Specimen Days (22 page)

"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 one." "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."

"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."

/
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?"

"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,
beingincidentally
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 sandal wood 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.

Cat summoned a regal bearing of her own.
I have no intention of slipping any of your sorry shit into my handbag.

"Hello," the woman said, without a hint of malice or suspicion. She might have been sitting here among these things for years, waiting to see if tonight someone would finally come in.

"Hello," Cat said. Regular voice. "I wonder if I could see that bowl in the window."

"Bowl."

"Yes. It's right there. It has jewelry in it. Is it for sale?"

"Oh, the bowl. Just a minute, please."

The woman stood. She was violently thin. She wore a lank dress covered in roses and some sort of purple shawl over her shoulders. She went to the window, leaned over, and dumped the jewelry out of the bowl. She brought it to Cat.

"Here it is," she said.

The bowl was, in fact, something. Anyone could see it. It was about the size of a sparrow's nest, luminous; it seemed to amplify the room's stagnant illumination. Cat took it from the woman. It was lighter than she'd expected it to be, almost weightless. Even up close, she couldn't tell what the symbols painted along its outer rim were meant to be. They didn't look Chinese. Each was different from the others, but all were variations on the same design: a circle that emanated slender spokes, some straight and some wavy, some long and some short.

"It's beautiful," Cat said.

"I don't know where it came from."

"Is it for sale?"

"It's ten dollars."

Cat paused, briefly and absurdly doubtful if it was really as lovely as it seemed, would it cost so little?

"I'll take it," she said.

She gave the woman ten dollars and waited while she wrapped the bowl in a sheet of newspaper. Cat thought she would give the bowl to Simon. She'd never bought him anything like this; she'd only bought him books, and once a tie he'd admired when they were in Barneys together. She'd never before given him anything that involved her own sense of beauty, anything meant to join the carefully selected prizes he kept up there in his aerie. She hadn't dared to.

The woman slipped the wrapped bowl into an old plastic Duane Reade bag. She gave it to Cat.

"Enjoy it," the woman said. "Thank you," Cat answered. "I will."

As she left the shop, she heard a clatter. Horse's hooves, galloping. She froze. Here it came, toward her. A bay horse, riderless, running up Broadway. For a moment, the world tipped on its axis. Something dreadful and impossible was happening. And then the world righted itself again. It was a runaway horse. It was only that. A car pulled over to avoid it, another laid on its horn. The horse was running up the middle of the street, its hooves sparking on the pavement. After a moment a patrol car appeared in pursuit, lights flashing and siren blaring. There was a stable down there, wasn't there? Where the police horses were kept. Cat stood sheltered in the doorway of the shop. The horse ran by. It was beautiful, no denying it. Black mane fluttering, brown flanks glossy and strong. An ancient and marvelous manifestation, slipped through a dimensional warp. It did not appear to be frightened. It was only running. The squad car came after, flashing its lights. The horse galloped on, pursued by the car.