Specimen Days

  Pete said, “Just wanted to let you know. See you later.”

  “I’ll be right here. At my loom.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. See you later.”

  She sat at her desk, resumed her waiting. Was it possible that the kid had gone out to Dick Harte’s house, to see his deathmate at home? Unlikely. She was projecting. Say it: you want Luke to be out there in the dark, watching you. You want that, and you fear it. She couldn’t help imagining herself looking down at Fifth Street from her own window, late at night, and seeing him on the pavement, three years old, staring up at her window. There he’d be, dark-eyed, curious, prone to fits of inexplicable laughter, a little bit pigeon-toed, devoted to trucks and to anything red.

  Would he be loving? Or would he be furious? Would he have forgiven her?

  A nick in your heart. The settlement from the doctor sent me to Columbia. Which got me here.

  What had she done to merit forgiveness? Nothing came immediately to mind.

  It happened at ten minutes to five.

  Cat heard it first from Aaron, the audio guy. He raced by her cubicle, stuck his small, otterish head in.

  “There’s been another one,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It just came in. Central Park.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Looks like the same thing. Bomb. Right by Bethesda Fountain.”

  He ran on. Cat bolted up out of her chair, ran into Pete on her way into the hall.

  “Fuck,” Pete said.

  “What do we know?”

  “Central fucking Park. Bethesda fucking Fountain.”

  “A kid?”

  “Don’t know yet. I’m on my way up there.”

  “I’m coming, too.”

  “You can’t. You’re here.”

  Right. She was on phone duty. There was no telling who might call, and her call would pick up background noise if she went to the site. She knew better than to argue.

  “Keep me posted,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She returned to her cubicle.

  He’d done it, then. The little fucker had walked up to someone in the park and taken them both to behold the birth of stars.

  She remained. There was nothing else for her to do. The office rocked and roiled around her; she was its still center. News filtered in. Victim was one Henry Coles, African-American, age twenty-two, married but separated. One son, five years old, who lived with the mother. Worked at Burger King. Perpetrator, according to witnesses, was a kid, eleven or twelve, wearing a Mets jersey and some sort of cap. Henry Coles had been out for a stroll, just sucking up a little light and air before his shift started. Kid came up behind him, hugged him, and detonated.

  Fuck.

  Cat heard snatches of the phone conversations going on in other cubicles. There was no lag factor today—the citizens of the Bizarro Dimension were seriously unnerved. Why do you think the government would want to do this? Do you, personally, know members of Al Qaeda? When did your television first start warning you about the Aryan Nation?

  Cat’s phone did not ring. She waited. There was nothing else for her to do.

  She thought about Henry Coles, brother from another planet. Or rather, from another country here on her own planet. She did not of course know Henry Coles, and if Ed Short or anyone like him had dared to generalize about the poor annihilated motherfucker, she’d have nailed him good. She was in no mood. But okay, privately, here in the unquiet of her semi-office, she could let her mind rove a little. Twenty-two years old with a child he wasn’t supporting (not by flipping burgers), probably working a scam or two, trying to get by, trying to be dignified if not powerful, struggling every moment to feel like somebody, to hang in, to not collapse, to not be in the wrong place at the wrong time, to not make the mistake that would send his ass to jail for the rest of his life. She knew Henry Coles. She’d been married to him.

  And not. Daryl had done better than Burger King; he was pretty and smart; he’d earned passable money working for UPS (he could deliver, that boy could) and was taking prelaw courses at Hunter. Still, he couldn’t quite pass, could he? He didn’t have the diction; he didn’t have the stance. Cat’s mother had never tired of insisting that Daryl was beneath her. Cat had had church dresses and piano lessons. She’d been read to every night.

  Daryl. I still think about your neck and your hands. I hope LA is working out for you. I hope you’re thinking about law school again.

  She pictured him walking through Central Park, as he might very well have done. Striding along, hopeful and scared and angry, aware of the unease he inspired in the white girls pushing strollers, mortified by it, glad about it. Step back, bitches. Dick Harte might have made the high-rises rise, but he couldn’t scare the mothers in Central Park just by walking past. Cat saw Henry Coles crossing before the fountain just as Daryl might have done, looking up at the angel with her furrowed profile and big peasant-girl feet; she who was always there, day and night, spreading her heavy wings for everyone but offering heaven only to her favorites. Step back, bitch. I’ll make my own heaven. You won’t be there.

  And then, from behind, a pair of small arms wrapped around him. Then blinding light and the intimation of an impossible noise.

  She struggled to imagine the kid. There wasn’t much to work with. Mets jersey, some sort of cap. She pictured him small, even for his age; pale and grave; a ghostly creature with unnaturally bright eyes and quick little fingers, like an opossum’s. A Gollum, a changeling. He’d have been a listless baby, and as he got older he’d have been passive and fearful, strangely empty, infinitely suggestible; an “as if” personality, one of those mysterious beings who lack some core of self everyone else takes for granted. He’d have been, all his short life, a convincing member of the dead, waiting for his time to come.

  She stuck around until after seven, when Pete returned.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  He slumped against the wall of her cubicle. She’d never seen him so exhausted. His eyes were rheumy, his face mottled.

  “What do we know?” she asked.

  “Black kid, cap pulled down low over his face, and then, poof. Nothing more for the witnesses to see.”

  “He was black?”

  “So say the witnesses.”

  He must have assumed she was white when he called in. As he naturally would. Black kids always assumed the person in power was white.

  But the kid had sounded white to her as well. Funny. Two black people, cop and killer, each assuming the other must be white. Funny.

  We’re in the family. We don’t have names anymore.

  She said to Pete, “Looks like they weren’t related, then.”

  “Unlikely. We’ll know as soon as the DNAs are in.”

  “A white kid took out a white guy, and a black kid took out a black guy.”

  “Yep.”

  “A black guy who worked at Burger King.”

  “He didn’t even have an address. He slept here and there. Been bunking most recently with his mother, up on 123rd.”

  “Very not Dick Harte.”

  “Couldn’t be much less like Dick Harte.”

  “It’s as if they’re saying nobody’s safe. You’re not safe if you’re a real estate tycoon, and you’re not safe if you work for minimum wage.”

  “That would seem to be true.”

  “I keep thinking about that ‘in the family’ shit.”

  “We’ll find something on that. It’s probably some obscure Japanese video game. Or from some storefront church.”

  “You think this is the end of it?” she said.

  “Hope so.”

  “Two crazy little boys who said they were brothers.”

  “You want dinner?”

  “Yes.”

  She pulled the stack of take-out menus from her top drawer. They decided on Thai.

  Pete said, “There can’t be no pattern.”

  “We’ll find o
ne.”

  “You sure about that?”

  She hesitated. What the hell, just let yourself talk. You’re a couple of exhausted government workers waiting for their pad thai to come; you can break the code.

  “I wonder,” she said. “It’s getting harder to see the patterns, don’t you think?”

  “We’re all freaked out these days.”

  “I hope that’s it. I hope it’s about us not being able to see what’s there.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, I hope there’s something there to see. I hope it’s not just…randomness. Chaos.”

  “It’s not.”

  She looked at him, steadily and hard. For a moment she thought, What I’m going to do is have another child and raise him far away from all this, in a house in the mountains, by an unpolluted stream where unmutated fish still swim, where we’ll have books and no television, and I’ll do the best I can with the boredom and racism, I’ll manage, I won’t be sitting on some bar stool every night, I’ll stay home and read to the kid, and during the days I’ll work in the local clinic or be a high school counselor or learn to knit sweaters and sell them in fucking crafts fairs. She thought, If you had any sense, Pete Ashberry, you’d want that, too. You’d admit that we’re emigrants, that our native land is too barren for us, too hard; that what we should really and truly do is buy a good reliable used car and drive out into the continent and see what we can find for ourselves.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

  “You did a good job. You did the best anybody could have done. You couldn’t have saved this kid.”

  And sounded white over the phone

  And let him die

  And am a cracked vessel, and am an empty cup

  “We’ll never know that, will we?” she said.

  “Give yourself a break.”

  “Trying.”

  “Would it piss you off if I gave you a little advice?”

  “That would depend on the advice.”

  “Don’t mix any of this up with what happened to your own kid.”

  She nodded, tapped her chin with her forefinger. Probably stupid to have told Pete about Luke. You lost track, working with someone every day. You told them things. You had sex with them in the ladies’ room.

  She said, “You don’t have some kind of theory going on about me, do you, Pete?”

  “No way.”

  A silence caught and held. Had she embarrassed him? Had she shamed him? Okay, then, give him something. He’s a good man; he cares about you.

  She said, “I didn’t take him to another doctor.”

  “You had no reason to.”

  “We didn’t have any money. We had shit for insurance.”

  “And a doctor told you it was gas. Kids have strange little aches and pains all the time. Gas was a reasonable diagnosis.”

  “The wrong one.”

  “You didn’t know that.”

  I suspected it. I had a feeling. I decided to believe the doctor. I told myself, kids have strange little aches and pains all the time.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

  “So give yourself a break. Can you do that?”

  A nick in his heart. He crawled into bed with Daryl and me, said he was thirstier than he’d ever been, and died. Right there.

  “Sure,” she said. “I can do that.”

  The food came. They ate, talked about other things, threw the empty containers out. Pete went back to his office. Cat hung around a little longer, for no good reason. It was all cleanup now, it was investigation; the deranged boys were dead, and the work of finding out who they’d been would fall to others. She dialed Simon’s number. He’d called three times since the event, left messages. He’d believe her when she’d tell him she’d been too busy to call him back, though of course it would be a lie. She was the least busy person on the premises. She’d put off talking to Simon (admit it) because she hadn’t felt up to it, hadn’t felt like being tough and passionate and wised-up.

  Amelia put her straight through.

  “Cat. God, I’ve been worried.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t call earlier. It’s crazy here.”

  “Can you get out of there now?”

  “Yes. Meet me at your place, okay? Just give me a drink and put me to bed.”

  “You got it. I can get out of here in about forty-five minutes.”

  Forty-five minutes was good time for Simon. Who knew what fluctuations in the futures needed his immediate attention?

  “I’ll come by around nine, then.”

  “Good. You okay?”

  “Relatively.”

  “Good. See you at nine.”

  She said good-night to Pete and went out into the streets. She’d wander a while among the terrorized citizenry, until Simon could extricate himself from the particulars of whatever deal he was dealing.

  She started down Broadway. If you didn’t know what had happened, you could easily believe it was just another night in the city. The sidewalks were a little less crowded, people were moving with more than the usual degrees of slink or alacrity, but if you were fresh from Mongolia or Uganda you wouldn’t have any but the usual touristic impressions. The city was only being rocked in its less visible parts, along its filaments, in its dreams of itself. People were scared, and yes, it was impossible to know yet just how much money was bleeding out, how many reservations were being canceled, how many corporations were considering relocating, but Broadway was still full of cabs and trucks, stores were still open, unfortunates still worked the passersby for change. The machinery of the city, the immense discordant poetry of the city (thank you, Mr. Whitman), racketed on. You had to bring a building down to make things look different. Tonight there were no candlelight vigils, no mounds of flowers, no women wailing. It all went on.

  Four people had gone into space to behold the birth of stars. It all went on. What else should it do?

  She browsed the store windows along lower Broadway. She was hungry for normalcy the way she might be hungry for a pastrami on rye. She didn’t want to be herself. Not right now. She wanted, right now, to be a shopper, a regular person, unhaunted, unjaded, free from all but the usual quotients of bitterness and guilt, somebody with a little time to kill on her way to her boyfriend’s place.

  The shop windows down here were full of jeans or running shoes or discount cosmetics or every now and then Chinese herbs. The fancier establishments were on the side streets. Broadway was for the young, the semipoor, the easily delighted. She was not young and was not easily delighted. She could have wandered east or west, into different neighborhoods, but then she’d have been window-shopping, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Too trivial. She could at best wander slowly along her inevitable route, scanning the windows she’d be passing anyway, being incidentally trivial, waiting for it to be nine o’clock.

  It was just after she’d crossed Canal Street that the feeling arrived again. Someone was watching her. She walked on. She didn’t turn around. Not right away. She waited until she’d reached a shop window (a junk shop, it seemed, didn’t matter what it was). She pretended to be checking out the merchandise, then did a quick glance up the street. Nothing and no one. Okay, a white couple huddled pigeonlike into each other as they negotiated the scraps of windblown trash, and an old woman sitting on a loading dock, dangling her tattered legs over the edge, swinging them like an ancient, exhausted child.

  Still, Cat had the feeling. The queasy tingle along the back of her neck.

  She refocused, actually looked at the contents of the store window. Gaya’s Emporium. It was a little strange for Broadway—more an East Village sort of establishment. Its window was heaped with scavengings: a ratty coat with a fake-fur collar, two pairs of ancient roller skates, a mirrored disco ball, tangles of costume jewelry, a lantern-jawed male mannequin’s head, blandly cheerful under a rainbow Afro wig. Total randomness—things that were gathered together because the shop owner had found them somewhere and thought
that somebody might conceivably want to buy them. The world overflowed with product, old and new; it was impossible to contain it all. At the lower levels, sheer quantity trumped categorization.

  She lingered a moment before the sorrowful bounty. It would look like treasure to most people in the world, wouldn’t it? You had to be among the privileged few to know that this stuff was junk even when it was new, this faux rich-lady coat and this chipped porcelain shepherdess and this bundle of plastic swizzle sticks topped with plastic mermaids.

  Among the coils of jewelry was a bowl, half hidden. It had been carelessly filled with gold-toned brooches, a strand of fake pearls, but the rim showed, pale and bright as the moon, decorated along its upper edge with symbols of some sort, which might have been flowers or sea anemones or stars. Junk, it was probably junk—what else could it be, considering where it had ended up?—and yet, it didn’t look like junk, even in the fluorescence of the shop window. It seemed to emit a faint but perceptible glow, like a wristwatch in the dark, though it was pure, pure white. It looked, from what she could see of it, like a displaced treasure, something genuinely rare, mistaken for dross. These things turned up every now and then, didn’t they? The da Vinci drawing slipped in among the botanical prints, the Melville letters stacked with old bills and yellowed shopping lists. Could it possibly be Chinese? Could it be something Simon might want for his collection?

  She went into the shop. It smelled of mold and sweaty wool, with an undercurrent of sandalwood incense. It was more like someone’s messy closet than a store. There were piles of shoes, a sagging clothes rack jammed full of old jackets and sweaters, a round cardboard bin that proclaimed, in scrawled Magic Markered letters, that its contents could be had for fifty cents apiece.

  A woman sat at the rear, behind a glass counter. She was as wan and worn-looking as her merchandise. Her gray hair hung to her shoulders, and her face was vague, as if someone had drawn the features of a woman onto the front of her head and then tried to erase them. Still, she was queenly, in her ruined way. She sat erect, with a vase full of peacock feathers on her right and an oval mirror on her left, like a minor queen of the underworld, ruler of the lost and inconsequential.