The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Maria,” she says.

  “And la niña?”

  “Anna.”

  I laugh. She looks at me, puzzled. “Maria,” I say. “I think you got lucky this time. But I don’t know if I’ve done you a favor. Did I?”

  She stares at me.

  More movement outside. Maybe just the wind, but for a long time—I begin to lose track—we wait. Marty will wonder what’s happened to me.

  Finally, Maria stirs and I know I can’t stop her. I nod, put my fingers to my lips. Slowly, I open the trap door. The sun has set. Night air touches our skin. I breathe deeply. The world. Here we are in the world. Maria scrambles up, pauses, looks down at me, smiles. Then I hear her run through the weeds. The baby cries. Or laughs. I can’t tell. They’re bound to be caught soon. Forgive me. But then I think: I took care of this woman. Briefly. Unwisely, perhaps. Badly. But: I am capable of taking care of someone. Maybe even my brother, no matter what Marty feels about me. No matter what Susan thinks is best for the two of us. No matter what Anna believes about the fraying limits of my powers.

  Does it matter that my parents are ghosts? Forgive me. An American Revolution. I didn’t stop it. If I could have, I would have …

  God knows my brother needs care. Susan could use me. With the crackpots, I always held something back—my tithing to grief? Taking care of someone. Giving willingly, not surrendering to need. A pair of eagles passes overhead. I don’t feel burdened or sad.

  I emerge from the hole. A disorienting mesh of odors and sounds. A bright flash. The Marfa Lights? The deep unknown? Dirt. Sage. Leaves. Come home? Above me, pulsing steadily, the stars.

  III

  Basement and Roof

  McGee’s, next to Bern’s building, sold many strange and wonderful things: high-end kitchen implements, ladies’ perfumes, pets. Bern wasn’t sure what this combination said about his West Side neighborhood. One day, he popped into the shop for an extension cord. He meandered up the aisles past Spanish combs and plastic flowers, old water pumps, shower nozzles, hat stands, paintings of bullfights on velvet, and bins of used yarmulkes. The narrow pathways smelled of foot powder and sweetened toilet water until he reached the animals. In a back corner, an oppressive odor of fur and pine-scented air freshener hung like invisible webbing. In a cage, four black terriers wrestled one another among shreds of the New York Times. Kittens slept nearby in a tall-sided box, unperturbed by the canary calls showering down on them. Bern noticed a saleswoman, a dark-haired beauty wearing a plastic nametag: “Marietta.” He smelled the mint flavoring of the gum in her mouth. Behind her, frantic scrabbling. In a large cage, a big brown bird with gold talons and chest feathers the color of wheat rattled the enclosing wire with stringy wings and his beak. A sign on the cage said “Macaw.”

  “Your sign is wrong,” Bern told Marietta. “I grew up in Texas and I used to see these birds. This is a roadrunner.”

  “Nuh-uh,” said the woman. “Imported from Brazil. A rarity.”

  “I’m telling you,” Bern said. After its flurry, the bird drooped, perfectly still. “And it looks sick.”

  “He’s fine.” She shuffled a stack of receipt books on a counter littered with newspaper ad supplements.

  Bern peered between the wires, into the bird’s dark eye. The pupil glistened. Your time is short, Bern thought.

  He bent closer to the cage, hands on knees. Fifty years old. Something is trying to talk to you.

  No. Not the bird. The angina he’d felt again last week; the stress test he’d taken, which turned up nothing; the impatient young doctor who implied that Bern had wasted his time despite bypass surgery eight years ago. “Just monitor yourself,” the young man said, dismissing him. “Pay attention, and let me know if you feel any changes.”

  Not the bird. But the creature stirred Bern. Its feathers resembled grass clippings, yellow and thin. All flesh is grass, Bern thought. Hang in there, old fellow.

  For some reason, on Friday morning, the 4, 5, and 6 trains weren’t running below Eighty-sixth Street. Bern hiked. Finally, with a speeding heart, he caught the M2. He stuck his MetroCard backward into the pay slot—he wasn’t used to riding the bus—and pissed off the driver. It takes an enormous capacity for shame just to get across town, he reflected. I am blessed with such a capacity.

  On East Fifty-fourth Street, near the river, a small fruit stand was temporarily abandoned. Perhaps the seller had taken a bathroom break. Bern watched an old woman pass the stand, place her hand on a bunch of grapes as though to snatch it, and apparently change her mind. In the end, her gesture appeared to be a sacrament instead of a near-theft.

  In the middle of the block, he found the brownstone whose basement Landau, his boss at the architectural firm, wanted him to renovate. The building was faintly Tudor, with cream-colored window trim. One of Bern’s new young co-workers had told him a pair of television stars lived in the place. He named them, but Bern didn’t know who they were. Before leaving the office this morning, he’d encountered Landau in the coffee room. Landau warned Bern to “get the lay of the land quickly. The only way we can turn a profit on this one is if you don’t spend too much time on it. Don’t screw it up, okay?”

  “Jerry, when have I screwed things up lately?” Bern asked.

  Landau stood nose to nose with him. “I used to be able to count on you, Wally, to work quietly, unobtrusively.”

  “And you still can.”

  “You’ve been a pain in the ass with these new hires, especially with this kid, Murphy. You could try to be more welcoming.”

  Bern said nothing.

  “I know, I know,” said Landau. “He’s a pain in the ass, too. They all are. But what do we do? These kids are going to take this firm into the future. You’d better get used to it, Wally.”

  So he’d been banished to a basement.

  Inside the assigned building, the cherry wood moldings nicely complemented the dark yellow walls and floor tiles, pink with pigeon-gray borders. In the lobby, a plum-colored carpet led to the doorman’s desk, lighted from above by a tiny chandelier shaped like an old gas lamp. The doorman, wearing black pants and a white shirt, no tie, was a friendly young fellow named Brian. His head was shaved like an NBA player’s and he wore thick red glasses. He called across the room to another young man in black pants, standing by a marble-topped table near a row of mail slots, and asked him to take the front for a while. He was going to show Bern the basement.

  The bowels of the building smelled of laundry detergent, bleach, Lemon Pledge, and oil paint, with a trace of old taffy and roach powder. The space’s dimensions were hard to determine. The dim yellow ceiling lights, tucked among heating pipes, were not much help, and the clutter was befuddling: decades’ worth of discarded furniture, appliances, radiator shells, and sports trophies. Propped against the wall beside the elevator were two framed movie posters, presumably removed from apartments when the tenants decamped or died years ago: The Woman on the Beach, starring Joan Bennett—“Go ahead, say it, I’m bad!”—and Call Me Madam, with Ethel Merman.

  Brian kept up a constant patter, following Bern as he moved among rows of musty boxes, toeing piles of paper, stacks of letters, mismatched shoes. “Must be interesting to be an architect in this city,” he said. “Though I bet you wish you were in on the World Trade Center sweepstakes, eh? Some folks are going to make scads off whatever goes on downtown. Best thing that ever happened to them.”

  “No,” Bern said. “I’m content to stay small. Sketch my little huts and things.”

  Brian laughed. The sound echoed in dark corners crammed with fishing poles and cobwebbed skis. Several pairs of children’s socks lay in a sea of green and white powder on the floor in front of a busted dryer. On top of the machine, a tower of phone books radiated mildew. “Look at that,” Brian said. “No one uses those anymore.” He pulled a cell phone from his pants pocket and held it high. “I haven’t given a thought to telephone books in five years.”

  “So the owner … he wants to expand the la
undry room, is that right? Over here?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.” Bern stepped behind a rusty oil container. Several poorly conceived abstract paintings, heavy on browns and midnight blues, leaned against the wall behind the old metal drum. As he maneuvered around a three-legged coffee table, he heard a kitten whine.

  Brian smiled. “We feed them,” he said, watching Bern’s face. “Keep the rats under control. Though now their numbers are getting out of hand. Need a cat?”

  “Don’t think so,” Bern said, remembering the melancholy creatures in McGee’s.

  Brian slid his glasses to the tip of his nose and gazed over the bright red frame at Bern. “Funny. You look to me like a cat-daddy.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Brian said. “Like you could use … something.”

  2.

  He ran his hand across his chest, breathed deeply, shedding the basement. The river’s waves were as thick as hair gel. Squinting at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, he glimpsed through the trees a corner of the Gothic madhouse, designed by the same architect who’d conceived St. Patrick’s. Angels and the damned. Well, any city worthy of the name was built on the shoulders, horns, and wings of a vast population.

  Cigarette butts bobbed on the surface of the green and black water.

  Bern remembered the rest home in east Houston where his grandfather had lived out his days, in a shadowy room at the end of a long hall swollen with the maddened moans of men and women. In his room, his grandfather kept only a tattered copy of the Five Books of Moses, a family photograph, and a blue glass swan smaller than a fist. Where had it come from? It was an unlikely keepsake for this rough and tumble giant, a yellow-pine salesman on the back roads between Longview, Lufkin, Nacogdoches. A remembrance of Bern’s grandmother, long dead? Or of some other woman? A family heirloom? The swan’s eyes and the point of its beak had worn away from too much touching. It appeared to be hollow inside, a container for yesteryear’s chills. Slowly, over time, Bern’s grandfather, too, had lost the sharpness of his features. Now, in the rich loam of a field north of Houston, more and more encroached upon by condominiums and gated communities, the old man’s definition was further abraded by earth-acid, the lime and spoors of the land he had loved and worked. That a glass creature, for all its fragility, could prove more enduring than this man’s enormous and immovable body (or so it had seemed to Bern as a boy when, in games, he rushed against his grandfather’s legs) was as imponderable to Bern as the composition of an interstellar cloud.

  The East River burbled, thick and mucoid. He turned a corner. In the street there appeared to be a huge chocolate milk spill. Three coatless businessmen conferred by an ash can. “Two percent of two billion is a big number,” said one. In the window of a little market, a rack of the day’s papers: the Irish Voice, France-Amerique, the Guardian, Amsterdam News (“New Black Faces”), India Abroad, Jewish Week (“The Difference between Non-Jewish and Un-Jewish”).

  Appropriately, he saw at a bend in the river the Secretariat’s mirrored green façade. Ordinary and bland. Bern hated to admit it, but across the street, Trump’s World Tower filled him with more global optimism than the United Nations. Taste or no taste, at least Trump tried to proclaim something—even if it was only the arrogance of wealth.

  Bern ate in a steamy sushi place whose antiquated sound system played Warren Zevon: forceful anthems of self-destruction, bitterness, divorce. As he listened, he thought about his ex-wife, to whom he hadn’t spoken in over a decade, as well as recent flings with women (one of whom he’d met through a dreary personals ad). In the end, either Bern or the women worked too much, felt exhausted on weekends, and called things off. There just wasn’t much interest, all around. Is this what happened to people when they reached a certain age? Or was it him?

  He wondered if he had given up on sex and love. Briefly, he imagined the thin, dark face of the saleswoman he’d encountered days ago—Marietta. He chewed his edamame. Was he disappointed in himself? Not the prize-winning professional he’d thought he’d become? The saint in his personal life? What would late life hold in the absence of women, their laughter and often embarrassing questions? He shoved his plate away. His wasabe had no zing. When Zevon sang “Reconsider Me,” Bern thought him malevolent and untrustworthy.

  After lunch, he spent another three and a half hours studying specs in the basement, trying not to brood on his solitude. The stuff here reminded him of a taxidermist’s shop he’d seen on vacation with Marla, his ex, in Paris’s Seventh Arrondissement (their last trip together). One afternoon, in a Beaux Arts building smelling like rich red wine, Bern had discovered row after row of dark wooden cabinets housing butterflies (aqua and gold), horned beetles (so black they were purple), peacock feathers, yellow birds no bigger than sewing spools. Fossils. Fish skeletons. In the back, in a vast space arrayed like a furniture showroom, stuffed zebras, ostriches, tigers, and giraffes. A swan stood in a corner, its tail feathers singed the light brown of caramelized sugar. The shop’s owner explained to Bern and Marla that the bird had been rescued from another taxidermist who had lost most of his inventory in an accidental blaze. At the time, Bern hadn’t flashed on his grandfather’s swan, but since he had been thinking about it this afternoon, he wondered at the connection his mind must have made that day among the stilled animals—for, leaving the shop, he had been crazed with the need to rush back to the hotel with Marla and make love for the rest of the day: a stay against wearing-away, he figured now, though at the time it felt like a response to the thrill of unapproachable creatures brought near.

  On his way home that evening, he peered through McGee’s front window. The store was closed and dark. He couldn’t see the pets. He pictured the roadrunner crimped in its cage, dying, perhaps, from the mixture of perfume and artificial fresheners in the air, still experiencing in its olfactory memory (did birds possess such an attribute?) dust from the back roads of Texas, bluebonnet blossoms, fresh peaches on sun-baked trees.

  In his apartment, he poured a glass of wine, disappointed to find no messages on his phone. Not that he’d expected to hear from anyone. He thought of the boxes in his closet. The basement had reminded him of family cast-offs he hadn’t combed through in years. He rose from his couch, picked a box, and untaped the lid. Dusty wool. Mildewed paper. Right away, he found what he’d hoped to discover—the item nagging at him, just below consciousness, most of the day.

  He would need to get a turntable. He hadn’t owned one since ’95, ’96.

  On his lap he held the record album. His grandfather had given him this recording one birthday, when Bern was just a boy: The Sounds of Texas, an oddball assortment of noises and effects. A strange and ridiculous gift, Bern always thought. Now, tonight, far from home, from childhood, it made more sense to him: “Track # 1: ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas,’ Performed by the Kilgore High School Marching Band,” “Track # 2: Railroad Cars Uncoupling,” “Track # 6: Sawmill Blade,” “Track # 8: Prairie Dogs Digging,” and “Track # 12: Road Runner.”

  In Houston, his family had lived near the lip of a bayou. Roadrunners roamed wild down there, among muddy, twisted oaks. Every night, Bern went to sleep to their sounds, which he couldn’t quite remember. A whistle, a call? His parents were gone now, along with his grandfather. He sat back, remembering them, closing his eyes and rubbing his chest.

  3.

  “Wally, how come you haven’t built anything?” Monday morning at work. Young Murphy blocking Bern’s doorway. At his desk, Bern hunched over sketches of the building on East Fifty-fourth, pencils strewn like pickup sticks. “What do you mean?” he asked, irritated. He had been trying to grasp the essence of basement.

  “Well, at Landau’s suggestion, I’ve gone through the company files,” Murphy said. “Getting up to speed on the institutional history. I didn’t mean to snoop or anything, but I notice you tend to take the renovations you’re assigned—and the designs are usually wonderful
, by the way—but then you hand the initial plans off to others, who finish the projects and take most of the credit. Why is that?”

  “It’s the way things are done,” Bern said.

  “No. I mean, that doesn’t appear to be the pattern with others. Landau isn’t pressuring you, is he?” Murphy said. “I mean, he doesn’t force you to surrender your—”

  “No, no.”

  “Then why don’t you build?”

  I like things that already exist better than things that do not. Who said that? “Naturally, the permits—”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Wally. And—forgive me—I saw some of your speculative work. The plans were tucked into the files,” Murphy said. “Really innovative. Your ideas for that old factory uptown? The curtain wall? Very nice.”

  Bern remembered those sketches. Many years ago now. An abandoned aluminum-sided cube beneath a railroad bridge on 125th Street. A meat wholesalers’ district. Men smoking on uneven sidewalks, wrapped in smocks as bright as marbled fat. A smell of blood in the air, pressurized steam from coiled hoses, river rawness—bracken and bones in the tidewater. Everywhere, a sting of meat-dust, stirred by passing traffic. In the late afternoons, the bridge cast structural shadows on the west side of the building and on the reflective sides of delivery trucks, a crisscross pattern suggestive of propeller blades, which Bern had used, along with the corrugations in the preexisting aluminum, as the basis for an airy design.

  “Why didn’t that project go forward?” Murphy asked. “If I were Landau, I would have championed it.”

  Bern shrugged.

  “When’s the last time you brought something to fruition?”

  Another shrug.

  “You’re far too modest, Wally.”

  “‘The builder is trapped between error and obsolescence.’ Someone said that once.”