Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

“My cell,” Cat said groggily.

“I wasn’t sure if I should wake you up,” he answered.

She got the phone out of her bag, checked the readout. Pete.

“What’s up?” she said.

“Guess who just walked into the Seventh Precinct station? Walt Whitman.”

“What?”

“You ready? Some old woman who says she’s Walt fucking Whitman. Walked into the Seventh, said she wanted to turn herself in. I’m there now.”

“You’re joking.”

“Never more serious. Says she’s the mother of the perpetrators and her name is Walt Whitman.”

“What the hell.”

“She knows about the Whitman business. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I’m on my way.”

“You know where it is, right?”

“I do.”

She clicked off. Simon was out of his chair, all thrilled capability. “What’s going on?”

“Walt Whitman has turned himself in. Walt Whitman, however, turns out to be a woman.”

“What?”

“I’ll call you later.”

She went back into the bedroom and got dressed. Simon was right behind her.

“Cat. What’s going on?” he asked. “Hell if I know.”

She couldn’t help thinking about how he must want to fuck her now.

She got into her clothes. Simon walked her to the door. She kissed him there. She took his face in both her hands, kissed him softly and lightly.

“Call me as soon as you can,” he said.

She lingered a moment. There on the coffee table was the bowl, perfect in its modest way, bright as ice under the track lighting. It wasn’t rare or fabulous, it wouldn’t have a place among the ancient treasures on the shelves, but she’d given it to him, and she knew he’d keep it. He could put his keys and loose change in it when he got home at night.

“Goodbye, sweetheart,” she said. Queenly bearing. Schoolmarm diction.

The woman sat in interrogation room three at the Seventh. Pete was with her, as were portly Bob (eyes like a pug’s, smell of burnt toast) and scary Dave (Duran Duran haircut, tattoo tendrils creeping up his neck from God knew what he had crawling over the rest of him), FBI. Cat was escorted in by a sweet-faced Hispanic detective.

The woman was sixty or so, sitting straight as a hat rack in the grungy precinct chair. Her white hair arctic white, incandescent white was pulled into a fist at the back of her long, pale neck. She wore a shapeless coffee-colored dress and a man’s tweed jacket with the sleeves turned up at the wrists, revealing modest bands of gray striped lining. Her long-fingered hands were splayed primly on the tabletop, as if she were waiting for a manicure.

For a moment Cat thought, It’s the woman I bought the bowl from. It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Still, this woman could have been her older sister.

“Hey, Cat,” Pete said.

Portly and Scary both nodded.

Cat said to the woman in the chair, “They tell me you’re Walt Whitman.”

“The boys call me that,” the woman said. Her voice was strong and clear, surprisingly deep; her diction was precise.

“It’s an unusual name for a woman,” Cat said. “I’m an unusual woman.”

“I can see that.”

“I’ve come to tell you that it’s starting,” the woman said.

“What is it that’s starting?”

“The end of days.”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

“The innocents are rising up. Those who seemed most harmless are where the danger lies.”

“What are you saying, exactly?”

“Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.”

“Listen, lady” said Portly.

Cat cut in quickly. “You know your Whitman.”

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” the woman asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“You will.”

“Are you the reincarnation of Walt Whitman?” Cat asked.

The woman gazed at her with wistful affection. Her eyes were milky blue, oddly blue, albinoish and unfocused. If Cat didn’t know better, she’d have thought the woman was blind.

The woman said, “It’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“To start over.”

“Start what over?”

“The world. The injured world.”

“And how do you think the world is starting over?”

The woman shook her head regretfully. “Those boys were dead anyway,” she said.

“What boys?”

The woman didn’t look particularly unstable. Her pallid eyes held steady. Her pale pink lips were firm. She said, “No one wanted them. One was left in an alley in Buffalo. He weighed just under three pounds. Another one was purchased from a prostitute in Newark for two hundred dollars. The middle boy had been a sex slave to a particularly unpleasant person in Asbury Park.”

“Tell me what you think you and the boys are doing.”

“We’re reversing the flow,” she said. Scary said, “Who are you working with?”

The woman looked at Cat with kindly, knowing weariness. She said, “It’s time to make the announcement. We can’t wait for the last one. He’s taking longer than he was supposed to.”

“Who’s the last one?”

“I can’t find him. I wonder if he’s gone home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Would you go and look for him? He likes you. He trusts you, I think.”

“Look for him where?”

The woman said, “327 Rivington. Apartment nineteen. If he’s there, take care of him.”

She smiled. She had tiny, perfectly square teeth, symmetrical as jewelry.

Pete said, “You’re telling us this boy is at 327 Rivington?”

“I’m saying he might be,” the woman answered. “It’s hard to keep track of your children, isn’t it? No matter how hard you try.”

“Is he armed?” Pete asked.

“Well, yes, of course he is,” the woman answered.

Pete said to Scary, “Let’s go.”

Cat knew who else would be going with them. If there was in fact a little boy sitting in an apartment with a bomb, he’d be vaporized by the squad. No one was wedded, at this point, to the notion of a live capture.

“Good luck,” Cat said.

The woman said to Cat, “Aren’t you going?”

“No. I’m going to stay here and talk to you.”

“You should go. If he’s there, you’re the one he’ll want to see.”

“Not gonna happen, lady,” Scary said.

“You care to tell us what you think we’re going to find there?” Pete asked.

“You won’t be in any danger. I can tell you that.”

“Thanks. That’s good to know.”

“If you find him, will you bring him here?”

“Right,” Pete said. To Cat he added, “I’ll be in touch.”

“So long.”

Pete and Scary took off. Portly stood ominously by the door as Cat settled herself in a chair across from the woman, whose hands were still placed carefully on the tabletop, fingers spread. Her nails, on closer inspection, were not clean.

Cat said, “You know, don’t you, that if your boy is there, they’ll be very hard on him.”

“There’s nothing they can do,” she answered.

“There’s a lot they can do.”

“I’d hate for them to hurt him. Of course I would. No one wants a child to be hurt.”

“But you’re hurting your children. You know you are.”

“It’s better, don’t you think, to have it over quickly. One flash, a moment of hurt, and then you’re elsewhere. Then you’re on your way.”

Cat held herself steady through a spasm of white-hot rage. She said, “Tell me a little more about what it is you’ve come to announce.”

The woman leaned forward. Her eyes took on a remote, cloudy light. She said, “No one is safe in a city anymore. Not if you’re rich. Not if you’re poor. It’s time to move back to the country. It’s time to live on the land again. It’s time to stop polluting the rivers and cutting down the forests. It’s time for us to live in villages again.”