Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the old woman told you? Anything?”

  “You want to know? You want to know the one and only thing she said since you left?”

  “Shoot.”

  “She said she’s waiting to speak to you. Otherwise, nothing.”

  “I guess I’d better go in there and talk to her, then.”

  “Yeah. I guess you’d better.”

  She went with Pete into the precinct station, into the interrogation room. The woman was exactly as Cat had left her. Same ramrod posture, same taxidermist eyes. She was surrounded, however, by a half-dozen burly suitors from the FBI.

  Pete ushered her in. The FBI guys parted reluctantly. Cat sat across from the woman, who blinked, shook her head slightly, and offered Cat a wry, coquettish smile.

  Cat said, “I’ve been to your apartment.”

  “But he wasn’t there, was he?”

  “No,” Cat said. “He wasn’t.”

  “He’ll be along. I wouldn’t worry.”

  “I saw what’s on the walls.”

  “I thought they should grow up with poetry. It’s been good for them, I think.”

  “Why did you choose Whitman?”

  “He’s the last of the great ones. Everyone since seems so slight.”

  “That can’t be the only reason.”

  “Everybody wants a reason, don’t they? Let’s say this, then. Whitman was the last great man who really and truly loved the world. The machinery was just starting up when he lived. If we can return to a time like Whitman’s, maybe we can love the world again.”

  “That’s the message you wanted the boys to get?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you get a message from poetry, really. You get a sense of beauty. I wanted my boys to understand about beauty. My family is bringing beauty back.”

  “You said you were part of a big family.”

  “People are so scattered nowadays. We used to live in villages.”

  “Where’s the rest of your family?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve lost touch.”

  “I think you can tell me where some of them are.”

  “No, really, I can’t. I’ve just been raising my babies here in New York. No one ever calls. No one writes.”

  “You told me, ‘It’s time.’ Someone must have told you that.”

  “Oh, that was decided a long, long time ago. June 21 of this year. It’s the first day of summer. It’s when the days start getting shorter. Doesn’t it always seem too soon, this early dark?”

  A large FBI hand landed on Cat’s shoulder. She looked up. Older guy, uncanny resemblance to Bashful in Snow White. She’d never met this one.

  He said, “We’re going to take over now.”

  “It’s been nice talking to you, dear,” the woman said.

  “Give me a little more time,” Cat said.

  “We’re going to take over now,” the man repeated.

  She understood. The interrogators were about to step in. Ordinary persuasion had reached its limit.

  Cat said to the woman, “It would be better for you to tell me anything you know. Right now. These other people are not going to be gentle with you.”

  “I don’t expect anyone to be gentle with me. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, then.”

  The woman said, “Take care of him.”

  “Take care of who?”

  The woman laughed, sharply and suddenly. Her laughter was high, crystalline, songlike; although it seemed genuine, she enunciated clearly: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Then, just as suddenly, she stopped.

  Pete walked Cat out to the sidewalk. A breeze, smoke-tinged, was blowing down Pitt Street from the north. Truck horns bellowed from the Williamsburg Bridge.

  “Sweet mother of God,” Pete said.

  “I don’t think they’re going to get anything more from her.”

  “You might be surprised. They’ve brought in the guys who don’t take no.”

  “I mean, I don’t think she knows anything.”

  “She knows things.”

  “Okay. Probably she knows about a plan that was set in motion years ago. Probably she knows a few names that aren’t real names, attached to people who won’t ever be found.”

  “These guys can do a lot with a little information.”

  “I know that.”

  “You should go home and get some rest.”

  “What about you?”

  “Soon. I’m out of the picture now, too.”

  “But—”

  “It spooks me, is all. I’m going to hang around here a little longer. I’m just not quite ready to go home and get into bed.”

  “I understand. I can stick around with you.”

  “Naw. Get some sleep. You’re on duty in, like, three hours.”

  “Right.”

  “Chicago. Fucking Chicago.”

  “She said she has a big family.”

  He closed his eyes, rocked slightly, as if he might lose his balance. He said, “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Who does?”

  “Right,” he said. “Who does?”

  They stood there together in the 3:00 a.m. quiet. Something was happening. Maybe it was no big deal; maybe it was small and only looked big, as Pete had said just a few days ago. It might even be a copycat, some Chicago-based citizen of the Bizarro Dimension who’d looked at the headlines and thought, Hmm, hug somebody and blow him up, interesting idea, why didn’t I think of that? Or maybe, at worst, it was a handful of lunatics, scattered around—dangerous, yes, but not majorly dangerous, not history-changing dangerous. How many Bolsheviks had brought down the czar? She should know that.

  Still. She had a feeling, and she was someone who relied on feelings.

  “Pete?”

  “Yeah?”

  She wanted to tell him that there might be somewhere. There might be grass and mountains, a little house. It wasn’t heroic—it was in fact more than a little bit cowardly—to want to slip away, to think of saving yourself and maybe another person or two, to try to live out your life in some hamlet while other people worked the front lines.

  And besides, Pete couldn’t go. He had obligations. Even without obligations, he wasn’t the house-in-the-country type. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself.

  Shade and water

  The murmur of the world

  Your cup and garden

  “Don’t start smoking again,” she said.

  “It’s just for now.”

  “Right. See you.”

  “See you.”

  She left him there, standing in the quickening air, under the rumble of the Williamsburg Bridge.

  The boy woke up a little after seven. Cat was sitting on the edge of the mattress.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “Are we going now?”

  “Yes. Let’s get your clothes back on.”

  He jumped out of bed, got into his jeans and jacket. Cat took up a pad of yellow legal paper and a pen.

  “I’m ready,” the boy said.

  “Just a minute,” she answered.

  She wrote:

  Pete—

  I have to go away. I’m not in my right mind. I wonder if I’ve been crazy for years without realizing it. I seem to have caught something from all the nuts I’ve talked to. I seem to not want this life or anything else that’s readily available. I can’t work for the company anymore. I need to find something else to do.

  What I want to say. Try to keep yourself safe. I want to thank you for all the love you’ve given me. If that isn’t unbearably corny.

  Cat

  She put the note on the kitchen counter. She still had the bomb in her bag. Not a good idea to leave it. She’d figure out a way to get rid of it so nobody would pick it up.

  “Okay,” she said to the boy. “I’m ready now, too.”

  There was nothing to give him for breakfast. She’d get him something en route to the train stat
ion.

  The train was the best way. She didn’t have a car, and if she rented one it’d be traceable. Plane tickets would leave a record, too. You could pay cash for train tickets, and no one needed to know your name or anything about you at all.

  She took him downstairs, paused with him on the stoop, looking up and down the block. It was the regular early-morning scenario. The achievers on their way to work, the shoe-repair guy rolling up his grate. The old man raved in front of the flower shop across the street. It was another day on East Fifth.

  She hesitated. This was her last chance to do the right and rational thing. She could take the kid in. She’d lose her job, of course—not policy to drug a dangerous suspect and keep him in your apartment overnight. But she could get another job. She could get another boyfriend. She could hand over the kid and go on as a respectable citizen. What she was doing—what she had not yet done but was about to do—would be irreversible.

  The little boy took her hand. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  With a sense of vertiginous recklessness, a queasy and light-headed plunging, she led the child down into the street.

  She stopped at an ATM and withdrew five hundred from her checking, five hundred from her savings. That was the maximum. Money would be a problem, of course. If she used her credit cards or withdrew more money from another ATM tomorrow, they’d be able to trace her. She’d figure something out. She’d have to.

  She took the kid to a Korean market, bought two big bags full of food, and paid with her Visa card—it wouldn’t make any difference, charging this last purchase in New York. The food would last them for a couple of days. She got the kid an egg on a bagel and got one for herself. He ate his bagel cautiously, in tiny bites, in the cab on the way to Penn Station.

  “How long does it take to get to the beach?” he asked.

  Right. The beach. They should head south, shouldn’t they? Better to be scraping by in a warm climate.

  She said, “It’ll take a while. The beach is pretty far away.”

  He nodded, chewing. “This is good,” he said.

  They got to Penn Station. She bought them two tickets on a train leaving for Washington, D.C., in twenty-five minutes. They’d change trains in Washington. They’d change trains a couple of times.

  Penn Station was mostly businesspeople, this early. It was the minor movers and shakers (the big ones flew) off to Boston or Washington, doing deals, standing now in the bright nowhere of the station, sipping Starbucks, talking on cell phones, guarding their briefcases against thieves, heads full of flowcharts and cost analyses; men in decent if unspectacular suits, women with impeccable hair and heavy makeup, working their pieces of it, lining up lunches, phoning in last-minute questions to bosses or instructions to spouses, maintaining their accounts, soliciting new business, keeping it going, moving it along.

  And here she was, holding the hand of an impaired child, with two sacks of groceries, a pipe bomb, and a copy of Leaves of Grass. The others made a little extra room for her, unconsciously, the way New Yorkers do when they sense the presence of someone strange. Black woman with a compromised white child. Crazy. Or so luckless, so dispossessed, as to be crazy by default. Here, then, was the beginning of her strange new life.

  Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  Their train was announced, and they got on. She found two seats, gave the kid the window. As the train pulled out, he pressed his moon face to the glass.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  “Yes. Here we go.”

  She was terrified and elated. She couldn’t be too optimistic about their prospects—it was hard to vanish, and she was already down to eight hundred and seventy-some dollars, after paying for the cab and the train tickets. Most likely she was only delaying the inevitable, and it would not go well for her if they were caught. She’d do time. Pete would intervene on her behalf. That would help. A lawyer would argue that she’d lost her own child and had collapsed under the stress of her job. Maybe they’d go easy on her. Maybe not.

  And maybe, just maybe, she and the kid would get away. It happened. People disappeared. Maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to get a job waitressing or tending bar in Sarasota or Galveston or Santa Rosa. She’d keep them out of the cities. Maybe she’d be able to rent them a little apartment close to a beach, get a simple job, give the kid books to read, get him a dog. They’d probably have to keep moving. People would get curious. People would want to know why the kid wasn’t in school, and telling them that he wasn’t right, that she educated him at home, would hold up for only so long. But if they kept moving, if they lived in enough places, then maybe they could manage to eradicate their pasts, become just another woman with a child, trying to survive in the big, difficult world. There were so many people out there living anonymously. It was possible, it was not impossible, that they could join them.

  The train pulled out of the long darkness of the tunnel into the marshland of New Jersey. The boy gasped at the sight, though it was only cattails and scummy little pools of dark green water.

  “You like it?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know what we need to do? We need to give you a name.”

  “I like Smokey. I do.”

  “Smokey’s not a good name for a boy.”

  “Luke?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “I know your other boy has that name. But I could have it, too, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. I think you should have a name all your own.”

  “I like Luke.”

  He returned to the window, enraptured. Although the field of cattails was interrupted periodically by asphalt tundras full of empty delivery trucks, and was studded with utility poles and smokestacks, Cat had to admit that there was something…wild about it, if not exactly beautiful. Even here, this close to the city, were brief passages of land that had probably looked just this way before the first tree was felled to build the first farmhouse. It was a brilliant morning, building toward a hot, cloudless afternoon. Early sun gilded the marsh, glittered on the brackish water.

  They were going, then. They were on their way someplace; there was no telling what would happen to them. It was morning everywhere. It was morning in Dayton and Denver and Seattle. It was morning on the beaches and in the forests, where the nocturnal hunters had returned to their dens and the timorous daylight animals, the ones meant to be eaten, were out browsing for food. It was morning on the tin roofs of factories and on the mountain peaks, morning in the fields and parking lots, morning in the rented rooms where women with no money did what they could to keep their children alive and healthy—where they hoped, given what they had to work with, to make them happy, at least some of the time.

  A seagull, almost painfully white, dipped down and for a moment kept abreast of the train. Cat could see the black bead of its eye, the spot of brilliant orange on the underside of its beak.

  She took a quick look inside her bag. Yes, the bomb was still there. Her cell was blinking. Someone had left a message. She clicked the phone off.

  The boy turned back from the window. His face was bright with excitement.

  He said, “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “The smallest sprout shows that there’s really no death.”

  “Right.”

  He turned back to the window, watched rapturously as the train rumbled into New Jersey. He was harmless now. He’d been disarmed. He was just a little boy, happy for the first time in his life. She could get to him, couldn’t she? She could bring him around. It was what she’d been trained to do.

  She touched his frail shoulder. He reached up and patted her hand, without taking his eyes from all that was passing by. It was a small gesture, small enough, but it was uncharacteristic. It was the first overture she’d seen him make that was not tentative, that implied the absentminded confidence of a child who’s been loved.
He was beginning to respond, to trust her. He was an impossible being, irreparably damaged, and he was a little boy who wanted to see the shells, who wanted to have a dog. He was letting her save him.

  He turned to her and smiled. She hadn’t seen him smile before. His smile was crooked, like a jack-o’-lantern’s.

  He said, “Now you’re in the family, too.”

  His smile was insane. It was gleeful and unabashed and full of a malice so crazy it would feel like joy to him.

  The ping went off in Cat’s mind. Here was a killer. Here was the face of true intent.

  And now, suddenly, she understood. She had fallen for it.

  We need to make it known that nobody is safe. Not a rich man. Not a poor man.

  This, then, was the message: no one is safe, not even mothers. Not even the people who are willing to sacrifice everything in the name of love. She and the boy were hurtling toward the day when, with milk on the table and a dog browsing for scraps, her adopted son, her second Luke, the boy she had rescued, would decide that he finally loved her enough to murder her.

  She could, of course, give him up. She could call Pete; she could hustle the kid off when the train stopped in Newark. Sure, she’d be in trouble, but she’d survive in ways he wouldn’t. He’d be sucked away into institutions; he’d never be heard from again.

  He could always choose to kill her. She could always decide to do away with him.

  But for now, she thought, they could go on together. They could put it off from hour to hour and maybe from month to month or year to year. She might still want to be his mother even if it proved fatal. And he might not, after all, be waiting to do it with a bread knife or a pillow as she slept; he might be willing to do it gradually, as children had been doing since time began. In a sense, he had killed her already, hadn’t he? He had ended her life and taken her into this new one, this crazy rebirth, hurtling forward on a train into the vast confusion of the world, its simultaneous and never-ending collapse and regeneration, its rock-hard little promises, its owners and workers, its sanctuaries that never endured, that were never meant to endure.

  To die is different from what any one supposes, and luckier.

  The child kept smiling his murderous smile.

  Cat smiled back.