Specimen Days

Pete and Scary took off. Portly stood ominously by the door as Cat settled herself in a chair across from the woman, whose hands were still placed carefully on the tabletop, fingers spread. Her nails, on closer inspection, were not clean.

Cat said, "You know, don't you, that if your boy is there, they'll be very hard on him."

"There's nothing they can do," she answered.

"There's a lot they can do."

"I'd hate for them to hurt him. Of course I would. No one wants a child to be hurt."

"But you're hurting your children. You know you are."

"It's better, don't you think, to have it over quickly. One flash, a moment of hurt, and then you're elsewhere. Then you're on your way."

Cat held herself steady through a spasm of white-hot rage. She said, "Tell me a little more about what it is you've come to announce."

The woman leaned forward. Her eyes took on a remote, cloudy light. She said, "No one is safe in a city anymore. Not if you're rich. Not if you're poor. It's time to move back to the country. It's time to live on the land again. It's time to stop polluting the rivers and cutting down the forests. It's time for us to live in villages again."

"Why are you doing this?" Cat asked.

The woman sighed and tucked an errant strand of ghost-white hair behind her ear. She could have been an elderly professor, fatigued by her students' youth and opacity but still hopeful, still willing to explain.

"Look around," she said. "Do you see happiness? Do you see joy? Americans have never been this prosperous, people have never been this safe. They've never lived so long, in such good health, ever, in the whole of history. To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself. We can fly. Our teeth don't rot. Our children aren't a little feverish one moment and dead the next. There's no dung in the milk. There's milk, as much as we want. The church can't roast us alive over minor differences of opinion. The elders can't stone us to death because we might have committed adultery. Our crops never fail. We can eat raw fish in the middle of the desert, if we want to. And look at us. We're so obese we need bigger cemetery plots. Our ten-year-olds are doing heroin, or they're murdering eight-year-olds, or both. We're getting divorced faster than we're getting married. Everything we eat has to be sealed because if it wasn't, somebody would put poison in it, and if they couldn't get poison, they'd put pins in it. A tenth of us are in jail, and we can't build the new ones fast enough. We're bombing other countries simply because they make us nervous, and most of us not only couldn't find those countries on a map, we couldn't tell you which continent they're on. Traces of the fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turn up in women's breast milk. So tell me. Would you say this is working out? Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?"

Portly said, "Yeah, but you still can't beat a Big Mac." He cleaned a fingernail with an opposing thumbnail.

"And you think you can do something about it?" Cat asked.

"One does what one can. I'm part of the plan to tell people that it's all over. No more sucking the life out of the rest of the world so that a small percentage of the population can live comfortably. It's a big project, I grant you. But history is always changed by a small band of very determined people."

This got Portly interested again. He said, "Who are you working with?"

"We don't see one another as much as we'd like to," the woman said.

"Give me a name."

"We don't have names."

"You call yourself Walt," Portly said.

"The boys call me that. I don't know how it started, really, but it seemed to comfort them, so I allowed it. You know how children are."

"What's your real name?" Portly asked.

"I don't have one. Really, I don't. They gave me one, many years ago, but I hardly remember it anymore. It isn't mine. It never was."

"You're in the family," Cat said.

"Why, yes, dear. I am. We all are, don't you see?"

"What do you mean by that?" Cat asked. "Whose family?"

"Oh, you know."

"I don't know. I'd like you to tell me." "You'll forget your false name, in time." "Do you work for the company?" Cat asked.

"We all work for the company. It's going out of business, though."

"Tell me about the company."

"I'm afraid I'm all talked out now. I really don't have anything more to say."

Something happened to her eyes. They went glassy, like the eyes taxidermists put in the sockets of dead animals.

"Walt?" Cat said.

Nothing. The woman sat with her hands splayed out on the tabletop, looking blindly at the air directly in front of her prim pink face.

Pete called fewer than twenty minutes later, on Cat's cell.

"Did you find him?" she asked.

"No. There's nobody. I think you should come over here. Have a patrolman bring you."

"I'm on my way."