The Shape of Water

1

ONLY THE HEAT of the man’s tears makes him aware of the pervading coldness: F-1’s closed door against his back; the hall’s catacomb draft; the corpse chill of his fingers clamped over his mouth. He’d laugh if he wasn’t crying—of course the conduit of this epiphany is an egg. So much of his life has been dedicated to investigating what some call evolution, but he prefers to call emergence: the asexual replications of worm and jellyfish; the embryonic morphogeneses of fertilized ovum; the infinite other theoretical paths of life’s progression that didn’t end with mankind obliterating everything pure and good.

It’s the same thing he used to tell his students. The universe folds itself along dull axial lines generation after generation, but what truly reshapes life are the foibled folds, the outright tears. Changes kick-started by emergences can last for millennia and affect us all. He’d flatter their young minds by telling them that, though he might be the only first-generation immigrant in the classroom, each one of them is quite exotic, a child of fantastic mutants.

Oh, he’s awfully bold when on terra firma, snug behind a lectern, high on chalk dust. Now he’s in the field, the real world. Why, then, does it feel more like fantasy every day? His mother used to call his daydream spells leniviy mozg. Translated: “lazy brain.” They are, of course, the opposite; his hyperactive mind is what has driven him to be a scientist of repute. What those diplomas, ribbons, and honors are worth here in the real world, he’s no longer certain. He could have pulled the janitor away from the tank, away from danger, and yet he, the ivory-tower coward, had simply raced from the room.

Frequently he returns to Occam late at night, unable to sleep until he’s checked, a fourth or fifth time, the gauges of pool and tank. The asset, he has become certain, won’t last much longer under such artificial conditions. One morning, they’ll find it belly-up, dead as a goldfish, and Mr. Strickland will go around cheering and slapping backs, while he, on the other hand, will try to hold back a tide of tears. Only here, tonight, at last, does he understand the answer to the riddle of the asset’s continued survival. This woman—this janitor—is keeping it alive, not through serums or solutions but through force of spirit. To drag her from the lab right now might be the same as dragging a dagger through the creature’s travailing heart.

Other daggers are slicing into his soft, pink, pitiful human palm. It is a stiff manila folder, an object of outrageous import moments ago, now wadded to sharp-edged crumples. He relaxes his fist and smooths it out. He hadn’t come to F-1 tonight to check gauges. He certainly hadn’t come to have his bedrock beliefs fractured by a dancing janitor. Tonight’s visit was to verify previously collected data. Inside the manila folder is an intel report he has compiled at great personal risk, a report that must be finished before tomorrow’s rendezvous.

Faint strains of “Star Dust” rumble into his skull, still pressed against the lab door. He pushes off and staggers down the hall. He grips the folder tighter, no matter how it cuts into his flesh, to remind himself who he is, why he’s here. He is Dr. Bob Hoffstetler, born Dmitri Hoffstetler in Minsk, Russia, and though one would be excused for inferring from his curriculum vitae that he is a scientist to his bones, his true occupation, the only real one he’s ever had, goes by terms far more sincere than “the asset.” He is a mole, an operative, an agent, an informer, a saboteur, a spy.

2

TO SEE INSIDE Hoffstetler’s rented house on Lexington Street would be to peg him as the sort of fanatic who arranges toenail clippings by length. The home is beyond spare. It’s sparse. Cabinets and closets are kept empty and open. Nonperishable groceries remain in shopping bags on a folding table in the center of the kitchen. Perishable goods, too, remain in bags inside the refrigerator. There are no dressers in the bedroom; his spartan wardrobe is folded atop another table. He sleeps on a camping cot of steel frame and canvas. His medicine cabinet is bare, his pharmaceuticals holding military lines atop the toilet tank. The single trash can he keeps is emptied outside each night and scrubbed clean each week. All lights are bare bulbs; he has moved the fixtures to a box in the basement. The light, therefore, is harsh, and months after arrival, he still jumps at his own thrown shadows—some KGB operative, he always thinks, slinking close to cut short Hoffstetler’s overlong mission.

Keeping a shipshape residence complicates the placing of wiretaps, bugs, other black-bag jobs. He has no reason to think the CIA is onto him, yet every Saturday, when other men crack open beers and watch sports, he runs a putty knife around drawers, windows, heat vents, doorjambs, and soffits, then makes a special event, like other men do of family cookouts, of disassembling and reassembling the telephone. Televisions and radios are burdens he doesn’t need; he guts the phone in silence, pausing to read from library books that he returns, finished or not, every Sunday. It took the jarring sight of a janitor—identified by punch-card records as “Elisa Esposito”—dancing in front of an asset gone absolutely radiant for Hoffstetler to feel the full sadness of his lonely customs.

Today, though, his routine dislodging one of the hallway floorboards feels worse than dangerous. It feels wrong. It’s a detestable feeling. Wrong is the bailiwick of parents, schoolmarms, men of the cloth. Scientists have no need of it. Yet caught in his throat like a fish bone is the certainty that what he saw last night changes everything. If the asset can feel that kind of joy, affection, and concern—he espied all three in its chromatic flux—no nation, for any reason, should toy with it like a specimen in a Bunsen burner. In hindsight, even his own experiments, done with doctorly care, feel wrong. Of the many emotions the asset has stirred in Washington, at Occam, and in his own heart, how is it, Hoffstetler wonders, that not a single one of those emotions has been shame?

The hollow beneath the floor holds a passport, an envelope of cash, and the crinkled manila folder. Hoffstetler picks up the folder, hears the toot of a taxi, and forces the plank back into place. It always happens the same. He receives a brusque phone call with a specific time and a code phrase; he drops all that he is doing; he formulates a lateness excuse for David Fleming. Then he stews in anxious acids until the time arrives, calls a cab, gets inside, and records the cabbie’s name in a notebook to ensure no cabbie drives him to the meeting location more than once. Today’s driver is named Robert Nathaniel De Castro. Hoffstetler wagers that his friends call him “Bob.” What American name is more inoffensive or forgettable?

Past the airport, across Bear Creek Bridge, contiguous to the shipyards in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, the industrial park is not a place men in suits are often dropped. Hoffstetler’s wardrobe is limited to suits; blandness is his only disguise. He stows away his professorial peacock feathers and bores Robert Nathaniel De Castro with flavorless chatter and an unmemorable tip. He walks toward a warehouse until the cab is gone, then veers between container ships, past a transit shed, and over the tracks, doubling back around thirty-foot sand piles to make sure no one has followed.

He likes to sit atop a particular concrete block while waiting. He drums his heels on it like he’s a bored little boy back in Minsk. Soon a Chinese dragon of dirt floats across the sky while tires crunch gravel like gnashed bones. A titanic Chrysler swings into view, black as a crevasse with chrome like liquid mercury, its tail fins slicing loaves of risen dust. Hoffstetler slides off the concrete block and stands before the purring beast in the swirling grit—his papa would call it gryaz. The driver’s door opens and the same man as ever emerges, stretching a tailored suit across his bison breadth.

“The sparrow nests on the windowsill,” Hoffstetler says.

“And the eagle—” The Russian accent is thick. “The eagle…”

Hoffstetler reaches for the silver door handle. “And the eagle takes the prey,” he snaps. “What’s the point of using a code phrase if you can’t ever remember it?”

3

THE STYGIAN CHRYSLER wends him all the way back across the city. The Bison, as Hoffstetler has come to think of the driver, never takes the shortest path. Today, he scoops up west of Camp Holabird, circles the Baltimore City hospitals, and effects a stair-step pattern to the North Street cemeteries before dropping like an anvil into East Baltimore. Hoffstetler’s leniviy mozg finds in Baltimore’s grimy, gray street grid proof of the cosmological organization present in all matter, from the smallest corpuscles to most unfathomable galactic clusters. Thus he is but an insignificant pinprick playing a nugatory role in history. This, at least, is his prayer.

They park directly in front of the Black Sea Russian Restaurant. It never makes sense to him. Why the cryptic telephone calls, coded phrases, and loop-de-loop course if it ends every time at the highly conspicuous, mirror-plated, gold-inflected, red-sashed restaurant bedecked with filigreed nesting dolls atop malachite tabletops? The Bison holds the car door open and follows him inside.

It’s still early. The Black Sea isn’t open yet. There is clatter from the kitchen, but not much talk. Waitstaff sit smoking at a table, memorizing specials. Three violinists tune their strings to “Ochi Chernye.” The sharp smell of red-wine vinegar mixes with the sweetness of fresh-baked gingerbread. Hoffstetler passes the restrooms, where hangs a poster issued by J. Edgar Hoover to inveigle immigrants to report Espionage, Sabotage, and Subversive Activities. It’s an inside joke: There, in the last booth of the restaurant’s farthest dogleg, backlit by the lunar glow of a giant tank crawling with lobsters, waits Leo Mihalkov.

“Bob,” he greets.

Mihalkov prefers speaking to Hoffstetler in English to practice his conversation skills, but hearing his Americanized name from the agent’s lips makes Hoffstetler feel strip-searched. It is no small thing that Mihalkov pronounces the name as boob. Hoffstetler wonders if this, like the FBI poster, is a backhand slap. On cue, musicians rush the booth like hatchet men, nod out a rhythm, and strike up. One point in the Black Sea’s favor is its insusceptibility to wiretap, and the deafening strings further moot the point. Hoffstetler has to raise his voice.

“I ask once again, Leo: Please call me Dmitri.”

Call it cowardice, but it is easier for Hoffstetler to keep his two personas separate. Mihalkov places a blini topped with smoked salmon, crème fraîche, and caviar onto his extended tongue, draws it in, and savors it. Hoffstetler finds himself smoothing the manila folder in his hands. How quickly this Russian brute, with a single belittling syllable, has muscled him into the position of timid supplicant.

Leo Mihalkov is the fourth intelligence contact he has had. Hoffstetler’s reluctant embroilment in espionage began the day after his commencement at Lomonosov in Moscow, when agents of Stalin’s NKVD came into view like shipwrecks from a draining lake. They fed him—a young, hungry scholar—a dinner of pickled tomatoes, zakuski, beef stroganoff, and vodka, followed by a dessert of government secrets: teams working to put satellites into space, advanced chemical warfare tests, Soviet infiltrators inside the US atomic program. It was as good as being fed poison. Hoffstetler was a dead man unless he obtained the antidote, and the antidote was, and always would be, strict allegiance to the Premier.

When the war was kaput, the agents said, America would sift Eurasia’s rubble for gold, and who would they find? Dmitri Hoffstetler, that’s who. His task was to willingly defect, become a good American. It wouldn’t be so bad, they promised. His wouldn’t be a life of pistol silencers and bitable suicide pills. He’d be free to follow his professional predilections, provided they were in fields ripe for top-secret harvesting whenever he was contacted by agents. Hoffstetler didn’t bother asking what would happen if he refused. The men took care to mention his papa and dear mamochka with specificity enough that there was no doubting how easily the NKVD could tighten their fists around them.

Mihalkov shrugs at Hoffstetler’s request. He’s not a physically imposing man; in fact, he seems to enjoy making himself smaller by sitting in front of the lobster tank’s blue vista. In this way, Mihalkov is a switchblade, compact and benign in snug suits, rose boutonnieres, and short-cut gray hair, until he’s provoked and the sharp parts are sprung. He swallows the caviar and holds out a receiving hand while the crustaceans behind him appear to crawl out of his ears. Hoffstetler hands over the folder, fretting over the wrinkles like a mother over a child’s unironed church clothes.

Mihalkov unravels the string tie, taps out the documents, shuffles through them.

“And this is what, Dmitri?”

“Blueprints. It’s all there. Every door, window, and ventilation duct at Occam.”

“Otlichno. Ah, English, English: good job. This will interest the directorate.”

He pinches another blini before noticing Hoffstetler’s tense expression.

“Drink this vodka, Dmitri. Four times it is distilled. Arrives in diplomatic valise from Minsk. Your homeland, da?”

This is the latest in a decade’s worth of references to the knives held against his parents’ jugulars. Unless Hoffstetler has become adrift in paranoiac seas. Unless he’s fallen so deep undercover he can no longer see the outlines of the surface. He flaps a cloth napkin from its pinwheel fold and mops his sweat. The violinists can’t hear anything beyond the vibrations passing directly into their chins, but still Hoffstetler leans forward and keeps his voice low.

“I stole those blueprints for a reason. I need you to authorize an extraction. We have to get the creature out of there.”

4

MEMORIES OF HIS years teaching in Wisconsin are like the state’s winter terrain: The bright sincerity of Midwestern living splotched by the ugly black slush of the reports he handed over to Leo Mihalkov, who would materialize behind snow whirlwinds in a sable overcoat and ushanka hat like Ded Moroz—Old Man Frost—of Mama’s Christmas fables. Hoffstetler tried to sate Mihalkov with material thefts: electroscopes, ionization chambers, Geiger-Müller counters. It was never enough. Mihalkov squeezed and Hoffstetler, like a sponge, seeped litanies of top-secret atrocity. An American program involving abrading the scalps of retarded children with ringworm to study the effects. Mosquitoes bred with dengue, cholera, and yellow fever and loosed upon pacifist prisoners as part of an entomological weapons program. Most recently, a proposal to expose US servicemen to a new herbicidal dioxin called Agent Orange. Each test result Hoffstetler ferreted to the Soviet agent was itself a virus that putrefied the guts of his otherwise pleasant life.

He realized, with a heavying grief, that anyone too close to him might become future fodder for Soviet blackmail. He had no choice that he could see. He broke it off with the lovely woman he’d been seeing and quit hosting the university cocktail parties that had intoxicated him with amiable intellectualism. He christened the house the university gave him by removing most of the furniture and all of the light fixtures, emptying the drawers and closets, and sitting, that first night, alone in the center of the cleared floor, repeating “Ya Russkiy,” I am a Russian, until wet snow covered the windows and he began, in darkness, to believe it.

Suicide was the only exit. He knew too much about sedatives to rely upon them to do the job. Madison lacked a tall building from which to leap. Purchasing a gun with a Russian accent might draw undue attention. So he’d purchased a box of Gillette Blue Blades and placed them on the tub’s rim, but no matter how hot he drew the bathwater, he couldn’t dissolve Mama’s warnings about Nečistaja sila—the Unclean Force—the demon legion into which all suicides were inducted. Hoffstetler cried in the tub, naked, middle-aged, balding, pasty-skinned, flabby, shuddering like a baby. How far he’d sunk. How very, very far.

The invite to be a part of an Occam Aerospace Research Center team analyzing a “newly discovered life-form” saved his life. This is no hyperbole. One day, the razor blades waited on the side of the tub; the next day, they were out with the trash. The news got better. Mihalkov got word to him that this would be the final mission required of him. Do his job at Occam and he’d be taken home, back to Minsk, back into the arms of parents he hadn’t seen in eighteen years.

Hoffstetler could not begin quickly enough. He signed every release form he saw and started reading the partially redacted but plenty astonishing dispatches from DC. He quit his position at the college using the old chestnut of “personal issues” and arranged lodging in Baltimore. Newly discovered life: The term pumped his cold, withering body with warm jets of youthful hope. Inside himself, too, was newly discovered life, and for once he would use it not to ruin another being but to understand it.

Then he saw it. That’s the wrong word. He met it. The creature looked at Hoffstetler through a tank window and acknowledged him in that distinctive way of humans and primates. In seconds, Hoffstetler was stripped of the scientific armor he’d constructed over twenty years; this was not some mutant fish upon which acts should be performed, but rather a being with whom thoughts, feelings, and impressions should be shared. The realization was freeing in the exact way that Hoffstetler, recently resigned to death, needed. Everything had prepared him for this. Nothing had prepared him for this.

The creature, too, was a contradiction, its own biology aligning with historical evidence from the Devonian Period. Hoffstetler began calling it “the Devonian,” and of foremost interest was its profound relationship to water. Hoffstetler first theorized that the Devonian coerced the water around it, but that was too despotic. To the contrary, water seemed to work with the Devonian, reflecting the creature’s disposition by kicking and frothing, or going as still as sand. Typically, insects were attracted to standing water, but those that made it inside F-1 were in thrall to the Devonian itself, zipping about in spectacular overhead patterns and pelting Hoffstetler whenever he made an aggressive-looking move.

His mind stormed with incredible hypotheses, but he hoarded them selfishly, limiting his first Occam report to digestible facts. The Devonian, he wrote, was a bilaterally symmetrical, amphibious biped showing clear vertebral evidence of a notochord, a hollow neural tube, and a closed blood system powered by a heart—four-chambered like humans or three-chambered like amphibians Hoffstetler did not yet know. Gill slits were evident, but so were the dilations of a rib cage atop vascularized lungs. This suggested that the Devonian could exist, to some extent, in two geospheres. What the scientific community might learn about subaquatic respiration, he typed frantically, was limitless.

The drawback to Hoffstetler’s newly discovered life was a new naïveté. Occam had no interest in solving primordial mysteries. They wanted what Leo Mihalkov wanted: military and aerospace applications. Overnight, Hoffstetler found himself in the business of hindrance, fiddling knobs and adjusting valves, declaring equipment unsafe and data compromised, anything to buy more time to study the Devonian. This took creativity and audacity, as well as a third personal attribute he’d let atrophy under Mihalkov: empathy. Hence the special bulbs he’d installed to approximate natural light, hence the Amazonian field recordings.

Such efforts took time, and Richard Strickland had turned time into a species as endangered as the Devonian. Academia was rife with rivalry; Hoffstetler knew how to see the blade hidden behind a grinning glad-hander. Strickland was a different kind of rival. He didn’t hide his antipathy toward scientists, cussing right to their faces in a way that made them flush and stammer. Strickland called out Hoffstetler’s delays for the bullshit they were. You want to learn about the asset, Strickland said in so many ways, you don’t tickle its chin. You cut it and watch how it bleeds.

Hoffstetler’s instinct, too, was to shrink in fear. He couldn’t, though, not this time. The stakes were too high, not only for the Devonian, but also for his own soul. F-1, he told himself, was the singularity of an untamed new universe, and to survive inside it, he’d need to create a third person. Not Dmitri. Not Bob. A hero. A hero who might redeem himself for saying nothing while innocents fell prey to the experiments of two heartless countries. To succeed, he’d need to live out the same basic lesson he’d taught his students: Universes form through collisions of escalating violence, and when a new habitat erupts, members of the local taxon will fight over the resources, often to the death.

5

“EXTRACTION,” MIHALKOV MUSES. “This is the word Americans use for teeth. A messy procedure. Bone and blood all over your bib. No, extraction is not part of the plan.”

Hoffstetler is unconvinced at the rationality of his own idea. Who is to say the USSR won’t inflict baser tortures upon the Devonian than the US? But incertitude has matured into the better of two bad choices. Hoffstetler opens his mouth to speak, but the violinists hit a gap between songs and he snags hold of his breath. Their elbows swoop, and they’re off again, the horse hair of their bows swaying like broken cobwebs. Shostakovich: lavish enough to blanket a conversation of any degree of danger.

“With these plans,” Hoffstetler insists, “we can get it out of Occam in ten minutes. Two trained operatives is all I ask.”

“This is your last mission, Dmitri. Why do you wish to complicate it? The happiest of homecomings awaits you. Listen, comrade, to the advice I give. You are no man of adventure. Do what you are good at doing. Sweep up after the Americans like a good maid and hand over to us your dustpan of dirt.”

Hoffstetler knows he’s being insulted, but the jab lands without muscle. Lately he’s come to think that maids, specifically janitors, are more attuned to secrets than anyone on earth.

“It can communicate,” he says. “I’ve seen it.”

“So, too, can dogs. Did that stop us from shooting little Laika into space?”

“It doesn’t only feel pain, it understands pain, the same as you or I.”

“I am not surprised Americans are slow to acknowledge this. How long did they espouse that blacks do not feel the same pain as do whites?”

“It understands hand signals. It understands music.”

Mihalkov takes a shot of vodka and sighs.

“Life should be like carving up red stag, Dmitri. You peel the skin, you strip the meat. Simple and clean. How I long for the 1930s. Meetings on trains. Microfilm hidden inside ladies’ cosmetics. We transported objects we could touch and feel and know we were bringing home to the benefit of nashi lyudi. Vitamin D concentrates. Industrial solvents. Today our work is more like pulling bowels from a hole in the belly. We deal in untouchable things. Ideas, philosophies. No wonder you confuse them with emotion.”

Emotion: Hoffstetler pictures Elisa’s orchestration of the Devonian’s lights.

“But what is wrong with emotion?” he asks. “Have you read Aldous Huxley?”

“First music, now literature? You are a Renaissance man, Dmitri. Da, I have read Mr. Huxley, but only because Stravinsky speaks so highly of his work. Did you know his newest composition is a tribute to Mr. Huxley?” He nods at the violinists. “If only these novices could learn it.”

“Then you’ve read Brave New World. Huxley’s warning of sterile baby hatcheries, mass conditioning. Is this not where we are headed if we are not guided by what we know is the innate goodness of human nature?”

“The path from Occam’s fish to this future dystopia is a long and tiring one. You must not be so softhearted. If popular fiction is your hobby, may I suggest H. G. Wells? Let me tell you what Wells’s Dr. Moreau said. ‘The study of nature makes a man at last as remorseless as nature.’”

“Surely you are not defending Dr. Moreau.”

“Civilized men like to pretend that Moreau is a monster. But this is the Black Sea, Dmitri. We are alone. We can be honest with each other. Moreau knew that you cannot have it two ways. If you believe the natural world is good, then you must also accept its brutality. This creature you hold in such high regard? It feels nothing for you. It is remorseless. And so should you be.”

“Man should be better than monsters.”

“Ah, but who are the monsters? The Nazis? Imperial Japan? Us? Do we not all do monstrous things to prevent the ultimate monstrous act? I like to visualize the world as a china plate held aloft by two sticks, one the US, the other the USSR. If one stick rises, so must the other, or else the plate goes smash. Once I knew a man by the name of Vandenberg. Embedded in America, like you. Cockeyed with ideals, like you. He did not make it, Dmitri. He sank into a body of water that I am not at liberty to specify.”

Bubbles burp up from the lobster tank as if water, all water, had participated in swallowing Vandenberg. A subtle shift in the music’s signature: the violinists moving aside to allow the arrival of a waiter who, with a diffident bow, slides a plate of lobster and steak before Mihalkov. The agent grins, tucks his napkin into his collar, and arms himself with cutlery. Hoffstetler is glad for the distraction; he is rattled, but given what happened to this Vandenberg fellow, doesn’t believe it is wise to let Mihalkov know it.

“I serve at the pleasure of the Premier,” Hoffstetler says. “I pursue the asset only so we alone will know its secrets.”

Mihalkov cracks the lobster, dips white flesh in butter, chews in large, slow revolutions.

“For you, so loyal for so long,” he says from behind the food, “I will do this favor. I will ask about extraction. I will see what is possible.” He swallows, points his knife at Hoffstetler’s empty place setting. “Do you have time to join me? Americans have an amusing name for this dish. They call it ‘surf and turf.’ Look behind me. Choose the lobster that suits you. If you would like, we can take it to the kitchen, and you can watch it boil. They squeak a little, it is true, but they are so soft, so sweet.”

6

SPRING COMES. THE gray scrim lifts from the sky. Lumps of old snow, bundled in shadows like shivering rabbits, vanish. Where there was silence, solitary birds cheep and impatient boys crack baseballs across sandlots. The swells of dock water lose their sickle edges. Menus change—you can smell it through windows open for the first time in months. But all is not well. Still the rain abstains. The grass is as rumpled as morning hair and yellow as urine. Garden hoses unravel for an unslakable task. Tree limbs hold buds like fists. Drainage grates face their thirsty, stained teeth to the sun.

Elisa feels the same way. A torrent inside her is being held at bay. She hasn’t been inside F-1 for three days—five days if you count the weekend, which she does, every minute of it, keeping a running sum in her head. The lab has been occupied. There are more Empties than before and their patrol is more vigorous; before a single mopped floor can dry, it is blotted by boot prints. When Elisa arrives at work, it isn’t only Fleming lording over the shift change. It’s Strickland. She looks away from him, hoping she didn’t just see him smile at her.

The laundry room still smarts the eyes five years after the washing machines were removed. This happened after Elisa came upon Lucille passed out from bleach fumes. In a valorous feat Zelda likes to recount over Automat lunches, Elisa lifted Lucille into a four-wheeled laundry cart and rolled her into the cleaner air of the cafeteria before calling the hospital. Occam doesn’t like attention; all laundry work was outsourced to Milicent Laundry, and Elisa and Lucille were lucky to keep their jobs.

Only sorting duties remain. Zelda and Elisa separate dirty towels, smocks, and lab coats onto large tables as Zelda runs through a fresh Brewster story. Zelda had wanted to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color last night, but Brewster had insisted upon The Jetsons, escalating a row until Zelda had shaken her husband off the Barcalounger like trash from a wastebasket, to which he’d retaliated by belting the theme to The Jetsons at top volume over her program’s entire hour.

Elisa knows that Zelda tells the tale to lift Elisa from the doldrums she is unable to hide and declines to specify. She is grateful, and between pitching items into carts, she signs interjections with as much vigor as she can muster. They finish and push their carts into the hall. Elisa has the squeaky one; it caterwauls enough that an Empty pokes his helmeted head into the far end of the hall to evaluate the threat. Their route takes them right past F-1. Elisa strains to listen for telltale sounds while trying not to look like she’s listening.

They turn left and head down a windowless corridor black but for the orange parking-lot lights eking through double doors being held open by a block of wood. Zelda pushes open a door, pulls her cart after her, and holds the door for Elisa to follow. They are met, as they often are, by the other graveyarders, standing like birds on a wire, puffing on cigarettes. Scientists dare flaunt Occam’s smoking ban, but not janitors; several times per night they gather at the loading dock, their quarrels suspended for the duration of a smoke. It’s a risk: Breaks are allowed in the main lobby, but not here, not this close to sterile labs.

“You need to oil those wheels,” Yolanda says. “I heard you squealing a mile away.”

“Don’t listen to her, Elisa,” Antonio says. “It gives me time to comb my hair nice for you.”

“Is that hair?” Yolanda gibes. “I thought that was the clog you plunged from the bowl.”

“Miss Elisa, Miss Zelda,” Duane calls. “How come you two never smoke with us?”

Elisa shrugs and points to her neck scars. One puff of one cigarette in the work shed behind Home was all the experiment she’d needed; she’d coughed until blood had darkened the dirt. She wheels the squeaky cart down the ramp, waves at the Milicent Laundry driver in the van’s side mirror, and begins chucking material through the open rear doors into waiting baskets. Zelda parks her cart alongside Elisa’s but turns back to the others.

“Oh, hell,” Zelda says. “I do kind of miss the taste. Give me that cigarette.”

The others hurrah as Zelda joins them at the top of the ramp. She accepts a Lucky Strike from Lucille, lights up, takes a drag, and nestles the elbow of her smoking arm into the palm of the opposite hand. It’s a pose that has Elisa fancying a younger, lither version of her friend being slung about a brass-blasted dance hall by a zoot-suited suitor, maybe Brewster. Elisa follows Zelda’s exhaled smoke as it rises, catching the sodium light before drifting in front of a security camera.

“Don’t worry, sugar.”

She’s startled into looking down at Antonio. He winks one of his crossed eyes and swipes an innocuous broom from where it rests against the wall. He lifts it, handle upward, until the end taps the bottom of the camera. An accumulated spot of dirt on the camera’s bottom panel reveals how the janitors tilt the camera upward, the same way every night, before tapping it back down into place.

“Make us a little blind spot for a few minutes. Pretty smart, huh?”

It takes a minute for Elisa to realize that she has ceased loading laundry. The Milicent Laundry driver honks; she doesn’t react. Duane tries to joke her awake, asking her how come she brings so many more boiled eggs for lunch than she can eat; she doesn’t react. Zelda finally stubs her cigarette, gestures for the driver to relax, and hustles down the ramp to do her share of the loading.

“You all right, hon?” she asks.

Elisa hears her neck bones crackle in a nod, yet can’t look away from the smokers as they toss their smoldering butts in capitulation to the clock and leave Antonio to nudge the security camera back into prosecutorial position. She barely hears Zelda shut the van doors and bang them to tell the driver he’s free to go. Blind spot: Elisa nuzzles into the phrase, explores it, finds it familiar, almost cozy. Zelda and Giles aside, she lives her whole life in a blind spot, forgotten by the world, and wouldn’t it be something, she thinks, if this invisibility were the thing that allowed her to shock them all?

7

DAYSHIFTERS FILTER INTO the locker room. Zelda makes eye contact with those she trained over the years. Funny how they got promoted and she didn’t. They pretend to look at watches, busy themselves with purses. Well, Zelda doesn’t forget a face. Some of these fancy-pants dayshifters had been the graveyard shift’s worst rumormongers. Sandra once claimed to have seen, in B-5, flight plans used in gassing the populace with sedatives. Albert declared that the cabinets of A-12 hid human brains simmering in green goo—probably, he theorized, the brains of presidents. Rosemary swore she’d read a discarded file on a young man, code-named “Finch,” who didn’t age.

That’s what rumor mills do: They grind. So Zelda puts little stock in the gossip swirling around F-1. Is there something strange in that tank? You bet there is—it bit off two of Mr. Strickland’s fingers. But strange is Occam’s racket. Anyone who’s been here a spell knows not to get into a lather about it.

That ought to include Elisa. Lately her friend’s behavior has Zelda at sixes and sevens. Oh, she saw how Elisa behaved when they pushed the laundry carts past F-1. That squeaky wheel might as well have been the girl’s whine. Zelda figures it will pass; everyone takes her turn getting gung-ho about government conspiracy. Try as she might, though, she can’t shrug it off. Elisa’s the one person at Occam who sees Zelda for who she is: a good person and a darn hard worker. If Elisa gets herself fired, Zelda doesn’t know if she can take it. Selfish, maybe, but also true. Her knuckles ache, not from gripping mops but because fingers are how Elisa talks, and the idea of losing that daily conversation, that daily affirmation that she, Zelda Fuller, matters—it hurts.

One true thing about F-1: It had top dogs pulling harder at service personnel than anything before. Elisa keeps lingering around that lab, she’ll be playing with real fire. Zelda finishes dressing, sits on the bench, and sighs, enjoying the sharp smell of Lucky Strike. She unfolds a QCC from her pocket, gives it another look. Fleming keeps transposing details, trying to trip them up; if she were Elisa, she might suspect Fleming did this to keep them too busy to concoct theories. Zelda rubs her tired eyes and keeps checking, every row, every column, as the dressed dayshifters bang lockers. The QCC is full of empty, unfillable boxes, the same as her life. Things she’ll never have, places she’ll never go.

The locker room is crowding with women. Zelda looks around, past legs being hoisted, clothes hangers being untangled, bra straps being adjusted. The QCC isn’t the only reason she has lingered here. She’s been waiting for Elisa, so they can wait for the bus together—waiting to wait, the story of her life. Admitting it makes her feel pathetic. The last person Elisa’s thinking about these days is Zelda. The QCC fades before her vision until the night’s biggest unchecked box is revealed to be Elisa. Where is she? She hasn’t changed out of her uniform. Which means she’s still inside Occam. Zelda stands, the QCC gliding to the floor.

Oh, Lord. The girl was up to something.

8

THE MATRON’S VOICE rings through her skull. Stupid little girl. Elisa slows her gait to wait out two gabbing dayshifters ambling toward the end of the hall. You never follow directions, no wonder all the girls hate you. There: She’s alone. She scoots to the F-1 door and slots the key card. One day I’ll catch you lying or stealing and throw you out in the cold. The lock engages, and she throws open the door, an outrageous act at this hour. You’ll have no choice except selling your body, you shameful girl. Elisa slides inside, shuts the door, presses her back against it, and listens for footsteps, her fearful mind conflating nightmare images of the Matron hurling little Mum down the steps only for David Fleming to catch her.

Occam is swelling with morning staff. It’s a treacherous time for Elisa to make this visit, but she can’t help it, she needs to see him, make sure he’s all right. But it’s difficult to see anything at all; F-1 is fully alight, as bright as it was the night the creature’s tank was wheeled inside. Elisa squints and staggers, but also smiles, despite everything. Just a quick visit to let him know she hasn’t forgotten him, to sign to him that she misses him, to radiate with warmth at his sign of E-L-I-S-A, to lift his spirits with an egg. She takes the egg from her pocket and dashes forward, her legs beginning to remember how to dance.

She hears him before she sees him. Like a whale moan, the high-frequency sound bypasses her ears to pull tight like wire around her chest. Elisa stops, completely: her body, her breathing, her heart. The egg slips from her hand, makes a soft landing on her foot, and wobbles through water puddles left behind by a struggle. The creature is neither in pool nor tank, but on his knees in the middle of the lab, his metal bindings chained to a concrete post. A medical lamp on an adjustable arm pounds him with wattage, and she can smell his salty dryness, like a fish left on a pier to fester. His twinkling scales have gone dull and gray. The grace of his water postures has been clobbered by the harsh bends of a forced kneel. His chest rattles like that of a phlegmy old man and his gills labor as if pushing against weights, each opening betraying raw redness.

The creature turns his head, saliva draining from his gasping mouth, and looks at her. His eyes, like his scales, are coated with a dull patina, and though this makes reading the color of his eyes difficult, there is no mistaking the gesture he makes with his hands, cinched though they are by chains. Two index fingers, pointing urgently toward the door. It’s a sign Elisa knows well: “Go.”

The sign also, by design or chance, draws her eyes to a stool next to the concrete post. She doesn’t know how she missed it before, such a bright color in all this laboratory drabness. Upright on the seat rests an open bag of green hard candy.

9

NEVER, IN ALL of Zelda’s years at Occam, has she passed through its halls in civilian clothing. Her work garb, it turns out, has been a magical cape; without it, she is noticed. Yawning scientists and arriving service staff see her in a way that gives her an unanticipated rush of warmth before it is punctured by an icicle of dread. Her flower-print dress, tasteful elsewhere, is indecent in this domain of white coats and gray uniforms. She covers as much of it as possible with her purse and charges forth. The shift-change chaos will last for a few minutes more, enough time to find Elisa and give her a forceful shaking.

She hustles around a corner to find Richard Strickland stepping from his security-camera office. He teeters as if stepping off of a boat. Zelda knows this kind of unstable weaving. She saw it in Brewster before he stopped drinking. In her father, during dementia’s grip. In her uncle as his house burned down behind him. Strickland rights himself and rubs eyes that look crusted shut. Did he sleep here? He completes his lurch from the office, and Zelda recoils at the clang of metal upon the floor. It is the orange cattle prod. Strickland is dragging it behind him like a caveman’s club.

He doesn’t see her. She doubts he sees much of anything. He lumbers off in the other direction, a blessing except that Zelda knows where he’s headed, and it’s where she’s headed, too. She rotates her mental map of Occam. The underground level is a square, so there is an opposite path to F-1. But it’s twice as long; she’ll never make it before him. Strickland wobbles, puts a hand to the wall to steady himself, and hisses at a pain in his fingers. He’s slow. Maybe she can make it. If only she can cough up the fear clotting her lungs and get her feet to—

She’s moving, arms swinging. She passes a cafeteria astir with smells, not reheated Automat eatables but actual cooked breakfasts. She clips a white woman putting on a hairnet and receives a hard tsk scolding. Secretaries, alerted by the clop of her shoes, poke their heads from the photocopy room. Then, trouble: a bottleneck at Occam’s amphitheater, a room so rarely open at night she’d neglected to figure it into her calculations. Scientists file inside, maybe to view some sort of dissection, though Zelda feels it’s just as likely they’re screening a horror flick, maybe the one she’s currently living, a coven of white-coated monsters leering at her large body and sheen of sweat.

They make things difficult for her. Haven’t they always? She is forced to assert her shoulders against their suddenly inert bodies, pleading I’m sorry and Excuse me until she squeezes out the other side and barrels onward, trying to ignore the laughs aimed at her backside. She is sorry, she thinks, and there is no excuse. Her heart is pounding. She can’t catch her breath. It is thanks only to momentum that she spills around the second corner and sees, at the far end, trudging her way, Strickland.

Zelda is spotted. To turn away now would be to admit wrongdoing. What else can she do? She walks straight toward him. It is the boldest thing she has ever done. Her heart lobs against her rib cage like a handball. Her breathing is a mystery, hijacked by mysterious muscles. He’s eyeing her like an apparition and lifting the cattle prod, a bad sign, though at least it’s no longer chortling along the tile.

Both stop directly in front of F-1. Between gasps, Zelda forces a greeting.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Strickland.”

He’s inspecting her with glazed eyes. No light of recognition, even though he’s met her twice. His face is haggard and wan. A residue of a granulated powder coats his lower lip. He abandons his study of her face with a disdainful grunt.

“Where’s your uniform?”

He’s a man who knows how to cut: do it first, do it deep. With the inspiration of the desperate, Zelda holds up the only item she carries.

“I forgot my purse.”

Strickland squints. “Mrs. Brewster.”

“Yes, sir. Except it’s Mrs. Fuller.”

He nods but looks unconvinced. He looks, in fact, rather lost. Zelda has observed this before in white people new to being alone with black people; he doesn’t know where to look at her, as if he finds her very existence embarrassing. It makes him mumble, a sound too low to be heard from inside F-1. If Zelda wants to warn Elisa, she needs to exploit Strickland’s discomfiture and keep him occupied for as long, and as loudly, as possible.

“Say, Mr. Strickland.” Zelda brightens her voice to hide its tremor. “How are those fingers of yours?”

He frowns, then considers the bandage on his left hand. “I don’t know.”

“Do they have you on any pain relievers? My Brewster broke his wrist once at Bethlehem Steel, and the doctor fixed him up pretty good.”

Strickland grimaces, and for good reason: She’s shouting. Zelda doesn’t care about his reply, though the thirsty pass of his tongue over his lip’s white powder tells her everything about his painkillers. He dry-swallows, and whether by prescription or placebo, his stoop straightens and his glazed, glassy eyes snap into frightening focus.

“Zelda D. Fuller,” he rasps. “D for Delilah.”

Zelda shudders. “How is your…” Suddenly, she can’t think. “Your wife, Mr. Strickland.” She’s got no idea what she’s saying. “How is your wife enjoying—”

“You’re graveyard shift,” he growls, as if this is the worst thing she could be, worse than the other things about her that are so self-evident. “You got your purse. Go home.”

He slides a key card from his back pocket like a stiletto and stabs it into the lock. Zelda goads herself to finish her question, some happy babble about his wife, a courtesy even Richard Strickland will be forced to return, but he’s retreated into his natural state of looking through her, a woman who barely exists, and he’s through F-1’s door, the cattle prod clanking off the knob, a final warning, or at least Zelda hopes, for Elisa, wherever she is.

10

FUCK, IT’S BRIGHT. It’s sewing pins into his eyeballs. He’d like to rush back to his darkened office, shut his eyes beneath the soft gray blanket of the security-camera monitors. It’s a chicken instinct. He’s here for a reason. It’s time to step in, face Deus Brânquia, force Hoffstetler’s experiments to completion. No, not Deus Brânquia. The asset, that’s all it is. Why has he started thinking of it as Deus Brânquia again? He’s got to stop that. The good old Alabama Howdy-do, the heavy-duty Farm-Master 30 cattle prod, is long and straight in his palm, a handrail guiding him from an opiate haze back into the real world.

Only took two MPs to help him fish it from the tank and chain it to the post, not a single finger lost. The MPs won’t say shit. He’s their boss. He’d sent them packing after that, only to discover he’d left the Howdy-do in his office. His office—the desk drawer, the pills. A coincidence. He didn’t leave the cattle prod there on purpose. He didn’t.

He thinks of Lainie’s distraught report of how she’d caught Timmy cutting open a lizard. It hadn’t bothered Strickland at all. Hell, he’d been proud. He ought to take a lesson from his own son. When was the last time Strickland has been alone with this lizard? He’d have to go way back, the Amazon, gripping the harpoon gun in a dim grotto echoing with monkey screams. Deus Brânquia—the asset—speckled with rotenone, reaching out to him with both arms. As if they were equals. The arrogance of it. The insult.

Now look at it. He’s got a nice, clear view of its suffering. Quartered on bloody knees not capped to bear weight for this long. Bleeding from uprooted sutures. Sections of its abhorrent anatomy palpitating and pulsating for air. Strickland holds up the Howdy-do and waggles it. Deus Brânquia bristles its webbed spines.

“Oh,” Strickland says. “You remember?”

He relishes the finicky click of his heels as he circles the post. The moments preceding torture are always sensuous. The tumescence of fear. The ache of two bodies being kept apart before inevitable impact. Acts more creative than Strickland has patience for flowering in the victim’s imagination. Lainie would never understand this sort of foreplay, but any soldier who’s felt the blood rush would. Lainie’s blood-smeared neck slides into his mind. A fine, invigorating image. He takes a green candy from the bag, sucks it, pretends its sharp tang is that of blood.

When he bites down, the crunch shatters his eardrums. Elisa Esposito must be the only point of silence left in the world. His own is being eaten away by the monkeys, which have returned. Chattering from behind security monitors. Hooting from under his desk. And screaming. Of course, screaming. When he’s trying to think. When he’s trying to sleep. When he’s trying to nod along to his family’s tedious daily chronicles. The monkeys want him to resume the throne of Jungle-god. Until he does, they’ll keep screaming.

So he gives in. Just a little. Just to see if they’ll soften, just a notch. The Howdy-do? Why, it’s not a cattle prod at all. It’s one of the índios bravos’ machetes. The monkeys giggle. They like it. Strickland finds that he likes it, too. He rocks the machete like a pendulum, imagining he’s chopping through the buttress roots of a kapok tree. Deus Brânquia reacts violently, pulling against its chains, the paroxysm of a fish you’d thought was dead. Its gills fluff, widening its head to twice its size. A dumb animal trick. Doesn’t work on humans. Not on gods, either.

Strickland flips a switch. The machete hums in his hand.

11

LIMBS PRETZELED INTO a hard metal box, hair snagged in a hinge, knee abraded and bleeding, and yet Elisa feels no pain. Only fear, that mighty dust storm swirling up from her insides, and anger, thundering her skull into a new shape of thick, broad forehead and long, curling horns. She’ll ram her way out of this box and on her new animal hooves charge this horrible man, even if he kills her in the process—anything to save her beloved creature.

Elisa hadn’t been able to identify the voices at first, but inside F-1, all human timbres mean trouble, and she’d tensed like a varmint and looked for a hole inside which to burrow. It wasn’t Strickland she first saw through the opening door, but Zelda, her casual dress as gobsmacking as a bright red wedding gown. Zelda had been trying to warn Elisa, and Elisa had to honor that risk. She dove into a medical cabinet, cracking her knees hard enough to draw tears to her eyes. Like everything in F-1, the cabinet was wheeled and began to roll. She stuck out a hand and pressed her palm to the floor as a brake.

Now there’s Strickland, pacing ten feet away, too close for her to close the creaky cabinet door. She constricts herself, hidden only by shadow, and self-strangles her panting. Her chest and left ear are flattened to the cabinet floor and she can feel through the flimsy tin the thump of her heart. Don’t move, she tells herself. Run, attack, she tells herself.

Strickland swings the prod with a ballplayer’s ease. It makes a sidearm swoop and sticks the creature’s armpit. Two gold lights flash and the creature’s body clenches, scales rippling over seizing muscles, torso twisting as far from Strickland as he can get—mere inches. It’s only because Elisa can’t cry out that she doesn’t. She covers her mouth anyway, fingertips digging into her cheeks. Everybody has felt electric shocks of some sort, but she can’t imagine the creature ever has. He’d believe it black magic, a bolt shot from a vengeful god.

Strickland looks damaged and desperate. He lumbers behind the post. There, out of the creature’s sight, he removes his blazer, folds it like a man who’s never had to fold his own laundry, sets it beside the candy bag. It is a snakelike shedding of a skin that chokes Elisa with dread. The white shirt beneath is stained with what looks like old food. It doesn’t look to have been ironed in some time.

“I got some shit to say to you,” he mutters.

He slides the prod across his injured left hand like a pool player so that it aims at the nape of the creature’s neck. Elisa can feel her hands signing into the darkness: “Stop, stop.” Strickland takes his shot; sparks fly and the creature’s head rockets into the concrete post. His head lolls back, his forehead scales crushed and shining with blood. To Elisa, they are still beautiful, silver coins dipped in red ink. His gills sinuate, confused from the shock, and he lets loose a dolphin whimper. Strickland shakes his head in disgust.

“Why’d you have to be so much trouble? Leading us to hell and back. You knew we were there. You could smell us, sure as we could smell you. Seventeen months. Hoffstetler says you’re real old. Maybe to you, seventeen months is a drop in the bucket. Well, I’ll tell you what. Those seventeen months—they ruined me. My own wife looks me in my face like she doesn’t know me. I come home, my little girl runs the other way. I’m trying, I’m fucking trying but—”

He kicks a cabinet just like the one in which Elisa hides, denting the door right where her face would be. He flips the table to its side. Medical instruments catapult across the lab. Elisa draws more tightly into a ball. Strickland rubs his free hand over his face and the bandage unfurls, and in the underlayers Elisa sees concentric brown rings of blood as well as a splotch of yellow. There’s a dark ring, too. The wedding band she returned to him. He’s forced it back on, right over his reattached finger. Elisa, already sick, feels sicker.

“I dug you out of the jungle like I’d dig a stinger out of my arm. Now you get hot tubs and pools. And what do I get? A house no better than a jungle? A family no friendlier than all those native fucks in all their fucking villages? It’s your fault. It’s all your fucking fault.”

Strickland thrusts the prod like a fencing blade, triggering fire against the creature’s sutures, then back-swinging to strike them again. Elisa sees one of the sutures tear, scaled flesh peeling away from raw muscle. A stench of smoke and singed blood fills the lab, and Elisa buries her mouth into her elbow while her stomach convulses. She doesn’t, then, see the second cabinet being kicked over, only hears its clatter like a full drum kit being tossed down a staircase. Her own cabinet, she realizes, is the next in Strickland’s destructive path.

She peeks from the cabinet and finds, close enough to smell the insomniac stink, the back of Strickland’s legs, the trousers wrinkled from being slept in and spattered with old coffee and fresh blood. If she had a knife, she thinks wildly, she could slice his Achilles tendon or go stabbing for a calf artery, terrifically vicious acts she’s never before considered. What has happened to her? She thinks she knows, despite the dark irony: What has happened to her is love.

“You’re going to pay for it,” Strickland snarls. “All of it.”

There is the hum of the Howdy-do and the malodor of hot metal, and he bucks away, the prod striking Elisa’s cabinet with an incidental but deafening crash. She grinds her teeth, rigid with horror, and watches Strickland lift the prod like a jouster’s lance and gallop straight for the creature’s eyes, those former beacons of flashing gold turned flat, milky plashets. Though the cabinet vibrates, she envisions it clearly: The prod will pierce an eye, pump the creature’s brain full of electricity, and end the miracle of his life while she, every bit as slow as the Matron accused, does nothing.

Strickland’s foot glances against a small object. It twirls away in a mocking arc. He stutter-steps, nearly trips, and then halts to watch the object putter to a stop. He mutters, bends down, and picks it up. It is the boiled egg Elisa dropped upon seeing the chained creature, a fragile little thing of atomic potential.

12

IT WAS FLEMING who’d suggested they check F-1 for the truant Strickland. Hoffstetler had scoffed, opining that Strickland had no business in there, but seconds after he trails Fleming into the lab and sees Strickland’s anthropoid shape pacing about in the center of the room, he feels as naive as he has since arriving in Baltimore, the epitome of the cloistered professor duped by a real world that discarded rules as it saw fit. The Devonian—it’s on the floor. Hoffstetler hadn’t been notified the creature was being removed from the tank; thus, a rule follower to his stupid core, he’d believed it an impossibility.

Even Fleming, still crossing the lab, is sharp enough to suspect misconduct.

“Good morning, Richard,” he says. “I don’t recall this procedure on the schedule…?”

Strickland lets an object slip from his hand to the floor. Does Fleming not also see this? It’s the cattle prod, this ruffian’s armament of choice, and Hoffstetler’s heartbeat quickens. He goes on tiptoes like a child, trying to ascertain that the creature is all right. Strickland has something in his injured hand, too, but it’s small enough to palm. Hoffstetler was disturbed before; now he’s frightened. He’s never known a man like Strickland, so unpredictable in his acts of concentrated id.

“Standard,” Strickland says. “Disciplinary matters.”

Hoffstetler speeds up, passing Fleming, his cheeks flushing in the hot beam of Strickland’s sneer. Disciplinary matters, perhaps—the man did lose two fingers—but standard? There is nothing standard about this. The Devonian’s condition is appalling. The sutures over its original harpoon wound have ripped, and it’s bleeding everywhere, from its armpit, the back of its neck, its forehead. From grayed lips hang gooey strands of saliva long enough to touch the slurry of blood, salt water, and scales in which it kneels. Hoffstetler drops to his knees beside the Devonian without fear; it is bound with chains and, furthermore, barely has strength enough for breathing, much less unleashing its secondary jaw. Hoffstetler palms its wounds. Blood flows thick and dark through his fingers. He needs gauze, he needs tape, he needs help—so much help.

Fleming clears his throat, and Hoffstetler thinks, Yes, please, step in, stop this, he won’t listen to me. But what comes out of Fleming’s mouth is as far from a rebuke as Hoffstetler could imagine.

“We didn’t mean to interrupt breakfast.”

Only an utterance this preposterous could get Hoffstetler to look away from the mutilated Devonian. Strickland looks down like a boy called out for stealing candy and opens his left hand to reveal a single white egg. He seems to consider it for a moment, its possible meaning, but in Hoffstetler’s opinion, an egg is too fragile a thing for a beast like Strickland to understand, too gravid with purpose, too symbolic of the delicate perpetuation of life. Strickland shrugs, drops the egg into a wastebasket. The egg, to him, is of no consequence.

To Hoffstetler, it is the opposite. He hasn’t forgotten, and will never forget, how the quiet janitor had held just such an egg in her hand when waltzing in front of the Devonian’s tank. Slowly, Hoffstetler turns his head, as if he’s making a casual inventory of F-1. His neck bones squeak, trying to reveal him. He shoots his eyes into every potential hiding place. Under desks. Behind the tank. Even inside the pool. It takes ten seconds to find Elisa Esposito, big-eyed and clench-jawed, clearly visible through a cabinet door her own body prevents from being shut.

Hoffstetler’s throat feels choked by cords of rushing blood. He holds the eye contact with her, then closes his eyes once, the universal sign, or so he hopes, for keep calm, though he knows full well that panic is the pertinent emotion. There is no telling what might happen to this woman if caught. This isn’t stealing company toilet paper. A graveyard-shift woman like her? Apprehended by a man like Richard Strickland? She might simply vanish into the mist.

Elisa has become critical to keeping the Devonian alive. Perhaps even more so following these injuries. Hoffstetler has to distract Strickland. He turns back to the Devonian. The damage to the janitor is theoretical; the damage to this singular organism is real, and gruesome, and might yet kill it if Hoffstetler can’t get it back into the healing waters of tank or pool right away.

“You can’t do this!” Hoffstetler shouts.

Both Strickland and Fleming had begun to speak, but now both cut off, leaving the lab silent but for the Devonian’s gasping. Hoffstetler glares up at Strickland, who appears to relish the whippersnapper insurgence.

“It’s an animal, isn’t it?” Strickland mutters. “Just keeping it tame is all.”

Hoffstetler knows true fear: each time he’s accessed classified papers for Soviet agents. Never anger, though, not like this. Everything he’s ever done, said, or felt about the Devonian feels superficial, even flippant. His haggling with Mihalkov over whether the creature was smarter than a dog, their debate over Wells and Huxley. In some ways, he suddenly feels, this creature in F-1 is an angel that, having deigned to grace our world, had been promptly shot down, pinned to corkboard, and mislabeled as a devil. And he was a part of it. His soul might never recover.

Hoffstetler bolts upright and stands face-to-face with Strickland, his glasses sliding down a face suddenly slicked with sweat, unable to stop from pooching his lip like a surly mal’čik defying his papa. He won’t get anywhere with Strickland, he never has, but Fleming has come with news, and Hoffstetler has a hunch that it might be the tool he needs to keep Strickland at bay. He prays that Elisa can hold on, just for a few more minutes.

“Tell him, Mr. Fleming,” Hoffstetler says. “Tell him about General Hoyt.”

The mere word does it. It’s a small satisfaction for Hoffstetler to see what he’s never before seen, a crease of disorientation fold through the center of Strickland’s face: forehead wrinkle, brow furrow, lip rumple. Strickland takes a step away from Hoffstetler. His heel lands upon a fallen object, and he looks down, seeming to notice the overturned tables and spilled implements for the first time—a mess he has, in fact, made and can’t hide. Strickland clears his throat, gestures vaguely at the spill, and when he speaks, his voice makes a pubescent break.

“The… janitors. They need… to clean up better.”

Fleming, too, clears his throat. “I don’t want to be awkward about this, Mr. Strickland. But Dr. Hoffstetler is right. General Hoyt called me this morning. Direct from Washington. He asked me to prepare a document for him. Clarifying, you know, the two different philosophies you and Dr. Hoffstetler have regarding the asset.”

“He…” Strickland’s face has gone slack. “… called you?”

There is unease in Fleming’s small, tight smile, but there is pride, too.

“An unbiased recorder,” he says. “That’s all he was looking for. I’m just to collect the information and present it to General Hoyt so he can make an educated decision about which course to take.”

Strickland looks sick. His face is pale, his lips an ill violet, and his head tilts slowly downward, as if by rusty crank, until he is staring at Fleming’s clipboard like it’s a saw blade about to start spinning. Hoffstetler doesn’t understand what kind of hold Hoyt has over Strickland, and he doesn’t care. It is an advantage, for him, for the Devonian, for Elisa, and he leaps at it.

“For starters, David, you can tell the general, that I, as a scientist, as a humanist, beg him to explicitly forbid behavior like this, unilateral decisions to harm the asset without reason. Our study has not yet left its crib! We’ve so much to learn from this creature, and here it is, beaten half to death, suffocating while we stand and watch. Let us move the creature back into the tank.”

Fleming lifts his clipboard. His pen zags across a piece of paper, and just like that, Hoffstetler’s objection is logged, down in permanent ink. His chest warms with victory, so much so that he finds Elisa again and flashes his eyes to say that it’s all going to be okay, before looking back at Strickland. The soldier is staring at Fleming’s ink squiggle, his jaw quivering, his eyes blinking in addled horror.

“Nn,” Strickland blurts, an ejection of nonverbal upset.

Hoffstetler is energized, powered by the same rich fuel he used to burn during big university lectures. Quickly, before Strickland can achieve anything more intelligible, Hoffstetler kneels beside the creature and indicates the shivering gills and shuddering chest.

“David, if you will, take note of this. See how the creature alternates—perfectly, flawlessly—between two entirely separate breathing mechanisms? It is too much to hope that we can replicate, in the laboratory setting, all of its amphibious functions—lipid secretion, cutaneous drinking. But respiratory emulsions? Tell General Hoyt that I am confident that, given enough time, we can formulate oxygenated substitutes, fabricate some semblance of osmoregulation.”

“A crock—” Strickland begins, but Fleming’s doing what he does best, taking notes, giving Hoffstetler his full attention. “All this is a crock of—”

“Imagine, David, if we, too, could breathe as this creature breathes, within atmospheres of incredible pressure and density. Space travel—it becomes so much simpler, does it not? Forget the single orbits toward which the Soviets work. Imagine weeks in orbit. Months. Years! And that’s only the beginning. Radiocarbon dating indicates that this creature could be centuries old. It dazzles the mind.”

Hoffstetler’s chest, ballooned with confidence, is pinpricked by shame. He’s telling the truth, but it’s arsenic on his tongue. For two billion years, the world knew peace. Only with the invention of gender—specifically males, those tail-fanners, horn-lockers, chest-pounders—did Earth begin its slide toward self-extinction. Perhaps this explains Edwin Hubble’s discovery that all known galaxies are moving away from Earth, as if we are a whole planet of arsenic. Hoffstetler comforts himself that, on this morning, all such self-contempt is worth it. Until Mihalkov can authorize the extraction, Occam’s dogs need bones on which to chew.

“… of shit.” Strickland manages to complete his sentence. “Crock of shit. You can tell General Hoyt that Dr. Hoffstetler—Bob—sides with the Amazon savages. Treats this thing like some god. Maybe it’s a Russian thing. Write that down, Fleming. Maybe in Russia they got different gods than we do.”

Hoffstetler’s throat clogs with alarm; he swallows it down, a hard bolus. Richard Strickland wouldn’t be the first colleague to undermine him for his ancestry, but he might be the first with the means to uncover the full truth. Although Hoffstetler has never met General Hoyt, not even seen a photo, he feels he can see the man take shape against F-1’s ceiling, a giant puppeteer who enjoys butting two marionettes against each other to see which one deserves sponsorship. Hoffstetler conceals his unease by looking back down at the wheezing creature. Hoffstetler’s career path is marked by spikes of ego, it’s true, but this is one kind of attention he’d never wanted.

It is also, however, a fight from which he can’t withdraw, not if he wishes the Devonian to live, if he wishes Elisa Esposito to live, if he wishes to live with himself. Beneath the medical lamp, squatting in the dying creature’s coagulating blood, Hoffstetler has the abrupt notion that the Devonian’s melding with the natural world only begins with the Amazon, and that its death might mean the death of emergence, the cessation of progress, the end of everything and all of us.

“The keys.” Boldly, he holds out a palm to Strickland. “We must return it to the water at once.”

13

LATELY HE CAN’T sleep. Until he can, and then it’s into the pitch. Three in the morning, he’s gasping and choking, and Lainie’s rubbing his back like he’s a boy, but he’s not a boy and those can’t be tears on his cheeks, and he repels her hands, and still she goes on shushing, asking if it’s his fingers and won’t he let the doctor examine them again, but it’s not his fingers, and she starts in about how it must be the war, then, she’s read about it in magazines, how war can haunt a man, but what would this woman know about war, how it eats you, but also how you eat it, and what would she know about memory, for it doesn’t seem possible that she, in her life of ironing boards and dirty dishes, has forged a single memory like those scorched onto Strickland’s brain.

In the dreams, he’s back on the Josefina, skating beneath cutlasses of fog, the blood of the crew drooling from the deck, the only sound the slavering suck of toothless mud. He steers the ship into a grotto as tightly curled as a conch, and a curtain of insects parts, and the being rises, except it’s not Deus Brânquia, it’s General Hoyt, naked and pink and shining like rubber, holding out the same Ka-Bar knife he’d held out to him in Korea and making the same grim bargain.

He can see Hoyt well enough. How he liked to stand with one hand dandling his medals and the other caressing his extended belly. His eyes half-closed but rarely blinking. A puckish grin wedging through his round cheeks. But he can’t hear him. His memories of Hoyt, all the orders, all the compliments, all the slippery inducements, have been scrubbed of voice. Not mute, not like Elisa, but rather obscured, the same way the redacted words of Hoyt’s Deus Brânquia brief had been obscured by black blocks. They sound like long, hard shrieking and look like redactions: **** *** **** ******.

Even here, in this lab, he can’t imagine how Fleming could have understood such senseless shrieking from Hoyt. Strickland feels a faintness he hasn’t felt since the high heat of Korea, the even higher heat of the Amazon. Maybe Hoyt heard about the reattached fingers. Maybe Hoyt thinks Strickland has lost his ability to control a situation. And if Strickland loses Hoyt’s confidence, what leverage will Strickland have to sever ties and be free? He blinks hard, looks about, thinks he sees green vines kinking through ventilation grates, green buds nosing from electrical outlets. Is it the painkillers? Or is it real? If he can’t put an end to this experiment, Deus Brânquia will win and the whole city might become another Amazon. Strickland, his family, all of Baltimore will be strangled inside of it.

He makes a fist, knowing what will happen. Pain slurps like a thick, hot syrup from his infected fingers into his arm, then heart. His vision swims, then focuses with a buchité-like clarity. Hoffstetler’s still got his palm upward, awaiting the keys. He’s still talking, too, about the benefits of the specialized light fixtures, the reels of field recordings. He’s promising to provide Fleming with graphs and data to send to General Hoyt, just as soon as they tuck this poor little creature back into its comfy tank. Strickland bears down. He’s got to get tough, and now.

He laughs. It’s harsh enough to interrupt Hoffstetler.

“Data,” Strickland says. “That’s when you type something on a page and all’s a sudden it’s true, right?”

Hoffstetler’s throat, that reedy, crushable thing, bobs in midspeech. His palm drops and Strickland is glad to see it. Indeed, it fills him with warmth, with hope. Are those Hoyt’s pleased redactions he hears? They seem to softly shriek from the vents of the computer: **** ***, *******. Hoffstetler must hear it, too. He hurries to the tank to indicate one of its bothersome gauges.

“Twenty-eight minutes. This chronometer tracks the time since the tank is last breached. The asset’s limit outside of water is tracked no further than thirty. We can discuss General Hoyt’s report later. The keys, Mr. Strickland. Do not make me beg.”

But begging is exactly what Strickland would like to hear. He hunkers down next to the asset, right where Hoffstetler had been. An enjoyable pose, even with Deus Brânquia convulsing so hard that scales speckle Strickland’s shirt. He feels like a cowboy examining livestock that has dropped to the dirt, frothing at the mouth and requiring a shotgun mercy. He traces a finger along the contour of Deus Brânquia’s expanding and collapsing chest.

“Now take this down for the general, Mr. Fleming. This here isn’t data. This is something you can touch with your own hands. All along the ribs here, you see that? That’s jointed cartilage. It’s like knuckles laced together. The going theory is it separates the two sets of lungs, primary and secondary.” He raises his voice. “Am I getting this right, Bob?”

“Twenty-nine minutes,” Hoffstetler says. “Please.”

“Now this cartilage is so thick we can’t get a clean X-ray. Lord knows we’ve tried. I’m sure Bob can tell you how many times. But here’s the bottom line General Hoyt needs to know. If we want to find out what makes this thing tick, there’s no discussing it. We need to crack it open.”

“For God’s sake.” Hoffstetler’s voice is how it should be. Distant, thin.

“The Soviets could be down in South America right now, fishing another one of these things out of the river.”

“Another one? There is not another one of these, not in the world! I promise you!”

“You weren’t on that boat with me, were you, Bob? Reading a couple books about a river isn’t the same as seeing with your own eyes the miles and miles of it. The millions of things in it. More than that computer of yours can count, I guarantee you.”

Happy redactions shriek from the computer: *** **** ***, *******! Strickland’s surprised no one else can hear it. Then again, he’s not. No one else has the military background. Strickland can’t understand the finer points of the shriek, but he can feel them in his gut, in his heart. He was, once upon a time, like a son to Hoyt, wasn’t he? Hoyt must be proud, seeing his boy grow into a man like this. Strickland has to fight not to feel proud, too. He swipes at his eyes, just to make sure they’re dry. Maybe he’ll accept Hoyt’s help here, just a little. But he won’t fall under Hoyt’s spell, not again.

“Thirty minutes,” Hoffstetler says. “I’m begging now. I’m begging.”

Strickland swivels on one of his heels. Hearing Hoffstetler beg isn’t enough. He wants to lock eyes with him, make him remember this moment. Hoffstetler, though, isn’t looking at him. He’s staring off across the lab, teeth bared and forehead twitching, almost as if signaling a fourth person in the room. Strickland recalls the egg. He doesn’t know why he recalls it. There had been an egg on the floor, hadn’t there? He begins to follow Hoffstetler’s gaze across the lab.

A gurgling hack blasts from the creature. Strickland looks down, the egg forgotten. Deus Brânquia is seizuring. Scales are being shed by the dozens. An off-white slime bubbles from its mouth. It tenses all at once, as if poked by the Howdy-do, or the machete, whatever the tool might be. Then it passes out. Its full weight slumps into the harness. Urines pools from under it, turning the white slime and red blood a murky orange. Strickland has to stand up to get out of the way. He hears Fleming’s pen and hopes he’s not recording this. It’s disgusting, disgusting, not fit for Hoyt’s consumption. Just as inappropriate, though, would be to let Deus Brânquia die before Hoyt had his say. Strickland digs the keys from his pocket and backhands them at Hoffstetler. Scientists: no coordination. Beneath the shrieking, Strickland hears the keys hit the floor.

14

MORNING MIST, CIGARETTE smoke, his own tired eyes: Through such shrouds Giles spots her half a block away. No one walks like Elisa. He ashes onto the fire escape and folds his arms upon the railing. Clubbed by blasts of wind, Elisa doesn’t make herself a blade, but rather a fist, hulking her upper body past phantom foes, arms linked with invisible rugby cohorts. Her feet, though, operate on a different plane, making long, deft, dancer’s strides in shoes bright enough to bring shining life to the neighborhood’s funereal gray. Shoes are to Elisa, Giles realizes, what his portfolio case is to him.

He stubs the cigarette, goes back inside. He’s up early, showered, and fed for his crucial return trip to Klein & Saunders. He shoos a cat from Andrzej the skull and removes the hairpiece. He stands before the bathroom mirror and centers it, scooches it, combs it. It isn’t as convincing as it once was. The toupee hasn’t changed. He has. It no longer looks right for a man his age to have so thick a mane. But how can he drop the act now? It’d seem to the outside world as if he’d been scalped. On the other hand: What outside world? He stares at the gaunt fossil in the mirror and ponders how he happened into a snare of such contradiction: A man no one looks at worrying about his looks.

A knocking on the front door jars him. He hustles through the apartment, checking his watch. He warned Elisa yesterday that he had an appointment this morning, but she hadn’t given a response. Lately she’s been lost in thought; Giles, dispirited by his reflection, suddenly dreads that she’s been hiding something awful, some untreatable cancer. The knocking is frantic.

Before he can reach the door, Elisa enters, pulling a stocking hat off her head, which fans propellers of staticky hair. Giles relaxes some. Barging in is a robust tradition of theirs, and despite Elisa’s nocturnal calendar and the meager vittles of the underpaid, her cheeks are so red that he’s struck by wistfulness. Under equal exertion, his face would be winding-sheet white.

“Bursting with brio this morning, aren’t we?” he asks.

She’s past him, all but ricocheting off the walls, signing recklessly enough to send columns of old paintings swaying. Giles holds up a finger for patience and closes the door to keep the chill out. When he turns back, she’s still going. Her right hand wiggles—“fish,” he thinks—and she pulls inward from both shoulders—“fireplace,” he thinks; no, “skeleton”; no, “creature”—and then a similar motion, but rounded—“trap,” he thinks, or something like it, though he’s probably wrong, she’s talking far too rapidly. He holds up both hands.

“A moment of silence, I beseech you.”

Elisa sulks her shoulders, glares like a rebuked child, and opens two shaking fists: no specific sign, just the universal gesture for exasperation.

“First things first,” he says. “Are you in trouble? Are you hurt?”

She signs the word like she’s squashing a bug: “No.”

“Wonderful. Can I interest you in Corn Flakes? I only ate half a bowl. Nerves, I’m afraid.”

Elisa scowls. Frigidly, she signs “fish.”

“Darling, I told you last night, I have a meeting. I’m practically out the door. Why the sudden craving for fish? Don’t tell me you’re pregnant.”

Elisa plants her face into her hands, and Giles’s chest tightens. Has his quip made this poor girl, single since the day he met her, cry? Her back convulses—but it’s a hiccup of laughter. When she lifts her face, her eyes remain wild, but she’s shaking her head as if in disbelief of an absurdity he has yet to comprehend. She exhales to calm herself, shakes her hands as if they’re on fire, and gives Giles a steadfast look for the first time. After a second, her mouth tweaks to the right. Giles groans.

“Food in my teeth,” he guesses. “No, it’s the hair, isn’t it? I’ve got it all cockeyed. Well, you took a battering ram to my door before I could—”

Elisa reaches out and plucks beech leaves from both suede coat and sweater, residue of a recent windstorm. Next she turns his bow tie one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. Finally, she pets his temple where real hair meets toupee, though this feels more like an act of affection than a corrective. She steps back and makes the sign for “handsome.” Giles sighs. Here is a woman who can’t be counted on to deliver the unvarnished truth.

“As much as I’d like to be a reciprocal monkey and pick your fur of lice, there is the aforementioned meeting. You wish to tell me something before I go?”

Elisa fixes him with a dour look and raises both hands to signal that she’s about to begin signing. Giles straightens his spine, a student receiving an oral exam. He’s got a hunch that Elisa wouldn’t appreciate a grin right now, so he tucks it under his mustache. His pervading fear, expanding by the year, is that he, a washed-up, never-was, so-called artist and his broken battalion of debilitated cats, are to blame for inhibiting Elisa’s potential. He could improve her life by simply moving out, finding some bland stable of old folks who’d have him in their bridge group. Elisa, then, would be forced to seek out those who might expand her world rather than restrict it. If only he could handle the grief of losing her.

Her signs are slow, deliberate, absent of affect. “Fish.” “Man.” “Cage.” O-C-C-A-M.

“Remedial,” Giles proclaims. “You can go faster than that.”

What follows is as startling as a Miltonesque monologue delivered by a bashful kindergartener. Gone is Elisa’s penchant for searching for the perfect words. Her hands take up the agility typically limited to her feet, and her narrative flows with symphonic clarity, even as it yaws with improvisational zeal. Mechanically, it is breathtaking, and like any well-told story a pleasure to read, even if every plot point pushes the story into a genre darker than Giles prefers. For a time, he thinks she is spinning fiction. Then the details become too unsparing, too mordant. Elisa, at least, believes every word.

A fish-man, locked up in Occam, tortured and dying, and in need of rescue.

15

IRONING: THIS TEDIOUS, humid, cramping drudgery has become the ideal cover for a double life. Richard’s never ironed a shirt in his life. He has no concept of the scale of the task, if it takes half an hour or half a day. Lainie wakes up before dawn, speeds through as many chores as possible, hustles the kids off to school, and then watches the morning news through steam, stretching out the ironing until Richard leaves. The hours she’d bargained for with Bernie Clay run ten to three, allowing her plenty of time to get to work, and also plenty enough to return home and mask the exotic scent of fresh office paper with the pedestrian odors of perfume.

Richard drives away, the old Thunderbird clanging, and Lainie folds the ironing board she’s been pretending to use for ten, or twenty, or thirty minutes. Lying to a husband is a virus in a marriage, she knows this, but she hasn’t found the right way to tell him. She hasn’t felt such thrill and promise since when? The days of being courted by Richard, maybe, that sharp-suited soldier fresh out of the Korean War? The early days of courting, anyhow; months into dating, at which point betrothal was inevitable, she’d already begun to feel loose gravel beneath her feet.

Lainie doesn’t let herself dwell on the past. So many parts of her current days excite, interest, and satisfy her, none more than the quick change into the work ensembles she keeps ready in the back of her closet. It’s a new kind of challenge, dressing for a job. She’s taken written notes of the secretaries’ wardrobes. She’s made three separate trips to Sears. Formal, not casual. Handsome, not pretty. Flattering, not frilly. Contradictory objectives, but that’s being a woman. She keeps skirts slim and flannel, collars petaled or bowed, bodices modest and belted.

The bus ride to work is just as gratifying. Mastering the bodily etiquette of public transport, claiming a seat all her own, snugging into her arms a handbag packed with paratrooper efficiency, and best of all, the cursory but fond eye contact between her and other employed women. They sat alone, but they were in this thing together.

The men at Klein & Saunders—well, they’re men. For the first week, her rear end was pinched exactly once per day, each time by a different man acting with the smug entitlement of someone choosing the plumpest shrimp from a buffet. The first time, she’d squealed. The second, she’d clammed up. By the fifth, she’d learned the working woman’s scowl enough to get the offender to offer a guilty shrug. She glared at this final pincher long enough to watch him join a group of chuckling backslappers. Her pinched butt burned. The whole week had been some sort of sophomoric contest.

So she’d set out to win it, to prove she was more than a grabbable ass. No doubt it was the same goal of the agency’s typists and secretaries. Or the ladies on the bus. Or the women who scrubbed floors at Richard’s lab. No matter her mood, Lainie held her head high. She drilled herself on the phone system over lunch. She projected her voice with a confidence that, day by day, she began to believe. The pinching dwindled. The men were kind to her. Then, even better, they quit being kind. They relied on her; they snapped at her when she messed up; they bought her cards and flowers when she saved their skins.

And at that, Lainie has become adept. It is both science and art, marshaling the parade of egos that crowded the lobby: tycoon execs, TV commercial playboys, yearling models. She learned to dial dead phone lines and improvise baloney to impress clients. “Hi, Larry. Pepsi-Cola had to reschedule to Thursday.” Lainie intuited when to do this. It was like monitoring Richard’s mood before asking for spending money. Of course, these days she didn’t ask; she had money of her own. She was proud of it and longed to share that pride with her husband. But he wouldn’t understand. He would take it as a personal affront.

Word reached Bernie that his impulse hire was paying off. Last week, he’d asked her to lunch. For the first half hour, he’d been like the rest of them. He’d pressured her to get an adult drink, and when she’d declined, ordered her a Gin Rickey anyway. She sipped at it once to appease him, and he’d taken that as a signal to reach across the table and place his hand atop hers. She could feel his wedding band. She slid her hand away, keeping her smile tight and cold.

It was like she’d passed a test neither had realized was being given. Bernie took a slug of his Manhattan, and the alcohol appeared to melt the salaciousness into an easy, uncomplicated affection. What must it feel like, Lainie wondered, to be a man and so blithely modify your intentions without fear of consequence?

“Look,” he said. “I invited you to lunch to offer you employment.”

“But I have a job.”

“Yes, a job—a part-time job. What I’m talking about is a career. A full-time position. Eight hours a day, forty hours a week. Benefits. Retirement package. The whole ball of wax.”

“Oh, Bernie. Thank you. But I told you—”

“I know what you’re going to say. Kids, school. But you know Melinda in accounting? You know Chuck’s girl, Barb? There’s probably six or seven ladies we’ve got on this deal right now. There’s a day care in the building. You bring them with you bright and early, and there’s a bus that comes around delivers them to their schools like packages. Klein & Saunders picks up the tab.”

“But why—” She held the Gin Rickey to settle her fidgeting fingers, even considered taking a gulp to settle her pulse. “Why would you do that for me?”

“Well, heck, Elaine. In this racket, you find someone good, you lock her down. Otherwise, she ends up at Arnold, Carson, and Adams spilling all our trade secrets.” Bernie shrugged. “This is the sixties. A few years from now, it’s going to be a woman’s world. You’ll have every single opportunity a man has. My advice is get ready, position yourself. Get in on the ground floor now. Receptionist today, but who knows? Office manager tomorrow? Down the road, future partner? You got the stuff, Elaine. You’re sharper than half the boneheads in the building.”

Had she drained the cocktail without realizing it? Her vision swam. To steady it, she looked past the bastion of ketchup, mustard, and steak sauce, and out the window, and saw a mother struggle with a grocery bag while pushing a wobbly baby carriage. Lainie looked in the opposite direction, into the restaurant’s murk, and saw sharp-suited sharks flashing teeth at heartsick mistresses, who prayed the men’s hungry looks meant something beyond their being devoured.

Lainie could guarantee them that the looks meant nothing. Just last night, Richard was saying that the asset he’d been hired to guard was nearing the end of its utility, and when it was gone, maybe the Stricklands would pull up stakes from Baltimore. He doesn’t like it here; she’s seen him with encyclopedia volumes on his lap, looking up Kansas City, Denver, Seattle. But Lainie does like it here. She thinks it’s the greatest city in the world. To be uprooted from the one place where she feels useful capsulizes the danger of attaching yourself to a man in the first place. You’re a parasite, and when your host begins to die—say, from an infection in his fingers—your bloodstream is poisoned, too.

She wanted to say yes to Bernie. She thought about it every day, every minute.

But would that be saying no to Richard?

“Tell you what, you think about it,” Bernie said. “Offer’s good for, let’s say, a month. Then I guess I’ll hire a second girl. Hey, let’s eat. I could eat a horse. Two horses. And the chariot behind them.”

16

FEAR DROPS ONTO Giles’s back like a pterodactyl shot from the sky. Occam is Baltimore’s own Bermuda Triangle, and he’s heard the wild rumors, most of which end with the suspicious death or disappearance of a courageous investigator. He feels a nausea. What Elisa is suggesting is far beyond the abilities of two broke deadbeats living above a crumbling movie theater. The fish-man of Elisa’s delusion must be a poor fellow born with physical deformities—and she wants to break him out?

Elisa is a good person, but her life experience is terrifically limited; she’s incapable of appreciating how deep run the fault lines of America’s Red Scare. Undesirables of all sorts risk their lives and livelihoods on a daily basis, and a homosexual painter? Why, that’s as undesirable as they come! No, he doesn’t have time for this rubbish. He has a meeting with Bernie, an advertisement over which he has slaved.

Giles turns away, knowing the gesture will hurt Elisa. It hurts him, too, to the point that he has trouble sliding his revised canvas into the portfolio case. He faces the wall before speaking, a cowardly tactic that prohibits a mute person’s interruption.

“When I was a boy,” he says, “a carnival pitched its tents out at Herring Run. They had a special exhibit, a whole tent full of natural oddities. One of them was a mermaid. I know because I paid five cents to see it. A sizable fortune for a boy in those days, I assure you. And do you know what this mermaid was? It was dead, first of all. All the paintings of some bare-breasted beauty didn’t square with the old mummified thing in the glass case. What it was was a monkey’s chest and head sewed to a fish tail. I knew that. Anyone could see that. But for years I told myself it’d been a mermaid, because I’d paid my money, hadn’t I? I wanted to believe. People like you and me, we need belief more than others, don’t we? Yet in the cold light of day, what was the mermaid? What was it really? Creative taxidermy. That’s so much of life, Elisa. Things patched together, without meaning, from which we, in our needful minds, create myths to suit us. Does that make sense?”

He buckles the case, the smart clicks the very sound of wisdom. He’s got to get going, after all; perhaps this will be the first of many small jiltings he delivers to Elisa like inoculations. He dons a placating grin and turns back around. His grin freezes solid. Elisa’s cold stare brings the outdoor chill gusting back into the apartment, and he shields himself from the spitting frost. She’s signing, bludgeon-hard and whip-fast, a tone he’s never seen her take, certain repeated symbols engraving themselves onto the air like Fourth of July sparklers. He attempts to look away, but she lunges into his line of sight, her signs like punches, like shaking him by the lapels.

“No,” he says. “We’re not doing it.”

Signs, signs.

“Because it’s breaking the law, that’s why! We’re probably breaking the law even talking about it!”

Signs, signs.

“So what if it’s alone? We’re all alone!”

It’s a truth too cruel to be spoken. Giles darts to the left. Elisa moves to block him. Their shoulders collide. He feels the impact in his teeth and stumbles; he has to slap a hand to the door to steady himself. It is, without question, the worst moment the two of them have ever shared, commensurate to a slap. His heart is pounding. His face is flushed. There’s something wrong with his toupee. He pats his scalp to make sure it’s in place; this only makes him blush more. Abruptly, he is near tears. How did things go so wrong so fast? He hears her panting and realizes he’s panting, too. He doesn’t want to look at her, but he does.

Elisa is crying, and still, the signs, the signs Giles can’t help but read.

“‘It’s the loneliest thing I’ve ever seen.’” He groans. “You see? You said it yourself. It’s a thing. A freak.”

Her signs slash and punch. He bleeds and bruises.

“‘What am I, then? Am I a freak, too?’ Oh, please, Elisa! No one is saying that! I’m sorry, dear, but I really have to go!”

There is more signing (“He doesn’t care what I lack”), but Giles refuses to repeat it aloud. His shaking hand finds the knob and pulls open the door. Cold wind crystallizes the single unfallen tear at the corner of each eye. He steps into the drafty hall, catching another sentence (“I either save him or let him die”), but he reminds himself that somewhere in the city is a building, and inside that building is an appointment book, and in that book is his name. That isn’t fantasy; those are facts. He takes a single step away before pausing and must raise his voice from a squeak.

“It’s not even human,” he insists.

They are the words of a quailing old man pleading to live out his days in peace. Before he can angle the portfolio case out of his own way and escape via the fire escape, just as he’s turning away, he catches her signed reply and it feels as if those signs brand themselves into his back, right through his jacket, his sweater, his shirt, his muscle, his bone, deep enough that the words ache like a fresh wound all the way to Klein & Saunders, where they begin their itchy conversion into scars that he’ll be forced to read for the rest of his life: “NEITHER ARE WE.”

17

WORD FROM WASHINGTON is that the asset is to be put to sleep, chopped like a steak, shipped off in samples to labs around the country. Hoffstetler has one week to wrap up his research. Strickland leans back in his office chair and tries to smile. Mission’s nearly finished. A better life waits on the other side. He should use this week to relax. Find a hobby. Get back to where he was before the Amazon. Maybe even visit the doctor like Lainie keeps nagging, get his fingers checked out. He strikes that idea. Looking at the fingers reminds him of jungle rot. Better keep them hid under bandages, just a while longer.

So he comes home early. He’ll surprise Timmy and Tammy by being there when they get back. Strange thing is, Lainie’s not there. He sits in front of the TV and waits. It’s the opposite of what he planned. He waits and crunches painkillers. What’s the point? He might as well be at work. Late afternoon, she finally returns. By that point, he doesn’t know what’s what. The pills smudge details until they are as unintelligible as General Hoyt’s shrieked orders: **** ** *****, ***. Strickland doesn’t see groceries in Lainie’s arms. The dress she’s got on, it doesn’t look familiar. She’s clearly startled to see him, then laughs and says she’ll have to go back to the store tomorrow, she’d forgotten her pocketbook.

Observation is what Strickland does. He can tell you which scientists are left-handed, what color socks Fleming wore last Wednesday. Lainie is talking too much, and Strickland knows that’s the truest tell of any liar. He thinks of Elisa Esposito, her soothing silence. She’d never lie to him. She hasn’t the power, or inclination. Lainie is hiding something. Is it an affair? He hopes not. For her sake, and also his, because of what might happen to him, legally speaking, after he dealt with the adulterers.

He compresses his emotions for the night. Next morning, after the kids catch the bus, he kisses Lainie good-bye over the hot ironing board and drives the Thunderbird to the next block. He parks under a giant beech tree. Not the cover he’d prefer. The limbs are skeletal from lack of rain. But it’ll do. He’s had his four breakfast pills, but that’s it. Needs to keep his observational ability sharp. He kills the engine. He silently prays that Lainie doesn’t appear on the road in front of him. This is their marriage. This is their life. Please, just stay home, clean the kitchen, unpack the boxes, anything.

Fifteen minutes later, she appears on the cross street, suddenly done ironing. He feels a needle of shame. He’d once promised her that no wife of his would have to take public transportation. He forces the needle from his mind with a mental flex. They’d both made promises, hadn’t they? He’s the one who forced his wedding ring back on only for his finger to bloat around it. He fights the Thunderbird for a good minute to get it started, then rolls out, creeping a block behind his wife. He idles as she waits for the bus, and when it pulls out, he follows.

The bus lets people off in front of a grocery store. Lainie isn’t among them. Strickland reminds himself that good surveillance requires an open mind. Maybe she doesn’t like the prices at that store. When the bus leaves an entire downtown shopping center without expunging Lainie, Strickland’s mind snaps shut. If his wife had some special errand today, she’d had all morning to tell him about it. Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it behind his back. He grips the steering wheel so hard he feels a snap in one of his injured fingers. One of the big black stitches, perhaps, ripping from rotting flesh.

Then the car dies. No dramatic deathbed scene. It coughs weakly, one last time, and then Strickland is coasting. He throws it into neutral and tries to reignite it, but there isn’t a wisp of life. The bus swerves back into traffic with a noise like the asset’s squeal of pain, and there’s not a thing he can do about it. Through engine smoke far thicker than Lainie’s ironing steam, he muscles the Thunderbird to the curb. The only spot is in front of a fire hydrant. Just fucking perfect. He slams the gear into park. Shoves his way out of the car. Stares down the road. Vehicles swarming like wasps. People scurrying like roaches. The whole city a venomous nest.

He kicks the car door. It leaves a dent. His toes sing in pain and he hops in a circle, running every cuss word invented into a single, vulgar masterwork. He finds himself turned around, looking across the street. What he finds is a white-hot fireball. Beneath it are giant plates of liquid fire and smooth runners of lava. His head throbs from the overkill of light. He has to shield his eyes to make sense of it. Sunshine sizzles from the rotating-earth sign, floor-to-ceiling windows, and endless chrome trims of a Cadillac dealership.

Strickland doesn’t recall crossing the street. But he’s wandering the car lot. Under garlands of snapping flags. Beside an actual palm tree. Staring into headlight eyes turned angry by the V-shaped emblem between them. Trailing his fingers across the Cheshire grins of front grilles, those hundreds of slippery fangs. He pauses before one of the cars. Seals his hands to the scalding hood. Feels strong and smooth and sharp. Even his damaged fingers feel reinforced. He leans over the hood and inhales. He likes the hot-metal smell, like a gun after being fired.

“Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Most perfect machine mankind’s ever made.”

A salesman has joined Strickland. Strickland registers thin hair, razor burn, a flabby neck. Further details melt in the too-bright sun. The man is perfectly automatized, as metallic as the vehicles he sells. He sidles alongside the Caddy as if he, too, moves on hubcapped wheels, the creases of his suit and pants as sharp as tail fins. He strokes the hood, his watch and cuff links as bright as the chrome.

“Four-stroke spark-ignition V-8. Four-speed gearbox. Zero to sixty in ten-point-seven. Clocked at one-hundred-and-nineteen on the straightaway. Runs as crisp as a fresh dollar bill. AM/FM stereo sound. Have the whole London Philharmonic in your backseat. All deluxe interior. White leather. It’s a presidential suite in there. Those aren’t seats. Those are sofas. Davenports. Divans. Settees. Air-conditioning good enough to keep your drink cold, heater good enough to keep your little lady warm.”

His little lady? She’s trundled on down the road to who knows where. Leaving him behind with an Occam job that’s nearly complete. Whether he chases Lainie or drives himself, all alone, out of this execrable burg, he’ll need wheels to replace that heap illegally parked across the street. This man of metal is stronger than him. Is it any use fighting? He protests because that’s what you do in car lots, but it’s pitiful. “I’m just looking.”

“Then look at this, my friend. Tip to tail, here to there: eighteen-and-a-half feet long. That’s two basketball hoops, the second balanced atop the first. You think you could sink a basket that high? Look at the width. That’ll fill a car lane, won’t it? Look how low it sits, like a lion. Two-point-three tons, it weighs. You drive this darling out of here, you rule the road, simple as that. Power windows. Power brakes. Power steering. Power seats. Power everything. Just plain power.”

That sounds good. It’s what any American man deserves. Power means respect. From your wife, your kids, flunkies who don’t know anything harsher in life than a car breaking down on the road. He’s better than that. All he needs is a way to tell everyone to steer the hell out of his way. He’s starting to feel better. Not just better, but good, for the first time in a while. He manages one more demurral, though any good salesman can hear his capitulation, and this is the best salesman of all time.

“I’m not sure about the green,” Strickland says.

The lot confirms that Cadillacs come in as many shades as Elisa Esposito’s shoes. Stardust gray. Cotton-candy pink. Raspberry red. Oil black. This one is green, but not the solacing glass-green of his hard candy. It’s silkier, like a creature that ought to have died centuries ago glimpsed through still waters as it trawls a riverbed.

“Green?” The salesman is offended. “Oh no. No, siree. I wouldn’t sell you a green car. This, my friend, is teal.”

Something shifts inside Strickland. The salesman has shown him the way. Power: He had it as the Jungle-god. He still has it now. He thinks back to one of Lainie’s jabbering pastors. What was one of God’s first displays of power? To name things. The Jungle-god can name things, too. They become what he wants them to become. Green becomes teal. Deus Brânquia becomes the asset. Lainie Strickland becomes nothing at all.

He leans down to peer inside. He’ll be sitting inside it in a moment. But it feels good to tease himself. The dashboard has a hundred dials and knobs. It’s F-1, packed into a single front seat. The steering wheel is whip-thin, the strap of a nightie. He imagines wrapping his fingers around it, how easily the red blood from his torn fingers will wipe from the white leather. The salesman has moved behind him. He whispers like a lover. The limited-edition color. Twelve coats of hand-polished paint. Four out of five successful men in America drive a Caddy. Forget the rockets everyone’s shooting into the sky. Sputnik’s got nothing on the de Ville.

“That’s the business I’m in.” Even with the deed all but signed, Strickland feels the need to impress the man.

“That right? Now, how about you slide in there.”

“National defense. New initiatives. Space applications.”

“You don’t say. You can adjust the seat—there you go.”

“Space stuff. Rocket stuff. Stuff of the future.”

“The future. That’s good. You look like a man who’s headed there.”

Strickland draws a long inhale through his nose. He’s not only headed into the future. He is the future. Or will be, once his job as Jungle-god is complete, the asset is gone, his family matters are resolved, and the pills are no longer required. He and this car will be joined together, a man of metal, same as the salesman. Fused on a factory assembly line of the future. A future where the world’s jungles, and all of the creatures therein, are modernized by concrete and steel. A place void of nature’s madness. A place of dotted lines, streetlights, turn signals. A place where Cadillacs just like this, just like him, can roam free, forever.

18

EVERYONE AT KLEIN & Saunders dresses to project style; it’s part of their job to anticipate trends. This old fellow isn’t wearing a suit of modern cut. He isn’t even wearing a suit. His blazer and trousers are mismatched. Maybe his eyesight is to blame; he wears crooked glasses, thick-lensed and paint-flecked. There’s paint on his mustache, too. His bow tie, at least, is clean, though she’s never seen a bow tie in this office before. It has its charm, though, just as the toupee does, though she doubts it’s the kind of charm he intended. Lainie wants to protect him, this grandfather figure, from the pack of wolves kept beyond the frosted glass door.

She recognizes him as Giles Gunderson right away.

“You must be Miss Strickland.” He beams and strides forward.

On his phone calls, of which there have been many, it has always been “Miss Strickland”—not “honey,” not “toots.” For his polite, dogged pursuit of a single meeting with Bernie, Mr. Gunderson has become Lainie’s favorite freelancer—and least favorite as well. Favorite because talking with him is like talking with the gentle grandfather she never knew. Least favorite because it is her job to pass along Bernie’s hogwash excuses and hold back apologies when she hears, popping through the telephone, the cracks of Mr. Gunderson’s pride.

He reaches to shake her hand, an unusual gesture. “Oh! You’re married. All this time, I should’ve been saying, ‘Mrs. Strickland.’ How rude of me.”

“Not at all.” The truth is that she likes it, the same as how she likes that everyone here calls her Elaine. “And you have to be Mr. Gunderson.”

“Giles, please. My royal processional must have tipped you off. The heraldic displays and tableaux vivants.”

Desk work has taught Lainie to hold her smile regardless of confusion or embarrassment. Mr. Gunderson—Giles, what a suitable name—senses it straightaway and offers an apologetic chuckle.

“Forgive my obtuseness. I toddle around most days without a single person following a word of my nonsense. It makes me ever so popular.”

He smiles, and it is so sincere, so patient, so absent of ulterior design, that she has to fold her hands or else risk reaching out to take his again. It makes her feel silly, and she looks at the appointment book to hide her blush.

“Let’s see, I have you down for a 9:45 with Mr. Clay.”

“Yes and I’m fifteen minutes early. Always be ready to go, that’s my motto.”

“Can I get you some coffee while you wait?”

“I wouldn’t say no to some tea, if you have it.”

“Oh! I don’t think we have tea. It’s coffee all the time here.”

“That’s too bad. They used to keep tea. Perhaps just for me. Coffee—a barbaric drink. That poor, tortured bean. All that fermenting and husking and roasting and grinding. And what is tea? Tea is dried leaves rehydrated. Just add water, Mrs. Strickland. All living things need water.”

“I never thought about it like that.” An arch remark comes to mind; typically she would bottle it, but next to this man, she feels safe. She leans in. “Maybe I’ll serve only tea from now on. Turn all these grabby apes into gentlemen.”

Giles claps his hands together. “Capital idea! Why, the next time I come, I expect your ad men to be wearing cravats and discussing the finer points of cricket. And we will serve only tea, Mrs. Strickland. You must get used to using the royal we.”

The telephone rings, then rings again, two lines at once, and Giles bows and sits, keeping his portfolio case at his feet like a dog. By the time Lainie is finished telling Bernie’s secretary that Giles has arrived and routing the calls, a trio of execs from a detergent company has arrived at the desk, all of them clearing throats, and after them, a bald-headed duo she knows has been giving Klein & Saunders headaches about a kitty-litter campaign. A half hour of appeasement passes before Lainie has a moment to breathe, at which point she notices Giles Gunderson still sitting there.

The lobby, by strategy, has no clock, but Lainie keeps one on her desk. She makes a surreptitious study of Giles and decides that his unmovable smile is his way of bracing against inevitable affront. Lainie considers darting through the office to see if any of the secretaries have tea, the manna that might set Giles at ease. Instead she waits, and waits, until the insult of Bernie’s lateness hangs in the room like oily exhaust from a backfiring bus. The brume thickens as thirty minutes becomes forty, and forty creeps, at the pace of a fraying rope, toward one hour.

Each passed second further instills Giles’s profile with nobility. There is something familiar about his bearing. When Lainie recognizes it, she catches her breath. It is the same poise she saw reflected in the ladies’ room mirror during her first week at Klein & Saunders as she’d adjusted hair and makeup and practiced her defenses against butt pinches. It had been part of the Elaine Strickland she’d developed apart from her husband—the Elaine Strickland she’s still developing. She’d raised her chin so high she’d almost looked down her nose, and that’s what Giles is doing, constructing, as grandly as necessary, a fantasy of his importance.

They have nothing in common—she the young wife and he the doddery gent—and yet for that instant seem to Lainie to be more alike than any two people on earth. It is too much for her to take. She places on her desk the placard she uses for bathroom breaks (SEAT YOURSELF, BE RIGHT BACK!) and, without allowing herself a chance to think better of it, plunges through the frosted-glass door and into the office.

19

“ALL HOPES FADE…”

“When spring… while the spring…”

“As the spring recedes. As the spring recedes. Is this Chekhov? Is this Dostoyevsky? Nyet. It is a sentence simple enough for a glupyy rebenok. This whole enterprise, it is bear claws, digging into my flesh!”

Hoffstetler is never calm when called to see Mihalkov. Now, though, he is frenetic, unable to restrain body or tongue. Today’s cab driver had complained of him kicking the back of the seat, and while waiting in the industrial park, he’d pounded his shoe heels into his concrete block enough to carve out twin caves. His mood isn’t lightened by the Bison, an oaf intelligent enough to pilot a Chrysler all around Baltimore but unable to memorize a remedial code phrase. Hours were being wasted at a time when there weren’t seconds to spare.

The violinists, called to duty on the Black Sea’s day off, are crusty eyed in disheveled suits. They raise untuned instruments when they see Hoffstetler, but he elbows past before they can hit the first note of Russian cliché. The effulgent blue of the lobster tank makes a brown murk of the booths below; the murkiest shape is Mihalkov himself in his usual seat. Hoffstetler bolts that way, striking a two-top with his hip. It smarts, and he sees in his mind the creature’s ripped sutures.

“This foolishness must end! Hours I spend waiting in the park or being driven around by your pet beast!”

“Dobroye utro,” Mihalkov says. “Such energy so early.”

“Early? Do you not understand?” Hoffstetler hurries through a triumphal arch and stands over Mihalkov, his hands in fists. “Every minute I am not at Occam is a minute those savages might kill it!”

“The loudness, pozhaluysta.” Mihalkov rubs his eyes. “I am with headache. Last night, Bob, I overindulged.”

“Dmitri!” Hoffstetler’s spittle disturbs Mihalkov’s black tea. “Call me Dmitri, mudak!”

It speaks well of Hoffstetler’s proficiency as an informant, he will think later, that he had never, before that moment, had to experience the full abilities of a man trained by the KGB. Mihalkov, eyes cast down with the misdirection of a headache, snatches Hoffstetler by the wrist and yanks downward, as if closing blinds. Hoffstetler is driven to his knees. His chin lands on the tabletop and he bites down on his tongue. Mihalkov twists Hoffstetler’s arm behind his back and pulls upward. Hoffstetler’s chin grinds into the table. The musicians, directly in Hoffstetler’s eyeline, snap shut their jaws, nod out a rhythm, and start playing.

“Look at the lobsters.” Mihalkov tidies his mouth with a napkin. “Go on, Dmitri.”

Pivoting on his chin hurts. Blood from either his chin or tongue dampens the table. He looks up with his eyes. The tank looms, a tsunami caught behind glass. Even under duress, Hoffstetler can see what Mihalkov means. Usually the crustaceans are torpid, shrugging along the tank’s bottom like barnacles. Today they are agitated, antenna swaying and claws pinching as they flex legs and carapace to scrabble up the walls, claws clacking against glass.

“They are like you, are they not?” Mihalkov asks. “They should relax. Accept their fate. And yet, left alone, they get big ideas. Climbing, escape. But it is wasted energy. They do not know the size of the world beyond their tank.”

Mihalkov picks up a fork. Hoffstetler’s eyes go to it. It’s clean, silver, lustrous in the low light. Mihalkov presses the points against Hoffstetler’s shoulder.

“A little twist and the arms come right off. Like butter.” He drags the fork to the nape of Hoffstetler’s neck. “The tail also. Very simple. Twist and pull, and off it comes.” The fork moves again, the tines ticking across his shirt until they rest against his biceps. “The legs are easy. Wine bottle, pepper mill—roll the arms flat and the meat, it just squirts out.” He licks his lips as if tasting the melted butter. “I can teach you how to do it, Dmitri. It is a good thing to know, how to take an animal apart.”

He releases his hold and Hoffstetler slumps to the floor, cradling his wrenched arm. Though his eyesight is blurred by tears, he sees Mihalkov gesture and feels the Bison’s huge hands lifting him into the air and depositing him in the booth. The comfort of the seat is somehow grotesque; writhing on the floor made more sense. He fumbles for a napkin, holds it against his chin. There is blood, but not a lot. Leo Mihalkov knows what he’s doing.

“My superiors have told me that extraction is impossible.” Mihalkov drowns two spoonfuls of sugar in his tea. “I made your case. A convincing one, I thought. The Soviet Union, I told them, does not lead the United States in many categories. But in space, we lead! The Occam asset, it would solidify this.” He sips, shrugs. “But what does a brute like me know about such things? I am what you said: a pet beast. All of us, Dmitri, are the pet beast to someone.”

Hoffstetler crumples the bloody napkin in his fist and gasps through panting.

“So it dies, then? We just let it die?”

Mihalkov smiles. “Russia does not leave its countrymen without recourse.”

He wipes his hands clean and lifts from the seat cushion a box. It is small, black, made of industrial plastic. He undoes the box’s fasteners and opens it to reveal three objects nestled into slotted protective foam. Mihalkov extracts the first item. Hoffstetler is familiar with many a gadget, but this is something new. It is the size of a baseball and constructed from a curled knuckle of metal pipe like a homemade grenade, except that the soldering is professional and the wiring held in place with tidy epoxy putty. A small green light, yet unlit, is taped next to a red button.

“We call this a popper,” Mihalkov says. “It is one of the Israelis’ new toys. Secure it within ten feet of Occam’s central fuses, depress the button, and five minutes later it will release a surge strong enough to disable all electricity. Lights, cameras, everything. It is highly effective. But I warn you, Dmitri, the damage is temporary. The fuses are replaced, and the power will return. I do not expect you to have more than ten minutes to complete your task.”

“My task,” Hoffstetler repeats.

Mihalkov nestles the popper back into the foam and, with the gentleness of a farmer scooping up a baby chick, withdraws the second item. This Hoffstetler recognizes, for he has wielded so many in so many regretful ways. It is a fully assembled syringe. Mihalkov removes the final item, a small glass vial filled with a silver liquid. He holds these items with more care than he held the popper and gives Hoffstetler a sympathetic smile.

“If the Americans are exterminating the asset, as you say, then there is but one course of action. You must get to it first. Inject it with this solution. It will kill the asset. More important, it will eat away the asset’s insides. When it is through, there will be nothing left to study but bones. Perhaps a little handful of scales.”

Hoffstetler laughs, a snort that spatters the table in spit, blood, and tears.

“If we can’t have it, neither can they. Is that the idea?”

“Mutually assured destruction,” Mihalkov says. “You know the concept.”

Hoffstetler braces one hand against the table and covers his face with the other.

“It didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he sobs. “It went centuries without hurting anyone. We did this to it. We dragged it up here. We tortured it. What’s next, Leo? What species do we wipe out next? Is it us? I hope it is. We deserve it.”

He feels Mihalkov’s hand settle atop his, pat it gently.

“You told me it understands pain like we do.” Mihalkov’s voice is soft. “Then be better than the Americans. Be better than all of us. Go ahead, listen to your author Mr. Huxley. Think of the creature’s feelings. Deliver it from its suffering. When you are finished, we wait, four or five days, just for appearances. Then I will take you, myself, to the embassy and put you on a ship to Minsk. Picture it, Dmitri. The blue skies like nothing they have here. The sun like the Christmas star through the snowy trees. So much has changed since you’ve seen it. You will see it again. You will see it with your family. Concentrate on that. All of it, it is nearly at the end.”

20

EVERYONE KNOWS THE front-desk girl, and everyone is busy. But today they halt their activities to watch her pass, her unerring smile gone grim and her studied saunter supplanted by a step so swift it flutters the hem of her dress. Lainie comes at Bernie’s secretary at such a march that the secretary, well-trained, responds defensively, “He’s not in.” Lainie presents roadblocks to clients all day; she knows how to dodge them, too. She swerves around the secretary, snatching the knob of Bernie’s door and pulling it open.

Bernie Clay is kicked back in his leather chair, ankles crossed atop his desk, a highball in one hand, face stretched in a laugh. Relaxed on the sofa are the copy chief and lead media buyer, chuckling over look-alike drinks. Too late, but bound by protocol, the secretary buzzes Bernie to say that Elaine Strickland is entering. Bernie’s smile fades to a look of perplexity. He gestures with his drink at the other men.

“This is called a meeting, Elaine.”

She’ll faint, she’ll be fired, she’s so stupid, what was she thinking?

“Mr. Gunderson… is waiting for you.”

Bernie squints, as if hearing Chinese.

“Right. But I’m in an important meeting.”

The copy chief snorts. Lainie looks at the sofa. Both men are smirking. A cold marble of sweat plummets down her backbone, even as she feels an angry roil at how these men just sit there, half-drunk and entitled. She holds tight to the resentment. If she must faint, let her do it from a respectable height. She plants her feet.

“He’s been waiting for an hour.”

Bernie rocks his chair to an upright position. Liquor slurps over the rim of his glass, hits the carpet. Not his concern, Lainie thinks: a janitor, one more of the overlooked, will take to her knees to do the scrubbing. Bernie sighs at the men and cricks his head at Lainie, as if to say, Let me deal with this. They stand up, buttoning jackets, not bothering to hide the collegial grins of watching a buddy butt heads with a strident female. The copy chief winks at Lainie as he passes. The media buyer brushes so close that Lainie is certain he can hear, if not feel, the crash of her heart.

“I know I offered you full-time employment,” Bernie says, “but let’s not let that go to our heads. Do your job, Elaine. And I’ll do my job. I’ll come and get Mr. Gunderson when I’m ready. I hope that’s before closing time, but we’ll see.”

“He’s a nice man.” Lainie despises the tremor in her voice. “He waited two weeks to get an appointment—”

“This is what I’m saying. You don’t really know what you’re talking about, do you? Everyone who walks through that door has a history. Don’t you? Let me tell you something about nice old Mr. Gunderson. He used to work here. Until he got arrested for moral depravity. Surprise. So when you charge in here, with other people in my office, and say Mr. Gunderson, that’s what they think of. It doesn’t make my life easier. I’m the only one in town who’ll work with Mr. Gunderson. I do it out of the goodness of my heart. Let me tell you something else. His work? It’s useless. Sure, it’s good. But it’s antique. It doesn’t sell. Two weeks ago, he brought me this big red monstrosity and I had him redo it green. I did it because I don’t have the heart to tell him the truth. He’s finished in this biz. At least my way he gets a kill fee. So, really, Elaine, who’s the nice one now?”

Lainie no longer knows. Bernie exhales indulgently, gets up, puts his arm around her, and guides her to the door, where he instructs her, tolerantly, she has to admit, to tell Mr. Gunderson that Mr. Clay had an emergency, and that he’s to leave his painting behind. That way the hard hearts in accounting can deliver the bad news later. Lainie feels like a child. She nods, a good girl, her forced smile crimping her face in a way she associates with home, the dinner table, pretending everything is all right.

When she returns to the lobby, Giles stands up, straightens his jacket, and strides forward, portfolio case swinging. Lainie scurries behind the desk as a soldier might into a foxhole, and selects from her inventory a tone of apology and the script that goes with it. Mr. Clay is busy handling an unforeseen event. I didn’t know. It’s my fault. I’m so sorry. Won’t you leave your work with me? I’ll make sure Mr. Clay sees it. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be Richard, to feel your heart harden to stone with every word. Giles shatters that stone by beginning to unbuckle the portfolio case without protest, accepting her blatant lie, not because he believes it, but because he doesn’t wish to cause her further upset. Forget what Bernie said about moral depravity. Giles Gunderson is the kindest man Lainie has ever known.

“Stop.”

It sounds like her voice. It feels like her voice, too; her lips feel the plosive pop. But how can such an insubordinate sound come from a woman blinded by Spray ’N Steam vapor, weighed down by a beehive hairdo, deafened by the repetitive thwack of a headboard against a wall? Still the voice continues, over the belligerent telephone and the harrumphs of the waiting room’s latest arrivals, so that she, just this once, might prioritize a man who is no one else’s priority.

“They don’t want it,” she says.

“They…” Giles adjusts his glasses. “I’m sorry?”

“They won’t tell you. But they don’t want it. They’ll never want it.”

“But it’s… they asked for green and—”

“If you leave it with me, you’ll get a kill fee. But that’s all.”

“—and it’s as green as can be, it can’t get any greener!”

“But I don’t think you should.”

“Miss Strickland?” Giles is blinking hard. “Mrs. Strickland, I mean—”

“You deserve better than this. You deserve people who value you. You deserve to go somewhere where you can be proud of who you are.”

The voice, Lainie realizes, feels sovereign from her because it’s not only speaking to Giles Gunderson—it’s speaking to Elaine Strickland. She deserves better; she deserves to be valued; she deserves to live in a place where pride is not an exotic gift. Once more, the young wife and doddery gent are one and the same, stamped as deficient by people who haven’t the higher ground to make the accusation. Klein & Saunders is a start but only that: a start.

He’s fussing with his bow tie, searching the corner of the room for clues, but she keeps nodding, harder and harder, urging him to do the right thing, to walk out of the room. He exhales with a weak shiver and stares down at his portfolio case. Then he inhales sharply and looks right at her, his eyes sharp with tears and his mustache quivering with a brave smile. He holds out the case. Not the painting—the whole case.

“For you, my dear.”

She can’t accept it. Of course she can’t. But Giles’s arm shakes the very same way her voice had shaken; he’s matching her impulsive heroism with that of his own, begging her to take the burdensome baggage of his life off his hands. Lainie takes the case, her fingers settling into grooves shaped by his fingers over the years into soft red leather. She sees the shifting of Giles’s shadow as he moves away, but she doesn’t look up. It would only make it harder for him, she senses, and besides, she’s looking for a place to set down the case so that it, heavy with significance, doesn’t crash through three floors of the building.

21

HOFFSTETLER IS CHECKING, for the final time, the barometers reporting temperature, volume, and pH from the F-1 pool, his assistants wheeling hand trucks of equipment from the lab for good, when he’s struck by a staggering fact. He might never again be this close to the Devonian, at least while it still breaths. On Monday, a sickening three days off, he himself will dissolve it from the inside via Mihalkov’s hypodermic solution.

Had it been the body armor of lab coats and battle shields of briefcases that had made him impervious for so long to others’ pain? Well, today he wears no coat; he threw it to his office floor, disgusted by its invisible soaking of blood. And his briefcase? In mere days it has come to represent the collapse of his meticulously maintained life; it is filled with crumpled notes, cracker bags, cookie crumbs. For once, no modicum of professionalism separates death and deliverer in F-1.

Hoffstetler’s victim—he won’t permit himself to think of the Devonian by any gentler term—floats at the pool’s center, the chains affixed to its harness as still as rods. Its sole show of life is the light spilling from its eyes like smelted gold across the water. Hoffstetler thinks of Elisa Esposito’s dancing and the Devonian’s delighted illuminations, and he’s gripped by a fierce jealousy. It isn’t fair that she got to love it, and it her, while he—he’s saddled with a murder no god will forgive. He replaces the barometers, tries to shake off all feelings of tenderness. Those won’t make it any easier to jam the killing needle through bony plates.

He has no reason to believe the Devonian feels anything toward him but hatred. None at all. And yet, as he hears the lab doors close behind his assistants, he finds himself raising his eyes imploringly. If Elisa did it, he could have done it as well: make contact, real contact, with the Devonian. He’s managed to live with himself despite repeated trespasses of the humane. Can he forgive himself for this final trespass as well?

The lab is empty and still. Hoffstetler sets down his notebook, not caring if it gets wet, if all his carefully notated facts go blurry, for what good have facts done him at Occam? He crosses the red warning line and lowers himself to the pool’s ledge, dampness soaking through his seat. His hands are used to being empty; they fumble for each other while his spine slumps. It is a melancholic pose, like hunching at the graveside of a loved one. Another fantasy of humanity. He has no loved ones. Not in this land. Even the Devonian, a being of another world, has him beat in that regard.

“Prosti menya, pozhaluysta,” he whispers. “I am so sorry.”

The gold-hued water undulates as softly as a field of wheat.

“You cannot understand me. I know this. I am used to it. My real voice, my beautiful Russian—no one here can understand it. In that way are we similar? Perhaps if I speak with enough feeling you will understand?” Hoffstetler taps his own chest. “I am the one who failed you. Who could not save you. Despite the diplomas I have packed away in boxes. Despite the honorifics they attach to my name. All of this to parade me about as intelligent. But what is intelligence? Is intelligence calculations and computations? Or must true intelligence contain a moral component? Each passing minute, I believe more that this is the case. And therefore believe that I am stupid, stupid, stupid. These chains, this tank—this is your repayment for saving my life. Do you know that you did? Can you smell it in my blood? I had the razor blades all picked out. And then they found you, as if from the pages of the Afanasyev fairy tales I read as a boy. Stories of magical beasts, strange monsters. It is you, my dear Devonian, who I have waited to meet my whole life. Our relationship—it should have been wondrous. I know my world is dry and cold. Yet there is so much in it that I could have shown you, that might have brought you joy. Instead, you and I have no relationship at all, do we? You do not even know my name.”

Hoffstetler smiles into the vague shape of his dark reflection.

“My name is Dmitri. And I am so very, very pleased to meet you.”

Sobs break out of him. Hot tears blast down his cheeks, a dozen at once, like he’s the one injected with Mihalkov’s serum, he’s the one whose guts are melting. He braces himself against the ledge and watches the tears patter into the pool, a diminutive rainstorm, the first Baltimore has seen in months.

The water is cut in half. It is the Devonian’s hand, slicing upward like a shark, its claws like five pearlescent fins. Hoffstetler recoils, totters from the ledge. But there is nothing to fear. The Devonian is three feet away, having swum close without a sound, and is already retracting its arm. Hoffstetler watches with held breath as the creature passes its fingers through its mouth, over its tongue. There is no question what is happening.

The Devonian is tasting his tears.

Hoffstetler knows that he is fortunate that none of his team enters F-1 at that moment. His mouth is open in a silent bawl, his face is slick and flushed, his whole body is shuddering. The Devonian’s double jaws gnash over his salty tears, and its eyes soften from metallic gold to sky blue. The Devonian lifts himself upright in the pool, seeming to defy gravity, and bows to Hoffstetler. There is no other word for it. Then it quietly dives under, its webbed feet giving a final wiggle that, to Hoffstetler reads like a thank-you as well as a good-bye.

22

DRIVING IT OFF the lot is a dream. The de Ville’s tires don’t touch the pavement. They roll on cottony clouds. On the whorls of his cigarette smoke. On the bouncy curls of the girls giving him, and his car, lusty looks at every stoplight. All he’d have to do is open the door and they’d pile inside. Happily, willingly, and knowing their place: the backseat. The American Dream—he’d thought it was lost. Misplaced in the boxes from the move. But wouldn’t you know it? Those clever boys in Detroit had managed to build it out of steel. All you had to do, mister, was pony up the cash, and it was yours.

Plenty of choicer parking spots exist at Occam, but Strickland picks the one on the end. Everyone who parks will see the Caddy. Even the buses ferrying service staff will have to pass it. He gets out, squats beside the teal beauty, inspects it. A blemish of dirt near the wheels. Some grit on the front fender. He takes a handkerchief and buffers the spots until they gleam. He feels better than he did this morning. Lainie’s got a secret, and that’s unacceptable. But the car helps. The car is a partial solution. He pulls out the bottle of pills and knocks a few into his mouth. There’s another solution, an even better one, inside Occam.

His mood is optimistic enough that he doesn’t bark at the janitors smoking on the loading dock instead of the upper lobby. They toss their butts and scatter. Strickland manages a grin. So what? Let the rank and file blow off a little steam. He even picks up the broom they left lying there and props it against the wall. He enters Occam via his key card and ambles down a bustling hall. Scientists, administrators, assistants, cleaners. Is everyone looking at him? He’s pretty sure they are. And why not? He feels like the de Ville. Huge and shining. Gobbling up the road and everything on it.

The second solution is Elisa. She doesn’t get in until midnight. Strickland keeps himself good and medicated until then. He’ll cut back on the pills, he will. Just not today. Every task he selects is spiked with anticipation. He dusts the security monitors with the same gentle motions he used on the Caddy. He tracks down a puffy-eyed Hoffstetler just so he can boast about the coming vivisection. He finds a cardboard box and gets a head start on collecting personal items from his desk. He pictures Occam, and Baltimore, diminishing in the Caddy’s rearview mirror. Washington, too. Is that Elisa in the seat beside him? If Lainie’s going behind his back, why can’t he do the same? He and Elisa will drive until General Hoyt can never find him.

Twelve fifteen, he taps the intercom.

“Could you find Miss Elisa Esposito and send her on over to Mr. Strickland’s office? I made me a little spill.”

A spill. He supposes he should make one. He looks about, sees the bag of hard candy. He doesn’t need all that candy. Not until he gets off the pills anyway. He gives the bag a flap. Watches the balls race into dark corners like green mice. It’s a little vigorous; they roll pretty far. What if she doesn’t buy it? He laughs once and feels his stomach flip. He’s nervous. He hasn’t felt nervous about a woman in a while.

A single knock at the door. He puts on a big grin and looks up. There she is, prompt as a schoolgirl and decked out in janitorial grays. Mop held like a bō staff and chin tilted down in the classic posture of mistrust. He can feel cool air on his back molars. Is his grin too wolfish? He tries to shrink it. It’s like relaxing a stretched rubber band. It still might fire off, shoot across the room if he’s not careful. He’s not used to handling grins.

“Hello, there, Miss Esposito. How are you tonight?”

The girl is as taut as a cat. After a moment, she touches her chest, then fins her hand outward. Strickland sits back in his chair. A scintillating rush passes through his head. It’s hope. He’s forgotten how it feels. He’s made so many mistakes. Getting involved with Hoyt. Letting Lainie stray, possibly out of reach. Right now, though, right here under the monitors’ soft, dim light, there’s a chance. Elisa is everything he needs. Quiet. Controllable.

Elisa extends her neck into the room and looks about. This dings Strickland’s serenity. She looks as if expecting a trap. Why would she think that? He went out of his way to wrap new bandages over his unsightly fingers and to stow the Howdy-do out of sight under the desk. He gestures at the floor.

“No need for the mop. I only spilled some candy. Rolled right out of the bag. Don’t want it to attract bugs. Pretty easy little job. Guess I could’ve done it myself. Except I got a bunch of stuff to do. That’s why I’m here so late. Paperwork.”

There is no paper on his desk. He should have thought of that. While Elisa consults her cart, he extracts a random file from his desk. Elisa enters the room with dustpan and brush held like nunchucks. She’s as observant as a cat, too. Her eyes are on the file he’s suddenly holding. He doesn’t like that, feels caught in a lie. But he does like her looking at him. She kneels in a corner to brush up a candy. Looks good doing it, too. Strickland feels a surge of power. Same as he did from the vibrations of the Caddy’s V-8. Power windows. Power brakes. Power steering. Just plain power.

“I’m not real used to these late hours, I guess. Get tired and clumsy. I guess you’re used to it, though, huh? It’s morning for you. You’re probably full of energy. Hey, you want some candy? Not from the floor, I mean. I still got some here in the bag.”

She’s in front of the desk now, crouched between the chairs. She looks up, holds his eyes for a few seconds. The gray monitor light flatters her. Her hair is storm clouds. Her face a lambent silver. The scars on her neck two glowing lines of nightsurf. He loves those scars. He wonders if there are other places on a woman’s body where scars might look as pretty. Lots of them, probably. Elisa shakes her head. No candy, no thank you. She starts to look away, but Strickland doesn’t want to lose sight of those scars.

“Hey, hold on. I’ve got a question.” On cue, one comes to him. “When you say you’re mute—well, I guess you didn’t say it. The Negro woman said it. You can’t say anything.” He laughs. She doesn’t. Why not? It’s a harmless joke. “Anyway, I’ve been wondering. Is it a hundred percent? I mean, if you get hurt, do you make a noise? Not that I’m planning on hurting you.” He laughs. Again, no reaction. Why won’t she relax? “Some mutes, you know, they squawk a little. I was just wondering.”

The words don’t come out perfect. He’s not given to pleasantries. He’s no Dr. Bob Hoffstetler, rattling off all the reasons he’s so damn brilliant. Still, the question deserves a nod, a gesture, something. Instead, Elisa turns away, gets back to her task. From the sound of it, as quickly as possible. Strickland takes a second to think. If anyone else ignored him, they’d regret it. This janitor, though, it only augments her blissful silence. He’s left staring at her backside. Tough to get a sense of it under that uniform, but he figures it’s good enough. Definitely good enough if she keeps wearing shoes like that. The shoes are leopard patterned. Leopard patterned. If she’s not wearing them for his enjoyment, then whose?

Each candy cracks when it hits the dustpan. Like twigs cracking in the jungle, the approach of a predator. Strickland stands up, paces before the monitors to shake it off. Right away, Elisa rises to her feet. She’s either done or done trying, and bolts for the door, but can’t move very fast. Candy rolls all over the dustpan, a balancing act fit for a circus. Strickland blocks the door with his right arm. Elisa pulls up short, the green candies clacking like bronchitic lungs.

“I know how it sounds,” he says. “Me, who I am. You being you. But we’re not that different. I mean—who do you have? Your file says you don’t have nobody. And me, I guess it’s not the same for me, but it feels—what I’m trying to say is that I feel the way you do. I figure we both got things in our lives we’d change if we could. You know?”

Strickland can’t believe it, but there it is. He’s raising his left hand, touching one of the neck scars. Elisa’s whole body stiffens. She swallows hard. A birdie pulse palpitates her jugular. He wishes he could feel its throb, but his fingers are bloated, bandaged, one of them pinched numb by a wedding ring. The ring Elisa presented to him right here in this office. He switches hands, traces a neck scar with his index finger, half-closes his eyes, gives into his senses. The scar is soft as silk. She smells so clean, like bleach. Her frightened breath purrs like the Caddy.

In the Amazon, his party found the cadaver of a marsh deer, its antlers tangled in the ribs of a jaguar. The índios bravos had supposed that the two beasts had been locked together for weeks prior to dying, a grotesque crossbreed. That’s him and Elisa, Strickland thinks. Two opposites, trapped together. Either they find a way to work together to break free, or both of them wither to bones. Female brains, he knows, require time to think. He lets his arm slide down the door frame. Elisa doesn’t wait. She plunges outside, unloads the dustpan into the trash, grabs and wheels her cart. She’s leaving, she’s leaving.

“Hey,” he calls.

Elisa pauses. In the brighter lights of the hall, her cheeks are pink, the scars red. Strickland feels a swirl of panic, loss, and frustration. He forces a smile, tries to mean it.

“I don’t mind you can’t talk. That’s what I want to say. I even kind of like it.” A good-natured entendre pops into his mind. Is it a permissible one? Will she respond positively to it? His head is dizzy from pills, and he doesn’t dare miss the opportunity. His rubber-band grin stretches again, close to snapping. “I bet I could make you squawk. Just a little?”

23

ZELDA SEES ELISA leaving Mr. Strickland’s office. There’s a bunch of possible valid reasons. Maybe Strickland, with his bulky bandaged hand, made some kind of mess. Or Elisa’s QCC had a note from Fleming about cleaning the normally restricted room. But when in their Occam history have either Zelda or Elisa fielded a special directive from Fleming without sharing it to speculate on its meaning? Elisa has said nothing. These days, does she ever? Zelda tells Elisa a Brewster story, Elisa asks no questions. Zelda tries to ask what’s wrong, Elisa pretends not to hear. Each snub is a poke to Zelda’s ribs as hard as if from Strickland’s cattle prod. She’s building up bruises. She winces over them even at home. Brewster has noticed, and when Brewster notices, you know your signals are firing like flares.

“It’s Elisa,” she’d admitted.

“Your friend at work?”

“She’s just been treating me… Oh, I don’t know.”

“Like the help?” Brewster snapped.

That’s Brewster. You catch him anywhere but in front of the TV, he’s switchblade sharp. Too sharp for Zelda; you don’t nourish a friendship this long and let it go, a petal in the wind. Some outside force is in play, and it has to be F-1. Since the time Strickland nearly caught Elisa inside, Zelda has twice spotted Elisa pushing her cart from the direction of F-1. Zelda gives Elisa every chance to share details, from the open-ended Did you see anything interesting tonight? to the pointed I sure wonder what’s going on in F-1. Elisa divulges nothing. Not even a shrug. More than out of character, it’s rude, and Zelda’s beginning to wonder if she should follow Brewster’s advice, respect herself, and turn her back.

Is Elisa’s friendship really so much to lose? Zelda figures she could integrate herself into the other graveyarders, no problem. A couple more cigarettes smoked on the loading dock, a chuckle shared at Elisa’s expense, and wham—she’d be current with all the inside jokes. It would hurt, but work was work, and Occam, she reminds herself, is but one limb of her life. She has family. Aunts and uncles and their various snarls of offspring, not to mention Brewster’s busted family tree of half-cousins, third cousins, and fringe clingers she’d never quite placed. She has neighbors, too, some of whom she’s known for fifteen years, some who hurrah when she arrives at their cookouts. And there is church, which is family and neighbors both, where they get loud, where they embrace and cry, where there is always support, always love.

There it is: all the proof that Zelda doesn’t need Elisa.

But Zelda wants Elisa. She’s headstrong about it, like a teenager forbidden to see a friend. Except she’s not a teenager. She’s the one, not Brewster, not her family, not her church, who gets to say when her pride has taken too much stomping. If she wants to give one more chance to a friend who’s out of chances, she will. Besides, a woman goes crazy when a man’s involved—men, too, go just as crazy—and that’s her working theory: Elisa Esposito is having herself an affair. If F-1 is the rendezvous point, then it has to be Dr. Hoffstetler, doesn’t it? That man who’s been so nice to them? Who so often works such late hours? Who doesn’t wear a ring?

Zelda doesn’t hold it against her. Heck, she’s tempted to offer congratulations; Elisa hasn’t had a man since Zelda’s known her. True, the affair could get her fired, but also true is that, if it works out, maybe she and Dr. Hoffstetler could leave Occam together. Can you imagine it? Elisa married to a doctor?

Tonight, though, after seeing Elisa hurrying away from Strickland’s office, Zelda isn’t sure. No doubt Strickland also has a key card to F-1. What if that nasty man with his rusty Howdy-do, who, come to think of it, had gotten himself an eyeful of Elisa’s legs when they met in his office, had made some sort of move? Elisa’s smart, but she’s got squat for experience when it comes to men. And if Zelda’s ever met a man who’d take advantage of a woman like that, it’s Mr. Strickland.

A metal rigidity screws into Zelda’s jaw, fists, and feet, all parts that could get a meek janitor in trouble at a place like Occam. She makes a choice. She only has to skip two rooms, storage spaces rarely dirty to begin with, to trail Elisa for the final half hour of the graveyard shift. Zelda feels like a creep. Worse, her detective work turns up nothing concrete. Neither Elisa’s uniform or hair seem ruffled from a physical encounter. Something, though, happened in Strickland’s office; Elisa fails to hang a feather duster upon its cart peg three straight times.

The shift bell rings. The janitors rebound to the locker room. Zelda keeps her watch on Elisa, speeding up her clothes change so she can make it to the punch cards right behind her. Only when they are outside, beneath the melon orange of a sunrise scar, waiting in the bus stop’s calf-high gravel dust, does Zelda send up a prayer, snag the startled Elisa by the sleeve, and pull her over to the trash can, spooking a raid of squirrels. Elisa’s eyes, red and tired at this hour, flash with caution.

“I know, hon. I know. You don’t want to talk to me. You don’t want to talk at all. Then don’t. Just listen. Before the bus comes, just listen.”

Elisa tries to dodge away, but Zelda exploits something she rarely does, her size and strength, and pulls Elisa back by the cuff hard enough that Elisa’s hip gongs the trash can. Elisa begins to sign with an angry energy, and Zelda gets the gist of the points and slashes. They are excuses, justifications, pretexts. It’s telling that not one of them is an apology. An apology would be admitting that she’d done something wrong.

Zelda brings both of her hands atop Elisa’s, gentling them like tussling pigeons and bringing them into the comfort of her bosom.

“You’re not signing anything worth my time, and we both know it.” Elisa quits resisting, but her face stays hard. Not unkind, just hard, as if holding a wall before a secret too big to show. Zelda exhales. “Haven’t I always tried to understand whatever bothered you? From the first day you came? I remember that poster Fleming hung up in the locker room when you first started. Picture of some Marilyn Monroe type with a mop, all these arrows pointing out her attributes. Hands willing to help. Legs ready to run the extra mile. Remember that? Remember how we laughed and laughed? That’s when we became friends. Because you were so young and so shy and I wanted to help. That’s still all I want.”

Elisa’s forehead ripples in turmoil. She starts at the crunch of gravel, a half-dozen workers adjusting their feet while digging out bus tokens. That means the bus is in sight. Zelda can’t hold her friend here much longer. She constrains Elisa’s hands as tightly as she can in the cage of her own hands; she can feel the rustles of Elisa’s delicate pigeon wings.

“If you’re in some trouble, don’t be frightened. Don’t be scared. I’ve seen all sorts of trouble in my life. And if it’s a man—”

Elisa’s eyes dart back toward Zelda’s. Zelda nods, tries to encourage her, but Elisa’s pulling away, and the snort and hiss of the bus can’t be ignored. Zelda’s eyes go bleary all at once, a sluice of tears that she despises; it’s every emotion she doesn’t want to show when trying to display strength. Elisa breaks away, but Zelda calls out. Elisa stops, half-turns. Zelda wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I can’t keep asking you, hon,” she moans. “I’ve got my own problems. My own life. You know one of these days, I’m leaving this place and starting my own thing. And I always pictured you coming along. But I got to know—do we just clean together? When we take the uniforms off, are we still friends?”

The swelling sun brings glistening definition to the tears that, in perfect match to Zelda’s, begin rolling down Elisa’s cheeks. Elisa’s face twists, as if she wants to speak, but she clenches her hands, her method of biting her tongue, and can only shake her head before breaking toward the bus. Zelda turns away, purposefully blinding herself with the sun, and wipes her wet face with a quaking arm, then leaves it there, cover against the glare, the grief, the loneliness, all of it.

24

TAKE YOUR PICK of the city’s army of ad men, and after a tough day they’ll have their bellies to a bar, washing down the hard luck, cursing the iniquities of their chosen racket. But what is Giles Gunderson doing? First off, he’d delayed mourning until the following day because he was old and tired. Second, it’s not beer he’s throwing back, it’s milk. Third, he’s alone.

He thought he’d never get out of bed again. No work, no money, no food, no friends if Elisa remains furious. Why elongate the inevitable? Then morning light had crystalled through his bedroom window, the resultant rainbows remindful of the chromed display cases at Dixie Doug’s. If anything could extricate Giles from the briar patch of doom, it was the attentions of Brad—unless the alternate name tag was correct and he was actually JOHN. Giles had dressed in clothes that, for the first time, seemed not permeated with character but simply old and put on his toupee, an exercise in disgrace. Then he’d attempted to ignore the Pug’s mortal chokes and tape together the shredded ribbons of his pride so that he might enter Dixie Doug’s with a soupçon of his usual verve.

But Brad wasn’t there, and the queue, a rattlesnake, had him coiled. Forced to order, and mindful of his destitution, he smiled wanly at a perky young woman name-tagged as LORETTA and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a pitiful glass of milk. Now he sits at the counter, despite how stools play hell with his hip. Gulp down the milk, make a quick getaway, get on with the business of dying.

He swivels to the right so he might distract himself with the black-and-white TV lodged between tureens of plastic utensils. The reception is snarled, but ropes of static can’t hide the familiar contrasts of Negroes toting signs in circles. Milk goes sour on Giles’s tongue. Oh, this is just what he needs! Giles considers calling for Loretta to turn the dial, but she’s in high flirt, transmogrifying winks and wiggles into whole fleets of ordered pies. At least Dixie Doug’s blares country-western music; he can make out only snatches of the news report. Something about William Levitt, the pioneer of “suburban” living. Something about how Levitt won’t sell plots to Negroes. Giles aches at the file footage of Long Island’s Levittown. He imagines himself in one of the pastel abodes, exiting each dewy morning in a snug house robe to water magnolias. It’ll never happen; he’ll serve a life sentence in that mice-ridden shoebox above the Arcade, and that’s if he’s lucky.

Elbows fold themselves onto the counter. Giles looks up and there he is, an angel floated in from short-order Elysium. Even Brad’s comfy hunch can’t hide a height that must be taller than Giles’s previous estimates. Six-foot-three. Six-foot-three at least! Brad leans across the counter, smelling of sugar and dough. He loosens one big, lazy finger from the knot of his arms to indicate a plate of bright green pie that has manifested alongside the milk.

“Remembered how much you like that key lime.”

Brad’s fake Southern accent is back, and Giles melts. Fake accent, fake hair, what’s the difference? Are we not allowed our little vanities, especially when they please someone about whom you care?

“Oh!” Giles pictures his emptied wallet. “I’m not sure I brought enough cash to—”

Brad scoffs. “Forget it. It’s on the house.”

“That is far too kind. I won’t hear of it. I’ll bring by the money later.” An idea strikes him, a deranged one, but if this, his lowest point, isn’t the time for insane acts, what is? “Or… you could give me your address, and I could swing it by?”

“Now who’s being too kind? Shucks, working here, it’s like tending bar. You get to know people. Hear their stories. And I can tell you, mister, most people? They hold a conversation about as well as I can hold a bag of cats. We don’t get a lot of customers like you. Smart, educated. All that stuff you told me about the big food launch whatchamadoodle? You got a lot of real interesting things to say, and I’m obliged. So eat up, partner.”

Bernie must be right, Giles thinks. He’s old, he’s sentimental, he’s trapped in a different time. Why else is it that, at this meagerest generosity, tears have begun to gather along his eyelids.

“I can’t tell you what it means to… I work alone, you know, and conversation… I talk to my friend, of course, my best friend, but she’s…” Elisa’s parting signs are still branded into the flesh of his back. “Well, she’s not much of a conversationalist. So… I thank you. From the bottom of my heart. And you must call me Giles.” He forces a smile, and it feels brittle, his whole skull feels brittle, a thing as shatterable as Andrzej. “You can’t be bankrolling my key lime habit and calling me ‘partner.’”

Brad’s laugh is sunshine, lemonade, mowed grass.

“Heck, I never knew a Giles before, if you want the truth.”

Giles can see it in the purse of Brad’s lips, his real name about to be divulged with the same easy affection with which he’d confessed his Canadian heritage. After this, thinks Giles, there will be no more prying for clues; there will be no more paging through phone books like a lovesick schoolboy; there will be no more humiliation in this life that has been filled with nothing else. On this worst morning of his life, all will be saved.

“I do want the truth,” he says, and it sounds profound.

Here is Giles’s truth. He has alienated his one confidant. The ad campaign he’d lied to Brad about “captaining” ended with a hack-job painting he’d given to a merciful receptionist. He has no future. He has no hope. All of this is why, he will postulate later, he succumbs to his long-delayed desire, as delirious as a child electrified by too much sugary pie. The last time he spoke to Brad, he’d explained the etymology of tantalize, how Tantalus had reached for fruit and water forever just out of range. Now Giles reaches, too.

He settles his hand atop Brad’s wrist. It’s as warm as fresh bread.

“I like talking to you, too,” Giles says. “And I’d like to get to know you better. If you’d like it as well. Is the name really… Brad?”

The merry twinkles of Brad’s eyes wink out, as quietly and completely as if he’d passed away. He stands up, not six-foot-three or six-foot-four, but ten feet, one hundred, one thousand, pulling away from the counter and into the stratosphere. Giles’s hand slides off the warm skin and drops to the cold counter, a withered, blotched, veiny, wobbling thing. From the god lording above comes a voice leached of its butter-and-syrup accent.

“What are you doing, old man?”

“But I… you…” He is effete, adrift, isolated in bright lights like a specimen. “You bought me pie.”

“I bought everyone pie,” Brad says. “Because I got engaged last night. To that young lady right there.”

Giles’s throat clenches. The same thick, hairy finger of Brad’s that had pointed at the suggestive free pie now points at Loretta, that smooth young thing, jiggling and giggling, the apogee of normalcy. Giles looks at Loretta, then Brad, then Loretta, back and forth, a helpless geriatric. Next in the queue is a black family—mother, father, and child—who stare at the overhanging menu, whispering to one another their pie-related plots. Brad’s face, Giles observes, is bright red from the disgrace of Giles’s touch, and such anger has to go somewhere.

“Hey!” Brad shouts. “Just takeout for you. No seats.”

The family’s chatter peters out. Their heads turn, as does every head in Dixie Doug’s, to look at the fuming Brad. The mother in the queue gathers her child into her hands before she replies.

“There are plenty of seats…”

“All reserved,” Brad snaps. “All day. All week.”

The family’s eager expressions curl away from Brad’s fire. Giles is overcome with nausea. He grips the counter to halt his stool from spinning only to find that it isn’t moving. Behind Brad, Giles sees the TV’s blur, and Giles, because he deserves it, accepts its contempt. People see blacks protest on the news every day, probably while ironing laundry, and feel nothing. Giles, though, can’t stand the sight. It’s not due to some swell of compassion. It’s out of self-preservation. He has the privilege—the privilege—of being able to hide his minority status, but if he had any pride at all, he wouldn’t be making furtive touches across a diner counter. He’d be standing alongside those who are unafraid of getting their skulls cracked open by batons. Disgracing himself is one thing; letting it spill onto these innocents just trying to purchase saccharine, overpriced, so-called pie is unacceptable.

“Don’t talk to them like that,” he says.

Brad angles his sneer at Giles. “You better leave, too, mister. This is a family place.” The doorbell dings, and Brad looks up. The father, likely familiar with the taste of a busted lip, is herding his family out of harm’s way. Brad plants onto his face a radiant grin, one Giles used to think Brad baked up special just for him, and dollops the accent on thick: “Y’all come back now!”

Giles glares down at the key lime pie. The color is identical to that of his painted gelatin, a synthetic, otherworldly green. He runs his eyes across Dixie Doug’s. Where have the pulsing colors and chrome liquescence gone? This is a graveyard of cheap plastic. He stands and finds himself firmer on his feet than expected. When Brad again looks his way, Giles is surprised to see that the object of his fantasies isn’t so tall after all. Indeed, they are the same height. Giles adjusts his bow tie, straightens his glasses, brushes cat hair from his jacket.

“When you told me about your franchising,” he says, “I was impressed, I admit it. The decorations, how they truck in the pies, everything.”

Giles pauses, in awe of the inflexibility of his voice. Other diners, too, look on as if they feel the same. Vain though it might be, Giles wishes that the family of three was still there to hear him. He wishes his father was there to hear, too. He wishes Bernie Clay, Mr. Klein, and Mr. Saunders were there. He wishes everyone who’d ever dismissed him was there to witness this.

“But do you know, young man, what franchising really is?” Giles makes a sweeping gesture across the diner. “It is a crass, craven, vulgar, piggish attempt to falsify, package, and sell the unsellable magic of one person sitting across a table from another person. A person who matters. You cannot franchise the alchemy of greasy food and human affection. Perhaps you have never experienced it. Well, I have. There is a person who matters to me. And she, I assure you, is far too intelligent to be caught in here.”

He pivots on a heel, Brad’s face joining the TV’s smear, and marches through the diner, silent now but for the country crooning. He’s at the door before Brad can rally a retort.

“And it’s not Brad. It’s John, faggot.”

The word has chased him home before, after he’s offered some promising fellow the delicate bait of a double meaning, plus the fail-safe of a third meaning should the double meaning be understood and rejected, except today the word does not chase so much as it does fuel, propelling him through Baltimore streets, into his parking space behind the Arcade, up the fire escape, past his own door, and inside Elisa’s apartment after the alert of a quick knock. He sees the second he enters that she isn’t asleep as she should be; he keels toward the beacon of the lit bathroom, where he finds her on hands and knees, partner to a sudsy bucket, paused from the perplexing activity of scrubbing the bathtub so vigorously that the surface gleams like marble, casting Elisa, the whole room, probably the whole theater below and the city’s entire metropolitan grid in a new, bright, better light.

“Whatever this thing is doesn’t matter,” Giles says. “What matters is you need it. And so I will help you. Just tell me what to do.”

25

ELISA GLANCES AT her friend as he fusses his paintbrush within the hand-cut stencil taped against the sliding door of the Pug. After dislodging plates of caked dirt, the two of them loosened decades of exhaust grit with citrus-based dish soap before scrubbing the van with clay—a janitor’s trick. Giles has done all this wearing the same houndstooth vest he wears when vultured over his drafting table, and he’s making the same squint. Seeing him released, however, into the sweet fresh air of spring is like seeing him released from dungeon shackles. The late Sunday sun warms the top of his bald scalp, and when was the last time he went outside without his toupee? It makes Elisa happy. Giles has been different this weekend; all hesitance has been cored from him. If this, Elisa thinks, is their final day together, before they enact her plan, before arrest, before sentencing, maybe before being shot dead, it has been a good day indeed.

She can’t observe him for long. Her arms quake beneath another load of unreturned milk bottles, each cleaned and filled with water. She climbs inside the van. Everything behind the front seats has been cleared to make room for a hodgepodge of boxes and baskets arranged atop a piece of carpet. Elisa lets the bottles roll from her arms and places them, one by one, into a box padded with a blanket. They clank and slosh; her stomach behaves in kind. She sits back against the inner wall, panting.

“Yes, do take a moment’s rest.” Giles flicks his smiling eyes from his stenciling. “You’re working too hard. Worrying too hard as well. In a few hours, my dear, all of it will be over and done with, one way or the other. Focus on that. The only thing I’m certain of is that uncertainty is the hardest thing in life to endure.”

Elisa smiles; she is surprised, but she does. She signs: “Did you finish your ID?”

Giles dabs paint, blows it dry, then sets his brush crosswise atop a tin of paint. He removes his wallet, withdraws a card with flourish, and presents it across his opposite wrist as he might a sword. Elisa takes it, examines it, and then digs her authentic Occam ID out for comparison. The texture and weight are wrong, though if anyone is handling the card that closely, it’s likely the game will already be lost. Otherwise it is as convincing a piece of work as anything Giles has done. That it was a new medium for him, and completed over a single day, makes the effort all the more impressive.

She signs the name on the ID: “Michael Parker?”

“I thought it was a good, hearty, trustworthy name.” Giles shrugs. “Naturally, my friends can call me Mike.”

Elisa scans the details harder, and with a smile, signs: “Fifty-one years old?”

Giles looks crestfallen. “No? Not even with the hair? What about fifty-four? A single dab of paint, and I can add three years, just like that.”

Elisa grimaces. Giles sighs and snaps his fingers for the card. He picks up the paintbrush, twists the bristles so that they taper into a point, and touches it softly to the ID.

“There. Fifty-seven. The absolute best I can do. Now stop being rude to poor old Mike Parker.”

He gets back to work, scowling for show. Elisa is sick with sustained tension, so dizzy she feels as if swimming, and yet bundled in a peculiar warmness, the interior of the van somehow the most comfortable spot in the world. So much of her life she’s felt alone, but at this second there is plentiful proof to the contrary. If they are caught in a few hours, her second-biggest regret is that she won’t be able to thank Zelda for wanting, nearly begging to help. Elisa couldn’t do it to her; if Elisa and Giles get caught, Zelda can’t be involved. It’s a terrible feeling, pushing Zelda away. Still, Elisa thinks, she must have done something right in her life to earn that kind of loyalty.

The sounds of Giles stowing his gear drag her back to harsh reality. A wind too dry to hold a drop of water buffets the inside of the Pug, and she feels from inside the theater the rumble of a sinister music cue. Elisa climbs out of the van, slits her eyes at the dusking sun.

“I’m proud of you.”

Elisa looks down at Giles. He’s on his haunches, rinsing his brush. The sinking sun backlights him, but she can make out the serene lines of fond contemplation.

“Whatever happens,” he says, “I’m old. Even my alter ego, Mike Parker, is old. What does this kind of risk matter to us at the end of the day? But you’re young. Your life sprawls out ahead of you like the Atlantic Ocean. And yet look at you. You’re not afraid.”

Elisa lets herself absorb the compliment, because she needs it, and then, to clear the air, simpers and signs with overblown motions. Giles frowns.

“Oh. You are afraid? Very afraid? Well, don’t tell me that, dear. I’m terrified!”

His exaggeration of fright makes the real thing somehow governable. Elisa smiles, grateful for the buoy, and steps back to gaze at Giles’s stenciled handiwork in the melodrama of an orange-purple sunset. She catches her breath. A doctored ID card slid into a pocket is one thing. A fraudulent sign painted onto a registered motor vehicle is another level of audacity:

Behind the lettering, the Pug’s cleaned door, luminous in the sun, becomes a pool into which Elisa slips and inside which she drowns until, in a great turnabout, she is graced with the creature’s abilities and begins to swim, even to breathe, not merely bubbled to the top like boiling eggs, but darting through the currents of this impossible scheme. Awareness of the cramped, dirty alley, suffused in the stink of tossed popcorn, doesn’t go away, and yet she believes she can feel an entire ocean’s worth of creatures converging on one spot, looking to her for guidance. The time has come.

26

THE BOTTLE CAP blunders from sweaty fingers, bickers off floor tiles, squirrels behind the toilet. Hoffstetler wants to fall to his knees, scrabble after it like a junkie. One of the janitors will find it, one of the scientists will lift fingerprints from it, and Strickland, cattle prod crackling, will collar Hoffstetler before he can schedule to meet the Bison’s Chrysler. But there’s no time. Monday’s graveyard-to-dayshift change, Occam’s most turbulent thirty minutes, is near. He’s got to steady his hands, his breathing, his mind, and do this. Not for himself. He’ll do it for the children whose lives were ruined by the classified medical studies that he allowed to happen. The Devonian, in its own way, is one more child being abused. Hoffstetler can avert its misery, and in that end, find a snip of redemption.

He pries the stopper and rubber tip from the syringe, tosses both in the toilet, and flushes it; the roar matches the pulse in his ears. Toilet-water flecks his face and hangs on his skin like warts as he pushes the needle into the bottle and draws the plunger. The silver solution eddies gorgeously into the barrel. He knows the law of nature: A substance that beautiful can only be deadly. He places the syringe into the pocket of his lab coat, wipes his face with his sleeve, and exits the toilet stall, trying not to look at the changeling face in the mirror. The poised, aloof college professor has been replaced by a red-faced, curled-lip murderer.

27

ANTONIO TAKES TEN years to find his punch card. It’s the crossed eyes, Zelda figures. Lord knows how he cleans a desk without knocking all contents to the floor. Hostile thoughts, but Zelda decides she deserves them. Elisa had a whole weekend to consider Zelda’s question: Are we friends? The answer, it seems, is no. Here it is, the end of Monday’s shift, and Elisa hasn’t said a word to her. Won’t even look at her. Zelda’s had it. At least that’s what she tells herself: She’s had it. Maybe Brewster’s right. A white friend is only a friend for as long as she needs you. What sticks in her head, though, is how fish-belly pale Elisa’s face had been tonight, how she kept looking over her shoulder, how half the cleaning products she picked up tumbled from the uncontrollable shake of her hands.

Yolanda pokes Zelda in the back. The line has shuffled forward, and so she does the same, except when she reaches for her punch card, the most ordinary thing in the world, it takes longer than Antonio’s ten years—it takes a lifetime. It’s like she’s reaching across a bottomless chasm. Humiliation and anger, it seems, no matter how much she deserves them and wants to own them, are slippery objects to Zelda, as slippery as this punch card. It flutters from her fingers, lazing down like a broken wing.

28

THE PUG JOUNCES up Falls Road. He’s got to arrive per Elisa’s schedule, one hour before the real laundry truck will show up—any earlier will raise suspicion. He barrels through pools of streetlight sodium, along the squiggled vein of the Jones Falls stream, past the black copses of Druid Hill Park, around the purple lawns of the Baltimore Country Club. Parts of the city he’s never explored and never will. Giles goes heavy on the pedal when nervous and takes the left at South Avenue so fast he can feel the passenger-side wheels almost lose contact with the pavement. The Pug slams down on wasted shocks and a box in the back overturns to unleash water-bottle missiles like a Polaris submarine. Giles curses, wrestles the vehicle, slows before a dark complex called Happy Hills Convalescent Home for Children, the last landmark before Occam Road.

He hasn’t been here since the day he drove eighteen-year-old Elisa to her interview. Nothing has changed. Thick woods on either side of the road still look to hide trolls, and the illuminated clock on Occam’s sign still glows like a second moon. He’s long regretted having had a role in Elisa taking this job. But not today. Today she has a purpose, and it is a beautiful thing to see. He tries to remember that as he follows the LOADING signs, passing through an empty parking lot. Well, not totally empty: He notices a giant green Cadillac Coupe de Ville before the Pug’s headlights strike a checkpoint guard holding up a hand for Giles to stop, while his other hand comes to rest upon the handle of a holstered gun.

29

THE GRAY LIGHT of the security monitors are all the sunrise Strickland needs. He climbs from the floor, his bed on nights he can’t bear to look at Lainie, and into his chair. His guts squelch, the sound of digesting painkillers. Must be hard work, because when he coughs there’s blood. It dots the white envelope on his desk. He wipes it. It smears, but that’s all right. Makes the envelope pulsate with importance. And it is important. It’s the paperwork for today’s dissection of the asset. He removes the document. It’s clean, beautiful—not a word is redacted. He doesn’t bother to read it, signs his name on a few dashes. He does linger over the diagrams. The autopsy looks pretty standard for a beast of such alleged scarcity. Y-shaped incision. Cracking the ribs in half. Scooping out the organs. The serrated-saw scalping. Brain plopped onto a pan. He can’t fucking wait.

Footsteps outside his door. Strickland looks up from the schema. This early, he expects Mr. Clipboard. But it’s not Fleming. It’s Bob Hoffstetler. He looks like shit. Sweaty, pale, skittish. Looks like Raúl Romo Zavala Henríquez, way over his head. Strickland leans back in his chair. Laces his fingers behind the head. It hurts, but the posture is worth it. This should be fun.

30

ZELDA KNEELS TO pick up the punch card. Yolanda’s going wild behind her. But all Zelda hears is Brewster carrying on about how she shouldn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t know Elisa, though, does he? Of course he doesn’t. Despite their long years of friendship, Elisa’s never been to Zelda’s home, not once. But Zelda knows the girl. She knows she knows the girl. And this is not the Elisa she knows.

Elisa’s card waits in its slot, unpunched despite Elisa’s rapid exit from the locker room. A small detail, maybe, until you add it to everything that’s been going on at Occam over the past several days. Equipment under dust covers being wheeled out of F-1. Scientists shaking hands at coffee-and-doughnut farewells. A mixed mood that feels like the last week of senior year: excited, but fearful, and sad, too. Zelda can feel the whole building clenching as if for impact. Something big is happening today, and Elisa, it seems abruptly clear, has gotten herself entwined. And how does Zelda know this? It’d been right there in front of her all night, squeaking across the floors.

Elisa’s shoes. She’d been wearing ugly, gray, rubber-soled sneakers, built for running.

Zelda swipes up her card, punches it, and then, in an act that makes Yolanda spit acid, finds Elisa’s card and punches that, too. Punch cards, after all, are the first evidence to which Fleming will look to find out who is here and who’s not if something goes wrong. Zelda wheels around, bumping past Yolanda without apology, and hustles back in the direction of the labs. Go wrong? Her hunch is that a lot is going to go wrong, a whole lot, and very quickly.

31

HOFFSTETLER TILTS TOWARD Strickland’s desk. He’s holding the syringe inside his pocket. Mihalkov will never find out. He’ll never need to know. Half the solution for Strickland. Half for the Devonian. The first needs to be killed to ensure the second can be killed cleanly. Hoffstetler tells himself that the wicked, hateful mudak deserves it. The glass of the syringe is oily, slipping from his grip. He wipes his fingers on the inside of his pocket, takes a drier hold. He’s nearly to the desk. Don’t stop moving.

“Go back and knock first,” Strickland says.

They are senseless words, and Hoffstetler, his brain hardwired for sense, rejects it like a computer fed defective data, and does the worst thing, he stops moving, right in front of a wall of monitors that blind him with sixteen screens of gray light. He raises a hand to shield his eyes, the hand that, one second ago, had held the syringe. It’s empty now, a soft, flabby, harmless thing.

“Knock…?”

“Protocol, Bob,” Strickland says. “I know how you value protocol.”

“I wanted… to give you one more chance…”

“Me? Give me? Bob, I don’t follow. You’re free to tell me about it, of course. Just go back to the door and knock first.”

32

NOT A SENSITIVE vehicle, the Pug, but the naked tires feel part of Giles’s flesh, and pulling away from the checkpoint, he feels every pebble that passes beneath. Sure, the guard had waved him through without checking ID, duped by the van’s paint job. But the checkpoint was always going to be the easy part, wasn’t it? Giles slows to a creep as he rounds the back of the facility. A figure leans on a wall, smoking between two lights. Giles wipes the fogged windshield. Yes, that has to be it: the loading dock. He tries to swallow his fear, but his throat is sandpaper.

He begins to pull in between painted yellow lines. The guard snaps awake, lifting both palms as one does to question an imbecile. He spins a finger, and Giles flinches at his error. He’s supposed to back in. Of course he is. You don’t load a van through the front. He wipes sweat from his face, shifts to reverse, and pulls back into the first leg of a three-point turn. This is bad. Oh, this is very bad. He’ll go a mile out of his way to avoid the public debasement of parallel parking. Now here, in the predawn dark, he’s got to back into a narrow slot while a wary guard observes? Giles checks the rearview mirror and sees the suspicious red eye of the guard’s lit cigarette. Giles shifts into reverse, grasps the wheel, and prays to the General Motors gods for a vehicular miracle.

33

“WELL, HOWDY, BOB. Come on in. What can I do for you this morning?”

Hoffstetler feels every inch the scolded child Strickland intended him to feel. Ten or twelve times he knocked on the door, while Strickland grinned, far too much time being lost. He lurches back before the strobing security screens. He’s baffled with fear, off-kilter enough that, thrusting his hand into his pocket, his index finger grazes the tip of the needle. Too close—he hisses panic into the bared teeth of his artificial smile.

“I just… wanted to make sure you… wished to go through with this.”

“These here are General Hoyt’s orders.” He lifts the topmost document, a superficial sketch of the asset perforated into butcher’s portions. “And I just initialed them. That means two hours and forty-five minutes from now, you and me act like good Americans and go gut that fish. I know how you feel. But think of it this way. The Japs, the Huns, the Chinese. They’re intelligent creatures, too, aren’t they? But we sure as hell had no problem killing them.”

Hoffstetler visualizes springing across the desk. He knew it might come to this. A graceless act, but so unlikely for a man his age that it might be all the surprise he needs. Strickland will raise an arm to defend himself, or turn his back—it doesn’t matter. The needle will pierce any part. Hoffstetler’s thighs are tensed for the vault when he notices the most minute of motions. Perhaps his eyes have become trained to detect anthropocentric detail of any size, down to the cilia of simple protocells and organelles. Just behind Strickland’s head, in the seventh monitor, the security camera’s perspective tilts upward, from a laundry van backing into a loading dock to the empty black sky above it.

Hoffstetler lets the syringe drop into his pocket. He replies that yes, of course, he’ll see Strickland at the euthanasia, but the polite sounds are muffled by the singing of his heart, “Slav’sya, Otechestvo nashe svobodnoye!” the Soviet state anthem. Mihalkov—he came through. After eighteen years of letting Hoffstetler struggle alone, the Russians have arrived to help.

34

ELISA SPRINTS INTO the laundry room. It is happening: For a second, she’d glimpsed the Pug backing into the loading dock and making such a serpentine production of it that the guard had rushed forward, a troubling thing, even as it had allowed Elisa space enough to take the broom and nudge the security camera upward before scrambling away. Her waist strikes the industrial sink, and she plugs the drain, cranks both hot and cold knobs. She snatches towels from a bin and hurls them under the water. Elisa and Zelda have spent years ridiculing Fleming’s QCCs, but now she’s got to hand it to the man: The practices rutted into her brain keep her on task when she otherwise might collapse in terror.

She scoops the sopping towels from the sink and drops them, heavy as mud, into the closest empty laundry cart. She keeps going, her uniform getting wetter, until the cart is half-filled, then wrenches off the water and clenches the cart handle. She pushes; the cart doesn’t budge. Her marrow turns to ice. She tries again, teeth bared, muscles tight, bearing down on her sneakers. The first inch is the toughest, but after that the cart slugs forward, one rotation, two. Her stopped heart picks up the beat, only to hiccup again: It’s the squeaky cart, the one that yowls like a tomcat, and there is no time left for switching it out.

35

GILES RECOILS FROM the knuckles against his window. The guard makes a cranking motion with his hand. Giles doesn’t know what to do but obey. He rolls down the window, and the guard’s features come into sharp definition: sleepy brown eyes, unkempt mustache, hairy ears. He frowns as he runs the light over Giles’s clothing, and Giles is jolted by memory: Twenty-two years ago, the night of the arrest at the gay bar that got him booted from Klein & Saunders, all those mustached cops and how their flashlight beams across his body felt like assault.

“You don’t look like Laundry,” the guard says.

“Thanks.” This is how a driver would talk, Giles thinks, not thank you, good sir.

The guard doesn’t appreciate the joke. “ID?”

Giles grins so hugely he believes teeth might start dropping from his jaws and pretends to search for his wallet, hoping the guard, cold and tired, will tell him to forget it. There is silence from the guard; Giles has no choice but to produce the ID. He holds it so the guard can read it without touching, but it doesn’t work. With viperous speed, the guard, not so drowsy after all, plucks it. The flashlight turns the ID’s papery stock translucent. Giles can see right through it as the guard scratches it with his thumbnail. The 7 Giles had inked to advance Michael Parker’s age comes off.

“Oops,” Giles says.

“Out of the van,” the guard says.

Then all the lights at Occam Aerospace Research Center go out.

36

ZELDA IS IN the laundry room when it happens. Six years ago, both halves of her duplex were robbed, and she’ll never forget how quickly she’d known that something was wrong. She’d been barely out of the car, Brewster still behind the wheel. Nothing was missing from the front patch of grass; there was nothing to take. And yet, everything was wrong. The grass was wrong, bothered by shoes different than theirs. The door was wrong, the knob rotated in an odd way. Most of all, the air was wrong, half-sucked away by a stranger’s panting, the rest stirred into wasplike agitation.

Staring at the drops of water on the floor, Zelda feels the same direful certainty. Nothing overt is wrong; water gets on floors. Why, then, does she edge around it like a detective around a pool of blood? Because, if she looks closely, the water drops themselves are evidence. They aren’t round beads snug with surface tension. They are slashes, describing a tale of haste—Elisa’s haste. These telltale patterns remain visible to her even after the overhead lights blink out and she is pitched into black.

It is the kind of event that has to be lived with for a minute before it can be believed. Occam is never dark. Even closet lights don’t turn off. An exhausted groan comes from the walls and then silence descends, a true silence bled of white noise, leaving Zelda alone with the drub of her own bodily machinery. No—not entirely alone. Far down a dark hall, she can hear the shrill squeak of the laundry cart with the bad wheel.

37

IF SHE HADN’T already been reaching for F-1’s door, Elisa doesn’t know how long it would’ve taken her to find it in the deluge of darkness. She muscles her cart across the still, shushed lab, the bad wheel screaming in the quiet, her constant dreams of the room her only map until her eyes begin to adjust to the low level of light—the first rays of dawn, she has to assume, eking in from first-floor windows and curling like smoke through ventilation passages heretofore invisible.

The cart strikes nothing until the ledge of the pool. Gray flashes of rocking water wheel through the darkness like thrown knives. Can he see her? Into blackness, she signs with the fever of prayer, words she can only hope that he’s learned. “Come.” “Swim.” “Move.” She’s sprawled across the ledge, leaning over the pool, signing. Water laps against her. She’s still signing, signing. There’s no knowing why the lights went out, but it will foster a panic, and panic will drive people to protect their most significant asset. There’s no hope for the creature, or Elisa, if he doesn’t come, swim, move, and now.

Two golden eyes crest like dual suns. Elisa goes wordless. Next thing, her shoes are off, her legs are in the water, her uniform is wrapping around her thighs like cold tentacles. She shivers and slogs toward him, arms outstretched. The golden eyes are wary, of course they are—he’s been pursued before. Elisa takes another step and the pool bottom slopes dramatically; suddenly the water is at her chin and she’s gasping, and the weight of her clothes drags her farther down the slope, and farther, and now she’s sputtering, and the only signs her hands are making now are the desperate, empty grasps of a drowning woman.

38

THE MONITORS SNAP with static electricity. The screens not yet black. A fading gray, sixteen dying eyes. Nothing’s being watched. Nothing’s being taped. Control is all Strickland has wanted since boot camp, Korea, the Amazon—control over his family, control over his own fate, and now it’s severed, machete into jungle root. He stands. His knee strikes his desk so hard he hears wood crack. He hobbles, tips against the monitor bank, steadies himself with dead fingers. That hurts, too, and he pushes away. It’s black lunar terrain. His foot upsets a trash can. His shoulder rams a wall. He has to fight his way through the doorway, as if it’s a tiny one built for a dog.

Footsteps, urgent but faltering, rise from the hall like a drip of rain. A beam of light scribbles across the black air.

“Strickland?” It’s Fleming, civilian putz, never any help.

“What the fuck”—sudden pain, everything hurts—“is this?”

“I don’t know. Fuses?”

“Well, call someone.”

“The lines are down. I can’t.”

Strickland’s instincts are always finest when it comes to contact. His fist shoots out as if by slingshot. Grabs Fleming by the collar. Their only instance of touching besides the first-day handshake. But it always loomed, didn’t it? The threat a man of blood and soot poses over a pencil pusher, clipboard waver? Fine stitching in Fleming’s collar rips as Strickland curls his biceps.

“Find someone. Now. We’re being invaded.”

39

AN OBJECT PRESSES against Elisa’s back. Seems too big for a hand, but it flexes like one, with palm cradle and finger posts. Another presses to her chest, five claws pricking, just barely, her breasts and stomach. There is strength enough here to squash her, but instead she is lifted, as gently as if she were a butterfly, until her head is out of the water. She coughs against the rolling muscles of a large shoulder as she’s floated backward to shallower depths. She can’t form coherent thoughts: He is holding her, his scales under her hands both soft as silk and sharp as crystal, and though no words pass, everything, everything is being said.

Her body jerks. He’s reached the limit of his chains. She snaps awake, establishes footing, and pulls from her sodden apron pockets the best tools she and Giles could scrounge: A bolt cutter and pair of pliers she’d smuggled in under her coat. The grooves across the creature’s body glow red, but only for an instant. He stares at her, only inches separating their eyes, and then stands upright, his chest emerging so that she can access the chains locked to the harness. Removed from water, his gills begin to fluff, but there is no doubting any of this. He understands. He trusts. He, like she, has nothing left to lose.

She wedges the bolt cutter around a chain link. Instantly she perceives that she’s made a fatal misjudgment. The link is too thick, and the cutter blades can’t get a grip; it’s like trying to bite a basketball. Elisa snugs the chain into the blades and tries to gnaw at it, but it has no effect beyond the flimsiest of scratches. She pockets the cutters and jams the needle nose of the pliers inside a link and tries to pull open the jaws to break it from within. This method gives her no leverage. Her hand slips, and the tool tumbles into the water. She doesn’t try to save it. There’s no point. She’s as red-handed as possible, soaked inside the F-1 pool with Giles waiting outside, with no way at all of cutting the creature free. It feels like a mercy when a man’s voice speaks from the darkness.

“Stop,” he says.

40

GILES BELIEVES HE is turning in a bravura performance as The Man Who Can’t Unlock His Seat Belt when the lights go out. Not only the two lights of the loading dock. All of them: Office windows, sidewalk path, lawns, awnings, parking lots, they all blink shut. The guard steps back from the van, scans the building, reaches for his radio.

“This is Gibson, loading dock. Everything all right in there? Over.”

Elisa hadn’t said anything about the lights going out. Giles takes the opportunity to peer into the side mirror at the loading-dock doors. He wants her to emerge. He also hopes she doesn’t, not yet. This guard isn’t going away. He will need, then, to be distracted. Giles leans out of the window and clears his throat.

“Sir?” He curses softly; that’s not driver-speak. He tries again: “Buddy?”

The guard adjusts his transmitter. “This is Gibson, loading dock, over.”

“Terribly sorry about the ID card,” Giles says. “I’m afraid I’m a little sheepish about my age. See this? It’s a hairpiece. I’m afraid I’m a vain man, though I assure you it does not interfere with my laundry-toting capabilities.”

The guard turns on him, deftly unholstering his gun.

“I’m going to say this one more time, Mr. Parker. Get out of the van.”

41

HOFFSTETLER SLIDES ACROSS the ledge, crashes into the water, grabs Elisa by the shoulder. The creature hisses, a sound like shaving ice, but, for once, death doesn’t scare Hoffstetler.

“Who are you working with?”

He asks because he still can’t believe that music and dancing, those vanguard tactics that kept the Devonian alive, could have been the brainchild of this nondescript janitor. But it takes one second of staring into her despairing eyes to affirm that she is that rarest of all things, a truly independent operative beholden to no principle beyond her sense of what is right.

“You moved the dock camera, didn’t you?” he says. “You’re taking it out of here, aren’t you?”

She nods, and his mind whirls. There are no Russians. He just blew Occam’s electrical grid with Mihalkov’s popper, and the only person here to help him is a frail-boned woman who can’t speak. It’s a situation doomed enough to laugh at, but he thinks of what he used to tell his students. Imagine being a planet. Don’t laugh, he’d tell them. Try to imagine it. Eons of loneliness, and then one day your ellipsis peaks toward that of another planet and there is a gasp of nearness. Wouldn’t you try to make the most of it? Wouldn’t you, too, combust and flare and explode if you had to? That is Elisa Esposito and Bob Hoffstetler: two lonely, unlikely bodies grasping at each other for just this precious instant.

“Tell it not to hurt me,” Hoffstetler says. “I’m going to unlock it.”

42

THE SECURITY-CAMERA screens are cold and lifeless when Strickland barges his way back into his tar-black office. He thunders about, knocking shit over. He feels blind. Handicapped. Like the creature, which can’t hardly breathe regular air. Like Elisa, who can’t talk. His swiping hand knocks the phone from the table. It lands with a pitiful little ring. He wonders if it was the red phone. General Hoyt. Jesus Fucking Christ. If Hoyt hears about this, Strickland will spend the rest of his life making up for it—

There. His good hand wraps around the smooth oak handle of the machete. No, the Alabama Howdy-do. It’s more and more difficult to keep that straight. The steel shaft zings against the metal cabinet behind which he keeps it hidden. He thumbs the switch. The Howdy-do hums to life. He waves it before him as he heads in the direction of the door. This time he doesn’t run into anything. It’s like the office is afraid of him now.

The hallway is lit by the barest gloss of infiltrating dawn. Only a few footsteps and voices echo down the corridors. Whoever fried the fuses knew what they were doing. The shift change is the perfect time to strike. A bottleneck at the elevator. General confusion in the front office. But only a few early birds in the actual halls and laboratories. Who would know this? The same man who’d just been in his office. Bob Hoffstetler. The Russkie. Strickland moves down the hall as fast as the darkness allows, snorting the smoking ozone of the Howdy-do.

“The asset!” he shouts to anyone listening. “Lock down the asset!”

43

NEITHER ARE SUITED for physical labor, this slight woman and this gone-to-seed mid-forties biologist. The laundry cart might as well be filled with cinder blocks. Hoffstetler, though, trusts the properties of propulsion and momentum. They just have to get it moving. But Elisa abandons the handle and leans into the cart to arrange wet towels to better hide the creature inside. She does it with such affection that Hoffstetler hates to snap at her, but he does. This woman has set in motion a plot the Soviet government decided was too risky, and it deserves the reward of a real attempt. She scurries back, they push, the towels rustle with the creature’s fear, and the wheels, weeping in protest, begin to turn.

It takes, by Hoffstetler’s estimation, the length of an entire career to reach the lab door. In the hallway, darkness still reigns, but he knows it won’t last; as Mihalkov said, the popper blows the fuses, but any homeowner with half a brain will be able to fix them. They bear down and push the cart in the direction of the loading dock. The only sounds are the squeaky wheel, their own grunts of strain, and the wheeze of the creature under the towels, until the serrated buzz of an angry voice reverberates from the next corridor:

“The asset! Lock down the asset!”

Hoffstetler knows, at once, what he must do. He takes a bottle of pills from his pocket and presses them into Elisa’s hand. “Mix one of these in the water every three days. Do you understand me? Its water must be kept at seventy-five percent salinity.” She stares in confusion. “Strict protein diet. Uncooked fish. Raw meat. Do you understand?” She’s shaking her head even as he’s handing her the syringe. “If you’re not going to make it, use this. Don’t let them cut it open. Please. It has secrets we’re not supposed to know. None of us deserve to know.” Except, perhaps, this janitor, he thinks. “It can only last thirty minutes out of water. Hurry. Hurry!”

She nods, but it’s loose, as if her head might topple off her neck. There is much more he needs to tell her, a lifetime’s worth of information and caution, but he’s down to mere seconds. He bolts into the darkness, following the bellow of Strickland’s voice.

44

ELISA PUSHES, HER leg muscles shaking, her arm muscles ready to burst. The cart moves by inches, every speck of grit on the floor a massive speed bump she’s forced to surmount. But she hears Hoffstetler calling for Strickland and this lights a fire under her feet as much as the hoarsening of the creature’s breathing. She pushes, and it’s hard, but what’s harder is acting normal at the approach of a confused-looking man, some white coat who, in a detail of almost obscene normalcy, is still holding his cup of coffee. He only glances at Elisa, of course he does, because women like her are invisible. Never has she been so grateful.

She reaches the sharp left turn leading to the loading dock. She can see morning light between the doors. But the stubborn wheel won’t budge. The cart won’t turn. People are coming. She hears footsteps, more than before, and voices of increasing hysteria. She kicks the wheel, and her feet almost slide out from under her. The cart is leaking water, the whole area is slippery. She gets behind the handle again, determined to bulldoze left with sheer strength, but her feet can’t get a grip in the puddle. Her knees hit the floor. She hangs from the cart like a child from a jungle-gym bar, afraid to drop.

Fingers curl around her arm.

45

ZELDA HOISTS ELISA to her feet. The girl is wild, trying to tear herself away, scrabbling for something in her pocket, but Zelda holds tight. Elisa isn’t just shaking. She’s convulsing, breath pounding, eyes blinkless and frenzied. Elisa’s hand rises from her pocket, holding what looks like a hypodermic syringe. A drop of silver liquid hangs from the tip, jeweled in the barest smidge of dawn’s blush. Zelda slowly draws her eyes from the needle’s point to Elisa.

“Honey,” she whispers. “Settle down.”

Her voice creates an effect that her face hadn’t. Elisa pushes the needle back into her pocket and collapses against Zelda, taking handholds of her uniform. Zelda has felt this kind of rageful hurt only at funerals and lets it happen, wrapping her arms around Elisa’s throttling back. Her uniform is wet. It’s soaking. Zelda looks over Elisa’s shoulder into the pile of wet laundry. White towels, white lab coats, white sheets—

And a single golden eye.

“Oh my God,” Zelda gasps. “Oh my God.”

Elisa pulls apart, grasping Zelda by the forearms, pleading with every quiver. Maybe it’s her ability to use those fingers to talk, but somehow through them everything is answered: why she’s been so cold with Zelda, why she’s tried to drive her friend away. It was because of this, because she didn’t want Zelda to become culpable in this, and it is just this dedication to their friendship that makes Zelda damn all good sense and take her place at the cart’s handle.

“You’re crazy,” Zelda says. “Now push.”

46

STRICKLAND KNOWS THE shadow-shape of Hoffstetler as sure as he knows the Russian’s flat-footed gait. He’s got him. Strickland moves faster, charging up the center of the hall by a single window’s worth of morning rays, ignoring an MP who salutes and asks for instruction. It takes a few steps for Strickland to pick up on a very unexpected thing. Hoffstetler isn’t running away. Hoffstetler’s coming straight at him. Strickland stops, thumbs the cattle prod, readies it at his side, opens his mouth to yell. But Hoffstetler speaks first.

“Strickland! It got free! I went inside to ready it, and it dragged me into the pool!”

“You expect me to believe—”

Hoffstetler grabs Strickland’s coat. Strickland recoils, wants to jam him with the Howdy-do, but it’s so sudden, so bewildering.

“It’s not me, Richard! Somebody broke in! Got it out!”

“You’re the dirty Red who came into my—”

“If it was me, would I be telling you this? We need to shut down the whole facility!”

Hoffstetler’s face is so close their noses touch. Strickland glares, trying to make out the scientist’s eyes. Truth is in the eyes. He’s seen it in every man he’s threatened. Every man he’s killed. If only he could see it.

Then, a little favor: All the lights in the universe blast back to life.

47

GOING DARK HAD been a soft thing, a closing of one’s eyes for sleep. When Occam’s lights return, it’s at stadium wattage, tungsten exploding from windows like backdraft fire, parking-lot lights pounding down like lava. The guard shields his eyes and spins, the building itself having become the ambusher. Giles has one leg out of the driver’s door and hesitates, blinded, too, but somehow, between his pressed eyelids, he looks in the right direction and sees the double doors open and Elisa emerge with a cart, just as planned, except with a large black woman helping her push.

Giles knows he is not a man of action. It has hurt him, again and again. It has taken the life he should have had. Not today. The guard is still staring at the building when Giles has an idea, one he doesn’t allow to reach the scale upon which notions so consequential are weighed. He grabs the door with both hands and slams it into the guard with all of his strength. The van sits high and the sound of the metal door against the man’s skull is awful, and so is the bag-of-bones rattle of the body hitting the pavement, but it is done, the first violent act of his life, and though it does not make him feel good, he knows there is plenty of violence to share, especially here.

48

THE CART DESCENDS the ramp by itself, crashing into the back of the van. Elisa sprints after it while Zelda shuts the ramp doors to camouflage their exit. Elisa pulls open one of the van doors and starts pitching wet towels inside, just enough to uncover the creature. He is curled like a fetus, one of his great hands shielding his darting eyes from the brilliant overhead floods. She reaches in, takes him under the arm, tries to lift. He comes with her, but only a little. His gills are ballooning, his posture is wracked, he can barely stand.

Zelda is there—again, her friend is there. She takes the creature’s other arm, her face scrunching in revulsion until she feels the cool, chain-mail texture of his body. She touches him for no more than ten seconds as they roll him into the back of the van, but in that time, Elisa glimpses the stunned comprehension on Zelda’s face. This is no mere creature, no overgrown lizard. This is more like a man, but greater in every aspect, a higher grade of creature than they are, stranded in a cold, arid desert he was never meant to enter.

“Go,” Zelda breathes. “Go!”

There is no time for grateful farewells. Elisa points at the security camera, signs “They can’t see you,” and scoots Zelda toward the doors, for they haven’t seen her yet, she can still get back inside and plead ignorance. But Zelda is still standing there, slack and astonished, when Elisa slams the van’s doors and the vehicle lurches from the dock, tires squealing louder than the laundry cart’s bad wheel.

49

STRICKLAND RUNS. HE loathes it. Running in an office is the ultimate proof he’s lost control. But there’s no choice. He hurtles through the lobby, thumping people to the floor, and scrambles up the utility stairs and through the lobby, exploding out the front door and stopping to get his bearings. Two MPs are right behind Strickland, and Fleming behind them. Outside, morning has fully arrived. Scientists are treading up the walk for work, yawning. Secretaries pause to adjust their lipstick in compact mirrors. Everything is normal.

That sound, though. A vehicle, too close to be going that fast. Strickland springs to the right, across the lawn, rounding the corner of the building. There it is, like a giant snowball plowing down Everest, a white laundry van careening toward him.

“Shoot it!” Strickland cries, but the MPs are still catching up, and there’s nothing a man with a cattle prod can do to a speeding behemoth. The checkpoint guard scrambles out of the way. Still the van swerves, an unexpected clue to the driver’s unwillingness to cause casualties. There is only one vehicle in that part of the lot, and the van swipes it. The car’s rear end crumples. It is a long, gorgeous teal Cadillac Coupe de Ville.

“No.” Strickland’s chest hurts like he’s the object being struck. He hears his voice spiral upward, girl-pitched. “No, no, no!”

50

THE VAN JOLTS, the tires spin. Giles feels the punch of Elisa’s body hitting the back of his seat. Burnt rubber wafts up. They’re stopped. Feet from freedom, they’re stuck. He looks over the Pug’s hood and sees the van’s front bumper locked with the bright green Caddy’s. He hears a broken scream—he thinks it’s a woman—but it’s a hulk of a man barreling toward the van in a silverback lope, holding some sort of bat.

Giles curses, cranks the van into reverse, pounds the gas. The van slugs backward a yard. Metal screeches. Broken glass pops like fireworks. The running man is fast; he’s halved the distance. Giles switches the gear to forward and stomps the pedal. Chrome crunches and the pinched bumpers whine. He looks up and sees armed men with raised guns calling for the running man to get out of the way so they can fire. The man, though, is crazed. He jumps a hedge, shouting nonsense. Giles rolls up his window, a pitiful defense.

And it’s good he does. The man’s bat strikes the window. A crack halves the glass. Giles cries out, twists the steering wheel right and guns the engine, then twists it left and guns it again. The man strikes the window again, creating a spiderweb. Then again and it shatters, hard little pellets raining against Giles’s face. It is then that the van’s bumper tears off and the man has to leap back to avoid being sideswiped. There are sparks as the Pug shears through the back of the Caddy, spitting green paint, a lot of it, multiple coats, it seems to Giles.

51

HIS GILLS OPEN wide, revealing dizzying layers of red lace, and hold there, the filaments fluttering like centipede legs in search of solid ground. His gasps are short, growing further apart. His arm rises from the wet laundry, draped in it like a child playing ghost, and his hand curls and continues upward, like the first part of him going to heaven.

Elisa grabs his wrist, brings it back to earth. It struggles back outward, and suddenly she sees it: the sign for water. She’s been packing him in towels, deaf to bottles clanging all over the floor. They bank and spin with Giles’s turns, but she snatches one, screws off the lid, and douses the creature’s face, eyes, gills. He arches his back, leans into it. It seeps into his body through grooves that have gone a miserable brown, the liquid vanishing seconds after it hits, and still he’s dry, still he’s gasping.

“Is it all right? Is it alive?” Giles hollers.

Elisa kicks the wall with both feet, the closest she can get to signing “faster.”

“It’s morning! It’s traffic! I’m doing my best!”

She kicks again. Hoffstetler had said thirty minutes was all the creature could take and fifteen must have passed by now, maybe twenty; time is lost. Her attention knifes back to the creature. He’s making a choking noise, and Elisa, who knows only human consoling techniques—a pathetic limitation, she now realizes—slides an arm beneath him and hitches him up to a sitting position, while her other hand corrals another bottle and starts pouring it over his body.

He absorbs, he gulps; his freshly watered eyes, now at window level, go from gold to dandelion yellow; even nearly suffocated, he appears amazed at the world unfolding outside the van. Elisa looks, too, wondering if the city possesses a shred of a jungle’s magic. Gray scaffolding of unlit neon lights daubed with orange sunlight. The surging yellow whale of a trolley. A Coca-Cola billboard of a man and woman, nestled as closely as Elisa and the creature, the woman holding a soda bottle as Elisa holds the next bottle of water. She thinks, just for a moment, that Baltimore isn’t the futile anthill she’s forced herself to accept, but its own tangle of tales, morass of myths, forest of fairies.

The Pug, swooping behind the Arcade, loses control, and though Giles brakes, the left front of the van, no longer protected by a bumper, smashes into the trash bins. No one has time to care. When Giles throws open the back doors, Elisa is ready, the creature draped in a wet lab coat and hooded in a wet sheet. The climb up the fire escape is a blundering, gawky, graceless slapstick, the sickening opposite of Shirley Temple and Bojangles.

Somehow they make it to the top, and also down the hall, and also through Elisa’s door, and Giles lets go at the bathroom threshold because of the narrow clearance, and it’s Elisa alone who has to guide the creature down, but they’re both weak now and it’s more like a fall, his useless legs buckling against the tub and dropping back-first into the waiting water. The splash hits Elisa’s face like the van’s bottled water had hit the creature’s face: ablution, baptism. He dwarfs the apartment’s tub, but so would most men, Elisa tells herself, and she cranks the hot-water knob because a full night has cooled what’s there. The pipes squeal and shudder, then water unloads right next to the creature’s head. The surface rises fast, covers his face. Elisa waits for bubbles of breath. There is nothing. She stirs the water with her hand to match the heat of F-1’s pool.

“Who was that woman helping you?” Giles pants from behind. “Do you employ a whole nest of saboteurs?”

Yes, the pool: She thinks of how she slipped beneath the water, how her mouth flooded with salt. She reaches into her pocket, withdraws Hoffstetler’s bottle of saline pills. Another object comes out, clatters to the floor.

“Good Lord,” Giles says. “Is that a syringe?”

One pill every three days, is that what Hoffstetler had said? Or three pills every one? The creature is a sunken rock; there is no time to ponder. She shakes three pills directly into the water. They fizz, and she stirs again with her hand, slopping the salt toward the creature’s face and neck. Then, terribly, there is nothing more to do. She takes the creature’s hand. That massive, webbed thing, resplendent with rainbowed scales, striated with delicate spirals. She adds her other hand, folding his clawed fingers until she can squeeze their joint fist as a surgeon might squeeze a heart.

Giles’s shadow falls over them.

“You were right,” he breathes. “He’s beautiful.”

The creature’s hand tightens around hers, swallowing it whole as a snake does a rodent. A death spasm, Elisa thinks with a jagging sob, until the bathwater begins to glow, a flicker of cobalt at first, a trick of the eye, then blossoming, then burning sapphire blue, transforming the cramped, dank, windowless chamber into an endless aquarium inside which they swim, too, effervescent, ethereal, and alive.