The Empire of the Dead

by Tracy Daugherty

  Murphy laughed. “Listen, can I take you to lunch? I’d like to pick your brain, hear more about your experiences here over the years.”

  “I have this basement.” Bern tapped his desk.

  “Don’t worry, Wally. I don’t expect you to be my buddy.”

  The kid was trying. Give him that. “Maybe another time.”

  “Okay, Wally. Suit yourself. I admire your work. Really. You should build.”

  Maybe Landau was right. Perhaps Bern shouldn’t push back so hard at his new co-workers. Still, he didn’t entirely trust this preening Mr. Murphy. Too much ambition. Did Bern even remember ambition? It could make a man ruthless.

  On his way to the washroom, he ran into a colleague, Chris Henderson, in the hallway. They’d been hired at the same time: the Dark Ages, before Murphy’s first diaper. The poor bastard looked quartered and beaten. “How are things, Chris?” Bern asked. Henderson had just finished chemo.

  The man picked at his lip. “Wally, I’ve been meaning to ask. Do you suppose on Thursday, you could swing a couple of hours to go with me to the hospital? They’re going to run some bone marrow checks and I’ll probably be a little woozy afterward. My wife’s out of town, my other arrangements have fallen through, and I might need assistance on the subway, getting home.”

  Bern owed Henderson for help, recently, pricing a brownstone renovation. “No problem, Chris. I’ll clear my desk,” he said.

  “Thanks, Wally. Thanks a lot.” He turned away, pinched by internal shadows.

  Bern dearly hoped the bathroom would be empty: a moment’s solace. These days, the briefest encounters rattled him. Murphy. Henderson. But a tall, bald man in blue overalls stood at one of the urinals, legs apart, pissing like a thoroughbred. From the back, Bern recognized him as one of the regular maintenance men. He didn’t remember the fellow’s name. He had once given Bern a tour of the attic when Bern bumped into him after-hours one Friday and expressed interest in the man’s extensive knowledge of the building. At his feet now sat a sweat-darkened leather tool bag. The man nodded hello. “Keeping busy?” Bern asked, unzipping at the end of the row.

  “Oh, you betcha. When are you geniuses going to come up with a place takes care of itself, so I can prop my feet up on a big desk and kick back the way you do?”

  Bern laughed.

  “Like today. Fucking birds.”

  “What’s that?” Bern said.

  “Oh, migration season for some species or another. I don’t know. This morning, I get a call—the lights on the roof are disrupting their damn flight patterns at night. Disorienting them. Something about the angle of our particular building. I gotta go up and disconnect.”

  “How do you get up there?” Bern asked.

  “Ah, yeah. That’s right.” He grinned. “You’re the fellow likes to know the ins and outs.” And he liked to be the Big Shot. He picked up his bag. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Bern finished his business, washed his hands, and followed the man—Simpson, he remembered now—to a freight elevator, out of sight of the normal business corridors. The elevator smelled of fiercely polished iron platings, not to mention the earthy sweat in the creases of Simpson’s leather bag. The door opened onto a narrow concrete room where another door, with a wire-reinforced double-glass window in it, led to the building’s roof. Twelve stories up, in a mild breeze with a scent of snow, though the day was sunny and dusky blue, Bern (his heart cantering!) surveyed the foliage, patterned grids, and movements below. From this perspective, everything looked orderly and random all at once—a healthy sign, Bern thought, for surely a city dies when it strays too far from its pathways or deals strictly in necessities. He stepped forward, stood steady. He was glad he had bought, last week, a firm new pair of shoes.

  A pale full moon, the color of chardonnay, bobbed in an orange dust cloud in the vicinity of Battery Park. Already, pier lights sparkled on the water. Greenhouses, jails, administrative centers. Church spires rose among circles of stone.

  Simpson pulled from his bag a paint-crusted screwdriver and fiddled with spotlights the size of snare drums. The lights were disported every few feet around the inner edges of the rooftop. Opaque plastic plates, red, green, and white, filled the fixture’s barrels. Simpson mumbled and cursed. Bern searched the sky but saw no birds. He thought of the roadrunner wilting in the back of McGee’s.

  To the north, the Cloisters, the delicate medieval buildings, the very top of Manhattan, a place Bern hadn’t visited in years.

  He leaned over the south-side parapet. All around him, windows like picture slides—each slide a life superimposed on many other lives. The old medieval argument: is the world as perfect as it can be? Could the Lord improve it if He wanted to? God could grant trees the power to think and talk. But would they still be trees? This would not be perfecting the world, but rather, producing another world entirely. A splendid idea—but, Bern thought, gazing at dashing scraps of color below, surely we would miss this sad old place.

  “All right. Now the damn birds can see where they’re going,” Simpson said, rising. His joints creaked. Loose tools jingled in his bag.

  “Thanks for bringing me,” Bern said.

  Simpson glanced at the streets. “Don’t seem so awful up here, eh?”

  “Sweet, really.”

  “Well, now, I wouldn’t go that far,” Simpson answered, shouldering his bag. “Hell, I just improved your odds of getting smothered in bird shit on your way home.”

  4.

  The mild weather broke. Snow blurred the gold domes and display windows of the neat, well-mannered shops along Madison Square Park. It clung to the black trees and grayed the air where cheerful men swept sidewalks and shook the park’s shrubbery free of ice; burlap wrapping made snug the delicate plants beside the benches. Soft office lights in the upper-story windows of pale-blue buildings turned violet in the twilight. Everywhere, bells seemed to ring: the chiming and crackling of frost. Smoke and chestnut-flavored breezes greeted walkers rounding chilly corners. A woman with a big white dog appeared to be strolling in the company of a polar bear. At the edge of the park, a man wearing a fig-colored coat, with his fine shoes mired in slush, stood waving at a woman in a curved window halfway up the Flatiron. The light behind her head was the purple of plums.

  The quick cold, and the giddy shock of the snowfall, reminded Bern of his very first trip to the city, alone, for his job interview, over twenty years ago now. Early February. Marla still had her job in Houston. The firm had put him up in a small room at the Gramercy Park Hotel, then a dim, if venerable, corridor of steady drafts and clanking pipes. Wall-to-wall carpeting in the lobby. Swedish meatballs were served in the bar, and you could smell them outside as you struggled with your umbrella (bought on the street, on the fly, unprepared as you were, a naïve Texan believing the newspapers’ promises of mild days ahead). Inside the bar (dark wooden beams curved like canoes, musty red drapes), the ghost of S. J. Perelman seemed to drift in a corner, next to a shelf of amber whiskeys, but this was just the breath of the patrons, visible in the chilly, convivial space. Bern’s room was freezing: a broken radiator and a cracked window bandaged by duct tape. At midnight, he huddled beneath his bedspread, figured food might warm him. He sprang for room service: a simple order of toast. Forty minutes later, a shivering boy tapped his door. As it turned out, the hotel’s room service came from a restaurant two blocks away. Through the snow, this kid had tramped in the middle of the night to hand Bern two slices of bread wrapped in a sopping napkin.

  A sweet, pathetic welcome to New York. Bern had chewed his rubbery toast and stared out the window at the ice crystals pelleting the small park below, yellow in circular lamp-glow. For Bern, the hotel would always be drifted in snow. These days, its gaudy reincarnation—the bronze and salmon décor, the Aubusson rug stretched across the lobby floor—had vanquished the place’s gentle spirit. He felt himself swoon as he envisioned, again, flakes falling against the smeary glass panes of his dreadful, yet charming, old room.
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  In this nostalgic mood, he stopped as he was strolling after work one day at a shop in the Village called Left Bank Books. He had glimpsed in its window a blue and gold volume the size of an old-fashioned men’s smoking case: The Latin Works of Dante, translated into English and published in 1904 by a modest London firm. Rare, but not too rare. The bookshop owner offered it to Bern for fifty dollars. Bern had no pressing interest in reading these minor pieces, but he recalled buying Marla the Vita Nuova shortly after she’d joined him in New York, a gift for her thirtieth birthday, and, seduced by the snow into sentimental recollections of his own new life in Manhattan—heady youth!—he gripped the book as though it were a swatch of his personal history. Besides, the volume was lovely, with an inset tissue covering the title page and stamped reproductions of details from the Lateran Mosaic: Peter and Constantine receiving their authority from Christ. The shop was a precarious maze of book towers about to topple. Bern spent an enjoyable twenty minutes chatting about reading with the owner, a spry, bearded former college professor who had given up tenure at a southern university to buy the store and indulge his lifelong passion for book collecting. The move had been a terrifying financial gamble, and he admitted he was struggling: he sold most of his books to fashion models who dropped in with photo crews to use the space as a quaint backdrop and who felt guilty enough to purchase something in return. But clearly, the man loved what he was doing, and Bern left the store abuzz with contentment.

  Warmed, he settled on the couch in his apartment next to The Sounds of Texas, propped against a lamp on his table. He opened The Latin Works of Dante. Most of the pages remained uncut. For more than a hundred years, this book had gone unread! Bern retrieved a small knife from his kitchen and ran it gingerly along the seams, freeing the poet’s words from their seals. In the back of the volume was Dante’s treatise on land and water. What is the planet’s noblest element? Dante asked. Where can it be found? The bottom or top of the globe? What deserves to be closest to Heaven?

  Basement or roof, Bern thought. Where is our proper place?

  A faint onion smell clung to the knife’s edge, and now to the sides of the pages.

  That evening, Bern popped into McGee’s, just before the manager locked the doors. Marietta was not around. He approached the roadrunner’s cage. The bird slumped beside its red water bowl, barely breathing. Its feathers were dusky and hunched. The air smelled of fake pine. Bern whistled softly. How did roadrunners speak? He should know this. All he could conjure was the beep beep of the cartoon creature. He whistled again. In cages swinging from the ceiling, canaries exploded into sound, but the roadrunner stayed as it was, eyes shut.

  5.

  The waiting room in the lab at St. Vincent’s overflowed with teenagers and children sitting with their mothers. Two or three old men with splotchy red faces.

  Henderson had trouble fishing his Blue Cross card out of his wallet. Bern gave him a hand. “It’s very kind of you to come with me, Wally,” Henderson said.

  “Happy to help.”

  “My wife scheduled a trip to visit her mother in Connecticut, knowing I had more tests coming up. Poor thing. It’s worn her down, caring for me. You appear to be doing well. How’s the heart?”

  “Who knows?” Bern smiled. “Seems to be working.” Soon after Henderson started chemotherapy, Bern admitted to him he’d had a bypass. The fraternity of the middle-aged. Now, he was wary of walking the Trail of Suffering—glorying in one’s infirmities in order to feel special. But this was unfair to his friend, who was genuinely nervous, and had reason to be. Besides, illnesses were isolating. Look around.

  “I hear they’re tearing this place down,” Henderson said. “St. Vincent’s, I mean.”

  “Preservationists are fighting the plans,” Bern told him.

  “Maybe that’ll stall them for a while. I’ve lived in this city thirty-eight years. I know. When people want to build something, they build. Well. I suppose it benefits you and me, eh? Got to keep things moving, or the whole shebang clogs up.”

  “We are not who we were,” Bern said.

  “No.”

  A nurse called Henderson’s name. Bern identified himself to her, said he’d be walking Henderson home. She informed Bern his friend would be responsive after the procedure, but he wouldn’t be steady on his feet, and later, because of the sedation, he probably wouldn’t remember this afternoon.

  Bern sat back down in the waiting room. A copy of Theatre News lay on the table next to him. He leafed through it, looking for the byline of one of the women he’d met, and stopped seeing, several months ago. He didn’t find her name. He thought again of Marietta. The smell of her gum.

  An hour and a half later, the nurse emerged from the lab arm in arm with Henderson. His skin was the color of bread dough. She told Bern to remind him, later, his test results would be ready next week. She handed him off.

  “Pizza,” Henderson slurred. “I’d like a slice. I’m starving.”

  Gripping his arm, careful to avoid the spot where the IV needle had pierced his skin, Bern guided him a couple of snowy blocks to a nearly deserted pizzeria. A teenaged boy, whose clothes reeked of pot, tended the wood-fired oven. He stared at the flames and cackled to himself. An elderly couple sat at a corner table glaring suspiciously at the twists of green pepper strewn across their deep-dish pizza. The woman appeared to be drinking a pitcher of beer all by herself. Her head lolled. A second empty pitcher sat beside her. Her companion, a bald, toothless man with a moldlike mustache, did not seem to know where he was. Henderson stared off into space. Bern realized, with more dismay than he would have imagined, he was the only functioning awareness in the place. Perhaps that was overstating things, but he was struck with loneliness, akin to the feeling he’d had as a kid (nine? ten?)—a memory still vivid to him—when one day he’d stared at his family’s house and wondered how others saw it? Did they see the same details he did? The off-white paint on the eaves? The slant of the roof? The exact same number of windows? Did they hear the birds in the bayou?

  Later, at Henderson’s apartment, he helped Henderson strip down to skivvies and a T-shirt. Then he tucked him into bed. He brought him a glass of water. “Thanks, Wally. I owe you,” Henderson mumbled, and drifted off to sleep. Bern left the key on the kitchen counter, next to a slip of paper with his home phone number on it. As he let himself out, he glanced at framed family photographs on bookshelves next to the door. Elderly men and women, children, teens. Foreign cafés. Graduation gowns, wedding dresses. Beyond work, Bern knew little of Henderson’s life. The photos opened angles onto worlds that Bern, through his association with Henderson, nearly touched, but didn’t, and never would. He buttoned his coat and shut the door behind him.

  God plans and man laughs. Bern recalled this Talmudic teaching from the Hebrew lessons his grandfather made him take as a child. Or was it Man plans and God laughs? He couldn’t remember now.

  He was standing in Henderson’s office doorway. It was midmorning. Henderson sat behind a large oak desk, gripping a pencil, staring at the ivory-colored carpet on his floor. “Chris? How you feeling?” Bern asked.

  “Oh,” Henderson said, hands trembling. His hair was parted sloppily in the middle. Bern had never seen it combed that way. “Oh.”

  “You doing okay?”

  “Thanks, yes. I’m always woozy for a while after they’ve had their mitts on me. Wally?”

  “Yes?”

  “Look at this.” He wagged a finger. A gold wedding band slid around the base of the digit. “A week ago, it fit me,” Henderson said. “Maybe it’s just as well. I think my wife’s had enough of sickness.” His face looked green. His shoulders drooped.

  Bern wasn’t sure what to do. “Chris, you need a little break or something?”

  Henderson didn’t move.

  “Yes, let’s get some air,” Bern said. He set his coffee cup on the desk then led Henderson to the freight elevator—“I didn’t know this was here!” Henderson said—and onto the roof. The ma
n’s cheeks reddened. He laughed, delighted, at the dizzying heights. “Ah well,” he said softly, gazing out over the city. “There it is. Where I misspent my youth.” He scanned the rooftops. “Were you ever in the service, Wally?”

  Bern shook his head in the wind.

  “Neither was I. I used to think I was lucky. The draft ended right before my number was called. But you know what I’ve thought lately?” He approached the building’s north edge, next to one of the spotlights Simpson had disabled. For an instant, Bern worried about the roof’s resilience. “My father—dead all these years. A World War Two vet. Normandy. He used to tell me he couldn’t talk about what he saw over there. But when he got into his seventies and eighties and suffered all sorts of ailments—heart, lungs, joints—he began to admit he’d never felt more alive than he did during the war, the exhilaration of the danger. Though he loved his family, and all of us children and grandchildren, his life since then had been one long anticlimax.” Henderson twisted his ring. “A common experience, I suppose. Now, that generation is gone, and no one gives a shit about the Second World War. Soon, Wally, our generation will be gone, too.”

  “Not all that soon, I hope.”

  “Soon enough. You know? I’m tired, man. I don’t ever want to feel nausea again. But I will.”

  “I hear you,” Bern said.

  Henderson surveyed the streets. “The only reason I go out anymore is to prove to myself I can. I don’t remember the last time I really enjoyed a restaurant or a movie or a play. I worry about the day I’ll go into a hospital and won’t be able to make it out again on my own. I worry about my kids. Not a single one of them has a head for money. How are they going to get along without me?”

  “You can’t think about that, Chris.”

  “I can’t not think about it. I worry about just marking time. About the fact that I’ve probably lived longer than I should have. I worry about the cure being worse than the illness. Wally?”

  “Yes, Chris?”