The Matron conducted Elisa’s exit interview while smoking and pacing the length of her office, infuriated at Elisa’s survival. A local women’s group supplied Home’s graduates with a month’s worth of rent money and a suitcase full of thrift-store outfits, and Elisa was wearing her favorite, a bottle-green wool dress with a pocketed skirt. All she needed was a scarf to hide her scars. She added it to her crowded mental checklist: Buy scarf.
“You’ll be a whore by Christmas,” the Matron vowed.
Elisa shivered, thrilled that the threat didn’t scare her. Why would it? She’d seen enough Hollywood films to know all hookers had hearts of gold, and sooner or later, Clark Gable or Clive Brook or Leslie Howard noticed the glow. This musing might have been what led her, later that day, not to a women’s home but her favorite place in the world, the Arcade Cinema Marquee. She couldn’t afford to see Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman, yet wanted nothing more than to lose herself among what the poster promised was “a cast of thousands”—just like the wider Baltimore of which she was now a part, except safely constrained to the screen.
She felt so irresponsible fishing forty cents from her purse that she hung her head, and that’s how she noticed the poorly placed sign: ROOM FOR RENT—INQUIRE WITHIN. There was never any doubt. Weeks later and one rent check from losing the place, she saw an ad for a janitorial position at Occam Aerospace Research Center. She composed her letter, achieved an appointment, and spent the morning of her interview ironing her bottle-green dress and studying a bus schedule. One hour before her planned departure, disaster: great silver scythes of rain, and she owned no umbrella. She panicked, tried not to cry, and became aware of rumblings from the Arcade’s other apartment. She hadn’t met the man who lived there, though he was always around, some sort of shut-in. She’d lost the luxury of guardedness. She knocked on his door.
She expected squat, hirsute, unshaven, and leering, but the fellow who answered had an aristocratic air, tucked like an envelope inside jacket, sweater, vest, and shirt, pushing fifty but with eyes sparkling behind spectacles. He blinked and absently touched his bald head as if he’d forgotten to put on a hat. Then he registered her distress and smiled gently.
“Why, hello, there. To whom do I owe the pleasure?”
Elisa touched her neck in apology, then made the sign for “umbrella,” an intuitive one. The man’s surprise at her muteness lasted only a few seconds.
“An umbrella! Of course! Come in, my dear, and I’ll pull it from the pile like Excalibur from the stone.”
He dove into the apartment. Elisa hesitated. She’d never been inside a home that wasn’t Home; she leaned rightward and saw baroque, shadowy shapes rippling with skulking felines.
“Of course you’re the new tenant. How inhospitable of me not to visit sooner with the ritual plate of cookies. I’m afraid the only excuse I have is a deadline which has had me nailed to the desk.”
The desk in question didn’t look like a desk. It was a tabletop hinged at an adjustable angle. This man was an artist of some sort, and Elisa felt a windblown tingle. The table had at its center a half-painted image of a woman from over her shoulder, the curls of her hair as the chief focus. Beneath her was painted the legend: NO MORE DULL DRAB HAIR.
“My neglectfulness notwithstanding, please let me know if you need anything at all, although I do recommend that you pick up your own umbrella. I notice you have a bus schedule there, and the station is a longer walk from here than is ideal. Many things, as you have no doubt noticed, are less than ideal about the Arcade Apartments. But carpe diem, and all that fine stuff. I trust you’re getting along all right?”
He paused in his canvas rifling and looked to Elisa for a response. She expected this; once people started talking, they tended to forget the disability over which they’d chosen to discourse. This man, however, smiled, his slender brown mustache broadening like open arms.
“You know, I’ve always wanted to learn sign language. What a wonderful opportunity for me.”
The worried tears Elisa had been tamping for weeks should have fallen in a grateful gush, but she forced them back; there was no time to redo makeup. It only got harder over the subsequent minutes, as the man, Giles Gunderson per his magniloquent introduction, located the umbrella, decided to drive her himself, and refused to accept her signed protests. Along the way, Giles distracted her with how the word janitor came from Janus, the god of entrances and exits, only stopping the lesson when an Occam guard established that Giles’s name wasn’t on a list. The guard motioned Elisa to climb out of the van and into the slashing rain.
“‘And wheresoe’er thou move, good luck / Shall fling her old shoe after,’” Giles had called out after her. “Alfred Lord Tennyson!”
Shoe, she’d repeated to herself, keeping eyes on her ugly, inherited heels as they splatted along a rain-run sidewalk. If I get this job, I’ll buy myself a nice pair of shoes.
16
THE MYSTERIOUS ADVENT of Strickland has supplanted Brewster stories as the favored topic of conversation. Elisa can’t quit thinking of what she saw in the tank, yet keeps it private from Zelda—the memory feels more preposterous by the day. Instead, and to Elisa’s gratitude, Zelda has defused tension by poking fun at everything else. Realizing, for instance, that Fleming kept calling Strickland’s armed guards “MPs”—Military Police—and not “Empties,” a label that was even more fitting, as the silent, stern soldiers showed no proclivity for independent action. Empties are, at least, easy for the women to avert, as they march in a buckle-jangling lockstep beyond the abilities of gawky scientists. Even now they hear a few, and Zelda and Elisa sidestep them, turning down a hall they usually save for later.
“Even when the Empties aren’t on the warpath, I know just where they are,” Zelda says. “They breathe together, you notice that? It’s like air coming out of the vents, all at once. Whoosh. I’m telling you, all these extra men here, and it’s just as quiet as before? It’s not natural.”
Before Elisa can sign a reply, the aforementioned quiet, a decade undisturbed, is cracked in half. In the neighborhood in which Elisa lives, such a sound might have her looking for a backfiring car before hedging toward cover, wary of local tales of organized crime. Inside Occam, the bang is so astonishing it might as well be a spaceship crash; Zelda ducks behind her cart, as if cheap plastic and corrosive liquids will be her salvation.
Then another bang, then another. The sounds aren’t sloppy. They aren’t objects being dropped. They are of mechanical issue, urged by a trigger, and Elisa has no choice but to assume that they are, in fact, gunshots. Shouting follows, as well as the rabbity heartbeat of running feet, both noises muffled behind the nearest door, which is, of course, F-1.