She picks up a black marker left on the table from language lessons. A desk calendar sits there, too, each day devoted to a cornball inspirational quote that she can no longer read without tearing up. She uncaps the marker. If she doesn’t write it, if she doesn’t make it real and see it for herself, she doesn’t know if she can carry through with it. Moving the marker across paper is like moving a knife across her own skin.
MIDNIGHT—THE DOCKS
Tonight, she will call in sick for the first time in years. Even if Fleming registers it as unusual behavior, it will be too late. Will she return to Occam on Monday? The issue feels trite. Probably not—she doubts she could stomach it. What she will do for money, she has no idea. That, too, feels like the banal concern of a stagnated realm she has left behind. Giles had a certain look the day he came to her saying that he would help break out the creature. She thinks she must have this look now, too. After bidding good-bye, there will be nothing left to lose that matters.
This is a joy she will miss above all others: The creature coming into view after a period she has spent away. This is the last time she’ll feel this delirious thrill, so she does it slowly, entering the bathroom as she might cold water, inch by inch. He sparkles like chromatic coral beneath the surface of a virgin sea. She is powerless to resist his call.
Elisa closes the door behind her and comes forward, chest hitching enough to make her dizzy with what first feels like tearful sadness before she feels the stronger, guttural pull and identifies the emotion as passion. There is, all at once, no question of what she will do, nor any surprise. It was always going to end like this, she realizes, from the first moment that she looked into the tank in F-1 and was pulled inside, not physically but in every other possible way, by the star clusters of his scales and supernovas of his eyes.
The plastic shower curtain is bunched against the wall. Elisa yanks it. A metal ring pops free. She does it eleven more times, rings tinging off the walls and getting lost in foliage, each tear of the curtain an astonishing, irreversible act of destruction no graveyard-shift janitor on the planet would have dared. She spreads the curtain across the floor like a quilt onto a bed, tucking it into the wainscoting and stretching it over the gap under the door. When the plastic is as taut as she can make it, she stands. She can’t command water like the creature, but she has the next best thing: modern plumbing.
Elisa plugs the sink and cranks the knobs. Water fires out. She leans over the tub and does the same. Running both faucets at full-blast is another thing no poor person would ever do, but she’s not poor, not today. Today she is the richest woman in the world; she has everything she could want; she loves and is loved, and as such is as infinite as the creature, not human nor animal but feeling, a force shared between everything good that has ever been and ever will be.
She removes her uniform; it is the unburdening of quarry rock from Chemosh’s toilers. She unsnaps her bra and peels off her slip; it is the unshackling of any creature trapped by another. Each item of dropped clothing makes no sound: the water has overflowed both sink and tub and is filling the spread curtain, lapping at her ankles, sliding up her calves like a warm hand. Only her silver shoes remain; she props a foot on the edge of the tub so the creature can see it, a flipper more fantastic than any he has ogled on her bedroom wall, the only thing she has that is as bright and beautiful as him. It is the most brazenly sensual posture she’s ever struck, and she hears the Matron calling her worthless, stupid, ugly, a whore, until the creature rises from the flooded tub, a thousand silent waterfalls cascading from his body, and steps over the edge into her waiting arms.
They curl to the floor together, her parts finding reciprocal space in his parts, and his into hers. Her head sinks underwater, a wonderful feeling, and then they roll, and she is on top, gasping, water pouring from her hair, and he is under the sloshing surface, and to kiss him she must dip her face under, which she does, and ecstatically, the tedious lines of her rigid world softening, the sink, toilet, doorknob, mirror, even the walls themselves relinquishing their shapes.
The kiss reverberates underwater, not the fussy wet tsks of human lips, but a rumbling thunderstorm that pours into her ears and runs down her throat. She takes his scaled face into her hand, his gills throbbing against her palms, and kisses him forcefully, hoping to stir the storm they’ve started into a tsunami so as to force a flood; perhaps her kisses, not the rain, can be what saves him. She exhales into his mouth, feels the bubbles tickle past her cheeks. Breathe, she prays. Learn to breathe my air so we can be together forever.
But he can’t. He uses his strong hands to force her above water so she won’t drown. She’s panting, for all sorts of reasons, her hands planted to her chest to help it rediscover oxygen. Her hands, she discovers, are covered with the creature’s twinkling scales. The sight enthralls her, and she runs her hands over her breasts and belly, spreading the scales, wishing this was how she really looked. From the theater below she hears a passage of dialogue, one she’s heard a hundred times: Trouble your heart no more. Be strong through this time. For from the widow of your son will issue children, and children’s children. Yes, why not? Each bead of water on her eyelashes is its own entire world—she’s read such things in science articles. Couldn’t one of them be theirs to populate with a new, better species?
No bathtub fantasy she’s ever had can compare. She searches out his every crest and pocket. He has a sex organ, right where it should be, and she has hers, too, right where she left them, and she pulls him inside her; within so much rocking water, it happens easily, the tectonic shift of two subsea plates. The effulgence of the theater lights eking through the floorboards and plastic are overwhelmed by the creature’s own rhythms of crystalline color, as if the sun itself is beneath them, and it is, it has to be, for they are in heaven, in God’s canals, in Chemosh’s slag, every holy and unholy thing at once, beyond sex into the seeding of understanding, the creature implanting within her the ancient history of pain and pleasure that connects not only the two of them but every living thing. It is not just him inside her. It is the whole world, and she, in turn, is inside it.
This is how life changes, mutates, emerges, survives, how one being absolves the sins of its species by becoming another species altogether. Perhaps Dr. Hoffstetler would understand. Elisa can only perceive the edges it, glimpse the foothills of the mountain, the horn of the glacier. She feels so small, so gloriously tiny in such a huge, wondrous universe, and she opens her eyes underwater to remind herself of reality. Plant leaves swim by like tadpoles. The curtain has ripped and flaps at them like worshipful jellyfish.
The storm outside, in the real world, doubles with the storm from The Story of Ruth, the end of the biblical drought. Her body convulses with sensations, each like the unclenching of a fist. Yes, the drought is over. It is over, it is over, it is over. She smiles, her mouth filling with water. Finally, she is dancing, truly dancing, across a submerged ballroom and fearing no misstep, for her partner has got her tight and will lead her anyplace she needs to go.
16
HE FLITS THE brush through the paint. Bernie likes green? Too bad he’ll never see this. It’s a green the likes of which Giles never dreamed possible. How did he mix it? He recalls a base of Caribbean blue, a touch of grape, dapples of harvest orange, streaks of straw yellow, daubs of gloaming indigo, his signature cotton-clay red—what else? He doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He’s coasting on impulse here. It’s rousing, and yet there’s a peace to it as well. His brain doesn’t smart from focus; it rambles and stretches, tying disparate threads together in shiny, department-store bows.
Bernie. Good old Bernie Clay. Giles thinks of the last time he saw him. In hindsight, he can see signs of stress all over the guy. The yellowed collar no volume of bleach can scrub, the gut bulging the shirt—Bernie had always been an anxious eater. Giles forgives him. He’s never felt more forgiving. For too long, ill will has clogged his arteries like cholesterol, an ominous substance he just read about in th
e news. Today, the cholesterol is flushed and only love remains. It flows into his every long-dug trench. The cops who arrested him at the bar in Mount Vernon. The executive cabal that got him fired. Brad—or John—of Dixie Doug’s. Everyone struggles against the qualms and uncertainties that life twines about them.
How had it taken him sixty-three years to recognize the futility of anger? When Mrs. Elaine Strickland, a woman half his age, knew it on instinct? Giles doesn’t believe a dawn will rise that he won’t privately thank her. Just this morning he’d tried calling her at Klein & Saunders to express what her candor had meant to him, how it’d forced open storehouses of courage he’d never suspected he had, but the voice that answered didn’t belong to Elaine, and couldn’t say why Elaine hadn’t shown up to work.
Quite all right with Giles: He has a lifetime’s backlog of patience upon which to draw. Mrs. Strickland is, after all, one of two beings to whom he credits his renaissance. The other is the creature. Giles chuckles in wonder. Elisa’s bathtub has become a portal into the impossible. The work Giles has done alongside it, from atop a toilet seat of all places—he is so thankful to know the sort of divine inspiration typically reserved, he is certain, for only the greatest of masters.
While the creature belongs to no one, no place, and no time, his heart belongs to Elisa, and Giles has left the two of them to share these final hours. Besides, Giles needs to complete his painting. It is, without question, his life’s finest work, and what existential relief there is in knowing you have managed, at last, to live up to your potential. The fulfillment of his hopes is to show the finished piece to the creature before the creature is gone, and that requires working on it day and night.
Working, however, hasn’t been a problem. Twenty hours he’s been at it now and he feels tip-top, as unflagging as a teenager, powered as if by a fabulous drug that has the sole side effect of suffusing him with confidence as powerful as the storm outside. He makes the boldest brushes of color without pause. He paints the finest slivers of detail without arthritic tremor. He hasn’t broken for a bathroom break in half a day, and when was the last time he made it two hours without peeing?
He laughs, and his eye catches a fluttering cloth. It’s the bandage Elisa coiled around his arm. He’s working so briskly that it has come loose. Strange that he hasn’t noticed. More strange, he thinks, is that he hasn’t needed to take aspirin for pain since before bed. Perhaps the cut wasn’t so deep after all. Still, the bandage will trail across wet paint and that won’t do. He sighs, sets down his brush. A quick, fresh dressing—maybe brush his teeth while he’s at it—and then it’s back to the easel! He can hardly wait.
Giles doesn’t realize that he’s whistling a show tune until the jaunty song cuts off. He blames the misperception on his speed: He’s unwrapping the bandage as if reeling in a catfish. He quits unwinding and carefully pushes the rest of the bandage into the sink. There’s no blood. Is he so exhausted that he’s looking at the wrong side of his own arm? He rotates it, finds nothing. Not even a wound, which, last time he checked, was pink and puckered.
He makes a fist, watches the cords of his wrist thicken. The shock of it settles slowly, rescuing him from full impact. The wound isn’t the only thing gone. There used to be liver spots on his arm. There used to be a scar from a youthful collision with a cotton loom. These, too, have been replaced by smooth, perfect skin. Giles checks his other arm. It is as old and wrinkled as ever.
Giles sputters in disbelief. It sounds rather like a laugh. Is that an appropriate reaction to the supernatural? He looks up into the mirror and, sure enough, the deep lines of his face are curved in jubilance. He looks good, he thinks, and notes that he hasn’t held this opinion of himself in more years than he can remember. His eyes flick upward. Ah, there’s the reason. He hadn’t noticed until now.
He has a head full of hair. Giles reaches for it, but slowly, as if it might be scared away. He pats it. It does not scatter like dandelion puffs. It is short and thick, a rich brown with familiar traces of blond and orange. More than that, it’s springy; he’d forgotten the resilience of young hair, how it resists being constrained. He pets it, stunned by the satin texture. It’s erotic. This, he thinks, is why young people are so lustful: Their own bodies are aphrodisiacs. Only after he thinks this does he notice a pressure against the sink. He looks down. His pajama bottoms are tented outward. He has an erection. No, that’s too clinical a word for this adolescent response to the slightest sexual thought. It’s a boner, a hard-on. He can feel youth swell his every molecule with lightness, quickness, pliancy, bravado.
There is a knocking at his door. A pounding, really, a sure sign of emergency next door. Giles knows himself well enough to anticipate a sick, sinking sensation, but whatever has affected his body has also affected his spirit: The alarm he feels is at the end of an upsurge, a tilting toward challenge rather than edging away. He lurches toward the door, mindful enough of the silly pendulum of his erect penis to grab a pillow to hold in front of him. Elisa can’t see him like this! He chuckles, despite everything.
He whips open the door and finds the perspiring, red face of Mr. Arzounian.
“Mr. Gunderson!” he cries.
“Ah, the rent,” Giles sighs. “Tardy, it’s true, but have I ever—”
“It is raining, Mr. Gunderson!”
Giles pauses, allowing the drumroll of rain on the fire escape to interject.
“Well, yes. I can’t argue with you there.”
“No! In my theater! There is rain in my theater!”
“Are you asking me to witness a miracle? Or do you mean a leak?”
“Yes, a leak! From Elisa’s apartment! She leaves the water on! Or else a pipe is broke! She will not answer the door! It comes through the ceiling, right onto paying customers! I will find my keys, Mr. Gunderson, and I will open her door myself if it doesn’t stop! I must go downstairs! Make it stop, Mr. Gunderson, or the both of you will live at the Arcade no more!”
He’s gone then, careening down the stairs. Giles doesn’t need the pillow anymore; he backhands it onto his sofa and jogs, in socked feet, the distance between apartment doors. He swipes the key from its lamp haven, inserts it with a dexterity that delights him, and barges in. He doesn’t know what he expects. More blood? Destruction from some fit of rage? Nothing is amiss until he divines that the floorboards near the bathroom have not been recently mopped. They are, instead, covered in a half-inch of water. He charges, socks soaking as he splashes through the thin pool. This isn’t a situation for knocking; he hurls open the bathroom door.
Water bursts outward, drenching Giles from the knees downward. A day ago, the force of the tide, not to mention the plain shock of it, would have toppled him; today, though, his legs are roots, planted firm even as standing lamps and end tables behind him topple to the floor in the rushing tide and its sloppy cargo of unpotted plants. The edge of a shower curtain, which must have held back the flood, flops like snakeskin onto his socks, revealing Elisa and the creature lying in the center of the floor.
They should be carved in marble in this exact position, Giles thinks, and by someone who knows how—Rodin, Donatello. Elisa is glistening wet, freckled with muddied soil, sparkling with scales, naked. The creature is, too: Though always unclothed, there’s a reckless need to his pose that makes him naked. His arms and legs are interlocked with hers, his face nuzzled into her neck. Her left hand strokes his scalp and cups the back of his head where his ridge of fins begins. He does not look good, and hasn’t in a while; he does, however, look content, as if he has chosen his fate, and does not, even upon pain of death, plan to regret it.
Giles expands his view, and along with it expands the spectacular. The room is a bathroom no more. It has become a jungle. He squints before realizing his vision is perfect, even without glasses. Did their lovemaking, whatever form it took, arouse household mold spores to blossom into rain-forest verdure? No, that’s not it. The plants that withstood the flood are languid, even voluptuous, with moisture,
but it’s the hundreds of tree-shaped cardboard air fresheners that have turned the room into an unimaginable wilderness of ravishing color. Shamrock green, lipstick red, sequin gold. Where did Elisa find so many? They are layered over every single inch of wall. Pumpkin orange, coffee brown, butter yellow. The low-budget ingenuity behind the cardboard jungle makes it all the more breathtaking. Amethyst purple, ballet-slipper pink, ocean blue. It is a home not quite Elisa’s and not quite the creature’s; it is one of a kind, a strange heaven built for two.
It takes a while for Elisa to register Giles. Her eyes are half-closed, dreamy. She absently pinches the shower curtain and pulls it over them as she might a bedsheet. Giles’s role, he supposes, is that of the fellow who didn’t knock, and he waits to feel disgusted by the vile, unnatural act he has uncovered. How many times, though, have these same adjectives been applied to people like himself? Today, nothing is wrong; nothing is taboo. Perhaps Mr. Arzounian will kick them out. Giles can’t force himself to care. Just as likely, in this world, Mr. Arzounian doesn’t exist at all.
Giles kneels, tucks the shower curtain around them. New neighbors, he tells himself, happy young lovers who he, newly young himself, will find to be true, long-lasting friends. Elisa blinks up at Giles and extends an arm shimmering with scales. She runs her fingers through his brand-new hair and smiles gently, as if to ask, What did I tell you?
“Can we keep him?” Giles sighs. “Just a little bit longer?”
Elisa laughs, and Giles laughs, too, loudly so that it might echo in the confined chamber and keep the silence of an uncertain future at bay, so that they might go on pretending that this happiness will last forever and that miracles, once found, can be bottled and kept.
17
TWO RINGS: IT’S the signal Hoffstetler has been waiting on since midnight, as there was no telling how technical Mihalkov would be in defining Friday. Nevertheless, when the phone rings in early afternoon, it’s like being pounced upon by a panther. Hoffstetler’s arms and legs spring upward to protect himself, and a hysterical scream rises to the top of his throat. The first ring draws to a ludicrous length, long enough for Hoffstetler to think that it’s Mr. Fleming calling, suspicious of Hoffstetler’s failure to show up for his last day at work, or Strickland wishing to tell him that he’s figured the whole thing out.