Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

“Great.”

  She lingered another moment, sipping her own coffee, though it was time to let him have the tiny bathroom to himself. Simon was so heedlessly alive, so unquestioningly glad about it. He traded futures. He’d been president of his senior class. He filled the room with his heat and his soapy smell.

  When her son died Cat had thought she was dead, too; she’d thought her systems would shut down all by themselves, but here she was, nine years later, not only still alive but looking pretty good, well educated (too bad the private practice hadn’t taken off), free of her poor tortured ex-husband (though he did creep into her fantasies), still capable of attracting someone like Simon.

  She wished she hated herself more for wanting to live on.

  She took a last deep draught of Simon’s shower smell, went into the bedroom to find something to wear.

  Mornings were good. (Mornings are good, enjoy them.) She liked the fact that all over the city, people were having their coffee and showers, deciding on their clothes. This was as close as it got to collective innocence, this mass transition from sleep (however troubled) to wakefulness (however tormented). Just about everyone, or everyone who was at least minimally functional, had to get up and get dressed. Even the ones who were going to call her and tell her about their plans to shoot or stab or ignite somebody. Even the ones who were going to strap a bomb to their chests and blow up a businessman on the street. Here we are, all of us, going through this daily miniature rebirth, and doing it together.

  She passed over the Maori-print dress she’d been thinking of in favor of the dark Earl jeans. The jeans and the black crewneck sweater, the low-heeled black boots. She would not try to intimidate or seduce. Not by way of costume, anyway.

  She didn’t wait around for Simon. It was, if anything, a day to show up at work on the early side. She kissed him goodbye while he was still in his underwear and socks (was there anything as touchingly unsexy as a man in black socks and no pants?), gratefully accepted his assurance that he’d wind up the client thing by ten and they’d decide then about where to eat, which apartment to sleep in.

  She descended the garbagey stairs, went out into the morning, a spanking-fresh June one, all spangly on the fire escapes. She paused for a moment on the stoop, taking it in. On a morning like this, you could believe the world was safe and promising. You could imagine that nothing harmful, nothing toxic, could flourish. Not when early light slanted down so purely from an ice-blue sky. Not when the window-box geraniums of the first-floor widow were incandescently red and a passing truck said PARTY PLANNERS in glittering gold letters.

  Someone was watching her. Right now. She felt it. Any woman could; it was survival coding. She glanced around. In this neighborhood a woman out alone, even in daylight, was by general accord offering herself up for public entertainment. She had to admit it: lately her fury had gone a little soft at the edges. They wouldn’t keep annoying her forever. One day the moans and coyote whistles, the Hey, sexy mommas, would cease. Which would be a relief. She’d be just another middle-aged black lady, going unremarked about her unremarkable business. Still, all right, admit it: right now, this morning, here on her front stoop, having left her younger boyfriend upstairs, she felt herself being scrutinized, and she looked for the offending party with a certain angry eagerness, like a princess who’d found her prince but was still being pestered by the enchanted frog with the golden ball. Hey, frog, I’m off the market now, go croak under somebody else’s window. She wasn’t interested, but still, in some crevice of her mind, some dark and foolish fold, she dreaded the day the frog gave up and hopped off to moon over someone else.

  No one was there. No, people were always there. No one was looking at her. There were the besuited eagers on their way to work, a couple of NYU students off to early classes, an old man lumbering along with bags of empty, chiming bottles dangling from both palsied hands.

  Still, the feeling was palpable. Someone was staring at her, right now.

  She hit the sidewalk, headed west. Get over yourself. You’re just feeling your own version of the same edginess that’s infecting everybody this morning as hatred once again demonstrates its capacity to find us wherever we are and suck us into the next dimension.

  She got to her cubicle a full half hour before she needed to. Ed Short was still there, finishing up the graveyard shift.

  “Morning, Ed,” she said.

  “Good morning. You’re in early.”

  “I am.”

  Ed sipped at what was probably his fifteenth cup of coffee. His eyes were bright and watery. His sparrow-colored hair, already thinning, stood out from his head with a certain doomed desperation, the way a fire flares just before it goes out. Ed was, what, thirty-two, thirty-three? He was made for the job: young and more than a little bit mean, untroubled by imagination, incapable of boredom, eager to root out the bad guys and hurl them into the abyss. He’d have red-tagged the kid if he’d been on the phone that day. Ed red-tagged almost everything. People complained—red tags meant more work, of course, plus they cost money, and the whole err-on-the-side-of-caution policy had its implied limits. But Ed was just the sort of pain in the ass who got to be a department head. When the Eds of the world were right, when they appeared to have made a good call because they called almost everything, the fact that they’d spent years irritating everyone around them didn’t matter. They were heroes. They’d saved the day. It was impossible to imagine how many historical figures, how many great men (and women, there was the occasional woman), were people like Ed, people who never got distracted, whose faith never wavered, who would stay by their phones or in their laboratories or at their easels until finally, finally, something happened, while most of the rest of the population tended, over time, to think of other things, to wonder what it would be like to live in the country, to speculate over the possibility that doing a simple job and raising a couple of kids might actually be enough.

  What lives in empty rooms?

  How far does the light reach?

  Are there teeth in the wood?

  Cat asked, “What’s come in from the site?”

  “Kid was rigged with a pipe bomb. No nails or anything, it wasn’t meant to scatter. Just to incinerate everything within five or six feet.”

  “You can learn how to make something like that off the Internet.”

  “Yep. Half of Dick Harte’s scalp turned up on a window ledge three stories up. Otherwise it’s just some bone fragments and one more tooth.”

  “Why don’t you go home early?” she said. “I’m ready to take over.”

  “Thanks. I’m fine. You just relax for a little while.”

  Right. Today she was someone who should relax for a little while.

  She went into the lounge, poured herself some coffee—it was drinkable until about 10:00 a.m.—and pulled the papers out of her bag.

  Thirty-six-point type in the Times, above the fold, but only eight points larger than a headline about an experimental new weapon that could render a country uninhabitable without killing its citizens or destroying its structures. EXPLOSION IN LOWER MANHATTAN. Subhead: Two Killed, Five Injured in Possible Terrorist Attack. Bless all those guys at the Times, our good fathers, trying to tell us what we need to know (what they think we need to know) without unduly exploiting our collective desires to be titillated, to be reassured, to be scared shitless. Easy to picture the men (and women, there might be a woman or two) up there in Midtown, agonizing over how much panic they should or should not inspire, pending further details. The Post and the News, of course, were not similarly concerned. MAD BOMBER AT GROUND ZERO in the News, TERROR STRIKES AGAIN in the Post.

  The gist of all three stories was essentially the same; only the tone varied. Unidentified bomber kills self and one Dick Harte, real estate magnate. Nothing yet about the bomber being a kid—the guys downtown had somehow managed to keep the witnesses sequestered for the moment. Obvious comparisons to what Hamas and the rest did in Israel. The Post reporter had fabricated something abou
t the bomber shouting “Allah is great”—either found some lunatic who claimed to be a witness or made it up entirely—but otherwise nothing appalling, beyond, of course, the event itself. All three had patched together what they could about Dick Harte, though his wife and kids weren’t talking. There were pictures: a scrupulously regular-looking guy, fifty-three years old, with that strange babylike blankness certain men could take on when they went bald, when that big dome of forehead made their features look smaller and more innocent. CEO of the Calamus Development Corporation. Wife Lucretia (Lucretia?) was a decorator based in Great Neck, where they did in fact live. Daughter Cynthia was a senior in public school, son Carl a sophomore at some school Cat had never heard of. The Times and the Post had the same photo, the straightforward one from God knew where that would go with the obit; the News had dug up one of Harte standing with a few others who looked more or less like him, at the dedication of what Cat knew to be yet another office monolith on Third Avenue.

  She went to her cubicle at nine, took her place in the chair still warm from Ed’s dedicated ass. She looked over Ed’s entries in the log. Three callers who claimed responsibility, all scrupulously red-tagged. Two were variations on the same idea: now you’ll all be sorry (no specifics about what we should all be sorry for), and I’m not finished yet; both were vague on the subject of how they’d survived the explosion and lived to make the call. The third said he was a member of something called the Brigade of Enlightenment and that the terror would continue until the U.S. stopped allowing women to murder their unborn children.

  Pete stopped by just after nine, nursing his first cup of hot coffee-flavored, sugar-free liquid candy. “How you doing?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Get some sleep?”

  “A little.”

  He stepped into the cubicle, made so bold as to put his hand on her shoulder. She and Pete had maintained an unspoken no-touching rule since that night three months ago when they were both working late, when they’d been exhausted and discouraged enough to duck into the women’s room together. Cat still couldn’t say why she’d done it, she wasn’t remotely interested, and yet mysteriously, unaccountably, she’d been headed to the ladies’ and had nodded to him, and before you knew it she was sitting on the sink with her legs wrapped around his unpretty middle-aged ass, he because she’d allowed it, because they’d seemed at that moment like the only two people in the world, because his wife was losing her sight and his only child had become an econut in Latin America, and she because…because Pete’s wife was losing her sight and his only child had become an econut in Latin America, because she’d let her own son die and she’d been taking calls for going on twelve hours, because Pete’s neck reminded her of her ex-husband’s neck, because this place was so ugly and silent and far from everything, because she seemed to have wanted, at that moment, to tear everything apart, to go down, to be as crazy and destructive and irresponsible as the people who called her. She and Pete had never spoken about it. They both knew it would not happen again.

  “You sure you feel like working today?”

  “Entirely sure. Find out anything new?”

  “Forensics is saying the kid was thirteen, maybe fourteen, but small for his age. Seems to have been healthy, from what they’ve found so far.”

  “I hate this.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I don’t just mean this. I mean all this.”

  Pete nodded wearily, warily. Cat hesitated. There was an unwritten rule in the unit. No one speculated, ever. No one waxed philosophical. It didn’t work that way. No one went moony about the notable increase in callers who were under eighteen and clearly well educated or about the increase in carry-throughs, from one in a thousand to one in 650 over the last five years. No one spun out over the collapse of the family or of civilization at large; no one wondered about atmospheric gases or irradiated food or rays being projected at the earth by hostile aliens. That was the callers’ realm.

  Cat said, “Sorry. I’m a little tired right now.”

  “ ’Course you are.”

  She sat up straighter in her chair. “What have they gotten from the wife and kids?” she asked. “Anything?”

  “Wife’s hysterical. Daughter, too. Son came down from Vermont, real eager beaver, wants to be of service and get to the bottom of all this and etcetera but can’t tell us shit. Dad was a decent guy. Coached Little League, paid the bills on time. My opinion? I think the son’s having the time of his life.”

  “What’s he doing in Vermont?”

  “Special school for underachievers, kids who do more than the usual amount of drugs. Like that.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “We’re checking into it.”

  “They’ve got the tapes in Washington?” she said.

  “They do.”

  “And they’ll be in touch?”

  “Nobody’s gonna nail you for missing a hint this small.”

  I wasn’t supposed to call anyone. Jesus.

  “Unless, of course, they decide they really and truly need someone to nail, and I seem like the best candidate.”

  “Unlikely. Why worry about it now?”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll check in with you later.”

  “You’re the best.”

  She got to work. It was a busy morning, which surprised no one. It always took about twenty-four hours for the callers to man their stations. After a big story hit the news, only the most labile reached immediately for the phone. The majority, the petit bourgeois lunatics, had to mull it over, settle in their own minds just exactly how the event in question belonged to them, and decide that someone in a position of authority ought to know about it. Now they were in full stampede. She got five in her first twenty minutes, three of them so unfocused that even Ed wouldn’t have red-tagged them, just a trio of screamers who wanted somebody to know they hadn’t seen anything yet, the worst was still to come, Judgment Day was upon us. The fourth was an English guy who wanted to tell her he’d overheard a conversation in the lobby of his building and had come to understand that this incident was part of his neighbor’s master plan to bankrupt small businesses in the financial district, sorry, he couldn’t leave his neighbor’s name or his own name, for fear of reprisals, but given this information, he hoped the police would know how to proceed. The fifth needed to tell her that certain evidence had been planted at the site by white supremacists to implicate the Muslim faith. This one did leave his name: Jesus Mohamed, minister of the Church of Light and Love. He was willing to work with the police in any capacity they required.

  She red-tagged the Englishman and Jesus Mohamed, thus setting into motion the inquiries into their lives and natures that would cost taxpayers roughly fifteen grand, She wondered if these people knew, if they had any idea, how much money and muscle they could summon just by making these calls. Better, of course, if they didn’t.

  Between calls she filed what needed to be filed, wrote her follow-ups, checked the mail, which was for the most part unremarkable: a half-dozen threats and one hex, written variously by hand, on a computer, and on what appeared to be a manual typewriter. The letters about the explosion wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. The day began to establish its momentum; it started feeling ordinary. This would pass, wouldn’t it? The kid would turn out to have been Dick Harte’s sex toy, or he would turn out to have been regular crazy (the new regular crazy), a friendless and universally bullied weirdo who’d been obsessed with computer games since before he knew how to walk. It was—what else could it be?—another disaster in a disaster-prone world, tragic but unavoidable. Life would go on.

  The call came a little before ten-thirty. It was patched directly to her—caller had asked for Cat Martin. She figured it was one of her regulars. She had a handful who called at least once a week, and twice that many who called sporadically, when they went off their medication or the moon was full or the papers (they were readers, these people) had featured something doomish th
at could conceivably have been somebody’s fault. Antoine always called about anything that inconvenienced commuters (automotive industry’s conspiracy to eliminate mass transit); Billy could be counted on whenever anything appeared about hostile conditions on other planets (ongoing attempt to disguise the fact that the aliens have been here for decades and are being tortured in government internment camps). Antoine and Billy and the others had been checked out long ago. Antoine lived on monthly disability in a rathole in Hell’s Kitchen; Billy was a sanitation worker on Staten Island. The regulars tended to love patterns. They scanned the news every day for further evidence. She couldn’t blame them, not really. Who didn’t want more patterns?

  She picked up. “This is Cat Martin.”

  “Hello?”

  Adolescent white boy. Her synapses snapped.

  “Hello. What can I do for you?”

  “Did you talk to my brother?”

  Cat pushed the green button. The readout was a 212 area code.

  “Who’s your brother?”

  “He told me he called you.”

  No, not adolescent. This kid sounded young, nine or ten. His voice was serene, even a bit aphasic. Drugs, probably. A few of his mother’s OxyContins.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Did you talk to him? I’m sorry, but I need to know.”

  “When would he have called?”

  “Last week. Tuesday.”

  Shit. This was something.

  “I’d have to check the records. Can you tell me his name?”

  “We’re in the family. We don’t have names.”

  Keep him talking. Give the guys as much time as you can.

  “What family are you in?” she said.

  “He told me he talked to you. I just want to make sure.”

  “Are you in trouble? Can you let me help you?”

  “I was wondering. Can you tell me what he told you?”

  “If somebody’s hurting you, I can make them stop.”

  No, no statements. Phrase everything as a question. Keep him answering.