Specimen Days

by Michael Cunningham

  When it had become apparent that he was not going to speak further, she said, “Simon?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Window.”

  “You want me to close the window? Is it cold in here for you?”

  “No. Take.”

  “You want me to take you to the window.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  He paused over how and where to touch her. She helped him by lifting her long, thin Giacometti arms and putting her hands around his neck. Apparently she could no longer walk, then. He slipped his right forearm under her upper back, his left under the sinewy stalks of her thighs. He lifted her.

  For a moment, she held herself apart from him. It was subtle but palpable. She maintained herself briefly as a dependent but private being. Then she relaxed and gave herself over into his arms. She was, he thought, too weak to do otherwise.

  Gently, carefully (he wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her when she said she was not in pain or not in much pain), he carried her to the window. The window looked out over the packed dirt of the yard, beyond which stood the single tree under which they had had their dinner the night before. He thought it was an elm. Or an oak. He wasn’t programmed for the identification of trees. The tree stood in the precise middle of the view, like a sentry. Beyond it was the vast green flatness of the plain, bright in the early sun, suspended, without wind or cloud, as if all that empty land were waiting for something to begin, for a note to strike or a pair of hands to clap. But most prominently there was the tree, dead center, in full leaf, shimmering in the expectant silence of the morning. Simon wondered how strange this must be to Catareen—this green terrestrial silence spread out under this ice-blue sky. Where she came from it was (according to the vids) mostly rock and mud, variously black, pewter, and an opaque silvery-yellow, from which tangles of moss and bracken struggled, black-green like seaweed under an eternally clouded sky that bled a soft, drizzly semilight. It was whatever villages had managed to establish themselves in the rifts and valleys that occurred here and there among the mountains, sheer and ice-tipped, pinnacled, like titanic dead gray cathedrals, vast impassive assertions of volcanic rock and permafrost that towered over the huts and corrals, the modest squares of unprosperous garden, the tiny turrets and steeples of the kings, miniature replicas of the darkly glittering peaks.

  Had it been beautiful to her? Had she felt stroth there?

  Simon held her before the window that looked out onto the tree. It might have been the tree and only the tree Simon had brought her to see, though of course neither he nor Catareen had thought anything of it, one ordinary tree spreading over a standard-issue patch of dirt. It was only now, at this window, with the dying Catareen in his arms and the tree so perfectly centered in the view, that Simon understood it to be in any way singular or mysterious.

  He said, “Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  They said nothing further. He held her as she looked out the window. Her face was brighter in the strong light. Her eyes seemed to take on a hint of their familiar depths, their orange and amber. She seemed, briefly, more alive, and it occurred to him that she might be undergoing an unexpected resurgence. Was being taken to the window some sort of healing ritual? It seemed possible. It did not seem impossible.

  Then he felt her arms slackening around his neck. He understood that even this was a strain for her. He said softly, “Shall I take you back to bed now?”

  “Yes,” she answered, and he did.

  The compound pulsed with last-minute preparations. People and Nadians rushed from house to barn and back again. The three Nadian men, who were technicians of some kind, went up and down the ramp of the spaceship, in and out of its entry portal, with such rapidity it seemed they must be doing nothing more than touching an agreed-upon goal and hurrying out again, laughing, emitting odd little yips and yelps, slapping palms whenever they passed one another. Simon, without duties, wandered the grounds. Emory was on the front porch arguing passionately with one of the Nadian women (she was, it seemed, a doctor) and Lily, the tattooed human scientist. The mustached, small-chinned man (whose name was Arnold) seemed to have been charged with the care of Emory and Othea’s baby. He walked the infant in circles in the yard, bouncing it and saying, “Little snip, little snip, little snip.” In the barn, among the consoles and keyboards, Othea and the other Nadian woman did their best to calm the frumpily majestic Ruth, who sat performing her last-minute calculations through a fit of inexplicable tears as the bells around her neck chimed softly.

  Crazy, Simon thought. They’re all crazy. Though of course the passengers on the Mayflower had probably been like this, too: zealots and oddballs and ne’er-do-wells, setting out to colonize a new world because the known world wasn’t much interested in their furtive and quirky passions. It had probably always been thus, not only aboard the Mayflower but on the Viking ships; on the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María; on the first convoys sent off to explore Nadia, about which the people of Earth had harbored such extravagant hopes. It was nut jobs. It was hysterics and visionaries and petty criminals. The odes and monuments, the plaques and pageants, came later.

  Simon could not settle. He could not find a plausible spot for himself. After meandering from place to place, trying to stay out of the way, trying not to look as idle as he was, he ran into Othea coming out of the barn. He spoke to her, though he knew she wouldn’t welcome it. It was something for him to do. And he did, in fact, have a question or two only she could answer.

  He said, “Catareen is pretty weak today.”

  “Yes,” she answered impatiently. He suspected she would have brushed him off entirely had he broached any other subject.

  “Is there any chance she could rally? I mean, could she still have a good period before—”

  “No. There are no remissions. Some take longer than others, and frankly I suspect she could hang on for quite a while still. The more resilient individuals can take weeks and weeks.”

  “We’ve decided we want to come along.”

  “Good. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Catareen will need a bed,” Simon said. “Maybe I could go aboard with one of the technicians and figure out the best way to make her comfortable.”

  “Oh, she can’t come with us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. I’d assumed you understood. Our space is limited. We anticipate some mortality en route, and we’ve tried to allow for that. But we can’t carry a dead body for thirty-eight years. I’m afraid it’s out of the question.”

  “You mean to leave her here, then.”

  “In a short while, she won’t even know where she is. She wouldn’t be eating anymore, under any circumstances. We’ll leave water for her on the off chance, but I doubt she’ll want that, either.”

  “You’ll let her die alone.”

  “It will mean something different for her from what it might mean to you. Nourtheans are more solitary. She’ll be all right. Believe me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Now you really must excuse me. You can’t imagine what all I’ve got to do.”

  “Of course.”

  She hurried toward the house.

  The day passed. Luke finally appeared, riding the horse with Twyla. He seemed to have joined the children in some way that implied membership without trust or affection. Simon saw them approaching from beyond the house. Luke sat behind Twyla like a boy pharaoh, regal and indignant-looking, as the smaller children capered in the horse’s wake. Twyla reined the horse in Simon’s direction, brought it to a halt just shy of the place where he stood. The horse blinked and shook its head. It made a low snorting noise that sounded vaguely like the word “hunk” played on an oboe.

  Twyla said to Simon, “Do you like horses?”

  “Who doesn’t?” he said.

  “It seems that there will be no horses in the new world.”


  Right, she was crazy, too. Still, she had her own version of Catareen’s lambent lizard eyes and nervous, undulating nostrils. Her gaze made Simon’s circuits buzz.

  He said, “Maybe there are horses there already.”

  “I will never love a horse other than Hesperia,” Twyla announced. “Not on any planet.”

  “Give me a break,” Luke said.

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

  “What I mean is, it’s just an animal—”

  Twyla reined the horse around and kicked it into motion again. As they departed, followed by the other children, Simon could hear Twyla saying to Luke, “You have a great deal to learn about the kingdom of animals. They are as various as any other race of beings.”

  “They’re food. Any being that can’t open a bottle or loan you money is by definition…”

  Simon watched them ride away. He understood that they would be carrying on this conversation together for the next eighty years or more. He wondered if Othea already had Luke in mind for Twyla. He wondered if they would have children.

  He said a silent goodbye to Luke. He wished him luck.

  Finally he returned to Catareen’s room. There was nowhere else for him. He felt calmer there. It was the one place in which he seemed to be something other than a tourist.

  She slept, mostly. He sat in the single chair at her bedside, watching her. He tried to imagine her life—her long life, as it turned out—before she came here. She would never, he thought, have been a particularly easy person. She must always have been defiant and stern, even by Nadian standards. She must always have harbored a privacy so deep it was almost audible, like the silence of a well. He suspected that her husband had been the friendlier one, the one with ease and amplitude. Simon thought he could picture them at home, in their hut of sticks and mud. The husband would have been forever welcoming others in, offering pipes and fermented drinks, warming the rooms by lighting fires with wood they could not easily spare.

  He would have exasperated Catareen. His profligacy would have inspired countless arguments, some of them bantering, some of them bitter.

  And yet, she must have loved him.

  Simon knew this, somehow. He could feel the information swarming inside his head, one cell splitting into two, two into four, four into eight.

  Here was Catareen’s long union. Here were her children, five of them, three girls and two boys, endlessly undecided about which of their parents was more to blame for the errors and injustices in the family. Here were their days of labor. Here were their nights together, on a mattress stuffed with leaves and hay. Here was an afternoon of no particular consequence, when Catareen stood in the doorway of her hut, looking at her village, at the sharp peaks beyond, at the pewter-colored sky that would soon release its rain; here were the sounds of her children at some game, mixed with the steady rhythm of her husband’s hoe in the garden out back; here was her sense of herself in the middle of a life that was hers and no one else’s. Here was the bittersweet savor of it, the piercing somethingness of it—the pure sensation of being Catareen Callatura, at that moment, on an afternoon of no consequence, just before a rain.

  And here, many years later, was her decision to withhold crops from the king’s collectors and to encourage others to do the same. Here were the doubts of her garrulous husband, a simpler soul than she. Here was his trust in her. Here were the children’s arguments, with her and among themselves. (Some would have decided by then that she was the good parent, others that she was the bad.) Here were the arrests. Here were the executions. All of them. Not only the sweet, baffled husband but the grown children, the ones who loved her and the ones who resented her, and their children, too. All of them.

  The room darkened with evening. Catareen woke several times, looked around uncertainly. She must have been surprised to find herself here, dying in an unfamiliar room on a strange planet. She must, in her sleep, have forgotten. Each time she woke, Simon leaned over her and said, “It’s all right,” which was not, of course, strictly true. It was something to say.

  He didn’t think she’d want him to touch her. Each time she looked at him with fading yellow eyes. Each time she drifted away again without speaking.

  Presently, Luke came into the room. “Hey,” he said. “It’s almost time to get aboard.”

  Simon knew by then what he would do. He seemed to have entered a decision without quite making it. The process had occurred somewhere deep in his circuitry.

  He said, “I’m not going.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t leave her here.”

  Luke hesitated. Then he said, “There’s nothing we can do for her, you know.”

  “I can be here. I can do that.”

  “Do you know what that means? We can’t turn around and come back for you.”

  “I know that.”

  “I want you to come,” Luke said. There was a hint of whine in his tone.

  He was in fact a twelve-year-old boy. It was easy to forget that.

  Simon said, “You’ll be fine without me.”

  “I know. I know I will. I still want you to come.”

  “What’s that you’ve got there?” Simon asked. Luke was holding something in a white plastic bag.

  “Oh. Just this.”

  He reached into the bag and produced the little china bowl they’d bought from the old woman in Denver.

  “You’re taking that to another planet?”

  “It was my mother’s.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how Gaya ended up with it. We left Denver kind of quickly, one of Mom’s credit-card things blew up, and I guess Gaya got to our apartment before the authorities did. I remember this bowl from when I was a baby. Mom must have boosted it. She’d never have bought something like this.”

  Luke stood holding the bowl in both hands. It appeared to put out a faint glow in the darkening room.

  “Is there some kind of writing on it?” Simon asked.

  “Doesn’t mean shit.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s a language from some loser country. One of those places with horrible weather and a long line of demented rulers. One of those places that seem to have existed only so their citizens could devote their lives to trying to get the hell out.”

  “Do you know what it says?”

  “Nope. No idea.”

  “But you want to take it with you.”

  “I paid for it.”

  “With my money.”

  Luke shrugged and put the bowl back into the bag. Only the sound of Catareen’s breath was audible. Ee-um-fah-um-so, faint as a curtain worried by wind.

  Simon thought he could see the bowl on another planet some time in the next century, sitting on a shelf, where it would silently reflect an alien light. This small and fragile object, bearing its untranslatable message, was the entire estate of a woman who had intentionally deformed her child and then abandoned him. The bowl would travel to another sun, although it was neither rare nor precious.

  Biologicals were mysterious.

  Luke said, “You’re absolutely sure you don’t want to come?”

  “I do want to come. But I’m staying here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Luke went and stood beside the slumbering Catareen. “Goodbye,” he said softly. She did not respond.

  Luke said, “If I was a better person, I’d stay, too.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no reason for both of us to stay.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “But you wanted to hear it anyway, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “Is this what Christians refer to as absolution?”

  “Uh-huh. Anybody can do it. You don’t need a priest.”

  “You don’t really believe in this crap, do you? Really?”

  “I do. I really do. Can’t help it.”

  Luke stood solemnly at Catareen’s bedside. He held the bowl close
to his chest.

  “She’s had a long life. Now she’s going to the Lord.”

  “Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that,” Simon said.

  “It shouldn’t. If you don’t like ‘Lord,’ pick another word. She’s going home. She’s going back to the party. Whatever you like.”

  “I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife.”

  “Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism.”

  “No heaven?”

  “That’s heaven.”

  “What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?”

  “We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It’s an ecstatic release we’re physically unable to apprehend while we’re in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it’s crude and minor by comparison.”

  “This is what Holy Fire taught you?”

  “No, they were idiots. It’s just something I know. The way you know your poetry.”

  “I don’t know poetry, exactly. I contain it.”

  “Same difference, don’t you think? Hey, it’s about time for me to blast off to another planet.”

  “I’ll walk you downstairs. I’d like to say goodbye to the others.”

  “Okay.”

  They went together to the base of the ship. It was humming now. It put out a faint glow like the one that had emanated from Luke’s mother’s bowl in the dimness of the sickroom. The settlers were assembled at the bottom of the ramp. At the top of the ramp, the entranceway was a square of perfect white light.

  Emory said heartily to Simon, “Here we go, then.”

  “I’ve just come to see you off,” Simon told him.

  “You’re not coming?”

  Simon explained. Emory listened. When Simon had finished, Emory said, “This is really rather extraordinary, you know.”