Specimen Days

'That's it?' 'For now, yes.'

He was disappointed, naturally. He wanted her careening around in an unmarked car. He wanted her cracking the case, saving the day. It was not sexy or interesting, her waiting by the phone. It was just say it too maternal.

She said, 'I was reading Whitman. At the same time some maniac was writing a line from Whitman on the wall outside my door.'

'I've never read Whitman,' he said.

Of course you haven't. You're Cedar Rapids. You're Cornell and a Harvard MBA. Your people don't do poetry. They don't need to.

Stop.

She said, 'Chapman was carrying a copy of Catcher in the Rye when he shot John Lennon.'

'Why do you think the kid would choose Whitman?'

'I'm trying to figure that out.'

'Why did Chapman choose Salinger?'

'Well, I'd say it was to feed his own narcissistic sense of himself as a sensitive loner. He identified with Holden Caulfield. Holden was right, and the rest of the world was wrong. Other people might think it was a bad idea to kill John Lennon, but Chapman thought he knew better.'

'You think your kid feels the same way about Whitman?'

'I don't know. I'm talking to a Whitman person at NYU tomorrow.'

'You tired?' 'God, yes.' 'Let's go to bed.'

* * *

Cat slipped under the covers while Simon was still in the bathroom, performing his rituals. Simon's bedroom was the sanctum sanctorum, the vault where the best stash was kept. Along the south wall, shelves offered row upon row of vases and plates and ginger jars, pale green and lunar gray. On the opposite wall a collection of old banks and music boxes looked back across at the pottery. Cast-iron Uncle Sams and horse-drawn fire trucks and dancing bears, carved boxes that still contained the favorite songs of people a hundred years dead. Little toys, behold the perfect serenity of a thousand-year-old jar. Pottery, never forget how much humans have always loved a sentimental song and the sound of a coin put by.

Cat let herself sink into the fat pillows, the zillion-thread-count sheets. Of course she liked it. Why wouldn't she? She'd gotten here by chance. If she and Simon hadn't happened to go to Citarella at the same time (they had the best crab cakes; she'd had a craving for crab cakes), if it hadn't been raining, if they hadn't hailed the same cab at the same moment…

Just like that. Just that quick and easy. A little banter in the cab's backseat. (You sell the future? That is heavy shit. You talk to murderers? No, that is heavy shit.) A cup of coffee and that thing he did with his thumbs, hooking them around the cup rim, tapping out a little tattoo. He had pretty thumbs (she was a sucker for men's hands) and a way of tucking in his lower lip that was what made it happen, initially. Soon after, he proved to be one of those men who cared if a girl had a good time, and she appreciated that. Okay, he was more focused than passionate, his lovemaking had some hint of the deal about it (got to close this one, got to keep the customer satisfied), but still, he was sweet in bed, and she'd thought she could loosen him up, with time. There was his beetle-browed determination to see her come; there was the impossible beauty and sureness of his fat, white propitious life. His collections and his deep leather sofas, his gigantic chrome shower-head. Which had mattered more at first, the thumbs and lips and conscientious sex or the gear?

The man. She wasn't like that. She'd never gone for rich guys, even young, when she was proper bait.

But still, here she was, safe, in this bedroom, high above the streets. It was admit it a little fucked up. Probably. It was a little bit cold. Wasn't it? She gave him street cred; she tickled his edgy bone. She made him more complicated. He gave her, well… this.

And love. She did in fact love him, and he seemed to love her, too. She'd gone years without anything she could call love. She hadn't expected Simon or anyone like him, but here he was. Here were his thumbs and lips and eyebrows; here were his gravitas and prosperity; here was his secret self, that tiny, harmed, indignant quality she sensed in him, thought she detected on his face as he slept.

Simon came out of the bathroom naked, got into bed beside her. He said, 'Do you think the kid will call again?'

'It's hard to say.'

'You must have some idea, don't you?'

She said, 'Once a perpetrator has initiated contact like this, odds are he'll want to reestablish.'

Screw it, talk dirty to him. You're too tired to resist. 'That figures,' he said.

'What you try to do,' she told him, 'is supplant the existing object. If you're lucky, if you're very lucky, you can become the person he loves and wants to destroy. He starts redirecting all that feeling to you.'

Shameless. Not even true. Just sex talk. 'Like you would in therapy,' Simon said.

'Yes and no. You need to be compassionate but authoritative with someone like this. Somebody like this usually wants a boss. A voice in his head is telling him to do things he suspects he shouldn't do. He wants a new voice. That's probably why he called in the first place.'

Was that enough? Now could they just have sex, or not have sex, and go to sleep?

He said, 'So, you try to become the voice in his head?'

He ran a pink fingertip precisely along her forearm, as if he were reading Braille. They could make one beautiful baby together, no denying it. Caramel-colored skin, head of billowy curls. Cat was probably still young enough. Maybe she was.

'Yeah,' she said. 'As opposed to the aliens, or the CIA, or whoever.'

'You try to be the new, better delusion.'

'Right. And if that doesn't work, you track the fucker down and blow him away.'

That did it. Simon kissed her and worked his hand up to her breast.

* * *

She woke at a quarter to four. She gave it five minutes, on the off chance, then slipped out of bed. She went into the living room, took Leaves of Grass from her bag, and started reading.

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the
soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than ones self
is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks
to his own funeral, drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the
pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod
confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young
man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for
the wheel'd universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

She put the book down and went to the window, looked out at the slumbering city. From here it was all lovely and remote, twenty-two stories below. It was lights and silence and the few stars bright enough to penetrate the