by Sean Ferrell
I left the food table with my plate for Emma. More people had arrived, and walking a straight line through the room was impossible. I drifted to a stop against Phil’s table, staring into a sea of baby-food jars full of washers and screwdriver tips. Unable to move, I reached forward and passed the plate to a woman on the other side of the table and asked her to hand it to Emma. It disappeared, and from beyond the wall of people came her shout of appreciation.
The woman across the table, older than Phil and weathered in a way that said she spent days under the sun, smiled at me and said, “That was very kind of you.”
I shrugged. “I promised her I would.”
“A man who keeps his promises.”
“Some of them.”
She laughed and then looked past me. “I hate to ask. But could you get me some water?”
So it began, the conveyer belt of refreshments passed around the room. The cheeses were followed by crackers. Fruit salad, grilled asparagus, chocolate in large bricks that needed to be chiseled into edible splinters, a bowl of tuna salad with walnuts mixed in. I began to see food I was sure hadn’t been at the table when I’d arrived. A roast turkey on a carving board was raised over people’s heads and passed like a sacrifice from hand to hand. A gravy boat followed. Half a layer cake. Pewter jugs sloshing with punch; old milk bottles filled with juices from grapes, apples, oranges; carafes of wine, red and white. Food passed over me, along either side. Where had it come from? The stores I’d seen were mostly vacant. Empty plates began to drift back. Shouts of thanks rose from the corners of the room. I handed platters bare save for grease and bones to the two other library workers. They solemnly took the refuse and piled it onto the table. When all the serving was done, the din of the crowd hushed to the sounds of smacking lips and occasional moans of gastric pleasure. A belch came from someone behind me. All around the room, strangers shared dishes and even meals. A petite young woman who somehow had ended up holding her heavy plate with both hands laughed as three men around her took turns feeding her with their spoons. Strawberry mousse dripped from her chin.
I watched and sipped my water. When a juice bottle came by, I poured what was left into my glass and handed the empty container to the nearest worker. He struggled to find a spot for it. We laughed when he placed it under the table.
“Where did this stuff come from?” he asked. “I don’t remember handing half this stuff out.” I wasn’t alone in confusion and felt a flush of belonging.
The woman with the sunburned face was eating an apple. “See what you started?” she said. “Just because you kept your promise.”
Phil, fully drunk now, emerged from the crowd and swept his jars off the table so he could climb on top. The shattering glass called the room to order and settled at our feet as everyone turned to face the commotion. Eating stopped and conversations ended midword. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Pointing a finger at the crowd, he spun around to take it all in and tried to speak again, his voice breaking. “You’re all here, right?” Everyone agreed, some laughed. I watched him sway and felt embarrassment for him. “Right,” he said. “So. There’s work to do. All this stuff needs to be taken care of. I’ve spoken briefly to each of you, about what you need to handle, but now’s the time to do it.”
Murmurs snaked through the crowd. Emma caught my eye, raised her eyebrows, and shook her head. I was reaching up to take hold of Phil’s hand when someone stopped me. It was Sara. She held my elbow, her green eyes searching mine as I waited for an explanation that didn’t arrive.
Phil continued his monologue. “There comes a time when a man realizes that he wasn’t always here, and won’t always be here. There comes a time for gathering and a time for letting go. I’ve reached both points at once. It happens that way sometimes. Not for everyone. I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand, but that’s where I am.” People looked at their plates and whispered to one another. A current of embarrassment washed over the crowd.
From the back came a drunk call: “What the fuck are you talking about, Phil?”
Phil’s flushed face swung to the heckler. His angry smile threatened to crack his face, and tears ran from his eyes.
He said, “I’m dying, you fucks.”
Even the dinnerware fell mute. The flap of wings from the dark street sounded through the windows. Footsteps clattered in the doorway. In ones and twos, guests slipped out. As space opened between people, they were free to turn away from Phil and roll their eyes. I stayed beside the table, looking up at him. Sara still held my arm.
Phil said, “It’s been happening for some time, but I can feel it coming now. It’s time for me to get these things back into the world, and that’s where all of you come in. I’ve asked each of you to take care of something, to make sure it’s ready when it’s needed.”
Phil was carved stone, gave no sign he saw the exodus, no sign he knew that the room was half as full. Cool air spilled through the windows. Candles extinguished themselves, drowned in their own wax. The people who remained muttered jokes behind hands, mocked him. As the three workmen passed behind me, headed toward the door, I heard one say, “Just like every other Phil party.”
The gathering frayed away to nothing. Someone slept on a chair in the corner. Emma stayed beside the door, her face wet, hands twisting on her lap.
“You’ll know when the items are needed,” Phil said. “Each of them was needed before and will be again. It’s the way of the world, it’s—” He stopped and shuddered, wrapped his arms around himself. He looked down at me and Sara and whispered, “Help an old man down, would you?” Sara let go of my arm and reached up to take both of his. He half fell into her and lowered himself to a nearby chair. Sara stroked his hair, and I turned away, embarrassed.
Emma, watching me, called out, “Phil, if I’m to get those books to my booth, I’ll need his help.” She pointed at me and waved me over to her side. “You know I can’t manage. We’ll go get them and I’ll be off, if that’s okay with you?”
Phil smiled at Emma. “Of course. Good night, Emma.”
I followed Emma into the hall. She said, “I’m supposed to take the phone books. As many as you can carry, I guess.”
When we entered the apartment on the second floor, I found it untouched. Apparently none of the guests had come to take the heirlooms they’d been assigned. I hadn’t expected them to, but it somehow shocked me nonetheless. I moved through the darkness, found the phone books stacked near the windows, and piled four in each arm, the most I found manageable.
Emma waited in the lobby, leaning against the doorjamb, breathing in what little air was moving through the streets. The heat of the day had gone with the sun, but what was left behind was humid and smelled of rot. “That can’t be all.”
“No. There are more. I can bring them in the morning.”
“Fine.” Her eyes said she didn’t need them, nor would she ever.
She walked onto the dark street without fear but with great effort. At the corner by my hotel, she crossed the street. I smiled; even those who knew I lived there still believed it haunted. I looked up at the building and saw the usual flickering lights on several floors. The electricity came and went at random. I had learned not to trust the system from one day to the next. That night the hotel’s uppermost floors burned bright, even the penthouse. I couldn’t recall ever before seeing any lights higher than the fifth working.
We turned the corner onto Forty-second. I didn’t know what I would say if it turned out Emma lived in her information booth itself. I was thankful when she stopped at a corner shop at Sixth Avenue and turned a key in the lock. The sounds of trains rattled beneath us, and singing came from the park across the street. We entered what had once been a coffee shop, before the coffee shops had been abandoned. The corner nearest the door was filled with copies of Emma’s brochures, lists of spots of interest around the city and maps for newcomers. Emma insisted that tourists were the blood of the city and that as the premiere information booth she her
self was the heart. I thought she was more of a spectacle, as much a site of interest as any of the abandoned buildings she told travelers how to get to.
Emma opened the door wide. “Just put them on a pile.”
She turned on the lights, and the fluorescents above clicked twice and began to buzz at us. Empty glass pastry displays winked to life. On the far side of the counter was a twin bed and covered with rumpled blankets. Her eyes narrowed as I placed the phone books on her corner table. “Wouldn’t you know it,” she said. “They’re all from different cities.”
“I haven’t seen a working phone since I got here.” I realized after I said it that I had no idea if phones ever worked here, if they ever had during Emma’s lifetime. For a moment I worried about what questions she might ask me now, but she just laughed.
“That’s beside the point, as far as Phil’s concerned.” Her chuckle ended with a gasp and a sudden release of tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. I stood behind her, watched her shoulders shake as she worked herself under control again.
“I’m sure Phil will be fine. He’s still—”
She turned to me, laughing and crying, eyes merry. “I forgot, that was your first death announcement.”
“First?”
“Yes. He’s announced his death every few months for years. The first time I met him, he told me he was dying and we spent hours discussing it. That was seven years ago.”
I felt relief at that, but Emma just continued to cry. “Why the tears?”
She took a great, quavering breath, released it in a puff, and wiped the wet from her face. “Because, other than the first time he told me, this is the first time I’ve believed him.”
“Why?”
She nudged the books, on which my hand still rested. “He’s never given his stuff away before.”
We both looked at the phone books, dry paper turning to dust as we watched. Numbers for phones and people long gone from Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle. Photos on the bindings of buildings we couldn’t know still existed.
Emma pushed hair from her face. “You should go. And keep an eye on him. I don’t think anyone else believed him. Except maybe Sara. Oh, God. What will she do?”
I didn’t know what she would do, but I knew that Phil thought it would be me who would take care of her. I’d realized that of all the things he’d bestowed on various people, she was what he’d seen fit to give me.
I left Emma’s place and walked back to the hotel. For a moment, standing at the entrance to the lobby, I debated returning to Phil’s, but I could see that his building was dark. Instead I entered the hotel. Sitting in the lobby’s cleanest chair, in the same black dress she’d been wearing earlier, was Sara. She looked at me over the top of a yellowed newspaper whose front page was covered in dramatic photos of what appeared to be a protest or a celebration.
A weight I hadn’t been aware of fell away. “What are you doing here?”
She folded the paper, which nearly snapped in half. “Phil’s not well.”
“So he said. Emma said he does this occasionally.”
Sara rolled her eyes. “She’s right. He does this a few times a year. But tonight was different.”
Around a corner from the empty concierge desk was the side entrance she’d come through the first time I’d seen her. I marveled that I’d never noticed her at the party in my youth. Even in just a simple black dress, she glowed like a bonfire among dry leaves.
She was shaking her head. “No one took anything he asked them to. It’s made him sick. If you could come by tomorrow to look in on him …?”
I said I would and wished her a good night. As I turned to walk away, she stood and said, “I’ve never seen your room.”
I felt a sudden dread. I’d managed to convince myself that this woman, Sara, wouldn’t have to become the Lily who would die in my arms if I could just keep a certain distance from her, never let her be anything but Sara, Phil’s daughter. As if it wouldn’t be me—some other version of me—to release the flood of bad choices that would bring her and the Body and the Drunk and maybe me, too, to the party where some or all of us would die. As if I could stand by, an observer in her time, and live … what? A normal life?
I was terrified by the idea of taking her upstairs with me. I was desperate for her to go upstairs with me. “What about the ghosts?” I asked.
She smiled. “We see fewer weird things now that you’re here. At least I do. Phil still thinks he sees shadows in the penthouse.” Her eyes darkened for a moment as she mentioned Phil. Under all the layers of lies, of self-protection and self-interest, there was genuine concern, a simple love that was rightly unconscious and unquestioned. I recognized, finally, that she needed to be away from Phil for the night, and that was why she’d come here. To be free from a man making himself sick with his collection of dead things.
I said, “I’m on the fifth floor.”
She followed me, quiet to the point of reverence. The rustle of the newspaper was louder than either of us. We found the entire fifth floor ablaze with light. The hall was hot and cleaner than I’d ever seen it before. The walls looked scrubbed, and the rug was cleared of the splinters and pebbles I felt beneath my feet every morning. At my door I pulled the key from my pocket.
She said, “I hope it’s darker inside.” She was obviously trying to kill me with her flirting.
I opened the door for her. I thought of my promise to Phil and my promise to Seventy. I didn’t owe Seventy anything. But to let Phil down would hurt.
Sara sat on the bed, and, without thinking, I shut the door. The ambient hallway light collapsed and vanished and we were left with the sliver of light from the bathroom.
“I have one of those,” Sara said. In the low light, her eyes glinted, two bright points. “It’s Phil’s, but he gave it to me.”
Not sure what she was talking about, I followed her gaze to the dresser. There sat the metallic device, the needle wrapped in squid arms, its head filled with the milky fluid. The one she would use the day she died in what had been Phil’s apartment. I realized then what I should have sooner: Phil was actually going die.
I held up the device. “I’ve never discovered what it’s for.”
She averted her eyes. She knew but wouldn’t say what it was. As I stared at her, she took the device and rolled it over in her palm, found a catch I hadn’t seen—still couldn’t, even though she’d pressed it in front of me—and the many twisted arms unwound, pulled away to reveal the long needle. She fingered another invisible button, and a small drop of opaque moisture formed at the tip. She carried it up to my neck and touched a spot just behind my ear.
“You insert it here. Do you want to try?”
“No. No, I don’t know what it is.” I was sick at the memory of what was in it.
Her fingers slid across my neck. “That’s part of the fun. A rush of pain followed by recollections you shouldn’t have.” She gave a small pinch, as if to demonstrate the process.
“I’d rather not.”
She shrugged. She looked down at the device in her hand, probably wondering how it could be so similar to the one Phil had given her. I felt the explanation rise in my throat, almost spoke it, and admonished myself. My only task was to not arrive at the party in several months, just go somewhere else and never invite her, and both she and I would be on different paths from the one I’d seen bleed out before me in the penthouse.
One problem lurked. I didn’t want to go. Sara stood near to me, her breath fast as she touched the back of my neck; my own came faster. I sought out her hand to take the device. If memories floated in the liquid, they belonged to Lily, and she wasn’t Lily. At least not yet.
She refused to let go of the syringe. “Let me have them.” Her whisper soft as skin on skin. “Please. Let me remember something else tonight.”
I tried to pull the device away from her. Her hand locked over it, and her fingers stopped moving in my hair. “Please.”
This was it, I was sure. These m
emories would be what would drag her under. She’d remember her own death, she’d remember all the versions of me. No wonder she’d been so calm at the party—it was all flashback to her. Keeping her away from the device kept her away from the party.
“I have to keep them,” I said. My heart clenched around a hollow in my chest.
“Why hold on to memories you don’t even want?”
When I still wouldn’t let go, she finally released the device. The liquid sloshed inside the vial. I should smash it, I thought. Right now, under my heel, let the dying memories soak into the ugly carpeting and dry to dust. But I couldn’t. It was all I had of Lily. I held the cool glass bulb between shaking fingers and knew that as much as I wanted them gone, there was nothing I would do to get rid of them.
Sara sat back on the bed and turned away from me. She was crying. “That’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at.”
I waited for her to look at me, to continue. She did neither. “What is?”
She looked at me at last, but with eyes that said I should already know the answer. “Being a lie collector.” She played with the hem of her dress. “Phil was the first job I ever had in the city,” she said. “He was my first and one of my only clients, because he didn’t want the job to end. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t really a job.” She didn’t wipe her tears from her face. She didn’t stop speaking either.
She’d come to the city to get away from something, but she wouldn’t say what. She’d needed money, but the only jobs people offered she’d been unwilling to do. She’d become a squatter, hid in vacant rooms and searched through refuse bins behind restaurants for brown lettuce and hard bread. Occasionally she’d make a little money cleaning strangers’ homes, spend it quickly on a large meal or a room with a bath. She passed her nights half awake, listening for people who would hurt her if they found her.
She grew so hungry that she begged from vendors. They sometimes took pity. Often they did not. One afternoon she entered a fruit-and-vegetable market and gathered a few things, hoped that maybe the clerk would turn away for a moment and she could run. The clerk only paid more attention to her, and when at last she knew there was no sneaking out, she surprised him and herself by carrying the items to the counter and demanding that he have the heart to help a starving woman.
