Specimen Days, Page 33

  “What is?”

  “You.”

  “I’m not extraordinary. Please don’t patronize me.”

  Emory said, “A child said—”

  “I don’t feel like reciting poetry just now,” Simon told him.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Emory smiled and nodded. “As you wish,” he said.

  Twyla approached from the crowd, with Luke behind her. She said to Simon, “If you’re staying here, you could take care of Hesperia.”

  “I guess I could.”

  “The neighbors are coming to get her tomorrow. Tell them they can’t have her after all. Tell them you’re going to keep her. Will you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  Luke said, “He can’t take care of a horse. The neighbors are a better bet. They’re horse people, right?”

  “Hesperia would be one of the herd to them. She’ll be Simon’s only horse.”

  “This is assuming Simon wants or needs a horse. This is assuming he’d have any idea what to do with a horse.”

  Othea said, “We need to be getting on board now.” She held the infant in her arms.

  Emory said to Simon, “It seems I did a better job with you than I’d realized.”

  “Have a good trip,” Simon said.

  “Same to you. Excuse me, I’ve got to do a head count. Don’t wander off. I want to say a proper goodbye.”

  Emory strode off into the crowd. Luke and Twyla continued bickering about the horse. The argument seemed to be leading them into other, more general areas of disagreement.

  Simon decided it was as good a time as any to slip away. No one seemed to notice when he did.

  He resumed his place beside Catareen in the dim, cool room. From outside he heard the sounds of the departure. A ringing of metal, three clear notes in succession. A strange sound of suction, unidentifiable, that came and went. And every now and then the sound of voices, a child calling, an adult answering. They were indistinct. They seemed to come from far away, farther than he knew them to be.

  He did not wish to see the ship depart. He preferred to be here, in this quiet room.

  As time passed he drifted into sleep and out again. His head fell onto his chest, and he jerked awake. Each time when he woke he was briefly surprised to find himself here, with the dark silent form laid out on the bed. Each time he understood that he was in fact here. Then he’d fall asleep again.

  Finally he got onto the bed beside Catareen. He was so tired. He wanted only to lie down. He moved carefully, trying not to disturb her. He arranged his body beside hers on the narrow mattress.

  Her eyelids fluttered open. She turned her head and looked at him. She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “You.”

  Her voice had thinned. It was a low whistle, barely audible.

  “Me,” he answered.

  “When you go?”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “When you go?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “You are.”

  “No. I’m staying here.”

  “Not.”

  He said, “I wouldn’t want to go without you.” It was not what he’d meant to say. It did not seem quite literally true. And yet, he’d said it.

  “You go,” she said.

  “Shh. Don’t talk.” As if he’d ever imagined asking her to speak less.

  She said, “Go.”

  He answered, “This is where I want to be.”

  She looked at him. Her eyes were fading. She opened her mouth to speak but could not speak.

  “Sleep,” he said. “Just sleep. I’ll be right here.”

  She closed her eyes. Carefully, he put his arm over her. Then he decided she probably wouldn’t want that. He removed his arm. He inclined his head toward hers, let the skin of his cheek touch the skin of her forehead. He thought she would not mind that.

  Soon he was asleep, too.

  He dreamed that he stood in a high place. It was bright and windy. In the dream he could not determine whether he was on a mountain or a building. He knew only that he was standing on something solid and that the earth was far below. From where he stood he could see people walking across a plain. They were distant, and yet he could see them perfectly. There were men and women and children. They were all going in the same direction. They were leaving something behind. He could just barely make it out. It was a darkness, a sense of gathering storm, far away, shot through with flashes of light, green-tinted, unhealthy, small shivers and bursts of light that appeared and disappeared in the roil of cloudy darkness. The people were walking away from it, but he could not see what it was they were moving toward. A brilliant wind blew against him, and he could only face into it. He could only look at that which the people were fleeing. He hoped they were going to something better. He imagined mountains and forests, rivers, a pure windswept cleanliness, but he could not see it. He could only see the people walking through the grass. He could only see what was on their faces: hope and fear and determination, a furious ardency he could not put a name to. The wind grew louder around him. He understood that the wind in his dream was the sound of a spacecraft, departing for another world.

  He awoke. It was still dark. He could still hear the wind from his dream.

  He knew immediately that Catareen had died.

  She lay rigid. Her eyes were closed. The orange no longer shone through the thin membranes of her eyelids. Simon put his hand on her small, smooth head. It was cool as a stone.

  He wondered: Had she hastened her death in the hope that he might still be able to get aboard the ship? Could a Nadian do something like that? It was impossible to say.

  The ship. He might still have time to get aboard, then.

  He ran from the room, down the stairs, and outside. He knew. Of course he knew. Still, he shouted, “Wait.”

  The ship was one hundred feet or more above the ground, quivering as its reactor prepared to deliver the blast. It floated, humming. Its three spider legs had been retracted. It was a perfect silver platter, trembling as if it might flip over, girdled with green-gold porthole lights. Centered in its underside was the circle of the reactor, deepening from blinding white to volcanic red. Ten, nine, eight…

  Simon ran to the empty place where the ship had been. He shouted, “Wait, please, wait.” He stood shouting in the middle of the scorched circle the ship had left behind. He knew it was too late. Even if they could see him (they could not see him), there was no way to bring the ship down again, no rope or ladder to unfurl.

  “No,” he shouted. “Please, oh, please, wait for me.”

  The reactor fired. Simon was consumed by red light, obliterated by it. He was momentarily made only of light, blinded, shouting. It was not hot; it was only bright. The reactor made a small sound, a mechanical cough, and then the ship hurtled upward so fast it seemed to vanish entirely. By the time the red light had dissipated, by the time Simon’s sight was restored, it was already impossible to tell which light was the ship and which was one of the nearer stars.

  Simon stood looking up at the sky. He fixed on a moving light that might have been the ship, though he could not be sure. The sky was full of starlike lights that moved, that could have been flycraft from Eurasia or secret weapons aimed at various enemies or alien ships bearing pilgrims from one world to another. The sky was full of travelers. Simon remained under the stars and the points of moving light shouting, “Wait, wait, wait, oh, please, wait for me.”

  When he was finished shouting there was nothing to do but go back into the empty house. He returned to the bedroom. He lay awake beside Catareen’s body, which contained no trace of her. She had departed entirely. Her flesh had joined the inanimate objects of the room; it was no more than the chair or the lamp. He lay beside the body until the room began to pale with the first light of morning.

  By the time the sun was fully risen, he had dug her grave. He chose a place behind the farmhouse, in the shade of the tree they had looked at together thro
ugh the bedroom window. When the hole was deep enough he went and lifted her body and carried it outside. She weighed almost nothing. In death, she was like a collapsed umbrella. He held her body carefully, with her head pressed to his chest, though of course it made no difference. As he carried her across the yard the horse nickered. It wanted to be fed.

  Before he fed the horse he took Catareen to the grave, sat awkwardly on its crumbly edge, then slid down and laid her on the cool, moist earth. It didn’t seem right to put dirt directly onto her face. He thought at first he would go back into the house for a cloth but decided instead to remove his shirt and drape it over her head. He thought she should have something of his in the grave with her, though of course it made no difference.

  When her features were shrouded by his T-shirt he reached up, took a handful of earth, and spread it over her face. He worked carefully and gently. He added another handful, and another. He covered her handful by handful until she was entirely blanketed by earth. Until she had disappeared. Then he hoisted himself out of the grave and shoveled the rest of the dirt in.

  The horse whinnied insistently. It needed to be fed. He went and fed the horse.

  The sun was high by then. The heat of the day had begun. He was alone here, with the horse and Catareen’s grave. The others were on their way to a new world, one that might be beautiful or might be barren.

  He made breakfast for himself and washed the dishes. It was nine-thirty on a summer morning in an empty house on the outskirts of Denver. He walked onto the porch and looked at what was there. Grass and sky. A single finger of cloud, dissolving in the searing blue above the distant mountain range.

  It was time to go.

  He saddled the horse. He was drawn more to the idea of riding the horse than he was to the prospect of driving away in the Winnebago. The Winnebago could stay here, in the heat and the silence. The sun would rise and fall and rise again on the truck and the house, on the scorched circle where the spaceship had been, on Catareen’s unmarked grave.

  He mounted the horse and rode out. He would ride west, he thought. He would ride to California. He would ride in that direction. He and the horse might die of starvation or the sun. They might be attacked by nomads and zealots. Or they might get to the Pacific. They might go all the way to the far edge of the continent and stand on a beach before what he imagined to be a restive, infinite blue. Assuming of course that the ocean was still untainted. There was no way of knowing, was there?

  He rode west. He rode until the farm was out of sight, until he was no one and nothing but a man on a horse in a vast emptiness, a world of grass and sky. The horse walked steadily on. It was unconcerned. It was only walking. It had no idea about anything.

  Simon and the horse would have to get across the mountains. What were they called? The Rockies, People had done that, though. People who were now long dead had ridden horses across these mountains and reached whatever waited for them on the other side. They had buried their dead. They had carried with them bowls that bore messages written in forgotten languages. They had carried memories of a pond or of a tree perfectly centered in an accidental view or of being left behind as others sailed away. They had harbored unreasonable hopes. They had built cities that rose and fell and might for all he knew be rising again.

  The woman was in the ground. The child was on his way to another world. Simon was on his way someplace, and there might be nothing there. No, there was something everywhere. He was going into his future. There was nothing to do but ride into it.

  A pure change happened. He felt it buzzing through his circuits. He had no name for it.

  He said aloud, “The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.”

  He rode on then, through the long grass toward the mountains.

  Acknowledgments

  As novelists go, I am not a particularly private or solitary individual. I tend to talk about work in progress with a small body of trusted friends, and have the good sense to listen to their ideas. I also show various drafts to various readers, and each helps to make the novel in question stronger and truer than I’d be capable of making it on my own.

  I extend my deepest gratitude to Diane Cardwell, Judy Clain, Frances Coady, Joel Connarroe, Stacey D’Erasmo, Marie Howe, Joy Johannessen, Daniel Kaizer, James Lecesne, Michael Mayer, Adam Moss, Christopher Potter, and Derrick Smit. Also crucial readers, and much more than that, are my agent, Gail Hochman, and my editor, Jonathan Galassi. Marianne Merola sees to it that my books are well published outside the United States. Susan Mitchell, Jeff Seroy, Timothy Mennel, Sarita Varma, and Annie Wedekind have been heroic in their efforts to make this book look beautiful, to catch its errors of fact and infelicities of diction, and to convey it into the world.

  The assistance and friendship of Meg Giles have been crucial in ways too numerous to mention.

  I wrote the third section while staying at the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany at the invitation of Beatrice von Rezzori, whose generosity toward writers is nothing short of remarkable.

  I relied for information on Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, published in 1999 by Oxford University Press; The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger, published in 1994 by Henry Holt and Company; Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself by Jerome Loving, published in 1999 by the University of California Press; Walt Whitman’s America by David S. Reynolds, published in 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf; and the edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass published by the Library of America in 1992. Mike Wallace, coauthor of Gotham, was kind enough to e-mail me in response to certain questions regarding life in the nineteenth century. Although the reader will not learn about the underwear those characters are wearing, I know, thanks to Mike Wallace, and that helped me to more fully imagine them.

  Finally I must acknowledge Ken Corbett, who not only reads passages as I go along, offers brilliant suggestions, and talks me through my fits of discouragement, but helps to create a domestic environment of discrimination, generosity, humor, scrupulous thought, and belief in the fundamental human obligation to try to do at least a little more than one is technically able to.

  MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of the bestselling novel The Hours, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into an Academy Award—winning film; A Home at the End of the World, also adapted for the screen; and Flesh and Blood, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Most recently, he edited Laws for Creations, a collection of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman, published by Picador. He lives in New York.

  ALSO BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

  Laws for Creations (ed.)

  The Hours

  A Home at the End of the World

  Flesh and Blood

  SPECIMEN DAYS. Copyright © 2005 by Mare Vaporum Corp. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.picadorusa.com

  Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.

  For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please contact Picador.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cunningham, Michael, 1952-

  Specimen days / Michael Cunningham.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-42502-9

  1. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.U484S64 2005

  813'.54—dc22

  2005040518

  First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus a
nd Giroux

  eISBN: 9780374706241

  PRAISE FOR MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM’S

  Specimen Days

  “Cunningham’s latest novel—actually, three novellas—is breathtaking…. Impossible to put down, so dazzling is its prose, so complex are the ideas it wrestles with, and so generous is its vantage point…It is, in three daring swoops, a poetic meditation on what it means to be human, a cautionary tale about the separation of progress from morality, and an eloquent call to rebellion against the powers that be. Walt Whitman, in all of his bearded amplitude, must be smiling.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Cunningham’s exquisite prose transcends the genres he has set for himself…. It is easy to imagine [Whitman] beaming down his approval at Cunningham’s strong-armed embrace of all that is America, as he beautifully articulates the frustrations of modern life…. Cunningham too brings that sense of the miraculous to bear on these ordinary, miraculous American lives, and Specimen Days is a book of wonders.”

  —The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

  “Cunningham’s experimentation with the genres brings his prose to new energy…. [It] is exactly the kind of bold experiment that a novelist who takes his art seriously ought to make.”

  —New York magazine

  “This is Cunningham’s most ambitious novel and, for me, his finest.”

  —London Review of Books

  “Cunningham weaves a captivating, strange, and extravagant novel of human progress and social decline…. With its narrative leaps and self-conscious flights into the transcendent, Cunningham’s fourth novel sometimes seems ready to collapse under the weight of its lavishness and ambition—but thrillingly, it never does. This is daring, memorable fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Whitman’s] boundless spirit…imbues Specimen Days with a sense of wonder and magic.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “From leaves of grass we come and go—and from Walt Whitman’s time to the twenty-second century goes Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days. Cunningham (The Hours, A Home at the End of the World) makes the American bard’s visionary democratic spirit the touchstone of this three-part novel set in Manhattan’s past, present, and future…. Specimen Days vividly underscores the timeless human condition: fragile, lonely, desperately seeking intimacy—but ultimately capable of connection and exaltation.”