The Shape of Water

1

“I’M GOING TO strangle him. Last week he swears to me he’ll get the toilet to stop gurgling so I can get a single decent day’s sleep, but when I get home it’s like there’s someone in there taking an eight-hour tinkle. He says I’m the janitor, why don’t I fix it? That’s not the point. That is not the point. You think I want to come home, dead on my feet, toes swollen up like gum balls, and just for fun stick my hand into the ice-cold water of the toilet tank? I’ll stick his head in the tank.”

Zelda is carrying on about Brewster. Brewster is Zelda’s husband. Brewster is no good. Elisa has lost track of the odd jobs Brewster has held, the multitude of colorful ways he’s been fired, the depressive dives he takes into his Barcalounger for weeks at a time. The details don’t matter. Elisa is grateful for them however they come and signs appropriate interjections. Zelda began learning sign language the day Elisa arrived, an effort Elisa doesn’t believe she can ever repay.

“And like I told you, the kitchen sink’s been running, too. Brewster says it’s the coupling nut. Whatever you say, Albert Einstein. If you’re finished with your theory of relativity, how about you go to a hardware store? And you know what he says? He says I should just sneak a coupling nut from work. Does he even know where I work? All the security cameras here? I’m going to be honest with you, hon, about my future plans. I am going to strangle that man and chop him into little pieces and flush those pieces down the toilet so at least when the toilet’s keeping me awake I can think about all those Brewster bits zooming off to the sewer where they belong.”

Elisa smiles through a yawn, signing back that this is one of Zelda’s better murder plots.

“So tonight I get up for work, because somebody in this family needs to afford luxury items like coupling nuts, and the kitchen is the Chesapeake Bay. I march right back to the bedroom, and because I haven’t bought my strangling rope yet, I wake up Brewster and say we’ve got us a Noah’s ark situation developing. And he says good. Baltimore hasn’t had rain in forever. The man thinks I’m talking about rain.”

Elisa studies her copy of the Quality Control Checklist. Fleming doesn’t warn them when he changes it; it’s how he keeps his workers on their toes. The three-sheet carbon form enumerates the labs, lobbies, restrooms, vestibules, corridors, and stairwells assigned to each janitor, each location tied to a numbered list of correlated tasks. Fixtures, water fountains, baseboards. Elisa yawns again. Landings, partitions, railings. Her eyes keep slipping.

“So I drag him into the kitchen where his socks get all soggy, and you know what he says? He starts talking about Australia. How he heard on the news Australia’s drifting two inches a year, and maybe that’s the reason everyone’s pipes keep coming loose. All the continents, he tells me, used to be shoved together. He says if the whole world is drifting like that, then all the pipes are going to bust one day and there’s no sense getting upset about it.”

Elisa hears the wobble in Zelda’s voice and knows where this is headed.

“Now, look, hon. I could have taken that man’s head, drowned him in two inches of water, and still made it here by midnight. But you ever known a man who could wake up from a deep sleep and talk like that? He mixes me up so bad. Some weeks we can’t put food on the table. Then this man of mine says ‘Australia’ and suddenly I get emotional? Brewster Fuller will be the death of me, but I’m telling you, the man sees things. Then, for a second, I see them, too. Past Occam, that’s for sure. Way past Old West Baltimore. The Chesapeake Bay in my kitchen? This too shall pass.”

From the lab to the left, a ruckus. They halt their carts; toilet scrubbers swing from pegs. For weeks, they’ve heard rumbles of construction behind this door, but that’s unexceptional. A room isn’t on your list, you ignore it. But tonight the door, previously unadorned, has been given a plate: F-1. Elisa and Zelda have never encountered an F. They always clean together the first half of every night, and together they frown and consult their matching QCCs. There it is, F-1, planted on their lists like a bomb.

The women angle their ears at the door. Voices, footsteps, a crackling noise. Zelda looks worriedly at Elisa; it pains Elisa to see her friend’s yakkity mood so easily snuffed. It’s her turn, Elisa tells herself, to be the bold one. She falsifies a confident smile and makes the sign for “go ahead.” Zelda exhales, gathers her key card, and inserts it into the lock. The gears bite down and Zelda pulls open the door, and in the outrush of chilly air, Elisa has a swift intuition, from out of nowhere, that she has just made a disastrous mistake.

2

LAINIE STRICKLAND SMILES at her brand-new Westinghouse Spray ’N Steam iron. Westinghouse built the atomic engine that fueled the first Polaris submarine. That says something, doesn’t it? Not just about a product, mind you, but a company. She’d been sitting at the back of Freddie’s, her beehive inserted into the pink plastic of the flip-top dryer hood, when she paused, right in the middle of an interesting and, she thought, important story about a place called the Mekong Delta, where a group called the Viet Cong had shot down five US helicopters, killing thirty Americans, soldiers just like her Richard, so that she could instead linger upon the full-page advertisement. It depicted a submarine unzipping the white ocean on its dive down. All those brave boys. The intrinsic danger of water. Would they die, too? Their lives depended on Westinghouse.

The image had resonated enough that she’d resolved to ask Richard what sort of brand of submarine a “Polaris” was. An army man since age nineteen, Richard’s reflex to any question about his job is to clam up, so she’d waited until he was well fed and pacified by the popcorn gunfire of The Rifleman before asking. Without breaking his appraising gaze of Chuck Connors’s ambidextrous gunmanship, he’d shrugged.

“Polaris isn’t a brand. It’s not like one of your breakfast cereals.”

The word cereal snapped Timmy from his television stupor. Electricity crackled between the shag carpet and his corduroyed knees as he turned to resume a two-day-old conversation. “Mom, could we please get some Sugar Pops?”

“Froot Loops!” Tammy added. “Oh, Mommy, please?”

Richard has always been gruff. It’s just his way. Before the Amazon, though, Richard didn’t let her dangle from the cliff of her own ignorance like this, watching her flail without offering a hand. Lainie had yet to figure out the right reaction and chose to laugh at herself. Then Chuck Connors had been replaced by a Hoover Dial-a-Matic with variable Suction Control, operated by an actress who looked a bit like Lainie. Richard chewed his lip and looked down at his lap in what might have been remorse.

“Polaris is a missile,” he said. “Nuclear-armed ballistic missile.”

“Oh!” She’d wanted to soothe him. “That sounds dangerous.”

“Better range, I guess. More accurate, too, is what they say.”

“I saw it in a magazine and I thought, ‘I bet Richard knows all about this,’ and I was right.”

“Not really. It’s Navy shit. I avoid those bastards the best I can.”

“That’s true. You do. You’ve told me many times.”

“Submarines. You wouldn’t catch me on one of those death traps, I’ll tell you what.”

He’d looked at her then and smiled, and Richard, that poor, powerful man, hadn’t any idea the pain his smile conveyed. Lainie senses that he’s seen too much, in Korea, in the Amazon. There are things he’ll never share. This is a sort of mercy toward her, she tells herself, even as it makes her feel as if she’s all alone and floating away like a helium balloon.

No man who’s spent seventeen months in the South American jungle can reacclimate to civilian life just like that. Lainie knows this and tries to be patient. But it’s challenging. Those seventeen months changed her, too. Overnight, Richard had been stolen away by the ghastly General Hoyt and dropped into a world without telephones or mailboxes. Household decisions had to be made, all the time, and they’d hit her like a spray of buckshot. Where to take the car when it broke down. What to do with that skunk carcass in the backyard. How to stand up to plumbers, bankers, other men who thought a lady alone was ripe to be rooked. All while herding two kids bewildered and hurt by an abruptly vacated father.

And she’d been good at it. Yes, she’d spent the bulk of the first two months envisioning her new life from behind a gloss of tears: a widowed mother of two terrors who’d grow up shredding drapes and crayoning walls as she gulped down cooking sherry. Soon, though, her evening collapse had begun to feel like satisfied exhaustion. Gradually, tentatively, in private nooks of her mind, she began to shape a plan for when Richard was declared missing in action and the army ceased sending her checks. She scribbled figures on matchbooks, Timmy’s school reports, the back of her hand, calculating estimated wages versus concrete expenses. She knew she could handle a job. It even sounded exciting. It also made her feel like the world’s worst wife to find any spark of enthusiasm at all in the vanishing of her husband. But there would be a sort of peace without Richard, wouldn’t there? Hadn’t he always been a little hard? A little cold?

It’s fruitless to rehash. After all, Richard did come home, didn’t he? A full week now they’ve been back together, and doesn’t he deserve the same wife he left behind? Lainie works up a smile until she believes in it. If those submariners trusted Westinghouse’s nuclear whatsits, why, she should be proud to stand in her living room and use the Spray ’N Steam, the very first item she’d bought in Baltimore. Richard needs to look sharp for his new job, a place called Occam, and that makes ironing a priority. With so much wardrobe still boxed up, the children’s clothes need ironing, too. Timmy looks feral in his ragged playwear, and Tammy’s favorite velveteen jumper is dishrag thin. A housewife, she insists to herself, has plenty of interesting, important jobs to do.

3

TOUPEES ARE MADE from human hair. That Giles Gunderson’s hairpiece doesn’t altogether match the tussocks sprouting above his ears galls him. His real hair is brown, but get close enough and you’ll see strands of blond and orange. Not that anyone has gotten close in years. Had he known he’d be shiny-domed by age thirty, he would have begun stockpiling hair decades ago. Every young man should do so; they should teach it in health classes. He pictures bulging trash bags of hair crowding his childhood closets, lugging them from his parents’ house to his first apartment and beyond. He chuckles. No, sir, nothing strange about that.

Giles pockets one pair of his glasses, moves a second pair down from his forehead, tugs shut his suede coat, and steps from the cream-colored Bedford van that Mr. Arzounian, the Arcade’s owner, lets him park behind the theater, that of the rusted sliding door and water-stained upholstery, dubbed by Elisa as “the Pug” for its buggy headlights and flat snout. Baltimore hasn’t had a drop of moisture in months, but the wind is a cat-o’-nine-tails. Giles feels his toupee begin to lift from his scalp. He mashes his palms to his skull to restick the double-sided tape and rounds the Pug, head lowered against the wind.

It’s the posture of a bruiser, but he feels the opposite, feeble and overweening. He fights the van’s side door and removes his red-leather, brass-buckled portfolio case. Carrying it makes him feel important. He scrimped for a full year in his thirties to buy it, and it remains the single piece of professional gear he’d set right alongside anything owned by Manhattan hotshots. He heads up the sidewalk, the gale giving him a brisk shove. Negotiating a door with a portfolio case is a sophisticated procedure; by the time he’s through, everyone inside should be buzzing about the debonair gent with the giant leather bag.

Giles feels a familiar jab of doubt. His need to cushion his ego is pathetic, especially at a joint like this. Look around. Not a single soul has noticed his arrival. Giles stands taller in his own defense. Can these diners be blamed for their distraction? Dixie Doug’s Pies is a fun house of colored lights and reflective surfaces, from the pedestals atop which plastic pies revolve to the refrigerated display cases backlit with jukebox plastic and piped with chrome.

Giles mazes into the queue. It’s a weekday midafternoon, a peculiar time for pie, and he’s second in line. He likes being here, he tells himself. It’s cozy and warm and smells of cinnamon and sugar. He doesn’t look at the cashier, not yet; he’s too old to feel this nervous. Instead, he studies a five-foot glass tower, each level presenting a different dessert. Double-decker pies like department-store hat boxes. Sculpted pies like the bout of a cello. Pie puffs like a woman’s breast. There is room for all kinds, all kinds.

4

F-1 IS SIX times larger than Elisa’s apartment, modest for an Occam lab. The walls are white and resplendent above clean concrete floors. Silver ranks of tables wait against the walls while caster-wheel chairs in packing plastic huddle like homeless people around a trash-can fire. Braided cables dangle from the ceiling and hospital lamps on jointed arms ogle down at nothing. Along the eastern side is a bank of beige machinery, the type Elisa has heard called a “computer.” Janitors are forbidden to touch these imposing agglomerations of switches and dials, though they are expected to use compressed-air sprayers to blast away dust the final Friday of every month.

What is unique about F-1, and what beckons Elisa past the balking Zelda, is the pool. The crackling they’d heard was water expelling from an industrial hose into what resembles a giant stainless-steel sink built into the floor and enclosed by a knee-high ledge upon which three laborers have planted their boots. They are blue-collar Baltimoreans plainly uncomfortable with the job’s confidentiality; they watch their foreman hold out a pen and clipboard to a man of receding brown hair and spectacles—an Occam scientist, for sure, but one she’s never seen. He’s late-forties but squats on the ledge like a hyperactive boy, ignoring the foreman so as to compare his notes to three gauges extending from the pool.

“Too hot!” he cries. “Much too hot! Do you want to boil it?”

The man has an accent. Elisa doesn’t recognize it, and this wakes her up: She recognizes none of these people. Six workers, five scientists; she’s never seen so many people at Occam this late. Zelda pulls on Elisa’s elbow, and Elisa lets herself be backpedaled before a voice both of them know in their marrow speaks up.

“Attention, everyone, please! The asset is off the loading dock. Repeat: The asset is off the loading dock and is on the approach. Respectfully, I need the construction crew to stop where you are and exit the lab via the door to your right—”

David Fleming’s white shirt and neutral slacks had camouflaged him against the computer. Elisa sees him now, his arm forked in a gesture toward the very door in front of which she and Zelda stand like scolded children. Every head in the room turns their way. All these men, staring at them, these infringing females. Elisa’s cheeks burn, and she feels every ugly inch of her trash-spattered Occam grays.

“I apologize, everyone, our lady visitors are not supposed to be here.” Fleming lowers his voice to that of a chiding husband. “Zelda. Elisa. How many times do you have to be told? When there are men working inside—”

Zelda shrinks like one accustomed to absorbing blows, and Elisa sidesteps in front of her, an instinctive shielding that puts her, to her shock, directly in the path of a man hurrying straight at her. Elisa snatches a breath, squares her shoulders. Corporal punishment was habitual during her youth, and though that was fifteen years ago, hands have been laid upon her before at Occam. Fleming manhandling her from an unsteady office chair from atop which she cleared cobwebs; a biologist slapping her hand from a paper cup that contained not old coffee but some kind of sample; a security guard giving her a hard spank on her way to the elevator.

“Don’t leave.” He is the man with the accent. The hem of his white lab coat is soaked gray from the pool and his half-laced wingtips make dog-tongue splashes. His dripping hand is held palm-up in appeal, and he turns to Fleming. “These girls are cleared, yes?”

“They’re janitorial. They’re cleared, yes, for janitorial services.”

“If they are cleared, should they not hear?”

“With all due respect, doctor. You’re new. Occam has protocols.”

“But will they not clean this laboratory from time to time?”

“Yes, but only at my direct request.”

Fleming’s eyes snap from the scientist to Elisa, and she witnesses his recognition that he’d prematurely added F-1 to the QCC. Elisa jerks her head down at her cart, all those safe, crusty bottles and jugs, but it’s too late to retract the stinger: Fleming’s dignity is stung, and extra work for her and Zelda will be the punishment. The accented scientist sees none of this; he’s still smiling, convinced of his benevolence. Like most of the well-intentioned privileged Elisa has met, he has no grasp of the priorities of the servile, how all they want is to get through a shift without trouble.

“Very good,” the scientist says. “Everyone should understand the importance of the asset so that there are no mistakes.”

Fleming mashes his lips and waits for the construction crew to exit. Elisa and Zelda shrink from the burly men’s appraising looks. The scientist, blind to Elisa’s discomfort, holds out his hand to shake. Elisa gapes in horror at the man’s neatly clipped nails, clean palm, and starched shirt cuff. What will Fleming make of this etiquette breach? Worse than to take the hand is to ignore it, so she offers hers as listlessly as possible. The man’s palm is damp, but his grip is genuine.

“Dr. Bob Hoffstetler.” He smiles. “How do you work in those shoes?”

Elisa shuffles backward several inches so that her cart separates her shoes from Fleming’s line of sight. Fleming can’t be allowed to notice her shoes for the second time. She couldn’t bear it if he robbed her of that revolt. Hoffstetler misses nothing; he observes her small retreat and angles his head curiously. He appears to be waiting on a reply, so Elisa pushes a smile onto her blushing face and taps her name tag. Hoffstetler’s eyebrows settle in sympathetic understanding.

“The most intelligent of creatures,” he offers softly, “often make the fewest sounds.”

He smiles again and steps to the right to make similar introductions to Zelda, and though Elisa is mortified by the attention and curls her shoulders inward to make herself smaller, she notes with a somber sting that, in all her years at Occam, Dr. Hoffstetler’s smile is the warmest she’s ever received.

5

IT’S A FINE iron, no doubt about it. Forget fiddly demineralizer kits; it takes tap water straight, and it’s so agreeable to have all the settings on one dial. And it comes with a wall mount; that’ll be handy once her ironing board has a permanent place. For now, she’s set up in the living room in front of the TV. This is how her army-wife friends in Orlando did their housework. Lainie had always resisted. Once during Richard’s Amazon mission, she’d tried listening to Young Doctor Malone and Perry Mason on the radio while ironing and the distraction had been too potent. She got through a whole laundry basket without memory of having done so, and it bothered her. That’s how unchallenging your daily tasks are, Lainie. That’s how repetitive.

But last night in bed, insomnia had hatched an obvious but invigorating thought. The channel dial: She can change it. She doesn’t have to watch I Love Lucy, Guiding Light, and Password like the other wives; she can watch Today, NBC News, and ABC Early Afternoon Report. It’s a fresh idea, and it inspires her. So far, everything about Baltimore inspires her.

Getting dressed this morning—why, it’d felt like she’d been dressing for a cocktail party of intellectuals! She’d set her beehive before unfolding the ironing board, and by the tight ache at her temples, she knows it’s holding. What unravels, however, is her attention, ten minutes into the first newscast. Khrushchev is visiting the Berlin Wall. Just the word Khrushchev makes her blush; she mispronounced it three years ago at a function packed with Washington bigwigs, and Richard’s jaw had throbbed in embarrassment. And the Berlin Wall. Why does she know the name of every single character on Captain Kangaroo but not a thing about the Berlin Wall?

Lainie toggles the iron’s selector, unable to decide which setting will best eradicate wrinkles. Is it possible Westinghouse has given her, and every other woman in America, too many choices? She examines the face of the iron, counts seventeen vents, one for every month Richard spent in the Amazon. She blasts the steam, dips her face into the draft, and imagines that it’s the jungle’s heat.

This must be how the world felt to Richard when he’d called her from Brazil. It had been like hearing a ghost. One second, she’d been cutting crusts off peanut-butter sandwiches and reaching for the ringing phone. The next, she’d dropped the knife and let loose a shriek. She’d wept, insisting to him that it was a miracle. She’d had to force the tears, though, hadn’t she? Well, who could blame her? She’d been in shock. Richard had replied that he’d missed her, too, but his deadness of voice persisted; he sounded slow and mealy, as if he’d forgotten English. There was a crunching sound, too, like he was chewing something. Why would he be eating while talking to his wife for the first time in seventeen months?

It was easy to excuse. Maybe he’d been starving out in that jungle. He’d told her that they’d be moving to Baltimore, and before she could ask questions, he gave her his flight number to Orlando and gotten off the phone, still crunching. Lainie sat down, gazed at the home that, for a year and a half, had seemed so comforting and functional. Now it looked like a bachelor’s disaster. Nothing shone from spray or scrub. The iron that had died eight months ago she hadn’t even replaced. Oh, how she’d cleaned for the next two days, her scrubbing fists bursting through dishwashing gloves, her mopping hands weeping with blisters, her grouting knuckles trailing blood. A phone call from Washington rescued her, if not her marriage: Richard was being rerouted by sea to Baltimore. He’d meet her there in two weeks at a house of government choosing.

Lainie replays, almost hourly, the sight of Richard first walking through the door of the Baltimore house. The crisp, buttoned dress shirt he wore bagged about him like a druidic cloak. He’d lost weight and was pure, knotty muscle. His posture was wary and vulpine. He was shaven to a rubbery gleam, his cheeks milky white from being hidden by a jungle beard while the rest of his face had cooked bronze. For a long moment, they’d stared at each other. He squinted as if he didn’t recognize her; her fingertips flew to her beehive, her lipstick, her fingernails. Was it too much? Too dazzling after he’d seen nothing but raw, filthy men for so long?

Then Richard had gently lowered his bag to the ground and a single quake had rolled through his shoulders. Two small tears, one from each eye, rolled down his smooth cheeks. Lainie had never seen her husband cry, had even suspected he didn’t have the capacity, and to her surprise, it frightened her. She knew, though, that it was proof that she meant something, that they meant something, and she ran to him, bound her arms about him, pressed her own crying eyes into the stiff folds of his shirt. Several seconds later, she felt his hands on her back, but cautiously, as if his instinct had become to hurl off creatures that attached themselves to him.

“I’m… sorry,” he’d said.

Lainie still wonders about this. Sorry for being gone? Sorry for crying? Sorry for his inability to embrace her like a normal man?

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “You’re here. You’re here. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“You look… you feel…”

She wonders about this, too. Did she look as strange to him now as South American fauna did seventeen months ago? Was her softness the softness of sucking mud, of boar carcasses, of other sorts of jungle rot she couldn’t begin to imagine? So she’d shushed him, told him not to speak, just to hold her. It’s something she regrets. Whatever lost well of emotion his two tears had indicated was crusted shut by the following day, impervious to her gentle prods. It was Richard’s protective instinct, perhaps, against the disorienting assaults of the city.

It was only when Timmy and Tammy rollicked down the stairs to greet their father did Lainie break from Richard, turn around, and consider the empty, unfurnished house behind her. Her knees wobbled with a terrible suspicion. What if she’d had nothing to do with Richard’s tears? What if it had been the perfectly clean, virtually silent rooms behind her that had moved him?

She wrangles the same dress shirt Richard had worn home around the ironing board’s nose. It’s best not to think such thoughts. It’s best to concentrate on what she can do now to be a better wife. Maybe it’s not Today-worthy, but Richard’s Occam job is important. Imagine what would happen if she left a burn mark on his shirt. It would hint at problems at home. And there aren’t any. Her job is to help Richard by taking the mess of warfare, however it hits him, and to scrub away the dirt, the grease, the oil, the gunpowder, the sweat, the lipstick if it comes to that, and to iron it tidy again, for her husband and family, of course, but also for her country.

6

THE NAME ON his tag reads BRAD, but Giles has seen him wear JOHN on occasion, and once even LORETTA. Giles presumes the second was by mistake and the third a joke, but the misnomers have introduced enough uncertainty that Giles is reticent to use any of them. He definitely looks like a Brad: six-foot-one, six-foot-two if he’d quit slouching, a face of forthright symmetry, straight teeth bordering on horsey, and a whipped-cream dollop of blond hair. His eyes, as melted-brown as the chocolate from the burned-down chocolate factory, brighten when they see him. Giles swears they do.

“Hey, there, partner! Where you been?”

Brad’s voice is broadly, unspecifically southern, and Giles becomes mired in its syrup. Hair worries engulf him: the gradient of his toupee, the crop of his mustache, the hazards of ear and eyebrow stragglers. Giles puffs his chest and snaps off a nod.

“Well, good afternoon to you.” Too professorial; he unscrews it. “Hey yourself, partner.” Who does he think he is, a schoolboy? “Very nice to see you, indeed.” Three redundant greetings. Just perfect.

Brad stilts a hand to the counter and leans onto it.

“Now what might be your pleasure?”

“It’s so difficult to say,” Giles gushes. “What, if I may ask, would be your personal recommendation?”

Brad drums his fingers. His knuckles are scuffed. Giles pictures him pitching firewood in a forested backyard, wood flakes alighting upon moist, minor abrasions like golden butterflies.

“How you feel about key lime? We’ve got a key lime that’ll knock you back to Newark. It’s that one there, top floor of the tower.”

“My, that is a vivid green.”

“Ain’t it? I’ll fix you up with a nice, hefty slice, what do you say?”

“How can I spurn such a tantalizing hue?”

Brad scribbles the order and chuckles. “You always got the best words.”

Giles feels a blush rise up his neck. He battles it back with the first thing that pops into his brain.

“Tantalizing comes from the Greek. Tantalus, one of Zeus’s sons. A troubled boy, to be sure. Rather famously, he sacrificed his son and served him up to the other gods. Not unlike carving up a pie. But it’s his punishment we commemorate. He was cursed to stand in a pool, hungry for fruit that was pulled away each time he reached up, and thirsty for water that ran away each time he kneeled.”

“He chopped up his kid, you said?”

“Yes, though the point, I think, is that Tantalus was not permitted the escape of death. His fate was to suffer knowing that everything he wanted was right there in reach, but he could partake in none of it.”

Brad chews over this, and Giles feels his blush resume its northerly creep. He’s often marveled at how a single painting can say so much to so many people, and yet the more words one uses, the more likely it is for them to turn on their tellers and expose them. Brad, he is relieved to see, chooses to abandon classical analysis. He spikes the order on a spindle.

“I see you got your paint bag there,” he says. “Working on anything good?”

Giles knows it’s an old man’s poppycock to make-believe that this or that cordial question throbs with furtive significance. He’s sixty-four. Brad can’t be older than thirty-five. Well, what of it? Does that mean Giles can’t enjoy the spar of good conversation? That he can’t feel good about himself as he has so rarely in life? He lifts his portfolio as if only now noticing it.

“Oh, this! It’s not much. The launch of a new food product is all. It seems I have been entrusted with captaining an ad campaign. I’m en route to a meeting at the agency, as it happens.”

“No kidding! What kind of food product?”

Giles opens his mouth, but the word gelatin feels flaccid.

“I probably shouldn’t say. Confidentiality agreements, you know.”

“Is that right? Lord, that sounds exciting. Drawing art, secret projects. Lot more exciting than slinging pies, I tell you.”

“But food is the original art! I’ve always meant to ask. Are you Dixie Doug himself?”

Brad’s guffaw is explosive; it tussles the bangs of Giles’s toupee.

“I wish I was. Then I’d be sitting on top a whole hill of cash. Let me tell you. This here ain’t the only Dixie Doug’s. There’s twelve of them. It’s called ‘franchising.’ They send you this brochure, see. Lays out the whole shebang. Paint color, decorations. Dixie Dog, our mascot. The whole menu, even. They do studies. Find out what people like, scientifically. They truck it across the country, and we serve it up.”

“Intriguing,” Giles says.

Brad looks about, then leans closer. “You want to know a secret?”

There is nothing Giles wants more. He’s harbored enough of them to know that receiving a secret from someone else magically lightens both parties’ loads.

“This voice? It isn’t even real. I’m from Ottawa. I’ve never heard a southern accent in my life, besides movies.”

Feelings settle inside Giles, ice into a glass. He may have failed to confirm Brad’s name, but he’ll come away today with a superior prize. One day, he is certain, Brad will share his real voice, some exotic Canadian lilt, and then—well, that will have to mean something, won’t it? Carrying his portfolio bag proudly, waiting on bright green pie, Giles feels more a part of the world than he’s felt in ages.

7

“I DON’T NEED to reiterate to most of you the great lengths some of our best men went to make this possible, and how not all of those men came back to be able to share in the achievement,” Fleming says. “What I do feel a responsibility to address—and I’m glad, frankly, that my janitorial girls are here to hear this—is that this is, without question, the most sensitive asset ever brought to Occam Aerospace, and it needs to be treated that way. I know you’ve all signed the forms, but let me say it again. Top-secret data is not for wives. Not for children. Not for the best buddy you’ve known since you were a kid. This is national security. This is the fate of the free world. The president himself knows your names, and I sincerely hope that’s enough to keep you—”

Elisa’s tensed body seizes at the crunch of a code key into a lock, and it’s not even the lock behind her. Ten-foot double doors on the other side of F-1, which connect with the hallway that feeds to the loading dock, swing open. A helmeted man in military drabs rushes in from either side to secure the doors. They are armed, as are all Occam guards, but not with enigmatic handguns in unemphatic holsters. Large black bayonet rifles are slung across their backs.

A car-length, rubber-wheeled pallet is guided into the lab by a third and fourth soldier. It carries what Elisa, in the first seconds, believes to be an iron lung. Polio was the orphanage’s unexorcisable boogeyman; any child forced to sit through overlong sermons and dry lectures could fathom the horror of being trapped forever in a neck-down casket. This object is similarly podlike but several orders larger, with riveted steel, compression seals, rubberized joints, and pressure meters. Whoever is inside, Elisa thinks, must be gravely ill for even his head to be kept inside the tank. Fleming is on the move, directing the pallet to a cleared space alongside the pool, before Elisa recognizes her own naïveté. Sick little boys do not earn four armed escorts.

The final man through the double doors is buzz cut with gorilla arms and the hulking gait of one suspicious of indoor spaces. He wears a denim coat over roughshod gray twills, and even these garments seem to constrain him. He circles the pod, muttering directions and indicating wheels to be locked, knobs to be adjusted. He doesn’t point at these with a finger. Looped around his wrist is the rawhide strap of a scuffed orange baton ending into two metal prongs. Elisa isn’t sure, but thinks it’s an electric cattle prod.

Both Fleming and Dr. Bob Hoffstetler advance upon the man with right hands outstretched, but the man’s furrowed eyes glare past them, across the length of the lab, directly at Elisa and Zelda. Dual veins fatten his forehead like subcutaneous horns.

“What are they doing here?”

In direct reply, the tank rattles violently upon its trailer and a high-pitched roar typhoons from within, sloshing water and frightening soldiers who expel curse words and bring about their rifles. What looks like a hand, but can’t be, for it’s far too large, slaps against one of the tank’s porthole windows and Elisa can’t believe the glass doesn’t crack, but it doesn’t, and the tank is rocking, and the soldiers are fanning into formation, and Fleming is rushing at the janitors and shouting, and Hoffstetler is wincing at his failure to protect them, and Zelda has two handfuls of Elisa’s uniform, dragging her into the hallway along with their carts, and the man with the cattle prod holds his furious glare for a second longer before dropping his head between his shoulders and turning to face the screaming, captured thing.

8

THE BOXES FROM Florida are a problem. She knows it and promises herself to unpack them, first chance she gets, and that’s an order! She recalls a treasured moment with Richard, years ago now, when she, emboldened by his orgasm, had dared make a sex joke, an allusion to “standing at attention.” In later years, such lewdness from her would repulse him. But that one time, he’d chuckled and checked off the basics of military formation. Heels together. Suck the stomach. Arms along seams. No smiling. That’s the efficiency she needs to emulate. She’s got a utility knife for opening boxes. She’s got Brillo Soap Pads, Ajax with Instant Chlorine Bleach, Bruce Cleaning Wax, Tide Laundry Detergent, and Comet with Chlorinol, all locked and loaded and ready for duty.

She could unpack the boxes in two days if she buckled down. But she can’t. Each time she slits packing tape, it’s like knifing open the belly of a doe. Inside these boxes are seventeen months of a different life. One that had knocked her off the well-trod path she’d been on since she was a little girl: dating, marriage, children, homemaking. Pulling items from those boxes—it’s like ripping organs from that other version of herself, that woman of ambition and energy and promise. The whole thing is silly, she knows that. She’ll get to it. She will.

Only it’s hard with Baltimore right there, right outside the window. After she gets the kids off to school, there’s no resisting. Each time, it happens the same. She puts on her heels for Richard, as seeing her barefoot irritates him—Lainie blames this, too, on the Amazon, perhaps some shoeless tribe that disgusted him. When Richard leaves for Occam, off fly the shoes so that Lainie can scrunch her toes deep into the carpet. Not much grit, not really. A modicum of crumbs, that’s all. Clean enough for now, surely. She gets dressed, goes out, boards a bus.

At first, she’d pretended that she was looking for a church. It wasn’t a lie, not entirely. A family needs a house of worship. Her church in Orlando had been a literal godsend those months without Richard before she’d found her footing. Footing: She needs, again, to find it. Problem is, Baltimore has a church on every block. Is she a Baptist? They’d attended a Baptist church in Virginia. Episcopal, perhaps? She’s not sure what the word means. Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian: Those all sound safe, untheatrical. She takes a seat on the bus, prim of posture, hands folded on her purse, and rolls specific church names over her lipsticked lips. All Saints, Holy Trinity, New Life. She laughs; it fogs the bus window, and she briefly loses sight of the city. How could she choose anything besides New Life?

9

WORKING WOMEN DON’T get to scurry home and bury their faces in pillows when they’ve been yelled at. You settle your trembling hands by wrapping them around your tools and returning to work. Elisa had wanted to talk about what she’d seen and heard—the giant hand slapping the tank window, the animalistic roar. From Elisa’s first startled signs, though, it became clear that Zelda hadn’t seen the hand and had taken the roar for yet another distasteful animal experiment that would only sicken her to consider in detail. So Elisa keeps her thoughts to herself, wondering if it’s possible that Zelda is right and she mistook the whole thing.

The best thing for tonight is to scrub the images from her mind, and scrubbing is something Elisa is good at. She’s in and out of toilet stalls in the northeast men’s room, stabbing her swab under rims. Zelda, done mopping the floor, wets a pumice stone in the sink and frowns at the piss-crusted urinal partition she’s squared off against for years, searching for a fresh complaint to lift their spirits. Elisa believes in Zelda as she believes in few others: She will find that complaint, and it will be funny, and they will begin to crawl from under this sticky film of debasement left by all those judging men.

“Finest minds in the country, they tell us, gathered right here at Occam—and there are pee freckles on the ceiling. You know Brewster’s not the crispiest chip in the bag, but even he hits the target seventy-five percent of the time. I don’t know if I ought to be depressed about this or go get the Guinness Records folks on the line. Maybe they’ll give me a finder’s fee.”

Elisa nods and signs “Get on the telephone,” opting for an old-fashioned, two-piece model to evoke visions of a herd of New York City correspondents with PRESS badges tucked into their fedoras. Zelda gets the reference and grins—a bursting relief of a sight—and Elisa presses the joke, wiggling her fingers in the sign for “teletype,” then signing a suggestion to send a letter via pigeon. Zelda laughs and gestures at the ceiling.

“I can’t even figure out the angle of the—you know what I mean? I don’t want to be indecent here. But if you think about the physics and all that? The angle of the garden hose, the direction of the spray?”

Elisa giggles soundlessly, scandalized and so very grateful.

“Only thing I can figure is it’s a competition. Kind of like the Olympics? Points for height and distance. Points for style if you waggle it really good. And to think, all these years, we thought these science types didn’t have any physical skills.”

Elisa is in full silent guffaw, rocking back against the stall, the night’s events bleaching away under Zelda’s off-color scenario.

“Hey, there’s two urinals here,” Zelda chuckles. “I don’t think synchronized peeing is out of the question—”

A man walks in. Elisa turns from the toilet, Zelda from the urinal. He wasn’t there; now he is. It’s so incredible, the women forget to react. A plastic sign reading CLOSED FOR CLEANING is all that defends female janitors from the threat of male incursion, but it’s always been sufficient. Zelda starts to point at the sign, but her arm dies midway; it’s not a janitor’s place to assert the existence of physical objects to a man of higher station, and besides, her gibes about men’s bathroom practices are still ringing from every pipe, locknut, and escutcheon of the undersink. Elisa feels shame, then shame for feeling shame. Thousands of times she and Zelda have cleaned this room, and it takes one single man to make them feel like the obscene ones.

The man paces coolly to the middle of the room.

He holds in his right hand an orange cattle prod.

10

THE REVOLVING DOOR of Klein & Saunders works its sleight of hand. On the street side, among briefcasers juking toward their next meeting, Giles is adrift, ancient, useless. The rotating chamber is where the metamorphosis happens, the glass turnstile reflecting an infinitude of possible, better selves. When Giles is ejected onto the lobby’s chessboard marble, he’s a new man. Art in hand, and with a place to take it, he’s important.

It’s been like this since before he can recall, the producing of art a mere prelude to the delight of having it, a concrete object he’d willed into being. Everything else he has is like his derelict apartment—at the end of the day, only rented. The first objet d’art in his life was a human skull his father had won in a poker game, named Andrzej after the Pole from whom it’d been won. It was Giles’s first study; he drew it hundreds of times, on the sides of envelopes, atop newspaper faces, on the back of his hand.

How he got from sketches of skulls to working at Klein & Saunders twenty years later he can barely recall. His first job was at the same Hampden-Woodberry cotton mill as his father, habituating himself to the tickle of cotton fibers in his nose, the callouses wrought by pitching bales, the soft second skin of red clay anytime he ran cotton from Mississippi. At night, sometimes all night, he painted on discarded paper he plundered from work, rampageous portraitures that sustained him better than food, and make no mistake—he was plenty hungry. He used the Mississippi clay on his arms to make his oranges pop. Decades later, it would still be his secret.

In two years, he’d left behind both the mill and his confused father to take an art department job at Hutzler’s department store. A few years later, he moved to Klein & Saunders, and there spent most of his career. He’d been proud, but not satisfied. His nagging discontent had something to do with art. True art. He’d once defined himself by that word, hadn’t he? All those abstracts of Andrzej, all those male nudes wild-lined from cotton-bale callouses and blood-orange with Biloxi mud. Giles slowly came to feel that each false smile of joy he painted for Klein & Saunders vampired real joy from those who gauged their own happiness against advertising’s impossible standards. He knew the feeling. He felt it every day.

Klein & Saunders works with prestigious clients. Hence the waiting room stocked with cardinal-red chairs of au courant German design and the libations cart managed by Hazel, the redoubtable receptionist who outdates Giles. Today, though, Hazel is absent, and some ad man’s fawn-legged secretary has been tossed before a dozen impatient execs, a smile bolted to her fearful face. Giles watches her accidentally sever an incoming call while fretting over a tray of half-made drinks. He assesses the room’s mood by the cloud of cigarette smoke: not lounging like Michelangelo’s Adam, but scattered in locomotive puffs.

He forgives her for taking a minute to notice him.

“Mr. Giles Gunderson, artist,” he heralds. “I have a two-fifteen with Mr. Bernard Clay.”

She pushes a button and garbles his name into the receiver. Giles isn’t convinced the message has been transmitted but can’t bear to ask the poor thing to try again. Giles faces the throng. It’s incredible, he thinks, that twenty years later part of him still desires to run with this stalking, snarling pack.

He considers the secretary, the drink cart. He sighs and steps behind the latter, clapping his hands for attention.

“Good sirs,” he calls out. “What say this afternoon we mix our own drinks?”

They sputter at this interference into their rightful disgruntlement; each man hoists one eyebrow high onto his forehead. Giles knows this feeling, how pique slides toward suspicion. After all this time, he doesn’t know how people so quickly sniff out that’s he different. He thinks he can feel his toupee tape begin to rip free. Should this moment tip wrongly, his rug will be the least of his problems.

“The advantage being,” Giles proceeds, “that we can make them as wet as Baltimore is dry. Who’s for a martini?”

The gamble pays off. Midafternoon businessmen, at their core, are toddlers—dehydrated and cranky—and one man’s Hear, hear is pursued by another’s Amen to that, and in a snap Giles is tending bar, performing speed pours and carving lemon twists to fraternity-house hurrahs. In the midst of the debauch, he gestures everyone aside so he can shake to life a single Brandy Alexander and present it to the secretary like an Academy Award. Everyone applauds, the girl blushes, sunlight skims off the cocktail’s frothy top like a Hawaiian horizon, and for a moment Giles feels as if his world is once more ripe with potential.

11

ZELDA KNOWS WHAT to do. It’s a variation she’s done a thousand times before, at work, certainly, but also all throughout life when pressed by men. Get out of sight, and fast. She adopts the detached smile of a servant, takes hold of her cart, and wheels it about. But the floor is soapy and the carts rolls too widely, striking the trash can and upsetting it with a clatter that bangs about the room. Just emptied, thank heavens, but she scrambles to upright it. Dropping to her knees emphasizes her weight, invites ridicule. She tries to do it quickly. While kneeling, she hears a crinkling sound. She looks up. The man is holding the last thing Zelda expects, the dictionary opposite of his electric rod: a plastic bag of bright green hard candy.

“No, no. Don’t leave. You ladies seem to be chatting enjoyably. Girl talk. Nothing in the world wrong with that. You go right on ahead, I won’t be a second.”

The inflection isn’t southern but has a crocodile’s swishing tail. The man continues forward and for a flash it looks to Zelda that the man is heading for Elisa’s stall. Did Elisa see something in F-1 that Zelda missed? Elisa’s always sensitive to people shouting at her, but her behavior since fleeing F-1 feels different, almost like she’s stunned. Is this man here to drag Elisa away? Zelda hoists herself to her feet, another graceless move, and slides her hand across her cart for a weapon—the kettle brush, the squeegee. She knows about fighting, too. Brewster has more battle scars than her, but she has her share. This man tries to harm Elisa, she’ll do what needs to be done. Zelda’s whole life will be ruined, but she’ll have no choice.

Instead, the man deviates, placing the cattle prod and candy bag on the sink, and steps over to the urinal and begins to unzip.

Now it’s Zelda who looks to Elisa for help. If Zelda’s terrified eyes missed something in F-1, maybe she can’t rely on her eyes here, either. A man, taking out his thing, right in front of them? Elisa, though, is hinging her head left and right and up and down in chase of a suitable reaction. One thing’s for sure: Zelda can’t look at the man. Looking at him, in here, doing this—she has no doubt it’s a fireable offense. All the man has to do is report them, obscene janitors, to Fleming and they’ll be history. Zelda stares at the floor so hard she waits for her gaze to crack the tile.

Urine hisses into the clean urinal.

“Name’s Strickland.” The voice resounds. “I’m heading up security.”

Zelda swallows. “Uh-huh” is all she can manage.

She tells her eyes to stay put, but they stray and see a spurt of urine splish to the mopped floor. Strickland chuckles.

“Oops. Guess it’s a good thing you got mops.”

12

RICHARD WOULD MALIGN her secret sightseeing as a misuse of time, and he’d be right. Her own gasps distract her from her guilt. The linebacker high-rises, mountainous billboards, robot-shaped gas pumps, cheddar-colored streetcars! She feels a knot inside of her fray as if her box cutter is being dragged along it. The bus rushes past signs that stay lit through the daytime drear: WE INSTALL MUFFLERS, $1.00 VARIETY STORE, SPORTING GOODS, JOIN THE AIR FORCE. She rings the bell and gets off at a West 36th shopping district locals call “the Avenue” and lets stores begin jostling for her dollar.

She tries to chime hello to all she passes, especially women. Wouldn’t it be grand to explore the city with a friend who knew its secrets? Who could parry sarcasms about outrageous markups, what the bay-wind does to your hair, all of that? Who could draw from Lainie, and appreciate the special, secret vitality she’d felt during those seventeen months on her own? But Baltimore women are startled by her greetings and barely muster smiles. After an hour, Lainie feels lonely, doomed to outsider status. She gets back on the bus. A man walks the aisle, mistakes her for a tourist, and tries to sell her a visitor’s guide. Her chest reknots. Is it her hairdo? In Florida, beehives were the rage, but not here. She is suddenly, deeply unhappy. She probably needs a visitor’s guide. She buys one.

Baltimore, the guide scolds her, has everything required to satisfy an American family. What exactly, then, is her problem? Tammy would adore the Museum of Art. Timmy would love the Historical Society. West of town is the Enchanted Forest, some kind of storybook attraction. Photos show castles and forests, princesses and witches. The kids could hold their birthday parties there this summer. It’s perfect, except for the park’s so-called Jungle Land. Even the word jungle makes Richard set down the newspaper or turn the channel. They’d just have to be careful where they walked, that’s all.

One of her past strolls took her to the docks at Fells Point. She’s tried to forget this walk, but each morning the Spray ’N Steam sweats the truth out of her; she wonders if the Amazon boiled Richard to his rawest root. It had been a slate afternoon, rhythmed with the whap of ships against docks. She’d toed the edge of the Patapsco River, lifting her collar to her jawline. To get there, she’d gotten off at a bus stop usurped by a rag-clad hobo and walked through the broken bottles of the ugliest neighborhood she’d ever seen. There’d been a movie theater, too, and she’d nearly bought a ticket just to evade the ogling. But the marquee had been missing a few too many bulbs for her comfort, and the movie hadn’t sounded pleasant at all—a circus of souls, something like that.

It was a lonesome spot. No one would hear her if she spoke. So she’d told lies into the cold, lapping water until there were none left to tell: She was happy that her husband had returned. She was fulfilled. She was optimistic about the future. She believed every statistic in the City of Baltimore leaflet Richard had given her. Only twenty percent of Baltimore households, it had boasted, owned a car, and Richard swore to her that one day soon they’d own two. He was sick of his T-bird breaking down, he said, and he wouldn’t have his wife taking public transport while he was off saving the world.

On her way back to the bus stop, in the neighborhood she didn’t like, she’d skirted a city worker spraying off the sidewalk with a hose. How nice, she’d told herself, to see a municipality taking pride in its upkeep. She’d pretended that the washing didn’t dredge up stenches of dog urine, spoiled fish, moldering leaves, congealing sewage, saliferous puddles, scorched oil, bodily excretions. One last lie before heading home, one more wrinkle to iron out.

13

BERNIE LEADS GILES into what Giles hopes is a meeting room but is merely a vacant office inside which has been wedged a table and two chairs. Bernie doesn’t sit, so Giles doesn’t, either. It feels unconvivial after the smiles and handshakes of the waiting room, even as Giles reminds himself that, if he has a friend here, it is Bernie Clay, not those rich old men in the lobby slurping down his mixed drinks. Bernie was part of the vote that kicked Giles out of the firm twenty years ago, it’s true, but his heart hadn’t been in it, and Giles reminds himself of the futility of martyrs—Bernie’s family had to eat, too, didn’t they?

Memories of the inciting event deject Giles, mostly because of its pedestrian predictability; clichés are anathema to any artist. That certain bar in Mount Vernon, the police storming in with raised badges. During the night he spent in jail, he’d thought of one thing: how the police blotter had always been his father’s favorite section of the paper. Giles hoped the old man’s eyesight, like his own, had worsened to the point that he couldn’t read the blotter’s small type, and then, when Giles never heard from his father again, knew that it hadn’t. Within a week of being fired, Giles adopted his first cat.

Finagling meetings with Bernie has become a large part of Giles’s job. But how can he complain? No one else at the firm, Mr. Klein and Mr. Saunders included, approves of Giles’s freelance involvement. Giles applies a big, red grin, just like the father in his newest painting. More advertising, he thinks, this time for himself.

“What in heavens happened to Hazel? I never knew her to miss a day.”

Bernie tugs loose his tie. “You wouldn’t believe it, Gilesy. The old broad made doe eyes at a beverage bottler and whoosh. They make off to Los Angeles. Took the account with them, too.”

“No! Good for her, I suppose.”

“Bad for us. That’s why everything’s haywire, so apologies for the room, we’re backed up. You know a good girl, you let me know, all right?”

Giles does, in fact, know a good girl, one whose job at a totalitarian research facility has been going nowhere for years. If only answering phone calls was Elisa’s forte. The few seconds Giles spends musing in silence make Bernie fidget and what’s left of Giles’s spirit sinks. Bernie is alone inside a closed room with a confirmed fruit. As eager as Giles is to jabber about the good old ad biz, he can’t let himself be the cause of this man’s distress.

“Well, here, let me show you the work—”

“I’ve really only got a few—”

Both are grateful for the distracting clank of the case’s buckle and slap of opening leather. Giles sets the canvas upon the table and gestures proudly. But what he feels is panic. Is there something screwy with the overhead lights? The bone structure of the family he painted is too pronounced, like their skin has worn down to an Andrzej polish. And did he really draw four bodiless heads? Did he not see how ghoulish that was? Even the colors look off, except for the gelatin, which, due to his all-night mixing, is the magmatic apotheosis of red.

“The red,” Bernie sighs.

“Too red,” Giles says. “I concur wholeheartedly.”

“It’s not that. Although the father’s lips do look a little… bloody. It’s the color in general. Red’s out. We’re not doing red centerpieces for anything anymore. Didn’t I tell you that? Maybe I didn’t. Like I said, things are haywire. Red’s being axed across the board. The new thing—are you ready? The new thing is green.”

“Green?”

“Bicycles. Electric guitars. Breakfast cereal. Eye shadow. Green’s the future all of a sudden. Even the new flavors coming in, wall-to-wall green. Apple, melon, green grape, pesto, pistachio, mint.”

Giles tries to ignore the quartet of mocking skulls and scrutinizes the gelatin of their desire. He feels so stupid, so blind. It doesn’t matter if Bernie mentioned the color before or not. If Giles had any judgment at all, he would have known better. What kind of ogre’s appetite would be roused by gelatin so red it looked as if sliced from a beating heart?

“It’s not me, Gilesy,” Bernie says. “It’s photographs. Every client who walks through that door today, they want photo shoots, pretty girls holding hamburgers or encyclopedia sets or what have you. They want to be invited to the casting calls to check out the goods. I’m the last guy at this firm selling the bosses on actual art. Great art is great art, that’s what I tell them. And you, Gilesy, are a great artist. Hey, you making any time for your own stuff these days?”

The painting is like key-lime-pie leftovers seen apart from the brilliant lights of Dixie Doug’s: untantalizing. Giles slips it back into his portfolio case. The weight of the case on the way home will bring him none of the comfort it gave on the trip here. His own stuff? No, Bernie. Not for years. Not when he’s busy painting and repainting gelatin that nobody wants, no matter the color of the future.

14

STRICKLAND FEELS THE hot creep of shame. The urine crawling across the slanted floor, it’s too much. He’d meant to spook the janitors. He plans on spooking everyone who laid eyes on the asset tonight. It’s a trick he took from General Hoyt when they were stationed in Tokyo. First time you meet a lesser, show him how little he means to you. As soon as he saw the black janitor, the bent back of the white janitor, the urinal, it all snapped together. But it’s disgusting. Peeing on the ground, it’s what he did in the Amazon. Cleanliness is what he craves now, and here he is, literally pissing on it.

He checks over his shoulder and gets a good look at the little one. She’s got an open face. Clear of all that glop Lainie layers on. This makes him feel worse. He urges his bladder to empty. He looks around for something else to say. Finds the cattle prod. No doubt both women are staring at it. He haggled it from a farmer before departing Brazil. Some peasant who barely spoke English and yet called it “the Alabama Howdy-do.” Really helped him move the asset in or out of the pool when the asset needed encouragement. There’s a fat, dark red drop of blood clinging to one of the two brass prongs. It elongates toward the white porcelain. Another mess about to be made.

He brightens his voice to distract himself from his self-disgust. “That right there is a heavy-duty 1954 Farm-Master 30 model. None of that newfangled fiberglass crap. Steel shaft, oak handle. Variable five-hundred to ten-thousand volts. Go ahead and look, ladies, but do not touch.”

His face heats up. It sounds like he could be talking about his cock. Disgusting, disgusting. What if Timmy heard him talk like this? What if Tammy did? He loves the kids, even though he’s afraid to touch them, afraid he’ll hurt them. All they have to judge him by is what comes out of his mouth. He feels a bloom of anger toward these women for bearing witness to his ugliness. Not their fault for being in this room, of course. But it’s their fault being in this job, isn’t it? For putting themselves in this position? The last drop of urine falls. He thinks of the pregnant bulb of blood hanging from the Alabama Howdy-do.

Strickland hitches his pelvis, tucks, zips his pants with a startling yowl. The women look away. Are there urine spatters on his pants? He’s not in the jungle anymore. He has to think of such things all the time now. He wants to run from this overbright room and the mess he’s made. Wrap this up, he tells himself.

“You both heard what the man said in the lab. I hope I don’t need to repeat it.”

“We’re cleared,” the Negro says.

“I know you’re cleared. I checked.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s my job to check.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

Why is this woman making this difficult? Why can’t the other woman, so much prettier, so much gentler looking, why won’t she say something? The air in the room feels swampy. His imagination, it’s got to be. His heart pounds. He reaches for a machete that isn’t there. The Howdy-do, though. It’ll make a fine replacement. He longs to wrap his fingers around it. He pushes a laugh through clamped jaws.

“Look. I’m not one of them George Wallace folks. I think Negroes have a place. I do. At work, in schools, all the same rights as whites. But you people need to work on your vocabulary. You hear yourself? You keep repeating the same words. I fought right next to a Negro in Korea who ended up court-martialed for something he didn’t do, because when the judge wanted his story he couldn’t say anything but yes, sir and no, sir. That’s why we’ve got so many of your kind in jail. I don’t mean anything personal by it. I heard they’re closing down Alcatraz next month and there’s hardly a Negro in there, and those are the worst criminals this country’s got. That’s a credit to your race. You ought to be proud.”

The hell is he talking about? Alcatraz? These janitors must think he’s a nitwit. The second he’s gone, this restroom is going to explode with their laughter. Sweat pours down his face. The chamber is closing in on him, and it must be three hundred degrees. He nods, sees the bag of hard candy, swipes it, fishes inside. He didn’t wash his hands first. Janitors, of all people, will notice that. Disgusting, disgusting. He shoves a green ball into his mouth. Gives the staring women one last look.

“Either of you ladies care for a candy?”

But the green ball is like a horse’s bit. He can’t make out a word of his own question. Oh, they’ll laugh, all right. Fucking janitors. Fucking everyone. He’ll need to be tougher on the scientists, not flub it like he flubbed this. Occam’s no different than the Josefina. He’ll make sure everyone understands that it’s Strickland in charge. Not David Fleming, the Pentagon’s flunky. Not Dr. Bob Hoffstetler, the benign biologist. He turns on his heel. It’s slick. He hopes it’s soapy water, not urine. He bites down on the candy so he won’t hear his own wet footsteps and grabs the Howdy-do off the sink. The bulb of blood, it probably falls. And the janitors will wipe it away. But they’ll remember it. Remember him. Disgusting, disgusting.

15

STRICKLAND’S OFFER OF candy only adds a sick sweetness to the revolting scene. Elisa lost her taste for candy at the age when most children would murder for it. Even the sugary pies Giles forces upon her at Dixie Doug’s scrape at her throat. She recalls the origin of her distaste from a cringer’s perspective, gawking up at adult gorgons every bit as inscrutable as Strickland. In the eyes of these early caretakers, Elisa wasn’t handicapped; she was stupid and recalcitrant. The orphanage had the darling name of the Baltimore Home for Wee Wanderers, but those who lived there slashed it to “Home,” ironic given the attributes that storybooks always associated with home. Security. Safety. Comfort. Joy. Swing sets. Sandboxes. Hugs.

The older kids could show you outbuildings where you could find equipment stenciled with Home’s prior title: the Fenzler School for the Feeble-Minded and Idiotic. By the time of Elisa’s arrival, children whose files would have once encumbered them as mongoloids, lunatics, or defectives were gathered under the wings of retarded, slow, or derelict. Unlike the Jewish and Catholic orphanages down the block, Home’s mission was to keep you alive, if barely, so that when you hit the street at eighteen, you could find a menial job serving your superiors.

Home’s children might have united, just as Occam’s janitors might have united. Instead, the paucity of food and affection circulated cruelty like a cough, and each child knew her or his rivals’ pressure points. You were sentenced to Home because your folks landed in the poorhouse? You’re Breadless Betty. Your parents are dead? You’re Graveyard Gilbert. You’re an immigrant? You’re Red Rosa, Harold the Hun. Elisa never knew the real names of some children until the day they were pushed out the door.

Elisa’s own nickname was “Mum,” though housemothers knew her better as “22.” Numbers tidied matters in the untidy world of unwanted children, and each child had one. Every item assigned to you had your number on it, making it easy to ascribe fault when something of yours manifested where it didn’t belong. Ostracized children like Mum were luckless. Adversaries had only to wad her blanket under their coat, toss it outside in the mud, and watch as the “22” on the tag was identified and Mum was assigned her discipline.

Punishment could be delegated to any housemother, but the Matron herself often liked to dole it out. She didn’t own Home, but it was all she had. As early as age three, Elisa intuited that the Matron saw Home’s unruly brood as reflections of her unstable mind, and to keep the children in order was to keep herself sane. It didn’t work. She’d laugh hard enough to make the littlest ones cry, then break into raging sobs that would further alarm them. She carried a sapling switch for the backs of legs and arms, a ruler for knuckles, and a bottle of castor oil for forced swallowing.

Treacherously, the Matron also carried candy. Because she depended so much on the feedback of pleading and sniffling, she smited silent Mum above all others. An incorrigible little monster, she called her. Secretive, up to something. Even worse were the opposite days when the Matron, her gray hair ribboned into obscene pigtails, cornered Elisa to ask if she wanted to play dollies. Elisa would go through the motions, terrified as the Matron asked if any bad little girls were wetting their beds. That’s when the candy came out. It was okay to tell her secrets, the Matron said. Just point out the kids, so I can fix them. It felt to Elisa like a trap. It was a trap. Same as Mr. Strickland, crinkling his cellophane bag. One way or the other, offered sweets, all of them, were poison.

Elisa got older. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. She sat alone at soda fountains, apart from the other girls, and listened to them talk about drinking alcohol; her glass of water tasted like soap. She heard them talk about dance classes; she had to freeze her hands on her ice-cream bowl so she wouldn’t pound her fists. She heard them talk about kissing. One girl said, “He makes me feel like somebody,” and Elisa dwelled upon it for months. What would feeling like somebody feel like? To suddenly exist not only in your world, but someone else’s as well?

One of the places to which she trailed other girls was the Arcade Cinema Marquee. She’d never been inside a theater. She bought a ticket and waited to be asked to leave. She spent five minutes choosing a seat, as if it might determine her whole life’s path. Maybe it did: The movie was The Yearling, and though she and Giles would poke fun at its schmaltz years later on television, it was the religious experience she’d never had inside a pew. Here was a place where fantasy overwhelmed real life, where it was too dark to see scars and silence wasn’t only accepted but enforced by flashlight-armed ushers. For two hours and eight minutes, she was whole.

Her second film was called The Postman Always Rings Twice, and it was a fleshly, fervid froth of sex and violence, a nihilism for which nothing in Home’s library, nothing adults had told her, nothing girls gossiped about had prepared her. World War II was only lately finished, and Baltimore’s streets bustled with clean-cut soldiers, and she looked differently at them on the way home, and they, she thought, looked differently at her. Her interactions, however, were failures. Young men had little patience for flirtations made from fingers.

By her own estimate, she sneaked into the Arcade roughly one hundred and fifty times over her last three years at Home. This was before the theater’s downturn; before plaster began dropping from the ceiling; before Mr. Arzounian started running films 24-7 in desperation. It was her education—her real education. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman gasping for air inside each other in Notorious. Olivia de Havilland writhing away from the madwomen of The Snake Pit. Montgomery Clift wandering through curtains of dust in Red River. Elisa was finally nabbed by an usher while slinking into Sorry, Wrong Number, but by then it didn’t matter. She was a fortnight from what Home had deemed as her eighteenth birthday. She’d be booted out and forced to find a place, and a way, to live. Terrifying but also sensational: She could buy her own tickets, look for people to gasp against, or writhe from, or just wander among.

The Matron conducted Elisa’s exit interview while smoking and pacing the length of her office, infuriated at Elisa’s survival. A local women’s group supplied Home’s graduates with a month’s worth of rent money and a suitcase full of thrift-store outfits, and Elisa was wearing her favorite, a bottle-green wool dress with a pocketed skirt. All she needed was a scarf to hide her scars. She added it to her crowded mental checklist: Buy scarf.

“You’ll be a whore by Christmas,” the Matron vowed.

Elisa shivered, thrilled that the threat didn’t scare her. Why would it? She’d seen enough Hollywood films to know all hookers had hearts of gold, and sooner or later, Clark Gable or Clive Brook or Leslie Howard noticed the glow. This musing might have been what led her, later that day, not to a women’s home but her favorite place in the world, the Arcade Cinema Marquee. She couldn’t afford to see Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman, yet wanted nothing more than to lose herself among what the poster promised was “a cast of thousands”—just like the wider Baltimore of which she was now a part, except safely constrained to the screen.

She felt so irresponsible fishing forty cents from her purse that she hung her head, and that’s how she noticed the poorly placed sign: ROOM FOR RENT—INQUIRE WITHIN. There was never any doubt. Weeks later and one rent check from losing the place, she saw an ad for a janitorial position at Occam Aerospace Research Center. She composed her letter, achieved an appointment, and spent the morning of her interview ironing her bottle-green dress and studying a bus schedule. One hour before her planned departure, disaster: great silver scythes of rain, and she owned no umbrella. She panicked, tried not to cry, and became aware of rumblings from the Arcade’s other apartment. She hadn’t met the man who lived there, though he was always around, some sort of shut-in. She’d lost the luxury of guardedness. She knocked on his door.

She expected squat, hirsute, unshaven, and leering, but the fellow who answered had an aristocratic air, tucked like an envelope inside jacket, sweater, vest, and shirt, pushing fifty but with eyes sparkling behind spectacles. He blinked and absently touched his bald head as if he’d forgotten to put on a hat. Then he registered her distress and smiled gently.

“Why, hello, there. To whom do I owe the pleasure?”

Elisa touched her neck in apology, then made the sign for “umbrella,” an intuitive one. The man’s surprise at her muteness lasted only a few seconds.

“An umbrella! Of course! Come in, my dear, and I’ll pull it from the pile like Excalibur from the stone.”

He dove into the apartment. Elisa hesitated. She’d never been inside a home that wasn’t Home; she leaned rightward and saw baroque, shadowy shapes rippling with skulking felines.

“Of course you’re the new tenant. How inhospitable of me not to visit sooner with the ritual plate of cookies. I’m afraid the only excuse I have is a deadline which has had me nailed to the desk.”

The desk in question didn’t look like a desk. It was a tabletop hinged at an adjustable angle. This man was an artist of some sort, and Elisa felt a windblown tingle. The table had at its center a half-painted image of a woman from over her shoulder, the curls of her hair as the chief focus. Beneath her was painted the legend: NO MORE DULL DRAB HAIR.

“My neglectfulness notwithstanding, please let me know if you need anything at all, although I do recommend that you pick up your own umbrella. I notice you have a bus schedule there, and the station is a longer walk from here than is ideal. Many things, as you have no doubt noticed, are less than ideal about the Arcade Apartments. But carpe diem, and all that fine stuff. I trust you’re getting along all right?”

He paused in his canvas rifling and looked to Elisa for a response. She expected this; once people started talking, they tended to forget the disability over which they’d chosen to discourse. This man, however, smiled, his slender brown mustache broadening like open arms.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to learn sign language. What a wonderful opportunity for me.”

The worried tears Elisa had been tamping for weeks should have fallen in a grateful gush, but she forced them back; there was no time to redo makeup. It only got harder over the subsequent minutes, as the man, Giles Gunderson per his magniloquent introduction, located the umbrella, decided to drive her himself, and refused to accept her signed protests. Along the way, Giles distracted her with how the word janitor came from Janus, the god of entrances and exits, only stopping the lesson when an Occam guard established that Giles’s name wasn’t on a list. The guard motioned Elisa to climb out of the van and into the slashing rain.

“‘And wheresoe’er thou move, good luck / Shall fling her old shoe after,’” Giles had called out after her. “Alfred Lord Tennyson!”

Shoe, she’d repeated to herself, keeping eyes on her ugly, inherited heels as they splatted along a rain-run sidewalk. If I get this job, I’ll buy myself a nice pair of shoes.

16

THE MYSTERIOUS ADVENT of Strickland has supplanted Brewster stories as the favored topic of conversation. Elisa can’t quit thinking of what she saw in the tank, yet keeps it private from Zelda—the memory feels more preposterous by the day. Instead, and to Elisa’s gratitude, Zelda has defused tension by poking fun at everything else. Realizing, for instance, that Fleming kept calling Strickland’s armed guards “MPs”—Military Police—and not “Empties,” a label that was even more fitting, as the silent, stern soldiers showed no proclivity for independent action. Empties are, at least, easy for the women to avert, as they march in a buckle-jangling lockstep beyond the abilities of gawky scientists. Even now they hear a few, and Zelda and Elisa sidestep them, turning down a hall they usually save for later.

“Even when the Empties aren’t on the warpath, I know just where they are,” Zelda says. “They breathe together, you notice that? It’s like air coming out of the vents, all at once. Whoosh. I’m telling you, all these extra men here, and it’s just as quiet as before? It’s not natural.”

Before Elisa can sign a reply, the aforementioned quiet, a decade undisturbed, is cracked in half. In the neighborhood in which Elisa lives, such a sound might have her looking for a backfiring car before hedging toward cover, wary of local tales of organized crime. Inside Occam, the bang is so astonishing it might as well be a spaceship crash; Zelda ducks behind her cart, as if cheap plastic and corrosive liquids will be her salvation.

Then another bang, then another. The sounds aren’t sloppy. They aren’t objects being dropped. They are of mechanical issue, urged by a trigger, and Elisa has no choice but to assume that they are, in fact, gunshots. Shouting follows, as well as the rabbity heartbeat of running feet, both noises muffled behind the nearest door, which is, of course, F-1.

“Get down!” Zelda pleads.

Zelda signs the order, too, and Elisa suffers a wallop of love for the woman. She realizes she is, indeed, still standing. The door opens, striking the wall as loudly as a fourth gunshot. Zelda recoils as if she took the bullet, toppling to a hip and crossing her arms over her face. Elisa’s entire body jerks once, and then she’s frozen by the size, speed, and force of the humanity gushing out.

Fleming is out in front. His grimace is familiar to anyone who’s seen him overreact to a clogged toilet or a hallway puddle, the difference being the bloody handprints tracked up both of his sleeves. Coming third is Bob Hoffstetler, and he’s the most upset of any of them, spectacles akimbo and his thin net of hair in an upright thatch. He carries a red, soaking wad of cloth that could be anything—towel, smock, undershirt. His eyes, usually so kind, shoot like darts into Elisa.

“Call an ambulance!” The accent, usually so delicate, is husky under hardship.

Between these regular-sized humans is Strickland, his deep-valleyed eyes ablaze and his lips peeled back, gripping with tourniquet tightness the wrist of his left arm, which ends not in the expected hand but a bouquet of fingers arranged at hinky angles, baby-breathed with blood, and vased in loose peels of skin. Blood drops to the floor as loudly as ball bearings. Elisa gapes at them, the ruby beads; they will be hers to clean.

Empties burst outward, kicking the blood beads. The guards break off on either side of Strickland, coming at Elisa and Zelda with rifles thrust out like dancers’ canes. This is crowd control. This is clearing the scene. Elisa grabs her cart, wheels it around, and knows by its yawing swerve that the back wheels have been fully slickened.

17

ANTONIO IS THE first to make it to the cafeteria to ask if everything’s okay. His crossed eyes pose the question to both Elisa and Zelda, but Zelda knows full well she’s the one who has to answer. All this time and the crew hasn’t bothered to learn so much as the sign-language alphabet. Zelda’s tired of it. She doesn’t want to be in charge here, or at home, or anywhere. It’s too hard. Look at her hands—they’re shaking. She conceals it by turning to face the Automat, scanning the geometric sandwiches and gamy fruit like it’s just another three-in-the-morning dinnertime.

Duane arrives next, toothless as a newt and just as squeaky. Yolanda makes up for their timidity, cycloning in and honking on about how it sounded like someone was shooting up the joint, she can’t work like this, she has half a mind to blah, blah, blah. Zelda lets her eyesight blur until she can only make out the Automat’s nickel-operated compartments, each one an itsy-bitsy Alice in Wonderland doorway. If she could become small, she might crawl through one and get the heck out of here.

Instead, she’s trapped to relive F-1’s gory eruption in her mind, over and over. She tries to generate sympathy for Mr. Strickland. The next time he visited a men’s room, would he even be able to undo his zipper? This stab at sympathy is like trying to chop ice with her hand. There’s no way that man couldn’t guess how it might feel for a black woman to be cornered by a white man with a cattle prod. She looks up and notices Lucille; her albino coloring cloaks her against the cafeteria wall.

“Look, even Lucille’s upset,” Yolanda cries. “¿Qué pasa?”

Zelda turns around. She’s been avoiding it. She doesn’t want to look at Elisa right now. She loves the skinny little lady so much, yet can’t shake the certainty that this is her fault. She’s the one who insisted they follow the questionable QCC directive to enter F-1, which grounded them on Strickland’s bad side, and Zelda can’t help but think Elisa purposely lingered outside F-1 tonight, which put them in the worst spot imaginable when the gunfire began.

Elisa wilts in her chair, like Zelda is stomping her chest. Zelda feels terrible, then tells herself to quit feeling terrible. Elisa’s a good person, but she’ll never get it. How could she? Things go wrong at Occam, and it won’t be the white woman who gets blamed. Hell, Elisa goes around pocketing loose change from labs like it’s nothing. What if it’s a trap? Elisa would never even think of such a thing. What if a scientist left it there to test the night janitors, and when it vanishes, and Fleming is told, guess whose neck is on the butcher block?

Elisa lives in a world of her own devising. That’s obvious from the shoes. Zelda imagines Elisa’s perception as one of those dioramas she saw in a museum, perfect little realms, breakable but not if you walk softly. This is not Zelda’s world. She can’t turn on a TV without seeing black people marching, stabbing signs into the anger-stirred air. Brewster sees footage like that, he changes the channel, and Zelda, in her heart, is grateful, even if it’s spineless. Anything racial goes down anywhere in the USA, and the looks she gets at the punch clock the next day are murder. All over the country, men like David Fleming are looking for reasons to fire women like Zelda Fuller.

What other work could she do? She’s lived in Old West Baltimore since birth, and the row houses haven’t improved much since then. Today, the neighborhood is more crowded, more segregated. Zelda gets the concepts of blockbusting and white flight, but doesn’t give a damn. She dreams of the suburbs. She can taste the air, like pine and marmalade, feel it flushing Occam’s toxins from her body. She won’t be working at Occam when she lives out there—it’s too far away. She’ll be running her own cleaning business. She’s told Elisa about it a hundred times, how she’ll bring Elisa with her, hire other smart ladies, pay them square like no man would. She’s waiting for Elisa to take it seriously. She never does, and it’s hard to blame her. How would Zelda make enough dough with Brewster only working at whim? What bank would cosign a business loan for a black woman?

Zelda imagines the cafeteria is a white man’s paradise of horseplay and joviality during the day, but at night it’s as bare and clangorous as a cave. Footsteps resound down an adjacent hall, coming closer. It’s Fleming, every last one of his promotions evident in his unfaltering stride. Zelda looks at Elisa, her best friend, her potential ruiner, and feels her dreams of getting out of Old West Baltimore, and out of Occam, start to drip down like blood off the prongs of Strickland’s cattle prod.

18

“WE HAVE OURSELVES a pickle, girls. A real pickle.”

The scene of the crime still vibrates from the ordeal. Without being asked, Elisa dips her mop into soapy water, wrings it in the vise, and swabs it at the tusk of blood. Fleming, meanwhile, issues the orders to Zelda. He always does. Zelda, at least, can verbally indicate comprehension.

“I need both of you inside F-1 right now,” Fleming continues. “Emergency work. No questions, please. Just do the job. Do it well, but do it quickly. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“What do you want us to do?” Zelda asks.

“Zelda, this will go faster if you just listen. There’s… biologic matter. On the floor. Maybe the tables. Check around. I don’t need to explain this to you. You know how to do your job. Just make it all go away.”

Elisa glances at the door. There’s blood on the knob.

“But… will we be…”

“Zelda, what did I say? I wouldn’t send you in there if you weren’t perfectly safe. Just stay away from the tank. That’s the big metal object you saw Mr. Strickland bring in. Do not go near the tank. There should be no reason at all for either of you to approach the tank. Is that understood? Zelda? Elisa?”

“Yes, sir,” Zelda says, and Elisa nods.

Fleming starts to say more, then checks his watch. His terse parting words divulge a troubling loss of orating acumen.

“Fifteen minutes. Immaculate. Your complete discretion.”

The lab is spare and orderly no longer. The concrete floor has sprouted a range of metal masts and stockades, each built with iron loops onto which an object, or a living thing, could be leashed. Carts of what look like medical devices extend from the beige computer bank like technological tumors. A table stands in the room’s center, wheels pointed in four different directions. Surgical implements are scattered like punched-out teeth. Drawers are open, sinks are full, cigarettes still seep smoke. One smolders on the floor. The floor, as always, is where the hard work is.

Blood is all over. Gazing over it, Elisa thinks of magazine photos taken from airplanes of flooded lowlands. There’s a hubcap-sized lake of blood congealing beneath the glaring lights. Smaller ponds, lochs, and lagoons trace Mr. Strickland’s race to the door. Zelda pushes her cart through a lakelet and grimaces at the blood trailing behind the plastic wheels. Elisa has no choice but to mirror the movement, too astonished to hatch a cannier plan.

Fifteen minutes. Elisa pours water over the floor. It slithers, strikes blobs of blood, births pink pinwheels. This is how she was taught to do it at Home, in every arena of life. Thin out the mystery of life, the fascination, the lust, the horror, until you no longer question it. She lobs her mop head at the center of the gunk and drags it this way, and that, until the yarn-strands bloat and darken. This is normal. The sound, too, is normal—the wet swap, moist slurp—and she fixates on it. That soot scorch on the concrete could be from an Empty’s fired gun; mop right over it. That’s a cattle prod, one million pounds of menace, impossible to lift; mop around it.

Elisa tells herself not to look at the tank. Don’t look at the tank, Elisa. Elisa looks at the tank. Even thirty feet away, next to the large pool, it’s too big for the lab, a dinosaur crouching in wait. It has been bolted to four plinths, a wooden stairway providing access to a top hatch. Fleming was right about one thing: There’s no blood anywhere near it. No reason to approach it. Elisa tells herself to look away. Look away, Elisa. Elisa cannot look away.

The moppers meet at the bloody area’s vertex. Zelda checks her watch, swipes sweat from her nose, and steadies her bucket for a final pour, nodding for Elisa to gather the contraptions off the floor before the water floods them aside. Elisa kneels and collects them. A pair of forceps. A scalpel with a broken blade. A syringe with a bent needle. Dr. Hoffstetler’s tools, for sure, though she can’t make herself believe the man would hurt anyone or anything. He’d looked devastated charging from the lab. She stands and sets the items in a parallel arrangement on a table like a hotel maid. She hears water lap from Zelda’s bucket and from peripheral vision sees its elongating tendrils. Zelda clucks.

“Will you look at that? Janitors have to sneak off to the loading dock to smoke. Meantime they’re smoking cigars in here like this is some—”

Zelda is not a person typically given to gasps. Elisa spins around to see Zelda’s mop timber forward. Her hands are cupped before her, holding two small objects the mop water washed back from under the table, objects she’d believed were cigars. Her hands shake and part, and the objects drop. One of them falls soundlessly. The other clinks, and from it pops a silver wedding band.

19

ZELDA HAS GONE for help. Elisa can hear her nurse flats firecracking down the hallway. She’s left staring at Strickland’s fingers. The pinky, the ring finger. Snaggy fingernails, poignant tufts of knuckle hair. The skin of the ring finger is pale on one end, blocked from sun for years by the wedding ring. Elisa’s mind returns to the sight of Strickland bursting from the lab door. He’d been clutching his left hand. These are two of the fingers that had fished into the crinkling cellophane bag of green hard candy.

She can’t just leave them there. Fingers can be reattached. She’s read about it. Maybe Dr. Hoffstetler has the know-how to do it himself. She grimaces and looks around. F-1 is a lab. It must have containers, beakers. Occam labs, however, mock people like her; they’re impossible to decode, provisioned with instruments of arcane utility. Her eyes fall in despair and she sees, next to a trash can, something more endemic to her field: a wadded brown paper bag. She goes for it, shakes it open, and sticks her hand inside the greasy paper to operate it like a puppet. Those nubs on the floor aren’t human fingers. They’re just pieces of trash needing to be picked up.

Elisa kneels and tries to collect them. They are like two chunks of chicken, too soft and small for her to get a grip. They fall once, twice, scattering blood like Giles’s dropped brushes scatter paint. She holds her breath, locks her jaw, and picks up the fingers with her bare hand. They are as lukewarm as a limp handshake. She inserts them into the bag and crimps the top. She’s wiping her hand on her uniform when she spies the wedding band. She can’t leave that, either, but no way is she opening the bag again. She swipes the ring and drops it into her apron pocket. She stands, tries to restore normal breathing. The bag feels empty, as if the two fingers have wiggled away like worms.

Elisa is alone, in silence. But is it silence? She is aware of a soft wheeze, air being discharged through a vent. She looks across the lab, once again, at the tank. A second, more disturbing question poses itself. Is she, after all, alone? Fleming warned her and Zelda not to approach the tank. Sound advice. Do not approach the tank, Elisa reinforces to herself. She glances down. Her bright shoes are moving over mopped floor. She is approaching the tank.

Though she is encircled by advanced technology, Elisa feels like a cartoon caveman advancing upon a thicket despite the growls vibrating from within. What was foolhardy two million years ago is foolhardy now. Yet her pulse doesn’t quicken as it did from Strickland’s harmless fingers. It could be because Fleming promised her that she was safe. Or it could be because every night she dreams of the darkest water, and there it is, beyond the portholes of the cylindrical tank: darkness, water.

F-1 is too bright for her to adjust her eyes to the tank’s interior blackness, so she sets down the paper bag and tunnels her hands against the porthole. Refracted light makes her feel as if she’s spiraling until she realizes that the window is underwater. She squashes her nose to the glass to see upward. Here, at last, her pulse gallops, right along with the old iron-lung nightmares.

The dark water eddies with weak light. Elisa catches her breath: It’s like distant fireflies. She presses her hands flat against the window, wanting closer, feeling a physical need. The substance turns, twists, dances like an arabesque veil. Between the points of light, a shape coalesces. Floating debris, Elisa tries to tell herself, that’s all it is, and then a shaft of light hits a pair of photoreceptive eyes. They flash bright as gold through black water.

The glass explodes. At least, that is how it sounds. The crash is the lab door banging open, the shatter is the several sets of feet charging inside, and the scrunch is the paper bag being swiped up by her own hands. She’s proving herself a caveman indeed, shrinking back from a bestial threat and rushing at civilization’s centrum—Fleming, the Empties, Dr. Hoffstetler—hoisting the bag of fingers like a trophy, her trophy for having looked into the eyes of ravishing annihilation and lived to tell. She’s giddy with survival, breathless, almost crying, almost laughing.

20

VARIOUS OFFICES WERE offered to Strickland. First-floor berths with panoramic views of swooping lawns. He enjoyed spurning Fleming’s largesse by instead insisting upon the windowless security-camera room. He had Fleming install a desk, cabinet, trash can, and two telephones. One white, one red. The room is small, neat, quiet, and perfect. He journeys his eyes across the four-by-four grid of black-and-white monitors. The interchangeable hallways. The sporadic twitch of a meandering night worker. After the occluded views of the rain forest, how relieving it is to see everything all at once.

He peruses the screens. The last time he saw the two janitors now seated right behind him was in the men’s room, he burning with the mortification of runaway urine, they holding their laughter until he left. Different dynamic now, isn’t it? An opportunity to reestablish a proper relationship. He lets his left hand dangle. Gives the janitors a chance to see the bandages, the shape of his reattached fingers. To imagine what they look like underneath. He could tell them. Pretty fucking bad is how they look. The fingers don’t match his hand. They’re putty-colored, stiff as plastic, attached by black thread the thickness of tarantula legs.

Strickland’s only concern is that they can make out his fingers in the dim light. He unscrewed the overheads after moving in, preferring to let the sixteen screens fill the office with a ghostly gray. After the jungle’s salacious blaze, bright lights are as bad as loud noises. F-1 is intolerable. Hoffstetler has begun dimming the lab at night for the creature’s sake, but that’s even worse. The idea that he and the asset share a light sensitivity enrages him. He’s no animal. He left his animal self in the Amazon. He had to if he had any hope of being a good husband, a good father.

Just to make sure they see, he wiggles his stitched fingers. The blood screams, the monitors go hazy. Strickland blinks, tries not to faint. This pain, it’s something else. The doctors gave him pills for it. The bottle’s right there in the desk. Don’t doctors know that suffering has a point? It grinds you harder, sharper. No thanks, doc. Hard candy will do.

Thinking of the sharp, stinging, distracting taste makes him finally turn around. Since Lainie refuses to unpack the boxes from the move, he’d had to dig out the Brazilian candy himself. It was worth it. The bag chuckles like a clean countryside creek when he picks it up. The glassy green ball billiards between his teeth. That’s better. Much better. He exhales over a tongue being playfully stabbed by sugar and drops himself into his chair.

He’s supposed to thank these two janitors. For finding his fingers. That was Fleming’s request. He would have told Fleming to stuff it, but he’s bored. Sitting behind a desk all day. How do people stand it? Takes fifty signatures before he’s authorized to blow his nose. A hundred signatures before he can wipe his ass. It’s a shame not a single idiot MP landed a bullet in the asset during the attack. He’s got half a mind to pick up the Alabama Howdy-do, march into F-1, and fix it so the asset has less life left to be studied. Once Deus Brânquia is gone, he’ll be out from under General Hoyt, back into his wife’s and kids’ lives. He wants that. Doesn’t he? He thinks he does.

Plus, he can’t sleep. Not with this kind of pain. So, fine. He’ll leak some gratitude upon the stupid janitors. But he’ll do it his way, just to make sure they don’t think he’s some overgrown child incapable of not pissing all over the bathroom floor. Anyway, he’s in no hurry to scurry home. The way Lainie looks at him, he can hardly stand it. Like the fingers don’t compare to what the jungle ripped out of him and what he’s tried to hastily sew back together. He’s trying. Can’t she see he’s trying?

He picks up the first of two pulled files.

“Zelda D. Fuller.”

“Yes, sir,” she replies.

“Married, says here. But how is it your husband’s got a different last name? If you’re divorced or separated, that’s supposed to be here.”

“Brewster, that’s his first name, sir.”

“Sounds like a last name to me.”

“Yes, sir. But no, sir.”

“Yes, but no. Yes, but no.” He screws his right thumb into a forehead beset by the pain crawling up his left arm. “Answers like that are going to make this last all night. It’s twelve-thirty. In the a.m. I could’ve called you two here in the middle of the day, make it easy on myself, but I didn’t. Best you can do is return the favor so I can get out of here, go to bed, have breakfast with my kids. That sound all right to you, Mrs. Brewster? I’m sure you have children.”

“I don’t, sir.”

“No? Now why’s that?”

“I don’t know, sir. It just never… took.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Brewster.”

“It’s Mrs. Fuller, sir. Brewster’s my husband.”

“Brewster. That’s a last name or I’m a monkey’s uncle. Well, I’m sure you have siblings. I expect you know how it goes with children.”

“I don’t have siblings, sir, I’m sorry.”

“That surprises me a great deal. Isn’t that unusual? For your people?”

“My mother died in childbirth.”

“Oh.” Strickland flips a page. “Here it is, page two. That’s too bad. Although if she died in childbirth, I guess you can’t miss her.”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Silver lining, is all I’m saying.”

“Maybe, sir.”

Maybe. It feels as if two balloons of acid are inflating inside his temples. Maybe they’ll explode. Maybe his skin will fizzle from his face and these girls will get to see his shrieking skull. He presses a finger to the page and converges his wobbling eyes upon it. A dead mother. Implied miscarriages. Some kooky marriage. Doesn’t mean shit. Words are useless. Take General Hoyt’s brief about Deus Brânquia. Sure, it’d explained the mission. But had it imparted a thing about how the jungle gets inside you? How the vines penetrate your mosquito net while you sleep, slithering past your lips, boring through your esophagus, and strangling your heart?

Somewhere there’s a government brief about the thing in F-1, and it’s bullshit, too. What’s inside that tank, you can’t capture it in words. You need all your senses. His had been electric in the Amazon, fueled on rage and buchité. Returning to America had dulled him. Baltimore had put him into a coma. Maybe getting two fingers torn off can wake him back up. Because look at him. Here, in the dead of night, listening to low-paid night crawlers, hired precisely because they are slow, uneducated women, tell him, to his face, maybe.

21

“WHAT’S THE D?” he demands.

Zelda has been menaced by men in power all her life. A steelworker following her to the playground to tell her that her daddy had stolen a white man’s job at Bethlehem and was going to hang. Teachers at Douglass High who thought educating black girls would only make them covet things they’d never have. A Fort McHenry tour guide who tallied the number of Union soldiers killed in the Civil War and then asked Zelda if she didn’t want to say thank you to her white classmates. At Occam, though, threats have only ever come from Fleming, and she’s learned how to handle those. Know your QCC front and back. Know how to look forlorn. Know how to flatter.

Mr. Strickland is different. Zelda doesn’t know him, and senses it wouldn’t matter if she did. He’s got lion eyes, like she saw once at the zoo, impossible to read to judge the degree of aggression. Forget divining any clues as to why she and Elisa have been called before this wall of security monitors, though it can’t be good.

“D, sir?” she ventures.

“Zelda D. Fuller.”

Here’s a question with an answer. She rushes for it, heedlessly.

“Delilah. You know, the Bible.”

“Delilah? The dead mother gave you that?”

She knows how to absorb a punch.

“That’s what my father told me, sir. She had it planned out for a girl.”

Strickland bites into his candy. He does this like a lion, too, jaws wide. Zelda knows cheap candy when she sees it, she practically grew up on it, but this is a new level of cheap. It cleaves badly; she sees splinters sliver into the man’s cheek and gums. She sees blood, diluted by saliva, and can almost taste it, cold and edgeless, as opposite to hard candy as the color red is to green.

“Interesting lady, this dead mother,” Strickland says. “You know what Delilah did, don’t you?”

Zelda enters Fleming’s scolding sessions prepared to deflect claims that janitors stole something that absentminded scientists only misplaced. Never before has she had to bone up on biblical characters.

“I… at church, they—”

“My wife’s a churchgoer, so I’m up on most of the stories. What I recall is God gave Samson a bunch of strength. Slew a whole army with a donkey’s jawbone, that kind of thing. Now Delilah, she was a temptress. Got old Samson to tell her his secret. So Delilah gets her servant to cut off Samson’s hair and calls in her friends the Philistines, who poke out Samson’s eyes and mutilate him till he’s hardly a man anymore. He’s just some thing they torture. That’s Delilah. Real credit to females. Odd name, is all I’m saying.”

The conversation shouldn’t go like this; it isn’t fair. Zelda knows the same Bible stories, but her body betrays her, turns her into the stooge Strickland expects—she can feel her eyes widen and her lips tremble. Strickland scans the file, and Zelda can hear his silent tsk, tsk. Zelda is ashamed to feel relief when Strickland shifts his gaze to Elisa. Zelda can still hear his thoughts, though. Laziness isn’t strictly a Negro problem, no sir. The lower class is the lower class because they can’t find their bootstraps. Take this white woman. All right face, nice enough figure. If she had an ounce of gumption, she’d be puttering about a tidy house taking care of kids, not working the graveyard shift like some sort of nocturnal beast.

Strickland crunches candy, picks up the second file.

“Elisa Esposito,” Strickland says. “Es-po-si-to. You part Mexican or something?”

Zelda glances at Elisa. Her friend’s face is taut with the particular anxiety she suffers when someone doesn’t yet know she’s mute. Zelda clears her throat and intercedes.

“It’s Italian, sir. It’s a name they give to orphans. She was found on the riverbank when she was a baby, and they gave her the name.”

Strickland frowns at Zelda. She knows the look. He’s getting sick of hearing her talk. Creating self-aggrandizing myths, he must believe, is yet another flaw of the common class. This girl here was found by the river. This boy here was birthed with a caul. Pathetic origin stories chanted as if proof of divinity.

“How long you two known each other?” he grunts.

“Whole time Elisa’s been here, sir. Fourteen years?”

“That’s good. Means both of you know how things run here. How things need to stay. I guess you’re the two who found my fingers?” He rubs his head. He’s sweating. He looks like he’s in agony. “That’s a question. You can reply.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m going to go ahead and thank you for that,” he says. “We thought they ended up—it doesn’t matter what we thought. Now I’m not real thrilled about the paper bag. Seems like there should have been something better than a bag. The doc says a wet rag would have been just as good as ice. He said they wasted a lot of time sterilizing the fingers before they could label the nerves and whatnot. I’m not trying to blame you here. But still. Right now, we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s like what Delilah here said about having children. The fingers will take or they won’t. Well, there you have it. That’s what I have to say about that.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Zelda says. “We did our best.”

An earnest apology delivered quick before you can feel bad about it—that’s Zelda’s method. Strickland nods, but then there’s trouble. He looks to Elisa, expecting the same, and impatience darkens his tired, pained face. Elisa’s silence comes off as rudeness. There’s no hope in dodging this. Zelda sends a prayer up and steps into the lion cage once more.

“Elisa doesn’t talk, sir.”

22

MILITARY WORK INGRAINS certain assumptions into a fellow. A person who won’t talk is suspect. They’re choosing belligerence. They’re hiding something. These two women don’t seem sharp enough for subterfuge, but you never know. The lower classes, after all, are where you find your Communists, unionists, folks with nothing to lose.

“She can’t talk?” Strickland asks. “Or chooses not to?”

“Can’t, sir,” Zelda says.

The throb in his arm fades to the background. This is interesting. It explains why this Elisa Esposito has kept this shit-hole job. Not obstinacy but limitation. Probably all explained on page two. He closes the folder, though, and gives her a long look. She can hear just fine, that’s for sure. There’s a raptness to her that is startling. Her eyes are locked onto his lips in a way most females would consider indelicate. He looks harder, wishing for buchité vision, and sees raised scar tissue in the shadow of her shirt collars.

“Some kind of operation?”

“They don’t know,” Zelda replies. “Either her parents did it to her, or someone at the orphanage.”

“Now why would someone do that to a baby?”

“Babies cry,” Zelda says. “Maybe that was enough.”

Strickland thinks back to Timmy’s and Tammy’s infancies. How each time he’d returned from DC to Florida, he’d been stunned by the Lainie he found. Exhausted, floppy-limbed, fingers puckered from baths and diapers. Now suppose you worked at an orphanage. Suppose there wasn’t one baby, or two, but dozens. He’s read military studies on sleep deprivation. He knows the kind of dangerous ideas that begin to seem sane.

He wants to tell Elisa to stretch out her neck so he can watch the gray light of the monitors slide across the satiny extrusion of scars. The ferocity of Elisa’s eyes make her wild; the wounds indicate that she’s tamed. It’s an appealing combination. She fidgets under his stare and crosses her legs. Well, there you go. Just a regular girl after all. Except here’s something else he wasn’t expecting. She isn’t sporting the rubber-soled shoes of every other janitor he’s seen. These are coral pink. He saw shoes like this all the time in Japan. Painted on the sides of Air Force bombers. Worn by pinup models. In real life, though, hardly ever.

Elisa Esposito stares at her clasped hands, just like they all do, then appears to recall something. She digs into the pocket of her smock, withdraws a tiny, bright object, and holds it out. She looks somber, which makes the monkey motion of her other hand so strange. She’s rotating a thumbs-up fist over her tits. She’s a certifiable fruitcake, he thinks, until the Negro pipes up to remind him of sign language.

“That means she’s sorry,” Zelda says.

Elisa is holding his wedding ring. This, too, he’d assumed had tumbled down the asset’s gullet. Lainie will be glad to see it. He, however, feels no emotion about it. He searches Elisa’s face but can’t find anything dishonest about the offer. She didn’t steal the ring, nothing like that. Her expression is sincere. The circular pattern of her hand over her breast seems less simian, more sensual. He has a sudden, strange realization. His new aversion to light and loud noises—here’s a woman built as if to those specifications. A woman who works in the dark of night. A woman who can’t make a peep.

He makes a cup of his left hand and allows her to place the ring into it. It feels ceremonial, an inverted wedding.

“Can’t put it on just yet,” he says. “But thanks.”

The girl shrugs and nods. Her eyes don’t leave his. Damn, it’s almost unnerving. He hates it. He kind of likes it. He looks away—that’s unusual—to her pink shoes, bouncing in midair. Pain blurts up his arm for no reason at all. He grinds his teeth and reaches for the bag of candy and instead opens the desk drawer. The bottle of painkillers is right there, glowing white amid Eagle Black Warrior pencils. Sweat pops from his forehead pores, and he tries not to wipe it. Wiping sweat isn’t a dominant gesture.

“That’s the first thing,” he says. “Second thing is, F-1.”

The Negro opens her mouth. Strickland slashes his hand to shut her up.

“I know. You signed the papers. I know all that bullshit. I don’t care. My job’s to make sure you comprehend the gravity of that signature. You’ve been here fourteen years? That’s nice. Maybe next year you get a cake. I hear fourteen years, you know what I think? Fourteen years is plenty of time to get lazy. Now, Mr. Fleming told you you don’t clean F-1 unless he says. Here’s what you don’t know. You disobey, you don’t deal with Mr. Fleming. You deal with me. And I represent who? The US government. We wouldn’t have us a local problem. We’d have us a federal problem. Is that understood?”

Elisa’s top leg slides off her lower. A positive, submissive sign, though he mourns losing sight of the shoe. Right then, one of the telephones begins to ring. The balloon of acid under his temple bursts from the noise and courses down his left arm, pooling under the wedding ring in his palm. A call this late? He flexes his bad hand, hoping to fight off the ache.

“Let me finish. You may have seen some things. So be it.”

He’s seeing things, too, streaks of red, tainted blood pumping directly into his eyeballs. Red—it’s the red phone ringing. Washington. Maybe General Hoyt. He’s got to get these girls the hell out of his office. Undaunted, his rivalry with Deus Brânquia rises from the swamp, the quicksand, the black depths of misery. The red phone, the red blood, the red Amazonian moon.

“Final words, now, listen, just listen. It doesn’t take a genius to know we’re dealing with a living specimen here. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter at all. All you need to know is this. That thing in F-1? It might stand on two legs, but we’re the ones made in God’s image. We’re the ones. Isn’t that right, Delilah?”

The worthless woman can’t muster but a whisper.

“I don’t know what God looks like, sir.”

The pain is absolute now. He is aware of individual nerve endings. It’s as if the lights inside his body have been switched on. Fine, he’ll take the painkillers. He’s already gripping the bottle. He’ll answer the red phone with cheeks full of half-chewed pills. Manufactured drugs, after all, are what civilized men ingest. And he is civilized. Or will be. Very soon. This phone call might even be the proving ground. Decisions are being made about the asset. And to advise about that he will need control. He thumbs off the lid of the painkillers.

“God looks human, Delilah. He looks like me. Like you.” He nods the women toward the door. “Though let’s be honest. He looks a little bit more like me.”

23

ELISA’S DREAMS HAVE begun to unmuddy. She’s reclined at the bottom of a river. Everything is emerald. She springs her toes from mossy stones, glides through caressing grasses, pushes off from the velveted branches of sunken trees. Objects she recognizes appear gradually. Her egg timer in slow somersault. The eggs themselves, little moons in rotation. Shoes tumble past like a school of clumsy fish, and album covers descend like stingrays.

Two human fingers float into view, and Elisa wakes up.

A lot about Richard Strickland distresses Elisa, but his fingers are what haunt her. It takes several of these dreams before, one night, she bolts awake in understanding. She uses her own fingers to interact with the world. It’s not ridiculous, she thinks, to be frightened by a man at risk of losing his own fingers. She imagines the equivalent in a speaking person and it’s horrific: Strickland’s teeth tumbling across riven lips, a man no longer capable, or inclined, to discuss what he does before he does it.

She, too, has things she won’t discuss. It’s the latter half of the night, when she and Zelda work separately. Elisa presses her ear to the ice-cold door of F-1. She holds her breath and listens. Voices tend to carry through lab walls, but tonight none do. She glances back at her cart, which she has parked in front of a different lab halfway down the hall, hopefully enough to hoodwink Zelda should she rejoin Elisa earlier than expected. Elisa feels exposed while carrying so little—just a brown-paper lunch bag and her key card. She slots the card and wishes the lock’s bite was softer.

Occam’s constant is its uncompromising brightness. Lights do not turn off. Elisa has never been privy to so much as a single switch. F-1’s dimness, then, is as outrageous as a fire. Once inside, Elisa presses her back to the closed door and panics that something has gone wrong. But this is clearly by plan: A perimeter of lights, installed along the walls for this purpose, radiate a honey glow off the ceiling.

Plenty enough light to see by, but there are noises, too, keeping Elisa sealed to the door. Reek-reek, chuk-a-kuk, zuh-zuh-zuh, thoonk, hee-hee-hee-hee-hee, thrub-thrub, curu-curu, zeee-eee-eee, hik-rik-hik-rik, lug-a-lug-a-lug, fyeeeeeew. Elisa has spent every day of her life in the city, yet recognizes these as natural sounds, none of which have any place in this concrete bunker. They overwhelm F-1’s after-hours inertia, impregnating every table, chair, and cabinet with predator menace. There are monsters loose in the lab.

Elisa’s reason wrests control from the fear. The bird arias and frog dirges come from a single source, off to the right. They are recordings, and this isn’t so different than a movie at the Arcade—the lowered lights, the speaker sound track. Some Occam scientist has designed what Giles might call a mise-en-scène, an atmosphere inside which unfolds the currently screening fantasy. Her guess is Bob Hoffstetler. If anyone at this facility has the empathy required for this artistic endeavor, it’s him.

She crosses over the spot where she plucked Strickland’s fingers from the floor. Her footsteps are loud, and she curses her forgetfulness. She’d meant to wear rubber-soled sneakers. Or had she kept on her purple heels as subconscious inspiration? There’s a hissing to her right. An anaconda attracted by the jungle’s incantations? No—it’s the roll of a reel-to-reel player. The stainless steel surface shimmers like a moonlit river; Elisa approaches until she is close enough to see the jumping VU meters. Canisters are piled about. MARAÑON FIELD #5. TOCANTINS FIELD #3. XINGU/UNKNOWN FIELD #1. Gathered also is a hill of other audio gear, none of which she can identify except for a standard record player.

Elisa steps away, circles the tank. One more foreboding sign: The top hatch is open. She expects the hair on her neck and arms to razor in dread, but it doesn’t. She continues toward the pool. It is the pool, after all, that has monopolized her mind. Every bath she takes, she takes in this pool, or so she pretends. This make-believe persists throughout her whole routine: Eggs bobbing into water, the creak of the timer, the hope of shoes, the disappointment of LPs, Giles pausing his paintbrush to bid her good night, having no idea of the strange thoughts in her head.

A red line is painted on the floor a foot from the pool. It is unsafe to go any farther. So why is she considering it? Because she can’t get it out of her head, this thing that Mr. Strickland has dragged here, that Empties guard with guns, that Dr. Hoffstetler endeavors to study. She knows that she’s been the thing in the water before. She’s been the voiceless one from whom men have taken without ever asking what she wanted. She can be kinder than that. She can balance the scales of life. She can do what no man ever tries to do with her: communicate.

She proceeds until the two-foot ledge pinches her thighs. The surface of the water is still. But not perfectly still. You only need to look, really look, to see the water breathe. Elisa inhales, exhales, and sets her lunch bag on the ledge. It crunches, as loud as driving a shovel into dirt. She watches the water’s surface for reaction. Nothing. She reaches into the bag and winces at the rustling. Nothing. She finds what she wants, withdraws it; it glows in the soft light. A single boiled egg.

For days, she’s dared herself to add this egg to the three she makes each night for Giles. Now she peels it. Her fingers are shaking. It’s the ugliest egg peeling of her life. White fragments drop to the ledge. The egg, at last, is revealed, and what is more coherent and elemental than an egg? Elisa holds it in the palm of her hand like the magical object it is.

And the water responds.

24

THERE IS A dark, underwater twitch, like the leg-jerk of a dozing dog, and a plip of water leaps a foot from the center of the pool. It lands and echoes outward in delicate concentric circles—and then the lab’s soft babbles are overwhelmed by a ripsaw of ratcheting metal. The water is torn into an X-shape as four fifteen-foot chains, each bolted to a corner of the pool, pull tight and shark-fin to the surface, sizzling foam and slobbering water, all of them attached to a single rising shape.

The knifing water, the rainbow refractions, the bat-wing shadows: Elisa can’t understand what she’s seeing. There: the gold-coin eye reflections she first saw in the tank, sun and moon. The angle alters and the eyeshine winks out. She sees its real eyes. They are blue. No—green, brown. No—gray, red, yellow, so many implausible shades. It is moving closer. The water does the thing’s bidding, barely rippling. Its nose is slight, reptilian. Its lower jaw is multijointed but rests in a noble straight line. It is moving closer. Upright, as if no longer swimming, but walking. It is the God-image Strickland referenced: It moves like a man. Why, then, does Elisa feel that it is every animal that ever existed? It is moving closer. Gills on either side of the neck tremble like butterflies. Its neck is brutalized by a metal collar that binds the four chains. It is moving closer. It has a swimmer’s physique, with shoulders like clenched fists, but the torso of a ballerino. Tiny scales cover it, scintillating like diamonds, lucent as silk. Grooves run over its whole body in elaborate, swirling, symmetrical patterns. It is no longer moving. It is five feet away. Even the water streaming from its body makes no sound.

It looks from the egg to her. Its eyes flash.

Elisa crashes back to earth, her heart thwacking. She sets the peeled egg on the ledge, grabs the lunch bag, and hops behind the red line. Her stance is defensive and the creature responds, lowering itself until only the smooth crown of its head is visible. Its eyes bore into hers for an unsettling moment before shifting back to the egg; the eyes, at this angle, go blue. It skims leftward as if expecting the egg to match the move.

He trusts nothing, Elisa thinks, and then verifies to herself, with surprise, that the creature is male. She’s somehow certain. It’s in the bluntness of his bearing, the forthrightness of his stare. Elisa has a queasy thought: If she knows he’s male, he must know she’s female. She orders herself to hold steady. This creature might be the first man-thing she’s known who is more powerless than herself. She nods for him to go ahead, take the egg.

He advances as far as the chains allow, two feet from the ledge. Elisa is postulating that the red line was painted at too cautious of a distance when the creature’s lower jaw drops and a secondary mandible punches out like a bone fist. A fraction of a second later, the egg is vanished, the pharyngeal jaw is retracted, and the water is as still as if none of it had happened. Elisa hasn’t the time to even gasp; she pictures Strickland’s fingers toppling to the floor.

The surface of the pool shivers, a billion pinpricks Elisa interprets as pleasure. The creature looks at her with eyes so bright they’re white. She takes a stabilizing breath through her puny, single-jawed mouth and directs herself to keep going, keep going, keep going. She reaches her shaking hand into the bag again. Chain links clang as he lifts a shoulder to shield himself from what might be a weapon. This, she sees, is what he has come to expect from Occam.

But it is simply another egg, the last one. She holds it up so that he can see, then cracks it against her opposite knuckle and peels off a bit of the shell. Carefully, now, carefully—she extends her arm, the egg upright in her palm, her proffering posture like that of a mythical goddess. The creature doesn’t trust it. He dolphins his upper body from the water and hisses. His gills fluff, flashing a blood-red warning. Elisa lowers her face to show meekness; it is no mere show. She waits. His jaws gnash but his gills subside. Elisa seals her lips and resumes extending her arm. She shifts the egg so that she holds it atop her fingers, a ball on a tee.

Elisa is out of range of his jaw and, she hopes, his arm. She lifts her other hand until it mirrors the egg. She can’t sign “egg” without letting the egg drop from sight so instead she uses the letters: E-G-G. He does not react. She signs again, the dog paw of the E, the finger-point of the G, and wonders what the signs might remind him off. Wolf? Arrow? Cattle prod? She asserts the egg, then the signs. She is desperate that he understand. Unless he does, this creature who seems to have materialized straight from her dreams can’t fully exist inside her reality. The egg, the signs. Egg, signs, egg, signs.

Her hand is beginning to cramp when the creature at last reacts. Once resolved upon action, he shows no hesitation, gliding as near to the ledge as the chains allow and raising his arm from water without splash or sound. Spines sprout from the arm like dorsal fins, and his fingers are bound by translucent webbing and tipped with curled claws. This makes the hand look huge, and when the fingers flex, it’s difficult to imagine them doing so for any reason other than crushing prey.

His fingers bend at the second knuckles. His thumb curls across pale palm scales. The webbing folds like diaphanous leather. It’s an E, a clumsy one, but Elisa believes this creature is accustomed to much larger gestures: full-body tumbles within seething seas; darting attacks; unfolding to full height beneath a tropical sun. Elisa feels as if she’s the one underwater. The creature dips its gills into the pool as if to remind her to breathe.

His palm releases the E and his fingers open into a hesitant fan. Elisa nods support and signs G, pointing off to her left. This is considered good signing, but the creature is a novice. His three smallest fingers pinwheel to touch the heel of his hand and he points his index finger directly at Elisa. Her vision spins. Her chest throbs joyfully, almost painfully. He sees her. He doesn’t look through her like Occam’s men or past her like Baltimore’s women. This beautiful being, however he might have hurt those who hurt him first, is pointing at her and only her.

She drops her signing hand and moves forward, her purple heels fearlessly disobeying the red line. The creature paddles in wait, his eyes, blue now, watching her body so closely that she feels naked. She holds the egg over the ledge, into the zone of hazard, no longer afraid of what happened to Strickland. The creature rises, all portents of caution gone, gills ruffling, chest expanding, water slipping from the splendor of his gemlike scales. He is what the jungle field recordings only hinted at: a pure thing.

She grieves the bulky steel locked to his neck and chest before noticing a second perversion down his left side. Four metal sutures clamp shut a gash spanning lower ribs to external oblique. Blood corkscrews into the water like drowned carnations. It’s while she frowns at the grisly wound that the creature strikes with viper speed. The egg is swiped—Elisa feels only a breeze from his webbed fingers and a coolness of scales—and then he is submerged, swimming upside down back to the pool’s center. She closes her empty hand. It’s shaking. The creature resurfaces, a hundred lonely miles away, trailing his nose across the egg’s shell. He picks at it with a claw, as if wondering how the human had managed to husk it.

Finally, he attacks the egg with claw and tooth. Scraps of shell catch the low light like shards of broken mirror. Elisa can’t help it: A silent laugh jets from her lungs. If there’s any chewing at all, it’s brief, and then the creature turns toward her, coin eyes twirling with the recognition that she is capable of wonders. Elisa has never been the recipient of such a look. She is light-headed with it, even as her purple heels feel nailed to the floor.

The jungle clangor is beheaded. A deafening pop slaps the lab like a sonic boom, and the creature dives, gone without a ripple. Elisa seizes, thinking she’s been discovered, until a soft flapping sound tells her that the reel-to-reel tape has run out and the take-up spool is spinning. It can’t be good for the machine; someone will be along to shut it off or restart it; she needs to get out of F-1 and be happy with what she’s achieved, which she is, so much so that her chest will surely be bruised tomorrow from the ferocious hammer of her heart.

25

EGGS ARE BAD enough. An omelet is worse. Omelets require fork and knife. Lainie should have thought of that. What kind of wife doesn’t think of that? Strickland takes the fork in his right hand. The knife, though, is not so simple, not with these fingers. He glances up at her. She’s unmindful of him. There’s no other way to put it. A year and a half spent fighting in the Amazon while she did what? Wipe up juice spills? A wife is supposed to anticipate her husband’s needs. Keep things spic-and-span, in all realms of his life.

Look at this place. Weeks have passed since their Baltimore arrival and still the house is backcountry, something from the Tapajós region. Wet bras and stockings loop from the shower rod like rattan vines. The heat’s cranked to verão levels. The television makes insect roars while Timmy and Tammy charge like tusked peccaries. And those fucking unpacked boxes. When he does manage to relax, the boxes surge upward like the Andes, and he’s back there again, his feet caught in the sucking mud (shag carpet), breathless in the fever mist (air freshener), paralyzed before the stalking jaguar (vacuum cleaner).

A man doesn’t like to feel like prey in his own home. More often he stays late at Occam, despite having nothing to do. How can a home television set compare with sixteen security monitors? “You’re never home,” Lainie sulks. He has shrinking sympathy. She finds the upheaval of the move invigorating, and he has begun to hate her for it. Because he can’t share in it, not until the asset is finished and his ass doesn’t belong to Hoyt. Maybe if she’d clean the place his heart would stop pounding and he could stand being here.

Family breakfast, the whole reason he’s awake after only four hours of sleep. How come he’s the only one at the table? Lainie’s calling the kids, but they don’t listen. She’s laughing, like their behavior is permissible. She’s chasing them. She’s barefoot again. Is this some kind of bohemian fad? Poor people go barefoot. They’re not poor. He pictures Elisa Esposito’s coral-pink shoes, her exposed toes, even pinker. That’s how all women should be. In fact, Elisa strikes him as the natural evolution of the female species: clean, colorful, silent. Strickland looks away from his wife’s feet in disgust, back to his plate, the uneatable omelet.

The last time he changed his bandages, he pushed his wedding ring back onto his swollen, discolored ring finger. He figured Lainie would appreciate it. But it’d been a mistake. Now he can’t get the ring off. He tries to get the fingers to grip the knife. The pain is like twine being dragged through his arteries. His face is pouring sweat. The house, it’s so goddamn hot. He looks for something cold. The bottle of milk. He picks it up, slurps from it, and gasps when finished. He spots Lainie in the kitchen, frowning at him. Because he drank from the bottle? Last year he ate raw puma butchered on the jungle floor. Still he feels guilt. He sets down the bottle and feels lost, a stranger. He’s a decaying finger, and Baltimore is the body rejecting his reattachment.

He picks up the fork, manages to squeeze the knife in his left palm.

The knife catches on cheese, the handle clanking against the wedding ring. Pain flares. He mutters bad words only to find Tammy sitting across from him, staring. The girl is getting used to seeing her father struggle. It makes him feel weak, and he can’t afford that, not with General Hoyt getting daily updates from Occam. He’ll need to betray no sign of frailty if he hopes to convince Hoyt that his quick, brutal path, not Hoffstetler’s lenient, winding one, is the right route to take in regard to the asset. Before Hoyt rang his red office telephone in the dead of night, Belém had been the last time he’d heard the general’s voice. And it had rattled him. He’d preferred pretending that Hoyt had been left behind with the broken-down Josefina.

Tammy’s cereal is untouched and bloating.

“Eat,” he says, and she does.

Hoyt’s voice did what it always did to Strickland. It’s like he’s one of those old metal soldiers, and Hoyt wound him. He’ll snap his heels. He’ll redouble efforts to enforce army doctrine upon Occam. Distantly he feels a melancholy. What little progress he’s made at home will continue to move slowly. The lumbering inroads he’s made with the children. The interest he’s made himself take in Lainie’s chronicles of shopping and childcare. It occurs to him that Hoyt isn’t altogether different than the asset. Both are unknowable, somehow larger than their physical forms. Strickland is merely the secondary jaw that lashes from Hoyt’s skull, and he’ll have to keep biting, just a few weeks longer.

The knife catches and falls, its handle thudding past his bandaged fingers. It feels like they’ve been twisted in their sockets. Strickland slams the table with his right fist. Silverware jumps. Tammy drops her spoon into her bowl. He feels tears, that unacceptable expression of vulnerability, rush to his eyes. No, not in front of his daughter. He fumbles from his pocket the bottle of painkillers. He bites off the lid, taps the bottle too hard. White pellets dance across the tabletop until stickiness grabs them. Why is the table sticky? What kind of household is this? He nabs two, then three, then what the hell, four, and pushes them into his mouth. Grabs the milk bottle and swigs—fuck germs. The pills and milk form a paste. He slurps it down. Bitter, bitter. This house, this neighborhood, this city, this life.

26

LAINIE KNOWS THE kind of man she married. Once, after slashing himself building Tammy’s crib, he’d wrapped his palm in duct tape and kept going. Another time he’d returned from a military exercise in Virginia sporting a forehead gash sealed shut with superglue. Finger reattachment is a different scale of injury, she understands that, yet still a dread rumbles her stomach each time she sees him gobble those painkillers.

Even before the Amazon, Richard had scared her a little. She figured that wasn’t so rare; she’d noticed an arm bruise now and then on her Orlando friends. Now it’s a different kind of fear. It’s unpredictability, the scariest thing of all. There’s nothing to panic about. It’s only that the idea of drugs dulling Richard’s investment in normal, everyday reality—well, it concerns her. A few pills down his hatch, and he starts looking like a stone-hearted hunter willing to destroy anything. Tammy’s Thirstee Cry-Baby doll: Its mewl is suspicious. The Kem-Tone wall-finish samples she’d brought home from the hardware store: Stratford Green is too much like jungle, Cameo Rose too much like blood.

Lainie trots up the stairs. It’s not to escape Richard’s opaque glower. It’s to find Timmy, the one person around who doesn’t show proper fear—respect, she corrects herself—to the head of the family. This is troubling, though not as troubling as Richard’s indulgence of it. Some days it seems like Richard is encouraging his son to denigrate his sister and challenge his mother, as if Timmy, at eight years old, is already superior to the household’s females.

“Timmy,” she sings. “It’s breakfast time, young man.”

A good wife doesn’t think such thoughts, not about her son and not about her husband. She understands the use of pharmaceuticals. Six weeks after Richard disappeared into the Amazon, she’d been a disaster, face puffy from lack of sleep, throat raw from weeping. At the urging of a Washington secretary forced to listen to her sob over the phone, she’d gone to the family practitioner and, staring at her lap, asked him if it was true there was a drug that could make lonely wives stop crying. The doctor, made fidgety by her sniffling, dropped his just-lit cigarette in his rush to prescribe her Miltown—“mother’s little helper,” he called it, penicillin for your thoughts. He’d patted her hand and reassured her. All feminine minds were fragile.

The Miltown had worked. Oh, how it had worked! The snowballing panic of her every dire day smoothed into a drowsy disquiet, nudged even closer to calmness by an afternoon cocktail or two. She had an inkling she might be overdoing it, but when she saw fellow army wives at the mailboxes or grocery store, they too were slurring and butterfingered. But then Lainie had pulled herself together and tossed the tranquilizers into the toilet. On her way to Timmy’s room, she catches carnivalesque reflections of herself in doorknobs, vases, picture frames. Is the independent Orlando Lainie entirely gone?

Lainie’s relieved to find Timmy sitting with his back to the door at his table, a darling replica, she likes to imagine, of his father’s workplace desk. She lingers at the door frame, chiding herself for having any misgivings about this cherub. He’s his father’s son, but he’s also his mother’s baby, a bright child with a voracious thirst for life, and she is lucky to have him.

“Knock-knock,” she says.

He doesn’t hear and she can’t help but smile. Timmy is as focused as his father. Lainie comes forward, her bare feet silent on the carpet, feeling like an angel floating down to check on one of the world’s saints, until she’s directly above him and can see the lizard pinned through its four legs to the tabletop, still twitching, its abdomen an open slit that Timmy explores with a knife.

27

THE GASH IN the creature’s side is healing. Each time Elisa visits, in the deadest of hours, she sees a lesser moil of blood following his glide across the pool. Only his eyes are visible, lighthouse beacons casting searchlights across a black sea. He swims right in front of her, and this is progress; no more hiding underwater. Her pulse rabbits. She needed this. She needed him to remember her, trust her. She shifts the heavy garbage bag she carries to the opposite hand. Not a surprising thing for a janitor to carry, though this bag carries anything but garbage.

To die for Chemosh is to live forever! The movie’s muffled cry has become a second wakeup alarm she doesn’t need. She’s awake long before needed, thinking of him, the magnificence no thickness of chain can diminish. Julia’s silver shoes are the only thing to distract her. She’s never late for the bus these days and has plenty of time to cross the street and put her palms to the window glass. She used to feel glass on all other sides of her, too, invisible walls of the maze in which she was trapped. No more: She believes she sees a path out of that maze, and it leads through F-1.

The jungle field recordings aren’t rolling tonight, and she’s done enough tabulating of the lab’s activity, in tiny hash marks at the bottom of her QCCs, to know this means no scientists have stayed late to reset the tapes. Occam is empty, Zelda is busy across the facility, and Elisa toes the red line and holds up the evening’s first egg.

The creature sharpens his arc to drift closer, and Elisa has to resist smiling—that’s giving him what he wants before he earns it. She stands firm, holding the egg upright. The creature floats in place by magic; if he’s kicking to tread water, she can’t see it. Slowly his large hand rises from the pool, water fluming between his forearm spines and through his chest’s etched patterns. The small flexings of his five fingers are like five arms wrapping her in a tight embrace: E-G-G.

She’s breathless behind her grin. She places the egg on the ledge and watches him take it, not with last week’s savage swat, but with a grocer’s discernment. She’d like to watch him peel it, see if he’s improved at that task, but the weight of the garbage bag makes her impatient. Holding as much eye contact as possible, she walks backward until her hip knocks the table of audio equipment. She slides the reel-to-reel player back, moves aside the radio, and opens the lid of the record player.

Elisa is certain the player’s presence is incidental. The gear likely came from a single scientist’s closet, all of it knotted together by tangled wires. She withdraws from the bag the dusty relics of a forgotten young life that she’s kept stashed inside her locker for days: record albums, the ones she quit playing around the time she quit believing she had any reasons left to hear them. She’s brought too many, ten or fifteen, but how was she supposed to know in advance what kind of music this moment would demand?

Ella Fitzgerald’s Songs in a Mellow Mood—would he find the low rumble distressing? Chet Baker Sings—is the beat too sharklike? The Chordettes Sing Your Requests—might he think the room had suddenly filled with other women? Lyrics suddenly seem like a bad idea. She selects the first instrumental album she finds, Glenn Miller’s Lover’s Serenade, and slides it from its sleeve onto the player. She looks back at the creature and makes the sign for “record.” Then she turns on the player, drops the needle, and only then realizes it’s unplugged. She finds both cord and outlet, brings them together—

—and the band swings to life in blasting brass syncopation, knocking Elisa to her heels. Piano, drums, strings, and horns dive down and soar up, catching the rhythm before a trumpet is let loose above it all like a tossed dove. She looks at the pool, certain that the creature will think she’s betrayed him with an ambush. Instead, he is as still as if the water itself has frozen. The shells of his half-peeled egg float outward, a physical expression of his widening awe.

Elisa lurches to the table, takes the needle from the spinning circle. The trumpet dissevers with a squelch. She musters a smile to convince the creature that everything is fine. But everything is fine. It’s beyond fine: The grooves in his scaled skin are glowing. She recalls a fragment of a news article regarding bioluminescence, a chemical light emitted by certain fish, but she’d imagined it like lightning bugs, soft bulbs in a distant night, not this dulcet simmer that seems to boil from the creature’s center and steep the entire pool from ink black to a radiant summer-sky blue. He is hearing the music, yes, but he’s also feeling it, reflecting it, and from that reflection Elisa can hear and feel the music as she never has before. Glenn Miller has colors, shapes, textures—how has she never noticed?

His lights are fading, though, and she can’t imagine the water without them. She grabs the record player arm and drops the needle—

—and a saxophone solo wiggles atop the orchestra’s snappy chugging. This time she’s got her eyes on the creature, and his light doesn’t only brighten this water, it electrifies it, imbues it with a turquoise glow that shines off the lab walls like liquid fire. The physical objects of table and records slide from Elisa’s awareness as she is reeled toward the pool, her skin blue by reflection, her blood blue, too, she just knows it. Wherever the creature has come from, he’s never heard music like this, a multitude of separate songs so meshed in joyful unison. The water directly around him begins changing—yellow, pink, green, purple. He’s looking into the air, habituated to sounds having a source, reaching up with a hand as if to cradle one of the invisible instruments into his hand and inspect it, sniff it for magic, taste it for miracles, before tossing it back into the sky to fly again.

28

THE BOY ARRIVES at the table. He’s not like his sister. He doesn’t sneak up on you. He dumps himself onto a chair, coughs without covering his mouth, clashes his silverware. Stares right at you like a man. Between throbs of pain, Strickland feels pride. Raising kids, that’s a mother’s job. Being a model of behavior, though, that’s something he can do. He smiles at Timmy. It’s the smallest movement of muscle, but one that tightens his face, which tightens his neck, which tightens his arm, which tightens his hand, which tightens his fingers. His smile flounders.

“Does it hurt, Dad?” Timmy asks.

The boy’s hands are soapy. He wouldn’t wash up unless Lainie forced him. That means Timmy was up to something his mother found repugnant. That’s good. Testing limits is important. He’s given up trying to explain this to Lainie. She’ll never understand that germs are the same as injuries. Both are required to build scar tissue.

“A little.” The pills are starting to dull the blades of pain.

Lainie joins them. Instead of food, she lights a cigarette. Strickland gives her a cursory review. He’s always liked her hair. A beehive, she calls it, a gravity-defying pod of swoops and tucks that must take some skill to maintain. But recently, coming home late from Occam tired or drugged and seeing the hairdo upon Lainie’s bed pillow, it looks like something from the jungle. A spider’s egg sac, bulging to expel a whorling fury of spiderlings. They had a solution for this in the Amazon. Gasoline and a match, unless you wanted infestation. It’s a horrific image. He loves his wife. Right now is a hard time. These visions will fade.

Strickland picks up his knife and fork, but keeps his eyes on Lainie as she mulls her insurgent son. Will she show her fear at what the boy is becoming? Or will she try to take control over him? He finds the struggle interesting the same way he finds the asset’s survival under laboratory conditions interesting. In other words, both are futile. In the case of boy versus mother, the boy eventually will win. Boys always do.

Lainie blows smoke from the side of her mouth and selects a tactic Strickland knows from interrogation procedure as “sidestepping.”

“Why don’t you tell your father what you told me?”

“Oh yeah,” Timmy says. “Guess what? We’re making a time capsule! Miss Waters says we have to put in guesses for the future.”

“Time capsule,” Strickland repeats. “That’s a box, right? You bury it. Then dig it up.”

“Timmy,” Lainie prods. “Ask your father what you asked me.”

“Mom said you do future stuff at work so I should ask you what to put in there. PJ says we’ll have rocket packs. I told him we’ll have octopus boats. But I don’t want PJ to be right and me to be wrong. What do you think, Dad? You think we’ll have rocket packs or octopus boats?”

Strickland feels all six eyes upon him. Any army man worth his bars knows the feeling. He suspends Operation Omelet, sighs through his nostrils, and looks from face, to face, to face. Timmy’s antsy expectation. Tammy’s pie-faced slackness. Lainie’s restless lip-chewing. He moves to fold his hands, thinks of the pain that will cause, and instead sets them flat on the table.

“There will be jet packs. Yes, there will. It’s only a matter of engineering. How to maximize the propulsion. Keep the heat down. Ten years, fifteen tops. By the time you’re my age, you’ll have one. A better one than PJ has, I’ll see to it. Now, an octopus boat, I’m not sure what that is. If you mean a submersible we can explore the ocean floor with, then yes to that as well. We’re making big strides in pressure resistance and water mobility. Right now, at work, we’re doing experiments on amphibious survival.”

“Really, Dad? Wait till I tell PJ.”

It might be the drugs. Warm tendrils rope around his muscles, scrunching the pain like snakes scrunch field mice. It feels good to see this look of veneration on the boy’s face. To see blind admiration in the face of his little girl. Even Lainie suddenly looks good to him. She still has a fine figure. Wrapped so tightly in that apron, so crisply ironed with that expensive Westinghouse iron. He pictures the garment’s straps, knotted into a hard, tight ball at the small of her back. She deciphers his look, and he worries that her lips will twist, repulsed at him the same as she’d been at Timmy. But she doesn’t. She half-closes her eyes, what she used to do when she was feeling sexy. He takes a deep, satisfied breath and, for once, there is no retaliatory shot of pain.

“You betcha, son. This isn’t some Communist rat hole you live in. This is America and that’s what Americans do. We do what we have to to keep our country great. That’s what your daddy does at the office. It’s what you’ll do, too, someday. Believe in the future, son, and it’ll come. Just wait and see.”

29

LAINIE REFUSES TO keep track of how often she’s returned to the Fells Point ports. She goes when life becomes too heavy to haul and thinks about tossing herself after it, but the water level is low from lack of rain and she’d probably just break her neck. Then where would she be? In a wheelchair, stuck in front of the television for good, shoving the Spray ’N Steam until she could stand it no longer and melted Richard’s shirt, melted the ironing board, melted herself until the whole mess was a pastel-colored puddle Richard would have to get steam-cleaned by a pro.

She believes the lizard Timmy was torturing is called a skink. If she saw a skink on the porch, she’d broom that icky crawler into the shrubbery. If she saw one inside the house, well, she’d stomp it dead. She tries to convince herself what Timmy did is the same thing. But it’s not. Most kids are curious about death, but most kids also feel reflex shame when adults catch them poking carcasses. Timmy, though, had looked at her in irritation, like Richard does when she presses him about work. She’d had to collect her courage, and quick, before insisting that he flush that thing down the toilet, scrub his hands, and get to breakfast.

After he’d finished, she stepped into the bathroom to make sure the skink wasn’t clawing its way back up the bowl. Then she took a minute to appraise her mirror reflection. She patted down springy hair. Pinkied her lipstick. Pulled her pearls so the largest ones rested in the hollow of her throat. Richard didn’t look closely at her these days, but if he did, would he see the secret she kept? Even Timmy, she thought, had gotten close.

It had been after one of her dockside trances that Lainie had plodded along the anchorage before going north past Patterson Park and east on Baltimore Street. She found herself dwarfed by tall buildings, coasting between them as if by canoe. She stopped outside one of the largest buildings in sight, a black-and-gold citadel with 1920s stylings. The revolving door turned and turned, blowing in a gust that smelled of leather and ink.

Lainie considers her morning news routine intellectual aerobics, and for that same reason she’d braved the whirling door. It spat her out onto a chessboard floor of a lobby carved from what looked like solid obsidian. Cutaway views of higher floors offered glimpses into what looked like an autonomous city. The workers here had their own post office, eateries, coffee carts, corner stores, newsstands, watch repair shops, security department. Modern women in smart outfits and men with briefcases crisscrossed the lobby, straight-backed with importance.

In this self-contained world, there was no Richard Strickland. No Timmy or Tammy Strickland. No Lainie Strickland, either. She was, rather, that woman she’d left in Orlando. She wished to bathe in the sensation so she took an elevator to a small bakery to pore over the display case. She decided on something she would enjoy herself, for once. When the clerk looked at her, she said, “Lemon Butter Ring, please.” Except he hadn’t been looking at her. A man, a building regular by the looks of his shirtsleeves, said, “Gimme a Lemon Butter Ring, Jerry,” at the same time. She apologized, and the man chortled and told her to go ahead, and she insisted she oughtn’t to eat an entire butter ring by herself anyway, and he said that yes, she should, Jerry makes them better than anyone.

The man was flirting but wasn’t overbearing about it, and besides, in this midworld she was capable of anything, and when the man complimented her voice, she pretended to be inured to such fluffery and laughed it off.

“I’m serious,” he said. “You’ve got a strong, soothing voice. You ooze patience.”

Beneath her costume of calmness, her heart raced.

“Ooze,” she said. “A word every woman wants to hear.”

The man snorted. “Say, who do you work for in this joint?”

“Oh, no one.”

“Ah, your husband, then. Whereabouts?”

“No, not that, either.”

He snapped his fingers. “Mary Kay. The girls upstairs are wild about it.”

“I’m sorry. I just came inside to—well, I just came inside.”

“Is that right? Hey, this may be a little forward, but any chance you’re looking for a job? I work at a little ad firm upstairs, and we’re hunting for a new receptionist. The name’s Bernie. Bernie Clay.”

Bernie held out his hand. Before Lainie could transfer the Lemon Butter Ring so as to accept it, she understood that everything had changed. Over the following hour, she introduced herself as Elaine, not Lainie, rode alongside Bernie on a gleaming escalator, followed him through a waiting room of trendy red chairs, and sat in his office past which ambled dozens of jolly men and secretaries who threw looks her way. Not hostile, but not friendly, either, as if wondering if the woman in the beehive had what it took.

Lainie knows she did all of this, but recalls only snippets. What she remembers in full are the rapid calculations she made regarding the schedules of her kids and husband, all of which had to be gauged before countering Bernie’s job offer, in a take-it-or-leave-it tone she couldn’t believe came out of her mouth, with her own part-time proposal—the best she could do, she said.

She hears the thump of Timmy kicking his seat at the table, hears the tentative clink of Tammy’s spoon against her bowl. Lainie rotates her head to see her reflection in the china-cabinet glass, wondering how beehives caught on in the first place. The secretaries at Klein & Saunders all have sleeker cuts, and though Lainie has only worked with them for a couple of days, she’s begun to imagine what it would feel like if her hair, too, was styled that way.

30

ELISA SUSPECTS SHE’LL never again know nights of such marvel and delight. Encounters in F-1 are too wondrous to grasp undividedly. She relives them the best she can, in gasping instants, like movie scenes that belong on the Arcade’s fifty-foot screen instead of being glimpsed on Giles’s tiny TV. How the whole pool burns electric blue the instant she enters the lab. The V-shaped current of the creature gliding underwater to meet her. The eggs as smooth and warm as baby skin. The creature’s head rising from the water, his eyes rarely gold now, but softer, human colors, and twinkling, not flashing. The safety lights’ snug, orange glow, like morning in a manger. The massive, bladed weapon of the creature’s hand, signing “egg” with motions gentle enough to stroke a gosling. Facial expressions she’d forgotten she could make: lip-biting excitement reflected in metal surgical tables, big-eyed anticipation reflected in pool water, heedless grins reflected in the creature’s shining eyes. Even daily drudgeries, the frustrating preliminaries to visiting him, are bathed in his radiance. Morning eggs not plopping into her stovetop pot but capering. No more dragging her feet room to room upon waking: she’s Bojangles in the kitchen, Cagney in the bedroom. Her choice of footwear getting showier by the day, sparkling down the Arcade’s fire escape as if the railing is threaded with tinsel. Dancing across Occam’s freshly mopped floors to watch the colors of her shoes gloss like a rising sun over a lake. Zelda giggling at her vivacious mood and remarking that Elisa’s acting like she did when she met Brewster, a comment Elisa deflects while wondering, half-crazy, if that’s exactly right. The scuffed, cat-fur cardboard of LP covers, the twelve-inch square revealed to be the precise dimension of joy. The creature signing “record” before she’s halfway to the pool, standing near the ledge, torso revealed, his chest scales glittering like a drawer of jewelry. The pinching of dust from the record player needle like the wiping of a tear from her eye. Miles or Frank or Hank or Billie or Patsy or Nina or Nat or Fats or Elvis or Roy or Ray or Buddy or Jerry Lee turned into angelic choirs, their every sung word gravid with a history the creature yearns to understand. His lights, his sensational lights, a symphonic reply to the purple glow of crooners, the blue pulse of rock and roll, the dusky yellow of country, the blinking orange of jazz. The touch of his hand, rare but thrilling, when he plucks eggs from her palm. The one time she dares hold nothing at all, and still he reaches out, draws his claws softly down her wrist, curling his hand into her palm as if enjoying the pretend-egg play, and letting her close her fingers around his, for that instant making the two of them not present and past, not human and beast, but woman and man.

31

SEX SIGNALS IN the rain forest were flagrant. Tortured ululations, fanned ruffles, engorged genitals, fulgent colors. Lainie’s signals are just as obvious. The drop of her eyes, the pout of her lip, how she leads with her bosom. It’s a wonder the children don’t crumple their noses at the pheromones as she puts a coat atop her apron and herds them to the bus. She returns and lets the coat drop to the carpet like a movie star. She touches the banister of the stairs with a single arched finger and asks, “Do you have time?” His head is smothered in painkiller, roaring like a tornado heard from a storm cellar, and words are inaccessible. She pivots on her finger and climbs the stairs, hips swinging like the tail feathers of a sashaying macaw.

Strickland takes his plate to the sink and shakes the omelet into the drain. He flips the switch of the garbage disposal. It’s the first they’ve owned. Blades whir like feasting piranhas. Specks of egg spatter the stainless steel. He turns it off and hears the floorboards overhead squeak and bedsprings creak. He’s been given food, is being offered sex, is suffused in warm morning sun—what else could he want? Yet he disapproves of his wife’s brazenness. He disapproves of himself, too, for the erection pressing against the sink. Seduction games belong in the Amazon, not here in this precise, planned American neighborhood. Why can’t he control himself? Why can’t he control anything?

He’s upstairs. He can’t say how he got here. Lainie is perched on the edge of the bed. He’s sorry to see that the apron’s coarse pragmatism has been replaced by a nightgown’s sheerness. She sits with shoulders forward, knees together, one leg kicked out to the side. This pose, too, she’s learned from movies. But is the sole of any starlet’s foot so dirty? Strickland continues toward her, upbraiding himself with each step. Accepting a woman’s lure is like taking an enemy’s bait. Lainie’s cunning: She waits, a shrewd shrug persuading a strap of the nightie to slip from her shoulder. He stands before her weak and worthless.

“I like it here,” she says.

Discarded clothing hunches on the floor like vermin. Perfume bottles are scattered in insect chaos. The blinds are crooked as if cracked by earthquake. He does not, in fact, like it here, nor does he trust it. Everything in this city is an elaborate feint toward civilization, a bluff regarding the safe superiority of their species.

“Baltimore,” she clarifies. “People are nice here. None of that phony southern stuff. The kids like their big backyard. They like the school. The stores are very impressive. And you like your job. I know you don’t think about it in those terms. But a woman can tell. All those late hours. You’re dedicated. I’m sure they appreciate you. You’re going to do great there. Everything is going to be wonderful.”

His bandaged left hand is in her hand. He can’t say how this happened, either. He hopes it’s the pills. Otherwise it’s his traitorous body flooding with the intoxicants of prospective intercourse. She settles his fingers on the slope of her breast and inhales to expand it, stretching out her neck. He examines the flawless skin and in its place sees the two puffy scars of Elisa Esposito. Elisa, Elaine. The names are so close. He finds himself tracing the imagined scars with his fingers. Lainie kittens her neck into his hand. Strickland has a pang of sorrow for her. She has no idea of the things in his head. His current thought, for example, that he’d rather like to chew her to pieces, just like the hidden piranhas in their sink.

“Does that hurt?” She sinks his cold, sewn fingers into her hot breast, just above her heart. “Can you feel anything?”

32

LAINIE SEES WILDNESS in him and welcomes it. For too long now, his best energy has belonged to the jungle. But there’s more at stake here in Baltimore than a military mission. She needs to remind him of that as often as she can. Timmy’s time-capsule question had knocked Richard off his rails, and he’d responded excellently, doling advice like a father should. Lainie knows she just needs to give him time. Soon he’ll be ready to talk to their son about what he did to the skink and how to be a good man. Because Richard is, despite his job, despite his fealty to General Hoyt, despite everything, good. She’s almost sure of it.

Progressive women’s magazines have instructed her not to offer her body as a reward, but what do they know? Have any of those writers and editors had a husband tossed into two different kinds of hell and come back alive? This is how it could be, is what she hopes their sex will tell him. We could be happy, normal. While she’s at it, maybe she can convince herself of the same. Maybe her job at Klein & Saunders won’t have to be a secret much longer. Maybe, if this goes well and he holds her tight afterward, drained and fuzzy-headed, she’ll tell him right then. Maybe he’ll even be proud of her.

His wildness, however, doesn’t last. Richard is easily embarrassed when his own body feels ungainly, and between the lumpish shucking of his clothes and his awkward positioning atop her, he retreats into the brow-furrowed ogre he’s been since the Amazon. She is purposely messy, her nightie half-open, one hand sunk into her tangled hair, the other gripping the coverlet, but he is flesh upon pistons, a tool for a task, and he enters her with syringe straightness. He thrusts without build, beginning at medium speed, not varying.

It is something, though, definitely something, and she crosses her ankles behind his back and digs her fingers into his biceps, and threshes her torso, not because it feels particularly good but to keep all of their parts in motion, for as long as she doesn’t lie still there’s a chance to see from fresh perspectives each moment, to believe that this act, as well as the larger act of their marriage, has yet to be resolved.

This takes energy and dedication, and it distracts her until she feels the warmth of Richard’s hand on her neck. She takes care to open her eyes slowly so as not to startle him. His face is wet and red, and his eyes, also wet and red, are fixed upon her neck, where his thumb is tracing a diagonal line down each side of her throat. She can’t interpret this but wants to encourage it.

“That’s good,” she whispers. “Rub me all over.”

His hand slides upward, over her chin, and covers her mouth with a smooth ease she doesn’t understand until she feels wetness roll down her neck. Against her lip, knuckle-hard, she can feel the wedding ring under a bandage. She tells herself to stay calm. He’s not trying to hurt her. He’s not trying to choke her. More wetness pools between her lips. She recognizes the taste. She refuses to believe it. She tastes it again and pushes her head sideways to break from his palm.

“Honey,” she gasps. “Your hand’s bleeding—”

But his wet hand slides over her mouth again. That’s what he wants—he wants her mute. He’s going faster now, the bedsprings shrilling and the headboard thunking in unexpected rhythms, and she presses her lips together to keep out the blood and breathes through her nose, and tells herself she can hold out until he’s done, because here is that wildness she wanted, and at heightened levels. Some women like this. She’s seen countless adventure magazine covers of helpless women in tattered dresses thrown about by Tarzanlike men. Maybe she can learn to like it, too.

His grip starts to slip as his body begins to hitch, and Lainie’s able to force her head upright. Richard is no longer looking at the two lines he’s been tracing in blood across her throat. His head is wrenched over his shoulder, neck muscles taut as he strains to see inside the closet. She feels his thighs shudder against hers and she lets her head drop back onto the pillow, feeling blood creep down both sides of her neck. It’s too confusing to think about. There’s nothing in the closet worth looking at, nothing at all. Just some crummy old high-heel shoes.

33

IT’S NOT EVERY night that Elisa makes it into the lab, and on nights when she does, eggs in hand, and finds the creature inside the tank instead of the pool, her heart breaks. This rouses her from selfish exuberance, reminds her that there is no joy inside F-1, not really. Yes, the pool is preferable to the tank, but what would be preferable to the pool? Anything, everything. The world is full of ponds and lakes, streams and rivers, seas and oceans. She stands before the tank on these nights wondering if she is any better than the soldiers who captured the creature or the scientists who keep him contained.

What she knows for certain is that the creature can sense her state of mind, even through metal and glass. His body-lights fill the tank with colors so intense it looks as though he swims in lava or melted steel or yellow fire. Elisa worries about the severity of these emotions. Has she only made his life harder to live? Before peering into a porthole window, she swallows down thick tears and masks her trembling lips with the most serene smile she can manage.

He’s waiting, circling just behind the portholes. He twists and rolls when he sees her, bubbles rising from his hands as they sign the words he likes best: “hello,” “E-L-I-S-A,” “record.” She doubts he can hear anything from inside the locked tank, and this takes her broken heart and grinds it to dust. He wants her to put on a record he can’t hear because it will make her happy, and that will make him happy.

So she goes to the audio table, relieved to be out of the creature’s line of sight so he won’t see the shudder of her sob or how she wipes tears with the crook of her arm. She puts on a record and takes bracing breaths before returning to the tank window, where he blinks perceptively, scanning her for authenticity before pushing off from one side of the tank to the other, back and forth, spinning and twirling, as if to impress her with a display of prowess.

Elisa laughs and gives him the show he wants, positioning one hand shoulder-high, the other waist-low, and waltzing to the music with the dance-partner substitute of an egg, sidestepping concrete pillars bolted with steel shackles and tables of sharp instruments as if neither are worse than bumbling fellow dancers. His pleasure is evident by the lavender that radiates from the tank, and after a time, she knows her dance floor well enough to close her eyes and imagine that it is his cool, clawed hand and strong, scaled waist that she holds.

34

THERE ARE PLENTY of reasons Elisa doesn’t notice the man enter the lab. “Star Dust” is a song of bewitching rhythm, and during her earlier upset, she’d turned the volume dial further than usual. Mostly, though, it is that her ears have become attuned to specific kinds of late-night threats: The oafish rattle of a scientist turning out his pockets for his key card or the exacting snap of Empties marching down a hallway. This sound is one for which she isn’t prepared, that of a man cognizant of the creature’s heightened senses of vision and hearing. Elisa box steps and dips and waltzes, while the creature’s luminescence dims to a worried matte black, a warning that Elisa, with her eyes so blissfully shut, has no chance to heed.