Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

They stopped periodically so that Catareen could hunt. She was usually successful. She would vanish for half an hour or longer and return with a rabbit or a squirrel. In her work of food procurement, Catareen was always the same. She slipped silently away, returned just as silently, and skinned and gutted her catch on the far side of the Winnebago, where Simon and the boy couldn’t see her. She presented the gleaming carcasses wordlessly. They never spoke, any of them, about what they ate. They simply ate, and Catareen buried the heads, bones, and whatever else was left. She always buried the remains. It was apparently necessary for her to do that. After the bits of the dead animals had been interred, they drove on.

On the second night, they stopped the Winnebago atop a modest rise overlooking a pond that was as bright as a circle of mirror in the fading light. It gave back the brilliant lavender of the evening sky, a rippled and deepened version, as if the water wore a skin of pale purple light.

Simon said, “I could use a bath.”

“We all could,” said Luke.

They went to the edge of the pond. Gnats and flies hovered over the water’s surface. It had a smell iron and something else, an odor Simon could identify only as wetness. He said, “Hard to say whether it’s toxic or not.”

By way of an answer, Catareen slipped off her cape, strode into the water, and dove, with the same alarming quickness that enabled her to stalk and kill small animals. She simply stood at one moment on the bank and at the next was only a discarded cape stained by animal blood. The black dot of her head surfaced twenty yards out.

“She’s not worried,” Simon said.

“Me, neither,” Luke said, though there was no conviction in his tone.

Simon and Luke got out of their clothes. Luke lifted the fetish necklace over his head, shrugged off the bathrobe. He paused naked at the water’s edge. Simon noticed Luke’s pink smallness, the twists and concavities of his body. Unclothed, he resembled the skinned carcasses of the animals Catareen hunted.

He said to Simon, “I guess it’s clean enough.”

“Yeah. I’m sure it is.”

Luke seemed to take comfort in Simon’s assurance, though of course they both knew Simon had no way of knowing anything at all about the pond’s level of contamination. Still, Luke seemed to derive a sense of permission. He went with a whoop into the water, throwing up droplets of spray.

Simon stood ankle-deep in the bright water. He thought for a moment that his circuits were seizing up again he felt the first intimations of chill and languor. But this, it seemed, was something else. This was a new sensation. It seemed to arise from the pure strangeness of finding himself at the edge of a circle of water (quite possibly polluted) with a lizard woman and a deformed boy. It was something that moved through his circuits, like shutdown but not quite; a floatier sensation, vaguely ticklish; an inner unmooring, like what preceded sleep.

“Come on,” Luke called.

Simon dove in. The water was warm on its surface, cold below. He swam out to Catareen and Luke.

Luke said, “This feels so good. I don’t care if it’s toxic.”

Catareen floated on her back, so effortlessly that it seemed she did not swim at all but was simply held by the water, propelled by it, as an otter or muskrat would be. They were swimmers, then, the Nadians. In the water she looked wilder than she ordinarily did. She looked wilder and more true. She had a creaturely inevitability. Simon understood; he thought he understood. She would be feeling the layer of warm water floating on the cold, the sensation of skimming across a shallow bowl of purple light surrounded by a darkening world as the first of the stars came out. She would be disappearing into this just as she disappeared into her dream states, her lizard song.

Simon was the first to get out of the water. He stood naked on the bank, letting the air dry him, and watched as Catareen and the boy emerged. Catareen naked was all sinew, with thin, strong arms and legs, tiny breast-buds, and a small, compact rise of bony, squarish pelvis. Who was the sculptor? Giacometti. She looked like a sculpture by Giacometti.

She stood a moment in the shallows as the boy scrambled up the bank and got back into his robe. She turned and looked out at the water. Simon understood that she took intense pleasure in this: the water and the darkening land. He knew she was reluctant to leave it. He watched her. She was a thin black shape against the pond and the sky. She was, he thought, happy. She was suddenly and unexpectedly happy, or whatever she would call it if Nadians had a term for happiness.

“Beautiful,” he said. He was not entirely sure what he meant by the word at that particular moment. It seemed almost like a new greeting he and Catareen had agreed to exchange a variation of common language, newly encoded.

She turned back at the sound of his voice. She was startled and shy. There was something about her at that moment. He could not describe it. There was perhaps no term for it in human language. He could not give it a name.

He said instead, “How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect is my soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!”

Catareen looked at him. A silence passed.

Luke said to Simon, “You smell slightly better now.”

“Thanks,” Simon said. He started getting dressed again.

Presently Catareen got out of the water, got dressed, and slipped away to hunt. She returned soon after with a pair of small, leggy creatures none of them could identify. Simon cooked them.

“I think we must be in western Kansas by now,” Luke said as Simon poked the skinned haunches on the Winnebago’s radiation pack. “We could reach Denver by late tomorrow.”

“By midafternoon, I’d say,” Simon answered.

What he thought but did not say: he wouldn’t have minded driving on and on. There was something hypnotic about it, something deeply agreeable. Just driving.

Luke said, “Denver has gotten to be a sort of giant shanty town. It’s probably a little like it was almost three hundred years ago. Except the people three hundred years ago didn’t live in abandoned malls and franchise joints.”

“The Christians don’t run Denver, as far as I’ve heard.”

“No, Denver’s basically secular. Some goddess cults, and a big Buddha town on the east side. Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, is small potatoes there.”

“Did you say you believe in all that?”

“Yep.”

“As part of the con.”

“Started out that way. I went along with it so they’d keep feeding me. I said the prayers, I did the daily devotions. I meditated in the pathetic little shrine they’d built in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Just scamming. Then I understood that it’s true.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m totally serious. Something happened one day. I don’t know how to describe it. Something arrived. It’s like, okay, say you walked out of your house every day and shouted, ‘Oh, come to me, Great Heffalump,’ just to please somebody, just because it’s the local custom, because your crazy old aunt won’t take her medicine unless you call for the Heffalump every morning, and then one day this big hairy thing with a trunk and antlers comes lumbering up and says, Tm the Great Heffalump, what do you want?’ What’re you going to do? You don’t believe in him, you don’t like him, you don’t want him, but there he is.”

“I’m not sure if I believe you.”

“I don’t need you to believe me. Hey, are those groundhogs just about done?”

“I don’t think they’re groundhogs.”

“Whatever they are. I’m starving, I don’t mind if they’re on the rare side.”

Simon served the irradiated creatures. Catareen sat between him and the boy, quietly consuming her share of the hunt. After they’d eaten, she buried the remains, and the boy went to bed in the back of the Winnebago. Simon stayed outside a while with Catareen. They sat together on the grassy rise. The wind made a low rustling sound, and the stars shone hard in the deep black sky. The pond put out minute ghostly sparks that could have been reflections of the stars.