The Empire of the Dead by Tracy Daugherty Read Free Book Online Page B

the kind doctors pull over their shoes for sanitary purposes, stood on the stoop. The revelers seemed to be using the slippers as party favors, wearing them on their heads or hands, or stuffing them into their pockets so they resembled boutonnières. Inside, the crowd danced to laborious hip hop while dressed to treat gunshot wounds, burns, and lacerations.
    Bern glanced back one last time at Kate’s place. Would she let him in now if he showed up, hangdog? Probably she’d gone to bed. He veered away and, thinking of her, missed the subway station. Well, it felt good to walk. It always felt good to walk. His shoe heel clattered on the street like the ceramic tiles hung on a chain-link fence, three or four blocks back, commemorating 9/11. The tiles came from New York well-wishers: “Oklahoma City is Thinking of You!” and “Arizona Says God Bless NYC!” When wind blew and shook the fence, the tiles rattled like seed-filled gourds.
    Tomorrow he would telephone Kate. Yes. He was the mature one here: it was up to him to make things right. They
would
forge a friendship, by God—against all odds. Men and women: it could be done. Belfast, right?
    Don’t get carried away, Bern told himself. After all, “making things right” meant taking small steps. Building a hut one mud brick, one pole, at a time. An apology. A design for a fire escape. A poster for a missing cat. He had learned his lessons from Lodoli, had
become
Lodoli, watching the great cities of his time wax and wane, and wax again. Live lightly on the earth, he thought, and leave all pages blank.
    On a sidewalk grating Bern paused impulsively, then steadied his feet as a subway train thundered beneath him.

Suitor
    The cabbie pushed a button and rolled down the windows rather than ease out of his coat as he drove. Shivering in the back seat, Bern concentrated on an ad posted in front of him in a small silver frame: a Lincoln Center staging of the Romeo and Juliet ballet. A few years ago, he had seen a production of
Romeo and Juliet
. The show’s second half featured few dances because, by intermission, most of the characters had been killed.
    Not the best story line, perhaps.
    Like his little pirouette with Kate. He was eager and afraid to see her now.
    The cab dropped him near the Dakota. A boy with skin as dully textured as Miracle Whip led a knot of tourists to the corner of Seventy-second Street. “The ghost tour begins in five minutes!” he called. “Spirits of the famous dead …”
    Bern slipped into the park across the street, between idle horse-drawn carriages. In a tiled circle inside a small plaza, a mosaic spelled the word
Imagine
. People sat on benches gripping Met bags, eating pretzels the size of babies’ fists, or reading papers—“Celtic Tiger!,” a piece about Irish entrepreneurs snatching up Manhattan real estate. A bald man with a blue dragon tattooed on his neck sat by a tree reading a biography of Einstein. Bern found a spot on a bench next to a Jamaican woman, apparently a caretaker hired to watch an elderly lady. The lady shook violently in a wheelchair, precisely in everybody’s way. Her companion waved a bagel in her face. “But I dropped it on the ground!” the old girl said. “Well then, I guess you can’t
eat
the damn thing now, can you?” said the nurse.
    Where was Kate? Making him wait. Punishing him for that terrible night last week.
    Of course, he deserved it. He had known she was living off and on with a guy. He had learned she was carrying Off-and-On’s kid. How could he have violated their friendship?
    We’re buddies
, Kate had always said to him.
Yes
?
    He was too damn old for this. And she was far too young to tolerate his sorry needs (midtwenties? she’d never said). The perils of the city. This is what happened when you packed people tightly on an island. It was impossible not to feel the
warmth
of the body beside