Specimen Days

"So you think the guy they really want to kill is their father."

"Don't hold me to it." "Wouldn't think of it."

"I predict we'll find a citizen who's so stressed about his oldest boy running away he's been torturing the younger one double. The kid'll turn out to have been privy to the plan, he'll be taken from his fucked-up home to a differently fucked-up home, where he'll live and get treatment until he's old enough to go out and get a job and have a family and start torturing his own sons."

"You take a dim view," he said.

"And you don't?"

"Why would a kid like that quote poetry?"

"Good question. Are they checking Whitman for that 'in the family' shit?"

"All done. It's not from Whitman."

"Too bad."

"Yeah."

* * *

She spent the day waiting for a call that never came. It was funny she usually felt grotesquely popular here on the job. She was sought-after. Today she just sat by the phone, begging it to ring, like a high school girl in love.

She tracked down a Whitman scholar at NYU, one Rita Dunn, and made an appointment for tomorrow morning. Otherwise, she killed time. Filed a few more things. Got to some old reports that had been languishing in a bottom drawer.

She stayed an extra hour, then packed it in. She had her cell, of course if the kid called back, they could patch him straight through to her wherever she was. She walked home through the dusk of another perfect June day among citizens who refused to shed their habits of looking suspicious to her. The guy nervously unloading boxes from a bakery truck, the jogger in Princeton sweats, even the blind man tapping along with his cane they all seemed like potentials. They were, in fact, all potentials. Everyone was. The trick was to keep living with the conviction that almost everyone was actually harmless. It was the job's central irony. If you weren't careful, you could get as paranoid as the people you dealt with.

Were all the same person. We all want the same things.

Her apartment felt particularly small. It had a way of expanding or contracting, depending on how the day went. Today it struck her as ludicrous, these little rooms in which she, an expensively educated thirty-eight-year-old woman, found herself living. Remember: it's a prize. In today's market, a dinky one-bedroom on Fifth Street cost a grand and a half, minimum. Be grateful for your rent-controlled life. Embrace the fact that you live above the poverty line.

She went to pour herself a vodka, decided against it. Better stay stone-cold sober, in case the kid should call. She made herself a cup of tea instead, took her Whitman down from the shelf, and curled up on the love seat with it.

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to
you.

Whitman, Walt. She hadn't thought about him, really, since college. Yes, she was an avid reader, but she wasn't the kind of person who sat home at night and read poetry for pleasure. She knew the basics: America's great visionary poet, alive sometime in the 1800s, produced in his long life this one enormous book, which he kept revising and expanding the way another man might endlessly remodel and add onto his house. Big, white Santa Claus beard, floppy hat. Liked boys.

He liked boys, didn't he? Was that true? She paged through the book.

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly, Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

Right. What else?

The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran
from their long hair,
Little streams passed all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also passed over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

Would the kid have read that? Maybe, maybe not. He'd quoted from the opening stanza, nothing more. A smart kid picked up all kinds of things.

Still, there was something sexual about this. A boy embraces an older man and blows them both up.

Were all the same person. We all want the same things.

She kept hearing his voice in her head. Giving a kidlike performance, she thought. A child who was doing his best to act like a child.