Specimen Days

They drove on, into the day, across the vast platter of the earth. They were able to go west in a straight line, relatively speaking. The directional kept them informed about what was ahead. They skirted the towns and settlements. They had to curve around the occasional stand of trees, but for mile upon mile there was nothing but fields that had once been grazing land or cropland and were now gone to grass. They saw deer. They saw coyotes. Always at a distance, tawny spots in the green immensity, watching them from afar. The larger animals were coming back, then.

They stopped periodically so that Catareen could hunt. She was usually successful. She would vanish for half an hour or longer and return with a rabbit or a squirrel. In her work of food procurement, Catareen was always the same. She slipped silently away, returned just as silently, and skinned and gutted her catch on the far side of the Winnebago, where Simon and the boy couldn't see her. She presented the gleaming carcasses wordlessly. They never spoke, any of them, about what they ate. They simply ate, and Catareen buried the heads, bones, and whatever else was left. She always buried the remains. It was apparently necessary for her to do that. After the bits of the dead animals had been interred, they drove on.

On the second night, they stopped the Winnebago atop a modest rise overlooking a pond that was as bright as a circle of mirror in the fading light. It gave back the brilliant lavender of the evening sky, a rippled and deepened version, as if the water wore a skin of pale purple light.

Simon said, "I could use a bath." "We all could," said Luke.

They went to the edge of the pond. Gnats and flies hovered over the water's surface. It had a smell iron and something else, an odor Simon could identify only as wetness. He said, "Hard to say whether it's toxic or not."

By way of an answer, Catareen slipped off her cape, strode into the water, and dove, with the same alarming quickness that enabled her to stalk and kill small animals. She simply stood at one moment on the bank and at the next was only a discarded cape stained by animal blood. The black dot of her head surfaced twenty yards out.

"She's not worried," Simon said.

"Me, neither," Luke said, though there was no conviction in his tone.

Simon and Luke got out of their clothes. Luke lifted the fetish necklace over his head, shrugged off the bathrobe. He paused naked at the water's edge. Simon noticed Luke's pink smallness, the twists and concavities of his body. Unclothed, he resembled the skinned carcasses of the animals Catareen hunted.

He said to Simon, "I guess it's clean enough." "Yeah. I'm sure it is."

Luke seemed to take comfort in Simon's assurance, though of course they both knew Simon had no way of knowing anything at all about the pond's level of contamination. Still, Luke seemed to derive a sense of permission. He went with a whoop into the water, throwing up droplets of spray.

Simon stood ankle-deep in the bright water. He thought for a moment that his circuits were seizing up again he felt the first intimations of chill and languor. But this, it seemed, was something else. This was a new sensation. It seemed to arise from the pure strangeness of finding himself at the edge of a circle of water (quite possibly polluted) with a lizard woman and a deformed boy. It was something that moved through his circuits, like shutdown but not quite; a floatier sensation, vaguely ticklish; an inner unmooring, like what preceded sleep.

"Come on," Luke called.

Simon dove in. The water was warm on its surface, cold below. He swam out to Catareen and Luke.

Luke said, "This feels so good. I don't care if it's toxic."

Catareen floated on her back, so effortlessly that it seemed she did not swim at all but was simply held by the water, propelled by it, as an otter or muskrat would be. They were swimmers, then, the Nadians. In the water she looked wilder than she ordinarily did. She looked wilder and more true. She had a creaturely inevitability. Simon understood; he thought he understood. She would be feeling the layer of warm water floating on the cold, the sensation of skimming across a shallow bowl of purple light surrounded by a darkening world as the first of the stars came out. She would be disappearing into this just as she disappeared into her dream states, her lizard song.

Simon was the first to get out of the water. He stood naked on the bank, letting the air dry him, and watched as Catareen and the boy emerged. Catareen naked was all sinew, with thin, strong arms and legs, tiny breast-buds, and a small, compact rise of bony, squarish pelvis. Who was the sculptor? Giacometti. She looked like a sculpture by Giacometti.