Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham
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trying to tell her was differently true.
She walked on. Her new face, reddened and ravaged, cut through the air. She might have been the carved woman at the prow of a ship.
She said, “I can’t worry about you anymore. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I have too much else to think about.”
“You don’t need to worry about me. Let me worry about you. Let me help you. Let me care for you.”
She laughed bitterly. “What a good idea,” she said. “I’ll come live with you and your parents. We’ll live, all four of us, on what you make at the works. No, there will be five. That shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”
For a moment, Lucas could see her as she’d said she was: a whore and a liar, a woman of the street, hard and calculating, naming her price.
He said, “I’ll find a way.”
She stopped, so abruptly that Lucas went on several paces ahead. Foolish, he was a foolish thing.
She said, “Forget me. I’m lost.”
He said, “Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded.”
She emitted a small, muffled cry and continued walking. He stood watching the back of her blue dress, the pile of her copper-colored hair, as she passed out of the square.
Always, then, it—everything—made a more complete and sickening sense. Simon would want her and the child as well. He sought to marry her in the realm of the dead, to live there with her and his child.
She must be prevented from going to work tomorrow.
Lucas couldn’t think what to do, yet he must do so much. He must keep her from her machinery. He must find money for her.
He remembered the money she’d thrown at his feet. He hadn’t picked it up. He ran back to Eighth Street for it, but of course it was gone.
He walked east on Eighth Street. He thought perhaps he could find the money again, if not the coins Catherine had tossed at his feet then some other money, some equivalent sum that might be out there, sent by a heavenly agency that forgave and abetted foolish hearts. He thought that if he scoured the city, if he went high and low in it, he might happen onto some money that was not being watched, that belonged to someone but was unattended, dropped on the pavement or otherwise misplaced, as his own coins had been. He didn’t propose to steal, any more than whoever had found his money had stolen it from him. He hoped rather to take his place on a chain of losses and gains, an ongoing mystery of payments made and payments received, money given from hand to hand, to satisfy an ancient debt that had always existed and might be finally repaid in some unforeseeable future. He hoped the city might produce help through incomprehensible means, just as his stamping of iron plates produced housings.
He would search for whatever might be there.
He went along Eighth Street to Broadway. If there was money overlooked, if there were coins carelessly dropped, it was likeliest to happen there.
Broadway was filled with its lights and music, its departing shoppers and its glad men in hats, laughing, blowing smoke from the bellows of their chests. Lucas walked among them, looking attentively downward. He saw the tips of boots, the cuffs of trousers, the hems of skirts. He saw the little leavings that were trod upon: a cigar end, a curl of twine, a canary-colored pamphlet announcing “Land in Colorado.”
He’d gone along for several blocks, twice incurring the muttered indignations of citizens who had to step out of his way, when he came upon a pair of boots that seemed familiar, though he knew he had never seen them before. They were workingman’s boots, dun-colored, stoutly laced. They stopped before him.
He looked up and beheld Walt’s face.
Here was his gray-white cascade of beard, here his broad-brimmed hat and the kerchief knotted at his neck. He was utterly like his likeness. He smiled bemusedly at Lucas. His face was like brown paper that had been crushed and smoothed again. His eyes were bright as silver nails.
“Hello,” he said. “Lost something?”
Lucas had gone searching for money and found Walt. A vast possibility trembled in the air.
He answered, “Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery, here we stand.”
Walt expelled a peal of laughter. “What’s this?” he said. “You quote me to myself?”
His voice was clear and deep, penetrating; it was not loud, but it was everywhere. It might have been the voice of a rainstorm, if rain could speak.
Lucas struggled to answer as himself. What he said was, “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.”
“How extraordinary,” Walt said. “Who are you, then?”
Lucas was unable to tell him. He stood quivering and small at Walt’s feet. His heart thumped painfully against his ribs.
Walt squatted before Lucas. His knees cracked softly, like damp twigs.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Lucas.”
“Lucas. How do you come to know my verse so well?”
Lucas said, “I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself; they do not know how immortal, but I know.”
Walt laughed again. Lucas felt the laughter along his own frame, in his skeleton, as an electrified quake, as if Walt were not only laughing himself but summoning laughter up out of the earth, to rise through the pavement and enter Lucas by the soles of his feet.
“What a remarkable boy you are,” Walt said. “How remarkable to find you here.”
Lucas gathered himself. He said, “I wonder if I might ask a question, sir?”
“Of course you may. Ask away. I’ll answer if I’m able.”
“Sir, do the dead return in the grass?”
“They do, my boy. They are in the grass and the trees.”
“Only there?”
“No, not only there. They are all around us. They are in the air and the water. They are in the earth and sky. They are in our minds and hearts.”
“And in the machines?”
“Well, yes. They are in machinery, too. They are everywhere.”
Lucas had been right, then. If he’d harbored any doubts, here was the answer.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Tell me of yourself,” Walt said. “Where do you come from? Are you in school?”
Lucas couldn’t find a way to answer plainly. What could he tell Walt, how account for himself?
He said at length, “I’m searching for something, sir.”
“What are you searching for, lad?”
He could not say money. Money was vital, and yet now, standing before Walt’s face and beard, under the curve of his hat, it seemed so little. Saying “money” to Walt would be like standing in Catherine’s hallway, blazing with love, and receiving a lamb’s neck and a bit of potato. He would have to say what the money was for, why he needed it so, and that task, that long explanation, was more than he could manage.
He could say only, “Something important, sir.”
“Well, then. We are all searching for something important, I suppose. Can you tell me more exactly what it is you seek?”
“Something necessary.”
“Do you think I could be of any help?”
Lucas said, “You help me always.”