Specimen Days

more than kind. He wouldn't desert her when she needed him. But an unraveling had begun. She could feel it, she could see it, still months away, but coming: the end of his interest in her. The beginning of her life in his mind as someone he had dated once. It wasn't surprising. It wasn't exactly surprising. Simon was a collector. She understood now that he was collecting the incidents of his own past, and that one day he would arrive at his present, married to a smart, pretty white woman his own age or a few years younger, raising children, referring every now and then to his youth, when he had bought art and antiques instead of paying tuition, when he had gone to the restaurants and clubs known only to the few, when he had dated a dancer from the Mark Morris company and then an installation artist who'd been in the Biennial and then, briefly, an older black woman, a forensic psychologist who'd been involved in those terrorist attacks, who had spoken to the actual terrorists.

He was programmed for this. Smart boy from Iowa, perfectly formed, ambitious he'd naturally want, he'd need, a wild phase before he took up the life that had been waiting for him from the moment of conception. It had been all but predetermined. If he and Cat hadn't met when they did, he'd have met another colorful character soon enough. And all the while his true and rightful wife was out there, waiting for him.

She, Cat, was a collector's item, wasn't she? She was an exotic specimen men had always thought so. No- nonsense, ultracompetent black girl who's read more books than you have; who doesn't give a shit about domestic particulars and can beat your ass at any game you choose. They liked the tough girl, but they weren't quite so crazy about the nervous one. They hadn't signed on for that. She and Daryl might have survived Luke's death together, but they hadn't survived her remorse. Daryl could have comforted her for a month or two. He couldn't manage a year of it, not when she had nothing left for him. Not when she kept telling him, over and over again, that she had killed their child and that he was an idiot for thinking he loved her. Say something like that often enough, anybody will finally start believing you.

Who could blame these guys, really, for bailing when the messy shit came out? She didn't like it either.

* * *

Her cell rang. She bolted awake, accustomed to listening for it. Where was it, though? Where was she! Simon's. Simon's bed. He wasn't there. Clock said twelve forty-three. She got up. She was naked. She went into the living room, where Simon sat at his thousand-year-old Greco-Italian table, working at his laptop.

'My cell,' Cat said groggily.

'I wasn't sure if I should wake you up,' he answered.

She got the phone out of her bag, checked the readout. Pete.

'What's up?' she said.

'Guess who just walked into the Seventh Precinct station? Walt Whitman.'

'What?'

'You ready? Some old woman who says she's Walt fucking Whitman. Walked into the Seventh, said she wanted to turn herself in. I'm there now.'

'You're joking.'

'Never more serious. Says she's the mother of the perpetrators and her name is Walt Whitman.'

'What the hell.'

'She knows about the Whitman business. That's all I can tell you.'

'I'm on my way.'

'You know where it is, right?'

'I do.'

She clicked off. Simon was out of his chair, all thrilled capability. 'What's going on?'

'Walt Whitman has turned himself in. Walt Whitman, however, turns out to be a woman.'

'What?'

'I'll call you later.'

She went back into the bedroom and got dressed. Simon was right behind her.

'Cat. What's going on?' he asked. 'Hell if I know.'

She couldn't help thinking about how he must want to fuck her now.

She got into her clothes. Simon walked her to the door. She kissed him there. She took his face in both her hands, kissed him softly and lightly.

'Call me as soon as you can,' he said.

She lingered a moment. There on the coffee table was the bowl, perfect in its modest way, bright as ice under the track lighting. It wasn't rare or fabulous, it wouldn't have a place among the ancient treasures on the shelves, but she'd given it to him, and she knew he'd keep it. He could put his keys and loose change in it when he got home at night.

'Goodbye, sweetheart,' she said. Queenly bearing. Schoolmarm diction.

The woman sat in interrogation room three at the Seventh. Pete was with her, as were portly Bob (eyes like a pug's, smell of burnt toast) and scary Dave (Duran Duran haircut, tattoo tendrils creeping up his neck from God knew what he had crawling over the rest of him), FBI. Cat was escorted in by a sweet-faced Hispanic detective.

The woman was sixty or so, sitting straight as a hat rack in the grungy precinct chair. Her white hair arctic white, incandescent white was pulled into a fist at the back of her long, pale neck. She wore a shapeless coffee- colored dress and a man's tweed jacket with the sleeves turned up at the wrists, revealing modest bands of gray striped lining. Her long-fingered hands were splayed primly on the tabletop, as if she were waiting for a manicure.

For a moment Cat thought, It's the woman I bought the bowl from. It wasn't. Of course it wasn't. Still, this woman could have been her older sister.

'Hey, Cat,' Pete said.

Portly and Scary both nodded.

Cat said to the woman in the chair, 'They tell me you're Walt Whitman.'

'The boys call me that,' the woman said. Her voice was strong and clear, surprisingly deep; her diction was precise.

'It's an unusual name for a woman,' Cat said. 'I'm an unusual woman.' 'I can see that.'

'I've come to tell you that it's starting,' the woman said.

'What is it that's starting?'

'The end of days.'

'Could you be a little more specific?'

'The innocents are rising up. Those who seemed most harmless are where the danger lies.'

'What are you saying, exactly?'

'Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.'

'Listen, lady' said Portly.

Cat cut in quickly. 'You know your Whitman.'

'Do you believe in reincarnation?' the woman asked.

'I'm not sure.'

'You will.'

'Are you the reincarnation of Walt Whitman?' Cat asked.

The woman gazed at her with wistful affection. Her eyes were milky blue, oddly blue, albinoish and unfocused. If Cat didn't know better, she'd have thought the woman was blind.

The woman said, 'It's time.'

'Time for what?'

'To start over.'

'Start what over?'

'The world. The injured world.'

'And how do you think the world is starting over?'

The woman shook her head regretfully. 'Those boys were dead anyway,' she said.

'What boys?'

The woman didn't look particularly unstable. Her pallid eyes held steady. Her pale pink lips were firm. She said, 'No one wanted them. One was left in an alley in Buffalo. He weighed just under three pounds. Another one