Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

“Happens all the time.”

“I know. I’m talking about a feeling, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Pete said. “Dick Harte is a God-fearing family man who’s never touched anybody but his two wives. Why does the kid pick him?”

“I’m just throwing this out. I predict that sooner or later we’ll track a missing and find a father who’s been torturing his boys all their lives. Older one gets to an age and decides it’s got to stop, somebody’s got to pay. But he can’t bring himself to kill his father. He picks some guy who looks like his father. Same age and weight.”

“Possible.”

“If the kids weren’t local, if they weren’t the sons of people the Hartes knew, it suggests they were the kind of boys who could be picked up by a stranger in a car.”

“Which happens all the time,” Pete said.

“Absolutely. But something in these kids’ voices, especially the second one… I don’t picture them hanging around a park, waiting for some guy to pull up in an expensive car and suck their dicks for ten dollars. It doesn’t click for me.”

“Hey, you’re the one with the pee-aitch-dee.”

“For all the good it’s done me.”

“So you think the guy they really want to kill is their father.”

“Don’t hold me to it.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“I predict we’ll find a citizen who’s so stressed about his oldest boy running away he’s been torturing the younger one double. The kid’ll turn out to have been privy to the plan, he’ll be taken from his fucked-up home to a differently fucked-up home, where he’ll live and get treatment until he’s old enough to go out and get a job and have a family and start torturing his own sons.”

“You take a dim view,” he said.

“And you don’t?”

“Why would a kid like that quote poetry?”

“Good question. Are they checking Whitman for that ‘in the family’ shit?”

“All done. It’s not from Whitman.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah.”

She spent the day waiting for a call that never came. It was funny she usually felt grotesquely popular here on the job. She was sought-after. Today she just sat by the phone, begging it to ring, like a high school girl in love.

She tracked down a Whitman scholar at NYU, one Rita Dunn, and made an appointment for tomorrow morning. Otherwise, she killed time. Filed a few more things. Got to some old reports that had been languishing in a bottom drawer.

She stayed an extra hour, then packed it in. She had her cell, of course if the kid called back, they could patch him straight through to her wherever she was. She walked home through the dusk of another perfect June day among citizens who refused to shed their habits of looking suspicious to her. The guy nervously unloading boxes from a bakery truck, the jogger in Princeton sweats, even the blind man tapping along with his cane they all seemed like potentials. They were, in fact, all potentials. Everyone was. The trick was to keep living with the conviction that almost everyone was actually harmless. It was the job’s central irony. If you weren’t careful, you could get as paranoid as the people you dealt with.

Were all the same person. We all want the same things.

Her apartment felt particularly small. It had a way of expanding or contracting, depending on how the day went. Today it struck her as ludicrous, these little rooms in which she, an expensively educated thirty-eight-year-old woman, found herself living. Remember: it’s a prize. In today’s market, a dinky one-bedroom on Fifth Street cost a grand and a half, minimum. Be grateful for your rent-controlled life. Embrace the fact that you live above the poverty line.

She went to pour herself a vodka, decided against it. Better stay stone-cold sober, in case the kid should call. She made herself a cup of tea instead, took her Whitman down from the shelf, and curled up on the love seat with it.

Whitman, Walt. She hadn’t thought about him, really, since college. Yes, she was an avid reader, but she wasn’t the kind of person who sat home at night and read poetry for pleasure. She knew the basics: America’s great visionary poet, alive sometime in the 1800s, produced in his long life this one enormous book, which he kept revising and expanding the way another man might endlessly remodel and add onto his house. Big, white Santa Claus beard, floppy hat. Liked boys.

He liked boys, didn’t he? Was that true? She paged through the book.

Right. What else?

Would the kid have read that? Maybe, maybe not. He’d quoted from the opening stanza, nothing more. A smart kid picked up all kinds of things.

Still, there was something sexual about this. A boy embraces an older man and blows them both up.

Were all the same person. We all want the same things.

She kept hearing his voice in her head. Giving a kidlike performance, she thought. A child who was doing his best to act like a child.

Yet she didn’t feel the murder in him. The kid was, of course, crazy by definition. But still, she prided herself on a certain ability to suss out the truly dangerous. She couldn’t name the specifics, though there were plenty of well-documented signs. This was something else. A flavor, a whiff. A buzz that was the best term she had for it. As if she could hear the tiny sound being made by a bad connection, the particular bit of faulty wiring that made murder more than just a fantasy.

It was complicated by the fact that every now and then, some of them were right. The tobacco companies had discovered a secret ingredient to make cigarettes more addictive. The North Koreans/iad been kidnapping Japanese tourists to educate their spies about the particulars of Japanese customs. Those noises coming from the apartment next door were in fact being made by a full-grown tiger.

She heard a noise in the hallway, right outside her door. A scraping. Something. Like a heel dragging across the tile. It was probably Arthur next door, pausing for an emphysemic breath before stumbling on, but she knew the sounds Arthur made; she knew

all the ordinary sounds the tenants produced in the hallways. This one wasn’t familiar.

She raised her head from the book. She listened.

There it was again. A furtive, scrabbling sound. If this were the country, it might have been an opossum, scratching at the shingles.

The country teeth out there in the dark?

She got up, went and stood by the door. Nothing now. Still, she was shaky. A little shaky. Given the times. She didn’t have a gun, being deterrence. Had never wanted one. Now she wondered.

She said “Hello?” and was embarrassed by the girlish fear in her voice. Fuck that. Fuck them if they wanted her meek. She opened the door.

No one. Just the ordinary drear of the corridor, its brackish aquarium light, its tiles the color of decayed teeth. She stepped out and took a proper look. Empty. The sound had probably been coming from the street or through the wall from the other next-door apartment (where the druggy, dreamy young couple in residence were always engaged in some mysterious project that involved endless little tappings and draggings). There was no one and nothing.