Man in the Empty Suit (9 page)

The woman from the ballroom was standing in the doorway. “Always have to slip out, don’t you?” She gave me a
conspirator’s smile. Her face made me forget the worried frenzy of the evening, among other things.

I tried to give my own conspiratorial smile in return but felt a lecherous grin lock onto my face. It wouldn’t let go. “I think I’m starting to hate crowds.” Just then the floor shook with thunder, and I imagined that I could feel the music from the ballroom bumping its way up through the superstructure.

She crossed the room. Her bright eyes were lined with dark makeup that made them stand out even more than I’m sure they normally would. Her dress was a complicated silk arrangement—red waves emerged and disappeared. A split seam ran up one thigh, and it flashed at me once, twice, I prayed for a third as she crossed to the foot of the bed and sat down. She turned and looked over her shoulder. The parrots tattooed there spoke to me.

I wiped my hands on the towel I held. I didn’t remember picking it up, but nothing comes from nothing, so there you go. I sat beside her. There wasn’t much room, but she didn’t move away.

“I was just washing my face. It gets pretty hot in that ballroom,” I told her.

She nodded, quiet, as if trying to recall something. Her eyes roamed the ceiling. I got the feeling that she knew all my answers even though I hadn’t heard her questions. We both faced the open closet, the blank television screen. I wished I had shut that door, even though she acted as if she’d seen it all before.

“What were you watching?” Her voice was silk scraping silk.

“Nothing, really.” The unused tape in my pocket pressed
heavily against my hip. It gave an embarrassing throb. “Just using the washroom.”

“Washroom.” She laughed. So many of her questions sounded like answers, and they all seemed to amuse her. Her voice dropped to an even silkier volume, so that I almost had to read her lips. “You were watching something about me, weren’t you?”

I couldn’t believe I’d destroyed the tape before watching to the end. Was it too late to retrieve the pieces from the plumbing and somehow reconstruct it?

She laughed as I blushed. I kept my mouth shut and let her lean in a bit closer, let her press a bare shoulder into mine. Her breath was sweet—from rum, I thought—and her hair smelled of flowers. I looked at the peonies on the wallpaper, faded and yellow, and tried to remember what peonies smelled like. She smiled at me. Her hand touched my knee, ran upward to my thigh. The gun, only an inch from her hand, seemed to pulse. She studied the lines of my jaw and neck, leaned in and touched my lips with hers. Our breaths mixed.

Her hands ran up my sides and drew me against her. She withdrew before I knew the kiss was over, and I watched her eyes harden as she leaned away. She examined my face. For just a moment, she ran her fingers over my cheek, up toward my temple and forehead, tender, as if caring for something only she saw. Her long nails sketched lightning trails on my skin that continued to vibrate even after her hand left my face. She pulled back my sleeve, and her fingers danced over the pale skin on my wrist. She smiled at it sadly, stood, and straightened her skirt. Red rose up her neck.

“That will make you follow me,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s important that you meet me and that you follow me.” She sounded like she was reciting a mantra.

“Why would your kissing me make me follow?” I sounded more accusing than I meant to. I saw a veil fall between us in her eyes.

“Because you’ve never been with anyone like me. That’s what you’ll say.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” My denial did nothing to dispel the truth of her comment. “Who invited you anyway?”

“No one yet.” Her lips continued to move after these words. She was still speaking, in a whisper I couldn’t understand. She stopped and tilted her head. For a moment she looked like one of the parrots tattooed on her shoulder, black eye watching me. Then her gaze fell on my lapel. “Your clock. Wrong time.” The color drained from her face, and I could practically hear her bird heart fluttering to escape her chest.

I stood and held out my hand. “Are you all right?”

She didn’t answer, just turned and walked from the room. The echo of her voice—“Wrong time, wrong time”—followed her out the door.

I trailed her down the hall, watching her avoid rips in the carpet and squeaky floorboards as if she’d walked these halls for years.

She approached the elevator, and I was about to sputter that she shouldn’t waste her time when she pulled open the grate and climbed in. She didn’t slam the door in my face, though this may be due to the door’s catching on a frayed edge of carpet. I smiled at her, kicked the door free of the
carpet, and yanked it shut behind me. We both faced forward, toward the gate, and she cleared her throat.

“Can you press the button, please?”

I pressed the button, stammered an apology, and the elevator, which was apparently working again, began its creaky descent. The buttons in front of me wavered in and out of focus, and I wondered what might be wrong with them—something with the electricity, perhaps. Then I remembered the bottle of whiskey I’d just finished. The meatballs from earlier had cushioned its fall, but now it was settling into me and finding its way to my head.

The elevator clicked past four and three easily enough. Halfway between the second and first floors, it gave a whine and a shudder. The floor pitched forward as if we’d caught on something, and she fell into my back. We both hit the gate, me first, hard, and my hand slipped through a gap and slapped the slowly moving shaft wall. It was smooth and gray, and little cobwebs hung across its surface, clung to my hand and sleeve, dragged along behind my fingers. She pressed into my back. We hung against the gate like two bats, and the elevator shook again and stopped. The woman had righted herself and apologized for falling into me.

“I think we’ve got greater worries,” I said.

We were stuck between floors. Light poured in through the one-foot gap at our feet and threw our ankles’ shadows against the rear wall. Above a thick slab of concrete was the darkness of the second floor. Music and voices leaked upward from the first.

The woman squatted down into her heels, peered through the gap, and called for help. There was no answer.

She looked at me. “How are we going to get out of here?”

I burped a semisolid, wet, and sour burp, swallowed what I could, and coughed on the rest. When I could breathe again, I said, “How should I know?”

“You must have some recollection of our getting stuck in here.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She stared at me as if realizing for the first moment that she was alone in an elevator with a man-shaped bag of feces. “Isn’t that a roomful of younger yous we’re listening to right now?”

“Oh, that.” I waved a hand, and much of my torso followed it. Finishing that bottle had been a big mistake. “No. Things haven’t been going according to memory tonight. Not for me. But even if I do remember this in a year, I’ll have to let it happen.”

“Why?”

“Rule number three.”

She smiled. She hadn’t smiled since the moment in the room when she thought I was someone older. “You and your rules.”

“You know my rules?” I didn’t tell people my rules. I didn’t tell people much of anything about me, assuming I even spoke to them at all.

“I know of them.”

“Ah.” This was a rather vague response, but as the car was swirling around me, it was all I could manage.

“So what do we do?”

I’d been in odd situations with women before, but this situation reverberated in a way that made me uncomfortable. I sat on the floor. The elevator hung at a nauseous angle.

The woman stared down at me, one hand against a wall. “I asked you, what do we do?”

I shut my eyes. The elevator stopped spinning briefly. I thought we might get away with staying there for a while, that she might understand that I needed to be still, to hide from everyone else. I don’t know why I had this fantasy—delusion, really—that she cared about my needs at all. She burst that impression by muttering, “I don’t want to die in this elevator.”

I opened my eyes. “What does that mean?”

“What?”

“Die in this elevator? Who are you, by the way? I can’t keep thinking of you as just ‘the Woman.’ ”

“The Woman?”

I waved a hand in the air to dispel her anger. She shook her head and looked up toward the ceiling, as if remembering something unpleasant. Her voice, sad and resigned, came from far away. “I’m Lily.”

“Lily. Nice to meet you.” I held out a hand, and she turned toward me just as I stole a glance at her breasts. Her green eyes pinned me against the wall. “How did you get here, Lily?”

She stopped to consider her own words. “I received an invitation.”

“Impossible. There are no invitations.”

“Not from you.”

I waited for her to continue. She didn’t. She understood me in a way that made me afraid. She knew I was weak and scared. She didn’t like it but accepted it nonetheless. I wondered when I would find her and how I would convince her to follow me to the party. Would she be familiar with me as
an old man? Did I really have to wait that long, if I made it that long?

I fumbled with the elevator’s control panel beside the door but couldn’t even get it open. I gave up and squatted, thought about where I might get sick inconspicuously.

Lily parroted herself. “How are we going to get out of here?”

“Seriously, can’t we just rest a bit?”

“Get the fuck up and help me get this gate open.”

I stood and brushed myself off. Head swirling, I put one hand against the wall and tugged at the gate with the other. I noticed a clean spot on the tile floor where a powerful cleaning solution had stripped not only the dirt but the polish. Somehow I knew that it had been a bloodstain, cleaned with effort by an Elder. Screwdriver, most likely. He wore an air of shitwork. I sensed Lily’s eyes following mine to the floor, and I looked away. Would she panic if she knew that one of me would die in the car earlier that night?

I rattled the gate. It made a lot of noise but drew no attention. Conversation from the first floor didn’t stop, and the disco music seemed to grow louder. I rattled the gate again, and Lily put a hand on my shoulder.

“Let’s get the gate open.”

She used the spike of her heel to hook the lower latch and wrench it free of the catch. I held the bottom of the gate clear, and she worked at the upper latch, jumping to reach it. She leapt again and again, with a determination I might have never had in my entire life. In a way I didn’t care if I got out of the elevator. In just one heel, she fell into me several times. I ended up keeping a hand on her waist to steady her.

“I almost got it that time,” she said, face flushed and damp with sweat. She glanced down at my hand. I pulled it away.

She struck the latch again. It held as if welded shut. Unless someone came to open it for us, we were truly stuck. Lily knelt back down, put her head into the opening, and shouted. She screamed. She pleaded. The music grew louder.

“What are they all doing down there? How much time can someone spend with himself?”

She looked at me as if I should have the answer. After a moment I realized that maybe I should. “It’s a party. I like music. Loud music, apparently.”

“Has there ever been trouble like this with the elevator before?”

Before I could answer, there were voices above us. “Hold on. We’ll have you out in a second.” Someone forced open the second-floor door. I looked up past the legs and tried to see the face. The voices that carried down to us included some so high-pitched they must be prepubescent. They made my skin crawl. When would I be so stupid that I would bring children into this?

The alcohol rushed over me in waves. “Get something under that latch and pop it out.” The elevator seemed to shrink around me, and I wondered if it was conceivable that I had intentionally poisoned myself with the whiskey. I stumbled and fell against the wall.

Lily grabbed my arm. “You’re not well.”

“No. I’m fine.” I watched the youthful shadows over her shoulder. “Listen. Do me a favor. Don’t talk to them. All right?”

“Why, what’s wrong?”

“They shouldn’t be here. I haven’t figured out how they
all got here. Some are too young. I don’t know what they’re capable of.”

Her hard eyes softened a bit. “Right. Okay. Now, let’s try to get out of here.”

Who was she? She was handling this better than I was.

That was when the whiskey had its way with me. As the elevator car turned sideways and darkened in a frenzy of childish hands.

I WOKE UP
being hauled by a dozen struggling pairs of little hands, head hanging, legs swinging, heels catching on steps. Above me, upside down, was Lily, knees flashing as she climbed stairs, a pair of teenagers holding her elbows. I felt a pang of jealousy. I let my eyes close again, catching a last brief glimpse of Lily’s legs in the parade of me.

Before I passed out for the second time, I heard her say, “If you look up my skirt again, I’ll break your nose.”