The Shape of Water

1

ON A TRAY, on his desk, are the blistered remains of a gadget. Strickland’s been staring at it for hours. A section of metal pipe peeled open by some kind of explosion. A red blotch that looks like deep-fried plastic. Black, crusted veins that probably used to be wiring. Truth is, he doesn’t have the first fucking clue. He’s not even really trying. He’s just staring.

Whatever sort of bomb it was, it melted everything. That’s his life now, isn’t it? Melted. His efforts to be a dad. The cardboard notions he’d had of domestic tranquility. Even his body. He glances at the bandages. He hasn’t changed them for days. They’re gray, damp. This is what happens to corpses in caskets. They melt to black sludge. And it won’t stop at his fingers. He feels the decay worming up the arteries of his arm. Tendrils of it already gluing to his heart. The Amazon was replete with such rank fecundity. There might be no stopping it.

A knock on his door. He’s been staring at the tray so long that it aches to roll his eyeballs. It’s Fleming. Strickland dimly recalls requesting this visit. Fleming had gone home to sleep. To sleep. After this level of disaster? Strickland never considered leaving Occam. He convinced himself it had nothing to do with how, if he wanted to go home, he’d first have to assess the damage to the Caddy. The thought is disrupted by Fleming clearing his throat. The gray light of the security monitors is like an X-ray. Strickland can see Fleming’s flabby organs. His twiggy bones. The pulsing electrodes of his fear.

“You making any progress with that?” Fleming asks.

Strickland doesn’t glare. To glare requires an ounce of respect. Over the top of the clipboard behind which Fleming hides, Strickland can see a neck bruise from where he throttled Fleming during the blackout. The fucker’s as tender as a fruit.

Fleming clears his throat again, consults his clipboard. “We have a lot of paint chips to work with. That should tell us a lot. Make, model. Best of all, we’ve got the whole front bumper. We can put out search parties right away to look for a white van without a bumper. It’d be easier if we could involve local police, but I understand why you don’t want to do that. Right now we’ve got the whole lot roped off so we can measure tire treads.”

“Tire treads,” Strickland repeats. “Paint chips.”

Fleming swallows. “We’ve also got surveillance tapes.”

“Except from the camera that matters. Do I have that right?”

“We’re still combing the footage.”

“And not a single eyewitness who can tell us anything useful.”

“We’ve really only just begun interviews.”

Strickland drops his gaze back to the tray. Food belongs on a tray. He imagines eating the gadget. His teeth cleaving against the metal bits. The swallowed pieces sitting heavy and strong in his stomach. He could become the bomb. The question would be where he chose to place himself when he exploded.

“If you don’t mind me saying so,” Fleming continues, “I believe we’re dealing with highly trained elites here. Well financed and well equipped. Infiltration took less than ten minutes. My opinion, Mr. Strickland, is that this is the work of Red Army Special Forces.”

Strickland doesn’t respond. Russian penetration? Could be. First satellite, first animal, and first man in space. Next to those feats, the theft of the century is nothing. Plus, there’s Hoffstetler. Except Strickland can’t find a feather of proof Hoffstetler did anything wrong last night. The whole attack, it doesn’t feel Russian. It’s too sloppy. The van he assaulted with the Howdy-do was a piece of junk. The driver some hysterical old man. Strickland needs time to think. That’s why he called Fleming here. Now he remembers. He sits up straight. Grabs his painkillers. Tosses a few into his mouth and chews.

“What I wanted to say,” he declares, “what I want to make absolutely clear, is that we confine knowledge of this situation to Occam until I give the say-so. Give me a chance to contain it. No one needs to know about this, not yet, you understand?”

“Except General Hoyt?” Fleming asks.

The rot threaded up Strickland’s arm freezes like sap in winter.

“Except…” Strickland can’t finish.

“I…” Fleming, needing a shield, brings the clipboard to his chest. “I called the general’s office. Right away. I thought—”

The last of his melt is rapid. Strickland’s ears seal off with his own liquefied flesh. The job he’d nearly completed at Occam, everything he’d achieved in the Amazon. All of it had been plenty enough to bargain away the binds roping him to Hoyt. What is it all worth now? Hoyt knows he’s failed him. The career tower Strickland has climbed at Hoyt’s goading is revealed to be a guillotine. Strickland falls from it in two halves and lands in something soft. It’s the slime of a rice paddy. He’s choked by the stench of excrement fertilizer. Deafened by the idiot chortle of passing oxcarts. Oh, God, God, God. He’s back in Korea, where it all began.

Korea, where Hoyt’s job was to guide the southward evacuation of tens of thousands of Koreans, with Strickland as his personal deputy. It was in Yeongdong, where General MacArthur ordered their group to make a stand, that Hoyt collared Strickland, pointed at a truck, and told him to drive. Drive he did, through steaming, silver rain, keeping pace with herons on their lazy, flapping hops from one paddy to the next.

They arrived at a former gold mine halfway filled with squalid clothes. Strickland figured he was to burn them, same as they’d burned so many villages so that the People’s Army of the North couldn’t nab the spoils. Only when Strickland got closer did he see they weren’t clothes. They were bodies. Fifty of them, maybe a hundred. The inside of the mine was pocked with bullet holes. It was the worst of army rumors come true, a massacre of Korean innocents. Hoyt smiled, took gentle hold of Strickland’s rain-slicked neck, and caressed it with his thumb.

“* **** ** * *****,” he said.

When Strickland thinks back on it, Hoyt’s words are but more shrieked redactions. The gist, though, he recalls well enough. A scout had brought word to Hoyt that not all of those dispatched inside of this mine were dead. That was bad for Hoyt. Bad for America. If survivors crawled out and told their story, the US would have a real mess on its hands, wouldn’t it?

Never, ever would Strickland let himself blubber in front of Hoyt. He unslung his rifle. It felt like he was tearing off his own arm. But Hoyt held a finger to his lips, then waved it around in the rain. It was just the two of them out here. Not too wise to draw attention. Hoyt drew from his belt a black-bladed Ka-Bar knife. He held it out to Strickland and winked.

The leather handle squished like putrefied meat in the muggy rain. The bodies were muggy, too, piled five or six deep, the limbs bent and raveled. He rolled a woman out of the way. Brains spilled from a hole in her head. He dug a man from the heap. Intestines spooled out, bright blue. Ten bodies, twenty, thirty. He burrowed into the cold carnage, like tunneling into a corpse’s womb. He was lost, slippery and stinking. Most were dead. But some were, in fact, alive, whispering, maybe begging, probably praying. He cut every throat he found, just to be safe. No one was alive here, he told himself, not even Richard Strickland.

He didn’t trust the sound when he heard it. How do you trust anything in the bowels of hell? But it kept on, a reedy whine, and at the bottom of the pile he found a woman. Dead, but rigor mortis had turned her body into a protective cage for her baby. The baby was alive. Some miracle. Or the opposite of a miracle. Uncovered, the baby began to cry. It was loud, just what Hoyt didn’t want. Strickland tried to wipe the Ka-Bar of hair and gristle so he’d get a clean cut. But he was shaking too much to trust himself. And wasn’t that the point of all of this? To trust? In Hoyt? In violence? In war? That bad was good, that murder was compassion?

There was a puddle. Half rainwater, half blood. Strickland gently pressed the baby’s face into the liquid. Maybe, he prayed, the baby was a miracle. Maybe it could breathe in water. But no such creature existed, not in the whole world. A few twitches and it was over. Strickland, too, wanted his life to be over. He rose to his knees, bodies rolling off his back. Hoyt came to him, cradling Strickland’s head against his round belly and petting his bloody hair. Strickland gave himself over, held on tight. He tried to listen to what Hoyt was saying, but his ears had clogged with blood and tissue.

“**** ***.”

Then it was a whisper; now it is a shriek. What he’d done was an atrocity, a war crime that would be on the front page of every paper in the world if it ever got out, and it would fuse him to Hoyt until one of them was dead. Alone in his Occam office, all these years later, Strickland finally understands. The earsplitting wails of Hoyt’s redactions—how had he missed the connection? They are the screams of the monkeys, one and the same. All his life, primal voices have pushed him to accept the mantle for which he’s been groomed. It is why Deus Brânquia had to be captured. It is why the Jungle-god must destroy the Gill-god. No new deity fully ascends until the old deity is slain. He should have listened to Hoyt all along. The monkeys—don’t be scared by their orders.

Follow them.

2

THE CHARCOAL IS a stick of dynamite in his hand. It’s not a tool he uses much. You don’t choose charcoal to depict Etiquette Antiseptic Deodorant Cream or Tangee Summer Rouge. It’s untidy, the opposite of what such products demand, and black makes people wary, not in the mood to buy. Ah, but there was a time when he’d accepted nothing else! He’d used it for nudes, mostly, as charcoal was the rawest instrument and demanded rawness of its subject. Drawing with it was equivalent to witchcraft. Even patches of paper he ignored came to life as angled cheekbones, lifted foreheads, thrust clavicles, the slopes of buttocks, the sides of bellies. Finer features sank into cinder and rose reborn, the story of evolution played out in two dimensions.

He was so young then and unafraid of mistakes, eager to seize mistakes, in fact, as the catalyst of artistic surprise. Giles wonders if he still has it in him. Will his aching old hands impede him from modulating color from black to heather to smoke to fog? Will the tremble of his old fingers prevent him from smudging the texture from burlap to twill to silk to suede? It is one day since the heist; his ears are attuned for police sirens. The only thing to settle his mind, and his hands, is to work. He selects a pencil of medium thickness. It is gummy from decades in a cigar-box coffin. He chips at it with a thumbnail and lowers it to the paper, which lies on the easel, which rests on his lap, which sits on the closed toilet.

The creature watches from beneath bathwater. It is still learning how to breathe the water of the Arcade Apartments, and can do little but roll. This it does rather comfortably, like a young man not ready to leave bed. Giles smiles at it; he smiles at it a lot. First it was to assure the unknowable sphinx that he meant it no harm. Now Giles’s smile is genuine, and he has to laugh. How flat and empty his cats’ eyes now seem! There is so much to be read in the creature’s ever-changing eyeshine. The interest it has in Giles and his colorful array of pencils, not a single one of them a scalpel or cattle prod. How it is coming to trust Giles, perhaps even like him.

No, not it—he. Elisa has been adamant about that, and Giles is happy to comply. It doesn’t hurt that the creature is ravishing, a billion dazzling gems molded into the shape of a man by an artist orders of brilliance superior to Giles. He doesn’t think they make oils or acrylics capable of reproducing such incandescence, nor watercolors or gouache capable of capturing the darker whispers. Hence the route of simplicity: charcoal. Giles says what he recalls of the Hail Mary and makes his first stroke, the S-curve of a dorsal fin.

“There,” he gasps. Then, a chuckle of amazement. “There it is.”

He can’t see the sink mirror at this angle, but he feels he could be thirty-five again, even twenty-five—that bold, that brave. He makes another line, another. Not a work of art, he warns himself, just a sketch, something to get the old juices flowing. Still, he can’t help but feel that these rough lines are the most vibrant he’s made since the day he accepted the job at Hutzler’s, the forerunner to Klein & Saunders, the forerunner to forgetting everything that mattered.

Miss Strickland—Mrs. Strickland—had she been some kind of lipsticked, beehived seer? She’d told Giles the truth. Not only the truth that Bernie didn’t want what he’d come to sell, but that he shouldn’t debase himself in the process. You deserve to go somewhere where you can be proud of who you are, she’d said, and that was here, right here, in the home of his best friend, within touching distance of the greatest living thing he’d ever seen.

Elisa had little information to give about the creature’s origin, but that didn’t matter. Giles senses the creature’s divinity, and practice sketch or not, no artistic charge requires graver attention than that of depicting the sacred. Raphael, Botticelli, Caravaggio—as a young artist, he’d studied all of them in library books and knew the rewards and risks of portraying the sublime. It required personal sacrifice. How else did Michelangelo complete the Sistine Chapel fresco in four years? It’s a joke, comparing himself to Michelangelo, but there is a similarity. Both had access to something the world at large had never seen. Even if the police sirens do come—by God, it has been worth it.

He starts to gesture for the creature to turn slightly, then laughs at the preposterous request. How quickly the portraitist’s prerogative returns! But the creature responds, adjusting so that his left eye rises above the waterline, as if to get a sharper look at the signal. Giles holds his breath, decides to finish the gesture. The creature follows the spinning finger, as he might have followed a winged insect or bird in his native land, calmly appreciative, devoid of hostility. The creature blinks. His gills settle softly.

Then, a willing model, he turns.

3

WHEN DID DEPARTMENT stores replace their overhead lights with supernovas? For how long has the binned fruit wept at its own beauty? At what point did baked goods begin sighing sugary secrets into a cloud that beaded upon her face like happy tears? When did shoppers, those disapproving ladies with bulky purses and rude carts, transform into women who smiled at her, insisted she go first, complimented her on her choices? Perhaps they’d seen what Elisa saw reflected in butcher-counter glass: not a timid huncher hiding her throat scars, but a woman straight of back pointing out the cuts of fish and meat she wanted. Quite a lot of both, the butcher probably thought, but why not? Surely a woman like this had a hungry man waiting at home. And she did. Elisa laughs. She did.

Not just meat, either. Eggs, loads of them, cartons arranged in her cart in playful crisscross patterns that make other shoppers laugh at her moxie. Bags of salt, too—Hoffstetler’s saline pills won’t last forever. It takes her a while to find these items, but she doesn’t mind. Shopping for someone else is wonderful. Giles had offered to do it, but she’d refused; she felt only she could intuit what the creature needed. She’d used public transit, ignoring uniformed police, reminding herself that they had no clue what she’d done, and gone all the way to Edmondson Village. Zelda has always raved about the shopping-center cornucopia, and she’d been right. Zelda: Elisa has a lot to say to her, and she will, on her next shift—it’s critical she not miss a single shift if she hopes to evade suspicion. Thinking of Zelda, Elisa’s heart, already full, presses at the limits of her rib cage.

She is surprised to find at the front of the store a section of plants and flowers. It draws her in; she lets the reaching fronds and dangling ivy toss across her cheeks. This is what the creature had needed to fill the lab’s bareness and what he needs now to round the bathroom’s sharp edges. She selects the leafiest plants she can find. Two thick, potted ferns; they’ll hide a lot of porcelain and tile. A fan palm with leaves like the creature’s hands; maybe he will feel less lonely? A dragon tree tall enough to reach the lights over the sink; perhaps it will tint the whole room green.

Piled inside the cart, the leaves tickle her nose, make her giggle. How is she going to get all of this home? She’ll have to buy one of the handcarts she saw near the entrance. An unexpected expense, but what difference will a few more dollars make? Today is the first day of her life she hasn’t counted pennies, and she’s determined to revel in it. She’s as conscious of her big smile as she would be a gaudy hat. She ought to try to temper it. Any cop in his right mind sees a woman this overjoyed about buying groceries, a red flag will rise.

It’s difficult, and quite amusing, to navigate through the plants in her cart, and upon steering into the checkout aisle, the cart bumps into a standing display. A hundred cardboard air fresheners dance from their hooks. She idles a finger across them. They are shaped like little trees, each advertising a different scent. Pink cherry. Brown cinnamon. Red apple. Several are green. REAL PINE SCENT!, a cellophane package proclaims.

She doesn’t think her smile can get bigger, but it does. She plucks one from the rack. No—she takes all the green ones off the peg. Six of them. Not much trees for a jungle, but a start.

4

EVEN WHEN HIS tears drop to the paper, Giles makes it work, smearing them with the side of his hand, imbuing harsh lines with a fluidic softness resembling that of the creature’s scales. He smiles at this revelation, even as he expects that it is only the first of many to come. Tears, a drop of blood, the touch of saliva from a kiss: The creature would use his magic to turn these substances, too, into art, into grace.

Giles lifts a hand, spins a finger. The creature shifts to offer Giles yet another angle, stretching his resplendent neck, almost preening. Giles laughs, tastes salt, licks it away, and draws, draws, draws, a starving man at a banquet that he worries the waiters might whisk away. When he begins to speak, he doesn’t notice it; his murmur is the rustle of charcoal over paper.

“Elisa says you’re all alone. The last of your kind. Something like that.” He chuckles. “Try as I might, I don’t catch everything she says. Naturally I didn’t believe her at all at first. Who would? Then I saw you and, if I may say so, you’re very convincing in person. I hope you can forgive my early reticence. Perhaps even sympathize. What did you think when you first saw the inside of a naval ship or the tank they put you in? I can’t imagine your thoughts were especially flattering to the human race. Things change.”

The ridge over the creature’s eyes: He draws it mist-gray, defenseless.

“But then Elisa finds you. And there again, yes? A change. In her, for sure. But also, I suspect, in you? Perhaps we humans are not all so bad? If such a thought has crossed your mind, I thank you, though I’d warn you that it’s a charitable assessment.”

The cascading plates of his chest, sleek as petals, each one drawn a darker silver.

“Now that I’ve properly met you, though—oh, I’m Giles, by the way. Giles Gunderson. The custom is to shake hands, but seeing how we’re to the point of bathroom nudity, I think we can forgo that. You see, now that I’ve met you, I find myself circling back to where I began. I’m not certain that I agree with our Elisa. Are you all alone? Are you really? For if you are an anomaly, then so am I.”

The diaphanous fins drawn ash-cloud gray, the bones black slashes.

“It’s silly. But I feel as if I, too, were plucked from where I belonged. Or when—perhaps I was born too early. The things I felt as a boy… I was too young to understand them, too out of place or time to do anything about it. Now that I understand? Well, I’m old. Look at this thing. This body I’m stuck inside. My time is ending, even though it feels like I never had a time, not really.”

The shape of the scalp, the smoothest, feathered strokes.

“But I can’t be alone, can I? Of course not; I’m not that special. Anomalies like me exist all around the world. So when does an anomaly quit being an anomaly and start being just the way things happen to be? What if you and I are not the last of our kinds, but one of the first? The first of better creatures in a better world? We can hope, can’t we? That we’re not of the past, but the future?”

Giles holds the drawing at arm’s length. For a character sketch, it’s not bad. And what are character sketches for? Practice for a grander work. Giles chuckles again. Is that what he’s planning? My, he hasn’t felt this precocious in decades.

He takes a breath and turns the paper toward the tub. The creature cocks his head until his second eye crests from the water. He stares at the sketch, then tilts his head to compare it to his own submerged body. Occam types might insist self-awareness in the creature was impossible, but Giles would tell them different. The creature knows he’s being depicted, and that it’s different from a reflection in a river. This is, in short, the magic of art. To concede the possibility of being captured in this way is to actively collaborate with the artist. By God, Giles thinks, it’s true: They are not so different from each other. Giles might still, under the right light, bathed in the right water, be beautiful, too.

5

THE TWO-WHEELED GROCERY cart is more agile than Elisa’s janitorial equivalent, but Baltimore’s sidewalks present a more robust challenge than polished laboratory floors. It’s late afternoon, forever since she’s slept, but she still isn’t tired; cradling the creature in the van seems to have injected her with the opposite of whatever had filled Hoffstetler’s syringe. She is electrified. She got off the bus several stops early so that she could take a scenic walk home, burn off this nervous energy. As badly as she wants to see the creature again, the brine odor of the Patapsco lures her forward, like a child to fresh-baked cookies.

She wrangles the cart past an off-limits pier and working wharf. There she finds a thin pedestrian jetty. Is it legal to walk it? The last thing she needs is police. But there is nothing suggesting a ban. She walks out onto the river, the shadow of city buildings sliding off her back like a nightgown. There is no fence, no protective posts, nothing but a sign reading NO SWIMMING! NO FISHING! OPENS TO THE SEA AT 30 FT! The idea of fishing has always revolted her, and no one at Home ever taught her to swim, but she understands the sign well enough. Once the water level reaches the 30 FT mark painted on a concrete stanchion—assuming it ever rains again—the canal will provide access to the bay, as well as the ocean.

Elisa parks her cart and toes the edge of the jetty, closing her eyes against a spluttering salt spray that suggests the day is not as halcyon as she has perceived it. This explains why people on the bus had their collars upturned and their postures locked so as not to feel the chill of their own clothes. It also helped explain why the woman who’d sat across the aisle from Elisa hadn’t noticed her sunny smile until the third attempt.

The woman had been pretty, everything that Elisa, until the events of the past day, had ever dreamed of being, just how she’d always imagined Julia of Julia’s Fine Shoes. Slim, but with curves enough to fill out a striped flannel dress, the ensemble accented with rhinestone buckles, a matching pin, bracelets, earrings, and wedding ring. Only the blond beehive felt out of date, and that Elisa attributed to the fact that, well, this was a working woman, and working women, as Elisa well knew, were busy.

When she’d finally caught the woman’s eyes, the woman had hesitated before smiling back; like everyone else, she’d seemed taken aback by Elisa’s gaiety. She’d glanced down at Elisa’s hand, seeming to take note of the absence of a ring. To Elisa’s surprise, the woman showed not scorn but relief; the smile became less performative, more genuine. Elisa got the sense that, as much as she admired this beautiful, professional woman, the woman admired her even more. Even crazier, Elisa felt she could hear the woman’s primary thought: Do what your heart tells you. At all costs, follow your heart.

At last, Elisa is doing just that. But here, at the edge of the world, the temperature dropping by the second, Elisa finds herself troubled by the woman’s pinched expression. If a woman who has it all can be so unhappy, what hope has a graveyard-shift janitor, one who can barely make rent, one whose inability to speak cuts her off from most of society, one who happens to have a highly classified amphibious man lying in her bathtub?

Elisa opens her eyes, turns around, squints north. There is no more doubting it: It is a gray, foreboding day. The proof is in the distant marquee lights of the Arcade, which Mr. Arzounian doesn’t switch on unless it’s dark enough to warrant the expense. Elisa’s stomach seesaws. She can see the Arcade from here, which means the creature is that close to this river. The proximity upsets her. She grabs her cart, wheels it around, heads home as quickly as she can.

She finds Giles asleep, upright on top of the toilet lid, snoring lightly, his hands caked in charcoal. Quietly, so as not to wake him, she lowers herself to the ratty rug, folds her arms on the tub rim, and nestles her chin into them. She gazes into the creature’s eyes, still bright underwater, and listens to the soft bubbling of his breath. He blinks, a greeting. She unfolds an arm and fins her index finger through the water until it touches the back of his hand. Unexpectedly, he rolls the hand over so that she is touching his palm, her finger the single stamen of a huge, dewy, unfolding flower. Now she listens for her own breath, but hears nothing. Hands are how the two of them talk, but this? This is a touch. Elisa pictures the woman on the bus, how rigidly she sat, touching no one. An absence of fear, Elisa realizes, can be mistaken for happiness, but it isn’t the same thing. Not even close.

6

WATCH THE WORLD in rewind. It’s faster, scoured of soul, a knife grated over fish scales until all iridescence is gone. Stop. Enjoy the fleshy slap of magnetic tape stretched thin. Play. Infinite hallways, all identical, white-coat clones gliding through like platelets. Isolate a person of interest. Toggle, toggle. Dissect the tape into seconds, half-seconds, quarter-seconds. Men are no longer men. They are abstract shapes you can study like an eremite studies scripture. That shadow in that scientist’s pocket could be the secret to all life. The muddy grin of his freeze-framed face might be the devil’s skull. Sixteen cameras. Infinite clues. Rewind, stop, toggle. This hallway, that. There’s no way out. All routes lead right back here, to his office. No closer to the truth. No further. He’s trapped.

Strickland’s eyes feel like spoiled sausages about to rupture. All that green candy he brought back from the jungle, when he should have brought back vials of buchité. A couple of drops and he’d see everything these tapes were hiding. Hour after hour after hour he’s been at this. Took only one hour to master the playback console. M1 Garand rifle, Cadillac Coupe de Ville, VTR deck—it’s all got the same guts. You put your hands to it, make it part of you. He quit feeling the buttons and dials around noon. Now it feels like he can direct the tapes with his mind. That’s the secret, he thinks. Let the footage flow by like water, dip your hands into it, and catch yourself a fish.

And there it is. Just like that. Camera 7. Loading dock. The first few seconds of the final tape before the blackout. The camera, does it bump upward? A couple of critical inches? Strickland toggles. Before, after, before, after.

He gets up out of his chair. The hallways, he swears, have gotten brighter. He shades his eyes with a hand, who cares if the MPs think he’s nuts, and travels past F-1 to the loading dock, the same route as the stolen creature. He pushes through the double doors and drops his hand. There is no sun. It is night. He’s lost track of time yet again. The ramp is empty but for puddles of oil. He whirls around. Looks up at Camera 7. Then looks straight under it.

Four people stand there, faces rubbery with shock. Each holds a cigarette. They have uniforms, lousy postures, different shades of skin. What they share is laziness. The time since the asset’s theft he’s spent slaving in his office, and they can’t endure five minutes without a break, and down here, where it’s against regulations? But Strickland needs information. He tries on a hard, waxy smile.

“Y’all taking a smoke break, huh?”

Does Fleming hire mutes exclusively? No, he decides. They’re just terrified.

“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.” He extends the smile, feels his wax lips start to crack. “Heck, I ought to join you. I’m not supposed to smoke inside, either, but darn it if I don’t do it anyway.” The janitors steal glances at their untapped, elongating ashes. “Tell me something, though. How do you lift the camera so you don’t get caught?”

Names are sewn to their uniforms, just like tags on a dog.

“Yo-lan-da,” he reads. “You can tell me, honey. Just curious is all.”

Dark brown hair. Light brown skin. Black eyes. The kind of thin lips that like to mouth off. Not in front of him, though. She knows her place. Strickland lets his wax grin melt a little. It works. He can smell her sweat through her perfume of bleach. She drops her eyes from the shit-scrubber cohorts she must think she’s betraying and gestures at an object behind them. It’s no sophisticated gadget like the one that blew the fuses. It’s a broom. A motherfucking broom.

Strickland’s mind is the VTR. It forwards, stops, plays, rewinds, toggles. He’s closing in on the critical frame.

“Say.” He means to sound convivial, and doesn’t, and doesn’t give a shit. “Any of you folks ever see Dr. Hoffstetler back here?”

7

ZELDA’S FIRST STEPS off the bus in front of Occam are unsteady, her neck sore from glancing for a wave of helmeted Empties coming to take her away, her ankles wobbly in preparation for being slung to the ground and handcuffed. All day she considered it. Come to work? Call in sick? Ride into the sunset? She’d even broken down and told Brewster, with certain facts massaged for believability, a half-lie regarding Elisa’s theft of an undefined valuable to which Zelda, unwittingly, had become party. Brewster had been firm of opinion: turn her in. Because if it comes out any other way, you’re the one who’s going to take the hit.

She spots Elisa ahead of her on the sidewalk and feels a shiver of relief. This is a good sign. Elisa might have taken off, left the city, abandoned Zelda to whatever questions might come. But no: She’s right here, right on time, striding on pretty shoes down the moonlit walkway into the front lobby. Zelda trails her at a short distance, watching for the clues Brewster warned about, attempts by Elisa to get a supervisor’s attention, that sort of thing. Again, nothing of the sort. Elisa goes into the locker room. Zelda has no choice now but to follow and sit alongside her on the bench. For a time, they don’t look at each other, but Zelda can feel the cart, the one with the squeaky wheel, between them, heavy with its otherworldly load.

Dressed, Elisa goes into the storeroom and begins loading her cart. Zelda follows her, does the same. She watches Elisa’s hand extract a roll of trash bags. Zelda does likewise. Zelda, then, lifts a jug of glass cleaner, and the second she sets it back, Elisa picks it up. They move on two separate pulses but are inching closer to synchronicity. When Zelda puts her hand on a new foxtail brush to replace one she’s abused into paddle flatness, Elisa’s hand lashes out and grips the same handle.

Zelda knows Elisa’s cart as well as she knows her own. The girl never uses her foxtail brush and certainly doesn’t need another. Elisa’s fingers spill over Zelda’s in a pile. Some fingers brown, some white, but in all other ways of equal experience: calloused by scrubbing, grimed under the nails, pinked by corrosive cleaners, and emerging from dingy Occam cuffs. Zelda sobs once, but holds it inside, no matter the toxicity of the room’s chemical cloud.

It is a quiet and invisible forgiveness. There are other people in the locker room. Beyond, there is Fleming and Strickland. Everywhere else, cameras and Empties. The only hug Zelda dares is the infinitesimal squeeze of Elisa’s fingers inside hers. Knuckle presses to knuckle, before Elisa’s hand cedes the foxtail brush and pushes her cart from the room. Zelda remains, closes her eyes, breathes in the fumes. The tiny finger-squeeze is the full-body embrace she’s waited on for weeks; it’s the hot tears onto a comforter’s neck; it’s acknowledgment, appreciation, apology, admiration. We will survive this, the squeeze says. Together, you and I will make it through.

8

WE RISE /// SUN is gone still gone only fake suns here fake suns are all we have felt for many cycles we do not like fake suns fake suns make us tired but the woman is blind without fake suns and so we try to like them for her for her for her the water in this cave is small but we begin to heal and it is better water than the last water no water should bring pain water should not be flat water should not be smooth water should not be empty water should not have a shape there is no shape of water /// in this cave there is only woman and man and food but it is good to have hunger we have not had strong hunger since river since grass since mud since trees since sun since moon since rain hunger is life and so we rise and the fake suns come closer the man did not hide the fake suns when he went away we miss the man the man is good he sits by the small water and uses black rock to make small twins of us long ago the river people made small twins of twig and leaf and flowers and twins are good twins make us eternal and now the river people are gone and we are sad but the man is good and makes twins all day and this brings us more strength more hunger /// the woman has planted trees in this cave and light from real suns comes from the outer caves and now we touch the planted trees and they touch us and they are happy and we love the trees and the woman has planted other trees on the walls small flat trees they do not smell like trees and they are not happy not alive but the woman planted them and we will love these small unhappy trees for her for her for her /// moving free no metal vines holding us it has been many cycles since we moved free and this small cave becomes a bigger cave and there is the man he holds the twins he makes of us his eyes are closed but he breathes in life patterns and makes sleep sounds and that is good and we are hungry but we will not eat the man because the man is good /// we smell the woman the smell is strong and there is another cave her cave and we go inside and the woman is not there but her smells are alive her skin her hair her liquids her air the strongest smell are her flippers on the wall so many colorful flippers we love her flippers and we worry she has lost her flippers but there is no blood smell no pain smell no fear smell and we are confused /// hunger and we go past the man to the place of smells it is flat and tall and white and we try to lift but it is heavy we try to crack but find no seam and we push and pull and it opens and the smells the smells the smells it is a very small cave of smells a cave with its own fake suns and we take a rock but it is not a rock we squeeze and it cracks it is milk and milk is falling and we hold it high and drink and it is good and we chew on the rock and it is not good we reject it and we take a new rock and it opens and it is eggs so many eggs and we are happy we eat the eggs and they are not the solid eggs the woman gives us they are liquid eggs but they are good and the shells are good to chew /// we forage good foods many good foods and the man makes happy sleep sounds and we are happy and there is another flat and tall and white thing and we think it holds more food and we push and pull the same and it opens but there is no food there is a passage and from the passage come different smells outside smells and bird sounds and insect sounds and we do not want to miss the woman when she returns but we are explorers it is our nature to explore and we are fed we are stronger and it has been so many cycles since we have explored and so we go

9

THE RED PHONE. It won’t stop ringing. He won’t answer it. He can’t. Not until he’s got the situation by the short, scaly tail. For five minutes it will ring. Thirty minutes will pass, if he’s lucky, an hour. Then it will ring again. He’s got to focus. Hoffstetler. This Trotskyite pinko. Glancing at the phone like he’s never seen the color red before, like it isn’t the same red as his homeland flag. Strickland shuffles the papers Hoffstetler handed him. An act, just to let the white coat sweat. He didn’t read more than the opening sentence. Can’t feel the papers with his dead fingers. Doesn’t care, not anymore. Paper is for men, not Jungle-gods.

“Do you need to answer that?” Hoffstetler asks. “If you’d like me to come back…”

“Don’t you go anywhere, Bob.”

The phone keeps ringing. The monkeys have dug their way into that sound, too, howling their instructions. Strickland squares the paper and grins. Hoffstetler avoids his eyes, looks around, nods at the monitors. Half are live, half are paused since yesterday. Strickland feels the same, half alive, half dead, desperate to find Deus Brânquia even as his veins are being threaded with thick lianas vines.

“How is the investigation?” Hoffstetler asks.

“Good. Very good. We have a lead, a very promising lead.”

“Well, that’s…” Hoffstetler adjusts his glasses. “That’s wonderful.”

“You sick, Bob? You look a little gray.”

“No. Not at all. It’s this gray weather, perhaps.”

“Is that right? Coming from Russia, I figured weather like this would be like being home.”

The phone, the monkeys, keeps ringing.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been there since I was a boy, of course.”

“You came to us from where again?”

“Wisconsin.”

“And before that?”

“Boston. Harvard.”

“And before that?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to answer the—”

“Ithaca, wasn’t it? And Durham. I’ve got a good memory, Bob.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“Impressive. I mean that. Another thing I remember from your file is you had a tenured position. People work hard for that, don’t they?”

“I suppose they do, yes.”

“And you gave it all up for us.”

“I did, yes.”

“That’s remarkable, Bob. Makes a man in my position feel good.”

Strickland snaps the paper he holds. Hoffstetler jumps in his seat.

“I guess that’s why this caught me by surprise,” Strickland says. “All those honors you gave up just to join our little project. And now you’re leaving?”

The red phone stops ringing. The bell’s vibration continues for twelve more seconds. Strickland counts them off while watching Hoffstetler’s reaction. The scientist does look sick. But so does everyone at Occam these days. He’s got to have better proof. If he pins shit this serious on their star scientist and he’s wrong, that red phone will only ring louder. He breathes through his nose, feels it scorch with Sertão heat. Energized, he studies Hoffstetler’s eyes. Dodgy, but they’ve always been dodgy. Sweaty, too, but half of these eggheads faint at the sight of an MP.

“I do wish to return to my studies.”

“Oh yeah? What kind?”

“I haven’t decided. There is always more to learn. I suppose I’ve been thinking about multicellularity in the taxonomic tree. I might also follow my interest in random and volitional nondeterministic happenings. And I don’t believe I’ll ever tire of astrobiology.”

“Big words, Bob. Hey, how about you teach me something? That last one. Astro-whatchamacallit.”

“Well… what would you like to know?”

“You’re the professor. First day of class, they’re all staring at you. What do you tell them?”

“I… used to teach them a song. If you want to know the truth.”

“I do. I do want to know the truth. I never took you for a crooner, Bob.”

“It’s just a little—it’s a children’s song—”

“If you think I’m letting you out of here without singing this little ditty, you’re crazy.”

Now Hoffstetler is really sweating. And Strickland is really grinning. He places a hand over his mouth to ensure that delirious monkey screams don’t begin hooting up from his throat. Hoffstetler tries to laugh it off, but Strickland won’t budge. Hoffstetler winces, stares at his hands in his lap. The seconds ticking by only make it more painful. They both know it. Hoffstetler clears his throat and, to Strickland’s joy, begins to sing.

“The color of a star, you can be sure, is mostly due to its temp-era-ture.”

It’s an off-key warble that betrays, more than is typical, the man’s Russian accent. Hoffstetler knows it, too, sure as shit, and he swallows hard. Strickland claps his hands, his dead fingers flopping like plastic.

“Beautiful, Bob. If you don’t mind me asking, though, what’s the point of it?”

Hoffstetler lurches forward, quick enough to kill. Strickland startles, rocks back in his chair, grabs for the machete, if that’s what it is, stashed under his desk. He curses himself. Never, ever underestimate cornered prey. The weapon, though, isn’t needed. Not yet. Hoffstetler perches on the edge of his chair, but not beyond it. His voice still shakes, but not from fear. Humiliation has produced anger, and it’s as sharp as cliff-side rocks.

“The point is that it’s true,” Hoffstetler snaps. “We’re all made of stardust, Mr. Strickland. Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and calcium. If some of us get our way and our countries fire off their warheads, then we shall return to stardust. All of us. And what color will our stars be then? That is the question. A question you might ask yourself.”

Friendly palaver is over. The two men glare.

“Your last week,” Strickland says slowly. “Gonna miss you, Bob.”

Hoffstetler stands. His knees are knocking. At least there’s that.

“Should there be a development, of course, I’ll return right away.”

“You figure there will be? A development?”

“I am sure I don’t know. You said you had a lead.”

Strickland smiles. “I do.”

Hoffstetler’s not even out of sight when the red phone starts ringing again. Monkey screams, accusatory this time. Strickland slams his right fist to his desk hard enough to make the receiver tremble. It hurts. But it’s also satisfying, like squashing longhorn beetles, bullet ants, tarantulas, all those Amazon pests. When he does it again he chooses the left fist. Fewer fingers to hurt over there. Hardly feels it at all. He slams, and slams, and slams, and believes he feels a pop in one of the fingers, another of the black stitches ripping free. Like the sutures in Deus Brânquia. Who is falling apart faster? Who will outlast the other?

He picks up the phone, not the red one, and dials Fleming’s extension. Fleming might be General Hoyt’s errand boy, but he’s under Strickland’s command, too. He picks up on the first ring. Strickland hears the clatter of a dropped clipboard.

“When Dr. Hoffstetler leaves today,” Strickland says, “I want you to follow him.”

10

LIGHT LEAPS FROM between the wood underfoot like playful animals many good colors bird color snake color roach color bee color dolphin color and we try to catch it but it is just light and sound too the woman calls it music it is different from our music but we love it and we glow our love and we follow it the light and the music down the passage until we see another object flat and tall and white and we push and pull and go inside and it is a cave that smells of the good man his skin his hair his liquids his breath his sickness there is sickness it is faint the man cannot yet feel it or smell it and it makes us sad but there are good smells too the black rock the man uses to make our small twins we can see the small twins all over the cave so many twins and we touch our twins and our claws smear the black and we lick the black and the black does not taste good and there is a man skull and on top of it is hair as fake as the fake suns and this makes us lonely in our river there are many skulls death is all over and it is good it is good to know death so that you can know life /// here is a better smell the smell of food the best food living food and we feel the animals in the cave all animals are our friends and they come out of hiding with pointy ears and whiskers and long tails and their eyes shine like ours they bow to us they offer themselves they are beautiful we love them we accept the sacrifice and we take one and we squeeze so there is no pain and we eat our friend and it is good it is blood fur sinew muscle bone heart love and we eat and we are stronger and we feel the river again all the gods the feather god the scale god the shell god the fang god the claw god the pincher god the tree god all of us part of the knot there is no you there is no me there is only we we we we we /// a noise a bad noise a crack like the bad man and his pain stick the lightning stick and we hiss and we turn and we attack and the bad man makes a pain sound but we have done wrong it is not the bad man it is the good man the good man has come back to his cave found us eating his pointy ear whiskers long tail friend and we are sorry we change to sorry color to sorry scent to sorry liquids to sorry stance we did not mean to attack we are not foe we are friend friend friend and good man smiles at us but his smell goes bad and the good man lifts his arm and looks at his arm and blood comes a lot of blood and the blood falls like rain

11

A PROJECT LEAD enjoys access to every room at Occam but one, and it is here Hoffstetler finds himself: the ladies’ locker room. There are, Slava Bogu, no cameras here; he has come to consider cameras to be gargoyles flapping their wings in the high reaches to report his every move. Hovering at the locker-room door would get him branded as a pervert—acceptable in these final days except for how it would spur further interrogation—so he’d slunk inside, nosed out a bygone shower room filled with supplies, and hidden behind a keep of industrial cleaner.

A harsh bell marks the close of the overnight shift. He hears the drudging entry of the graveyard shift’s quartet of women. He feels dizzy. It must be the stench of ammonia. Unless it’s panic. The rest of the week, he repeats to himself, is all he needs to last. His first and, he hopes, last lie to Mihalkov was that the syringe had worked and the Devonian was dead, and Mihalkov had rewarded him with details: On Friday, Hoffstetler’s phone will ring twice, and he is to proceed to the usual spot, where the Bison will take him to a ship, and the ship will sail him home, to Minsk, to his waiting parents. Mihalkov had even lavished praise on Hoffstetler for his dauntless years of service. He’d called him Dmitri.

Hoffstetler tears off his glasses, rubs eyeballs aflame from chemical vapors. Is he going to faint? He focuses on locker-room sounds. He is a cataloger by nature and trade but has done little study in the classification of feminine noises. Silken rustles. Pert snaps. Delicate jingles. Evidence of life that he has never known, but still might, if he can just survive until Friday.

“Hey, Esposito.” The woman’s voice is of Latin accent and is as harsh as the shift siren. “Did you tell that man we were out there smoking?” A pause for Elisa’s signed or gestured reply. “You know what man. The one that gives you the looks.” Pause. “Well, someone told him that we move the camera. And the only one of us that doesn’t smoke is you.” Pause. “You act all innocent. But you’re not. You watch your back, Esposito. Or I’ll watch it for you, entiendes?”

Footsteps march away, followed by sympathetic murmurs—Hoffstetler believes they come from the one named Zelda. He holds his breath against fumes, waits for sounds of Zelda leaving Elisa’s side. Instead he hears a rumble from upstairs, the lobby, the day shift beginning to arrive. There is no time. Hoffstetler makes his move, scrambling on all fours across the dank tiles. He peers around a corner. Elisa is sitting on the bench. Zelda stands beside her, combing her hair in a locker mirror. He has to take the chance. He waves a hand to get Elisa’s attention.

Her head whips in his direction. She is clothed but covers herself reflexively, a leg cocking back, ready to kick. She’s wearing shoes of startling flair—bright sequined green—and the heels crack loud against the tile and Zelda whirls and sees Hoffstetler and her chest expands to scream, but Elisa snatches Zelda’s blouse and springs from the bench, dragging Zelda behind her into the dim aqua glow of the shower, her free hand signing as wildly, no doubt a litany of questions. Hoffstetler lifts his own hands, begging for a moment.

“Where is it?” he whispers.

“They’ve got us,” Zelda gasps. “Elisa, they’ve got—”

Elisa signs curtly to Zelda, something that shuts her up, and then signs to Hoffstetler, gesturing for Zelda to translate.

Zelda eyes Hoffstetler with misgiving before stating, simply, “Home.”

“You’ve got to get rid of it. Right away.”

Elisa signs. Zelda translates: “Why?”

“It’s Strickland. He’s close. I can’t promise what I’ll tell him if he uses—he’s got that baton—”

He doesn’t need to know sign language to understand Elisa’s panic.

“Listen to me,” he hisses. “Do you have means to get it to the river?”

Elisa’s face drains of emotion. Her head drops down until she stares at her bejeweled shoes, or perhaps the mold of the tiles showing between them. After a moment, her hands rise, torpidly as if attached to weights, and she signs with a mournful reluctance. Zelda translates each fragment as it comes.

“The dock. Opens to the sea. At thirty feet.”

Zelda looks at Hoffstetler pleadingly; she doesn’t know the significance of these words but Hoffstetler does. This fragile-looking janitor of incalculable ingenuity must live near enough to the river to get the Devonian to some kind of pier. But that’s not good enough. If the spring drought persists, the creature will be beached there, a flopping fish no better off than being chained to one of Strickland’s posts.

“Is there anything, anything at all?” he pleads. “That van—you took it away in a van—could you make it to the ocean—”

She’s shaking her head in childish refusal, eyelashes thick with tears, cheeks and neck splotched red except for two keloid scars that hold a smooth, gentle pink. Hoffstetler wants to grab her by the dress and shake her, rattle that brain inside her skull until the selfishness is knocked clean out of her. But he has no chance: A phone is ringing, it is answered, and the angry woman with the Latin accent is shouting, her voice reverberating from the locker room’s surfaces.

“Phone call for Elisa? If that isn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. How the hell’s she supposed to take a phone call?”

“Who is it, Yolanda?”

The boom is loud enough to pull Hoffstetler from his tarn of consternation. It comes from Zelda, discounted by Hoffstetler as dumbstruck by fear of losing her job or worse. With the situation for the three of them as dire as it has ever been, this woman’s leaping, lioness defense of Elisa hands to Hoffstetler a tiny, precious gift, thinner than cellular membrane, smaller than a subatomic particle: hope.

Zelda’s brown eyes boil with a warning for Hoffstetler, and then it is she, this time, who takes Elisa by the arm and drags her away. Hoffstetler has no choice but to recede, though not far, knowing he’ll need to escape the locker room before the dayshifters begin filing inside, knowing he’s got three more days of this pressure, knowing he won’t sleep tonight with Elisa uncommitted to the only sensible course of action. It is entirely possible that he’ll never sleep again. He ducks behind the bottles of cleaning fluid while Yolanda’s last few grouses echo.

“I’m a custodian, Zelda, not AT&T. Jerry? Jeremy? Giles? How am I supposed to remember?”

12

EACH OF THE thousands of times Elisa has seen Giles’s apartment, it has been a world of tweed browns and pewter grays. Now it is bright red. Blood on the floor. On the wall. A bloody handprint on the refrigerator. Elisa entered too speedily to sidestep and now helplessly watches her green shoes track red across rug and linoleum. She grabs Giles’s drafting desk for support, sending two cats bounding. She forces herself to study the blood, tries to determine which direction it leads. But it leads every direction.

Including back out the door. She lopes that way and sees a thin stripe of blood connecting Giles’s door to hers. She bursts into her apartment and there he is, collapsed on the sofa. She rushes to his side, her knees landing on black charcoal sketches accented with red blood. Giles’s face is pale; he blinks in slow motion; he is shivering. His left arm is wrapped, very poorly, in a blue bath towel soaked purple. Elisa looks at the bathroom.

“He’s not here,” Giles croaks.

Elisa holds his face in her hands. He is warm, not cold. She questions him with her eyes, and he responds with a weak smile.

“He was hungry. I startled him. He’s a wild creature. We can’t expect him to act any other way.”

If she’s going to do it, she tells herself, do it fast. She grabs the towel, unravels the sticky fabric from his arm. Running from wrist to elbow is a slash so spiderweb thin that nothing but the creature’s cusped claw could have carved it. It is deep, still bleeding, but not gushing, and Elisa dashes into the bedroom, rips a clean sheet from a shelf, dashes back, and begins winding it. It’s like a cloth whirlpool enveloping the arm in sea foam—even here, even now, she can’t stop seeing water. Giles winces, but his smile hangs on like a cheap mask. He puts a clammy palm to her cheek.

“Don’t fret over me, dear. Go find him. He can’t be far.”

Elisa doesn’t know what else to do. She bolts to the outer hallway, closing the door behind her. It is difficult to see anything but the most garish streaks of blood, but she forces herself and finds a spackle of red tracking a separate path toward the fire-escape stairs. Impossible, she thinks. The creature would be too frightened. Then fanfare blares from the theater below, and it’s not so different, is it, from the records she played in F-1? She runs, crashing down metal steps so fast she feels the vertigo of a plunging elevator, and then she’s tripping through the alley and down the Arcade’s sidewalk, snared by a velvet rope, dazed in the signboard’s brilliance.

In such light, the spots of blood, only a few now, stand out like scattered jewelry. They lead into the theater. Elisa throws a glance at the box office. Mr. Arzounian mans the booth, but he’s yawning, fighting sleep, and Elisa doesn’t falter. She looks at her feet, those emerald green, thick-buckled, Cuban-heeled Mary Janes, not bad for dancing, and tells herself that she is Bojangles with the TV volume turned down, and she dances past Arzounian as she’s danced past so many woolgathering Occam men.

The chafed carpet beneath her shoes gives way to Navajo-motif terrazzo flooring. Elisa cranes her neck to the dusty, muraled dome that, according to Mr. Arzounian, greeted celebrities, politicians, and giants of industry in the forties and fifties, back when the Arcade mattered, back before the upper offices were sacrificed to build a couple of rat-trap apartments. Age and disregard don’t mean something isn’t beautiful; Elisa has come to believe this with all of her heart. The lobby, though, is too bright, and Elisa knows the creature will seek darkness.

Even awash in the film’s coruscating light, Elisa can’t find the back of a single head in any of the theater’s twelve hundred seats. It doesn’t matter: the screen, balcony, and constellations of ceiling lights lend the theater the majesty of a basilica. And hadn’t she worshipped here as a girl? It was here she’d found the raw materials to build a beautiful fantasy life, and it is here where, if she is lucky, she might salvage what is left of it.

It’s with a pious stoop that she slinks down the aisle. These are the final days of The Story of Ruth, the biblical epic about which she knows nothing except its loudest dialogue and every single music cue. Between peering left and right down shadowy ranks of seats, she passes her eyes over the screen, where a sweaty mob of enslaved men pound rock in a quarry under the bug-eyed glower of a giant pagan statue. So this is Chemosh, the name she’s so often heard rumbling up through the floor. If her creature, too, is a god, then he is one far less frightening.

She’s hatching nightmares of him wandering downtown Baltimore when she sees a dark shape floundering between the first and second row. She ducks beneath the projector rays. There he is, knees pulled to heaving chest, arms wrapped around his head. Elisa scurries into the row, stealth abandoned, heels clacking, and the creature hisses, a harsh warning she hasn’t heard since her first approach with the egg. It’s a feral noise, and she stops, fear icing her body, no braver than the countless beasts that once showed their bellies to this superior thing.

Cries of pain caw out, and like the jungle field recordings they blast from speakers, the sound effects of men’s backs whipped while trying to move the stone idol. The creature envelops his head in his hands as if trying to crush his own skull. Elisa lowers herself to her knees and crawls across the gummy floor. The cascading colors of light make kaleidoscopes of the creature’s eyes, and he scuttles back, stumbling to his knees, short on breath.

A deafening crash and Elisa can’t help but look: Chemosh toppled, pinning a screaming slave. The creature responds with a piteous dog-squeak and dog-shiver. Perhaps afraid that he has caused this onscreen pain, he stops retreating and instead reaches out to Elisa. She slides across the floor and wraps him in her arms. He is cold. He is dry. His gills flutter against her neck, coarse as sandpaper. Thirty minutes, Hoffstetler had warned, that’s as long as he’s got. There’s an emergency exit. It feeds right into the alley. She’ll get him out, upstairs, back to safety. She just wants a few more seconds of embracing this beautiful, sad creature who, in this world, can never be safe.

13

HER HAND ACHES from signing “hospital.” But Giles won’t go, and she understands why. Doctors know claw wounds when they see them, and there are protocols regarding animal control: visits to Mr. Arzounian, searches of the Arcade Apartments to make sure a tenant isn’t harboring a dangerous beast. She is, though, and both she and Giles know what the local government does with dangerous beasts: They are taken from their unfit masters and put to sleep.

So she’d capitulated to Giles’s request and provided him with a guesswork treatment of iodine and bandages. He’d made jokes at every step, his way of making it clear that he wasn’t upset, but it had done little to soothe her. One of his cats, eaten. A wound that will sprout who knows what sort of infection. Giles is old and not especially robust. If something happens to him, it’ll be her fault—her and the heart she can’t contain. Her heart, then, is a wild animal, too, a second living thing to be locked up should animal control arrive at the door.

Elisa is monitoring Giles, making sure he ingests both the soup and water she poured, when they both hear water dribbling into the bathtub. They stare at each other. One thing they have come to learn is that the creature can move into, out of, and through water without a sound, which means he is warning them, on purpose, that he has stood up. Giles’s hand tightens around his spoon like a shiv, and it breaks Elisa’s heart. Everyone is changing, and none for the better.

It takes a full minute for the creature to exit the bathroom. He plods slowly, face tilted to the floor, gills flat and submissive, lethal claws tucked out of sight behind his thighs. His finned back is curled in a submissive hunch, and he keeps one shoulder to the wall as if he’s chained himself to one of Strickland’s concrete posts. Elisa is confident that not once in his ageless life has the creature known the misery of regret, and she stands, holding out her arms, as eager to accept his apology as she is reticent to accept her own.

The creature, afraid to look at her, slouches past her open arms, trembling so badly that scales ping off and land on the floorboards, where they twinkle as brightly as the constellation of lights on the theater’s ceiling. He shuffles across the room like one of Chemosh’s whipped slaves, his head dipping lower until it matches the height of Giles, seated at the table. Giles shakes his head, holds up his hands.

“Please,” he says. “You’ve done no wrong, my boy.”

The creature releases his hands from their hiding place and raises them, so gradually that it’s imperceptible, until all ten of his claws, half-retracted into his fingers, snag at Giles’s bandaged arm. Giles looks at Elisa; she stares back, sharing his confusion and hope. They watch as the creature lifts Giles’s arm from the table, as tenderly as if it were an infant, and positions it beneath his downturned face. Despite the creature’s meekness, the pose is disquieting: It looks as if he is about to eat Giles’s arm, like a scolded child forced to finish his dinner.

What happens is less violent and far stranger. He licks it. The creature’s tongue, longer and flatter than a man’s, extends past his double-jaws and laps at the bandage. Giles’s mouth moves, but he looks too startled to manage actual words. Elisa is no better prepared; not a single letter forms from her dangling hands. The creature rotates Giles’s arm as he licks, wetting the entirety of the bandage until it is soaked to Giles’s skin, until the dried blood is liquid again and the creature is licking it clean. He lowers the glistening arm to Giles’s lap, slowly leans over, and then, like some parting kiss, licks the top of Giles’s head.

The ritual, abruptly, is finished. Giles blinks up at the creature.

“Thank you?”

The creature doesn’t react. It looks to Elisa that he is too ashamed to move. But it has been a long day for a being whose only true comfort is inside water: His gills and chest begin to expand and shake. Elisa wants to wash Giles’s arm, reapply iodine, rewrap it in sterilized bandages, but she can’t bear the idea of insulting the creature. She steps close and settles a hand upon his bowed back, gently pushing him toward the bathroom. He allows it, but only in a backward stumble that doesn’t impede his genuflection to Giles. It is the least graceful she’s seen the creature, and she has to tug his arm to get him through the bathroom doorway, a whack from his shoulder joggling the air-freshener trees.

She folds him into the tub. The lights are off and his face slides underwater, and yet his eyeshine is undiluted. Elisa breaks his gaze to pour salt into the water, but feels him watching. Throughout her life, she has felt men on the street or bus trace her movements. This is different. This is exciting. When she reaches into the tub to swirl the salt, their eyes meet, only for a second, but in that second she reads both gratitude and amazement. The idea is outlandish. She amazes him. How is that possible, when he is the most amazing thing that ever lived?

Elisa finishes stirring. Her hand is beside his face. Such a small thing to move it, so she does, cupping her palm to his cheek. It is smooth. She bets the scientists never noted this in all their data. They only registered teeth, claws, spines. She caresses him now, her hand gliding down his neck and shoulder. The water has turned him the same temperature as the air, and maybe this is why she doesn’t feel his hand sliding up her arm until he is at the soft, bluish flesh of her inner elbow. His palm’s scales are Lilliputian daggers, nicking playfully at her skin, while his claws poke, never enough to puncture, as they travel her biceps, leaving white scratches in their wake.

After dressing Giles’s wound, Elisa had changed into a gauze-thin shirt dating back to Home, and when the creature’s hand shifts from her arm to her chest, the cotton soaks instantly, as if by magic. First one breast, then the other, is heavied by the grip of the shirt slicked to her skin. She feels naked beneath his hand, can feel every shiver of her hitching chest, breathless but not because there is anything illicit here. He is always naked before her, and it feels overdue that she join him in this natural state.

The room incandesces from below. The Story of Ruth, she thinks, the projector cranking up for another screening. But there is no music. It is the creature, his body lights suffusing the water with pink, like flamingos, like petunias, like untold other fauna and flora from a world she knows only from field recordings: reek-reek, chuk-a-kuk, curu-curu, zeee-eee-eee. She arches her back, leaning her full weight into a palm wide enough to cradle her entire chest.

Somewhere far away, Giles hisses in pain. Elisa realizes her eyes are closed; she opens them. She finds that her whole body has moved. She is bent over the tub so far that her hair dangles into the water. She wants to keep going, tip forward until she drowns as she has drowned so many times in dreams, but Giles is hurt, and it’s her doing, and she needs to treat that wound again, especially after it was licked. With great effort she straightens her spine. The creature’s hand trails down her belly and reenters the water without splash or sound.

Elisa covers her wet shirt with a bathrobe before moving into the main room. She does not, however, go to Giles. She walks past him, across the apartment’s length, to the kitchen window. She leans her forehead onto it. She presses her hand against it. Her vision blurs, but not because she’s crying. There is water on the window, hanging in small globs on the pane, slugging in wet streaks down the glass. Yes, she might be crying after all.

It is raining.

14

HE TURNS THE dial with his good hand. The images are thin, discolored. Goddamn hunk of junk. Shelled out for it at a place called Kosciuszko Electronics. Is it the cord? The wiring? Did one of his kids spill a glass of juice on it? He has half a mind to bust off the back of the television just to be able to finger the guilty party. He’s stopped by the irrational fear that the TV’s innards will look like the gadget that blew Occam’s circuits, a scorched tangle. He hadn’t been able to identify that. What makes him think he’ll be able to diagnose this?

Or it’s the weather screwing with the signal. All this time in Baltimore and he swears this is the first rain he’s seen. It’s been pelting all day. There’s an antenna on the roof, an arachnid thing like one of the space-capsule transceivers he’s glimpsed at Occam. It’s tempting to climb onto the roof to tinker with it, right there in the rain. Watch the storm thicken and roll. Laugh at lightning. Be in the sort of danger a man can understand.

Instead, there’s this. Living-room ruins. A family struck by lightning, provided you know where to check for burn marks. Tammy’s droning on about a puppy. Timmy wants to watch Bonanza. Lainie’s twaddling about gelatin parfait, some orange glop she’s proud of despite having dumped it from a box. All their meals come from boxes these days. Why is that? Strickland knows why. Because she’s gone most of the day, doing who knows what. He shouldn’t have come home. He should have slept another night at the office. After all, General Hoyt had called Occam only four hours ago. Worse—he’d called Fleming. And the message relayed had been clear as glass.

Strickland had twenty-four hours to find the asset before his career was over.

What does over mean? Court-martial? Military prison? Worse? Anything was possible. Strickland got scared. So he’d climbed into his busted-up Caddy, the one people at Occam, he swears, are starting to whisper and laugh about, and driven it home. Soon as he’d arrived here, Fleming had called. He’d done what Strickland asked and trailed Hoffstetler like a pro. Shouldn’t have surprised Strickland. Fleming is a dog, after all, and a dog has a nose for shit. Fleming says he’s got photographs of Hoffstetler in an unfurnished house packing up belongings. He’s got Hoffstetler linked to a Russian attaché called Mihalkov. Deus Brânquia might still be in the country, even the city. Strickland needs to be out there, right now, in the night, in the rain, finding the creature, ending all of this, fulfilling his destiny.

Instead, he keeps cranking the dial. Where the hell is Bonanza?

“Bonanza’s for adults,” Lainie says. “Let’s keep it on Dobie Gillis.”

Strickland flinches. He must have muttered it aloud. He glances at Lainie. He can barely stand the sight of her. Yesterday, she came home with new hair. The beehive gone as if chopped by an Amazon machete and replaced by a smoother style, an S-wave curled girlishly at the neck. But she’s not a girl, is she? She’s the mother of his children. She’s his goddamn wife.

“But Dad said we could watch Bonanza!” Timmy cries.

“If Timmy gets to watch Bonanza,” Tammy reasons, “then I should get a puppy.”

Dr. Kildare. Perry Mason. The Flintstones. Same three shows, a couple of dead channels. It’s all he sees. He feels a tremor of thunder. He looks to the window. Nothing to see but rain, exploding against the glass like bugs on a windshield. Except the guts keep being washed away. His guts, too. His career, his life. This lampoon of American bliss. Gelatin fucking parfait, imaginary puppies, a Western program that’s nowhere on the dial.

“Nobody’s getting a puppy,” he says. “You know what happens to puppies? They become dogs.”

Doctor, lawyer, caveman. He’s getting the characters on the channels confused with his own reflection in the screen. He’s the doctor, he’s the lawyer, he’s the caveman. He’s the one regressing, devolving. He can feel it in the crumbling away of his civility, the rise of primitive bloodlust. Scalpel, gavel, club.

“Richard,” Lainie says, “I thought we said we’d at least—”

“Dog’s a wild animal. You can try to domesticate it. You can sure as hell try. But one day, that dog’s going to show its true nature. And it’s going to bite. Is that what you want?”

He wonders. Is Deus Brânquia the dog? Or is he?

“Dad!” Timmy’s flapping his arms. “You just passed it!”

“What did I say, Timmy?” Lainie scolds. “That show’s too violent.”

People dying on the surgical slab, people dying in jail, an entire species dying out. The three channels spin faster. Ghost channels, too, phantom signals, purgatories of unclaimed static. He can’t quit turning the dial.

“Bonanza’s not violent,” he snarls. “The world’s violent. You ask me, it’s the right thing to watch. The only thing. You want to learn to be a man, Tim? Then you need to learn how to look a problem in the eye and solve it. Shoot it in the face if you have to.”

“Richard!” Lainie gasps.

The dial breaks. Snaps off right in his hand. Strickland stares at it, dumbfounded. There’s no putting it back. The plastic is broken. He lets it drop to the carpet. It doesn’t make a sound. The kids don’t make a sound, either. Neither does Lainie. They’re mute. Finally mute. Just the way he wants them. The only noise is the crinkle from the static channel on which the dial is stuck. It sounds like rain. He stands up. Yes, rain. The rain forest. It’s where he belongs. He’d been a coward to run here, when his real home is out there.

He walks to the front door, opens it. The patter becomes a roar. Good, good. If he listens close, he can hear the monkeys, messengers of Hoyt, swinging through the wet trees, hooting their blasted redactions, instructing him what to do. It’s like Strickland’s back in the Yeongdong gold mine under all those bodies. Yes, sir. He’ll rip through flesh and dislocate bone until he finds breathable air. It doesn’t matter anymore who gets torn apart.

A moment later, he’s outside. In the seconds it takes to get to the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, he’s sopping. Rain slams to the steel surface, the mad drumming of jungle cannibals. He runs his fingers over the hood ornament, some primitive idol. Through the grille teeth, dripping with what feels like blood. Along fins so sharp they cut beads of rain in half. What had the dealer said, that grinning, razor-burned Mephistopheles? Just plain power.

He runs his hand over the fractured paint. His wet bandages unravel and drop away. Both of his reattached fingers are as black as the night. He frowns. He can’t even see his wedding ring. With his other hand, he presses on one of the noxious fingers. He can’t feel it. He presses harder. Yellow liquid squirts from under the fingernail, hits the back of the car, is erased by rain. Strickland blinks water from his eyes. Did he really see that?

Lainie is suddenly beside him, hunched under an umbrella.

“Richard! Get back inside! You’re scaring the—”

Strickland grabs Lainie’s blouse with both hands. Pain is sucked from his fingers into his arm. He slams her down to the car’s crushed back end. A gust snatches her umbrella, tosses it into the night. The Caddy barely reacts to the impact of Lainie’s body. That’s craftsmanship. Top-notch suspension. Perfectly calibrated shock absorbers. Lainie stares straight into the driving rain. It muddies her makeup into clown blotches. Flattens the teenage haircut she’s so smug about. He adjusts his grip, holds her by her skinny little neck. He has to lean down to be heard over the thunder and rain.

“You think you’re smarter than me?”

“No—Richard, please—”

“You think I don’t know how you go downtown every day? How you go behind our backs?”

She’s trying to peel his fingers from her neck. Her fingernails dig into his black fingers. More liquid seeps from them, drops of rancid yellow spattering her cheeks and chin, aglow under the streetlight. Her mouth is wide open, filling with rain. If he does nothing else at all, just holds her here, she’ll drown.

“I didn’t—mean to—it’s just a—”

“You think people won’t find out? Small shit-hole city like this? They’ll see, Lainie. Just like they see this crashed car. And what will they think? They’ll think I don’t deserve to be here. That I can’t control my own. And I have enough problems already. Do you understand?”

“Yes—Rich—I can’t—I can’t—”

“It’s you who’s ruining this family. Not me. Not me!”

Strickland almost believes his own accusation. He tightens both hands around her neck, tries to solidify the belief. Vessels fatten in her eyeballs like red ink dropped onto paper. She coughs up what looks like a tongue of blood. The whole thing’s revolting. He pitches her body behind him, easy as hiking a football. Hears her body thump against the garage door. A soft sound compared to the monkey screams. The rain has turned his clothes into a second skin. Naked again, just like the Amazon. He can feel his keys in his pocket, sharp as broken bone. He extracts them. Walks the long, satisfying length of the Caddy, the length of a whole life, still salvageable.

He opens the door, drops behind the wheel. It’s dry inside. Tidy. Still smells new. He fires the ignition. Sure, the car moans when he puts it in gear. But it’ll get him where he needs to go. He pictures the locked drawer of his desk. Inside, his Model 70 Beretta, the same one he used to shoot the pink river dolphin. He’ll miss the Howdy-do. Men grow attached to their tools and it was a good one. But it’s time to advance. He stomps the gas, pictures the spray of mud from the back wheels. All over the garage door, over Lainie’s blouse. The suburbs turned ugly, though that shouldn’t surprise anyone with a brain. Everything’s ugly underneath.

15

IT’S MORNING, BUT there is no light. Overflowing drainage ditches are teethed with traffic cones. Side roads are cordoned by sawhorses. The bus she’s riding slices through a foot of standing water that buffets the tires. All of it, the earth’s gush, the sprawling darkness, reflects her anguish. She has checked the river levels twice a day since the downpour began, an act equivalent to carving out her heart ounce by ounce. Tomorrow, Dr. Hoffstetler will get his way. She and Giles will load the creature back into the Pug, drive to the foot of the jetty, lead the creature to the water’s edge. Today, then, is her last day and night with the being who, more than anyone ever, sees her as more than she is. And isn’t that love?

She looks at her feet. Even in the lightless murk of the bus floor she can see the shoes. The shoes; she still can’t believe it. Yesterday, before managing a few anxious hours of sleep before going to work, she’d lived out a dream. She’d gone inside Julia’s Fine Shoes, and though stunned by the spicy scent of leather, made a quick turn to the window display, nabbed the low-slung, square-toed, silver-encrusted lamé pair from its ivory column, and marched them to the checkout counter.

As it turned out, the Julia of her long-held imagination, that formidable beauty with a brain for business, didn’t exist. She’d asked about it, and the woman at the register had told her. It was just a nice-sounding name. This had soothed Elisa as she’d gone home and snugged the glittering shoes around the sides of her feet. If Julia didn’t exist, why, she’d be Julia. Providing for the creature had drained her funds, and this extravagant purchase left her flat broke. She didn’t care. She still doesn’t. The shoes are hooves and just this once, over this final day, she wants to be a beautiful creature, too.

Elisa gets off the bus and expands her umbrella, but it feels wrong, a cumbersome human contrivance. She tosses it into the gutter, turns her face to the sky, and loses herself in water, tries to breathe inside it. She never wants to be dry again, she decides. She’s drenched when she gets home and glad of it; rain patters from her clothes as she heads down the hall, forming puddles she hopes won’t ever evaporate. Before the creature’s trip to the theater, she’d never locked her front door. Now she feels for the key she’s ferreted inside a defunct lamp and fits it into the lock.

Giles isn’t at his usual spot. He told her before she left for Occam that he’d check in, but that he’d wanted to complete the full painting for which he’d been training with his charcoal sketches. He was on fire, he’d told her. He hadn’t felt so inspired since he was a young man. Elisa didn’t doubt it, but she also wasn’t stupid. Giles, too, knew the end was at hand and he wanted to give her space to say her farewell.

He’d left the radio on for her, of course. Elisa dawdles by the table to listen. She has come to depend upon the radio: politics, sports scores, dull listings of local events that provide sane counterpoints to the untamed fantasy she is living. She has kept it playing nonstop. Yesterday the creature, wrapped in sodden towels, had sat at her table with her, his first time on a chair—a tricky thing with his spine fins and his short, plated tail. He’d looked like a woman fresh out of the shower and she’d laughed, and though he couldn’t possibly have understood, he’d lit up, his version of a laugh, golden light pulsing about his chest while his gills wiggled.

She stirs Scrabble tiles with her fingers. She’s been trying to teach him printed words. The day prior, she’d brought home magazines from work to show him things he’d never otherwise get to see: a 727 airplane, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Sonny Liston punching Floyd Patterson, a spectacular movie still of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. He’d learned with such fervor. With the delicate movements of one accustomed to tearing things with his claws, he extended a long index finger and thumb, picked up the still of Elizabeth Taylor, and placed it atop the 727, which he then set atop the New York Philharmonic. Then, like a child playing airplane, he pushed the 727 across the breadth of the table until it landed at another photo of Cleopatra’s Egypt.

The meaning was clear: For Elizabeth Taylor to get from New York to Egypt, she’d have to take a 727.

It was information, of course, he didn’t need. He did all of it, she was certain, just to see her smile, hear her laugh.

None of that means that he is well. A grayness has settled over him like grit from a factory. His brilliant scales have lost luster and turned teal like an old penny on the sidewalk. He seems, in short, to be growing older, and this, she fears, is her most unforgivable crime. For how many decades, if not centuries, had the creature lived without losing a notch of vitality? At least Occam had filters, thermometers, processions of learned biologists. Here there is nothing to sustain him but love. In the end, it isn’t enough. The creature is dying, and she is his murderer.

“Heavy rains expected to deluge the upper Eastern Seaboard today,” the radio buzzes. “Baltimore will continue to get the worst of it, expecting anywhere between five and seven additional inches by midnight. This storm isn’t going anywhere, folks.”

She picks up a black marker left on the table from language lessons. A desk calendar sits there, too, each day devoted to a cornball inspirational quote that she can no longer read without tearing up. She uncaps the marker. If she doesn’t write it, if she doesn’t make it real and see it for herself, she doesn’t know if she can carry through with it. Moving the marker across paper is like moving a knife across her own skin.

Tonight, she will call in sick for the first time in years. Even if Fleming registers it as unusual behavior, it will be too late. Will she return to Occam on Monday? The issue feels trite. Probably not—she doubts she could stomach it. What she will do for money, she has no idea. That, too, feels like the banal concern of a stagnated realm she has left behind. Giles had a certain look the day he came to her saying that he would help break out the creature. She thinks she must have this look now, too. After bidding good-bye, there will be nothing left to lose that matters.

This is a joy she will miss above all others: The creature coming into view after a period she has spent away. This is the last time she’ll feel this delirious thrill, so she does it slowly, entering the bathroom as she might cold water, inch by inch. He sparkles like chromatic coral beneath the surface of a virgin sea. She is powerless to resist his call.

Elisa closes the door behind her and comes forward, chest hitching enough to make her dizzy with what first feels like tearful sadness before she feels the stronger, guttural pull and identifies the emotion as passion. There is, all at once, no question of what she will do, nor any surprise. It was always going to end like this, she realizes, from the first moment that she looked into the tank in F-1 and was pulled inside, not physically but in every other possible way, by the star clusters of his scales and supernovas of his eyes.

The plastic shower curtain is bunched against the wall. Elisa yanks it. A metal ring pops free. She does it eleven more times, rings tinging off the walls and getting lost in foliage, each tear of the curtain an astonishing, irreversible act of destruction no graveyard-shift janitor on the planet would have dared. She spreads the curtain across the floor like a quilt onto a bed, tucking it into the wainscoting and stretching it over the gap under the door. When the plastic is as taut as she can make it, she stands. She can’t command water like the creature, but she has the next best thing: modern plumbing.

Elisa plugs the sink and cranks the knobs. Water fires out. She leans over the tub and does the same. Running both faucets at full-blast is another thing no poor person would ever do, but she’s not poor, not today. Today she is the richest woman in the world; she has everything she could want; she loves and is loved, and as such is as infinite as the creature, not human nor animal but feeling, a force shared between everything good that has ever been and ever will be.

She removes her uniform; it is the unburdening of quarry rock from Chemosh’s toilers. She unsnaps her bra and peels off her slip; it is the unshackling of any creature trapped by another. Each item of dropped clothing makes no sound: the water has overflowed both sink and tub and is filling the spread curtain, lapping at her ankles, sliding up her calves like a warm hand. Only her silver shoes remain; she props a foot on the edge of the tub so the creature can see it, a flipper more fantastic than any he has ogled on her bedroom wall, the only thing she has that is as bright and beautiful as him. It is the most brazenly sensual posture she’s ever struck, and she hears the Matron calling her worthless, stupid, ugly, a whore, until the creature rises from the flooded tub, a thousand silent waterfalls cascading from his body, and steps over the edge into her waiting arms.

They curl to the floor together, her parts finding reciprocal space in his parts, and his into hers. Her head sinks underwater, a wonderful feeling, and then they roll, and she is on top, gasping, water pouring from her hair, and he is under the sloshing surface, and to kiss him she must dip her face under, which she does, and ecstatically, the tedious lines of her rigid world softening, the sink, toilet, doorknob, mirror, even the walls themselves relinquishing their shapes.

The kiss reverberates underwater, not the fussy wet tsks of human lips, but a rumbling thunderstorm that pours into her ears and runs down her throat. She takes his scaled face into her hand, his gills throbbing against her palms, and kisses him forcefully, hoping to stir the storm they’ve started into a tsunami so as to force a flood; perhaps her kisses, not the rain, can be what saves him. She exhales into his mouth, feels the bubbles tickle past her cheeks. Breathe, she prays. Learn to breathe my air so we can be together forever.

But he can’t. He uses his strong hands to force her above water so she won’t drown. She’s panting, for all sorts of reasons, her hands planted to her chest to help it rediscover oxygen. Her hands, she discovers, are covered with the creature’s twinkling scales. The sight enthralls her, and she runs her hands over her breasts and belly, spreading the scales, wishing this was how she really looked. From the theater below she hears a passage of dialogue, one she’s heard a hundred times: Trouble your heart no more. Be strong through this time. For from the widow of your son will issue children, and children’s children. Yes, why not? Each bead of water on her eyelashes is its own entire world—she’s read such things in science articles. Couldn’t one of them be theirs to populate with a new, better species?

No bathtub fantasy she’s ever had can compare. She searches out his every crest and pocket. He has a sex organ, right where it should be, and she has hers, too, right where she left them, and she pulls him inside her; within so much rocking water, it happens easily, the tectonic shift of two subsea plates. The effulgence of the theater lights eking through the floorboards and plastic are overwhelmed by the creature’s own rhythms of crystalline color, as if the sun itself is beneath them, and it is, it has to be, for they are in heaven, in God’s canals, in Chemosh’s slag, every holy and unholy thing at once, beyond sex into the seeding of understanding, the creature implanting within her the ancient history of pain and pleasure that connects not only the two of them but every living thing. It is not just him inside her. It is the whole world, and she, in turn, is inside it.

This is how life changes, mutates, emerges, survives, how one being absolves the sins of its species by becoming another species altogether. Perhaps Dr. Hoffstetler would understand. Elisa can only perceive the edges it, glimpse the foothills of the mountain, the horn of the glacier. She feels so small, so gloriously tiny in such a huge, wondrous universe, and she opens her eyes underwater to remind herself of reality. Plant leaves swim by like tadpoles. The curtain has ripped and flaps at them like worshipful jellyfish.

The storm outside, in the real world, doubles with the storm from The Story of Ruth, the end of the biblical drought. Her body convulses with sensations, each like the unclenching of a fist. Yes, the drought is over. It is over, it is over, it is over. She smiles, her mouth filling with water. Finally, she is dancing, truly dancing, across a submerged ballroom and fearing no misstep, for her partner has got her tight and will lead her anyplace she needs to go.

16

HE FLITS THE brush through the paint. Bernie likes green? Too bad he’ll never see this. It’s a green the likes of which Giles never dreamed possible. How did he mix it? He recalls a base of Caribbean blue, a touch of grape, dapples of harvest orange, streaks of straw yellow, daubs of gloaming indigo, his signature cotton-clay red—what else? He doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He’s coasting on impulse here. It’s rousing, and yet there’s a peace to it as well. His brain doesn’t smart from focus; it rambles and stretches, tying disparate threads together in shiny, department-store bows.

Bernie. Good old Bernie Clay. Giles thinks of the last time he saw him. In hindsight, he can see signs of stress all over the guy. The yellowed collar no volume of bleach can scrub, the gut bulging the shirt—Bernie had always been an anxious eater. Giles forgives him. He’s never felt more forgiving. For too long, ill will has clogged his arteries like cholesterol, an ominous substance he just read about in the news. Today, the cholesterol is flushed and only love remains. It flows into his every long-dug trench. The cops who arrested him at the bar in Mount Vernon. The executive cabal that got him fired. Brad—or John—of Dixie Doug’s. Everyone struggles against the qualms and uncertainties that life twines about them.

How had it taken him sixty-three years to recognize the futility of anger? When Mrs. Elaine Strickland, a woman half his age, knew it on instinct? Giles doesn’t believe a dawn will rise that he won’t privately thank her. Just this morning he’d tried calling her at Klein & Saunders to express what her candor had meant to him, how it’d forced open storehouses of courage he’d never suspected he had, but the voice that answered didn’t belong to Elaine, and couldn’t say why Elaine hadn’t shown up to work.

Quite all right with Giles: He has a lifetime’s backlog of patience upon which to draw. Mrs. Strickland is, after all, one of two beings to whom he credits his renaissance. The other is the creature. Giles chuckles in wonder. Elisa’s bathtub has become a portal into the impossible. The work Giles has done alongside it, from atop a toilet seat of all places—he is so thankful to know the sort of divine inspiration typically reserved, he is certain, for only the greatest of masters.

While the creature belongs to no one, no place, and no time, his heart belongs to Elisa, and Giles has left the two of them to share these final hours. Besides, Giles needs to complete his painting. It is, without question, his life’s finest work, and what existential relief there is in knowing you have managed, at last, to live up to your potential. The fulfillment of his hopes is to show the finished piece to the creature before the creature is gone, and that requires working on it day and night.

Working, however, hasn’t been a problem. Twenty hours he’s been at it now and he feels tip-top, as unflagging as a teenager, powered as if by a fabulous drug that has the sole side effect of suffusing him with confidence as powerful as the storm outside. He makes the boldest brushes of color without pause. He paints the finest slivers of detail without arthritic tremor. He hasn’t broken for a bathroom break in half a day, and when was the last time he made it two hours without peeing?

He laughs, and his eye catches a fluttering cloth. It’s the bandage Elisa coiled around his arm. He’s working so briskly that it has come loose. Strange that he hasn’t noticed. More strange, he thinks, is that he hasn’t needed to take aspirin for pain since before bed. Perhaps the cut wasn’t so deep after all. Still, the bandage will trail across wet paint and that won’t do. He sighs, sets down his brush. A quick, fresh dressing—maybe brush his teeth while he’s at it—and then it’s back to the easel! He can hardly wait.

Giles doesn’t realize that he’s whistling a show tune until the jaunty song cuts off. He blames the misperception on his speed: He’s unwrapping the bandage as if reeling in a catfish. He quits unwinding and carefully pushes the rest of the bandage into the sink. There’s no blood. Is he so exhausted that he’s looking at the wrong side of his own arm? He rotates it, finds nothing. Not even a wound, which, last time he checked, was pink and puckered.

He makes a fist, watches the cords of his wrist thicken. The shock of it settles slowly, rescuing him from full impact. The wound isn’t the only thing gone. There used to be liver spots on his arm. There used to be a scar from a youthful collision with a cotton loom. These, too, have been replaced by smooth, perfect skin. Giles checks his other arm. It is as old and wrinkled as ever.

Giles sputters in disbelief. It sounds rather like a laugh. Is that an appropriate reaction to the supernatural? He looks up into the mirror and, sure enough, the deep lines of his face are curved in jubilance. He looks good, he thinks, and notes that he hasn’t held this opinion of himself in more years than he can remember. His eyes flick upward. Ah, there’s the reason. He hadn’t noticed until now.

He has a head full of hair. Giles reaches for it, but slowly, as if it might be scared away. He pats it. It does not scatter like dandelion puffs. It is short and thick, a rich brown with familiar traces of blond and orange. More than that, it’s springy; he’d forgotten the resilience of young hair, how it resists being constrained. He pets it, stunned by the satin texture. It’s erotic. This, he thinks, is why young people are so lustful: Their own bodies are aphrodisiacs. Only after he thinks this does he notice a pressure against the sink. He looks down. His pajama bottoms are tented outward. He has an erection. No, that’s too clinical a word for this adolescent response to the slightest sexual thought. It’s a boner, a hard-on. He can feel youth swell his every molecule with lightness, quickness, pliancy, bravado.

There is a knocking at his door. A pounding, really, a sure sign of emergency next door. Giles knows himself well enough to anticipate a sick, sinking sensation, but whatever has affected his body has also affected his spirit: The alarm he feels is at the end of an upsurge, a tilting toward challenge rather than edging away. He lurches toward the door, mindful enough of the silly pendulum of his erect penis to grab a pillow to hold in front of him. Elisa can’t see him like this! He chuckles, despite everything.

He whips open the door and finds the perspiring, red face of Mr. Arzounian.

“Mr. Gunderson!” he cries.

“Ah, the rent,” Giles sighs. “Tardy, it’s true, but have I ever—”

“It is raining, Mr. Gunderson!”

Giles pauses, allowing the drumroll of rain on the fire escape to interject.

“Well, yes. I can’t argue with you there.”

“No! In my theater! There is rain in my theater!”

“Are you asking me to witness a miracle? Or do you mean a leak?”

“Yes, a leak! From Elisa’s apartment! She leaves the water on! Or else a pipe is broke! She will not answer the door! It comes through the ceiling, right onto paying customers! I will find my keys, Mr. Gunderson, and I will open her door myself if it doesn’t stop! I must go downstairs! Make it stop, Mr. Gunderson, or the both of you will live at the Arcade no more!”

He’s gone then, careening down the stairs. Giles doesn’t need the pillow anymore; he backhands it onto his sofa and jogs, in socked feet, the distance between apartment doors. He swipes the key from its lamp haven, inserts it with a dexterity that delights him, and barges in. He doesn’t know what he expects. More blood? Destruction from some fit of rage? Nothing is amiss until he divines that the floorboards near the bathroom have not been recently mopped. They are, instead, covered in a half-inch of water. He charges, socks soaking as he splashes through the thin pool. This isn’t a situation for knocking; he hurls open the bathroom door.

Water bursts outward, drenching Giles from the knees downward. A day ago, the force of the tide, not to mention the plain shock of it, would have toppled him; today, though, his legs are roots, planted firm even as standing lamps and end tables behind him topple to the floor in the rushing tide and its sloppy cargo of unpotted plants. The edge of a shower curtain, which must have held back the flood, flops like snakeskin onto his socks, revealing Elisa and the creature lying in the center of the floor.

They should be carved in marble in this exact position, Giles thinks, and by someone who knows how—Rodin, Donatello. Elisa is glistening wet, freckled with muddied soil, sparkling with scales, naked. The creature is, too: Though always unclothed, there’s a reckless need to his pose that makes him naked. His arms and legs are interlocked with hers, his face nuzzled into her neck. Her left hand strokes his scalp and cups the back of his head where his ridge of fins begins. He does not look good, and hasn’t in a while; he does, however, look content, as if he has chosen his fate, and does not, even upon pain of death, plan to regret it.

Giles expands his view, and along with it expands the spectacular. The room is a bathroom no more. It has become a jungle. He squints before realizing his vision is perfect, even without glasses. Did their lovemaking, whatever form it took, arouse household mold spores to blossom into rain-forest verdure? No, that’s not it. The plants that withstood the flood are languid, even voluptuous, with moisture, but it’s the hundreds of tree-shaped cardboard air fresheners that have turned the room into an unimaginable wilderness of ravishing color. Shamrock green, lipstick red, sequin gold. Where did Elisa find so many? They are layered over every single inch of wall. Pumpkin orange, coffee brown, butter yellow. The low-budget ingenuity behind the cardboard jungle makes it all the more breathtaking. Amethyst purple, ballet-slipper pink, ocean blue. It is a home not quite Elisa’s and not quite the creature’s; it is one of a kind, a strange heaven built for two.

It takes a while for Elisa to register Giles. Her eyes are half-closed, dreamy. She absently pinches the shower curtain and pulls it over them as she might a bedsheet. Giles’s role, he supposes, is that of the fellow who didn’t knock, and he waits to feel disgusted by the vile, unnatural act he has uncovered. How many times, though, have these same adjectives been applied to people like himself? Today, nothing is wrong; nothing is taboo. Perhaps Mr. Arzounian will kick them out. Giles can’t force himself to care. Just as likely, in this world, Mr. Arzounian doesn’t exist at all.

Giles kneels, tucks the shower curtain around them. New neighbors, he tells himself, happy young lovers who he, newly young himself, will find to be true, long-lasting friends. Elisa blinks up at Giles and extends an arm shimmering with scales. She runs her fingers through his brand-new hair and smiles gently, as if to ask, What did I tell you?

“Can we keep him?” Giles sighs. “Just a little bit longer?”

Elisa laughs, and Giles laughs, too, loudly so that it might echo in the confined chamber and keep the silence of an uncertain future at bay, so that they might go on pretending that this happiness will last forever and that miracles, once found, can be bottled and kept.

17

TWO RINGS: IT’S the signal Hoffstetler has been waiting on since midnight, as there was no telling how technical Mihalkov would be in defining Friday. Nevertheless, when the phone rings in early afternoon, it’s like being pounced upon by a panther. Hoffstetler’s arms and legs spring upward to protect himself, and a hysterical scream rises to the top of his throat. The first ring draws to a ludicrous length, long enough for Hoffstetler to think that it’s Mr. Fleming calling, suspicious of Hoffstetler’s failure to show up for his last day at work, or Strickland wishing to tell him that he’s figured the whole thing out.

The second ring, though, is terse, severed by the caller, and it gongs off the bare walls, empty cabinets, steel cot frame, and dishes. The last moans, he hopes, of a lonely life. He should be giddy. Instead, he is paralyzed. He can’t swallow. He has to force himself to breathe. Everything is going as planned. Every detail is in place. The loose floorboard, glued shut. His passport and cash, bulging the inside pocket of his jacket. His single suitcase, packed and impatient by the door.

He dials a taxi with memorized numbers and returns to the kitchen chair upon which he’s spent the past fourteen hours. Another fourteen hours after that, he tells himself, and he’ll be in Minsk, where he can get started on his new profession: the business of forgetting. Did the janitor get the Devonian to the river? Or had it died in her possession? In the tall white snowbanks of Minsk, he can bury such questions forever and attempt to get beyond the dismal hunch that, if a being like the Devonian can be allowed to die, then the whole of planet Earth is doomed.

A taxi honks. Hoffstetler takes a deep breath, stands, and waits for his wobbling knees to lock. The moment is heavy; it is also inevitable. Warm tears fill his eyes. I’ve kept myself out of reach of all of you, he thinks, and I’m so sorry. The students for whom he’d felt affection, the friends he’d almost had, the women who might have made him happy. Their ellipses had touched—but nothing had happened. In all of time and space, there is nothing sadder.

Hoffstetler picks up his suitcase and umbrella and steps outside. The cab awaits, a yellow smear beneath a silver scud of pouring rain. An ugly day, by all accounts, yet Hoffstetler is struck by beauty everywhere he looks. This is America: He bids his adieus. Good-bye to the green buds yawning awake from the skeletons of bony trees. Good-bye to the bright plastic children’s toys waiting in front lawns to be renewed with springtime vigor. Good-bye to the cats and dogs blinking from windows, proof of interspecies symbiosis. Good-bye to households of strong brick, cozy television light, comfortable laughter. Hoffstetler lifts his elbow to wipe the tears, but they have mixed with rain.

He’s had this cabbie before, a violation of his own rules of conduct, but it’s his final trip, what could it matter? He tells the man where to go, then peers out the window, wiping fog from the glass, unwilling to miss a single sight. American automobiles, he’ll miss them, too, their preposterous shapes, brash spirits, and gregarious pigments. Good-bye, too, to that big green Cadillac Coupe de Ville idling across the street, a gorgeous machine, even if its back end is smashed.

18

IT IS A good day for disappearing. Lainie can’t help but think it. She parts the pleated mustard drapes of which she was once so proud and gazes into a barrage of rain that bounces like marbles to the street. Baltimore, land of dirt and concrete, is now of water, pouring not only from sky but also from everything else. Rain torrents from roof gutters, dumps from trees, cascades from railings, whirlpools behind passing cars. It falls so hard that it seems to shoot upward from tripped booby traps. In such a downpour, you can’t see far. You could step into it, be lost in seconds, and that is precisely the idea.

Timmy’s backpack is so crammed with toys it takes both of his arms to hold it, leaving his tears unwiped. Tammy’s bag, too, is bursting, but she doesn’t leak a tear. Lainie wonders if it’s because she’s a girl and has learned that the masculine maxim of never running away from trouble is bullshit. (Lainie finds herself cursing in her thoughts lately, another exciting development.) Tammy looks up at her mother, eyes dry and perceptive. The girl has always paid heed to the lessons of picture books. Running is why animals have feet, why birds have wings, why fish have fins.

Lainie became aware of her own feet, their full potential, only this morning. Richard was shambling through the house, eyes swollen, shoulders cracking banisters, tearing free the black tie his dead fingers refused to knot and letting it slop to the floor. She was in her standard position, the patch of carpet permanently dented from the ironing board, skimming the Westinghouse Spray ’N Steam over one of Richard’s dress shirts. He’d gotten home late; she’d felt his half of the bed sink and she’d clung to her side of the mattress so as not to roll into his bottomless hole. This morning, he’d wakened at full boil, slithering his greasy body from bed and dressing without a rinse, his hand constantly dipping into a coat pocket that sagged with the weight of an object as heavy as her iron.

She’d kept beaming into the shifting textures of the TV. The news was no better or worse than any other day. Sportsmen excelling. World leaders orating. Blacks marching. Troops amassing. Women linking arms. Nothing connected one story to the next except forward progress, each spotlighted individual advancing, improving, evolving. At some point, Richard left, the slam of the front door his farewell peck, and the floor had trembled, and that tremble had shaken the ironing board, and her thumb had slipped from the setting dial, and she was just standing there, all at once certain that she was the only one in the world not moving.

The iron was too heavy to set upright. She’d had no choice but to let it settle onto Richard’s shirt. For ten seconds, normalcy was rescuable with a twitch of her wrist. Then smoke began to seep. The Westinghouse sank into the Dacron blend the same way an idea soaks into a mind. Lainie let the smoke coarsen. She let the toxic fumes thistle her sinuses. She’d only pulled the iron from the melted smutch of the board when the children had rushed downstairs, sniffing the smoke, at which point she’d turned, and smiled, and told them, “We’re going on a trip. Pack all of your favorite things.”

Now she has three heavy bags biting down on her shoulders. One of her arms has gone numb; she doesn’t mind. Numbness: It’s how she has survived life with Richard. The woman known as Mrs. Strickland is a corseted, aproned, lipsticked shield from the sting of discarded potential, and to use that shield to advance her own purposes, just this once, is thrilling. She adjusts the straps, her fingertips brushing the furrows in her neck from Richard’s choking. Everyone will see the bruises. Everyone will know. She takes a deep breath. All you have to be, she tells herself, is honest. Truth will begin to pour, and freedom will begin to rise.

A cab pulls up in front of the house, its tires sizzling through standing water. Lainie waves at it through the screen door.

“Come on, kids, let’s hustle.”

“I don’t want to,” Timmy pouts. “I want to wait for Dad.”

“It’s too wet,” Tammy says. “The rain’s high as my dress!”

Lainie has regrets. She regrets that she’ll have to quit her job over the telephone from Florida or Texas or California or wherever they land, and that doesn’t strike her as very professional. But she’ll explain to Bernie the reason she had to leave, and Bernie will forgive her, probably even agree to serve as a reference. There’s another regret: not jotting down Mr. Gunderson’s address, so that at some point in her deliriously undefined future she could write him, let him know that the instant he’d handed over his leather portfolio bag, she’d understood that it was never too late to exchange the things you believed defined you for something better. His bag, in fact, is one of the three strapped over her shoulder right now. Turns out, it can carry quite the load.

Mostly, she regrets that it took her so long to arrive at this front-porch launchpad. Her sloth has had real costs. The children have seen and heard things that have shaped them in unkind ways. Timmy’s dissection of the skink remains a troubling, unresolved thing. Thankfully, both children are young yet; Lainie’s no Occam Aerospace Research Center scientist, but she knows that maturation is no straight line and that her influence upon her kids has a long path still to run. She lifts the bag from her right shoulder so that all three hang from her left, and kneels, wrapping an arm around Tammy while leaning into Timmy.

“Run,” she whispers to him. “Right through the puddles. Make the biggest mess you can make.”

He frowns down at his clean pants and shoes. “Really?”

She nods and grins, and he begins to grin, too, and then he bolts down the steps with a hoot, marauding through the yard, dousing himself from both directions. Tammy panics, of course, but that’s why Lainie’s got her arm around her. She lifts her daughter, propping the girl on her hip, opens the door with a foot, and stands beneath the awning that had once represented so much promise but is now laden with enough disappointment that she worries it might collapse and she, trapped beneath it, might crumple.

But Timmy is at the cab, soaking wet and laughing, and hopping in place for her to hurry up, and Lainie laughs, too, and realizes that no, she won’t crumple, she won’t crumple ever again. She runs into the waterworld. She likes how the rain cracks crisply on her short haircut, how it slides off the curled back. The cabbie takes her bags, and she crashes into the backseat, yelping as raindrops run down her back. She brushes water from Timmy’s cap and wrings the ends of Tammy’s hair as both of them howl and giggle. She hears the trunk door slam, and then the cabbie lurches into the front seat, shaking his head like a wet dog.

“We’re all going to float to Timbuktu if this doesn’t let up,” he chuckles. “You going far, ma’am?”

He looks at her in the rearview mirror. His eyes skip downward to her bruised neck. Lainie doesn’t flinch: let truth pour, let freedom rise.

“Somewhere I can rent a car. You know a place?”

“The one by the airport is the biggest.” His voice is softer now. “If you’re aiming to get a car without a reservation, I mean. If you’re aiming to leave quick.”

Lainie consults his identification card: Robert Nathaniel De Castro.

“Yes, Mr. De Castro. Thank you.”

The cab pulls from the depths of the curb and starts down the middle of the road.

“Apologies for the crawl. Little tricky on the roads today. But don’t you worry. I’ll get you where you’re going, safe and sound.”

“It’s all right. I don’t mind.”

“You look happy. The three of you. That’s good. Some people, a little rain falls, they get a little wet, it ruins their whole day. Earlier on, dispatch sent me to pick up this joe, take him to this industrial park over by Bethlehem Steel. Second time I’ve took this joe there. There’s not a thing over there—not a thing. I circled around to check on him. I was kind of worried, you know? And there he was, sitting on a concrete block in the rain. Now there’s a joe who doesn’t look happy. There’s a joe who could use a rental car, you know? Looked like he was waiting for the world to end. From the look on his face, I half believed it would, too.”

Lainie smiles. The cabbie keeps talking, a pleasant distraction. The children have their faces pressed to the windows, and she rests her chin on Tammy’s sweet-smelling scalp. Outside, it’s as if the cab has run off a cliff and is sinking into the sea. To survive under so much water, she thinks, she’ll have to learn to breathe inside it, to adapt into a different kind of creature. Strangely enough, she’s confident that she can. The world is rampant with creeks, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes. She’ll swim through as many as it takes to find the right ocean for them, even if it takes so long she has to grow flippers.

19

RAIN DROPS LIKE wet cement. Hoffstetler’s umbrella carves out a small, dry column eddying with his own breath. It looks like smoke, feels like he’s being burned at the stake. Anything beyond the umbrella is difficult to see: gray breath, gray rain, gray concrete, gray gravel, gray sky. But he knows where to look, and after an anxious eternity, exhaust fumes, one more layer of gray, rise along the path. The black Chrysler sharks through the water.

Hoffstetler wants to dive into the heated leather backseat, but even the fruition of an eighteen-year mission doesn’t mean the riddance of asinine protocol. He picks up his suitcase, stands from the concrete block, and bounces upon the balls of his feet, woozy with excitement. He’s so close now, so close to shaking the trembling hand of Papa, to wrapping both arms around Mamochka, to making amends for the life he’s lived by starting to live a better one.

The driver’s door, as usual, is thrown open with a clack. The Bison, as usual, steps from the running car, his black suit complemented by a black umbrella. Then, something unusual: The passenger door, too, opens, and a second man exits beneath the spreading wings of his own umbrella. He shivers in the cold, shrugs himself more snugly into a scarf that threatens to flatten his boutonniere. Hoffstetler feels a dropping sensation, as if he’d slid off his concrete block to find no ground at all beneath.

“Zdravstvujtye,” Leo Mihalkov says. “Bob.”

The rain against Hoffstetler’s umbrella is deafening; he tells himself sounds cannot be relied upon. Zdravstvujtye is a cold greeting, and Bob, instead of Dmitri? Something has gone wrong.

“Leo? Are you here to—”

“We have questions,” Mihalkov says.

“A debriefing? In the rain?”

“One question, really. It will not take long. When you injected the asset with the solution, how did it react before it died?”

Hoffstetler is still pinwheeling through a vortex. He wants to reach out for his concrete block, the Chrysler’s grille, anything to save himself, but if he lets go of the umbrella, he’ll drown in all the water. He tries to think. The silver solution, what might it have been? He should know; this is his field. Surely one ingredient was arsenic. Was another hydrogen chloride? Could there have been a scintilla of mercury? And what ruin would such a cocktail wreak upon the Devonian’s anatomy? If only the thrum of rain weren’t so disorienting, he might be able to figure it out. Instead, there is no time. All he can do is blurt and pray.

“It was instant. The asset bled. Profusely. Died right away.”

Rain falls. Mihalkov stares. The ground bubbles like lava.

“That is correct.” Mihalkov’s voice is gentler now, pitched for a booth at the back of the Black Sea Restaurant, soft in the storm’s kettledrums. “You have made your country proud. You always have. You will be remembered. Very few can say that. Not even I will be able to say it when my own time comes. In that way, I envy you.”

A KGB man like Mihalkov would have detected the slow-motion closing of this mousetrap a decade earlier, but Hoffstetler only sees it now. Hadn’t he insisted to the Devonian that he didn’t possess true intelligence? He’s spent too much time in America for Moscow to be comfortable with him back on Soviet soil. All that has ever mattered is that his mission reach completion. To believe anything else was reveling in fantasy. His mama and papa are likely alive as promised, but only as collateral. Now, they will be eliminated, shot through the skull, their bodies weighed with rocks to sink into the Moskva River. Hoffstetler says good-bye to them, quickly, and that he’s sorry, frantically, and that he loves them, desperately, all in the second before the Bison lifts from his hip a revolver.

Hoffstetler cries out and, on instinct, hurls his umbrella in the direction of the Bison, and before he hears the shot, the umbrella blacks out the world, a singularity swallowing the man, the gun, the rain, all of it. These are trained killers, though, and he a bungling academic, and what feels like an iron fist whacks his jaw and what feel like hot stones explode from his face. Teeth, he thinks. He’s spinning now, cheeks ballooned with blood, tongue sludgy with splattered flesh.

Now he’s on the ground. Blood gushes from his mouth in a single splash, the upending of a bowl of tomato soup. Cold air lances through his face from left to right, an odd feeling. He’s been shot through the cheek. Mama would be so upset, her little boy disfigured, his nice straight teeth turned to rubble. He tries to raise himself to his knees, thinking that if he shows Mihalkov the damage done, he might leave it at that, but his head weight is all off, and his knees slip in the mud, and he is on his back, the rain coming at his eyes like silver spears.

The Bison’s black form, still holding his umbrella, occludes all light. He looks down with the same void of personality as ever, and aims the revolver at Hoffstetler’s head. The bang, Hoffstetler thinks, is oddly muffled for being the shot that kills him. Stranger yet is how it’s the Bison who recoils. There is a second bang, and the umbrella falls from the Bison’s hand, on top of Hoffstetler, like soil being pitched into an open grave, and it takes a moment for Hoffstetler to dig his way out and prop himself on his elbows, the rain sluicing a hot mix of blood and saliva down his chest.

What he sees is the Bison’s still, fallen body, the red puddle about him being thrashed into pink by the clobbering rain. Hoffstetler’s eyes won’t focus, but he can see shapes, Mihalkov’s slender ovoid shuffling with a haste incongruous with his usual demeanor. He’s pulling his own gun, that’s clear even in abstract, but perhaps spoiled on lobster and caviar, he holds on to vanity too long, choosing not to drop his umbrella, and in those crucial few seconds, Hoffstetler’s savior, whoever he is, rushes forward, his own weapon still smoking from the Bison’s murder, and he’s no amateur, either. The pistol is held with two hands, steady in the storm, and a single shot is all it takes.

Mihalkov is thrown against the car. Now he drops his umbrella. His gun, too. A circle of red blooms on his shirt, a second boutonniere. He dies instantly and is instantly forgotten, just as he predicted he would be. Hoffstetler squints through the cloudburst to watch the gunman kneel beside the body to make sure it’s dead, then bolt upright and move, with spiderlike speed, toward Hoffstetler. It is the rain that obscures the man’s identity until he looms over Hoffstetler. It is also, Hoffstetler supposes, disbelief.

“Strickland?” His voice is mushy, lispy. “Oh, thank you, thank you.”

Richard Strickland reaches down, loops the thumb of his free hand into the hole in Hoffstetler’s cheek, and pulls. Pulls so hard Hoffstetler’s whole body is dragged through the mud. Pain arrives belatedly, full-fleshed and muscular from under a blanket of shock, and Hoffstetler screams, feeling the jagged rip of his cheek, and screams again, and keeps screaming, until the mud being plowed by his shoulder fills his eyes and his mouth and he is blind, and mute, and then nothing at all.

20

RECLAIMING WAKEFULNESS IS leaping into a nightmare. A thunderous roar subsumes everything. Hoffstetler’s eyes whirl upward, expecting needles of rain, but there is a tin roof, hence the roar. He’s on a concrete porch, some sort of outbuilding. He sees thick plaits of rain pound crumbled brick and oxidized steel. He’s still in the industrial park. A shadow lurches across his vision. He blinks liquid from his eyes—rain, blood? It’s Strickland, pacing the length of concrete. He’s gripping something small, a medicine bottle. He upends it over an open mouth, but it’s empty. He curses, whips the bottle into the rain, stares down at Hoffstetler.

“You’re awake,” Strickland grunts. “Good. I’ve got things to do.”

He squats down. Instead of that orange cattle prod Strickland brings everywhere, he’s got a gun, and he pulls the slide and noses it into Hoffstetler’s right palm. The barrel is cold and wet, a puppy’s nose, Hoffstetler thinks.

“Strickland.” As soon as Hoffstetler says it, his mangled cheek, all those severed nerves, scream to life. “Richard. It hurts. The hospital, please—”

“What’s your name?”

He’s been lying for two decades, it’s instinct: “Bob Hoffstetler. You know me.”

The gun discharges. A bullet into cement sounds surprisingly rubbery, a resounding thwap. Hoffstetler’s hand feels swatted. He lifts it. There is a tidy, singed hole through the center of the palm. His instinct is to contract the fingers to see if they still work, for there are thousands of book pages still to flip, scores of analyses yet to write, but instead he revolves it. The exit wound is a ragged starburst serrated by flaps of skin. Blood vessels drape from the hole. He knows it is about to bleed; he presses it against his chest.

Strickland pins Hoffstetler’s other palm with the gun.

“Your real name, Bob.”

“Dmitri. Dmitri Hoffstetler. Please, Richard, please.”

“All right, Dmitri. Now give me the name and ranks of the strike team.”

“The strike team? I don’t know what—”

The gun blasts again, and Hoffstetler screams. He brings his left hand into his chest without looking at it, though he can’t ignore the puff of smoke exhaling from the burnt flesh. His hands, what are left of them, clasp on to each other, while actions Hoffstetler might never again make race through his head: feed himself, bathe himself, clean himself after using the toilet. He’s sobbing now, his tears funneling into the hole in his cheek and gathering salty on his tongue.

“Now look, Dmitri,” Strickland says. “Those guys who came to pick you up, someone’s going to notice they’re gone. Things are moving fast now. There’s nothing I can do about that. So I’m going to ask again.”

Hoffstetler feels the hard barrel of the gun screw into his kneecap.

“No, no, please, no, Richard, please, please.”

“Names and ranks. Of the strike team that took the asset.”

Through the red eruptions of pain, Hoffstetler understands. Strickland believes the Soviets stole the Devonian. Not a single infiltrator like Dr. Hoffstetler, either, but some penetration unit toting high-tech tools as they wriggled through air ducts to collar their quarry. A strange sound escapes Hoffstetler’s throat. It must be a bleat of pain, he thinks, but then another one escapes and he recognizes it as a laugh. It’s funny what Strickland thinks. And here, as the wick of his life burns toward bottom, he can’t think of any more surprising, and welcome, sound on which to end. He drops his jaw and lets the laughter peal, bubbling out blood, slushing out pebbles of tooth.

Strickland’s face goes red. He shoots, and Hoffstetler screams, and he can see from the bottom of his vision the bottom half of his leg sliding across concrete, but his scream mutates right back into laughter, and he’s so proud, and Strickland’s lips peel back and more gunshots follow, his other knee, both elbows, his shoulders, pain detonating until it is not pain at all, just a pure, raw state of being that amplifies the fermata he’s chosen as his final one: laughter. The jolly sound rings from his mouth, the hole in his cheek, the new holes all over his body. Strickland has stood up, is unloading his clip into Hoffstetler’s stomach.

“Names! Ranks! Names! Ranks!”

“Ranks?” Hoffstetler laughs. “Janitors.”

Hoffstetler feels a shot of regret like one more bullet—perhaps he shouldn’t have said that—but he’s too light-headed to think. The stew of his guts runs down the sides of his torso, steam rising from his entrails to curl before Strickland, little fists of protest. He is twirling backward and downward, moving rapidly after a lifetime rooted behind lecterns and desks, and still, stubbornly, he’s a scholar till the end, the words of his favorite philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—who but a career academic has a favorite philosopher?—bleeding through the haze. We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other. Yes, that’s it! A lifetime spent alone doesn’t matter, for he’s not alone here at the end. He is with you, and you, and you, and he wouldn’t have noticed any of it if not for the Devonian. Here is the ultimate emergence, quickened by sacrifice: finding God, that mischievous imp, hiding where we least expected, not in a church, not on a slab, but inside us, right there next to our hearts.

21

WHAT WAS ZELDA doing in the seconds before her front door was kicked in? Before the wood securing the dead bolt disintegrated into daggers and left the chain lock dangling like a mugger-torn necklace? She thinks she was cooking. She often does before heading to work, stocking Brewster with a day’s worth of food. She sniffs bacon, butter, brussels sprouts. There’s music, too, a deep-throated crooner. She must have been listening to it. She wonders if she’d been enjoying herself, if she’d been happy. It seems vital to remember these details, for she’s certain they will be her last.

Until now, the most surreal sight of Zelda’s life was the asset from F-1 staring back at her from Elisa’s laundry cart. It had been so incongruous, that fearsome, brilliant beast situated inside a gray, driveling bed of soiled rags. Even that vision, though, pales against this: Richard Strickland, that horrid man from work, bug-eyed, drenched with rain, spattered with blood, and holding a gun in her living room.

Brewster where he always is when work is scarce, in the Barcalounger at full recline, socked feet propped on the leg rest, a can of beer in one loose fist. Strickland blocks the TV, and Brewster scrutinizes him in mild perturbation, as if the ghoul had appeared behind Walter Cronkite’s news desk instead of inside their duplex. Strickland snorts and spits a flume of spit and rain and blood. He steps over it, smirching the clean carpet with the flat pancakes of mud adhered to the bottom of his shoes.

Zelda doesn’t need to ask why any of this is happening. She lifts her hands before her. She finds she is holding a spatula.

“Nice home you have here.” Strickland’s voice is garbled.

“Mr. Strickland,” she pleads, “we didn’t mean any harm, I swear.”

He frowns at the walls, and for an instant Zelda can see her cheerful decorations through the man’s ferocious red eyes: mendacious trifles, mawkish mementos, idiotic knickknacks commemorating a happy life that could have never been all that happy. Strickland flicks his wrist lazily. The gun barrel smashes the glass of a framed photograph, a lightning-shaped crack splitting the face of her mother.

“Where’d you put it?” He staggers drunkenly. “Basement?”

“We don’t have a basement, Mr. Strickland. I swear.”

He slides the gun along a shelf of porcelain figurines. One at a time they drop, shattering on the floor. Zelda flinches with each one: the little accordion boy, the big-eyed deer, the Happy New Year angel, the Persian cat. Just baubles, she tells herself, without real significance, except it’s a lie, they are significant, they are three decades of evidence that she has, on occasion, saved enough money to purchase herself something frivolous, something that simply looked nice, exceptions to the hard rules of knotty steaks, generic cereal, government cheese.

Strickland swivels, his muddy heel grinding porcelain, and points the pistol at her like an accusing finger.

“Sir, Mrs. Brewster. You got a real problem with names.”

“Brewster,” says Brewster. Hearing his name stirs him. “That’s me.”

Strickland doesn’t look at him but waggles his head. “Oh. Right. Zelda Fuller. Zelda D. Fuller. Old Delilah.” He lopes from the wall, halving the distance to Zelda so quickly she drops the spatula. “You never let me finish the story.” He swings his gun arm, obliterating a ceramic vase once belonging to Zelda’s grandmother. “Samson, as I remember it, betrayed by Delilah, blinded and tortured by the Philistines, at the very last second is saved. God saves him.” He punches the gun through cabinet glass, pulverizing her mother’s good china. “Why’s he saved? Because he’s a good man, Delilah. A man of principle. A man who, down to his last little fucking ounce of energy, is trying to do the right thing.”

He backhands the stovetop beside Zelda, flipping a pan and shooting bacon grease atop Zelda’s sign language handbook. The grease sizzles and burns holes through the pages. Zelda feels a blast of indignation. She darts her eyes over her spoiled home, the path of crude destruction doing its best to destroy the memories of every struggle she has overcome. Strickland’s a couple of feet away. The gun might swipe her face next. It doesn’t matter: She lifts her chin as high as she can. She will not be frightened. She will not give up her friend.

Strickland leers at her. A white froth that looks like upchucked aspirin has gathered in the corners of his lips. Slowly, he displays his left hand. Despite the stupefying terror, Zelda recoils from the repellent sight. She hasn’t seen these fingers since she and Elisa had found them on the lab floor. Now the bandage is gone and the operation is exposed as a failure. The fingers are the glossy black of rotten bananas, inflated to the point of rupture.

“God gives Samson back all his strength,” Strickland says. “Gives him back all his power. So that Samson can bring ruin raining down on all the Philistines. He takes hold of the columns of the temple. Like so.”

Strickland stashes the gun in his armpit so that he can pinch the two dead fingers.

“And then? He breaks them.”

Strickland tears off the fingers. They detach as if perforated, with a series of light pops—just like snapping beans, Zelda thinks before screaming. She hears a thud, Brewster dropping his beer, and a zing, the Barcalounger springing to starting position. Strickland’s eyebrows lift in surprise at the brown fluid that geysers two inches from the finger holes before dribbling down his hand like slopped gravy. He considers the two black sausages he’s still holding, and drops them on the kitchen floor. From one of the fingers pops a wedding band.

“It’s Elisa,” Brewster blurts. “Elisa what’s-her-name. The mute. She’s the one that has it.”

The only sounds are the rustle of rain coming through the open door, the yammer of the television, and the soft glug of beer emptying onto the carpet. Strickland turns. Zelda reaches for the stove to keep herself upright, then shakes her head at her husband.

“Brewster, don’t—”

“She lives over a movie theater,” he continues. “That’s what Zelda says. The Arcade. Just a few blocks north of the river. Easy trip from here. Five minutes, I bet.”

The weight of the gun appears to double. Zelda watches it hitch downward until it points at the floor.

“Elisa?” Strickland whispers. “Elisa did this?”

He stares at Zelda, face drawn in shocked betrayal, arms shaking slightly as if in search of a hug to keep him aloft. Zelda doesn’t know what to say or do, and so makes no sound or move. Strickland’s face falls. He pouts at the finger smudged across the linoleum, as if longing to have it back. He breathes for a minute, shallow at first, then more deeply, before raising his head and squaring his shoulders. Military bearing, Zelda guesses, is all this wrecked man has left.

He plods across the carpet, shoes dragging through the mud. He lifts the telephone as if it, too, is of cinder block weight, and dials as if through clay. Zelda stares at Brewster. Brewster stares at Strickland. Zelda hears the pip-squeak report of a man picking up on the other end.

“Fleming.” Strickland’s voice is so lifeless that Zelda shudders. “I was… I was wrong. It’s the other one. Elisa Esposito. She’s got the asset above the Arcade. Yes, the movie theater. Reroute the containment unit. I’ll meet it there.”

Strickland gingerly replaces the receiver into its cradle and turns around. He surveys the glass, the porcelain, the ceramic, the china, the paper, the flesh—so much detritus generated so quickly. His comatose manner suggests to Zelda that he’ll never leave this spot, will become a fixture in her home that she’ll have to glue back together along with the rest of the ruin. But Strickland is a wound watch. Cogs inside of him turn and he moves, shuffling between Brewster and the television and out the open door.

One more lurch and he’s gone, melted into the rain.

Zelda bursts forward and reaches for the phone. Brewster, though, is out of his chair at last, and moves more rapidly than she’s ever seen. The Barcalounger rocks and yowls, abruptly empty, and Zelda finds her husband’s arm held crosswise over the phone.

“Brewster. Please move.”

“You can’t get involved. We can’t get involved.”

“He’s going to her home. Because of you, Brewster! I need to warn her. He has a gun!”

“Because of me we saved our skins. They don’t get your friend, who do you think they blame next? You think they’re just going to forget? Forget the black folks who stuck their noses in? We’re going to repair that door and we’re going to pick up those… things he left on the floor, and we’re going to sit down and watch TV. Just like normal people.”

“I never should’ve told you. I never should’ve said a word—”

“You finish dinner; I’ll find some seltzer to scrub the rug—”

“They love each other. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what that was like?”

Brewster’s arm sags. But he does not abdicate the phone.

“I do remember,” he says. “That’s why I can’t let you make that call.”

His brown eyes, so often half-shut and glazed by television strobes, are wide and clear, and in them she can see the reflection of debris left behind by Strickland. In truth, she can see a lot more than that. She can see Brewster’s own history of battling and losing, always losing but never quite quitting, not even when Zelda spins her risky fantasies of quitting Occam and starting her own business. In that way, Brewster is brave. He has survived. He’s still here, surviving. He’s a good man.

But she’s a good woman, or wants to be, and that particular achievement is measured by the distance between the change bowl, where Brewster’s car keys rest, and the gaping front door, and beyond that, the distance between the front door and Brewster’s Ford snoozing in the rain. She knows she can make it; Brewster will be too stunned to follow. She knows she can make it to Elisa’s, too, even in this Old Testament tempest. What she doesn’t know is what good she can do once she gets there, or what will be the aftermath. But such things are always unknowable, aren’t they? The world changes, or doesn’t. You fight for the right things and be glad you did. That, at least, is the plan, the best one Zelda D. Fuller’s got.

22

ELISA KNOWS EVERY leaf of her jungle, every vine, every stone, and detects no malice in the shadow that slides over her. She opens her warm, wet eyes, enjoying the playful resistance of droplets trying to keep individual eyelashes mated. They peel apart, one by one, reluctant and languorous. It is Giles, backlit by living-room light, standing over the tub, smiling gently, and she wonders if the hothouse mugginess of the room is to blame for the tears filling his eyes.

“It’s time, dear,” he says.

She winds her drowsy arms around the dozing creature, unwilling to recall, but unable to stop herself, either, how several hours ago, possibly several millennia, she’d knocked on Giles’s door to beg of him the greatest, most terrible favor. She’d signed her request briskly so that the grief wouldn’t prolong: unlock her apartment before midnight, rouse her from the tub, and ignore any protests she might make. The bathwater she lies in, she notices, has gone cold, yet she has no desire to leave it. It can’t be that late already. It can’t be. She’s had all day, all night to say good-bye to him and she hasn’t even begun.

Giles plants his hands to his knees in order to hunker down, but halts halfway. He’s holding a long, thin paintbrush, fine-tipped for detail, and seems to have forgotten it. Now there’s green paint all over one knee of his trousers. He chuckles, stows the brush into his breast pocket.

“I finished.” He can’t keep the pride from his voice, and Elisa is glad he doesn’t. “It won’t be the same thing as having him. Not even close. But I believe it’s the closest anyone could ever come. And it’s for you, Elisa. You’ll have it to remember him by. Let me show it to you on our way out—show it to both of you. Now, please, sweetheart. It’s late. Won’t you take my hand?”

Elisa smiles, lost in awe over her friend’s head of hair, his face’s boyish brio, his skin’s healthful hue. His aspect is tender, but resolute. She looks at his outstretched hand, the knuckle hair clotted with paint, the fingernails swathed in paint, the cuff of his sweater ringed in paint. She raises a hand from the water. The instant it leaves the creature’s back, he bristles, holds her more tightly. Elisa hesitates, her hand occupying the midworld between her watery wedding bed and Giles’s solid ground, and she doesn’t know if she can bridge the gap.

There is a crash. Down on the street. It’s close, against the building itself. And loud. Metal, glass, plastic, steam. Elisa feels the brunt in her body, a concussion in her lungs, and she knows, she knows she has lingered too long. Giles knows it, too: He reaches across worlds and snatches her wrist. Even the creature knows it: His claws protrude, scratching like a lover’s fingernails across her naked back. They move in concert. Water sloshes over the tub rim. Plants topple from the sink. Cardboard trees swing from the walls. They have been found.

23

IT’S THE RAIN’S fault. Must be two inches deep, suctioning him toward the gutter. Lashing the windshield with dizzying ecliptics that make him misjudge the turn. The movie theater springs into view, its thousands of lights smudged like drizzled yellow paint. He cranks the wheel at the adjacent alley, relying on the ballyhooed power steering, but too late. The bashed-in back end muffs the simplest maneuvers, and his Caddy—his beloved teal Cadillac Coupe de Ville, two-point-three tons and eighteen and a half feet of palatial leisure, zero to sixty in ten-point-seven seconds, AM/FM stereo sound, crisp as a fresh dollar bill—rams into the side of the theater.

Strickland shoves his way out. He tries to shut the door, force of habit, but he’s not used to missing two fingers. He misses the door entirely, his hand slicing through rain. He takes stock of the disaster. Front end smashed, back end smashed. The American dream demolished from both ends. It doesn’t matter. He’s the Jungle-god now, the monkeys ripping apart his stupid human skull. He stomps through ankle-deep puddles. A man with a name tag rushes at him from the box office, gesturing in dismay at the broken bricks strewn across the sidewalk.

In the jungle, this man is just a buzzing carapanã. Strickland lashes out with the Beretta, strikes him in the nose. A pennant of blood flaps before the rain splatters it to the sidewalk. Strickland stalks past the writhing body, hunts beneath the waterlogged glitz of the marquee bulbs. Finally, back in the alley, he spots it. An alcove, a door to the overhead apartments. Elisa, his voiceless vision, his hope of the future, his betrayer, his prey. The Caddy blocks the whole alley. He has to climb over the indented hood. The bifurcated engine spews steam, and Strickland pauses inside it. The heat of the Amazon, the leprous thrill, the warm viper squirm, the sweltering swirl of piranha, all of it picking him down to the hard, clean, sharp, efficient bone.

What’s that he sees at the other end of the alley beneath a moth-flickered light? A white van missing its front bumper, painted with the words MILICENT LAUNDRY. Strickland pushes from the scorching steam and grins, feeling a million hard darts of rain bouncing off his skull.

24

THEY SWAY AT the top of the fire escape, overweight with the creature between them. Elisa wears the quickest of coverings, her ratty pink bathrobe and the first shoes she saw, Julia’s silver-encrusted specials, which she grabbed like talismans, and sure enough she slips, her top half pitching over the guardrail. The creature, draped in a blanket that barely hides him, pulls her from the brink. Below, Elisa sees the Pug. Also below, a car wreck, a goliath green machine wedged between alley walls, blocking the Pug’s only exit path. Directly beneath them, out of view, she hears the knob of the Arcade Apartments being throttled, then the loud whacks of a shoe kicking the door, then a blast so loud all the raindrops freeze in place for one second, red light from the gunpowder flash transforming each drop into the blood of an expiring world.

The man’s footsteps race upstairs. Giles, in turn, pulls Elisa down the fire-escape stairs. Their descent is the opposite of their inchworm climb with the creature a week ago, a madcap scramble, feet slipping and bodies colliding. Elisa can only tuck her head into the creature’s neck and hold on to Giles’s sopping sweater. He leads them onward, fast, undaunted. His new hair is slicked to his head and the paintbrush in his breast pocket bleeds green through his shirt. Her heart, if punctured, would bleed green, too, she thinks.

They reach the alley with broken hearts, but not one broken bone.

“We’ll have to go on foot!” Giles cries over the downpour. “Just a few blocks! We can make it! No discussion! Go, go!”

The alley is its usual minefield of potholes. Elisa has never cared until now, when every other step plunges one of them shin-deep into oily water. There’s no time to unbuckle the silver heels. They progress like damaged pistons, one up, one down. It’s taking them far too long. Finally, they are at the crashed car, blinded by its headlights. Elisa crawls over the scrunched hood, then helps Giles hoist the creature. Giles is last, gathering the fallen blanket, wrapping it back around the creature, and shoving them onward. Elisa throws a look back at Mr. Arzounian, who gawks from the sidewalk, a hand pressed to his broken nose, perhaps believing that the strangest film he ever screened has come to life.

25

STRICKLAND SMELLS DEUS Brânquia. The memory floods back from the Amazon. The Gill-god’s scent of brine and fruit and silt. In Occam’s labs, antiseptic cleaners had blotted it out, and that had been a mistake. How stupid are humans to rob themselves of their most critical defensive sense? He knows who’s to blame. The janitors. Their soap, bleach, and ammonia weren’t wiping away the crud of this world. It was hiding a second world, an ascendant one, unless Strickland moves fast and puts an end to it.

Two apartment doors. He picks the first one. Doesn’t bother with hands or feet. He points the Beretta, fires at the knob. The door is of lousier quality than Delilah Brewster’s. The middle third of it disintegrates into sawdust. Strickland boots away the sharp-edged clingers and shoulders inside, gun raised, as prepared as he was at the bottom of the pile in Yeongdong to murder anything that breathes.

Deus Brânquia, colossal, beatific, resplendent, lords from the center of the cramped, dusty apartment. Strickland was wrong that he was ready. He isn’t. He screams, and falls to his knees, and fires, and screams, and fires, and screams. Bullets pass right through Deus Brânquia. The Gill-god doesn’t react. The gun goes hot in Strickland’s hands. His arms tremble from the discharges. He throws himself back against the wall and covers his face. Deus Brânquia gazes down at him, patient and unchanged.

Strickland wipes rain from his eyes, begins to understand. This Deus Brânquia isn’t real. Not in the sense of a thing that he can kill. It’s a painting. Bigger than life, disorienting in detail. It is Deus Brânquia, somehow, as if painted with Deus Brânquia’s blood and scales upon a rock dredged from Deus Brânquia’s grotto. Strickland angles his head and the picture of the Gill-god seems to lift its arms, offering embrace. Some kind of visual trick. Strickland rejects the memory. It barges in anyway. His chasing of Deus Brânquia to the fateful bayou. His cornering of it in a cave. How it had reached out to Strickland, accepting his violence, anger, and confusion, understanding the obligation Strickland felt to the god he called General Hoyt. Strickland, in reply, had harpooned Deus Brânquia. Until now, he’d never noticed that he’d impaled himself on the harpoon’s other end, binding the two of them forever, wound to wound.

26

ELISA CAN’T DENY that it is a form of miracle. The night she has no choice but to walk in public with the creature at her side is a night so brutally beset by sheeting rain that the streets are empty. Rogue automobiles idle in parking lots, drivers hoping to wait out a storm that they must suspect won’t ever end. Woeful loners huddle under bus-station carapaces or store awnings watching the water rise ever higher over their shoes. The sidewalks are impassable, so Elisa and Giles walk along the highest available ground, the center of the road, the creature supported between them, his gills opened to the rain.

She can barely walk under the soaked housecoat. Giles, though revived in spirit, is still old. They are not going quickly enough. The man in the Arcade Apartments will catch them. Elisa throws a look behind her, waiting to hear the crunch of the ruined Cadillac rolling after them like a tank or see Richard Strickland part curtains of rain, grinning lazily, saying to her, once again: I bet I could make you squawk. Just a little?

If not Strickland, some good citizen will approach to help, and all will be lost just the same. Elisa looks about frantically, hair spitting rain. One more miracle is all they need. An abandoned car with the keys in the ignition, a maniac bus driver still running his route. Elisa starts signing to Giles: “Too slow.” He isn’t looking. She reaches past the creature, drags the sign across Giles’s arm. He pats her hand, but it’s not a response. He’s trying to get her attention. He pulls to a sudden halt. The creature pitches, and Elisa nearly topples in her silver heels. Stopping is a terrible idea; she glares at Giles. But he is staring at the curb, eyes wide open against the downpour.

To their right, a dark mass gathers in the gutter. Mud, Elisa thinks, coughed up by inundated sewers. But the mass is moving. Swimming through cascades of rain. Scrabbling over wet pavement. Elisa identifies the creatures with a dull shock. Rats, pouring out of the flooded sewers. Far off, a horrified observer screams. The rats tussle past one another, pink tails twitching, spreading across the road like tar, wet pelts winking in the streetlights. Elisa looks left and it’s the same, a black ripple of rodents. She feels Giles clutch at her hand and she holds her breath as the rats encircle them. The madness intensifies: The rats stop en masse, holding a five-foot distance, black eyes staring, noses twitching. Hundreds now, waiting for a signal.

“I confess, my dear,” Giles says, “I do not know what to do.”

Elisa feels the creature stir from beneath the soaked blanket. A single huge, taloned hand emerges, and though his body heaves in a struggle for breath, the hand is steady. It makes a smooth, curling gesture, a benediction, the rain gathering in his scaled palm. The field of soaked rats undulate in a collective shiver, one small body to the next, and a strange scritching noise rises to compete with the beat of rain. It is the scrape, Elisa realizes, of a thousand minuscule legs backpedaling across pavement. She wipes rain from her eyes, but there is no mistaking it.

The rats are parting, creating a path to let them pass.

The creature drops his hand and slumps so heavily that Elisa and Giles have to snap together to keep him from collapsing.

“‘It ain’t a fit night out for man or beast,’” Giles quotes, his voice trembling. “W. C. Fields.” He swallows, nods at the road ahead. “Together, then, we go. Into the fray.”

27

MOLTEN TEARS BLAZE down Strickland’s face, already burned from the Caddy’s steam. He will not become a human again. Changing would be crawling back into the womb, voiding his whole history, confessing to a purposeless life. Impossible, no matter how badly he might want it. The monkeys shriek and he does what they say, forcing himself to look at Deus Brânquia. Mere paint, mere canvas. He stands, finds equilibrium. Yes, that’s right. If he has to, he’ll yank off another two fingers, a whole arm, his own head, anything to see the blood flow and prove which one of them is real.

Strickland passes through the splintered door into a hallway uproarious with rain, and faces the second apartment. Best to save bullets. Six or seven kicks and he’s inside. It’s worse than Lainie’s unpacked boxes. It’s a slovenly hole fit for vermin. That’s all Elisa Esposito is. The second the Negro told him how Elisa had been raised in an orphanage, he should have known. No one has ever, will ever, or should ever want her.

He follows her smell into a cluttered bedroom. The wall over the bed is covered with shoes, many of which, to his shame, he recognizes. His cock responds, and he wants to rip it off the same as he did his fingers. Maybe later, when he comes back to watch the whole building burn. Deus Brânquia’s smell is thick here, too. He hurries to the bathroom, finds a tub varnished in luminous scales. Little air-freshener trees cover every inch of wall. What in the holy hell happened here? The idea he’s beginning to form disgusts him.

Strickland teeters into the main room. His vision spirals. They’re not here. Somehow the asset got away. The Beretta grows heavy in his hand. It pulls him to the right, to the right, in one circle, then another. He’s spinning. The detritus of Elisa’s world, the world he once wanted, swirls into an ugly brown. He glimpses something, has just enough sense left to notice it. He has to jam the gun against a rattletrap table to halt the nauseating rotations.

A day-by-day calendar. Inked across today’s date are the words MIDNIGHT—THE DOCKS. Strickland checks the clock above the table. Not quite twelve. There’s still time. Still time if he can stop spinning, if he can run in a straight line. He snatches a phone from its cradle on the table, dials with a finger that looks long and insectile next to its missing brethren. Fleming picks up. Strickland tries to tell him to divert the containment crew, coming all the way from Occam, to the docks just down the street. He can’t tell if his instruction succeeds. His voice no longer sounds like his own.

“****** ******** ** *** *****! ******* **** *** ******! ***, ***, ***!”

28

THE RATS WERE all she noted at first because they so outnumbered the rest. By the time she sets her foot on the jetty, her dazed eyes have accepted other subterrestrial dwellers among the palpitating legion, predators and prey alongside one another in a cross-species peace that imitates that of Elisa and the creature. Matted squirrels, red-eyed rabbits, ponderous raccoons, sewage-stained foxes, bounding frogs, scampering lizards, glissading snakes, and, squirming beneath them all, a layer of worms, centipedes, and slugs. Insects churn above the rolling rodentia, a black stripe that persists even through the driving rain. On the periphery, overland animals have begun to arrive, too. Dogs, cats, ducks, a single mysterious pig, drawn forth as if to bow before a god that they, in their beastly hearts, had always awaited.

The animals peel from the jetty to let the trio pass. The pier is as short as Elisa remembers, maybe forty feet, though that is plenty. The thirty-foot depth mark has been far surpassed; only the top of the stanchion is visible. The river level is mere inches below the jetty and it bucks in the storm, spilling across the planks. Here it is, then. All elements are aligned. Yet Elisa stands still, rain drilling into her flesh. Her breaths come in scraping jags; she realizes that they resemble the creature’s labored pull of air through his flapping gills. She feels a hand on her wet back.

“Hurry,” Giles whispers.

She cries, but so does the sky; the whole universe sobs, the people and animals and land and water, all weeping for a unity nearly sealed between two divergent worlds, but that could not, in the end, be sustained. Elisa’s arms dangle at her sides and she feels the cool, damp scales of the creature’s hand slide against hers. They are holding hands. For one final time, they are joined. Elisa looks at his beautiful face through the prison bars of rain. Great onyx eyes gaze back, betraying no inclination to take to water, despite how the absence will kill him. He will stand here forever if that’s what she wants.

So she walks. To save his life, she walks. One step, two steps, wading through the sloshing water. Over the storm’s blast, she can make out the chattering retreat of the beasts, as well as the splashing footsteps of Giles, her sole follower. Forty feet doesn’t take long. Elisa finds herself at the end, the very end. The square toes of her silver shoes align to the edge of the jetty. The creature’s feet line up as well, his toe claws jutting over the perimeter. Inches below, black water spumes. Elisa takes a deep, salty breath and turns to him. Gusts of apocalyptic wind catch her pink bathrobe and rip free the belt, and the coat flutters about her naked body like butterfly wings.

He glows green. His light lanterns through the rain, pulsing like a lighthouse. Even now, Elisa’s breath is stolen away. She tries to smile. She nods at the water. The creature surveys the depths; his green glows brighter and she sees his gills yawn in yearning. He looks back at her, liquid coursing from his face. Can he cry? She believes he can, though his sobs do not come from his chest. Thunder rumbles from above: That is his cry. He releases her hand, slowly, gingerly. He signs her name, his favorite word, E-L-I-S-A, then folds his own webbed hand so that he can gesture the index finger from his chest to the water. He then turns the finger in a counterclockwise circle.

The signs, though clumsy, read: “Go alone?”

The broken parts of Elisa’s heart break further. For how long has the creature been the last of his kind? How long has he swum alone? She can’t let herself be deterred. She nods, points at the water. He signs again, a pinching gesture: “No.” She flings her arms downward in frustration. He keeps signing, faster now, he’s learned so much: “I need”—but she doesn’t let him finish, she can’t bear it, she needs, too, but their needs can’t matter, and she pushes him, and his body twists toward the water, nearly falling. His blue eyeshine swirls with green. His shoulders curl inward. He stares down at the water. He turns to face it. She is glad, for she doesn’t want him to see her fingers, which, though kept at her side, act on their own, signing, “Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay.”

“Elisa,” Giles cries. “Elisa!”

29

THE VERÃO, THE dry season, is over. The wet season, with its secret name, its secret purpose, has returned. There is no mistaking it. Rats, lizards, snakes, flies, a world made wholly of living, breathing things. They glint evil eyes, open fanged mouths. They come at him. The monkeys in his head shriek their orders, each of them just as secret. He’s a loyal solider. He is the asset, their asset. He roars and runs, kicking and thrashing against rabid squirrels clinging to his pants, manic rats biting into his calves. They can’t stop him. He, Jungle-god, delivers punishment, cracking brittle skulls beneath his heels, throttling tiny, squealing necks with his hands.

Then he’s on the jetty, tearing off a last rat along with a chunk of his thigh. Waves smash into the walkway, walls of water rising on either side, a military saber arch. The black tunnel focuses him upon its end. There stands Elisa Esposito and Deus Brânquia, their backs to him, gazing down at the river’s vortex. Strickland covers the distance in seconds, his feet sure despite the river’s spray. There’s an old man, too, off to the side. Strickland recognizes him. It’s the driver of the laundry van. It’s all coming together now. Oh, what a pleasure this will be.

The old man sees Strickland and cries, Elisa! But Strickland is coming too fast. The old man does the last thing Strickland expects, rushing him. Strickland has to stop, his foot slipping across the slick planks, the whorling torrent. He’s off-balance. All he can do is swing the Beretta. It cracks the side of the old man’s head. He goes down hard and lands badly, his torso rolling off the side of the jetty and into the raging waters. There is a suspenseful second, the old man trying to grip the wet wood. He can’t do it. He drops headfirst into the barbed waves.

Now Elisa sees him. Strickland rights himself, aims the gun at Deus Brânquia, ten feet away. But his eyes flick toward Elisa. She’s wearing next to nothing, an untied housecoat. And shoes. Of course, shoes. Sparkling silver heels meant to torture him. This temptress, this jezebel, this deceiver. She was the true Delilah all along, distracting him from her scheme. Instead, he’ll make her serve as witness to Deus Brânquia’s end. Starting now, the Gill-god is of the past. And he, Richard Strickland? It’s like the Cadillac salesman said: The future. You look like a man who’s headed there.

He’s satisfied to be right about one thing. He does, at the end, make the mute girl squawk. It’s her only way to warn Deus Brânquia of the bullet about to be fired. She gulps a water-swirled breath and, her neck veins drawing taut, screams. Strickland is certain it’s the first to ever expel from her weakling throat. It’s a little sound, the breaking of whatever is left of her voice box, the same croak the vulture chained to the Josefina made when it choked on Henríquez’s logbook.

The noise is unique enough to pierce the howling squall. Deus Brânquia turns. Lightning strikes, slashing white through the Gill-god’s blue-green glow. But it is too late. Strickland, man of the future, wields a weapon of the future. He squeezes the trigger, once, twice. In gale winds and pelting showers, it sounds tidy. Pop, pop. Two holes appear in Deus Brânquia’s chest. The creature wobbles. Drops to its knees on the jetty’s edge. Blood spouts outward, mixes with rain.

After such an epic hunt, across two continents, against so formidable a foe, it’s disappointing. It is, however, the nature of the hunt. Sometimes, your prey rages in death, becomes legend. Other times, it winks away, becomes nothing stronger than a fairy tale. Strickland shakes the rain from his face, aims at Deus Brânquia’s bowed head, and pulls the trigger.

30

IN THAT INSTANT, Elisa knows the frenzy that makes a man cover a grenade for his fellow soldiers, that makes mothers sacrifice their lives for their children, that makes anyone in love impatient to lose everything so that their loved one can carry on. But there is no opportunity. She raises an arm, as if she could ward off the bullet by gesture alone. It is as far as she gets. Everything happens at once.

Strickland’s body wrenches to the left at the moment of firing. The thin, sharp end of a paintbrush has been impaled through his left foot. Just behind him is Giles, resurfaced and clinging to the edge of the jetty. It is the person who dragged Giles free of the current who has taken the paintbrush from his pocket and stabbed. It is Zelda, incredibly Zelda, materialized here at world’s end, sprawled across the walkway, drenched and muddy, her fist still clenched around the brush, her hand gone green from the drizzling paint.

Strickland reaches for his foot, stumbling to a kneel. Hope punches Elisa in the chest. Then, she realizes, it isn’t hope at all. She falls to her own knees, mirroring Strickland. Her thighs quake and she clenches them with both hands, not wishing to fall any farther. It’s no good. She pitches forward, bracing herself in a push-up pose. River water splashes across her face, over her fingers. The water is black, it is blue, it is purple, it is red. She looks sharply down at her chest. There is a neat bullet hole directly between her breasts. Blood spurts out, onto the planks, and is instantly washed away.

Her elbows are paper. She wilts. Her vision rolls over. She sees an upside-down world: charcoal clouds with lightning-bolt capillaries, a shower of racing rain, police lights flashing against nearby boats, Strickland scrabbling for his gun, Zelda pounding her fists on his back, Giles back on the dock and reaching for Strickland’s ankle. Elisa sees green, and blue, and yellow; then faster, violet, and crimson, and umber; then faster, peach, and olive, and canary; and faster, every color known and unknown, outshining the storm. It is the creature, the magnificent grooves of his body phosphorescent, and he has caught her in his arms, his blood pouring into hers, hers spattering into his, both of them connected by the liquid of life even as both of them are dying.

31

A WAVE NUDGES the Beretta toward the depths, but Strickland is quicker. He crawls for it, seizes it, joins both hands to hold it tight. Now to rid himself of the twin rats nipping at him. He rolls onto his back, kicks the old man in the face. He shoves Delilah Brewster several feet down the jetty. Strickland is bitten all over, spurting blood from his foot, blinded by the downpour. Still he props himself on an elbow, opens his mouth to the rain. It is his rain now. He brings himself to a sitting position, gasping water into his lungs, and cranes his neck.

Deus Brânquia fountains with color. It stares at Strickland through blades of rain, past Elisa, who is cradled in its arms. Slowly, it lowers her to the walkway, where waves lick against her. The Gill-god stands. Strickland blinks, attempts to comprehend. It’s been shot twice in the chest. And yet it stands? And yet it walks? Deus Brânquia continues down the jetty, its body a torch in the night, an infinite thing that Strickland, stupid man, believed he could make finite.

Strickland tries anyway. He fumbles the gun upward, fires. Into Deus Brânquia’s chest. Into its neck. Into its gut. Deus Brânquia wipes a hand across the bullet holes. The wounds dribble away along with the rain. Strickland shakes his head hard enough to spatter water. Is it the freshly filled river that gives it such strength? Is it the gathered beasts supplying their master with life force? He’ll never know. He isn’t meant to know. He’s crying. The same big, ragged sobs he told Timmy he wasn’t ever allowed to cry. He lowers his face to the jetty, ashamed to meet the Gill-god’s everlasting eyes.

Deus Brânquia kneels before him. With a single claw, it hooks the trigger guard of the gun, gently removing it from Strickland’s grip and lowering it to the dock. A spate of black water explodes across the jetty, steals the gun, swallows it down. With the same claw, Deus Brânquia tilts Strickland’s face upward by the tender underside of his chin. Strickland sniffles, tries to keep his eyes closed, but he can’t. Their faces are inches apart. Tears stream down his cheeks, across the bridge of Deus Brânquia’s claw, down the brilliant scales. Strickland opens his mouth and he is glad, here at the end, to hear that his own voice has returned.

“You are a god,” Strickland whispers. “I’m sorry.”

Deus Brânquia cocks its head to the side, as if considering the plea. Then, with a single, casual motion, it moves its claw from Strickland’s chin, touches it to Strickland’s neck, and draws the claw across his throat.

Strickland feels opened. It isn’t a bad feeling. He has been closed to too much, he thinks, and for too long. There is a lightness to his head. He looks down. Blood is jetting from his slit throat, spilling down his chest. It empties him of everything. The monkeys. General Hoyt. Lainie. The children. His sins. What remains is Richard Strickland, the way he began, the way he was born, a vessel containing nothing but potential. He is falling backward. No, it is Deus Brânquia, guiding him down, tucking him into water as soft and warm as blankets. He is happy. His eye sockets fill with rain. Water is all he can see. It is the end. But he laughs as he dies. Because it is also the beginning.

32

GILES SEES CIVILIZATION reassert itself from nature’s wilds. Vehicles with histrionic lights and infant bawls. Men in uniforms and rain gear, sprinting for the docks, hands steadying the jounce of equipment belts. They skid to a halt before the beasts massed at the foot of the jetty, not as many as before, but enough to impress. Civilians have also begun to gather, people who wouldn’t brave a storm like this except to seek out the incredible colors they saw radiating from the docks, some madman, maybe, launching fireworks in the downpour.

He coughs water from his lungs. He ought to be dead. He recalls striking the river bottom and paddling furiously to resurface, only to be clenched by a riptide and tugged toward the bay. A hand had grasped his wrist, though, pulling him back to the jetty. Their palms should have slipped from each other’s, but this hand had a good texture for gripping, calloused by scouring pads and perpetual pushes of brooms and mops, a hand rather like Elisa’s.

It had been the black woman Giles had glimpsed at the Occam loading dock, their clandestine colluder. How she was here he couldn’t begin to guess, but then again, nothing about the woman added up: round, middle-aged, given to appearing at momentous junctures, driven by some unlimited cache of courage. The second he had a hold on the jetty, she’d unsheathed the paintbrush from his pocket and attacked the man with the gun. Now that man is dead, his throat pumping so much blood even the whipping waves can’t disperse all of it.

Giles struggles to an elbow. The woman pulls his shivering body close to hers. Their heaving breaths equalize as they squint through the spray to watch the creature stand, flick the man’s blood from his claw, and walk on webbed feet to Elisa’s collapsed body, his glorious lights dimming with every step.

“Is she…?” Giles croaks.

“I don’t know,” the woman says.

“Put your hands up!” men shout. The creature takes no heed. He lifts Elisa from the jetty. The shouts change to “Put the woman down!” but these have no better effect. The creature stands in place for a moment, black against the river foam and sterling rain, a tall, strong shape at the edge of America. Giles is too exhausted, too heavied by grief to cry out, but he mouths the word good-bye, both to the creature whose healing touch gave him the strength to resist drowning tonight, and to his best friend, who gave him the strength to resist drowning for the past twenty years.

Without a sound, without a splash, the creature, holding Elisa, dives into water.

Men come at last, their shoes splashing up the jetty. The ones with firearms go all the way to the end, pinning their hats to their heads in the gusty winds while trying to follow the flashlight beams being shone at the waves. The ones with medical kits drop down first beside the dead man, and second beside Giles and the woman. A medic runs his hands over Giles’s head and neck, along his torso.

“Are you hurt?”

“Of course he’s hurt,” snaps the woman holding Giles. “We’re all hurt.”

Giles surprises himself by chuckling. He will miss Elisa. Oh, how he’ll miss her, every night as if it’s morning, every morning as if it’s afternoon, every time his stomach rumbles because he has forgotten to eat. He loved her. No, that isn’t right. He loves her. Somehow he knows that she isn’t gone, nor will she ever be. And this woman? His savior? He might already love her, too.

“You must be Giles,” she says as the medic examines her.

“And you,” he says, “must be Zelda.”

The absurdity of formal introduction under such apocalyptic settings makes both of them smile. Giles thinks of Elaine Strickland, who disappeared before he could tell her everything she had meant to him. He will not make that mistake again. He reaches out, takes Zelda’s hand. Salt water slides between their palms and seals them together. She leans her head against his shoulder as the rain drums against them, melting them, or so it feels, into one being.

“Do you think…” Zelda begins.

Giles tries to help. “That they’re…”

“Down there, I mean,” she offers. “That they might…?”

Neither can finish. That is all right; they both know the question as well as they know that, for them, there will be no definitive answer. Giles squeezes Zelda’s hand and sighs, watching his plume of breath—still strong, he observes—dissipate beneath a shower that he believes might, at long last, be waning. He waits until after they are swaddled in hospital blankets, after they are in the back of the ambulance they insisted upon sharing, after he suspects Zelda has forgotten the question, before he offers his best guess at the answer.

33

ELISA SINKS. POSEIDON’S fist grabs her, rolls her back and forth like a crocodile rolls its prey. Twice she has pushed herself to the surface only to see Baltimore, her homeland, diminish to a piddling twinkle. She is shot, and can’t kick, and slides under for the final time. Down here, it is dark. There is no air. There is only pressure, like dozens of hands pressing her flesh as if to staunch her wounds. Blood escapes anyway, spreading through the water, a scarlet gown to replace the natty bathrobe that has floated away.

Elisa parts her lips, lets cold water pour in.

From blackness he comes. She believes he is a school of glittering fish until each of the million points of light is revealed as one of his scales. He brings his own underwater sun, and by its radiance she watches him move in unimaginable ways. He is not inside the water, but rather part of it, walking straight through it as if down a sidewalk, quite the trick, only to then rebel against gravity, pirouette like a flower caught in the wind. With perfect precision he meets her with a kiss to her head; he wraps his arms around her, enveloping her in his sea-sun. His wide palms slide up her back, crest her naked shoulders, and dive between her breasts. He then wiggles away to hold her by the sides, like she’s a child on a bicycle she’s only starting to learn.

Elisa blinks, her eyelids oaring aside pounds of water. The hole in her chest has been erased. The surprise is that she feels no surprise, only an easy, pleasant approval. She looks up to find the creature has swum off to her right, holding only to her hand. Elisa becomes aware that he is preparing to let go. She shakes her head, her hair aswirl like seaweed. She’s not ready. She brings her free hand close to sign her apprehension, but human appendages are lousy at cutting through water. His hand unleashes hers, and she is falling, falling, falling, though it is tricky to say for sure in so black a void. Perhaps, in fact, she is rising, rising, rising. She kicks her legs. Julia’s beautiful silver shoes tumble past her like exotic fish. She no longer needs them.

He emerges again from the deep. They stand before each other on nothing but water, new and naked, the ocean their Eden. His gills expand and contract. Elisa, too, breathes. She does not understand how, and doesn’t care, for the water-air is wonderful! It tastes like sugar and strawberries, fills her with an energy she’s never felt. She can’t help it: She laughs. Bubbles rollick from her mouth and the creature playfully swats them. She reaches out, caresses his soft gills. She believes she could look at him forever.

And she might. Something inside her is beginning to expand. These are the parts, she realizes, that made the Matron, maybe the only person to know the truth, call her a monster. Elisa feels no hate for the woman; she realizes that, down here, hate has no purpose. Down here, you embrace your foes until they become your friends. Down here, you seek not to be one being, but all beings, and all at once, God and Chemosh and everything in between. The change in her isn’t only mental. It’s physical, of skin and muscle. Yes, she has arrived. She is full. She is perfect.

She reaches out to him. To herself. There is no difference. She understands now. She holds him, he holds her, they hold each other, and all is dark, all is light, all is ugliness, all is beauty, all is pain, all is grief, all is never, all is forever.

34

WE WAIT WE watch we listen we feel we are patient we are always patient but it is difficult the woman we love it takes her a long time it takes her so long to know to see to feel to remember and it is not happy to see her struggle it is not happy to see her with pain but we struggled too we all struggled and the pain and struggle are important the pain and struggle must happen if she is to heal as we all have healed as we have helped heal her and now it is happening it is happening there is understanding and it is beautiful she is beautiful we are beautiful and it is a good sight a happy sight the lines on her neck the lines she thought were scars but are not scars it is a good sight to see those lines split open for the gills to open for the gills to spread wide it is a happy sight and now she knows who she is who she has always been she is us and we speak together now we feel together now and we swim into the distance into the end into the beginning and we welcome all who are willing to follow we welcome the fish we welcome the birds we welcome the insects we welcome the four-legs we welcome the two-legs we welcome you ///

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