Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham

I know the language he speaks.”

      “You should go back to sleep,” Lucas told her. “I’m going to put the music box in the parlor for a while.”

      “He’s all alone in a strange land.”

      “I must go. I can’t be late for work.”

      “We brung him here from Dingle. It’s only right we should go to him where he is now.”

      “Goodbye, Mother. I’m off.”

      “Farewell.”

      “Farewell.”

      He left the bedroom and put the music box on the parlor table, where his father still sat, awaiting breakfast. “Goodbye, Father,” he said.

      His father nodded. He had acquired an infinite patience. He would come to table at the appointed hours, eat if food was offered him, not eat if food was not.

      At the works, Lucas had to struggle to pay proper attention. His mind wanted to wander. He aligned a plate, pulled the lever, and then was at the back of the machine, inspecting the impressions, with no memory of having gotten there. It was dangerous, a dangerous condition to bring to the machine, and yet he could not seem to do otherwise. Trying to think only of his work—align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect—was like trying to remain awake when sleep was overwhelming. Inattention took him like dreams.

      To steady himself he set his mind to the whisper in the machine. He listened carefully. It might have been the squeak of an unoiled bearing, but it sounded more like a voice, a tiny voice, though its words were indistinguishable. It had the rhythm of a voice, the rise and fall and rise again suggesting intention rather than accident, the tone implying a certain urgency more human than mechanical, as if the sound were being made by some entity struggling to be heard. Lucas knew well enough what it was to speak a language no one understood.

      He fed it another plate and another and another.

      The nature of the machine’s song didn’t disclose itself until afternoon. The song wasn’t sung in language, not in a language Lucas recognized, but gradually, over time, the song began making itself clear, even though its words remained obscure.

      It was Simon’s voice.

      Could it be? Lucas listened more carefully. Simon’s voice had been deep and raucous. He had sung not well but with bravado, with the rampant soaring tunelessness of someone who cared less about sounding beautiful than about creating a sound big enough to reach the sky. This seemed, in fact, to be Simon’s voice, rendered mechanical. It had that reckless, unapologetic atonality.

      The song was familiar. Lucas had heard it elsewhere, at a time and place that hovered on the outer edge of memory. It was a song of melancholy and yearning, a sad song, full of loneliness and a thread of hope. It was one of the old ballads. Simon had known hundreds of them.

      Simon was imprisoned in the machine. It made sudden, dreadful sense. He was not in heaven or in the pillow; he was not in the grass or in the locket. His ghost had snagged on the machine’s inner workings; the machine held it as a dog might hold a man’s coat in its jaws after the man himself had escaped. Simon’s flesh had been stamped and expelled, but his invisible part remained, trapped among the gears and teeth.

       Lucas stood dumb before the singing wheel. Then, because he must not stop working, he loaded another plate. He aligned, clamped, pulled, pulled again, and inspected. In his mind he sang a duet with Simon, matched him note for note, as the hours passed.

      At day’s end, Jack came to say, “All right, then.” Lucas desperately wanted to ask him if he knew about the dead in the machines, but he couldn’t seem to manage a question as large as that, not right away. He began by asking instead, “Please, sir, when do we get paid?” It seemed better to say “we” than “I.”

      Jack said, “You get paid today. Go to accounting after you’ve shut down.”

      Lucas could scarcely believe it. It seemed he had produced his pay by asking for it; that if he had failed to ask he’d have worked on and on for nothing, and no one would have remembered. He said, “Thank you, sir,” but Jack had already left him, to say “All right, then” to Dan. Lucas hadn’t had time to ask anything more. Still, he was glad to know there’d be money tonight. Tomorrow he would ask Jack the other, more difficult question.

      Lucas shut down his machine. He said good-night to Simon and went with the others to receive his pay from the men in the cages. With money in his pocket, he set out for home.

      When he arrived, all was as ever. His father sat in his chair, his mother dreamed or did not dream behind the closed door. Lucas said to his father, “I have money. I can buy us a proper supper. What do you think you’d like?”

      “Ask your mother,” he said.

      That was an answer from former times, when his mother was herself. Lucas said, “I’ll go see what I can get, then.”

      His father nodded agreeably. Lucas leaned over to kiss him.

      It was then that he heard it. The same song, steady, pining, the little song of love and yearning.

      It came from his father’s breathing machine.

      Lucas put his ear closer to the mouth of the tube. It was there, softer than soft, inaudible to anyone who didn’t seek it. It was the same song, sung in the same way, but by a voice gentler and breathier, more like a woman’s. It came, he thought, from the little bladder at the machine’s base, rose up through the tube, and issued from the opening, the slender oval of horn, where his father put his mouth.

      It was the song Lucas had heard at the works. It was lower and more sibilant, it was more difficult to detect, but it was that song, sung in that voice.

      And so he knew: Simon was not caught in the machine at the works; he had passed over into a world of machinery. Machines were his portals, the windows he whispered through. He sang to the living through the mouths of machines. Every time his father put his lips to the breathing machine, it filled him with Simon’s song.

      Lucas understood now that Mother was not dreaming, not deranged; she heard more clearly than anyone. Simon wanted his people with him. He was alone in a strange land. Hadn’t the Simon-machine taken his sleeve when he was distracted? Hadn’t it tried to pull him from this world into the other?

      The dead returned in machinery. They sang seductively to the living as mermaids sang to sailors from the bottom of the sea.

      He thought of Catherine.

      She would be the main prize. She was Simon’s bride-to-be; he’d want to marry her in his new world if he could no longer do so in the old. He was singing to her, searching for her, hoping she might go to him just as everyone had left Ireland to come to New York.

      He ran from the apartment, raced down the stairs. He had to warn her. He had to tell her the nature of the threat.

      When he reached the steps of Catherine’s building he stopped. His heart fluttered and raged. He needed to knock at the door, to beg admittance from the tiny woman and see Catherine. But he knew—he knew—that what he’d come to tell her she would not immediately believe. He understood the strangeness of his news, and he understood that he of all people was suspect, he who was known to be frail and odd, who suffered fits in which he could speak only as the book.

      He hesitated. He couldn’t bear, even now, the prospect of going to Catherine, telling her what he knew, and finding her merely remote and kind. If she treated him as a sad, addled boy, if she gave him more food to take to his family, he would fall into a shame so deep he might never return from it.

       He stood on the stoop in an agony of unresolve. It came to him that he might bring her something. He need not arrive at her door desperate and penurious. He could come to her with an offering. He could say, I have a present for you. He could give her something rare and wonderful. And then, as she exclaimed over the gift, he could broach his true purpose.

      He couldn’t take her the music box, not when it had proved