Specimen Days

Lucas waved. He couldn't be certain it was Walt or St. Brigid, but he waved nonetheless. His good hand held Catherine, so he had to wave with the other, the bleeding bundle. He was suddenly proud. Here is what was asked of me. Here is what I've done.

Neither Walt nor St. Brigid saw him. Walt would find him in time, though. He had found him on Broadway at his moment of need; he would surely find him again. Lucas and Catherine would go into the book, for the book was never finished. Lucas would recite it to Walt and to everyone. He would recite what Walt had not yet written, for his life and the book were one thing, and everything he did or said was part of the book.

Smoke but not smoke, that which smoke created, swirled around them all, a densifying of the air, a sharp and painful enlivening. Lucas could see it as clearly as he saw the pain curtain. The air had thickened; it seemed he could reach out with his good hand and form it into balls, like snow. It sparked with embers, demonstrating its likeness to the night sky.

The air had a taste. Lucas rolled it in his mouth. He recognized it.

The dead had entered the atmosphere. Lucas knew it as surely as he had known Simon's presence in the pillow. With every breath Lucas took the dead inside him. This was their bitter taste; this was how they lay ashen and hot on the tongue. Lucas went on waving to the man in the crowd. It seemed suddenly that Walt must see him, must come to him, and soon. Walt must take him to the riverbank, show him the way to the grass.

Walt didn't look at him, nor did the grieving saint. There was too much else to see. Lucas saw, as they all must, a crowd and a building blazing, a huge and mesmerizing wholeness in which a boy waved the stump of his hand.

The dead filled Lucas's mouth and lungs. Catherine wept in his embrace. He felt himself seen, as he'd been seen last night in the park, by a presence that knew him beyond his name or person, beyond the mechanism of flesh and bone that slept in a room, that had wanted a horse on wheels. He was weary; he was abruptly and profoundly weary. He thought his legs would crumble under him. He thought he would fall as the woman had fallen. He would vanish and leave only clothes behind, worried by smoke and wind.

He struggled to remain. He said, 'Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.'

The crowd cried out, as if they were one body. Above, another woman stood in a window. Her dress had caught fire. She stood like fire itself, in the shape of a woman. Lucas watched as the others did. Her dress blazed, but her head was still a woman's head. She might have been Emily or Kate or the dark-haired girl who'd said, 'Won't I do instead?'

She looked down. She looked at Lucas.

He knew, though her eyes were not visible from so far away. He understood. By waving his hand, he had summoned not Walt or St. Brigid but the fire woman, the newest member of the dead. He had wanted to be seen, and he had been.

He returned her gaze. He could do nothing else. His heart raged and burned, full of its own fire. It blazed as Emily or not Emily, as Kate or the dark-haired girl, blazed in the window. She said (though she did not speak in words), We are this now. We were weary and put-upon, we lived in tiny rooms, we ate candy in secret, but now we are radiant and glorious. We are no longer anyone. We are part of something vaster and more marvelous than the living can imagine.

She said, God is a holy machine that loves us so fiercely, so perfectly, he devours us, all of us. It is what we're here for, to be loved and eaten.

Lucas heard the woman's words, and he heard Catherine's heart at his ear. He understood. He and Simon had done their work. They'd outwitted the machine God. They'd given more life to Catherine; they'd given her a future. He saw her tickling her baby with a leaf of grass. He saw her and the child going on as citizens in the world of the not dead. He himself was meant for other things. He was meant, had always been meant, for this.

The fire woman spread her wings and flew.

Catherine screamed. She and the crowd made a single sound. The fire woman shrieked toward the earth, trailing ribbons of flame. Lucas pressed closer to Catherine's heart. His own heart, joining hers, swelled in his chest, grew bigger and bigger. He knew then that he was one of the dead and always had been. He felt his heart burst, like a peach breaking through its skin. He faltered, though he hadn't meant to. The pavement grew larger. Catherine caught him. She held him against one knee. Half prone, held by Catherine, he looked up. He saw the woman cross the sky. He saw above her, above the smoke and the sky, a glittering horse made of stars. He saw Catherine's face, pained and inspired. She spoke his name. He knew that his heart had stopped. He wanted to say, I am large, I contain multitudes. I am in the grass under your feet. He made as if to speak but did not speak. In the sky, the great celestial horse turned its enormous head. An unspeakable beauty announced itself.

The Children's Crusade

She had missed it. Nobody blamed her, but she shouldn't have missed it. She was supposedly one of the magic few, one of the ones who could hear the ping of true intention, like a distant hammer driving home a nail, no matter how florid the caller, no matter how unlikely the threat. But she had missed it. When the call came she'd thought: white kid, somewhere between an old twelve and a young fifteen, standard cybergeek sitting in a smelly boy-room that no force on earth could make him clean, surrounded by Big Gulp cups and remote controls; pale, ferretlike underling who lacked inflection of voice or body, who looked grubby even on the rare occasions when he was clean, who had one or two friends exactly like him and spoke to no one else, just his family because it was unavoidable and his tiny band of fellow Igors, with whom he shared a private language and a vocabulary of creepy passions and a proclivity for spending as much time as humanly possible in dim suburban bedrooms that glowed with furtive computer light and smelled of feet and sweaty wool and old cum.

This kid, in various incarnations, was a regular feature of life in the deterrence unit. They were a breed sad little pockmarked desperadoes half-mad with hormones and loneliness, sitting out there with their dicks in one grimy hand and their cell phones in the other. Nothing about the call had been notably different, none of the danger signs was there. Or so she'd thought. She only half remembered it, at best.

No specifics of target or weaponry, just that adolescent-voiced vow to take out an average citizen, because people were, well what's wrong with people, tell me fucking up the world, destroying it you thinking of anyone in particular, someone specific you want to take out? doesn't matter, does it, we're all the same not to us, we're not I meant it doesn't matter to the world, it doesn't matter in geological time who are you mad at, I think you're mad at someone, am I right? no you don't get it I'm not mad at anyone I'm just going to blow somebody up and I thought I should tell someone.

Click.

Cat had blue-tagged it, sent it down the funnel. Then, three days later, she'd heard that ping in the back of her mind when the report came in. Explosion on Broadway and Cortlandt, right by Ground Zero, at least one splattered, two likelies, maybe more. She had by then talked to dozens more potentials, among them a guy who said he was posing as a gay man and going to gay bars to slip poison into other men's drinks, thus helping to eliminate a few of the people who were sucking the sap from the Tree of Life. She'd talked to an elderly male Hispanic who was going to machete the staff of the public library, main branch, unless they tracked down whoever had been writing insults about him in the pages of the books.

She'd started making lists again. She'd been trying to kick the habit. But after the man who was going to dice the librarians hung up, there it was, right in front of her, in Sharpie on a Post-it:

Harm is in the books Kill the harmless New broom?

It wasn't crazy. These were her notes. A psychologist took notes. Still, hers could run a little loose. She'd crumpled the Post-it and thrown it away. Given the current climate, she didn't like the idea of somebody finding those particular words in her handwriting. And okay, she didn't like the fact that she hadn't fully realized she was doing it.

Maybe Simon needed to take her away for a few days. Maybe a dose of beach and room service, a dose of pure, undivided Simon, would help her feel less edgy.

She'd toss his BlackBerry into the surf, if it came to that. She'd drown it in her pina colada.

When the news arrived, Cat heard the ping but couldn't quite remember the call. It