Specimen Days

The building on Rivington was one of the last of the old wrecks, sandwiched between a skateboard store and a wine bar. It was scabby brown plaster, chalky, like very old candy. Across the street a converted warehouse, its bricks brightly sandblasted, flew a green banner that announced the imminent availability of The Ironworks Condominium Luxury Lofts.

The galvanized steel door, which said DETHRULZ and PREY FOR PILLS in bright, dripping letters, was open. Cat went in. The door led onto a scarred yellow hallway illuminated by a buzzing fluorescent circle. Desolation Row. And yet, someone had put a vase full of artificial flowers on a rickety gilded table just inside the vestibule. Gray daisies and spiky wax roses and, hovering over the flowers, impaled on the end of a long plastic stick, a desiccated angel made of plastic and yarn.

Cat went up the stairs, found the door to apartment nineteen. It was open.

Inside, Pete and Scary and the guys from the bomb squad stood in the middle of a small, dim room. Cat paused, getting her bearings. The room was neat. No clutter. It smelled of varnish and, faintly, of gas. There was an old beige sofa, a little like the one in her own apartment. There were a couple of mismatched chairs, a table, all chipped and scarred but presentable, surely found on the streets. And every surface except for the furniture was covered with pages, carefully aligned, yellowish under coats of shellac.

The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered with the pages of Leaves of Grass.

'Motherfuck,' Cat said. 'Motherfuck,' Pete agreed.

'What do you make of this?' Scary said.

Cat walked slowly around the room. It was all Whitman.

'It's home,' she said. 'It's where the boys grew up.'

At the room's far end, an arched opening led into a short hallway. It, too, was covered in pages. She gave herself a tour.

Kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, lit by bare bulbs screwed into ceiling sockets. The bulbs were low-watt, probably fifteens they emitted a dim and watery illumination. The wan light and the varnish that covered the pages on the walls made it all sepia, insubstantial, as if she were walking through old photographs of rooms. The place was snug, in its insane and barren way. The kitchen was more presentable than hers. Pans, battered but clean, hung from hooks over the stove. On the countertop, a Folgers coffee can held silverware. In the first bedroom were three cots side by side, each scrupulously made up, their dust-colored blankets tucked in, an ivory-colored pillow centered at each one's head. Blue plastic milk crates contained modest stacks of clothes. In the second bedroom was another cot, just like the others. The second bedroom also contained an old sewing machine, the treadle kind, glossy black, insectlike, on an oak stand.

It might have been the low-budget version of an army barracks or an orphanage. Except of course for the fact that everything the kitchen cabinets, the windows was plastered over with pages.

'She's kept them here,' Cat said to Pete. 'Who?'

'The boys. She got them as infants and raised them here.'

'You're shitting me.'

'She brought up a family of little killers. She got custody of kids nobody wanted and brought them here. She's been planning this for years.'

'You sure about that?'

'I'm not sure about anything.'

'You got any ideas as to why?'

'What do you think endures? Do you think a great city endures?'

'Say what?'

'According to her, it's the end of days. The innocents are rising up.'

'Crazy.'

'Mm-hm. Entirely crazy.'

'Her prints aren't matching up with anything in the files yet.'

'They won't. She's nobody. She's from nowhere.' 'You're starting to sound a little like her.'

She said, 'Doing my job. Projecting myself into the mind of the suspect.'

'Not a fun place to be.'

Never has been, baby.

She said, 'Honestly, Pete, we've been expecting this. You know we have.'

'I haven't.'

'Not this. You know what I mean. People see how easy it is to scare the world right to its core. Not so hard to fuck up the system, as it turns out. You can do a lot with a few deranged children and some hardware-store explosives.'

'Give me a break, okay? Sure everybody's freaked out, but the world's going on. One insane old witch and a couple of retarded kids are not bringing it all down.'

'I know. I know that.'

'So what are you saying?'

'You mind if I just go a little loose?'

'Nope. Go.'

'You're probably right. An old witch and a couple of damaged children. But she told me she thinks history is changed by a small band of people.'

'That would be, say, a few thousand Bolsheviks. That would be entirely fucking different.'

'Of course it is. It's entirely different.' 'Don't use that voice with me.'

Pete would know about the voice. His mother had probably used it.

'Sorry. I'm just saying it seems possible, it doesn't seem impossible, that this ragged band of crazy fucks we've stumbled onto is part of something bigger. Something with considerably more potential.'

'More of them?'

'She mentioned an extended family.'

'Christ.'

'She's probably just crazy, Pete. She's probably doing this all by her crazy old white-lady self.'

'But you don't think so.'

'I don't know what to think. Truly, I don't.'

Pete shoved his hands deep into his pockets. His face was ashy, his forehead studded with sequins of sweat. She could see him, briefly, as a child. He'd have been balky and stubborn, furious at the slow-moving, ungenerous world. He would never have told anyone, certainly not his poor overworked mother, of his convictions about what whispered in the back of his closet, what waited hungrily under his bed.

Children know where the teeth are hiding They only tell us what they think we can bear Pete said, 'You should go back and interrogate her.' 'I don't interrogate.'

'Whatever. Go have a chat with the murderous old bitch.'

'Glad to. You've got more people coming, right?'

'About half the force.'

'Pete?'

'Yeah?'

'I was about to say, Don't worry. Now why would I say a thing like that?'

'Take a cab back to the precinct, okay? I need all the boys here.'

'I love a cab.' 'Get the receipt.'

'You know I will.'

* * *

It took her a while to get a cab in a neighborhood this close to the projects. When a courageous soul finally stopped for her (Manil Gupta, according to his ID;

thank you, Manil), she let herself sink into the piney semidark of the backseat, watched the city slip by.

She asked Manil to take her to her apartment instead of the precinct so she could pick up her copy of Leaves of Grass. She might want to refer to it as she talked to the woman, and it seemed unlikely there'd be a copy lying around the Seventh.

Manil nodded and took off. Even if he was only taking her to East Fifth, she found it nice to be driven like this, to hand over control to somebody else. The late-night New York you saw from a moving car was relatively quiet and