Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham

paused. His iron face took on three creases across the expanse of its forehead.

      “What was that?”

      “Good night,” Lucas said.

      “Good night,” Jack replied doubtfully.

      Lucas hurried away, passed with the others through the cooking room, where the men with the black poles were shutting down their furnaces. He found that he could not quite remember having been anywhere but the works. Or rather, he remembered his life before coming to the works as a dream, watery and insubstantial. It faded as dreams fade on waking. None of it was as actual as this. None of it was so true. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.

      A woman in a light blue dress waited outside the entrance to the works. Lucas took a moment in recognizing her. He saw first that a woman stood at the entrance and thought that the works had summoned an angel to bid the men goodbye, to remind them that work would end someday and a longer dream begin. Then he understood. Catherine had come. She was waiting for him.

      He recognized her a moment before she recognized him. He looked at her face and saw that she had forgotten him, too.

      He called out, “Catherine.”

      “Lucas?” she said.

      He ran to her. She inhabited a sphere of scented and cleansed air. He was gladdened. He was furious. How could she come here? Why would she embarrass him so?

      She said, “Look at you. You’re all grime. I didn’t know you at first.”

      “It’s me,” he said.

      “You’re shaking all over.”

      “I’m all right. I’m well.”

      “I thought you shouldn’t walk home alone. Not after your first day.”

       He said, “This isn’t a fit place for a woman on her own.”

      “Poor boy, just look at you.”

      He bristled. He had set the wheel turning. He had inspected every plate.

      “I’m fine,” he said, more forcefully than he’d meant to.

      “Well, let’s take you home. You must be starving.”

      They walked up Rivington Street together. She did not put her hand on his elbow. He was too dirty for that. A fitful breeze blew in from the East River and along the street, stirring up miniature dust storms with scraps of paper caught in them. The dark facades of brick houses rose on either side, the lid of the sky clamped down tightly overhead. The sidewalk was crowded, all the more so because those who walked there shared the pavement with heaps of refuse that lay in drifts against the sides of the buildings, darkly massed, wet and shiny in their recesses.

      Lucas and Catherine walked with difficulty on the narrow paved trail between the housefronts and the piles of trash. They fell in behind a woman and a child who moved with agonizing slowness. The woman—was she old or young? It was impossible to tell from behind—favored her left leg, and the child, a girl in a long, ragged skirt, seemed not to walk at all but to be conveyed along by her mother’s hand as if she were a piece of furniture that must be dragged home. Ahead of the woman and child walked a large bald man in what appeared to be a woman’s coat, worn shiny in spots, far too small for him, the sleeves ripped at the shoulders, showing gashes of pink satin lining. Lucas could not help imagining this procession of walkers, all of them poor and battered, wearing old coats too small or too large for them, dragging children who could not or would not walk, all marching along Rivington Street, impelled by someone or something that pushed them steadily forward, slowly but inexorably, so it only seemed as if they moved of their own will; all of them walking on, past the houses and stables, past the taverns, past the works and into the river, where they would fall, one after another after another, and continue to walk, drowned but animate, on the bottom, until the street was finally empty and the people were all in the river, trudging along its silty bed, through its drifts of brown and sulfur, into its deeper darks, until they reached the ocean, this multitude of walkers, until they were nudged into open water where silver fish swam silently past, where the ocher of the river gave over to inky blue, where clouds floated on the surface, far, far above, and they were free, all of them, to drift away, their coats billowing like wings, their children flying effortlessly, a whole nation of the dead, dispersing, buoyant, faintly illuminated, spreading out like constellations into the blue immensity.

      He and Catherine reached the Bowery, where the rowdies strutted together, brightly clad, past the taverns and oyster houses. They swaggered and shouted, chewing cigars fat as sausages. One tipped his stovepipe to Catherine, began to speak, but was pulled onward by his laughing companions. The Bowery was Broadway’s lesser twin, a minor star in the constellation, though no less bright and loud. Still, there was more room to walk here. The truly poor were more numerous.

      Catherine said, “Was it dreadful there?”

      Lucas answered, “The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass.”

      “Please, Lucas,” she said, “speak to me in plain English.”

      “The foreman said I did well,” he told her.

      “Will you promise me something?”

      “Yes.”

      “Promise that as long as you must work there you will be very, very careful.”

      Lucas thought guiltily of the clamp. He had not been careful. He had allowed himself to dream and drift.

      He said, “I know I am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass.”

      “And promise me that as soon as you can, you will leave that place and find other work.”

      “I will.”

      “You are …”

      He waited. What would she tell him he was?

      She said, “You are meant for other things.”

      He was happy to hear it, happy enough. And yet he’d hoped for more. He’d wanted her to reveal something, though he couldn’t say what. He’d wanted a wonderful lie that would become true the moment she said it.

       He said, “I promise.” What exactly was he meant for? He couldn’t bring himself to ask.

      “It’s hard,” she said.

      “And you? Were you all right at work today?”

      “I was. I sewed and sewed. It was a relief, really, to work.”

      “Were you …”

      She waited. What did he mean to ask her?

      He asked, “Were you careful?”

      She laughed. His face burned. Had it been a ridiculous question? She seemed always so available to harm, as if someone as kind as she, as sweet-smelling, could only be hurt, either now or later.

      “I was,” she said. “Do you worry about me?”

      “Yes,” he said. He hoped it was not a foolish assertion. He waited nervously to see if she’d laugh again.

      “You mustn’t,” she said. “You must think only of yourself. Promise me.”

      He said, “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

      “Thank you, my dear,” she answered, and she said no more.

      He took her to her door, on Fifth Street. They stood together on the stoop that was specked with brightness.

      “You will go home now,” she said, “and have your supper.”

      “May I ask you something?” he said.

      “Ask me anything.”

      “I wonder what it is I’m making at the works.”

      “Well,