought. Apologize. The boy is making an effort. What the hell is my problem? But he stood by his desk, gazing at the tragedies on his wall. I am what I am, he thought, tightening his rectum. If I trailed that boy down the hall right now, I’d be brick masquerading as oak. A false front, whose only recourse is to crumble. He remained standing, uncomfortably, until his feet hurt; as he sat, he congratulated himself, half-heartedly, on his dignity.

  On his way home, studying storefronts, traffic islands, and billboards, he realized he had come to like the look of flat, gray, unadorned concrete: its reassuring rigidity. Did this preference indicate a coarsening of his sensibilities?

  He passed a Greek deli. In the window, under red heat lamps, skewered lamb shanks and pork loins rotated on a metal contraption. The motion reminded Bern of Aristotelian models of the universe he’d seen in old philosophy books. The meat looked singularly unappetizing.

  Perhaps because he was a step or two slower today, having skipped his meals, he was startled by his fellow strollers’ aggressions. Few of them waited for “Walk” signals. They appeared to dare trucks, buses, and cabs to run them down. The defiance of the foot. For all the cockiness implied by this behavior, Bern took it as a sign that most people felt helpless in their surroundings and rebelled in small, meaningless ways.

  Was he projecting again? Regretting his treatment of Murphy in the break room?

  The lobby of his building was vacant. On his way to the elevator, he passed through a cloud of old woman—a scent of wool, dry skin, and faint, sweet lavender perfume.

  In his apartment, he mixed his purgative. The instructions told him to drink eight ounces of the disgusting stuff every fifteen minutes, until no more remained. Then he had to swallow sixteen ounces of water. An hour and half later, repeat. A flat, lemony taste. Immediately, he felt bloated. He paced his kitchen, sang to himself, switched on his radio. Two NPR announcers led a pledge break. Strangely, their droning money chatter cheered him: a predictable, distracting rhythm keeping him from dwelling on his belly.

  From his bookshelf, he pulled a paperback copy of the 1930s WPA Guide to New York City—dated but still a fine overview of Gotham. He forgot his stomach, further, by studying prints of the murals he had extolled to Murphy in the break room. One of them, entitled “Chelsea Shape-Up” showed gaunt men in baggy pants rioting outside a street-side factory gate.

  By early evening, he had blasted his insides into the toilet. He was certain he could not leak any more. A cramp seized his belly and he rushed to the bathroom again. The phone rang. He let it go. No one could possibly want him like this.

  4.

  His gastro man had a small clinic on the east side of Washington Square Park. At first, Bern had worried that a doctor who wasn’t located on the Upper East Side or around Union Square might not be worth his salt. But he had overcome this prejudice (after all, several of his colleagues—Henderson and Davis among them—swore by the guy), and he had learned to trust Nadelson.

  Bern left his apartment early in the morning and took his time getting to the clinic. Normally, at this hour of the day, in this part of town, he would have stopped at the Café Reggio and admired the green and brown walls and the tin-plated ceiling while enjoying a latte and biscotti. The smell of steamed milk bubbling through the open doorway onto the sidewalk as he passed the place weakened his knees. In just a few hours, once the procedure was finished, he could return to the buzzing human world.

  In the park, two boys sporting dreadlocks pounded plastic buckets with drumsticks. Behind a row of chess players sitting at concrete tables, a young man straddled a bench next to a young woman. Together, they ignored a preacher shouting at passersby, “Sinners, the End is gnawing at your bones!” The couple concentrated on a screenplay the woman had written. “Well, I meant him to be a cliché,” she said. “Well, I can see that,” the man replied.

  “The End is a pit bull,” screamed God’s emissary, wagging a finger at Bern. “And it will drag your bent and miserable carcass to Hell.”

  Am I bent, Bern thought, sidestepping the man. I’m not bent, you old nuisance. He straightened his shoulders. Poor Henry James, he thought, turning with relief to the arch at the park’s far end. In The American Scene, Bern remembered, James had called the arch “lamentable”—“lonely and unsupported.” Generally, the Great Man’s architectural criticism had more to do with his emotional states than the intrinsic values of objects. Fair enough, Bern thought, fair enough. On his return from Europe in 1904, James said he missed the “mild and melancholy glamour” of the area around the park, which had been buried by developers. James’s birthplace had been “ruthlessly suppressed” (i.e., torn down), its castellated, gabled façade fiercely “amputated.” The city would never feel the same to him.

  The preacher continued to harangue Bern from a distance.

  In Nadelson’s waiting room—plastic flowers, mediocre seascapes on the walls—Bern read a magazine article about newly discovered planets orbiting an “ordinary” star in Pegasus. “This is a window onto what our solar system might have looked like sixty million years ago,” an astronomer was quoted as saying. Bern recalled the mnemonic he’d learned as a kid to remember the names of the planets in the order of their distance from the Sun, My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles, and he giggled when he came to the “naughty” sphere. No matter how you pronounced it—Urine-us or Ur-anus—you soiled the cosmos.

  It’s your anus today, Bern thought. He swallowed another giggle, and a woman sitting across the room cut her eyes at him, disapprovingly.

  Nadelson, a thin, balding man, was chatty this morning. He and his wife planned to visit Paris next week, a short vacation. As he prepared Bern’s IV—“This anesthetic probably won’t knock you out completely, but you’ll feel no pain,” he said—he went on and on about Notre Dame, the excursion he intended to take down the Seine, the sights he hoped to see in the Marais. “I hear there’s a great kosher butcher shop there, in the old district,” he said, and Bern’s stomach pitched.

  The drip began in his IV tube, and soon the lower half of his body seemed to have turned to stone while his head floated off, in search of a light to orbit. All was fire, but not unpleasantly so. The fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling blurred, milky rainbows. Paris burned. Was someone talking about the City of Light? Construction is combustion, Bern thought, drifting. Here’s a piece of wood. Do you burn it to warm your limbs or do you use it to build shelter? Was civilization a matter of huddling around a fire or congregating under a roof? He was vaguely aware of Nadelson hovering over his haunches, some kind of business going on behind him. A nurse may have entered the room. Or maybe not
. Bern didn’t care. Vitruvius. Yes, it was Vitruvius who’d called fire a “civilizing trauma.” Lighting hits a tree. Flash. Boom. Terror. But the flames bring heat. Together, we press around them, holding out our hands. “Now we see the splendor of the stars,” Vitruvius said. “One more pass,” Bern heard Nadelson say. Sunlight moved along the wall, incandescent as a jellyfish.

  “Mr. Bern? Mr. Bern? Wally?” Nadelson bent above him. Bern was lying on a gurney, in a different room than before. How had he gotten here? When? A god-awful pink curtain swayed in noisy air currents behind Nadelson’s shiny head. The metal rings attaching the curtains to a rod suspended from the ceiling clattered like automobile gears. His hearing and sight were fuzzy. The room smelled of mercurochrome. “You did just fine,” Nadelson said. “Flying colors. No sign of polyps.” He handed Bern a box of apple juice with a straw stuck in it. “As soon as we check your blood pressure and you’re feeling a little less wobbly, you’re free to go. You’re a healthy man.” He patted Bern’s knee.

  Twenty minutes later, sure-footed, dressed, declared fit, he stepped outside and inserted himself into the stream of swift, determined bodies on the sidewalk. “Sudden death,” he had heard Murphy say to another young colleague in the break room the other day. “That’s the reality of city life, right? A speeding car coming around a corner. A stray bullet. A building crane falling on top of you. A gas main explosion. I favor designs that peel away the city’s skin, revealing the raw nerves underneath …”

  You’re a healthy man.

  Across the street from him, the window of a thrift store featured rocking horses, bird mobiles, inflatable punch clowns. Momentarily, their odd shapes disoriented Bern, and he recalled a number of men he had read about over the years who had designed not only buildings but also strange contraptions, synthetic creatures, automata, fanciful animals made from found materials … Jacques de Vaucanson, who made one of the world’s first lathes, revolutionizing building practices, but who also manufactured a mechanical duck that could digest and excrete. The maddening certainty of architects, dissatisfied with the world as it is, confident they could do a better job. Bern pictured Murphy’s face. It’s not enough to make homes for the world’s creatures, he imagined the young man saying; we have to remake the creatures themselves.

  The anesthetic had worn off, but Bern felt preternaturally sensitive and alert; he moved through the city as though it were a museum filled with relics whose functions weren’t clear.

  He strolled past the Stonewall Inn, crossed the street, and found a spot on a bench in Sheridan Park, next to the life-sized plaster casts of two women, one with her arm relaxed across the lap of the other. The first one resembled a young Mrs. Mehl—well, on second thought, maybe not. But wouldn’t it be nice to see the old woman this happy? He should take her strolling sometime. Get her outside. Sunlight bathed Bern’s lips, brows, cheeks: he was certain he could feel each part of his face separately as it was anointed by this spectacular day. He took a long, slow breath. A healthy man.

  The Pont Neuf came into his head. Why was he thinking of Paris? Had someone been speaking about Paris? Yes, yes, of course—Nadelson, right before administering the anesthetic. That summer after Houston, when Bern was in a pall following the school kids’ deaths, he and Marla had come to Paris by way of Barcelona. In Barcelona’s Barrio Gotico, its gray walls still pocked from Civil War machine-gun fire, they had run across the ruins of the oldest synagogue in Europe (or so it claimed to be), dating from the thirteenth century. A few old stones, visible through holes in the floor of a new synagogue, were all that remained of the ancient structure, but after days of reading only Spanish, Bern felt comforted by the signs in Hebrew (the writing familiar to him from childhood) and charmed by the young woman behind the gift shop counter, who wished him mazel tov in a lovely Catalan accent. In Paris, Marla had stopped him in a crowd, in the middle of the Pont Neuf, and kissed him because, she said, “This is what lovers do in Paris.”

  For Bern, the city’s romance came alive when he was surrounded once more by Hebrew, in the Marias—the signs on shuttered delis, the shouts of old, bearded men kvetching at one another in alleyways, in the midday heat, amid slightly sour smells of meats and oils. Bern had never been religious, but he recalled feeling profoundly Jewish that summer, traipsing through the old quarters of European cities, trying to outrun the tragedy that threatened his future, his career. His day of release—the day he first felt sure he could crawl out from beneath the fallen roof—was the one in late August when he and Marla visited the Empire of the Dead: the Catacombs of Paris, nearly two kilometers of dank, twisting tunnels underneath the city’s Left Bank. He wasn’t prepared for this unearthly realm. Millions of human skulls, symmetrical walls of bones, carted here from the city’s overcrowded cemeteries during Baron Haussmann’s nineteenth-century redesign of Paris. The tunnels were cold and dark. White niter covered the ground, his shoes. The sound of dripping water. Bern’s lungs tightened. What seemed like hours later, he and Marla emerged into the sunlight—as warm and welcome as it was today—and felt reborn. He saw it in Marla’s eyes and, drawing painful, grateful breaths, knew he experienced it too. Death had reminded them how rare it was to be awake, ambulatory, and famished. Chalky niter tracks smeared the sidewalk—thousands of traces left by the netherworld’s shaken escapees. Arm in arm, Bern and his wonderful wife rushed to a nearby Vietnamese cafeteria and wolfed down spring rolls, cabbage salad, soup.

  Now he sat among lovers turned to stone: these statues commemorating gay liberation. Not literally stone—plaster and copper, Bern recalled reading somewhere. But certainly, the figures resembled people caught by surprise, frozen in the midst of mundane acts, talking, touching each other casually, like the men and women in Pompeii, their intimacies seared into everlasting pathos.

  He recalled the Inferno—Dante, outside the City of Dis, threatened by Medusa … Virgil shading the Pilgrim’s eyes so he wouldn’t become petrified, his chance at salvation calcified, crumbling, lost …

  (Bad Jew! he remembered his grandfather telling him, once, only partly in jest. What is it with you, all the time with this saving of things… buildings, neighborhoods … what’s next? The body? You want a resurrection? Tell me, boy, are you a secret Christian?)

  A healthy man. I am a healthy man, Bern thought. That’s what I am. A man easily stimulated, a prisoner of my impulse to witness … but surely, for this, I can be forgiven. It’s a benevolent impulse, based on a desire for the world’s improvement. Is it egotistical to believe one man’s sentience can shape things for the better? Well, that’s the pact we make with ourselves to prevent our dissolution. It’s true, Bern thought, I’m driven by beliefs (Judeo-Christian, and more) insufficient to meet present-day challenges; I shrink in the face of power; I evade my deepest feelings. A flawed man. A flawed and healthy man.

  One of the most moving artifacts recovered at Pompeii, he remembered, was a stone fragment with the impress of a young woman’s breast in it.

  A man moved to tears by ghostly breasts.

  A girl walked through the park, singing “Across the Universe.”

  Was it silly or noble to take personal responsibility for the world’s history?

  Surely, it was dangerous to feel so much inner stimulation. But the excitement made him happy. His good health left him reeling. Overjoyed. He sat as still as he could, a conserver of energy—a quiet, elegant form. Next to him, the inanimate women enjoyed one another’s bodies.

  For a while longer Bern sat, content and unmoving, with stone.

  Art and Architecture

  The building seemed to shudder with the sigh of the opening door, and a dusting of snow blew into the lobby. Bern stepped inside with the kitten in his arms.

  “Oh no,” said Ryszard, the super. He was standing by the elevator doing nothing Bern could see.

  “You didn’t witness this,” Bern said. “It won’t concern you.”

  “No?” Ryszard scratched his belly. “We’ll all be cat watchers
. Day and night. She’ll have us on our hands and knees.”

  “She’s a lonely old woman.”

  “I’ve swept this floor for eighteen years. Loneliness? It’s like utility bills. Slip slip slip. In your mailbox. Every day.”

  The kitten, golden, gray, purred against Bern’s chest.

  On the third floor, listing precariously inside the doorway of her apartment, Mrs. Mehl wept. Bern knew she’d never gotten over the loss of her previous cat.

  “I thought you’d like the company,” he said. He’d always wanted to do more for her than help her upstairs, now and then, with her grocery sacks. She wore a wool nightgown, now, exposing her veiny ankles. Her skin smelled of Vaseline. She held out her arms and the kitten nuzzled her neck.

  “What do you call her? Him?” she said.

  “Him, I think. Whatever you want.”

  “No. You. Please.”

  Names imprinted on Bern during his Torah studies back in Texas came to mind. Childhood lessons with the rabbi. Ishmael, whose moniker means Heard by God. Isaac, He Who Laughs. And who does the Almighty anoint as the Chosen One? The joker. Go figure.

  “How about Jacob?” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bern.”

  “I’ll run out and get you some fresh cat food, okay?”

  What he didn’t tell her was that the doorman on East Fifty-fourth who’d been offering, all week, free kittens from his building’s overrun basement had found Jacob this morning pawing six of his brothers and sisters. They lay asphyxiated, curled in a heap near a leaking gas pipe. Through tears, the doorman said, “Well, this little fellow’s a survivor. Maybe I should keep him. What happens to him if your old woman keels over tomorrow? She’s pretty frail, you say?”