Specimen Days

She started down Broadway. If you didn't know what had happened, you could easily believe it was just another night in the city. The sidewalks were a little less crowded, people were moving with more than the usual degrees of slink or alacrity, but if you were fresh from Mongolia or Uganda you wouldn't have any but the usual touristic impressions. The city was only being rocked in its less visible parts, along its filaments, in its dreams of itself. People were scared, and yes, it was impossible to know yet just how much money was bleeding out, how many reservations were being canceled, how many corporations were considering relocating, but Broadway was still full of cabs and trucks, stores were still open, unfortunates still worked the passersby for change. The machinery of the city, the immense discordant poetry of the city (thank you, Mr. Whitman), racketed on. You had to bring a building down to make things look different. Tonight there were no candlelight vigils, no mounds of flowers, no women wailing. It all went on.

Four people had gone into space to behold the birth of stars. It all went on. What else should it do?

She browsed the store windows along lower Broadway. She was hungry for normalcy the way she might be hungry for a pastrami on rye. She didn't want to be herself. Not right now. She wanted, right now, to be a shopper, a regular person, unhaunted, unjaded, free from all but the usual quotients of bitterness and guilt, somebody with a little time to kill on her way to her boyfriend's place.

The shop windows down here were full of jeans or running shoes or discount cosmetics or every now and then Chinese herbs. The fancier establishments were on the side streets. Broadway was for the young, the semipoor, the easily delighted. She was not young and was not easily delighted. She could have wandered east or west, into different neighborhoods, but then she'd have been window-shopping, and she couldn't bring herself to do that. Too trivial. She could at best wander slowly along her inevitable route, scanning the windows she'd be passing anyway, beingincidentally trivial, waiting for it to be nine o'clock.

It was just after she'd crossed Canal Street that the feeling arrived again. Someone was watching her. She walked on. She didn't turn around. Not right away. She waited until she'd reached a shop window (a junk shop, it seemed, didn't matter what it was). She pretended to be checking out the merchandise, then did a quick glance up the street. Nothing and no one. Okay, a white couple huddled pigeonlike into each other as they negotiated the scraps of windblown trash, and an old woman sitting on a loading dock, dangling her tattered legs over the edge, swinging them like an ancient, exhausted child.

Still, Cat had the feeling. The queasy tingle along the back of her neck.

She refocused, actually looked at the contents of the store window. Gaya's Emporium. It was a little strange for Broadway more an East Village sort of establishment. Its window was heaped with scavengings: a ratty coat with a fake-fur collar, two pairs of ancient roller skates, a mirrored disco ball, tangles of costume jewelry, a lantern-jawed male mannequin's head, blandly cheerful under a rainbow Afro wig. Total randomness things that were gathered together because the shop owner had found them somewhere and thought that somebody might conceivably want to buy them. The world overflowed with product, old and new; it was impossible to contain it all. At the lower levels, sheer quantity trumped categorization.

She lingered a moment before the sorrowful bounty. It would look like treasure to most people in the world, wouldn't it? You had to be among the privileged few to know that this stuff was junk even when it was new, this faux rich-lady coat and this chipped porcelain shepherdess and this bundle of plastic swizzle sticks topped with plastic mermaids.

Among the coils of jewelry was a bowl, half hidden. It had been carelessly filled with gold-toned brooches, a strand of fake pearls, but the rim showed, pale and bright as the moon, decorated along its upper edge with symbols of some sort, which might have been flowers or sea anemones or stars. Junk, it was probably junk what else could it be, considering where it had ended up? and yet, it didn't look like junk, even in the fluorescence of the shop window. It seemed to emit a faint but perceptible glow, like a wristwatch in the dark, though it was pure, pure white. It looked, from what she could see of it, like a displaced treasure, something genuinely rare, mistaken for dross. These things turned up every now and then, didn't they? The da Vinci drawing slipped in among the botanical prints, the Melville letters stacked with old bills and yellowed shopping lists. Could it possibly be Chinese? Could it be something Simon might want for his collection?