Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham
were machinery, too. There was nowhere to go that was not the world, that was not the room. The stars moved mechanically, and something was descending, a dark shape from high in the night sky …
He turned and looked into a face. Its eyes were black pools. Its skin was stretched taut over its skull. It said, “My boy, my boy.”
His mother’s face was pressed to his. He was dreaming of his mother. He struggled to speak, but couldn’t speak.
The face said again, “My poor boy, what they done to ye.”
He was awake. His mother crouched beside his bed, with her face to his face. He felt her breath on his lips.
“I’m all right, Mother,” he said. “Nothing’s been done to me.”
She held the music box, cradled close. She said, “Poor child.”
“You’re dreaming,” Lucas told her.
“My poor, poor boys. One and then another and another.”
“Let me take you back to bed.”
“It’s greed that done it. Greed and weakness.”
“Come. Come back to bed.”
He rose and took her arm. She yielded, or did not resist. He led her out of the bedroom and through the parlor, where the faces watched. Her feet shuffled on the floor. He took her into the other bedroom. His father wheezed and gagged in his sleep.
Lucas helped his mother into bed, pulled the blanket up. Her hair was spread over the pillow. In the fan of dark hair her face was impossibly small, no bigger than his fist.
She said, “I should be dead with him.”
Lucas thought—he could not help thinking—of the bowl he’d bought. There were nineteen cents now, to keep them until Friday next. There wouldn’t be food for the week.
He said, “You’re safe. I’m here.”
“Oh, safe. If anyone were safe.”
“You must sleep now.”
“Do ye think sleeping is safe?”
“Shh. Just be quiet.”
He sat with her. He couldn’t tell if it was better to stroke her hand or refrain from stroking her hand. He rocked slightly, to calm himself. There was nothing so frightful as this. There was nothing, had been nothing, as terrible as sitting on his parents’ mattress, wondering if he should or should not touch his mother’s hand.
He knew he had to take the music box away. But what of Simon’s other point of ingress, their father’s breathing machine? Father needed the machine. Or did he?
Lucas didn’t know if the machine was crucial to his father or merely helpful. He hadn’t been told. It was possible, it was not impossible, that the breathing apparatus, which had been given as a gift, was in fact a bane. Could it be sucking his father’s life away, when it pretended to help him? Did any machine seem to want the good of its people?
Lucas stood, went as quietly as he could to his father’s side of the bed, and took up the machine. Its iron pole was cool to his touch. It was full of its song, as steady and unmistakable as the mice inside the walls. Gingerly, as he would take up a mouse by its tail, he carried the machine through the parlor and put it in the hallway. Was that far enough away? He hoped it was. In the twilight of the hall the machine was as indistinct as the goat’s skull. Its bladder, the size and shape of a turnip, was gray but subtly luminous. Its tube and mouthpiece dangled.
He would leave it there overnight. He would bring it back in the morning, when he’d seen how his father fared without.
He went into the parlor for the music box. He took it and put it in the hallway, beside his father’s machine, then returned to the parlor and locked the door. He checked to make sure it was fast.
When sleep found him again, it brought its dreams, though he recalled upon awakening only that they had involved children and a needle and a woman who stood far away, calling out across a river.
In the morning his father had not yet risen. Lucas went to his parents’ bedroom and cautiously opened the door. They were quieter than usual. His mother murmured over her dreams, but his father, who was ordinarily given to deep snorts and coughings, was silent.
He must need the machine. Lucas must hurry and bring it back.
When he went into the hallway to retrieve it, it was gone. Breathing machine and music box had vanished entirely.
He stood for a moment, confused. Had he dreamed of putting them there? He searched up and down the hall, wondering if they were only farther away. Perhaps he had gotten up during the night and moved them, somnambulistically. No. They were nowhere. He thought briefly that the mechanisms were more alive than he’d imagined, that they walked. Would they have found their way back into his parents’ bedroom? Would the music box be sitting at his mother’s side, singing a song she couldn’t bear to hear?
He summoned himself. He was agitated, but he was not insane. Someone had taken the machine and the music box, as people did. Nothing of any value could be left unattended. He had thought they’d be all right for those nocturnal hours, but someone had carried them off. Someone would be trying to sell them, as the boy had sold the china bowl.
Lucas returned to the parlor. What could he say to his father that his father would understand? He could think of nothing, and so he said nothing. He left his father and mother in their bedroom together. He hoped that when he returned from work, they might be restored to themselves.
Here it was, then: his own machine. He stood before it in the enormous room. Dan and Will and Tom were at theirs, tending them as they ever did, with the steady dispassionate attention of farmers.
Lucas whispered, “You were unworthy, you must admit it. You were untrue. I’m sorry you’re dead, but you can’t have Catherine with you. You must stop singing to Mother about your sorrows.”
The machine sang on. Its song didn’t vary. Lucas still couldn’t decipher the words, but he knew they were all about love and longing. Simon wanted more than he should rightfully have. Why would he be different dead than he was alive?
Lucas loaded a plate and fed it in. The machine took the plate as it always did. It made the impressions, four across, six down. As Lucas carried the first of the day’s plates to Dan, he wondered if his machine spoke to the others at night, when the men were gone and the machines lived here alone. He could imagine it easily enough, the machines murmuring in the darkened rooms, singing the songs of their men, praising their men, dreaming of them, singing each to the others, He is mine, he is my only love, how I long for the day when he allows me to have him completely. Lucas thought he should warn Dan, he should warn Tom and Will. But how could he tell them?
Dan was bent over his machine. He said, “Good morning, Lucas,” without looking up.
“Good morning, sir.”
Lucas lingered after he had dropped the plate in Dan’s bin. Dan was the biggest man in cutting and stamping. He was massive and stooped. He carried his immense round shoulders like burdens; upon his shoulders, partly buried in them, his head looked out with drowned blue eyes. Lucas knew nothing of his life but could imagine it. He would have a wife and children. He would have a parlor with a bedroom on one side and a bedroom on the other.
Dan turned from his machine. He said, “Something wrong?”
“No, sir.”
Dan took a kerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat from the gleaming red dome of his brow.
He was missing the first and second fingers of his right hand. Lucas hadn’t noticed it before.
Lucas said, “Please, sir. What happened to your fingers?”
Dan lowered the kerchief and looked at his hand as if he expected to see something surprising there.
“Lost ’em,” he