Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham
said in his new voice, which was all but indistinguishable from his breathing, as if his machine’s bellows were whispering language as they blew.
“It’ll stop soon.”
“That’s good.”
Lucas said, “Good night, Father,” because he could not think of anything else to say.
His father nodded. Could he get himself to bed? Lucas thought he could. He hoped so.
He went to his own room, his and Simon’s. Emily’s window was lit. She was faithfully eating her candy, just as Lucas faithfully read his book.
He undressed. He did not remove the locket. If he removed the locket, if he ever removed the locket, it would no longer be something Catherine had put on him. It would become something he put upon himself.
Carefully, he found the locket’s catch and opened it. Here was the black curl of Simon’s hair, tied with a piece of purple thread. Here, under the curl, was Simon’s face, obscured by the hair. Lucas knew the picture: Simon two years ago, frowning for the photographer, his eyes narrow and his jaw set. Simon’s face in the locket was pale brown, like turned cream. His eyes (one was partially visible through the strands of hair) were black. It was like seeing Simon in his casket, which no one had been allowed to do. What the machine had done had rendered him too extraordinary. Now, in the quiet of the room, the Simon who was with them still met the Simon who was in the locket, and here he was, doubled; here was the smell and heft of him; here his habit, on the drinking nights, of slapping Lucas playfully. Lucas closed the locket. It made a small metallic snap.
He got into bed, on his own side. He read the evening’s passage.
I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation,
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
When he had finished it he put out the lamp. He could feel Simon in the locket and Simon in the box in the earth, so changed that the lid had been nailed shut. Lucas determined never to open the locket again. He would wear it always but keep it forever sealed.
He slept, and woke again. He rose to dress for work and get breakfast for his father, feeling the locket’s unfamiliar weight on his neck, the circle of it bouncing gently on his breastbone. Here was the memento of Simon’s ongoing death for him to wear close to his heart, because Catherine had put it on him.
He gave his father the last of the jelly for breakfast. There was no food after that.
As his father ate, Lucas paused beside the door to his parents’ bedroom. He heard no sound from within. What would happen if his mother never came out again? He got the music box from the table and crept into the room with it, as quietly as he could. His mother was a shape, snoring softly. He set the music box on the table at her bedside. She might want to listen to it when she awoke. If she didn’t want to listen to it, she’d still know Lucas had thought of her by putting it there.
Jack wasn’t there to greet him when he arrived at the works. Lucas paused at the entrance, among the others, but didn’t linger. Jack would most likely be waiting for him at the machine, to tell him he had done well yesterday, to encourage him about today. He passed through the vestibule, with its caged men scowling at their papers. He passed through the cooking room and went to his machine. Tom and Will and Dan all said good-morning to him, as if he had been there a long time, which pleased him. But there was no Jack Walsh.
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,