He’s waiting, circling just behind the portholes. He twists and rolls when he sees her, bubbles rising from his hands as they sign the words he likes best: “hello,” “E-L-I-S-A,” “record.” She doubts he can hear anything from inside the locked tank, and this takes her broken heart and grinds it to dust. He wants her to put on a record he can’t hear because it will make her happy, and that will make him happy.
So she goes to the audio table, relieved to be out of the creature’s line of sight so he won’t see the shudder of her sob or how she wipes tears with the crook of her arm. She puts on a record and takes bracing breaths before returning to the tank window, where he blinks perceptively, scanning her for authenticity before pushing off from one side of the tank to the other, back and forth, spinning and twirling, as if to impress her with a display of prowess.
Elisa laughs and gives him the show he wants, positioning one hand shoulder-high, the other waist-low, and waltzing to the music with the dance-partner substitute of an egg, sidestepping concrete pillars bolted with steel shackles and tables of sharp instruments as if neither are worse than bumbling fellow dancers. His pleasure is evident by the lavender that radiates from the tank, and after a time, she knows her dance floor well enough to close her eyes and imagine that it is his cool, clawed hand and strong, scaled waist that she holds.
34
THERE ARE PLENTY of reasons Elisa doesn’t notice the man enter the lab. “Star Dust” is a song of bewitching rhythm, and during her earlier upset, she’d turned the volume dial further than usual. Mostly, though, it is that her ears have become attuned to specific kinds of late-night threats: The oafish rattle of a scientist turning out his pockets for his key card or the exacting snap of Empties marching down a hallway. This sound is one for which she isn’t prepared, that of a man cognizant of the creature’s heightened senses of vision and hearing. Elisa box steps and dips and waltzes, while the creature’s luminescence dims to a worried matte black, a warning that Elisa, with her eyes so blissfully shut, has no chance to heed.
CREATIVE TAXIDERMY
1
ONLY THE HEAT of the man’s tears makes him aware of the pervading coldness: F-1’s closed door against his back; the hall’s catacomb draft; the corpse chill of his fingers clamped over his mouth. He’d laugh if he wasn’t crying—of course the conduit of this epiphany is an egg. So much of his life has been dedicated to investigating what some call evolution, but he prefers to call emergence: the asexual replications of worm and jellyfish; the embryonic morphogeneses of fertilized ovum; the infinite other theoretical paths of life’s progression that didn’t end with mankind obliterating everything pure and good.
It’s the same thing he used to tell his students. The universe folds itself along dull axial lines generation after generation, but what truly reshapes life are the foibled folds, the outright tears. Changes kick-started by emergences can last for millennia and affect us all. He’d flatter their young minds by telling them that, though he might be the only first-generation immigrant in the classroom, each one of them is quite exotic, a child of fantastic mutants.
Oh, he’s awfully bold when on terra firma, snug behind a lectern, high on chalk dust. Now he’s in the field, the real world. Why, then, does it feel more like fantasy every day? His mother used to call his daydream spells leniviy mozg. Translated: “lazy brain.” They are, of course, the opposite; his hyperactive mind is what has driven him to be a scientist of repute. What those diplomas, ribbons, and honors are worth here in the real world, he’s no longer certain. He could have pulled the janitor away from the tank, away from danger, and yet he, the ivory-tower coward, had simply raced from the room.
Frequently he returns to Occam late at night, unable to sleep until he’s checked, a fourth or fifth time, the gauges of pool and tank. The asset, he has become certain, won’t last much longer under such artificial conditions. One morning, they’ll find it belly-up, dead as a goldfish, and Mr. Strickland will go around cheering and slapping backs, while he, on the other hand, will try to hold back a tide of tears. Only here, tonight, at last, does he understand the answer to the riddle of the asset’s continued survival. This woman—this janitor—is keeping it alive, not through serums or solutions but through force of spirit. To drag her from the lab right now might be the same as dragging a dagger through the creature’s travailing heart.
Other daggers are slicing into his soft, pink, pitiful human palm. It is a stiff manila folder, an object of outrageous import moments ago, now wadded to sharp-edged crumples. He relaxes his fist and smooths it out. He hadn’t come to F-1 tonight to check gauges. He certainly hadn’t come to have his bedrock beliefs fractured by a dancing janitor. Tonight’s visit was to verify previously collected data. Inside the manila folder is an intel report he has compiled at great personal risk, a report that must be finished before tomorrow’s rendezvous.
Faint strains of “Star Dust” rumble into his skull, still pressed against the lab door. He pushes off and staggers down the hall. He grips the folder tighter, no matter how it cuts into his flesh, to remind himself who he is, why he’s here. He is Dr. Bob Hoffstetler, born Dmitri Hoffstetler in Minsk, Russia, and though one would be excused for inferring from his curriculum vitae that he is a scientist to his bones, his true occupation, the only real one he’s ever had, goes by terms far more sincere than “the asset.” He is a mole, an operative, an agent, an informer, a saboteur, a spy.
2
TO SEE INSIDE Hoffstetler’s rented house on Lexington Street would be to peg him as the sort of fanatic who arranges toenail clippings by length. The home is beyond spare. It’s sparse. Cabinets and closets are kept empty and open. Nonperishable groceries remain in shopping bags on a folding table in the center of the kitchen. Perishable goods, too, remain in bags inside the refrigerator. There are no dressers in the bedroom; his spartan wardrobe is folded atop another table. He sleeps on a camping cot of steel frame and canvas. His medicine cabinet is bare, his pharmaceuticals holding military lines atop the toilet tank. The single trash can he keeps is emptied outside each night and scrubbed clean each week. All lights are bare bulbs; he has moved the fixtures to a box in the basement. The light, therefore, is harsh, and months after arrival, he still jumps at his own thrown shadows—some KGB operative, he always thinks, slinking close to cut short Hoffstetler’s overlong mission.
Keeping a shipshape residence complicates the placing of wiretaps, bugs, other black-bag jobs. He has no reason to think the CIA is onto him, yet every Saturday, when other men crack open beers and watch sports, he runs a putty knife around drawers, windows, heat vents, doorjambs, and soffits, then makes a special event, like other men do of family cookouts, of disassembling and reassembling the telephone. Televisions and radios are burdens he doesn’t need; he guts the phone in silence, pausing to read from library books that he returns, finished or not, every Sunday. It took the jarring sight of a janitor—identified by punch-card records as “Elisa Esposito”—dancing in front of an asset gone absolutely radiant for Hoffstetler to feel the full sadness of his lonely customs.