“Fifteen minutes. Immaculate. Your complete discretion.”
The lab is spare and orderly no longer. The concrete floor has sprouted a range of metal masts and stockades, each built with iron loops onto which an object, or a living thing, could be leashed. Carts of what look like medical devices extend from the beige computer bank like technological tumors. A table stands in the room’s center, wheels pointed in four different directions. Surgical implements are scattered like punched-out teeth. Drawers are open, sinks are full, cigarettes still seep smoke. One smolders on the floor. The floor, as always, is where the hard work is.
Blood is all over. Gazing over it, Elisa thinks of magazine photos taken from airplanes of flooded lowlands. There’s a hubcap-sized lake of blood congealing beneath the glaring lights. Smaller ponds, lochs, and lagoons trace Mr. Strickland’s race to the door. Zelda pushes her cart through a lakelet and grimaces at the blood trailing behind the plastic wheels. Elisa has no choice but to mirror the movement, too astonished to hatch a cannier plan.
Fifteen minutes. Elisa pours water over the floor. It slithers, strikes blobs of blood, births pink pinwheels. This is how she was taught to do it at Home, in every arena of life. Thin out the mystery of life, the fascination, the lust, the horror, until you no longer question it. She lobs her mop head at the center of the gunk and drags it this way, and that, until the yarn-strands bloat and darken. This is normal. The sound, too, is normal—the wet swap, moist slurp—and she fixates on it. That soot scorch on the concrete could be from an Empty’s fired gun; mop right over it. That’s a cattle prod, one million pounds of menace, impossible to lift; mop around it.
Elisa tells herself not to look at the tank. Don’t look at the tank, Elisa. Elisa looks at the tank. Even thirty feet away, next to the large pool, it’s too big for the lab, a dinosaur crouching in wait. It has been bolted to four plinths, a wooden stairway providing access to a top hatch. Fleming was right about one thing: There’s no blood anywhere near it. No reason to approach it. Elisa tells herself to look away. Look away, Elisa. Elisa cannot look away.
The moppers meet at the bloody area’s vertex. Zelda checks her watch, swipes sweat from her nose, and steadies her bucket for a final pour, nodding for Elisa to gather the contraptions off the floor before the water floods them aside. Elisa kneels and collects them. A pair of forceps. A scalpel with a broken blade. A syringe with a bent needle. Dr. Hoffstetler’s tools, for sure, though she can’t make herself believe the man would hurt anyone or anything. He’d looked devastated charging from the lab. She stands and sets the items in a parallel arrangement on a table like a hotel maid. She hears water lap from Zelda’s bucket and from peripheral vision sees its elongating tendrils. Zelda clucks.
“Will you look at that? Janitors have to sneak off to the loading dock to smoke. Meantime they’re smoking cigars in here like this is some—”
Zelda is not a person typically given to gasps. Elisa spins around to see Zelda’s mop timber forward. Her hands are cupped before her, holding two small objects the mop water washed back from under the table, objects she’d believed were cigars. Her hands shake and part, and the objects drop. One of them falls soundlessly. The other clinks, and from it pops a silver wedding band.
19
ZELDA HAS GONE for help. Elisa can hear her nurse flats firecracking down the hallway. She’s left staring at Strickland’s fingers. The pinky, the ring finger. Snaggy fingernails, poignant tufts of knuckle hair. The skin of the ring finger is pale on one end, blocked from sun for years by the wedding ring. Elisa’s mind returns to the sight of Strickland bursting from the lab door. He’d been clutching his left hand. These are two of the fingers that had fished into the crinkling cellophane bag of green hard candy.
She can’t just leave them there. Fingers can be reattached. She’s read about it. Maybe Dr. Hoffstetler has the know-how to do it himself. She grimaces and looks around. F-1 is a lab. It must have containers, beakers. Occam labs, however, mock people like her; they’re impossible to decode, provisioned with instruments of arcane utility. Her eyes fall in despair and she sees, next to a trash can, something more endemic to her field: a wadded brown paper bag. She goes for it, shakes it open, and sticks her hand inside the greasy paper to operate it like a puppet. Those nubs on the floor aren’t human fingers. They’re just pieces of trash needing to be picked up.
Elisa kneels and tries to collect them. They are like two chunks of chicken, too soft and small for her to get a grip. They fall once, twice, scattering blood like Giles’s dropped brushes scatter paint. She holds her breath, locks her jaw, and picks up the fingers with her bare hand. They are as lukewarm as a limp handshake. She inserts them into the bag and crimps the top. She’s wiping her hand on her uniform when she spies the wedding band. She can’t leave that, either, but no way is she opening the bag again. She swipes the ring and drops it into her apron pocket. She stands, tries to restore normal breathing. The bag feels empty, as if the two fingers have wiggled away like worms.
Elisa is alone, in silence. But is it silence? She is aware of a soft wheeze, air being discharged through a vent. She looks across the lab, once again, at the tank. A second, more disturbing question poses itself. Is she, after all, alone? Fleming warned her and Zelda not to approach the tank. Sound advice. Do not approach the tank, Elisa reinforces to herself. She glances down. Her bright shoes are moving over mopped floor. She is approaching the tank.
Though she is encircled by advanced technology, Elisa feels like a cartoon caveman advancing upon a thicket despite the growls vibrating from within. What was foolhardy two million years ago is foolhardy now. Yet her pulse doesn’t quicken as it did from Strickland’s harmless fingers. It could be because Fleming promised her that she was safe. Or it could be because every night she dreams of the darkest water, and there it is, beyond the portholes of the cylindrical tank: darkness, water.
F-1 is too bright for her to adjust her eyes to the tank’s interior blackness, so she sets down the paper bag and tunnels her hands against the porthole. Refracted light makes her feel as if she’s spiraling until she realizes that the window is underwater. She squashes her nose to the glass to see upward. Here, at last, her pulse gallops, right along with the old iron-lung nightmares.
The dark water eddies with weak light. Elisa catches her breath: It’s like distant fireflies. She presses her hands flat against the window, wanting closer, feeling a physical need. The substance turns, twists, dances like an arabesque veil. Between the points of light, a shape coalesces. Floating debris, Elisa tries to tell herself, that’s all it is, and then a shaft of light hits a pair of photoreceptive eyes. They flash bright as gold through black water.
The glass explodes. At least, that is how it sounds. The crash is the lab door banging open, the shatter is the several sets of feet charging inside, and the scrunch is the paper bag being swiped up by her own hands. She’s proving herself a caveman indeed, shrinking back from a bestial threat and rushing at civilization’s centrum—Fleming, the Empties, Dr. Hoffstetler—hoisting the bag of fingers like a trophy, her trophy for having looked into the eyes of ravishing annihilation and lived to tell. She’s giddy with survival, breathless, almost crying, almost laughing.
20
VARIOUS OFFICES WERE offered to Strickland. First-floor berths with panoramic views of swooping lawns. He enjoyed spurning Fleming’s largesse by instead insisting upon the windowless security-camera room. He had Fleming install a desk, cabinet, trash can, and two telephones. One white, one red. The room is small, neat, quiet, and perfect. He journeys his eyes across the four-by-four grid of black-and-white monitors. The interchangeable hallways. The sporadic twitch of a meandering night worker. After the occluded views of the rain forest, how relieving it is to see everything all at once.