Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

  “Catherine,” he said, “you must not go to work today.”

  “You’ve used up my patience, Lucas. I have no time for you anymore.”

  “Come away with me. Let me take you away.”

  She walked on. In a fury of desperation, before he knew what he did, he took her skirt in his hand and tugged at it. “Please,” he said. “Please.”

  “Leave me, Lucas,” she said, in a voice more awful for its measured calm. “You can do nothing for me. I can do nothing for you.”

  He stood still and watched helplessly as she went east, to her machine. He waited until she had traveled a distance, then followed. As they neared the sewing shop, other women in the same blue dresses gathered in the street. He watched as Catherine went among them. He watched as she went through the door. He remained a while. More women in blue dresses passed him and entered the building. He imagined Catherine mounting the stairs, going to her machine. He saw her work the treadle. He knew the machine would be gladdened by her touch. He knew it had been waiting patiently through the night, singing to itself, thinking of Catherine.

  She could not be allowed to remain there. She had no idea of the danger she was in. He stood helplessly before the building as the last of the women entered. He was too small and strange; he could do nothing more to intercede.

  No. There was something he could do. There was one thing.

  The trick would be to stop his machine before it had eaten more than his hand. He had to figure stealthily as he worked. He couldn’t let the others see him in his calculations. He knew he could not put one hand under the wheel and pull the lever with his other hand. The distance was too far. But he thought that if he stretched himself forward, if he lay half upon the belt, he could pull the lever with his foot, and stop the wheel in time.

  Lucas put off from moment to moment that which he had to do. It was easy, it was fatally easy, to keep on working. Even now, the waking sleep of his work life wanted him. He aligned and clamped. He pulled, pulled again, inspected. Even now he felt his resolve slipping away, and not only his resolve. His self was diminishing. He was becoming what he did. He began to think, as an hour passed, that he had dreamed of Catherine and her plight, had dreamed of everything that was not this, and was awake again, in the only world. To rouse himself, he thought of her putting stitches into blouses and shirts. He thought of the pressing machine, its rollers raised and waiting, exhaling draughts of steam.

  He was ready. If he didn’t do it now, he might not do it at all. He glanced around. The others were at their labor. He took a plate, dropped it on the belt. He placed it perfectly against the line. He was expert at that; he was proud of it. He put his left hand—the left would be better—along the plate’s upper edge. He aligned his fingers against the edge and in so doing was calmed. This was his work. He reached over with his right hand and pulled the lever.

  The belt started. He felt the movement of the rollers that turned the belt, their sure and steady rhythm. This was how the iron felt, going in. His left hand rode along with the plate. He felt graceful, like a dancer. He passed through a moment of beauty. He was partner to the iron and the machine.

  His hand was conveyed along. His body was gently stretched, and stretched further. His toe slipped away from the lever. He scrambled to find it again and lost his grace. He was a foolish thing, struggling. His foot touched the lever, though he couldn’t be sure it was the right one. He glanced back. He couldn’t be sure. When he turned again, his fingers were going under the wheel.

  He watched it happen. He saw that his hand was positioned between two teeth. His fingers slipped into the space between them. The teeth bit into the iron. His fingers went under. His knuckles went under. The drum of the wheel touched his fingertips. It was warm, warmer than he’d expected it to be. It was as warm as his mother’s mouth had been when he reached in to retrieve the bit of potato. He felt it crushing his fingertips. There was no pain. There was a high pale nothingness. With its warm implacable patience the wheel crushed his knuckles. There was no pain and no blood. There was no sound but that of the machine.

  Then he returned to himself. Then he saw what he did. He saw the larger body of his hand going under. He tried to pull the lever with his toe. He lost his purchase. He cried out. He didn’t recognize the noise he made. He fumbled with his boot, and found the lever again. For a moment it didn’t yield. And then it did. With its little clicking sigh, the wheel stopped turning.

  Lucas could not remove his hand. There was still no blood. There was still no pain, but there was something. A tingling. A newness. He remained where he was, looking at his arm and his vanished hand with numb fascination.

  He heard the sound of the others. Someone—it would be Tom—pulled the second lever, which reversed the wheel. Someone else, it was Dan, put his own hand over Lucas’s wrist as the machine began slowly to release it. Lucas saw Dan’s big hand, with its two missing fingers, receive his own.

  His hand had been flattened. He thought for a moment that it was unharmed, that it was only larger. But no. Blood welled up around his fingernails. He held up his big, bleeding hand. He wanted to show it to himself and Dan. Briefly, his fingernails were outlined in red. The blood increased. It ran in streams down his fingers.

  He fell. He hadn’t meant to fall. One moment he was standing looking at his hand, and then he was on the floor, with the black ceiling over him. There were the pulleys and hooks. The floor smelled sharply of oil and tar.

  Dan’s face arrived. Tom’s face arrived. Tom put his arm under Lucas’s head. Who’d have imagined him capable of such tenderness?

  Dan’s face said, “Stay here with him.” Dan’s face departed.

  Tom’s face said, “My God.” Tom’s mouth was broad, its lips rough. Its teeth were the color of old ivory.

  Lucas said to Tom’s mouth, “Please, sir. Send for Catherine Fitzhugh, at the Mannahatta Company. Tell her I’ve been hurt.”

  In the hospital, a man stood crying. He was dressed for his work, in a butcher’s apron smeared with animals’ blood. His affliction was uncertain. He appeared to be whole. He stood with grave formality, as a singer might stand on a stage.

  Around him were the others. They sat in what chairs there were. They sat or lay on the floor. There were men, some old and some not yet old, wounded in ways that could be seen (one bled extravagantly from a gash in his forehead, another tenderly stroked his mangled leg) and in ways that could not. There were women who sat quietly, as if whatever sickness had brought them here were as ordinary as sitting in their parlors; one of them, in a tobacco-colored kerchief, coughed demurely, a sound like paper tearing, and leaned forward now and again to spit on the floor between her feet. A man and a woman and a child huddled together on the floor, rocking and moaning as if they shared an injury among them. There was the smell of sweat and other humors mixed with ammonia, as if humanness itself had been made into medicine.

  Sisters in black habits and a doctor in white—no, there were two doctors—hurried among those who waited. Sometimes a name was called, and one of the people rose and went away. The man went on standing in the room’s center, crying with a low, unwavering insistence. He was the waiting room’s host, as Mr. Cain was the host of Lucas’s block, its wounded and inspired angel.

  Lucas sat on the floor with his back against the wall. Dan stood over him. Pain was a hot, brilliant whiteness that suffused Lucas’s body and bled into the air around him. Lucas held in his lap the bundle that was his hand, wrapped in rags soaked through with blood. Pain originated in his hand but filled him as fire fills a room with heat and light. He made no sound. He had gone too far away to speak or cry. Pain was in him like the book or the works. He had always been here, waiting in this room.

  He leaned his shoulder against Dan’s leg. Dan reached down and stroked his hair with the fingers he had left.

  Lucas couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Time in the waiting room was like time in his parents’ bedroom and time at the works. It passed in it
s own way; it couldn’t be measured. After a span of time had passed, Catherine came. She walked into the room in her blue dress, alive and unharmed. She stood at the entrance, searching.

  Lucas’s heart banged hotly against his ribs. It hurt him, as if his heart were an ember, harmless when it hung in the bell of his chest but painful when it touched bone. He said, Catherine, but couldn’t be sure if he had actually spoken. He made to rise but couldn’t.

  She saw him. She came and knelt before him.

  She said, “Are you all right?”

  He nodded. Tears sprang unbidden to his eyes. He had an urge to conceal his hand from her, as if he had done something shameful; as if, seeing his hand, she would know some final secret about him.

  Catherine looked up at Dan. She said, “Why is he still out here?”

  “They told us to wait,” Dan answered.

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Catherine rose. Lucas could hear the rustle of her dress. She went among the others, stepping around them. She stood near the crying man until a sister passed, carrying something on a tray, something that had made a red stain on the cloth that covered it. Catherine spoke to the sister. Lucas couldn’t hear what she said. The sister replied and walked away.

  Catherine returned. She bent over, put her face close to Lucas’s. She said, “Are you in much pain?”

  He shook his head. It was true and not true. He had entered pain. He had become it.

  She said to Dan, “He’s still bleeding.”

  Dan nodded. It would be foolish to deny it.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dan said.

  Catherine made her stern face. For a moment, Lucas felt as if he had come home, as if the hospital were where he lived.

  A doctor, one of the doctors, came out of the door through which they took the people whose names were called. The doctor was thin (there was another who was not thin) and grave. Lucas thought briefly that the doctor was one of the men in the cages at the works, the men who scowled over papers and counted out the pay. One of them was a doctor, too. No. The doctor was someone else. Catherine went to the doctor with dispatch (she moved so quickly among the prone bodies of the ill) and spoke to him. The doctor frowned. He looked at Lucas, frowning. Lucas understood. There is always someone poorer than you. There is always someone sicker, more grievously harmed.

  Catherine took the doctor’s arm. They might have been lovers meeting. Catherine might have been the doctor’s fiancée, taking his arm and insisting as a woman could that he accompany her on an errand she knew to be necessary. Lucas wondered if she and the doctor had met before.

  The doctor frowned differently—he had a language of frowns—at Catherine’s hand on his white-sleeved elbow. But, like a lover, he came with her. She led him among the bodies to where Lucas sat.

  She said, “He’s had his hand crushed at the works.”

  The doctor offered a new frown. He was a marvel of frowns. This one was canted, rakish.

  The doctor said, “Someone over there has had his leg half torn off. The surgery rooms are full. We are doing all we can.”

  “He is a child.”

  “There are others here before him.”

  “He is a child who supports his parents, who does work much too hard for him, and he has had his hand crushed. His brother died less than a week ago. You must attend to him.”

  “We will attend to him presently.”

  “You must do it now.”

  The doctor made his face darker. He retracted his eyes, made them smaller but brighter in his darkened face. “What did you say, miss?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” Catherine answered. “I don’t mean to be rude. But please, please attend to this boy. As you can see, we’re beside ourselves.”

  The doctor made a decision. It was easier, the doctor decided, to comply. Others were here before Lucas, but they would wait, as they’d learned to do.

  “Come with me,” the doctor said.

  Dan helped Lucas to stand. He put his arm around Lucas’s back and helped him walk, as Lucas had helped his mother back to bed once. When had that been? The doctor led them, though it seemed it should be Catherine who led.

  They passed through the door. It opened onto a corridor that was full of other people. Like those in the waiting room they sat or lay upon the floor. They left a narrow aisle through which the not sick could pass. Lucas wondered if the hospital was like the works, if it was room after room, each different and each the same, leading on and on like a series of caverns until at some length they reached—what? Healing itself. A living jewel, a ball of green-gold fire.

  Dan helped Lucas along the path the afflicted had left for them. They had to step over a leg and then an extended arm that was strangely colored, bluish-white, like cheese. Lucas wondered if they were going toward the final room, where the healing was kept.

  The room they entered was near the end of the corridor. It was an ordinary room, though nothing here was ordinary. It was small and dingily white. There were cabinets with glass fronts, and a chair and a cot. A sister sat upon the chair, bent over a man who was on the cot. The man, about Father’s age but smaller, with longer hair, muttered to the sister.

  The doctor said, “All right. Let’s see.”

  It took Lucas a moment to know that the doctor wanted to see his hand. He’d thought the doctor meant something more general, something larger, though he could not have said what it was. He preferred his hand. Blood from the soaked rags dripped onto the floor. Lucas looked at the red drops. He thought, I’m hurt.

  The doctor unwrapped the bandage. He didn’t seem to mind about the blood. As the rag came away, the pain changed. It gathered in Lucas’s hand. It had been all over him like a sickness, but now it was here; it followed the course of the bandages as they were pulled away, like sparks that were caught in his flesh, exquisite and excruciating. Lucas whimpered, though he hadn’t wanted to. It seemed as if the bandage had joined him, as if the doctor without realizing his mistake were peeling Lucas’s very skin away.

  Then the bandage was gone. Here was his hand, revealed. It wasn’t big anymore, as it had been at the works. It was small and curled in upon itself, like a chicken’s foot. It was thickly red, as if it were made of blood. It looked like something dreadful, newly born.

  He glanced nervously at Catherine. Would she be repulsed?

  She merely said to him, “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  The doctor put the bandage into a can on the floor. The can contained other things as well. The doctor took Lucas’s mangled hand in his palm, held it with sharp but weary attention. His new frown was broad and sternly beatific.

  Catherine said, “What can you do for him?”

  The doctor answered, “Remove the hand. Right away.”

  “No,” she said. She seemed to possess a power not of knowledge but of divine refusal. It seemed possible—it did not seem impossible—that Catherine could restore his hand by insisting it be restored.

  “Would you rather we wait and remove the whole arm?” the doctor said.

  “It can’t be as bad as that.”

  “Where did you receive your medical training, miss?”

  “It’s broken,” she said. “It’s badly broken but only that. Can’t you set it?”

  “Not here.”

  “Elsewhere, then.”

  “There is no elsewhere. Not for him.”

  Lucas had never been talked about so, as if he were present and not present. It was like being in the works. There was something good—there was something not bad—about giving himself over.

  “We’ll find somewhere to take him,” Catherine said.

  “With what money? Do you have money?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Let me tell you what will happen, then. You’ll take him to New York Hospital or St. Vincent’s. It will take time, perhaps considerable time, for you to see someone there, and that person will
most likely send you back here. By the time you get back here it will be gangrenous, and we’ll have to remove the arm, at the elbow if we’re lucky and at the shoulder if we’re not. Do you understand?”

  Catherine hesitated. She looked to Dan.

  Lucas became visible then. Catherine saw him.

  She said, “Lucas, I think we’d better let them do it.”

  He nodded. He soared above all feeling save for the pain and Catherine. Lucas was strangely excited. She regarded him with such concern, such deep and abiding love.

  “Can you be brave?” she asked.

  He nodded again. He could be brave.

  “All right, then,” she said to the doctor.

  “Wise girl,” he answered.

  “Can you get him to a bed now? Can you give him something for his pain?”

  “We have no empty beds.”

  “Surely one can be found.”

  “Should I evict the woman dying in the room next to this one? Should I put out the man whose heart is failing?”

  “This is monstrous.”

  “A surgery room will be free in an hour or two. He will have to wait here until then.”

  “Some medicine, then. He doesn’t show his pain. He wouldn’t.”

  “We have very little medicine.”

  “How can that be?”

  “What we have, we must reserve for the gravest cases.”

  “This is a grave case.”

  “This is a boy about to lose his hand. When you compelled me to look at this boy, I had just left a man with a length of pipe driven through his skull. It entered here”—the doctor indicated a place above his left ear—“and came out here.” He pointed to a spot just behind his right ear. “He is still alive, somehow. We have morphine for him.”

  Catherine hesitated. She looked around the room (where the man lay whispering on the cot under the sister’s ministrations, where the jars stood behind the glass) as if she thought she might find an answer there. Finding none, she said to the doctor in a lowered voice, “Surely some provision can be made. As you can see, he is not quite right.”

  “Miss, this is a charity hospital. Half the people who come here are not quite right.”