Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

Would he be loving? Or would he be furious? Would he have forgiven her?

A nick in your heart. The settlement from the doctor sent me to Columbia. Which got me here.

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.

Daryl. I still think about your neck and your hands. I hope LA is working out for you. I hope you’re thinking about law school again.

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.

We’re in the family. We don’t have names anymore.

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.”

“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.”