18
“WE HAVE OURSELVES a pickle, girls. A real pickle.”
The scene of the crime still vibrates from the ordeal. Without being asked, Elisa dips her mop into soapy water, wrings it in the vise, and swabs it at the tusk of blood. Fleming, meanwhile, issues the orders to Zelda. He always does. Zelda, at least, can verbally indicate comprehension.
“I need both of you inside F-1 right now,” Fleming continues. “Emergency work. No questions, please. Just do the job. Do it well, but do it quickly. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“What do you want us to do?” Zelda asks.
“Zelda, this will go faster if you just listen. There’s … biologic matter. On the floor. Maybe the tables. Check around. I don’t need to explain this to you. You know how to do your job. Just make it all go away.”
Elisa glances at the door. There’s blood on the knob.
“But … will we be…”
“Zelda, what did I say? I wouldn’t send you in there if you weren’t perfectly safe. Just stay away from the tank. That’s the big metal object you saw Mr. Strickland bring in. Do not go near the tank. There should be no reason at all for either of you to approach the tank. Is that understood? Zelda? Elisa?”
“Yes, sir,” Zelda says, and Elisa nods.
Fleming starts to say more, then checks his watch. His terse parting words divulge a troubling loss of orating acumen.
“Fifteen minutes. Immaculate. Your complete discretion.”
The lab is spare and orderly no longer. The concrete floor has sprouted a range of metal masts and stockades, each built with iron loops onto which an object, or a living thing, could be leashed. Carts of what look like medical devices extend from the beige computer bank like technological tumors. A table stands in the room’s center, wheels pointed in four different directions. Surgical implements are scattered like punched-out teeth. Drawers are open, sinks are full, cigarettes still seep smoke. One smolders on the floor. The floor, as always, is where the hard work is.
Blood is all over. Gazing over it, Elisa thinks of magazine photos taken from airplanes of flooded lowlands. There’s a hubcap-sized lake of blood congealing beneath the glaring lights. Smaller ponds, lochs, and lagoons trace Mr. Strickland’s race to the door. Zelda pushes her cart through a lakelet and grimaces at the blood trailing behind the plastic wheels. Elisa has no choice but to mirror the movement, too astonished to hatch a cannier plan.
Fifteen minutes. Elisa pours water over the floor. It slithers, strikes blobs of blood, births pink pinwheels. This is how she was taught to do it at Home, in every arena of life. Thin out the mystery of life, the fascination, the lust, the horror, until you no longer question it. She lobs her mop head at the center of the gunk and drags it this way, and that, until the yarn-strands bloat and darken. This is normal. The sound, too, is normal—the wet swap, moist slurp—and she fixates on it. That soot scorch on the concrete could be from an Empty’s fired gun; mop right over it. That’s a cattle prod, one million pounds of menace, impossible to lift; mop around it.
Elisa tells herself not to look at the tank. Don’t look at the tank, Elisa. Elisa looks at the tank. Even thirty feet away, next to the large pool, it’s too big for the lab, a dinosaur crouching in wait. It has been bolted to four plinths, a wooden stairway providing access to a top hatch. Fleming was right about one thing: There’s no blood anywhere near it. No reason to approach it. Elisa tells herself to look away. Look away, Elisa. Elisa cannot look away.
The moppers meet at the bloody area’s vertex. Zelda checks her watch, swipes sweat from her nose, and steadies her bucket for a final pour, nodding for Elisa to gather the contraptions off the floor before the water floods them aside. Elisa kneels and collects them. A pair of forceps. A scalpel with a broken blade. A syringe with a bent needle. Dr. Hoffstetler’s tools, for sure, though she can’t make herself believe the man would hurt anyone or anything. He’d looked devastated charging from the lab. She stands and sets the items in a parallel arrangement on a table like a hotel maid. She hears water lap from Zelda’s bucket and from peripheral vision sees its elongating tendrils. Zelda clucks.
“Will you look at that? Janitors have to sneak off to the loading dock to smoke. Meantime they’re smoking cigars in here like this is some—”
Zelda is not a person typically given to gasps. Elisa spins around to see Zelda’s mop timber forward. Her hands are cupped before her, holding two small objects the mop water washed back from under the table, objects she’d believed were cigars. Her hands shake and part, and the objects drop. One of them falls soundlessly. The other clinks, and from it pops a silver wedding band.
19
ZELDA HAS GONE for help. Elisa can hear her nurse flats firecracking down the hallway. She’s left staring at Strickland’s fingers. The pinky, the ring finger. Snaggy fingernails, poignant tufts of knuckle hair. The skin of the ring finger is pale on one end, blocked from sun for years by the wedding ring. Elisa’s mind returns to the sight of Strickland bursting from the lab door. He’d been clutching his left hand. These are two of the fingers that had fished into the crinkling cellophane bag of green hard candy.
She can’t just leave them there. Fingers can be reattached. She’s read about it. Maybe Dr. Hoffstetler has the know-how to do it himself. She grimaces and looks around. F-1 is a lab. It must have containers, beakers. Occam labs, however, mock people like her; they’re impossible to decode, provisioned with instruments of arcane utility. Her eyes fall in despair and she sees, next to a trash can, something more endemic to her field: a wadded brown paper bag. She goes for it, shakes it open, and sticks her hand inside the greasy paper to operate it like a puppet. Those nubs on the floor aren’t human fingers. They’re just pieces of trash needing to be picked up.
Elisa kneels and tries to collect them. They are like two chunks of chicken, too soft and small for her to get a grip. They fall once, twice, scattering blood like Giles’s dropped brushes scatter paint. She holds her breath, locks her jaw, and picks up the fingers with her bare hand. They are as lukewarm as a limp handshake. She inserts them into the bag and crimps the top. She’s wiping her hand on her uniform when she spies the wedding band. She can’t leave that, either, but no way is she opening the bag again. She swipes the ring and drops it into her apron pocket. She stands, tries to restore normal breathing. The bag feels empty, as if the two fingers have wiggled away like worms.
Elisa is alone, in silence. But is it silence? She is aware of a soft wheeze, air being discharged through a vent. She looks across the lab, once again, at the tank. A second, more disturbing question poses itself. Is she, after all, alone? Fleming warned her and Zelda not to approach the tank. Sound advice. Do not approach the tank, Elisa reinforces to herself. She glances down. Her bright shoes are moving over mopped floor. She is approaching the tank.
Though she is encircled by advanced technology, Elisa feels like a cartoon caveman advancing upon a thicket despite the growls vibrating from within. What was foolhardy two million years ago is foolhardy now. Yet her pulse doesn’t quicken as it did from Strickland’s harmless fingers. It could be because Fleming promised her that she was safe. Or it could be because every night she dreams of the darkest water, and there it is, beyond the portholes of the cylindrical tank: darkness, water.
F-1 is too bright for her to adjust her eyes to the tank’s interior blackness, so she sets down the paper bag and tunnels her hands against the porthole. Refracted light makes her feel as if she’s spiraling until she realizes that the window is underwater. She squashes her nose to the glass to see upward. Here, at last, her pulse gallops, right along with the old iron-lung nightmares.
The dark water eddies with weak light. Elisa catches her breath: It’s like distant fireflies. She presses her hands flat against the window, wanting closer, feeling a physical need. The substance turns, twists, dances like an arabesque veil. Between the points of light, a shape coalesces. Floating debris, Elisa tries to tell herself, that’s all it is, and then a sha
ft of light hits a pair of photoreceptive eyes. They flash bright as gold through black water.
The glass explodes. At least, that is how it sounds. The crash is the lab door banging open, the shatter is the several sets of feet charging inside, and the scrunch is the paper bag being swiped up by her own hands. She’s proving herself a caveman indeed, shrinking back from a bestial threat and rushing at civilization’s centrum—Fleming, the Empties, Dr. Hoffstetler—hoisting the bag of fingers like a trophy, her trophy for having looked into the eyes of ravishing annihilation and lived to tell. She’s giddy with survival, breathless, almost crying, almost laughing.
20
VARIOUS OFFICES WERE offered to Strickland. First-floor berths with panoramic views of swooping lawns. He enjoyed spurning Fleming’s largesse by instead insisting upon the windowless security-camera room. He had Fleming install a desk, cabinet, trash can, and two telephones. One white, one red. The room is small, neat, quiet, and perfect. He journeys his eyes across the four-by-four grid of black-and-white monitors. The interchangeable hallways. The sporadic twitch of a meandering night worker. After the occluded views of the rain forest, how relieving it is to see everything all at once.
He peruses the screens. The last time he saw the two janitors now seated right behind him was in the men’s room, he burning with the mortification of runaway urine, they holding their laughter until he left. Different dynamic now, isn’t it? An opportunity to reestablish a proper relationship. He lets his left hand dangle. Gives the janitors a chance to see the bandages, the shape of his reattached fingers. To imagine what they look like underneath. He could tell them. Pretty fucking bad is how they look. The fingers don’t match his hand. They’re putty-colored, stiff as plastic, attached by black thread the thickness of tarantula legs.
Strickland’s only concern is that they can make out his fingers in the dim light. He unscrewed the overheads after moving in, preferring to let the sixteen screens fill the office with a ghostly gray. After the jungle’s salacious blaze, bright lights are as bad as loud noises. F-1 is intolerable. Hoffstetler has begun dimming the lab at night for the creature’s sake, but that’s even worse. The idea that he and the asset share a light sensitivity enrages him. He’s no animal. He left his animal self in the Amazon. He had to if he had any hope of being a good husband, a good father.
Just to make sure they see, he wiggles his stitched fingers. The blood screams, the monitors go hazy. Strickland blinks, tries not to faint. This pain, it’s something else. The doctors gave him pills for it. The bottle’s right there in the desk. Don’t doctors know that suffering has a point? It grinds you harder, sharper. No thanks, doc. Hard candy will do.
Thinking of the sharp, stinging, distracting taste makes him finally turn around. Since Lainie refuses to unpack the boxes from the move, he’d had to dig out the Brazilian candy himself. It was worth it. The bag chuckles like a clean countryside creek when he picks it up. The glassy green ball billiards between his teeth. That’s better. Much better. He exhales over a tongue being playfully stabbed by sugar and drops himself into his chair.
He’s supposed to thank these two janitors. For finding his fingers. That was Fleming’s request. He would have told Fleming to stuff it, but he’s bored. Sitting behind a desk all day. How do people stand it? Takes fifty signatures before he’s authorized to blow his nose. A hundred signatures before he can wipe his ass. It’s a shame not a single idiot MP landed a bullet in the asset during the attack. He’s got half a mind to pick up the Alabama Howdy-do, march into F-1, and fix it so the asset has less life left to be studied. Once Deus Brânquia is gone, he’ll be out from under General Hoyt, back into his wife’s and kids’ lives. He wants that. Doesn’t he? He thinks he does.
Plus, he can’t sleep. Not with this kind of pain. So, fine. He’ll leak some gratitude upon the stupid janitors. But he’ll do it his way, just to make sure they don’t think he’s some overgrown child incapable of not pissing all over the bathroom floor. Anyway, he’s in no hurry to scurry home. The way Lainie looks at him, he can hardly stand it. Like the fingers don’t compare to what the jungle ripped out of him and what he’s tried to hastily sew back together. He’s trying. Can’t she see he’s trying?
He picks up the first of two pulled files.
“Zelda D. Fuller.”
“Yes, sir,” she replies.
“Married, says here. But how is it your husband’s got a different last name? If you’re divorced or separated, that’s supposed to be here.”
“Brewster, that’s his first name, sir.”
“Sounds like a last name to me.”
“Yes, sir. But no, sir.”
“Yes, but no. Yes, but no.” He screws his right thumb into a forehead beset by the pain crawling up his left arm. “Answers like that are going to make this last all night. It’s twelve-thirty. In the a.m. I could’ve called you two here in the middle of the day, make it easy on myself, but I didn’t. Best you can do is return the favor so I can get out of here, go to bed, have breakfast with my kids. That sound all right to you, Mrs. Brewster? I’m sure you have children.”
“I don’t, sir.”
“No? Now why’s that?”
“I don’t know, sir. It just never … took.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Brewster.”
“It’s Mrs. Fuller, sir. Brewster’s my husband.”
“Brewster. That’s a last name or I’m a monkey’s uncle. Well, I’m sure you have siblings. I expect you know how it goes with children.”
“I don’t have siblings, sir, I’m sorry.”
“That surprises me a great deal. Isn’t that unusual? For your people?”
“My mother died in childbirth.”
“Oh.” Strickland flips a page. “Here it is, page two. That’s too bad. Although if she died in childbirth, I guess you can’t miss her.”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Silver lining, is all I’m saying.”
“Maybe, sir.”
Maybe. It feels as if two balloons of acid are inflating inside his temples. Maybe they’ll explode. Maybe his skin will fizzle from his face and these girls will get to see his shrieking skull. He presses a finger to the page and converges his wobbling eyes upon it. A dead mother. Implied miscarriages. Some kooky marriage. Doesn’t mean shit. Words are useless. Take General Hoyt’s brief about Deus Brânquia. Sure, it’d explained the mission. But had it imparted a thing about how the jungle gets inside you? How the vines penetrate your mosquito net while you sleep, slithering past your lips, boring through your esophagus, and strangling your heart?
Somewhere there’s a government brief about the thing in F-1, and it’s bullshit, too. What’s inside that tank, you can’t capture it in words. You need all your senses. His had been electric in the Amazon, fueled on rage and buchité. Returning to America had dulled him. Baltimore had put him into a coma. Maybe getting two fingers torn off can wake him back up. Because look at him. Here, in the dead of night, listening to low-paid night crawlers, hired precisely because they are slow, uneducated women, tell him, to his face, maybe.
21
“WHAT’S THE D?” he demands.
Zelda has been menaced by men in power all her life. A steelworker following her to the playground to tell her that her daddy had stolen a white man’s job at Bethlehem and was going to hang. Teachers at Douglass High who thought educating black girls would only make them covet things they’d never have. A Fort McHenry tour guide who tallied the number of Union soldiers killed in the Civil War and then asked Zelda if she didn’t want to say thank you to her white classmates. At Occam, though, threats have only ever come from Fleming, and she’s learned how to handle those. Know your QCC front and back. Know how to look forlorn. Know how to flatter.
Mr. Strickland is different. Zelda doesn’t know him, and senses it wouldn’t matter if she did. He’s got lion eyes, like she saw once at the zoo, impossible to read to judge the degree of aggression. Forget divining any clues as to why she and E
lisa have been called before this wall of security monitors, though it can’t be good.
“D, sir?” she ventures.
“Zelda D. Fuller.”
Here’s a question with an answer. She rushes for it, heedlessly.
“Delilah. You know, the Bible.”
“Delilah? The dead mother gave you that?”
She knows how to absorb a punch.
“That’s what my father told me, sir. She had it planned out for a girl.”
Strickland bites into his candy. He does this like a lion, too, jaws wide. Zelda knows cheap candy when she sees it, she practically grew up on it, but this is a new level of cheap. It cleaves badly; she sees splinters sliver into the man’s cheek and gums. She sees blood, diluted by saliva, and can almost taste it, cold and edgeless, as opposite to hard candy as the color red is to green.
“Interesting lady, this dead mother,” Strickland says. “You know what Delilah did, don’t you?”
Zelda enters Fleming’s scolding sessions prepared to deflect claims that janitors stole something that absentminded scientists only misplaced. Never before has she had to bone up on biblical characters.
“I … at church, they—”
“My wife’s a churchgoer, so I’m up on most of the stories. What I recall is God gave Samson a bunch of strength. Slew a whole army with a donkey’s jawbone, that kind of thing. Now Delilah, she was a temptress. Got old Samson to tell her his secret. So Delilah gets her servant to cut off Samson’s hair and calls in her friends the Philistines, who poke out Samson’s eyes and mutilate him till he’s hardly a man anymore. He’s just some thing they torture. That’s Delilah. Real credit to females. Odd name, is all I’m saying.”
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