Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

  Lucas put the book back under the mattress. He extinguished the lamp. Across the air shaft, he could see the light of Emily’s curtains. He buried his face in Simon’s pillow. Simon was with them still. His pillow still smelled of him.

  Lucas whispered into the pillow. “You should go away now. I really think it’s time.”

  In the morning he made tea for himself and his father and put out some bread. His father sat at table with his breathing machine, a tube and a bellows on a metal pole, with three square, delicate feet. His mother hadn’t risen yet.

  When Lucas had eaten his bread and drunk his tea, he said, “Goodbye, Father.”

  His father looked at him, startled. He had been turned to leather by his years in the tannery. His burnished skin, fine-grained, fit perfectly on his big-jawed skull. His dark eyes were set like jewels. Simon’s beauty, his large and defiant features, came mostly from their father. No one knew how Lucas had come to look as he did.

  “G’bye, then,” his father said. He raised the tube to his lips, drew in a mouthful of air. The little bellows rose and fell. Now that he was leather, with jewels for eyes, the machine did his breathing for him.

  “Will you see to Mother?” Lucas asked.

  “Aye,” his father said.

  Lucas put his small hand on his father’s brown one. He loved himself for loving his father. It was the best he could do.

  “I’m off to the works,” he said.

  “Aye,” his father answered, and took another breath from the tube. The machine was a gift from the tannery. They had given him the machine, and some money. There had been no money for Simon, because dying was his own fault.

  Lucas kissed his father’s forehead. His father’s mind was leather now, too, but his goodness remained. All he had lost were his complications. He could still do what he needed to do. He could still love Lucas’s mother and tend to her. Lucas hoped he could still do that.

  He said, “I’ll see you tonight, then.”

  “Aye,” his father answered.

  On his way to the works, Lucas stopped at the school. He didn’t enter. He went around to the side and looked through the window. He could see Mr. Mulchady frowning at his desk, the little flames from the lamps dancing on his spectacles. He could see the others hunched over their lessons. School would go on without him. Here as always were the desks and slates. Here were the two maps on the wall, the world and the stars. Lucas had only lately understood (he could be slow in some things) that the two were different. He’d believed, and had not thought to ask otherwise, that the stars were a version of the world, that they mirrored its countries and oceans. Why else would they be mounted side by side? When he was younger he had found New York on the map of the world and found its counterpart on the map of the stars, the Pleiades.

  It was Mr. Mulchady who’d given Walt’s book to Lucas, on loan. Mr. Mulchady said Lucas had the soul of a poet, which was kind of him but wrong. Lucas had no soul at all. He was a stranger, a citizen of no place, come from County Kerry but planted in New York, where he grew like a blighted potato; where he didn’t sing or shout as the other Irish did; where he harbored not soul but an emptiness sparked here and there with painful shocks of love, for the map of the stars and the answering flames on Mr. Mulchady’s spectacles; for Catherine and his mother and a horse on wheels. He did not mourn Simon; he had no convictions about heaven, no thirst for Christ’s revivifying blood. What he wanted was the raucousness of the city, where people hauled their loads of corn or coal, where they danced to fiddles, wept or laughed, sold and begged and bartered, not always happily but always with a vigor that was what he meant, privately, by soul. It was a defiant, uncrushable aliveness. He hoped the book could instill that in him.

  Now, abruptly, he was finished with school. He would have liked to say goodbye to Mr. Mulchady, but if he did Mr. Mulchady would ask him to return the book, and Lucas couldn’t do that, not yet. He was still an empty suit of clothes. He hoped Mr. Mulchady wouldn’t mind waiting.

  He said goodbye, silently, to the classroom, to the maps and Mr. Mulchady.

  The works was like a city unto itself. It was red brick walls and red brick towers, a gate big enough for six horses walking abreast. Lucas entered through the gate, among a crowd of boys and men. Some went quietly. Some spoke to one another, laughed. One said, “Fat, you never seen one as fat as her,” and another said, “I like ’em fat.” The boys and the younger men were pale. The older men had darkened.

  Lucas, uncertain, walked with the others into a cobbled courtyard where stacks of brown-black iron, dusky as great bars of chocolate, stood against the red brick walls. He went with the others to a doorway at the courtyard’s opposite end, an arched entrance with flickering dark inside.

  He stopped there. The others moved around him. A man in a blue cap jostled him, cursed, walked on. The man would be eaten as Simon had been. What the machine did not care for would be put in a box and taken across the river.

  Lucas couldn’t tell whether he was meant to go in or to wait here. He thought it might be foolish to wait. The others were so certain, so loud but steady, like unruly soldiers on parade. He hated drawing attention to himself. But he thought, too, that if he went on he might be drawn forward into some error, obscure but irredeemable. He stood in an agony of doubt with the others flowing around him.

  Soon Lucas was alone save for a few stragglers who hurried by him without seeming to see him at all. Finally—it seemed an unspeakable mercy—a man came from the building into the courtyard and said, “Are you Lucas?”

  He was an immense gray-skinned man whose face, wide as a shovel, didn’t move when he talked. Only his mouth moved, as if by magic a man made of iron had been given the power of speech.

  “Yes,” Lucas said.

  The man looked at him skeptically. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. As he spoke, his mouth showed flashes of pink, livid in the gray face.

  “I’m sound, sir. I can work as well as anybody.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Thirteen, sir,” Lucas answered.

  “You’re not thirteen.”

  “I’m thirteen in another month.”

  The man shook his iron head. “This isn’t work for a child.”

  “Please, sir. I’m stronger than I seem.” Lucas settled his shoulders, striving to look sturdier.

  “Well, they’ve given you the job. We’ll see how you do.”

  Before he could stop himself, Lucas said, “Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you.”

  “What?”

  “Please, sir,” Lucas said. “I’ll work hard. I can do anything.”

  “We’ll see. I’m Jack Walsh.”

  Lucas held out his hand. Jack looked at it as if Lucas had offered him a lily. He took it in his own, pressed it hard enough to put the sting of tears in Lucas’s eyes. If Walt was the book, Jack was the works. He was made of iron, with a living mouth.

  “Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s get you started.”

  Lucas followed him through the entranceway, into a hall where men behind wire cages scowled over papers. Beyond the hall, they came to an enormous room lined with furnaces. Where the light from the furnaces didn’t reach, it was twilight, a dull orange twilight that faded, in its remoter parts, to a bruised, furtive undark. The room reeked of heat and coal, of creosote. It rang and wheezed. Furies of sparks swirled up, skittish as flies. Among the sparks, men stood before the furnaces, stoking the fires with long black poles.

  “This is coking,” Jack said, and said no more. Did he mean “cooking”? Lucas thought he would ask his questions later.

  Jack escorted him past the row of furnaces, under a chaos of black hooks and leather pulleys that depended from the high ceiling, touched here and there by small incidences of orange firelight. A portal that opened from the room where the coking (the cooking?) was done led onto another room, equally large but dimmer, lined on either side by the gray-brown bulks of machines as preposterous and gra
nd as elephants, machines made up of belts and beams and wheels turning with sharp squeals and groans. The room was like a stable or a dairy. It was full of steady, creaturely life.

  “Cutting and stamping,” Jack said. “This is where you’ll be.”

  The atmosphere of the cutting-and-stamping room was dust, but bright dust, drifting silvery particles that winked and glimmered in the sluggish light. Men stood at the machines engaged in mysterious efforts, bent over, straining with their shoulders and thighs. Lucas saw that the men, like Jack, had taken on the color of the room. Were they dying or just becoming more like the air?

  Jack led him to a machine at the far end. Yet another room opened off this one, though Lucas could discern only a sepulchral stillness and what appeared to be stacks of vaults, like catacombs, filled with silver canisters. It seemed there must be another room after that and then another and another. The works might extend for miles, like a series of caverns. It seemed that it would be possible to walk through them for hours and finally reach—what? Lucas didn’t fully understand what it was that the works produced. Simon had never spoken of it. Lucas had imagined some treasure, a living jewel, a ball of green fire, infinitely precious, the making of which required unstinting effort. He wondered now why he had never thought to ask. His brother’s labors had always seemed a mystery, to be respected and revered.

  “Here,” Jack said, stopping before a machine. “You work here.”

  “This is where my brother worked.”

  “It is.”

  Lucas stood before the machine that had taken Simon. It was a toothed wheel, like a titanic piano roll, set over a broad belt bordered by clamps.

  Jack said, “You must be more careful than your brother was.”

  Lucas understood from Jack’s voice that the machine was not to blame. He stared at the machine as he’d stared once at the gorilla at Barnum’s. It was immense and stolid. It wore its wheel as a snail wears its shell, with a languid and inscrutable pride. Like a snail with its shell, the machine contained a quicker, more liquid life in its nether parts. Under the wheel, which snagged flecks of orange light on its square teeth, were the rows of clamps, the pale, naked-looking leather of the belt, the slender stalks of the levers. The wheel harbored a shifting shadow of brownish-black. The machine was at once formidable and tender-looking. It offered its belt like a tentative promise of kindness.

  Jack said, “Tom Clare, over there” (he nodded at a young man laboring at the next machine), “stacks plates in the bin here. Tom, this is Lucas, the new man.”

  Tom Clare, sharp-faced, whiskered, looked up. “Sorry about your loss,” he said. He would have seen Simon eaten by the machine. Was it his fault, then? Could he have acted more quickly, been more brave?

  “Thank you,” Lucas answered.

  Jack lifted from the bin a flat rectangle of iron, the size of an oven door, and laid it on the belt. “You fasten it tight,” he said. He screwed clamps down onto the iron plate, three on each side. “See the lines on the belt?”

  The belt was marked with white lines, each drawn several inches above one of the clamps. “The top edge,” Jack said, “has to be lined up exactly. Do you understand? It has to be right up on this line.”

  “I see,” Lucas said.

  “When it’s even with the line and when the clamps are secure, you pull this lever first.”

  He pulled a lever to the right of the belt. The wheel awakened and began, with a sigh, to turn. Its teeth came to within an inch of the belt.

  “When the drum is turning, you pull the other lever.”

  He pulled a second lever that stood beside the first. The belt slowly began to move. Lucas watched the belt bear the iron plate forward until it met with the teeth of the wheel. The teeth, impressing into the iron, sounded like hammers banging on glass that wouldn’t break.

  “Now. Follow me.” Jack led Lucas to the back of the machine, where the plate was beginning to emerge, full of shallow, square impressions.

  “When it’s come through,” he said, “you go back and pull the levers again. First the second one, then the first. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Lucas said.

  Jack pulled the levers and stopped the machine, first the belt and then the wheel. He released the clamps from the plate of iron.

  “Then you inspect it,” he said. “You make sure it’s taken a complete impression. Four across, six down. They must all be perfect. Look into every square. This is important. If it isn’t perfect you take it over there” (he pointed across the room) “to Will O’Hara, for resmelting. If you have any doubts, show it to Will. If you’re satisfied that the impressions are perfect, if you’re sure, take it to Dan Heaney over there. Any questions?”

  “No, sir,” Lucas said. “I don’t think so.”

  “All right, then. You try it.”

  Lucas took a new plate from the bin. It was heavier than he’d expected but not too heavy to manage. He hoisted it onto the belt, pushed it carefully up to the white line, and attached the clamps. “Is that right?” he asked.

  “What do you think?”

  He tested the clamps. “Should I pull the lever now?” he asked.

  “Yes. Pull the lever.”

  Lucas pulled the first lever, which started the wheel turning. He was briefly exultant. He pulled the second lever, and the belt moved forward. To his relief, the clamps held tight.

  “That’s all right,” Jack said.

  Lucas watched the teeth bite into the iron. Simon would have been pulled under the wheel, first his arm and then the rest. The machine would have ground him in its teeth with the same serenity it brought to the iron. It would have believed—if machines could believe—it had simply produced another iron plate. After it had crushed Simon it would have waited patiently for the next plate.

  “Now,” Jack said, “let’s go and inspect the piece.”

  Lucas went with him to the machine’s far end, and saw what he had made. A plate of iron with square impressions, four across and six down.

  Jack said, “Does it look all right to you?”

  Lucas looked closely. It was difficult to see in the dimness. He ran a finger into each impression. He said, “I think so.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think so.”

  “All right, then. What do you do now?”

  “I take it to Dan Heaney.”

  “That’s right.”

  Lucas lifted the stamped iron, carried it to Dan Heaney’s machine. Dan, bulbous and lion-headed, nodded. After a hesitation, Lucas placed the plate carefully in a bin that stood beside Dan’s machine.

  “Fine, then,” Jack said.

  He had pleased Jack.

  Jack said, “Do another one.”

  “Sir,” Lucas asked, “what are these things I’m making?”

  “They’re housings,” Jack said. “Let me watch you do another one.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lucas did another one. Jack said it was all right and went off to attend to other things.

  Time passed. Lucas couldn’t have said how much. There were no clocks. There was no daylight. He loaded a plate onto the belt, lined it up, sent it through, and inspected the impressions. Four across, six down. He began trying to drop each plate onto the belt so that its upper edge fell as close to the white line as possible and needed only the slightest nudge to put it in place. For a while he hoped the impressions made by the wheel would be perfect, and after what seemed hours of that he began hoping for minor imperfections, a blunted corner or a slight cant that would have been invisible to eyes less diligent than his. He found only one flawed impression, and that debatable. One of the squares seemed less deep than the others, though he could not be entirely sure. Still, he took the plate proudly over to Will for resmelting and felt strong and capable after.

  When he had tired of trying to hit the line on his first try, and when he had grown indifferent to the question of whether he was searching for flaws or searching for perfection, he tried thinking of
other things. He tried thinking of Catherine, of his mother and father. Had his mother awakened? Was she herself again, ready to cook and argue? He tried thinking of Simon. The work, however, didn’t permit such thoughts. The work demanded attention. He entered a state of waking sleep, an ongoing singularity of purpose, in which his mind was filled with that which must fill it, to the exclusion of all else. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.

  It was after the lunch hour when his sleeve caught in a clamp. He’d allowed his mind to drift. The tug was gentle and insistent as an infant’s grip. He was already reaching for another clamp and saw that a corner of his shirtsleeve was in the serrated mouth of the first, pinched tight between clamp and plate. He pulled instinctively away, but the clamp held the fabric with steady assurance. It was singular and passionate as a rat with a scrap of gristle. Lucas thought for a moment how well the machine was made—the jaws of the clamps were so strong and sure. He tugged again. The clamp didn’t yield. Only when he turned the pin, awkwardly, with his left hand, did the clamp relax itself and give up the corner of his sleeve. The cloth still bore the imprint of the clamp’s tiny toothmarks.

  Lucas looked with mute wonder at the end of his sleeve. This was how. You allowed your attention to wander, you thought of other things, and the clamp took whatever was offered it. That was the clamp’s nature. Lucas looked around guiltily, wondering if Tom or Will or Dan had noticed. They had not noticed. Dan tapped with a wrench on his machine. He struck it firmly but kindly on the flank of the box that held its workings. The wrench rang on the metal like a church bell.

  Lucas rolled his sleeves to his elbows. He went on working.

  It seemed, as he loaded the plates onto the belt, that the machines were not inanimate; not quite inanimate. They were part of a continuum: machines, then grass and trees, then horses and dogs, then human beings. He wondered if the machine had loved Simon, in its serene and unthinking way. He wondered if all the machines at the works, all the furnaces and hooks and belts, mutely admired their men, as horses admired their masters. He wondered if they waited with their immense patience for the moment their men would lose track of themselves, let their caution lapse so the machines could take their hands with loving firmness and pull them in.