Specimen Days (21 page)

"What about the idea of working for a company?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"If somebody said, 'We all work for the company.' In light of Whitman."

"Hmm. I could go out on a limb a little, I suppose." "Please do."

"Well. When Whitman published the first edition of
Leaves of Grass,
the industrial revolution was well under way. People who had lived on farms for generations were all moving to the cities in hopes of getting rich."

"And…"

"A handful did in fact get rich. Almost everybody else worked twelve-hour shifts in factories, six days a week. It was the end of the agrarian world and the beginning of the mechanized one. Do you know that universal
time
didn't exist until around the late 1800s? It was two o'clock in one village, three o'clock in another. It wasn't until the transcontinental railroads that we all had to agree on when it was two and when it was three, so people could make their trains. It took a full generation just to convince people that they had to show up at work every single day at the same hour."

"Everybody worked for the company, in a manner of speaking."

"You could say that. But, really, it's impossible to pin a poet like Whitman down this way. Was he writing about industrialization? Yes, he was. Was he writing about family? Certainly. And he was also writing about logging and sex and the westward expansion. You can go at him from just about any angle and find something that seems to support some thesis or other."

"I see."

" 'Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.' I'm afraid that if you insist on too much focus here or there, you miss the larger point."

Cat said," 'To die is different from what any one supposes, and luckier.'"

"You know your Whitman, then."

"Just a line or two. I shouldn't take up any more of your time."

"I don't think I've been very helpful."

She rose graciously, a compassionate duchess who'd reached the limits of her ability to intercede in the coarser mysteries of the world, its infestations and calamitous weather. There were afflictions that were probably best addressed by local methods by chants and ritual burnings, the drawing of pentagrams.

"May I ask you one more question?" Cat said. "It's not related to Whitman."

"By all means."

"Is this where that fire was, the one that killed all those women? Was it this building?"

"No, actually, that building is around the corner. It's part of the biochemistry department now."

Cat rose and went to the window. It was all calmness below. It was students hurrying to class and, at the end of the block, the leaf-shimmer of Washington Square Park.

She called Pete on her cell when she got to the street.

"Ashberry."

"I just talked to the Whitman person."

"She tell you anything?"

"It seems you could interpret him as some sort of voice for the status quo. As in, if you worked at some awful job in a factory, twelve hours a day, six days a week, here was Whitman to tell you that your life was great, your life was poetry, you were a king in your own world."

"You think the kid thinks that?"

"I think
somebody
thinks that. I think somebody is speaking through the kid."

"You on your way back in?" "I am." "See you."

Pete was waiting in her cubicle when she arrived. He didn't ask about Whitman. He said, "Dick Harte's wife just gave us a little something."

"What?"

"He woke up in the middle of the night, the night before he was killed. Said he heard a noise."

"A noise?"

"One of those middle-of-the-night things."

"He was scared?"

"She didn't say scared. She said he said he heard a noise. She said he said he was going to go see what it was."

"She
was scared."

"Yeah. But she takes a little something to help her sleep. She doesn't rouse easily, it seems."

"And?"

"And he got up, left the bedroom. Was gone maybe ten minutes. Came back, said it was nothing, the two of them went back to sleep."

"That's it?"

"That's it," Pete said.

"You think it means anything?"

"Probably not. What do you think?"

"Hard to say. Probably not."

"At least she's talking now."

"The daughter?"

"Still in the ozone. Seriously unhinged."

"What's up with the son?"

"Mondo cooperative. Scary cooperative. Boy detective seems to like his sudden fame."

"As people do."

"He's a piece of work, as it turns out. Serious drug history, lately turned to Jesus. That school in Vermont's a jail, basically, for rich kids."

"Interesting."

"Semi-interesting. You don't think the son's involved, do you?"

"No. I don't."

"We're not going to get anything from the family, I don't think. I mean, I don't think there's anything to get."

"Probably right," she said.

And yet, an image crept into her mind. She pictured Dick Harte roused from sleep, walking through a big, dark house in his pajamas (he'd have worn pajamas, wouldn't he; a balding fifty-three-year-old with no record of drug use or illicit sex, a man who paid his bills on time, whose pretty wife number two sent herself to Pluto every night with the help of a few key Pharmaceuticals), tracking down a suspicious nocturnal sound. What would it have been like, being Dick Harte? Was he satisfied; was he prospering in his heart? Had he had a premonition that night, out there in the stately abundance of Great Neck? Cat imagined him going down the staircase, walking barefoot over parquet and Oriental rugs, finding nothing amiss, but wondering. She pictured him going to a window make it a living-room window, Thermopane, with heavy brocade
window treatments
(the wife was a decorator, right?); say it looked out onto an expanse of black lawn, with hedges and rosebushes and the dark glitter of a pool. She saw Dick standing at the window, looking out. She saw him understanding he would sense more than see it that a child stood on his lawn, a boy, skinny and erect and alert, crazy and worshipful: a sentinel, watching Dick Harte's slumbering house the way a guerrilla fighter might take a last look at a village, its lamps extinguished and its people dreaming, before he set it on fire. The child would have vanished immediately, nothing more than a child-shaped shadow that resolved itself into a patch of darkness where a rosebush bore no blooms. Dick would have shrugged it off, gone back to bed, assured his zonked-out wife that there was nothing to fear.

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?

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 cell 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.

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.

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."