Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

“Still…”

“Just a few more days, Marc.”

“I’ve been wondering if we should split up.”

“Say not so.”

“We’re conspicuous, Simon.”

“Parting track’d by arriving, perpetual payment of perpetual loan.”

“Concentrate. Please.”

“I’d be all alone without you, Marc. And you, without me.”

“I know. I just think”

“I’d rather risk it with you. Listen. Have yourself a Liquex or two, get some rest, meet me for breakfast tomorrow.”

“At Freddy’s?”

“Where else?”

“Okay. Two o’clock?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Goodnight.”

“Sweetest of dreams.”

Marcus clicked off. He dissolved in a shiver of silvery dust.

Simon drank off his Liquex and poured himself another. Was Marcus in fact overreacting? He ran to nervousness. And yet. Old New York was riskier than other places, no denying it. But it was the best place for picking up a few quick yen with no questions asked.

Simon ran through half the bottle of Liquex. He let it carry him off into a simmering, nightmare-laced twilight that passed for sleep. He dreamed of people walking calmly and regally into a river. He dreamed of a woman who wore a secret around her neck.

He rolled off the shelf at one-thirty. He took a dermaslough, got into his streetwear. Levi’s, Pumas, a ratty CBGB T-shirt. Old New York required period dress at all times. It was part of the agreement.

East Fifth Street was full of players and the people who’d come to look at them. The punks strode along in their rage funks. The old ladies nattered on their stoops. Rondo, the day-shift derelict, was at his post in front of the flower shop, ranting his rants. In midblock, a tour pod disgorged a battalion of Sinos. Simon hustled to Freddy’s, dodging tourists. Some snapped a vid of him, though he was not a popular attraction. He was East Village regular; he was filler. There were so many more exotic specimens. Who cared about an aging musician type when there were pink-haired girls with snakes draped around their necks? When there were demented old men dressed in scorched rags, screaming holy fire and the coming of the insect god?

Freddy’s wasn’t crowded at this hour. Marcus was already there. He was at a back table, hunched over a double e. Jorge, who was Freddy during the ten-to-four shift, bid Simon a sardonic good-morning, it being two in the afternoon. He had Simon’s latte on the tabletop almost before Simon’s ass had landed in his seat. Jorge was a good-looking guy, still young. What was he doing playing Freddy, all piercings and mordant wisecracks, during off-peak hours? There would of course be a story. The stories usually involved having failed somewhere else and landing temporarily in Old New York to pick up a little cash before moving on. Some of the players had been there temporarily for twenty years or more. Some had started living 24/7 as their characters. Some had had their names changed.

Marcus didn’t look so good. He huddled into his coffee like it was his only friend.

“Hey, boy,” Simon said. “Feeling any better?”

Marcus’s face darkened, as if he were stifling a belch. His neck went taut. Then it burst out of him. “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.” Immediately after, he glanced around in furtive shame.

“It’s okay,” Simon told him softly.

“It’s not. There’s nothing right now that could accurately be called ’okay.’”

“A drone. One drone, hovering over the band shell when you happened to be nearby. It isn’t much.”

“I told you, though. I’ve had a feeling. For a while.”

“I am given up by traitors, I talk wildly, I have lost my wits.”

“We are so fucked up.”

Simon took Marcus’s hand in his, pressed, and released. He said, “We can’t be nervous all the time, Marc. What would our lives be worth?”

“Why exactly do you think we shouldn’t be nervous all the time?”

It was a pertinent question, if not a welcome one. There seemed to have been an election. The Christians seemed to have regained their majority on the Council. How else to explain the upsurge in Christian comedies and dramas all over the vid, the increasing stringency of law enforcement? If the Christians had in fact won an election, it was not good news for simulos, or any other artificial.

Simon said, “Don’t skeev out on me, huh? I’ll deliver the pep talk if you aren’t careful.”

“When we get to Denver, I’m going to fucking kill him.”

“As if you could.”

“I keep wondering. What if there’s nothing there?”

“Not a productive line of thinking.”

“Right. Okay. He’s out there in Denver, waiting, and he’ll not only fix us, he’ll give us new shoes and free vacations to the island paradise of our choice.”

“Better. Focus on the future. In three more days, we’re out of here.”

“And bound for some godforsaken cow town because a chip is telling us to go there.”

“It’s not like you have a prior engagement.”

“All things swept sole away — This — is immensity — “

“You got that right, sport.”

“I’m tired, Simon. I’m sick of this.”

“What, exactly, are you sick of?”

“The whole thing. I’m sick of being illegal. I’m sick of feeling like I’m nobody in particular. I’m sick of spitting out lines of fucking verse I don’t even understand.”

“And in Denver on June 21, maybe you’ll understand.”

“The message is more than five years old, Simon. It’s like a note in a goddamn bottle.”

“Prodigal, you have given me love! Therefore I to you give love.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Can’t.”

“God help me. Neither can I.”

Simon sent Marcus home with instructions to worry less. He ran a few errands. He needed coffee and dermalath and laser blades. He tried to focus on the immediate. He tried not being nervous all the time.

It was Saturday. The streets were jammed. Still, he went to Broadway for the coffee. That was where the good coffee store was. Besides, he had these hours to fill until he was back on duty again.

Broadway was all ethnic youth, rolling along in packs. Plus the tourists. Plus a smattering of faux tourists in period dress: Midwestern ma and pa in matching nylon windbreakers; Euro couple consulting a map; Japanese gaggles in Burberry and Gucci, aiming ancient cameras at anything that moved. Plus of course a Nadian here and there, making deliveries, cleaning up. There were those who insisted that Old New York should be free of Nadians, for accuracy’s sake. They were suffered to remain, however, for now. Who else would do the work they were willing to do?

Simon procured his coffee and toiletries. He watched a little vid back home. He had gotten hooked on the Finnish show about the woman who leaves her husband for an android, but it seemed to have been replaced by something involving a teenage girl who starts seeing the Virgin Mother in unexpected places (on a bus, at the movies, all ghostly shimmer, with a hungry and mortified smile) and renounces her boyfriend. He watched that instead. It was sexy, in its way. Dykey. Then he scarfed down a spanomeal, got into his kit, reported to the park, and manned his station.

He strode along just north of Sheep Meadow. He had a six at seven.

It was one of those evenings all soft, with an undercurrent of haze-green glow. The chlorophyll sprayers were turned up high. In honor of early summer they had released the first of the fireflies. The lawn rolled off into lavender nowhere, vanishing into trees, and then, overseeing all, the limestone and ziggurats of Central Park South, where the windows were blinking on. Scattered across the broad expanse were the various players the joggers and rollerbladers, the dog walkers and, always, the tour groups, which from where Simon stood might have been gatherings of monks or nuns en route to their devotions, following the liquid twinkles of their guides’ lightglobes.