Specimen Days

were going to strap a bomb to their chests and blow up a businessman on the street. Here we are, all of us, going through this daily miniature rebirth, and doing it together.

She passed over the Maori-print dress she'd been thinking of in favor of the dark Earl jeans. The jeans and the black crewneck sweater, the low-heeled black boots. She would not try to intimidate or seduce. Not by way of costume, anyway.

She didn't wait around for Simon. It was, if anything, a day to show up at work on the early side. She kissed him goodbye while he was still in his underwear and socks (was there anything as touchingly zm-sexy as a man in black socks and no pants?), gratefully accepted his assurance that he'd wind up the client thing by ten and they'd decide then about where to eat, which apartment to sleep in.

She descended the garbagey stairs, went out into the morning, a spanking-fresh June one, all spangly on the fire escapes. She paused for a moment on the stoop, taking it in. On a morning like this, you could believe the world was safe and promising. You could imagine that nothing harmful, nothing toxic, could flourish. Not when early light slanted down so purely from an ice-blue sky. Not when the window-box geraniums of the first-floor widow were incandescently red and a passing truck said PARTY PLANNERS in glittering gold letters.

Someone was watching her. Right now. She felt it. Any woman could; it was survival coding. She glanced around. In this neighborhood a woman out alone, even in daylight, was by general accord offering herself up for public entertainment. She had to admit it: lately her fury had gone a little soft at the edges. They wouldn't keep annoying her forever. One day the moans and coyote whistles, the Hey, sexy mommas, would cease. Which would be a relief. She'd be just another middle-aged black lady, going unremarked about her unremarkable business. Still, all right, admit it: right now, this morning, here on her front stoop, having left her younger boyfriend upstairs, she felt herself being scrutinized, and she looked for the offending party with a certain angry eagerness, like a princess who'd found her prince but was still being pestered by the enchanted frog with the golden ball. Hey, frog, Pm off the market now, go croak under somebody else's window. She wasn't interested, but still, in some crevice of her mind, some dark and foolish fold, she dreaded the day the frog gave up and hopped off to moon over someone else.

No one was there. No, people were always there. No one was looking at her. There were the besuited eagers on their way to work, a couple of NYU students off to early classes, an old man lumbering along with bags of empty, chiming bottles dangling from both palsied hands.

Still, the feeling was palpable. Someone was staring at her, right now.

She hit the sidewalk, headed west. Get over yourself. You're just feeling your own version of the same edginess that's infecting everybody this morning as hatred once again demonstrates its capacity to find us wherever we are and suck us into the next dimension.

* * *

She got to her cubicle a full half hour before she needed to. Ed Short was still there, finishing up the graveyard shift.

'Morning, Ed,' she said.

'Good morning. You're in early.' 'I am.'

Ed sipped at what was probably his fifteenth cup of coffee. His eyes were bright and watery. His sparrow- colored hair, already thinning, stood out from his head with a certain doomed desperation, the way a fire flares just before it goes out. Ed was, what, thirty-two, thirty-three? He was made for the job: young and more than a little bit mean, untroubled by imagination, incapable of boredom, eager to root out the bad guys and hurl them into the abyss. He'd have red-tagged the kid if he'd been on the phone that day. Ed red-tagged almost everything. People complained red tags meant more work, of course, plus they cost money, and the whole err-on-the-side-of-caution policy had its implied limits. But Ed was just the sort of pain in the ass who got to be a department head. When the Eds of the world were right, when they appeared to have made a good call because they called almost everything, the fact that they'd spent years irritating everyone around them didn't matter. They were heroes. They'd saved the day. It was impossible to imagine how many historical figures, how many great men (and women, there was the occasional woman), were people like Ed, people who never got distracted, whose faith never wavered, who would stay by their phones or in their laboratories or at their easels until finally, finally, something happened, while most of the rest of the population tended, over time, to think of other things, to wonder what it would be like to live in the country, to speculate over the possibility that doing a simple job and raising a couple of kids might actually be enough.

What lives in empty rooms?
How far does the light reach?
Are there teeth in the wood?

Cat asked, 'What's come in from the site?'

'Kid was rigged with a pipe bomb. No nails or anything, it wasn't meant to scatter. Just to incinerate everything within five or six feet.'

'You can learn how to make something like that off the Internet.'

'Yep. Half of Dick Harte's scalp turned up on a window ledge three stories up. Otherwise it's just some bone fragments and one more tooth.'

'Why don't you go home early?' she said. 'I'm ready to take over.'

'Thanks. I'm fine. You just relax for a little while.'

Right. Today she was someone who should relax for a little while.

She went into the lounge, poured herself some coffee it was drinkable until about 10:00 a.m. and pulled the papers out of her bag.

Thirty-six-point type in the Times, above the fold, but only eight points larger than a headline about an experimental new weapon that could render a country uninhabitable without killing its citizens or destroying its structures. EXPLOSION IN LOWER MANHATTAN. Subhead: Two Killed, Five Injured in Possible Terrorist Attack. Bless all those guys at the Times, our good fathers, trying to tell us what we need to know (what they think we need to know) without unduly exploiting our collective desires to be titillated, to be reassured, to be scared shitless. Easy to picture the men (and women, there might be a woman or two) up there in Midtown, agonizing over how much panic they should or should not inspire, pending further details. The Post and the News, of course, were not similarly concerned. MAD BOMBER AT GROUND ZERO in the News, TERROR STRIKES AGAIN in the Post.

The gist of all three stories was essentially the same; only the tone varied. Unidentified bomber kills self and one Dick Harte, real-estate magnate. Nothing yet about the bomber being a kid the guys downtown had somehow managed to keep the witnesses sequestered for the moment. Obvious comparisons to what Hamas and the rest did in Israel. The Post reporter had fabricated something about the bomber shouting 'Allah is great' either found some lunatic who claimed to be a witness or made it up entirely but otherwise nothing appalling, beyond, of course, the event itself. All three had patched together what they could about Dick Harte, though his wife and kids weren't talking. There were pictures: a scrupulously regular-looking guy, fifty-three years old, with that strange babylike blankness certain men could take on when they went bald, when that big dome of forehead made their features look smaller and more innocent. CEO of the Calamus Development Corporation. Wife Lucretia (Lucretia?) was a decorator based in Great Neck, where they did in fact live. Daughter Cynthia was a senior in public school, son Carl a sophomore at some school Cat had never heard of. The Times and the Post had the same photo, the straightforward one from God knew where that would go with the obit; the News had dug up one of Harte standing with a few others who looked more or less like him, at the dedication of what Cat knew to be yet another office monolith on Third Avenue.

She went to her cubicle at nine, took her place in the chair still warm from Ed's dedicated ass. She looked over Ed's entries in the log. Three callers who claimed responsibility, all scrupulously red-tagged. Two were variations on the same idea: now you'll all be sorry (no specifics about what we should all be sorry for), and I'm not finished yet; both were vague on the subject of how they'd survived the explosion and lived to make the call. The