Specimen Days

Thirty-six-point type in the Times, above the fold, but only eight points larger than a headline about an experimental new weapon that could render a country uninhabitable without killing its citizens or destroying its structures. EXPLOSION IN LOWER MANHATTAN. Subhead: Two Killed, Five Injured in Possible Terrorist Attack. Bless all those guys at the Times, our good fathers, trying to tell us what we need to know (what they think we need to know) without unduly exploiting our collective desires to be titillated, to be reassured, to be scared shitless. Easy to picture the men (and women, there might be a woman or two) up there in Midtown, agonizing over how much panic they should or should not inspire, pending further details. The Post and the News, of course, were not similarly concerned. MAD BOMBER AT GROUND ZERO in the News, TERROR STRIKES AGAIN in the Post.

The gist of all three stories was essentially the same; only the tone varied. Unidentified bomber kills self and one Dick Harte, real-estate magnate. Nothing yet about the bomber being a kid the guys downtown had somehow managed to keep the witnesses sequestered for the moment. Obvious comparisons to what Hamas and the rest did in Israel. The Post reporter had fabricated something about the bomber shouting "Allah is great" either found some lunatic who claimed to be a witness or made it up entirely but otherwise nothing appalling, beyond, of course, the event itself. All three had patched together what they could about Dick Harte, though his wife and kids weren't talking. There were pictures: a scrupulously regular-looking guy, fifty-three years old, with that strange babylike blankness certain men could take on when they went bald, when that big dome of forehead made their features look smaller and more innocent. CEO of the Calamus Development Corporation. Wife Lucretia (Lucretia?) was a decorator based in Great Neck, where they did in fact live. Daughter Cynthia was a senior in public school, son Carl a sophomore at some school Cat had never heard of. The Times and the Post had the same photo, the straightforward one from God knew where that would go with the obit; the News had dug up one of Harte standing with a few others who looked more or less like him, at the dedication of what Cat knew to be yet another office monolith on Third Avenue.

She went to her cubicle at nine, took her place in the chair still warm from Ed's dedicated ass. She looked over Ed's entries in the log. Three callers who claimed responsibility, all scrupulously red-tagged. Two were variations on the same idea: now you'll all be sorry (no specifics about what we should all be sorry for), and I'm not finished yet; both were vague on the subject of how they'd survived the explosion and lived to make the call. The third said he was a member of something called the Brigade of Enlightenment and that the terror would continue until the U.S. stopped allowing women to murder their unborn children.

Pete stopped by just after nine, nursing his first cup of hot coffee-flavored, sugar-free liquid candy. "How you doing?" he asked.

"Okay."

"Get some sleep?"

"A little."

He stepped into the cubicle, made so bold as to put his hand on her shoulder. She and Pete had maintained an unspoken no-touching rule since that night three months ago when they were both working late, when they'd been exhausted and discouraged enough to duck into the women's room together. Cat still couldn't say why she'd done it, she wasn't remotely interested, and yet mysteriously, unaccountably, she'd been headed to the ladies' and had nodded to him, and before you knew it she was sitting on the sink with her legs wrapped around his unpretty middle-aged ass, he because she'd allowed it, because they'd seemed at that moment like the only two people in the world, because his wife was losing her sight and his only child had become an econut in Latin America, and she because… because Pete's wife was losing her sight and his only child had become an econut in Latin America, because she'd let her own son die and she'd been taking calls for going on twelve hours, because Pete's neck reminded her of her ex-husband's neck, because this place was so ugly and silent and far from everything, because she seemed to have wanted, at that moment, to tear everything apart, to go down, to be as crazy and destructive and irresponsible as the people who called her. She and Pete had never spoken about it. They both knew it would not happen again.

"You sure you feel like working today?" "Entirely sure. Find out anything new?"

"Forensics is saying the kid was thirteen, maybe fourteen, but small for his age. Seems to have been healthy, from what they've found so far."

"I hate this."

"Who doesn't?"

"I don't just mean this. I mean all this."