Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

The man. She wasn’t like that. She’d never gone for rich guys, even young, when she was proper bait.

But still, here she was, safe, in this bedroom, high above the streets. It was admit it a little fucked up. Probably. It was a little bit cold. Wasn’t it? She gave him street cred; she tickled his edgy bone. She made him more complicated. He gave her, well… this.

And love. She did in fact love him, and he seemed to love her, too. She’d gone years without anything she could call love. She hadn’t expected Simon or anyone like him, but here he was. Here were his thumbs and lips and eyebrows; here were his gravitas and prosperity; here was his secret self, that tiny, harmed, indignant quality she sensed in him, thought she detected on his face as he slept.

Simon came out of the bathroom naked, got into bed beside her. He said, “Do you think the kid will call again?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“You must have some idea, don’t you?”

She said, “Once a perpetrator has initiated contact like this, odds are he’ll want to reestablish.”

Screw it, talk dirty to him. You’re too tired to resist. “That figures,” he said.

“What you try to do,” she told him, “is supplant the existing object. If you’re lucky, if you’re very lucky, you can become the person he loves and wants to destroy. He starts redirecting all that feeling to you.”

Shameless. Not even true. Just sex talk. “Like you would in therapy,” Simon said.

“Yes and no. You need to be compassionate but authoritative with someone like this. Somebody like this usually wants a boss. A voice in his head is telling him to do things he suspects he shouldn’t do. He wants a new voice. That’s probably why he called in the first place.”

Was that enough? Now could they just have sex, or not have sex, and go to sleep?

He said, “So, you try to become the voice in his head?”

He ran a pink fingertip precisely along her forearm, as if he were reading Braille. They could make one beautiful baby together, no denying it. Caramel-colored skin, head of billowy curls. Cat was probably still young enough. Maybe she was.

“Yeah,” she said. “As opposed to the aliens, or the CIA, or whoever.”

“You try to be the new, better delusion.”

“Right. And if that doesn’t work, you track the fucker down and blow him away.”

That did it. Simon kissed her and worked his hand up to her breast.

She woke at a quarter to four. She gave it five minutes, on the off chance, then slipped out of bed. She went into the living room, took Leaves of Grass from her bag, and started reading.

She put the book down and went to the window, looked out at the slumbering city. From here it was all lovely and remote, twenty-two stories below. It was lights and silence and the few stars bright enough to penetrate the city haze. There were the windows of Tribeca and then the empty sky.

Where was the kid right now? Was he sleeping? She had a feeling he was not. She imagined him out there, as wide-awake as she was; he might be looking through a window of his own.

Luke would be twelve now. Since he died she’d been sure he was somewhere; she’d known it as deeply as she’d known his presence inside her, shortly after conception. She’d never been religious. She hadn’t allowed grief to send her crawling to the church. That might have helped, but she hadn’t had it in her; it had seemed if anything like a final insult, to concoct sudden hysterical convictions about what she’d spent her childhood escaping. All right, take my baby, but don’t expect me to don the veil and kneel before the statue. Don’t expect me to clap my hands or raise my voice in song. If she’d done that, she’d have lost herself completely.

And yet, Luke wasn’t gone. She had no idea where he might be. He wasn’t in heaven, and he wasn’t a ghost, but he was somewhere. He had not evaporated. She knew it with gut-level certainty. It was her only belief. That, and the workings of justice in a dangerous world.

She slipped into bed just before sunrise. She wasn’t sleepy, not even a little bit, but if she simulated sleepiness, if she acted like someone about to fall asleep, she could sometimes fool herself. Simon breathed steadily beside her, murmured over a dream. He never had trouble sleeping. She tried not to hate him for that.

She was still wide-awake when her cell went off. It was ten minutes after six.

“This is Cat Martin.”

“Cat, I’ve got your caller. I’m patching him through.”

It was Erna, from downtown. Cat’s heart quickened. Simon opened his eyes, blinked uncertainly. She put her finger to her lips.

She said, “Go ahead, Erna.”

There was the brief electronic hiccup of the transfer. Then there was his voice.

“Hello?”

He sounded even younger than she’d remembered.

“Hello. Who’s this?”

“Urn. I called before.”

“Yes.”

Keep it calm. Keep it matter-of-fact.

“I could get in trouble,” he said.

“You’re not in any trouble at all, not if you let me help you. Did you write something on a wall last night?”

“What?”

“Did you write something for me last night? On a wall?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“What were you trying to tell me?”

“Well. What it said.”

Simon was sitting up now, watching her, wide-eyed.

“Do you think it’s lucky to die?” she asked. “Do you think dying is a good thing?”

“I don’t think I want to yet,” the boy said. “Who is it who wants you to die?”

“That’s how it works. I didn’t know. It’s murder, if you don’t go, too.”

“Is somebody telling you to hurt yourself?”

“I beat and pound for the dead.”

“That’s Whitman, isn’t it?” she said. “Who?”

“Walt Whitman. Did you learn those words from Walt Whitman?”

“No. Walt doesn’t talk like that.”

“Where did you learn them, then?”

“They’re from home.”

“Listen to me. Listen very carefully. Someone is telling you to do things that are bad for you, that are bad for other people. It’s not your fault. Someone is hurting you. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come there and help you.”

“I can’t.”

“You don’t need to be afraid. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of, but you have to let me help you. Tell me where you’re calling from. You can tell me that. It’s all right.”

“The next one is today.”

“Tell me what he’s making you do. You don’t have to do it.”

“I have to go.”

“Don’t go. You’re in trouble, and it’s not your fault. I can help you.”

“Do you think a great city endures?”

“What do you think?”

“Goodbye.” He hung up.

Simon said, “That was him.” He all but quivered with fervent competence.

“It was him.”