She can’t observe him for long. Her arms quake beneath another load of unreturned milk bottles, each cleaned and filled with water. She climbs inside the van. Everything behind the front seats has been cleared to make room for a hodgepodge of boxes and baskets arranged atop a piece of carpet. Elisa lets the bottles roll from her arms and places them, one by one, into a box padded with a blanket. They clank and slosh; her stomach behaves in kind. She sits back against the inner wall, panting.
“Yes, do take a moment’s rest.” Giles flicks his smiling eyes from his stenciling. “You’re working too hard. Worrying too hard as well. In a few hours, my dear, all of it will be over and done with, one way or the other. Focus on that. The only thing I’m certain of is that uncertainty is the hardest thing in life to endure.”
Elisa smiles; she is surprised, but she does. She signs: “Did you finish your ID?”
Giles dabs paint, blows it dry, then sets his brush crosswise atop a tin of paint. He removes his wallet, withdraws a card with flourish, and presents it across his opposite wrist as he might a sword. Elisa takes it, examines it, and then digs her authentic Occam ID out for comparison. The texture and weight are wrong, though if anyone is handling the card that closely, it’s likely the game will already be lost. Otherwise it is as convincing a piece of work as anything Giles has done. That it was a new medium for him, and completed over a single day, makes the effort all the more impressive.
She signs the name on the ID: “Michael Parker?”
“I thought it was a good, hearty, trustworthy name.” Giles shrugs. “Naturally, my friends can call me Mike.”
Elisa scans the details harder, and with a smile, signs: “Fifty-one years old?”
Giles looks crestfallen. “No? Not even with the hair? What about fifty-four? A single dab of paint, and I can add three years, just like that.”
Elisa grimaces. Giles sighs and snaps his fingers for the card. He picks up the paintbrush, twists the bristles so that they taper into a point, and touches it softly to the ID.
“There. Fifty-seven. The absolute best I can do. Now stop being rude to poor old Mike Parker.”
He gets back to work, scowling for show. Elisa is sick with sustained tension, so dizzy she feels as if swimming, and yet bundled in a peculiar warmness, the interior of the van somehow the most comfortable spot in the world. So much of her life she’s felt alone, but at this second there is plentiful proof to the contrary. If they are caught in a few hours, her second-biggest regret is that she won’t be able to thank Zelda for wanting, nearly begging to help. Elisa couldn’t do it to her; if Elisa and Giles get caught, Zelda can’t be involved. It’s a terrible feeling, pushing Zelda away. Still, Elisa thinks, she must have done something right in her life to earn that kind of loyalty.
The sounds of Giles stowing his gear drag her back to harsh reality. A wind too dry to hold a drop of water buffets the inside of the Pug, and she feels from inside the theater the rumble of a sinister music cue. Elisa climbs out of the van, slits her eyes at the dusking sun.
“I’m proud of you.”
Elisa looks down at Giles. He’s on his haunches, rinsing his brush. The sinking sun backlights him, but she can make out the serene lines of fond contemplation.
“Whatever happens,” he says, “I’m old. Even my alter ego, Mike Parker, is old. What does this kind of risk matter to us at the end of the day? But you’re young. Your life sprawls out ahead of you like the Atlantic Ocean. And yet look at you. You’re not afraid.”
Elisa lets herself absorb the compliment, because she needs it, and then, to clear the air, simpers and signs with overblown motions. Giles frowns.
“Oh. You are afraid? Very afraid? Well, don’t tell me that, dear. I’m terrified!”
His exaggeration of fright makes the real thing somehow governable. Elisa smiles, grateful for the buoy, and steps back to gaze at Giles’s stenciled handiwork in the melodrama of an orange-purple sunset. She catches her breath. A doctored ID card slid into a pocket is one thing. A fraudulent sign painted onto a registered motor vehicle is another level of audacity:
Behind the lettering, the Pug’s cleaned door, luminous in the sun, becomes a pool into which Elisa slips and inside which she drowns until, in a great turnabout, she is graced with the creature’s abilities and begins to swim, even to breathe, not merely bubbled to the top like boiling eggs, but darting through the currents of this impossible scheme. Awareness of the cramped, dirty alley, suffused in the stink of tossed popcorn, doesn’t go away, and yet she believes she can feel an entire ocean’s worth of creatures converging on one spot, looking to her for guidance. The time has come.
26
THE BOTTLE CAP blunders from sweaty fingers, bickers off floor tiles, squirrels behind the toilet. Hoffstetler wants to fall to his knees, scrabble after it like a junkie. One of the janitors will find it, one of the scientists will lift fingerprints from it, and Strickland, cattle prod crackling, will collar Hoffstetler before he can schedule to meet the Bison’s Chrysler. But there’s no time. Monday’s graveyard-to-dayshift change, Occam’s most turbulent thirty minutes, is near. He’s got to steady his hands, his breathing, his mind, and do this. Not for himself. He’ll do it for the children whose lives were ruined by the classified medical studies that he allowed to happen. The Devonian, in its own way, is one more child being abused. Hoffstetler can avert its misery, and in that end, find a snip of redemption.
He pries the stopper and rubber tip from the syringe, tosses both in the toilet, and flushes it; the roar matches the pulse in his ears. Toilet-water flecks his face and hangs on his skin like warts as he pushes the needle into the bottle and draws the plunger. The silver solution eddies gorgeously into the barrel. He knows the law of nature: A substance that beautiful can only be deadly. He places the syringe into the pocket of his lab coat, wipes his face with his sleeve, and exits the toilet stall, trying not to look at the changeling face in the mirror. The poised, aloof college professor has been replaced by a red-faced, curled-lip murderer.
27
ANTONIO TAKES TEN years to find his punch card. It’s the crossed eyes, Zelda figures. Lord knows how he cleans a desk without knocking all contents to the floor. Hostile thoughts, but Zelda decides she deserves them. Elisa had a whole weekend to consider Zelda’s question: Are we friends? The answer, it seems, is no. Here it is, the end of Monday’s shift, and Elisa hasn’t said a word to her. Won’t even look at her. Zelda’s had it. At least that’s what she tells herself: She’s had it. Maybe Brewster’s right. A white friend is only a friend for as long as she needs you. What sticks in her head, though, is how fish-belly pale Elisa’s face had been tonight, how she kept looking over her shoulder, how half the cleaning products she picked up tumbled from the uncontrollable shake of her hands.
Yolanda pokes Zelda in the back. The line has shuffled forward, and so she does the same, except when she reaches for her punch card, the most ordinary thing in the world, it takes longer than Antonio’s ten years—it takes a lifetime. It’s like she’s reaching across a bottomless chasm. Humiliation and anger, it seems, no matter how much she deserves them and wants to own them, are slippery objects to Zelda, as slippery as this punch card. It flutters from her fingers, lazing down like a broken wing.
28
THE PUG JOUNCES up Falls Road. He’s got to arrive per Elisa’s schedule, one hour before the real laundry truck will show up—any earlier will raise suspicion. He barrels through pools of streetlight sodium, along the squiggled vein of the Jones Falls stream, past the black copses of Druid Hill Park, around the purple lawns of the Baltimore Country Club. Parts of the city he’s never explored and never will. Giles goes heavy on the pedal when nervous and takes the left at South Avenue so fast he can feel the passenger-side wheels almost lose contact with the pavement. The Pug slams down on wasted shocks and a box in the back overturns to unleash water-bottle missiles like a Polaris submarine. Giles curses, wrestles the vehicle, slows before a dark complex called Happy Hills Convalescent Home for Children, the last landmark before Occam Road.