Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham
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.
“Yes. Thank you.” As he followed Catherine out he said good-night to Alma and Sarah.
“Even the goblins prefers Catherine,” Alma said.
Sarah answered from the stove. “You should watch that mouth of yours, some goblin’ll fix it one day.”
Lucas stood with Catherine in the hall. It was like his own. A lamp flickered at one end, by the stairwell. Near the lamp, piles of paper, empty bottles, and a sack (what must it contain?) were visible in the semidark. At the hallway’s farther end, the refuse was only shadows. Halfway down, in the direction of the true dark, something lay atop a discarded oil can. Did it have teeth? Yes. It was a goat’s skull, boiled clean.
Catherine said, “I’m happy to see you again.”
Speak as Lucas, he bade himself. Don’t speak as the book.
He said, “I’m happy to see you, too. I wanted you to know that I’m well.”
“I’m glad of that.”
“And you’re well, too?”
“Yes. I’m fine, my dear.”
“And you’re careful?”
“Why, yes, Lucas. I am.”
“Does someone walk with you? In the dark, when you come home?”
“My friend Kate does, as far as the Bowery. Really, you mustn’t worry about me. You have so much to attend to.”
Lucas said, “My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach.”
“Wait here a moment,” she said. “I have something for you.”
She went back into the apartment. Lucas touched the locket at his breast. His mind was a chaos of urges. What would she have for him? He wanted it, whatever it might be. He wanted so much. He watched the goat’s skull as he waited for Catherine. He went into the skull. He became that, a bone grinning in the dark.
Catherine returned with a plate covered by a cloth. She said, “Here’s a little food for you and your parents.”
This was what she had for him. She gave him the plate. He accepted mutely and held it.
He was a beggar, then.
He said, “Thank you.”
“Good night, my dear.”
“Good night.”
She retreated and closed the door. She did not kiss him again.
He remained for a while before the door, holding the plate as if he had brought it and not received it. He heard the murmur of the women’s voices, couldn’t make out their words. Then, because there was nothing else for him to do, he went back down the corridor, carefully holding the plate. His father and mother would want it. He wanted it.
The old woman was waiting on the ground floor to see him out. “No mischief, then,” she said.
“No, ma’am. No mischief.”
Lucas went into his building, carrying the plate. He went up the stairs. He was aware of a subtle wrongness, as if this most familiar of places (the stairwell, with its gas smell and its flickering lamps, the rats busy among the scraps) were altered, as if it had become, overnight, an imperfect copy of itself, in contrast to his day at the works, which was perfect in every regard.
But the parlor was itself. His father sat as he did, in his chair by the window, with the machine at his side. Lucas said, “Good evening, Father.”
“Hello,” his father replied. His work was breathing and looking out the window. It had been for more than a year.
Lucas took three plates from the cupboard, divided the food among them. He put a plate on the table for his father and said, “Here’s your supper.”
His father nodded and continued looking out the window. Lucas took his mother’s plate into the bedroom.
She was in bed, as she’d been when he left in the morning, as she’d been the night before. Her breathing, the gauzy rasp of it, filled the dark. It seemed for a