Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

  Nadia’s sun was one of the stars just above the black roof silhouettes. That shitty little star over there.

  He realized Catareen was standing beside him. They could move very quietly, these people. These lizards.

  She said, “Nadia.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “We say Nourthea.”

  “I know.”

  The name “Nadia” had always been an ironic approximation. One of the right-wing papers had started calling it Planet Nada, Spanish for “nothing,” as its riches and wisdom kept failing to materialize. The name had stuck.

  She said, “You have go?”

  “Me, personally? No. I’m new. I was manufactured about five years ago. I’m actually one of the very last ones they made.”

  “Why not legal?”

  “You mean, why do they bother chasing after a poor, harmless, old artificial like me?”

  “Yes.”

  “A couple of years ago the Council identified all artificials as stolen property, because the whole debate about natural versus engineered life just went on and on. We were monsters and abominations. Or we were the innocent victims of science, and deserved protection. There was talk of special preserves for us. Somebody in Texas invented and patented a soul-measuring apparatus, but the courts disallowed it. Finally the people who were most appalled by us came up with a solution. Because we were manufactured, simulos were declared the property of Biologe. And because we were walking around loose, we were stolen. We had essentially stolen ourselves. We were declared contraband. We were ordered to return ourselves. But Biologe was out of business by then. So, next best thing, we were to turn ourselves in to the authorities until our rightful owner came to claim us. Which of course was never going to happen. We would be held in a sort of escrow until that time, aka never. A few actually did it. As far as I know, they’re sitting in cells to this day with tags clipped to their ears. The rest of us did our best to disappear. But as stolen property, we’re inherently illegal. We break the law by continuing to possess ourselves.”

  “And they hate?”

  “Well, ‘hate’ may not be exactly the right word. You could say they think of us as a bad idea. A needless complication in the ongoing argument about the eternal soul. They just sort of want us not to be.”

  “Nadians also.”

  “Well. It’s different. You’re legal aliens. Being biological, your right to life is not in question. All your other rights are.”

  “We live with no stroth.”

  “Agonies are one of my changes of garments,” he said.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  The night hummed around them. Certain insects remained. The birds were probably gone forever.

  Simon said, “I know you don’t like questions.”

  “Some questions.”

  “And I’m not going to ask you about your past or your family or any of those clearly forbidden subjects.”

  “Thank.”

  “But I would like to know. I mean, here we are. You had a job, you had a place to live. Granted, maybe not the greatest job, but given what’s available to you—”

  “To one like me.”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to offend. You know what I’m getting at, right? Why are you here? If we get to Denver, if by some miracle Lowell is actually there, what do you hope will happen for you?”

  “Die in Denver.”

  “That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?”

  “No.”

  Then she went stare-y and blank. Although he could not see her clearly he knew what her nostrils were doing. He was learning to feel these conditions when they arose in her. The air changed between them. A legible and almost audible absence announced itself.

  “Why do you do this?” he asked. “I mean, where do you go when you get like this?”

  Softly, she exhaled the little Nadian song. Ee-um-fah-um-so.

  “I’m asking,” he said, “because frankly it gets a little creepy for me when you zone out. I’ve pretty much come to understand that you tune back in eventually, but still. Would it be too hard for you to just, you know, hang in a little more? Would it be too un-Nadian?”

  Nothing. The breathy song, soft in the darkness.

  “Okay. Well, I’m glad we had this conversation. Let’s go find a place to sleep, okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. She said that, at least.

  They crossed the road and went into the development. It was one of the villages Titan had tossed up for the soon-to-be-rich. Front porches, dormers, window boxes. There’d been rumors that these places were made of something that broke down over time and produced toxic fumes, though the high incidence of cancerous tumors among the soon-to-bes could just as easily have had its roots in the soil or water of their various native lands.

  Catareen led him straight to the third house in the first row. It seemed briefly that she must have been here before, must have had some connection to this particular house, though that of course was extremely unlikely. It was probably a Nadian thing about always choosing the third in a lineup or making arbitrary choices with a ritual show of certainty. Or something. Who knew? Who wanted, at this late hour, to go to the trouble of asking?

  The front door was locked. Most people had expected to come back. The windows were locked, too. Simon suggested that they try another house, but Catareen had settled on this one. They ended up breaking a window with a plastistone Krishna that stood silently blowing into a silent flute among a circle of long-dead marigolds on the front lawn. The plexi, when it shattered, produced a sharp and hopeless musical sound.

  After they crawled in through the window, they found themselves in a living room that had been stripped of all that could be easily carried. What remained was a sofa and two low, hulking chairs covered in pinks and golds and peacock blues bright enough to show even in the darkness. There was a low, carved table and a giant vid and a lightglobe in the shape of a period chandelier.

  “Let’s see if there’s any food,” Simon said.

  They went into the kitchen, where they found old packets of curried this and pickled that. All of it needed water to reconstitute, however, and there was of course no water.

  Catareen held a foil packet in her hands and turned it over and over, as if she hoped to discover some secret instructions for converting the husks within into food without the introduction of moisture. Watching her like that, Simon was filled with a sense of her unknown life—scrabbling whatever crops she could from the sloggy, dead soil of Nadia, coming to Earth on one of the Promise Ships and arriving, at the end of the seventeen-year trip, in a post-meltdown world where an alien was lucky to get work in sanitation or child minding. Now she was here, in the abandoned kitchen of a relocated family, holding a packet of inedible food, on her way to a place where she had no business, where she was going simply because she could no longer stay in the place she’d been.

  Simon said, “We’ll figure something out about food in the morning. Let’s just go to sleep now.”

  “Yes,” she said. She laid the packet on the countertop carefully, as if it were precious and fragile.

  They ascended the stairs, past the wall shadows of holopix that had been taken down. Upstairs were three modest bedrooms, each of which contained a stripped bed and an empty bureau. By some unspoken accord they both chose the rooms that had belonged to the children, as opposed to the slightly larger parental room, with the bigger bed in it.

  “Good night,” Simon said. She gave him a brief, military nod and went into her room.

  Simon stretched out on the modest child bed. The emptied room, with its single window that gave onto the window of the house next door, resembled a nun’s cell, though its vanished occupant had overlooked a holopic cut from a magazine and fastened to the wall, as well as a single pale-pink sock, which coiled like a question mark at the foot of the bed. The holopic was Marty Mockington, early years, twirling with a doomed and childish grace though a field of singing poppies. Simon watched Marty Mockington da
nce by, over and over, young and alive, glowing. It could not have been one of the kid’s favorite pictures, or it wouldn’t have been left behind. It must have been a lesser image among the dozens that would have covered the wall. Simon could briefly imagine the kid—a girl, judging by the sock—lying here before her wall of singing and dancing icons. Would she have imagined herself in the future, getting somehow from this little room to the world of the holopix? Probably. Kids believed in extravagant destinies. Now she must be…who knew where? Doing something slavish in the Southern Assembly, most likely, or, if she was lucky, if her parents had managed the paperwork, being trained for something semislavish up in Canada. Eurasia would be out of the question for people like this. The girl was wherever she was, and Marty Mockington, a lesser star in her private constellation, twenty years dead by now, went on dancing on her bedroom wall and would keep doing so for one hundred years or more, until the photons broke down, until the poppies started to fade and his exuberant interlude of dance (heel, toe, leap) slowed and slowed and finally stopped.

  Simon shut his eyes. Dream fragments arrived. A room that was somehow full of stars. A proud and happy man whose hands were flames.

  He woke with a light shining hard and white in his eyes. For a moment he thought he might still be dreaming, dreaming of a terrible light.

  A male voice said from behind the light, “Here’s another one.”

  Another what, Simon wondered.

  A second voice, female, said, “He’s not a Nadian.”

  “Nope. He’s not.”

  Simon got off the bed and stood blinking in the light. He said, “We just needed a place to sleep. We weren’t going to steal anything.”

  “What are they doing here?” the female voice said. “Ask him what they’re doing here.”

  Simon’s eyes adapted. He could discern two figures standing behind the glare. One was tall and hooded, the other shorter, with a nimbus of crackly hair standing out around her head.

  Simon said, “We’re travelers. We don’t mean any harm.”

  “People say that,” the male voice answered. “Harm comes anyway.”

  A third voice sounded from down the hall. It said, “What did you find in there?”

  It was a boy’s voice. A boy speaking with unboyish authority.

  “A Possessionless,” answered the man shape behind the lightglobe. “Looks crazy to me.”

  Simon was still wearing the filthy stolen sweaters and the stained pants over his black multizippered kit from work. Looks crazy. Right.

  He was briefly, strangely embarrassed.

  Other people entered the room. Simon said, “Could you maybe drop that light a little?”

  A pause followed, during which the man with the lightglobe seemed to be checking for permission. It apparently being granted, he aimed the lightglobe down slightly, out of Simon’s eyes, and revealed the following: himself, the bearer of the lightglobe, a man of seventy or more, wrapped in an old Halloween costume: Obi-Wan Kenobi. The crepey synthetic of the robe billowed around his lank frame; his gray head blinked out from under the hood, which was far too small for him and fit him like a skullcap. Beside him stood a girl around seventeen, a Blessed Virgin, cloaked in blue and white. Just behind them stood Catareen, in the grip of a Full Jesus. He’d had his face done, with the thorn implants at the brow.

  The Jesus and the Blessed Virgin both carried stun guns.

  From some invisibility in Catareen’s vicinity, the boy said, “What exactly are you two doing here?” His voice was like the sound of scissors snipping tin.

  Simon answered, “The myth of heaven indicates the soul; the soul is always beautiful.”

  “Poetry doesn’t really answer the question, does it?”

  The boy stepped forward. He was probably eleven or twelve years old. He was disfigured. His head, big as a soup tureen, squatted heavily on his thin shoulders. His eyes were larger and rounder than they should have been. His nose and ears could barely be said to exist. He wore what appeared to be a man’s bathrobe, with the sleeves rolled up and the tail trailing on the ground. Ornaments hung from strings around his neck: a flattened Aphrodite tuna can, an orange plastic peace symbol, a bottle of MAC nail polish, a yellow-fanged cat skull.

  Simon delivered a silent, futile plea to Catareen. Help me out a little here. See if you can muster something more useful than just standing there quietly captured, as if captivity were your true and natural condition.

  He said, “We’re just driving through. That’s all.”

  The boy asked, “Where would you say you were driving to, on a road like this? It only leads to other roads like this.”

  “We just got off the podway for a little while. We wanted to see what the country was like.”

  The Jesus said, “This is the country. This is what we’re like.”

  The boy said, “I am Luke. Of the New Covenant.”

  “I’m Simon.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Her name is Catareen.”

  “We found your pod out front. We saw the window you broke.”

  “I’m sorry about the window. I could, well, I could leave my name, and if the house’s owners ever come back, I could try to make it up to them—”

  “This is unusual, the picture you two present,” Luke said. “A man and a Nadian in a pod full of soymilk. I’m trying to think of the reasonable and innocent explanations.”

  Catareen said, “No money. Not nothing, we have.”

  The old man said, “We don’t use money. We never touch it.”

  “Never,” said the Jesus.

  “We keep clean.”

  Simon said, “We keep clean, too. We’re trying to get to a brotherhood in Colorado.”

  There was a chance of impersonating Christians in flight. It was a small chance but nevertheless.

  “A brotherhood that accepts Nadians?” Luke asked.

  Simon said, “That I could look with a separate look at my own crucifixion and bloody crowning.”

  Oops.

  The Blessed Virgin cried out, “They’re with Satan!”

  “Oh, I suppose they are,” Luke said, with an expression of weary disappointment.

  The old man said, “Should we slay them here or take them back to the tabernacle?”

  “Tabernacle,” Luke said.

  The Jesus said, “Let’s do it here.”

  “No. We’re taking them to the tabernacle,” Luke replied. He was clearly accustomed to command.

  “Oh, well, okay,” said the Jesus, clearly accustomed to obedience.

  Simon and Catareen were taken downstairs and out of the house. There, parked on the road in front of the deliverypod, was an ancient Winnebago covered in faded decals that depicted guns, fish, and mammals.

  “Give Obi-Wan Kenobi the engager for your pod,” Luke told Simon.

  Simon obeyed. The old man snatched the engager from him like a squirrel taking a nut.

  There followed a debate, rather lengthy, about who should go in which vehicle. It was determined that Luke and the Jesus would take Simon and Catareen in the Winnebago, and the Virgin and the old man would follow in the deliverypod. Simon and Catareen were put ungently in the back of the Winnebago. There was a miniature house inside. There was a small kitchen and a table with seats and a bedshelf. It was brilliantly colored, in the way of old things. It smelled of bread mold and warm plastic.

  Luke got in back with Simon and Catareen. He took the stun gun from the Jesus and leveled it at them. The Jesus stood in the doorway, jingling the ignition keys in his pierced palm.

  “You think you can manage them back here?” the Jesus said.

  “Absolutely,” Luke answered. “About the gun, though. It’s set to stun, right? A five is nonlethal, right?”

  “It’s on five?”

  “It is.”

  “Okay. Five is good. Five’ll knock ’em out, but it won’t kill ’em.”

  “Good.”

  Luke aimed the stun gun at the Jesus and fired. A
bright blue beam struck the skinny, white-robed chest. The Jesus looked at Luke with an expression of profound bafflement. Then his eyes rolled back in their sockets, and he crumpled away, out the door of the Winnebago and onto the street.

  “Quick,” Luke said to Simon and Catareen. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Simon stared at the fallen Jesus. One of his sandaled feet, surprisingly small, twitched on the Winnebago’s threshold. The rest of him lay sprawled on the asphalt in an attitude of ecstatic release.

  “What do you have in mind, exactly?” Simon asked.

  Luke handed him the gun. “Take me hostage,” he said. “Grab the keys and drive like hell.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Absolutely. Aim the stunner at me.”

  Simon had no trouble with that, considering the boy’s unambiguous wishes.

  “I’m going to go out in front of you,” Luke said. “Pick up the keys, and get us out of here. Do you understand?”

  “I guess so.”

  “We should take the Winnebago and leave the pod. The Winnebago is better off-road.”

  “Right.”

  “Make them give you back the engager for the pod so they can’t follow us.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Luke kicked the Jesus’ foot down from the threshold. He raised his hands in the air and hopped outside. Simon glanced at Catareen—did she think this was some kind of trap? She flicked her long fingers toward the doorway, that Nadian gesture of impatience.

  From outside the Winnebago, he heard Luke say, “For the love of Christ, don’t shoot.”

  Catareen flicked her fingers more urgently. All right, then. If this was a mistake, he’d let it be her problem.

  Simon jumped out after Luke and trained the stun gun on the frail back. He said, “Move. I will fucking kill you if you don’t do exactly what I say.”

  He was good at this, no denying it.

  “Just don’t hurt me,” Luke whimpered.

  The Virgin and Obi-Wan stood frozen at the doors to the pod, blinking in confusion. It seemed to Simon an unnecessarily elaborate charade, given that its entire audience was a teenage girl and an elderly man in a Halloween costume.