Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

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.