He makes a cup of his left hand and allows her to place the ring into it. It feels ceremonial, an inverted wedding.
“Can’t put it on just yet,” he says. “But thanks.”
The girl shrugs and nods. Her eyes don’t leave his. Damn, it’s almost unnerving. He hates it. He kind of likes it. He looks away—that’s unusual—to her pink shoes, bouncing in midair. Pain blurts up his arm for no reason at all. He grinds his teeth and reaches for the bag of candy and instead opens the desk drawer. The bottle of painkillers is right there, glowing white amid Eagle Black Warrior pencils. Sweat pops from his forehead pores, and he tries not to wipe it. Wiping sweat isn’t a dominant gesture.
“That’s the first thing,” he says. “Second thing is, F-1.”
The Negro opens her mouth. Strickland slashes his hand to shut her up.
“I know. You signed the papers. I know all that bullshit. I don’t care. My job’s to make sure you comprehend the gravity of that signature. You’ve been here fourteen years? That’s nice. Maybe next year you get a cake. I hear fourteen years, you know what I think? Fourteen years is plenty of time to get lazy. Now, Mr. Fleming told you you don’t clean F-1 unless he says. Here’s what you don’t know. You disobey, you don’t deal with Mr. Fleming. You deal with me. And I represent who? The US government. We wouldn’t have us a local problem. We’d have us a federal problem. Is that understood?”
Elisa’s top leg slides off her lower. A positive, submissive sign, though he mourns losing sight of the shoe. Right then, one of the telephones begins to ring. The balloon of acid under his temple bursts from the noise and courses down his left arm, pooling under the wedding ring in his palm. A call this late? He flexes his bad hand, hoping to fight off the ache.
“Let me finish. You may have seen some things. So be it.”
He’s seeing things, too, streaks of red, tainted blood pumping directly into his eyeballs. Red—it’s the red phone ringing. Washington. Maybe General Hoyt. He’s got to get these girls the hell out of his office. Undaunted, his rivalry with Deus Brânquia rises from the swamp, the quicksand, the black depths of misery. The red phone, the red blood, the red Amazonian moon.
“Final words, now, listen, just listen. It doesn’t take a genius to know we’re dealing with a living specimen here. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter at all. All you need to know is this. That thing in F-1? It might stand on two legs, but we’re the ones made in God’s image. We’re the ones. Isn’t that right, Delilah?”
The worthless woman can’t muster but a whisper.
“I don’t know what God looks like, sir.”
The pain is absolute now. He is aware of individual nerve endings. It’s as if the lights inside his body have been switched on. Fine, he’ll take the painkillers. He’s already gripping the bottle. He’ll answer the red phone with cheeks full of half-chewed pills. Manufactured drugs, after all, are what civilized men ingest. And he is civilized. Or will be. Very soon. This phone call might even be the proving ground. Decisions are being made about the asset. And to advise about that he will need control. He thumbs off the lid of the painkillers.
“God looks human, Delilah. He looks like me. Like you.” He nods the women toward the door. “Though let’s be honest. He looks a little bit more like me.”
23
ELISA’S DREAMS HAVE begun to unmuddy. She’s reclined at the bottom of a river. Everything is emerald. She springs her toes from mossy stones, glides through caressing grasses, pushes off from the velveted branches of sunken trees. Objects she recognizes appear gradually. Her egg timer in slow somersault. The eggs themselves, little moons in rotation. Shoes tumble past like a school of clumsy fish, and album covers descend like stingrays.
Two human fingers float into view, and Elisa wakes up.
A lot about Richard Strickland distresses Elisa, but his fingers are what haunt her. It takes several of these dreams before, one night, she bolts awake in understanding. She uses her own fingers to interact with the world. It’s not ridiculous, she thinks, to be frightened by a man at risk of losing his own fingers. She imagines the equivalent in a speaking person and it’s horrific: Strickland’s teeth tumbling across riven lips, a man no longer capable, or inclined, to discuss what he does before he does it.
She, too, has things she won’t discuss. It’s the latter half of the night, when she and Zelda work separately. Elisa presses her ear to the ice-cold door of F-1. She holds her breath and listens. Voices tend to carry through lab walls, but tonight none do. She glances back at her cart, which she has parked in front of a different lab halfway down the hall, hopefully enough to hoodwink Zelda should she rejoin Elisa earlier than expected. Elisa feels exposed while carrying so little—just a brown-paper lunch bag and her key card. She slots the card and wishes the lock’s bite was softer.
Occam’s constant is its uncompromising brightness. Lights do not turn off. Elisa has never been privy to so much as a single switch. F-1’s dimness, then, is as outrageous as a fire. Once inside, Elisa presses her back to the closed door and panics that something has gone wrong. But this is clearly by plan: A perimeter of lights, installed along the walls for this purpose, radiate a honey glow off the ceiling.
Plenty enough light to see by, but there are noises, too, keeping Elisa sealed to the door. Reek-reek, chuk-a-kuk, zuh-zuh-zuh, thoonk, hee-hee-hee-hee-hee, thrub-thrub, curu-curu, zeee-eee-eee, hik-rik-hik-rik, lug-a-lug-a-lug, fyeeeeeew. Elisa has spent every day of her life in the city, yet recognizes these as natural sounds, none of which have any place in this concrete bunker. They overwhelm F-1’s after-hours inertia, impregnating every table, chair, and cabinet with predator menace. There are monsters loose in the lab.
Elisa’s reason wrests control from the fear. The bird arias and frog dirges come from a single source, off to the right. They are recordings, and this isn’t so different than a movie at the Arcade—the lowered lights, the speaker sound track. Some Occam scientist has designed what Giles might call a mise-en-scène, an atmosphere inside which unfolds the currently screening fantasy. Her guess is Bob Hoffstetler. If anyone at this facility has the empathy required for this artistic endeavor, it’s him.
She crosses over the spot where she plucked Strickland’s fingers from the floor. Her footsteps are loud, and she curses her forgetfulness. She’d meant to wear rubber-soled sneakers. Or had she kept on her purple heels as subconscious inspiration? There’s a hissing to her right. An anaconda attracted by the jungle’s incantations? No—it’s the roll of a reel-to-reel player. The stainless steel surface shimmers like a moonlit river; Elisa approaches until she is close enough to see the jumping VU meters. Canisters are piled about. MARAÑON FIELD #5. TOCANTINS FIELD #3. XINGU/UNKNOWN FIELD #1. Gathered also is a hill of other audio gear, none of which she can identify except for a standard record player.
Elisa steps away, circles the tank. One more foreboding sign: The top hatch is open. She expects the hair on her neck and arms to razor in dread, but it doesn’t. She continues toward the pool. It is the pool, after all, that has monopolized her mind. Every bath she takes, she takes in this pool, or so she pretends. This make-believe persists throughout her whole routine: Eggs bobbing into water, the creak of the timer, the hope of shoes, the disappointment of LPs, Giles pausing his paintbrush to bid her good night, having no idea of the strange thoughts in her head.
A red line is painted on the floor a foot from the pool. It is unsafe to go any farther. So why is she considering it? Because she can’t get it out of her head, this thing that Mr. Strickland has dragged here, that Empties guard with guns, that Dr. Hoffstetler endeavors to study. She knows that she’s been the thing in the water before. She’s been the voiceless one from whom men have taken without ever asking what she wanted. She can be kinder than that. She can balance the scales of life. She can do what no man ever tries to do with her: communicate.