Specimen Days

  Catherine paused again. Lucas saw her make a decision.

  She said to the doctor, “Could I speak to you privately?”

  The doctor said, “Aren’t we private enough here?”

  She moved to the doorway, and the doctor followed. She spoke to him in a low tone. He nodded gravely.

  Dan didn’t speak. Lucas could feel him not speaking. The doctor listened to Catherine and produced yet another frown.

  Lucas said, “The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing.”

  Catherine said sharply, “Lucas, be quiet.”

  He strove to be quiet. He ground his teeth together.

  The doctor and Catherine returned. The doctor said, “I will order him some morphine. Since you’re so insistent.”

  “Thank you,” Catherine answered.

  “I finish here at five o’clock.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  The doctor said, “I’ll send in one of the sisters with the morphine and fresh bandages. I’ll return when the surgery room is free.”

  “All right,” Catherine said.

  The doctor left them. They were there, they three, in the room with the sister and the murmuring man.

  Catherine said to Dan, “Well, then.”

  Dan didn’t speak, though Catherine seemed to expect it. At length he said, “I must go back to the works.”

  “Yes,” Catherine answered.

  Lucas had not thought until that moment that anyone would return to his job. He’d forgotten. He’d been his hand and his pain, he’d been Catherine. But Dan must return to the works.

  Lucas said to Catherine, “Will you stay with me?”

  “Of course I will,” she answered.

  “You’ll be all right,” Dan told Lucas.

  Lucas couldn’t speak. He began to realize. He’d made an interruption and nothing more. If Dan must return to work now, Catherine would return tomorrow.

  “You’ll be all right,” Dan said again, more slowly and distinctly, as if he were uncertain whether Lucas had heard him the first time.

  Lucas said, “Which of the young men does she like best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.”

  “Goodbye now.”

  “Goodbye,” Catherine said.

  Dan regarded her strangely. His face resembled Catherine’s face when Lucas brought her the bowl. Something had occurred between Dan and Catherine. She had shown him the bowl she’d paid too much for. She had shown him her mangled hand. She stood defiantly, harmed and proud.

  Because there was nothing to do or say, Dan left. After he had gone, Catherine said to Lucas, “You must lie down. I’m afraid it will have to be the floor.”

  He answered, “I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me.”

  “Shh. Hush now. You must rest. You must rest and be quiet.”

  “I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing.”

  “Come along now,” Catherine said. “You make yourself worse by raving.”

  She helped him to lie down on the floor. She sat on the floor herself so he could lie with his head on her lap. Here under his head were the starchy folds of her blue dress.

  He said, “You will stay with me?”

  “I told you I would.”

  “Not only today.”

  “For as long as I need to.”

  Lucas was pain and Catherine’s lap. The pain was a cocoon that wrapped him like fiery bandages. In the cocoon, in Catherine’s lap, it was difficult to think of anything but that. Still, he struggled. He held to himself. He had brought her here, but he’d only saved her from today. He must do something further. He could not know what.

  “Catherine?” he said.

  “Shh. Don’t speak.”

  “You have to come away with me.”

  “Forget about that. Forget everything.”

  He strove not to forget. He said, “You were wrong, yesterday.”

  “Not another word.”

  “You must take the baby and go away.”

  “Hush. Hush.”

  He saw it, through the fiery cocoon. She must take the baby and go to a place like the park at night, a place of grass and silence. She must go out searching, as Walt had told Lucas to do. There were such places, not only the park. He’d seen the pictures. There were fields and mountains. There were woods and lakes. He could take her to a place like that, he thought. He would find a way to do it.

  From the cot, the man murmured on.

  A sister came into the room. Her black habit was alive; it had created within itself her face, which was carved from wood. She wrapped Lucas’s hand in new bandages. She produced (had it been inside her habit?) a syringe full of clear liquid. She took his other arm, the undamaged one, with the practiced calm of a boot maker nailing a sole. She put the needle in, which stung like a bee, a small pain, an interesting one, differently alive, like a tiny flame. She withdrew the needle and departed. She had not spoken at all. Because her face was carved from wood, she wasn’t able to speak.

  After some time, a flower blossomed in Lucas’s mind. He felt it, an unfurling of petals, a transformation from bud to bloom. The pain was there still, but it was not in him anymore. The pain had left him as the spirit leaves the body of the deceased. It had made of itself a curtain, shimmering, as if curtains could be made of glass and the glass were veined with colors and tiny instances of light. The curtain hovered, fragile as glass, around Lucas and Catherine. It encircled them. Pain ran through it in capillaries of blue and green, of softest pink. Where it was most intense, pain produced watery quiverings of illumination, like light on a river. Pain surrounded them, and they were here, inside it.

  Lucas didn’t think he slept. He didn’t think he dreamed. He was able, though, to see things he ordinarily saw in dreams. He saw that outside the pain curtain, outside the walls of the room, was the hospital, with its patiently damaged supplicants and its crying man. Outside the hospital was the city, with its houses and factories, its streets where Walt walked, marveling at everything, at smiths sweating over their forges and women strolling under feathered hats, at gulls circling in the sky like dreams the hats were having. Outside the city was the book, which invented what Walt saw and loved, because the book loved Walt and wanted to delight him. Outside the book…was there anything outside the book? Lucas couldn’t be sure. He thought he saw a distance, an immensity that was in the book and outside it. He thought he saw fields and mountains, forests and lakes, though they were not as they appeared in the pictures. He had thought from pictures that they were flat and drab, all murky greens and limpid, shallow blues. He saw now that they were alive and brilliantly colored. There were oceans of grass, swaying. There were mountains blindingly white.

  Lucas’s forehead was caressed. Catherine whispered to him. He couldn’t tell what she said.

  Something said, Lucas, it’s time.

  What was it time for?

  Everything changed. He stood in the room again, though it was the room as it truly was, a scrim shaped like a room, with a city around it and an ocean of grass beyond. He wondered if others knew. He wondered if the wooden nun knew, for here she was, here was the back of her, and here was Catherine’s arm, helping him. He was walking, he seemed to be walking. The curtain of pain followed him, blinking and coalescing.

  He was in the corridor where the waiting waited. They were bright with their own pain, suffused by it, rendered beautiful and strange, phosphorescent. As he walked among them, he knew they were his friends. He knew that the harmed, all of them, were his family, relations he had not met but knew by blood.

  Then he saw Simon. Simon walked out of a door and stood in the hallway before him.

  Lucas stopped. His brother was terrible to see. His face was pulp, with one dark eye staring blindly from its socket and the other vanished entirely. What remained of his hair was matted, plastered to what remained of his skull. His right arm, the one tha
t had been taken by the clamp and pulled under the wheel, was tatters clinging to bone. The fabric of his shirt had gotten muddled up with his chest, so that fabric and flesh were one. His heart, intact, bigger than Lucas would have expected it to be, glistened between the clean lines of his yellow-white ribs.

  It was Simon released, finally, from the machine and the box. It was the Simon they had not been permitted to see. How had he gotten out?

  Simon said, You’ve brought her to me.

  “Lucas, what is it?” Catherine asked.

  Simon said, Thank you. I’m glad to have her here.

  A sister came and took Simon’s arm, the other one, the one not yet ruined. She hurried him away.

  “It’s all right,” Catherine said. “That man has been terribly hurt. There’s nothing we can do for him. Come along.”

  Lucas said, No. He could not be sure if he had spoken aloud.

  He said, We have to leave.

  Because he couldn’t be sure if he spoke or didn’t speak, he turned and went the other way, toward the waiting room, moving quickly among the fallen. His legs were good, they had their own intelligence. He knew Catherine would follow him. He hoped she would.

  He saw himself open the door with his good hand. He saw himself move through the waiting room, past the crying man, past the mother and father who rocked and moaned with their child. (Would their names ever be called?) He saw himself go through the outer door and into the street. It was daytime. People walked, carrying parcels.

  Catherine was there, behind him. She had followed. She said, “Come back. Please.”

  He started off down the sidewalk. Did she follow him? Yes, she did.

  He saw that the red bundle of his hand was held close to his chest, near his heart, like a second heart he wore outside.

  Catherine said, “Stop. Lucas, stop. You’ll lose your place.”

  It was funny, hearing her say that. She thought he’d been waiting for a gift, some marvel he would not want to lose, when what he wanted, all he wanted, was to lead her away.

  He ran on. He was sure of where he was going, where he was taking her, but couldn’t name it. He knew only that it lay in this direction. He imagined it was somewhere safe, a place of trees and mountains. Trees and mountains were out there, ahead of him, ahead of Catherine, and though they lay at an unknowable distance he knew that with every stride he led her closer to them, farther away from the dead. He knew only, but he knew with utter certainty, that he must keep moving. He knew he must take her with him and couldn’t do it with words or explanations. He had no language for that. He had only his body to speak with, he had only his legs.

  Catherine strode after him. He was moving too fast for her. He slowed a little, so she wouldn’t fall too far behind. She said, “If you don’t come back, they won’t take care of you.”

  “The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.”

  She called out, “Somebody stop him. Please. He’s sick, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  Lucas saw a man and then another man wonder if he should interfere and decide not to. There was the lump of blood at Lucas’s breast. There were the troubles of others, unfathomable, and these men had troubles enough of their own.

  He was near Washington Square, with Catherine following, when he heard sirens. He thought at first that they were trumpets, piercing and cacophonous. (Why would he—why would anyone—think angels would make a beautiful sound?) He thought that he, he and Catherine, were entering a promised realm, that they were being greeted by a host of…not angels, no. A host of spirits that were like animals, that were like ghosts, that were like Mr. Cain and the crying man, inscrutable, possessed of a language the living didn’t know but would come to understand. They were not kind, but they were not cruel. Lucas knew he must go to them. He knew he must take Catherine. He knew that the trumpeters were the book and that the book was the world.

  He smelled the smoke before he saw it. For a moment it seemed simply the usual smell of the air, brought to him in heightened form. But this was sharper, more acrid. Others on the street seemed to notice it, too. An ember floated by, brilliantly orange, like the little lights in the curtain of pain but far brighter. He paused, he couldn’t help pausing, to watch the ember drift past.

  Catherine caught up with him. She was out of breath. She said, “My God.”

  She walked on, hurriedly. Lucas followed her. He was glad to be the one following. He was glad that she seemed now to understand.

  The Mannahatta Company was breathing fire. Licks of flame snapped like banners from its upper windows. The windows, some of them, were orange squares. Plumes of black smoke billowed up, fat and velvety.

  “Oh, my God,” Catherine said. Lucas stood beside her. Fire engines glowed in the street. Firemen in black coats, husbands for the nuns, sent up streams of bright water that fell short of the windows where the fire was. Lucas thought of the jewelry in the window of Gaya’s Emporium, glinting among the folds of faded cloth.

  He went with Catherine until a policeman told them they could go no farther. Catherine stood before him as she had stood before the doctor in the waiting room. It seemed she would summon her power of insistence. She would tell him there was not, could not be, a fire.

  She said, “I work there.”

  “Lucky you’re not there now,” he answered.

  Catherine reached for Lucas, held him close to her. They watched together as the flames unfurled, demonstrating their beauty, which was neither cruel nor kind. They watched the water rise in brilliant threads and fall back to the pavement as rain. They heard the sirens blare.

  And now, finally, Lucas understood. It had all been for this. It had been done so that Catherine would not be at Mannahatta when the fire came. Simon had loved her; she was wrong about that. He had not married the machine, he had sacrificed himself to it, as the saints gave themselves to glory, as St. Brigid gave herself to the fiery circle of her headache. Simon had known—for he was intimate with machinery, Lucas had learned how intimate—that the sewing machines at Mannahatta adored and desired their women but were too puny to take them as the greater machines took their men. Simon had known, he had guessed (had the machine told him?) that the sewing machines were waiting to take their women in the only way they could.

  And Catherine alone had been spared.

  She held Lucas fast. He felt the thrum of her heart. He answered with the beat of his own, paltry and birdlike but resolute.

  A woman appeared at a window, seven stories up.

  The woman stood in the window, holding to its frame. Her blue skirt billowed. The square of brilliant orange made of her a blue silhouette, fragile and precise. She was like a goddess of the fire, come to her platform to tell those gathered below what the fire meant, what it wanted of them. From so far away, her face was indistinct. She turned her head to look back into the room, as if someone had called to her. She was radiant and terrifying. She listened to something the fire told her.

  She jumped.

  Catherine screamed. Lucas clung tightly to her. Her heart caromed in his ear.

  The woman’s skirt rose around her as she fell. She lifted her arms, as if to take hold of invisible hands that reached for her.

  When she struck the pavement, she disappeared. She’d been a woman in midair, she’d been the flowering of her skirt, and then in an instant she was only the dress, puddled on the cobblestones, still lifting slightly at its edges as if it lived on. Policemen rushed to her.

  “Oh, my lord,” Catherine said. She did not speak loudly.

  Lucas held her. He was sorry for the woman, but she wasn’t Catherine.

  Lucas whispered to her, “Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy? Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work’d over and rectified?”

  With his blood hand, Lucas touched the locket at his breast.

  The air thickened. He could taste it. He could feel it in his lungs. Storms of embers rained down, danced on the pavement
around the policemen and the firemen, around the vanished woman and her skirt.

  Catherine began weeping. Lucas comforted her. An appalling thing was happening, but he and Catherine had a curtain around them. They were inside it. From the circle, Lucas could see, as clearly as if it had happened already, a house in the sea of grass. He could see the light it would make at night, under the sky.

  A crowd had gathered. Lucas and Catherine were at its front, as close to the building as the police would allow. The people of the crowd were horrified and excited. Their faces were brightened by the fire.

  Was that Walt, far off, among the others, Walt with his expression of astonished hunger for everything that could occur? Lucas could see a man with a beard who might have been Walt or might not have been. A woman stood beside him. Was it St. Brigid, gazing upward with her livid and compassionate face, her halo discreetly hidden under a brown felt hat? It looked like her.

  Lucas waved. He couldn’t be certain it was Walt or St. Brigid, but he waved nonetheless. His good hand held Catherine, so he had to wave with the other, the bleeding bundle. He was suddenly proud. Here is what was asked of me. Here is what I’ve done.

  Neither Walt nor St. Brigid saw him. Walt would find him in time, though. He had found him on Broadway at his moment of need; he would surely find him again. Lucas and Catherine would go into the book, for the book was never finished. Lucas would recite it to Walt and to everyone. He would recite what Walt had not yet written, for his life and the book were one thing, and everything he did or said was part of the book.

  Smoke but not smoke, that which smoke created, swirled around them all, a densifying of the air, a sharp and painful enlivening. Lucas could see it as clearly as he saw the pain curtain. The air had thickened; it seemed he could reach out with his good hand and form it into balls, like snow. It sparked with embers, demonstrating its likeness to the night sky.

  The air had a taste. Lucas rolled it in his mouth. He recognized it.

  The dead had entered the atmosphere. Lucas knew it as surely as he had known Simon’s presence in the pillow. With every breath Lucas took the dead inside him. This was their bitter taste; this was how they lay—ashen and hot—on the tongue. Lucas went on waving to the man in the crowd. It seemed suddenly that Walt must see him, must come to him, and soon. Walt must take him to the riverbank, show him the way to the grass.