Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You will.”

  “Are you the reincarnation of Walt Whitman?” Cat asked.

  The woman gazed at her with wistful affection. Her eyes were milky blue, oddly blue, albinoish and unfocused. If Cat didn’t know better, she’d have thought the woman was blind.

  The woman said, “It’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To start over.”

  “Start what over?”

  “The world. The injured world.”

  “And how do you think the world is starting over?”

  The woman shook her head regretfully. “Those boys were dead anyway,” she said.

  “What boys?”

  The woman didn’t look particularly unstable. Her pallid eyes held steady. Her pale pink lips were firm. She said, “No one wanted them. One was left in an alley in Buffalo. He weighed just under three pounds. Another one was purchased from a prostitute in Newark for two hundred dollars. The middle boy had been a sex slave to a particularly unpleasant person in Asbury Park.”

  “Tell me what you think you and the boys are doing.”

  “We’re reversing the flow,” she said.

  Scary said, “Who are you working with?”

  The woman looked at Cat with kindly, knowing weariness. She said, “It’s time to make the announcement. We can’t wait for the last one. He’s taking longer than he was supposed to.”

  “Who’s the last one?”

  “I can’t find him. I wonder if he’s gone home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Would you go and look for him? He likes you. He trusts you, I think.”

  “Look for him where?”

  The woman said, “327 Rivington. Apartment nineteen. If he’s there, take care of him.”

  She smiled. She had tiny, perfectly square teeth, symmetrical as jewelry.

  Pete said, “You’re telling us this boy is at 327 Rivington?”

  “I’m saying he might be,” the woman answered. “It’s hard to keep track of your children, isn’t it? No matter how hard you try.”

  “Is he armed?” Pete asked.

  “Well, yes, of course he is,” the woman answered.

  Pete said to Scary, “Let’s go.”

  Cat knew who else would be going with them. If there was in fact a little boy sitting in an apartment with a bomb, he’d be vaporized by the squad. No one was wedded, at this point, to the notion of a live capture.

  “Good luck,” Cat said.

  The woman said to Cat, “Aren’t you going?”

  “No. I’m going to stay here and talk to you.”

  “You should go. If he’s there, you’re the one he’ll want to see.”

  “Not gonna happen, lady,” Scary said.

  “You care to tell us what you think we’re going to find there?” Pete asked.

  “You won’t be in any danger. I can tell you that.”

  “Thanks. That’s good to know.”

  “If you find him, will you bring him here?”

  “Right,” Pete said. To Cat he added, “I’ll be in touch.”

  “So long.”

  Pete and Scary took off. Portly stood ominously by the door as Cat settled herself in a chair across from the woman, whose hands were still placed carefully on the tabletop, fingers spread. Her nails, on closer inspection, were not clean.

  Cat said, “You know, don’t you, that if your boy is there, they’ll be very hard on him.”

  “There’s nothing they can do,” she answered.

  “There’s a lot they can do.”

  “I’d hate for them to hurt him. Of course I would. No one wants a child to be hurt.”

  “But you’re hurting your children. You know you are.”

  “It’s better, don’t you think, to have it over quickly. One flash, a moment of hurt, and then you’re elsewhere. Then you’re on your way.”

  Cat held herself steady through a spasm of white-hot rage. She said, “Tell me a little more about what it is you’ve come to announce.”

  The woman leaned forward. Her eyes took on a remote, cloudy light. She said, “No one is safe in a city anymore. Not if you’re rich. Not if you’re poor. It’s time to move back to the country. It’s time to live on the land again. It’s time to stop polluting the rivers and cutting down the forests. It’s time for us to live in villages again.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Cat asked.

  The woman sighed and tucked an errant strand of ghost-white hair behind her ear. She could have been an elderly professor, fatigued by her students’ youth and opacity but still hopeful, still willing to explain.

  “Look around,” she said. “Do you see happiness? Do you see joy? Americans have never been this prosperous, people have never been this safe. They’ve never lived so long, in such good health, ever, in the whole of history. To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself. We can fly. Our teeth don’t rot. Our children aren’t a little feverish one moment and dead the next. There’s no dung in the milk. There’s milk, as much as we want. The church can’t roast us alive over minor differences of opinion. The elders can’t stone us to death because we might have committed adultery. Our crops never fail. We can eat raw fish in the middle of the desert, if we want to. And look at us. We’re so obese we need bigger cemetery plots. Our ten-year-olds are doing heroin, or they’re murdering eight-year-olds, or both. We’re getting divorced faster than we’re getting married. Everything we eat has to be sealed because if it wasn’t, somebody would put poison in it, and if they couldn’t get poison, they’d put pins in it. A tenth of us are in jail, and we can’t build the new ones fast enough. We’re bombing other countries simply because they make us nervous, and most of us not only couldn’t find those countries on a map, we couldn’t tell you which continent they’re on. Traces of the fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turn up in women’s breast milk. So tell me. Would you say this is working out? Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?”

  Portly said, “Yeah, but you still can’t beat a Big Mac.” He cleaned a fingernail with an opposing thumbnail.

  “And you think you can do something about it?” Cat asked.

  “One does what one can. I’m part of the plan to tell people that it’s all over. No more sucking the life out of the rest of the world so that a small percentage of the population can live comfortably. It’s a big project, I grant you. But history is always changed by a small band of very determined people.”

  This got Portly interested again. He said, “Who are you working with?”

  “We don’t see one another as much as we’d like to,” the woman said.

  “Give me a name.”

  “We don’t have names.”

  “You call yourself Walt,” Portly said.

  “The boys call me that. I don’t know how it started, really, but it seemed to comfort them, so I allowed it. You know how children are.”

  “What’s your real name?” Portly asked.

  “I don’t have one. Really, I don’t. They gave me one, many years ago, but I hardly remember it anymore. It isn’t mine. It never was.”

  “You’re in the family,” Cat said.

  “Why, yes, dear. I am. We all are, don’t you see?”

  “What do you mean by that?” Cat asked. “Whose family?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  “I don’t know. I’d like you to tell me.”

  “You’ll forget your false name, in time.”

  “Do you work for the company?” Cat asked.

  “We all work for the company. It’s going out of business, though.”

  “Tell me about the company.”

  “I’m afraid I’m all talked out now. I really don’t have anything more to say.”

  Something happened to her eyes. They went glassy, like the eyes taxidermists put in the sockets of dead animals.

  “Walt?” Cat said.

&n
bsp; Nothing. The woman sat with her hands splayed out on the tabletop, looking blindly at the air directly in front of her prim pink face.

  Pete called fewer than twenty minutes later, on Cat’s cell.

  “Did you find him?” she asked.

  “No. There’s nobody. I think you should come over here. Have a patrolman bring you.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The building on Rivington was one of the last of the old wrecks, sandwiched between a skateboard store and a wine bar. It was scabby brown plaster, chalky, like very old candy. Across the street a converted warehouse, its bricks brightly sandblasted, flew a green banner that announced the imminent availability of The Ironworks Condominium Luxury Lofts.

  The galvanized steel door, which said DETHRULZ and PREY FOR PILLS in bright, dripping letters, was open. Cat went in. The door led onto a scarred yellow hallway illuminated by a buzzing fluorescent circle. Desolation Row. And yet, someone had put a vase full of artificial flowers on a rickety gilded table just inside the vestibule. Gray daisies and spiky wax roses and, hovering over the flowers, impaled on the end of a long plastic stick, a desicated angel made of plastic and yarn.

  Cat went up the stairs, found the door to apartment nineteen. It was open.

  Inside, Pete and Scary and the guys from the bomb squad stood in the middle of a small, dim room. Cat paused, getting her bearings. The room was neat. No clutter. It smelled of varnish and, faintly, of gas. There was an old beige sofa, a little like the one in her own apartment. There were a couple of mismatched chairs, a table, all chipped and scarred but presentable, surely found on the streets. And every surface except for the furniture was covered with pages, carefully aligned, yellowish under coats of shellac.

  The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered with the pages of Leaves of Grass.

  “Motherfuck,” Cat said.

  “Motherfuck,” Pete agreed.

  “What do you make of this?” Scary said.

  Cat walked slowly around the room. It was all Whitman.

  “It’s home,” she said. “It’s where the boys grew up.”

  At the room’s far end, an arched opening led into a short hallway. It, too, was covered in pages. She gave herself a tour.

  Kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, lit by bare bulbs screwed into ceiling sockets. The bulbs were low-watt, probably fifteens—they emitted a dim and watery illumination. The wan light and the varnish that covered the pages on the walls made it all sepia, insubstantial, as if she were walking through old photographs of rooms. The place was snug, in its insane and barren way. The kitchen was more presentable than hers. Pans, battered but clean, hung from hooks over the stove. On the countertop, a Folgers coffee can held silverware. In the first bedroom were three cots side by side, each scrupulously made up, their dust-colored blankets tucked in, an ivory-colored pillow centered at each one’s head. Blue plastic milk crates contained modest stacks of clothes. In the second bedroom was another cot, just like the others. The second bedroom also contained an old sewing machine, the treadle kind, glossy black, insectlike, on an oak stand.

  It might have been the low-budget version of an army barracks or an orphanage. Except of course for the fact that everything—the kitchen cabinets, the windows—was plastered over with pages.

  “She’s kept them here,” Cat said to Pete.

  “Who?”

  “The boys. She got them as infants and raised them here.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “She brought up a family of little killers. She got custody of kids nobody wanted and brought them here. She’s been planning this for years.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’m not sure about anything.”

  “You got any ideas as to why?”

  “What do you think endures? Do you think a great city endures?”

  “Say what?”

  “According to her, it’s the end of days. The innocents are rising up.”

  “Crazy.”

  “Mm-hm. Entirely crazy.”

  “Her prints aren’t matching up with anything in the files yet.”

  “They won’t. She’s nobody. She’s from nowhere.”

  “You’re starting to sound a little like her.”

  She said, “Doing my job. Projecting myself into the mind of the suspect.”

  “Not a fun place to be.”

  Never has been, baby.

  She said, “Honestly, Pete, we’ve been expecting this. You know we have.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Not this. You know what I mean. People see how easy it is to scare the world right to its core. Not so hard to fuck up the system, as it turns out. You can do a lot with a few deranged children and some hardware-store explosives.”

  “Give me a break, okay? Sure everybody’s freaked out, but the world’s going on. One insane old witch and a couple of retarded kids are not bringing it all down.”

  “I know. I know that.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “You mind if I just go a little loose?”

  “Nope. Go.”

  “You’re probably right. An old witch and a couple of damaged children. But she told me she thinks history is changed by a small band of people.”

  “That would be, say, a few thousand Bolsheviks. That would be entirely fucking different.”

  “Of course it is. It’s entirely different.”

  “Don’t use that voice with me.”

  Pete would know about the voice. His mother had probably used it.

  “Sorry. I’m just saying it seems possible, it doesn’t seem impossible, that this ragged band of crazy fucks we’ve stumbled onto is part of something bigger. Something with considerably more potential.”

  “More of them?”

  “She mentioned an extended family.”

  “Christ.”

  “She’s probably just crazy, Pete. She’s probably doing this all by her crazy old white-lady self.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I don’t know what to think. Truly, I don’t.”

  Pete shoved his hands deep into his pockets. His face was ashy, his forehead studded with sequins of sweat. She could see him, briefly, as a child. He’d have been balky and stubborn, furious at the slow-moving, ungenerous world. He would never have told anyone, certainly not his poor overworked mother, of his convictions about what whispered in the back of his closet, what waited hungrily under his bed.

  Children know where the teeth are hiding

  They only tell us what they think we can bear

  Pete said, “You should go back and interrogate her.”

  “I don’t interrogate.”

  “Whatever. Go have a chat with the murderous old bitch.”

  “Glad to. You’ve got more people coming, right?”

  “About half the force.”

  “Pete?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was about to say, Don’t worry. Now why would I say a thing like that?”

  “Take a cab back to the precinct, okay? I need all the boys here.”

  “I love a cab.”

  “Get the receipt.”

  “You know I will.”

  It took her a while to get a cab in a neighborhood this close to the projects. When a courageous soul finally stopped for her (Manil Gupta, according to his ID; thank you, Manil), she let herself sink into the piney semidark of the backseat, watched the city slip by.

  She asked Manil to take her to her apartment instead of the precinct so she could pick up her copy of Leaves of Grass. She might want to refer to it as she talked to the woman, and it seemed unlikely there’d be a copy lying around the Seventh.

  Manil nodded and took off. Even if he was only taking her to East Fifth, she found it nice to be driven like this, to hand over control to somebody else. The late-night New York you saw from a moving car was relatively quiet and empty, more like anyplace else in nocturnal America. Only at these subdued moments could you truly comprehend that thi
s glittering, blighted city was part of a slumbering continent; a vastness where headlights answered the constellations; a fertile black roll of field and woods dotted by the arctic brightness of gas stations and all-night diners, town after shuttered town strung with streetlights, sparsely attended by the members of the night shifts, the wanderers who scavenged in the dark, the insomniacs with their reading lights, the mothers trying to console colicky babies, the waitresses and gas-pump guys, the bakers and the lunatics. And scattered all over, abundant as stars, disc jockeys sending music out to whoever might be listening.

  She got out of the cab at the corner of Fifth Street, paid Manil and gave him an extravagant tip. At first, as she approached her building, she merely understood that a small person was huddled in the doorway. Finding someone camped there was not unusual. She’d gotten used to stepping over drunks and vagrants on her way in. This one was smaller than most, though. He sat with his back against the vestibule door, knees pulled up to his chest. He was wrapped in a khaki jacket, army surplus. He was white. When she reached the bottom stair, she knew.

  “Hi,” he said. Here was his voice.

  Although it was hard to tell from his bunched-up position, she guessed he was just over three feet tall. A midget child. Or was it a dwarf? He looked out at her from the upturned collar of his oversized jacket. He had a pale, round face. Big, dark eyes and a tiny mouth, puckered, as if he were whistling. He might have been a baby owl, roosting on a branch.

  “Hello,” she said. Calm. Stay very, very calm.

  They were silent for a moment. What should she do? She could have the boys here in less than ten minutes, and she had his only exit blocked. Even if he managed to get around her, she could probably catch him.

  Not yet, though. Not right this second. She mounted one stair tread. He didn’t seem to mind her coming that much closer. This might be the only chance to get him talking. After this, it would be the interrogators.

  She said, “Are you all right?”

  He nodded.

  Cat fingered the cell phone in her coat pocket. “Have you decided to let me help you?” she asked.

  He nodded again. “And you’ve decided to let me help you, too, right?”

  “How do you want to help me?”

  “Every atom of mine belongs to you, too.”