Specimen Days

Someone was watching her. Right now. She felt it. Any woman could; it was survival coding. She glanced around. In this neighborhood a woman out alone, even in daylight, was by general accord offering herself up for public entertainment. She had to admit it: lately her fury had gone a little soft at the edges. They wouldn't keep annoying her forever. One day the moans and coyote whistles, the Hey, sexy mommas, would cease. Which would be a relief. She'd be just another middle-aged black lady, going unremarked about her unremarkable business. Still, all right, admit it: right now, this morning, here on her front stoop, having left her younger boyfriend upstairs, she felt herself being scrutinized, and she looked for the offending party with a certain angry eagerness, like a princess who'd found her prince but was still being pestered by the enchanted frog with the golden ball. Hey, frog, Pm off the market now, go croak under somebody else's window. She wasn't interested, but still, in some crevice of her mind, some dark and foolish fold, she dreaded the day the frog gave up and hopped off to moon over someone else.

No one was there. No, people were always there. No one was looking at her. There were the besuited eagers on their way to work, a couple of NYU students off to early classes, an old man lumbering along with bags of empty, chiming bottles dangling from both palsied hands.

Still, the feeling was palpable. Someone was staring at her, right now.

She hit the sidewalk, headed west. Get over yourself. You're just feeling your own version of the same edginess that's infecting everybody this morning as hatred once again demonstrates its capacity to find us wherever we are and suck us into the next dimension.

* * *

She got to her cubicle a full half hour before she needed to. Ed Short was still there, finishing up the graveyard shift.

"Morning, Ed," she said.

"Good morning. You're in early." "I am."

Ed sipped at what was probably his fifteenth cup of coffee. His eyes were bright and watery. His sparrow-colored hair, already thinning, stood out from his head with a certain doomed desperation, the way a fire flares just before it goes out. Ed was, what, thirty-two, thirty-three? He was made for the job: young and more than a little bit mean, untroubled by imagination, incapable of boredom, eager to root out the bad guys and hurl them into the abyss. He'd have red-tagged the kid if he'd been on the phone that day. Ed red-tagged almost everything. People complained red tags meant more work, of course, plus they cost money, and the whole err-on-the-side-of-caution policy had its implied limits. But Ed was just the sort of pain in the ass who got to be a department head. When the Eds of the world were right, when they appeared to have made a good call because they called almost everything, the fact that they'd spent years irritating everyone around them didn't matter. They were heroes. They'd saved the day. It was impossible to imagine how many historical figures, how many great men (and women, there was the occasional woman), were people like Ed, people who never got distracted, whose faith never wavered, who would stay by their phones or in their laboratories or at their easels until finally, finally, something happened, while most of the rest of the population tended, over time, to think of other things, to wonder what it would be like to live in the country, to speculate over the possibility that doing a simple job and raising a couple of kids might actually be enough.

What lives in empty rooms?
How far does the light reach?
Are there teeth in the wood?

Cat asked, "What's come in from the site?"

"Kid was rigged with a pipe bomb. No nails or anything, it wasn't meant to scatter. Just to incinerate everything within five or six feet."

"You can learn how to make something like that off the Internet."

"Yep. Half of Dick Harte's scalp turned up on a window ledge three stories up. Otherwise it's just some bone fragments and one more tooth."

"Why don't you go home early?" she said. "I'm ready to take over."

"Thanks. I'm fine. You just relax for a little while."

Right. Today she was someone who should relax for a little while.

She went into the lounge, poured herself some coffee it was drinkable until about 10:00 a.m. and pulled the papers out of her bag.