“Hey, there, partner! Where you been?”
Brad’s voice is broadly, unspecifically southern, and Giles becomes mired in its syrup. Hair worries engulf him: the gradient of his toupee, the crop of his mustache, the hazards of ear and eyebrow stragglers. Giles puffs his chest and snaps off a nod.
“Well, good afternoon to you.” Too professorial; he unscrews it. “Hey yourself, partner.” Who does he think he is, a schoolboy? “Very nice to see you, indeed.” Three redundant greetings. Just perfect.
Brad stilts a hand to the counter and leans onto it.
“Now what might be your pleasure?”
“It’s so difficult to say,” Giles gushes. “What, if I may ask, would be your personal recommendation?”
Brad drums his fingers. His knuckles are scuffed. Giles pictures him pitching firewood in a forested backyard, wood flakes alighting upon moist, minor abrasions like golden butterflies.
“How you feel about key lime? We’ve got a key lime that’ll knock you back to Newark. It’s that one there, top floor of the tower.”
“My, that is a vivid green.”
“Ain’t it? I’ll fix you up with a nice, hefty slice, what do you say?”
“How can I spurn such a tantalizing hue?”
Brad scribbles the order and chuckles. “You always got the best words.”
Giles feels a blush rise up his neck. He battles it back with the first thing that pops into his brain.
“Tantalizing comes from the Greek. Tantalus, one of Zeus’s sons. A troubled boy, to be sure. Rather famously, he sacrificed his son and served him up to the other gods. Not unlike carving up a pie. But it’s his punishment we commemorate. He was cursed to stand in a pool, hungry for fruit that was pulled away each time he reached up, and thirsty for water that ran away each time he kneeled.”
“He chopped up his kid, you said?”
“Yes, though the point, I think, is that Tantalus was not permitted the escape of death. His fate was to suffer knowing that everything he wanted was right there in reach, but he could partake in none of it.”
Brad chews over this, and Giles feels his blush resume its northerly creep. He’s often marveled at how a single painting can say so much to so many people, and yet the more words one uses, the more likely it is for them to turn on their tellers and expose them. Brad, he is relieved to see, chooses to abandon classical analysis. He spikes the order on a spindle.
“I see you got your paint bag there,” he says. “Working on anything good?”
Giles knows it’s an old man’s poppycock to make-believe that this or that cordial question throbs with furtive significance. He’s sixty-four. Brad can’t be older than thirty-five. Well, what of it? Does that mean Giles can’t enjoy the spar of good conversation? That he can’t feel good about himself as he has so rarely in life? He lifts his portfolio as if only now noticing it.
“Oh, this! It’s not much. The launch of a new food product is all. It seems I have been entrusted with captaining an ad campaign. I’m en route to a meeting at the agency, as it happens.”
“No kidding! What kind of food product?”
Giles opens his mouth, but the word gelatin feels flaccid.
“I probably shouldn’t say. Confidentiality agreements, you know.”
“Is that right? Lord, that sounds exciting. Drawing art, secret projects. Lot more exciting than slinging pies, I tell you.”
“But food is the original art! I’ve always meant to ask. Are you Dixie Doug himself?”
Brad’s guffaw is explosive; it tussles the bangs of Giles’s toupee.
“I wish I was. Then I’d be sitting on top a whole hill of cash. Let me tell you. This here ain’t the only Dixie Doug’s. There’s twelve of them. It’s called ‘franchising.’ They send you this brochure, see. Lays out the whole shebang. Paint color, decorations. Dixie Dog, our mascot. The whole menu, even. They do studies. Find out what people like, scientifically. They truck it across the country, and we serve it up.”
“Intriguing,” Giles says.
Brad looks about, then leans closer. “You want to know a secret?”
There is nothing Giles wants more. He’s harbored enough of them to know that receiving a secret from someone else magically lightens both parties’ loads.
“This voice? It isn’t even real. I’m from Ottawa. I’ve never heard a southern accent in my life, besides movies.”
Feelings settle inside Giles, ice into a glass. He may have failed to confirm Brad’s name, but he’ll come away today with a superior prize. One day, he is certain, Brad will share his real voice, some exotic Canadian lilt, and then—well, that will have to mean something, won’t it? Carrying his portfolio bag proudly, waiting on bright green pie, Giles feels more a part of the world than he’s felt in ages.
7
“I DON’T NEED to reiterate to most of you the great lengths some of our best men went to make this possible, and how not all of those men came back to be able to share in the achievement,” Fleming says. “What I do feel a responsibility to address—and I’m glad, frankly, that my janitorial girls are here to hear this—is that this is, without question, the most sensitive asset ever brought to Occam Aerospace, and it needs to be treated that way. I know you’ve all signed the forms, but let me say it again. Top-secret data is not for wives. Not for children. Not for the best buddy you’ve known since you were a kid. This is national security. This is the fate of the free world. The president himself knows your names, and I sincerely hope that’s enough to keep you—”
Elisa’s tensed body seizes at the crunch of a code key into a lock, and it’s not even the lock behind her. Ten-foot double doors on the other side of F-1, which connect with the hallway that feeds to the loading dock, swing open. A helmeted man in military drabs rushes in from either side to secure the doors. They are armed, as are all Occam guards, but not with enigmatic handguns in unemphatic holsters. Large black bayonet rifles are slung across their backs.
A car-length, rubber-wheeled pallet is guided into the lab by a third and fourth soldier. It carries what Elisa, in the first seconds, believes to be an iron lung. Polio was the orphanage’s unexorcisable boogeyman; any child forced to sit through overlong sermons and dry lectures could fathom the horror of being trapped forever in a neck-down casket. This object is similarly podlike but several orders larger, with riveted steel, compression seals, rubberized joints, and pressure meters. Whoever is inside, Elisa thinks, must be gravely ill for even his head to be kept inside the tank. Fleming is on the move, directing the pallet to a cleared space alongside the pool, before Elisa recognizes her own naïveté. Sick little boys do not earn four armed escorts.
The final man through the double doors is buzz cut with gorilla arms and the hulking gait of one suspicious of indoor spaces. He wears a denim coat over roughshod gray twills, and even these garments seem to constrain him. He circles the pod, muttering directions and indicating wheels to be locked, knobs to be adjusted. He doesn’t point at these with a finger. Looped around his wrist is the rawhide strap of a scuffed orange baton ending into two metal prongs. Elisa isn’t sure, but thinks it’s an electric cattle prod.
Both Fleming and Dr. Bob Hoffstetler advance upon the man with right hands outstretched, but the man’s furrowed eyes glare past them, across the length of the lab, directly at Elisa and Zelda. Dual veins fatten his forehead like subcutaneous horns.
“What are they doing here?”
In direct reply, the tank rattles violently upon its trailer and a high-pitched roar typhoons from within, sloshing water and frightening soldiers who expel curse words and bring about their rifles. What looks like a hand, but can’t be, for it’s far too large, slaps against one of the tank’s porthole windows and Elisa can’t believe the glass doesn’t crack, but it doesn’t, and the tank is rocking, and the soldiers are fanning into formation, and Fleming is rushing at the janitors and shouting, and Hoffstetler is wincing at his failure to protect them, and Zelda has two handfuls of Elisa’s uniform
, dragging her into the hallway along with their carts, and the man with the cattle prod holds his furious glare for a second longer before dropping his head between his shoulders and turning to face the screaming, captured thing.
8
THE BOXES FROM Florida are a problem. She knows it and promises herself to unpack them, first chance she gets, and that’s an order! She recalls a treasured moment with Richard, years ago now, when she, emboldened by his orgasm, had dared make a sex joke, an allusion to “standing at attention.” In later years, such lewdness from her would repulse him. But that one time, he’d chuckled and checked off the basics of military formation. Heels together. Suck the stomach. Arms along seams. No smiling. That’s the efficiency she needs to emulate. She’s got a utility knife for opening boxes. She’s got Brillo Soap Pads, Ajax with Instant Chlorine Bleach, Bruce Cleaning Wax, Tide Laundry Detergent, and Comet with Chlorinol, all locked and loaded and ready for duty.
She could unpack the boxes in two days if she buckled down. But she can’t. Each time she slits packing tape, it’s like knifing open the belly of a doe. Inside these boxes are seventeen months of a different life. One that had knocked her off the well-trod path she’d been on since she was a little girl: dating, marriage, children, homemaking. Pulling items from those boxes—it’s like ripping organs from that other version of herself, that woman of ambition and energy and promise. The whole thing is silly, she knows that. She’ll get to it. She will.
Only it’s hard with Baltimore right there, right outside the window. After she gets the kids off to school, there’s no resisting. Each time, it happens the same. She puts on her heels for Richard, as seeing her barefoot irritates him—Lainie blames this, too, on the Amazon, perhaps some shoeless tribe that disgusted him. When Richard leaves for Occam, off fly the shoes so that Lainie can scrunch her toes deep into the carpet. Not much grit, not really. A modicum of crumbs, that’s all. Clean enough for now, surely. She gets dressed, goes out, boards a bus.
At first, she’d pretended that she was looking for a church. It wasn’t a lie, not entirely. A family needs a house of worship. Her church in Orlando had been a literal godsend those months without Richard before she’d found her footing. Footing: She needs, again, to find it. Problem is, Baltimore has a church on every block. Is she a Baptist? They’d attended a Baptist church in Virginia. Episcopal, perhaps? She’s not sure what the word means. Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian: Those all sound safe, untheatrical. She takes a seat on the bus, prim of posture, hands folded on her purse, and rolls specific church names over her lipsticked lips. All Saints, Holy Trinity, New Life. She laughs; it fogs the bus window, and she briefly loses sight of the city. How could she choose anything besides New Life?
9
WORKING WOMEN DON’T get to scurry home and bury their faces in pillows when they’ve been yelled at. You settle your trembling hands by wrapping them around your tools and returning to work. Elisa had wanted to talk about what she’d seen and heard—the giant hand slapping the tank window, the animalistic roar. From Elisa’s first startled signs, though, it became clear that Zelda hadn’t seen the hand and had taken the roar for yet another distasteful animal experiment that would only sicken her to consider in detail. So Elisa keeps her thoughts to herself, wondering if it’s possible that Zelda is right and she mistook the whole thing.
The best thing for tonight is to scrub the images from her mind, and scrubbing is something Elisa is good at. She’s in and out of toilet stalls in the northeast men’s room, stabbing her swab under rims. Zelda, done mopping the floor, wets a pumice stone in the sink and frowns at the piss-crusted urinal partition she’s squared off against for years, searching for a fresh complaint to lift their spirits. Elisa believes in Zelda as she believes in few others: She will find that complaint, and it will be funny, and they will begin to crawl from under this sticky film of debasement left by all those judging men.
“Finest minds in the country, they tell us, gathered right here at Occam—and there are pee freckles on the ceiling. You know Brewster’s not the crispiest chip in the bag, but even he hits the target seventy-five percent of the time. I don’t know if I ought to be depressed about this or go get the Guinness Records folks on the line. Maybe they’ll give me a finder’s fee.”
Elisa nods and signs “Get on the telephone,” opting for an old-fashioned, two-piece model to evoke visions of a herd of New York City correspondents with PRESS badges tucked into their fedoras. Zelda gets the reference and grins—a bursting relief of a sight—and Elisa presses the joke, wiggling her fingers in the sign for “teletype,” then signing a suggestion to send a letter via pigeon. Zelda laughs and gestures at the ceiling.
“I can’t even figure out the angle of the—you know what I mean? I don’t want to be indecent here. But if you think about the physics and all that? The angle of the garden hose, the direction of the spray?”
Elisa giggles soundlessly, scandalized and so very grateful.
“Only thing I can figure is it’s a competition. Kind of like the Olympics? Points for height and distance. Points for style if you waggle it really good. And to think, all these years, we thought these science types didn’t have any physical skills.”
Elisa is in full silent guffaw, rocking back against the stall, the night’s events bleaching away under Zelda’s off-color scenario.
“Hey, there’s two urinals here,” Zelda chuckles. “I don’t think synchronized peeing is out of the question—”
A man walks in. Elisa turns from the toilet, Zelda from the urinal. He wasn’t there; now he is. It’s so incredible, the women forget to react. A plastic sign reading CLOSED FOR CLEANING is all that defends female janitors from the threat of male incursion, but it’s always been sufficient. Zelda starts to point at the sign, but her arm dies midway; it’s not a janitor’s place to assert the existence of physical objects to a man of higher station, and besides, her gibes about men’s bathroom practices are still ringing from every pipe, locknut, and escutcheon of the undersink. Elisa feels shame, then shame for feeling shame. Thousands of times she and Zelda have cleaned this room, and it takes one single man to make them feel like the obscene ones.
The man paces coolly to the middle of the room.
He holds in his right hand an orange cattle prod.
10
THE REVOLVING DOOR of Klein & Saunders works its sleight of hand. On the street side, among briefcasers juking toward their next meeting, Giles is adrift, ancient, useless. The rotating chamber is where the metamorphosis happens, the glass turnstile reflecting an infinitude of possible, better selves. When Giles is ejected onto the lobby’s chessboard marble, he’s a new man. Art in hand, and with a place to take it, he’s important.
It’s been like this since before he can recall, the producing of art a mere prelude to the delight of having it, a concrete object he’d willed into being. Everything else he has is like his derelict apartment—at the end of the day, only rented. The first objet d’art in his life was a human skull his father had won in a poker game, named Andrzej after the Pole from whom it’d been won. It was Giles’s first study; he drew it hundreds of times, on the sides of envelopes, atop newspaper faces, on the back of his hand.
How he got from sketches of skulls to working at Klein & Saunders twenty years later he can barely recall. His first job was at the same Hampden-Woodberry cotton mill as his father, habituating himself to the tickle of cotton fibers in his nose, the callouses wrought by pitching bales, the soft second skin of red clay anytime he ran cotton from Mississippi. At night, sometimes all night, he painted on discarded paper he plundered from work, rampageous portraitures that sustained him better than food, and make no mistake—he was plenty hungry. He used the Mississippi clay on his arms to make his oranges pop. Decades later, it would still be his secret.
In two years, he’d left behind both the mill and his confused father to take an art department job at Hutzler’s department store. A few years later, he moved to Klein & Saunders, and there sp
ent most of his career. He’d been proud, but not satisfied. His nagging discontent had something to do with art. True art. He’d once defined himself by that word, hadn’t he? All those abstracts of Andrzej, all those male nudes wild-lined from cotton-bale callouses and blood-orange with Biloxi mud. Giles slowly came to feel that each false smile of joy he painted for Klein & Saunders vampired real joy from those who gauged their own happiness against advertising’s impossible standards. He knew the feeling. He felt it every day.
Klein & Saunders works with prestigious clients. Hence the waiting room stocked with cardinal-red chairs of au courant German design and the libations cart managed by Hazel, the redoubtable receptionist who outdates Giles. Today, though, Hazel is absent, and some ad man’s fawn-legged secretary has been tossed before a dozen impatient execs, a smile bolted to her fearful face. Giles watches her accidentally sever an incoming call while fretting over a tray of half-made drinks. He assesses the room’s mood by the cloud of cigarette smoke: not lounging like Michelangelo’s Adam, but scattered in locomotive puffs.
He forgives her for taking a minute to notice him.
“Mr. Giles Gunderson, artist,” he heralds. “I have a two-fifteen with Mr. Bernard Clay.”
She pushes a button and garbles his name into the receiver. Giles isn’t convinced the message has been transmitted but can’t bear to ask the poor thing to try again. Giles faces the throng. It’s incredible, he thinks, that twenty years later part of him still desires to run with this stalking, snarling pack.
The Shape of Water Page 5
