Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

Lucas got to work. Jack would be glad of that when he came by. Lucas steadied himself before the machine. He took the first of the plates from Tom’s bin. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.

He inspected every plate. An hour passed, or what seemed like an hour. Another hour passed. His fingers started bleeding again. Smears of his blood were on the plates as they went under the wheel. He wiped the plates clean with his sleeve before conveying them to Dan.

He began to see that the days at the works were so long, so entirely composed of the one act, performed over and over and over again, that they made of themselves a world within the world, and that those who lived in that world, all the men of the works, lived primarily there and paid brief visits to the other world, where they ate and rested and made ready to return again. The men of the works had relinquished their citizenship; they had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry. Their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works.

It was only at day’s end, when the whistle blew, that Jack appeared. Lucas expected what? A reunion. An explanation. He thought Jack would tell him apologetically of a sick child or a lame horse. Jack would squeeze his bleeding hand (which Lucas feared and longed for). Jack would tell Lucas he had done well. Lucas had aligned each plate perfectly. He’d inspected every one.

Instead, Jack stood beside him and said, “All right, then.”

There was no tone of congratulation in his voice. Lucas thought for a moment that Jack had confused him with someone else. (Catherine hadn’t known him at first, his mother hadn’t known him.) He almost said but did not say, It’s me. It’s Lucas.

Jack departed. He went to Dan, spoke to him briefly, and went into the next chamber, the room of the vaults.

Lucas remained at his machine, though it was time to go. The machine stood as it always did, belt and levers, row upon row of teeth.

He said, “Who need be afraid of the merge?”

He was afraid, though. He feared the machine’s endurance, its capacity to be here, always here, and his own obligation to return to it after a short interlude of feeding and sleep. He worried that one day he would forget himself again. One day he would forget himself and be drawn through the machine as Simon had. He would be stamped (four across, six down) and expelled; he would be put in a box and carried across the river. He would be so changed that no one would know him, not the living or the dead.

Where would he go after that? He didn’t think he had soul enough for heaven. He’d be in a box across the river. He wondered if his face would be hung on the parlor wall, though there were no pictures of him, and even if there had been, he couldn’t think of who might be taken away to make room.

Catherine wasn’t waiting for him tonight. Lucas stood briefly outside the gate, searching for her, though of course she would not have come again. It had been only the once, when he was new, that she was worried for him. What he had to do was go home and see about getting supper for his parents.

He left among the others and made his way up Rivington and then the Bowery. He passed by Second Street and went to Catherine’s building on Fifth.

He knocked on the street door, tentatively at first, then harder. He stood waiting on the glittering stoop. Finally, the door was opened by an ancient woman. She was white-haired, small as a dwarf, as wide as she was tall. She might have been the spirit of the building itself, pocked and stolid, peevish about being roused.

“What is it?” she asked. “What do you want?”

“Please, missus. I’m here to see Catherine Fitzhugh. May I come in?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Lucas. I’m the brother of Simon, who she was to marry.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to see her. Please. I mean no harm.”

“You’re up to no mischief?”

“No. None. Please.”

“Very well, then. She’s on the third floor. Number nineteen.”

“Thank you.”

The woman opened the door slowly, as if it required all her strength. Lucas struggled to enter in a civil manner, to refrain from rushing past her and knocking her down.

“Thank you,” he said again.

He stepped around her, went up the stairs. He was aware of her eyes on his back as he ascended, and he forced himself to go slowly until he had reached the second floor. Then he raced up the next staircase, ran down the hall. He found number nineteen and knocked.

Alma opened the door. Alma was the loudest of them. Her face had a boiled look, peppered with brown freckles.

“What’s this here?” she said. “A goblin or an elf?”

“It’s Lucas,” he answered. “Simon’s brother.”

“I know that, child. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“I’ve come to see Catherine, please.”

She shook her large, feverish head. “You all want Catherine, don’t you? Did y’ever think we others might have a thing or two to offer?”

“Please, is Catherine at home?”

“Come on in, then.” She turned and shouted into the room. “Catherine, there’s a fella here to see ye.”

Alma allowed Lucas into the parlor. It was identical to the apartment he lived in with his family, though Catherine and Alma and Sarah had left the dead out of theirs. They’d hung pictures of flowers on the walls instead. They’d covered their table with a purple cloth.

Sarah stood at the stove, stirring something in a pot. A lamb’s neck, Lucas thought, and cabbage. Sarah’s face was round and white as a saucer, and almost as still.

“H’lo,” she said. She was small and pretty, childlike, though she was at least as old as Catherine. She wore a tangerine-colored dressing gown. She might have been something you could win at a carnival.

Catherine emerged from what would have been her bedroom, still wearing her blue dress from work. “Well, hello, Lucas,” she said. For a moment she wore her former face, the face she’d had before the machine took Simon. She seemed, as she once had, to know a joke that was not yet apparent to anyone else.

“Hello,” Lucas said. “I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you.”

“I’m glad to see you. Have you had supper?”

He knew he mustn’t accept. “Yes, I have, thank you,” he said.

“Such a strange-lookin’ thing,” Alma said. “What’s the matter with ye?”

“Alma,” Catherine said sternly.

“It’s a question, is all. Do y’ think he don’t know?”

Lucas struggled to answer. He liked Alma and Sarah, though they weren’t kind. They were raucous and brightly colored, heedless, like parrots. They had a shine about them.

“I was born this way,” he said. It seemed insufficient. He might have told them that between himself and Simon there’d been Matthew, dead at seven, and Brendan, dead before he was born. Now they’d lost Simon and it was somehow, miraculously, only he, Lucas, the changeling child, goblin-faced, with frail heart and mismatched eyes. He should have been the first to die but had somehow outlived them all. He was proud of that. He’d have liked to declare it to Alma and Sarah.

“Well, I never thought you’d decided on it,” Alma said.

“Alma, that’s enough,” Catherine said. “Lucas, surely you’ll have something with us. Just a bite.”

Lucas saw Sarah shift her weight to shield the pot. He said quietly to Catherine, “May I speak to you for a moment?”

“Of course.”

He paused, in an agony of confusion. Catherine said, “Why don’t we go out into the hallway?”

There would be nowhere else for them to go. There would be only the parlor, and the two bedrooms.